by Evie Manieri
‘The Mongrel?’ he echoed, taken aback, suddenly remembering the girl in the desert, the girl who was not Nomas, nor Shadari. The Mongrel? That would certainly explain why Jachad had not wanted him to meet her, but it did nothing to explain Eofar’s unsettling sense of recognition.
‘You understand, then,’ she said, mistaking his reaction. ‘You see how serious it is. I’m afraid they’re going to do something really reckless.’
Eofar looked down at her belly. He reached out slowly and held his palm up close enough to feel the warmth. ‘Even more reason to leave,’ he said quietly.
‘Eofar—’
‘You said that being together was all that mattered, remember?’ His throat burned. ‘You said that we can never change anything here.’
‘That was then – in the temple. Things are different now,’ Harotha told him. Her eyes flashed strangely. ‘I discovered something – something about the past. If I have the chance to tell people, I could save them from—’
‘I don’t care about them,’ he interrupted, ‘I care about you, and our baby. What will happen if he’s born here? Do you think we’ll be able to protect him?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. She walked away from him, back towards the rocks, but her shawl slipped from her shoulders and fell to the ground. She bent down awkwardly to pick it up. ‘Running away, just to suit ourselves?’ she said, twisting the dark fabric in her hands, still with her back to him. ‘How can that be right? Abandoning our families? Our friends?’
‘Harotha.’ Every muscle in his body clenched. ‘Do you still love me?’
She stopped pulling at the shawl. ‘You know I do,’ she answered, but she did not turn around.
‘Harotha?’ he called faintly, walking towards her. ‘Harotha: look at me.’
Now she did turn around, with her lips parted as if she was about to speak. But before she could, the expression on her face suddenly collapsed into shock. Her eyes fixed on a point over Eofar’s shoulder. So softly that even his finely tuned Norlander hearing could barely make out the word, she murmured, ‘Faroth!’
He whirled. A group of Shadari men, roughly a dozen of them, had stopped on the near side of the dune about thirty yards away, as if they had just run around from behind it and drawn up short. Their leader took a couple of steps forward, dragging his left leg lamely behind him. Eofar knew him at once from Harotha’s description.
‘I recommend that everyone stay calm,’ a voice called out from the opposite direction, near the cliffs.
‘Sorry, we haven’t been introduced,’ Jachad said to Harotha, smiling and holding up his palms pacifically as he walked towards them. ‘I’m only here to—’
She lunged towards Jachad so unexpectedly that neither the Nomas king nor Eofar had time to react. She grabbed the thin, sharp knife from the scabbard at Jachad’s waist and paced back, brandishing the knife at both of them until she bumped up against the rocks.
The world tilted for a moment. The elixir’s vision hung before Eofar’s eyes as if it had been etched on a piece of glass. This was the moment he had seen: it was the same, in every detail.
‘Harotha!’ he cried, lunging towards her.
‘Stop! Stay away! Don’t touch me!’ she shouted, and he drew back, cringing. They were the very words he had dreaded hearing from the first moment he’d realised, with despair, that he’d fallen in love with her. Then she cried out to the Shadari, ‘Wait there!’
‘Harotha,’ he groaned.
‘I used you.’ Her voice sounded flat and hard, and totally unfamiliar: the voice of a stranger. ‘I want you to know that. Everything I told you was a lie. I needed to escape with my baby, and you were my way out.’
She stepped forward, away from the rocks, and waved the knife to move them aside. Eofar and Jachad both backed up out of her way, clearing a path between her and the other Shadari. She walked past them, revolving as she went to keep them in sight, until she was backing across the sand towards the dune. The band of Shadari waited behind her, jostling restlessly around their leader.
‘Harotha, please,’ he begged, his throat so raw that each word was little more than a cough.
