Phoenix Rising

by Rebecca Harwell

  There she was, cloaked and at the back, stalking away from the short figure of the former matriarch of the Gabori clan.

  Before Shay could think better of it, she was strolling out into the square, intercepting a white-faced Nadya, attempting to be as casual as possible. “Enjoy the ceremony?”

  The instant those words left her mouth, Shay winced, knowing she had said the wrong thing. Being cavalier was her shield; she knew herself well enough to admit it. But for Nadya, Shay’s levity would be sea salt to a jagged, open wound, thrown by one she was just beginning to trust.

  Nadya’s head jerked up, eyes shining. “Shay.” Nadya looked around. “Did I—you came here to mock me, then.”

  “No, Nadya, I—” Stars, she was not good at this. Shay rubbed at the back of her neck, trying to sort out the words jumbled around in her mind. “I heard about the Gabori clan, and I thought, well, you might—”

  “And, what, you care?”

  That barb hurt. “Blast it, can’t you see that I am here? Would I be if I did not care?” Shay’s voice choked off. “You think I enjoy taking jaunts through this place?”

  “Then why come down here at all?” Nadya spat. “Surely you do not value anything touched by Nomori customs. It’s only a silly ceremony, after all.”

  “I came…” I do care. But of course, Shay could not say that. Not with the accusatory glare Nadya threw at her. “Damn it all, you will not even listen. Why did I bother?” She should have stopped there, Shay knew. Should have read the stiff line of Nadya’s shoulders, the heaving of her chest. Her mouth, however, went off on its own, leaving any remaining sense behind. “You should have expected this. You got off easy.”

  “What did you say,” Nadya whispered, voice strained. It was not a question. Her hearing was nivasi-touched, after all.

  “I said, you got off easily. Your family lost their precious title. Your mother will not speak to you. But you are here. You are alive, and you do not have a mob coming for your head. That is far more than most of our kind get.”

  “Our kind?” Nadya took a step toward her, and Shay stepped back. Nadya’s eyes burned with pain that was quickly changing to anger. Oh, Shay knew those feelings all too well. The helplessness, the knowing that no matter how strong you are, how high your flames burn, you cannot change your fate. She swallowed and glanced around them. The Nomori square was near deserted, but her fires would surely be noticed.

  Nadya raised a hand. “I am nothing like you. I am Nomori, proudly.”

  Shay flinched. A tortured Nadya, beset by phantoms of the past, was one thing. She did not fear Nadya’s strength. Her anger, however?

  “I stand by my people,” Nadya continued, “and I do not need you to console me of whatever wrongs you think you understand.”

  “Gobshite.” Shay stepped forward and caught her hand, praying to any deity listening that Nadya would not crush every bone in her fingers. “Stop pretending. You are hurt.” She nodded to where a few Nomori lingered after the ceremony. “They hurt you. They hurt both of us.”

  Nadya tried to pull her hand away, but Shay held on hard enough that she dragged her along.

  “Not going to be that easy, Phoenix.”

  “You hate them. I don’t.” The edge of her voice quavered.

  Shay bit her lip. “Maybe I do. Maybe not. That does not absolve them of what they did, and stuffing your feelings down until they rot in your stomach doesn’t either. You can be a proud Nomori and still be hurt by them.”

  Nadya looked up at her. Her grip softened, and her eyes shone. Without thinking of the implications or possible consequences, Shay wrapped her other arm around Nadya’s shoulders and drew her in. Nadya shook against her chest. Her fingers balled up into Shay’s shirt, tearing it. Shay did not flinch. She stood there, holding Nadya, riding out every tear she shed.

  Her own feelings toward the Nomori people had numbed so far down that she could not bring herself to join Nadya’s tears. Does she realize, Shay wondered, stroking the edge of Nadya’s braid, that I tell her these things so she can avoid my fate?

  When the shaking stopped and Nadya’s breathing slowed, she pulled back, wiping at her eyes. “Sorry about the shirt,” she mumbled.

  “Take me to the market one day, and we’ll call it even.”

