by K. Eason
Snow cut him a smile that tried and failed at casual. “Need some help with bandaging, yeah? You mind?”
He walked over and sat carefully on the hearth, where the firedog’s heat was almost painful after the soaked cold of his waiting. She set the mortar between them. Pale pulp in it, mixed with chunks of dark green and a distinct minty bite.
She twisted her wrist. Offered it to him. “Start with this.”
“How?”
“Put a little on your fingers, and—”
“Tell me.”
She sighed. “It wasn’t Tsabrak.”
“Who, then?”
“The God. He borrowed Tsabrak’s skin. It’s a blessing, yeah? A sign of the God’s favor, that he chooses you.”
Veiko frowned at her. Some noidghe could sing a spirit into their own bodies, so that their mouths spoke in the spirit’s voice. But spirits did not take bodies unbidden, by any stories Veiko knew. Unless those spirits were Illhari gods. Unsettling.
“Would he have agreed to this?”
“No. I don’t know.” Deep, shuddering breaths that had to hurt, stretching raw skin. “He bolted when the God left him. When he saw.” She stopped. Swallowed. “Just get on with it, yeah? It’s all right. You’re not going to hurt me any more than’s already done.”
He nodded. Took a grim lock on her forearm and dipped his fingers into the paste. Cool, thick, yellowy brown. He smeared it on. Braced against her recoil and got only a shiver. She held still while he moved on to her shoulder, where the burn wept clear fluid. He traced the edges of it. Imagined what the God had done to make the wound, and then wished he hadn’t.
Better to know, if she would tell him. “What happened?”
She stared hard at the stones on the hearth. “We—Tsabrak and I—were talking about you, yeah? And the God decided he had something to say. You got his attention, yeah? Impressed him.”
“How?”
“Avoided rape and murder.”
He had not told her all those details. Flushed now, imagining the God’s account. “I was fortunate.”
“Luck doesn’t turn Tal’Shik. How did you do it?”
“I am a noidghe.” It felt like fraud to say it, with everything he didn’t know: the songs and the true names of things, how to take himself to the grey world by will and choice, how to beat the spirit drum to send another across. Noidghe wasn’t something he’d ever wanted. But want didn’t govern a man’s life. Choices did. And his choices had brought him here, sharing a hearth in an Illhari brothel with the woman
partner
who’d called him back from death.
“Noidghe.” She tried out the unfamiliar word. “That why you can talk to ghosts? Make deals with them?”
“Yes.”
“Well. That’s what the God wants from you. You can be his noidghe.”
“Why does he not ask me, then?”
“I talked him out of it. Said you wouldn’t deal with him. And he thinks I owe him. The Illhari never bargained with their gods, yeah? They prayed. The God’s followers still pray. We ask. And we’re supposed to be damn grateful whenever our prayers are answered. You’re alive.”
“That is not his doing.”
“I know. He knows. But the God found you, and that’s half what I asked. So I owe him.”
“I told him I would pay your debt.”
Headshake, so that the rings in her ear flashed and clicked. “You need to watch what you say, yeah?”
Which stung, coming from her. He opened his mouth to tell her so. Clipped it shut again.
“He could try and claim that debt from me.”
“He will if I don’t pay it.” She hissed. Braced her arm against the hearth, which exposed a long chain of blisters that wrapped farther down and around her than he had thought, all the way to the hollow under her ribs, and the soft skin above her hipbone. He wondered how far the burns went. Asked instead,
“And this is his idea of persuasion?”
“This is punishment.” Her mouth knotted up at the corner. “I argued with him. Besides. He reckons hurting me will make you jump the way he wants. He’s got a different idea what’s between us, yeah?”
“What idea?”
“Lovers.”
“Ah.” He had been, with Kaari’s daughter. He wondered how she might’ve answered had he asked her to go with him into outlawry. He hadn’t thought to ask. They had not been partners. “How would doing this to you inspire my cooperation?”
“Because if I—we—don’t do what he wants, he’ll do it again. Maybe worse, next time. Wait, stop.” She shuddered away from him as he reached for a blister at the top of her hip. Took his wrist. Her hand shook, tremors he could see working up her arm and all through her. “That’s good,” she said hoarsely. “That’s enough. Thank you.”
