I shook my head at him and smiled.
“I’m not upset about the husband,” he insisted in a lowered voice. “If that’s what you think. I knew you were running from something terrible. We’ll figure something out. I meant it when I promised you our protection. If they somehow track you here—and they can’t possibly arrive before the rains do—then we’ll make a plan. We’ll have time for that. All right?”
I smiled at him, which seemed to relieve him considerably. Then I laid a hand on his cheek and brushed his generous mouth with mine, savoring the kiss. I left the goodbye unsaid.
“Goodnight, Ivariel.” He kissed me again, easy now. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
* * * *
Climbing down the poles one level to the terrace was easy. Much easier to execute, in fact, than my escape from the inn back at Sjør. I could still move silently, and the room below mine was an unoccupied work area. With my pack of belongings on my back, and Kaja’s knife on my belt along with my sword, I made my way across the terrace, one with the shadows, and descended the steps to the river.
I’d have liked to leave Ayela the gift of a dagger, as Kaja had done for me, but she was too young for an edged blade yet. And I had no way to indicate it should go to her. Likewise I would’ve liked to say goodbye, to Zalaika, to all the family who’d been so kind to me.
Ochieng… I couldn’t think about him.
The best gift I could give them, all of them, wasn’t a goodbye anyway, but to keep the Dasnarians from ever reaching Nyambura. What I liked didn’t matter now more than it ever had. There was a price to pay for the time I’d lingered with Ochieng, the D’tiembos, and the elephants. I’d known that I shouldn’t but I’d allowed the enchantment of it all to work on me.
Because of it, the time for me to flee had long since passed. I knew my people, and they wouldn’t be far away. They’d find the D’tiembo home just as Kaedrin’s missive had. They would not be kind in expressing their disappointment at finding me gone.
I stopped by the grassy wallow where the elephants liked to sleep, not far from the lagoon. Under the slight moonlight, they looked like the monsters Ochieng described in his stories, looming shapes black against the sky. One detached herself from the rest, padding over to me. Violet, of course, wrapping me in her trunk.
I hugged her back as best I could, whispering my thanks and farewell. To my surprise, another trunk joined hers. Efe. I leaned into the smaller elephant, soothing her, aware that she sensed my sorrow. Perhaps my fear, though I thought I didn’t feel afraid so much as resigned.
All along I’d known I’d never be free while Rodolf lived. He was not a man to release what he considered his.
I tore myself away from the elephants, forcing myself to move on. Efe followed with me up the path, but Violet called her back, her trumpets sounding anxious. I finally shooed Efe back, lest Violet wake everyone and give me away.
I didn’t know if I’d ever forget the look of wounded betrayal she gave me when I told her to go. Such a short time that I’d regained my voice, and I’d used it only to tell lies and cause sorrow.
It helped, though, to gather up the pain. To use it, as Kaja had repeatedly counseled me. The fear, the regret, grief, and rage—all of that would fuel me in the days to come. I had no particular plan, no more than I’d had all along. Other than to give the Dasnarians what they came for—me—to get them away from Nyambura, and go from there.
I couldn’t think about what would happen to me if Rodolf was truly with them. I started to, formulating a hope that he wouldn’t be able to do his worst to me on the caravan roads and public oases, that he’d wait for privacy. But hope was something I couldn’t afford. Hope grows on itself, spawning new wants. I started hoping that things could be different than I knew they had to be, so I made myself stop.
Instead, I focused on walking the road, listening to the night. Nyambura slept under the moon, peaceful and still. I’d keep it in my memory that way. An image came back of another village, a Dasnarian one glimpsed from the high tower window of a seraglio I’d stayed in on my wedding journey. I’d wondered what lives those people led, illuminated in the glow contained by those far-off frosted windows.
At least I knew something now of how other people lived. An answer to one question. I’d tasted freedom, and it had been as sweet and satisfying as I’d ever imagined. A meal that could last me the rest of my life.
However long that might be.
