So I couldn’t visit my mother.
Just as well, really. If I did visit her, we’d just end up fighting again.
I found a hidden spot to wait near the kitchen window and sat down. I couldn’t hear the voices of the people in the kitchen here, and I was tempted to move closer, but I stayed where I was. I’d told Nika what to do; I had to trust her to take care of her part.
Then again, if she didn’t, how obligated should I feel to free her? If I made a good-faith effort and failed, how many times did I have to try again? For Nika, I’ll have to try at least once more. She’d be free already if it weren’t for me. If she doesn’t manage tonight, it’s because something kept her. But what about the others? Burkut had almost died in the desert; what if he now balked at the risk? How many times did honor demand that I return if someone was indecisive?
I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.
The window was opening. I moved over to it just in time to see a pair of soldiers rounding the corner of the street. Damn it to hell. I pushed the window shut again, hoping that Nika would get the message, and shrank back into the shadows; the soldiers continued past without stopping. My heart beat in my chest like a smith’s hammer. I waited for a few moments to be sure that they weren’t coming back. Then I started to knock on the window, but realized that I could hear the murmur of voices again. Well, at least the soldiers hadn’t walked past as I was helping Nika and her daughter climb out the window. I waited, clenching my teeth and knotting my hands into fists.
The window opened a crack, then swung wide. “Here,” Nika said, and swung a small body out the window. I took the little girl in my arms. She was surprisingly heavy. Nika climbed out after her. With a day’s warning, she’d also found a way to have coats for both her and the child. “We’d better run, they’ll be back in minutes,” she said. She took Melaina back and swung her up against her shoulder.
We ran. Prometheus and Arachne, keep us from meeting those soldiers again! Melaina clung to her mother, not complaining, and we made it to the wall without incident. I scrambled up first, took Melaina, and gave Nika a hand up. Then I jumped down, she lowered Melaina to my arms, and dropped down after me. “Follow me. We have horses,” I said, and we found our way to Tamar.
“You got them,” Tamar whispered as we approached, her eyes alight. We helped Nika up onto Tamar’s horse and handed Melaina up to her; we could lead the horses until dawn.
“I got them out of Elpisia,” I said. “We still need to get away.”
“They sent only one person after me when I ran before,” Nika said.
“If she comes after us again, we’ll make her sorry,” I said.
Nika sucked in her breath and looked down at my face, still half covered with the scarf. Despite the scarf, and the darkness, now she recognized me. I saw fear in her eyes.
“I was wrong before,” I said. “I’m trying to make amends.” I glanced back toward Elpisia. We didn’t have much time.
Tamar reached up and clasped her hand. “Trust us,” she said. Nika shifted to meet Tamar’s eyes, and Tamar’s hand tightened on hers. “I was a slave, like you. She helped me escape to the Alashi, and now we’re going to help you and your daughter.”
Nika tightened her arms around Melaina and nodded once.
Once the sky lightened to gray, Tamar and I mounted as well; Nika was small enough to ride double with Tamar, and Melaina rode with me. In the daylight I could see that she had dark curls and gray eyes; she was about three, I thought, old enough that Nika had probably been pregnant when she ran. I thought I could see Kyros in Melaina’s face. My half-sister? I always thought myself an only child. It occurred to me with a jolt that Kyros’s wife, the former sorceress, had eight children.
We pushed the horses hard; the closest well Tamar knew how to get to was on the Helladia side of the hills. Our horses left an easy trail to follow, though if Myron or someone like him were trying to find Nika, he would completely disregard the possibility that the slave could be escaping on horseback. “What did you tell the other slaves?” I asked Nika.
“Nothing. Well, I told them that Melaina had hit her head and needed to be close to me tonight; that’s how I brought her with me to the kitchen. I made her a little bed with the coats, so that’s how I made sure we had them. And I made sure to forget something so someone would have to go to the pantry.”
“Twice,” I said, thinking of the soldiers’ untimely arrival.
“I forgot a couple of things, just in case.”
“If it was that easy, why didn’t you ever climb out that window before?” Tamar asked.
“I knew I’d never get away with a child. And the punishment for running away is severe. I couldn’t risk Melaina’s safety that way, not with so little chance of success.”
We reached Tamar’s well at dusk. Like the other Alashi wells I’d seen, it was marked with a cairn of rocks. We took turns hauling up water for our horses, then for ourselves; we drank deeply from the bucket and filled our waterskins. The night was cold. Even knowing that Tamar was on watch, I kept rousing, certain that someone was about to catch up with us. I woke everyone at the first hint of dawn so that we could start again as quickly as possible.
“Even if they follow our trail, we’re far enough out that it would be risky for them to come after us,” Tamar said. “They’re afraid of the bandits and afraid of the Alashi. It’s not worth it, not for two slaves. How stubborn was . . .” She glanced at Nika, and paused. Since the flash of recognition the night we escaped, Nika had pretended that I was truly a stranger. Tamar was clearly wary of forcing either of us to acknowledge that we’d met before. “How stubborn was your old master?” she asked, finally. “How hard would he search for a woman and a child?”
