Tasia had grown bolder over the last year. The children had an easier time adjusting to life in the woods than the adults. Lilia had knotted Tasia’s hair with ribbons, a style preferred by the dajian refugees that Lilia had brought with her into the Woodland. Tasia tugged at one frayed white ribbon as she watched the hungry boars.
“Mother Lilia,” Tasia said, and Lilia did not dissuade her from calling her that, because it seemed to placate her. Lilia knew what it was to miss one’s mother. “Are we safe now?”
“Safer,” Lilia said. She peered up at the massive cover of the trees, so thick that in the woods below they lived in perpetual twilight. Safer than we were, she thought, but safety and comfort were a lie, out here, a dream.
Lilia had kept the Dhai alive in exile far longer than should have been possible. She knew that. Her people knew that. Even cigarette-toting Yisaoh and smirking Meyna could not argue about Lilia’s role in their survival. Lilia knew the Woodland in a way that even Meyna did not, and using it to their advantage against the Tai Mora had been Lilia’s idea from the very start. They only moved to a new area once the Tai Mora patrols had been over it. These days the Tai Mora concentrated their time to the south, scouring the foothills and craggy valleys around Mount Ahya. They were as safe in the north, here, as they ever would be. For a time.
“Why couldn’t the boars protect Catori Mohrai?” Tasia asked, fingers sticky with blood.
Lilia tugged at Tasia’s frayed ribbon and retied it. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself. Anxious panic often overwhelmed her during the strangest times. It had come more often the last few months. “They can protect us from enemies outside the fence,” Lilia said, “but not enemies already inside.”
“Are there a lot of enemies inside?” Tasia asked.
“I don’t know,” Lilia said, mindful of the other children.
“I thought we were safe in the Woodland,” Tasia said, “safer than in the valley.”
“We are, love.” Fleeing to the Woodland had been their only option after the Tai Mora invasion. They had no access to Asona Harbor, and trying to climb over Mount Ahya and into Aaldia would have killed the old, the children – and the infirm, like Lilia, would never have managed it.
Even in the Woodland, Mohrai, the Kai’s first Catori, never seemed to fully recover from her difficult pregnancy, and Yisaoh, with the loyalty of the Garika and the Badu clans, had a voice that grew stronger over the weeks and months instead of weaker. Meyna – parading around the young child she insisted was the chosen Kai – was in hale health. It was Mohrai they finally lost, and Lilia admitted that she sometimes dreamed it would be her own death next. Maybe all of them together, in one Tai Mora raid. The fear gripped her again; a racing of the heart, a sense of impending doom.
“Are you scared?” Tasia asked.
“No. Are you?” Lilia half-smiled at her own lie, because her guts roiled even as she breathed through the heart palpitations.
“Sometimes.”
“We have each other,” Lilia said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
A single tirajista, Salifa, stood a few paces distant, watchful for semi-sentient monstrosities from the woodland. She met Lilia’s look, warning her that the conversation was being followed with great attention by the other children.
“We should go back,” Salifa said. She wasn’t much older than Lilia, only a novice when they fled Dhai and still not a proper Ora, but she bore an infused everpine weapon and carried herself like she had been born into the militia, puffing out her chest from the post at the fence. Her left eye sagged in its socket, gray and bleary; like the film of a rotten lizard’s egg. She’d lost the eye to a bone tree not long ago, and it was still in the long process of regenerating; a possibility only with Tira in the sky. She wore a single white ribbon around her throat.
“Salifa is right,” Lilia said. “You’ve spent enough time above ground today.”
The children protested. Lilia herded them ahead, thunking her walking stick like some old woman. The children went before her, easily navigating the deliberate maze of trees and scrub that hid the entrance to what had become their semi-permanent settlement the last few months.
Lilia rubbed at her face with her soft, undersized left hand. A tirajista had cut the hand off and begun to regrow it the year before; there were a great many of them taking advantage of Tira. Lilia had been unable to grip anything due to a bad break and worse recovery. She had considered doing the same with her leg, but could not have afforded the time it took to heal. The hand was enough of an ordeal. The leg… the leg could wait until this was over.
