Ramahd gave her a look filled with disappointment and betrayal.
“It wasn’t me,” she said as she stepped out. With Hektor’s blood all over the bodice of her blue dress, she looked like a murderer over a fresh kill. She seemed to fumble for the right words, then spoke softly. “I’ll see to this.”
And then she was gone.
Nearly an hour passed before the captain returned and fixed his grinning face on Ramahd. “It went just like you said. She headed straight for the House of Kings.”
“Good,” Ramahd said.
“Is that long enough in your cozy cell, my lord?”
Judging that it had been long enough for them to be unobserved, Ramahd nodded, and the captain unlocked the door with a clank, and led Ramahd and Hektor up to the garrison’s main floor. They came to an office of sorts, a room once used for the lodging of citizens’ complaints, and where the garrison’s Spears received their daily assignments.
Waiting, his bulk leaning against a counter with several empty chairs behind it, was the drug den’s potbellied barkeep. As Hektor neared, the big man held out his hand, sparing a cringe for Hektor’s bloody face. “Hope the boys didn’t rough you up too bad.”
Hektor, whose lower lip was still bleeding, grasped forearms with him. “I’ve had worse,” he said as the two of them shook.
The barkeep slapped Hektor’s shoulder. “There’s a good lad.”
The barkeep had been an ardent supporter of Meryam’s father, King Aldouan. He had blood ties to the throne, albeit distant ones, and his father had served under Duke Hektor I. When he’d heard Ramahd’s and Hektor’s tales, he’d grown angry enough to betray Amaryllis, a woman who’d treated him more or less like she’d treated everyone else in her life: as a useful lever in her manipulations of Sharakhai’s seedier elements.
The barkeep’s smile faded as he jutted his chin at Ramahd. “You think it worked?”
Ramahd shrugged. “We’ll know soon enough.”
“Indeed we will.” This came from the back doorway of the grimy office, where Hamzakiir’s rangy form was striding toward them. Behind him came Cicio, his compact swagger in stark contrast to the genteel sweep of Hamzakiir’s long limbs.
The barkeep looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Well then, I’ll leave you gentlemen to it, shall I?”
At this, Ramahd gave Cicio a sharp nod, and the small man sent a leather purse arcing through the air. The barkeep caught it, opened it, and smiled broadly. Their transaction complete, he left without another word, his boys, all wearing Silver Spears uniforms, filing after him like a pack of jackals after their leader.
It left only Ramahd, Hektor, Hamzakiir, and Cicio inside the garrison.
“How soon do you think she’ll try?” Hektor asked. He was a brave young man, but Ramahd could see the fear brewing inside him. No one liked being the subject of blood magic, least of all the man who stood to inherit a kingdom.
“She’ll do it tonight,” Ramahd said, “perhaps as soon as Amaryllis returns.”
“Agreed,” Hamzakiir intoned. “Best we go and prepare our surprise.”
The four of them left together, passing the ruins of the barracks, not visible from inside the office, as they went. The barracks had been damaged by the Malasani golems and had since been closed. It had made for a convenient location for their caper to play out, a way to lower Meryam’s suspicions that Amaryllis had been part of a plan for her to use the blood that had been so conveniently smeared on her dress. Meryam would use that blood, either to kill or dominate Hektor, which would give Hamzakiir a conduit to Meryam herself.
They made their way north to the city’s quarry and a set of tunnels that led to several small, manmade rooms once used by the Moonless Host. Several cots lay in one, which Hektor promptly availed himself of.
“Your wrist,” Hamzakiir said.
Hektor hesitated, but they’d come too far for him to have reservations now. He held out his arm, and Hamzakiir used a blooding ring to pierce the skin of his wrist. He drank of Hektor’s blood, the very same blood that Meryam, if all went according to plan, would drink as well, then closed the wound.
A nervous energy charged the room. The board was set. A very dangerous game was about to be played between Meryam and Hamzakiir, with Hektor, the rightful King of Qaimir, their battlefield.
