Lightning in the Blood

by Marie Brennan

  This wasn’t the time to ask. Along with Mevreš, Ree bowed low, while all around them the court shouted the ritualized phrases, to mark that they heard and heeded their sovereign’s words.

  * * *

  “Of course you still have a month,” Aadet said. “If he didn’t want to give you that time, he would have waited to make his decree until your time was nearly up.”

  “Well, shit,” Ree said with a grin. “I guess I can’t use that as my excuse to skip out on the hard work, then.”

  There was no point calculating the balance of debt between the two of them. It had long since passed any possibility of repayment; they helped each other how and when they could. And this felt right, striding out of Taraspai side by side, the mountains rising up ahead like a green wall. They’d been happy there, both of them, and they were happy to return—even with the trouble waiting for them, in the form of the Red Leopard.

  Decree or no decree, the soldiers were uncertain what to do with the archon in their midst. Not Ree; Aadet had picked veterans, people who remembered her from the days of the revolution. With her, they fell back into the familiar habits of the past. But they didn’t know Mevreš, apart from rumors about the Korenat and what they’d heard about his speech in court.

  Ree hadn’t said anything to him yet about that speech. She was still trying to figure out what it meant for her. Until that question got answered, she was happy to keep herself busy with Solaike’s problems.

  Mevreš took the soldiers’ suspicions in stride, and neither forced his company on them, nor held himself so far aloof that he would seem even more alien than he already did. He told stories—first to Ree and Aadet, then to groups when they stopped for the night—and as the days went by this got him a measure of goodwill from the soldiers. They’d all been fugitives in the mountains, where the only forms of entertainment available to them were the ones that needed nothing more than a body and a voice.

  Seimer, Ree thought. She was sure of it now. If he embodied the blood ties that bound the Korenat together, then he had to be ruled by his seimer aspect; there was nothing of destruction in that, not even the good kind. But he had a gemer aspect, too—every archon did. What was his? Their exile and scattering across the world? Or maybe the Korenat fought each other sometimes, internecine feuds made worse by their common kinship. She didn’t know enough about them to guess.

  The journey began easily enough, along the main trade road, with no attempt to travel in secret. In fact, Aadet had deliberately let word of his plans slip, knowing it would be picked up by the rebels’ eyes and ears in the city. Keeping the entire thing under wraps would have been impossible, and one of the most trusted ministers had agents watching the most likely spies; they’d tracked a handful of people leaving Taraspai who might be going to warn the rebels. The warning hardly mattered—Sihpo Teglane’s force couldn’t get much harder to find than they were already—but the path the informants took once they neared the mountains might give Aadet some notion of where to start his search.

  Two days’ journey from the city, their force split up and began traveling cross-country in smaller groups, to hide their precise location and movements from any rebel watchers. They regrouped in the foothills, and there Aadet laid out the pattern of their search.

  He didn’t use a map. When the revolutionaries were the ones hiding in the mountains, maps had been a liability; all it took was a single one falling into enemy hands, and half their refuges would be compromised. Instead he described routes and search areas in terms of landmarks, their usual way of navigating. Their total force he split into four parts, to cover more ground, and arranged for scouts to run the circuit between each group so they could stay informed of each others’ movements.

  It was a good plan—and it got them absolutely nowhere.

  They tramped up and down any number of valleys, looking for the Red Leopard. It was almost like the old days, moving in stealth beneath the high branches, signaling by hand when the enemy might be close. Ree’s body and mind fell easily into the rhythm of it. But instead of retreating to cover, they were hunting through it, looking in every concealed rock shelter, every ravine that seemed completely choked with vegetation, but if you got under the canopy of it you found there was enough room to move.

  Oh, they found the signs they were looking for. Cold firepits, trampled greenery, the butchered bones of forest antelope and other game animals. But all of it was days old, nothing recent, nothing they could use as a lead. And some of the encampments had been made in places they shouldn’t have known about, little dells and caverns that had stayed unknown to Valtaja’s men when it was Kaistun’s followers hiding out here.

