Warrior of the World

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “I don’t wish to fight anyway,” I told him, pointedly, because he knew that. The look he returned clearly said he intended to push me on that.

  Zalaika beamed at me. “I agree with your decision, Ivariel, and your priorities.” Raising her brows in subtle reprimand at Ochieng, she breezed on. “I will plan the festival of kuachamvua. We are having it,” she raised her voice. “People will be coming from all around to sing and trade. We have young people who’ve been waiting nearly a year to marry, and we will not put them off.”

  Something about that bothered me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. Ochieng, too, because he cast me an assessing glance, a faint line between his brows. “Then Ivariel and I shall work with the elephants also?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Zalaika waved a hand at us. “You’ll be busy harvesting and carving the poles for your addition to the house. There’s a great deal to do to prepare for your wedding, and not much time to do it in.”

  Though the word was, of course, different than in Dasnarian, it still froze me as if a blade had sliced me from behind, a silent, silvery, and agonizing shock. Wedding. Another one being planned for me, and I’d been running headlong for it, so desperate for approval. Had I learned nothing? Idiot. I’d have no choice, no escape. My chest went tight, my vision darkening.

  “Breathe.” Ochieng squeezed my hand, rather hard, and I started, coming back to the here and now. He stared at me a moment longer, as if making sure of me, then pulled his gaze from mine. “Nothing has been decided, Mama. Ivariel and I will not be getting married yet.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. If you don’t marry this kuachamvua, you will have to wait an entire year.”

  “Then I will wait,” he replied evenly.

  “And if there is war?” She pinned us both with a steely glare.

  “Then we deal with it, if and when it comes,” he said.

  “You could learn from your betrothed. Already she plans not to fight, to protect the babies she’ll carry.”

  Babies? Wait, no, I wasn’t…

  “Mother.” Ochieng’s voice held a warning, even as he stroked my hand. “There is time for that. Don’t—”

  “It is easy to squander time when it seems to lie all in the future. Soon enough you will find that most of your allotted time lies in the past and the future holds not so much.”

  “Are you talking about me or yourself?” Ochieng shot back, and she flinched, as if he’d flung a rock at her.

  “Oh, Brother,” Palesa murmured.

  Zalaika drew herself up. “All right then. I’ll speak of me. I am no longer young. I no longer have a husband to hold me at night. This is what I have.” She spread her hands at the gathering, her eyes welling with tears and her voice wobbling. My mother would sooner have died than expose her emotions in such a way. If she’d even had emotions. “My own future dwindles with each passing year, but you—you are my future. I have been patient with you, Ochieng. All these years I’ve waited for you to find a wife to suit you. Now you’ve brought Ivariel here and you asked us to accept her into the family, which we did. Gladly!” She paused to smile at me through her tears. “When Ochieng presented you to us for approval that first night, I didn’t hesitate. Why do you hesitate now?”

  I looked from her to Ochieng. “That ceremony the first night?” I asked him in Common Tongue, so they wouldn’t understand.

  He rubbed his forehead, looking pained. “It’s not like she’s making it sound, but I did ask them to potentially accept you as a member of the family so you could stay here.” He squeezed my hand, then seemed to realize he’d already been holding it tightly, backing off his grip, but staring at me fiercely. “I wanted you to stay here. And it would give us time. I only wanted time to…” He trailed off at whatever he saw in my face.

  I was shaking my head, I realized. “It’s too much,” I whispered. In Dasnarian, but he no doubt understood. Sliding my hand from his grasp, I wiggled out from under Ayela, who never stirred, boneless in sleep. I managed to stand. Everyone stared at me, but I couldn’t read their faces. Panic fluttered in my breast, cramping my heart. Drawing on manners hammered into me, I drew myself straight. “Please excuse me,” I said to them all. They stared at me, uncomprehending. “I must withdraw.”

  Too princess. I didn’t care. I began walking out of the circle of light. “Ivariel,” Ochieng called. “Wait.”