  That got a chuckle. “All right, it’s a promise. And thanks. I—I did not deserve that just now.” She cleared her throat. “I should leave before someone recognizes me. Especially after such a scene.”

  “You are not nearly as good at making a scene as you think. And if you think I’m letting you walk home alone in your state, you are downright daft.”

  Nadya’s protests fell away as Shay threw an arm around her shoulders once again and marched them away from the square and to the railbox that chugged up to the second tier.

  When Shay entered Nadya’s shack, neither woman remarked upon it. Nadya let Shay wipe the salt trails from her face before she pulled her tunic over her head, revealing a gray undershirt. Shay’s breath caught in her throat. Nadya had never looked so vulnerable before, eyes still puffy from tears.

  The little shack had a single pallet tucked away in one corner. When Nadya knelt down upon it and glanced up at Shay, she knew she should leave, that it would be better for both of them to cut this off before it went any further. But Nadya looked so fragile, and Shay found herself stepping toward her.

  The darkened shack held nothing but soft touches as they lay next to one another. Nadya curled up, her knees nearly to her chest. Shay’s arm fell over her. Their chests rose and fell as sleep slowly claimed them.

  Shay struggled against her fatigue as long as she could. She wanted to drink in every moment of this: the way Nadya’s hair fell about her face, the flutter of her eyelashes in sleep, the weight of her body against Shay’s.

  She wanted to remember it, because she knew such a night would not happen again.

  *

  The sun crept higher over the edge of the world, sending bright glares rippling off the city’s marble walls. Gnats buzzed, and their overexcited noises at the break of day caused Nadya to stir out of her dreamless sleep. She yawned.

  “I was about to call a doctor. That or light a fire underneath you.”

  She jerked upright, and warm hands steadied her. Shay’s hands. Shay sitting next to her on her pallet, hair mussed and eyes soft. Shay who’d spent the night with her, next to her, body against body.

  Heat crept up her neck to the tips of her ears. “You’re still here,” she said, coughing away the thickness of morning.

  “Yeah, well, your snoring did its best to drive me off.”

  “I do not—”

  “No arguments, Phoenix.”

  Nadya swallowed back a protest when Shay stood, her vanishing body heat leaving the pallet nook of the shack several shades cooler. “You call me that a lot.”

  “Does it bother you?” Shay pawed through a couple of the hole-ridden baskets that lay around. “I don’t suppose you have any food here, hmm?”

  “No, to the food, I mean. I get mine from the ration lines, or the fourth tier,” she added, rubbing at the back of her neck.

  Shay grinned. “Don’t be ashamed—petty theft suits you fine.” She took a small canteen off her belt and lifted it to her lips.

  “It does,” Nadya burst out.

  “What does?” Shay wiped her mouth, offering the canteen to Nadya.

  She shook her head. “Calling me that. It does bother me.”

  “Why?”

  She stood, dusting off her clothes as she did so. “Why does being called the name of a mass killer bother me?”

  “You are the Phoenix, Nadya,” Shay said. “It’s part of you, just as your blood is. I do not know why you keep trying to divorce the two.”

  “Because I’m already reminded of what happened plenty,” Nadya snapped. “You should know that.”

  Shay winced. “All right. Look, Nadya, I—” A knock at the door interrupted whatever she had begun to say. “Expecting
someone?”

  “No.”

  As Nadya reached for the handle, the door opened to reveal a windblown Kesali standing on the stoop. She did not wait to be invited in. “You’re needed at the palace, Nadya. It’s important.”

  “Too important to send a pigeon, it seems,” Shay said with a drawl. She leaned against one of the walls, hip out, one leg tucked behind the other. Looking ever so much like she belonged there.

  Kesali spun toward her. Instantly, her expression clamped down. “Who are you?”

  “I’m not the one who just swept into Nadya’s house like a dust devil.”

  “Shay, Kesali,” Nadya said, staring very intently at the floor.

  “Oh, so this is Kesali. Stormspeaker, right, or do you wish to be addressed as Lady Isyanov?”

