My hair was unbound under my veil, and both blew wildly around my face. My sister had tied back her braid and stood with straight shoulders, her veil pulled back and her black hair gleaming in the sun. She was looking out at the coming storm, but there was a storm brewing in her eyes that only made her more beautiful. I could not lose her, and surely once Lo-Melkhiin saw her, she would be lost.
I thought of all the stories I had heard, those whispered at my mother’s hearth and those told in the booming voice of our father when the village elders met in his tent for council. I knew them all: where we had come from, who our ancestors had been, what heroes were in my lineage, which smallgods my family had made and loved. I tried to think if there was any one thing in the stories that I could use, but there was not. The world had never seen another like Lo-Melkhiin, and it had no stories to combat him.
Not whole stories, but maybe there was something smaller. A thread in the story of a warrior who laid siege to a walled city. A fragment in the story of a father who had two daughters, and was forced to choose which of them to send into the desert at night. An intrigue in the story of two lovers who wed against the wishes of their fathers. A path in the story of an old woman whose sons were taken, unlawfully, to fight a war they were not part of. There were stories, and then there were stories.
No single tale that I could draw from would save my sister from a short and cruel marriage, but I had pieces aplenty. I held them in my hands like so many grains of sand, and they slipped away from me, running through my fingers, even as I tried to gather more. But I knew sand. I had been born to it and learned to walk on it. It had blown in my face and I had picked it from my food. I knew that I had only to hold it for long enough, to find the right fire, and the sand would harden into glass—into something I could use.
My sister watched the dust cloud for Lo-Melkhiin, but I watched it for the sand. I took strength from her bravery in the face of that storm, and she took my hand and smiled, even though she did not know what I was trying to do. She had accepted that she would be the one to save us, the one to be made a smallgod and sung to after her time of leaving. The one who died. But I would not allow it.
By the time the village elders could see flashes of bronze armor in the dust cloud, and hear the footfalls of horses that rode, too hard, under the sun—by the time the wind pulled at my sister’s braid and worked a few strands loose to play with, as though it, too, feared to lose her—by then, I had a plan.
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We know exactly how we came to these cold, hard mountains, and we remember everything that we have lost since we arrived here.
We were a proud kindred, once, taking what we wanted from the petty humans, and nesting on our ever-growing power. We were made strong in that desert heat, tempered by sand and blood and bones. We stretched out our hands and our will, and used that which we seized however we wished. We made bodies that could not be killed, and we began our slow domination of the world we inhabited. Then one of us rose too high, took too much, and was brought down.
The world is made safe by a woman.
She took the evil that she knew and bound it up with bright iron she had dreamed into existence. She found a place for evil to roost, far away from the people she loved. She made for evil a home where it would be weakened and starved, where the earth itself would be a poison to it. She did the very best she could.
And, for a while, that was enough. The mountains were not kind to us, as she knew when she sent us here to suffer. For generations of human life, we were too weak to leave them. We would not die, but we could no longer send out our spirits with the fiery vengeance we had carried before our defeat. We were beaten. Lowered. Angered. We hungered and we thirsted, and we lamented what we had lost in the hot desert sand. And we remembered every modicum of it.
The creatures she made to be our keepers hemmed us in, keeping us weak and struggling. Their iron horns and fiery breath caught us on the slopes without mercy, and their flames brought out new strength in the earth’s power over us. Their songs and laughter were torture to our ears. Even their little feet and little stingers made our unending lives a misery, turning the ground again and again to magic beyond our control.
But we endured.
Humans came to the mountains, to cross them at safe passes, seeking a pathway to the sea. The land on the other side was better, fertile enough for growing food and soft enough for cattle. First, villages sprouted up to mock us, prospering where we could not go; then, towns and trade routes; and finally, a kingdom in its own right. We knew that if we were to rise again, we would have to do it before they gained full mastery of the land they had claimed.
Our first attempts to leave the mountains were met with disaster. Time, perhaps, or hubris had dulled our sense of ourselves, and we were hopelessly overmatched. We were not yet strong enough to face a horde of human fighters, much less the creatures who jailed us. There was iron everywhere now, it seemed, plucked from our very prison and smelted into bright weapons, and even jewelry, that we could not abide. Our wounding was beyond the mortal measure of pain. We retreated. We regrouped. And, oh, we abhorred it.
From my hated sanctuary, I looked down upon that kingdom, and I knew that another way must be found. We could not take, as we once did. We could not force and pillage as we liked. I would not wheedle, and I would not beg; but I would ask, barter, and trick. I would find weakness, and I would push it until it cracked. They would give me what I wanted and think that they had bested me. I had only to outlive them, after all, as my kind did not die. And so I learned.
There are corners in the world that are too dark to see, and there are edges that are sharper than they appear, ready to snag the unwary. There are those who do not fear the things they should, and there are those who would bargain with the devil herself for the sake of their greed.
The world is made safe by a woman, yes, but it is a very big world.
