But Kavian breaks the silence with a hiss: “What did you to do to her?”
Fereyd Japur looks away.
“What method?” Kavian insists, leaning across the fire. The heat is harsh but her arms are a cage for it and the pain only makes her angrier. “How did you reach her so quickly? Was it some secret of knives? What did you do?”
“I did what I’ve always done. I obeyed my orders.” The softness in his voice, the tilt of his eyes—for a moment he could be the boy of impossible talent Absu plucked out of the laborers’ quarter. But the rage returns. “Heurian will be ready when the enemy comes. Why are you angry? What more would you ask of me?”
She waits there, hunched across the fire like her namesake, and he sits in quiet deference, trembling with a need to flee or yield or kill (she does not like to guess at his thoughts).
Shadows move across the inside of the tent.
From the sleeping-tent Irasht begins to howl. When Kavian rises to go to her she catches Fereyd’s eyes and sees something shattering under that howl, something long ago broken, something still coming apart.
“Keep my daughter safe,” she says. More than anything else she could say, she thinks it will hurt him most.
IRASHT TAKES UP collecting. She does not much care for the idea of property, but after silent rebukes from Kavian, she focuses her needs on waterskins. Soon she learns to show anger by pouring water on the earth.
Kavian laughs in delight, and then sobers. The girl is ready for a test.
On the riverbank, she finds three small stones to show Irasht. The abnarch perches, head cocked, and waits for Kavian’s command.
Kavian waggles her fingers. This is the counting game. Count three stones, Irasht.
Three, Irasht indicates: three fingers.
Kavian holds up four.
Three, Irasht insists, brow furrowed. She waves her raised fingers and makes a high chirp. Three, three. There are three stones.
Kavian answers with stillness: four fingers. Four stones.
Irasht’s eyes narrow in bafflement.
And a small weight moves in Kavian’s palm. A fourth stone, conjured from nothing. Irasht’s abnarchy at work. Faced with a gap between reality as it is and reality as Kavian says it must be, Irasht has rectified the discrepancy.
Kavian hugs Irasht tenderly, kisses her gently on the brow, and conjures her an air-picture of the night sky, crowded with stars. It makes Irasht tremble in joy, to see those lights in the dark.
T HE WAR BEGINS again. Twenty thousand Efficate spearmen and four hundred wizards under the stripling Adju-ai Casvan march on a southern dam. Word comes by rider from Warlord Absu:
I have judged your reports. Fereyd Japur will use Heurian against the enemy. Kavian, your abnarch is unready. Keep her safe.
She sees it happen. Sees all this:
Fereyd carrying Heurian (she is a small dark shape, limp—but her hair moves in the wind off the reservoir) across the bridge beneath the dam. Fereyd raising his arms to the sky. The two armies beneath him looking up in awe as he draws against the dusk an image of the Efficate soldiers broken into bone.
Then he puts his hands over Heurian’s ears.
Through her own art of sorcery Kavian hears the shriek he puts into her daughter’s, a shriek like a nightmare cracking. Horrible enough to make the screams of battle sound less than a lullaby.
Kavian, unable to protect her daughter, breaks a tree in half with a killing word.
The noise Heurian makes is so low and awful that it stirs snow to avalanche when it strikes the distant mountains. When that sound rolls over the first rank of the Efficate army their wizards’ shields flare with lightning.
Whatever gets through is enough. Men fall, drowning on ash and water, on the mud that suddenly grows to fill their lungs. Adju-ai Casvan, shielded by his elite cadre, survives to pull his decimated forces out—fleeing west, chased by the sound of Cteri soldiers beating their shields and crying: the water washes out the filth!
On the bridge beneath the dam, Fereyd Japur lifts the fallen girl. She puts her arms around his neck and tries to hide against him.
The battle is won. Heurian functions. All it takes is bone in the sky and a scream in her skull.
When Kavian goes to the center of the camp and asks to see her daughter, Fereyd Japur looks at her with cold contempt. “You saw her today,” he says. “You saw everything you need to see. She is a weapon.”
