“I agree,” I said softly. I wasn’t as worried for my former friend now that it appeared we were taking a nomad prince with us as collateral. It seemed a highly inequitable trade to me, but I wasn’t about to spoil things by commenting. Kalim was clearly a man of honor; if he said Geoffrey would not be harmed in his absence, then I believed him.
A shout rose from the crowd, and Kalim raised a hand to silence them. I thought for a moment that we were in trouble again, but as no one moved to attack anyone, I realized it was no more than a very enthusiastic farewell from Kalim’s people. Rook seemed to like it, in any case, since he pumped his fist into the air too.
Then, with a look over his shoulder just to make sure we were paying attention, Kalim took off across the desert. His camel moved like nothing I’d ever seen before, like it was an entirely different breed of animal, which it might well have been. It made sense for a nomadic people to breed their animals for speed more so than for anything else, as covering a great deal of space in a short amount of time would be vital to their success and survival.
Unfortunately, while I was thinking about this, my brother had already taken off, kicking up clouds of sand and dust in his wake. I was left in the undesirable position of bringing up the rear. As always.
It hadn’t been as difficult before, because back when we had been on foot, I hadn’t been staring into a camel’s ass the entire time. Now that was the only view I had; we were riding too quickly, and my attention was too focused on not falling off to observe the other desert sights.
I was also sore everywhere, and the uncomfortable pace the animal kept was magnified only by the unshapely angles of its ridiculous body. We were not friends. We would never be friends. Riding more quickly meant we would reach the end of this torment sooner, but it also heightened the pain I felt with each jolt and jostle. On top of that, my nerves were frayed to bastion and back, as the beast preferred to test my attention at random intervals.
The damn thing was trying to buck me.
It was a contest of wills, and I did not intend to lose against a camel—no matter how damned this particular creature was. I could be stubborn, too, I thought, and I refused to let Rook down again.
We rode this way for the rest of the night, without pause or rest, until at last the camel was too tired to try his games and I was too tired to hate him. We were both in the same boat—and by the time we stopped when the sun rose, cresting the far-off dunes, we’d made an uneasy peace with each other. Neither I nor the camel appreciated our current lots in life. Both miserable creatures, we could agree not to make each other’s lives worse. We would just have to accept our differences for the sake of our similarities and try to get along.
“Here!” Kalim said, drawing his mount up short and leaping from its back with such exquisite grace that I was, momentarily, breathless. “We rest!”
“There’s still an hour before the sun’s too hot,” Rook pointed out, but he dismounted too. It wasn’t with the same fluidity as Kalim, but it was with its own steely grace. Meanwhile, I clambered down from my camel like an old painter off his rickety ladder.
“That is not how you do it,” Kalim said.
“I am aware of that,” I agreed.
“Don’t be rude to our guide, Thom,” Rook said.
I hadn’t been trying to be, but I was ashamed nonetheless. “I am sorry,” I said. “Please, Kalim; I hope you will forgive me.”
“I have no room for more grudge-bearing in my heart,” Kalim said, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Do not worry, Mollyrat Thom. You are given my forgiveness.”
Relieved, I fumbled around in my pack for my tent while Rook finished setting his up against the side of his compliant camel.
“If you would like, I will teach you how to mount when we next ride,” Kalim offered. “And how to dismount. You would not last moments here with such technique.”
“My brother has more aptitude than I,” I explained wearily. The exact technique of tent-building was also eluding me, and Kalim did me the great honor of pretending he didn’t see me fumble. I was grateful for that.
Rook had already disappeared inside his tent; knowing him, he was also probably already asleep. I rubbed sand out of my nose—this happened when the wind was up, and it was one of the most disgusting facts of desert life I had yet to accept—and managed to get the tent up at least enough to keep the sun, if not the sand, out of my eyes. Kalim shook his head, very clearly pitying me, and gave me one last shoulder clap before he created, with impossible speed, a tent out of his riding stick and cape, disappearing underneath it at once.
At least, I told myself as I crawled into the dark space, which smelled of sunlight on camel, Rook might be able to find the answers he thought he was looking for, somewhere in the Khevir dunes.
I only hoped they’d make him happy.
MADOKA
When I woke up there was somebody holding something cold and wet against my head. It made me cranky as shit from the beginning, because what I’d really wanted was to wake up and be dead.
“Hey,” I said, my voice cracking with disuse. I sounded like an angry frog. “That you, Badger?”
I didn’t know who else I thought it could possibly be, but a creaking female voice answered me instead.
“Your Badger has taken a short rest,” it said. “He needed it, and I was finally able to convince him of the practicality. Once I am assured you will be all right on your own, I will go get him.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Sounds good. Who are you?”
As I looked at her, her face resolved itself in the darkness. It was nighttime, and we were outside, and the air was cold against the wet spots at my temple. I shifted uncomfortably, but at least the dizziness and the headache that’d overtaken me were gone.
The woman who was sitting next to me looked strange as anything, like a ghost out of one of the stories the old lady used to tell late at night to scare the kids into bed. Never scared me; I was too practical for that. But seeing her here, in this desert town, with all my memories slowly starting to come back to me…I definitely felt a chill. For a moment, anyway. Then it was gone.