  The third time that happened, Aadet kicked a charred branch-end into the wall of the rock shelter. “Damn it. How long have they been out here? You can stumble onto a place like this, but again and again? They haven’t had enough time to find so many.”

  “Maybe it isn’t time they’ve got,” Ree said. “Maybe they have something else.”

  He stared at her. “No. None of our people would—”

  “Are you sure? Do you know where every former revolutionary is? Can you swear none of them would take a fat bribe, or the promise of founding their own lineage when Sihpo comes to power?”

  It echoed what he’d said back in Taraspai, about somebody there funding the rebels. But neither of them had extended their suspicions this far, all the way to the men and women who had stayed by Kaistun’s side during the long years of their forest war.

  We should have thought of it before now.

  Aadet stared blindly at the stone wall. “I hate this,” he breathed, shoulders rising with tension. “The politics of it. I thought—after I went to the Lhian—”

  He’d traded blood for the inspiration necessary to make his people believe a revolution could succeed. At the time, that had seemed like the biggest obstacle in the world to him. Nothing else would have mattered if he couldn’t clear that hurdle . . . but now he was on the far side of it, and the path there was even more treacherous than the one before.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Ree said. The rest of the soldiers had already left the shelter; there was no one to see her transgressing royal law. She reached out and gripped Aadet’s shoulder, digging in hard enough to bring him back to himself. They can flog me for touching the king’s wife later. “If there’s a traitor—and we don’t know for sure that there is—it doesn’t make the Red Leopard invincible. It just makes this a little more annoying, is all.”

  She felt the tremor as he let out his breath. “Annoying. Is that what you call it.”

  “I could use other words, but they’d be less polite.”

  The tremor became a ghost of a laugh. Then Aadet inhaled deeply, and she let go of his shoulder. “All right,” he said. “First, let’s find out if we’re just imagining things.”

  Mevreš was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree outside, but he shot to his feet when Aadet came sweeping out of the cave. “Yes, honored royal wife?”

  “That thing of yours.” Aadet gestured, a sharp flail of his hand that betrayed the frustration and impatience not far beneath the surface. “Get it out. Tell me if we have a traitor on our hands, and that’s why we can’t find these bastards.”

  “It’ll take a little while,” Mevreš said. “And I’ll need a flat surface.” The area around him was mazed with ferns and underbrush, thriving where the fallen tree had allowed sunlight through to the ground.

  They ended up using the tree itself, planing down its trunk with machetes until it approximated a table just large enough for Mevreš’s cloth. Every soldier in their squadron would have crowded around to watch the archon do his work, if Ree hadn’t driven them off with sharp words and sharper elbows. “Get your asses out of here. Keep an eye on our surroundings—you want those bastards ambushing us while he’s staring at his seeds?” They listened, mostly, and left the three of them in relative peace.

  A single arrangement was enough to give Mevreš his an
swer. “Zhuyin,” he said, and the fact that his handful of seeds came out in even piles of four meant the answer was certain. Someone from the revolutionaries had gone over to Sihpo Teglane’s side, teaching the rebels how to hide in the mountains, using the same tricks that had kept Enkettsivaane’s followers safe for so long.

  Aadet didn’t bother to hide his fury. He stormed off before Mevreš was even done binding up his divination bundle. Ree followed; judging by the looks on the faces of his soldiers, she was the only one who dared do it anymore. They knew him from the old days, but he was the king’s wife now. No longer a simple soldier.

  Some old habits died hard; others didn’t die at all. Aadet kept going until he found a sheltered spot, overhung by vines, just large enough for him to sit cross-legged and Ree to crouch nearby. The uneven footing strained her ankles, but she waited without complaint until Aadet was done swearing, in a low, vicious tone that didn’t carry past the vines.

