by Melanie Rawn
“So you believe the story Princess Baetrizia put around, do you? She thinks my visions and voices are visitations by the Mother.”
“And you did nothing to disabuse her of this notion, did you? Quite the rise, from humble peasant to confidant of royalty!”
“You know nothing about it!”
“The fact remains that you were a guest of the simple-minded Baetrizia for quite some time. How did you come to be a guest of the Shagara?”
“I’m here on purpose! Which is more than can be said for you!”
Ayia, she had him there. What puzzled him was why, if she was here in his room clandestinely, during all their conversation she had not troubled to lower her voice. Although he knew himself to be the only occupant of this particular floor (the third) of the building, and the clattering rain and rumbling thunder and occasional crash of lightning were admittedly very loud, surely someone ought to have heard their voices by now. “Did you drug or bribe your way in?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Having nothing but your delightful self to offer—and you really don’t seem that sort of girl—it must have been drugs.”
Grudgingly, she said, “I have trouble sleeping sometimes. They’re very good with medicines, you know. The Shagara won’t fight, but they sent healers to tend our soldiers.”
So that much at least of Shagara capabilities was generally known. Interesting, that the imperative to use their healing gifts in service to others remained so strong. He nodded, his lips tickled by her wildly curling hair. “You did come here on purpose, then. You want the Tza’ab out of your country, and you thought you could convince the Shagara to help you do it.” By the way she stiffened—and not in response to thunder—and then sagged against him, he knew he was right. Smarter than a seventeen-year-old girl; his mother would be so proud. “You might as well explain all of it,” he invited, “in as much detail as whatever you used on the guards will allow.”
“Only about an hour,” she confessed. “Eiha, what do you want to know?”
“That lazy old king of Cazdeyya not moving fast enough for you, I take it? And you know what the Shagara can do by way of potions and—and things.” How much did she know? “Poor qarassia, aren’t you aware of their history? They left my country because gr—greater men than they used Shagara knowledge in ways they didn’t approve!” He’d almost said great-grandfather.
“And thus they hate you Tza’ab almost as much as we do. In the end, we’ll make common cause and throw you out. You don’t belong here!”
“The land belongs to us now. You might as well accept it.”
“You don’t belong here, and you never will! Just because your troops march all over a country doesn’t mean you own it. Land belongs to the people who belong to it.”
This notion sounded vaguely familiar. He was distracted from chasing it down inside his head by her sudden wriggle to get free. To his surprise—and hers, to judge by her gasp—he let her go.
“The rain has slacked,” he said as he got to his feet in the darkness. “And it’s been nearly an hour, hasn’t it? You’d better lock me in. If you’ll forgive me, I’ll wait until you’re outside before giving you back your knife.”
“Whoever you are, you’re certainly a fool. An open door, sleeping guards—and you ask to be locked up again!”
“An open door, sleeping guards, and an entire fortress filled with many, many more guards between me and freedom. How far do you think I’d get?”
“How did I get here?” she taunted.
“Ayia, you are here, so why don’t you have that look at me that you say you want so much?” He went to the corner where he’d thrown the candlestick, not surprised to find it in pieces. The candle was still intact, and he groped on his bedside table for flint. “I warn you, I’m not looking my best. I need my hair trimmed by someone who actually knows how, and a nightshirt isn’t the most flattering of garments.” He struck her knife against the flint and the candlewick ignited. Turning toward the door, he smiled.
She caught her breath. He might have been pleased with the reaction but for the nature of her shock. “You—you’re so young! And there are no scars—”
His brows arched. “The nature of your visions dismays me, qarassia. You saw a scarred old man and mistook him for me?”
“I only saw you lying there in the dirt,” she snapped. “I didn’t see your face that clearly.”
“Yet you had an impression of age and scars? I must have looked even worse than I felt at the time!”
“You don’t understand! Nobody ever understands!”
With her brown eyes flashing and her chin jutting out, she didn’t look seventeen. More like five or six, and threatening an impressive tantrum. He had to laugh. She really was rather adorable. Not precisely pretty, not to his usual tastes, but the pale hair was intriguing, and he suspected she had an enchanting smile. Not that he was likely to see it anytime soon.
“I saw you old,” she hissed. “I saw it just as I saw Ra’amon al-Joharra’s death in battle! And it came true! I saw it last summer, and this summer he died!”
“Ra’amon is dead?” Qamar had no time to feel anything. A deep and angry voice echoed off the stone walls all the way to the third floor, bellowing about lazy stupid louts who got so drunk they passed out while on duty. Fresh lightning and an immediate thunderclap couldn’t drown out his roars.
Solanna flinched so violently that she dropped the key. Qamar bent to retrieve it, pushed her through the door, and blew out the candle.
“Go on, hurry! But don’t forget the lock!”
Swinging the door closed, he heard her fumbling attempts to insert and then turn the key. More lightning, more thunder—and the enraged voice almost shaking the walls as the abuse went on and on. But it seemed the guards were in no condition to appreciate the creativity of his invective; most of the yelling consisted of orders to wake up.
