Freedom s Sisters

by Naomi Kritzer

  I took a deep breath.

  “I am the one who was sent to free the rivers,” I said out loud. “I cannot fail.”

  I braced my feet against the ribs under the canvas and braced my body against the wind as I rose slowly to my feet. The slightest shift could knock me from my perch; I needed to do this quickly. I reached up, and realized as I tipped my head back that the djinni were reaching for me, straining to touch me from where they were held by their orders. I could touch all four. “Return,” I said, and opened the gate in my heart.

  I felt a rush of sudden heat like a blast of hot wind, and I threw myself down to the roof of the palanquin, grabbing the ribs under the canvas with both hands. Within, I could see the four djinni passing into a narrow tunnel, but it seemed to be closing on me even as I struggled to hold it open. I was being crushed, pressed, smothered. I thought I heard the djinni talking, then realized it was Xanthe’s voice shouting. The tunnel was still there, a whirl of fire in the darkness around me, but everything else was going away; I couldn’t breathe.

  Then it was gone, and I could breathe again. “Lauria!” someone was shouting. Their voice was muffled. “Do we need to cut a hole in the roof or can you crawl back down here?”

  I was sprawled on the roof of the palanquin. The voice was coming from inside.

  “I’m all right,” I said. My voice was a croak, but everyone inside fell silent, so I said it again. “I’m all right. I think I can get back inside.”

  “If you swear you won’t free it, I’ll send an aeriko to carry you in,” Zivar said.

  “I won’t free your aeriko,” I said. Not right now, anyway. It was a relief not to have to try to climb down and crawl back inside. My whole body felt bruised. I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength in my hands to hold on.

  The djinn was over me now. I had the sense of a woman looking solemnly into my face. I swallowed hard, and let go of the palanquin’s roof. The djinn gathered me up as if I were a cat, supporting me gently as it lifted me off the roof. “Don’t fear,” it whispered. “You will not fall.”

  It slid me over the edge and for a moment, I hung in the air, nothing below me. I took a quick look down since I didn’t have to worry about freezing up and falling. The ground was a long way down. Palanquins fly high, of course, but I could swear we were as high as a mountaintop with nothing—nothing—below us except possibly some birds. Then we went through the doorway, and the djinn laid me down on the cushions, and I could breathe again.

  “Well,” Zivar said, embarrassed. “That could have been planned better.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Xanthe glared at me. “She means that she didn’t give precise enough instructions to the aeriko that was supposed to pick up the other palanquin and take it safely to the ground. When you freed the aerika that were carrying it, they dropped it onto you. Zivar’s aerika didn’t pick it up because it was resting on our roof—its instruction was to not let it fall and, well, it wasn’t falling, was it? She had to bring it back, give it a new instruction, and send it back up there to lift the palanquin off you. You could have died!”

  Zivar gave me a mute, apologetic shrug.

  “Well.” I felt the tender spots on my face, my breasts, my arms and legs. “I don’t think anything’s broken.”

  Zivar still looked embarrassed. “I’m really sorry.”

  “This sort of thing happens when you’re working with djinni,” I said. “Aerika, I mean. I could tell you some stories from when I was still working for Kyros…” I shrugged again. “Did the other palanquin…”

  “It’s safely on the ground,” Xanthe said.

  “My aerika are watching to see if they have any other spies to send after us, but I don’t think they do,” Zivar said. “I think we’ve shaken pursuit. For now.”

  “Aerika aren’t supposed to be very good at finding people,” Xanthe said.

  “No,” I said. I had recovered enough to sit up, arrange myself on the pillows, cross my legs. “They’re not. But if they’re determined enough—if they send out enough—they’ll find us. They’ll find me. It’s just a matter of time.”

  We traveled through the day and into the night without stopping. “Aerika don’t get tired,” Zivar said when Xanthe suggested that we put down for the night. She had a chamber pot for us to pee in, though no screen to hide behind. It was emptied by a djinn. When Xanthe hesitated to use the pot, Zivar offered to have a djinn carry her down to the ground, and then back up when she was done. She blanched, hesitated a bit longer, and finally used it. But she refused tea the next time Zivar offered it.