Kyros was stubborn but not reckless. “You’re right,” I said. “A slave who escaped on horseback would’ve gotten too far too fast to be worth the effort.”
“Did he ever use the djinni to search?”
“No. Bound djinni aren’t very good at finding people. There are so many ways to be unhelpful: you can look just in the open and skip over even the most obvious hiding places. If you’re told to look everywhere, you can waste time checking every mouse-sized crevice. If you don’t know exactly what a person looks like, you’ll never find them; if they’ve changed their appearance even slightly, you can pretend not to recognize them.”
“Don’t they carry messages?”
“This is why you’ll send a djinn to ‘the commander of such-and-such post’ and give a location. Though there are downsides to that approach, too.”
“Kyr—Someone did find you with a djinn, once, though.”
“He knew more or less where I was, and the djinn knew me. Now . . . it won’t be as easy.”
“What will he do?”
I bit my lip. I hadn’t really wanted to think about this. “It’s a big world,” I said. “He’ll have to tell the djinn to look everywhere. It could take a really long time.”
Tamar mulled that over for a few minutes, then asked, “Do you think he’ll send a djinn to search, though? Because it probably would find you eventually.”
I sighed and glanced at Nika, as reluctant to shatter the pretense as Tamar was. “Alibek told me something once,” I said, knowing that Tamar would know this meant while I was bringing him back to Kyros. “He said that after his sister escaped, his master took Alibek for his harem instead, then sent a djinn up to the steppes to tell Alibek’s sister what he did. And that was just out of pique. He’ll never give up on finding me. Ever.”
It was light enough to ride now, so we mounted up. Nika asked, “If the djinn was able to find the escaped slave to carry a message, why couldn’t it just kidnap her and take her back?”
“Moving a person is a delicate task,” I said. “Moving an unwilling person is particularly hard, and if the person gets killed in the process, the binding spell is broken. That sometimes kills the holder of the spell-chain and always kills the sorceress, and it frees the djinn.
It’s too risky most of the time—certainly too risky just to retrieve a runaway slave.”
A few more days of travel brought us near to the Alashi fall gathering. We moved in close enough to see the smoke from their campfires and then stopped, helping Nika and Melaina down from the horses.
“Be sure to tell them that you ran away once, and were caught and brought back against your will,” I said. “The Alashi don’t rescue slaves; they believe those who truly want freedom will run on their own.”
“But I didn’t get away,” Nika said. “What if they don’t accept me?”
“They will,” Tamar said. “Anyway, you can’t stay with us forever.”
“They’ll call you a blossom and make you pass tests—oh, don’t worry. They’ll haze you but they’ll accept you. Good luck.”
“Wait,” Nika said, and took my hand. “I thought I recognized you, the night we escaped.” She had recognized me, even with a scarf over my face; she certainly knew who I was now. “But I was right to trust you. Whoever you used to be, today you are not the person I thought I saw. When I reach the Alashi, who should I say helped me?”
Saying my own name, my real name, felt like it would be a rejection of her forgiveness. But I wanted Janiya, at least, to know who’d done it. “Tell them it was two women, one named Tamar, the other named . . . Xanthe.” Xanthe, the name of Janiya’s lost daughter—the one Janiya had told me I reminded her of. Janiya would know it was me.
“Thank you, Xanthe,” Nika said, took Melaina’s hand, and turned toward the smoke from the fires.
Well, that went pretty well,” Tamar said. “Do you want me to call you Xanthe now?”
We’d ridden west to another well, and had built our own small fire with dung we’d managed to collect. I was still cold. We need a shelter.
“No,” I said. “That’s . . .” I paused; this was personal information, after all. Then I shrugged and finished. “Janiya has a daughter by that name, in Penelopeia where she used to live.”
“Huh.” Tamar poked at the fire. “If you use another name, will that make it harder for Kyros to find you?”
“His djinni both know who I am. Knew. I guess there’s only one of them now.”
“If it finds you, can you just banish it like you banished the last one?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It might not work twice.” I sighed and wiped my nose on my sleeve; the cold air was making it run. “I wish I could have asked Zhanna about that before I was banished.”
“Yeah . . .” Tamar tossed another chip of dried dung onto the fire. “What if you disguise yourself somehow? You said earlier that if you changed your appearance, a djinn could pretend it didn’t know who you were.”
“Yeah, that’s true. I don’t really know what I’d do, though. I would get tired of keeping a scarf over my face all the time. There are people who can change their face a lot with face paint, but I think if I tried I wouldn’t look like a different person, I’d look like Lauria trying to disguise herself.”
Tamar laughed a little at that, then gave me a long, speculative look. “Well, buy some face paints then, and I’ll put them on you. I learned to paint my own face back in the harem. I could make you look older, or something. I think. It’s worth a try.”
“Huh.” I thought it over. “Well, all right. When we pass near a city that isn’t Elpisia . . .”
“So where are we going, anyway? Who do you want to free next? Can we go get Meruert and Jaran and the others in Sophos’s harem?”
