“Will we still have enough money to get down there?”
“If you don’t know anything about gems, a garnet looks pretty much like a ruby. If I buy a nice sack of oiled linen with cushioning inside, and fill it with small garnets, the sack will be the most expensive part.”
“I bet all the karenite merchants pretend to be gem sellers,” Tamar said.
“You’re probably right. I think we should unload the karenite as fast as we can. If they don’t catch us with it . . .” If we fell under enough suspicion, they’d find an excuse to execute us anyway. But they couldn’t execute too many suspicious gem merchants or they’d scare all the other legitimate merchants away. “We’ll keep our heads down,” I said.
“And keep some money handy,” Tamar said. “In case we need to bribe the gate guards on our way out.”
Though I’d traveled with the Alashi across the steppe using remounts, I was still shocked at how much more ground we could cover with two riders and four horses. We bought grain for the horses, and I was chagrined to discover that I grew sore from our longer days riding. Krina was getting to know me, but Kara, I realized on the second day, was not happy about being relegated to “remount” status. She’d willingly carried Uljas up to the steppe, since obviously Uljas needed someone to carry him. But now it was just me and Tamar, and she resented the fact that Krina was my first choice.
That first day, I kept wanting to look back over my shoulder, at the steppe. When I’d ridden down to Elpisia and to Daphnia, I’d known that I would be heading back toward the territory of the Alashi as soon as I could. Even as an outcast, I would at least be near them. I tried to tell myself that I would be returning in the spring, but that was many dark months away. What does it matter? I was cast out. I can return to the steppe, but not to the Alashi. Not surprisingly, that thought didn’t make me feel any better.
We skirted Daphnia, not wanting to get too close; I found a gem cutter in one of the larger towns just beyond Daphnia who willingly sold me a sack of garnets. He had a white silk cloth that he spread out before laying them out for me, one at a time, then weighing all of them: they glittered in the sunlight that slanted through the open door. Our negotiations were quick, and the gem cutter was also able to sell me a nice sack to keep them in. It was padded and lined with silk on the inside; on the outside, it was dirty, scuffed leather, designed not to attract attention. As I’d predicted, it cost more than the garnets. If the gem cutter thought it was odd that I was buying such a nice bag for such cheap stones, he didn’t show it. I drank a quick glass of tea for courtesy’s sake and we were on our way again.
“They may look like rubies at a quick glance, but if someone gets suspicious of us and tries to scratch stone with one of them, they’ll know for sure that we’re up to something,” Tamar said.
“We can take payment for the karenite in real rubies,” I said. “And leave the garnets with the sorceress.”
As we lay down in our blankets that night, I thought about Zhanna. Though I’d been a reluctant apprentice, I missed Zhanna more than Janiya or Erdene or any of the others. I wished I could talk with her, not least because I had so many questions, and no way to answer them for myself. Shamans can talk to each other in dreams. I think some of my dreams have been Zhanna coming to me . . . maybe I’ll try to talk to her tonight. I really had no idea how to go about doing that, but the first step was no doubt falling asleep. I tried to focus my thoughts on Zhanna as I waited for sleep to come, but of course that just made me wide-eyed and restive even as I heard Tamar fall asleep. My thoughts began to drift from my desire to talk to Zhanna to Zhanna herself: her raven-black hair, the quirk of her willing smile, her unabashed laugh. I was thinking of her laugh when sleep finally claimed me.
Lauria, Lauria, stay here, I need to talk to you . . .
That was Kyros’s voice. I looked around, but didn’t see him; part of me wanted to jerk myself into waking, but I forced myself to take a moment to look around and see where I was. I was enveloped in darkness, and as I tried to understand my surroundings, I realized that it wasn’t a simple matter of standing on a dark road or in a dark room. This is foreign, I thought. This is something very different.
Lauria . . . The voice was farther away.
On occasion, I’d seen burning clouds—the rippling flames in the sky that appeared most often on very cold nights in the depths of winter. As I looked around, I could see something like that now—cold flames, white and yellow and red, rippling around me like water. Around and around, above my head and below my feet, and now that there was light, I realized that it gave me no illumination: I couldn’t see my hands or feet.
