“You should hurry,” Meiying said as she headed toward the doorway.
The view changed as she stepped through—into a comfortable looking room filled with shelves and scrolls and carvings of ivory and jade. Then it too faded, and Ramahd was left alone with Cicio, who was lying in the corner as before.
“Come,” Ramahd said, rousing him. “Tiron’s in trouble.”
When they reached the drug den, Tiron was curled up as Ramahd had seen through the vision. His eyes were no longer moving, however. Cicio dropped to his knees and shook Tiron, but Ramahd didn’t bother. Tiron was dead.
Cicio stood and stared at the young tough, Pony, who ran the den. “You let him die, ah?” Cicio pulled his knife and pointed the tip at Pony’s chest. “You let him die?”
Pony raised his hands, his long hair unbound and falling around his shoulders. “He paid for what he wanted!” He backed up as Cicio advanced. “He paid! What was I supposed to do?”
Before he’d even finished, Cicio barreled into him and drove him down against the filthy floor. Pony screamed and twisted as Cicio stabbed him through the ribs. Over and over Cicio drove the knife home while, Mighty Alu shield his eyes, Ramahd stood and watched. It felt like sweet justice, a righting of this terrible wrong. Of course, it was anything but. This wasn’t Pony’s fault. It was Ramahd’s. Ramahd had sent him here knowing full well how sweet the lotus’s call would be to Tiron.
By the time Ramahd pulled Cicio off, Pony’s kaftan was soaked red with blood from a dozen wounds. Cicio spat on him, kicked him as he writhed on the floor and stared wide-eyed at the ceiling.
“Tiron,” Ramahd said to Cicio. “Help me with Tiron.”
The look Cicio gave him was crazed, as if he had half a mind to attack Ramahd as he had Pony, but then he put his knife away and moved to Tiron’s side.
That night, they buried their friend in the desert.
Chapter 12
AS THE SHIELDWIVES CARRIED RAMELA’S body away, the color drained from Çeda’s world, leaving everything a washed-out haze. Shame over Ramela’s death filled her like a fetid stream. She wished she could wash the taint of it from her, but how could she? It was all her fault.
She should have waited. She should have forced Ramela to choose a different asir, any but Amile. She should have had another Shieldwife attempt this first bonding ritual. Now it was ruined. The other asirim had seen what Amile had done. They’d felt it. Would they follow his lead? Would they allow their pent-up anger and frustration, sentiments that had been building for four centuries, to outweigh their desire for revenge against the Kings?
And who among the Shieldwives would even be willing to try? One or two might be brave or stupid enough, but even if they did, their fear might cause them to falter at the worst time. Çeda couldn’t allow any of them to risk it until she knew how to forge their bonds safely.
She suddenly realized she was alone with Leorah. The others had all left, and Çeda couldn’t rightly recall if they’d spoken words in parting and, if they had, whether she’d responded.
“They’ve lost so much,” Leorah was saying. “It’s been eroded, generation after generation, so that now, in some of them, there’s practically nothing left.”
The memory of Amile attacking the ship played out in Çeda’s mind. He’d wanted Ramela to attack him, and had used her fear of the asirim to make her do so. And when Ramela had succumbed to that desire and drawn her sword, it had allowed Amile to sidestep his bond with Çeda and sever the one that Ramela had been trying to create with him.
“His will is so strong,” Çeda breathed.
“No,” Leorah said. “You have it precisely wrong. Amile acted as he did not because he wanted to, but because he has so little will left. In his moment of weakness, the compulsion laid down by the desert gods to protect the Kings of Sharakhai drove him.”
“But I bonded with Kerim. It lasted for months.”
“Kerim, I fear, was a very special case. Mavra and Sedef may be forged of the same stuff as Kerim, perhaps one or two others, but how many more? And how to tell them apart? We may not know until their will breaks and they attack.”
Çeda’s arm was burning so badly she sucked her breath through clenched teeth while shaking away a bit of the pain. Leorah studied her, the concern plain on her face. “It’s not too late to send them back to the adichara. Try again another day.”