Her nose was too sharp for the rest of her delicate face, and her skin was very pale—the kind of white that all the court ladies wished they had. No wonder she looked like a ghost. If I squinted, I could see that her eyes were green, so all that meant she had to be foreign. Her lips twitched when she saw I was watching her and she looked away, but I knew she was just playing at being shy. I’d lived with a lot of people, and I always knew when someone was being truthful or when they were playacting.
“Any guesses?” she asked softly. There was something wrong about her voice; my hand started throbbing all at once, and I closed my eyes with a groan, curling up around it.
She said nothing at that—maybe, if she’d been looking after me, she was used to this. I didn’t know. She moved the compress to the side of my throat, easing the racing pulse there, and it did make things feel better after a little while.
“My name,” she said, like a peace offering I guessed, “is Malahide.”
“Strange name,” I said. “You raised around here? How do you know Ke-Han?”
“Hm,” she murmured. “You’re very sharp. I’ve had to learn a great many things that are not natural to me.”
“Your voice sounds off,” I told her.
She blinked down at me, her green eyes going wide, but I still wasn’t fooled by the show. “Does it?” she asked, and pressed one dainty little gloved hand against her throat.
“Yeah,” I said. I was still kind of out of it, and feeling pretty woozy to boot, so I wasn’t too sure what I was saying. “Like wind chimes, or a music box, or something. Tinny. Pretty, though.”
“Oh, dear,” Malahide said, putting her gloved hand against my forehead. I wanted to tell her that it was a good way to lose a glove, since my face was smeared with soot and sweat and who knew what else, but I couldn’t quite get the words out of my mouth. “I see you’re still
a little disoriented.”
“That’s a good word for it,” I muttered. Didn’t get the chance to see many foreigners where I came from. Xi’An kept to itself, for the most part, and the people did the same in some kind of twisted show of patriotism. Nobody from other lands bothered to try our borders anymore, and I’d gotten out before the Volstovic diplomats arrived. So I was more than a little interested in this woman, with her skin like parchment and her strange green eyes.
I wanted to ask Badger what he thought of her, but according to Malahide, he was taking a little snooze. He sure had great timing. I guess I felt a little guilty, since I hadn’t been able to tell that he needed to stop and rest, but then it was his own damn fault for not speaking up in the first place. I wasn’t his mother, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to start acting like it. Where I came from, people always told you when they needed something. You sure as hell couldn’t trust anyone else to look after you.
Malahide, I repeated to myself. It was still a weird name, no two ways about it, but then again she was a foreigner. Maybe everyone where she came from had a name like that, and mine was the weird one. She took her neat little hand off my forehead, and my hand gave a sudden, insistent throb just to remind me it was still in business. I flinched, curling my fingers around my palm. Never thought there’d be a day when I’d miss it itching like fire all through my skin, but now I kind of did. This pain was definitely worse.
If Malahide noticed what I was doing, she pretended not to see. Instead, she busied herself with something just out of my line of sight.
“Hey,” I said, rasping just like the old woman.
“Water?” she asked, holding a canteen up to my lips.
Without any kind of modesty whatsoever, I took it right out of her hands, and she helped me to sit up while I did my best impression of a dying woman. Maybe I had been dying. I had to slow down when the water started dribbling out of my mouth and running across my cheeks, though, since I didn’t want to waste it. Especially not in a place like the desert; it was disrespectful to the gods. When I’d finished, I handed the canteen back to Malahide, who looked a little surprised, but she didn’t call me a desert pig the way Badger might have, so at least there was that. Maybe her kind was too dainty for it, but something about her face made me doubt that.
“I’ll refill it at the well,” Malahide said thoughtfully, screwing the top back on.
My hand pulsed again, hot and sharp, and I traced the lines of the compass’s hands with one finger, keeping the whole spectacle out of Malahide’s sight. The hands were still in alignment, pointed straight out over the desert on whatever path those nomads had taken. I knew I had to follow them, but right now my bones felt about as sturdy as mud in a rice paddy, and it was doing a wood-heeled clog dance on my morale.
“Were you here when the village was attacked?” Malahide asked, her queer voice trembling like a bowstring. The nervous show didn’t quite reach her eyes, though. She was a lot tougher than she was letting on, for whatever reason. But if she was as noble as she looked, then toughness was considered right up there with the big sins, so it was probably a lot less trouble to go around fainting at spiders and whatnot than to let people see what she was really made of. I didn’t envy her that kind of playacting one bit.
“No,” I said, starting to sound halfway back to human after drinking all that water. “Just caught the aftermath.”
In a flash, I remembered the boy I’d tried to help, before Badger had taken over. Was he all right? Maybe it was stupid for me to get so attached to someone I hardly knew, but the kid’s situation and mine’d been more similar than I liked to think about. In fact, his whole village was making me itchy, like I’d somehow made a wrong turn and ended up back home again. Snap out of it, Madoka, I told myself, sternly. The old woman would never’ve allowed wallowing like this, and for a minute I imagined I could feel her stick across my knuckles. The memory of the sting was still fresh in my mind, and it did pull me out of it. For the moment, anyway.
