“I don’t know why she’s helping us, but I don’t really see that we have much of a choice. Do you want to go back to your room and wait for them to come for you?”
“If you knew, why didn’t you say something yesterday?”
“They’d have taken me away from you,” she said.
“There was no point in making you…worry.”
“Making me worry? About them coming to kill me? I could have tried to escape. I could have at least drunk less of the tea—the wine—”
“Shh!”
Footsteps. We froze, silent and waiting, but it was Xanthe. “Come on,” she said.
“I think I can walk, now,” I said, but when she let go of my arm, I almost fell; my mother grabbed me again. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Out of the Koryphe,” Xanthe said. “I know a place we can hide.”
But instead of passing out through a gate, we went back indoors and down a narrow staircase that led to a dim room full of musty-smelling wooden barrels. Xanthe led us around to the back of the room, where we crawled through a short, low tunnel that led into darkness. My head spun again as I knelt to crawl, but at least I was steadier on hands and knees than I’d been on my feet. Then my mother helped me up, and Xanthe unshielded a lantern; we were in a dark hallway built of bricks. Xanthe swung a door closed behind us and we followed her through the hallway. After a few minutes of walking, we had to duck and crawl again through a small opening. We emerged into a cellar, and Xanthe led us up and out into the streets of Penelopeia.
There should have been a guard, I thought, twisting against my mother’s steadying arm to glance back at the unremarkable house we’d emerged from. Was my escape a conspiracy, or had Xanthe managed this some other way—bribery, calling in a favor? Is Xanthe giving up her whole life, helping me like this, or is she following orders from someone? I glanced back at the high walls around the palace, already half-lost in the bustle of the crooked streets. This doesn’t seem like a good time to ask.
My feet were bare. This hadn’t been much of a problem inside the Koryphe—the floors were mostly as smooth as polished metal, silky under my feet. Now, beyond the walls, I had to watch carefully where I stepped. From my distracted perspective, Penelopeia was a city of broken paving bricks and rutted dirt roads; animal shit of a hundred different varieties, from horse to squirrel to dog; half-rotted refuse and broken shards of pottery. I smelled grilled meat and garlic as we passed a street vendor, and my mouth watered.
The gravelly voices of the men around us made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Kyros had been the only man I’d seen since arriving at the Koryphe. Every guard and servant I’d seen had been female. As had happened during my months among the Alashi with the sword sisterhood, I’d come to think of female voices as normal, female bodies as the way things are. Suddenly seeing men again was disorienting; I wanted to stop and gawk at the bearded men as if they were some sort of exotic animal.
The street we walked on changed from brick to broken stones, then to dried mud. We skidded down a steep embankment to a muddy canal and picked our way across on rocks. A stench rose off the water and clung to me after we’d finished crossing. Rather than scrambling up the bank on the other side, we followed the canal, occasionally splashing through the water, until we reached an overhanging rock. “In there,” Xanthe said, and I squeezed under and found myself in a cave.
We could sit up, but not stand. There was a heap of blankets along the back edge to serve as a bed. Xanthe had also laid in some waterskins, a tiny stove with a teakettle, and a basket of plums. Light filtered in from under the rock—enough to see by, though the cave was dim. Xanthe sat down on the blankets with a sigh.
“This should be safe, at least for a little while,” she said. “Ensiyeh came to power yesterday morning. She wanted you killed; the sooner the better.” Xanthe rubbed her forehead with her thumb and forefinger, the same way Janiya did when upset.
“Is she the one who sent me to the pit?”
“No, that was Lydia. She also wanted you killed, but…their plans differed somewhat. Lydia just wanted you dead. Ensiyeh had this idea that you had to be slain by an aeriko.” She shook her head. “Phile, the magia who just slipped, usually longs for death during her melancholia. Ensiyeh knows that, so she was going to keep you drugged and quiet, then have Phile send an aeriko to kill you. The drugs were to keep you from speaking to the aeriko; they seemed to have some idea that you had power over them if you were conscious.”
“How many magias are there?” I asked.