“If we do that, the Kings will kill them all.”
In the distance, several asirim wailed.
Leorah glanced their way, then turned quickly as the wind threw sand and dust against her. “Of that there can be no doubt,” she said, blinking the dust from her eyes, “but you must see that if you don’t find a solution soon, the bonds you now share with them will break. You’ll be risking not only their lives, but your own and the lives of your Shieldwives as well.”
It was true. Çeda felt her links to the asirim weighing on her. The wailing in the distance ceased, though a moment later one of them began to sob pitifully.
Just past nightfall, as the sun lit the western clouds a terrible, burning orange, Çeda went into the desert and beckoned to Mavra. With plodding steps she came, stopping some distance away. Amile remained sheltered by the others, his mood murderous, while Mavra’s worry for him shone like a beacon. She feared the same might happen to her, or to any of her children. She feared Çeda’s response if it did.
Before Çeda could say a word, Mavra spoke in a thin rasp. “I heard you. Speaking with your great-grandmother.” She waited, perhaps hoping Çeda would answer her unspoken question. When Çeda didn’t, she went on, “Will you do it? Will you send us away?”
Çeda was uncertain about many things, but not about this. “I would die first.”
There were tears in Mavra’s eyes. She could feel the honesty in Çeda’s words, and was grateful for it. “Your friend,” she began. “My heart fills with salt at her loss. Amile was once so gentle.”
“I remember,” Çeda said, recalling many of her sweetest memories of him.
“It wasn’t him.”
“I know,” Çeda replied easily. “I know it wasn’t Amile’s fault. But we can’t proceed until we’re sure it won’t happen again.”
Çeda could feel Mavra’s desperation, her worry that she would, just as Leorah had said, lose everyone because she’d agreed to leave the blooming fields. In a display of perfect helplessness, she spread her hands wide. “I don’t know how to help.”
“I know.”
“Then why have you summoned me?”
Çeda stepped forward but stopped when Mavra took a step back. She tried again, and this time Mavra remained. Çeda embraced her. “To let you know, all of you, that we will find a way through this. I won’t rest until it’s done. Do you hear me?”
Mavra didn’t respond, but Çeda felt her fear diminish. There, where the fear once was, a hope was born. It was small and tentative, but after so much worry among the asirim, it was infectious—Mavra waddled toward her children with a lighter heart, and Çeda felt the rest of them begin to hope too, even Amile.
Sedef stood apart from the crowd, tall, unyielding. It won’t last.
Çeda faced him. “For now, that isn’t what matters. Sleep. Rest. We’ll find a way.”
Two days after Ramela was buried, while the evening meal was being prepared, Çeda was sitting with Sümeya on the deck of Leorah’s yacht. Sümeya hummed an old Sharakhani folk song while inking a new tattoo across Çeda’s left arm. It was a welcome respite from the rhythms of the last few days. The tapping of the needle, the constant pinpricks into her skin, were helping to distract her from the pain in her right arm. The ache had grown over the course of the last few days, but focusing on the sharp pain from the new tattoo—indeed, focusing on the various tattoos she now had over her body—helped to take her mind off the slowly growing knowledge that she couldn’t keep Mavra and the others bo
nded to her like this forever.
Sümeya switched to another bowl of ink, one of six she had sitting around the deck, and pointed to the inside of Çeda’s bicep. “Here.” When Sümeya had shifted her stool into better position, Çeda twisted her arm so that it rested on Sümeya’s thighs. “Now hold still.”
“I always hold still.”
“No, you don’t.” She was staring at Çeda’s right leg, which was bouncing up and down again. Çeda stilled it, and Sümeya laughed. “You’re like a little girl with a whole tray of baklava.”
Çeda glanced over the side of the yacht, where several Shieldwives were preparing food.
Sümeya paused, following Çeda’s gaze. “Sometimes you’re like an open book, Çedamihn. Why don’t you just spit it out?”
“It’s nothing.”
Sümeya rolled her eyes and went back to work.
“It’s just,” Çeda said under her breath, “I don’t know what to do.”