Lauria . . .
I couldn’t see my hands or feet, but I could taste the colors, I realized after another moment. The white flames tasted like honey-sweetened tea; the yellow flames tasted like unripe apple. The red flames tasted like fresh mint leaves, chewed to keep the mouth moist, and when blue flames washed over the others for a moment I tasted kumiss.
I need to find Zhanna, I thought. She can explain things to me. Surely all of this is familiar to her.
But then I felt hands seize my wrists and whirl me around, and suddenly I faced Kyros. We were in a room—my room, I realized, back in Kyros’s house—but as I protested inwardly, no, I want this to be on my terms, mine we stood in a tent instead, an Alashi yurt, filled with red and black felt rugs and hand-stitched tapestries of horses and glittering hangings that looked like glass mosaics.
Zhanna, I thought, but I knew she was nowhere near me. I was not at the Sisterhood’s camp. I made this. Kyros came to me.
“Where are you?” Kyros demanded.
“Penelopeia,” I said. The tent started to shift again, and I grabbed the tapestry behind me with my hands, as if to hold it in place.
“Why are you lying to me? Why are you hiding?”
I need to convince him that I’m still on his side. “How can you think I would lie to you? You don’t trust me anymore,” I said. The words were bitter in my mouth, but I forced them out.
“Then come back to me. You can’t possibly be in Penelopeia; you can’t have gotten that far. Come back to Elpisia and tell me what’s going on.”
I’ve got a better idea, Kyros. Why don’t you search out Zeus’s lost hell and move there, you cold bastard? I choked the words back, but the room around us was changing, and I realized with horror that it was taking the form of a cave, Zeus’s lost hell where Alexander had imprisoned him after conquering Olympus. Would Kyros realize where we were? With a wrench I turned my thoughts to Elpisia, and found myself standing in Kyros’s office.
“I can’t come back right now,” I said. “I’m pursuing a project that might win me back into the good graces of the Alashi, but I have to assume I’m being watched.” They could be watching us right now. The room was becoming an Alashi tent again, and I decided to let that particular bit of panic slip out. “They could be watching us here!”
“No, listen—”
“They have shamans! They could—you have to leave! Now!” Kyros started to back out of the tent and I ran after him, shouting, “Don’t contact me again! Don’t try to speak to me! You could ruin everything, everything!”
I was back in the rippling darkness. “Zhanna?” I said, but my voice scratched in my throat, and I knew I’d woken myself. Well, I hoped that conversation with Kyros would throw him off the scent a little longer. Maybe. If I was lucky. Or perhaps I will be unlucky, and Zhanna heard the conversation and thinks I’m still working for Kyros. It was a risk I had to take.
On our tenth day riding south, Tamar grabbed my arm and pointed. Black clouds were approaching. “We need to find shelter,” she said.
We urged the horses to a faster pace; it didn’t take much encouragement, as they could smell the storm approaching and wanted to get to shelter even more than we did. The first flakes were spitting down when we saw a roadside inn. Tamar reined Kesh in. “It’s got a stable, four walls, and a roof,” she said.
&nb
sp; “We could attract suspicion. Arachne help us all, we could run into Myron.”
Tamar looked at me with long-suffering patience. “Lauria. Do you have any better ideas? Because camping in a snowstorm isn’t one.”
The innkeeper couldn’t give us a room, but was willing to let us stay on the floor of the common room with all the other latecomers desperate to get out of the storm. There was room in the stable for our horses. We led them through the yard as a gust of wind swept down hard enough to almost knock me off my feet. Yeah, it’s winter, I thought. Somehow I always forget just how much cold wind can hurt. The stable boys opened the door with some reluctance, as a gust of freezing wind came in with us. Once the door was shut it wasn’t too bad. “We’ll groom our own horses, you’ve clearly got plenty to do,” I said. I wasn’t making our horses wait.
