My child, we forged you as a weapon. This you already knew. But not the extent of it, the breadth of what we've done, the decision we made on Tafari's sacrifice in the ghost-kiln. The sacrifice that we now, at the last, must ask of you.
But this is not what we meant to do, not at the start. Believe this, if nothing else. We saw ourselves bringing you up in the Sirapirat we knew as children, a Sirapirat where you will not have to guard yourselves always against the killing cold. A gentle world, a good world. We had thought the Heron would give us the secret to her defeat. And he did—but not in a way we thought. We believed it would be difficult, immediate, bloody. We believed it would be tomorrow, not in decades.
I did not think I would have to watch Tafari walk into the kiln. I did not think I would have to watch you enter it with her, hand in hand. No wife or mother should have to. Two species of creatures commit unthinkable atrocities: the tyrant, and those who fight them.
The rest, our daughter, is yours to decide.
Eight
When Guryin drags Nuawa to the other side of the palace, to the disused wing where the dead king resided, she expects to meet someone or something grander than a jeweler. "Lieutenant Nuawa wants to commission a piece from you," xe is saying. "Isn't that right, Lieutenant?"
She looks from the major to the squat, thick-handed man Guryin has brought. He doesn't look like much, dressed plainly, but artisans who work with expensive materials tend not to wear their own pieces. "Do you work with flowers, by any chance?" She considers the jewelry Lussadh wears. Nothing on her fingers or wrists. "A pendant, I'm thinking, shaped like an anthurium."
He notes down her preferences for metal and stones—she declines the latter and asks for plain metal—and guarantees that it will be finished within a few days. Nuawa pays half upfront, not that the jeweler dares to ask for any.
"You do remember what I told you about Lussadh's favorite flower," Guryin exclaims once the jeweler has been escorted to the palace exit.
"I have a fair memory and you are right that I should get something for the general." Even if it must be trivial compared to anything else Lussadh owns. "But the real reason you called me here?"
The major shakes xer head. "So suspicious. This is a good spot for people-watching, when there are people in need of discretion and stealth. Look out this window. It's nice and small, and from the outside—down in the garden, say—it's almost invisible."
Nuawa looks and, indeed, Minister Veshma is emerging into the garden. In this section of the palace, garden means stained fountains and bare stones: no one has maintained it, and nothing grows here except for a dune chameleon, a lizard the size of hunting hounds, dozing in a corner. Veshma paces the area, head cocked as though listening for something. Whatever it is does not please her; her expression contorts. She throws down her fan, a tortoiseshell ornament that looks foreign, and scurries indoor.
"Odd," Nuawa concedes, "but it doesn't look conclusive."
"She's been here every other day. Nobody ever shows up and she doesn't do anything so obvious as pick up a secret letter or similar. I got my hand on the bangle she wore to the party, and there's nothing on or in it except this tiny whiff, sour, like a recently faded hex. It's a shame really—she gave herself away trying to poison you. Why would she make such a reckless move?"
"She must have especially hated the look of my nose."
Guryin snorts. "She's close to the general—well, used to be, at any rate. Part of the old guard Lussadh recruited for her, ah, historical event. Do you want to bring this to her?"
"The general will take it better coming from you." And it ought to keep Guryin occupied for the next hour or so. Nuawa has her own errand to attend.
* * *
Penjarej freezes, mid-pacing, when Nuawa enters. The professor looks caught, red-handed at a forbidden activity, as though she thinks she ought to remain as bound to the bed as a shackled dog, fetal and whimpering.
"What you said and what I read in the letter don't line up," Nuawa says without preamble, once she is sure there's just the two of them. The room is windowless, and there is no sign of Guryin's etheric scouts. "One or the other must, of necessity, be false."
Penjarej keeps to her side of the room, as far from Nuawa as possible. She has moved the cadaverous furniture around, arranged it into a crude barricade coyly draped in tattered silk. "Have you made a decision, Lieutenant?"
