My stomach lurched and I fought down nausea. If I threw up, I wouldn’t be able to spit it out. I would choke to death. Finally, my stomach settled, but fear still hummed in my ears. I forced myself to breathe deeply, to tense and relax my body. Fear was useless to me now, but I was a shaman. I had one door still open to me—I could go to the borderland. Perhaps I would find Zhanna there. It was only just dawn, and she might still be sleeping. I could tell her what had happened, and what we knew. And not to expect us to come back.
I closed my eyes and took another deep breath. I focused my thoughts on my breath, and on the drip-drip-drip of water I could hear somewhere far away. After a time, I felt my mind float free.
Zhanna, I called in the grayness. Jaran.
Silence.
It was day. They were probably awake.
I could come back tonight. Well, unless I was dead.
I decided I might as well stay in the borderland as long as I could. It wasn’t as if I had anything useful to do back in my body.
I had spent a long time in the borderland once before, when I had tried to keep Lauria from binding a djinn. Day or night, I saw the borderland as a misty twilight unless I wanted it to look like something else. Djinni were flickers in the mist. I bowed when I saw them.
Zhanna and Jaran were both awake, but could I find anyone else? When Andromeda said, “Xanthe lies,” maybe she meant that Lauria wasn’t dead. Suddenly hopeful, I looked for my tie to her, but it was still gone. I closed my eyes and rested my face against my hands. I would see her again. For now, I needed to look elsewhere.
I focused on the web of threads that tied me to people. Kyros found me because we were bound together by the rape, and I could see the thread to Kyros, though it was slack—he was awake.
Unfortunately, a depressing number of threads bound me to people like Kyros. There were ties to the Alashi sisterhood, as well—the women I had served with last summer. But I saw no threads I could use to let me pull someone into the borderland with me. Either they were awake, like Zhanna and Jaran, or they weren’t bound to me strongly enough.
Then I realized that one thread was much stronger than the others—it pulsed with light. It was Alibek, I realized, and I smiled a little to myself as I thought about the kiss we’d shared. Well. Why not?
Alibek? Can you hear me?
And he was there—with me, in the borderland. He looked confused, and I quickly made it look like an Alashi yurt. “Am I dreaming?” he asked. “Or did they come and kill me, and we’re dead?”
“You’re dreaming,” I said. “This is the borderland. I brought you here. Since they’re probably going to kill us in a few hours, I thought we might as well keep each other company here. So we can talk.”
Alibek looked out. “I see the steppe,” he said.
“I can make it into something else, if you’d like. Any place I’ve seen.”
“I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be,” Alibek said.
“Me either.” I stepped outside and stretched. The wind rippled across the grass. The sky was cloudless blue. A perfect day.
“Can you talk to Zhanna? Tell her what happened?”
I shook my head. “I tried. It’s too late in the morning. Everyone’s awake.”
“Surely there’s something we can do.”
“Something useful, you mean?” I shook my head. “Bringing you here was the best I could come up with.”
He let out his breath in a silent laugh and opened his mouth to say something mocking. But then he fell silent for a moment, and said, “I am honored.” He brushed my hand with his, then let it fall to his side. “I assume it’s my company you wanted, and not…”
I laughed a little, nervously.
“You would be happier with someone else, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Lauria. For, you know.” He clasped my hand again. “That kind of companionship.” His grip went a little tighter. I jerked my hand away.
“Look, Alibek. I know you hated her, so just leave it, please. She was my blood sister, and I wasn’t even there by her side when she died.” And she’d sworn that she’d come back to me. “She was never that kind of friend, she was my sister. And I can’t take defending her from you. Not right now.”
“Tell me something,” Alibek said. “Why did you follow her? You could have stayed with the Alashi. Was it because she saved you from the bandits? Because you were blood sisters?”
“No.” I rubbed my palm. “I followed her because I loved her, and she loved me.” I stared at the ground for a moment. It had started to drift to grayness, but I narrowed my eyes and it re-formed itself into cracked earth and dry grass. “Do you at least believe now that she spoke the truth when she said that she had turned away from Kyros?”