We unloaded the horses and stripped off their tack. I groomed Kara, since I’d just been riding her, then Krina, who made it clear she thought I should have groomed her first. Tamar worked over her own horses, and I groomed the packhorse as she finished up, brushing away sweat and dirt.
“Do you think we could just stay in here?” Tamar asked. “It’s plenty warm in here, and we won’t run into anyone . . . It’s not like they’ll have any beds inside.”
“Good idea.” The stable master grudgingly gave me permission and we settled down near Krina.
“There’s hot stew inside,” one of the stable hands told us as he passed, but wind rattled the door of the stable even as he said it, and I shook my head.
“It’s not worth going out in that. I’ll trade you some wine for some of whatever you’re eating.”
“Are you sure? There’s no meat in ours. For wine I could maybe run in for you . . .”
“I’d just as soon you not open the door,” I said. “I don’t want meat that badly.”
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and a few moments later he returned with two bowls of soup and a hunk of bread. It was decent enough vegetable soup, I thought: mostly root vegetables and beans, with a few withered remnants of the fall harvest tossed in. Tamar measured out a generous portion of wine to trade for it and we settled down to sleep.
We woke early, roused by the stable hands bringing in food and water for the horses. “Hey,” said the slave who had brought our food last night. “You made a good choice. Everyone who ate the inn’s stew last night got sick.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, half of them stumbled out and puked all over the courtyard in the night. One drunk soldier died, choked on his own vomit. Did you do something to the stew?”
I blanched. “No! We barely even set foot in the inn. We paid for a place to stay and then stayed here.”
“Lucky,” he said. “Well, the cook’ll probably get blamed again. She always does . . .”
The snow was still falling too hard to go out onto the road again. “We should go inside,” Tamar said reluctantly. “If everyone’s sick, they may need the healthy people to pitch in and get water and tea for the sick people . . .”
“What if we get sick?”
“Just don’t eat any of the food.”
“Probably a good idea.”
Not quite everyone was sick, as it turned out. The inside slaves had eaten their own food, like the stable hands, and were all feeling fine. As I passed near the kitchen, I heard shouting, and looked in to see the innkeeper backhand the cook so hard that her head hit the wall. She pressed her hands to her cheeks, sobbing silently and shaking as she shrank into the corner. The innkeeper heard us come in and turned around to look at us. “Do you need something?” he asked.
I wouldn’t have eaten or drunk anything coming out of this kitchen if you’d paid me in karenite, but I said, “Tea,” hoping to distract him from beating the cook.
It worked, more or less. He glanced at the cook, said, “She’ll get you some,” then stalked out.
“Next time poison him, not the rest of the customers,” I said as one of the cook’s assistants brought out hot water and started to make more tea.
“She didn’t do anything,” the girl said, her eyes filling with tears of sympathy. “He always blames her.”
Always? “How often does this happen?” I asked.
“Every now and then. Maybe twice a year.”
The cook stood up, rubbing her cheek as she started preparing the next meal. When the tea was ready, I took a cup, stepped outside into the courtyard, and poured it out on the ground.
“The innkeeper blames the cook,” I said when Tamar joined me. “Apparently this happens every so often. The other slaves in the kitchen swear the cook had nothing to do with it.”
Tamar let out a dry chuckle. “The master always blames the kitchen slaves for this sort of thing. My mother got blamed once, when I was a child, and we spent a month scrubbing floors before he decided it couldn’t have been her and put her back in the kitchen.”
The one good thing about the day was that the snow seemed to be tapering off; I thought we’d be able to travel the next day, if we were stubborn about it. The slaves were healthy enough to care for the sick guests, so we returned to the stable.
“I want to take the cook with us,” Tamar whispered as night fell.
Of course, I thought, but I didn’t argue.
I rose before dawn, told the stable hands to get our horses ready, and trudged back into the inn and poked my head into the kitchen. As I’d expected, the cook was awake, along with one of her assistants. She had a black eye from the blow she took yesterday, and a bruised, swollen cheek. I leaned forward to whisper in the cook’s ear.