Warlord Absu writes:
Fereyd Japur has field command. Defeat all Efficate incursions you encounter. Use the abnarch until no longer practical. Kavian, you must bring your charge to the same standard.
CAMPAIGN SEASON ROLLS down in rain and thunder and blood. The Efficate’s wizards try ingenious new defenses. Under Fereyd Japur’s guidance, Heurian breaks them. The Cteri win again and again and soon their defensive stand becomes a counterattack.
Kavian pursues her own method with stubborn, desperate resolve. Fereyd’s technique—an image to achieve, a goad to drive the abnarch to fear and terror, the promise of relief—is direct. Crude. She has a more elegant solution.
One symbol: the dark. The empty black of Irasht’s childhood. Bad. And another—she should have chosen something else, something less fragile, less desperate, but Irasht responds more strongly to the promise of love than anything else—
A starry sky, like the sky that covered them when Kavian held her and kept her from the dark. The only goodness Irasht knows.
Some of the soldiers in Kavian’s retinue pool their talents to make Irasht a set of dolls. She plays with them in silence, and Kavian watches, wondering how much of a person is still left in her, and how much has withered away. How much waits, stunted, for some healing rain to fall.
The abnarch technique came from legends of ancient ascetic kings. Transcendent and serene, they locked themselves away, to forget the laws that chained them. They chose confinement.
What would Irasht choose, if given a choice? Does she know how to choose?
Kavian shakes her head and gets to her feet. The philosophy must wait. Irasht needs to be made ready. Until then, Fereyd Japur doesn’t even need to taunt her. His abnarch carries the nation’s hope while hers plays with toys.
She comes upon him in the night after a victory. It is too dark to see his face but through the smoke of a joyful camp she smells wine. “Kavian,” he rasps. “Kavian Hypocrite. Come. Sit with me.”
She crouches across from him. Makes no light to lift the shadows. “Have a care.” It comes out a threat, a purr.
“You are gentle to my daughter.” He raises something and she opens her mouth to defend herself, but, no, it is only a cup. “My traitor heart is grateful.”
“I will make her ready yet.”
His eyes flash white in the dark. “Mercy to a broken thing? Too late, Kavian. Years too late.”
“The war broke her.” That desperate mantra. “Not us.”
“Did Absu tell you that? No, no—it is our choice. The Paik Rede chooses to sacrifice its children. We choose to bury them.” A wet sound, like gathered spit, like a sob choked. “Is it not said—the mother has the child for nine months, and the father for nine years? They took that from me. They made my choice, and took Irasht.”
“Treason...” she whispers. But she cannot put any heat in it. Her honor hates to see a man so beautiful brought so low.
He rises unsteadily and she uncoils to match him. “You are the traitor. Your mercy to Irasht is the real treachery. She died when Absu put her in those cells. What came out was a weapon. And now you are too weak to use her—as if you could protect her in place of Heurian. Is that your secret, Kavian Catamount? Do you want a warm doll to hold in place of your daughter?”
“Absu?” Kavian lifts a hand to ward off sudden light. They are launching fireworks from the mountainside. “Absu was Irasht’s mother?”
Fereyd Japur lowers his face to her in the red glare. His skin looks kilnfired. “She loved me.”
It makes sense. Ferey
d Japur is common-born: powerful blood without the politics of a highborn father. No mind as apt as Absu’s could pass up the chance to make an abnarch weapon without another parent of good blood to fight the entombment.
Kavian cannot believe there was any love.
He must see the thought in her eyes. “She did,” he croaks. There are tears in him, but his rage and his pride and his obvious, agonizing need to be more than just a man hold them back. “She did. She did. You think I invented it? A tourniquet for a broken heart? Damn you. Damn you.”
Kavian watches him stumble away. It is pity she feels, old and strange.
T HE eFFICATE OUTFLANKS the Cteri counterattack and marches on the dams at Tan Afsh. Absu orders Fereyd Japur and Heurian to remain with the main thrust and sends Kavian and Irasht to save Tan Afsh.
Kavian is not ready. So much rides on Irasht, and Fereyd Japur’s words still ring in her: you are too weak to use her!
