What followed was an afternoon of absurdity and frustration as I tried to master binding sorcery. It had a heavy, unwieldy feel, like a weight on my shoulders, and no matter how I tried to shape it the ropes of light I threw at the dummies always faded with a moment’s lapse in my concentration. Whenever I asked a question, Cinder guffawed and slapped me on the back and told me I would figure it out eventually, with enough practice, like he did.
It was satisfying, I suppose, to realize that Hand Usher was not the worst teacher in the Empire.
After a few futile hours, Cinder suggested that I continue practicing on my own, and told me to inform him when I could hold the bonds for a count of thirty.
“Until then, any of the subtleties I could teach will be lost on you,” he said.
He left, and I made a good faith effort, but soon quit the archery range and returned to my paperwork. When I finished, I sent Jhin to ask Hand Alabaster if he would be willing to meet me in the Abundant Nectar hall for a meal that evening. Cinder’s visit had reminded me of the need to maintain my ties in the citadel, regardless of how my colleagues annoyed or disgusted me. If I meant to forge my own path, I needed to defray suspicion, for now, until I was ready to break away from the Empire.
Alabaster accepted. Though neither of us apologized for the argument that had ended our previous meeting we passed a pleasant enough time discussing a collection of the latest court poetry, which Alabaster’s betrothed had sent to him along with her most recent correspondence.
A conversation skirting around love and longing, which only deepened the pain that had lodged itself in my chest. The seeping wound I had dealt myself--and dealt Atar? I wondered--by reaching for more than she could give.
* * *
On the next full moon--the fourth since Atar and I had met beside the Blessed Oasis--I left the citadel by the servant’s gate and walked, alone, to the Valley of Rulers. When I emerged from the catacombs the music of the dance already rebounded from the valley walls. I hung back from the circle and watched from afar while Atar spun and leapt in a dance I had not yet seen. Her movements shifted from one step to the next, full of grace, sadness, anger, and regret. I sank to the sand, hugged my knees to my chest, and watched her, captured by the depth of feeling she expressed with a single turn of her wrist.
How had I imagined that such a person could love me? A leader of her people, the master of the wind and the dance. A woman who might have had the captain of the fastest, sleekest ship in the windcallers’ fleet if she wanted. And I a foreigner, a Foolish Cur, servant to her enemies and uncertain of my place in the world.
A shadow passed between me and the moon. With a grunt, and favoring one knee, Katiz lowered himself to the sand beside me.
“Atar was not certain you would return,” he said.
Something tightened in my chest. “Did she want me to?”
“I think she hoped,” Katiz said. He cupped my shoulder in one thick, calloused hand.
A candle flame flickered to life in my chest, and with it a new fear. “She rejected me, and she was right to.”
“I think she is as afraid as you are,” Katiz said.
I looked up at him, puzzled, but saw no trick in his sun-seamed face.
“On your first night here, you danced for us, you showed us your magic, and the Sienese would have killed you for it.” He squeezed my shoulder, then released me and leaned back, crossing his arms over his barrel chest. “This is why I have come to trust you, Firecaller. You have not found your way of fighting them, but you have shown yourself to us, and you have helped us. That is enough for a start. Now,” he grinned down at me. “Atar tells me you wish to learn the windcaller’s dance.”
I straightened. “Are you willing to teach me?”
“I am,” Katiz said. “But not tonight. The circle gathers for expression, not for learning. What will you dance tonight, Firecaller?”
A shiver ran down my spine as Atar called the wind and let her scarves unfurl. They spun around her like flying serpents that twined together, then split apart, each to follow its own spiraling, circuitous path.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know if I have it in me.”
“You do,” Katiz said, and nodded toward Atar. “Just as she did. You should have seen her this last week. Always with slumped shoulders and a dour expression. Even Shazir stayed well clear of her path. Yet she has come, and she dances, and shares her truth. You, too, have come to the circle, and you must dance.”
