by Jay Lake
“You possibly could, at that,” I said, my tone gentle. “Chances are very good she and Samma are being held in this part of the city. But you would not find your way back from there once you had located them. Those who hold her would take you up as well.”
“You are a storm of swords. Even those terrible women we travel with have become frightened of you.” Her voice was ragged. “I cannot defend my daughter as you defend your own children.”
Wishing I could embrace her right then and there, I touched Ilona’s arm gently, but she hid fiercely behind the shield of the cutting knife. “I defend only because I am attacked.”
“You are attacked because your defenses are so vigorous as to make you seem a danger to others.”
I’d never quite thought of it that way. “Like the wave?…”
Ilona sighed, giving me an exasperated stare as her knife finally stilled. “Prince Enero’s men might not talk here in Kalimpura. They have their own skins to think of. But they will sail away, and sailors will tell their tales. Tales will be retold, again and again. In a year’s time, you will be known in a dozen other ports as a Selistani storm goddess. In this port, if that rumor ever crosses back over the rail, everyone will fear you. Everyone.”
“And what people fear, they attack.”
“You must make yourself less frightening.” She turned, the knife in her hand quivering in a fashion that would have been a threat from almost anyone else. “Green, I know you well and care for you deeply, but still you frighten me. And I’ve seen some dreadful things.”
“I’ve done some dreadful things,” I muttered, putting the rest of her words away to savor later in private.
She cares for me deeply. That I dared not answer. I wished I did not frighten her as well.
“Precisely.”
For a while I ground chickpeas in a bowl. We had found paprika, of all things, and it would go well with a bit of oil there. In time, as I worked, I spoke again. “How do I become less frightening?”
“You will never seem a safe person to the rest of us.” I might have bristled at her honesty, but Ilona strained to speak the truth. Her words were worthy of my respect. “Right now, though, you do not even have rules to follow. If you were bound in service to your Lily Temple once more, or to Endurance, then you’d have, well, a framework for your powers.”
“Even calling down the sea all unknowing?”
She smiled ruefully. “Perhaps not that. I do have one request, though.”
“Mmm?”
Ilona’s eyes held mine, and I saw tears standing in her gaze. Her smile fled as if it had never been there. “Do not bind your power away until my daughter is safe with me once more.”
“You’d rather have me be the storm of blades until then?”
“I am a mother,” Ilona said, her voice stark. “Anything that gets me back my child.”
Laying down my spoons, I took her in my arms. Ilona went willingly, bending her face down to my shoulder. I hugged her till she sobbed, then hugged her harder awhile, breathing in the scent of her and containing her shuddering grief.
In a different time and place, we might have found more ways to banish her pain, but this would have to do for now.
* * *
Late that afternoon Mother Argai was back with my oil stove and a string of harbor carp, as well as a fresh supply of rumor. Street Guild were out in unusual numbers, but they hadn’t succeeded in following her back. I was irritated—the activity meant I could not yet safely leave the compound. Not with Surali’s thugs on their greatest alert.
We gathered with the babies around the great chopping tables in the kitchen so I could skin and debone the fish, preparing fillets to be cooked on the little flame. Ponce I sent to brave the golden monkeys in the garden for limes or lemons or anything of that sort. I had all else I needed.
“The wave is still much discussed,” Mother Argai said. “No one has blamed any of us yet.”
Given my own presumptive agency in those events, I thought that was diplomatically put, but I kept to my work and figured my fellow Blade would say what she must. She had never lacked for directness.
Mother Argai did not disappoint.
“I spoke in deep confidence to some of our friends among the Blades.” She glanced at Mother Vajpai. “We need to find a way for you to meet with them.”
Temple politics was far more Mother Vajpai’s strength than Mother Argai’s. “We shall soon,” the Blade Mother answered.
“Great disagreement echoes inside the temple now,” Mother Argai continued.
“Good,” I said, slamming my knife much harder than required into the cutting block. “Mother Srirani needs reasons to think a bit deeper. A missing Blade in the hands of our enemies might be one of them, if she had a care for her duties as Temple Mother.”
Mother Vajpai’s hand brushed my arm. “I will handle those reasons. Patience, please, Green. Samma has been held for months now. If we wait a few days and let this brew, our own goals may be easier to attain.”
“How will that help us go over the walls into the Bittern Court?” I demanded.
Her response was acerbic, in that same arresting tone that had dominated so much of my learning years in the Temple of the Silver Lily. “Would you rather fight them alone, or with three score Blades at your back?”
Those words were solid and true. “I understand,” I said more quietly. Though I did not yet realize it then, my political education was fully under way at that time. So far in my life, I had been a weapon in the politics of others, albeit a weapon with my own interests and intentions. To be an actor in politics was far more empowering, even if one did not wield either the blades or the votes directly in one’s own hands.
Then something else was said that would become critical for all our futures. It is odd in looking back to see how some moments in time are pivots from which so much else unfolds.
“Green,” said Mother Argai. “You had asked about these Saffron Tower renegades.”
“Yes,” I replied. “The other god-killers, whom Iso and Osi had been following.”
