Blood's Pride

by Evie Manieri

  For once Jachad was at a complete loss for words.

  She smiled. “There, you see, Jachi? Simple. You come to us when you’re ready. And if you need us, we’re your people, and we’re here for you.” Then she caught at his hand and held it tightly, holding it to her cheek. “Bring her back to us, if you can.”

  He nodded, took her hand and kissed it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As Isa reached the top of the stairs she could see the heat rippling the air in front of her. Greasy cooking smells came in waves and she paused, waiting for a sudden surge of nausea to pass. From the refectory doorway just up ahead she could hear knives clattering on clay plates, and every now and then a strained word of command to the slaves. Occasional bursts of light flared out through the open archway as fat dripped down onto the cooking fires.

  Frea wasn’t in the refectory. Isa didn’t have to look inside; no wall in the temple could conceal the frigid intensity of her sister’s presence.

  She shut her eyes. Sweat sheeted down underneath the stiff new leather of her fighting clothes. She could feel the heat pulling her back toward the darkness of her room, the softness of her bed, the filminess of the gown she’d left lying in a heap on the floor, pulling her back toward sleep and the greedy way it devoured the long, pointless hours of her life.

  But no, not this time. Now she was made of ice. No amount of heat could thaw her. She was frozen as solid as the statues in the emperor’s palace at Ravindal. Her fingers were icicles. Her breast was a snowdrift. Her heart was a glacier.

 

  Her eyes flew open. Rho was standing in the shadows at the far end of the hall. All she could see of him was a long face and two indistinct hands hovering in the darkness.

  She greeted him coolly, keenly aware of the shiny newness of her leather suit. The sleeveless jacket was supposed to be worn with a shirt underneath, but it was just too hot here. She tugged at the buckle across her chest to make sure it was still fastened.

  Rho said noncommittally. She expected him to continue down the hallway toward her, but he didn’t move.

  she said. She didn’t want him to know that after she’d left Daryan alone in the bathing room, she’d wasted the rest of the night away sitting half-dressed on the edge of her bed, lost in a miasma of feelings she couldn’t even name. She had left herself only enough time to put on her clothes and tie her hair back like a boy’s.

 

  she amended bluntly, hoping to shock him. She was not as innocent as he thought: she knew all about Frea and Beorun, just as she had known all about Frea and Rho.

 

 

  he asked.

  For a moment, all of the breathable air disappeared from the corridor. Nothing was left but the lung-searing heat.

  Ice, she reminded herself.

 

  Made of ice, like a Norlander. Like Frea. Like Rho.

  he agreed.

  Something was different about him—she should have noticed it right away. The aristocratic disdain that was the mainstay of his personality felt forced. And why was he standing so far away from her? She started down the hallway toward him.

  he warned her, shrinking back, but not before she had seen what he hadn’t wanted her to see.

  she cried out, both in alarm and disgust. Some dark stuff was splattered all over the front of his tunic and messy streaks of it trailed down his arms and hands. A grayish-blue bruise swelled under his right eye, distorting his handsome, quintessentially Norlander features.

  he answered, pushing away her concern with the finality of a slammed door.

  she chided him.

  The dark pupils in his silver eyes roamed up and down her frame.

  She didn’t understand the comment, but she felt the criticism.

  he went on,

  Isa felt him as oddly distant, as if he were talking to himself, without quite realizing she was there. she asked incredulously.

  he replied.

  Ice. She was made of ice.

 

  Isa demanded helplessly, feeling the brittle wall of her composure beginning to splinter.

 

  She tossed her head and took a step back from him.

  His warning came at her, glinting and sharp, like the edge of a blade catching the sun.

 

 

  Now, even through the buzz of her own anger, Isa could feel some dark emotion churning up beneath his genteel posing. she reminded him.

  he said again.

  she tossed back to him.

