by Devin Madson
The cave was larger than it appeared from outside, and having ascertained it was safe and dry, I went back out in search of wood and food. I wanted to lie down and never move again, but there was no herd to help and I doubted the empress was used to collecting her own dinner.
Dry wood was hard to come by. Food was easier with mushrooms and berries aplenty, but not sure whether either were safe to consume, I left them to stalk mud crabs up the riverbank. Making messy kills of half a dozen, I carried them back as colour began to drain from the sodden forest.
The empress was hissing angry words when I returned. She knelt in the cave opening, leaning over a collection of her own sticks, trying to make the wood spark. She had collected the mushrooms and berries, along with a few things that looked like dirty roots and a crushed bunch of flowers. She sucked a flower stalk as she worked and had just discarded it to reach for another when I dropped the wood and crabs beside her.
“Try with these,” I said, handing her the driest of my sticks and drawing my knife to peel the wet bark from the rest. With a mutter that might have been thanks, she returned to the task but was no more successful.
“You have to keep it going,” I said, watching her start and stop with the two sticks she had chosen. “Keep an even pace. And this one”—I pointed to one by her foot—“would be better.” I held out my hand and she gave me the sticks, but it was with such a scowl that I bit back all complaint about the mess she called a fire. Perhaps I could rebuild it when she wasn’t looking.
Empress Miko watched me work with folded arms. It took longer to create a spark than usual—fatigue, I told myself, not because she was watching. At last a flame flickered, but even when it caught upon the leaves the empress’s scowl did not soften. She picked up another flower and, having nipped the stem between her teeth, sucked as she brushed the mushrooms clean with her skirt. She had spread the contents of the supply bag out to dry as well, but none of the sodden items looked familiar.
Working in silence we soon had the beginnings of a good fire and a pair of crabs cooking. Night swept in outside, and Shishi curled up in the corner of the dry cave, only the gentle rise and fall of her back proving she had not yet given up on life.
“I hope these mushrooms aren’t poisonous,” I said as I bit into one. “There are a few varieties back home that are awful. One, it’s called a redcap or redlobe because it looks like a red flower with five lobes, has killed more horses than I like to think about. They’re attracted to it for some reason, and almost as soon as they eat it, they’re twitching and frothing at the mouth. You have to purge it if you don’t want to die, but horses can’t vomit, so…” I shrugged, trying not to think of all the horses I’d watched die. Old and young. Sick and well. Even Gideon’s ilonga. Did he ever think of her now?
I cleared my throat, but the lump stayed. “Our horse masters keep some with them for putting injured horses out of their misery. It’s better than desecrating their flesh.”
The empress stared into the flames, nibbling her own mushroom. Despite how hungry she must have been, she ate as though at a fine table rather than kneeling in a dirty cave.
“We don’t often eat crab,” I went on, unsure if I ought to be turning them as they cooked. “We Torin have never spent much time at the river mouths. We’re steppe folk, used to hunting antelope.” I splayed my hands and set them atop my head like antelope horns. “Antelope. There are boars in many of the forested areas as well, and fish”—I put a fin atop my head with a waving hand—“in the upper streams at the right season.” A pang of homesickness twisted inside me and I stared out at the darkening sky. “We aren’t used to this much rain either. Even in the deltas it doesn’t get this wet at any season.” Still the empress didn’t respond. “And we have two moons.” I held up two fingers and our symbol for moon. “The Goddess Moon sits upon the horizon like a shy sun. She waxes and wanes the same as the Watchful Father does, but only half is ever visible even in the northern plains. She is like a mother, watching over us.”
The empress looked up at this, peering at me in an attempt to understand.
“My mother died when I was young,” I said, talking now as much for myself as for her. “She got sick and there was nothing the healers could do. They tried. My father was gone before I was old enough to remember him, but there was always someone to care for me. Our herd is our family. We do everything for the herd.”
I stared into the flames, watching them lick around the crabs’ hard carapaces. “I think Gideon still believes it, he just chose a different path.”