“I never doubted it,” Alibek said. “The Lauria I knew—Kyros’s perfect servant—never would have come back to defend you. But she is still the one who took me back to slavery. Surely there are people that you will never forgive.”
“Kyros,” I said. “Though, you know, that gives him power over me. We’re bound together. He can find me in the borderland.” Alibek glanced around. “I don’t think he’s coming right now,” I said.
“Kyros was never your owner, was he?”
“No. Kyros was…” I tipped back my head to look up at the sky for a moment. “Kyros was my first.”
“Ah,” Alibek said, and nodded. “Yes. He was my ‘first’ too, of course.”
“I was ten,” I said.
“That’s very young,” Alibek said. “I was eleven.”
“If the djinni could give me a knife that would sever the tie between Kyros and me, I would use it in a heartbeat,” I said.
“But if they said that to break that tie, you had to forgive him—what then?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“But you would have me forgive Lauria?”
I turned away. “Kyros, to me, is only a rapist. Lauria is far more than that.”
Alibek held out a fistful of grass. After a moment, it turned into a wreath of flowers, like the wreaths Prax and the other mine slaves made after their escape. “Tamar,” he said. “Show me Lauria through your eyes. Help me to see the person you love.”
Well, this was the borderland. I could make that happen. I closed my eyes for a moment and made the tents and the steppe fade away.
The first time I saw her was in Sophos’s harem. The room pieced itself together—the carpets, the scent of perfume, the low strum of the dombra. The door opened, and Boradai brought Lauria in. She was the oldest pretty virgin I’d ever seen. Her eyes flicked around the room, and her smile was nervous.
“You didn’t love her then,” Alibek said. He sat beside me on the carpet, barefoot, his ankles crossed. I saw him as he had been in Kyros’s harem: pretty, smooth-skinned. Kyros’s little bird.
“No.” I resented her. She was so much older than me. All those years working in the stables. And she wasn’t afraid. I envied her fearlessness even though it made no sense.
I cupped my hands and closed my eyes, trying to gather together everything I saw. When I opened my eyes, Lauria looked like a giant. Enormously tall, with a booming laugh, she walked like a Greek even though she was one of us. Below, I was no longer Tamar, but a snake, coiling at her feet, tasting bitterness.
“What changed?” Alibek asked.
A flicker, and we stood outside in the courtyard—Lauria clutching her torn shift, covered in her own blood. She crept into the bathhouse and scrubbed herself raw in the cold water.
Lauria was small now, like me. And I was no longer a snake: I was a woman, but covered in blood as well. Lauria’s blood, because I knew that this was at least partly my fault.
“Your fault?” Alibek asked.
I took a deep breath. I had never admitted this to Lauria. “When Sophos sent for her, he called me in first, briefly, and asked me how nervous Lauria was.” The courtyard vanished, and Alibek saw me speaking to S
ophos. This time, I saw myself as a mouse, shrinking back from a cat. “Not nervous,” I said. “Hardly nervous at all.” I hadn’t wanted to give Sophos the pleasure of her fear. But I’d also known that Sophos was always more brutal when he thought a slave needed to be taught a lesson.
“And he did teach her a lesson,” Alibek murmured. “Do you really think it would have made a difference if you’d told him she was terrified? He had eyes. She was only able to infiltrate the Alashi because he raped her.”
“That’s also why she turned against them,” I said.
“Yeah, that was the risk they took. But Sophos must have known the first Lauria you saw could never pass as anything but a spy. But later…”
The night she escaped, she covered me with her shawl before she slipped out. That’s what woke me. I followed her, and saw she had the means to escape. She had somehow arranged for food and water, even a pair of boots. The hunger to escape had risen in me like a flood.
What was Lauria, in my eyes, at that moment? She was a horse. An ox. A palanquin. A means to an end—I would have said anything at all to make her take me along.
