Whatever truly happened, one thing remained clear: I was Yeshin’s first daughter and was raised the only way my father knew how. I was four years old when he gave me my first sword, a wooden one that was too heavy for me to wield properly. Then he dragged me down to the barracks at the base of Oka Shto Mountain, where I joined an eight-year-old Agos in training.
I wasn’t fond of the training. I kept a good pretense because my father wanted me to—because to defy Yeshin would be to face down a dragon myself and I’ve never had the strength to do that, especially not at four years old. I went through the exercises with the precision of a newborn calf and then, for the next two days, lay sick in bed from the fever brought on by sore muscles. The servants took turns rubbing me with hot compresses and spooning chicken and papaya soup down my throat, all while criticizing my father behind his back.
That, for many years, became the shape of my life. At least once a week, I was required to sit with the soldiers and taught how to wield a sword properly, how to read an opponent, how to take a blow. Not every swordsmaster in the army was eager to send a young girl flying across the yard, but eventually, Yeshin was able to secure the services of a skilled sellsword from Darusu. Anong Garru we called him to his face—Sharkhead to his back. He was an awful man with a temper that matched his hideousness. Agos hated him so much that he once dipped the man’s boots in cat urine, which meant we had to sit through an entire lesson pinching our noses with our fingers. The prank was discovered and Agos spent that entire summer carrying two sacks of rice up and down the mountain steps.
Not exactly an idyllic childhood, but the sweet note was there all the same. I remember chasing after Agos in those days, laughing with him as he sweated up the mountain and cursed poxes on Garru and all his children, or clapping with the young recruits while we watched Agos decimate his opponent during training rounds. “Agos the Crusher!” we’d yell. I was the youngest, with a shrill voice that ran with the wind.
The lessons stopped in my tenth year. Yeshin hired Sharkhead as my private instructor, and I was no longer allowed to spend time in the barracks without an escort. The turning point had been an argument between Yeshin and my tutor, Arro. “A lady!” my father had fumed at Arro’s retreating back. He caught sight of me stumbling into the hall and witnessing the last of the exchange, and his face contorted. “You…”
“Yes, Father?” I walked up to him, thinking he was calling me.
Trembling hands came up to my shoulders, but he lifted them as soon as he made contact, like he was afraid he would break me with his touch. “I know you’re my daughter,” he said. “I know what you are.” His eyes were red and his lower jaw was shaking. This frightened me—I had never seen my father in near-tears before.
I struggled to maintain my composure. “Yes, Father.”
“They brought you those dresses, didn’t they? Your grandmother’s…I asked them to. That silk survived the Zarojo sack from Dragonlord Reshiro’s time.”
“They did, Father. They were beautiful.”
He nodded, as if this reassured him somewhat. “Wear them to the next meeting. The blue one suits you best, Tali.”
I bowed. But because he didn’t dismiss me, I stayed standing in front of him, straight and true—a soldier’s stance. After a moment, he drew me in for a hug. One hand came up to pat me on the hair once. And then he pulled away, that hard expression returning to his face. He would die in that same year.
My father’s daughter, my father’s soldier. They were one and the same as far as I was concerned, and it used to help whenever things became unclear. I tried to remind myself of this over the next few days, which was harder than I thought it would be. I couldn’t seem to cross whatever it was that lay between Khine and me. The journey felt disjointed, days of going through the motions rolling into each other. We never stayed at the same place longer than a night, arriving in inns late and waking up long before the other patrons in an effort to remain hidden. Three times we ran into Qun’s men, who were looking for me. But they didn’t know what I looked like, and they didn’t know I was travelling with only one companion. Each time, we managed to slip past them unnoticed.