* * * *
I found the Dasnarians by noon. Once I would’ve considered the timing an omen from Danu, Her bright, unrelenting midday sun shining on their armor. But Danu had abandoned me. If She’d ever been there at all. More likely I’d invented Her to replace Kaja, and now they’d both disappeared from the world.
I saw the soldiers from a distance off, so blinding were they. They had to be sweltering, marching along the road under the uncaring sun.
Rodolf’s flag led them.
Apparently I’d allowed some hope to creep in, because I felt its death at the sight. I’d nurtured the slim possibility that my brother Kral had been the one to track me, as he had before. Some small part of me had the temerity to wish that it would be Harlan, somehow come to join me in exile.
Though I’d known he would not journey with a battalion of armored soldiers.
Weary in every way possible, I sat beneath a mushroom tree and waited in the shade for them to meet me. And in that time of waiting, a plan came to me. For the first time, I knew with brutal clarity what I wanted, where I wanted to be, and how I would get there.
The Dasnarians themselves pulled the carts, no doubt unable to acquire drivers to sing the negombe along. I tried to imagine a Dasnarian man singing the ongoing refrains necessary and flat couldn’t. I might’ve laughed at the image, if I hadn’t felt so grim. In the tales, when the hero faces his death, it seems much more glamorous. The reality is a kind of numb resignation.
Rodolf rode in the lead cart, somewhat thinner than I remembered, his long beard looking scraggly. The privations of the journey, perhaps. He had his bald head uncovered, except for his iron crown, the thin strip of gray hair bordering the bottom of it had grown overlong, and his face and scalp shone crimson from sunburn and heat.
He almost passed me without noticing, and I almost let him. The soldiers barely glanced at me, a slim youth they likely assumed to be male, since I wore my leathers, and my weapons. I sat cross-legged, apparently at ease. No sign of the weeping, cringing girl he’d terrorized.
Rodolf glanced at me, and I met his gaze, steady, not averting it. He looked away again, and then—almost eerily—he seemed to freeze, only his head moving on his neck as it rotated smoothly around to stare at me in dumfounded incredulity.
“Seize her!” He roared, startling the soldiers. Dasnarian military discipline is too good to allow dithering, however, and they obeyed immediately. Taking me in a brutal grasp, two of them carried me to Rodolf without bothering to disarm me. My former husband’s pale blue eyes nearly bulged with raging horror. “What in Sól’s name have you done to yourself, wife?”
So odd, to hear my native language again, to have it rise again so easily to my tongue.
“I am not your wife,” I said. The perfect words to speak aloud. They tasted as delicious as freedom had.
His jaw clenched, and Rodolf ordered the men to strip the vambraces from my wrists and knock my hat into the dust, where one stepped on it, crushing it. The first gift I’d received from Ochieng. No—the first gift had been his friendship and his stories, and Rodolf could never take those from me. They eyed my wrists, the scarring from my wedding bracelets.
“Do you deny you are Her Imperial Highness Princess Jenna?” Rodolf asked silkily.
“My name is Ivariel,” I replied.
“You can cut your hair and pretend to have another name, but by birth and law you are Jenna, the emperor’s daughter, and
my wife.” His voice rose at the end, grating on my ears.
“I am an exile,” I informed him, my voice a cool and imperious counterpoint to his. “And I belong to no one. I’ve annulled our marriage.”
The soldiers laughed at that. Even the men who would have sold their children before offending a member of the imperial family. Apparently they accepted my forsaking of rank, but not the impossibility of a woman annulling her own marriage. They thought I lacked the power. Alone among them, Rodolf showed zero amusement. He’d always hated me for being what he needed to advance his ambitions. His greatest fear, I realized, was that he couldn’t control me.
“You are mine until the day you die,” Rodolf asserted, as if convincing himself. “Hold her.” He clambered down from the wagon and snapped his fingers. A soldier came running up with a velvet bag. “You forgot this,” Rodolf said. I fought and struggled, but two more men came to hold me still while Rodolf thrust the diamond ring onto my finger. He’d recovered it from the chicken carcass in Sjør after all. He locked new bracelets on my wrists and connected the chains from the bracelet to the ring to on my right hand.
