by Evie Manieri
‘You were here when the ashas died – so why did they jump?’
‘Hah! Do you think they told me? Me who they treated like a servant, or worse? When the Dead Ones came, they locked themselves away and took the elixir. They didn’t tell even me what they were doing. Then they jumped – not a word why! And they never even thought to open the staircase so that I could escape to the city. They just left me here … I had to hide when the Dead Ones came and it was weeks before they started bringing servants up from the city and I was able to mix in with the others.’
Daryan wet his lips. ‘Shairav’Asha,’ he whispered to himself, and chuckled darkly – but the laughter was too close to a sob and he clamped his mouth shut over it.
‘She’s coming for us,’ his uncle promised. ‘She’s going to kill us.’
Daryan shook his head. ‘Not me, I think. When someone stabs you, you don’t blame the knife.’
The old man stepped backwards until the doorframe checked his progress. ‘You’re going to let her kill me.’ The bag dropped out of his hand and fell to the floor with a musical crash. A few coins slid out; one rolled to the hole and went pinging down into the darkness.
‘You used us – all of us,’ he told his uncle, ‘Meena, Eleana. You used Lahlil to make your own little privileged world here, and after you couldn’t use her any more, you traded her for me – so that you could use me and all of us Shadari to keep yourself nice and comfortable right here. You didn’t bring me here to protect me – you brought me here to make sure that nothing changed for you. You never wanted me to be a leader, like the one Harotha always thought I could be. You wanted me to feel worthless, so that you could control me – so that I’d never see what a fraud you are.’
The hard lines around Shairav’s mouth went slack and he suddenly looked years older. ‘That’s not true.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Daryan said, unmoved, and walked past his uncle and across Lahlil’s bedchamber.
A shaft of dusty sunlight pierced the blackness as the old man followed behind him. ‘You’re leaving me – you’re going to let her kill me,’ he moaned. ‘You can’t leave me! After all I’ve done for you—’
Daryan kept walking, but just before he slid through the secret door, he turned to his uncle and said coldly, ‘Let me go, or I might just kill you myself.’ He stumbled through the doorway and out into the hall, taking deep breaths like a diver coming up for air, but the dank atmosphere of the temple gave him no relief. After a few pointless turns, he threw himself into a corner with his face against the wall and broke down.
He couldn’t have said how much time had passed when he heard the voice behind him. He’d finished his angry sobbing, but he’d remained in the corner with his forehead pressed against the cool stone and his eyes closed, too drained to move.
‘Daryan.’
He blinked his sore eyes open reluctantly. ‘I wondered what happened to you,’ he said gruffly, but he didn’t turn around to face her. He was embarrassed at having been caught weeping in the corner like a child. ‘You’d better stay out of sight for now – that business with the knife was bad. I’ll try to straighten things out for you later, if I can. It won’t be easy.’
‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ said Rahsa. He felt the tips of her fingers touch his shoulder, then dart away again like a timid little mouse. ‘Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘I want to help you.’
‘All right then, can you tell me what I’m supposed to do now?’ he asked, with a grim laugh. He looked briefly over his shoulder at her and caught a glimpse of dark eyes staring intently at him and what looked like a nasty gash on her forehead.
‘That’s not hard. You’re our daimon,’ Rahsa said calmly. It was hard to believe she was the same girl who had behaved so wildly in the bathing room. ‘You’re our king – our leader. You’re supposed to lead us.’
‘Lead?’ he asked derisively. ‘The only thing I know how to do is follow. I do what Eofar tells me to do, or Shairav, or Harotha. I’m a slave, Rahsa, just like the rest of you; that’s all I’ve ever been.’
‘That’s not true. You’re much more than that.’
‘Well then, that just makes it worse, doesn’t it?’ he countered harshly. ‘Because if I’m capable of more, that must mean that I chose this. I chose not to see what Shairav really was, or what he was doing. I guess it was easier to blame him for this mess than try to do something about it on my own and fail. I’m worthless; I’ve always known that. Even my own mother knew it or she wouldn’t have let Shairav take me away in the first place.’