It came as a relief when we finally left the towns behind and came upon the first strip of wilderness. The Ruby Grove was named for the forest and the unusual growth of a variety of bright red-leafed deciduous trees and shrubs. By sunrise, the brilliance was dazzling, giving the hills the appearance of a rolling sea of fire. I felt like we had been transported to a magical land—to Sheyor’r, perhaps, what the Zarojo called the land across the agan fabric. I saw a gecko of some sort sunning itself on a rock, and even its skin was red, with bumps of bright orange.
“Anjishing isn’t far from here, you know,” Khine said. It was the first time he had spoken in hours.
I blinked, remembering the name of the village he liked to use for some of his cons. “I thought the red cliffs were to the north, past Anzhao,” I managed.
“Yes. Up there is a village called Anishing,” he said. “Which is a hub for craftsmen peddling rare and valued jewellery. You hear about it often enough, you think it’s the same thing.”
“You tricky bastard. They sound almost the same.”
“That’s the whole point. If a guard catches up to me for fraud, I could always tell him that I did acquire said item from Anjishing, yes, at the base of the red cliffs in the Ruby Grove…what, you don’t call them red cliffs over there? But everything’s red…”
“Any other trick you want to tell me about?”
“I have one that involves a suckling pig. You need…”
His voice was drowned out by a rush of wind from above. I looked up just as an enormous shadow crossed us. A giant shape, rather like a ship in mid-air, blocked the sun. I had read enough about airships to know what it was, but it was my first time seeing one.
Khine whistled. “That’s a new route,” he said. “Looks like it’s heading east for the Inland Sea.”
We watched it drift off into the sky. The wooden sides of the ship were marked with brightly coloured carvings of lionbeasts and rok haize. The rest of it was dominated by green and blue paint, and red tassels placed on nearly every angle where they could fit. Dageian airships, from the drawings I had seen in books, were more sombre in comparison. “They run on agan too, don’t they? Just like the Dageians’?”
“I think so,” Khine said. “I don’t know much about it myself. I’ve read about these channels they’ve made along the ground, and how the mages draw from them? I’m not sure. They copied the system almost entirely from Dageis.”
The ship continued to bob up and down until it disappeared into the horizon. I realized that my horse had drifted right beside Khine.
“I’d love to ride one,” I mused. “How does the sky look from above?”
“You’ve never?” He made a sound. “I thought, being a queen…”
“Politics is my whole life, Khine. It’s always been one meeting after another, the warlords’ complaints, my bannermen’s requests, laws to pass over to the council…I once thought if things got quiet and Thanh was older, maybe we could travel and see the world.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “You’ve been on one?”
“Tashi Reng Hzi once took us to the southern coastal cities. The route only went so far back then. That new one, though—that’s going to bring you to the capital at Kyan Jang a lot faster. The things they can accomplish with this agan is nothing short of amazing.”
“What’s it like?”
“Magnificent. I was frightened at first—nauseous. Tashi Hzi made me chew on a piece of ginger root until it passed. And then—it’s nothing I can describe. You feel like you can see everything from up there.” He gave me a look, and the smile died on his lips. “Maybe someday, you and I…”
I turned away, wishing he wouldn’t say half the things he said. I clicked my tongue and urged my horse forward, trying to ignore the feeling of dread welling up inside of me. If I wasn’t dead by the end of the year, I
would be back in Jin-Sayeng, back on the throne. I, who had grown up with so much, who had every need taken care of before I could even realize I was wanting, had no right to ask for more. I was content with these red trees, the way they bowed over the worn trails; the ride through them was a pleasant excursion on what was an otherwise wretched quest. And Khine…
The uncertainty of what awaited me had the effect of slowing down the passage of time. From the hills, we dropped down to a path running along a river, where I could see steep mountain sides from across. Mounds of sandstone scree gathered in the valleys between the ridges, while pink and white wildflowers blossomed around the base, so many that they looked like snowfall on the first day of winter. I caught Khine staring at them, a faraway look on his face.
“I haven’t been through here in so long.” He shook his head as soon as he had spoken. I wanted to ask him when the last time was, but something in his voice stopped me—it felt like I was stumbling onto a stray thought, one I wasn’t supposed to hear.
