Galipa, Anna thought as she moved the fork to her mouth. She stared at the northerner and wondered, distantly, if he’d done a good thing by saving her life. The tracker, too, had kept her breathing, but it hadn’t been an act of mercy. Still, Galipa’s smile, warm and inviting, despite the closed lips, showed his connection to Shem. They were not of the same blood, but they were linked somehow.
Maybe compassion was better than blood.
“Well?” the tracker pressed.
It’s fine, she wanted to say. She wanted to scream it. If it meant having her voice back, she would speak to the tracker gladly.
“If you need nerkoya, you tell him.” The tracker swallowed. “Grove knows I’ve paid for the entire experience.”
“You pay for miracles,” Galipa said, prodding at coals with a twisted black iron rod.
“A miracle would be a speaking girl.”
“All in time, ah?” Galipa winked at Anna. “Do not fear. In time, you may regain everything, okay? You may speak.”
“May,” the tracker muttered.
“Yes, she may. Miracles take time.”
The tracker brushed his hands over the coals. “A miracle would come before our ship.”
Most benches were empty when Anna scraped her plate clean. Some guests were carrying their plates and leftover food to a trough on the far side of the room, while others huddled by the doorway, peering out at the sky and lacing up their boots. But the woman with the cinnamon wrap and a hawk’s gaze sat rigid in her seat, her plate untouched.
“Go wait for the miracle worker, Anna,” the tracker said. He jerked his head toward the curtains. “Farthest one back. The red one. He’ll be in for you soon enough. Just don’t go wandering.”
“It’s fenced,” Galipa said. He unclenched his brow and looked at Anna. “No worry about this, yes? Go and sit. I’ll take care of this,” he said as he tapped his throat.
Anna slid from the bench and walked past the tracker like a beaten hound. She glanced over her shoulder to see if the hawk-eyed woman would ever move, only to find her being approached instead.
“You need to delay it by another day,” the tracker said while wandering up to her bench.
Anna paused at the edge of the red curtain, half-slipping into a nearby alcove.
“Impossible,” the hawk-eyed woman said. “They will not pay the fees in Nur Sabah.”
The tracker leaned over the table. “Circumstances are different, if you couldn’t tell. I’ve sunk good salt into the girl.”
“So we sail tomorrow.”
“She’s worthless if she can’t speak.”
“Voice returns,” Galipa said. He poked the coals absently.
The tracker ignored him and shook his head. “Get me another day, and you can have the last of my salt. I’ll make a killing in the north.”
But the hawk-eyed woman only blinked back at him. “Have you been there, mohur?”
“My sources have. My riders used to—”
“Used to.” The hawk-eyed woman tipped her head back. “The north has changed. There is a reason that men such as Mohur Galipa are quick to flee the flatlands.” She paused, surveying the tracker’s veiled face. “Do you think that another day will change Hazan?”
The tracker cocked his head to the side. “One girl might.”
Anna strained to hear more, but noticed the spark of tumbling coals as Galipa finished his raking and set the rod aside. She peeled away the curtain and slipped through its folds before the herbman stood.
All four walls of the room were hanging curtains, and it was cramped enough to be lit by a single candle on its iron chain. Directly beneath the candle was a square wooden table, and nearby sat a tray full of thread, rags, needles, razors. Black spots covered the floorboards like freckles.
But the most unsettling thing was out of sight.
Anna heard the coughing as a faint crackling noise until she stepped closer to the table. It came from the wall of maple-colored curtains ahead, and the fabric did little to dampen the sounds of fluid bubbling in the lungs. She’d heard the noise enough to know that it couldn’t be helped, and their only escape was death. If she’d been allowed, she could’ve tried to mark them.
The curtains rustled behind Anna.
She whirled, breathless, to find Galipa drawing the curtains closed. It’s fine, she told herself. Not everything will hurt you.
“Sit, sit,” Galipa said as he ushered her to the tabletop. He grabbed a tin bucket from the corner and set it near the instrument table, sloshing some of its water onto the wooden floor in the process. “You are not hurting, ah? You do not need the pulp?”