  His emotions suddenly rolled to the surface, striking out at her with the force of a blunt fist, and as she reeled back he reached out with both hands and grabbed her wrists. She could feel the blood pulsing wildly through his fingertips, and for the first time she noticed the heavy scent of wine clinging to him and realized that he was drunk.

  she cried—but he’d already released her and as she watched in revulsion, he lurched and fell against the wall. He tried to tamp down his emotions, but the best he could do was reduce them to a dark smolder. She reminded herself sternly that she didn’t have time for compassion, or pity, or curiosity—she didn’t even have time to be angry.

  he called after her as she walked away from him.

  She turned back to him.

  He didn’t bother to contradict what they both knew was a lie. He was calmer now, but still intense, in a way that she had never known him to be before.

 

  His silver eyes flashed in the dark hallway.

 

  o ridiculous?> He had straightened up against the wall, but his shoulders were still slightly hunched, as if something were pressing down on him from above.

 

 

  She was too furious to respond. She stalked off down the corridor, hands trembling with rage.

  She felt him behind her just as her foot touched the first stair.

 

  He trailed off, but then said with a new eagerness,

  She stopped halfway down the stairs and turned back to him warily.

 

  Isa regarded him suspiciously.

 

  She considered his proposal.

  A shadow of the same bleak emotion that had overwhelmed him earlier hovered between them, but this time he had it under control.

  She looked past him, toward the doorway. All of those bodies. All of that heat.

 

  He was right. She’d fail again, just as she had before.

  he assured her. He moved past her down the stairs, leaving the sweet, rotten-fruit scent of wine in his wake as the darkness closed over his head. She remained there for a long time, halfway up and halfway down the stairs, staring at nothing. Finally she ran her tongue slowly over her dry lips, turned and walked back up to the refectory.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Daryan stopped at the junction of two passages, his momentum gone. He told himself that he should keep going, but he felt incapable of propeling himself any further. Isa had played with a wooden toy when she was little, a Norland animal—he had never known what it was called—on rackety wheels; no matter how hard you pushed it, it never traveled more than a few feet across the stone floor before stuttering to a halt. That’s what he felt like now.

  He didn’t know where she’d gone after she’d left him alone in the bathing room. That had been hours ago. He should have been helping to restore order in the wake of the earthquake, and Shairav was looking for him. He couldn’t just stand here brooding, going nowhere, doing nothing. People were hurt; they were afraid. He was the daimon. He had responsibilities. He wasn’t a child any more.

  But neither was Isa.

  Finally he heard footsteps, light and quick, too light for a man, too quick for a woman, and only a soft pattering, not the percussive strike of boots or the slap of sandals. And as the source of the footsteps solidified out of the gray darkness at the far end of the hall, he understood quite plainly that his mind had snapped—temple sickness, his people called it, from living too long in the dark. He had gone mad.

  Because it was a child: a little curly-haired Shadari child, just like Daryan himself had been when he first came to the temple. It was a likeness, an echo, conjured up from his own memories. The apparition walked toward him without slowing, and he would have not been at all surprised if it had passed through him as easily as if he were made of smoke. But the child stopped in front of him and looked up into his face.

  “Hello,” said the boy.

  Daryan bent down. The warm, fresh smell of the boy’s hair and clothes—a mixture of bleached sand and hearth fires and sea-salt—made his head swim with longing and loss. “Who are you?” he asked faintly. “Where did you come from?”

  “I’m Dramash. From the Shadar.”

  “But how did you—?”

  “I’m going to live here now and help take care of the dereshadi.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The White Wolf. One of the soldiers said he’d teach me how to fight, too. I don’t know his name. What’s your name?”

  “Daryan.”

  The whites of the boy’s eyes widened. “Oh! I’ve heard of you! I know all about you.”

  “Do you?,” he asked, smiling, but he was not really listening. He heard more footsteps coming their way.

  “My father told me,” said Dramash. “He says you’re a coward.”

  Daryan’s stomach muscles screwed up tight. He was careful to keep his face turned away from the boy. “Does he?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice level. “Why does he say that?”

