“There will be two stories,” Taigan said, pressing her. “The story the Kai and his people tell, of a mad refugee girl pretending to be Faith Ahya, trying to fool the country. The other is that you are, indeed, Faith Ahya, or some aspect of hers. That woman and her family already hold a spark of that. All I intend to do is kindle it. We kindle our story, Lilia, or we get burned up by the blazing storm of someone else’s.”
“I’m not going to lie to people,” Lilia said.
“You already deceived them,” Gian said, munching her apple.
“This is different.”
“We’ll tell the stories they’ve already made up,” Gian said. “It’s not as if we’ll make new ones.”
“I’m going to burn up all those Tai Mora in Liona,” Lilia said. “That will be story enough.” But she heard the wisdom in Taigan’s words. All her power came from these people. If things went wrong, and the Kai blamed the war on her…
“You’re untrained, raw,” Taigan said, “and after killing a few legionnaires who couldn’t defend themselves and hurling yourself to the top of a wall, you’ve gotten supremely arrogant. Power is nothing without discipline. Power without discipline is short lived.”
“All right,” Lilia said. “But don’t hurt anyone. I could bind you up in a bone tree forever.”
“See how that transpires a second time,” Taigan said coolly.
“What do you care what happens, Taigan?” Lilia said. “Why not go home to Saiduan on your own?” But that wasn’t her real question. Her real question was why Taigan gave her any choice in her fate at all now. Why hadn’t she bundled Lilia up in a sack and thrown her into a ship bound for Saiduan yet? What was she playing at?
“I do what I please,” Taigan said, but there was a briskness to her tone that made Lilia wonder why she would be so defensive.
“It’s at least seven more days to the harbor,” Lilia said. “We should talk about what happens there.”
“Ships arrive. Ships depart,” Taigan said.
“Bone tree,” Lilia said.
Taigan shrugged. “What is it you intend to do there? Burn them all up? There will be more than a few hundred legionnaires there with them. And the Tai Mora will be gifted. The legionnaires were not. You have won thus far on luck,” Taigan said. “Best not forget that.” She slunk off back to her tent.
Gian came up beside Lilia. She had finished her apple, and now asked, “May I take your hand?”
Lilia held out her hand. Gian took it. There was fear in her face. “What is it?” Lilia asked.
“Let’s stay in Kuallina,” Gian said. “We don’t need to go to the harbor. Look how safe it is here! Food for everyone. Nice people. Freedom. My whole life, I just wanted this. Two people holding hands in the warmth of a fire. We can have our own warm house, our own–”
“The Tai Mora killed my mother,” Lilia said.
“I don’t want to be lonely anymore,” Gian said. She raised her hands to Lilia’s face. Lilia remembered, again, the other Gian, clearing a path with her weapon, shirtless, the corded muscles of her back moving just beneath her skin. The Gian who had died for her, for a greater cause than Lilia would ever understand. Did Lilia have that kind of resolve, to die for a cause, for what she believed was right, even when others called her mad for it?
“Can I kiss you?” Lilia said, and her voice trembled when she said it, because she knew she wanted to kiss the woman for all the wrong reasons – for who she could be, not who she was, and for a life she dreamed about, not one they would have.
Gian kissed her. Her mouth was warm and soft.
“Let’s stay here telling stories,” Gian murmured. “We’ll build a life here, just the two of us. I can plant a garden, grow big tomatoes and squash and–”
Lilia saw her mother’s terribly twisted body mounted on the top of the Tai Mora mirror, saw her bursting into a thousand fractured pieces when she destroyed it.
“I’m sorry,” Lilia said, “But I don’t have any hold on you. You can do what you want.”
“Do you want me to stay?”
“Yes,” but when the words bubbled out, it all felt very selfish. She liked the way Gian looked at her. She liked that Gian seemed to need her. Gian wanted her.
Her feelings were terribly tangled up, because if Lilia asked herself what she wanted, she wasn’t sure anymore. Maybe all she wanted was to go back to the beginning of it all, and refuse to go through the tear in the world, and fall on the Kai’s willowthorn sword. Maybe the world where she did that would be a better place.