Namia kept at Lilia’s side, her ever-present shadow. Salifa, too, hung back, eying the children forging ahead as if they might sprout wings and fly away.
A rustling caught Lilia’s attention, and she shrank away from the snapping violet tendril of a feeding lily. Salifa jumped between her and the lily, severing its trembling head neatly with her everpine sword.
“Li,” Salifa said, “let me walk between you and the wood, here. The tirajistas haven’t been through to clean it out this morning.”
“It’s all right,” Lilia said. “I saw it.”
But Salifa remained between her and the edge of the path, mouth forming a thin line. Lilia sighed.
“This is a dangerous place,” Salifa said, “and not all of that danger is from the trees.”
“Mohrai died eating a hasaen tuber. It’s been known to happen.”
“I knew this truce wouldn’t last,” Salifa said.
“If someone deliberately harmed Catori Mohrai, there’s no proof of it. It’s best we continue to work toward our goals. Who is Catori, or Kai, doesn’t matter to the greater cause. You know that. I know that.”
“Even with them all married to each other, they are still back-biting and snarling. I wish they were as easygoing as you, Li.”
Lilia said nothing. Silence asked to be filled, and the people around her were always quick to fill it. The marriage of Mohrai, Meyna, and Yisaoh had been Lilia’s idea, soon after all the fractious groups of surviving Dhai had come together in the Woodland: a difficult, frightening, and fractured time.
“It’s the unity of their marriage that saved us,” Lilia said. “The Tai Mora seek to fracture us. Remember that. Always. If anyone tries to tear us apart, you must ask why. Who does it serve?”
“I know, I know,” Salifa said.
“It could very well have been a Tai Mora agent,” Lilia said. The walking, and the conversation, made her wheeze. She slowed and tapped at the mahuan-laced water bulb in her pocket. Her fingers still trembled when she thought about eating raw mahuan instead of the powder, to ease her breathing, but that had nearly killed her. And only living people could get revenge. She often blamed her anxiety on the lack of raw mahuan.
“Surely you don’t still think they have agents among us?”
“Why not?” Lilia said. “We certainly still have our own informants among them. Why couldn’t the Tai Mora have done the same?”
“They didn’t expect us to live this long,” Salifa said, and the pride in her voice made Lilia wince. But it was the pride that Lilia had used to her own advantage. Salifa loved to feel part of something larger than herself, something important. So many of them did. It made them pliable, easy to manipulate.
Around the next bend, Avosta met them, hand perpetually on the hilt of his standard sword, dark eyes widening at Lilia’s approach. He strode toward her, offering an arm though he knew she would not take it. Avosta was another of hers: a former member of Ghrasia Madah’s militia, whose gaze often made her intensely uncomfortable. He looked upon her as a god, big-eyed and sometimes bashful.
But he was useful. Like Salifa.
Avosta was a stout man with a pockmarked face and the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. His hair was knotted back in white ribbons, a style he had insisted she show him how to manage himself. The knotted white hair ribbons had become a symbol of loyalty to Lilia, a sign in their belief th
at she was divine, or perhaps Faith Ahya reborn… and she had not dissuaded them from that belief. It was among the many reasons the three married Catoris did not care much for her. But she couldn’t take revenge on the Tai Mora alone. It required a long embrace with what she had made of herself.
“The children are below,” he said. “There were two snapping lilies here. Are you all right?”
“We’re fine, Avosta,” Lilia said, sighing. “I was the one to tell you all how to spot the lilies, yes?”
Avosta put thumb to forehead, a gesture of respect. “Apologies, Li, I only meant–”
“I understand. Could you give Namia and me a moment to rest?”
“Certainly,” Avosta said. “I came to tell you, however, that Caisa has arrived with the week’s news.”
“She’s much earlier than expected.”
“She says there have been major developments.”
“No one following her?”
“Absolutely not. I give my word on that. I’ve trained our rangers very well.”