‘Did you really think I would carry your baby?’ she spat at him, one arm crossed over her belly as if to shield the child even from his sight. ‘I would have thrown myself from the temple before I did that.’ In a voice less loud, but filled with more venom than he could possibly have imagined, Harotha delivered her final, crushing blow. ‘Daryan is my real husband. Daryan is the father of my baby.’
She took another backwards step, leaning awkwardly to balance the weight of the baby. He wanted to reach out to her, but his arms hung at his sides like leaden weights. She kept her head tilted so he could not see her eyes.
‘Don’t follow me,’ she commanded.
She turned and ran into her brother’s arms.
He could feel the elixir’s poison twisting through his veins still as he gazed across the sand at the Shadari.
But he was thinking of the long, hot days that he had slept away, alone in his bed, and of Daryan and Harotha quietly talking, laughing, casually touching one another on the arm or the shoulder. The pair of them fluttered through his mind, eating away at his happy memories like moths.
Chapter Fourteen
Harotha clung to her brother’s shoulder and rubbed her face against the coarse fabric of his robe. She wasn’t weeping; she was trying to gouge from her memory the stricken look in Eofar’s eyes. Faroth circled his left arm stiffly around her back and she could see his right arm stuck out awkwardly beside her, keeping the blade of his curved sword at a safe distance. ‘All right, it’s over now. Get a hold of yourself,’ he whispered gruffly into her ear.
‘Faroth!’ Elthion cried out.
She lifted her head away from her brother’s shoulder and saw the young Shadari dancing at his elbow. She recognised most of the same faces she’d seen at Faroth’s house, plus a few others. Most of them were armed, of a sort, and many were bloodied. Their ragged clothes reeked with an unwashed funk that turned her stomach, but it was the hard expression on their faces that made the muscles in her throat constrict.
‘Come on,’ Elthion shouted, ‘what are we waiting for? He’s just standing there by himself – let’s get him!’
‘He’s got an imperial sword,’ said Binit, sounding worried. ‘That Nomas is there, too. He’s got that fire trick.’
‘Jachad works for the Mongrel, and she’s working for us,’ Elthion reminded him impatiently. ‘He won’t stop us.’
‘The Mongrel didn’t say anything about killing Lord Eofar,’ Sami pointed out.
‘But she did tell us to come here!’ Elthion insisted.
‘To get Harotha,’ Sami argued.
‘The Mongrel? That’s how you knew I’d be here?’ she asked, shocked. But then she bit her lip. Best to keep her other questions to herself for the moment.
‘Come on, Faroth, Elthion’s right. Let’s kill him.’ Alkar flexed the
only remaining digit on his maimed hand. ‘We can take him. This is a lucky chance for us: one less Dead One to worry about later on.’
‘We should take him hostage,’ she interjected, gripping Faroth’s forearm. She filled her voice with loathing and gestured towards Eofar with Jachad’s knife. ‘He’s the governor’s son – and he’s weak. We can use him.’
‘Use him for what? Practise? We already know how to kill Dead Ones,’ snarled Alkar.
‘Shut up, all of you,’ commanded Faroth, pulling his arm away. ‘Look! What’s she doing there?’
She turned towards the mountain and saw a bare-armed woman standing next to Eofar and Jachad in front of the cave. The stranger looked remarkably similar to Eofar – his build, his height, even his stance – but her skin had a much darker cast, and her tangled hair was as black as Harotha’s own.
A shrill whistle cut through the chilly dawn air: Eofar, calling to his dereshadi. He was going back to the temple, she realised, simultaneously relieved and panicked. In a few moments he would be gone, perhaps for ever, carrying her ruinous lies along with him.
‘The Mongrel is helping him!’ Sami called out. ‘She’s betrayed us!’
‘Faroth!’ Elthion shrieked, scooping a sharp rock up from the ground.
She heard the piercing whistle again. ‘Faroth, listen to me – don’t—!’
‘Come on!’ Elthion shouted, ignoring Faroth’s barked command to stop. As he halved the distance between the dune and the cave he hurled the stone with all of his might. The throw was true: the stone flew through the air, well-aimed, dangerous.
