Pain shot through Anna’s skull, and the symbols vanished.
Wisps of hayat evaporated.
“I’m holding your suture,” the voice said, cutting through the ringing in Anna’s ears. It was a woman’s voice, detached, certain. It was Bora, who now knelt on Anna’s chest with hardened amber eyes. She held three rigid fingers against Anna’s throat. “If you make another move, I’ll tear your threading free, and you will bleed to death.”
Even if Anna could’ve drawn a breath, there was hardly anything to say. Her head throbbed in slow pulses, robbed of hayat’s euphoria, and she saw Bora only by the candlelight upon her shaved head and the murder in her eyes. Anna realized, distantly, that thousands had probably seen this image in their last breath.
“Nod if you can understand me,” Bora said.
But Anna didn’t dare to move; she could feel Bora’s fingers pinching the knot at the tail-end of her suture. She forced a dab of air into her lungs. “I understand.”
Bora’s eyes hardened. “You can speak.” Her posture was militant, her knee tucked into the crevice of Anna’s ribcage and forcing the air out in a slow burn.
Pressure mounted behind Anna’s eyes. Her throat tightened. Her vision blurred with tears. She clawed at Bora’s linen, striking and slapping until her arms grew too heavy to move. In her last moments of breath, she flailed her legs and scraped her boots over the hardwood, unable to reach . . .
Bora withdrew her knee, stood, and stepped away. She loomed over Anna as a dark shadow, examining her every movement. But the attention wasn’t curiosity; it was mercy.
Anna gasped as the crushing sensation fell away, and her first full breath arrived with sharp pain. Her fingers and toes tingled, all lifeless. The room slowly brightened around her.
“Shem,” Bora said, glancing away, “sharafen ha demecine.” When Shem opened his mouth to protest, she whirled on him. “Shara.”
The boy staggered to his feet, little more than a blur in Anna’s periphery, and retreated through the hanging curtain.
Anna squinted up at Bora, acutely aware of her throat’s dryness. The salve had been her only barrier against pain. Stranded in Bora’s shadow, it seemed that the woman had materialized from the shadows like a specter. There had been no footfall, nor any hint of cinnamon or sumac in the air.
“You didn’t really believe that your handler would leave you to your own devices, did you?” Bora asked. “He may have reservations about harming you, but I’m not bound in the same manner.”
“He’s not my handler.” Anna propped herself up on her elbows, tucked her knees in, and held onto her ankles, unwilling to look at Bora. “That man is a killer.”
“What else?”
Anna squeezed her ankles. “What do you mean, what else?” She glared at the northerner. “He murdered my brother. And you work for him. You do everything for him.”
“I work with him.”
“Who is he?” Anna asked. Cold fear of the answer immediately set in.
“I don’t know,” Bora said. “He paid salt on the grounds that you are his dependent, and that you will be escorted with him. Anything else is concealed, child. I serve another.”
Another. Surely they had to be far more wicked.
“All I know,” Bora said, drawing Anna back to the moment, “is that he trusts you excessively.”
Anna glanced to her right, where her blood-spattered blade rested in the candlelight. “You shouldn’t work with him.”
“Why? Because he’s a criminal?”
“Because he should die. If he didn’t have that rune, he would be dead.” Anna’s eyes watered, and she swiped her face with linen sleeves. “If you can hurt me like that, you can kill him. You should have killed him.”
“You believe that I can destroy a rune, then?” Bora asked. “How did he receive such a mark?”
Anna wrapped her arms around her knees and closed her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. You should help me, not him. He doesn’t deserve help.”
“If I murdered every wicked man alive,” Bora said with a rigid brow, “then this world would be empty. We leave scars upon the worthy flesh in our circles. It would be a fool’s task to choose justice in life.”
