Phoenix Unbound

by Grace Draven

  Unlike Azarion, the two women didn’t speak the language and glanced at him for translation. He obliged, telling both, “She’s addressed you in Kraelian high tongue as a sign of respect. Speak trader’s tongue, so we can all understand each other.”

  Saruke’s face softened into a cautious smile; Tamura’s did not. She watched Gilene with a raptor’s focus as if trying to see the magic inside her that made her one of Agna’s handmaidens.

  Saruke took Gilene’s hand. “Come, we’ll walk together while my son is remembered to his friends.” They strolled leisurely toward the encampment, leaving Azarion to face a swarm of well-wishers who embraced him, slapped him on the back, and passed around skins of fermented mare’s milk in an impromptu celebration of his return.

  By the time he broke free of old friends and new acquaintances, his head buzzed from countless swigs of the potent milk. Masad showed him the way to one of the seasonal creeks, now swollen with melted snow and spring rain.

  “Saruke won’t let you into her qara smelling like you do.” Masad wrinkled his nose and promised to return with a change of clothes. Azarion used the time to dig up a fist-size bulb of soaproot not far from the creek. All around him, other holes were made, signs the women had been here earlier, harvesting the wild root for either roasting to eat or crushed into a poultice for infected wounds or a sickly stomach.

  He pulled away the tough fibers from the bulb and peeled back the sticky layers. The water was so cold that it burned his skin, and his teeth chattered hard enough to make his jaw hurt as he washed his body and hair, sending islands of soaproot lather careening down the creek’s fast current. By the time he was finished, he was numb, and he dressed in the clothes Masad brought him with fingers made stiff from the cold.

  He followed his uncle toward his mother’s qara in the fading afternoon. Masad led him through the maze of felt-covered shelters whose placement might look chaotic to an outsider but made perfect sense to a Savatar. The ataman’s home occupied the camp’s center space with all others radiating out from its point. Those subchiefs and families of high status raised their qaras closest to the ataman’s, while those of lesser rank pitched closer to the camp’s perimeter.

  Azarion was surprised to discover his mother’s tent not too far from Karsas’s, still in a spot that denoted her status as the widow of an ataman but below that of the subchiefs who helped Karsas lead the clan. One day, very soon, she’d take her place in or right beside the ataman’s qara if his plans still found favor under Agna’s gaze.

  Masad patted him on the shoulder at the entrance. “Spend time with your mother and sister. Tup your priestess tonight, and tomorrow seek me out. We’ll hunt, and you can tell me all that happened while you lived within the Empire’s borders.”

  He left Azarion with a promise to retrieve him before dawn. Azarion stared at the low doorway that, like some of the barrows, forced a person to bow or hunch to enter. Azarion had been raised in a qara but hadn’t seen the inside of one in a decade. So many recollections crashed down on him—the filtered sunlight spilling in a column to the floor from the qara’s crown, bedding and cook pots stacked against lattice-framed walls held up by steam-bent timber ribs and wheels that his people traded silver and livestock for with the Goban clans to the east. The heady scent of cooking food drifted to his nostrils, and the sound of women’s voices talking teased his ears. He bent and swept into the qara.

  The sight that greeted him gladdened his heart. Saruke sat on a rug near a fire, stirring something fragrant in a pot he remembered from his childhood—a gift given to her by his father on the birth of the brother who didn’t live past infancy. Tamura sat across from her, against the felt and timber wall, hands busy at building a bow. She stilled at her work to watch him from the shadows.

  Gilene sat not far from Saruke, weaving her dark hair into a braid. At some point, while he drank with the men outside and caught up with their lives over the last decade, she had bathed and washed her hair. The dim light from the cooking fire caught strands of red in her locks, creating a shimmering net that haloed her head. She no longer wore the Kraelian clothes almost reduced to rags from their journey. Instead she sat garbed in the typical dress of Savatar women—a long-sleeved wool tunic that fell to her calves over loose trousers tucked into ankle-high goatskin boots.

