She felt as if she knew the way, as if the arrow inside her was turning and pointing home.
* * *
Gavi stood and watched as a small figure left the tents. He followed as she went home, and sighed with grief when she emerged, fully suited for travel. It was true, then. She really planned to leave them all. As she walked across the fields, he shouldered his own bag and followed her.
Chapter 8
Benayeem sat in the garden in the early morning sunlight, checking his arrows. He had fletched them recently, as part of his seeker training. They weren’t bad for a first attempt, but they weren’t anywhere near what he had seen Jabari make. He smoothed the stiff feathers on the end of one arrow and stretched his awareness out around him, listening for the song of his family in a morning ritual that he had begun when they first moved to Azariyah. For so many years he had lived in a panic, hearing strange music and not knowing where it came from. The music had been full of anger in the Worker village, discordant and angry, so that he thought he was insane. Then he had come to Maween and learned that he had a very rare discernment gift. He could detect feelings, intention, and truth through music that not everyone could hear. Now that he understood the threads of music, he could sort them and put them in their places. It soothed him to know where everyone he loved was.
Recently he had begun playing with sending his awareness out farther and farther, finding the familiar music of friends. Today Ibba wasn’t hard to find. He could hear her with his physical ears, singing while she pulled weeds from the garden. Underneath, he could hear her particular music, earthy and fiery, swooping and rising, beautiful in a way that few things were. She had the song of an artist, and he knew that no one really guessed at what the nine-year-old would become.
He found Auntie Teru in the kitchen with Kital. Auntie Teru’s song was calming and warm, though run through with tiny notes of anguish. She had lost her son to a poisonous battle and the hurt never went away. But she was strong, and her song remained warm and steady. She was happy with Ben and his siblings near her. Kital’s song was sunny and happy, lilting music with very little complication. Kital had always been a sunny boy, and Isika had protected him for most of his life to keep him that way.
He reached out farther. Isika was in her room, her song the way it always was—fierce, longing, tinged with sadness. He and Isika both had songs filled with sadness. They had seen a lot, and they both missed their mother so terribly. Ben always thought that Isika’s song was a bit like an anthem. It was purposeful, inspiring. If everyone could hear it, they probably would already have made her queen.
Uncle Dawit was in his workshop. He had the old song of past days. Benayeem could hear songs from the palace. It was harder to isolate the sounds from here, but he knew the palace well. He found Jabari. Gavi must be sleeping, his song too quiet to hear.
He stretched farther and found Aria’s family at their house, but he couldn’t hear Aria and he frowned, the arrows still in his hands. Then he remembered that Aria was at the healing tents. Ben checked for Aria several times a day lately. Deep worry and concern for her caught his stomach at times, froze him in the middle of routine tasks. She couldn’t be so sick that she was lost to them. She couldn’t be. Surely they could learn something from this Karee healer that would help her.
He listened at the edges of the healing tents. The pain and worry there made him flinch as he listened to the unfamiliar songs of patients and healers, but he could not hear his sister.
He frowned, staring out into the morning sky, listening hard. Perhaps she was still sleeping. He listened closer, but there was nothing, nothing that sounded even a little like Aria. Usually her music was so easy to hear, as familiar to him as Isika’s or his own, even though it was mixed these days. He stood, alarmed now, staring in the direction of the healing tents. Nothing.
He bolted into the house, where the smell of spice tea filled the air and Auntie was making tea-boiled eggs for breakfast. Isika was there now, her face sleepy. She caught sight of the look on his.
“What is it?” she asked.
Auntie Teru was staring at him as well, and Ben realized he probably looked crazy, standing there with a hand full of arrows, body tense. He tried to relax. He shouldn’t alarm Auntie or Isika before he really knew something was wrong.
He tried to clear his face of worry. “It’s probably nothing,” he murmured. “Just music that is louder than normal,” he said.
The family stared back at him. Auntie raised one eyebrow, and he heard her music spike and fall, spike and fall, as she brought herself back from panic. He felt horrible.
“Sorry, Auntie,” he said, going to give her a hug. “I didn’t mean to alarm you.”
“You are the oddest boy,” Isika said, pulling an orange from the bowl on the table and peeling it. Ben shrugged, thankful that he wasn’t going to be questioned further, hoping that his vagueness would be enough to satisfy their curiosity. And it was, perhaps because he usually didn’t have much to hide. Everyone’s music calmed and settled into a familiar rhythm in song beginning to blend together into harmony as family rhythms often did.
Ben ate quickly, trying to calm himself as well as he had calmed them. As soon as he was finished and had washed his plate in the washing basins, he put his boots on and ran out the door, calling goodbye, making the excuse that he needed to get to his training early. He headed straight for the healing tents.
When he arrived, Aria was nowhere to found. The healers told him that her parents had come and taken her home. He ran to their house then, taking a short cut over a grassy field near the horse barns. Aria’s family raised animals and took care of sick ones. Ben had often thought that their willingness to care for Aria came from their natural compassion. Their music was so soothing and beautiful that he felt himself lulled into it as he ran toward the door. Aria’s music was not mixed into theirs, despite what the healers had told him.
