Lightning in the Blood

by Marie Brennan

  “You’ll get a whole lot of necessary trouble if they find out the hard way.” But Ree wasn’t in any hurry to tell anybody. The ban against archai in Solaike had ended with Enkettsivaane’s ascension—and she’d ignored it plenty herself, in the two years before that ascension—but the new government of Solaike hadn’t decided yet how to deal with their kind. If Mevreš got caught, it would be on both of their heads; nobody would believe Ree hadn’t known about him. But if he was leaving soon, she’d just as soon avoid the problem.

  Ree studied him out of the corner of her eye, brushing the side of one boot with quick strokes. “Is that why you came to visit me? To make sure I’m keeping your secret?”

  She expected confession, or false bluster that he intended nothing of the sort, or a graceful segue to the favor he really wanted to ask. She didn’t expect him to deflate, as if somebody had promised him a song, and she refused to sing. “No. No, I trust you.”

  It was a substantial improvement over their first meeting, when he spiritually bound her not to hurt him. But the change had happened too fast. “You wanted me to speak for these Nevati to the king’s people. I’ve done that. If you think I can manage anything more here, you’re overestimating me by a long shot.”

  “It isn’t that. I just—after all the stories I told. You drank šokol; you spent time with the women and the children . . . I thought, surely by now you would have figured it out.”

  Ree scowled and put down her brush. His sad, disappointed posture made her feel like a student failing to grasp an obvious lesson. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Her voice was sharp as she said, “Let me guess. We knew each other in a past life.”

  “Quite possibly—though if we did, I haven’t remembered it yet either. But no, I mean something much larger than that.”

  He kept searching her eyes as if he could look through them to see the light dawn inside. It didn’t come; Ree had no idea what he was hinting at, and her attempts to figure it out weren’t producing anything other than a growing desire to hit him. “Let’s take it as given that I’m too thick to figure out what you mean, and get to the part where you tell me.”

  Mevreš said, “You’re from the Korenat.”

  It should have been one of those moments where an intangible bell rang and memories flooded into her mind. If she came from the Korenat—if her spirit had its origin in stories told by Zhutore’s ancestors, in the long-gone age when stories could come to life—surely Mevreš’s words would have resonated in the core of her soul, just like the first time she heard the word “archon” and realized what she was.

  But nothing came.

  She’d met Korenat in previous lives; his stories had called that much out of her memories. She remembered the taste of šokol, the sound of their language. But when she looked inside herself for a connection, she found nothing.

  Less than nothing. Which made Mevreš’s air of certainty all the more jarring. Ree picked up her brush again. “Sorry, but you’re wrong.”

  “No, I’m not. This—this is what I do.” He gestured with one hand at the opposite arm, at the veins that had glimmered red in the shade when he was unmasked. “I can tell. I suspected from the moment I saw you, just because of your appearance.”

  “I don’t look much like Zhutore.”

  “Her skin is lighter than yours, it’s true. The Nevati tend to be light skinned. They’ve traveled through too many lands, married out too many times over the centuries, for their appearance not to change. But there are Korenat in the world who look more like you. Some of them still wear sashes like yours.” He waved these details away with an impatient hand. “But those were only reasons to suspect. I know when someone is Korenat, if I unmask. And you are.”

  Her boots weren’t anything like clean, but Ree dropped the brush again and began tugging them back on anyway. “Then why don’t I remember anything?”

  Mevreš shook his head. “I don’t know. Triggering memories isn’t a reliable process; maybe it’s been too long since you met up with your own people—”

  “You aren’t my people.” The words came out hard as steel, Ree on her feet and inches away from Mevreš’s face. He held his ground, but not without flinching. “And if you decided I was Korenat the moment you laid eyes on me, why didn’t you say anything before now?”

  “Because it was clear that you didn’t remember. How would you have reacted if I tried to claim a connection in our first meeting, when you barely even knew my name?”