She wants to save isu-Cter. This is what she’s always fought for. Yet she can’t believe that the girl she holds and soothes in the night is only a weapon.
And she wants to believe, now, that what they have done to their daughters can somehow be undone.
But she pushes Irasht out onto the stone above the battle and shows her the sign for wrong alongside the stone-eyed owl banner of the Efficate. It is not Fereyd Japur’s method— an image that demands to be real. All she says to Irasht is: this is wrong, this army. The rest she leaves to the girl.
Irasht makes a raw noise deep in her throat, as if she is trying to vomit up everything that has ever hurt her. For one instant she burns so bright with will that Kavian cries out in pain.
In the valley beneath them, in the space of a single eyeblink, the Efficate army vanishes. Fifty-five thousand scoured from the sight of God. Even their bootprints.
There are no survivors. It is the most powerful exercise of magic in Cteri history.
After the battle Kavian casts aside all laws of language and isolation, holds Irasht, and whispers love until the girl stops clawing at her own skin. Irasht has learned a few words. She can say:
No more. No more. No more.
A little more, Kavian promises. I’ll protect you. Just fight a little more.
Irasht clings to her in silent need, and with a wizard’s ken Kavian knows she will not survive many more battles. That she would prefer to erase herself and end the pain.
Word comes from the Cteri spearhead at Cadpur, Fereyd’s army, her daughter’s army: we have met the main body of the Efficate invasion force. There are more men than ants upon the earth. More wizards than stars in the sky. Qad-ai Vista leads them. Make haste to join us, Kavian.
And then an order from the warlord Absu:
We cannot risk both abnarchs in one day. Fereyd Jaypur. Your weapon is battle-tested. You will defeat the enemy at Cadpur. Attack now.
By the time Kavian reaches the front, the battle’s already over. The Efficate army has withdrawn with extraordinary casualties. Fereyd Japur killed Qad-ai Vista’s elite cadre and nearly claimed the brother-general himself.
The price was small, as the reckoning goes.
Kavian’s daughter Heurian is dead.
SHE LEAVES IRASHT with her dolls and a retinue guard and goes down into the sleeping camp, to find the man who lost her girl.
Fereyd’s tent has no guards. Kavian ties the privacy screen behind her, lace by lace. Everything inside is silk. Fereyd Second-Best travels like the highborn he never was.
“I prepared tea,” he says. The candles he has set out around him light him from below. Braided hair, proud chin, empty eyes. An iron chain ornament around his neck, another around his left wrist. Silver on his bare ankle.
She sits across from him on the cushions. The arrangement of the tea service is exact. He’s measured the angles with a courtier’s geometry pin.
She sets her hands before her knees, palms down. “My daughter.”
One tremor in his jaw. “I asked too much of her.”
“So,” she says, each word a soft considered point, like a blow, a kiss, “I had concluded.”
“She struck three times. Made their flesh into earth, and then air, and then water. Their wizards tried to kill her and I held them back. I was distracted. But after her third blow—” He sits with stiff formality and pauses, once, to breathe into his cupped hands. “It was too much. She had done so much and the world wasn’t better and she, ah, she had to go. She made herself into water along with all the soldiers she killed, and flowed into the earth. I tried to—I tore down a banner and I tried to—to sop her up—”
His mouth opens in rictus and he makes a terrible sound that cannot be a laugh, is not gentle enough to be a sob.
Kavian moves the tea set aside, piece by piece, and takes him in her arms.
“I killed your daughter,” he says into her shoulder. “I killed her.” He puts his hands against her shoulders and tries to force her away. “I killed her. I killed her.”
“Fereyd.” She will not let him go. “You can grieve. I will not mark you weak.”
“You will. You always do.” The plural you.
She takes his face between the palms of her hands and ohhhh her muscles have not forgotten how to twist, to snap, to hear the bone go and feel the last breath rush out. He killed Heurian. He killed—
She will not do it.
“You have every right to grieve,” she says, though some part of her resents each word. “You have given more than anyone. Today you did what you have always done. Paid too high a price.”
