by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 64
Ilahe woke to the smell of orange blossoms, and under it, something heavier, darker. She lay with her head on Hash’s pale chest, her dark skin like writing against new parchment. Sweat plastered her cheek to his flesh. His even breaths lifted and lowered her head infinitesimally. The afternoon sun, burning through the linen cloth over the window, cast the room in gold and topaz. The beat of his heart stroked Ilahe’s cheek. And then she remembered the last time she had felt a heart beat in time with hers, when she had lain on that altar, with the light of the solars raining down around her.
Suddenly fear, cold and hard as ice, struck her. She had been with him. The lingering ease in her muscles vanished, replaced by tight anxiety. With a man. Had she quickened? Did the godling inside her now live? Blackness take her, she was outside of the Iris; who knew what would happen this far from the solars’ influence?
Ilahe tried to calm herself with these thoughts, but it made no difference. The intimacy of the moment vanished, and suddenly she felt exposed. Naked. Peeling her cheek from his warm chest, Ilahe scrambled from the bed on shaky legs and began to pull on her clothing. Her hands trembled so that it took two tries to slip on Esmer’s ridiculous yellow dress. What she wouldn’t give for a shirt and trousers again, a robe, anything to hide herself.
As the dress dropped down, her eyes came to rest on Hash. He stared up at her, ocean-blue eyes still full of sleep, and smiled. His real smile? Or the mocking one? Ilahe could not tell; her heart skipped. She had been with him. He had seen her—all of her. The scars, the unsightly muscle. If he had peeled back bone and flesh to see her soul, he could not have seen her more privately.
“Where are you going?” Hash asked, running one hand through that wild blond hair.
He rolled over, the blanket sliding away to reveal his bare backside, and Ilahe gripped the mourning cloths in her braids. Solars above, he was perfect.
“Your friend Daye found me again,” Hash continued. He fished out a paper from underneath the bed and thrust it toward Ilahe. “Would have given it to you this morning, but I was distracted.” He smiled up at her again.
Mocking her. He had to be. Blackness take her, Ilahe was a fool. If she had let herself be quickened—Ilahe stopped, unable to finish the thought.
Hash’s smile faded. “What’s wrong?”
“Is this a joke?” Ilahe said. “What is this, what do you want from me?” The words meant nothing; she didn’t even know why she said them, but she had to say something. Had to leave.
A look of confusion, then hurt washed over Hash’s face, but Ilahe’s fear controlled her, and she pushed her concern for him aside. Grabbing her swords from the floor, she stalked out of the room and slammed the door behind her. Blood pounded in her ears so that Ilahe could not hear her own steps; it flamed in her cheeks. She had been such a fool. To have been with a man. To have trusted Hash. To have thought that someone could love her again, knowing what she was.
She needed to leave this city where everything confused her. Strapping the swords to her back, Ilahe jogged down the stairs, pushing past a startled Gyune. The whore’s voice came after her, but Ilahe did not stop to listen, did not want to hear. Something about Naja. It did not matter. Ilahe would help Naja best by leaving her alone. Ilahe was a weapon, not a woman. Not a lover. Not a friend. She would return to Cenarbasi and be the weapon she had become, until she had her revenge.
An obese man in a yellow tunic sprawled across one of the couches in the waiting room, his green eyes tracking Ilahe. She growled at him and rested one hand on a blade. Esmer’s dress undermined her efforts to be threatening. The fat man’s smile grew, and he beckoned to her with one finger. Ilahe glared at him and stalked out the door.
The afternoon sun hung halfway toward the horizon, when suddenly the drums started. They came from everywhere, rending the air, insistent. The sound carried Ilahe like a wave, and before she knew it she found herself stumbling down a broad dirt street, her eyes locked on the wooden structure of the temple, visible across the length of the city.
Anger pounded in Ilahe, forcing back the call of the drums. Pulling herself back from that compulsion was like tearing off her own skin, but Ilahe fought the power of the tair. She fought with all her self-hate, all her loathing of gods and men—their toying with women’s lives, their fickle cruelty, their control. White-hot rage consumed the sound of the drums, and Ilahe straggled to a stop, legs aching.
People collided with her, surged around her, heedless of her presence. The press of the tide carried her forward, but Ilahe pushed and shoved her way past men and women and children until she reached an empty alley. Sweat, from fear as much as heat, stained the yellow dress. Ilahe pressed back against a mural-covered wall and examined the street.
The citizens of Khi’ilan walked like men who had drunk their weight in rengi—steps over-eager, fingertips atremble. Awareness lingered in their eyes, but no control; instead, Ilahe saw abandon, lust, ecstasy. A two-story building stood across from Ilahe, and movement in an upper window caught her eye.
An old woman, hair pulled over one shoulder in braid, stood at the window. Even at the distance, Ilahe could read the determination written in the lines of the woman’s face. Other shapes moved behind the old woman, indistinct to Ilahe’s eyes. Some people, it seemed, had resisted the tair’s call. To judge by the numbers in the street, though, those that resisted were few. Ilahe could not blame the rest for giving in; even now, the tair’s call lingered at the edge of her mind, more intoxicating than rengi or mechta smoke. With a shiver, Ilahe turned and headed down the alley. Away from the swell of bodies and the unrelenting call of power. There were other ways out of the city.
Something about the alley tugged at a memory—an overturned pile of splintered boards, an obscene mural done in lurid red and pink. Ilahe had been here before, although she did not remember when. She increased her speed; she just needed to gain a major street and then she could find her way out of this city, and then out of the Thirteen Paths. The alley opened up just ahead.
Ilahe emerged into the street, grateful, and surprised, to find it almost empty. A few men clustered at the door of a tall building. A sign hung out over the street, painted with blood-red flowers. Beneath it, in elaborate lettering, “The Bleeding Glories.”
Daye’s inn.
A crack sounded in the street, and Ilahe watched as one of the men dropped to the ground, hands moving to protect his head. The remaining men—dressed in chain and green robes, Ilahe realized—surrounded him, kicking. Eses, beating up one of Daye’s men. Ilahe’s heart fell to her stomach.
All those notes from Daye that she had forgotten, or willfully ignored, or overlooked. She had thought them more of Daye’s silly fascination with Istbyan romances, another opportunity for the woman to play out her elaborate fantasy of romance and adventure. What if they had been something else? Begging for help from the Istbyans who would not stop searching for the mysterious Lady Orodna Tseta Atiatla? Or from the eses who had turned their attention to Istbyan malefactors after Ilahe had forced Ayde to leave the Cenarbasins alone? Guilt and fear left Ilahe’s throat tight.
A scream rose from the building, and the eses stepped back from the man they had been beating. Smoke wisped from one window, and heartbeats later Ilahe saw the first pale fingers of flame at the drapes.
They were burning Daye’s inn. And it was all Ilahe’s fault.