Chapter 37
HALF A DAY’S SAIL from the foothills of the Taloran Mountains, the Red Bride signaled Ihsan’s galleon to approach. Çeda told them of a small cove south of the valley.
“I know it,” Husamettín called across the gap between their ships.
“If we’re not finished at the acacia within a week,” Çeda said, “I’ll come in a skiff and let you know.”
“You needn’t bother,” Ihsan called across the distance. “Zeheb will be listening to your whispers.”
The very notion sent Çeda’s worries over the Kings and their true purposes to swirling within her mind, but her thoughts were interrupted when two sharp whistles came from the top of the Bride’s mainmast.
“Ship ho!” Kameyl called.
Çeda groaned inwardly. She’d hoped to avoid being seen on the way to the valley. “Her shape?”
“A ketch, from the look of her! Might be Tribe Khiyanat’s. Might not.”
Well, there was nothing to do about it now—someone on the distant ship had surely already spotted them sailing next to a royal galleon. They parted soon after, the Kings’ galleon sailing southeast while the Bride continued toward Mount Arasal. As the sun was setting, they reached one of three sandy bays where the tribe anchored their ships. The following morning, they made the trek up into the mountains and reached the valley.
To Çeda’s disappointment, Macide was gone. He was tending to a harbor to the north where a dozen new ships were being built, but Leorah was there, and she welcomed Çeda and the others with open arms. She looked more bent than she once did, and was moving so slowly Çeda felt bad she’d had to come down from the old fortress to meet them.
“We would have come to you,” Çeda told her.
“These bones aren’t so old they can’t make it down a hill, Çedamihn Ahyanesh’ala.”
“It isn’t the climbing down I’m worried about. It’s the climbing up.”
“Afraid I won’t make it?”
“I’m afraid you’ll topple down the mountain!”
Leorah smacked her lips, and waved to Kameyl with a mischievous smile. “Then why don’t you strap me to that bloody great Maiden of yours? I could do with a ride.”
Çeda laughed, then paused before asking her next question. “Has there been news of Emre?”
“I’m surprised it wasn’t the first question out of your mouth.”
“In truth, I was afraid to ask.”
“Well, I’m sorry, child, there’s been no news as yet, but don’t you worry”—she patted Çeda’s wrist while climbing doggedly along the trail—“that boy’s a fighter. Sooner or later, he’ll turn up.”
Çeda certainly hoped so, but she couldn’t shake the feeling something terrible had happened to him.
As they climbed the slopes of Mount Arasal, the heat of the desert gave way to a pleasant mountain breeze. Eventually they reached the valley, where Leorah, tired but still eager to trade tales, led Çeda beneath the shade of an ironwood. Jenise, Kameyl, and Sümeya came behind, speaking in low tones. Nalamae, meanwhile, gave the stone fortress above them a long piercing stare, as if she were reliving some memory, then moved toward the acacia near the banks of a clear green lake.
The acacia, planted by Leorah, Çeda, and Macide, had been a seedling when Çeda left the valley. Now, less than a year later, it was fully grown, ten paces tall with reaching arms and leaf-choked branches. Hundreds of glass chimes hung from the branches by thread-of-gold. Tied to the chimes were mementos—beads, charms, locks of hair, and bits of cloth. They were from the tr
ibe, Çeda realized, small contributions from those who lived in the valley.
Nalamae, her staff in hand, stared up as the chimes played a subtle symphony. She stood unmoving for a long while, then raised her staff high and swung it in circles above her head. The wind picked up, making the boughs and branches sway. Sunlight speared through gaps in the canopy to glint off the myriad surfaces of the chimes. It made the tree look like a thing come alive, a creature from another world.
Word of Nalamae’s arrival spread quickly. Dozens gathered to see. When Nalamae had been here last, she’d been tall and impressive. Even carried in on a stretcher, wounded by an arrow loosed from King Beşir’s bow, there had been an undeniable gravitas about her. This Nalamae was a mousy woman who seemed tentative and unsure of herself. Some of those watching, maybe even most of them, must have thought Çeda had made a terrible mistake.