  Zivar had a kettle and—terrifyingly—a tiny stove to heat water. Her servants, fortunately, had packed a generous hamper full of food before she left. I dug out some thin bread, slightly stale, and a covered bowl of hummus, along with a sack of plums. I was ravenously hungry; I tried to remember my last proper meal, and I was pretty sure it was lost in the mists of the drugs they’d given me. This wasn’t exactly a proper meal, either, but we had a great deal of time and no shortage of food, so I ate bread and hummus until I was sick of both, then turned to plums, then to cheese.

  “Where are we going?” Xanthe asked.

  “North,” Zivar said. “To the place where there’s no night.”

  Xanthe bit her lip and looked at me. She wanted to talk to me privately. When I didn’t say anything, she asked, “How far is that?”

  “A couple of days…I don’t really know. When we stop seeing night, we’ll know we’re there, won’t we?”

  I wanted to pace, as the day wore on, but within the palanquin I really couldn’t. It was the size of a small room; there was room for all three of us to stretch out, side by side, but barely. The rest of the space was taken up by the hamper of food, all the gear we’d stolen from the guardswomen in the other palanquin, and the miscellaneous junk Zivar had brought along. Even just reaching for food from the hamper, I kept getting jabbed by the rosebush.

  When I’d felt like this, traveling with Tamar, I’d gotten off my horse to run alongside for a while but that wasn’t really an option here. I tried to stifle the itch that rose up inside me, without success. I fidgeted, instead—tapping my feet against the floor. If my mother were here, she would tell me not to fidget. That started me worrying about my mother. Was she alive or dead? Free or captured? Had Kyros spared searchers to find her, knowing her potential as a hostage? The worries circled through my thoughts like a noisy parade: alive or dead? Free or captured? Alive or dead? Free or captured?

  It was a relief when Xanthe interrupted. “Tell me about my mother’s crime. What do you know about what she did? Do you know that she was innocent, or were you just saying that to try to persuade me?”

  If even Zhanna isn’t sure, I don’t think I know either. I evaded. “Janiya is no common thief.”

  “What did she steal?” Zivar asked. “Or what was she accused of stealing?”

  Xanthe was waiting for my answer. “A spell-chain,” I said. “An important spell-chain. The one that binds the Syr Darya.”

  “That was your mother?” Zivar said, turning to Xanthe.

  “Did you know of this at the time?” I asked.

  “When was this? A bit over ten years ago?”

  “Thirteen years,” Xanthe said.

  “What do you know of it?” I asked.

  “I was always a good listener—good at hearing things I wasn’t supposed to hear. Mila—the Weaver I apprenticed with—was entangled, that spring, in some sort of conspiracy.” Zivar gave me a brief nod, as if to acknowledge the truth she knew I knew: that Mila had been her owner, and she had been a slave who had learned sorcery by spying on her mistress. “I overheard rumors about a theft of something extraordinarily powerful.”

  “Was Mila involved?” I asked.

  “I think so, yes. I think that’s why she was killed.”

  “Killed?” I said. “I thought it was an accident. Someone misusing a spell-chain out of arrogance, or stupidity.”

&n
bsp; “Yes, that’s what they wanted everyone to think,” Zivar said. “That’s what I assumed for years, but then we had that little chat, you and I, and you said that a certain Greek officer would only use a spell-chain that way if he were ordered to do so by the Sisterhood, and if they could give him certain guarantees of safety. I lay awake for weeks, thinking that over. And yes. I think that is what happened to Mila. They knew about the conspiracy and took care of it.”

  “If there was a conspiracy, why was my mother blamed?” Xanthe asked, softly.

  Zivar looked over at her: at her earrings, her tattoo, the sword that rested by her feet while we traveled. “Tell me about your mother,” she said.

