“I don’t know of any.”
“Sure you do. You must. Everyone does. You heard them from your mother, from soldiers, from traders.” Her voice turned coaxing. “Think it over. You can take one of the letters with you now; they’re stacked by the window.” Sure enough, there was a pile of books on a table, all in that cramped handwriting. I chose one with a dusky green cover. “Think about it, and come back when you have thought of one.”
I nodded and tucked the book under my arm.
“Send in Nurzhan as you leave,” she said, so when I passed Nurzhan on the stairs I told her that Zivar wanted her.
Back with Tamar, I leafed through the book, squinting at pages. “Have you ever heard stories about places a long way away?” I asked. “Zivar wants to hear them.” On that journey, Photios had found a man who spoke a little Greek, badly, who had served as his guide. They’d seen amazing creatures: huge striped cats so big they could eat a human, and giant gray animals with noses like long ropes that they could coil and uncoil like we might grip with our hands. It had gotten unbearably hot while Photios was there, and then rained so hard he thought they were all going to drown.
“I’ve heard stories about a land with no night,” Tamar said.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“Well, maybe. I heard it years ago from one of the kitchen slaves, who claimed to have heard it from a man who’d been there. A trader-explorer, like Photios. He was there for a week, or so he thought—it was hard to mark time without night, but they slept and ate each day, and that’s how he counted—and the sun never set. It did get a little dim at times.”
I shook my head. “I think he was pulling her leg.”
“Probably. But I bet Zivar would like the story. What’s that sound?”
We paused and listened. It was coming from outside and was not wind, or the clatter of sleet hitting our shutter. It was a tap, tap, tap, quite steady.
“Thaw,” Tamar breathed. “The snow is melting. It’s finally almost spring.”
CHAPTER TEN
In one of Zivar’s letters from Photios, he described a pretty land, somewhere south of us, where spring arrived in a single decisive burst. The snow melted away, the migratory birds returned, the flowers bloomed. Here, there was a thaw, then a freeze when all the melted snow hardened overnight into pure ice. There were more snowstorms, and more melts. Then there were days of rain, which finally slacked off, and the muddy hills turned green. The days grew longer.
Tamar and I argued, as spring advanced, about what to do. She still thought selling me into slavery in the mine was a horrible idea; I still hadn’t thought of anything better. At her insistence, we both tried to speak to Prax, in dreams, but couldn’t find him on our own. If I were going to speak to him, it would have to be for real, face-to-face.
With the first thaw, travelers began to pass through Casseia again—first a trickle, then a flood, like the melting snow. Tamar and I decided to wait until the mud had dried out a bit. “If we need some money, we could sell the packhorse,” Tamar said.
“I think we need the horse more.”
“We need a way to feed the other horses,” Tamar said. “And ourselves. Money for bribes might be nice . . .”
“We can let the horses forage, since we’re not in as much of a hurry.”
“Yeah, well, what are we going to eat?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” I shrugged; the spring wind brought the scent of wet mud through the window, and it made it hard to think of anything other than getting onto the road again. “Do what you think is best.”
I went out to exercise the horses. When I returned, I heard a voice coming from the open door to our room as I approached from the hall. Some instinctive nosiness from my days as Kyros’s spy made me slow and soften my step, to listen in. “—whether she’s interested or not,” a voice was saying. Nurzhan, I thought it was. “If she’s with you, then excellent. If not, we still want you.”
“I don’t think I understand what you want me for,” Tamar said.
“For our Sisterhood,” Nurzhan said.
Another servant spoke. “Sorceresses do not run their households very well. The calmest and most logical sorceress still has days when she would throw herself down from the high tower if someone took her up there.”
“Think how they run their Empire,” Nurzhan said.
“We have control over Zivar,” the other servant said. “We take care of her, and she serves us. That’s the natural order of things. There should be a ruler, and the Weavers should serve her, and should be taken care of when . . .”