Elthion’s comrades cheered and charged forward, washing past Harotha, who remained where she was, paralysed with dread and her own helplessness.
Suddenly her hair was blown back from her face and the air before her shuddered. She heard her brother calling her name, screaming at her to get down, but she stood rigidly straight as the dereshadi flew towards her. It swooped overhead, near enough for her to touch its bristling grey belly. She could feel its breath on her face. The men around her scrambled backwards, clawing at each other in a panic as the curtain of sand kicked up by the strokes of Aeda’s wings blinded them.
She turned to watch the creature as it swung past and slid to a stop next to Eofar. The Mongrel swiftly pushed him into the saddle; then she vaulted up behind him and the dereshadi leapt back into the sky. They flew higher and higher into the greying sky until they blended into the dark walls of the temple and disappeared.
‘You’re pathetic.’ Faroth stalked among his bedraggled followers, pulling them back to their feet even as he berated them. ‘Look at yourselves! This is why they were able to overcome us at the mines: discipline. I expected as much from Elthion, but the rest of you should know better.’
Harotha weighed the hilt of the Nomas knife in her hand and looked back at the cave. She didn’t see where Jachad had gone, but he hadn’t left on the dereshadi. She knew he and Eofar were friends, of a sort – but Elthion had said the Nomas king was working for the Mongrel …
‘Faroth,’ Sami began, ‘if the Mongrel’s betrayed us—’
‘Shut up.’ Faroth’s stormy eyes fixed on Harotha. He limped towards her, winding a rag around the blade of his sword before tucking it under his sash. ‘The Mongrel said we’d find you here. I didn’t believe her, but here you are.’
‘Here I am.’ Harotha swallowed, and tried a wry smile. Both she and Faroth had always hated sentimentality, so she hadn’t expected him to weep and catch her up in his arms, but this felt wrong. ‘Did you miss me?’
‘We mourned you. Saria and me – and Dramash,’ Faroth said. His voice was hard, angry, but she could see the pain in his eyes, still raw after all this time. ‘Five months ago: that’s when they told us you were dead. Not that I ever expected you to come back from the temple, dead or alive.’
‘I had no way to get word to you.’ The other Shadari were coalescing around them. She curled her arm across her belly, feeling their stares. Faroth’s eyes roamed dispassionately over her body, almost as if she were a jug priced too cheaply and he was looking for the telltale flaw.
‘The daimon, hm? Did we hear that right?’
She nodded as the others murmured to each other. ‘Once I knew about the baby, I had to do something before the Dead Ones found out. You know the rules for temple slaves – no marriages, no babies. I wasn’t going to let them kill Daryan’s child.’
‘Go on,’ Faroth urged, when she paused.
‘Eofar had made it plain that he was … well, interested. It was an obvious choice.’
‘And so you talked him into thinking he was the father?’ asked her brother.
‘I did what I had to do.’ She let some of her discomfort show through. ‘It wasn’t easy, but I convinced him that I was in love with him.’
‘You must have done a good job. Convincing him.’ Faroth shifted his weight from his good leg to his bad and then back again, and spat on the ground.
She looked steadily into his eyes. ‘I couldn’t afford to be squeamish. I had to protect the baby.’
‘And you’re sure that Daryan is the real father?’
‘I should know, shouldn’t I?’ she retorted.
He rubbed the stubble on his chin with the heel of his hand. ‘So, then. Where have you been for the last five months?’
‘Up there.’ She shuddered. ‘I thought Eofar would help me escape once I started to show; instead he locked me up where no one would see me. Until tonight.’ She dropped her head. ‘Five months. You can’t imagine— I finally told him the baby was going to be born any day now; that someone would hear it cry – that’s when he finally agreed to take me away.’