THE LITTLE ROSE was only five years old when her parents ruined my mother and brought ruination to my own life. I can tell the story like I was there, though I wasn’t. Even if I had been, I had only six years to my life then, and my memory would likely fail me on the finer details. So it is better that I heard the story from others, others I trusted. That means I know the truth.
My mother told it to me, and the others who fled with her repeated it, and I learned it at their knees. By then, I was old enough to card the wool and spin the thread—I was my mother’s son, so my spinning was to be expected. When you spin, there isn’t much to do besides talk and listen, but at the time I needed to learn more before I could do my share of the talking. As a result, I was a very good listener. The words I heard were woven into my heart, and I wrapped myself up in the details I gleaned from them as I would a blanket: once my mother had been a proud woman, and a wealthy one, and then a spoiled little princess had ended it all.
The Little Rose was born in Kharuf to the king and queen of that land. It had been seven generations since the King Maker had split his country along the mountain seam, bequeathing half to each of his sons to avoid a civil war. In Qamih, prosperity was easy. The soil was fertile and the weather was fine for much of the year. The Maker Kings still ruled there, throne passing from father to son when they died. There was an unnatural blessing upon that land, for even when it should have gone ill for them, it did not. We in Kharuf might have a drought—heather withering on the slopes, while the sheep starved—but their fields were always well watered. We might have too much rain, and lose villages to mudslides, but their crops never faltered.
Even with such a neighbor to compare with, Kharuf was not always unpleasant. I do not recall much of my early years there, but my mother assured me that we were always well kept and cared for by the king. Ruling a smaller kingdom as he did, it was said that King Qasim knew all of his subjects by name. This was of course an exaggeration, but Qasim and his wife Rasima did well by their people, and their people loved
them for it. The Maker Kings might live in a castle three times the size of theirs, and never fear that the game in their forests would run out, but in Kharuf we had a king who was not afraid to shear his own sheep, and a queen who could tend a flock as well as she could weave a tapestry.
The birth of the Little Rose, called Zahrah by her parents, did not change that, not at first. The Little Rose was a pretty child, my mother told me. She had the same dark skin as her parents, brown eyes, and a mouth that smiled before she had teeth. Her hair was the color of wheat in high summer, which was unusual but not unheard of. It was said that long ago, one of the Little Rose’s ancestresses had married a man who had pale skin and hair the color of rice cooked with saffron. Pale skin was not ever seen in the line again, unless someone fell ill and the color was unnatural, but every now and then, light hair reappeared. It was less a mark of kingship, though, than it was a reminder of where our people had once come from. No, in the Little Rose’s case, her kingship was assured by her parents’ careful stewardship of Kharuf—at least, it was until the day that the Little Rose turned five.
No one ever argued that the birthday party was less than magnificent, even afterwards, when talk of the day was confined to hushed whispers of faded hope. At the time, the partygoers were thoroughly charmed. All I remember is that I was in bed with sheep pox and couldn’t attend, but my mother told me that the queen herself had made sure to send me a plate of sweetbreads, and a handkerchief she had embroidered with her own needle in an attempt to make up for it.
In the main gallery, where the castle people gathered to celebrate, it was a much merrier time. The subtle glow of the candles highlighted the gold thread and deep purple silks of the tapestries. The royal harpist played so perfectly in tune that the crystal goblets at every place setting sang with her as she plucked each note. And the food, the food was perfection beyond the sweetbreads I had been given, each succulent morsel resting in finely decorated vessels.
This was why Kharuf loved its king and queen so much. The Maker Kings sat at high tables and did not speak to any but the most important lords and merchants. They had fine glass and inlaid spoons to eat with, but the lower tables had only rough fare. They lorded their creations over each and every one: their roads and their harbors, the bright steel of their soldiers’ helmets. In Kharuf, what the king ate was eaten by all, and the cutlery in the queen’s hand was the same as that in the hand of the lowest scullion.
Qasim and Rasima had, as tradition dictated, invited each of the magical creatures that guarded humanity to the feast. Where a common shepherd might put out purple cloth and a few iron nails if they wished to attract the attention of our protectors, the king and queen had commissioned wrought-iron figures of each creature, paying the smiths quite handsomely, it must be said. They had placed each gift in a purple silk bag that the Little Rose had, with help from my mother, stitched herself.
Perhaps it was the care that they had put into the invitations, or perhaps the creatures themselves sensed that they might be needed at the party, but each of them came. This was not tradition. We might pay lip service to them, or see a fiery feather or bright flash flitting through the heather at night, but no one had laid eyes upon any of the guardians in decades. I was devastated for weeks afterwards to have missed them, for I did not think I would ever see their like again. My mother described them to me, though, as lovingly as she could, even while her life was falling to shreds all around her.
The piskey and the sprite had been the most entertaining. Both of them fliers, but small enough not to cause alarm on the scale of the others, they had danced with one another in the air above the tables, the harpist providing accompaniment for their antics. The sprite swooped and dove, to the delight of the children, while the piskey shed fine gold dust behind her as she flew in stately circles.