When Nalamae faced the tree and spread her arms wide in a gesture of welcoming, as if asking the tree to share its secrets, Leorah began ushering everyone away with broad sweeps of her arms. “Leave the goddess in peace.”
And so they did.
In the days that followed, Nalamae spent every waking hour at the tree. She walked around it. She climbed it. She examined the chimes for hours on end, often forgoing food. She seemed content to keep her thoughts to herself, and Çeda didn’t want to disturb her, but on the third day, with no indication of progress, Çeda could take the uncertainty no longer.
“Is it working?” she asked Nalamae.
The goddess was sitting with her back against the tree, eyes closed, but at this she opened them. “If you mean is it showing me visions, then yes, it’s showing me many. But if you mean is it forming what one might call a memory of who I am and what I was before all this began, then no. It’s a patchwork. I don’t know what connects to what. It feels like a hundred people are telling me bits of their lives all at once. No context. Jumping from story to story.”
Çeda cringed. “As bad as that?”
“As bad as that. It’s maddening, Çeda.” She smiled halfheartedly. “But I think it will come.” She rubbed one of the gnarled roots beside her. “I’ve come to trust this tree. It wants to speak—it just doesn’t know how. And I don’t know how to talk to it. But it’s like my ships. When I first start building them, it’s a mountain of work, and all I have to show for it is a collection of individual, disconnected parts. But when it starts to take form, it does so quickly. We shipwrights say the ship is finding itself.” She gave the root a gentle pat. “We’re nearing that point, aren’t we?”
Çeda was asked by many to tell her tale since leaving the valley months earlier. And she did, though she always left out her temporary alliance with the Kings. She thought about omitting the entire battle at the harbor, but she felt it important that everyone know about Nalamae’s reawakening, so she said Goezhen had fallen on them on their way to the Red Bride.
The King of the asirim, Sehid-Alaz, seemed awestruck by the tale. He pressed her for details, particularly how the shriveled eye of Navesh the All-Seeing had helped Nalamae to find herself. She told him what she could and hid the rest. The deception made her nervous and sad—Sehid-Alaz wouldn’t take kindly to her truce with the Kings, and he didn’t deserve her lies—but there was nothing for it. The Kings’ presence had to remain hidden.
Sehid-Alaz had changed greatly. He was once bent, nearly broken. Now he stood tall, though there seemed to be a different sort of weight on him. He was dour and taciturn. The blackened skin of his face was often pinched into an expression of worry or fear. He was free from the gods’ curse, but chains of a different sort bound him.
“We deserve our time in the land beyond,” he said to her one evening. The two of them were standing on the fortress’s walls, staring down at the lake and the acacia beside it.
“You do,” Çeda said, who had herself wondered when that day would come, and whether it would happen all at once, the asirim all going together to the land beyond. Might the answer lay with the adichara trees, the blooming fields, and the strange crystal in the cavern? Or would the asirim simply live on, fed by the magic that still infused them, until the fates took them at last? Çeda waved to Nalamae, who had just stepped out from beneath the cover of the acacia’s branches. “The goddess may find the answer to that question as well.”
“Or she may not.” Sehid-Alaz turned and took to the stairs leading down to the courtyard. “The asirim are hardly the focus of her efforts, after all.”
Çeda wanted to mollify him, but how could she? He was right and they both knew it. So she only watched him go.
Word came on the fourth day. Macide would return that night. A feast would be held in the fortress to celebrate Nalamae’s return, though Nalamae herself had refused the invitation, preferring to remain near the tree.
“That many voices in one place,” she’d told Çeda, “would be too much. It could set me back days.”
That night, as the people of the tribe were beginning to gather, Çeda lingered in the fortress’s courtyard. She looked down at the pair of graves that had been dug beneath the flagstones. The tribe had debated long and hard about what to do with Nalamae and Yerinde’s remains. In the end they’d decided that neither should be removed from the keep—the site of their last battle was holy ground, and even though Yerinde had been there to do them harm, no one wanted to risk angering the other gods by desecrating it.
“And so our lost lamb has returned,” someone called from behind her.
