“I’m married,” he said.
“As am I,” she said.
“I don’t expect Mohrai will give her permission for such an affair,” he said, “even if your husbands did.”
“I’m barren,” Ghrasia said, “though I expect that will not dissuade her.”
“No,” Ahkio said. “Barren with your husbands does not mean barren with me.” He wanted that to be the end of it. But he opened his mouth again and said, “Our desire would need to have limits.”
“I’ve heard your wife has an eye on your seat,” Ghrasia said.
“She does,” he said. “And some days, I have a mind to let her have it.”
“Why is it you didn’t just turn it over to her? We all knew you didn’t want to be Kai.”
“Maybe that’s why,” he said. “I always did like being contrary.”
“So, let’s pretend I didn’t ask about an affair,” she said.
Ahkio wanted to touch her again. He was already on fire with images of the two of them together. He’d been dreaming of her for weeks.
“I think I’m afraid of having a happy moment,” Ahkio said.
Ghrasia reached out her hand. He took it. He wanted her so desperately, he nearly fell into her lap.
“I’m far more afraid of never dancing again,” she said, and led him upstairs.
Ahkio lay awake, staring at the ceiling. He heard voices from the courtyard. They faded before he could make out the words. He thought about Roh and Dasai, and wondered what had become of them. Were they awake, too? Or dead? The moons’ light bled in from the window. He had forgotten to draw the curtains and now regretted it. He did not often desire or require privacy.
He went to the window. The air was cold against his bare skin. The fire in the hearth was low. He gazed out at the lighted square.
Saw no one.
“What is it?” Ghrasia asked. She propped herself up on one elbow. She was captivating in the low light. The moons’ light made her skin glow. Her hair was unbound and spilled across the sheets. It reminded him suddenly of Meyna. A lifetime ago.
“Thought I heard something,” he said. He climbed into bed next to her, drawn back to the warmth of their shared bodies.
She took his scarred hands and kissed them.
He made to pull away, suddenly self-conscious, but she held his wrists. “What really happened in that camp?” she said. She pressed her thumbs to his smooth palms. “I know the stories, but I also know stories lie.”
Ahkio pulled his hands away a second time. She released him. He traced the lines of her cheek. “My mother took us to a big refugee camp on the other side of the Liona Stronghold. I still don’t know why. She said it was to enlighten people. Maybe she was searching for someone.”
Ghrasia shook her head. “Your mother and I… had a falling-out. Soon after you were born.”
“She took us with her,” he said. “A mad thing, by all accounts. We lived in that refugee camp for years while she met with all sorts of people – farm workers and scullery drudges and servants. I don’t remember what they talked about. But there was an uprising in the camp. She was certainly a part of it. How much, I don’t know. But when the rebellion came, the Dorinahs were ready.”
“They burned the camp,” Ghrasia said.
“Yes,” he said. He flexed his fingers. “I still remember. There was this legionnaire. She looked old to me, but I guess she must have been young, maybe as old as I am now, and it was so strange. She looked Dhai. Mostly Dhai, anyway. And she torched our house and the houses of those around us. My father went out to kill the legionnaire, but she cut him down.”
“I’m sorry,” Ghrasia said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have–”
“It’s all right,” he said. He expected his hands to tremble, but they did not. “I didn’t know how to use a sword. So I ran back inside the house to find my mother. She was ill. When I got in… she was burning. Her hair was on fire, her clothes…” He could still smell the stink of her burning hair and flesh, even now. “So I just grabbed her.” He held out his hands. “I don’t know what they burned the houses with. Some tirajista-created thing, maybe, because it stuck to me. The fire just licked up my arms. My own hair caught fire.”
“Did Ora Nasaka really–”
He grimaced. “Yes. Nasaka pulled me out. She left my mother to burn up, but she pulled me out and rolled me in the dirt until all that was left was the pain. Then she pulled out that sword of hers. She made quick work of the legionnaires after that. But she didn’t go back for my mother.”
Ghrasia pressed her hand to his face. “It’s a horrible thing. I’m sorry it happened to you.”
“It’s done,” he said. He pushed out of bed. “I think I’m going to stay up and read for a bit. Do you mind?”