"I'm curious as to your testimony. You implied the Dasarets intended to enter the kiln." And on purpose sacrifice Tafari, sacrifice Nuawa. To forge her better, faster, turn her into a weapon that simple training could not produce. "The letter suggests otherwise."
"My memory is not what it used to be."
What were her mothers like, Nuawa wants to ask, in those days before history exerted its weight; before they began building a future that she would come to inherit. How they had met, was there a sedate courtship or a stunning whirlwind romance. The things a daughter would desire to know, those pieces of the past that should matter more than anything. "Nor does the chronology align. Your acquaintance with them must have been concurrent with ... a great deal of pivotal events. I'd judge that you were there all the way up until Tafari's execution. Perjury before a representative of the queen—me—isn't something you want on your record, Professor."
Penjarej's fingers convulse. "How did Indrahi die?"
Like an open wound. Nuawa can almost taste it, the sudden rage, the wish to see this woman cast off a high balcony and shattered on the cobblestones. Her mothers died; this woman lives. Instead she smiles, calmly. "I executed Indrahi Dasaret myself, as is right and proper, for I serve as one of Her Majesty's swords."
Penjarej starts crying and Nuawa almost does it, pull the trigger and shoot a round into the wall next to Penjarej's head. This display of tears and mucus, these unearned theatrics. But the professor stops almost as abruptly as she started. She rubs her sleeve across her face like a child. "She loved you. They both did. They bought this iron womb and they nursed it in their house, counting the days, watching you grow inside. They'd tell me how many months or weeks were left, they got baby clothes and asked me which milk was best for infants, as if I knew anything about milk. They couldn't talk of anything else. You were the world. They wanted to meet you so much, they wanted to give you everything, they couldn't bear to put the glass in you. They delayed and delayed. Until Tafari was arrested and there was no longer any other choice."
"How tidy," Nuawa says and watches the professor try to regain the breath she expended in that deluge of words. "Of their collaborators and contacts, who else is alive?"
"Nobody." Penjarej stares down at the floor, her shoulders sagged and her arms limp.
Nuawa says nothing, moves nowhere. She waits Penjarej out. But the older woman stays quiet too, perhaps hoping that Nuawa will forget that she exists and go away. Conversationally, Nuawa says, "A foreign demon tried to lure me to act against the queen, to bait me into treason. Ey made marvelous promises."
"They were empty."
"While you make none at all?" Nuawa lets her words congeal, like poison inside a slice of persimmon. She wonders if Penjarej knows about that too, the fruit tree in the glasshouse, nurtured for lethality. Just as Indrahi nurtured Nuawa, to much the same result. Her mother plotting for death from the beginning, perhaps from the day of Tafari's dissolution within the kiln. A child, a persimmon. "Why do you do anything, Professor? What do you want? Winter may not be the ideal state of the world, but there has been worse. I know my textbooks, and Sirapirat was ruled by warlords back in the day. The world turns on an axis of butchery. Different butchers, that is all."
Penjarej shuts her eyes. Blocking out the sight of Nuawa, the lines of resemblance that must run down to her from Indrahi and Tafari. The point of the nose, the slant of cheekbones, the crook of the mouth. "You wouldn't understand."
"I suppose plenty of people devote themselves to things they can't see or have never seen, like the goodness of human hearts or what lies within st
ars. What might a restored Sirapirat look like? You and I don't have the faintest idea. Who or what might replace the Winter Queen? You haven't thought about that, either." This is as far as she can push Penjarej, Nuawa judges. She raps her knuckles against the nearest table—Penjarej startles, her eyes snapping open—and makes a show of listening for something. "Ah, now we're alone. How did you like it, Professor? Was I convincing?"
"What?" The single word is a whistle of air through teeth.
Nuawa tosses her head a little, smiles, affecting warmth though she is well-aware she lacks the disposition. "We were under surveillance, as a matter of course. But it appears I've intimidated and tormented you enough that my colleague is satisfied nothing untoward will happen in this room. I'll tell you why you are here—it's nothing to do with your past. The queen has little interest in history; if anything, she finds it dull."
"What?" Penjarej says, softer this time.