At the sound of his name, Empress Miko’s gaze narrowed. “Emperor Gideon?” she said.
“How strange that sounds, but yes, I suppose he must be that now. He is a good man, at least he was. I can’t forget that.” I shifted my position and stared right at her. “Do you know?” I said, the intensity of my gaze catching her attention. “Do you know he is being manipulated by Grace Bahain? That he is the one who made all this happen?” I pointed in the direction that seemed right for where we had come from. “He used us. He used the Chiltaens. Just to take the throne from you.” My voice cracked on the words, barely able to imagine what sort of man would destroy so much, would end so many lives, for something so meaningless. It did not negate what the Chiltaens had done to us. Or what Gideon had done to Kisia. But in that moment, I needed to know she understood we had not been completely at fault, that her real enemies were in her own lands speaking her language.
Her brows lowered. She didn’t understand the words, but perhaps she sensed some of their meaning or knew the truth already, for she looked away, her head weighed down with grief.
I stared into the fire and she at the rain, neither of us speaking again until the crabs were cooked. Cracking a shell, I peeled out a length of soft white meat and held it toward Shishi, still hiding in the back of the cave.
“Here,” I said, waving it in her direction. “Come near the fire to dry off.”
When she didn’t move, I threw it halfway. The dog eyed it, tail beginning to wag, and then slowly, so slowly, she crept toward it, licking the air. The meat was inhaled the moment she reached it, and I dropped another piece closer. Less hesitation this time, and the meat was gone. I set a third in my palm, and after sniffing, she drew close and ate that too, her rough tongue tickling my fingers.
I ruffled her ears. “There, it’s not so bad here by the fire.” I set a chunk of crab down beside me and Shishi settled with it between her paws.
When I looked up the empress was watching me, her smile wan. She nodded at the dog and spoke, her smile trembling. My stomach fluttered at the trust in that look, the gratitude, and unable to meet her gaze I reached my hand out to pat Shishi’s head. My fingers brushed hers amid the fur and she snatched her hand away, her cheeks reddening. It might have been an apology she uttered, cradling her hand and looking away, chin lifted proudly, but whatever lie she was trying to make me, or herself, believe, she succeeded only in looking vulnerable.
I took a crab from over the fire and held it out. “Crab.” When she looked at it I pointed and repeated, “Crab.”
She attempted the word, and though she didn’t get it quite right, I smiled at the sound of my words on her lips. The only Chiltaens to have learned our language had done so for very different ends. She tried the word a second time and almost got it. Taking the crab, she pointed at the fire.
“Fire,” I said, and she tried that word too. Once she had it to her satisfaction she pointed at a stick, a leaf, the ground, a puddle of rainwater and then at Shishi.
“Shishi?” I said, but the empress shook her head and pointed again. “Oh. Dog.”
For the rest of the evening we ate our meagre food and shared our words, taking turns to name things and roll our tongues around new sounds. When we ran out of things to point at, we moved on to simple phrases, but slowly as the fire began to fade so too did our spirits, fatigue bleeding in with the cold.
We settled down to rest on either side of the dying fire
. It was not the most comfortable of places, but exhaustion makes up for many things and I was on the verge of sleep when a sob broke the peace. So unexpected was it that I looked first at the dog, but it was Empress Miko’s shoulders that shook. She buried her face in her knees, hugging them to her chest like a child.
“Empress?”
I set my hand upon her shoulder, offering my own strength as I would for any Sword in distress, but she pulled away, and lifting her head like a baying wolf, she wailed. With barely a break for breath, the wail became a stream of unintelligible Kisian laced with sobs. Most of it made no sense beyond conveying her misery, but I caught repeated names. Syan. Edo. Bahain. She gestured to me and spat Gideon’s name in a spurt of anger, before hopelessness set in. She spread trembling hands, and tears tracked down her cheeks as she spoke of Mei’lian and repeated the names Jie and Manshin and Oyamada over and over. I had no idea who Jie and Oyamada were, but I knew Manshin. The old warrior who had sat on the throne in her armour and tricked us all. Who I had seen locked up in the palace. I wished I could tell her he lived, but all I could do was listen to her outpouring until she was spent. She curled up then, sobbing and repeating a single name over and over. Mama.