The hypocrisy was too much. Anna gritted her teeth and stared up at the northerner, knowing that violence was hardly an answer. There were no surprises against her. “Just help me,” Anna said. “Help me get away, and I’ll give you whatever you want.” She shook her head. “I’ll give you a rune. I don’t care. Jus—”
Bora sank in a low crouch, her hawkish eyes locked with Anna’s. “You will not offer me such a thing again. You believe you’re a good child with a bad man, but you wear the blood of the conquered. You are not a victim. You create victims. This is the truth of the world.”
“What?” Anna whispered.
“You should be afraid of me, child. I do not fear pain, not as your handler does. I am not afraid to perish. The first thing you’ll learn in Hazan is that you are not immortal. You never will be.”
“I never claimed to be.” Instantly she recalled the sutures across her neck.
“You still hold onto life within your breaths,” the northerner replied. “You fear the end.”
Despite the woman’s hardness, there was something admirable about her. Something so essential to her survival that Anna wanted to say teach me, to beg for her knowledge. But there were scars that accompanied the lessons, surely.
“You have taken this boy from his family,” Bora added, “and you now wish to take away his freedom with your cuts. I will not allow this.”
“He asked me,” Anna said. “He wanted this. You heard him.”
“He is a boy, and he knows little. Among the sands and plains, your cuts are everything.” Bora’s words emerged like tar, viscous and burning in Anna’s mind. “For one cycle of immortality, men are willing to die. Men are willing to kill a thousand other men. Millions of innocents have died because of your cuts.”
Anna scowled. “You’re blaming me for these things, but I did nothing wrong.”
“If you had marked this boy, you would have. In your new home, you will cause such deaths, and perhaps many more. It is the nature of your kind.”
“I don’t belong to any kind.”
“The hayajara, child.” Bora moved her head to block Anna’s view of the wooden planks, staring back into her eyes with the same sharpness. “In the north, life is everything. And the lives you preserve will claim countless others. You cannot forget this.”
Although Anna’s fingers trembled, and her throat pulsed with the agony of speaking, she was struck with a sense of boldness. Bora’s words had torn into her, but they only bled her fear. Somewhere beneath the surface, she felt power. The lives I preserve.
“Do you understand this?” Bora asked.
There was venom in her words, but Anna refused to show fear anymore, especially to Bora. She pursed her lips.
“You should not think of me as your enemy. You’ll have plenty of those, you know.” Bora leaned even closer. “I protect those who require protection.”
“For salt.”
“Do you believe that Shem gave me salt?” Bora asked. “If he were a hayajara, I would strike him as I struck you.”
It was a pointless comparison, Anna realized. Scribes—hayajara, as Bora knew them—could never be boys. And they could never be like him, without man-skin or descended from the stag groves. Maybe that was why the tracker had always wanted daughters. Maybe he’d only wanted a chance at Anna’s gifts.
“Heed my words.” Bora waited until Anna met her eyes. “You should cooperate with me. In Hazan, this will be your saving.”
“I don’t need you.”
Bora blinked. “I don’t extend aid for your benefit. It would be irresponsible to let you roam freely, child. One does not release their hound into the streets
without teaching it to return home.”
“I’m not a hound,” Anna said.
“You leave your teeth marks wherever you go.”
“If I told my handler what you’ve said to me, he would have you killed.”
“So tell him.” Bora glanced toward the curtains, letting the candlelight wash over her hooked nose and firm jaw. “I don’t care if I receive payment. I don’t care what he may do to me. No man would be swift enough to stop me, if I resolved to do something.” Her gaze passed over Anna like a knife’s edge. “My oaths bear deep roots, child. You would be wise to take my hand when it is offered.”
And so she slipped through the curtains.
Anna sat on the floor, motionless, unable to cleanse the feeling of being watched. Eventually she blew out her candle, curled up in the packed-straw bunk with her blade, and recalled how it had felt to hold Julek in his swaddling blankets. She’d been so surprised by the babe’s warmth, and how her mother had trusted her so greatly.
In the darkness and the sea breeze that slipped through the vessel’s cracks, her mind endlessly churning Bora’s words, Anna wondered if she belonged in the land of the wicked.