  When his most recent pause grew long enough to sound more like a halt, she said, “What now?” Then she shook her head. “Stupid question. We keep going, of course.”

  “What else can we do?” Aadet said, jaw setting in an uncompromising line. “The king is hunting for traitors at home; if the gods are generous, he’ll find them, and then the Red Leopard will at least lose their support. But we’ll still have to dig them out of the mountains.”

  “You could try to set bait. Fill a caravan with soldiers, send it along the main road, and see if they bite.”

  “That would get us some of them, but not all. Not enough.” He braced his elbows on his knees and brooded. “We need Sihpo Teglane. Him and all of his lieutenants. And if he’s smart, he won’t commit himself personally to an attack. Assuming we can even send a bait caravan without him knowing it’s a trap, which is probably optimistic.”

  Ree shifted position, trying to find a more comfortable way to crouch. “Then layer the traps three deep. Send a bait caravan, make him think that’s you trying to distract him from something else important—a shipment of coin or weapons or whatever—fill those wagons with explosives or something—”

  Aadet buried his hands in his hair. “You never give up, do you?” Then he snorted. “Of course not. It’s in your nature.”

  He was half right. Ree didn’t know her own story, not the way Mevreš knew his, but the instinct to pit herself against everything in her path was carved into her bones. It was the same impulse that had sent her over that deer track in the mountains, just to see if she could make it.

  But that was only half of her nature.

  “For now,” she said. “Speaking of which.”

  His head came up sharply. He’d forgotten again—because he had the luxury of forgetting. “Ree,” Aadet said, “you don’t have to go.”

  “Yes, I do. You don’t want me around here during the new moon. And to be honest—” The downside to being shielded from view was, it made it harder to tell if anybody was eavesdropping. Ree went on, more quietly. “I’d rather not show Mevreš this side of me just yet.”

  “You don’t trust him?”

  She snorted. “You know me. The list of people I do trust is pretty damn short.”

  “Yes, I know you,” Aadet said, his voice steady. “And I know when you’re brushing me off.”

  Ree shifted again. Her ankles were beginning to seriously ache. Aadet could have picked a better place to hole up and brood. “Look, he’s an archon. That right there is enough to make me twitchy. But he—” The words stuck in her throat. Finally she said, “He thinks he knows something about what I am, but I’m not so sure. It ought to ring true, and it doesn’t. Until I sort that out, I don’t want to give him any more ammunition.”

  Aadet knew when not to argue. His hand on her shoulder was a comforting weight—a reminder that however much had changed between them, this hadn’t. Even if they could only touch when no one else was around to see.

  And better he do it now than tomorrow.

  “Then do what you have to,” Aadet said. “We’ll see you in three days.”

  * * *

  It always woke her up.

  Ree couldn’t see the moon from her perch in the crook of a tree, but she didn’t have to. She knew the moment it broke the horizon, a crescent too thin and pale to see in the grey light of dawn. Like a magnet to iron, the new moon called to her soul—and the gemer half answered.

  Weight settled on her like lead. Dawn’s light didn’t bring the bright possibility of a new day; it was thin and damp with the forest’s oppressive humidity, and what the fuck did she think she was going to accomplish out here, anyway?

  Nothing. She’d known that before she left Aadet’s squadron, even though she was in her seimer aspect then.

  Seimer and gemer, the two faces that made up her coin. Every archon’s coin, no matter where they hailed from or how long they’d been in the world. Creation on one side; destruction on the other. However those impulses manifested in any given case.

  For Ree, it was about hope. Most days she was ruled by her seimer half, and believed that whatever trials she faced, she would find a way to overcome them. To survive whatever the world threw at her. To win through. But for the three days of the new moon, her gemer aspect took control . . . and then she saw things very differently.