  She raised tired eyes to watch him as he made his way to Saruke and sat down beside her. His mother squeezed his arm with one hand and continued stirring the contents of the pot with the other. “There is tea and stew. You must be hungry.”

  He kissed her gnarled fingers. “Speak the trader’s tongue, Ani. The agacin doesn’t yet understand our language.”

  “Is she truly able to wield fire?” Tamura asked in Savat, disregarding his instruction.

  He nodded. “Yes, though she pays a price for it that our handmaidens don’t when she uses it.” He accepted the cup of hot tea and the bowl of stew Saruke handed him. “Did you eat?”

  She nodded. “Aye. Your woman looks as if she’ll blow away with the next stiff breeze.” She gave Gilene a brief smile that was returned. “We thought it best to put something in her belly before she flew away from us.”

  Azarion had finished most of his bowl when Saruke spoke again, her eyes glossy with tears. “What happened to you? They said you were separated from the hunting party. None could find you. All they brought back were your horse and your cloak, both bloodied. Your father was inconsolable.”

  “Is that what they told you?” His hand clenched around his spoon. “It was the hunters who took me. I was beaten until I passed out. I woke up in Uzatsii, waiting my turn on the auction block.”

  Tamura sprang to her feet, the half-finished bow held in such a way that Azarion expected her to nock an arrow and draw. “Who did this to you? I will cut out their hearts!” She still hadn’t spoken in trader’s tongue, but Gilene’s quick scuttle back told Azarion she understood perfectly Tamura’s outrage. And her threat.

  He waved her back down. “Peace, midge,” he consoled her. “I’ll have my revenge soon enough.” He squeezed Saruke’s hand as tears tracked down her cheeks. “Yerga, Zabandos, and Gosan all had a hand in my enslavement. They were the ones who beat me and sold me to the Nunari. But they did so on Karsas’s orders.”

  Tamura paced, pausing once to point at her mother. “I knew it.” This time she used trader’s tongue. “Didn’t I say those piles of sheep shit had something to do with his death? I knew they were lying!” Her nostrils flared, and her pacing threatened to wear a bare spot in the rug under her feet. She stopped again, hands on hips, to glare at Azarion as if he were somehow as responsible for his own abduction. “All three are dead, by the way. Yerga broke his fool neck from a fall out of his saddle. He was always too stupid to learn how to ride properly. Zabandos took a spear to the gut.” Tamura’s humorless smile stretched wide. “Got caught tupping a tirbodh’s wife in his own qara.”

  Azarion didn’t know whether to cheer or curse. He had hoped to mete out justice to Karsas’s henchmen as well as to Karsas himself. It seemed fate had done it for him. “And Gosan?”

  “Drowned in a spring flood.” Tamura’s waspish smile faded. “I don’t think anyone mourned him much. We all felt sorry for his wife. She’s a kind sort. Deserved better than him.”

  There were more than a few widows and fatherless children in every clan camp. Some women grieved their men, others did not. If Karsas was married, Azarion would soon make his wife a widow and his children fatherless. “When did Karsas become ataman?”

  Saruke answered him. “Right after your father died. He courted the Ataman Council long before that, and as the closest living male relative to your father, they considered him the next in line to succeed.”

  It was as he expected, though hearing it made him want to howl his anger. “The Fire Council agreed?”

  “Yes. There were none to challenge him and no agacin to naysay the vote of th
e Ataman Council.”

  Azarion turned to Gilene, who listened with a confused expression. “The agacins have their own council separate from that of the atamans, and even more powerful. When an ataman is chosen by the other clan chieftains, they still must get approval from the Fire Council. If they don’t, then another must be chosen.”

  Her eyebrows climbed toward her hairline. “You have a council of women more powerful than that of your men?”

  Tamura’s sharp laugh filled the qara. “The Savatar value their womenfolk. Unlike Kraelians.” Her voice lost a little of its edge. “My brother says you are an agacin, even though you aren’t Savatar.”

  Gilene nodded. “I can wield fire, yes, and I don’t suffer its burn.”

  “Show us,” Tamura challenged. She pointed to the cook fire. “Strengthen the fire here.”