He took a few deep breaths while he stood on the doorstep and listened intently. There was no concern woven into their music. They had no idea that Aria was gone. He knocked.
When the door swung open, Aria’s foster father, Tal, stood before him. Uncle Tal was wide in the shoulders and impossibly tall, with a gentle soul and soft music. Elba came to join him in the doorway, her face wreathed in smiles as she spotted Ben. He knew from their music that the two of them bore a deep love and ongoing worry for Aria, but they had kept their strong peace despite the stormy ache of her music.
“I came to find Aria,” he told them.
Elba looked surprised. “She is at the healing tents,” she said. “Didn’t you know that?”
Ben shifted from foot to foot, looking up at the sign above the door that proclaimed peace for all who entered. He hated the way people’s music changed as they grew sad or worried, and he hated to be the one who caused it. But he knew his gift also came with a desire to keep the peace at the cost of truth, a desire to keep the music good and sweet and whole, not afraid or scary or mad. He always fought this tendency. He looked back at the two of them standing there, questions on their faces.
“She is not at the healing tents,” he said, “and I cannot hear her music anywhere.”
They didn’t get worried as fast as he had, and Benayeem thought that perhaps this was because they didn’t trust his gift as much as he did. They didn’t realize how far his reach was, that he could have found her anywhere in the city of Azariyah. They weren’t afraid the way Ben was, with his palms clammy, his heart racing. At first they thought she was somewhere close by, that perhaps she had just needed to get away. But he knew she was already gone, so he left them as they searched for her. It was time to tell Isika. She would believe him.
She was with Olumi when he found her, in the library going over Karee texts as Isika prepared to leave.
Ben heard them arguing even as he approached the room.
“It’s important, Uncle,” Isika said, standing with a stack of books in her arms. “It’s more important to find
a cure for Aria than it is to keep a few books safe. We need to take them on the journey.”
Olumi was shaking with barely suppressed anger.
“And what would happen if we lose the books that we have?” he said. “We can never get them back.”
“Olumi,” Isika began, but then she caught sight of Ben in the doorway. Something on his face made her pause, because she put the books down on a nearby table and moved toward him.
“I can’t find Aria anywhere,” Ben told her. She stared back at him. “Isika, I can’t find Aria anywhere,” he said, enunciating more clearly to make sure she understood what he was saying.
Her eyes widened. “How far can you hear?” she asked.
“The farthest fields of Azariyah,” Ben said. “She is nowhere within the bounds of the city or the greater areas surrounding the city.”
Isika flinched, shaken. “Sorry, Olumi,” she said and turned to leave the room. Ben followed swiftly after. He toppled into her as she ran down the hallway and stopped short. He realized that what had stopped her so suddenly was running smack into Jabari, who was on his way to the library. Ben rubbed at his forehead, which had collided with the back of Isika’s head.
Ben listened and was surprised by the fearful music coming from Jabari. He must have heard about Aria already. But then Jabari spoke.
“Gavi is gone,” he said. “I can’t find him anywhere, and I’ve been searching all day.
“Aria is gone, too,” Isika told Jabari. Their eyes were locked on each other.
There were bits of song that Benayeem heard from each of them recently that had nothing to do with fear or anger. Each of them had a song that only appeared when the other was near. It made Ben feel like he was eavesdropping and he tried not to listen, but it was hard when they were locked in a staring contest. He moved to intervene.
“So are they together?” he asked. “What do we do?”
Isika looked at Ben then, breaking her gaze away from Jabari. “Why would Gavi have let her escape?”
Jabari bristled at this, standing taller and looking down at both of them.
“If you think Gavi would do that, you don’t know him at all,” he said.
Ben could hear Isika’s anger beginning to simmer. He sighed.
“None of us know what has happened,” he said. “Isika, can you send Keethior to find Aria? Do you think he could do that?”
Isika stared at him. Without a word she turned and walked away. Ben and Jabari shared a glance, then followed. Lately, when Isika was concerned, Ben had noticed she grew imperious. He thought of it as her queen face.
When they caught up with her, she was standing on the steps in front of the palace, her queen face very certainly in place. Ben heard a ripple in her music as she called to the ancient bird who was sworn to serve her. After a few moments, he heard the far-off song of the Othra. Othra song was warm, tender, and invigorating all at once. In the song was the thread of oddness that was Keethior, different from any of the other ancient birds. Despite his worries, Ben smiled.
Keethior came in a rush of wings and feathers and alighted with a cheerful amount of drama onto the space in front of Isika. He was huge. His head reached above Isika’s waist.
“You called?” he asked out loud so all of them could hear.
Isika sighed and dropped her head. “Yes, Keethior, I called.”
“What do you need, whisperer?” the bird asked, cocking his head to one side.
“Aria is gone,” Isika said. “Will you please find her? We need you to bring her home.”
The bird departed in another rush of wind and feathers and the three of them stood on the steps. Ben felt powerless and empty, wondering if they would be fast enough to stop the danger that aimed itself at Aria.