“I told her if she didn’t take me along, I’d raise the alarm,” I said. “I didn’t know that Sophos had planned the escape. He had to find a way to get her out. If I’d raised the alarm, it wouldn’t have mattered. But the next time…”
The bandit’s tent formed around us, rank and dark. I had ached from the way he had used me. I wished for death, and when it didn’t come, I tried to take my mind somewhere else, and half succeeded. Then I heard a horse screaming, and then the rough sound of tearing fabric, then Lauria’s voice. “We have to hurry. Can you run?” She cut the ropes that bound my hands.
I gathered in the truth of what I saw, to show Alibek. To me at that moment, Lauria was Arachne freeing Prometheus from his chains on the mountainside. I had despaired, but she had restored me. So I offered her the only thing I had—my blood, my loyalty, myself as her sister. We cut our hands on the bandit’s sword and swore.
My hands had clenched. I let go, and Lauria faded into mist. “We walked,” I said. “We reached the Alashi. Joined the sisterhood.”
“And passed the tests, of course,” Alibek said.
“Yeah. We should compare sometime. I’d love to know how different yours were.”
Alibek snickered at that, and we fell silent, neither of us wanting to say that we’d probably be executed side by side for banditry the minute Kyros figured out who we were. If Lauria were still alive, he’d have used us as hostages, but with her dead…well, it was possible he’d have us tortured first, then executed.
I took a deep breath and made the steppe again. I wanted to show him one more thing.
The night after Lauria was exiled, we made camp alone on the steppe. “I’m not going back to Kyros,” Lauria said quietly, looking at the campfire. “I’d rather die. But there were five other slaves I took back. They’re all still slaves. I want to find them, and free them. And take them to the steppe.”
I studied her face in the dancing flames, trying to let Alibek see her as I did. She was no goddess now. I knew her secrets and her hidden darkness. But in her face, I also saw my own, and when she looked at me, I knew she saw herself reflected in my eyes. We hadn’t grown up together but she really was my sister. She was my family.
If I had to choose between Lauria and the Alashi, I would choose Lauria.
My sight blurred. I let her image fade away.
Alibek was silent for a moment, then sighed, and stretched, and lay back in the grass to look up at the sky. “She spent years serving Kyros. Years. It wasn’t until she met you that she realized that was wrong.”
“It was the only life she knew,” I said. “When she met me—well, I opened a door. But Lauria stepped through. She opened her heart. Changed. And tried to atone.”
“Do you remember when you went through the initiation as Lauria,” Alibek said. “When I turned my back on you?”
“Of course I remember that,” I said.
“If you can summon up that night, the way you summoned up your other memories—I’d like to do that bit again.”
The steppe darkened. Excited sisters crowded around the bonfire. I blinked back more tears when I saw Janiya and Zhanna. Zhanna and the priestess held torches high and I passed under the archway. They tossed the torches into the fire, then clasped my hands and kissed me.
I made my way through the crowd until I came to Alibek. He faced me as he had that night. A flare from the fire lit his face. I could see him hesitate, and for a moment I thought he would turn away from me again. But then he smiled into my eyes, laced his fingers through mine, and kissed my forehead. His lips felt warm and real against my skin—a true touch, not an echo.
I felt a ripple of wind that I realized, a moment later, had not come from my own thoughts.
Alibek looked behind me, and his grip on my hands went tight. “I can see her,” he said. “She’s standing right behind you. Did you put her there?”
I shook my head and turned, letting the steppe dissolve to grayness around us. In the twilight of the borderland, a djinn wavered in the air before us. I bowed. “It’s a djinn,” I said.
“It’s not a djinn. It’s Lauria,” Alibek said.
I squinted my eyes. I didn’t see Lauria’s face, but Alibek was right. It was her. There was something about the djinn that made me certain it was her.
“If we’re seeing Lauria, they killed us in our sleep and we’re in the underworld,” I said.
