Yephi pouted her lips and raised her hands to her shoulders, palms open like she was showing us she wasn’t armed. “I thought we were going to die,” she quipped. “I was quite certain of it.” She nudged her head slightly to Iris. “Says we had it… under control.” She rolled her eyes at the word, then flattened her lips into a knowing smile. “Under… control.” She let the words roll off her tongue as she winked at me.
Iris glowered at her, crimping her lips into a frown.
“The two of you. What… what happened?” I asked. “Why did you come here? Who took you? And are you all right now? Has anything happened to you?” I examined them from head to toe. Their necks, the back of their hands, their arms, I even squeezed their feet as they watched and laughed. It was the same way we had just checked Jahlil, but everything was fine with my sisters.
They both glanced upward at Taa, and then at each other, and then at me.
“I don’t really know,” Yephi said, emphasizing the last word like it had a secret in it. She leaned in on the balls of her feet as she spoke.
“I remember being at the Cathedral,” Iris continued, shaking her head. “We were learning—”
“Old Emelim,” Yephi interjected. “Father Rait was teaching it and then—”
“We went outside to eat lunch by the—”
“Meadows. A woman called out to us there. I think we were alone, by the birds. Yes, I remember because they went when she came. I kind of knew then. There was something not right about her,” Yephi said. She glanced at Iris, who nodded eagerly. “She was wearing—”
“A green cloak,” Iris continued. “The perfect color of emerald. Real emerald, cut right from stone.” She pinched her fingers together in front of her face and then squinted one eye, like she was examining a jewel. “I remember the eyes. That’s the last thing I could remember clearly. Her eyes, blue ones. After seeing them, I can’t remember as well. It was magic, Dina, I’m sure.” She waved her hands slowly to the left, and then to the right, imitating arcane motions as she spoke. “Not alchemical magic. Something else. I remember everything clearly before looking into her eyes. I remember everything that happened today. I can say it all back. But after seeing her eyes it just all turned into kind of a—”
“Dream, Dina,” Yephi cut in. “It was like we could see ourselves moving. But I remember I couldn’t speak. Or I could speak but—”
“We had no control over it. We were just watching from afar through our eyes, and we’d say whatever the woman wanted us to say.”
Iris rose on her tiptoes and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. Her hand was cool with nervous sweat. Her feet made a crunching sound against a twig as she took a careful step forward. Her hair smelled like rose oil, the same blend that Mother made all of us use. She took two of her fingers and pushed them into my neck, as gentle as a kiss but with all the seriousness an eight-year-old was capable of. Then she took her other hand and did the same thing on the other side of my neck, but pinched hard this time.
“I thought she was a vampire at first,” Iris whispered in my ear.
Taa had been listening to us at first, but her attention was now back on Nikhil and Avisynth. She watched the two of them with pensive eyes, tapping a long, patient finger against the knot at the top of her cane. Nikhil was still holding his sword by Avisynth’s ear. His knuckles had gone milk white and his ears were warm and red. Avisynth had relaxed, watching Taa instead of Nikhil now. He held his left hand as tense and still as a wounded fox, and continued to run a thumb through the dry blood on his fingers every few seconds. His hair was flat from all the rain it was holding. He brushed some off the top of his face every few seconds, taking an extra second to rub his eyes. His expression wasn’t any different, and his eyes were still distant, but they glistened with color.
“Lady Anasahara,” Elsa sobbed. She ran a hand through Jahlil’s hair, then held the front back, showing his forehead to Taa. “Jahlil. He… something happened. Something happened to him. The boy. Avisynth. He’s not breathing. Jahlil, I mean. He’s not breathing. His breath is gone and his body has gone cold. He’s been uttering these things. Words that don’t make sense. They’re not Emel.”
Iris and Yephi ran over to see the boy. They rapped his forehead with their knuckles, ran their hands through his palms, and then rubbed their own hands together after feeling the cold. Iris glanced at Taa, then looked back and sighed a deep “hmmm,” as though on the verge of a solution. She brought her left thumb up to bite on a nail without saying anything more. Yephi checked the boy’s pulse, and then glanced at Taa, seeing if she had done the right thing. Taa tapped her staff against the ground in approval. Yephi turned, then continued to examine the boy more vigorously.
