The Daylight War (42 page)

The two contenders for the black hood led the way down into the underpalace, followed by every woman and girl in the palace. When they had barred themselves into the chamber, out of sight of men, Qeva produced her dice and moved up to Inevera, hatred in her eyes. ‘Just a few drops of your blood now, but don’t fear, I shall take the rest before the day is out.’

Inevera lifted her veil, spitting blood from her split lip onto Qeva’s dice. She didn’t think it was possible to double the woman’s rage, but she could see in her eyes that she had managed it.
I
am
sorry, Qeva, but you must be broken like a
Jiwah Sen
for
all
to
see.

The assembly held their breath as Qeva shook the dice and chanted her prayers. The
hora
glowed fiercely, casting a sinister light over the crowd, but Inevera did not fear it, or them. She stood tall over Qeva as she knelt. A single well-placed kick could kill the woman while she was intent on the casting, but Inevera had no wish to kill Qeva, even less than she had Enkido. Honour demanded Qeva kill her, but Inevera’s dice had told her more of the woman’s heart.

– You are more daughter to Qeva than her own get. She may kill you, but she will never betray you.—

Qeva threw, and as the dice settled, the other women lost composure, Bride and Betrothed alike moving forward in a rush to see the pattern.

Some, like Qeva and Melan, saw the heart of it immediately and gasped, much as Belina and the others had. Most stared at the dice for several moments before their meaning became clear.

Qeva looked up at her, and Inevera held out the black hood. It was a paltry thing, and she had no interest in it. In truth, she never had. It was a rung in a ladder she had only to grasp long enough to leave behind her.

‘You will wear the black hood, sister Qeva,’ she said, and turned to Melan. ‘And you, sister Melan, the black veil. I have my husband to see to, and little interest in Kaji tea politics. I have my own palace, and higher goals.’

Qeva nodded, reaching for the hood. Inevera moved it slightly out of reach, and there was an intake of breath around the room.

‘You will speak for the Kaji at court,’ Inevera said, ‘but though it be your voice, the words will be mine.’

Qeva bowed. ‘Yes, Damajah.’ She reached again, and this time Inevera allowed her to take the hood.

She held the black veil to Melan, who bowed even more deeply. ‘Yes, Damajah.’

Inevera raised the veil, forcing Melan’s eyes to rise to meet hers. ‘You are not to speak that name aloud.’ Her voice carried throughout the chamber, but she turned, meeting the eyes of each woman and girl in turn. ‘None of you – not yet.’

Three more times over the next six months, Inevera needed decrees from the Andrah, and each time he took payment the same way. He pawed at her boldly now, like she was some pillow wife. When he dared to bite her breast, she nearly stabbed him.

Long
enough
, she thought.
Ahmann
has
made
his
name. The Andrah cannot take the white turban back, and no decree is worth this
.

That morning she called Qasha, her Sharach
Jiwah
Sen
and Ahmann’s favourite, to her.

‘I will invite the Andrah again tonight,’ she said. ‘Let slip to Ahmann that he visits the Palace of the Sharum Ka while its master is away. I want Ahmann to find us together. It is time to teach the Andrah to fear, and time for Ahmann to learn more of his destiny. I will suffer the fat man’s touches no longer.’

‘S
t
op
pacing, Rojer,’ Leesha said. ‘You’re making my head hurt.’ Indeed, the motion of the Jongleur’s garish motley had set off a throbbing behind her right eye. She worried her temple with the heel of her hand.

Ahmann had invited them to breakfast at his table before they joined the caravan back to Deliverer’s Hollow. Leesha assumed he meant at dawn, the traditional time for breakfast before a long journey, but the Krasians seemed to be dragging their feet. They had been left waiting in one of the receiving rooms for hours.

After the first hour, Rojer produced his fiddle and began to play, but as always his emotions came through in the music, a piercing melody that reminded Leesha of nothing more than fingernails on slate. She had asked him to stop, but it was too late. She felt her sinuses constrict. No stranger to the feeling, Leesha knew a headache cycle was beginning.

She had known headaches her whole life. Sometimes the pain and nausea lasted an hour. Other times it would come and go for a week or more, like rain in springtime. Most of the time the aches simply made her irritable, and many were fended off with easily mixed remedies and avoidance of triggers. Other times, Leesha had a choice between blinding pain or such powerful medicine that she was delirious for hours. On the worst – and thankfully least frequent – occasions, there was nothing to do but find a private place and weep.

The cycles worsened as she grew older and took on more stress and responsibility, and were regular visitors by the time she became Herb Gatherer of Deliverer’s Hollow. Now, in Everam’s Bounty, surrounded by their enemies, it was a near-constant state, like a long winter with no sign of spring.

She wasn’t alone in her discomfort. Tension was thick in the air as the delegation from Deliverer’s Hollow waited on this last formality before they could begin the long trek home. Her father, Erny, had stood and strode urgently to the privy room seven times in the last hour, and he blushed furiously as her mother harangued him about it.

‘It ent natural, Ernal, piddling in drips and drops. You should have Leesha examine you.’ Elona was across the room, but Leesha’s sense of smell would put a wolf to shame when a cycle was upon her. She caught the scent of her mother’s perfume, and it nauseated her. The pressure in her skull increased.

Like everyone else, the Cutters pretended not to hear. Wonda, who fancied herself Leesha’s bodyguard, sat hunched forward in a chair much too small for her massive frame. Her giant warded bow, unstrung, was slung with her quiver of arrows over the chair back, and a heavy knife hung at her belt.

