Lightning in the Blood

by Marie Brennan

  Ree watched with interest as he began to sort the seeds into piles of four, laying them in tidy rows. “Can I ask questions?” she said. “Or will that distract you?” Then she snorted. “Two questions right there. Feel free to tell me to shut up.”

  Mevreš smiled up at her. “It won’t distract me, not right now. But please don’t interrupt when I begin chanting.”

  “Fair enough. Can you tell me what you’re doing?”

  His smile became a laugh. “For me to answer that completely would take two hundred and sixty days.”

  “That’s an oddly specific number.”

  “It’s the number of days in the ritual calendar. Initiating a daykeeper requires one full cycle, and a complete explanation would mean initiating you. But to give you a briefer answer: I’m going to be calling on the Day Lords, the spirits of the ritual calendar, to hear your question and respond. They will answer me as I count the days; which day they answer on will tell me something about the question you asked. It may take multiple arrangements of the seeds to address the whole question. Some things are answered clearly and quickly, while others require more effort.”

  He was watching her as he said all of this, the same way he’d watched her while he told stories on the trip down to Taraspai. Waiting for me to suddenly remember that I’m Korenat. She shoved the thought aside and said, “Go ahead.”

  Mevreš began to chant. She picked out the numbers immediately, cycling from one to thirteen and then repeating. The other words came through more sporadically. She heard some she recognized, like “deer” and “bird” and “dawn,” but others were unfamiliar. After a time, though, she realized they were repeating just like the numbers did. Thirteen numbers; twenty names; they cycled at different rates, with One Bird coming back around the next time as Eight Bird, and then as Two Bird. Two hundred and sixty days in the ritual calendar—the point at which both cycles would return to their start at the same time. Mevreš’s explanation made more sense now.

  He wasn’t just counting, though. Here and there he paused, always at the end of his layout of little piles, but sometimes also in the middle. Whenever he did so, he spoke, and the fact that he spoke mostly in trade tongue didn’t make his words much more comprehensible to her. “Vlaya,” he said at the end of his first pass. It was the Korenat word for “deer”; then he shifted languages. “He has mounted his obstacles. A strong man—but Vlaya’s strength can be for both good and ill.” He resumed his count, but only made it five piles into the second pass before he stopped again. “Çe. The good road, the straight road, the long road. Not an evil man, then, but a good one, a leader.”

  Ree clamped her hands in her lap to avoid fidgeting. The longer she sat there, the more her body began to tingle, as if there were lightning in her veins. It was a thing that happened to her sometimes, but never like this. It usually coincided with blood: a sacrificed bull, a cauldron full of crimson. Mevreš was just counting. But her own blood had sparked in reply the first time she saw him, and now it was as if her body was responding to those two conflicting rhythms, thirteen numbers, twenty names, until she would have given her teeth just to make them harmonize.

  Mevreš didn’t seem to notice. And between the distracting sensations and his unpredictable words, Ree got comprehensively lost. If this was a sham, he was a master of obfuscation, throwing out so many seeming non sequiturs that she went cross-eyed trying to see how they were connected. She just gave up and waited for him to be done.

  When he finally finished, he scooped the seeds and crystals back together and laid his hands over them. “Thanks be to the homeland earth,” he said in the Korenat tongue, then took up one last handful, kissed it, and tied the bundle back together.

  The sensation of lightning faded, much to Ree’s relief. “Okay,” she said. “What the hell did that mean?”

  “Each of the Day Lords has associations,” Mevreš said. “If they speak—”

  “I don’t care how it works. You could make up complete nonsense for an explanation and I wouldn’t know any better. What answer do you have for my question?”

  Mevreš put the bundle away, mouth set in a pensive line. After a moment, the red of his veins faded back into the warm brown of his skin. “He is grateful to you, this Kaistun. You saved him once, didn’t you? Saved his life, or something else of equal value—he owes you a great debt, and he knows it. But at the same time, he fears you.”