Veiko made a fist of his empty hand. “What does he want?”
“For me to kill Ehkla. For you to kill Tal’Shik.” She let him go, squared to face him. “How much you know about Illhari history?”
“That your people are very efficient at building roads.”
Whole lakes would freeze at that look. “Tal’Shik’s godsworn don’t die easy. Archives are full of stories. She doesn’t like to lose, yeah? But if you slow Tal’Shik down, you hurt her, you buy me space to kill Ehkla. So then Tal’Shik will kill you, but that’s fine, yeah? The God won’t mind that. He doesn’t expect you to win.” Snow leveled a blind stare into the fire. “Here’s my advice: you take Logi and get out of Cardik. Safer out there in the forest, even with Ehkla roaming around.”
Safer, perhaps. But the life of an outlaw meant solitude and exile. Meant the company of dogs, so that sometimes he forgot to speak for days at a time. Meant loneliness, which ached worse than a week of poor hunting in his belly. He wouldn’t go back to that. Would not leave her, however short that might make his life, because,
“If I leave, then the God will kill you.”
“More than likely, whether or not you stay.”
“I have only one dog now,” he said. “It would be difficult to hunt enough surplus to trade. It will be more difficult, if the villages are worrying about raiders, for me to trade at all. Nor am I certain I am strong enough—”
“It’s not a toadfucking joke, Veiko.”
“I know that.” Ancestors, did he know. He remembered
dying
the wurm’s tooth deep in his leg, and the marks carved on him. The power that had held him, helpless. The power that had forced answers from him. He had thought then that it was witchery, Ehkla’s own strength. But perhaps she had borrowed it from Tal’Shik. He rubbed his thigh where she’d cut him, traced the familiar pattern.
Snow hissed like a boiled cat and swatted his hand away. “Don’t. Let me tell you something else. Conjuring’s about changing things, yeah? Working with what’s already there. It’s about patterns. Taking one thing and making it something else. The shapes your hands make, when you’re conjuring. The patterns of the glyphs you cut to make wards so the power stays in the shape. Like this.” She showed him the godmark on her palm. “Like the mark Ehkla’s got, too. But for godmagic, real godmagic, the power’s in cutting the pattern, not in the mark left behind. So every time you trace that, you carve its pattern—its power—into you. Leave it alone.”
Veiko eyed his leg warily. Power in symbols. Symbols that meant names. Noidghe—real noidghe, not accidental noidghe whose knowledge came from fireside tales—had songs to describe the essence of things. Animals. Plants. Patterns, maybe, in the way Snow described them. But no gestures. No shapes any fool with a knife could duplicate. The Alviri and the Dvergiri put so much stock in symbols. In writing. A dozen Ehklas, all armed with knives and carving symbols—what chaos could they cause? Small wonder there had been witch-wars.
But still. To meddle with a Dvergir god, a man had to use Dvergiri weapons. Those symbols, those prayers, would be a way to call Tal’Shik. But he would need to learn them. To see them. No living person he knew bore those marks whole and c
omplete. He would have to learn them using the only noidghe skill he had, which was bargaining with the dead. Which meant he had to get back to the ghost roads and find a particular ghost and ask favors.
“Veiko.” Snow was looking at him, narrow-eyed. “You’re thinking. Do I want to know what?”
“I am considering how to kill a god.”
“Fuck and damn. Can you? Is it even possible?”
“If it is, I will do it.” Almost an oath, that. Certainly a promise. And then a second, because the smells of sweat and medicine and pain in this room were hers, and not his: “And if one god can die, then so can another.”
She winced. “Fool, Veiko. That’s what you are.”
“So my father said.”
“And your mother?”
He almost smiled. “She was too wise to argue with him.”
Snow took a breath, held it, slid hip deep into the water. The tub’s stone rim pressed a line across her back, unpleasant on the knobs of her spine, agony on her burns. Veiko wouldn’t thank her for undoing some of his handiwork, but she needed the bath. Needed to wash away what had happened, as much as water could. She closed her eyes and emptied her lungs, very slowly, as the hot water cooked the ache between her legs to numb. Raw flesh there, but not burned. The God had wanted to hurt and humiliate, not kill.