“Did you know they would be out this time of the year?” I asked, gesturing at the bloom.
He gave a wry smile. “Impressed?”
“Not unless you braved the death-defying rapids to plant the seeds yourself.”
The relatively calm river continued to trickle past us. His horse slowed to a walk, but Khine’s usual chatter was gone. A hot breeze came to tease my hair, which was followed by a bug that made clacking sounds by my ear. As I tried to brush it off, I caught sight of a mousey-looking deer, one with tusks the length of my thumb. It stared back at us, unafraid, and waited until we had passed by before it hopped back into the bush.
Sweat trickled down the grime on my face. As I wiped it off, I heard him clear his throat. “I’m sorry if I’ve been scarce the past few weeks.”
His words caught me by surprise. I smacked the bug on my face and flicked the carcass off. “You’ve been busy. I understand. Lo Bahn isn’t exactly an easy employer.”
“You can’t imagine,” he said. “Everything was a downward slide for him after what happened at the governor’s office. Partners turning on him left and right—I was at my wit’s end trying to help him salvage what he could. I wasn’t even sure I was going to succeed. He very nearly had me beheaded for tricking him at one point—I’m going to spare you the details—but he needed me and Inzali, and so I lived to scheme another day.”
“What did you do for him?”
“Everything I could. Set up meetings with his partners, spoke on his behalf. A good percentage of his operations were illegal, so without the muscle to back him, he was grasping on thin air.”
“He didn’t have money to hire new men? Anya Kaz would’ve provided them to him, I think.”
“It’s more complicated than that. For one thing, I don’t think Anya would’ve risked her men just to save Lo Bahn’s assets—not in a million years. You caught Lo Bahn at a bad time—he had sunk a fair amount of his fortune in some new investments, and paying the blood money all but crippled him. He’s put up a commendable show in pretending it’s nothing to him, but I don’t think the man’s getting out of this any time soon. His only chance is to start all over.”
I looked down past my mount’s ears to the ground. There was a new insect buzzing at my ear, and I let it. “I didn’t know any of this was going to happen,” I murmured.
“I didn’t, either. I would’ve found a better way to help you if I had known what would come from it. Perhaps I wouldn’t even have helped you at all.” From the corner of my eyes, I saw Khine gaze out at the horizon again. “I used to walk along this river with my father when I was younger. Not all the time—only if the overseer would spare him a few days. He used to tell me about his dreams for me—how he wanted me to be more, do more, to get out of that mining town and carve a life for myself. ‘Khine,’ he would tell me. ‘Some of us, me included, can only live for ourselves for today—to scrape to survive, only to wake up to scrape again. But I want you to be the sort of man who can live for tomorrow, who can dream of something better.’
“When he died, I stood over his body for the seven days and at the end of it my mother came with a box. She showed it to me—it was half full of silver. ‘This is not for spending,’ she said. ‘Father had been saving to send you to Anzhao City. He had been corresponding with Tashi Reng Hzi of Kayingshe Academy. He wanted you to be a physician, Khine, and I think if we can save a bit more, I think you can go.’ I remember staring at that box, wondering how we were going to be able to do that without my father, without the mines, with a new mouth to feed. I was only nine years old.”
“Khine…” I reached out to touch his arm.
He remained still. “I don’t know what to think, Tali. About you, about all of this.”
“I thought you had an opinion about everything.”
“I’ve always known I’ve been on a downward spiral, but back then, I was harming only myself. Only me and what I could have been. This is different. I knew some of those men, Lo Bahn’s guards. I went to their funerals. Their families fed me. I couldn’t bring myself to say how I had caused the deaths of their husbands…their children…their fathers.”
“You didn’t.”
“It was my idea in the first place.”
“We didn’t know Yuebek would be there.”
“There are patterns we can observe to prevent such things, and we owe it to the people around us to take heed of them.”