Malahide turned around, and I snuck a look at my hand, peering close because of how dark it’d gotten. I didn’t particularly like what I was seeing. My skin definitely wasn’t any less red than it’d been at the height of the burning stage, and slowly but surely there were little red lines filtering their way out from the center, like little green sprouts growing up in the ground. If my compass was a big, fat spider in the center of my palm, then it’d started growing legs. I was gonna kill the magician when I saw him next.
I was too busy seething to hear Malahide when she came up behind me, which was probably why I nearly jumped straight up to the moon when she took hold of my bad hand.
“Yow,” I said, startled as I’d ever been. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“My apologies,” Malahide said, but she was staring intently at my hand with something pretty close to reverence. She glanced up at me, and this time her eyes betrayed nothing. “Your hand is troubled.”
No shit, I thought, but didn’t say. “Yeah, that’s one way of putting it, I guess.”
Before I could stop her, she was touching the hands of the compass, little white gloves tracing the direction they indicated. The added pressure was small, but it was enough to send a dull pain through my palm and all the way down my wrist. I gritted my teeth, more frustrated than actually upset. I was sick of this whole stupid thing. I wanted the compass out of my hand, I wanted someone else to do the job—Badger, maybe, ’cause he seemed like a responsible kind of guy—or maybe I could give it to this woman, if she wanted it. I didn’t care. All I knew was that I hadn’t signed up for this of my own free will, and now more than ever, I wanted out.
But all I had to do was conjure up my family’s faces to know that getting out was impossible.
“It doesn’t agree with you,” Malahide said at last.
Well, even I could’ve told her that.
I was feeling better now, at least. Less light-headed, and more like my bones were real bones again, which was always a comfort. Maybe I’d been going too many days on too little water, but it wasn’t like I’d known I’d be ending up in desert country, of all places. Just one more thing I’d have to thank the magician for when we met again.
“Not much I can do about it,” I told her, wanting my hand back. It was making me uncomfortable the way she looked at it, but I didn’t quite know how to tell her to stop without being rude. For all I knew, she’d saved my life. It wasn’t something you just spat on—that, too, would piss the gods right off.
“It’s broken,” she said, sounding concerned. “The direction it’s pointing isn’t north at all.” A weird thing to focus on, I thought; it didn’t faze her one bit that I had a compass in my actual fucking hand, but it did freak her out that the direction wasn’t right. They came in all shapes and sizes, crazy people.
“It’s not supposed to,” I told her, to cover up for my one second of panic when she’d called it broken.
“No?” Malahide asked, her voice drenched in curiosity. “What do you follow, then, if not true north?”
“Just…something I’m looking to get my hands on,” I said, being evasive. I’d never been trained in espionage, so I wasn’t the best liar or anything; I just didn’t feel like getting into what’d happened in that storage cellar, with that madman of a magician. Even to me, it sounded a little nuts. There was the added matter of Malahide being a foreigner, for all I knew even from Volstov, and the last thing I wanted was to bring up the fire-breathers to a Volstovic. “For now, it’s those shit-eating cowards that hit this village,” I added, which was the truth, if only a part of it.
Malahide nodded as if she understood. “You’ll have to make preparations before attempting to cross the desert,” she said then, like she was some experienced traveler herself. I guessed it was possible; she just really didn’t have the complexion for it, not even so much as a single freckle.
“I know,” I told her. I’d already resigned myself to scrabbling through whatever these poor people ha
d to see if there was something I could use in getting across all that sand. It made my heart hurt worse than the throbbing in my hand, to steal from dead people who couldn’t defend themselves, but I wasn’t about to go killing myself in the desert out of sentimentality. When you were dead, you had no use for the stuff left over from living.
“Are you feeling better?” she asked me. I nodded. “Then I’ll go and wake your soldier friend.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s dark out. Should probably let him sleep.”
“You might prefer to have this conversation with all three of us,” Malahide said. “Unless, of course, he doesn’t know about your hand.”
I snorted. The compass in my palm was as plain as the eyes in my face. I couldn’t keep it covered up with a glove anymore; it hurt too bad for that. And now I’d just gone and shown it to a total stranger—someone who by all rights had been an enemy up until a few months ago. I wasn’t ready for this mission; the magician’d made a real big mistake. He could’ve chosen anyone, a soldier, a seasoned tracker, somebody who knew what he was doing. But he’d chosen me, I guess to absolve him and the emperor of having anything to do with it if I was caught. They trusted me not to turn myself in to the emperor’s men, to remain beholden to the people who’d put this foreign object inside of me because I needed them to take it out. And if I died, I was expendable. Badger’d just chop my hand off and it’d be given to someone else, maybe better’n I was.
“What about it?” I said lightly. “Common practice here in the Ke-Han. It’s in fashion; women wander around with compass hands all the time.”
“That,” Malahide said, pointing gracefully at the item in question, “is no simple compass. You said so yourself.” Her nostrils flared; it wasn’t a dainty expression at all, maybe the first true face I’d seen her make. Suddenly, I felt afraid, and would’ve scrambled away from her if she hadn’t reached out to clasp me by the wrist.
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