He levered himself to his feet, then offered me a hand. I took it, not knowing what dance I would perform, but unwilling to insult Katiz and the others at the circle by coming to watch while offering nothing of my own. Atar finished her dance as we joined the circle. Her eyes found mine, then darted away.
A longing to speak with her welled within me. I wanted to reassure her. To tell her that though she might not feel the way I did, I did not wish to sacrifice our friendship to salve the bruises on my heart. Perhaps it was the echo of my grandmother in Atar’s ferocity, in the hard line of her shoulders, in her unimpeachable defence of her culture and people, but I admired her far more than I desired her.
Was that a truth I could bring to the dance?
My turn came. Uncertain of what I would do, but with the first steps percolating in my body and my mind, I walked to the center of the circle.
I began with the footwork of the iron dance. A first line in the poem I would write with steps and gestures, recalling the day we had met and the first night of our friendship. Then, in the order that she had taught them, I moved through the dances of An-Zabat, performing each for a scant dozen steps, retelling the story of our time together. The loose, broad strokes of the scribe. The twirls and reversals of a merchant on the balls of my feet. A soldier’s leaping precision. Last, a recreation of her dance that night--as best I could capture it, having seen it only once and at a distance--with what echo I could muster of its beauty and sadness.
But, instead of scarves, I danced with twining lines of fire, which curled through the air in a blazing spiral before dividing, swirling high to flash and fade against the backdrop of night.
In the wake of their light and my sorcery, a chill trickled down my spine, and a breeze curled out to fill a pair of silver-patterned scarves.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Atar said.
She caught my wrists, curled my fingers to the proper form, and began the dance again.
“Follow my steps,” she said, and I did, though with a bare fraction of her grace and certainty. Her wind whirled up and down, drawing her scarves into the dance. My fire rose to meet them, encircling them, forming a double-helix of wind, silk, and flame that spun around us to fill the night with warmth and color.
“Someday, Nayen will call you home,” she said, with no hint of exertion in her voice. “That is your place, your fight.”
“Someday,” I said, breathless. “Not today.”
She considered this while our dance pulled us apart, then drew us back together, and some of the sadness had gone out of her steps.
“Then I can promise you no more than today,” she said.
“That is enough,” My heart leaped, and not only from fatigue. “More than enough.”
Her hand flashed out, caught mine, pulled me close. My world filled with the scent of lavender, sweat, and honey, then with the soft press of her lips. Her scarves descended and draped themselves around us, shielding us from the circle in our moment of intimacy, for this alone we would not share.
“To today, then,” she whispered. “And a hope of tomorrow.”
* * *
That night, when the dance had tasted water from Katiz’s bowl and returned to the city, he, Atar, and I remained. I followed the steps as he showed them to me, but my feet wanted to flatten against the earth, and the sweeping movements of my arms felt loose and impotent. The Iron Dance had taught me to tighten my core, but windcalling required fluid motion, and Katiz refused to so much as mention magic until I had mastered
the steps.
The moon swung low, and when I once again faltered in the early steps of the windcaller's dance Katiz announced, with a heavy note of frustration, that our lesson was at an end. Without another word he departed and vanished into the tunnel that led back to the city. I collapsed to the sands in exhaustion, letting the cool, pre-dawn wind wick the sweat from my brow. Atar smiled down at me, the setting moon framing her head and filling the loose curls of her hair with pale light.
“It takes time,” she said, then lay down beside me. “And a great deal of practice. I will help you through it.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She shrugged. “It is my duty as Winddancer to pass such knowledge on.”
“Not only for that,” I said, and struggled for the right words, as I so often struggled with her as with no one else. A sign, perhaps, of how much I cared not only for what she might think of me, but for how well she understood. I had spent so little of my life trying to articulate the truth. Even with Oriole, there had always been a scaffolding of lies.
“You didn't have to dance with me,” I said.