“A Red Man passed through this city several years ago. He stayed a season or two, then went on to the Fire Lakes.” She looked at me solemnly. “They say he had an apsara with him.”
That would have to be Firesetter and Fantail, the Saffron Tower agents who’d found their way to Copper Downs shortly after my slaying of the Duke. Laris had told Mother Vajpai of them, back in Copper Downs, and of the encounter between the two god-killers and Marya, before the twins had finally finished the task that their predecessors had abandoned. We had much discussed the missing pair during the recent sea voyage here.
I wanted to find those two, badly. With their cooperation, I might be able to peel back some of the Saffron Tower’s secrets. If they would talk to me. Assuming their abandonment of their mission was real and not some effort at misdirection, I was almost certain they were rebels against their masters’ rule. That meant they might be willing to share some of their secrets. Or even aid us, holding hope against hope in this process.
Even if they were not truly renegade, I needed to know whether they still hunted the Lily Goddess. After all, it could just as well have been those two She had prophesied as being a threat to Her from my own heart. If one interpreted my heart to be Copper Downs. Prophetic language being as elliptical as it was, that wouldn’t be unreasonable.
It had always irked me that gods never said, “Next Tuesday, Rajit will be struck with boils in his mouth and choke to death.” What good was prophecy if you had to live through the events foretold before you could begin to understand them?
“Have they returned from their journey?” The Fire Lakes were a mountainous badland country far to the south and west of Kalimpura, where the Red Men were said to originate.
Mother Argai shrugged. “If so, no one seems to have heard of it.”
A dead lead, then. A lead nonetheless. By the Wheel, a live one might be nicer still. It was all well and good for me to
raise waves from the ocean, but why couldn’t they bear the people I needed on their foaming shoulders?
If only water could wash Corinthia Anastasia and Samma out from whatever hole Surali had plunged them into.
We are trapped in this place. I shall not say where, lest someone else read this missive, but we are not prisoners except of our own caution. Inaction was never my way.
I know you would probably approve. No one is being pursued or assaulted or made to bend a knee beneath a blade. I also know you would counsel that there are many solutions to every problem, and most of them begin with patience.
Patience was never my way, either. I have the stomach for talk, when it is useful and especially when I hold the upper hand. But the people who oppose us here will not listen to anything we might say. I also believe that time is their friend, and our enemy.
In our small half handle, I suspect I am the only one who sees things so.
Another problem beyond the obvious worried me here in our little retreat. Of all of us, only Mother Argai could go out. Even she was often followed now, which meant risk that we could all be discovered at a moment’s ill luck. Mother Vajpai and I had been marked by both the Temple of the Silver Lily and by the Street Guild. Ponce had a Selistani face, but his command of Seliu was poor, and he knew nothing of life in Kalimpura. Ilona was utterly foreign of face and skin here, and her Seliu was not even as good as Ponce’s.
So, Mother Argai went out for food, for information, to scout, and I could swear, just to stretch her legs in peace away from our smoldering and bickering.
Idle, the rest of us turned toward one another. As my life had unfolded since, those days of bitter quiet have been quite a lesson for me, but at the time I did not appreciate anything beyond the tension that stretched us thin, heart and body.
Ilona was moody and withdrawn, even more than she had been back in Copper Downs or aboard Prince Enero. I understood why—completely—but this made her an increasingly difficult companion. My own affections for her continued in their ever-frustrated fashion, drawing from earlier times when she had been so much more than a distraught mother, but she had eyes only for my children. And for Ponce.
In turn, his devotion to me was becoming an embarrassment. He took to following me around the house, offering services large and small. Nothing crude. Not his way, to be sure. But the intimacy he craved was painfully clear to everyone. My own attachment to Ilona meant nothing to him in the face of the incontrovertible evidence that I had previously shared the love of a man.
Mother Argai fled. Mother Vajpai was simply irritated at the lot of us. She several times was quite cross, accusing Ilona, Ponce, and me of being not much better than children. I could only spend so much time sewing bells and dandling babies, so as a relief, I cleared a room and passed many hours in training. At night I went outside to hunt down and kill those pestilent golden monkeys in the garden. That was effort never wasted. The downside was that when I worked my body indoors during the day, Ponce would come and watch me move, stretch, and sweat until I began throwing my knife and let it come too close to him more than once.
I had to repeat that nasty trick several times over.
Waiting for our two lost ones, we were on a slow boil, in other words. A kettle with a sealed lid ready to explode.
It was my fervent desire for that explosion to be directed outward. There it might do some good. Otherwise, we were only furthering the cause of our enemies.
Gathered in the kitchen over a cold, simple meal of mango slices with rock salt and powdered red pepper, along with a bit of the goat milk Mother Argai bought daily against my children’s need in my absence, I pressed my case.
“We have been here five days now,” I grumbled.
“No one has lost track of the time, Green.” Mother Vajpai’s voice was unusually tart for her.
“I would go to the Bittern Court and scout for our missing hostages.”
