“Yes,” she said as she retrieved one of the empty urns and went to the well to fetch water. When she returned, she laid out twenty thick stalks of charo and cut the first of them. She used a roller, running tip to stem, forcing the thick white milk out and onto the work board. She finished and tossed the spent stalk into the waste bin beneath the table.
“That stalk has more milk,” Dardzada said, still grinding the pistachios. He stood and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “Finish each one, as I taught you.”
She rolled her eyes and dropped the stalk back onto the table, rolling it until she got the last of it out—no more than a teaspoon. It was only charo milk, but to Dardzada it might as well have been the tears of Tulathan herself.
She continued the slow process, expecting Dardzada to demand to know where she’d been, but he never did, and she figured if he didn’t care enough to ask her about it, she wasn’t about to tell him.
At the end of the day, they each went to bed knowing a large order was finished and ready for pickup in the morning. It was a good day. A day of accomplishment.
Alone in her room, she pulled out the pressed adichara bloom from her leather satchel. She’d put it between two pieces of goat leather that she’d brought out to the desert for that very purpose. On their walk home, Emre had asked about it. Or, rather, he’d expressed disappointment that she hadn’t been able to get one.
It’s all right, she had replied. It was a fool’s journey in any case.
Which was true, though it didn’t make her feel any better about lying to him. It was just that she felt so terrible about leading him into such danger. And that, in turn, had made her realize she was on a path she needed to walk alone. She’d return to the blooming fields one day, but she wouldn’t take Emre with her. She would never take anyone with her again.
After checking to make sure the petals were intact, she placed the bloom under her mattress and finally slipped beneath her blanket and tried to fall asleep. She should have been happy—she’d gone to the blooming fields; she’d done something her mother had done and lived to tell the tale—but the silence was stifling. She waited a long while, hoping she’d become tired. She ought to be tired. She’d had so little sleep these past few days. But the truth was, she wasn’t.
Knowing she wouldn’t sleep until they’d spoken, she got up and padded over the creaking floors toward Dardzada’s room, only to stop short of knocking on the door.
“What is it?” he said through the door.
“Does my mother remember me?” It was something that had been bothering her since her mother’s death, but she hadn’t realized how very important it was to her until the moment she’d voiced the question to Dardzada.
“What?”
“In the farther fields. Does she remember me?”
“Why would you ask such a thing?”
“Because you gave her something. Hangman’s vine, I’d guess.”
“How do you know about hangman’s vine?”
“I read about it in your books.”
“I told you to stay away from those.”
“Does she remember?”
She heard a sigh from beyond the door. “She may. I don’t know.”
“It’s important.”
“I don’t know, child.”
Çeda stayed there awhile, screwing up her courage. “I went to the blooming fields.”
Dardzada was silent for a long time. Long enough for her to wonder what he was thinking and if he would throw her to the floor as he’d done the last time she’d angered him.
“Dardzada?”
“Go to sleep, Çeda.”
“Don’t you want to know why?”
“I know why.”
He did? “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know enough to see your mother in you, Çedamihn Ahyanesh’ala.”
How those words stung. How lovely they were to hear. I know enough to see your mother in you. He’d meant it as an insult, but to her it was high praise.
“There’s much the Kings will answer for one day,” she confessed softly. She’d never told Dardzada of her plans. Never even hinted at them.
But when his only reply was to repeat “Go to sleep, Çeda,” she realized he’d known all along.
She returned to her bed, unsettled, and sleep was achingly long in coming.
The days dragged on, and still Çeda felt Dardzada would snap at any moment and yell at her. Or beat her. Or something.
But he didn’t. And eventually life returned to normal. She worked in the shop during the day, doing whatever was needed. Grinding, cutting, boiling. Milking the infernal charo. Mixing, fetching water, delivering packages. Whatever Dardzada needed doing, she did.
Her insect bites eventually faded, as did Emre’s after she snuck a batch of Dardzada’s curative to him. She ran the streets with Emre and Tariq and Hamid whenever her work was done.
One night she brought honeyed almonds home from the bazaar and gave them to Dardzada.
“What’s this?”
“Almonds,” she said. “You eat them.”
He nodded and gave her half a smile, putting the packet of almonds beneath his desk before continuing to tie a set of linen packages for delivery.
“Not hungry?” she asked.
“Not hungry.”
Fair enough, Çeda thought, and returned to her chores.
As the days wore on, and the night of the twin moons neared, Dardzada became more and more tight, snapping at her for the least little thing. He made her clean the worktable four or five times until he found it satisfactory. He snapped at her when she ate, saying she chewed like a cow. He forced her to brush her hair at night with a hundred strokes before she was allowed to go to bed. “If it’s good enough for bright Tulathan, it’s good enough for you,” he’d say. As if he knew how many times the goddess brushed her hair. As if the goddess even needed such things.
When he asked her to come to the back garden with him, though, two nights before Beht Zha’ir, she knew something was wrong. The sun was setting, and the air was warm if already cooling with the evening’s first breeze. He held a blue bottle of wine in one hand with only the smallest amount of dark liquid still left in the bottom. An empty bottle lay among the rows of his lush herb garden.