Sümeya continued to concentrate on Çeda’s arm as if she hadn’t sensed Çeda’s desperation. “I’ve told you my feelings on the subject.”
“Just let them go?”
“Or choose a pairing yourself.” She jutted her chin toward the sand, where Jenise was drilling ten others in spearcraft. “Jenise is strong. So is Sedef. Take them. Or another two. There must be some combination that would work. But do it soon. Waiting is only going to make it worse.”
Çeda watched them, Jenise shouting the sequence, the women spinning or thrusting their spears to the proper position. They were drills Sümeya had taught them only a week earlier, and for the most part they’d taken to it well. They were far from perfect, however, and Çeda wondered how far they could advance given how engrained their bad habits were. But they were eager to learn and rarely grumbled when asked to correct their mistakes.
Çeda had said as much to Sümeya last night, and Sümeya had laughed long and hard. “Çedamihn Ahyanesh’ala . . . I never thought I’d see the day.”
“What?” Çeda asked.
“There may be a bit of Sayabim in you after all.”
Sayabim had been Çeda’s instructor in bladecraft in the House of Maidens. She’d been an exacting mistress, always complaining that Çeda was too old to learn properly. Çeda started to laugh too—she supposed she had learned more from Sayabim than she’d thought—but the sounds of their laughter had only seemed to sour Melis’s mood, who was trying to read in her bunk.
As Sümeya tapped away, Çeda considered her counsel and remembered Kerim, the asir who had bonded with her before the Battle in King’s Harbor. “We might find a pair who could bond as Kerim and I did, but how many more?”
“You may not need more. Sometimes all it takes to loosen a jam in the streets is to get that first cart to move. Find two who can bond and the rest may follow.”
“Yes, but if we choose wrongly again, that may be the end of it.”
Sümeya shrugged, as if to say who can tell?
“We have to be certain,” Çeda said, her words half question, half declaration.
“The future is never certain.”
“I can’t gamble with others’ lives.”
“You already have, and will again.” Sümeya lifted her head and stared at Çeda, the gaze of the First Warden returning. “We’re entering a proper war now, Çeda, and whether you recognize it or not, war is a study in attrition.” She returned to her inking. “You have time yet, but don’t lose the opening battle because you refused to make a move.”
Çeda knew Sümeya was right; there was a path through this forest. Çeda just had to find it.
As Sümeya continued to expand the image along her bicep, Çeda concentrated on her right hand, where Zaïde’s tattoo hemmed in the poison from her adichara wound. Staring at it always brought her back to her roots. It gave her perspective to think about the dizzying sequence of events that had led to Dardzada depositing her on a cart and leaving her in front of the House of Maidens in a last ditch attempt at saving her life. Her acceptance into the Blade Maidens had followed as a result, and set her on this long, strange, and winding course. Zaïde’s tattoo made a sort of fingerless glove around her hand, words and traceries and sigils combining to tell the tale of Çeda’s life as a young woman, with hints at her heritage. The lost are now found, it said in one place, and nearby, Bane of the unrighteous. Zaïde had always meant for her to be a knife, bent toward the heart of the Kings. Çeda’s true nature, her purpose, had been there in plain sight for all to see, though most read it differently and assumed it was meant in honor of her service to the Kings.
Her time in the Blade Maidens had led to another tattoo, the one on her left hand. Sümeya had designed and inked it after Çeda had killed Külaşan the Wandering King. A peacock wrapped around her wrist, head low as if bowing. On the back of her hand, surrounded by verdant leaves and lapping water, were the words Savior of Sharakhai in beautiful calligraphy. Sümeya, thinking Çeda had been trying to save Külaşan, had thought Çeda a hero. They hadn’t spoken of that day since Sümeya had inked the tattoo, but whatever Sümeya’s thoughts, Çeda was proud of the images and all they represented. Külaşan had thought of his death as a release, and for Çeda’s part, she had never regretted killing her first King.