“He’s lost his heat from using magic?” Yephi asked. “It should come back after—”
“A day,” Iris said. “Two days at most if he’s gone too far with his body. He used too much alchemy of water? He’s got the chills then.”
Elsa shook her head. “No, it’s not like that,” she panted. “Not from magic. It wasn’t Jahlil who used alchemy.” She stammered between breaths. Mawlik helped her hold Jahlil up. “I know what you’re thinking,” Elsa continued, “but it’s not fever chills. I don’t know what it is. It’s not a side effect from anything he did.”
“He used blood magic!” Nikhil shouted, jerking his sword closer to Avisynth. The feratu boy didn’t move, letting the sword scratch his face. It didn’t pierce through his skin. Its edge was too withered to cut anything on a soft touch, and too wet from the rain to catch friction on anything as smooth as skin, but it still pressed against Avisynth’s cheek in a rough manner. It left a thin white line right under his eye. It was the kind of thing you would expect to make a boy lose his color in rage. Nikhil held the sword in place stiffly, gripping the hilt of the weapon with his left hand and the bottom part of the blade with his right. His eyes didn’t move from Avisynth’s. They were dark and intent pools, looking out of place on someone so young. He occasionally bent his head lower to wipe rain from his brow against the side of his elbow, but other than that, he stayed firm in his position. His eyes flickered to Taa once in a while.
It might have seemed odd, that Yephi and Iris had said nothing about the scene in front of them. A boy was holding a sword to another boy’s face. The second boy was holding a hand with dry blood behind his back as a means of defense. But really, this was a testament to how well we were taught. It might’ve seemed like a frivolous detail, but it was the small things that were the strongest reminders of how my sisters and I were different from other children. Taa had said, Put the sword down, foolish child. She had set a flippant tone already, and by not paying attention, Yephi and Iris were making sure not to draw attention to what was happening. It was a subtle choice, but an important one, and it was decisions like these that added up through the years to separate the wolves from the sheep. A child that understood how to get other children to stop crying or agree with what she said would become a queen who knew how to command others that might be her equal. There was an Old Emelim word for what they had shown, a word that had no adequate Emel translation. Shapnau. Deep awareness. Awareness of both the conscious and unconscious minds. Cognizance that is both calculative and instinctual. Emel words always treated the two concepts as separate states of mind.
Taa walked toward Nikhil. Her staff creaked against the wet floor, digging into the gaps between stones on every step until she was away from the cave’s entrance. The hem of her shawl swept over the mud and grass as smoothly as satin, never once catching dirt or rain at its fringes. The cloth looked as thin and fragile as cobwebs or mesh, but if you touched it, it felt as solid and warm as velvet, and as strong and old as wyrm skin. Her steps made no sound unless she was grinding them against the floor, and her breaths whistled quietly against the warm air—calm but intense like rain in a spring storm.
It might have also seemed odd that Taa had waited so long to react. She could have turned Nikhil’s sword to dust in th
e space of a step, and Taa knew what to do when facing blood magic. But she had been intrigued. I could tell by the way she watched Avisynth. The way she tapped her staff and bent her head at an angle toward the ground to see the feratu boy through the corner of her eyes. The way she had taken her time to regard him, as slow and keen as an owl, as patient and shrewd as a snake.
“From what it sounded like, the lot of you were about to die and then he saved you, no?” Taa asked, without looking directly at Nikhil. “So from my understanding, even if something did happen to your friend, it’s better than if he did nothing and let all of you die, isn’t it?” She pushed the sword with the knot of her staff, gently tipping it to the side. She dabbed at a fresh green tear with a sleeve. Her face was no more than a shadow under the hood of her shawl, with glittering green bits wherever she was missing skin. “Put the sword down, and let us worry about helping your friend instead.” She spoke in mock severity, the patience in her voice wearing thin after every word. Iris and Yephi weren’t looking, but I could see the attention they were listening with. Their shoulders were stiff and their ears were pushed back in tension.