  “I have no intention of threatening him.”

  “No intention, perhaps—but you are an archon. Your very presence in Solaike might be a problem for him. He breathes a sigh of relief whenever you’re gone, and each time, a part of him hopes you will never come back. And he is ashamed of this impulse.” Mevreš paused, clearly wrestling with himself. Then he said, “What is his real name? No one calls him Kaistun, I’m sure of it.”

  “Enkettsivaane,” Ree said. “And you should probably get in the habit of saying that instead, because using the king’s personal name after he takes the staff is punishable by death.”

  Mevreš’s whole body jerked.

  “Sorry,” Ree said. She meant it: annoyance at Mevreš wasn’t reason enough to lure him into a capital crime. “But I needed to be sure you weren’t getting your information from some other source, and using this whole show as a cover.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes crinkling shut. “You’re a very suspicious woman, you know that?”

  “It’s in my nature.” Ree leaned back and stretched her legs out, angling her body so she wouldn’t kick Mevreš. Her fingers dug into the thick grass. “I’m not surprised I make him nervous. I make a lot of people nervous, here especially. They’ve been arguing about it since he took the staff, what they should do about archai. The stories say that the kings of Solaike used to be attended by their own ancestors—the archai who supposedly founded their lineages. Some people insist Enkettsivaane has to call up his own ancestral archon, to legitimize his lineage holding the staff.”

  “Unless his summoners are exceedingly skilled,” Mevreš said, “they would end up with dozens of stray archai wandering the kingdom before they got the right one.”

  “Not if they banished them all. And by ‘banish,’ of course I mean ‘kill.’” Mevreš looked sick, but Ree went on without giving him a chance to find his tongue. “Valtaja wasn’t from one of the old noble families. He had no ancestral archon, and he didn’t like the idea of anything destabilizing his control, so he had all the skilled summoners killed, along with the bound archon who served the previous king. Summoning an archon was made a capital crime. Some people think Enkettsivaane should have maintained that ban—and he might put it back. But it’s a little awkward for him to welcome me at court while saying that nobody like me should ever be called into Solaike again.”

  “Or like me.” Mevreš brooded, linking his fingers together. “So you think I should not reveal myself. Even if I could help.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Ree tipped her head back, looking at the sky through the scraggled branches of the tree. There were a dozen reasons why she couldn’t stay in Solaike, from her inability to sleep more than three nights in the same bed to the king’s justifiable fear that her presence would warp the world around her, remaking it in her own image. That was what happened when archai lived for long enough in one place. It was how the Lhian’s island had been created.

  But even if the king welcomed her, even if she moved to a new room every three days, she still couldn’t make this place her home. Because that was the one thing she could not have.

  So she came and went, leaving because she had to, and returning because Aadet was here. He was the first friend she’d made in this life, and this was his home. So she kept coming back—and the knife twisted a little deeper every time she did.

  Her own situation wasn’t the problem right now. Mevreš’s was. She said, “You can’t stay here, not in the long run. I know you weren’t planning to anyway, but we’ll need to make it clear to them that you’re not going to try
.”

  Mevreš sat up straighter. “So you think I should offer my help.”

  Ree smiled sourly. “I don’t know what your Day Lords say about our future, but I have a bad feeling we’ll need all the help we can get.”

  * * *

  They faced the king in full court, kneeling like petitioners in front of the latticed fence that divided the royal dais from the rest of the courtyard. Mevreš didn’t hesitate to show all the deference Solaine protocol demanded: an artifact of his people’s travels, maybe, which made deference necessary to survival. Ree wasn’t sure how long the Korenat had been wanderers—whether they’d begun their journey before or after the gods and higher powers exiled the archai to the apeiron and forbade any more to be made.