“Escort her to my rooms. I’ll speak to her after Catori Mohrai’s funeral. I need to keep my head clear and focus on this.”
“I will, yes.” He bobbed his head, but did not move from her path. “Are you… certain you wish to stay here alone?”
“I’m happy to stay with you,” Salifa said, good eye widening.
“I’ll meet you both at the tables,” Lilia said. “We’re quite near the village now. I have Namia, and my own gift, and I’m the one who taught you both to navigate snapping lilies.”
“You have been so ill, though,” Avosta said, “it’s been some time since you called Oma. I understand, of course, I just don’t want something to suddenly–”
“I’m fine,” Lilia said.
Avosta nodded once. “Of course. Apologies.”
Salifa put thumb to forehead and followed after him, but both kept glancing back at her, as if Lilia might blow away on the wind.
Big drops of rain splashed against the thick foliage above. Fitting, Lilia thought, that Mohrai’s funeral should begin with rain. She waited for Salifa and Avosta to disappear in the stir of others preparing for the funerary feast before she allowed herself a breath. Being some kind of infallible prophet was exhausting.
Beside her, Namia signed, “Noisy.”
“I agree,” Lilia said. “But they mean well.”
Ahead, in the area cleared around the great trees for public events, funerary attendants raced to cover the open fires with waxed linen; it was too dangerous to build stoves above ground, especially this close to their refuge. But the dead did not wait on the weather. They came and went at their leisure; far too many and far too quickly, of late.
Lilia stepped beneath the welcoming arms of a great bonsa tree to avoid the rain, carefully balancing on a tree root to keep her feet out of the gathering puddles. The smell of roasting flesh permeated the air. Her stomach grumbled, tightening into a needy fist of hunger. It had been just four days since the last funeral. But the meals between the funerary feasts were grim affairs. They were all starving for calories by the time another of their number succumbed to disease, age, or starvation. It made it doubly worse, then, that so many of the newly dead were children.
Namia crouched next to her, blind face turned up to the dripping canopy. She huffed at something: the spicy scent of Tordinian tobacco.
“You done indoctrinating the youth?” Yisaoh asked. She came up behind Lilia; the stink of the cigarettes still gave her away. She had kept a small cache of them for “special” occasions.
“Celebrating?” Lilia asked, nodding at the cigarette.
“Mourning, clearly,” Yisaoh said, taking a long drag.
“Are you going to speak at the funeral and tell everyone how much you loved Catori Mohrai as your own sister?”
“Mohrai was always a pain in the ass. Her and all of Clan Sorai, really. Meyna is worse, though. Bigger pain. Bigger ass.”
“None of us are perfect.”
“I’ll be happy to eat Mohrai’s finger bones.”
“I’m sure your responsibilities will be easier shared with just you and Meyna.”
“Only the two of us?” Yisaoh chuckled. “And what about you, our third leg, with her three hundred little followers flouncing about here displaying their hair ribbons like war trophies.”
“I never asked them to.”
“I never asked the Tai Mora to take over the country,” Yisaoh said. “And here we are. Listen, Meyna bedded Ahkio for years, him and half of clan Garika. All respect for that, but it means Meyna is a social climber with increasingly strong ties to what remains of Dhai, and she’s the sort who’d murder us both where we stand, probably with smiles still on our faces.”
“I have no experience of Meyna in that way,” Lilia said, “but she has a keen sense for how to get what she wants from people. That’s a useful skill. We both agreed on that.”
“I’m watching you, Lilia, and your followers. So is Meyna. Just warning you about that.”
Lilia smirked. She could not help it. She rested a hand on Namia’s shoulder to ease the burden on her twisted leg. Namia leaned into her. “I’m not a threat to anyone,” Lilia said. “I’m just a scullery drudge.”
Yisaoh choked on cigarette smoke and burst into a fit of coughing. “That’s… a wonderful joke,” she wheezed.
A thump sounded in the canopy above. Patter of leaves. Crackling branches. A single blue-black frog, big as Lilia’s thumbnail, landed on the ground at her feet and burrowed into the loam. Snaking green tendrils wavered up from the detritus, in pursuit of it.