“Four. The fourth magia, Sophia, also wanted you alive.”
“You’re well-informed,” my mother said, dryly.
Xanthe shrugged, and let slip a hint of a smile. “I have always preferred to know what was going on. Even if I wasn’t supposed to. In a palace ruled by four separate women, nothing stays truly secret for long.”
My mother pursed her lips and looked down at the ground. I wondered if Phile or Sophia had instructed Xanthe to protect me—if that was how she’d managed to slip me out so handily. I looked at her, trying to assess how nervous she was. From what I’d seen of her so far, I couldn’t imagine her acting entirely on her own. But even in the dim cave, I could see that her hands were shaking. If she’d acted on Sophia’s orders, or Phile’s, why would she be so nervous?
I took one of the plums. I was sick of plums, after the day before yesterday, but I was also ravenous. I sat down beside Xanthe, leaned against the wall, and stretched out my legs. Then I ate the plum, sucking pulp and juice away from the pit. My mother sat down beside me and massaged her forehead with her fingertips. I stared at the wall, wondering when I’d shake loose the last of the drug. I need to keep my eyes on the target. What is the target? Escape. No! My target is the rivers. I’m going to free the rivers. Escaping is just an important step toward that goal. I couldn’t very well escape with Xanthe right here with us. She’d said she’d go out in a few hours, but I couldn’t imagine that she’d just leave me here.
Ideas for things I could do began to dart in and out of my thoughts like insects. Create a distraction. Wait till night. She can’t stay awake forever, she has no one to guard us. Don’t escape at all—win Xanthe to our side. She’s half joined us already—she kept me alive because I’m her only link to her mother. No, Xanthe is nothing but an obstacle; shed her as soon as possible. Kill her! She’s the only thing holding me here. No, I can’t kill her. She’s Janiya’s daughter. I could never face Janiya again…
My mother checked the kettle; there was water, but no tea. Just the plums. She sighed deeply and took some of the plain water. The cave was warm and stuffy, and smelled like the canal.
“Why did you save me?” I asked Xanthe.
Xanthe had been staring at the shaft of light that slipped under the edge of the cave; at the sound of the question she jumped slightly, then folded her hands and put them in her lap. She looked me over—she was back to avoiding my eyes. “Tell me about Janiya,” she said.
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
“You said…that she was mean to you,” she said.
“Well, for a while. But it was for a purpose, not just out of malice.”
“Tell me,” Xanthe said.
I hesitated a moment; my mother was listening, and she was loyal to Kyros, and Xanthe was a member of the Sisterhood Guard, even if she’d disobeyed orders and done something that might cause her to be cast out. But there seemed little enough harm in this, and besides, if I couldn’t walk—despite my hunger, despite the lingering sluggishness from the drugs, my body itched to move—I wanted to talk. My hesitation was brief, and then I started to tell her the whole story: how Kyros had sent me to infiltrate the Alashi, how Sophos had raped me and Tamar had escaped when I did, how the eldress had sent us out with a sword sisterhood, how we’d been tested to see if we’d learned yet how to be free, rather than slaves.
“For our first test, Janiya woke us early in the morning and told us that we needed to
go out into the desert and hunt for a particular gemstone.” Karenite, in fact, but I decided to leave that part out. “Tamar and I went straight out and spent the morning searching. And we found some, and brought it back. And do you know what Janiya said to us?”
“That you failed,” my mother said.
“How did you know? Did you guess what we did wrong?”
“I have no idea what you did wrong,” she said. “But this Janiya—” She glanced at Xanthe, sharp-eyed, then back at me. “You think you’re smart. You think you’re capable. Janiya would’ve wanted to slap you down. So of course you failed! You’d have failed no matter what you did.”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “We failed because we didn’t take water with us, or food. We just headed out without thinking ahead to provide ourselves with what we’d need. If we’d asked for water, we would have passed the test.”
My mother shook her head stubbornly. “If you’d asked for water, you’d have failed for some other reason.”
“That wouldn’t have been fair. Janiya was fair.”