  Questions like that would have to wait. Mevreš was masked; Ree wasn’t, and her black clothing stood out like an ink blot among the brighter colors of the king’s court. The sun beat down on her without mercy, while Enkettsivaane and all his ministers enjoyed the shade. She knelt a pace ahead of Mevreš, almost at the fence itself, and bowed low. “Father of the Nation, you have shown me great kindness in permitting me to reside not only in your kingdom, not only in your capital city, but within the walls of your very palace.”

  Everyone in the courtyard could hear her perfectly well, but one of the king’s wives inclined her head, turned, and bent to repeat her words into the king’s ear. Ree had been at court sessions a few times, and she found the practice of carrying on the whole conversation through an intermediary to be incredibly tedious . . . but now that she was a petitioner on the other side of the lattice, she also had to admit it had an effect. You aren’t important enough for the king to hear you directly. On her, the effect was mostly annoying, because she’d known Enkettsivaane when he was covered in mud and didn’t have two coins to rub together. But for the people he needed to impress, she suspected it worked.

  I wonder if one of his predecessors was hard of hearing, and that’s how this whole process got started?

  Entertaining as the thought was, Ree knew she was trying to distract herself. Mevreš had said it, after his divination: the king was both grateful to and afraid of her. Today’s business might tip him toward the latter half of that balance. She could end this afternoon with the news that she was no longer welcome in Solaike at all.

  Ree waited when the king’s wife was done, but he had no reply for her. Not yet.

  So she went on. “The Sixfold Blessed One has demonstrated his great prudence in the matter of the usurper’s ban against my kind. To maintain it would be to deprive the Solaine people of their heritage, and of powers that might work to their benefit. But to welcome every passing archon would be . . . reckless.” She almost said “stupid.” Speaking at court always made her tongue clumsy; she wanted to speak plainly, but the fashion here was to embroider every sentence.

  Once this had been repeated for the king’s benefit, Ree gestured to Mevreš, kneeling a pace behind. “Strong Hand Upon the Staff, if I have been of use to you in the past”—which we both know I have—“then I ask you to consider my words today, when I recommend this man to your attention. He is an archon of the Korenat, a wise elder to their people. It was his intention to leave the Nevati caravan here and move onward to another group of Korenat who might benefit from his guidance. But hearing of the insolence of Sihpo Teglane and his so-called Red Leopard, he has offered to remain for a short while longer and give what assistance he can to the expedition led by your honored wife Aadet Temini.”

  None of this was a surprise to the king or his ministers, of course. Springing an archon on him in public, without warning, would have been sheer idiocy. Ree had talked to Aadet, who had talked to a senior wife, who had talked to a minister, who had talked to the king. It was a longer and more annoying chain of communication than the one she faced now. But it meant she didn’t have to wait now for the king to consider what his response would be, because he’d already decided.

  Springing his decision on her as a surprise: that was fair game.

  Ree held her breath.

  And then let it out again a moment later, because no matter what the king did today, it wouldn’t happen that fast. But she took it as an encouraging sign when he called for Mevreš to approach the fence—surely he wouldn’t bother with that if he was going to throw one or both archai out? Speaking through his intermediary, Enkettsivaane questioned Mevreš, finding out how long he’d been in the world (he answered honestly, or at least with the same answer he’d given Ree), how long he’d been with this particular Nevati caravan, and more.

  Then Mevreš said, “Father of the Nation. May I have your leave to answer a question you have not asked?”

  Murmurs answered him from around the courtyard. Mevreš’s words came perilously close to implying the king was a fool, failing to ask something obvious. But the king, after some consideration, said, “Speak.”

  Mevreš bowed. “Exalted of the Many, any given archon often lives and dies without having enough time to recall their true nature in full. I have been blessed with many years in this lifetime—enough years to know myself. You have not asked me to explain my nature, but with your permission, I will do so now. And I will unmask, so you may see me for what I am.”

  Ree found she was holding her breath again. Volunteering that information like this, in public . . . was he stupidly brave? Or just confident that nobody here would—or could—harm him?