“Tira’s tears,” Yisaoh muttered, gazing up at the canopy.
“Maybe it will be a small swarm,” Lilia said.
“I hate the Woodland.”
They stood in silence a moment as a half-dozen more frogs tumbled from above. Lilia sighed and asked, “What is it you want, Yisaoh? I need to prepare for this speech.”
“I want to know what you’re going to say up there,” Yisaoh said, “so I can prepare for the fallout if Meyna wants to eat your face off. You think it’s me and her with the political headbutting, but it’s you she hates. I’m family, painful as it may be for her to admit.”
“I’ll share a wholesome message about unity.”
“You’re a hungry little wolf.”
“You’re seeing the reflection of a dove in a teacup and thinking it’s a snake.”
Yisaoh laughed. “I haven’t heard that one in quite some time. Your mother use that?”
“She did.” Another frog landed on Lilia’s shoe. One tangled into her hair, gripping tightly with its tiny feet. She brushed it away. “Oma’s breath,” Lilia said.
The patter of frogs grew louder. Namia snorted and pressed herself closer to the bonsa tree. Lilia did the same.
“Fire and fear, these frogs,” Yisaoh said. “The crowd will take it for a bad omen.”
“It’s the season for it,” Lilia said. “With all the warmer weather this spring, we’ll see more of them. That’s just the cycle of things.”
The frogs continued to rain from above, trapping the three of them together under the spread of the bonsa. The frogs hopped across the forest floor, darting in the direction of the baleful eye of Oma. Whorls of snapping ground sage darted from their subterranean nests and dragged the little frogs back under the loam with them. Soon the frogs piled up nearly ankle high, moving like a great wave across the forest, interrupted occasionally by the burst of ground sage. The smell of sage filled the air, mixing with the scent of cooking flesh from the funerary feast.
“Meyna won’t start it until this passes,” Lilia said. She glanced over at Yisaoh, who had put out her cigarette but still gripped what remained of it. They had come to confide in one another, brought together by their shared experiences in Kuallina at the feast with Kirana, self-styled Kai of the Tai Mora, but Lilia knew better than to trust her completely. Yisaoh had nearly toppled the country by contesting the former Kai’s rule.
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“You know Meyna is pregnant again?” Lilia said.
“Of course she’s pregnant again.” Yisaoh spit a bit stray, spicy tobacco onto the ground. It was immediately overwhelmed by a slurry of frogs, though the worst of the stampede was over. Only the occasional amphibian dove from the canopy now. “It’s something she’s incredibly good at.”
The tide of frogs thinned on the ground. Lilia wiped a few of them off one shoulder, and untangled yet another from her hair.
“I hate this place,” Yisaoh said. She kicked at a clump of frogs, scattering them ahead of a snarl of snapping sage.
“It won’t be much longer,” Lilia said. “One way or another.”
“What are you going to tell them, Lilia?”
“What I always have,” Lilia said. “That we are strongest when we work together. That there are some of us who understand that the best way to stop the Tai Mora is to strike back against them.”
“Retaliating against them is suicide. You intend to march your little followers down into that valley and start killing people? No one here knows how to kill people, not really.”
“Someone likely killed Mohrai,” Lilia said, “and there are Dhai militia here who fought the Tai Mora next to Ahkio. There are plenty of murderers among us. More importantly, there are those driven to fight back, as I am. Those are the ones that will help me. I’ve been planning a strike against the Tai Mora for a very long time.”
“Any retaliation just murders more of us.”
“So will doing nothing.”
“A better way to unite us would be asking your disciples to stop it with the white ribbons. And you could stop holding those religious meetings like you’re some kind of prophet.”
Lilia studied Yisaoh’s long face. Yisaoh gazed out over the funeral preparations as the attendants shooed frogs off the tables and swept piles of the dead and dying frogs away from the main speaking area. Sooty smudges darkened the area under her eyes. Her unwashed hair was twisted into a greasy tangle, held in place by old hair picks.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 108