by Kate Elliott
“We were just going.” Esladas caught Kiya’s eye and glanced toward the gate, now cleared, as the crush had swept into the tavern.
Their good-byes felt even clumsier than the greetings. He was relieved to push back out into the lanes of the Lantern Market where people might sight-see without others gawking or acting so strangely. But Kiya did not loiter and examine the remarkable array of merchandise as she had before their encounters in the tavern. She strode along the crowded streets as if determined to get out of the Lantern District as quickly as possible.
Evidently the early performances of plays had just let out, for knots of men bellowed songs as they clustered around pushcarts selling fresh oysters and baked shrimp. Two men wearing the dusty tabards and worn trousers of low-ranking soldiers sauntered toward them. They made such an offensive show of ogling Kiya that Esladas stepped directly between them and her. That just made them laugh.
“Don’t bother, my friend,” said the bigger of the two. “The girl’s a pretty bit of flesh, that’s true enough, but their whores wear white belts. She’s not for sale, so no point in you begging for her favor.”
“I did not think she was for sale,” said Esladas, wanting nothing more than to punch the leers right off their ugly faces. “I was just talking to her.”
They chortled. “That’s what they all say. You’ve had too much sun, newcomer. Come have a drink with us. We’ll show you where the actual whores parade their belts for those willing to touch their Commoner kind.”
“I don’t like that word,” said Esladas softly.
“What word?” The air itself seemed to snap around the other man’s voice.
“Or your tone,” he added, feeling a swell of such unexpected belligerence that he knew his temper, like an incoming gale wind, was about to overset his best intentions to stay cool-headed and in control. Not only did their gross behavior make him look bad in front of Kiya, but he now realized why she had wanted to leave the tavern; how had he been so naïve as to take her there? What must his friends think of her?
“You looking for a fight? Over an Efean girl?” They shouldered forward, secure in two against one.
He did not back down. How could he? He would take any number of bruises rather than disgrace her.
Kiya stepped up beside him. She looked them right in the eyes, not one bit intimidated, and said something in Efean that sounded blunt and crude.
His anger dissolved in a rush of exhilaration: he had never seen a woman so bold. Her elbow touched his; their gazes met in a swift glance, and she nodded decisively to let him know she was ready to fight at his side.
“Mud lover,” spit the bigger soldier.
Esladas’s heart was pounding with the rush that always took him right before a fight. He raised both hands, fingers beckoning. “We’re waiting.”
Nearby Efeans began backing away as Saroese onlookers jeered. Someone whistled, and a distant voice shouted in Saroese, “Call for the wardens!”
Kiya did not budge.
“We see how it is,” sneered the smaller soldier. “Let a woman fight for you. That’s how we beat the Efeans in the first place. You mud grubbers disgust me.”
The big one darted in with a swing, and Esladas dodged back. The man was lumbering, easy to sidestep. But even as he did, the man chopped at him again, and Esladas barely jumped out of the way and slammed up against a cart. Hot water splashed out of a wide-necked jar and slopped onto the ground with a hiss.
Kiya kicked the big soldier in the back of one knee so hard his leg gave way, then shoved his shoulder in the opposite direction while he buckled. He collapsed on the ground with a shout of surprise.
Cursing, the second man dashed forward and grabbed Kiya like he meant to rip her arm off. He punched her in the face, though she ducked out of it fast enough that the fist only clipped her. The sight of her reeling back jolted Esladas into a state where the whole world seemed to slow down while his mind raced at triple speed.
The second man cocked an arm back to swing another punch at Kiya.
Esladas stepped inside and slammed his elbow into the man’s gut, doubling him over. The big man was starting to crawl up, yelling names, calling over comrades to come help. Out of the corner of his eye, Esladas saw five or six burly soldiers pushing through the crowd. The spears of wardens bobbed above the heads of onlookers as they tried to clear a way through to the altercation.