  The king’s wives murmured amongst themselves. Ree could guess well enough what was coming. Guards pushed their way through the audience to ring the two of them where they knelt in the courtyard, took up new stations, and aimed their guns at the two archai. Great. If they decide to take him out, I’m going down with him.

  “Careful,” she muttered through her teeth.

  He didn’t acknowledge her, or the guards. He merely waited until the king’s intermediary said, “Continue.”

  Mevreš bowed in thanks and unmasked, displaying his glimmering red veins for the world to see. The smoke of his breath pluming the air, he said, “The truth of my nature may be seen in my skin. I might best be described as the bonds which hold the Korenat together as a people, although they have been scattered across the world, and now travel under a dozen different names. I am their kinship: the blood ties that bind them together.

  “Blood is the fundamental fact of the Korenat world. Our myths say the sun did not move in the sky, the earth did not bear fruit, until it was gifted with blood. That is the means by which we speak to the spirits and the gods, the coin in which our heavens trade. All other valuable things we sacrifice or trade in—gold, gems, the beautiful craftsmanship of our hands—are metaphors for this most precious coin, so that our word for ‘debt’ is a close cousin to our word for ‘blood.’ And so, when we speak of owing someone a debt, we speak of owing them blood.

  “I mean no harm to your people or your land, and I think it is unlikely that I will inflict it on them. My presence brings wholeness for the Korenat, a renewal of their kinship with each other and their more distant cousins.” Mevreš bowed again, this time placing his hands on his knees in a style unlike the bows of Solaike. “But your hospitality to this Nevati caravan would place us in your debt. On behalf of my people, I wish to pay that debt—even if it means risking my own life in the mountains against your foes. Thus do I offer you the blood we owe.”

  Silence fell. Ree’s fingers ached from digging into the unyielding flagstones of the courtyard. The lightning was back, in her veins, in her blood. Blood is the fundamental fact of the Korenat world.

  But if that were true, why could she not remember them?

  It gaped within her like an open wound, that lack. She screamed inside her own mind, a demand that her spirit regain some tiny fragment of itself, a memory or another syllable of her true name, anything that would confirm Mevreš’s claim that she was Korenat. Or prove him wrong—she would be happy either way. Anything would be preferable to this echoing silence in her head.

  Nothing came.
Ree missed what the others said next, the wife’s repetition of Mevreš’s words and the king’s reply. She only came back to her senses when the king stood: a sign that he was about to make a formal proclamation.

  For this, he spoke in his own voice, directly to his people and his petitioners. It was a voice Ree had heard hundreds of times before, whispering a warning through the trees or bellowing commands across a battlefield. It would never be called resonant, but it carried the self-assurance of a man who did not question—or let others question—the certainty that his words would be obeyed.

  “We have given much thought to the question of archai in our kingdom. This is our decision: that they neither be banned, nor given free rein. To summon an archon without royal approval is henceforth punishable by death . . . but those lineages who wish to study the art may petition for our approval. To bring a bound archon within our borders without declaring its presence to our guards and soldiers is likewise a crime, to be punished by exile or death as we see fit. To be a free archon within our borders without declaring one’s nature will bring exile or death.”

  His gaze fell to the two kneeling before him. “To those free archai we permit to enter the kingdom, license will be granted to remain for no longer than a period of one month. After departing, they may not return until a full year has passed. By these means do we grant to our people the benefits of their kind, and protect our land against the influence of those whose nature bends the world around them.”

  Ree’s breath came fast. One month. One year. It wasn’t much different from her usual behavior—just formalized. She had no doubt the king had calculated with that in mind. The debt he owed her was not forgotten, but she didn’t have free rein, either. No more coming in unannounced.

  She could live with it. But depending on whether he meant to count from today or the day she’d crossed the border, she didn’t have long to help Aadet . . . and neither did Mevreš.