“Fair? She sent you out to find rocks and failed you for obeying orders. What’s fair about that?”
“It wasn’t a test of whether we could find rocks,” I said. “It was a test of whether we could think like free people.”
“You were a free person,” my mother retorted. “You were free for your whole life.”
“But I wasn’t thinking like a free person.”
“That’s an absurd thing to say. Some free people think the way Janiya wants them to think. But some free people don’t, obviously, since you were free and failed the test anyway.”
I looked at Xanthe—she was the one I’d been telling the story to, after all. She was studying the floor. “That’s not a fair test,” Xanthe said. “She lied to you.”
“Not exactly. I don’t think she ever said that the test was to see whether we could find the rock.”
“I would have assumed that the test was to see whether we would follow orders even when they didn’t make much sense. Whether we trusted our commander enough to obey her without insisting that she hold our hand and find us water before we went out. What kind of commander abuses that trust?”
“Among the Alashi, you need to be more self-sufficient than that. You need to take care to provision yourself, to have food and water with you. Always. Or you could die.”
Xanthe shook her head. “That still seems unfair.” She crawled over to get a plum, looked at my mother sitting on the floor, and gestured for her to take her seat on the blankets. “Go on,” she said to me, as my mother resettled herself.
I went on, telling more stories about the tests, about Janiya, about the night that Janiya had told me about her own past, working as a member of the Sisterhood Guard. I left out the details I didn’t want Xanthe or my mother to hear, like that this was all part of a ritual to repudiate the vows I’d taken to Kyros, but nonetheless, when I paused, my mother said, “You did turn against Kyros. He’s right; you did give your loyalty to the Alashi.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “Everything I did, I did because I had to. I was a spy. I had to pretend to be loyal to them, or they’d have exiled me, or worse.”
“You don’t have to lie,” my mother said. “Your secrets are safe with me.” She glanced involuntarily at Xanthe, then shrugged. “Though I suppose you might need to lie to Xanthe. Carry on, then.”
Xanthe pulled her bag open. “I need to go get some food; I’m hungry,” she said. She took out a rope. “I can’t leave you loose, and you can’t come along. If you want me to bring you food, you need to let me tie you up.”
“Can’t I just promise not to go anywhere?”
“Do you think I’m stupid? Your choices are to cooperate and let me tie you, or to go hungry.”
I grimly held out my hands. She made me put them behind my back and tied them; then she took another length of rope and tied my feet as well. She glanced at my mother. “I trust that you have the sense to stay put,” she said. My mother nodded. Xanthe took her bag and the last of the plums, and left.
“Untie me,” I said.
“Not a chance,” my mother said. “You’re safer in here.”
“I’m not going anywhere, I just want to be able to stretch my arms.”
“You’re a bad liar. And I’m leaving you bound. Xanthe will be back soon.” My mother settled beside me and stroked my hair; I flinched away from her. “So tell me, Lauria. When did you lose your loyalty to Kyros? When did you decide to truly join the bandits?”
“Never.”
“Stop lying to me.”
“I’m not lying to you.”
“Was it when Sophos raped you?”
“I still trusted Kyros, even after that happened.”
“Until he didn’t send you Sophos’s head in a bag.”
I clenched my teeth and said nothing. I realized a moment later that this was as damning as if I’d said, I trusted him for months—I told him over and over what had happened, and asked him to tell me what he’d done. When I knew that he’d sent me to Sophos knowing full well that Sophos might do this, when I realized that I was his tool and the tool of the Sisterhood of Weavers, to use and break and throw away, then I decided that he could rot in Zeus’s lost hell. I should have denied it, insisted that it wasn’t Kyros’s fault, but the cold fever was in my blood today, and when I was in its grasp, I tended to speak the truth.
“What does it matter,” I said, finally. “I’m here now. I’ll never be able to return to the Alashi.”
“This Janiya you’re talking about—is she Xanthe’s mother?”
“Yes.”
“I figured she had to be, or why would Xanthe care so much?”
“My nose itches. Can you untie my hands, please?”