I took a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t know. It would be hard, getting so many people out.”
“Well, what would it take? Horses? Sophos has a stable full of horses.”
“He also has an entire garrison full of soldiers. One or two people can sneak past. The entire harem—that would be harder.”
“Sophos has a spell-chain . . . maybe we could steal it.”
“That would make things a lot easier. You know Sophos better than I do. Is he careless with his spell-chain? If one of us slipped into his house, would we have a good opportunity to steal it?”
Tamar mulled that over. “I’ve never seen him take it off,” she admitted after a little while. “He even wears it to bed, and he is a light sleeper, even when he’s been drinking. If someone caught him in an unguarded moment . . .”
I had seen him in an unguarded moment, once. His knife had been within my reach—but I hadn’t grasped it when I had the chance, and he had raped me and sent me bleeding and sobbing back to the harem. I winced at the memory that came back, unbidden. That wasn’t the sort of unguarded moment I hoped ever to catch him in again. I pushed the thought away and let out my breath in a sigh. “Think on it,” I said. “If there isn’t a way to get his spell-chain, then surely there’s some other way to accomplish our task.”
“If it were easy, then someone would have done it before.”
“It might not be easy. But we will find a way.”
I stood in the center of Janiya’s camp: the yurts loomed up around me, but I knew they were empty, and I could hear none of the noises from the horses or camels or dogs that I would have usually heard.
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
I turned, and saw Zhanna standing in front of one of the yurts.
“You sent us Nika.”
“It was me,” I said, but a gust of wind whipped the words away and I was alone again. “Zhanna? Are you there?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement, but when I turned, it wasn’t Zhanna—it was a man riding toward me on a horse. Kyros. I wrenched myself awake with a start and stared up at the starry night sky, listening to Tamar breathing beside me. Zhanna had told me that with practice, shamans could sometimes communicate with each other through dreams—was this a dream like that? Was she trying to talk to me? And if so, what was Kyros doing in my dream? He was no shaman. But he’s my father.
Tamar whimpered in her sleep, but settled when I nudged her slightly. It was almost dawn; I watched as the eastern horizon lightened to gray.
I’d never faced my mother in a dream, though the djinni had sent me a dream once that showed me her past with Kyros. I wondered if she had ever tried to speak with me in a dream. Surely, if she could harass me in my sleep instead of having to limit herself to my occasional visits, she wouldn’t pass up the opportunity. The last time I’d visited her, she had brushed my hair and nagged me to get married. I ran my fingers through my hair now. I wouldn’t mind seeing her, if only she were somehow temporarily struck mute.
“We need some sort of disguise,” Tamar said, startling me; I hadn’t known she was awake. “Not the face paint we talked about yesterday. Some way that we can move around through places like Elpisia without anyone getting suspicious.”
“No disguise is going to get us into Sophos’s household unrecognized—not face paint, not a traveling animal show, nothing. You lived there for years. I was only there briefly, but I still think people would recognize me.”
“Yeah.” Tamar sighed. “Maybe we should work on the others first. For practice. When we go to Sophos’s, I want to do it right. I want to get everyone out of there, even Aislan.”
“All right,” I said.
“For now . . .” She sighed. “Maybe we could pretend we were merchants?”
I’d thought about that already. “Merchants have stuff to sell—we don’t. And more urgent than disguising ourselves, really, is money. We need to come up with some way to pay for food and shelter. Winter’s coming. We have no yurt. We’re running out of food.”
“Have we got anything at all that we could sell?”
“The horses.”
“I don’t want to sell them.”
“I don’t either.”
I poked through my packs. They contained what I’d had with me when I’d been banished: some waterskins, some food, a blanket, a knife. My sword, the one I’d stolen from the bandits last spring. Flint and iron. Women in the sword sisterhoods all carried basic survival materials with them in case
they got separated from the group—lucky for me, or I’d have died the first day. Nothing valuable, though. Nothing I could sell. And no money.
There was something lumpy at the bottom of one of my packs. I dug out the lumps and examined them in the dawn light. Karenite, two thumbnail-sized pieces of it; they rattled against each other in the palm of my hand. How did this get here? After thinking about it for a minute or two, I remembered. Janiya had given us a chunk and sent Tamar and me out to find another piece, as a test to see if we were worthy to join the Alashi. Tamar and I had found karenite, as instructed, but the real test had been whether we’d have the sense to provision ourselves before going out to look. Janiya had refused to take it when we returned, and in my humiliation, I’d tossed both pieces into my pack and forgotten about them, until now.
“Can we sell that?” Tamar asked.
“Probably,” I said, looking it over. “I don’t honestly know how much we’ll get for it, though.”
“Do the Greeks even, you know, like it? It’s pretty, but it’s not really a gemstone.”
I laughed a little and tucked the karenite back into my pack. “That’s not what the Greeks use it for. Karenite is used as the binding stone on a spell-chain; it’s needed, I think, as part of the spell.” I chewed on my lip. “I think the main reason the Greeks were planning an offensive against the Alashi is that most of the Greek sources of karenite are tapped out.”
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