by Evie Manieri
‘What earthquake?’ she asked. ‘There haven’t been any more since you left for the temple.’
But Sami went on as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘Then Daryan refused to come back with us, and just as we were getting ready to leave, Shairav—‘ He stopped for a moment and swallowed, then whispered, ‘Harotha, he just died. His heart gave out, they said. Dead – just like that. It wasn’t Faroth’s fault – he did everything he could – but where does this leave us with the Mongrel?’ He scowled and shook his head wordlessly, then pulled away from her and disappeared into the crowd.
She pushed her way towards Faroth, a cold knot of anger in the pit of her stomach. ‘What happened?’ she demanded. ‘You couldn’t get any of them? Not even Daryan?’
‘Daryan!’ Faroth burst out angrily. ‘He refused to come. He doesn’t give a damn about you, by the way.’ He was upset and he was trying to make her angry, she knew that. She could see the dark circles under his eyes and the lines of exhaustion around his mouth.
‘He knows I can take care of myself,’ she told him, refusing to take the bait, ‘but why did he stay behind?’
Someone pressed a jug into Faroth’s hands and while he paused to drink deeply, Binit answered for him. ‘He wants to stop the White Wolf in the temple. No one knows what’s going on up there – the governor is dead and the White Wolf has taken over. We think she’s already killed Lord Eofar – at least you’ll be happy hear to that. She’s organising the soldiers for something, so Daryan stayed behind to try to figure out what they’re up to.’
‘Lord Eofar is dead?’ she asked, keeping her voice as steady as she could. ‘Who said so? Why do you think that?’
‘Well,’ said Binit, sympathetic for all the wrong reasons, ‘I can’t say for sure, but he was supposed to be the next governor, wasn’t he? So, how can the White Wolf take over if he’s still alive?’
‘I never wanted Daryan here in the first place,’ Faroth said, staring into the distance with smouldering eyes, ‘but Shairav – it figures he would decide to die just when he might have made himself useful. And he took everything he knew with him.’
‘Harotha, you don’t look well,’ said Binit solicitously. ‘Maybe you should sit down somewhere?’
‘I’m all right,’ she muttered. They all moved aside to make way for the two nervous dereshadi, who were being led away to a quieter, shady spot. ‘And Dramash? What happened there?’ she asked, unable to keep the harshness from her voice.
‘I’ll tell you this,’ Faroth vowed darkly, to no one in particular, ‘if Daryan comes back here without my son, I don’t care who he is – I’ll kill him myself.’
Alkar came trudging towards them, his maimed hand tucked fastidiously under his opposite arm. ‘I just talked to Sami,’ he said to Faroth as he reached them. ‘He’s right about one thing, anyway. They must be planning something up there. There’s not a single patrol left anywhere in the Shadar, and no guards at the mines. We’ve been keeping watch the whole time.’
‘Maybe the Dead Ones really are going to leave the Shadar,’ Harotha mused, stroking her bottom lip with the tip of her finger, ‘just like Saria said.’
She became aware of a change in the level of noise around her, a sudden silence, and she looked up to find Faroth staring at her intently. Even before he asked the question, she realised the horrible mistake she had made.
‘How did you know Saria said that?’
She twisted her mouth into a derisive grimace. ‘Oh, these women! They never stop gossiping. I know more than I care to about the last two years – it’s no wonder I have a splitting headache.’
‘Faroth!’ a voice cried out from behind them and Elthion came forward, pushing Jachad in front of him. ‘I found him hanging around – spying.’
‘Didn’t you go back to the desert? Aren’t we done with you yet?’ snapped Faroth.
‘I came back to help, if you want to call that spying,’ Jachad explained pleasantly, his breezy manner unaltered by Elthion’s rough treatment. ‘I saw you land. Where is Meiran?’
‘Who?’
‘The Mongrel.’
‘Her?’ Elthion burst out. ‘She sent us up there for nothing! It was a trap – I knew it would be. Daryan wouldn’t come with us, the White Wolf still has Dramash and Shairav is dead. And she’s still up there – she’s probably telling the White Wolf everything she wants to know about us.’
‘Shairav is dead?’ Jachad asked. Tension pulled at the Nomas king’s usually engaging smile. ‘How?’
‘His heart. It gave out just as we were leaving,’ Binit repeated, clearly relishing his role as the bearer of bad news.
‘Oh, how sad. I’m sorry to hear that,’ Jachad answered, but Harotha wasn’t fooled by his attempt to sound sympathetic. She could tell he was relieved.
‘You’re the one who told us to go up there,’ Faroth said to Jachad. ‘Well, we failed – so now what? What does the Mongrel expect us to do? If this has all been some kind of trick, we’ll kill you, even if you burn us all alive while we do it.’
‘Faroth,’ she broke in, taking his arm. She tried to draw him aside, but there was no place to go; the crowd had been steadily gathering around them and now people pushed in on all sides, waiting to hear what Faroth had to say. ‘I think we’re missing something. Why did the White Wolf take Dramash? She’s never done anything like that before. There has to be a reason.’
