by Mike Grinti
The woman spoke again, and Jala thought she was trying to be reassuring. Why doesn’t she just tell me? She could speak our language well enough before. Then the translator kicked the horse and they were off, like a grayship with sails full of wind over storm-mad waters. Jala could only squeeze her eyes shut and hold on tight. I won’t fall, she told herself as they rode out into the desert. I won’t fall. I won’t fall and smash my head open on a rock.
They rode for a long time. When carrying two people became hard on the horses, they switched to the other three. When all the horses had been ridden, they walked them for a while. At these times Jala was able to open her eyes. Stars filled the sky overhead, and the moon was bright. In the distance, she could hear the river. They rode out of sight from it, among the dunes, but she could tell they still followed its path.
Askel sat on another horse, holding on to one of the soldiers. He had no qualms about the horse. He seemed to have no fear at all.
The sun rose, and in the heat of midday they rested. Jala watched the Hashon. They spoke softly to each other. One of the men was taller than the other, with a long face and a short, neat beard that gave him a serious look. The other was clean-shaven and had a rounder, kinder face, and when the Hashon quietly prayed before their meal, his eyes glistened with tears. Jala wondered if he had lost people to Lord Stone’s crusade to retrieve the Anka. Maybe that’s why he was helping her now.
“I thought the whole point of these horrible beasts was to make travel easier,” Jala muttered as she hobbled over to the kindly-looking man to get her meager meal. “I feel like I walked a thousand miles. I won’t be able to walk at all if I have to sit on that creature much longer.”
Watching her, the bearded man said something and laughed. He had a rich laugh, and it made his eyes crinkle in a way that changed his face completely. She wondered if he understood her meaning even if he didn’t understand her words.
Dinner the night before had been water and strips of dried horsemeat. Today’s lunch was water and a handful of wrinkled, sugary fruit. The kind-faced man tried to teach her the words for them as he handed them to her. Fig. Date. Grape. She repeated the words but quickly forgot which was which.
The translator took no more food than the rest of them but fed half to her horse. She seemed very alone, in spite of the two men traveling with them. She commanded, and the two men obeyed, but they never had real conversations with her. She carried the mask with her always, and sometimes Jala caught her reaching for it only to stop herself and press her hands down to her lap.
They rode again, into the afternoon heat, while the city of the Hashon grew small and distant behind them. Soon Jala saw they had circled back around to the river, and the two men took the horses down to the water.
Jala was growing increasingly uneasy around the kind-faced man. Sometimes, when everyone grew silent waiting for sleep to take them or for the sun to lessen its hold on the world, the kindliness would slip from his face. His eyes would dart back and forth, as if he was watching an insect flit about in front of his face. He often stared at Askel.
When she asked the sorcerer if he knew why the man watched him, Askel held up his arms, indicating the patches of burns that covered him. “Maybe our friend just can’t tear his eyes away from my beauty, oh queen.”
“So you don’t know anything?”
“I know he draws flames in the sand for me, when the other two aren’t looking,” Askel said. “Perhaps he knows of the fire mountain.”
“Perhaps,” Jala said. But she began to think of him as the haunted man instead of the kindly one, and she avoided his gaze.
They followed the river closely now, and occasionally the translator would look back at Jala and ask something in the Hashon tongue.
“Osh,” Jala said, shaking her head. “Not here. Farther.”
The translator frowned. She was growing impatient. But then, as night fell, Jala’s finger stump began to itch worse than it had in days. “Can you feel it?” Askel asked. “The closer you get the stronger the sensation will be.”
Jala only nodded in reply. She closed her eyes and held out her hand, moving it back and forth in front of her. She could almost feel it . . .
“Stop,” she called. “We’re going to miss it.”
The translator called to the others, and they slowed their horses. She reached into her robe, pulled out the mask, and put it on. “It’s here?” she asked, again speaking Jala’s language with ease, her voice once again strong and commanding.
