“But you said you were blind…”
The smile slipped a little. “So I am. But here in the Kadun…I don’t know. Things seep through. Here, and…well…it’s like when I felt the Standing Stones on the moor when we were running from Sif.”
He’d destroyed her mood, and was sorry for it. But she was none the less luminous for having her spark quenched, merely banking to the glow of yellow embers. Yes, she was blind, but ai’Jihaar had held out a ray of hope, and Anghara was clinging to it like a drowning man might cling to a spar. There would be a chance for her. She waited for it with a hunger that yawned visible in her gray eyes in unguarded moments. A hunger in which there was no room for anything else—not for Roisinan that was her inheritance, and certainly not for…how had ai’Jihaar put it to al’Tamar just before he left? For a qu’mar of this world, still less one who had not, in so many words, declared himself and of whose true feelings, hidden beneath so many layers laid down over the passing years, he could hardly expect her to be aware.
These thoughts were less than helpful. Kieran smothered them, ruthlessly, and offered a sharp, deliberate smile, part of whose dazzle was pure pain. “So you expect them tonight?”
“It’s possible,” Anghara said, responding, once again, only to the obvious, as if to a few dry autumn leaves upon the mirrored surface of a black, cold depth of water below.
“I wonder what they will make of me?” he said with a grimace, raking his dark hair back from his brow with long fingers.
“They…” Anghara stopped abruptly, frowning delicately as if she had just allowed a stray thought to trickle away irretrievably, like sand through fingers. But when Kieran lifted a quizzical eyebrow she made a self-conscious wave of her hand. “I forget what I wanted to say.” She glanced back over her shoulder as the tent flap lifted again to reveal ai’Fatmah with a laden tray, closely followed by her mistress. Today ai’Jihaar was clad in her gold robes, with the full say’yin’en due her rank; once again Kieran bowed before the subtle power which coursed through this small, frail woman, disregarding the inescapable fact that his gesture would go entirely unnoticed.
As it would have done, if ai’Jihaar had been anyone other than who she was. The old an’sen’thar, however, smiled eerily at something she couldn’t possibly have seen and met it with a studied and appropriate response.
“I am friend to you, as I have ever been friend and teacher to Anghara,” ai’Jihaar said. “There is nothing which requires obeisance between us. Come, sit by me; we have so very little time before the others arrive and we must be about doing…what must be done. But while we are still alone, come, and tell one who loves your land about green Sheriha’drin.”
“Alas, it has not been a pleasant country these last few years,” Kieran said.
“The bleeding land,” ai’Jihaar said, nodding.
“The oracle,” Anghara offered, at Kieran’s slight frown. “Reaching from the dark, the bleeding land waits. That’s what Gul Khaima told me when I left her.”
“The bleeding land,” echoed Kieran. “Yes.” He glanced at Anghara out of smoldering eyes. “I have always believed,” he said softly, “that you…”
“Not yet, Kieran,” Anghara said, raising a hand to forestall him. “Not yet. Perhaps not ever. So much depends on what…happens in this place.”
“But you are ours whatever the outcome. You have always been that. And we, yours. That was all written long before Sif snatched the Book of Hours to write his bloody reign into it.”
“Your feelings do you credit,” said ai’Jihaar. “Without you Anghara would never have been in a position to choose. And yet it is still she in whose hands the choice remains…as the power to grant lies in the hands of the Gods. Remember that.”
“Nothing changes for me, whether she is Sighted or blind,” said Kieran desperately, turning to face ai’Jihaar. “I don’t understand the first and cannot pity the second; for me she remains Anghara, once foster sister, now my rightful queen.”
“Peace, Kieran,” Anghara said, reaching out to lay a small cool hand on his arm. It was all he could do not to snatch it up and kiss it, but with a great shuddering sigh he controlled himself and once again let much of what he would have blurted out remain unsaid. Now was not the time, if the right time could ever exist for all that was buried within him to be brought into the light of day. Restive fingers fluttered up; touched the hard curved surface of a say’yin made with love he now wore hidden against an auspicious hour. And it was al’Tamar’s peace that welled up through his hot palm, giving strength to his silence. He bowed his head.
“Tomorrow,” Anghara said, giving his arm a gentle squeeze. “Tomorrow we will know everything.”
