by Evie Manieri
He’d known this moment had been coming, ever since Isa, ten years old at the time, had taken the opulently jewelled sword from their mother Eleana’s tomb and stubbornly dragged it back to her room. As the eldest daughter Frea had first claim to the sword, but she wanted nothing to do with it; for her own Naming Day she had commissioned Blood’s Pride from the swordmakers at Ravinsur according to her own precise specifications. But there was still Norlander tradition: if Isa wanted to carry her mother’s sword, she had to fight her older sister for the right to do so on her Naming Day. That was her seventeenth birthday. Tomorrow.
Isa’s wordless fury struck him like a slap.
Eofar shut his eyes. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have with her, and he certainly didn’t want to have it now.
She looked away from him, towards the shuttered window, as if she could see through it all the way to the snow-covered mountains of Norland, far across the sea.
he reminded her.
Eofar stepped past her and glanced inside the little room. The straw pallet was disarranged and the bedclothes were half on the floor, as if Daryan had risen hastily. he said defensively,
A complicated mix of consternation and pique sputtered out of her, but before she had time to respond she suddenly stumbled, as if she’d been pushed from behind. She lost her balance and fell down on one knee. Over her head, Eofar saw the person who had just come around the corner and crashed into her.
The female slave, struggling to keep hold of a gigantic bundle clasped in her thin arms, took a moment to realise who she’d knocked into and then let out a sharp cry that pierced Eofar’s head like a dagger. ‘I’m sorry, my Lord! My Lady!’ the slave whispered, frantically reverting to the low tones in which the slaves were taught to address their masters. Rahsa, that was her name. She was new to the temple, but he remembered the unusual reddish tint of the hair straggling out from beneath her scarf, and the odd air she had about her.
‘They told me to open the shutters for the night and take these things up to the laundry. I didn’t know— Let me—’ And clearly without thinking, she shifted her bundle to one side and reached out for Isa’s arm to help her up.
Isa cried out in pain as the Shadari’s touch burned into her cold flesh – though of course Rahsa couldn’t hear her – and wrenched her arm away violently, but not before the cold of Isa’s skin bit into Rahsa’s fingers. The slave choked back her own scream as the realisation of her terrible mistake broke over her; she dropped her bundle and stared at Eofar and Isa, quaking, her big brown eyes stretched wide in terror.
‘I’m s-sorry,’ she stammered.
‘Go,’ Isa hissed at her menacingly in Shadari, and Rahsa turned and fled down the corridor, leaving her bundle behind on the floor. Eofar heard the sound of her bare feet slapping against the hard stone.
Isa stood up slowly. She compacted her emotions down into a dark brood and now she stood before him so still that she might have been a statue carved in ice.
Her feelings were like blinding colours; a conversation with her always left him spent and disoriented. He wished she could have remained the little girl who had liked nothing better than to throw her skinny arms around his neck and rest her white head on his shoulder.
He tapped the hard lump of the little bottle in his shirt pocket, and started back for his room.
Striding down the corridor in front of his room came two of the garrison’s soldiers, dressed for duty in their embroidered tabards and white sun-proof cloaks, their broadswords sheathed across their backs.
Eofar paused with his hand on the curtain to his room. he said irritably.
He felt Rho’s anger, but the soldier was too well-bred to answer back to the governor’s son. There had been a time when he thought he and Rho might become friends – but then Frea had taken him under her wing and into her bed, and by the time she dropped him, it was too late.
Rho’s chill displeasure darkened to uneasiness.
He would know, if anyone would, Eofar thought. With apparently minimal effort and even less intent, Rho had learned to speak Shadari more fluently than anyone else in the garrison, including Eofar, who had lived there his whole life.
Rho betrayed a little flicker of suspicion.
He left Rho and Daem and returned to his room, ducking his head automatically under the lintel of the doorway never meant for someone of his stature, climbed up to the dais, and sat down on the bed. He took the little bottle out of his pocket, tipped it one way, then the other.
He pulled out the cork, poured a few drops onto his tongue and swallowed them. And waited.
Chapter Four
Daryan’s heart sank when he realised how late he was to arrive. He stopped in the doorway, guiltily glancing around at the other Shadari ringing the pyre, but every one of them had their watering eyes fixed resolutely on the flames. There were at least sixty people there, and probably more of the two hundred-odd slaves in the temple would have come if their duties had allowed it.
He moved in amongst the mourners as quietly as he could. The flames had already caught the hem of the dead girl’s robe and before long were sweeping over her body and consuming the filmy veil covering her face. He watched the garments char away. The heavy, drowsy scent of the oils in which the garments had been soaked rolled through the room – it was oppressive, but at least it masked other less pleasant smells. Acrid smoke spiralled around the pyre and drifted into the room, but the draft pulled most of it up through the aperture in the ceiling and out to the stars. Suffocating heat pulled at his limbs, reminding him longingly of his bed, and he sighed heavily.
‘I know. She was so young. And she’d only been here a few weeks,’ the young Shadari woman standing next to him commiserated in a tragic whisper. She had her hands pressed to her heart, but when she saw him looking at them she self-consciously curled them up under the sleeves of her robe; her knuckles were swollen and red with sores, most likely from scouring floors. ‘She would have been honoured to have you here, Daimon.’