On the stone bench along the left side of the garden rested a censer. Next to it was a lamp and what looked to be an adichara bloom.
Her shock at finding Dardzada with a bloom from one of the twisted trees was quickly eclipsed by the realization that this wasn’t just any bloom: It was hers.
Of course it was hers.
Dardzada had stolen into her room and found it—who knew when?—and was preparing to do something strange with it. With Çeda.
“The adichara are very rare,” Dardzada said casually. “Did you know?”
Çeda glanced up at the walls around the garden, walls to other nearby homes. It was not strictly forbidden to speak of the groves or the trees within them—they housed the asirim, the heroes and heroines who had sacrificed themselves on the night of Beht Ihman. But it was sure to arouse the suspicion of their neighbors and of the Silver Spears, too, were their conversation to be reported. Even the Whispering King’s attention might be drawn here.
“They have always been rare,” he went on, “but the tribes knew where to find them.” He sat on the bench and lifted the bloom with its white petals. “And when they did, they would take a bloom, like this one, and they would burn it.”
He held the bloom to the edge of the flames. They did not take quickly, but Dardzada was patient. He waited until the petals were ablaze, then carefully set the burning bloom onto the censer. “They would take the ashes, and they would mark tattoos on one another. Do you know the sorts of tattoos I mean, Çeda?”
“Like the ones the women in the bazaar will lay on your s
kin?”
He shook his head lazily, his eyelids laden by the touch of wine. “No. Nothing like those. They ink ancient symbols. Symbols that had meaning.” He stared at the flames, whose light caressed his face, orange and amber and gold. “The sort that marks the very soul.”
“Dardzada,” Çeda said slowly. “What are you doing?”
“They would give a child their first when they reached thirteen.”
“I’m not thirteen.”
“The day is very close, Çeda. The point is that you will be marked, and tonight is the perfect night.”
She hadn’t realized it before, but there was a tattooing needle on the bench just next to the censer, gleaming like a cruel wink of Bakhi’s eye. “I don’t wish to be marked.”
“Don’t you understand?” The flames were dying now. When they had fluttered away to nothing, Dardzada poured a little water on the blackened remains and began crushing it with a pestle, mixing it into a thick paste, then he added more water, turning it into a dark pool of ink. “The tribes did not mark a child for them to become something. They marked upon them what they already were, their very nature.” He looked up to her, surprisingly sober in that moment. “You’ve already been marked, Çeda. By your mother. By your father, whoever he may be. By the gods. Even by me. And now you are who you are. And this”—he held up the censer—“will merely tell the tale.”
“I won’t let you do it.” She backed up a step. “You’re not my mother. You’re not my blood. You can’t make me do this.”
He set the censer down gently on the bench and stood slowly. “Oh, but I can. There’s no choice, Çeda.”
The moment he took a step toward her, she sprinted for the door. But it didn’t open. He’d locked it, somehow.
He came closer but she pulled and pulled until the lock finally gave with a crunch of wood and flying splinters.
He moved quickly now, like a charging bull, and he snatched her wrist. She fought to pull away, but his grip was strong, and when she started to fight he wrapped his other hand around her mouth and nose. He had a piece of cloth in his palm—she could feel it against her lips—which smelled strongly of alcohol and something foul and earthy, like bitumen, and it made her muscles lose their strength. One moment she was fighting him with all her might, the next she fell loose as an eel into his arms.
Yet for all the disregard her body had for her will, her mind still railed, No! No! Don’t do this!
Dardzada dragged her across the ground and laid her down on the wiry grass near the bench at the edge of the garden. He pulled her dress down enough to expose her upper back.
Please, Dardzada, don’t!
He picked up the censer. Tapped the needle into the ink made from her burnt flower, her prize. The very thing that made her feel closer to her mother, Dardzada was using against her.
Merciful goddess, no!
The needle entered her flesh, between her shoulder blades. Piercing her over and over again, the pain untouched by whatever drug Dardzada had given her.
You miserable piece of shit! I’ll kill you for this! I’ll take up my blade and slip it beneath your ribs! I’ll pierce your heart and watch you bleed!
But he didn’t even pause. He kept marking her, slowly and methodically, the needle burning her skin, burning her. The Kings had marked her mother—not with ink, but with knives, carving into her blood and bone a message for all the world to see. And here was Dardzada doing the same with ink, a thing he knew would cut Çeda as deeply as a knife. It was the sort of cruelty she expected from the Kings, but not from Dardzada, the man her mother had once referred to as blood of Çeda’s blood. Even she could never have thought he would do something so heartless.
She screamed for him to stop. With her entire being she screamed. And although she was silent, she knew Dardzada heard, knew the pain he was causing.
And still the needle bit.
Dardzada carried Çeda from the garden, where he’d finally finished her tattoo, and deposited her in her room. Aside from the burning pain between her shoulder blades, she was numb. She wanted desperately to rise, but her body would not respond. It took all her effort to move her hand a mere inch or two.