“What is it? A religious text?”
“A book of Kirana’s. Some lurid Dorinah romance.”
“That will do the trick,” she said.
He walked over to his tunic draped on the back of a chair and grabbed the book in his tunic pocket.
“You know what haunts me,” he said, “about Dorinah? Besides all the burning?”
“The legionnaire,” she said.
“How did you know that?”
“Dhai killing Dhai,” she said. “The first time you see it… it breaks the world, a little bit.”
Ahkio crawled into bed. He pressed himself against her, savoring the heat, as he opened the book.
“It’s odd to see all Kirana’s things stacked up here,” Ghrasia said, pointing to the trunks. “I’ve been trying to think of where I saw those maps of the basements before. I just remembered. Kirana requested six of the militia in Kuallina about, oh, four years ago? To help her go through and confirm some maps. They were just like those.”
“Why would she need militia to help with that?”
“That’s why I remember it. Odd request. I thought there might be a fugitive down there, some rogue novice or Ora she didn’t want to tell me about.”
“Something she… feared,” Ahkio said.
“That’s possible.”
Ahkio closed the book. “What if I told you I’d heard someone say that Kirana killed herself? Why would a person do something like that?”
Ghrasia touched his hands. “To save someone they love.”
Ahkio heard raised voices again. A shout. The noise was coming from the other side of the council house.
Ahkio glanced at the door. He saw light coming from beneath it. The house was abuzz with movement.
Ghrasia released him. “Oma’s breath,” she muttered, and began pulling on her clothes.
Ahkio lit a lantern. He tucked the book back into his tunic and pulled on the tunic. He yanked the bedsheets straight and grabbed his trousers.
Footsteps sounded in the hall, closer.
Just as Ahkio noticed the edge of Clan Leader Talisa’s terrible painting sitting behind the bed – he’d taken it down before taking Ghrasia to bed – the door burst open.
Caisa and Ohanni ran into the room.
Ghrasia was standing by the fire, still knotting her hair back. Ahkio put his hands on his hips. “What is it?” he said. His heart hammered. For fear of being found out or fear of what they had to say, or both.
Caisa glanced quickly from one of them to the other.
“We have one of those foreign assassins downstairs,” Ohanni said.
“Alive,” Caisa said.
46
“You mean Casa Maigan,” Maralah said. They were still mopping up the halls from the coup four days earlier; the Patron’s former dining room now served as her strategy room while they took out the three remaining groups of rogue sanisi holed up in the keep. The hold still shook occasionally, caused by dueling parajistas. Dust trickled from cracks in the ceiling.
Maralah stood with Kadaan and his little Dhai ward, Roh, in the dining room. Her brother was asleep in the next room with his mouthy second, and Wraisau and a squad of Rajavaa’s own men guarded them. Kadaan had brought Roh to her after discovering he knew something about a book the other Dhai were hiding. It turned out that slaughtering his companions had shaken something loose in him. As much as Maralah abhorred what the Patron had done – it was very unlike him – she had to admit it was effective.
“I thought it was a name you might know,” Kadaan said. “It sounded like someone from the north, one of Alaar’s women.”
“I’m familiar with her, yes,” Maralah said. “She was part of Alaar’s harem in Isjahilde, inherited from the prior Patron. She was one of those we had to leave behind. And you heard this from one of your Dhai friends?”
“From Aramey,” Roh said. The boy stood straight, with his hands clasped behind his back just like Kadaan. Kadaan had dressed the boy in a dark tunic cut in the Saiduan style, and shaved his head. Maralah thought it better fit his new status. Kadaan had undertaken his scrubbing up with an eye for utility. She appreciated that. It would make things easier on the boy, too, though Maralah was uncertain how much he knew of that yet.
“Keeper Takanaa had your friends’ rooms cleaned,” she said, “and the contents returned to the scholars.”
“There was a book there,” Roh said, “written in Talamynii. Ora Dasai said it was very important. I thought maybe the woman’s name had to do with the book. Maybe they meant to give it to her? To translate?”
“Indeed,” Maralah said. “It was the first book our scholars brought to my attention after the rooms were cleared. I’ve never seen two men so excited. There was no record of it in the archives. Do you know where Ora Dasai found it?”