A tall man on her other side, so tall that the top of the girl’s head did not reach up to his shoulders, nudged her gently. ‘You’re not supposed to call him that, Mariya,’ he reminded her quietly in a low, deep voice.
The girl brought her swollen hand to her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry, Dai—’ she began, and then stopped herself. ‘I mean, I’m so sorry, Daryan,’ she amended, emphasising his name with a shy giggle.
‘That’s all right,’ he said, smiling warmly back at her. He turned back to the fire.
On the far side of the pyre behind the leaping flames, he noticed his Uncle Shairav glaring at him from beneath his heavy black brows. Daryan dropped his smile.
The tall man – Omir, he remembered – looked up through the skylight. ‘Almost dark,’ he said to himself uneasily. Daryan looked upwards as well, anxiously scanning the cobalt sky for any sign of the White Wolf’s patrols. Anyone flying over the temple on a dereshadi might easily notice the smoke.
He looked round again at the ring of solemn faces. The Dead Ones had outlawed the burning of the dead as a waste of resources, just as they’d outlawed drums because of the noise, and a host of other Shadari rituals for offending their sensibilities in one way or another. The punishment for participating in this ritual – not to mention the related crimes of stealing oil and straw and exhuming the girl’s body from the Dead Ones’ tombs – would be unpleasant, to say the least. And yet here they all were, huddled in this unused room while someone kept watch out in the corridor, just to liberate the soul of a young woman most of them barely knew.
Shairav walked forward into the circle, taking a large jar of sand from one of the waiting Shadari. Daryan thought he looked ridiculous in his gaudy ceremonial robes with their silver and gold constellations crudely worked over a ground of flamboyant indigo, but his dark, deep-set eyes, straight shoulders and black hair shot through with silver were still impressive. Shairav poured the sand out onto the floor while the rest of the Shadari knelt down on the hard stone and looked away. Everyone – except for Daryan – assiduously averted their eyes while the old priest scratched the prayer into the sand; he was watching Shairav carefully, mouthing the words to himself as they emerged from beneath the asha’s sharp fingers.
‘You don’t look away?’ Mariya whispered to him with a thrill of fear in her voice.
‘No – it’s not a sin for me, because I’m the— you know,’ he whispered back. ‘Not many people know it, but it’s one of the ancient privileges. All the daimons used to read and write. My uncle said my father and my grandfather never bothered with it, but I made him teach me anyway.’
Mariya looked up at him, wide-eyed. ‘What for?’
He answered with a tiny shrug, but when she looked away again he allowed himself a secretive pat to his chest. Underneath his robe, he could feel the flat, square object hidden inside his pocket.
‘We inscribe these prayers to the gods on behalf of their daughter Inada,’ Shairav was intoning solemnly, ‘that they may see her and take her spirit upwards to join them in their eternal dance.’
‘The gods are merciful,’ murmured the assembly.
Shairav took the tattered hem of his robe in his hand and with a long, careful sweep of the fabric, smoothed away the sacred inscriptions so that none but the gods would ever look upon them. ‘Your daughter Inada’s spirit has been freed from the flesh and returns to the winds and the sands. May the gods watch over us all this nigh
t, and all nights.’
The ceremony was over. Obeying a gesture from Shairav, the rest of the Shadari scrambled to douse the fire with the mound of blankets they’d brought for the purpose. Daryan stepped back out of their way and collided gracelessly with someone behind him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, but his apology was drowned out by a chorus of anxious protestations of concern on his behalf. ‘I’m fine, really,’ he started, but then he caught sight of an older man with a long nose and sharp, intelligent eyes. ‘Tal!’ he called out, walking over and taking him swiftly by the arm. He pulled him back a little from the others. ‘Did you ask him? What did he say?’
Tal began to speak, but then the expression in his eyes suddenly changed. At the same moment Daryan’s nose caught the stink of dereshadi.
‘Ask me what?’ His uncle stood behind him, already changed out of his asha finery and back into the brown breedmaster’s robe in which he’d seen more than fifty of the stinking creatures into the world. His eyes were bloodshot from the smoke.
‘We thought—’ began Daryan, but Tal interrupted him.
‘It was my idea, Shairav’Asha,’ Tal lied. ‘These ceremonies are so heartening for everyone; we thought that perhaps we could do something for Harotha—’
‘Daryan and I have already discussed this,’ Shairav growled, looking not at Tal but at Daryan. He finished tying his sash with an angry tug. ‘I cannot perform the funeral rites without a body. Have you found her body?’
His jaw tightened. ‘You know we haven’t.’
‘Well then.’
‘But she has to be in one of the tombs. We just haven’t found the right one yet. We’re still looking—’
‘You’ve been looking for five months.’ Shairav shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.’
Daryan, emboldened by the presence of Tal and the other Shadari surreptitiously watching and listening as they bustled around the room, pleaded, ‘You’re our only asha – the last asha. Can’t you just make something up? Make a new ritual? We’re not asking you to use your powers. Just to say a few prayers for her. After everything she did for us—’