The night ground slowly past, and the tattoo continued to burn. It was the pain, she found, that allowed her to crawl back toward her own body. She concentrated on the pain, on his betrayal. She was able to move her shoulders first, then her arms and hands, and finally her torso and legs. But by the gods she was uncoordinated. Her legs moved like fresh-cut meat, slapped around on a butcher’s block; her arms were little better, but she managed to roll off her bed, to prop herself up with her arms and push herself to a shaky stand. She fell when she tried to reach the door but crawled along until she could use the handle to pull herself up.
She opened it and staggered out, walked along the hall to Dardzada’s workroom. Somehow, by Rhia’s grace, she reached the worktable without falling on her face, and once there, she took up one of the knives they used to prepare the dozens of ingredients Dardzada needed for his curatives, elixirs, and draughts, not to mention the hallucinogens he sold to the well-to-do in Sharakhai’s east end.
Çeda stared at the keen blade, the edge gleaming in the moonlight that slipped in from windows in the next room. Holding it felt wrong, as if her intentions were somehow tainting the blade.
That wouldn’t stop her, though. She would go upstairs and she would fulfill her promise. The way he’d marked her was unforgivable.
She wobbled toward the stairs, the knife in a fist sweaty from the anger at betrayal and from the drug Dardzada had used but more than anything from the way her heart pounded over what she was about to do. She made her way slowly but surely up the steps, then along the hall toward Dardzada’s room. She reached it after what felt like an interminable length of time, and when she opened his door, she found him snoring face down on his bed, as she’d been in his garden, arms and legs splayed in every direction. She stood over him, her breath coming faster now, sweat beading on her forehead. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat.
She’d never thought of killing someone. Not really. Not someone she knew. She dreamt of killing the Kings, but that was nothing like this. Other than her fleeting view in the desert, she’d never seen one up close, and she certainly didn’t know them.
Her hands still trembled with rage. “How could you do that to me!”
Dardzada’s snoring hitched, then fell into the same languid pattern as before.
She took one step toward him, knife poised, her teeth chattering. But she stopped at the foot of his bed, unable to take another step.
And then the contents of her stomach surged up, and she doubled over, vomiting onto the floor in agonizing waves until there was nothing left. She used the back of her hand to wipe the spittle from her mouth, while staring at the sleeping Dardzada, holding back her tears. Her fingers still gripped the knife, felt the familiar grain of the wood against her skin, and a new wave of anger overtook her. She stepped to his side, raising the knife high, then drove it down with all her might. Into the mattress.
It bit deeply into the slats, where she left it, her final message to Dardzada.
Before she could change her mind, she left his room, navigated the stairs, and stumbled out into the night. The air in his home had been stifling, but the city was little better. She needed to get away. She needed to be anywhere but Sharakhai.
She trudged unsteadily through the streets, the city’s tall stone buildings swimming in her vision. The space between her shoulder blades burned. She was fearful of the deep shadows in the darkness, afraid someone would grab her and haul her back to Dardzada’s, or worse, into a forgotten alley. She wound her way through the city. She knew she should be mindful of where she was headed, but her mind was too addled, her fear too great, so she simply plodded onward and wove her way into the desert where she could lose herself at last.
A great weight was lifted, then. It felt so freeing to be out and into these open spaces. So she walked, and she kept walking, on and on and on. She walked until she could walk no farther, and then she fell to the sand, exhausted and delirious, but more than anything, utterly relieved to be alone.
DAYS AFTER ÇEDA’S VISIT WITH SALIAH, she lay in her bed, watching sunlight leak through the gauzy drapes in the nearby window. She was flipping through her mother’s book, the pages brightening momentarily as a breeze blew the curtains inward, making Saliah’s beautiful, cursive handwriting seem numinous.
From outside, she heard three short, sharp whistles—a signal in the west end that the Silver Spears had been spotted and were coming this way. The signal was picked up and passed along, further westward. The clack of children dancing at swords, of the two women across the street arguing, of old Hefhi singing a song as he wove his carpets, all died away. Somewhere up the street was the ring of steel-shod horse hooves. The horses clopped closer, their pace slowing as they turned onto Çeda’s street. One of the horses snorted, a man called, “Ho, hup!” and then the sound receded. Soon the Silver Spears were gone, the sounds of life in Roseridge resumed, and Çeda began flipping through the pages of her book once more.
The mysteries of the poem had eluded her so far. There were weeks still before Beht Zha’ir returned to Sharakhai, but she was starting to feel nervous. If she was going to put her plan into action, she needed to unlock the riddles of her mother’s book. The fact that she was the daughter of one of the Twelve Kings still burned like a dark star inside her. Part of her wanted to shrug the entire thing off as a dream, as a gross misinterpretation of Saliah’s wondrous tree. How could Çeda, after all—as far from a desert witch as a mule from a caravan master—be expected to interpret such things?
She knew better than to really doubt it, though. The dream was real.
No matter what she might feel about her mother—and truth be told, she wasn’t sure what to feel anymore; how should she feel toward a woman who despised the child she’d given birth to?—she’d picked up her mother’s pragmatic habits. There was no sense avoiding the truth. On the contrary, she would use it to her advantage.
Twelve Kings in Sharakhai Page 26