  “Shay,” Nadya said, shutting the door.

  Kesali’s mouth fell open, and her eyes flashed. “And who do you think you are, forcing yourself upon Nadya before dawn?”

  Shay’s mouth lit up in a half smile. “I did not come barging in here this morning.”

  It took a moment for Kesali to get the meaning behind her words. The instant she did, however, she stared at Shay, then Nadya, the color vanishing from her cheeks.

  Nadya wished for the ground to swallow her whole right there. Shaking, she gritted her teeth and looked to Kesali. “You said it was important?”

  Evidently, not as important as uncovering what had occurred here. Kesali crossed her arms, her focus still on Shay. “You look familiar. Do I know you from one of the Nomori gatherings? From an arrest trial, maybe?”

  Shay didn’t move, but her back stiffened. “Not likely. I just arrived. Enough time for Nadya and me to catch up, though.”

  Nadya felt like she was in the middle of two warring armies, and that never worked out well for anything caught on a battlefield.

  “Catch up…” Kesali’s eyes widened. “Shay. Shay Rissalo, the firestarter? You vanished years ago. Not dead, then.” She whipped toward Nadya. “You let her stay with you? One of them?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not about to start setting things on fire. Except the things I’m paid to, of course,” Shay said.

  “She works at the smithy. Came with a Cressian caravan,” Nadya hurried to say before Kesali called the Guard down upon them.

  “But you do not know—Nadya, she could be dangerous.”

  Shay laughed. “Believe me, Nadya has nothing to fear from me.”

  “Kesali knows about the…” Nadya twisted the edges of her tunic. She could not look at either of them, not when they glared daggers at one another.

  “Well, it’s good to know that she only thinks some of them are dangerous.”

  “I know exactly what your kind—” Kesali’s voice vanished when Nadya looked up at her.

  Hearing those words, even without the accusation being finished, tore something inside her. Nadya struggled to keep her hands from shaking. How could she draw distinctions like that? What really separated her from Shay? When they first met, Nadya had been turned off by the levity with which Shay regarded her nivasi blood, with those that came before them. Nadya had clung to every scrap of difference she could find. That was before she had met the real Shay. The Shay who had held her when the memories swelled around her. The Shay who had called her out of Gedeon’s darkness. Beneath Nadya’s cloak and Shay’s smirk, they were the same, connected in a way Kesali could not begin to understand by their shared nivasi blood.

  That is it, isn’t it? she realized, bitterness rising in her throat. Kesali does not see me as nivasi. Maybe it’s too painful for her to think of me as anything but being of the same blood as Durriken, Gedeon. But when she’s faced with the reality, like that night—her stomach clenched—she cannot handle it. She fears this part of me, so she pretends it doesn’t exist.

  Protectress, please let me be wrong.

  Shay stepped away from the wall. She walked up next to Nadya. “You said you had business here, Stormspeaker. I assume that it isn’t to round up us illegal nivasi.”

  “No—no, of course not.” Kesali shook her head. “Nadya, the compound shipments have stopped.”

  Shoving back the feelings that threatened to drown her, Nadya drew a deep breath. “That is not possible.” She did not believe Kesali’s words.

  “It is, I’m afraid. We have no more. Soon the wells will run foul again, starting down here and working up to the palace.” Kesali clenched her fists. “That damn Councillor only just responded to our pleas for a meeting. It happens after the noon bell. Her demands are coming, Nadya, I can feel it. I—we need you there.”

  “Wait, what happens if this Councillor doesn’t give you more?” Shay asked. She looked from one to the other.

  Kesali’s voice barely raised from a whisper. “If we’re lucky, war. If not…a city of corpses and carrion eaters.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Shay disappeared soon after Kesali’s arrival, citing the forgemaster’s strictness as her excuse. Nadya felt her absence more and more as she and Kesali rode in a carriage from the fourth tier railbox stop up to the palace. Kesali was silent the whole time, only answering the questions Nadya dared ask about the situation with Wintercress and their ambassador.