Chapter 9
For four days the boat cut across the sea. Anna spent most of her time on the sun-bleached deck, playing dice with copper-skinned sailors and passengers, scanning the horizons, watching her forearms and ankles darken considerably in the sunlight. She caught only stray glimpses of Shem, whom Bora kept sheltered behind her white cloak.
Even so, she needed him. Julek had always given her the assurance that she would never be alone in life.
It wasn’t long before Bora revealed her working voice to the tracker, but the man had only been gentle and encouraging in light of the discovery. “Easy,” he’d whispered when Anna tried to explain, standing under the nebulae with her. “Let it rest, girl.”
He was a shadow of the creature he’d been in prior days. When fish leapt out of the waves he gave a deep belly laugh, and he often brought Anna wine and honey cakes at dusk. In the evenings and hours before sunrise he wandered Anna’s deck and put a blade to the throat of any man who crept too close to her bunk, giving her ample time to trace true letters into the floor’s straw coverings.
On the fifth day, just before sundown, they reached Hazan.
Anna saw its shores as a black mass. Towers rose like a palisade, taller yet denser than in Malchym, bright with the glow of hanging lanterns. Northern air, warmer than usual, but hardly hot, flowed into her quarters and stirred her hair, bearing a scorched industrial odor.
Look how far you’ve come.
She envisioned her parents spending every morning scouring the woods for moss covered bones, hoping that their fruitless search haunted them while she created a new life. One of wealth, safety, prestige, all earned by her own hands and her gifts. Her father would’ve subjected her to a lifetime of labor in a riding post, anyway. Your cuts are everything. Bora’s words made her cognizant of just how much her family would’ve squandered.
While the other passengers were busy packing their wicker trunks, Anna slipped on a poncho and gathered her meager possessions. On the upper deck, where Anna saw the lights and towers of Hazan, a thin wreath of smoke hung over the city and drifted westward toward emergent stars.
“Girl,” the tracker called from the railing. He stood among a crowd of passengers, including Bora and Shem, appearing monstrous yet unremarkable beside scarred Morahrem worshippers and eyeless, blindfolded Gosuri. A nearby brazier, fanned by a sailor using a wooden paddle, lighted the threadwork of his mask. “Stay near me when we get off.” He placed a hand on Anna’s shoulder and nodded toward Bora. “She’s our best guide here.” The tracker stared intently at Anna’s wrist. He took hold of her linen sleeve and unrolled it, concealing the silver bracelet. “Make sure it stays like that.”
“I’m careful,” Anna said. His touch, soft as it was, still startled her.
“Bad things have a habit of happening to pretty girls here,” the tracker warned. He returned his gaze to the city. “Sometimes careful isn’t enough.” He drew up the hood of Anna’s poncho, shrouding her in warm darkness and tucking her hair out of sight. “When we’re on land smear some dirt on those cheeks. Bit too rosy.”
Anna clutched at her belt and its hanging blade.
* * * *
The sun was a low hanging blister when they disembarked and left the mooring grooves carved into the coastline, their walkways manned by torchbearers and workmen with grating northern voices, surrounded by towering barges swathed in chains and strange black paste. Nearby were narrow city streets, where fading daylight reduced strangers to shadows and foreign tongues. They came to a shrill and sweltering junction of countless paths, hemmed in by buildings jutting out at one another.
Shem stood between the tracker and Bora, his eyes full of wonder at the commotion. He only noticed Anna after the girl had been watching him for a short time, but he flashed a smile verging on fanaticism. Even so, it was more welcome than the children gawking along surrounding rooftops and walls.
Thick, insignia-laden blocks of setstone formed waist-high walls at the opening of every street. Guards stood in packs behind each barricade. A man with teal face paint reclined in a hammock stretched between an alleyway’s windows, while a nearby gathering of bare-chested, paunchy northerners inhaled powder and skinned pears and played the citole. Blindfolded falcons stirred within another group’s cages.
Clumps of travelers, each distinct yet wearing similarly outlandish clothing, crossed the checkpoint stations.