“I’ll scratch your nose for you.”
“That’s the wrong spot,” I said. My nose really did itch.
“Well, tell me the right spot, then. I’m not untying your hands.”
Xanthe was back a short time later—I thought that she probably didn’t entirely trust my mother, either. She had grilled chicken and a little pot of cooked rice for us to share. She smiled a little grimly when she saw that I was still tied up and untied me. I sat up to eat dinner. I wondered if she was going to insist on tying me up to sleep. Probably. I wasn’t going to get much sleep anyway; I didn’t feel the least bit tired.
“The Sisterhood is looking for you,” Xanthe said over the meal. “I think they’ve sent out all their aerika that weren’t urgently needed elsewhere. Except they know they can’t get too close to you, so…I think you’ll be safe if you stay in here, but if you so much as poke your head out the opening, there will be guards here in minutes.”
I nodded. Xanthe narrowed her eyes, glaring at her bowl of food. “Do you really understand that?” she asked. “Do you believe me? Or do I have to tie you up for the night just to make sure you don’t try to creep off while I sleep?”
“I’ll stay here,” I said.
“You gave that promise very easily,” Xanthe said. “I don’t trust you.” When we were done eating, she tied me again, though she let me have my hands in front of me this time. She let me lie down on the makeshift bed, tied my feet as well, and gestured for my mother to lie down beside me.
It was a hot night, and I was not sleepy. I listened to my mother fall asleep, then Xanthe. The drug they’d been giving me was surely out of my body by now; if I fell asleep tonight I could go to the borderland, but I didn’t think I’d ever sleep. Maybe if I meditate. I closed my eyes and pictured beads dancing in the darkness—faceted gemstones, carved stone animals, polished wood, swirling colored glass. Karenite.
I found myself thinking of Zivar—of the beads in jars and bowls and vases in her workroom. Count them, I thought. All the glittering thousands of them. Maybe I’ll hear their singing, to lead me to the borderland.
Instead, I heard trickling water again, and followed it down into the darkness.
Wher
e are you?”
“On the steppe,” I said, looking around me at the grasses spreading out around me. I could smell the sweet grass and gritty dust; I flung back my head to look up at the starry sky unrolled above me, stars gleaming all the way to the horizon. I could walk for a hundred years if it would bring me back here. I could walk through fire. I could go without food or water for weeks.
“No,” Kyros said, and the steppe disappeared; we were in his office. I caught my breath. Kyros leaned across his desk, his dark eyes narrow and hard. “Where are you?” When I didn’t answer immediately, his face softened, his voice became soothing. “Lauria. I know that you were taken—kidnapped?—by your guard. We found her missing, and you missing, and your mother missing. Is your mother all right?”
I wondered why he didn’t just ask her. Did she know how to avoid the borderland? Surely she would tell him where we were, if he asked. Or maybe not.
“Whatever Xanthe told you that you needed to flee from, you’ve only made things worse for yourself. I had almost convinced the magia that you could be trusted again. Now—well, if you tell me where you are, I can convince her that you were taken against your will, tricked into running. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise, she’ll have me killed the minute she gets her hands on me, won’t she?”
“Probably your mother, too. And Xanthe.”
“Well.” I leaned back in my chair and smiled at Kyros. “I guess I don’t have much to lose, then.”
“You have nothing to lose by telling me where you are. You will be caught, and soon, even if you don’t turn yourself in.”
“Actually,” I said, “that’s not what I meant.”
I’d changed the scenery around me a few times, back when I’d regularly found myself meeting Kyros in my dreams. One time I had summoned up a bouquet of roses to give to my mother. Now I pressed my hands together, imagined the hilt of my sword, and swung it at Kyros as it appeared in my hand. I’ll cut off your head, you bastard.
He was faster than I expected; the office was gone, and we stood on the steppe again, Kyros just out of reach and holding his own sword. “Well, I’m glad we have that little revelation out of the way,” Kyros said. “It makes these conversations so much easier when I don’t have to pretend that I don’t know you’re lying to me.”
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