They were expected in the morning of the following day, but it was late afternoon when emissaries from the sen’thar tower of Al’haria arrived—seven women wearing gray beneath cowled black djellabas and blue burnouses, and one, riding a magnificent blond-maned dark dun, whose robe gleamed gold. Behind them plodded a pair of ki’thar’en bearing a clutch of sleepy-looking servants, and another who carried a load carefully bundled and muffled in corded layers of padded woollen wrappings with the occasional gleam of rich jin’aaz silk.
Feeling unwell that morning, ai’Jihaar had not emerged to greet her guests. It made little difference, for her they were as visible from the inside of her tent as if she had risen to wait for them outside.
“A gold,” she murmured. “But not ai’Farra…Chud, now that we need her, now she visits her mother in Say’ar’dun…”
Anghara, too, had chosen not to emerge from the tent, but, lacking ai’Jihaar’s unearthly senses, she was reduced to peering through a slit in the entrance flaps. “There is just the one gold,” Anghara said. “She’s veiled, but I don’t think I know her.”
“Hai!” breathed ai’Jihaar. “She has a cold soul fire, that one—the color of shadows in the hollow eye sockets of a desert-bleached skull. Her name is ai’Daileh; she was raised to the gold after you left, in the Beku tower, down in the Arad, and ai’Farra had her brought to Al’haria. She is strong, this young one, but hard, too hard…She kills cleanly, but I wonder if she has it in her to heal?”
“You say ai’Farra brought her? But aren’t you also…”
“It is not for such as I to question the Keeper of the Records’ choice of successor. And ai’Farra is…ai’Farra. When you forced her hand by choosing Hariff, she declared herself in other ways. I suspect one of the greatest seals on ai’Daileh’s suitability had roots in the fact that she, too, is Sayyed. It changes the balance of power in Al’haria. And ai’Farra was never one to allow the chance of power to slip through her fingers.”
“Should I disappear?” Kieran asked. He had been standing back, arms crossed almost defensively across his chest. Whether from the old, ingrained wariness of “Khelsies” or from something newer, deeper, to do with Anghara and her own gifts, Kieran’s scalp was crawling; never before had he been prey to a premonition this strong. Trouble was brewing, that much was certain.
“No,” said ai’Jihaar. “It’s not as though they don’t know you are here. But leave the talking to me.”
Kieran was more than happy to oblige. He merely withdrew a step or two, deeper into the filtered reddish half-light which pervaded the tent and from which his eyes glittered like sapphires.
At the entrance, Anghara’s narrow, silk-sheathed back suddenly stiffened, and her hands dropped from the tent flaps to fly to the sides of her head.
“Are you all right?” ai’Jihaar said instantly, even as Kieran’s own arms uncrossed, his right hand seeking its instinctive position on the pommel of his sword.
“The pain…” Anghara moaned, backing away from the tent entrance.
“Stay,” ai’Jihaar said to Kieran, who had already tensed to leap forward, without turning her head. “This is not something where you can be of help. Come, Anghara.”
Even as Anghara staggered toward the pile of silk cushions where ai’Jihaar reclined, the hail
came from outside. “Sa’hari, an’sen’thar?”
“Iman’et?” ai’Jihaar said, and then glanced down at the tight mask of pain which still rode the features of the girl who had collapsed at her feet. “Dan’ah,” she added. Inadvertently al’Tamar had extended Kieran’s Kheldrini vocabulary during the journey from the mountains—Kieran knew what sa’hari meant. And the response—iman’et, enter. The third word he hadn’t come across, but its import was obvious as the tent flaps lifted to divulge a single representative of the small caravan which had just arrived. Dan’ah. Alone.
The voice asking admission had been cool, assured, and the imperiously gold-robed figure which ducked into ai’Jihaar’s tent suited it well. Now free of its burnouse, ai’Daileh’s face was chiselled rather than sculpted—all sharp angles and no curves. The line of her jaw could cut, and her eyes were golden ice. They flicked to Kieran briefly, taking his measure, then turned away as though he had been no more than an interesting and mildly distasteful piece of furniture. Kieran was dismissed, left to smolder in silence while the two gold-robed Kheldrini priestesses, who held Anghara’s future in their hands, proceeded to have a conversation of which he understood not a word.