  “No,” I said, still in Dasnarian. My brain had forgotten it knew any other languages. Dark night had fallen and I could barely see—but there was the gate to the steps. I opened it and plunged through.

  “Ivariel—not that way!” Ochieng was running after me, so I descended faster, finding the handrails, my feet knowing the way.

  He yelled my name and other words, falling on me like a blizzard I hunched against, that drove me down and down, fast as I could go. Escape. I had to escape or they’d take me back. They’d force the bracelets on me, lock me up and then—No. No. No.

  I ran. So many times I’d gone up and down these stairs on the way to the river, to the little beach. My refuge. My escape. I’d gone many times a day before the rains. The wood crackled under my feet, the whole structure shaking, the world coming apart around me.

  My feet found their way, my dancer’s balance warning me of something I couldn’t quite grasp, the steps feeling as if they fell away.

  And then weren’t there.

  I plunged down, a shriek ripping out of me. The steps, washed away by the rains, I recalled. Too late. Much too late.

  Flailing I reached, grabbing something. Wood splinters and rock. My feet dangling in darkness. Stupid. So stupid in my panic. I was Efe, drowning in floodwaters because I hadn’t been smart.

  And then Ochieng’s hands were around my wrists. Calling my name, breaking through the hysteria, he pulled and I climbed. Kicking against the rock wall beside me, I pushed up. He caught me in his arms, back onto the wooden steps higher up, pulling us back against the rock face, as if that would make us safer. He held me far too tight, his ragged breathing pummeling us both.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I forgot. I forgot about the missing stairs.”

  “I don’t understand,” he panted.

  I knew he didn’t. How could it be that just the word “wedding” sent me into such an icy panic that I couldn’t even breathe? I didn’t understand myself.

  “Can you say it in Common Tongue?” he asked, mastering himself enough to let me go a little.

  I laughed. Oh. He didn’t understand because I’d said it in Dasnarian. I tried to think of other words, and couldn’t find them. I’d become silent again. And had started weeping.

  “No, no, lovely Ivariel,” he murmured, stroking my face, wiping the tears away. “Don’t weep. My mother doesn’t understand. I’ll speak to her. A year is nothing. Two years. Five. Ten. A hundred. I’ll wait for you.”

  I concentrated past the wall of emotion, groping for words. Kaja teaching me Common Tongue. Baby steps. “Why me?” I asked him.

  He paused. I wondered if I still hadn’t used the right language. “Why you what?” he asked.

  “Why do you want me?” I asked.

  “I told you already,” he replied, sounding confused. “I love you. I have since those first days on the Robin.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. If I’d had better command of myself, of my tongues, I might have said that more politely. As it was it came out blunt, even scolding. My mother’s sneer. Hulda at her cruelest.

  With his lean, hard body all along mine, Ochieng’s flinch rippled through me. He and his whole family, so physically expressive of every little thing they felt.

  “Could we maybe not have this conversation on a staircase battered by storms that could drop us both to our deaths at any moment?” he asked.

  I thought that over, as if it were a problem with real alternatives, options for me to weigh. Somet
hing in my head simply had stopped working correctly, and I was unable to make even that simple, obvious decision.

  “Come back up, love,” he coaxed. “I promise no one will ever make you do anything you don’t want to.”

  I looked up at him, though I could barely see any of his face in the muffling night. Where was the moon? “You can’t make that promise,” I informed him.

  “I can and do. Now come on.” He tugged at me, easing me back up the steps, like he might direct Violet. I became aware that the structure shuddered under our footsteps, rocking and clacking against the rock face.

  “What is holding up the stairs?” I asked.

  “Not a whole lot,” he replied, in a wry tone. “Which is why we’re getting off them.”

  “I miss the beach,” I told him, then felt foolish. I sounded like a child. Or a crazy person. The latter was probably accurate. And here I’d told Zalaika I hadn’t been a child for a long time. Maybe I’d never stopped being one.

