by Jane Kindred
Peta observed Shiva, who raised a deep ruby crescent brow in her direction. “Will you be staying the night?”
Shiva laughed with the elegance of genuine amusement. “You’d rather we left, despite the temperature below freezing. Our blood does not boil half so vigorously as you think it does. We will impose.”
“Keiren and I can sleep on the hearth,” Mell offered from the kitchen doorway, and tripped forward as though someone had nudged her sharply from behind.
Shiva nodded. “Ra and I will share the bed.”
“No,” said Ra. “I have a room.” She paused. “Do I?”
Peta inclined her head and went to fetch extra blankets from the cupboard in the hall.
Ahr was staring wicked darts at Ra. “Oh, come now.” She looked Ra up and down, arms still folded. “Surely you’d rather have Jak than a cold bed. I can sleep on the floor, or better yet, at Mound Ahr.”
“I would rather have you both,” said Ra solemnly. “But even the Meer can’t have everything they wish for.”
Rem cleared his throat with a disapproving frown.
Shiva broke the tension. “I’ll take your kind offer of a bed.” She nodded at Mell, who slipped before her and hurried down the corridor.
Keiren took the rest of the blankets from Peta and began to arrange them by the fire with irritation, while Geffn emerged from the kitchen last, drawing a pale young woman with him.
Looking at Jak and Ahr, he propelled his friend around them in the protection of his arms. “Let’s stay out of this, shall we?”
Ahr rested her hands on her hips. “Will we stay out of this, Jak? Should I go? Will you return to her bed?” When Jak’s gaze darted from Ahr to Ra in conflict, Ahr laughed, the sound as cold as her eyes. “Truth help you, Jak.”
Truth help me, thought Jak, standing before Ahr later in the bedroom they shared. It didn’t seem to. The more truth Jak knew, the more tangled by fate life seemed to be.
Ahr bristled when Jak tried to touch her arm. “I don’t want you here. Go sleep with her. Go lick her holy wounds.”
Weary, Jak sat on the bed and gazed up at her, standing stiff against the bureau, dressed in clothes like Jak’s now instead of the sweater and skirt. When Ahr had last come to the mounds, he’d been burning for Ra, and it had given Jak a sense of foreboding. His former vitriol and hatred of Ra was more familiar and hadn’t threatened the claim Jak had on his affections. But he’d professed to love Ra with his dying breath, though it was Ra who’d killed him.
Ahr’s first word in her new incarnation had been that name, held so deeply within the matrix of the soul, it was all she knew. Jak had punished her for it and extracted her renunciation of the one they both had loved. And now— How could Ahr not be angry? Jak was like some trickster goblin who’d grubbed in between them and stolen Ahr’s love for Ra to secretly hoard it. There was no way out of this.
“I don’t want to sleep with her,” Jak lied, and shifted on the bed, boot heels resting on the frame. “You know I didn’t intend to forgive her, but how could I see the pain she endured for me and remain coldhearted?”
“Ra’s bloody scars! If she was whipped by that cold devil, she deserved it. She put her hand through me, Jak, and that was not the worst she did.”
“If those marks had been for you, could you have stood it?”
The look in Ahr’s red-pooling eyes stabbed into Jak. “But they weren’t, were they? She suffers nothing for me. And you don’t care. You liar. Liar! Liar!” Red was spilling out in an angry splatter. Like Ra’s when she’d first renaissanced, Ahr’s emotions seemed like a kettle on the fire that might boil over at any instant.
As Jak rose and held a hand out toward her, Ahr moved swiftly to avoid it, bringing something from behind her back where her hand had rested. She was holding Jak’s leather shears in her fist, and the long, sharp blades darted up in the light of the oil lamp behind her. Jak drew back against the bed with dawning alarm. Ahr was missing the part of herself so persistent it had withstood fire, and Jak had forgotten. And Ahr had the advantage of Meerity and its attendant madness.
“You don’t need me now that you have the real thing.” Ahr spoke with deadly calm. “You don’t want me at all. You have your sickeningly beautiful, ageless Meer, to whom I so pathetically gave unconscious homage in the making of myself. You’re done with your game of me.” She jerked the shears up before her, and Jak braced for it, eyes shut tight in terror, not wanting to see it coming.