Khine was looking at me while he said this. I felt my ears ring. “That’s why you wanted me to ride alone with you. You wanted me away from your family.”
“Among other things.”
I struggled against the disappointment in his voice. “Then why not just leave me be, Khine?”
“I take you to your husband, this all ends.”
I found myself laughing. “You know it’s not that simple. Walking away, on the other hand...”
“It’s not that simple, either,” he said. And he left it at that.
Some time later, we laid out bedrolls beside the river in the dark. I watched him talking to the horses, rubbing them down and scratching their chins, and tried to think about what my father would think about him. They shared, if nothing else, that same, stubborn, idealistic streak. Yeshin would’ve enjoyed talking to him, at least before killing him for overstepping his bounds.
He came up to join me by the fire. “Dealing with me is tiresome, isn’t it?” Khine asked.
I stared at him, my cheek on my knee. “Sometimes.” I wanted to ask if he thought the same thing about me, and then decided against it; I didn’t know how to deal with it if he’d said yes.
“We haven’t even known each other all that long.”
I nodded, smiled.
“Tell me what you really think.”
I pretended to mull over his words. “I think…” I began. “If you had a choice, what would you have been? Not a physician. Anything else. If you were free.”
“You’d laugh.”
“You know I won’t.”
Khine gave an embarrassed grin. “I suppose I’d have been a soldier.”
“You,” I said. My lips quirked into a smile. “But you don’t like killing.”
“I told you you’d laugh.”
“Sorry. Tell me, then. Why a soldier?”
“I had this dream once that I could maybe rise up the ranks—a general or something. If you did well enough in your studies and did your best to get noticed, it’s not a far cry. Do you know how much influence a general can wield? Being a soldier isn’t all about a killing. You can stop deaths. March an army elsewhere. Save people.”
“You could do that as a physician, too.”
“A physician is limited in what he can do. You’re controlled by the guild, by what you have to charge people, by the fact that you couldn’t stop them from getting hurt in the first place. And you can see how well that’s turned out for me. In any case, both are a lot better than being a con-artist and a hired thug from Shang Azi, don’t you think?�
�� Khine turned to me. “What about you? If you could be anything else but a queen? If you were free to walk away from all of this, what would you be?”
I stared at the fire for a long time.
“I’d be free,” I murmured.
~~~
There are no words to portray how I felt over those next few days—none, at least, that wouldn’t be misinterpreted by a historian with a better overview of how my life turned out in the end. I can write what I remember, but I feel that they are a poor substitute for the truth—that somehow in that wilderness, with the company of that one man, I found the shackles of my life loosening. Instead of the pressing concerns of politics, I knew only the sound of the hooves clip-clopping on the trail, the feel of my sweat running down my back from the heat, the swaying of the bridges we needed to cross—something the horses, I was pleased to find out, were used to—and the endless, unreachable blanket of the clear sky above. We chewed on dried mangoes, nuts, and flat bread along the way, boiling rice only when we camped for the night. Khine would explain the forks in the road, and tell me stories about the villages and towns that existed out in the expanse of this dusty wilderness. I listened with rapt attention as we fell back into the pattern of our early acquaintance, before the baggage, before he knew I was Queen.
The trail followed the banks of the Tanshi River. The river itself didn’t just run in a straight line—it swung out like a serpent, making long loops and winding around itself so often that it sometimes felt like we weren’t making any forward progress. Parts of it were calm and shallow enough to tempt you to walk across—elsewhere, it was loud and rushing, full of foamy water and rocks and battered driftwood. The colour changed, too—it was usually a deep green or grey, reflecting the amount of brush around it. On the third or fourth day, it turned to a brilliant blue, so wide and calm that it very nearly seemed like a lake. The only disturbance came from a waterfall on the other side. There was a cave underneath where the water gathered, forming a small pool that seemed deep enough to swim in.
The Ikessar Falcon Page 8