Nikhil didn’t move. He avoided looking at Taa, his expression still angry and desperate. He took a deep breath through his nose, glanced at Jahlil, then me, then back at Avisynth. He kept the sword in place. He slid his right leg three inches back to steady himself, then curled his fingers firmly around his sword’s handle. The withered blade barely reflected light, gleaming dully against the blue moon like a well polished stone.
Taa turned an inch to look at him directly. Eyes like jade diamonds. Malachite stones carved into the eyes of an assassin. They widened with irritation. With no lashes, they were the eyes of a cobra, with slitted pupils surrounded by clouds of green instead of white. She leaned in to whisper to him, though spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear.
“You know who I am, eh?” Taa asked, her voice bleeding with irony. “I don’t like repeating myself, child, to anyone but my grandchildren. Put the sword down and if you give me that look again, I’ll break every bone in your face and your father will have no one to replace him in the King’s Guard.” She lifted her left hand and held it by his ear. Her voice was slow and methodical, as controlled and delicate as the sand in an hourglass. “I could do it with my fingers, you know. They’d break like bubbles.”
Nikhil’s sword dropped a few inches. He leaned away from her, twisting his neck to face the other way. Avisynth turned to stare at the top of the hills. I would have thought he was doing what Taa called watchful inattention—facing another way but watching the scene in front of him carefully, but he wasn’t. His head was turned entirely away, and his odd eyes were engrossed with the trees above us. He wiped his left hand on his pants, rubbing off the last bits of blood. He took his other hand out of his pocket and poked at the small tears and rips in his clothes.
Taa leaned in closer to Nikhil. I imagined he could smell her breath now, the nutmeg and the spices, the wormwood and the tobacco. She chewed so much of it, it was a wonder she didn’t faint on a daily basis. “Your father wants you to replace him as the head of the King’s Guard?” Taa asked. “Said the Anasahara need good men more than ever now. How will a boy who uses the muscles here,” she touched Nikhil’s arm, “more than the muscles in his mind, keep a kingdom safe from the most cunning enemy in all of Mirradalia? How will he keep my granddaughter safe?” She pointed to Nikhil’s head. “Learn to use it better, boy.” She waited for a response. Or rather, she knew no response was coming but wanted him to feel the silence. The pauses in a conversation always belonged to Taa, and she was careful to put them in the right places.
Nikhil waited reluctantly for another second, opened his mouth to say something, then silently put his sword down and rushed to Jahlil. Avisynth turned back from the hills to watch them.
“Let me see the boy,” Taa said, straightening herself and speaking with sudden urgency. Everyone moved aside except for Elsa. Taa walked over to her and waved a dismissive hand.
“Move, child, now,” she said. Taa could be as gentle as a leaf, but when her patience wore thin, she was as sharp and splintered as a wooden blade. She was used to the quicker wit of my sisters and I. It made her expect much more from other children than they were usually able to live up to. There were exceptions, of course. You didn’t have to know eight languages or memorize all the cycles of the moons to impress Taa. You didn’t even have to be smart, really, although that always helped. No—Taa was looking for something that went much deeper than that. I asked her once and she said she looks for ghaneu. Old Emelim for worth. Not economic or social worth. Ghaneau was the worth of your very being. What was deep down. What made you, you.
Elsa glanced at me. I nodded, gesturing toward myself with a hand. She placed Jahlil’s head as delicately as she could on the ground, then walked over. Her eyes were swollen and red. Her hands shook unsteadily. She bit her bottom lip and played nervously with the collar of her shirt, running a single finger through the entire front of it over and over again. Elsa was brave, but not when it came to me or Jahlil. I was the same way with my sisters. She breathed heavily and quickly, sobbing between sighs and sharp breaths. She turned to watch Taa. It was rare to see her like this. Being bold was part of her Xenashi ancestry. They were people of sport. Competition was a way of life, and courage and resilience in the face of mortal danger were doctrine. The crème of their society were gladiators, not queens or merchants. If this had happened to one of Elsa’s older brothers, or even her father, she wouldn’t have been as shaken as she was now with Jahlil.