Maybe smarter if he had. He’d reckoned to teach Veiko a lesson. Do what you’re told, or she suffers. Veiko, being Veiko, had learned something else entirely.
If one god can die, then so can another.
She’d left him back in their room, eyes flat and distant. Same look he’d worn before he went off to play decoy for Teslin and Barkett out in the forest, before he’d damn near got himself killed. That was a man making plans. So now Veiko would try to kill Tal’Shik for her sake, and die over in the ghost roads where Snow couldn’t get him back, before he ever got a chance to go after the Laughing God.
And meanwhile she would kill Ehkla or die trying, and Tsabrak would—fuck and damn if she knew. Tsabrak had gotten his body back while it was still inside hers. Pulled out like she’d scalded him and retreated, first across the couch, then the room. Shock on his face, maybe horror. He hadn’t said anything. Not I’m sorry or the God has his reasons or it’s the God’s will. He’d just left her there, to gather the shreds of her composure. To limp back here, all the way across the motherless Bridge, because where else could she go now, except back to Veiko.
The hot rock in her belly kept getting bigger, until her ribs and chest hurt with it. Until her eyes stung and smarted and she had to close them. Tsabrak met her on the backside of closed lids. She pressed the pads of her fingers against her eyes until he dissolved in sparks and flashes.
Always knew where his allegiance sat, hadn’t she? Godsworn fanatic, however cool he played when he did business. Smuggling was one thing, yeah, but heretic set a man against all of Illharek, highborn and Senate and legion. And heretic sounded just fine to a woman who already knew that she didn’t have the talent to make up for blue eyes and fair hair, who shared his hatred for all things highborn. They weren’t friends, weren’t partners, however often they fucked—but she’d assumed some thread of loyalty from him.
Fool, yeah? Not Veiko. You.
Aneki had warned her. Fuck and damn, even Dekklis had known better. Tsabrak was the God’s, first and finally, and the God did not love women.
The God still had use for her, clearly, and use for Veiko, but useful and valued weren’t the same thing. She could’ve stayed in the Academy and been useful. Ground powders and distilled potions and mopped blood and boiled scalpels for someone whose mother had a House name, whose mother didn’t run an apothecary in Illharek’s Suburba.
She wasn’t done with Tsabrak, or the God. That was the toadshit part of it. She couldn’t be. Had to play along with the game. Wait. Slide herself back into the cartel, into whatever plans Tsabrak had for those crates of weapons. Veiko needed time to heal. She did. Give it a month. That should get Veiko walking. Give her time to figure out what she was going to do about Ehkla. And then, after that, she would—
Fuck and damn, what, put a knife through Tsabrak’s eye?
A draft stirred the curtain, smelling faintly of familiar incense. Snow gathered the room’s shadows around her, covered the burns and the slick shine of salve. She didn’t want conversation. Didn’t want company.
Aneki wasn’t asking. She tugged the curtain aside. Steam rolled off the bath like fog off the river. Settled again as Aneki twitched the curtain shut. No paint on her face, this time of morning, and every line showing.
Anger, Snow noted with some surprise, real anger that squeezed down to a near-svartjagr hiss. “What are you playing at, Snow?”
Snow slapped a spray of water over the shadows, drops glittering like snowflakes in lamplight. The shadows swallowed their descent. Plink and splash as they landed, invisible.
“Soaking my feet. Got a little cold on the walk back. Might have a hole in one of my boots.”
Another hiss. “I mean with Veiko.”
“Veiko?”
“You know. Tall, fair, skraeling? Paced around the courtyard all night waiting for you?”
“Aneki,” softly and all edges. “What’s this about?”
“You might want to tell him what partner means. Translate it into skraeling. I think he’s got the wrong idea.”
“The wrong idea? What the—oh. I see. He wouldn’t bed you.” Snow’s aggravation misted away in the steam. “Listen. That’s not my doing. His people have different customs. He calls it modesty—”
“He asked about Tsabrak.”
The anger came back, hot and too big for her lungs. “I know. Do I need to ask what you told him? Or can I guess?”
“Truth.”