The djinn bobbed in the air. “She’s shaking her head,” Alibek said. “She’s reaching out her hands to you.”
Hesitantly, I stretched out my own hands. “Why can you see what she’s doing so clearly?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s because of the ritual,” Alibek said. “I welcomed you, standing in Lauria’s place. Maybe the power of the ritual is letting me see her clearly.”
“What’s she doing?”
“She’s clasping your hands,” Alibek said.
I could feel nothing.
“She looks frustrated.”
“Maybe she should try grabbing your hands, since you’re the one who can see her…”
Alibek held out his hands. “She tried, then shook her head. It’s yours she wants. Keep holding them out.”
I remembered the time I had brought her to me after hunting through the darkness, and I closed my eyes. “By our bond as sisters,” I said. “You swore to come back to me. Let your oath bind us now.”
I felt hands clasp mine. “Go,” Lauria’s voice whispered in my mind.
Go where? There wasn’t anywhere to go except back to my bound, helpless body. Was that really what she meant? I hesitated and her grip tightened. “Hurry,” she said.
I tried to return to my body, only my grip on Lauria held me here now like a weighted chain. It was like trying to drag a boulder with me. I can’t, I thought, but refused to speak the words aloud—she might let go.
Surely there was a way I could get back with Lauria. If not the way I came, then another way.
There. I felt a breath on my face, as if through a crack in a door, and when I yanked this time, I felt Lauria follow. Usually returning to my body felt like nothing more than waking up, but this time I fell into my body from a great height, and jerked like a fish even in the grip of the djinn. I struggled to open my eyes. Something warm and heavy lay on top of me.
It was Lauria.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
L AURIA
Night in the Silent Lands passed as slowly as the day had. I spent much of the time thinking up ways that the djinni might yet manage to kill me, as insubstantial as I was. If they could find a way to speak with me, they could threaten people I cared about—Tamar, Janiya, my mother, Zhanna. Rogue djinni could possess the unwilling. They could seize control over someone like my mother at a critical moment and leave her defenseless.
But even if they threatened people I loved—no way, I thought. I couldn’t hand myself over,
not knowing what they planned.
But they’d find some other way. After all they’d done to bring me here, they’d find another way.
And what a great deal of trouble they had taken. They had seen my potential, even before I had the gate within; I remembered the djinn speaking to me through Jaran, back in Sophos’s harem. They sent me dreams and visions, and visitors with warnings. They had encouraged me to free the people I’d taken back to slavery, then gave me directions to Thais, which had put me in Kyros’s hands. What if he had just killed me? Perhaps they sent messages to him, too. Kyros had taken me to Penelopeia, where I had seen the picture of the drowned gate, and been shown a spell-chain lost under the water. Was it ever really there? I bet it was not. Then they’d whispered in Xanthe’s ear to free me, and whispered to her again when it was time for her to push me out of the palanquin into the reservoir, right over the drowned gate.
They could not force me to walk through. But they could lead me to that door and give me no other choice.
Kasim roused after a few hours and got up, looking around to see me.
“Who built the gate?” I asked. “Your people, or my people?”
“Yours,” he said, stretching, then held up his hand to show me something. The images I saw this time looked different. The details were missing, I realized after a moment. They were blurry or shadowed, impossible to see. Still, I could see the woman at the center, her long hair gathered loosely where it swept against her waist, her cat’s eyes shining red. Her anger rang in my ears like jangling brass bells. Then I saw a vast boulder of shifting iridescent colors—karenite—shattered into dust in a sudden hot white light. Then another light, this one growing brighter, and not fading.
“The angry woman,” I said. “She was one of you? And she opened the rift?”
“Yes.”
“And—the boulder of karenite. What was that?”
Kasim gave me a picture of a well. I didn’t understand, so he changed the picture of the well so that it held heat instead of water, then something else. Finally, he spoke aloud. “Like a well of…power.”
“How did she destroy it? The vision didn’t show that part.”
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