He kicked the big man in the side to keep him down for another few breaths, then grabbed Kiya’s hand. They pelted through the market, wardens shouting after them, and darted down an alley. Kiya asked breathless directions from each startled Efean they passed, and soon they cleared the decorated gate of the Lantern District and cut down several side streets until all that was left was empty streets baking under the afternoon sun.
Eventually they staggered to a halt on a deserted lane and sank down, laughing uncontrollably, on the rim of a neighborhood fountain. He was still holding her hand, which he noticed with a fierce flush of embarrassment, her fingers intertwined with his as if they had always been that way. It was impossible to let go, with her leaning against him and her elation a blaze that consumed him.
She drifted closer, and closer still, and he froze in a kind of shocked incomprehension as she pressed a light kiss on his lips and afterward sat back with an expression of satisfaction.
He had left home the day he’d turned twenty, the age at which he could travel without legally needing his father’s permission, as was the law in Old Saro. She was certainly younger than he was, if not by much. But by the easy pressure of the kiss, and the lack of any shame or furtiveness in her posture or expression, she had an entirely different view of what a kiss meant. Maybe to her it was a gesture of uncomplicated flirtatiousness, or an expression of camaraderie. Maybe it was a way of saying she found him interesting. Maybe it was a thank-you for a day she had enjoyed as much as he had.
He desperately wished she would kiss him again, or that he had the nerve to lean forward and kiss her as if it were nothing to him, as if he kissed girls all the time when in truth it had been only two women before this day and had never gone one proscribed step beyond the touch of lips.
She lifted an eyebrow, waiting for him to speak or react somehow, then winced slightly.
Her eye was starting to swell.
“Kiya, you’re hurt.”
He untangled his hand from hers and lightly traced the edge of the swelling. The eye wasn’t affected, but there would be a bruise. However attractive he found her, the kiss was the least of it. The injury reminded him all over again of how she had stepped up beside him without hesitation, a partner willing to face down the world, whatever struggles and wounds it brought.
She wasn’t afraid.
“Kiya,” he said, more softly, and after all he leaned close, and closer still. Fleetingly it occurred to him that he might be clumsy, that he might go about it wrong, but surely it was no different from words, from drill: things you improved on with practice.
He shut his eyes as he brushed his mouth against hers: her lips soft, her fingers strong as she caught his wrist and held him as if to make sure he did not draw back. Slipping an arm around her back he pulled her into him, not really sure what came next but knowing whatever it was would be worth the whole of his life so far in waiting for it.
“Good Goat!” cried a woman’s voice, speaking Saroese. “Get that business off our street!”
He released Kiya and jumped to his feet. A pair of Saroese matrons in respectable clothing and with several small children in tow had come around a corner. Kiya rose and took a step up beside him.
The littlest child broke away and tottered toward them, so unsteady on its feet that Kiya leaped forward and swept the toddler up before it could pitch forward onto its face. Her gesture brought a chortling laugh from the child as she set it down beside its mother.
“Greetings of the afternoon, Doma,” she said in her warmest tone, her pronunciation of the Saroese really quite excellent.
“Co
me along,” said the elder matron repressively, sweeping her companion and the children ahead of her. Over her shoulder she loosed her parting shot. “You’ll grow out of it and find a proper woman to court, young man. The sooner the better.”
The woman’s rudeness stunned him in a way the soldiers’ crudeness had not. She might as well have slapped him.
“Esladas?”
Kiya’s voice interrupted him as he stared after their retreating figures. “You go?” she said sadly, and gestured in the direction the matrons were walking, as if to say she understood that it was time for her to leave him with his own people.
He grabbed her hand. “We go, Kiya. You and I walk together.”
Just because he could, to show her he meant it, he kissed her again.