Instead of the sting of their plunge, the heavy snip of the blades pierced the air. Jak opened one eye and saw that Ahr hadn’t meant violence to Jak at all. Her plunges with the shears were chopping great chunks out of her glorious hair. “You don’t want her poor copy.” Ahr spoke through red tears as she held out another length before her and severed it roughly. “Maybe you still want Ahr ‘No One’. I can be him.”
“Meershivá,” Jak whispered, coming forward. “Don’t.” Jak reached for the shears, but Ahr held them away with a rough motion of her arm that made Jak fear she’d injure herself. “Please don’t, Ahr. My feelings for you haven’t changed. You’re not a copy of her. Please!”
Ahr shook her head and went on cutting until she’d severed it all in a jagged crown two inches from her skull. She dropped the shears onto the bureau and turned to look in its mirror. “Are you him?” She addressed the red-eyed reflection. “Do you remember?” Her eyes met Jak’s in the mirror. “If I dress as you do, you can pretend. Leave my clothes on this time when you make love to me. We’ll both be secretive and untouchable. Will you make love to me, or are you only for Ra?”
“Oh, Ahr.” Jak turned her around, and she gazed out of the conflicting inks of color in her eyes. Jak kissed her, tasting the blood that had crossed over her lips as it fell, and feeling strangely aroused by it. “I told you I couldn’t let you go. Why can’t you believe me?”
“That was before.”
“And in an hour’s time, you think I could change so toward you?” Jak’s head shook almost angrily. “We’ve had this argument before. I told you I loved Ra and you believed it meant I couldn’t love you. I let you think it then, but I refuse to now.” Jak pressed Ahr against the unfinished dresser, fingers playing at the clasp of Ahr’s belt. “I want you…if you’ll still have me.”
Ahr covered Jak’s hand. “Let my sex be a mystery, like yours.”
Jak’s head shook. “I know your sex. And I want it.” Unbuckling the pants and letting them fall, Jak sank down, balanced on boot heels, and partook of that certainty. The piquant warmth of her filled Jak’s mouth, and Ahr began to cry again, punctuating the tears that fell onto Jak’s head with adoring moans. She wept until she trembled urgently into Jak’s kiss with further proof of her womanhood.
“I know your sex, also,” she gasped as she curved into Jak. “Let me have it.”
Jak savored one last taste of her before coming up, unbuttoning the flannel shirt that covered what Ahr had only seen once, and that in a setting of abasement. “Take me, then,” said Jak. “Take all of me.”
Ahr pressed Jak toward the bed and tumbled onto it, the pants Jak had loosened catching at her ankles. She kicked them off and shimmied Jak’s down. Her limbs prowled over Jak, and she let her body press against the equal parts of the other, moving against Jak in the instinctive motion of union.
“Never doubt that I love you,” Jak whispered, and Ahr embraced the words on Jak’s lips.
In the silence of the mound after Jak had gone to sleep, the declaration didn’t seem so simple to Ahr. There was still Ra, who couldn’t be expected to just leave Jak to her. Jak would have to choose, as Ahr had: Ahr or Ra. Ahr couldn’t leave this to fate, which had been so capricious. She slipped her limbs out of the tangle of Jak’s and whispered a conjured robe, leaving Jak sleeping the heavy sleep of satisfaction.
Ra was awake as well, probably expecting her. Ahr found her door and we
nt in without knocking to find her seated in the center of her bed in the pose of meditation, brushing her hair in the dim glow of lamplight. Ahr put her hand to her own wild whim of the night, stung by the beauty of Ra, but perversely satisfied to have defaced her own. Somehow she knew this would be upsetting to Ra. The brushing slowed, and Ra stared as she pulled the door closed.
Ra’s brow wrinkled in concern. “What did you do?”
“You knew me that way, didn’t you?” Ahr still clutched the doorknob behind her. “As the woman, not the man. Whom you murdered.” When Ra continued to brush, watching her, fury spiked in Ahr’s blood. “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
“That you’re here is so much more than I could have hoped. What right have I to questions?”
“I want you to go away. Go away with that other one, and leave me Jak. You owe me.”
“Yes.” Ra drew the brush through her hair. “And I owe Jak.”
“You know that I’m Meer now.”