  “The beach is still there,” he answered me, as if it had been a reasonable thing to say. “We’ll go there now, if you like, the long way around.”

  I shook my head and the stairs creaked. Something broke off and fell. “It will be dark.”

  “True.” He sounded calm, but he picked up the pace. “In the morning then. We can start stacking all the wood that’s fallen,” he added under his breath.

  And then we were at the top, Ochieng opening the gate and drawing me inside. He bent over, leaning hands on knees, breathing in and out, long and slow. The terrace was quiet and deserted, though lights shone inside through the gauzy curtains, blowing in the light breeze, and a few torches remained lit along the wall. Zalaika detached herself from the shadows and put a hand on her son’s shoulder, gazing at me.

  She gave me a little smile, patted Ochieng’s shoulder, and went inside without a word.

  I’d frightened him, frightened all of them. I might’ve killed not only myself, but Ochieng. My legs abruptly weak, I sat on the broad, low wall that encircled the terrace. Some stars pinpricked the sky, but they seemed dim and far away—nothing like how close and brilliant they’d been aboard the Robin, when Ochieng had told us all the stories embedded in the patterns. He sat beside me, not touching me.

  “There is water in the air still,” he said, fluttering his fingers to show something rising from the ground to the sky. “The sun pulls all the water from the ground, making the air full and dense. Once it dries, the stars will shine bright again.”

  That made a kind of sense. Funny how he always seemed to know my questions before I did. He was a good man. Palesa had been right about that. I’d likely never find a better one.

  But I didn’t deserve a man that good. And he didn’t deserve a wife as unstable as those wooden stairs.

  “I think I should leave,” I said.

  ~ 11 ~

  “Why is that?” he asked, seeming unsurprised by the change of subject, or my harsh declaration.

  “I was always going to leave,” I pointed out, the words coming back to me. “When you invited me here, you seemed to understand I couldn’t stay. You never said you intended to trick me into staying forever, to wear me down into agreeing to be your wife.”

  He rubbed his hands over his face, then leaned his elbows on his knees, staying there. “It sounds so bad when you phrase it that way,” he said through his fingers. “I swear upon your goddess that wasn’t my intention. I hoped for that, yes, but I thought time would work its magic. That we had a connection, that we’d already become friends and we simply needed the opportunity to come to know each other better.”

  “Yet you introduced me as your wife, to your family.”

  “What?” He sat up straight and looked at me. “No. Not at all. As my betrothed, yes. That’s all.”

  “It’s the same thing.” I cut a hand through the air to dismiss that silly argument, a gesture I recognized as my mother’s. Unpleasantly so. Ah, Hulda, how she haunted me still. She would have plenty to say about—and punish me for—my getting myself betrothed without her knowledge or permission.

  “Wait,” Ochieng said, taking my hands. I tugged at them, but he held on, doggedly. “Let’s clear up at least this bit right now. Why do you say it’s the same thing?”

  “Because it is. That is the way of things.” My jaw ached a little from clenching it.

  “Not in Chiyajua. Here a betrothal is simply a public declaration of interest. Of potential. A betrothed couple might marry, they might not. It’s a way of saying to our friends and family ‘this person is precious to me; please treat them as precious to you, also.’ That is why I introduced you to my family that way.”

  The phrasing, the earnestness of what he said, choked me up a little, the ever present tears welling up. Precious to me.

  He leaned his forehead to mine, and I realized I’d echoed the phrase aloud. “Yes,” he said very quietly, with great warmth. “Precious to me.”

  Oh. Maybe that hungry part of me wanted this, too.

  “Now is when you explain to me what betrothal means to you.”

  “In Dasnaria, the betrothal is a legal contract, the first of several to bind a wife to a man. When a girl’s father and brothers agree to the betrothal, there is no going back.”

  “What if the girl doesn’t agree?”

  I laughed, watery with it. “There’s not even a way to say that. In Dasnarian, the word for betrothal means a contract between men to decide the fate of a potential bride.”