Anna pushed herself up onto the table and listened to her body’s aching. By now, pain was a constant thing, and she could hardly tell the difference between suffering and relief. Still, she shook her head.
“Good,” Galipa said. He flashed a smile before sorting through a leather pouch on his hip. He produced a handful of flat green leaves, sprinkled them into a clay bowl, and mashed them with a black pestle. After a quick sniff, he gathered the paste on his fingertips. “This will help the skin to, how you say, form back? This will help.”
Anna stared at Galipa for a long moment, then lifted her chin and peeled away the fabric around her neck. His fingers smoothed the ointment over her skin and prickly sutures, and the mixture cooled from warm to chill, throbbing over the wound.
Her lip broke at its edge, trying to smile. If not for her lack of words, she would’ve thanked him.
But Galipa seemed to see it anyway, patting her on the arm. His touch didn’t make her shy away. “You are strong girl, ah? Shem says that he bring you food last evening. He says you are strong. This is very good. He does not meet many his age.”
A flurry of whispers and coughing broke out behind Anna, just beyond the curtains. She turned her head and frowned, then looked back at Galipa. She could easily discern Shem’s foreign words.
Once again, it seemed Galipa either read her thoughts, or the situation. His bright eyes dimmed, leaving his smile behind like an etching on his flesh. After a moment he looked away and patted her arm again. “It is good that you are strong. I need to head to market now, yes? Can you find your way to yard?”
Anna nodded, already working to rewrap her neck bandages. She returned his smile with as much strength as she could muster, sustaining the illusion until the northerner slipped through the curtain and his footsteps ceded to barking hounds and crying infants and cawing ravens, their wiry feet scratching over the roof tiles. Sitting in the gloom, taking in the piney odors of a nearby rag and the pulses of her torn flesh, Anna realized that she wouldn’t wake up from a dream. She wouldn’t learn why they’d sold Julek, or what the tracker desired of her, or why she was forced to live at all. Everything was wrong and much too real.
She pressed her palms to her face and sobbed.
She cried until she no longer heard the hounds, and until—
“Anna?”
Instantly placing Shem’s voice at her back, she swiped at her cheeks with linen sleeves and cleared her nose with a hard sniff, swallowing the filaments of saline and hops-laden mucus. She gritted her teeth and tightened her hands in her lap, more angered than broken by her exposure. If you cry, she heard father saying, his voice muffled beneath river water, do it in the far woods, Anna. Boys are too young to do anything but laugh. Yet there was no laughter, only soft footsteps rounding the table.
Shem leaned into view with dimmed eyes. “Anna, why you cry?”
She glanced away. “Pain,” she mouthed.
But the words drifted past him, his eyes scrunched as he parsed her face. “Thought pain?”
Anna lifted her head, studying the boy and his smile with blurred sight.
“I know stories.” Shem kneaded his fingers shyly. “Many stories, and maybe you like them. Maybe they take away thought
pain. They bring thought happiness, maybe.”
Dark woods and dead brothers and wicked men. She knew too many stories already, cradled too many horrible thoughts to recover now.
But the boy’s lopsided grin remained, and in spite of her shaking hands, she managed a nod. “Please,” her lips spoke.
His smile widened. “Okay,” he said, sinking down into a deep squat before the table. “I tell first story of beautiful girl. Very beautiful. Long, long time ago—”
A violent fit of coughing broke through the rows of curtains. Shem’s eyes snapped to attention, flared, focused on something behind Anna with chilling intent. He dashed out of the stall with his young voice calling, echoing: “Mat, mat.”
And in the same way that Anna could mentally assemble true letters into basic words without being told, she translated basic words of his language without learning it.
He was calling for his mother.
Anna spun and listened to the wet hacking as it leaked into her stall. She heard fluids boiling in the lungs, spattering and drowning the sufferer, and Shem alternating between orders and soothing reassurances.
