“So, you have omajistas too,” Lilia said. She kept the woven breath that held Tulana taut. In the back of her mind, she recited the Saiduan Song of Binding.
“I am many things,” Tulana said. “Dangerous enough for my own Empress to try to kill me, in fact.”
“I can promise I won’t kill you,” Lilia said. “But if you don’t go with me, you’ll die here. They have omajistas outside, much more powerful than you or me. They’re going to burn us out. They’ll come looking for you. But I can get you into Dhai. I can get you over the wall.”
“No one gets over the wall,” Tulana said. “You could force it, but–”
“No,” Lilia said. “Listen.”
And she told them her plan.
They stared at her in stunned silence. Only Gian laughed.
“You have grown bold,” Taigan said.
“No bolder than a sanisi who pushed me off a cliff,” Lilia said sharply.
“They will pound us against the wall,” Tulana said. “They will slaughter us like boars.”
“They’ll do that anyway,” Lilia said. “Yes or no?”
“You get us through that wall… then yes.”
“Taigan, can you bind them to their word? Can you bind them in blood?”
“What?” Tulana said.
“You can’t–” Voralyn spat.
“This is not–” Sokai said.
Lilia’s voice rose. “You will bind yourselves in blood, or we’re done.”
“No,” Tulana said.
So Lilia left them.
Taigan followed after her, said, “What are you trying to do, raise some kind of army?”
“They’ll come,” Lilia said with conviction. No one opened the gates of Liona, she knew. To get home, she needed to do something extraordinary.
Lilia went to the meeting house at the center of the camp. She took the stage. The whole camp was already abuzz with what had happened at the gates. They had begun to collect in the meeting house.
“I’m leaving for the pass,” Lilia said loudly.
“You’re mad!” someone yelled back.
“Maybe so,” Lilia shouted at him. “Maybe so! Listen, I’m going. If you stay here, you’re dead. I cannot protect you like I did yesterday. You understand? We’re going home, or not at all.”
“It’s not our home!” someone else said.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Lilia said. “It’s the home of every Dhai. They will open those gates to you as your kin. I swear my life on it. Will you join me or burn here?”
She tried to jump off the stage, but her bad leg made it difficult. Taigan offered his hand. Lilia took it. They walked back to Emlee’s house. Lilia announced she was leaving.
“I have known no other home but this,” Emlee said. “I will not smash myself against your wall.”
“It’s different this time,” Lilia said.
“Why?”
“Because you have me.”
“You are powerful, girl, but you aren’t a god.”
“We’ll see about that,” Lilia said.
Lilia held out her hand to Gian. Gian took it.
“Are you with me?” Lilia asked.
“Yes,” Gian said.
People collected behind them as they made their way to the western gate. Hungry people. Big women and thin old men, and the orphans, some of them almost adults, but most of them young and small and scared.
Lilia waited until the dusk came and she was certain no one else was coming.
And as Taigan approached the gate to open it, Lilia saw Tulana stepping from the crowd of houses. Amelia, Voralyn, and Laralyn walked behind her. Sokai took up the rear of their procession.
Lilia glanced over at Taigan. Taigan popped the lock with a simple burst of air.
Lilia and Gian went through. The others followed.
The western gate was unguarded. Most of the legionnaires had withdrawn.
They walked all night, hungry and cold, stopping to collect hasaen tubers as they went. Lilia had not eaten a full meal in some time, and she was light-headed. The stronghold was a two-day walk. She was glad then of the small group. They would have moved more slowly with the others.
Taigan trotted back up behind Lilia and Gian. They led the column of ragged Dhais and dajians and Seekers.
“There are more following,” he said.
“Who?” Lilia asked.
“There’s smoke to the east,” he said. “They’ve burned the camps. There are surviving Dhais following.”
“And legionnaires?” Lilia asked.
“Not yet,” he said, “but they will come.”
They pushed on.
Night found them inside the mouth of the pass. At its widest point, the pass was nearly a mile across. Lilia knew it tapered to its narrowest point at Liona, two hundred yards across.
The trees became shorter, the path steeper. Finding a comfortable place to sleep that night was impossible. Lilia slept from sheer exhaustion and woke cramped and aching, her body pressed to Gian’s. She was so cold, she didn’t think her body could move, let alone stand, but she got up. Her body sometimes amazed her. She could keep going long after she couldn’t.