“Not so pretty as the old ones, but perhaps you’ll earn jewels again if you beg hard enough.”
I would never beg Rodolf for anything, ever again, not even for death. Besides, the jewel-encrusted wedding bracelets had been yet another lie. At least these didn’t pretend to be other than the manacles they were. He took my chin in his hand, turning my face from side to side, while I stared him down.
“You need to be retaught your manners, my wife,” he gritted out. “Avert your gaze.”
I stared him down, pleased to see it bothered him. “I look at who I please.”
He backhanded me, hard, but I’d taken knocks since training with Kaja and it didn’t stun me as it used to. I recovered, stared into his eyes. And smiled.
And, allowing the hatred to uncoil and emerge, I spat in his face.
~ 25 ~
Rodolf didn’t beat me more than that. Not right then. I knew him that well. As brief as our marriage had been, I’d learned his habits intimately. Rodolf was a man who liked privacy for his games. No, when he hurt me—as his vicious expression promised while he wiped my spittle away, smearing it over my mouth where, he softly explained, it belonged—it would be where only he and I would know about it.
His favorite type of intimacy.
He was also a king with designs on the imperial throne, and he needed me to cement his ambitions. Thus, neither would he kill me. Not until we were back in Dasnaria and he’d demonstrated my continued marital enslavement to him. So, he seated me in the cart beside him—my weapons tossed in the back like so much laughable rubbish, my bracelets chained together, my boots removed to make me properly barefoot—to all appearances like an honored wife as the procession turned around and headed back to Bandari where his ship awaited us.
No, he’d wait until that night, at least, to hurt me physically. But that didn’t stop him from schooling me as we rode along.
It made him crazy to see me in such clothes, and he informed me he’d brought my klúts along, which I would change into at the first opportunity of privacy. I didn’t bother to tell him there would be no privacy to speak of. They’d seen the oases. What could a mere woman have to tell him? So I kept to my silence.
I didn’t have to ask how they’d found me. Rodolf was happy to crow about it. When my worthless brothers—Rodolf’s words—had come crawling home without me, the emperor had attempted to get out of Harlan where I’d gone. Despite His Imperial Majesty’s best efforts—a phrase that made me wince for what Harlan must have endured for my sake—no one could get him to say a word. Finally, Harlan had taken refuge in the Skablykrr, sacred vows that ensured no one could make him reveal any secrets he knew.
But Rodolf, he hadn’t gotten where he was by giving up—or depending on anyone else. If he’d been in Sjør instead of foolish Kral, I would never have escaped him.
He sent men to check every ship that put into Sjør. Eventually the Valeria had returned—and one of the sailors remembered a lone traveler who came on as a wealthy passenger who kept to herself, except for an odd friendship with a Priestess of Danu.
After that it had been simple to track the priestess to the Port of Ehas. Though his men had no luck spotting me there—and I longed to tell him how close they’d been to me, but I kept my counsel—they watched dispatches from the temple. And followed the one from Kaedrin to Bandari.
A miserable place to wait, Bandari, as the missive had sat for some time with no direction to take it further. Until a caravan came through that remembered a warrior woman who killed a ruffian at the oasis. The verses they’d made for me had become part of the ones passed up and down the trade routes. An unwanted fame of sorts.
Ultimately I’d been easy to find. And now I would pay for all the trouble I’d caused.
He spent the rest of the day telling me conversationally about the lessons he’d teach me and exactly how he’d drive each message home. My habitual silence served me well yet again. Rodolf took my lack of response as me being suitably cowed. I used it as my shield and succor. I was past fretting over the future. At least, not a future I dreaded. Eyes on where you want to go.
I no longer worried about whether the hatred would destroy me. Instead I nurtured that dark viper, feeding it my heart and soul so it grew strong. It would be the sword I sacrificed my life to. A worthy end.