The dragon arrived with an apology, of all things, as she was only a child herself, and was worried she would appear uncultured in so fine a court. Her mother, she explained, would be unable to fit inside the castle without breaking the roof, and so the younger, smaller dragons had cast lots to see who would get to attend. Rasima did an admirable job of keeping her face straight and welcomed the dragon with all the pomp and ceremony she would have given an elder statesman, before calling the steward to settle the great beast somewhere close to the main hearth.
My mother could never quite recall where the gnome had sat. Sometimes when she told me about her, the gnome stayed at the king’s knees, and whispered to him about which flocks should graze in which meadows. Sometimes, the gnome disappeared to the kitchen garden and sank her hands into the soil there. Sometimes my mother forgot the gnome entirely, which I would have thought unfair, except gnomes were shy, and far happier to repay any gift they received quietly and immediately before going on their way again.
The phoenix perched on the back of the unicorn, and the two did not eat, nor speak to anyone once they had greeted the king and queen. They took their place, unbidden, beside the princess, and the Little Rose stared at them, quite forgetting that she had gifts she was meant to be opening and food she was meant to eat. They had gifts of their own for her, of course—gifts that would ensure she grew to be a good and wise ruler—but they were not the sort of gifts a child could open, or even readily understand. Instead, they were gifts to her body and to her mind: discernment and resilience and grace and the like, each tailored with a ruling queen in mind.
And so the birthday celebration was a remarkable success, a wonder for all those in attendance, even for the small boy who was sick in bed and would only ever hear about it secondhand. If the feast had ended as well as it began, the stories would have been much shorter. My mother would not have been forced out of her home, I would not have lost all I cared about, and the kingdom of Kharuf would have continued its quiet march through history.
As it was, a demon came, and the march was not so quiet after that.
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MANDALORE BURNED.
Not all of it, of course, but enough that the smoke filled the air around her. Ahsoka Tano breathed it in. She knew what she had to do, but she wasn’t sure it would work. Worse, she wasn’t sure how long it would work, even if it did. But she was out of options, and this was the only chance she had left. She was there with an army and a mission, as she might have done when she was still Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan. It probably would have gone better if Anakin were with her.
“Be careful, Ahsoka,” he’d told her, before handing over her lightsabers and running off to save the Chancellor. “Maul is tricky. And he has no mercy in him at all.”
“I remember,” she’d replied, trying to scrape up some of the brashness that had earned her the nickname Snips the first time they’d met. She didn’t think the effort was tremendously successful, but he smiled anyway.
“I know.” He rolled his shoulders, already thinking of his own fight. “But you know how I worry.”
“What could happen?” Acting more like her old self was easier the second time, and then she found that she was smiling, too.
Now, the weight of her lightsabers in her hands was reassuring, but she would have traded them both for Anakin’s presence in a heartbeat.
She could see Maul, not far from her now. Smoke wreathed his black-and-red face, though it didn’t seem to bother him. He’d already put aside his cloak; battle-readiness oozing from his stance. He was in one of the plazas that wasn’t burning yet, pacing while he waited for her. If she hadn’t known that his legs were artificial, she never would have guessed they weren’t the limbs he’d been born with. The prosthetics didn’t slow him down at all. She walked toward him, determined. After all, she knew something she was pretty sure he didn’t.
“Where’s your army, Lady Tano?” he called as soon as she was within earshot.
“Busy defeating yours,” she replied, hoping it was true. She wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of seeing how much his c
alling her Lady Tano hurt. She wasn’t a commander anymore, even though the battalion still treated her with the same courtesy they always had, because of her reputation.
“It was so nice of your former masters to send you out alone and spare me the exertion of a proper fight,” Maul said. “You’re not even a real Jedi.”
Malice dripped from his every word, and he bared his teeth at her. His was the kind of anger that Master Yoda warned the younglings about, the sort that ate a person whole and twisted every part of them until they were unrecognizable. Ahsoka shuddered to think what Maul must have suffered to become this way. Still, she was smart enough to use it to her benefit: she needed him angry enough to think he had the upper hand.
“It’ll be a fair fight then,” she retorted, looking him up and down. “You’re only half a Sith.”
That was rude for no reason, the type of thing that would’ve had Master Kenobi rolling his eyes, but Ahsoka couldn’t bring herself to regret it. Taunting one’s enemy was customary, and Ahsoka was going to use all the cards she was dealt, even if it wasn’t polite. He was right, after all: she was no Jedi.
Maul was stalking sideways with a dark feline grace that was oddly hypnotic and twirling the hilt of the lightsaber in his hand. Ahsoka tightened her grip on her own lightsabers and then forced herself to relax. She needed him to come closer. It was a bit like meditation, this waiting. She knew it had worked against Maul before, on Naboo when Obi-Wan beat him the first time. She reached out to the Force and found it waiting for her, a comfort and a source of power. She opened her mind to it and listened with every part of her that could. Then she moved, mirroring Maul across the plaza and taking one step back for every step he took toward her.
The Garden of Three Hundred Flowers Page 3