  Gilene shook her head, refusing to rise to Tamura’s obvious baiting. Azarion was tempted to end it but sensed this was a play of dominance between these two, one where his interference wasn’t welcomed or helpful.

  “I can’t,” she said. “Not now, anyway. I don’t know how it is with your agacins, but my power doesn’t draw from an endless well. I drained it weeks ago. I need time to replenish.”

  Tamura snorted and shot Azarion a disdainful glance. “She told you she was agacin?”

  “No. She didn’t even know the word until I told her. I’ve seen her summon and control fire with my own eyes several times.”

  Saruke put more water on to boil for tea. “The Fire Council will want her to prove it to them.”

  Azarion’s eyes met Gilene’s. Hers were dark, anxious, weary. “She can. That she doesn’t burn should be enough to satisfy them until all her power returns.”

  For all that she had aged twenty years in the ten he’d been gone, Saruke rose nimbly to her feet and without aid or complaint. She motioned to Gilene and gestured to a pallet of blankets and furs. “Come. You and Azarion can sleep there tonight. For now you can rest unless you want to attend tonight’s celebration.” Gilene gave an adamant shake of her head, and Saruke smiled. “I didn’t think so. Go on. One of us will wake you if you’re needed.”

  Gilene accepted the offer without protest, not even questioning Saruke’s assumption that she and Azarion shared a bed. For all practical purposes, they had done so since their sheltering with Hamod’s traders, always out of necessity and often for warmth. He inwardly cheered her lack of resistance to the notion of sharing this particular pallet with him. She didn’t like him, but she had begun to trust him a tiny bit, at least in this matter.

  She slid under the pile of covers, still fully clothed, and turned to face the qara wall. In moments she was asleep, the curve of her shoulders drooping as slumber overtook her.

  Saruke returned to her place and gave her full attention to Azarion, slipping back into Savat. “Now you will be truthful with me. What did you suffer at the Empire’s hands?”

  He was reluctant to tell her, reluctant to recall those things that left a scar on his soul each time. “Everyone suffers at the Empire’s hands,” he said shortly. He did offer up one fact and left out the worst details. “I was the Gladius Prime.”

  Tamura gasped and Saruke’s eyes narrowed. Tamura leaned forward, gaze shrewd. “A useful skill then, if you intend to regain your birthright,” she said in a low voice meant only for him and their mother.

  He took the tea Saruke passed him. “I do. It’s the thing that’s kept me alive all this time.”

  Tamura slapped her knees. “I want to help. Karsas is a toad. Our clan has been lessened in the eyes of the other clans while he’s been ataman.”

  The question lurking at the back of his mind since he first arrived at the clan camp surfaced to his lips. “Why didn’t he make you his wife?”

  She bared her teeth. “Because he knew I’d kill him in his sleep.”

  Saruke rolled her eyes. “She won’t marry anyone. I have no grandchildren.”

  Tamura mimicked her mother’s expression. “We live well enough without a husband underfoot. And I hunt, and herd, and fight as well as any man.”

  Azarion chuckled. “You always have.” Tamura had always held her own with him and the other boys her age, riding, fighting, and shooting as well as any of them and better than most.

  “Whatever child I bore wouldn’t live to see its first year completed,” she declared, and refilled her cup with steaming tea. “Karsas would see to it. He wants no contender for his role as ataman or anything that will endanger his son’s chance at inheriting it.”

  Azarion growled. For now, the role of Clan Kestrel’s ataman belonged to Karsas and his progeny unless the Fire Council revoked it. “I’ve much to learn and even more to avenge.”

  Some of Tamura’s ferocity faded. For a moment, she looked as careworn as Saruke, her back bent with worry. “A lot has happened since you were taken from us. Much of it not good. Trade has thinned on the Serpent’s eastern flank, and our wool and horses fetch only half the price they used to. Only the silver holds its value, but our best mines are playing out. Raiders from the Gamir Mountains are wreaking havoc in territories belonging to the Goban, who in turn flee into our lands and ask us to help them against their enemies. I’m afraid if we don’t, they’ll turn to the Empire for support, though some suspect it’s the Empire supplying the raiders and encouraging them to harass the Goban.”