I let her be. There was nothing I could do to ease her suffering except call the eyes of the gods to her pain. And so, turning my back to give her privacy with her grief, I sang our lament, thinking of the time I had done so while chained to the ground in southern Chiltae. They had wanted to break our spirit, and they had failed. Levanti could be beaten, tortured, killed, but not broken. Never broken. I had to keep telling myself that.
The next morning, I prepared to leave. We had only the one bag, my sword, and the clothes we stood in, so it didn’t take long. I doused the fire, checked the hillside was clear, and watched the drifting grey clouds with hope the rain might hold off, yet throughout it all the empress didn’t move. She just lay there, patting Shishi and staring at nothing.
“It’s time to go,” I said. And when she didn’t move or reply or even seem to hear me, I pointed out the cave mouth. “I have to get back to my people.”
Shishi lifted her head and wagged her tail, but the empress remained.
“What happened back there was awful,” I said, stepping into her line of vision. “What has happened to your empire is enough to break anyone. But we cannot break. We cannot walk away. If we do not go back then that…Bahain will get everything he wants and destroy everything we care about. If I don’t get back in time to stop him my people will die, having been nothing but pawns in a war not of our making. Gideon will die.” Emotion cracked my voice and I swallowed hard, trying to bury the fear, but it was already too late. “I cannot stay here and let it happen, whatever our part in this has been. And you cannot lie there and let them take your throne.” I didn’t understand her world any more than she understood my words, but once I had started I could not stop. “You are the Dragon Empress. You rode fearlessly into a battle you couldn’t win. You escaped when you ought to have been captured and here you are still free and strong and capable.”
She replied in a forlorn tone, and lying there with her cheek squashed to her arm she looked younger than I had ever seen her. Younger and more vulnerable. Yet like a Levanti I knew this fiery woman’s spirit could not truly be broken. Hopelessness smothered her like a blanket and I knew the feeling of loneliness it brought so well that it tore at my heart.
I crouched down beside her. “You are not alone,” I said. “Your Manshin is alive.” And having indicated her, I attempted to convey the dragon mask he had worn by baring my teeth and curling my fingers into horns. “Minister Manshin.”
“Manshin?” she said, the strange name bringing life back to her eyes if no smile to her lips. Empress Miko rose from the stone floor. Not to her feet, but it was a start.
“I will go get some berries. And water. We will eat and then go, all right?”
However little she understood, she nodded, wiping wet eyes with a determined swipe of her hand.
Leaving everything behind, I ventured down the mountain as I had the day before. I itched to get moving, but an hour delay for a full belly was not a bad trade.
The forest was loud with birdsong and chirruping insects, their noise stealing the crash of the nearby waves despite every breath being laced with salt. I had never seen anywhere like this on the plains, something I was grateful for as I slid on bare feet down steep inclines toward the river, landing in ever more piles of mud and sodden leaves.
“I should have kept my boots,” I said to no one as I scraped mud off my feet. “Better on my feet than sitting at the bottom of the sea scaring fish.”
A clump of wild berry bushes tangled along the upper river-bank, and stretching the bottom of my damp tunic, I formed a little pouch and began dropping them in. Most of them. I ate every fifth—all right, every fourth—for although they weren’t sweet, my stomach was rumbling.
A small suck of a breath made me turn, already drawing my blade with berry-stained fingers. A soldier halted bare paces from me, grinning, the sword he wielded owning far greater reach than my knife. He greeted me with a Kisian hello, before adding, “Levanti dog,” his smile stretching all the broader.
I backed up, holding my knife in front of me and still cradling my pouch of berries. He followed, his outstretched sword a promise he could and would kill me if I made him do it. At least he probably thought so. It had been a long time since I’d seen anyone hold a blade like they were asking to be killed.
“Having a bigger blade doesn’t help much if you’re going to hold it stupid,” I said.