Chapter 9
The days of Aria’s journey were long. For the first few days, she walked through fields, keeping to the edges, cloaking herself as she walked in the direction she knew she needed to go. She had stopped wrestling with herself over why she was walking in this direction, how she knew exactly which way to go. She only knew, and it was enough.
She had practiced hiding herself for a while, after she realized she could feel Isika wherever Isika was, and that possibly people could do the same with her. She wanted to disappear. She had wanted to disappear for a long time.
She walked every day until she couldn’t go farther, ate a bit of the nut-rich bread she had taken, then rolled up in her blanket and slept. The fields grew farther apart. She hid from farmers, and finally she was in the scrubby grasslands with only a few grazing goats. On the fourth day, when she reached the beginning of the long desert, she had grown too tired for cloaking, so she let the magic go, feeling herself exposed. She hoped she was far enough away that no one would find her.
The desert. It stretched on every side, endless sand that seemed to undulate in the distance like an old parchment of paper, golden white bronze in the setting sun. She walked in the early mornings and the late afternoons. Sometimes she walked at night.
She ran out of bread and began to shoot small lizards with her bow, cooking them over a fire during the cold night. She roasted desert plants if she couldn’t spot a lizard, and ate them slowly, because there was never enough and she was hungry. Sometimes in the morning she would find more food near the fire, food that hadn’t been there the night before. She wondered at this, but concluded that whatever was calling her was also looking after her.
She found she needed to use all her seeker training to remember which plants were edible, how to travel in the cool of day. Or how to keep warm at night when she didn’t have enough blankets, hiding behind a bluff, or her pack, to stop the wind. Finding water was one of her biggest problems, but it was there when she needed it most, and this, like everything else, she didn’t question.
Something that troubled her was the poison of the arrow, which grew until she could no longer tell the difference between the thoughts the arrow sent her and her own thoughts. She grew angrier, fiercer. She wasn’t sure that she remembered the Aria who had existed before the arrow. Sometimes she missed her former self, but she comforted herself, knowing she was going where she belonged. In Maween they couldn’t heal her; neither did they want her.
She had scratched seven days of walking into the leather of her travel bag when the bird came. She knew him. She tried to ignore him at first, but he refused to be ignored, flying in and out of her vision, sending her calm thoughts that battled with the arrow and threatened to bring her back to herself. He tried to speak to her. She ignored him. He flew circles around her, twittering. Finally she turned to glare at him with hands on her hips.
“I know whose you are,” she said “so don’t even bother trying to convince me that you’re here for my good. You’re her spy.”
“What are you doing, Aria, daughter of Amani? Where are you going?”
“How is that any of your business, bird?”
“Everything in Maween is my business, daughter, and if you weren’t poisoned, you would remember that.”
“We aren’t in Maween,” she snorted. “So you can go home now.”
He landed at her feet and she frowned down at him. He opened his wings and flapped them back and forth slowly, dazzling her with the red lights within his feathers.
“You are a daughter of Maween, beloved Aria. You are Amani’s daughter, Azariyah’s granddaughter, daughter of the ancient earth. Where are you going?”
Aria scowled, then walked around him and marched on. He followed, half hopping, half flying.
“I don’t have to tell you where I’m going,” she spat, “and as for being beloved and a daughter, how would you know any of that? You are nothing but a bird, a slave to the sister who runs the land you speak of. She cares nothing for me.”
He gave a low cry and flew away, and Aria told herself she was glad.
That night, there was a dead desert hare at her camping spot when she came back from looking for water. Aria knew the animal came from Keethior, but she
was hungry and she hadn’t had anything besides lizard in days. She took the hare and dressed it. That night she made a stew in her cooking pot, spicing it with the desert plants and herbs that Abbas had shown them on their last journey.
The taste made her cry as she sat beside the fire.
The bird flew to a nearby dune as the tears ran down her cheeks. He opened and closed his wings in the light of the fire, glittering like red jewels. Hope wafted to her from his wings, and it made her angry because she was gone, she had left. There was no return for her, and how dare he come near with his glimmering hope? She glared at him and sent him dark thoughts.
“Where are you going, daughter?” he asked.
She answered him then, to hurt him and her sister through him.
“I am going to my father, bird. He has called me and I will answer him, unlike my sister, who chooses to ignore the love that he would offer.”
“Aria, no,” the bird said with deep sorrow, and the sound of his voice cut through Aria’s heart and the poison of the arrow.
For one, brief moment she felt horror at what she had chosen to do—to leave Maween and go to the Desert King, enemy of her people. Then, like a shutter, the poison of the arrow closed over her mind and she felt glee at the sorrow she had caused the bird. Perhaps he could take a bit of her own. She wanted him to feel the despair she had felt for so long.
“Daughter, don’t do this,” the bird said. “He poisoned you. This arrow that is slowly killing you, turning you against everyone you love, comes from him. It is his poison. Don’t go to him.”
Aria couldn’t think of what to say in response, so she turned her back on him. That night she had a full belly. She wrapped herself in her blanket and lay behind a dune to sleep. She tried to ignore the bird as he sang a mournful song. But that night she dreamed of Isika calling her, saying “Do not leave, sister. Do not leave. Stay with us. Please stay with us.”
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