"She wants you here for the same reason that Kemiraj assassin went to you. I will tell her that I have persuaded you to work for her, and she will bring here the pieces of the god-engine Vahatma. This is something she badly desires, and the Winter Queen does not covet without reason." She takes the diptych panel out of her jacket and holds it out to Penjarej. "Together we could discover her true goal and bring about her fall. What will you decide, Professor?"
* * *
Leaving behind Penjarej's cell, Nuawa sights down Ulamat standing beneath a chandelier of moth-bulbs that give off a lacey, shivering radiance. Too far from Penjarej's room for him to have eavesdropped. Nevertheless, he looks furtive.
"Lieutenant." He curtsies.
"Does the general require me?"
"Not exactly, sir. There's just something you will want to see, if you have the time? I've had it delivered to one of the courtyard sheds. It took some doing—we had to put districts on lockdown again, what with the hysteria, stories about the party spread around and grown wild. Still, mostly under control. The city has faith in my lord."
They exit to the courtyard where prisoners have been brought out, plucked from Veshma's guest list. Nuawa counts six, though she is unable to tell who they are or what rank they held, what criteria were used to determine their proximity to Magistrate Sareha and therefore to guilt. They have been stripped down to underclothes—a thin choli, a gauzy wrap, a lungi. None is adequate to the weather. On the frigid flagstones they kneel and tremble, their exhalation steaming in the cold, their teeth chattering: Nuawa can hear it from where she stands. A soldier walks circuits around the prisoners, slapping their palm with the hilt of a baton, staccato and loud, a presage of the near and immediate future. Hard wood, pliant flesh.
Barring a couple, none of the prisoners are military. They are older, in their sixties to seventies, and soft. They must have just been brought out from a ghost-heated room or carriage—there’s still vapor on spectacles, and icicles have rapidly formed in their hair.
Nuawa stops to watch. A light flurry begins to fall. The mind etches strange grooves and pathways into itself, for Nuawa thinks not of this courtyard but of the time she went into the kiln, her giving-mother with her. Her recall before that point has nearly been extinguished. To her understanding most people retain a better grasp of their life at eight or seven than she does. Hers is a canvas entombed by snow.
The soldier goes by each official, forcing their chin up with the baton’s tip. The same questions rattle off: For how long did you know of Magistrate Sareha’s treachery? You were appointed to your post by her, how is it possible you claim ignorance? Do you know what it means to defy the Winter Queen? Sometimes for variation the soldier would ask the prisoners how long they believe a human body can last under this temperature, from now until midnight; whether they expect to see the dawn. An ash-gray man loses control of his bladder. Piss soaks down his kurta, splattering onto the soldier's boots.
How does it feel, she muses, for these people to have been complacent all their lives, assured that they're favored by Lussadh and therefore guaranteed an easy life under winter? How it feels, now.
"I see we'll soon resolve the issue of Sareha's co-conspirators," she murmurs as she follows Ulamat into the shed.
"Some of it is to settle old scores. Those officials were never the most competent or the most loyal, and this was an efficient way to get rid of suboptimal elements."
Not so guaranteed after all. She looks around the shed as Ulamat turns on the light. A shelf of watering cans and pruning shears, a rack of shovels and rakes. It is a far humbler arrangement than she expects of the palace, but then there must be places for the mundane work, the menial labor that underpins the posturing of power and governance. She muses whether she could ask to see the kitchen.
Ulamat fiddles with one of the cabinets. "Here we are," he says, dragging into view a casket.
It is out of place in this shed, made of camphor wood worked over with golden curlicues. The sides are emblazoned with the banners of radiance, verses for passing and reincarnating. A saffron cloth covers the casket's lid, signifying that the body within belongs to a monk. Nuawa stares at it, confounded at what this might—
The aide lifts the saffron cloth and unseals the casket. Inside is a monk in his late forties, well-fed and up until recently healthy. He has been expertly touched over with wax and pigment, but there's no hiding the bloating that happens to flesh left too long in the water: he died by drowning. In the hachure of his features, the same cartography as her own is written—the reflections of Tafari and Indrahi. He and she, the two remaining images that show the world that their mothers ever existed.