Taa didn’t touch or bend over to look at Jahlil. Her eyes barely flickered over his body. She took her staff and tapped once on the front of his head, and once on his temple. For a moment, I thought that was going to be it. Jahlil would be fixed immediately and then I’d be able to spread a rumor that Taa’s healing powers were something that came from our blood, and that I probably had them too. Mothers would bring their babies for me to kiss. Fairies would sing of my deeds. Scholars would send me inquiries. I would tell them the powers were sporadic and they would have to turn to Yuweh for their daily needs.
Jahlil didn’t move. He groaned another word. Taa threw her staff down, then turned around. She was still calm, but her eyes were serious. “The six of you wait here,” she said. She bent over, picked up Jahlil, and threw him over her shoulder. “Come with me,” she said, gesturing to Avisynth. She pointed to the woods up ahead.
Nikhil flashed a glance at the feratu boy, then to Taa, but said nothing. I prayed that he didn’t. Taa’s threats were never empty. If anything, she tended to underestimate how far she’d go. There were many stories from Taa’s youth that people said were only stories—but once you knew her long enough, you’d be certain that every story, even the wildest ones, held more than a kernel of truth. Some had likely been fabricated down to make them more believable.
Yephi and Iris took tiny steps forward, wanting to follow Taa. I placed a finger on each of their shoulders to tell them to stay behind. Yephi clicked her tongue, but said nothing.
Avisynth followed Taa silently, and without looking at her. It occurred to me that he wasn’t someone who followed directions so simply, even from elders. There were hints: the hesitation when he moved for anything, the distracted glances, the slow mannerisms. He had made an exception for Taa, perhaps because she had saved him from the fire, or perhaps because of the verbal whipping he had just seen Nikhil take. Perhaps both. He moved with neither the reluctance that Nikhil and Elsa had shown, nor with the eagerness of Yephi and Iris.
The way he moved was not particularly remarkable or anything, but it bothered me that I couldn’t read into him as much as I was used to. I could lay bare a person’s upbringing from the way they walked and ran. I could tell you how their mother treated them and what hobbies their father encouraged them to pick up from the way they moved about while completing their chores. The way we move reflects the way we think and feel. If our movements are blan
k and expressionless, then they are too disconnected from our thoughts to reflect them accurately. It might seem like a point of strength, to make yourself unreadable, a thing of mystery and subtlety—but that is only if you are a person of true cunning. A master tactician of social settings, someone able to control their movements to reflect whatever feelings and thoughts they wish to publicize. For everyone else, it is not something we can control, and its absence shows a profound weakness in our character, something that could never make up for the advantages in ambiguity that it grants. Our thoughts and feelings are imbued in our motions and the language of our bodies because in this way, they give them strength. Our movements have vigor and purpose, whether in fear or anger or love or envy. It is the seat of our inner strength. In many ways, it is deeply connected with Ghaneau.
Taa did not take Avisynth and Jahlil far. They were just out of earshot. Only their outlines were visible through the dark of the forest. Taa had put Jahlil down on the floor, and Avisynth was standing in front of a tree right next to him. There were no animals nearby, and no daemons. Or at least, there were no sounds of any nearby. It was still early in the night. There was plenty of time for them to wake as the blue moon waxed and waned through its cycle. The forest was quiet now for the most part, but a part of me was still afraid. I remembered the faces we had seen in the place that Avisynth had taken us. The faces of the trees. Scorned and uneven faces, with wide gaps for eyes and lines of wooden chips for teeth. The totem creature was a daemon, but its many faces and expressions were playful, and in many ways entirely human. The trees were different. But then another part of me said, Taa probably already knows. Somehow, she would know. She wouldn’t just know—she would see the faces that I could no longer see.
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