“Ah. Truth. So, you have Tsabrak eating babies yet? Or just kittens? Or did you stop at saying I fuck him, and figure jealousy would get Veiko in your bed?”
“Tsabrak’s a—”
“I know what Tsabrak is. Better than you, yeah?”
Snow pushed her hand under the skin of the water. Let Aneki see. Let her understand. Snow banished the shadows to the corners of the room, to the space under the bench. Banished them under the water, turning it mirror black, so that her own face rippled up back at her through the steam. So that she didn’t have to see Aneki react when the lantern spilled across her bare torso.
Heard her, though: another hiss, this one all shock, and a chain of profanity that ended with, “Did Tsabrak do that?”
“No. You think I’d let him?”
Aneki’s face said she thought exactly that. Aneki’s mouth, for once, was wise enough to stay closed. She came around the tub in a swirl of silk and incense. Touched Snow’s shoulder almost as gently as Veiko had.
“You want to say what happened?”
Snow’s throat sealed up. She shook her head. Gagged and choked and pushed Aneki’s hands away. “It was the God.”
Utter quiet from Aneki, for long enough Snow cranked her neck around to look at her. The moment Snow’s gaze touched hers, Aneki blurted, “But why?”
“Veiko asked the same thing. Say it’s the price for disobedience.”
Aneki squatted beside her. Her skirt dusted the water’s surface. Darkened and sank, while Aneki didn’t appear to notice. “I had a mistress like that once. Thing was, I wore a collar.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, you’re freeborn. And you’re not godsworn. You can walk away.”
“Can I?”
“You’re a master chirurgeon, yeah? You’re Academy.”
“You think that’s worth shit? Listen. You know why I left Illharek? Not because Tsabrak asked me to go. Because of Briel. Some third son of some toadshit senator carved her up for a project. See what makes her wings work, he said. She was, oh, this big. He did it because he could, yeah? Because she had less power than he did, and he’d been shat on his whole life by his sisters, and his mother, and everyone. So I get this mutilated hatchling, an
d I make her my project, yeah? He had her flayed to fucking bone, and I got her back flying.” Snow gathered her hair into a topknot and twisted it up, so that Aneki could see her ear. “I got the master’s ring. But you want to guess who got the honors? Who got the motherless teaching post? Not the Suburban half-blood.”
Aneki grimaced. “Snow. I get why you linked up with Tsabrak. I do. But there are other ways to hit back at the highborn besides him and his toadshit God.”
“Yeah. I know. And you picked the best way to do it. I know that, too.”
“Not the best. Just the best one available to me.” Aneki shrugged. Scrunched into a crouch at the edge of the bath, arms around her knees. “Best would’ve been to walk away from it. Open a tavern, maybe, near the garrison. Water the ale, scorch the flatcakes, serve the chicken bloody.”
“Be a toadshit tavern, then.”
“Yes. Instead I run a good brothel. Now they pay for what they used to take. But you’ve got more options than I do.”
“Had.”
“Toadshit. Walk out the gates, yeah? Take Veiko and leave. The Republic’s got other cities. There’s always work for what you do.”
Echoes of what she’d said to Veiko. Echoes of his answer. The irony tasted like blood. “I walk out now, they’ll come after me. All the Tsabraks and Drasans. The God will make it his business to find me, and he has a lot of fingers.”
“Mm.” A feather touch on her shoulder. “You’re not afraid for your sake.”
“I’m not—listen. Veiko’s people. They bargain with spirits, yeah? That’s what the gods are to him. Spirits. Just like, ghosts and animals and whatever else. Veiko made some half-assed promise to the God that the God will happily collect, until and unless I do what the God wants. Don’t even ask what, yeah?”
“Think I can’t guess? I know you.” A pause. A breath. “You could let him have Veiko.”
“You come in here spitting mad about partners, and you say that?”
“I’ve known you a long time.”
“Thanks.”
“Snow. You just met him how many weeks ago? Partners? What does that even mean?”
“He could have let me die out there, and he didn’t. Got between me and the legion. Came back for me when the Taliri got me. That’s how he got cut, yeah? That’s how he almost died. And just now I told him go, and he won’t.”