  His thoughts reeled with this revelation. He’d been wrong to think most things hadn’t changed since he was sold to the Empire. The Savatar were no longer the powerful people they had been ten years earlier. “If the Goban can’t hold off the Gamir raiders or turn to Krael for help, Krael will use that to invade our lands. The Veil requires a lot of power from the agacins to keep it standing. There aren’t enough of them to add a second one.”

  Tamura snorted. “Trust me, nothing you’ve just said hasn’t been discussed to death in council meetings. The atamans talk and talk but come to no decisions. Karsas isn’t the only one guilty of that failing.”

  Saruke stirred the coals of the fire to redder life. “We send warriors to help the Goban fend off a raid or two, mostly during trade exchanges, but it isn’t enough.”

  “The clan council and the Ataman Council will ask you the same thing we did, Brother.” Tamura drained the last of her tea before continuing. “They’ll want to know everything that happened to you to glean information. If you want a strong claim to challenge Karsas for the clan’s leadership, you will need to offer something to gain their favor. Knowledge of the Empire will help toward that.”

  She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. He only hoped what little he could offer as a Pit gladiator with his wits about him and his ears open would be enough. “I wasn’t a statesman there. I was a slave, so I won’t know Krael’s plans, but I know the layout of the capital and how it places its regiments. Some of the gladiators were once Kraelian soldiers, commanders even, who displeased the emperor for some reason and were punished by having their freedom taken. They talked sometimes of their exploits. If you listen hard, you can learn while in the practice arena.”

  Saruke’s hand on his arm made him turn. His mother’s eyes, a more faded green than his, were dark with grief and sympathy. “Then you’ll have something useful to tell them. Maybe they’ll listen.”

  He glanced at the sleeping Gilene. “I have an agacin. They’ll listen.”

  Tamura gave another one of her sardonic snorts. “An agacin who can’t light a candle at the moment. You’ll need luck as much as Agna’s blessing, Brother.”

  He had no argument to deny that.

  PART TWO

  THE SKY BELOW

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Gilene turned her face to the sun, grateful for its light and warmth. She’d been in the Stara Dragana for five days, finding her footing among a people whose ways and language were unfamiliar to her. Behind her, the roofs of the b
lack felt tents the Savatar called qaras rippled in the wind.

  The clan camp was a hive of activity. The wedding of a Kestrel man to a Marmot woman was to take place in three days’ time, and several women from the Kestrel families had banded together to create felt rugs for the groom to present to the bride’s family as gifts. It was backbreaking labor, and Gilene joined in, welcoming the hard work.

  When they started the first rug, Gilene offered her services as a skilled dyer to dye baskets of wool rovings in the colors requested. Once they dried, they’d be separated into more baskets while the women worked in teams of four or five to felt the white and gray rovings that made up the foundation of each rug.

  One of the older clan matriarchs had eyed Gilene suspiciously, as if the offer to oversee the dyeing process would somehow endanger everyone handling the wool. With Saruke acting as translator between them, the matriarch peppered Gilene with questions.

  “What do you know of dyes?”

  Gilene hid a smile. “My village is known for its dyes. We extract the green out of long nettle and sell the dye powder throughout the Empire.”

  “But do you know how to dye cloth? Making dye and using dye aren’t the same.”

  Gilene didn’t argue that. The woman was right. “I’ve been dyeing cloth for a long time.”

  A small crowd of women had gathered around them now, curious about this outlander’s purported skills. Still skeptical, the Savatar elder pointed to the kettles of dye set up nearby. “Show us what you can do.”

  While the Savatar used plants that rendered colors in shades of yellow and red instead of the green she usually worked with, the process of dyeing the wool was much the same. Several dunkings with a hand rake and spoon and drying time on the racks produced rovings in the expected vibrant shades. Gilene, however, had added her own twist to the process, and the rovings looked like a sunrise or a sunset, graduating in shades from pale yellow to crimson. The many gasps of delight and approving nods told her she’d won the crowd. But had she won the critic?