“He’ll have to go for help,” Qamar told the girl through the barred window. “If you’re careful, you can slip out then. Will you lock the damned door and get out of here?”
She said nothing, but in the darkness he heard the clink of metal on stone on the floor within his room. He had to wait for the next flash of lightning to be sure. But it was indeed the key.
No one accosted him the next day to demand what had gone on in the middle of the night. Thus he assumed that Solanna had safely reached her own quarters, wherever they might be. Over the next few days, on his walks around the rain-grayed alleys, he looked for possible “guest” accommodations—or, better still, a glimpse of her—but had no luck.
As for the key—ayia, guards who got drunk on duty were also capable of losing keys. That was what got shouted the next morning, and Qamar was disinclined to correct the mistake.
He kept it in his left boot, and Solanna’s knife in the right.
The building in which he was not quite a prisoner but not quite a guest was a narrow construction crammed against another building several stories taller. The entire fortress always smelled cold and harsh, for everything here was built of stone and iron. He missed the sweet fragrances of wooden floors and staircases polished with oils. But he supposed that this, like the stinking salve and the pungent herbs that flavored the food, was yet another example of working with what one had. The lowest floor was divided into treatment rooms and a dispensary; the second was a single large room with beds for recovering patients. The third floor’s dozen little rooms were all equipped with barred windows and lockable doors. Qamar wondered if this had been the doing of the original builders or if the Shagara had turned this floor into a prison.
One morning the healer who had Tariq forebears was the one to unlock Qamar’s door. After a silent walk downstairs, he was ushered into a room almost as small as the one he inhabited upstairs.
“Please sit.”
He did so, in a comfortable wooden chair at a table laid out with paper, pens, and bottles of different colored inks. Smiling brightly, he asked, “Am
I to write my own ransom note?”
“You may be worth more than money.” From a pocket he drew a much-folded sheet of paper. “Copy these symbols using the green ink.”
What in the Name of Acuyib the Inscrutable was going on here? During boyhood he had spent a year with his Shagara relatives, but having no talent for even the most rudimentary talishann he’d been perfectly happy tending and training the horses instead. His Haddiyat cousins were forever writing and rewriting the protections at the family residences, and a few times Qamar had been bored enough with his other pursuits to watch. None of the symbols on this page looked familiar at all.
Shrugging, he opened the bottle of green ink, noting that the stopper was carved of green moss agate into the shape of a rather pretty flower he didn’t recognize. He dipped a pen and made his copy.
“Now write my name at the top. Zario Shagara.”
Qamar glanced up. “That’s unusual.”
“It commemorates the Cazdeyyan nobleman who gave us this fortress. One Shagara male at a time, and only one, bears the name. Do you want me to spell it?”
“Please.” He wrote as he was told. When he looked up, expecting further instructions, Zario was holding a small, thin-bladed knife.
“Your hand,” he said.
Qamar stared at him.
“I need a few drops of your blood. Hold out your hand.”
He very nearly blurted out “No!” They must think—they thought he was—but he wasn’t, he couldn’t possibly—
He tried to remember what most people knew about Shagara magic. He was wearing hazziri, so he had to know something, but how much?
“Your great-grandfather Azzad didn’t believe until it was demonstrated to him over and over again,” his great-grandmother Leyliah had told him a long time ago. “Ayia, a very stubborn man! Your grandfather Alessid, of course, was told directly when Abb Shagara thought it time to do so. And now I will tell you. It is not just the talishann, nor the skill of the maker, nor the metal, nor the stones that make hazziri potent. Neither is it only the particular combination of herbs or flowers or the amount of wine or water or vinegar in a medication that gives it the power to heal.”
They thought him Shagara, and he was—but not that sort of Shagara. He was certain of it. So let Zario do whatever it was he would do, conduct whatever test this might be.
Qamar shrugged and held out his hand.
Zario didn’t prick Qamar’s finger. He drew a long, shallow scratch across his own palm. He watched the blood well up, a meditative and bitter smile curving his lips. Then he wiped the blade between his fingers and seized Qamar’s hand and pricked his thumb. Before Qamar had time to cry out his surprise, Zario had squeezed drops of blood onto each of the six symbols and both words of his name.
“What do you—how dare you—” He looked from the smear of blood on his thumb to the Shagara’s face—but blocking his gaze was the man’s palm. His clean, whole, uninjured palm, without a mark on it.
“But I’m not!” he cried. “I’m not one of you—I’m not like you!”
The old man who was not really an old man eyed him with a certain grim satisfaction. “All evidence to the contrary,” he said.
“No—it’s not possible—” He cast about frantically for some excuse. Some reason. Some escape. “It was your blood, not mine—your blood still on the blade—”
“Are you calling me a clumsy fool, boy? I’ve done the testing these twenty and more years. It’s one of the privileges of bearing my name. There is only one of me, you see, and so only one person that the signs and the blood and the paper and the ink can touch.”
Qamar staggered up from his chair, dimly heard it crash behind him, backed away from Zario’s shrewd, pitiless gaze. “No! I can’t be one of you!”