‘Stop, please! I won’t let you talk like that,’ Rahsa started. ‘You’re the daimon! You may have lost your way, but—’
‘Leave me alone, Rahsa!’ he shouted, slapping his palm angrily against the wall. The girl’s quivering body and wide-eyed stare fuelled his sudden rage. ‘You don’t know me – you don’t know anything about me. There’s only one thing in the world I care about, and tonight I let her go forever because I don’t have a single thing to offer her. I’m in love with a Dead One, Rahsa: how do you like that? Is that the daimon you want to lead you? I don’t care about the Shadari, and I don’t care about you! For the gods’ sake, find someone else to worship – I can’t help you, don’t you understand?’
The sight of Rahsa’s stricken face after he delivered this cruel speech was more than he could stand and he turned back and pressed himself against the stone walls again, wishing that the rock would swallow him up.
After a moment Rahsa spoke again, her voice soft, sympathetic, almost soothing, as if she were speaking to an overwrought child. ‘My father was a healer. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ Daryan answered miserably, ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘He’s dead now,’ Rahsa said. ‘He worked near the mines – the Dead Ones used to bring the mining accidents to him. Father would tell the miners that if they wanted to live, he’d have to take their arm, or their leg, or the wound would drain the life out of them.’ She paused and moved a little closer. ‘The men would scream and cry. When I was a little girl, I thought my father was a very cruel man, but when I got older, I understood that he knew how to save them.’
‘I’m sure he was a good man,’ he responded vaguely. He didn’t know what response was expected of him. ‘Rahsa, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean all that – I just heard some things that …’ He trailed off as a thought occurred to him. ‘All these years, I did what Shairav wanted me to do because I was afraid to be on my own with no one looking out for me. I was afraid to make decisions for myself. But the truth was that I was on my own anyway; I just didn’t know it.’ He straightened up with a deep sigh. ‘Maybe you’re right: maybe I am more than that. I have to be, don’t I? I couldn’t very well be less.’ He rushed on, trying to express himself before the idea slipped from his grasp. He fixed his eyes on the solidity of the red rock wall. ‘And so the things I’ve wanted, for myself – for all of us – don’t have to be wrong, do they? Nothing Shairav told me means anything at all; I have to decide for myself, don’t I?’
He turned back hopefully to Rahsa, but she was gone.
Chapter Twenty
Eofar ran down the corridor after Lahlil, leaving the startled Daryan behind; under the circumstances, even Daryan’s incredible revelation would have to wait. He kept his sister in sight and caught up with her a moment after she turned the corner, but when he tried to fall into step beside her, she quickened her pace and left him trailing in her wake.
The ragged Shadari robe over her shoulders and the tangle of black hair almost made him feel as if he was chasing a slave, but her height, her rod-straight shoulders and the self-assured swing of her arms said otherwise.
She stopped but didn’t turn, sending the message that she would not allow him to delay her for long. Eofar was well aware that he was frightened of her, in the irrational and all-consuming way that only a small child can be frightened. This made him angry, but his anger hit the blank wall of her presence and slammed right back into him. He had the urge to provoke her into some emotional response, to slap her into wakefulness as he might a fainting victim.
He had never given himself permission to hate her for tearing their family apart while their mother was still alive – but Mother was dead and gone now.
Lahlil remained so still, and so blank, that he wasn’t even sure that his words had reached her.
She turned the corner up ahead and disappeared. The moment she was gone, the bulky figure of Arnaf, Eonar’s personal bodyguard, emerged from a crossing a few yards ahead leading two other guards.
Dead. He’d been expecting it for so long, he would have thought it had no power to shock him. He’d been wrong. His knees suddenly felt weak, and for no practical reason he reached up and grabbed the hilt of Strife’s Bane, holding on tight: his father’s gift to him, so long ago, before everything went wrong.