On her back was the first tattoo Çeda had ever received, this one from Dardzada, the apothecary who’d taken Çeda in after her mother died. Çeda hadn’t asked for the tattoo; he’d forced it on her in a drunken rage over what he viewed as intolerable disobedience. Funnily enough, over my first visit to the blooming fields. It was an ancient sigil, writ large along the skin between her shoulder blades. For a long while she’d thought it had meant bastard, but she’d found out years later from King Husamettín himself that it more properly meant both one of many and many in one.
Around that tattoo, subsuming it, Leorah had inked another design that spread across the whole of her upper back. It recounted Çeda’s involvement in the Night of Endless Swords, the great battle in King’s Harbor. Mount Tauriyat, as viewed from the harbor, now hovered over Dardzada’s sigil. Around it was wrapped a lyrical retelling of everything that had led up to the battle and what had happened after, including Mesut’s death at Çeda’s hands. The way Leorah had inked it made the entire design look like a spread-winged falcon, the tips of the wings wrapping around Çeda’s shoulders and the rounded muscles of her upper arms.
Only a few weeks ago, Sümeya and Leorah had begun combining their efforts to create sleeves of imagery and words along Çeda’s arms. The new additions recounted everything that had led to the Battle of Blackspear. Leorah had continued from Zaïde’s design on Çeda’s sword hand, connecting it to the falcon wings near her shoulder. Hers told Çeda’s tale from the point of view of the tribes, how Çeda had come to the desert, how she’d breathed her spirit into the gathered forces when times were their most bleak, how later she’d fought and then killed Onur with her own knife. The mighty wyrm wrapped her arm, its head resting along her forearm. Onur’s great spear, the one given him by the desert gods on Beht Ihman, was pointed toward the gaping maw of the wyrm—one of the great dragons of legend.
Sümeya’s design continued from the one she’d inked on Çeda’s left hand, telling Çeda’s tale from the point of view of a Blade Maiden. How she’d bonded with the asir, Kerim, how she’d brought Mesut’s magical golden band to the desert, how she’d used it to create the seventeen: the Forsaken, the asirim who, once liberated from Mesut’s bracelet, had vanquished the wyrm in the final battle and helped to turn the tide. Sadly, all of the Forsaken had died shortly after the Battle of Blackspear. Days after the battle had ended, without warning or preamble, those who’d survived had simply fallen to the sand, never to rise again.
Leorah had finished her tattoo on Çeda’s right arm two days ago. Sümeya was nearly finished with the one on her left, but there were several important elements remaining. Sümeya was using bright wh
ite ink to render Salsanna, the brave woman who’d found the way to free the asirim from Mesut’s bracelet. She’d later sacrificed herself to allow one of the Forsaken to take her form. Çeda’s pride in her swelled as her likeness took shape.
As Sümeya’s clever fingers adjusted Çeda’s arm, her thoughts drifted to their time in the desert before they’d reached Ishmantep. They’d shared something then, the two of them losing themselves to passion. For Çeda it had been mixed with a desire to learn more of the Kings’ secrets. Even so, her feelings for Sümeya had been real. She’d long wanted to bring it up, to see if Sümeya still felt the same way. But she was worried that Sümeya would be angry, or that she’d tell Çeda it had only been her loneliness and her desire for Nayyan coming through.
And yet the way Sümeya had responded in the blooming fields when she thought Çeda was in danger—terror had filled Sümeya’s voice, the sort one saves for those closest to them—made her think that maybe she should bring it up. Right then.
She was just about to say something, anything, when Sümeya lifted her hand and stretched. The sun was just touching the horizon. “We’ll have to finish tomorrow.”
“Sümeya . . .” Çeda began, but just then Melis climbed up from belowdecks. Çeda hid her disappointment as Sümeya prepared the salve and bandages she would wrap around the newly inked areas. Melis saw the two of them there and seemed unsure of what to do, what to say.
Çeda twisted her arm, showing her what Sümeya had done. “What do you think?”
“Lovely,” she said, and moved past them to sit heavily in one of the four chairs fixed to the deck.
“Don’t mind her,” Sümeya said to Çeda while applying the salve. “Her moon day has yet to pass.”
“My moon day?” Melis stood.
Sümeya ignored her.
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