“Yes.”
“I could kill you.”
“Yes.”
“But that Shiva.” Ahr jerked her chin toward the wall. “She’d kill me, wouldn’t she?”
Ra seemed to contemplate it, drawing on the brush as she held a plait of hair taut beneath it. “I can’t say.”
Her ire was growing at Ra’s quiet, simple answers. “Why did you come here? You knew I was here.”
“No.” Ra shook her head, apparently bemused. “You’d think I would.” She completed a stroke of the brush with excruciating slowness, and Ahr crossed the room in a rage and snatched it from her hand.
Ra looked up at her, waiting. “Will you kill me again, to even the score?”
Unable to control the impulse, Ahr struck Ra’s face with the back of the silver brush. But she was Meer, and she hadn’t realized precisely what this meant. Ra tumbled backward from the bed, catching herself with her arms against the wall as she struck it. Her face was already swelling to a Meeric red, the infamous blood trailing from one side of her mouth.
Ahr’s chest rose and fell with a colossal breath, determined not to show alarm despite the unexpected result of her action. “You come here and you tear Jak up to ease your conscience. Parading your scars for Jak. What devotion!”
“Why are you so angry with me?” Ra put her hand to her swelling cheek, her audacity incredible. “You weren’t when you died.”
“Then I was a fool.” Ahr spat the words at her. “I was a fool to come to you at all. I made Jak go. I was a fool to leave Rhyman and Merit.” She paused. “Merit…” This hadn’t been in her memory before, this piece of time between life at Haethfalt and the end at Ra’s hands. Ahr had been penetrated by the earnest Merit. It had been an act of utmost friendship, midtlif. But when had this friendship grown? It had the indelible certainty of a cataclysmic shared experience. And that experience—it had something to do with Ra.
The dark rubies of the ring that hung on a thread about Ra’s neck caught the light. “Mi la,” Ahr whispered, and the expression of shock took on an instant meaning. Ra’s hypnotic eyes had conquered her. Ahr had forced this same memory upon Ra once, in Ra’s own renaissanced amnesia: the memory of their daughter, whom Ahr had named Mila after that same expression of awe.
The influence of the ebony gaze delivered the rest to her, time flowing in a backward spiral. The violent end to that life and Ra’s at Ahr’s provoking as MeerRa, beaten, tumbled from the temple steps onto the broken body of their child. The isolation from Mila as she was raised as Ra’s heir, renamed RaNa. The theft of the baby, and Ahr’s milk wasted in the rain as she collapsed, hopeless onto the ground. Ra’s refusal to acknowledge the child inside her. Ra’s inexplicable silence after the weeks together. Ecstasy at his hands, his mouth, his cock. The irrevocable piercing of her maidenhead. The stumbling of beloved Merit as he bore Ra in his litter, allowing Ahr to be secretly drawn inside the curtains. The seven unbearable days of visual communion between two pairs of eyes in the dusty streets of Rhyman as Ahr followed MeerRa’s procession during the People’s Blessing.
The brush Ahr still held dropped from her fingers. She was numb, unable to move. “My god, how I’ve hated you.” Ra made a move toward her, and Ahr stumbled back against the door. “You took my hatred in the last life.” Ahr shook her head to clear it of the drug of Ra’s eyes. “It was a deliberate act to weaken me, to bewitch me once more.”
“No.” Ra stepped back against the bed. “It was an act of instinct. It felt like acid on your skin when I touched you. I took it without thinking.”
Ahr ignored her excuses. “You took my hatred,” she repeated with a growing conviction. “But I found it again in the elements, and it’s mine. We are even on the score of murder. But there is all the rest. You left me in the beggar’s yard in the punishment of silence with your baby in my belly and upheld me to the scorn and ridicule of the host of Rhyman. You stole my child! You broke my maidenhead without a thought for my pain, and then threw me back into the street like garbage. I was fifteen, barely more than RaNa would become.” Her voice became an untrusted whisper. “And you made me your concubine without caring to see my face.”
Her voice wavered as the inevitable tears began. “You shamed me, Ra, making me wear the veil when you’d been inside me. You dishonored my virginity. It was worth nothing to you!” Ra tried to speak, but Ahr refused to allow it. “For all of it, and for loving Jak, I hate you.” She grasped the handle of the door, and turned back once more to Ra. “Jak was far more gentle in taking my new maidenhead.”