We traveled at a good pace, as only well-trained Dasnarian soldiers can do, and reached the oasis in late afternoon. No other caravans occupied the place now, and it seemed I could smell rain in the thickening air, though the sky remained as clear as ever. I had no idea what would happen when the rains began. The men would try to continue to travel of course, certain in their Dasnarian arrogance that they could prevail over something as frivolous as weather. Perhaps we’d become stranded at an oasis and starve there once we ran out of supplies. Or be eaten by lions.
I wouldn’t mind that end. Far better than returning to Dasnaria.
I didn’t think about that, though. Rather, as soon as I found my thoughts wandering in that direction, I yanked them back and cultivated my hatred. Eyes on where you want to go.
That night, Rodolf took me with him into his cart, a makeshift tent over it. Eager to assert his rights on my body and confident that I was the Jenna he remembered, he unchained my bracelets from each other. With great satisfaction, he ordered me to shed the leathers he so hated. He wanted me naked, and humble, and cringingly obedient as I had been from the beginning. A reunion of man and treasured wife, he informed me, should remind me of who I was.
The man just didn’t listen. I’d repeatedly warned him: Jenna was dead. I was Ivariel.
Ivariel, she knew what to do. She borrowed Jenna’s skills, to seductively strip the leathers away. Rodolf seized her in his lust, overcome by her nakedness, eager to caress the scars he’d caused, salivating to create just a few more. Ivariel knelt in the small space, lit by a single lantern, and shook her breasts to tease the twisted lust in him, while she slid the leather pants down.
I drew the blade I’d tucked down the back of the pants, the one they’d never bothered to look for, the one Kaja had sent me. I planted it where it belonged. Right where Kaja wanted it, in Rodolf’s black heart.
A pity, that he died so easily, the utter astonishment on his face my only reward.
Painting myself in his blood to celebrate my emancipation, I sent up a ululating song of triumph and joy.
He should have taken the annulment, because I was just as happy to take being a widow.
* * * *
In that moment, I had no more reason than when I’d killed my first man, at another oasis. If I had, I might’ve chosen a better time and place. Though, if I’d been in a state to think things through, I would never have found the courage to plant my blade in the eye of the monster.
> Of course, upon hearing my song of murder and freedom, the soldiers descended upon the cart. They asked politely at first, in case Rodolf had elicited those cries from me on purpose. It gave me enough time to find my sword and knives, to pull my pants up and fasten them so I could add some reserve knives.
Kaja would have been proud. Perhaps she guided my hand.
When the first soldier stuck his unhelmeted head in the tent, I cut his throat. One swing of my sword from the final kneeling position of the ducerse. I had no pearls to offer, only death.
After that, the third man I’d ever killed, and far from the last, the night became a blur of moonlight on white faces, and the black slickness of blood. Most of the men had taken off their armor, and the first few who tried to subdue me were so astonished by a half-naked woman holding a blade and daring to strike a man that they went down like ghosts in the night.
I danced for them, my bared breasts drawing their gaze while they commanded me to obey, my blades slicing their words into silence.
After that, they wised up. They came at me until my skin gleamed black with my own blood. I kept to my feet, my fight, for a time, as they tried to subdue me rather than kill. I was still the trophy they fought to bring back from their long journey, the pearl beyond price.
I refused that fate. I no longer belonged to Dasnaria, and would die here in Chiyajua. Return my blood to the fertile soil that grew grass for my elephants. I would not be subdued. I would force them to kill me.
Shrieking like the madwoman I was, I heaped curses upon them in three languages. My heart thundered with the hatred that drowned all else. The men circled me, several deep, their armor unfriendly to Moranu’s moon, their blades fencing me. I spun in my dance, keeping them that far away. Until I tired, an inevitability that still seemed distant.
No matter what, I would not be taken alive.
Then the thunder became so loud even they heard it. And the night came alive. A trumpet as Moranu’s shadows manifested into mountains of dark fury.
Exile of the Seas Page 18