  In some ways it might have been better if he had. Ree would have laughed at him and assumed it was some feeble attempt at a trick. Instead she had this: days of friendliness, of stories shared in what she thought was good faith, and the entire time, Mevreš was fishing for something that wasn’t there.

  Even now, he believed it was true. He was waiting for the clouds to part, for Ree to fall silent and get a distant look in her eyes and then say, “Oh, powers, you’re right; I remember now.” But it was never going to happen. And the way he was looking at her—the wise elder patiently leading the child through the lesson—

  “Get out of Solaike,” she said. “You have until we go after the Red Leopard to move on, with or without the Nevati. If you’re still here when that happens, I will expose you.”

  Then she stalked off through the garden, ramming her heels into the dirt as if to pound it into stone. But no amount of force jarring up through her body could erase the hollow, empty feeling in her gut.

  * * *

  In the end, by some political alchemy Ree didn’t have the patience to identify, Aadet was chosen as the leader of the soldiers mustered against the Red Leopard. By naming one of his wives to the post, the king sent a message: although he was grateful to the various lineage heads for their support, he was asserting his own strength against those who would challenge it.

  It meant that Aadet got to handpick the soldiers who would go into the mountains. Many of them were familiar to Ree, at least by sight; they were veterans of the revolution, men and women who had survived in the wilds during the years when they fought to take back their country. They knew that terrain inside and out . . . which wasn’t the same thing as saying they knew every corner of it. “The truth is,” Aadet said to Ree, “there are too many places for Sihpo’s people to hide out there. More of them than even we know—and the real problem is, there are too many opportunities for them to move around. They might be in one of our old havens, but by the time we get there, they’ll have shifted to their next base of operations.”

  It was what the revolutionaries used to do, and why they had succeeded for so many years at keeping themselves out of Valtaja’s hands. There were at least a few among the new rebels who would remember that, and do their best to imitate it. “We’ve got one advantage over them, though,” Ree said. “They don’t know the land as well as you do. They won’t move as fast, or as secretly. Sooner or later, we’ll dig them out.”

  Aadet grimaced. “Oh, I’m sure. We just need it to be sooner, not later, because the longer they’re out there, the worse it gets for us. If we can’t dig them out quickly, we’ll have to hope we at least keep them busy enough that they don’t have much spare time to interfere with trade.”

  He pushed for them to leave as soon as possible, before the Red Leopard had more opportunities to strike. Even with Aadet’s efforts, though, the expedition was delayed enough that Ree had to move out of the room she’d been given in the palace compound, finding temporary quarters in the city outside. She made sure he knew where she’d gone, and when a palace messenger boy found her there, she assumed Aadet had sent him to say it was time.

  Instead he saluted and said, “There’s a man who wants to meet with you, honored one. From those strangers—the Korenat. He said his name was Mevreš.”

  Ree had no idea what her expression looked like, but the boy immediately began to apologize. Ree waved that off. “Not your fault. Tell him . . .” Mevreš might just want to say goodbye. And after that, all the little baby leopards will sprout wi
ngs and begin to fly.

  Well, if he started preaching her supposed Korenat past again, she could always walk away. After kicking him in the shins. If he had some other reason for arranging this meeting, she could give him at least a few minutes of her time. “Tell him I’ll meet him outside the palace wall, on the southwest side. At noon.” The boy saluted again, then scurried away.

  Mevreš was already waiting when she arrived, well away from the dust and clamor of the gate market. She suspected he’d arrived early, just to be sure of not missing her. “I hope nothing is wrong,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Wrong?”

  He nodded toward the wall, and the palace compound beyond. “You aren’t lodging here anymore.”

  “I don’t like spending too long in the palace,” Ree said. Which was true, but incomplete. She wasn’t eager to advertise her weaknesses, though, and the fact that she couldn’t spend more than three nights in the same bed was one of them.