This was a dangerous lie, but she couldn’t think of any other way to explain why she’d been in the Shadar for five months without telling anyone. Now it was imperative she find Saria and get their stories straightened out before Faroth found out the truth.
‘It’s lucky we were here, then,’ said her brother, ‘or you might not have escaped from him so easily.’
‘I would have found a way.’
‘And what about your great plan to defeat the Dead Ones?’ His voice lifted in mockery and his dark eyes shone as hard as glass. He’d been nurturing this anger a long time. ‘Did Shairav ordain you and teach you the magic? Did he tell you why our parents and the other ashas committed suicide just when they were needed? Did he show you the way into the temple? Give you anything useful? Anything at all?’
Harotha’s mouth stiffened. ‘Shairav was uncooperative.’
‘I told you not to go,’ he reminded her bitterly, as if she could possibly have forgotten that terrible argument. ‘Three years – three years, wasted.’
Harotha crossed her arms across her belly again, conscious of the proximity between her unborn child and the naked Nomas blade in her hand. ‘Not wasted.’
Faroth came closer to her. ‘All right. Maybe you’re not such a fool after all,’ he told her softly. ‘To most of these people, the daimon still means something. But you and I both know that ever since Shairav stole him from his mother, Daryan has been nothing more than the old man’s lackey. If you think I’m going to—’
He was interrupted by the sound of a faint shout coming from the south, and everyone turned. In the distance dereshadi were still circling over the mining camp, no doubt preparing to return to the temple with the dawn, but much closer at hand, a group of six or seven Shadari were advancing towards the rebels, juggling a large, awkward burden. Harotha saw the leader raise a hand to his mouth and a moment later heard his cry again.
‘Faroth? Faroth with you?’
He checked the area around them cautiously, then he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted back. ‘Here!’
She saw the leader turn for a moment to speak to his companions. Then they came on at a faster pace. A tense restlessness had fallen over the waiting company. Their failed attack on Eofar had left them somewhat sheepish, but not enough to quell their curiosity about Haroth
a, and she was conscious of the surreptitious glances and the murmured discussions she couldn’t quite make out.
Faroth suddenly reached back and gripped her shoulder, hard.
‘Ow! That hurts! What did you do that for?’ she asked, hurriedly moving out of his grasp.
‘Harotha – you go— Go and see,’ Faroth urged her. He had gone pale, and a shiver of fear raced up her spine.
‘All right,’ she told her brother, laying a hand on his arm before she walked forward to meet the approaching party. The sun had just crested the horizon and she had to shield her eyes from the glare as she made her way towards them. When they were only about twenty paces apart, the men paused briefly to reposition their burden, and as they lowered it for a moment, she saw a mass of long, dark hair tumble down and sweep the sand.
She drew in a long, painful gasp, but still she watched silently as the bearers came forward and lowered Saria’s body to the ground. Her sister-in-law’s lush hair was matted with blood. Her skin was the ghastly yellowish-grey of an old bruise. The cause of her death was all too clear: a great gash split her throat, partially hidden by her collar and the mess of dried blood caking her skin.
A sob too large to release wedged itself in Harotha’s chest and swelled there, threatening to burst like an angry blister. Her head spun dizzily and she fell to her knees in the sand.
‘We chased Dramash to the mines after he ran out of the tavern,’ she heard Sami say gruffly. ‘Saria must have gone there after him. It was the White Wolf— She— She took your boy. One of her men killed Saria when she tried to stop them.’ He looked down at the ground and added awkwardly, ‘I’m so sorry.’
Faroth screamed in fury, and the cry ripped Harotha open like a jagged blade. She became headily aware of the hard wooden hilt of the Nomas knife still clutched in her palm, smooth as a bone, as she rose up from her knees on legs shaking with rage. The Dead Ones had been doing this all of her life: destroying, killing, taking away any chance that the Shadari might have at happiness. The rotten Norland Empire teetered on a foundation built from pain and fear, and she wouldn’t let it stand a moment longer.