“All right then,” Lilia said, “but you must be with me to the end. Promise me that. No matter what happens.”
“I promise,” Gian said. “To the end.”
10
The way back to Oma's Temple was swift. Ahkio and Caisa went by Line. The stories from Liona would spread. They would get worse when people found out he’d sent some scullery drudge from Dorinah to the harbor to help with defenses. An omajista’s place was there, at their most vulnerable point, but it would make her look just like the divine thing she said she was, and that worried him.
When he arrived, Ora Una, the gatekeeper, told him the Tai Mora emissary was in the garden. Ahkio crossed the foyer with Caisa to the entrance to the back garden. His stride was longer, and she skipped to keep up.
Ahkio followed the winding path through the garden. Most of the greenery was still dormant, waiting for the first kiss of spring. Caisa hurried beside him, her breath crystallizing in the cool mid-morning air. A mist had descended, and still clung to the bases of the trees. The central fountain, its centerpiece a massive three-pronged claw that mirrored the shape of the temple, had been drained. It stood still and silent, its crown lost to the mist.
“Is this some emissary from the south?” Caisa said, rubbing her shoulders. He realized only then that he had given her no indication of who the emissary was.
Ahkio rounded the fountain and went up a broad set of stone steps to a great living structure of bowed bonsa saplings draped in withered wisteria. A slim figure stood beneath it, gazing out toward the great chasm that held the Fire River in its mouth.
“Hello,” Ahkio said.
The figure turned. She was a slight woman with a broad grin. Her dark hair was cut strangely, as if hacked with a hatchet. She wore a long blue coat of what looked like wool and dyed fireweed cord.
“You must be the Kai,” the emissary said. “I know your face. I am Hofsha Sorek.”
Caisa made a sound behind him. Ahkio turned. Caisa had stopped at the base of the steps, hand on the hilt of her weapon.
He glanced back at Hofsha. Hofsha’s grin had faded. “Do the two of you know each other?” Ahkio asked.
“I have known this little boy since he was a pup,” Hofsha said.
“You’ve mistaken Caisa for someone else, then. Caisa is a woman, not a boy.”
“Not where I’m from,” Hofsha said. “Where I’m from you get a pronoun at birth and you keep it, like a civilized person.”
“How does she know you, Caisa?”
Caisa’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.
“Caisa?” Ahkio said.
Ahkio felt a chill. I wasn’t sure she was on our side, Liaro had said, back when the council house in Raona had burned. But Caisa had hacked apart the man who had wanted to take Ahkio’s life. She stood by him with Liaro when he was ill and brought him to Kuallina. Was she really Tai Mora or some Tai Mora’s twin?
“Wait for me inside, Caisa,” Ahkio said.
“I can explain,” Caisa said. “You don’t want to be alone with her!”
“I suspect Hofsha isn’t here for murder,” Ahkio said. “We’ll speak later.”
Caisa ran down the steps and through the garden.
Ahkio regarded Hofsha. “She’s one of yours, then? How long ago did you put her here?”
“Not at all,” Hofsha said. “He’s a runaway from our parajista ranks. We sent the hounds after him, but had very little luck. Now I know why.”
“Hounds?”
“It’s how we retrieve our people,” Hofsha said. “Deserters, and the like.”
“I expect you have a lot of those.”
“Less than you think.” Hofsha smiled.
Ahkio rose to the bait, and came up the rest of the steps. He stood beside her, his elbow placed a few inches from hers. “You come here alone, ungifted, to parley?”
“My gift is not with the satellites,” Hofsha said, stirring her fingers in the air. “My gift is with people. Moving them. Managing them. Mitigating harm to them.”
“What do you need here that you can get from me without blood?”
“A peaceful surrender,” Hofsha said. “I’ve come here to save you from a very prolonged death by starvation and disease. I’ve seen it happen to a hundred and twenty-seven countries across three worlds. My Empress, my Kai, always gets what she wants. It’s up to you to decide in what way it’s delivered to her.”