  “I don’t remember her all that well,” Xanthe said. “She raised me until I was six. Then one day she was arrested. Accused of theft of a spell-chain. An important spell-chain. For a few weeks, everyone thought she would be executed. Instead she was stripped of her rank and sold into slavery. I was raised by one of her friends, Photine, until she died from a sickness when I was twelve. After that, I joined the Sisterhood Guard myself.” Xanthe cleared her throat. “You say some conspiracy was to blame. Surely they knew that. If this is true, then why—my mother—why?” Her voice went suddenly very thin.

  Zivar gave her a long, level look. “There are several possibilities, of course. One is that the magias disagreed.” She turned her palms up. “Surely there are loyalties, even now.”

  “My loyalty is always to the serpent,” Xanthe said. “To whoever holds it.”

  Yet you freed me when the magia wanted me dead. I decided not to point that out.

  “Anyway, it’s awkward to admit a mistake,” Zivar said. “It shakes the illusion that the magias operate as one. Another possibility is that they needed someone to blame publicly, having taken care of the erring sorceresses privately. Your mother was convenient. She might have angered the wrong person. Finally, there is the possibility that your mother was involved. I only know that Mila was involved, not who else might have been; I see no reason to assume it was only Weavers.”

  Watching Xanthe, I saw her relax slightly, at that possibility. My mother really was a criminal. All is still right with the world. Zivar saw it, too, and laughed, very faintly, under her breath.

  “Make no mistake, Xanthe,” she said. “These are not nice people. Whether your mother was guilty or innocent would have been irrelevant. She was not a Weaver; therefore, she was expendable. She had sworn her life to the service of the Weavers; therefore, if the Weavers needed for her to take blame for a crime she did not commit, in their eyes it was her duty and her privilege to submit to their punishment. They probably felt that they were being very kind and merciful, not having her executed.”

  Xanthe drew the curtain aside to stare outside. I studied her face; Zivar laughed softly to herself. Tension still coursed through Xanthe’s body. Her face was rigid, impossible for me to read.

  “One of the magias was removed shortly afterward,” Zivar said. “Sometimes one will get unmanageable, and when that happens, the other three have her confined. There are loyalties among the guards—surely you do know of this, Xanthe. Perhaps your mother’s loyalty was to the magia who was removed. Perhaps that’s why she was punished so harshly.”

  Xanthe swallowed hard. “Yes,” she said, very softly. “I believe you may be right.”

  If Xanthe freed me on Sophia’s orders, or Phile’s, was Zivar part of the plan? Surely not. Xanthe glanced back at me, her nervous eyes flickering quickly over my face. Her expression was still unreadable. It took me a whole summer to turn against the Greeks. Surely Xanthe is hiding something.

  I did turn against them in the end. And they took Xanthe’s mother from her. But surely, right now, she’s still hiding her real loyalties. She won’t even meet my eyes, and that’s not just shyness. Xanthe isn’t shy. I tried to remember whether she’d ever looked at me straight on before our escape, and couldn’t. Before my illness, she’d spent as little time in my company as she could manage. I remembered her looking me full in the face when I was still too drugged to see straight. But other than that, it was hard to say whether she’d ever met my gaze.

  Night fell. Zivar stretched out and went to sleep; I thought Xanthe lay awake for a while, then she fell asleep, too. I lay awake, thinking about the djinni that even now were no doubt searching for me, thinking about the battles that raged on the steppe. I could hear my heart beating in my ears, racing like an out-of-control horse. My whole body pulsed with energy, but I had nowhere to go and nothing to do with it.

  Rivers, part of my mind whispered. Or maybe djinni? Was I hearing djinni, speaking beyond that gate in my heart? Rivers.

  I started listening for the sound of trickling water, then pulled back. If I stayed away from the borderland, Kyros would not be able to find me; if Kyros could not find me, he could not threaten my mother, even if he had her. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to talk to Tamar, either. Doesn’t matter. I need to stay away.

  I lay awake in the dark for hours, dropped into a light doze for a bit, then woke again, still in darkness. Tamar said that I could return to the Alashi, I remembered, but surely they’ve sent watchers there. If I go to the Alashi they’ll find me. But is there anywhere I can go where I can truly hide? Is there anything I can do to help the Alashi, before the Greeks wipe them out?