“. . .when they’re too crazy to be trusted with a glass of tea, let alone an Empire,” Nurzhan finished.
“That’s the natural order we’re working to restore.”
“You.” Tamar’s voice was frankly disbelieving. “You expect me to believe . . .”
“It was actually Zivar’s idea, some years ago,” Nurzhan said. “We think she’s forgotten about it, though.”
“Everything has to start somewhere. The Sisterhood started with Penelope, and her apprentices . . .”
“Right,” Tamar said.
“We have many friends,” Nurzhan said. “We’re not alone.”
“Think it over,” the other servant said.
“Why approach me, and not Lauria?”
“She’s one of them, now.”
“But—”
“You’ll see,” Nurzhan said. “She seems perfectly fine right now, but in a few weeks, a few months—fever, melancholia. You’ll have to take care of her.”
It won’t happen, I told myself.
“In any case, you’re one of us. You have been one of us all winter. Lauria, well, she came with you, so if she wants to be part, we’ll accept her.”
“What do you want from me?”
“To carry the word.”
“We’re trying to free slaves, not recruit them for your plot.”
“The servants we speak of don’t want to join the bandits. Surely you’ve met a few . . .”
I thought of Zarina. She would be in her element in the home of a lone sorceress. Tamar may have thought of her, too, because I heard her murmur reluctant assent a moment later.
“Think it over,” Nurzhan said. I could hear the sound of someone standing up, and I slipped swiftly back down the stairs, so that I could pretend that I was just coming up and had overheard nothing. I saw Nurzhan and the other servant coming out as I approached; they gave me a bare glance and a courteous smile, and I knew that if I hadn’t overheard I wouldn’t have suspected anything.
I waited that afternoon to see if Tamar told me anything about her conversation that afternoon. She didn’t. She told me nothing that night, either, and nothing at breakfast, though she was quiet, her face thoughtful.
When I was working for Kyros, this sort of information would have been squirreled away. I never would have told the person I’d overheard that I’d overheard her, though I would have taken careful note of whether or not she’d come clean to me, all so that I could report as fully as possible to Kyros when I was done. Gathering information for myself was harder. I realized that I didn’t care whether Tamar was going to tell me on her own—I just wanted to know what she thought of the proposal. “Hey,” I blurted out after an implacable Nurzhan brought our breakfast and left again. “I overheard you yesterday.”
Tamar quickly pasted a look of surprised innocence over her features, then shrugged and dropped the pretense. “I thought as much. You’ve had this expectant air ever since.”
“So . . . what do you think?”
“Are you asking whether I want to join their ‘sisterhood,’ or just what I think?”
“I guess I just want to know what you think.”
“Well, they’re right that sorceresses are an intemperate lot. If it weren’t for the magic, they never could have created and held an Empire. Then again, if it weren’t for the magic, they wouldn’t be, well . . .” She threw up her hands in a shrug. “I thoug
ht about it all night. But I guess the fact is, I still feel Alashi, even though we walked away. And what serves the Alashi better? A fractious, weak council running the Empire that threatens them? Or someone like Nurzhan?”
“Would Nurzhan have the sense not to invade Alashi territory?”
“If she needed karenite to feed her pet sorceress . . .”
“She could buy it from the Alashi with a lot less trouble.”
“Perhaps. But I’m not certain of that. The Sisterhood is dependent on karenite; without it, there are no more spell-chains, no more magic. Even if they had a formal truce with the Alashi, you can’t let your enemy control something you need that badly. The Alashi can never trust the Sisterhood, or anyone who relies on the Sisterhood. Not unless a whole lot of karenite suddenly turns up in Persia.”
“I can’t imagine that they haven’t looked for it there.”
“Me either.”
“So . . . no. I’m not joining.”
I sighed, feeling both a little disappointed and a little relieved.
“But I think I may ask them for more information, because who knows, it might be useful.”