  He stayed quiet a moment, then finally spoke. “I think your Dasnaria must be an admirable place in some ways, because she gave birth to you, the most amazing woman I’ve ever met, but I find I cannot like a land that has such vile customs.”

  Some proud part of me wanted to protest, to point out all that the Dasnarian Empire had that simple Chiyajua did not, but I couldn’t. I simply sighed for the truth of his words.

  “To make it perfectly clear,” he said, when I stayed silent, “you are bound by no contract. You are free of all obligations.”

  “Then I can leave.”

  He hesitated, then sighed, an echo of mine. “Of course. You left before, didn’t you?”

  “You brought me back,” I felt compelled to point out.

  “True. But only to heal, I promise.”

  “I know.” And I did know. “I think that, since I can’t…marry you—” Danu, I had a hard time even saying the word. “Since I can’t do that, I need to break our betrothal.”

  “All right.” He had his eyes closed, hands relaxed, voice even. I’d hurt him. He worked hard not to show it, but I could tell.

  “And I should leave,” I reiterated.

  He opened his eyes and searched my face. “Don’t leave. Please stay.”

  “I can’t.” I hung onto his hands, trying to make him understand. “They agreed to let me stay because of the betrothal, because I’d be family. If I am not family, I don’t belong.”

  “That’s not true,” he protested, but his stubbornness spoke, not clear thinking.

  “Your mother would say so.”

  “She is not the only one who decides.”

  “Ochieng…” I felt helpless to make him see. “She won’t stop. If I’m here, she’ll think I should be your wife. If I’m here and not your wife, you won’t look for another.”

  “I don’t want another. I’ve waited all my life for you.”

  I understood why Zalaika despaired of Ochieng sometimes, with his romantic ideas. “She won’t see it that way. She’ll see me either as an obstacle to you finding a wife, or she’ll keep pushing me—and we’ve seen what happens. Ochieng, I am not sane.” I used the phrase they used to describe Efe, how she wasn’t quite rational.

  He narrowed his gaze at me. “You are not insane.”

  “Ochieng. I freaked out just now, forgot what language I spoke, and ran down
a staircase I knew was broken. I could’ve killed us both. Those are not the actions of a sane person.”

  He laughed. Actually threw back his head and laughed at me. “Ivariel.” He said my name with the same patiently instructive tone I’d used on him. “You reacted like a wounded person. Of course you temporarily lost two of the languages you’ve only recently learned. Don’t you realize how few people can even learn another language? You’ve learned huge amounts in only a few turns of the moon. You’re incredible. You might be the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Now I know you flatter me. I am ignorant and stupid beyond belief.”

  He studied me. “Perhaps I haven’t flattered you enough. I’ve clearly failed to tell you all the reasons why I love you that you can say you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t think I believe in love at all,” I clarified.

  He tilted his head in question. “At all? Ever? What about a mother’s love for her baby?

  “Nature,” I said. “So the mother isn’t tempted to bang the child’s head against the wall when it won’t stop crying.”

  A laugh escaped him before he sobered, frowning. “You’re serious.”

  “Yes.”

  “You think your mother didn’t love you.”

  My turn to laugh. “If you met Empress Hulda, you would not question this. My mother valued me, to an extent, so long as I was useful and did exactly as she bade me.”

  “Your sisters. You must have loved them, and they you.”

  I turned over that idea. How Inga, Helva, and I had clung to each other, how they’d wept for me. How they’d promised to wait for my return and how, even in the midst of my pain, shock, and terror, I’d thought of them and negotiated for a modicum of freedom for them. “Maybe,” I allowed, “if any of us had known how to love each other, we might have.”

  “Your brother, Harlan,” Ochieng offered immediately. He’d been ready with that one—and he nodded at whatever he glimpsed in my eyes. “When you speak of him, your face changes, your voice softens, your whole body. You speak of him with love.”