  Thoughts of Shay were soon pushed away as they entered the parlor. Nadya nearly tripped on the ripe tension in the room. Duke Isyanov sat in one of the plush chairs at the head of the room’s table. Tired lines were etched along his hairline, and he cradled his hands in his lap. Opposite him, Marko mirrored the same nervous gesture. Kesali left Nadya standing in the doorway and walked over to the Duke’s son.

  “You made it.”

  Nadya could have cried in relief at her father’s voice. Shadar, representing the Duke’s Guard, no doubt, took his station at the wall.

  “Is it as bad as—”

  The opposite door opened, and her words died in her throat.

  The Councillor entered the room. She wore another dress of deep white, its silken skirt drifting slightly over the carpet. Long sleeves tapered off past the edge of her fingertips. Her hair hung in curls that ended in a long tail down her back, shockingly gold against the white fabric, and copper glimmered at her ears and throat.

  It was not her clothing that cooled off the room. Nor was it the strength of her walk, the noted slight when she sat herself without first bowing to the Duke.

  No, it was the predatory gleam of her blue eyes. The look of a shark in the midst of a school of sunfish.

  She took hold of the glass of water that had been placed in front of her. “Thank you for your hospitality as always, Your Grace.”

  “My thanks to you for coming on such short notice,” the Duke said, raising his own goblet. “I am afraid there is little time for pleasantries. Lives hang upon the thread of what is done here today. I will be frank, milady. Our supply of the compound has run out, and the shipments from Wintercress have not appeared. I would settle this misunderstanding as quickly as possible.”

  “I am afraid that something has come up regarding the newest shipment,” Councillor Aster said, carefully setting her glass down upon the table with the tiniest clink. “An…inconvenience.”

  “Inconvenience?” The Duke leaned forward, goblet forgotten in his hands. “Do tell us how this can be resolved.”

  “It will not be so simple, Your Grace.” Aster met the gaze of every person at the table, as if inviting each of them into the conversation. Nadya managed not to blush furiously at the Councillor’s stare; this woman, polished and deadly, was as slippery as a slaughterfish. She fought with words, with the wet ink of treaties and agreements. Somehow, her soft blue eyes glowed almost venomously, her carefully pleasant face all the more unsettling.

  “There is no more compound coming.”

  No more. Nadya sucked in a breath, but her lungs did not seem to work. How in the Protectress’s name was there no more? She wanted to stand up, to shake the Councillor until her polite smile fell off and she realized what that meant for the people of Storm�
�s Quarry.

  Marko choked on his sip of wine. “What? How is that possible?”

  Nadya appreciated his bluntness. It was an axeblade down the center of these damn formalities. The Duke, however, fixed his son with a pointed look before turning back to the Councillor. Even he could not hide the sudden stiffness of his shoulders, though.

  “My son’s outburst was inappropriate, but surely the feelings behind such words can be understood. Councillor, we rely on that compound. The taint runs deep within our wells.”

  “I understand completely, Your Grace, which makes this so difficult.”

  Difficult? It is not your home that will die of thirst or scouring sickness without that damned compound! Nadya thought, catching herself before making a scene.

  “You see, the compound is exceedingly difficult to produce. Until recently, it was within my country’s resources to do so, and to offer it to our allies free of charge. That, unfortunately, is no longer the case. My great-uncle, High King of Wintercress, has decided that our agreement is no longer in Wintercress’s favor. The expense is hurting us too much to continue.”

  How could a person spew so much poison and not choke? Nadya wondered.

  Despite the color that slowly left the Duke’s face, his voice remained calm and strong, a tower that they could all retreat to in the aftermath of Aster’s words.

  “I see. That is unfortunate news indeed.” Beside the Duke, Marko stared daggers at Aster, his hands gripping the table with white knuckles. His father’s words did little to soothe his demeanor. “I must reiterate our offer to produce the compound ourselves. It will cease the need for Cressian soldiers in Storm’s Quarry and it will remove the burden this kindness has placed upon your people.”

  As well as the yoke you have lain around our necks was implied but unspoken.