Roh shook his head. He met her look when he did it, but Maralah suspected that any boy smart enough to survive the slaughter of his comrades would be smart enough to tell half-truths when the time came for it.
“The issue with the book is translation, as you noted,” Maralah said. “Casa had Talamynii roots. Hers was a very old and isolated family. It wouldn’t surprise me if they wanted her to translate this book.”
“Isjahilde is under enemy control,” Kadaan said. “Even if she still lives–”
“We can find other translators,” Maralah said. “All this death and politics and tracking down omajistas… You think what we need is in this dusty book?”
“It may be a list of recipes, for all we know,” Kadaan said.
“It’s not,” Roh said. “There were two books mentioned in a text we found from an old Dhai scholar. They were specifically about omajistas. He referenced them as among the first books they tried to get rid of, to punish the Saiduan during the next rising of Oma. This could be one of those books.”
“I can’t spare many for this,” Maralah said. “Take Roh, Luna, and a small team. I need Driaa here, but aside from hir, any of the others can go.”
“Where?” Kadaan asked.
“The Shoratau. Tell anyone in there who can translate the book that we’ll free them.”
Kadaan shook his head. “Trusting prisoners to speak truth-”
“I suspect having a squad of sanisi over them, looking to sniff out lies, will aid in preventing some of that,” she said. “So will having two Dhai. Luna knows later Talamynii, though Bael says the ancient is beyond hir. They’ll know if anyone is bluffing.”
“I’m sorry,” Roh said, “What’s Shoratau?”
“A prison,” Maralah said, “where we put the people we should have killed but thought we might need later.”
“It’s north of here,” Kadaan said. “We won’t be able to find a clear road–”
“It’s northeast,” Maralah said. “You’re a small group. You may be able to avoid detection. We’ll be retreating south to Harajan. If the weather holds long enough, you still may be able to meet us there before it takes you.”
“Yes, Shao,” Kadaan said.
Maralah held out her hand. Kadaan gripped her elbow. She leaned in. “It was a good, hard run,” she said.
“If you can’t keep him on the seat, I expect you to take it,” he said.
“A woman on the seat? Then you’ll know we’re lost,” she said, and pulled away.
She watched the sanisi and the boy leave the dining room. Then she sat in one of the tall chairs and stared at the crystal place settings. The slaves had set the table for eight – for Patron Rajavaa and his ministers of finance, agriculture, commerce, foreign relations, health and education, transport and infrastructure, and her, the acting minister of war. She remembered standing here at Alaar’s side, more than twenty years before, when he was the minister of commerce and she just a young sanisi bound by oath and blood to the Patron at the head of the table. She did not know what she saw in Alaar then. It went beyond his quick wit and generous but firm hand. She realized it was his willingness to end all the bloody internal wars and rebellions and invest heavily in their gifted arts and infrastructure. Oma was only a century from rising, he had told the table. Every astronomer said it. It was not just myth. It was coming. Saiduan had to be the most stable country in the world, united, strong, to take on whatever invaders Oma brought with it this turn. It was he who reinstated the minister of health and education. After his bloody ascension, they had sat here together to build a fine new country.
Alaar had not been made for war. He was made for peace. Perhaps Kadaan had done her a favor. She could never have killed him herself, even knowing the rules, even knowing it was necessary. She would have secreted him away somewhere – simply sent him into stasis by slowing down his fibrous heart – and brought him back after the tide was turned back and they needed a man with a head for politics instead of a stomach for strategy.
The loss was still painful. Putting her brother on the seat meant she had finally given up on that dream of peace.
“Maralah?”
She glanced up. Rajavaa entered, dressed in Alaar’s soft amber robes. Her heart clenched. She stood.
“Yes, Patron,” she said.
“I need a woman’s guidance on something,” he said.
“Then I am not the person to ask,” she said.
The Saiduan had six words that described types of snow, and Roh had seen every one of them. He trudged across an icy tundra, trailing after twelve sanisi. They had thrown off their dark garb for white fur coats and boots. They were making for Shoratau, staying far away from the roads and regular paths. The days blurred together, so many that Roh woke one day and felt blinded by the blank stretch of white.