‘It’s obvious,’ said Elthion, with a haughty wave of his hand. ‘The White Wolf knows about the rebellion now, and she knows Faroth is our leader. She took Dramash to get at him. She knows she’s losing her grip. She’s desperate.’
Harotha stared hard at Elthion and then looked at her brother. ‘That makes no sense. It’s ridiculous.’
‘It’s true!’ Alkar averred, daring her to challenge him. He raised his voice to address the crowd at large. ‘The White Wolf killed Faroth’s wife and took his child! It’s true, the White Wolf is afraid of Faroth!’ A murmur of excitement, of pride, swept through the crowd.
She pressed her fingers to her throbbing temples and asked her brother in an incredulous whisper, ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’
Sharp fingers gripped her shoulder: Trini was standing next to her, frowning angrily, with a basket of bread under her arm. ‘Come with me, girl, and let the men have their talk,’ the older woman insisted, none too gently. ‘There’s better things—’
‘Take your hands off me!’ Harotha exploded in frustration, jerking away. She spun back to her brother. ‘Faroth, don’t be a fool! The White Wolf didn’t take Dramash because of you. To her, you’re nothing more than another worthless Shadari cripple.’
Even as the words left her mouth Harotha knew she’d made another dreadful mistake.
Faroth stared at her with a terrible look on his face as a deadly silence swept over the crowd.
‘Bread! Thank goodness. I’m starving!’ Jachad cried brightly. He scooped the basket of bread away from Trini with one hand and with the other he took Harotha’s elbow and turned her smoothly around. A moment later, she found herself strolling with the Nomas king towards the same large flat rock that had offered her refuge earlier in the day. She was sickeningly aware of the way the other Shadari subtly retreated before them.
‘Bread?’ he asked, pushing her gently down onto the rock, then sitting down next to her. He proffered the piece he’d just torn from one of the loaves.
She took the bread without a word and looked at it. The thought of eating turned her stomach.
‘I don’t suppose I’m doing you any great favour, sitting here with you,’ he said quietly as his shrewd eyes took in every hostile glance cast in their direction, ‘but I didn’t like the way that conversation was tending and I thought it might be prudent to end it.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, matching his tone. He was right, of course, on both counts. He had rescued her when her own presence of mind had failed, but now his companionship was arousing more suspicion, even amongst those who hadn’t hea
rd what she’d said to Faroth. She should go, find some way to repair the damage she’d done, but she didn’t have the energy. The teetering structure of pretence she had built for herself was ready to topple over, and she was afraid that she no longer had the strength to keep it up.
She looked over at the redheaded king sitting beside her, contentedly chewing his bread. She had a feeling that pretence was useless with him; she felt like he could see straight through her. She had been raised to believe that the Nomas never gave away anything for free, but she had a hard time believing that he expected anything from her in return for his friendship. And so they sat together in silence, idly watching people bustling in and out of the houses or moving purposefully up and down the street.
Eventually she forced herself to take a bite of the bread in her hand. The sun would be setting soon and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. She squinted up at the fiery orange disk hanging over the mountains. ‘Do you really believe the sun is your father?’ she asked, breaking the silence.
He turned to her. ‘That’s not the kind of question I’d expect from a Shadari,’ he commented, arching his eyebrows. ‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes, I really want to know.’
‘Then, yes, I do.’
She thought for a moment. ‘And does he answer your prayers? Does he tell you what he wants from you?’
‘Ah, now that,’ he said sagely, ‘is exactly the kind of question I’d expect from a Shadari. You have a very complicated relationship with your gods, you know that? Ours is much simpler. Our gods don’t want anything in particular from us, and we don’t expect them to pay us any special attention.’
‘You don’t believe that your gods have some purpose for your life?’
‘If they do, that’s their business. We’re a practical people, and most of us feel that trying to know the unknowable is pretty much a waste of time. We’d rather try to solve the problems nearer at hand.’
‘But you pray.’
‘Oh, yes,’ he agreed emphatically. ‘Shof gives us light and warmth; that’s reason enough to be grateful, isn’t it? But we don’t believe that he requires our worship to climb into the sky each morning. That would be tremendously arrogant, don’t you think? And as you can see, he shines just as brightly on those who don’t pray to him at all. Frankly, I don’t have too much respect for gods who love only one group of people and let the others go hang.’
‘So, do you think that the gods can be cruel?’ she asked, keeping her tone light. She took another bite of bread.
He surprised her by considering her question with absolute seriousness, frowning in a thoughtful way that changed his face completely. His eyes took on a distant look. ‘Yes, I do. By mortal standards, anyway.’
She forced the bread down her dry throat. ‘So what are we supposed to do then?’
‘Well, I think the worst thing you can do to gods is to stop believing in them.’ He peered up at the sky, then he grinned at her, and the clouds left his eyes. ‘But I wouldn’t be too hasty. It’s not so easy to tell the difference between what the gods have done, and what has simply been blamed on them. I’ve met a lot of people in a lot of places who claim to speak for the gods. Personally, I’ve never understood why people believe them, but many do.’