It was neither her responsibility nor destiny to help. It was in her best interest to let these things slip away. It was in consideration of her own safety and secrets to leave Julek unmarked.
You’re wrong, father. She clenched her fists. You were always wrong.
She slid off the table, intent on Galipa’s scalpels.
Chapter 6
She chose the cleanest blade on the tray, holding it an arm’s distance from her face and staring into the silver, unsure of who was looking back at her. Three years ago, she’d seen herself in a rider’s pocket mirror while he stopped in Bylka overnight. Even then, she’d stared into unfamiliar wide eyes, a lopsided smile, and a nose that seemed too crooked. Now her cheeks were less pronounced and her jaw was shapelier, but she still had that nose and too-bright blond hair. She had rough, world-worn skin, and a bandage where the world had left its mark.
She shook away the reflection as she lowered the scalpel, rounded the table, and pushed through the next set of curtains.
Shem stood over his mother with a wet rag in hand, dabbing at her forehead and the jagged lines of her collarbone while he sang lullabies. Several candles burned around the storeroom, illuminating his mother’s crate-mounted mattress and half-finished tapestries upon the walls. The air was thick and hot and smelled of vinegar.
Shem’s mother opened her eyes and smiled at Anna. “Come over, dear. Did Galipa send you?” She buried a cough deep in her throat. “Don’t be afraid. You can stand closer.”
“Sickness never spread,” Shem said softly.
“Shem, she looks scared.” His mother squinted. “What do you have in your hand, dear?”
Anna raised the scalpel and turned it in her hands, glinting light around the room. She noted the apprehension in Shem’s eyes and his mother’s bemusement, wondering if she could get away with putting a blade to a woman’s throat and replicating the three points of her sigil, all under the auspices of healing.
She thought of father and mother and how they had hidden their blades in the rafters, just in case Anna decided to defy their wishes.
While mother and son stared at one another, Anna rounded the raised mattress. Glancing past the woman and into Shem’s bewildered eyes, she gleaned that the tracker hadn’t told them anything about her. She raised the blade to her own throat, pressing the point across her fabric, and mimicked the flow of her cuts. “Scribe,” she mouthed, drawing out the motions of each sound. “I want to help.”
Shem took hold of his mother’s upper arm and frowned. “Not enough salt.”
Shem’s mother patted her son’s arm in turn, trying to soften his mask of disappointment. “But perhaps where she comes from, dear . . .”
Shem’s eyes were wide and bright, and the translucent lump in his throat bobbed with uncertainty. He shared quick, furtive looks with his mother, who seemed unaffected by the turn of events, if not relieved. “Maybe she is ill.”
The woman put on a tired grin and smoothed over Shem’s hand with her own, which had grown pallid and jaundiced. “Just get your ba, will you?”
Shem’s eyes darted between his mother and Anna. Watching, waiting, blinking, he eventually stepped back. “No touch her until I return?”
Anna lowered the scalpel to her side and nodded.
Before the boy had even slipped between the curtains, the sigils on the woman’s neck began to dance. They contracted and spun in tight revolutions, begging the blade to part the skin. They were gusts of cool air rising off a stream.
She lifted the scalpel, pressed it to the woman’s throat, and cut.
Shem’s mother remained still. She stared back at Anna curiously, perhaps wondering if she would die here and how long it would take. There was no pain in her eyes.
Anna followed the luminous trail as it warped and formed around her blade, teasing the edge deeper and further up the woman’s neck. It was like chasing leaves in the wind, always one step behind but lost in the thrill.
She finished her stroke and turned the blade, joining the incision’s edges. She watched the rivulets of blood halt halfway down the neck’s milky skin, waver, then retreat into the wound. The severed skin pulled inward and reformed with a patina of smooth, pink scar tissue. Beneath Anna’s fingers, the wound healed.
The rune burned with pale light.
“Yishna’sul,” the woman whispered. Her eyes were wide and shimmering with tears, but they were not born from pain. Seconds before, her voice had been heavy with the fluids in her lungs. Now, with the rune’s light, her words held only awe. Even her skin darkened, swelling with a rosy hue. “Yisha’halam esul.”