  She’d tried various ways of cheating it, just as an experiment—different beds in the same room, different corners of the room, different rooms in the same building—but fundamentally, it wasn’t some game whose rules she could bend. It was just her nature as an archon, and so long as she knew she was looking for a loophole, there weren’t any. She could have shifted to another room in the palace; Aadet would have made certain she got one. But it still would have made her chafe, and really, she didn’t mind using the issue as an excuse to get clear of the palace. Aadet wasn’t the only one who preferred being a revolutionary in the mountains to a politician in the city.

  Mevreš let it pass, in favor of getting straight to the point. “You told me to leave. I would like to show you something first, and see what you think; it may be of use to your friends here. If, after seeing it, you tell me to reveal my true nature and offer my aid, I will do so. If you tell me to remain hidden, I will leave Solaike, as you asked.”

  It hadn’t so much been a request as an order—but he had her curiosity up, and Ree knew he knew it. She crossed her arms and leaned against the palace wall. Its stones were already warm in the morning sun, cooking through her shirt into the muscles of her upper back. “Your aid. Against the Red Leopard?” He nodded. “Why?”

  “Because it would help the Nevati.”

  Too pat. But challenging him on it would mean going back to their previous conversation, the one where he insisted she came from the Korenat. Ree preferred to let it pass. “So what help can you offer? Just because you’re . . . what you are doesn’t make you useful for everything. Who was that archon you told me about on the road—Mianglaia? Her story was that she was always in peril, always having to be rescued. Some help she would be in this.”

  Mevreš grinned. “She might be a great deal of help if the Red Leopard kidnapped her. Her rescuers never have any trouble finding their way to the dastardly villains who did the deed.”

  “Or she might be threatened by an actual leopard, which wouldn’t do us any good at all. And whatever your story is, I know you’re not a maiden waiting for rescue. What good do you think you can do us, out there? You couldn’t even find your own way out of the mountains.”

  The bluntness got to him; she could see his shoulders twitch, the little flinch of vulnerability. “I may not be able to find the rebels,” Mevreš said. “But I might be able to find answers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t remember much about the Korenat—” Before Ree could say anything, he put up one conciliatory hand. “This is not about you. I only mean that you may not recall one of the means by which they make their living.”

  “And that is?”

  “Divination,” Mevreš said. “To the common people it’s mere fortune-telling—and I will admit to you, if not publicly, that in many cases it’s a sham. There is more money, and more safety, to be had in telling people what they want to hear. But the art itself is real enough. The Korenat use it among themselves for the good of their people; each caravan is expected to have its own diviners, husband and wife. I came to this group because they had lost theirs, and needed someone to train replacements.”

  The Korenat did a lot of things in husband-and-wife couples. One of the stories Mevreš had told her on the road was about the creation of human beings; the Korenat said they had been made in pairs, male and female. “If you can do this kind of thing, why didn’t you use it to get out of the mountains on your own?”

  He smiled ruefully. “Our lives would be a good deal easier if it worked in that straightforward a fashion. No, I’m afraid it can’t be used to draw a map to our destination—though had we not encountered you, I would have done my best to guide us, by any means available to me.”

  Ree hooked the toe of one boot over the other foot. “So this can’t find the rebels, either.”

  “Not directly, no. But I do think it could be of use.”

  “How?”

  “Ask me a question,” Mevreš said. “We will sit down somewhere, out of view, and I will count the days for you, and tell you what I hear.”

  What did I give up to the Lhian? The question tried so hard to leap out of her mouth, Ree had to clench her jaw to keep it inside. There was no way in any hell she would ask Mevreš that. Not even if he could answer it for her. Maybe especially if he could.

  It would have to be something where she had a reasonable chance of judging his accuracy, without being a subject he might have learned about by other means. After all, he’d already admitted that sometimes this was a sham.

  “All right,” she said, and shoved herself off the wall. “Follow me.”