“I think it’s close,” Jala said. “Let me off, I can’t concentrate sitting on this thing.”
With another word from the translator they stopped and dismounted. The horses were almost spent anyway. The two that had been carrying Jala and Askel were panting loudly, their mouths covered in foam.
“They breathe too loud. Take them away,” Jala said. Then she closed her eyes again and let the strange, unpleasant sensation lead her away from the river and into the desert. The itching became stronger, and her finger began to throb. The blood had slowed to a mere trickle before, but now it soaked into the bandages, the way it had when it had first been cut off.
“It’s here,” she said.
The two men began to dig. Jala edged away from the horse as the monstrous thing huffed and stamped sideways, nervous without its rider’s hands on the reins.
Jala looked at Askel. “You said the finger still lives. Can you . . . reattach it somehow?”
“There would be a high price,” he whispered back. “And I’m hungry, and tired.”
Jala didn’t ask what that price would be. It was only the smallest finger.
The digging was hard. The wind blew sand back into the hole as they dug. Jala could feel Lord Water’s impatience.
Then both of the men jumped back from the hole. “Anka!” the bearded man said, while the kind-faced man whispered a prayer under his breath and touched a hand to his heart.
Jala bent down and grabbed the book before it was covered again. Her little finger was still tied to it, oozing blood. She snapped the reeds and let the flesh fall to the ground, where it shriveled and dried. The throbbing in her finger subsided, and the bleeding stopped.
As Lord Water watched, she picked up a handful of sand and rubbed it gently on the front cover, scouring off the blood.
When she was done, she held it out to Lord Water. “I’ve kept my promise. Now, if this book is truly holy to you, keep yours.”
Lord Water took a deep breath and touched the book. A shudder ran through her. Then she grasped it with both hands. “The Hashana will remember you, island queen.” She raised the book over her head and shouted in triumph. The two men fell to their knees before her, touching their heads to the sand. The bearded man was crying joyfully.
They’re only stories, Jala wanted to say. Stories that don’t change.
On the ground, the kind-faced man reached into his robe, to the place where he’d held his hand over his heart, and fished out a piece of paper.
“Good-bye, island queen,” Lord Water said as she lowered the book and reverently placed it into a satchel at her side. The two men rose, and the bearded man led the three horses to Lord Water.
“You’re going to leave me here?” Jala asked. “What about Marjani? You said she’d be safe.”
“I will keep my promise,” Lord Water said. “Your friend will be sent to you, along with any of your people that still live.”
Jala saw something move out of the corner of her eye. It was the kind-faced man. He had a creased paper mask in his hands, and his eyes darted wildly as he lifted it to his face. It was a mask of flames. Somehow, in that instant, his eyes seemed to dance.
His knife was out of his belt, and Jala cried out, but it was too late. He screamed Hashon words as he leapt at Lord Water. The steel slid into Lord Water’s gut. The man jerked his hand to the side, and Lord Water fell back, clutching her entrails as they slithered, dark and bloody, out onto her lap.
The kind-faced man took
another step and struck Lord Water in the face, sending the water mask flying. The woman tried to scream, but her voice was weak. He reached for the satchel holding the Anka. He never made it. The bearded man grabbed him by the hair and opened his throat with his own knife.
The translator whispered something, but Jala couldn’t understand the words. The woman’s lips were bloody with foam. Then she smiled and fell back onto the sand, eyes open but unseeing.
Jala stared, frozen in place. It had all happened so fast. The bearded man fell to his knees. His knife fell from his hands. He mumbled a prayer under his breath but did not move. The horses neighed and stamped the sand, their eyes wide and their nostrils flaring.
The animals are going to run, Jala thought. They’re going to run, and then we’re going to die.
“Do something,” she said to the bearded man. “Take your book, your Anka.” She reached into the translator’s satchel, heedless of the blood, and pulled the book free. The man backed away from her, averting his eyes. “Osh,” he said, followed by words she couldn’t understand. He wouldn’t listen to her. And why should he? What was she to him? Only the little island queen. Not anyone important. Not Lord Water.