“Certain of that, are you? Left a fine little collection of bastards behind you in Tza’ab Rih, did you?” He snorted a laugh, then drew himself up and squared his shoulders and said in cold and formal tones, “Qamar Tariq, it is my honor to inform you that you have been blessed by Acuyib and have the right to use the name Shagara.”
His first encounter with Solanna Grijalva came when both were guests, or prisoners, or perhaps both, at the Shagara fortress, from which he escaped with great cunning. It would be more than half a year before he saw her again. Little is known of that portion of his life, although rumors have gradually transformed over time to legends, none of which are true. The most repellent of these stories would have it that he slaughtered a dozen or more Shagara during his escape from the fortress, and spent the next autumn and winter carousing from town to town. Any recounting of his life and deeds that asserts these things is a lie.
—HAZZIN AL-JOHARRA, Deeds of Il-Ma’anzuri, 813
20
After having it proved to him that he was Haddiyat, that he would age quickly and painfully, that at not quite twenty-two his life was half over, he spent three days alone in his room at the Shagara fortress. The door was no longer locked. This was a good thing, for it took less time to open it when more wine was delivered, and speedy delivery was second only to generous quantity in Qamar’s bloodshot eyes.
On the fourth day, no wine arrived. Downstairs Zario Shagara was waiting for him in the room where his blood had proved what he was. It often happens like this, Zario said. Some cannot face the truth at first, he said. I remember once a boy only a bit younger than you broke into the dispensary and swallowed everything he could stuff into his mouth.
Now, despite the passage of many weeks, Qamar was still unable to decide whether or not he envied that boy. The fact that he was yet alive argued in one direction; the fact that he was planning to go on drinking argued in the other.
The first choice, Zario said, is acceptance or despair. But your next choice, he said, is one never given to any man before: Stay here and learn how best to use your gifts, or return to your own Shagara, with whom you would probably be more happy.
Happy. Ayia, of a certainty—happy as a colt in clover.
It was a dim, rickety little tavern he sat in now, a short walk from the palace in Joharra. He wasn’t quite drunk enough. The last weeks had refined his perceptions of how much wine it took to make him forgetful and how much rendered him oblivious. There were stages between tipsy and insensible he had never bothered to catalog before. At the moment, he was at that unfortunate point where nervous caution still existed. It was a somewhat delicate calculation, but the amount of wine left in the jug was sufficient to bring on just enough recklessness so he could accomplish his goal. He had only one, very carefully thought out while he was stone sober. Simple, really. He needed money.
His Shagara relations—by Acuyib the Incomprehensible, how he loathed having to acknowledge them as such, and especially the reason he must acknowledge them—had no money to give him. What they had given was food enough for three days and a horse. This was after they’d drugged him for an unknown number of days, and taken him on a journey to Acuyib didn’t want to know where, and left him with a vicious headache and the food and the horse and instructions to ride south for two days and then east. Or perhaps it had been east for one day and then south. He’d been beyond caring.
He’d ridden sober back into territory controlled by Joharra. That had been his last piece of luck—the right choice of direction, not the sobriety.
Seated in a corner of a tavern in Joharra, Qamar poured a precise amount of wine into his cup and wasted a few moments picking little floating bits of debris from it. Happy. He would not go to the desert, to the Shagara, to waste precious years of his abbreviated life crouched at some mouallima’s knee, memorizing talishann or pounding designs into silver or mixing up healing potions, and dripping his blood onto or into his work.
Neither would he stay with the other Shagara in their Cazdeyyan fortress. The studying would be the same, and the bleeding. But his tools would be paper and pen and ink and the strange plants of a realm that had already tried to kill him once with lethal thorns. Besides, being pent up inside ston
e walls in a land not his own was not the way he wanted to live. Happy? He would go insane.
Not that this wasn’t an intriguing thought, for a little while. Empress Mirzah had been quite, quite mad. When Qamar thought of the afternoons spent with her as she tended her dolls and called him by his great-grandfather’s name, he was both attracted and repulsed by the prospect. To live out his days not understanding or caring; to lose all awareness of reality . . . to be shut up someplace safe and private where he could shock no one . . .
Ayia, he was here, in this filthy little tavern not far from his cousins’ palace, so he had made the choice not to go mad, at any rate. Now that he thought about it, he had made quite a few choices. To stay alive, to leave Cazdeyya, to retain his sanity—although what he planned to do this evening would not be considered entirely sane.
Halfway through the last measure of wine now. He could feel nervousness turning to excitement, and smiled. He was still in an alien land that had first tried to kill him by piercing his body with poisoned thorns and in essence had succeeded in killing him with the truth about what he was. But a transplanted piece of Tza’ab Rih was a few streets away, eminently exploitable. He did not know how to live, let alone thrive, in this country that was full of barbarian people and poisonous plants and all manner of hideous things. Happy? he thought again, with a muffled snort. Here? He could not go home, but at least he could have one last hour of sensing home things all around him.
He began to be grateful, grudgingly, that the Shagara had let him go. It is not so much that we trust you not to try to find us again, Zario had said, and lead your army to us. You have no idea where you are, and will have even less idea of it by the time you ride away.
Then why? Qamar demanded. Why allow me to leave?