She thought about the elixir. What did she really know about it? How could she be sure the visions came from the gods when everything else she had ever been told about her religion had turned out to be a lie?
‘Are you married, King Jachad?’
He gave a rueful little laugh. ‘Now you sound like a Nomas – like my mother, to be precise. No, I’m not married.’
‘Is it because of her – the Mongrel?’
The Nomas king turned sharply to her, and she could see that her question had both surprised and disarmed him. ‘Yes. I suppose you could say that,’ he answered. His eyes held a curious intensity. ‘You are an extraordinary woman, do you know that? You certainly don’t miss much.’
‘It’s in your voice, when you speak of her. The way you say her name,’ she explained, uncomfortable with the compliment, if it had been one. A breeze, the first harbinger of evening, rustled the hair around her face. ‘You’re bound to her somehow.’
‘That’s one way to put it – though it’s probably not in the way you think.’
Apparently he was not inclined to explain further, and the companionable silence returned. She let her mind drift, not thinking about anything in particular. She could feel herself on the edge of some crucial understanding; instinct told her that if she pursued it too vigorously, it would slip away.
A dove’s mournful cry sounded from a drooping palm tree nearby. Its mate fluttered over in a whir of wings.
‘There were two earthquakes,’ she said quietly. ‘Not three.’
Jachad looked over at her. ‘That’s right.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Quite sure. A smallish one, and then the big one just after sunset last night. I’m not likely to forget either of them any time soon, believe me.’
‘But nothing after that. Nothing at all – no aftershocks, even.’
‘That’s right,’ he agreed again. There was curiosity in his voice, but it wasn’t his way to question her. ‘I heard about what happened at the mines after the second earthquake,’ he offered a few moments later. ‘It sounds quite extraordinary: hundreds of miners were trapped in the collapse, and then the shaft just suddenly opened up. No one knows how.’ His blue eyes fixed on her. ‘They’re calling it a miracle. And it happened just before Frea took off with Dramash.’
Harotha reached up and rubbed her cheek. Suddenly she could feel the imprint of Saria’s fingers there as if her sister-in-law had slapped her no more than a moment ago. But Saria was dead. Maybe when you’re a mother, you’ll understand: Saria’s last words to her before she ran after Dramash – her son. Faroth’s son. The last in a line of ashas stretching as far back in time as the elixir’s stream had carried her.
Jachad stood up from the rock and stretched languorously. ‘I’m not used to sitting for so long. I think I’ll go for a walk.’
The street had emptied out again as Faroth and his friends had moved inside his house, pointedly excluding Harotha from the meeting. Smoke wound up from the chimneys and the familiar scents of homely cooking drifted by on the steadily cooling air.
She stood up as well. ‘I’ll go with you.’
By mutual accord they turned right, walking away from Faroth’s house, and when they came to a crossing, they turned left, again by unspoken agreement.
‘Careful,’ Jachad murmured as he steered her around a trench in the road that looked as if it might have been dug out by a large, clawed foot.
‘Just to be clear,’ she began. She glanced at her companion as they walked along in the fading light. Both of them had subtly quickened their pace. ‘We’re going to find those two dereshadi Faroth brought back, take one and fly it back to the temple, yes?’
Again she found herself caught in his deep blue eyes; at this moment she could truly believe that his father was the sun. He had warmth banked down inside of him, an unending and limitless supply, and it radiated out from his gently conspiratorial smile. ‘Of course we are,’ he agreed. ‘Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A voice ordered Rho to wake up, and nothing would have given him greater pleasure than to obey – he tried to say this, but the voice had already become just another random detail in the jumbled landscape of his nightmare. He was in a forest with a little curly-haired Shadari boy, and they climbed a tree, only now the boy was his older brother, Trey.
‘You’re not Trey,’ Rho told the boy. ‘Trey’s dead. He died hunting, a month after I left Norland.’
‘Isn’t this Norland?’ asked the boy. They were sitting side by side on a broad branch, and when Rho looked down he saw not a forest floor but a mountainside sloping away from him, all jagged rocks under a blanket of new sno
w. The boy who was and wasn’t Trey stood up and began jumping up and down on the branch. Rho wanted him to stop – he was afraid, but he found that he could neither speak nor move; all the while the boy was laughing out loud and jumping, jumping and laughing. He heard the cracking sound as the branch began to break, but it wasn’t the branch that was cracking, it was the dark Norland sky, slicing open to reveal a zigzag of blinding light—
He turned his head and saw a black-gloved fist dart out and flick up his shirt to expose his wound. The warm air hit his sore flesh like a handful of sand.
He dragged his eyes up to her face and saw that she was wearing the silver helmet. If he’d had the strength, he would have ripped the thing off her head.
She withdrew her hand and paced around his bed. He forced himself to sit up, clenching his teeth against the pain screaming from his side. The room was empty except for the two of them, but he had no doubt the Shadari boy was somewhere close by.