Tamar did not invite me down to the kitchen with her when she went to have one final chat with Nurzhan, so I followed a few minutes later, planning to eavesdrop. But as I passed the receiving room, I heard a hiss and turned to see Zivar. “Come for a walk with me,” she said, so I put on my boots and we went out.
The city streets were paved with stones, but still covered with a layer of slick mud. Here and there I could spot patches of dirty snow. “The walls of my house have ears,” Zivar said after a little while. “I wanted to talk privately. No, not about the conspiracy.” She glanced at me, her eyebrow tilted up; I knew I looked surprised. “Of course I know about the Servant Sisterhood. I have ears, too, and they don’t always know that I’m listening. They’re right, in a sense. The Sisterhood makes for a strange empire. No, I don’t care about that. I want to negotiate with the Alashi.”
“For karenite?”
“That would be part of the arrangement, of course. I want to ask for shelter with them. Asylum. I want them to protect me from the Sisterhood, and in exchange my aerika and I will serve them.”
“That would . . .” I tried to imagine making this offer to the eldress. “That would be a very strange arrangement. Some of them worship the djinni.”
“Don’t most worship Prometheus and Arachne?”
“Yes, but . . .” My words stumbled to a stop. “Well, they might take you up on it, I suppose. Maybe.”
“Will you negotiate as my representative? I do not wish to go there unless I have promises of safety.”
“Um, that would be hard.” I found myself flushing. “You were right, I was cast out. You might ask Tamar . . . though she threw her lot in with me . . .”
“Ah.” Zivar gave me a shrewd look. “Well, then. I suppose this was a rather useless conversation.”
“Send your man,” I said. “The one who explores. They’re always happy to see merchants.”
“Ha. Photios, you mean? I suppose I could send him. I don’t exactly trust him.”
“Do you trust me?”
“You and I are of a kind. You have seen the borderland, and heard the singing of the aerika. You aren’t Greek, and you’re outcast from the Alashi. Two mice, passing through a forest full of owls.”
“There are more than two mice in the world, though.”
“Yes, true enough. So, green mice, then. The only two green mice in the world.”
“So far as we know.”
“Yes. Well, since you can’t go to the Alashi for me, perhaps you can keep your eyes open for green mice. You never know what you’ll find, until you look for it.”
The day we departed, Zivar and all her servants came out to see us off. Zivar gave me a small book of paper bound with leather. “You can write, as well as read, I assume? Then as a favor, it would please me a great deal if you would write descriptions of anywhere particularly interesting you should happen to travel. It is possible to have packages delivered through the Sisterhood of Weavers—the Temple of Athena in any large city can arrange it. I would be in your debt. It can be convenient, to have a sorceress in your debt.” I bowed, and took the book. “I should add, packages sent through the Sisterhood are sometimes examined.”
“I will be discreet in any messages I send,” I said.
Zivar turned to Tamar. “I really do wish you the best,” Tamar said to her, before she could say anything. “I hope you have enough spell-chains soon.”
Zivar nodded a little hesitantly, then withdrew to her house. The stable hands brought out our horses; they were ready, our belongings loaded.
“Think about what I said,” Nurzhan whispered to Tamar, and opened the door.
It was strange to be on the road again, with our string of horses. We had to travel slowly just to give ourselves a chance to get used to the saddle again. “I could use some of Maydan’s salve,” Tamar muttered our first day.
We stopped to rest at the inn where everyone else had gotten sick, though we didn’t eat any food. Instead, I put a little bit of the stew into a leather pouch, thinking that I would bring it with us. No one got sick that night, but if it was left to spoil . . . But after a couple of days, it smelled terrible and attracted swarms of flies. I ended up throwing away the entire pouch. I still thought that poison was a good plan, but I wasn’t carrying rotting meat the whole way up to the mine.
“Maybe we can find a diseased animal and sell it to the guards for food,” Tamar suggested once we’d left the stink behind us.