Now there is only her.
The mirror shard inside her numbs who she is, what she feels. It leeches her humanity, perhaps converts it to something else, and that thought must have summoned something—the hallucination, the inexplicable phenomenon. The shed dims, the casket and Ulamat recede, and she becomes the single source of illumination. Her skin like a veil, and the tendons underneath overrun with crystals.
But as before, this vision disperses. There's just the corpse and Ulamat and her. "I recognize him," she says in a voice as impersonal as a mortician's. "My aunt's son. We were not close. By the time he left to ordain, I wasn't even in puberty. His departure allotted Aunt Indrahi more funds to spend on my keep and education, for which I am grateful. Am I to do something about this as his next of kin?"
Ulamat's eyes dart to meet hers, as if even he is alarmed by her lack of reaction. "Indeed, Lieutenant. You would know the proper rites."
"I will send this to the Seven Spires' scriptorium, the bhikkuni there should see to the matter properly. Send her an offering in coin and food. Luang-mae Kabilsingh should appreciate a few sacks of rice and spices, and fruits if we have any to spare." Nuawa straightens. "I mean you no insult, but this is a waste of my time and yours. My cousin—though I cannot claim him as that, as he renounced all worldly ties at twelve—would have been taken care of in Kavaphat by his temple."
"I'm admonished, sir. I will deal with the matter as you've instructed." He bows.
"See to that," Nuawa says. The air is too close, the shed too small. Dust and rust and decay. "I'm going to get some fresh air."
Away from him she draws a lungful of cold. The body has a capacity; it stands to reason that if she fills herself with morning crispness, it will displace the rest—sentiment, anger—and seal up the soft places where she can be hurt. She has not thought about him for a long time, the brother who was too old for the mirror shard and who therefore did not have to bear her fate. The brother whose name she is already working to forget. Why is he dead, she could have asked, demanded it from the general's aide, when he lived in the most sheltered place in the world, when he had forsaken Mother Indrahi and her history. The cause of demise wouldn't have mattered. As she studied the corpse with forensic detachment, she could only think of what she might do to Ulamat.
And Lussadh could not possibly have been ignorant. The general does not miss such things.
She wal
ks faster, long military strides, through the garden and past the palace gates: none stands in her way. She walks without thinking, peripherally aware that she is beyond the reach of the palace's defenses, the unseen veils and bulwarks that keep them safe from the Heron. But it does not occur to her to care: what she needs is distance, what she needs is solitude. Given a few hours she will recover, she will regain her equilibrium and her ease of dissembling. She will continue on as she ever has, plucking at the strings of history Penjarej shares with her, returning to the silks and opulence of Lussadh's bed as if nothing has changed.
Someone is calling her name. She does not stop. Her march is long, and she intends to complete it, even if that means circumnavigating every level of Kemiraj. To keep her heart pumping, her muscles pulling, until exhaustion overtakes her and blanks out all thoughts. Behind her footfalls pound the pavement, the noise of pursuit. Nuawa quickens her pace, turns in to a narrow street hemmed by stone tenements and angular lampposts, and statues with the starved limbs and narrow fontanelles of marionettes. The path is a dead end, terminating at a sheer pitted wall, above which a tree peeks—bent under its own weight, dense with leaves the color of lampreys and fruits like lidless eyes.
She looks over her shoulder, by necessity. The general has caught up with her, must have run as fast as a demon of the storms. Lussadh is not even winded, though her brow is alloyed with sweat, electrum-bright. Nuawa thinks of what she will say next, what she will do, as she stands there facing Lussadh.
The general's eyes widen. She begins to move, and perhaps in a different time—when she has not already spent her breath on the run—she might have sidestepped it. Nuawa hears the whistle of momentum, sees the glitter of black ice.
The spear goes through Lussadh, its trajectory perfect and smooth. Lussadh staggers backward. When she tries to breathe, a wet rattle results.
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