The water mask lay only a few feet away. Such a simple thing, just wood and paint and a leather strap. She tucked the book under her arm and then, with trembling hands, she picked up the mask. She wondered, briefly, what good it would do. She couldn’t speak the language. The man might even kill her for touching it. Like that really matters now.
She placed the mask over her face. It smelled of sweat, and the narrow eyeholes made it hard to see. Such a simple thing. She clutched the Anka tightly.
“Listen to me,” she said, trying to make her voice deeper, more confident, more like the translator when she was Lord Water.
The man looked up sharply, and his eyes grew wide. “My lord,” he whispered. He touched his forehead to the ground once more. Askel stared at her, wide-eyed.
“I have the Anka,” she said, and there was something strange about her words, something strange about her voice. “You will take me and this sorcerer back to the city.”
“At once, great one,” the man said.
He had understood her. Jala had understood him. She realized what had sounded strange. When she spoke to him, she had spoken in the tongue of the Hashon.
A cold wind blew across the sand. The paper mask fluttered away from the dead man’s face. Beneath it, his skin was blistered and burned. The mask tumbled in the air, then curled in on itself in red and orange flames.
Azi sat on the beach and watched the waves come in one after another. The sky was bright and blue, with only the occasional wisp of luminous white cloud. No storms gathered in the distance. No ships appeared on the horizon. He held the King’s Earring in his hands and toyed with it mindlessly while he waited and watched.
Someone was walking down the beach behind him. He could hear them breathing heavily as they approached. It was a long walk to this empty stretch of beach, but from here he could look out toward the mainland. Here he was usually left alone.
If her ship came, if it ever came, this was where he’d see it first.
“Leave me, Uncle,” Azi said softly. “I’ve heard it before.”
But his uncle said it anyway. “The storm season is over, and there’s no sign of her. She’s gone. You have to accept that.”
“Why must I accept that?” Azi asked, not bothering to turn around.
“Because I expect you to act like a king, not some sulking child,” his uncle said. He grabbed Azi by the shoulders and spun him around. Azi opened his mouth to order him away but stopped. He wasn’t alone. Kona was there, a determined look on her face. She met his eyes.
“What’s going on?” Azi asked, looking from Kona to his uncle.
“You have to remarry,” his uncle said. “Rebuild our alliance with the Rafa, father sons to take your place. Do your duty, to the Five-and-One and to your family.”
“Your uncle says we can be together,” Kona said. “All you have to do is let Jala go.” Her voice was neutral, almost hard. He couldn’t read her expression.
“I’ve made a deal with the Rafa,” his uncle said, his voice softer than it had been for a long while. “You won’t have to choose a girl you don’t know again. As soon as you’re done officially mourning for that lost Bardo girl, we’ll hold another wedding.”
“But she’s not Rafa. I don’t understand how this would help the alliance,” Azi said.
“My father was Rafa,” Kona said. “He took my mother’s name to be with her.”
“She will be adopted as a long-lost daughter of the Rafa, and you will marry her and make her a Rafa queen. No one will dare question it. Jala’s left the Bardo without a leader, and whoever they send to the next Sectioning will still be struggling to convince the captains they should listen to him. We’ll give him a few scraps of land to make him look stronger than he is, and then he’s under our control.
“The Gana are no more, and without allies the Nongo are little threat. We’ll return Two Bones to the Rafa along with the other cities taken from them. So long as the girl does what I say, and carries the Rafa name, they’ll stay loyal to us. And with only four families, things become simpler, don’t they? By the time your son is ready to be king, he might marry a Kayet queen.”
“You sound just like Jala’s father,” Azi said.
“Except unlike the former Lord Mosi, I’m not the one who caused all this in the first place,” his uncle said stiffly. “But I’ll do what it takes to make sure the Kayet remain strong. This is the course the winds have laid for us, Azi. We’d be fools to try to steer into them instead.”