Bora led them to a barricade adorned with a painted red paw. The men behind this checkpoint mulled in eerie silence. They wore iron plates with tan silk underneath, and only in the light of a brazier’s pulsing coals did Anna notice their trick. Their armor carried a dull patina of sand baked into the metal, forming a speckled pastiche of sun-bleached ochre and soil. Bits of shrubs and withered grass hung from the armor in clumps.
“Fill our tins full,” the tracker whispered in river tongue to the attending guard, “and tell patvor we’re coming.”
Monsters, she translated. Ghouls and demons lurking in the fen, as riders had once termed them. Every child knew the word from tales. She turned, staring at Bora expectantly, but received nothing.
As they passed, the guards shuffled back and regarded Anna with wide eyes. She couldn’t ignore their hands resting upon dented pommels.
The market was a wide courtyard packed with net-covered stalls, and despite night’s approach, buyers and sellers crowded the aisles, bickering. Candlelight illuminated vignettes of vendors’ booths, the dim lights scraping up merchants’ and craftsmen’s faces to carve monstrous features.
A restless crowd clogged one side of the market. Bare-breasted women stood on daises, most of them young and frail and trembling, struggling to meet the eyes of the buyers in the audience. Some were still girls, though their long, black hair dampened the youth in their faces.
Anna wondered how much a pale-skinned, golden-haired girl would fetch in a market for Hazani men, but was quick to dismiss the thought.
“Best droby in Hazan,” the tracker explained, shouldering his way past a beggar. He gestured for Anna to stay close. “Just one of them would cost a pouch, maybe two. But they’re good at what they do. Worth the salt, the whispers say.” He shrugged, then leveled a toying stare at Shem. “Look familiar?”
Shem examined the spectacle. “A little.” He smiled as though he didn’t understand the question. “In Tas Hassa, much quieter. They make the paying in coins. And in Qersul—”
“He’s from Nahora?” The tracker narrowed his eyes at Bora. When the northerner declined to reply, he whistled. “Interesting. Who knew that a puddle of afterbirth could travel so far?” Shem continued to smile, oblivious. “Does he know Orsas?”
“Ashah meid’to baqa,” Shem said in a rush of exciteme
nt.
Anna stared at the boy, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was grinning proudly, willing to continue if prompted. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t mentally replicate the strange yet flowing sounds.
“So korpa?” the tracker hissed. “What did he say?”
Bora shrugged. “I don’t know Orsas.”
“But he does.” The tracker stopped at the end of an aisle, scanning the boy up and down. He met Shem’s grin with bloodshot eyes. “Around me, and around Anna, you’ll speak only the river-tongue. And if you teach her a single word of eastspeak—”
“He understands.” Bora seized the boy’s wrist and pulled him closer.
“And he’d better take off that fucking grin.”
The edges of Shem’s lips lowered by a hair.
“Settle affairs at the kator,” Bora advised the tracker, drawing Anna’s attention. “I’ll escort her.”
The tracker moved his neck from side to side, producing a dull crackling sound like branches over flame. He sighed, slipped a hand into his tunic, and retrieved an apple-sized leather pouch bound with twine. “Should be enough for what we need. And then some.”
Anna gaped at the salt, unsure of how the tracker had been able to accumulate so much. It was enough to buy a pair of oxen, if Anna went by Bylka’s rates. Beyond the value of the pouch, however, she also found herself asking, If he had so much salt, why was he tracking?
The tracker tossed the pouch to Anna. It was impossibly hefty, rolling with the smoothness of a merchant’s finely ground salt.
“Be sure she’s at the rails on time,” he said.
Bora eyed the pouch with distaste. “Naturally.”
Hazani women grasped at Anna’s sleeve as she passed their counters, vying for her to feel their fabrics: silk, cotton, wool. Some stalls sold spiders in bottles, while others offered horses so cheap that Anna could only attribute the price to their proximity to the plains, where such beasts were bred and tempered like sows. Shem translated at each stall, calling out prices for canteens, soaps, and dried provisions.
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