  * * *

  They went out of the city, to the spindly shade of a tree near the southern road. For comfort it was less than ideal, but anywhere in Taraspai carried too high a risk of them being interrupted . . . or overheard. And the question Ree had decided to ask wasn’t one she wanted anybody hearing, not even Aadet.

  The grass hadn’t yet burned brown in the summer’s heat, but it was well on its way. Ree sat cross-legged in a thick patch of it; Mevreš sat facing her, but with the soles of his feet together and his back very straight.

  I’ve done this before, she thought, seeing his posture. Not with him, but other Korenat in other lifetimes. A woman—she could see the face, though she couldn’t remember the name. Older. What did I ask her? The memory was frustratingly incomplete. She knew Mevreš was sitting that way because he shouldn’t cross any part of his body while performing the ritual, but she couldn’t remember who had taught her that.

  He reached inside his shirt and drew out a bundle shaped like the leaf-wrapped dumplings the Korenat ate at every meal. This one was made of fabric, though, and bound with a leather thong. Holding it between his hands, he spoke for a time in a low, rapid voice—Korenat words.

  Ree kept her expression blank. Five days among the Nevati; five days unmasked. It was enough for her to make good progress with their language. On a first hearing, a strange tongue was as unfamiliar to her as to anybody else, but the process of learning was a thousandfold faster. If she heard words translated, or spoken in a context where she could guess at their meaning, she never forgot them. It didn’t take much before she started picking up grammar, and from there it was a cascade. Not memory—though no doubt she’d learned plenty of these languages in past lives, or older forms of them. It was just a gift, her nature as an archon.

  She understood part of what Mevreš was saying, and picked up more as he went along. He was praying, invoking Korenat spirits and features in the landscape. Not the landscape of Solaike; she didn’t know what place he was describing. But she did catch him posing the question she’d given him: “What are Kaistun’s feelings toward this woman?”

  She wondered whether Mevreš thought the question was a romantic one. When people went to diviners, that was often what they worried about: Does he love me? Should I marry him? Romance was the furthest thing from her mind. Survival . . . that was a good deal closer.

  When his prayers were done, Me
vreš untied the cord and unfolded the fabric to reveal a pile of seeds, with a small number of crystals mixed in. Good manners—and a little bit of caution—kept Ree from picking up one of the seeds, but she studied them curiously. “What are those? I’ve never seen anything like them before. Not that I’m an expert on seeds, of course.”

  “Çayem,” Mevreš said. “It’s a tree that grows in Krvos, the ancestral homeland. They’re the traditional material for these bundles, but—well. Most Korenat daykeepers have to make do with something else.”

  Then I bet that’s one of your icons. Archai came out of the apeiron with nothing, but over the course of a given lifetime they collected a scattering of objects that identified them from one existence to the next—assuming they survived long enough to collect anything. Ree had gotten hers fast, on the island of the Lhian, where the long residence of a free archon bent the ordinary rules of the world to suit its mistress’ nature. She still didn’t know what they meant: the red sash at her waist, the sabre at her hip, and the cool ember she wore beneath her shirt.

  Thinking of icons made her frown. “You aren’t going to unmask?”

  “What I’m doing here isn’t an archon gift. Humans learn to count the days, too.”

  “Will it go better if you do?”

  He paused, which told her the answer even before he replied. “It might.”

  “Then unmask. I’ll let you know if anybody’s approaching close enough to tell.”

  Mevreš didn’t hesitate, which also told her something. He trusts me to watch his back..

  He laid out the fabric, which was embroidered with intricate, colorful patterns that closely echoed the strip of fabric draping his shoulders. With his right hand he mixed the seeds and crystals, repeating phrases from his opening prayer. Then he plucked out the crystals, laying them out one by one in an arrangement that meant nothing to Ree, invoking each with a brief call. Once these were separated out, he mixed the seeds once more, blew into his hand, and grabbed a handful from the pile, pushing the rest to the side.