“That is true,” Atar said. “But I wanted to, as I want to be here with you tonight. Do you think I stayed to help Katiz only because it would be amusing to watch you flail aimlessly about?”
I frowned at her, and she burst out laughing.
“Your dignity is so easily bruised for a man soaked in his own sweat,” she said.
“We're in the desert!” I blurted. “Everyone is sweaty all the time!”
“Indeed,” she said. “But we An-Zabati understand this, and accept it, while the Sienese seem to melt into puddles of wilting fabric.”
“Was I not sweating when you kissed me?” I said, and immediately regretted it. That moment had felt like a brush with a new kind of magic. Something not to be spoken of, lest the memory of it crumble to dust.
She smiled, a hint of mischief--and something richer, stranger--lighting her eyes. She leaned toward me. Her breath brushed the line of my jaw.
“There is time, yet, before the sun rises,” she said. “Time for one more dance.”
My pulse throbbed at my throat. Then, in a burst of motion, she was on her feet again.
“Come, Firecaller,” she said. “You'll never learn if you just lie there in a heap.”
Disoriented, and disappointed in a vague way I dared not directly face, I stood and followed her through the steps once more. And then again the night after, and the night after that, until four weeks later--beneath another full moon, after dancing the dance of a windcaller at the heart of the circle--I earned my tattoos.
While those gathered to the circle watched, Katiz ground ink in a wide stone bowl, then sharpened the radius of a hawk into a hollow-tipped needle. “Only thrice before have we given mastery of the wind to an outsider,” he said. “They, like you, came to us already powerful in magic. They, like you, had lost their own people. They, as we hope for you, stayed with us for many years.”
“The first marks go here,” Atar said. She made three swirls with the tips of her fingers on the underside of my forearm, below my elbow. “One day, if you have your own ship, the whole of both arms will be covered.”
A pleasant shiver ran up my arm at her touch. I doubted I would ever wear so many marks, and I was grateful that the tattoos would be so small. The sleeve of a Sienese robe would cover them easily, and I had yet to form any kind of plan to extricate myself from the citadel. There had been nothing to put my guard up since Cinder’s visit to my office. I still had plenty of time.
“Don’t be afraid to show pain,” Katiz said, raising a laugh from the gathered dancers. “Everyone winces on the first few strikes.”
“My grandmother carved my hand with a stone knife. I doubt this will be worse.”
Katiz prodded me with the needle, and I did wince, especially at the burn of the ink rubbed into my wounds. Atar teased me, then kissed my cheek. The moon had begun to descend by the time Katiz finished, but all in the circle had remained to witness the rise of a new windcaller.
“Try not to move the arm more than necessary for the next few days,” Katiz said. “And for Naphena’s sake don’t wash it or the ink will smudge.”
I barely heard him. While he had prodded and inked my arm I had felt the first trickles of a new power. Cool and calming, like healing sorcery, but with a tumultuous undercurrent like conjuring fire. There was a pang of disappointment as I realized that windcalling, too, was limited, as witchcraft was. But I had expected nothing less. Wherever I found magic, I found it bound, whether by the canon or by pacts forged long ago with the gods.
The moment Katiz was done I sprang to my feet and reached for that power. Its gentle, almost invisible wake followed the slow arc of my arm. A gust billowed in the palm of my hand. I pushed forward and down, and it rushed away from me.
“Look, Atar!” I leaped, grinning and giddy, for though this was not the deep knowledge I sought, it was beautiful. “I can call the wind!”
She ran to me, and together we danced with the zephyrs of the desert until the setting of the moon.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Tools of Empire
Sleep returned me to the Valley of Rulers, but alone, and dressed in the plain clothes that my grandmother and I had always worn to the Temple of the Flame. A curl of wind stirred the sand, and when it passed the wolf god Okara stood at the bottom of the valley, where the dancers made their circle and Katiz drew water from the earth.