Çeda turned to find Macide, a bright smile on his handsome face, walking toward her. He looked much the same as she remembered, though there was more gray streaking his forked beard than before.
“You’re back,” she said.
“I’m back,” he replied, and the two of them embraced.
He stared at the flagstones’ engravings. One read, Here lies Nalamae, lastborn and savior of the Thirteenth Tribe. The other read, Here lies Yerinde, goddess of love and ambitious thoughts.
He motioned to Yerinde’s. “Ambitious, perhaps, but I will admit I question the love part.”
Beyond Macide, Sümeya was striding into the courtyard with Kameyl. “Yes, well”—Çeda waved to Sümeya with a smile—“love makes us do strange things.”
Macide glanced over his shoulder. “It does indeed.”
The feast was held in the keep’s audience hall. A fire was lit in the hearth and dozens came, including Leorah, Dardzada the apothecary, Shal’alara of the Three Blades, and other tribal elders. Rasime, a severe young ship’s captain and one of the Moonless Host’s most ruthless agents, was there as well. With her keen eyes and her hair pulled tight into a tail, she looked more than a little like a desert hawk. Even Sehid-Alaz came, though he did little more than sit in a distant corner near the hearth, speaking to few. With his dark, shriveled skin and his somber clothes, cut in their ancient style, he looked more memory than man.
They ate tangy bread dotted with pine nuts and slathered in goat’s cheese. They had lentil soup topped with slices of grilled lemon and a sprinkling of a rare mountain herb that tasted like grapefruit and rosemary. They had wild rice, stewed tomatoes, and lamb marinated in yogurt and spices, spit-roasted for hours until the meat was deliciously crunchy on the outside and fell off the bone within.
Just before dessert was served, Macide was called away. Çeda was so stuffed she was tempted to leave the hall and walk off a bit of the meal, but the moment she learned kanafeh was being served, she sat right back down. Kanafeh was a soft cheese baked in delicate, flaky pastry dough then slathered in rosewater syrup and topped with toasted pistachios. It was gooey and crunchy, with the sort of salty-sweetness that made the mouth water with every bite, and it was paired with a Qaimiri port that stood up to the dessert’s sweetness and brought its own flavors of wild berries, currant, and thyme.
It was as delicious a meal as Çeda had ever had, but halfway through something ma
de it even better. Macide returned with two men in tow. Çeda’s heart leapt as she recognized the first, Frail Lemi, who was greeted with a chorus of salutations. Waving to all with a toothy smile, he halted at the door, momentarily blocking Çeda’s view of the man behind him. The moment Frail Lemi spotted an empty chair with a plate of kanafeh sitting before it, however, he immediately sat and began devouring the food, and the man who’d been hidden was revealed.
It was Emre.
A childish grin broke over Çeda’s face. A host of butterflies took flight within her chest as all the worry that had been building inside her since learning of Emre’s disappearance shed from her in a rush.
Frail Lemi had eaten his kanafeh in three massive bites and was already calling for more. Emre, meanwhile, made his way around the table, exchanging greetings along the way, always with one eye on Çeda. When he reached her end of the table, she stood and the two of them embraced tightly. Everyone was watching, including Sümeya, whose sober expression Çeda had no trouble interpreting. But in that moment Çeda could spare no thoughts for anyone else. Emre felt too good against her to do anything more than lose herself in the moment.
After a breath, maybe two, they were whistled at, and people began laughing and talking in low tones. Çeda finally broke away, grabbed an extra chair, and made room for Emre beside her.
“Try it,” she said, and fed him a bite of her still-warm kanafeh. “Wait . . .” She handed him her glass of port as he chewed. “Chase it with this.”
Emre put on a sour face as he finished the bite and sipped the port. “Horrible,” he said. “Worst thing I’ve ever tasted.”
She slapped his shoulder.
Emre laughed, but as he set down the glass, his brow furrowed, as if something pained him. When she gave him a questioning look, he made a miserable go of trying to smile. “It’s only a headache.”
“Should we call Dardzada?”
When Jackals Storm the Walls Page 34