* * *
Dusk fell swiftly over them as they walked back to the Warrens, but they took their time, in no hurry to break the glamour that wrapped them away from the rest of the world. They did not touch as they walked but they did not need to. She was so alive to his presence that she felt his breathing as her own. His heart seemed to pulse in her flesh. Each sidelong glance he threw her, each spark that lit the air when their gazes met: an intangible connection vibrated in the air between them, as undeniable and as fierce as the sun.
It wasn’t just the intensity of the feelings, surprising in how hard they had hit. It was the certainty she felt, as if her five souls had been waiting for his appearance, as if a part of her had known he was out there, traveling toward her.
We meet.
So she thought nothing of guiding him into the twisting alleyways of the Warrens where he was the only Saroese among Efeans in those narrow lanes. If strange and often hostile glances were cast their way, what difference did they make to her? Nothing could touch her, not as long as he walked beside her.
Nothing until they reached the butterfly fountain to discover Uncle Wenru standing in the open gate with a company of men holding staffs and lanterns. They looked ready to go out as a night hunting party into the marshes.
“Kiya! Thank the gods you’re safe.” He strode forward, then stopped dead as he took in her companion and, an instant later, her hair. With an expression of barely restrained rage he plucked the flower from behind her ear.
“What is this?” he demanded.
“He doesn’t know about our custom. It was just meant as a friendly gift.”
Wenru’s scowl was as bad as her mother’s. “And you wear it anyway?”
The light fell more fully on her face, and he recoiled, seeing the swelling.
“Has he hit you?” he roared.
“Of course he didn’t hit me! Two Saroese soldiers jumped us—” By the lightning-quick shift of Wenru’s expression from sympathy to scalding contempt, she knew she had given away too much.
“Us? Us! Are you saying you have been gone all day today because you have been walking about the city with this man? After you promised not to talk to Saroese men?”
Fury whipped and sawed through her, such a rare emotion that she had no idea how to tame it. “I never promised! I just said I heard you. I came to Saryenia to get away from Mother ordering me around all the time. Do this, Kiya! Do that, Kiya! No, no, your suggestion isn’t any good, Kiya; we’ll do it like we have always done! But I guess I didn’t escape her after all, did I? You were never like this at home, Uncle!”
“Kiya!” He spoke her name with harsh correction, not with the delighted surprise she heard in Esladas’s tone. “Go into the compound.”
Her mouth pinched, but before she could refuse, he barked, “Now!”
Almost she defied him. Almost she snatched the flower from his uncaring hand. She would have shouted into his scowl and not cared if he yelled back at her—loud words did not scare her—but Esladas caught her eye and gave a shake of his head. It stunned her how easy it was to comprehend him, as if the gestures of this man she’d barely known for a week were a language she had learned before she was born and carried into the world to be held in readiness.
She exhaled her fury in a gust, then obeyed, stomping to the open gate of the compound. To her horror, Dame Marayam and a number of the household had gathered there, and in fact the intersection—empty when she and Esladas had strolled up to the butterfly fountain—was now filling up with interested spectators holding lamps the better to illuminate the exciting altercation.
“Come, Kiya,” said Dame Marayam in a tone no person would wisely refuse.
Kiya trudged inside and sat on a bench with a glowering heart. The dame waved for everyone to go away, and they vanished about their tasks as if they hadn’t all been staring with gleeful expressions a moment ago. Look at the village girl, so stupid she thinks she can walk out with a Saroese man!
The dame returned with a tiny ceramic pot. She painted a mint-scented salve where the bruising had begun. “It could have been worse. Looks like you weren’t hit straight on. Did he do it?”
“Of course he didn’t do it! Why does everyone think so?” The strong scent and cool salve relieved the pain, but it was not the relief she wanted.
“Ah, I see it now. You have the stars in your eyes, thinking you have stumbled across a treasure no other girl has ever had fall at her feet. But it isn’t like that. The Patron men who grow up here think of us as beneath them. Their disrespect is honest, and easy to avoid. It’s the Saroese men who come here from overseas who are dangerous. They see a girl like you as a toy to be played with and then discarded when they go back to their own people.”