“You sent for us, an’sen’thar?” said ai’Daileh ma’Sayyed. The tone was formal, correct, polite; no less deference than required between a senior an’sen’thar and a junior sister who, nonetheless, herself wore gold—and not a grain of sand more. All too aware of death and of mortality, ai’Daileh’s approach was that of coiled power, content to wait a little—for it would not be long—before ai’Jihaar’s world passed into the keeping of hands such as her own, younger, stronger, chosen by ai’Jihaar’s own Gods. “I am here, together with seven gray sisters. They wait without for your word, as you commanded. Sa’id al’Jezraal was not completely forthcoming; he merely said you would tell us why we were required.”
“She is the reason,” ai’Jihaar said, very softly.
At last ai’Daileh’s eyes slid down to Anghara. Her lip curled—a little. It might have been the beginning of a smile. “The fram’man an’sen’thar. I have read of this one, in the records ai’Farra has made of the raising of Gul Khaima. She has returned from Sheriha’drin?”
Beneath ai’Jihaar’s soothing touch Anghara’s face had cleared a little, but her cheeks were scarlet, and her eyes…Kieran had seen those haunted eyes before, back on the bare gray slopes of the mountain across which they had struggled to gain this land. Anghara was back in a place he thought they had long since left behind. His heart sank; there was a twinge, almost instantly gone, in the hand which had tasted the black dagger on her behalf.
“She is back,” ai’Jihaar said, “and she needs our help.” She had to stop, draw breath. She suddenly looked all of her age and more, beside this dangerous young priestess she had invited into her home. But it was for Anghara she was fighting, child of her heart, and so she gathered her strength and power and straightened. “I have been ill,” ai’Jihaar said stiffly, as though making the admission galled her. “And that which ails our sister is beyond the strength of one, were I ten times younger and my health as sound as it was when I was your age.” It was a subtle reminder, and ai’Daileh did not miss it. The golden eyes swept down briefly, veiled by spiky copper eyelashes. “Therefore I have summoned you, and those whom you bring. She has returned from the brink in the day or so she has been here with me, but now, when you arrived…I did not think that all this power in one place might well prove to be too much for her.”
“What is the trouble?” ai’Daileh asked delicately.
“You have read of the an’sen’thar who raised an oracle,” ai’Jihaar said. “Look, and tell me if you sense her here with us today!”
It shook the self-possessed young priestess to find the wreckage that she did—shook her to such a degree that her face actually softened for a moment as she gazed at the silent, motionless Anghara. But it was gone by the time she lifted her head to look at ai’Jihaar again. “There is something odd here,” she murmured.
“The first thing we need to do is to forge again the bridges that were broken,” ai’Jihaar said, choosing to ignore her remark, not wishing to take the first bite out of the subject of Kieran just yet.
“Is that possible?” ai’Daileh said thoughtfully.
“We will find out. Have you come prepared?”
The younger woman nodded. “A white ki’thar lamb, not yet four full moons old. Two of the wounded silkseekers brought in to us…although I still cannot understand how you knew we had two with the precise hurts you wanted.”
“I do not have to be at the tower to know what passes there,” said ai’Jihaar calmly, folding her hands serenely in her lap. “You have the silkseekers. The rest?”
“I have brought the Rab’bat Rah’honim.”
“It is well.”
After a moment of silence, while she regarded Anghara with curious eyes, ai’Daileh said, “Perhaps there is after all little we can do.”
In response ai’Jihaar raised an eloquent eyebrow and ai’Daileh crossed her arms, a little defensively, but ai’Jihaar could not see this, and ai’Daileh’s voice, when she spoke, was cool and distant. “Perhaps this is no more than the price she pays for taking the Way—she, fram’man, to whom the desert should have been forbidden…”
Tension crackled in the air; Kieran didn’t have to understand the words to gather a sense of looming danger. There was something in ai’Daileh’s face and in the way she looked on Anghara that outraged him, a dismissiveness, a speculation…He stiffened in the shadows; keeping his peace seemed for a moment to be beyond his powers. Who did she think she was, this gold-robed…Khelsie? To slight thus one who had, fram’man or no, spoken face to face with ai’Daileh’s own Gods? The words formed in his mind, incandescent, ready to burst forth—have you ever looked al’Khur in the face and lived, desert priestess—but ai’Jihaar was a quiet flame in the darkness, a still white light which reached out and quenched Kieran’s anger, delicately, gently.