“How would we know that they wouldn’t feed it to the slaves instead of eating it themselves? If it were obviously sick . . .”
“There are ways of hiding sickness . . .”
“How suspicious would that be, though, to walk up and knock on their door to sell a lamb?”
“Well, if we posed as merchants, with a lot of different stuff . . .”
“Like slaves?”
“Shut up about it, Lauria, all right? I’m not going to sell you. We could have a lot of stuff, including livestock, and then throw in the sick lamb as a gift at the end to close the deal, ‘for a nice dinner tonight.’ Then be sure not to eat any ourselves, wait until everyone goes down sick, and raid. I think poison is a good idea; we just need to think of the best way to do it.”
“What if we can’t find a sick lamb? And what if it doesn’t make anyone sick?”
“Well, you know, that would be a much worse problem if we started this by selling you to the mine. If it doesn’t make anyone sick, we go away, wait a month, then come back with another round of things to sell. We can do it twice, three times, as many times as it takes to make everyone ill.”
“They’re a suspicious bunch.”
“Yeah, well, let me know if you think of a better plan—and selling you into slavery is not it,” Tamar said. “I want to free Sophos’s slaves first, anyway.”
“That’s because you don’t trust this plan to work. You want Sophos’s slaves free in case the mine guards get suspicious and kill us both.”
“Yeah, well, that’s true, so I hope you think up a better plan between now and when we go to the mine.”
“How are you going to free Sophos’s slaves?”
“I’m going to talk to Jaran. Actually, what I would really like to do is have both of us talk to Jaran. Do you think we can try that tonight?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t tried to go to the borderland, on purpose, since the night I’d visited Zhanna. It hadn’t plunged me into darkness like the day I’d tried to bind the djinn, but I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d just gotten lucky that time. “I guess we can try,” I said. “Tonight, then.”
We camped that night. I had expected our yurt to smell mildewed from its winter folded up in a corner, but it welcomed us with the scent of wool and woodsmoke. We made ourselves porridge for dinner over our campfire, and then settled down under our mound of blankets. It might be sp
ring during the day, but nights were still cold. “This will be easy if we go to sleep touching,” Tamar said, so we snuggled against each other. “Don’t worry about finding Jaran. I think I can get both of you. Just try to stay in the borderland when you get there.”
The borderland was quiet tonight; I felt as if I stood on the very edge of rippling water, unable to move away but desperate not to get wet. I was alone: no Tamar, no Zhanna, and thankfully no Kyros. Don’t think of him; it might draw you together. I thought of Tamar instead, and after a moment that stretched for what seemed like a week of nights, I found myself standing in Sophos’s harem, with Tamar and Jaran. Tamar clasped my hand, and his, holding us in place with raw concentration. “We’re coming,” she said to Jaran. “If you and the others would be free, we can get you to the Alashi.”
“How will we break out?”
“Can you think of a way?” Tamar asked.
“Kill Sophos,” I suggested.
“And his guards?”
“You outnumber them.”
“They have weapons.”
“We can’t free you without your help,” Tamar said.
There was a pause.
“It’s going to take us time to get to Helladia,” I said.
“Weeks still,” Tamar said.
“I can kill Sophos,” Jaran said. “But I’m not sure what to do next. What about his guards?”
“Well, think of something,” Tamar said. Things were fading around us. “We’ll talk again soon . . .”
Tamar groused about Jaran as we rode the next morning. “So he doesn’t know what to do after he kills Sophos. And I should? How am I supposed to know what he should do next?”
“Should he free himself?”
“We’re meeting him halfway! We can get him to the Alashi! I think I could break just Jaran out without help from the inside, but to get the rest out . . .”
“Well, it’s not like we can go in and work on the inside like I did to get Burkut,” I said. “Either of us would be recognized.”
“True enough.” Tamar sighed. “In fact, just the thought of being near Helladia makes me queasy. I’m afraid somehow . . . well.”
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