“My companion and I would help you escape, if you would like to be free.”
The cook gave me a look of disbelief, squinting at me with her bruised eye. “Where would I go?”
“We’re going to Casseia, for now. In the spring we could help you go to the steppe . . .”
“Me, join the bandits? At my age?” She seemed both taken aback and genuinely amused. “I can’t even ride a horse.”
“You’d learn. It’s not that hard.”
“The snow is waist deep out there. What a favor, freedom in the middle of winter.” She laughed again. “Come back in the summer and you might convince me, girl, but for now I like slavery better than freezing to death.”
“Even being blamed every time someone gets sick?”
She touched the bruise on her cheek gingerly. “It’s not so bad. He’s a fine master when things are going well, and that’s most of the time. I’ve had worse. If I ran and he caught me, I’d have worse again.”
I bowed slightly, acknowledging her refusal. “Good luck to you, then,” I said.
“It was kind of you to offer,” she said, sounding a little apologetic.
I went back to Tamar. “She’s not coming,” I said.
“Really?” Tamar sounded shocked.
“She thinks we’ll let her freeze to death. She might be right, too. Only the rivers’ return can free them all. Are you ready? I want to get out of here before anyone gets sick again.”
The cook hadn’t exaggerated by much: there were drifts up to our hips. The storm was over, though, and the sun had come out; the feathery snowflakes caught the sun in tiny, dazzling sparkles. My eyes watered in the brightness. Krina snorted beside me and twitched her head up as if she were admiring the blue sky. I decided to ride her first today, even if it annoyed Kara.
“Hey,” Tamar said as we mounted up. “When you said that only the rivers’ return could free all the slaves—do you really believe that?”
I glanced at her. “I was afraid you’d want to stay and try to convince her yourself. You’d quoted that old line about the rivers back when we were in Daphnia. I figured it might persuade you. I don’t know if I believe it. I’ve never really understood it.”
“My mother told me that the great river would sweep away the Greeks and their Empire. But where we lived, I think if it had come back it might have swept us away, too.”
“You grew up worshiping
the djinni, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yes. Did your mother worship Arachne?”
I shook my head. “Athena.”
Tamar laughed at that. “Did anyone ever tell her that she can worship Athena all she wants, but Athena’s never going to make her Greek?”
“I don’t know. My mother makes me crazy—I’ve said lots of things to her, but last time I visited I was still pretending to be Greek, too.”
“Well, it’s the djinni that promised that the rivers would come back, and that this would free our people. I really don’t know what the Alashi and the other worshippers of Arachne and Prometheus make of that. It’s not how I grew up.”
We had to take it very easy that day, with plenty of breaks, and due to the snow we couldn’t just let the horses forage. I didn’t want to stop at another inn because I was superstitiously convinced that it would make us sick, so we bought oats at a farm for the horses and then camped, digging a big hole in a snowdrift and pitching our tent inside. I knew, of course, that if caught outside in a snowstorm the best way to survive was to dig a hole in the snow and crawl inside—you didn’t have to be Alashi to know that—but when traveling for Kyros in the winter I’d always stayed at inns or with military garrisons and I’d never been caught out in a storm unprepared. I hadn’t realized just how well it worked. With layers of wool felt underneath us and the snow insulating the sides, I woke in the night feeling too warm. I took my coat off and lay back down, enjoying the sensation of warm hands and feet, and fell deliciously back into deep sleep. And dreamed, decisively, of Zhanna.
We were on the steppe, in a yurt; it was warm and comfortable inside, and Zhanna sat on a pile of wool felt rugs. She was meditating, her eyes closed; she held something black in her hands, and I realized as I approached that it was my vest. The black felt vest of sister cloth that I’d embroidered over the course of the summer—that Janiya had taken away from me when I was banished. I wondered if Janiya knew that Zhanna had saved it.
Zhanna’s eyes opened and she looked straight at me. “Janiya has a question for you,” she said.
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