At midmorning, the first of the later refugees caught up with them. Lilia recognized Pherl, the man with yaws whose nose was still a gaping hole, though some of the flesh had grown back over his missing upper jaw. His sisters were with him, Sazhina and Tal, Tal trailing behind, carrying her child. Someone else’s child clung to her apron strings. Their faces were smeared with soot.
“What happened?” Lilia asked Sazhina.
“The legionnaires came,” Sazhina said. “Sent fire first. They came in under the smoke.”
Lilia saw the lights of Liona long after dark. She didn’t know what time it was. The night was clear and cold. The moons were brilliant. They lit the rugged pass in a garish light. The lights of the stronghold glinted from behind the massive wall, a crown of square turrets topped in toothy parapets. The wall itself, even from so far away, was imposing.
As they neared, Lilia realized how big the wall was. Just one stone was as tall as she was. The beaten dirt road they traveled upon broke itself against a small gateway just tall enough for someone Lilia’s height to enter. It was not a wall meant to be breached. It was not a wall for idle travelers.
The steps of the refugees slowed as they approached the wall. Lilia stilled a dozen yards from it and gazed up. The height was staggering. Three hundred feet tall, easily. She could just make out dark figures patrolling the top.
Her resolve trembled.
“Tears of the goddess,” Gian said. “You don’t mean to get us through
that
?”
“At dawn,” Taigan said.
Lilia looked behind them. More ragged figures trailed after them in the moons’ light, far more than had begun the journey. And there would be legionnaires behind them. Soon.
“Where are the Seekers?” Lilia said. “We have to do this now.”
Tal sent the child at her apron to look for the Seekers.
The girl brought back Tulana and Sokai and the others.
“Are you ready, dajian?” Tulana asked.
“Take off your coats,” Taigan said.
Lilia watched the Seekers line up with their naked backs to Lilia and Taigan. Voralyn was cursing. Tulana’s face was unreadable. Amelia cried. For a moment, just a moment, Lilia felt sorry for them.
Taigan saw Lilia watching them, said softly, “Would you like to cut?”
“Yes,” Lilia said. “What’s the mark I put in?”
“Your name,” Taigan said.
“My name,” Lilia said. “Of course. Like the boy with the stone. Names have the most power.”
Lilia cut three neat Dhai characters into each of them, between their shoulder blades.
Taigan said to Tulana, “Do you swear to remain loyal to Lilia Sona of Dhai, to aid her in every way, to keep all oaths and promises, to not deal falsely with her or her kin or play her false at pain of a death at your own hand?”
“I swear,” Tulana hissed.
The others swore and were cut. The air around them was heavy, electric. Lilia could not tell if any of them were working against Taigan, trying to unbind the flesh and blood Taigan manipulated to bind their bodies to their words. If they did, Taigan said nothing of it, and Lilia saw no red mist massing around Tulana. Lilia watched the way Taigan braided the red mist so she could replicate the ward in the future. It was an intricate thing, like a piece of prose poetry set to music.
When Taigan finished, Gian cleaned their wounds.
Lilia sat awake with Taigan on a mass of rough-cut stones. They gazed up the height of the wall. Taigan passed her a pipe of sen leaves. She took a few puffs, choked on the smoke, handed it back.
They sat in silence for a long time. Finally, Lilia asked, “Why did you come back for me? You left me to die, Taigan.”
“I wanted your opinion on the battle at Roasandara, the one fought two thousand years ago,” he said.
Laughter bubbled up. Lilia choked on it. She laughed so hard, she doubled over. Tears streamed down her face.
Taigan said, “Should I pound your back? Are you dying?”
His serious tone made Lilia laugh harder. She remembered being broken at the bottom of the ravine, the karoi pecking her apart, piece by piece. She thought of the dead child severed by the gate, the burning legionnaires, the burst mirror, and how she had killed her own mother.
“If you wanted my opinion on a battle,” she said, “you should have turned around sooner.”
“No,” Taigan said. “I came back for you at just the right time.”
51
Zezili was getting happily drunk when the world exploded.