Big enough to wrestle strong men to the ground, Wonda Cutter was just sixteen, and when she was nervous, as now, she rocked slowly back and forth, tracing the demon scars on her face with her fingers.

Gared Cutter, close to seven feet tall and thick with muscle, was the only one in the room built on Wonda’s scale, though they were only distantly related. Bored and with nothing to kill, he was attempting to carve a wooden horse, but his massive hands – perfect for throttling a downed wind demon – were unsuited to the careful work. He put too much pressure on the knife, and for what felt like the hundredth time the blade skipped from the wood and nicked his hand.

‘Corespawn it!’ He stuck his bleeding thumb in his mouth and made as if to throw the bit of wood, but Leesha raised an eyebrow at him, and he restrained himself. She immediately regretted the gesture, minute though it was, as a stab of pain struck her eye.

Rojer rounded on her. ‘Can’t pace, can’t fiddle. What
can
I do, Your Highness?’ Everyone looked up at that. Leesha wasn’t known for tolerating that tone even in her best moods.

But the last thing Leesha needed at the moment was an argument. There was still hope to blunt the attack, and every heated word would halve her chances. She took a dose of headache powder with a sip of water from her mixing flask. The liquid splashed in her empty stomach, making it roil with a mix of hunger and nausea. The last thing Leesha wanted was food, but if she didn’t eat soon, it would be all the worse.

She cursed herself silently for passing on the tea and pastry Abban’s wives had put out that morning in the Palace of Mirrors, but she had just cleaned her teeth, and wanted her breath fresh when she greeted Ahmann. His invitation was for breakfast, a last meal before their journey began, but the sun was already high in the sky.

Idiot
girl
, she heard Bruna say in her head,
chew
a
mint
leaf
next
time
. Leesha knew her old mentor’s spirit was right. She fumbled in the pockets of her apron for something to eat, but for all the thousand and one medicines she could brew from their contents, she did not have so much as a nut.

Rojer kept glaring at her, and she suppressed the desire to snap at him. ‘I’m sorry, Rojer. I’m as frustrated as you. At this rate, it will be past noon before we’re on our way.’

‘If they let us go at all,’ Rojer said. ‘Every minute we’re kept waiting makes me all the more sure I’m going to end up in a dungeon with my stones on a chopping block by sunset.’

Rojer had good reason to be afraid. Ahmann had sent his eldest daughter Amanvah – a full
dama’ting
– and his niece Sikvah to Rojer as potential brides some weeks past. The two, selected by Inevera, had proven to be spies, pretending not to speak Thesan when in fact they were fluent, and attempting to poison Leesha when she threatened the status quo in Everam’s Bounty.

Nevertheless, and much to Leesha’s annoyance, Rojer had allowed himself to be seduced by them, bedding Sikvah while Amanvah coaxed them on. Since that night he had been on edge, wondering if at any minute the Spears of the Deliverer would come and take him away for despoiling the girls without first agreeing to marry them.

‘Perhaps you should have shown some self-control,’ she said.

‘Like you should tell,’ Rojer said.

‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ Leesha asked.

Rojer’s face became one of such comic incredulity Leesha almost laughed, but for the lash of words that followed. ‘Do you honestly think there isn’t a person in this room, this palace – this city, even – who doesn’t know you’ve been sticking Ahmann Jardir?’

Leesha closed her eyes and took a breath. ‘I made a calculated decision with Ahmann, pondering all the variables. Your calculus was done solely with your cock.’

‘Calculus?’ Rojer laughed. ‘I grew up in a brothel, Leesha, I know all about that sort of maths.’

‘That is enough, Rojer!’ Leesha’s temper flared, and a bright ball of pain flared hot in her skull, giving her strength as she surged to her feet.

But Rojer refused to back down. ‘Or what? I’m getting tired of your holier-than-thou attitude, Leesha. You’re not the Duchess Mum of Angiers. I don’t have to do as you say, and I won’t have you acting better than me after whoring yourself to the demon of the desert.’

Gared rose to his feet, pointing at Rojer with his carving knife. ‘Can’t have you talking to Leesha like that, Rojer. Painted Man said to keep you safe, but I’ll scrub your mouth with soap, you say that again.’

A knife spun into Rojer’s hand. ‘Try it, you backwoods bumpkin, and you’ll have a knife in your eye.’

Gared blanched, and then his face narrowed into the look of an angry predator. Wonda had her bow strung in an instant, arrow nocked and ready. ‘You throw that knife, and I’ll—’

‘Stop it, all of you!’ Leesha shouted. ‘Wonda, put up your bow. Gared, sit back down.’ She whirled on Rojer. ‘And you, mind your ripping manners and remember that my “whoring” may be the only reason your stones remain attached!’

‘Leesha Paper!’ Erny barked, and all eyes turned. Erny was close to sixty, much older than his wife, but he looked older still. He was thin, with only a few wisps of grey hair atop his head. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles and his pale skin was almost translucent. A moment ago his head was down, looking ill as Elona harped at him, but now he met Leesha’s gaze and his eyes were sharp. ‘Is that how I raised you? You demand respect, and that’s your due, but you give it in return and tell honest word.’

Leesha felt her face go cold, and for a moment her headache was forgotten. Her father didn’t speak up often, and he took that tone even less, but when he did there was nothing for it but to obey, because he had the right of things.