Azi met Kona’s eyes. “What about your family?”
A smile tugged at the corners of Kona’s mouth. “They’ll get used to my Rafa name a lot faster than they’ll get used to having me as their queen.”
“And you? Can you be happy as my queen? Can you still love me knowing that I chose her instead of you?”
“Of course she can,” his uncle said. “The Bardo girl made things hard on herself. It’s easy enough to do what we tell her and take care of your children when you have them. She won’t even have to leave her family.”
“Is that all you think a queen should be, Uncle? What about the king? Should the king simply do as you say, too?”
“I may not be your father, but I’m doing everything I can to teach you to be a good king,” his uncle said. “I won’t be around forever. Listen to me now, and you’ll know what to do once I’m gone. There’s no reason to deny it now. That Bardo girl twisted your head around until you couldn’t steer straight. But it’s not too late.”
Azi turned away from his uncle. The man was more of a father to him than the old king had been, but at that moment he couldn’t stand the sight of him.
“Is that what you believe?” he asked Kona. “That I was tricked by her? That I never really loved her?”
“You’re still here, aren’t you?” she asked.
Azi started. “What?”
“You wanted to know if I’d be happy as your queen. I don’t know. I never wanted to be queen. Your uncle says you need me, and maybe you do. Maybe I can help. Everything that’s happened is so much bigger than either of us. Will I love you? How can I answer that? I don’t know this king I see in front of me where Azi used to be. You will not rule, but resent your uncle ruling for you. You say you love her, but do nothing to help her.”
Azi tensed. “I do love her. More than anything. But what can I do?”
“You can sail into the wind,” she said softly. “If that’s what it takes to get her back.”
“What are you doing?” Lord Inas spat. “You’re only confusing the boy more.”
She turned her hard stare on Lord Inas, and her expression made him fall silent. “The Kayet don’t need a boy, and I don’t want one.” She turned back to Azi. “If you were seduced by her, then you were a fool. Maybe I could love a fool. But if you do love her and c
hoose instead to stay here, with me . . .” She hesitated only for a moment, just long enough to close her eyes and breathe before meeting his eyes again. “I could be your queen, but I could never love you.”
“I love her,” Azi whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“No. You’re not,” she said. Her eyes glistened with tears, but she blinked them away. “You’re sorry you hurt me, or you’re sorry you had to see me hurt. It’s not the same thing at all.”
Azi felt his own eyes burn, but he wasn’t about to let her see him cry. He didn’t have the right, not after what he’d done to her. After what his uncle had done, using her like nothing more than a token in a game.
“You could have stayed with me if you really wanted,” Kona went on. “But you chose her. That was easy. So choose her again now, when it’s hard.”
“What am I supposed to do? Get a ship and sail off to the mainland alone?” The thought had in fact crossed his mind more than once, but it was impossible. Wasn’t it?
“You were a sailor once. And you’re the king.”
“Are you mad, girl?” his uncle sputtered. “Do you wish him killed?”
Kona ignored his uncle, as if he wasn’t even there. “A part of me still wishes you won’t go, even now,” she told Azi. “I don’t want to say good-bye. But if—when—we see each other again, it’ll all be different. So this is still good-bye, in a way.”
She leaned forward and kissed him, lightly, on the cheek. She smiled at him, and Azi knew it was the last time she would ever look at him like that again. Then she turned and walked away down the beach without a second glance.
Azi’s uncle was still trying to find the right curses to throw at her back, the right threats.
“Uncle?” Azi said. “Shut up. Your king commands it.”
Lord Inas spun back around to face him. “Or what? You’ll exile me like that wretched Bardo girl exiled her father? Go ahead. If this is what it takes to get through to you, to make you act like a king, I’ll gladly go. Forget her, take any girl you want to be your queen, but let the Bardo girl go.”