“It was your price too. She was your blood.”
She doesn’t answer that. Doesn’t know how.
“I loved her like my own,” he says, and lets himself begin to sob.
They speak a little. Mostly not. After a while, moved by the fey mood that comes after deep grief, by the closeness of him, by months of watching him on the march, Kavian takes his chin and kisses him.
“No,” he says, turning away. “No. Not you as well. Enough.”
“I don’t make prizes of men.” She regrets this even as she says it. It’s not the right assurance.
“You think it’s the only way I know how to speak.” He laughs with sudden snapping cold. “I win the greatest victory of our time. I lose your daughter—and mine, and mine—to buy our triumph.” A pause while he gathers himself. She respects it. “And here I am, in my own tent, still Fereyd Second-Best. Still the beauty.”
“Fereyd,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I wanted distraction. It was wrong.”
He draws away to make a fiercely focused inspection of the tea ceremony, the cushions. “You highborn always forget this: when you break someone, they stay broken. You cannot ask a broken thing to right itself. You cannot ask that, and then laugh at it for falling.”
She’s found some strange kind of comfort here, holding him. So she says this, against her pride, as the only thanks she can manage:
“Now you have seen me broken too.”
“I haven’t.” The truth of pain is in his voice, beneath the grief. “Not yet.”
It hurts, but it is true. She never knew her daughter as he did.
She gets up to go but pauses by the screen, uncertain, and when she looks back she catches on the care of his makeup and the suggestion of his body beneath his garments. She hesitates. He speaks.
“Come back.” He says this like it’s ripped itself from him. “I want to help you. I want to be what you need.”
“Fereyd…” she says, warning him, warning herself.
“I want to be something for someone,” he says, eyes fierce: and she cannot deny him that.
What happens between them isn’t all grief. He’s been watching her too— he admits that, though not in words. Her pride likes this.
When she’s done with him he touches her shoulder and says:
“I will always do my duty, no matter how it hurts. But you—you are not yet so utterly bound.”
She touches his lips in gratitude. The pain is
worse than ever. But it runs clear. It feels true.
KAVIAN LEADS THE army through the Cadpur pass into Efficate land, and there on a plain of thin grass and red stone they meet Qad-ai Vista at the head of another numberless host.
This time the brother-general asks for parley.
She meets him in the empty space between the armies. Qad-ai is a tall man, ugly, weary, and he speaks accented Cteri in bald uncomplicated phrases. “We will not seize your water this year,” he says. “We ask truce. Next year, or the year after that, we will come again. This year we will go thirsty.”
She spits between his legs. “There. Water.”
“We will eat you.” There’s more sadness than anger in his voice. “You understand that, don’t you? You buy your proud centuries by visiting atrocity on your own children. You stand on a mountain of chains. Soon they will swallow you.”
She chews blood from her cheek and spits that on the sand too. “I’ll see you next year.”
He squints at her with pragmatic distaste. “Not too late to use the other girl. The one you still have left. Worth her life to kill us, isn’t it?”
She says to him what she cannot speak to her own: “She is worth more to me than this victory.”
WHAT SHE DOES next is not her duty: not what Fereyd Japur could ever do. But it must be done. Not the easy rebellion of the sanctimonious, Kavian roaring home to say, give up the abnarchs, give up the war! Not that. Because that would be Kavian’s choice, Kavian’s anger, and Kavian is not the wounded woman here.
What she does she does for Irasht.
It has to happen now, while the hurt is fierce in her, while Irasht’s power still permits it—before she learns too many laws, like it will always hurt, like Kavian will never leave me.
But the journey home to isu-Cter nearly breaks her determination. The shining reservoirs and the waterfall-terraces glistening in summer gold. The lowborn turning out to cheer.
Kavian has spent two decades fighting for this nation, with her fists and voice and womb.
But when she reaches the summit, she revolts.
The Paik Rede turn out in force to stop her, once they realize her intent. “I am coming to give Irasht a choice,” Kavian tells them. “That is all I ask. A choice for all of them.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven Page 27