“You haven’t fought us before.”
Hofsha patted the railing. “I’m afraid we need your temples.”
A fist of fear squeezed Ahkio’s heart. The heart of Oma’s seat. The riddle of the temples.
“What would you need the temples for?” Ahkio asked.
“My Empress is weary, she will be the first to admit, but also merciful. It doesn’t please us to kill so many. We’ll take the temples, and you’ll all keep your lives.”
“What will you do with the temples, Hofsha?”
“What do you care, as long as you have your lives? I promise you, Kai, I am offering you a way out of madness and bloodshed. So much you can’t even fathom it. What do you have left here? Twenty thousand people? Thirty thousand? Hardly a drop in a pond. The Dhai left in this world just barely register as a people.”
“What else?” He remembered Kirana killing herself before her shadow could do it, ensuring he ascended to Kai before her shadow moved in. It was why she waited until he was safely inside Oma's Temple before perishing. Did they know how that worked yet? Or would that wait until they’d already come in and discovered that the new Kirana had to be Kai to unlock the temple’s heart? Would they ask him to open the way for her? And when they activated the temples to do… whatever they did, what would happen to the rest of the world? The world broke when Oma rose. Ahkio suspected the temples played a large part in that.
“Oh, there’s one more thing,” Hofsha said, “but it’s a trifle. There’s a woman we’re looking for. I believe you know her. Yisaoh Alais Garika. If you could assist us in finding her, we’d think most kindly of you.”
“If I had any idea about where to find Yisaoh, I’d happily tell you where she was.” Right up until Ahkio said it aloud, he believed it. But he was not that man.
“Well, it will be appreciated. What do you say to our offer, Kai? It’s been some time since I came to the leader of a country with such a fine offer. It’s usually very bad news.”
“What are the usual terms?”
“She lets a lover, a child, live. Maybe spares a few dozen close kin, all exiled.”
“And the rest?”
“The rest die,” Hofsha said.
“And these people you speak to, they agree to that? They give up the lives of their entire countries to save a few dozen close kin?”
“The first few didn’t,” she said, “the others learned. You know what choice to make.”
“I know what choice you’d like me to make, and they are entirely different things.”
Hofsha exhaled, sending out a puff of breath into the air. She seemed to marvel at it as it dissipated. “Shall I tell you a little story, Kai?”
“I’m not fond of stories.”
“That’s not what I heard. I heard you have a love of a fine tale from The Book of Oma. That’s what it’s called here, isn’t it? Oma’s Book. Ours is The Book of Dhai.”
“Why spare me?” he said. “You sent people here to kill many others, and you’re asking after Yisaoh, but you haven’t killed me. Why?”
“I’m only telling you what my Empress bid.” She pulled something from the deep pocket of her coat – a soft, floppy hat. She pulled it on. If not for the dark color, and her somber attire, and the substance of her message, it might look ridiculous.
“Good day, Kai. I wish you the best.” She trotted down the steps, paused at the bottom, and looked back. “I’ll say this. I’ve watched a good many people die in my time, and seen a lot of lovely places burn. I’d hate to see you gutted out here, and all these lovely gardens turned to dust.” She began to whistle.
Ahkio watched until the mist swallowed her.
In the temples, they taught a class each year on strategy and tactics, mostly based on records of the final battles the Dhai fought with the Saiduan. Those fights were bitter ones. The Dhai ate one another not merely as a show of reverence, but as a means of survival.
They had been forced to do any number of terrified and desperate things, at the end, because they knew their fate. They would be routed, and their children turned into slaves. It was a known end. They fought hard because they knew there was no other alternative they could live with.
Ahkio went to the rail and listened to the eerie murmuring of the river below, made alien in its cadence by the fog. The Tai Mora were like that. Some distorted version of themselves. Not real people. Not truly Dhai. If they were Dhai, they would not propose to slaughter them all in their beds.
Ahkio left the rail and headed back to the temple, in search of Liaro. Not for council, but for the comfort of one known. He wanted someone to take him into his arms and tell him there was some other choice not constructed by a foreign army, even if he was too old to believe in children’s stories.