“I was afraid of this,” ai’Jihaar said out loud, as though her mind had not, for an instant, been focused elsewhere.
The voice was flawlessly controlled—a little resigned, a little regretful, yet shot through with a solid resolve which found its mark. Even Kieran caught the tone of those words; ai’Daileh herself jumped as though the words had been a dagger pointing at her throat.
“Even ai’Farra has grown past this,” said ai’Jihaar. “You…you have never known Anghara of Sheriha’drin, or what she did, apart from that which you have read and which has been relegated for all eternity to the dust of the cata-combs. There, perhaps, she was as great as her achievements. Here, all you see is a helpless fram’man girl-child with a wounded soul. Tell me now, ai’Daileh: are you able to rise above what you see and reach for what you know? If not…I will not allow you near enough to do her harm unless I have your sworn word that you came here to heal, not sacrifice.”
No, her eyes were not ice. They smoldered now in the angled, chiselled face; ai’Daileh’s hands were balled into tight fists at her side. Kieran wished passionately that he could understand what was transpiring here—he had been holding his breath, watching the face ai’Jihaar couldn’t see. He exhaled in a long, quiet sigh even as ai’Daileh lifted her chin in what was part pride, part defiance.
“I would not harm one who has been confirmed to gold as I have,” she said slowly. “I may not have liked to see it done—but it was done, and it stands. She is an’sen’thar, the same as I.”
“Your sworn word,” said ai’Jihaar, implacable.
“If you believe it necessary, you have it. I am here; I will do what I can to heal a sister in the Way. I will work no harm upon her. May I have leave to withdraw, an’sen’thar? I assume you would want us to begin as soon as everything has been made ready.”
“You may leave.”
With that ai’Daileh bowed lightly and turned to leave. She paused at the entrance, glancing back, taking in Anghara’s wide and uns
eeing gray eyes, Kieran standing tense and ready in the shadows, ai’Jihaar bent over Anghara’s bright head—and Kieran reeled as he heard unspoken words echo distinctly inside his head: You are getting old, venerable one. There was a time you would not have needed an oath to know a sister’s heart. A little regret, perhaps; but more of triumph, of satisfaction, perhaps even a little malice.
Then ai’Daileh was gone; and, shock on shock, ai’Jihaar’s own voice, quite physical and substantial, but frailer by far than the chance thought he had just caught. “That one,” ai’Jihaar said in Roisinani, almost in a whisper, “she would have taxed me even were I not as weak as this…Curse this affliction! Where is ai’Fatmah?”
“Shall I look for her?” Kieran said, coming closer.
“No time…There is a vial in the chest there at the back, blue glass…”
Kieran was already there, throwing open the lid, searching with frantic hands. There were two blue vials, damn it. He hesitated, and his eye was caught by a glint of metal. The edge of a blade—Anghara’s dagger. A memory of honey-thick air…eyes in the desert…blood…
“Kieran…”
He snapped out of it with a start, aware he had been sitting entranced for some minutes, while ai’Jihaar’s voice behind him was softer still, fading…He snatched at a blue vial at random. Where ai’Jihaar had seemed to be bending anxiously over Anghara, it was now all too obvious that Anghara was the support ai’Jihaar slumped against.
Kieran thumped down on his knees on the cushions beside ai’Jihaar, lifting the lid of the vial as he did so. “Here it is,” he said, lifting one of her hands and folding it around the blue glass. Unstoppered, it smelled familiar, oddly familiar in a land where everything was strange to him, but he had no time to wonder, and ai’Jihaar had taken a swallow or two before either of them gathered their thoughts.
It hit them both at once.
“Lais,” Kieran whispered, staring at the vial in horror. “That’s lais…”
“Concentrated essence,” ai’Jihaar said, allowing her hand to fall to her lap. “Kieran, what have you done? It is in the hands of the Gods, perhaps, even now…bring me the other vial. Perhaps there is time.”
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