Ilona stirred from her gloomy silence. “Yes. Please, why are we not finding my daughter now?” I understood her single-minded concern, but her fears were a spiked barrier between us now as they had not been back at Copper Downs after Corinthia Anastasia had been taken.
Ponce rocked Federo and glanced at me with worry in his eyes, but did not speak up.
Turning back to the other two Blades, I locked gazes with each of them. Both women knew me quite well. Both understood how I chafed.
“I respect that you have given your word, Green,” said Mother Vajpai. “And that you are keeping it. I respect even more your need to act on this. But consider that we have been months on this trail. A day or two more will not bring new harm to either Samma or the girl.”
“A day, or two, or three, or eight,” I said bitterly. “We sit, while the city whirls around us. Surali knows we are in Kalimpura. Everyone who cares to know is being aware of that.” My frustration built behind my words. “We lose time, initiative.”
Mother Argai “We confound her more with silence than with action.”
“Following that strategy, no one would ever raise a weapon in defense.”
“A few more days,” Mother Vajpai said by way of answer. “The Street Guild is already settling down, as Mother Argai tells it. Rumor sweeps on past us to other fascinations. Let people forget the wave, and not connect the beggars’ riot to us.”
“Surali is no fool.” The growl in my voice startled even me. I knew precisely when I had begun to see her as a human being instead of an enemy, and I did not appreciate that shift inside my head. Far better that the Bittern Court woman remain a monster to my way of thinking. “She will infer what we have done. The longer we wait, the more time her agents have to ferret out Little Kareen or someone else who can betray our part in the beggars’ riot and the rest of the business at the waterfront. The more time there is for her to decide to use Samma or Corinthia Anastasia against us somehow. Not just a prisoner or a hostage, but to make a victim of either of them.” I knew my voice was pitched with anger. I did not try to swallow it.
Mother Vajpai drummed her fingers on the table. “So what if she does? We will move against her soon enough, at a time of our choosing. Let her fear our influence.”
I snorted. “Influence among the lowest of the people of the street.”
“We all saw their power,” said Ilona. “You stopped the waterfront, and rescued us from that ship.”
“Will I storm the Bittern Court with an army of the poor?” I laid my hands flat, looked around at them. “Please, let me go look for Corinthia Anastasia, for Samma.”
“I agree.” Ilona nodded.
Mother Argai shook her head. “No. Too soon.”
“For what do we wait?”
“For aid from the Blades,” snapped Mother Vajpai. “Let us do our work, and make our path easier. We’ve already discussed this, Green. It is too soon.”
I turned to Ponce, the tie-breaking vote in our little council. Shameless, I cast him a sorrowful, suffering look. “Please … What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I cannot know. None of this is my way. I … I will not block you, but I will not agree.”
All the more frustrated, I stomped out of the kitchen toward my informal practice room. Over my shoulder, I shouted, “I will obey!”
I did not have to like it.
* * *
Mother Argai came over the back wall the next day bleeding and at a dead run. I was in the garden with Ilona and the babies, which was safer now that I had discouraged the golden monkeys from their dung-flinging depredations. I realized a man was following my Blade Sister over the top of the masonry.
“Take them,” I growled to Ilona as I leapt to my feet.
She stifled a shriek, but grabbed the children to race toward the house.
Meanwhile, Mother Argai nodded to me as she raced forward, her chin thrown to one side to point over her shoulder. Though innocent of my leathers in one of the old robes from my room, I of course had my god-blooded knife strapped to my wrist.
The
man was armored in light scale—Street Guild, then—and laughed when he saw my little blade. I stepped around his sword and let him impale himself upon my weapon.
Though we Lily Blades did not normally fight to kill, he could not be allowed to leave this place knowing we were here. I rocked back a pace with the shock of the impact and turned the knife to his left, cutting into his heart even as his face betrayed his surprise.
With a sigh, the man died, blood spurting out of the wound to spray me crimson and brown.
I lowered him to the ground and quickly dragged the body into the shade of the ragged trees of our garden. Mother Argai came to squat next to me, breathing hard.
“I could not afford to kill him in the road behind us,” she said. “Too public and too close.”
“Are you hurt?” I asked her.
She glanced down at her own leathers. “Oh. This is not my blood.”
“Where are his fellows?” Street Guild almost never worked alone.
She touched the blood smearing her midsection. “I killed two several blocks away. This one lost his head and pursued alone.”
I looked down at the still face. Not unhandsome, though someone had once broken his nose for him. His big brown eyes that might have wooed maidens—or men—had already dulled. I felt sadness, unusual for me at a death. Almost regret. As if he and I might have been friends meeting some other way. As if he had not come to threaten me and my children.
“This was too close,” I told Mother Argai.
“Yes.” Mother Vajpai had joined us. I saw Ilona peering out from the house, and gave her a wave to signal that I was all right. “Too close.” It was as near as she would come to scolding her old friend.
Mother Argai nodded. “We can hide only so long.”
“Now you sound like Green,” Mother Vajpai said.
For once, I decided to let the argument make itself without my help. Instead, I went to find a shovel. We would need to bury this man here in the garden. Where we sat in a trap, rotting like fruit in a basket.