11
Lilia had smelled the sea for much of her childhood, but never set foot in it. The great rocky spur of land she grew up on had no safe path to the sea, so she had settled for viewing it from afar. As she came over the low rise of scrubland and saw the vast gates of Asona Harbor, she realized she was not likely to set foot in it now, either. The gates were easily the same height as the walls of Liona, maybe higher. She told herself that was all right. Revenge did not require a dip in the sea.
Lilia, Gian and Taigan had left the refugees ensconced safely at Kuallina and kept on northward to the harbor where they were met by Alhina and two of her male relatives, both smart looking men who did not go so far as to carry weapons, but who held themselves like people who would not be afraid to stand between Alhina and an aggressor. Alhina was a short, plump woman with a kind young face that put Lilia in mind of Kalinda Lasa, which made Lilia feel far more kindly toward her than she probably should have. The day was cool, and, as they trekked along the road, Lilia saw that spring had indeed come to Dhai in full force now. Many plants stayed green during the winter, but those that went dormant had begun to unfurl, revealing new green shoots and tender leaves and spines.
Now they drew up their mounts short. Ahead of them, a sea of floxflass covered the road.
“Curse this spring,” Alhina said. She took a long drink from a flask at her hip.
Lilia glanced at Taigan. “I’ll race you,” she said.
“I will win,” Taigan said.
Lilia urged her bear into a sprint across the floxflass field, and raised her fist high as she called on Oma. All around, her, the field of floxflass burned, sending sickly-sweet smoke into the air. Taigan galloped past her, murmuring words of encouragement in Saiduan to her bear. The sanisi gained the lead, and where she pointed her fingers out across the teeming sea of floxflass, the little tendrils burst into flame.
They dashed madly together for nearly a mile, burning and urging their bears on. At the end of the floxflass sea, Lilia reined in her bear and turned to look back at the scorched path, and she laughed.
Taigan pulled up beside her, grinning. “You are so easily amused,” Taigan said.
“I cleaned pots my whole life,” Lilia said.
“Fair point.”
Lilia gazed up into th
e great trees standing in matted clumps amid the farmland all around them. “The trees were grander,” she said.
“More dangerous.”
“Grander,” Lilia said. “I’ll race you back!” She galloped back to meet their party.
Alhina and her male escorts looked at her askance when she arrived, she and her bear covered in char from the floxflass, but that just made Lilia grin harder. As she fell back into the procession with them, she coughed. It turned into a wheezing hack.
Gian moved her mount closer. “Do you need your mahuan?”
Lilia shook her head. She’d had a fit the night before, too, without it being triggered by the usual things – frights, too much exercise. She suspected she was more exhausted than she felt. Sometimes, after holding Oma beneath her skin for hours, she felt invincible. The letdown when she finally released it was starting to become more pronounced.
Taigan finally caught up to her, and fell in beside her. “Take it anyhow,” Taigan said.
“You aren’t my mother.”
“Stop acting like a child who needs one, then,” Taigan said. “You natter like a bird.”
“You fuss like a hen.”
“You wheeze like a dying wren.”
“You scheme like a raven.”
Taigan puffed out her chest. “Thank you.”
Lilia motioned to Gian for the powder. Gian added it to a small water bladder and handed it over. It took several minutes more of silent riding before the powder began to take effect. The constriction eased. All this power, and what did it get her? It didn’t fix her labored breathing. And it wouldn’t fix her leg or her hand, unless she chopped them off and had Taigan regrow them. Power over everything, the whole world, but not herself.
“The world has a bad sense of humor,” Lilia said.
“I often think the same,” Taigan said.
“Your body doesn’t fail you.”
Taigan laughed. “My body does what it pleases.”
Lilia continued to drink and watched the harbor gates as they approached. The road here should have been bustling with traffic to and from the harbor. Numerous public houses lined the road, mostly eateries and way houses. She saw two tea houses with broad green awnings. The floxflass on the road must have grown up overnight. No stretch of road this vital would have been left unattended longer than that.
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