She supposed she should have expected who it would be shaking her awake the next morning while she slept off the drink and violence of the night before in the cold, crooked roots of a tree stump.
She rubbed her gummy eyes and saw Monshara standing above her. “You’re predictable, at least,” Monshara said. “You want to go in chains back to your Empress, or take a dog and walk in on your own two feet?”
Zezili gazed up at the rotten sky of Monshara’s world. “It was worth it,” she said.
“We’ll see,” Monshara said.
By the time Zezili was delivered back to her own world, put back into her proper clothes, and escorted back to Daorian by Monshara and two of her omajistas, Daorian was already wreathed in red, the color of mourning. Great red banners flanked the tower gates, the spires of the distant keep. The city people had put out red kerchiefs in their windows, hung them from the snow-heavy awnings of their shops. Zezili wondered who died. Then wondered if it was supposed to be her.
People knew her by her armor, the plaited skirt knotted with the hair of dajians, the image of Rhea holding a sword over a dead bear etched into the breastplate, outlined in flaking silver. Her helm had no plume, ending instead in a curve of metal like a snake’s tail. The people came out to see her, muttered about her on their doorsteps, pointed. Some saw her and hid. Two old women made a ward against evil as she passed. It told Zezili something of the Empress’s silent ambiguity regarding her station that they did not spit at Zezili or curse her. It helped that Monshara hadn’t bound her.
It was a small kindness, Zezili supposed.
The city waited on the Empress’s judgment.
Zezili reined her dog within the courtyard of the keep. Monshara and her omajistas slid off their bears. A kennel girl darted out from the warmth of the kennels and took the reins of Zezili’s dog without looking Zezili in the face.
Zezili reached up a hand to her dog’s ears and rubbed at the base of them. She pressed her cheek to his and pretended he was Dakar. She had lost her husband and her dog. She had betrayed her Empress. It was the end of all things.
The dog licked her face with his hot tongue. She pulled away only to find that she had gripped the hair of his collar in both hands. She slowly uncurled her fingers. She turned away and walked up the loop of the outdoor stair and into the foyer of the hold. She glanced back at Monshara. “I can get the rest of the way myself,” she said.
Monshara swept her hand forward. “You should have listened to me,” she said.
“I don’t listen to anybody,” Zezili said. “Not anymore.”
Saofi, the Empress’s secretary, was waiting for Zezili outside the audience chamber. She played with the eyeglass at the end of her chatelaine.
“She’s been expecting you,” Saofi said.
“You have too, no doubt,” Zezili said.
“Your fate and mine are linked,” Saofi said. “So yes, I have an interest in this outcome.”
At first, Zezili wasn’t sure what she meant. But of course, everyone knew about the purging of the dajian camps by now. The privately-owned dajians knew it was only a matter of time before the bloody swords came for them, too. And for me, Zezili thought. Us.
Saofi went inside the audience chamber to announce Zezili. Zezili felt oddly calm. She had been courting this day for some time.
The secretary reappeared. Her expression was blank. “She’ll see you,” Saofi said. Saofi gripped the outer handle and leaned back with all her weight, pulling the door wide.
A chandelier of crystal shards and flame flies hung from the ceiling. A purple carpet stretched the length of the hall to the raised dais at its end. Atop the dais sat the silver throne of eighteen hundred years of Dorinah rule, the throne usurped from the first Patron of Saiduan’s fiftieth son, constructed in the far north of that country two thousand years before by silversmiths whose like Zezili had never encountered.
The Empress did not sit on the throne but stood near it, surrounded by her enormous green-eyed cats, each as tall as Zezili’s shoulder. The sight of them sent a prickling up Zezili’s spine. The Empress herself was a tall, striking figure, slender, with knobby arms and legs that were often canted at awkward angles. Her face, neck, and hands were smeared in a bronzer that gave her the color of dark honey. A blotch of red marked her lips. Her black brows and brilliant yellow eyes were smudged in kohl, and her hair – most of it her own – added another foot to her already extraordinary height. She dressed in a pale white dress with bone corseting that gave her the figure of a stick insect. The elaborate hooping under her gown created a wall of material belling out from her narrow frame, a distance that would have to be crossed before one touched her.