Something warm and trembling grasped Anna’s hands while she stared into the woman’s eyes. She looked down and saw the woman’s hand—once pale, now lively and bronzed—clasped over her own. Anna felt the woman’s heartbeat drumming across the back of her hand.
“You are blessed,” the woman whispered.
Anna left her hand in place, comforted by the pulsing of her heartbeats and the way she looked at her. She stared at Anna like she was a gift, a miracle. She looked at Anna like her mother.
Footsteps creaked behind the curtains, and hushed words materialized from silence.
“Mat?” Shem asked. He wandered past Anna and leaned closer, trying to peer around Anna’s hand and glimpse the hayat glowing behind the rune. His eyes snapped to Anna. “You did?”
There was no telling whether his shock came from anger or joy. Anna pulled her hand free, still clutching the scalpel, and edged away from the table.
Galipa hurried to the table, his bright blue eyes darkening. He gazed up and down his wife once, twice, three times, pinching his brow with each pass.
The more Anna watched their stares, the more she wondered if she’d committed a crime. She wondered if she’d somehow ruined things, or put hatred in the hearts of the only people who had shown her kindness.
Anna dropped the scalpel.
“The lungs?” Galipa asked. His eyes reddened as he laid a hand across her rune. “How are the lungs, Emine?”
Shem’s mother, Emine, it seemed, reached up to Galipa and caressed his cheek. Candlelight reflected the glint of tears forming and breaking over her cheekbones. She inhaled a great gulp of air and released it smoothly. “Dobra.”
Despite the sobbing of his parents, however joyful it was, Shem wore a smile. His translucent lips peeled back and offered a clear view of his teeth, which were whiter and more rigid than any others Anna had seen. His gaze was one of boyish curiosity.
His stare fell to the rune, its lines appearing as scars in the reflection of his pearl eyes.
Galipa wiped at his eyes. “Have you tried the standing?”
Emine shook her head.
“Shem, stay.”
Galipa took hold of his wife’s arm. “Hold her like this. Not too harsh.”
“They don’t feel beskyah.” She glanced down at the arm on Shem’s side, her eyes creeping over the limb as though she’d just discovered it. She flexed her fingers and wrist, marveling at the bones shifting beneath the skin. “You see, canam? Do you see?”
Galipa ran a hand over her other arm, tearful once more. “Yes, I see.” As their flesh met, the sigils stirred and swirled near the point of contact.
She’d seen that on her mother and father before, each time their lips or arms met.
“Oh, child,” Galipa whispered, studying Anna with misty eyes. “You left this mark?”
Their eyes weighed down upon her. She glanced at Emine, who seemed incapable of taking her eyes from her own limbs, and nodded.
Shem studied Anna with a furrowed brow. “He tell you this, ba?”
“He said nothing,” said Galipa. For the first time, Anna felt the bite of Galipa’s tone. It wasn’t directed at her. “You are a blessed child, Anna. You are—”
He cried softly into his palms.
“Ba?” Shem pressed.
“Shem, canam, bring her whatever she likes,” Emine said, rubbing Galipa’s leathery arm and making the sigils dance. “Take care of her.”
After a moment of silence, Galipa wiped his eyes and dabbed his cheeks with the collar of his tunic. “Yes, as your mat said,” he managed. “I want you to take her up to the room. Stay with her, yes? Bring her anything.” With a last glance at his wife, Galipa turned back to Anna. “You will not have to work another of the days, Anna. You will never want for any of the things in this world.”
Once Anna followed Shem through the curtains, she heard the crying resume.
* * * *
Upstairs, on her new home of straw and linen, Anna tried to focus on the true letters. Shem sat on the floor in front of her and stared, touching his neck and trying to understand what Anna had done to his mother. After some time in silence, no longer keen on Shem’s mumbled adoration, she’d requested a piece of paper and some writing utensils to resume practice. But the boy’s curiosity hadn’t dimmed.
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