Twenty-three: Machination
She couldn’t stay here. It was impossible. Ahr slipped past the sleeping couple in the gathering room and up the stairs on the feet of one trained from birth to keep her presence unobtrusive, lifted the latch with care and stepped out into the icy night.
She stood in the snow before the mound, trembling. “Clothes of black, like Shiva’s.” Garments identical to the ones MeerShiva had worn on her arrival rippled downward from Ahr’s shoulders, terminating in heavy boots of a shiny black hide she didn’t recognize. Like the heavy coat that hugged her, it seemed to repel the damp snow. She stroked her leather-gloved fingers across the dense threads at her sleeves, pleased. She might be new, but she had Meeric blood, and it seemed eager to create.
“Wool scarf,” she added, and the long, knit lilac wool she’d envisioned circled slowly about her throat. She tucked it up over her mouth and ears, as the night was growing windy.
She hadn’t known what she meant to do, just wanting to be free of the suffocating mound and Ra’s suffocating presence. But in Shiva’s traveling clothes, a purpose was breathing within her. She needed a drink. Ahr began to walk in the direction of the slender crescent moon, legs moving with Meeric certainty and swiftness.
The old Ahr had often traded at Mole Downs. She remembered him now. He was an outsider, and to most of Haethfalt, little better than a Downser himself. It was to the Downs he’d first come from Rhyman, after the disintegration of the Expurgist movement. It was a natural progression, since stories of falend settlements had been the seeds of the early movement.
In the beginning, the Expurgation had been nothing more than a secret meeting of a small group of radicals. After hearing whispers of it in the market, Ahr had gone to see for herself because it was said the Expurgists would bring equality to all Rhymani. As though meeting for the dark sabbats of a secret church, they’d gathered each week in the upstairs room of the teahouse where Ahr had once worked. There were temple prostitutes—of which Ahr considered herself one—itinerant dockhands, textile workers from the factories—a handful of youthful idealists and weary laborers who met to discuss the modern relevance of Meerism. No one at first had believed a rebellion was feasible.
It was Ahr’s own vocal bitterness that had encouraged the shift in focus from Rhymanic equality to the eradication of Meeric rule. And once it had shifted, the numbers
grew larger. People from all castes began to attend, and the meetings moved from the upstairs room to the teahouse floor itself. There was no limit to the rage evoked by MeerRa’s devotion to his pampered daughter.
When the Expurgation was over, everyone had changed. Rhyman had changed. The templars no longer had any use for the agitators who’d laid the groundwork for their new regime. And the activists who’d once held up Ahr as a leader in the fight no longer had any use for women.
The details of Ahr’s life after the Expurgation had been hazy before tonight, but they, too, were now returning, shaken loose from memory by Ra’s relentless gaze. It was after the Expurgist groups had drifted apart that the seed of seeking out a fugitive Meer and demanding a vetma had begun to germinate in Ahr’s mind. She’d found MeerShiva and made her petition, and Shiva had granted it. And Ahr had become a man.
In the falend, other aging Expurgists had staked their claims as Meerhunters in the Downs, and so Ahr had followed.
Ahr stopped as the glow of the ever-open taverns splashed across the snow. She’d made the ten-mile walk to the Downs in less than an hour, moving with Meeric speed without even realizing it. Hooray for the Downser drunkards who kept the taverns open. Ahr had never needed a drink more. It was almost a proper town now, not just a falend outpost with a jumbled collection of buildings. And directly ahead was the pub Jak and Ahr had frequented in another life.
Upon entering the pub, she suffered a moment of unpleasant disorientation. She’d forgotten she wasn’t Ahr Naiahn any longer, but a young woman, not much more than twenty summers by the reflection in the mirror over the bar, alone at night in a tavern. The last time Ahr had been a woman, she’d been subject to the veil. There was no such custom in Mole culture, but at that moment, she almost wished for one.
Trying to ignore the leering looks from a table of drunkards in the front of the establishment, Ahr headed toward the barkeep at the far end of the bar, but one of the men put his arm out to block her way. Before she could move to go around him, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her close to his ale-marinated beard.