“What sort of home is this for a wolf?” Okara said. He peered up at me, his eye staring from above his scar-seamed muzzle. No longer a carving of stone, but a living, breathing god. And, meeting his gaze, I suffered the shuddering realization that this was no mere figment of my sleeping mind--and had never been, when he had visited me before--but the god himself, speaking into my dream.
“I am happy here,” I managed to say. A paltry defense.
The god snarled, and the sands shook with his anger. “Stay, then. Here you might live as an outcast and make a paltry contribution to the coming war, but the boy who veered without pact--who drew the eyes of the gods--desired knowledge, not happiness,” Okara said. “Do you forget what you accomplished, when your mind was supple, unconstrained, like a witch of the old sort before they bound us with their pact? This windcalling is not the truth you seek. Only another frame.”
“And how do you suggest I learn these truths, when every teacher I have had seems ignorant of them?” I said. “You speak only in riddles and allusion.”
I felt a sudden weightlessness, and in the blink of an eye the Blessed Oasis appeared before us, surrounded not by the city but by empty sands. Naphena stood tall beneath the stars, and in the haze of the dream she seemed not carved of sandstone, but almost alive.
“You came seeking her, did you not?” Okara said.
“She is dead,” I said.
“Yes. But there is one like her who might teach you,” Okara said. “Another witch of the old sort.”
A gout of flame swirled out from him, whipped across the sand as by a wind from nowhere. It curled toward me, caught in my clothes, blistered my flesh, and I shut my eyes against the heat of it. A scream boiled in my throat.
The heat receded. I found myself surrounded by stone columns. A forest of them, stretching in every direction, into depthless dark. Strange symbols written in the color of blood, or old rust, decorated them.
“There is a woman of the bones in the north of Nayen,” Okara said. “In a temple that is no longer a temple. Seek her out. The pact allows me to say that much.”
“Do you mean this?” I showed my right hand and the scars my grandmother had carved. “Is this the pact? How does it bind you? It constrains magic--I know that much--but how can scars in human flesh bind a god?”
“Why should I answer, when by your actions you reveal that your thirst for the truth was but a passing curiosity?” Okara glared at me, turned and loped up the temple steps. “Seek the woman of the bones, if you wo
uld seek magic as it belongs to you, in all its fullness and all its power.”
The wolf god vanished beyond the gateway of the temple. In its passing a trickle of water began to flow, building to a stream, then a flood that swept my feet from under me.
I woke slowly, as though rising from the depths of the sea, my head thick with the residue of the dream. What did he mean, the woman of the bones? I had heard of no such thing, not in any legend of Nayen. Yet…that made the wolf god’s words ring more powerfully. Surely my dreaming mind could conjure nothing it did not already know. For a fraught moment I wondered if I, like Iron Claw, the first Sun King, had been chosen by the gods for power.
A notion which made no sense. Why would the gods of Nayen choose a servant of the Empire, flung far from his island home, neglectful of their ways? At any rate, to seek out this woman of the bones and the answer Okara had promised would mean a return to Nayen, and I had many reasons to stay in An-Zabat.
The sun was already high--I had returned from the Valley at dawn--but I smelled no brewing tea, nor porridge, nor boiled eggs, nor fried dough, nor heard the feet of servants scurrying about to prepare my outer rooms for the day.
I called out for Jhin, but he did not answer. I dressed and went to the door, and found it locked. I shook the handle and felt the weight of a wooden beam barring it shut.
“Jhin! What is the meaning of this!” I shouted.
My tattoos itched beneath their bandage. But it had been less than a night. How could anyone possibly know? I imaginedJhin leaning over me while I slept, drawing down the sheets to reveal my freshly tattooed arm.
“Steward Jhin!”
“Good morning, Hand Alder.” Alabaster said through the gap in the doorframe. I pressed my eye to the gap, but he stood beyond the narrow band of my vision. “Or should I call you something else?” he purred. “Alder is a Sienese name, after all.”
“What is this, Alabaster?” A deep breath did little to calm me.
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