Eofar arched his arm over his shoulder, ready to charge between the two girls. Strife’s Bane leapt a few inches from its scabbard into his palm; but then, like the soldiers around him, he stopped and stared.
He couldn’t take his eyes off Isa.
In the last few hours she had somehow throttled back the volatile emotions that had always been her greatest obstacle and become the Norlander she had always aspired to be: cold, efficient, ruthless – and she was obviously out for blood. This was no ritualised sparring match, nor the kind of short-lived fit of passion that he had come to expect from her. The very real possibility of death whined in every swing of her sword. Frea was stronger, and far more practised, but once she had cycled through her repertoire of moves she had no recourse except to repeat herself. Isa was relying on some preternatural skill; it was flowing through the lean lines of her body, her unconventional style throwing Frea off-balance, making her incapable of anticipating Isa’s next move or finding an unguarded spot at which to strike.
Even as he watched, Frea aimed a swipe at Isa’s body that had a good chance of hitting the mark. Isa was in the wrong position to block. He could see her only chance lay in diving backwards, out of the way, but instead she dived forward underneath Frea’s sword, slapping her palm on the ground to catch herself at the last moment. As a defensive move it was dreadful, leaving her nearly prone and vulnerable to a downwards thrust – but it wasn’t a defensive move. She swept her blade up behind her, slicing just inches above the ground at Frea’s ankles. Frea had to jump to avoid the sword, and already off balance from her swing, fell heavily onto one knee. Isa used the momentum of her own strike to roll onto her feet and a heartbeat later she was lunging for Frea.
Sick with the fear that he was about to see one of his sisters killed right in front of him, Eofar finally drew Strife’s Bane. The black blade twitched with eagerness in response to his distress.
The violence of his emotion thudded out like a shockwave through the room.
Reluctantly, the soldiers began to jostle their way out of the room. Eofar kept one anxious eye on their departure and the other on his sisters, listening to them still hammering at each other while he tried to work out what to do next.
It wasn’t until after the last soldier departed that Lahlil emerged onto the portico from whatever niche she had found to conceal herself. His sisters didn’t notice her right away, but he wasn’t surprised about that. It wasn’t just the dark cloak; she had a trick of shrouding her presence so completely when she wanted that even staring straight at her, he had a hard time believing she was really there.
He turned back to Isa and Frea and watched in frustration as they continued their battle. As soon as he saw an opportunity he jumped between them, beating back their blades with two quick strokes.
He had been so struck by the change in Isa that he’d barely had time to notice Frea, but something was different about her as well. Something was moving beneath the rock-hard slab of her anger: a thin trickle of despair, the kind that eroded everything in its path, drop by drop. Then he noticed the corner of paper – just a corner – between the folds of her jacket. It could have bee
n anything …
Except that it wasn’t.
He averted his eyes too late. She’d seen him looking and she knew that he’d recognised the letter.
He would have asked her for mercy, except that he didn’t deserve any.
He stumbled forward. Strife’s Bane struck the floor and was wrenched from his stinging hand, then skidded out of reach under one of the refectory tables. He hastily focused his mind on recalling it, feeling naked without its weight to ground him, though he had to admit to himself that a sword – even this sword – wasn’t going to help him now. The shiny triffons on the hilt rattled against the stone floor and slid a few inches towards him, but not far enough. The bond eroded over distance, but he was only a few feet away; he wasn’t concentrating. Again he turned his will to the task, bearing down hard, and this time the blade skidded out from under the table and flew up, hilt first, towards his waiting hand.
Lahlil plucked the sword out of the air before it reached him.
Frea was the first to put words to the question that was already pulsating through the silence, snarling,
said Isa, examining Lahlil’s disjointed face intently.
Eofar tried to walk away, but the tables blocked his path; there was nowhere to go. The four of them stood equidistant from each other: the four points of a square.