  It was always tempting, outside the new moon, to see this as an aberration. A temporary depression, a fleeting bit of pessimism she would shake off in due course. But Ree knew better. Her gemer half was as true as its counterpart, its fatalistic predictions as plausible as their hopeful cousins. She could tell herself as much as she liked that finding the rebels was just a matter of searching hard enough, but the truth was that Aadet’s revolutionaries had hidden in these mountains for a generation, and the soldiers had never dug them out. If the rebels had a turncoat advising them, then it might be a generation more before they could be captured and destroyed. Assuming Sihpo Teglane didn’t cripple trade into Solaike thoroughly enough to topple the king and start the civil war all over again.

  Her seimer half might not want to think about that possibility, but hiding from it didn’t change a thing.

  She leaned her head back against the trunk of the tree and sighed. This was the darkness the Lhian had lifted from her, years ago—but that deal hadn’t taken it away, not entirely. Whatever the other archon had claimed as her price, it put Ree into her seimer aspect; at the time, Ree had expected that change to last. The first new moon after leaving the island had broken her of that notion. No archon expressed only one half of their nature: even someone like Mevreš, who seemed to be as seimer as they got, had his destructive side.

  Unless he’s playing us all, building up our trust so he can betray us later.

  No. Even right now, when she saw the dark alternatives so much more clearly, she didn’t believe that.

  But she had hoped—foolishly—that the new moon might bring her some much-needed clarity. Aadet’s deal with the Lhian had been blood for inspiration: his blood, her inspiration. Ree’s deal had gone the other way. She took blood, and in return, the Lhian took . . . something. Ree had never been able to figure out what, even though its effects were unmistakable. Then along came Mevreš, telling her she was Korenat. Words that rang hollow and false.

  She’d started to wonder if that was what the Lhian took from her—the part of her story that connected her to Zhutore’s long-dead ancestors. After all, blood was the fundamental fact of the Korenat world, and Ree had paid for blood.

  But the logic of it didn’t quite work. If the Lhian had taken that connection, how could Mevreš recognize her as Korenat? And it didn’t explain the new moon, these three days where the weight of it all came crashing back—but Ree had half-wondered if she would remember, once the moon rose. If the Lhian’s deal only held force twenty-five days out of the month, then maybe on the other three, Ree would know herself for what she was.

  So much for that hope. She looked inside, and found nothing.

  It could still be true, both part
s of it. She might be Korenat, and that connection, or at least the awareness of it, might be what the Lhian had taken from her. But it didn’t matter either way. She was still out here in the forest, by herself, and the odds of her accomplishing a damned thing were vanishingly small.

  All the same, it was better than the alternative. She’d left as much to get away from Aadet’s people as from Mevreš. For these three days, she was a danger to everyone around her, because a single touch was enough to infect them with the fatalism of her gemer aspect. Not to mention that people rarely wanted to hear what she had to say, her honest evaluation of their situation and their chances. There were a few instances where her contagious darkness was of use to the revolutionaries—one battle in particular, when she managed to get at the enemy commander the night before and poison his hopes of success until he made a series of idiotic mistakes the following day—but on the whole, she was better off alone.

  Yet another reason she could never stay in Solaike, regardless of the law.

  Even in her gemer aspect, though, Ree wasn’t much inclined to cool her heels in a tree until the moon changed. She swung down, her muscles protesting the long hours of carefully balanced stillness. She might as well move.

  Part of her sometimes thought she should spend her whole life like this, traveling the wilderness, where it didn’t much matter whether she was seimer or gemer. She always felt right when she was in motion; she could lose herself in the trance of it, her legs working tirelessly while the small part of her mind that remained alert considered which path to take. And for someone who couldn’t spend more than three nights in the same bed, it made sense. Sure, there was always the risk that she might be eaten by a leopard or other local predator—but the human world had its own dangers, equally lethal, and often less honest.

  But she knew it would never work. Wandering was only part of her nature; she also needed words. Conversation, stories, interaction. She would go mad if she had nobody to talk to, as mad as she would if somebody chained her to one spot.