  The Greeks were using djinni against the Alashi. If I joined the Alashi on the steppe, I could free the djinni that were being used on the battlefield. Well, some of them, anyway. I thought about what I’d seen in the vision of the battle. It wouldn’t change anything. It would help, but it wouldn’t make a real difference.

  But if I freed the djinni that bind the river…

  Well, that might make a difference. The floodwaters would sweep away most of the outposts along the frontier. That would be a potent distraction. Not to mention that everyone said that the rivers’ return would free the Danibeki slaves. This would be only one of the two rivers, but still, it was hard to imagine that anyone, Greek or Danibeki, would look at the waters crashing down from the mountains and not see the beginning of the defeat of the Sisterhood of Weavers.

  The palanquin was still headed north, and even with my hours of lying awake I thought the night seemed short. We ate the last of the food for breakfast, and to my relief, Zivar decided to stop somewhere to buy more. She selected a tiny cluster of houses from the air: “There.” The descent made me feel a bit ill, and when we stopped with a gentle bump in the center of the village, it felt like we were still moving; I stood up to step out and immediately stumbled.

  Everyone in the village had run out of their houses to stare at us, but we quickly realized they didn’t speak Greek. Zivar tried some other languages—Persian, I thought, then something else—with no better luck. So she dragged out the empty hamper, gestured to it and pantomimed eating something. Then she opened her purse to show them the coins inside, then gestured again to the hamper.

  That worked—mostly. They brought cheese and thick loaves of bread, but Zivar had to stop them from putting in a live chicken. “It has to be cooked. READY TO EAT,” she said, shouting as if that would make her words easier to understand. “No chickens! No sheep, either!”

  The villagers were odd looking. Their skin was much paler than normal. I’d seen someone that pale—who wasn’t sick—once before, when the traders had come to the Alashi sisterhood during the summer. One had had pale skin, blue eyes, and yellow hair. I thought some of the villagers here had blue eyes; I saw no yellow hair, but some of them had hair the color of dry sand. They were polite and helpful, though, despite the fact that they couldn’t speak our language.

  Xanthe pulled me aside. “Where are we going?”

  “Zivar said something about the land with no night,” I said. “It’s north of here…somewhere…”

  Xanthe shook her head impatiently. “That’s not where I want to go.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  Xanthe turned away from me, looking south, th
e way we’d come. “You can free djinni. So you could free the river, if you went to where the Sisterhood of Weavers dammed it.”

  “Yes,” I said, and eyed Xanthe, who was still looking south.

  “That would hurt the Weavers, wouldn’t it?”

  “Hurt them? I don’t know. It would make them angry.”

  “Furiously angry.” Xanthe was still looking south. Her eyes widened slightly at the thought.

  “Do you want to hurt them?” I asked. “Make them angry?”

  “Yes,” Xanthe whispered. “They took my mother.”

  She was still staring south. Why? I wondered, but the curiosity about her motives was drowned out by my rising excitement—this could be possible, really possible, I could do this… “I’ll try to persuade Zivar,” I said.

  The hamper full, the villagers counting their money, one of the men gestured for us to follow him, making eat, eat gestures. Zivar glanced at us, then shrugged and followed. He led us into the largest of the houses, where we took seats around a table. Villagers crowded in to watch us eat and the man who’d invited us brought out a roast leg of mutton, with roast carrots and tiny fresh-shelled peas. The mutton was tough, but the vegetables were welcome; I thought I could have made a meal of carrots and peas. They filled our glasses with something I initially took for cider, but it was bitter instead of sour. After the shock of the first sip, I decided it was drinkable. Better than kumiss, at least.

  When we returned to the palanquin, I waited until the djinn had lifted us high into the air, then said, “Do you think there’s any chance they’ll tell the Sisterhood where we are?”

  “How?” Zivar asked. “They’re months of travel from Penelopeia. They don’t even speak a civilized language.”

  “Someone there might have a spell-chain,” I said. “I bet the Weavers told everyone with a spell-chain to watch for us. And just because we didn’t see anyone there who spoke Greek doesn’t mean no one there does.”