The Kisian twitched his head to the side, still smiling. I let my tunic go and, as the berries tumbled out, caught a handful and threw them at his face. The moment of shock was all I needed to get close, negating his advantage. Hand to sword blade, fist to face. The man reeled back a step and I plunged my knife into his neck.
Blood spurted as I yanked the blade free, leaving him gasping as he fell amid my abandoned berries.
“Down!”
I dropped, training kicking in before I realised the word had been spoken in Levanti. Something whooshed overhead, followed by a crack of wood hitting skull, and I found the empress standing behind me like an avenging demon, a thick branch in her hands. Another soldier dropped between us, stunned or dead; it didn’t matter. Either way his head leaked blood into the undergrowth, further ruining the berries.
“Thank you,” I said. “I guess they sent men to find us after all.”
There was no sign of others, but the forest that had felt welcoming and safe was now alive with all too many sounds that could have been footsteps or hushed voices, every shadow owning a figure about to leap.
I got to my feet, abandoning the berries. “We should go.”
Empress Miko hadn’t dropped the branch. “Manshin. Mei’lian? Kogahaera?”
It took me a moment to realise she was asking where he was. Where she ought to go. “Mei’lian,” I said, though Kogahaera was where I needed to be.
“Mei’lian,” she repeated, the word determined, and in a sudden flurry of activity, she pulled off both the soldiers’ sandals and handed a pair to me. “Mei’lian. Manshin.”
I nodded, but I was not crossing an empire for her minister. In truth I was not even crossing an empire for my people, but for a man who had accepted me at my worst, only to push me away rather than let me see him at his. Gideon had always been there for me and I could not fail him now.
15. CASSANDRA
I woke to pain and heaviness and the sure knowledge I needed to sleep forever. Rain pelted the roof. Brazier coals clinked. I wanted to pull the covers over my ears and go back to sleep but could not move. The scent of incense crept through my sleepy haze. Then a rustle of movement. A whisper. Footsteps cracking reeds. I ought to roll over, to open my eyes and prepare to defend myself, but I couldn’t bring my heavy body to move at all.
I urged it back toward sleep, but a swirl of anxious thoughts rose on a tide, nag
ging for attention. More than ever I wished I still had all those quarts of Stiff I’d lost in the ambush.
More footsteps trod past, and with a lick of dry lips I made a demand for the most wondrous of drinks. “Tea.”
What? No, Stiff. I meant—
“She’s awake!” Kocho’s voice, but it was not his feet that appeared before my swimming gaze. Simple blue linen filled my vision as Saki knelt.
“Tea,” I repeated. My lips but not my voice.
“Tea, Lechati,” Kocho said, his voice a little distant as though he had stuck his head out the door to shout. “Her Majesty wants tea!”
“Her Majesty? I’m no fucking Majesty, old man,” I said, forcing myself to roll over in search of him. From the open door Kocho stared, jaw dropped, before his gaze darted to Saki. She shifted her weight, rustling fabric by my ear.
Slowly, Kocho slid the door closed. “You were right,” he said to the young woman at my back. “But… how?”
No answer came.
“How what?” I said, some of the heaviness sloughing off me like excess skin. I sat up, though muscles I had never known existed ached in ways I had never thought possible. Everything felt wrong, hands, legs, even my lips. “You’re staring.”
Pain sheared through my knees and the gentle spinning of the room made me want to lie back down, but I clenched different hands into different fists and glared at Kocho, the only one who could answer. But he didn’t have to answer. Realisation dawned like a wildfire sunrise, and I looked at the legs I had tried to bend, at the hands I had clenched and the body that felt all wrong. Not my legs. Not my hands. Not my body. Without thinking I pressed the hands that were not mine to my chest, only to rip them away from breasts far too small and—“Fuck!” I had just touched the Dragon Empress’s tits.
They aren’t magical, she said. The empress. The God-be-damned empress in my head as She had always been. Although I would appreciate it, Miss Marius, if you refrained from touching them again in future. Or any other part of me. Even better, you could leave.