“He’s not like that.”
Marayam affected a startled lift of the chin. “Of course not! You have spoken to him at length to ascertain his views and feelings?”
“No. We are still learning each other’s language so we haven’t had any long conversations.”
Marayam’s knowing chuckle made Kiya fume, but she knew better than to interrupt. “I know it seems strange to you, coming from the village, but this is their city, not ours, no matter how many of us live here. They keep to their lives and we keep to ours. That is how peace is kept. If it is the company of lads your age you miss, then I can introduce you to many suitable young men, and, of course, only the good-looking ones who have good manners.”
Kiya had to force herself not to roll her eyes. Coy teasing about good-looking lads only served to irritate her further.
“My thanks, Honored Dame, but there’s no need. I’m content as I am.”
Content to live my life without the endless advice of everyone around me! She wanted to run out into the plaza to see what was happening with Wenru and Esladas, but a childhood of obeying her elders kept her fixed to the bench.
“You were such a help to me that one morning going out on my rounds. You offer such a genuine smile to everyone. It’s a gift to see people in a compassionate manner, so they feel welcomed and not rejected.”
“Just like a young man newly come to Efea. Shouldn’t we welcome him too?”
“If he abuses you, nothing will happen to him.”
“He’s not the one who hit me!”
“If you give birth to children, they will be scorned their whole lives and have no legal standing as well. Is that what you want?”
Trembling, Kiya rose. “Children are a gift we give to the world. What ignorant, hateful, selfish people say about them can never tarnish that gift.”
“Ah! You believe he cares for you as he would care for a woman of his own people. I’m sorry, Kiya. Saroese men take their pleasure, grow bored, and move on to respectable women of their own kind.”
“Not him!”
“Come along!” The dame had the look of gates closing. “We will have this out now. As soon as he understands what the gift of a flower means, he will walk away.”
* * *
The contrast between Kiya’s uncle’s obvious fury and the way he carefully kept his distance and his gaze cast down like a menial reminded Esladas of his own life. So many times in his hometown he’d had to act the groveling servant in front of a chance-m
et highborn man. How he’d hated it!
There was no point in not attacking the situation head on, was there? He spoke in Saroese, sprinkling his speech with the few polite phrases he knew in Efean.
“My apologies, Honored Sir. It seems I have offended your customs. I am newly come to your shores. I did not intend to insult anyone.”
The man glanced up warily, struggling to disguise the hostility that was obvious in his pinched lips. His Saroese was perfect, even if Esladas imagined it was being spoken grudgingly. “Domon, your respect does me honor.”
“Please call me Esladas. I am no domon, no lord to stand above you.”
“You are Saroese, Domon, and I am Efean. Therefore, according to the law, you stand above me. If you truly wish to show honor to our customs then you will walk away and not come back.”
Esladas hadn’t been known as the stubborn one among his brothers for nothing. “Do you forbid our meeting?”
Wenru wavered, desire clearly fighting against truth. “I do not have that authority over her.”
“Then let Kiya tell me herself that she wishes me to walk away and I will do it and never return.”
The man closed his fingers over the flower to crush it.
“I ask you again with all respect, Domon, walk away. Forgive me for speaking so plainly. Nothing good can come of your interest in my niece.”
“If you are not her guardian, then is there some other man I may speak with regarding her?”
“She is old enough to make her own choices, not like you Saroese who keep your women locked away like animals harnessed at your bidding—” He broke off, and finished, “No offense intended, Domon.”
Esladas had been called too many taunting names in his time to care. Insults said more about the person speaking them than about the one against whom they were thrown. He grabbed for the important words Wenru had spoken.
“Are you saying that according to Efean custom a girl of Kiya’s age can make her own choices? Yet you stand here and tell me I should walk away because you say so, rather than waiting to hear what she has to say on the matter?”