  “He says if you didn’t like it here you would have done something by now. He says you get to lie around here while other people are dying in the mines,” the child continued blithely.

  He was just repeating what he’d heard, Daryan reminded himself. He was just a little boy.

  “He says that you don’t really care about the Shadari at all. He says that if we wait around for you to do something, we’ll be waiting forever.”

  Now Daryan did hear the scrape of boot-nails and he recognized that long, confident stride. “That’s the White Wolf—come here, quickly!” He grabbed the child by the hand—a small, moist hand—and yanked him down the hallway to their right.

  “Hey!” the boy protested, pulling his hand from Daryan’s grasp. He skipped away before Daryan could grab him again. Frea’s silver helmet gleamed as she passed and he waited in the shadows with his heart in his mouth for her to notice the boy. She never even broke her stride, but the boy—Dramash—fell into step behind her heels and padded after her like an obedient puppy.

  He watched, dumbfounded, until he lost them in the darkness.

  “Oh, Daryan! I’m glad I found you,” a voice called out from behind him, and he started, nearly knocking his head against the wall. He turned around and found another slave advancing down the corridor toward him.

  “Shairav wants me. I know,” Daryan said tightly. As usual, he had to search frantically for a name. “You can tell him I’m on my way, Veshar.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Veshar, “but Shairav didn’t send me. Lord Eofar has come back. Aeda’s just landing now. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Are you sure it’s Lord Eofar?” Daryan asked, not sure whether he was glad that Eofar hadn’t left the Shadar, or sorry that he hadn’t found Harotha.

  “Well, we weren’t at first, actually,” said Veshar, eyeing him quizzically, “because he’s brought someone back with him.”

  “He has?” He grabbed the startled man by the shoulders. “Who?”

  “I couldn’t really tell,” Veshar answered, “but it looked like a woman. A woman with dark hair.”

  He released Veshar and ran toward the stables. The scene he rushed into was even more chaotic than usual, with dereshadi everywhere: circling in the gray sky above, diving in to land, trundling along on the ground, flopping heavily into their berths. Shairav’s brown-robed assistants were ubiquitous, unsaddling, feeding and watering the creatures before bedding them down for the day. Dead Ones crowded near the walls, wary of the dawn, shrugging out of cloaks and peeling off gloves smeared with all kinds of grime and effluvia. And as Daryan waded in among the crowd, he kept hearing the same phrase, whispered over and over again by the Shadari.

  Trouble at the mines.

  He touched the arm of the first slave he recognized. “Rasabal, is Lord Eofar here?”

  “I think he just landed over there somewhere,” she answered, pointing.

  He wove through the confusion, craning his neck this way and tha
t, trying to spot Eofar or Harotha. Just as he caught sight of a tangle of black hair, someone grabbed his arm from behind and jerked him back sharply.

  “Run,” Shairav hissed into his ear.

  “What?” Daryan cried out, recoiling from his uncle’s touch.

  “Run! Get away from here!” he insisted again, circling in front of Daryan and staring into his face. The old man’s skin was slick with perspiration and his eyes bulged with fear.

  “Run? From Harotha?”

  “That,” Shairav growled, “is not Harotha.”

  Just then the crowd parted and he saw her. In the first instant he could do nothing but stare at the black eye-patch. Then he saw that her other eye was fixed on him, staring at him with a strangely intimate intensity. He couldn’t look away. Even in the uncertain light he could see the smoothly shining scars written across her face like a cipher. He thought at first that she was smiling—a mocking, half-smile—but then he noticed the scar pulling up one corner of her mouth.

  “Who is that? I’ve seen her before,” he told his uncle, adding in a low voice, “haven’t I?”

  A stablehand paused his vigorous saddle-scrubbing long enough to lean toward them. “That’s the Mongrel.”

  “The Mongrel? No, it can’t be.” Daryan stepped around Shairav to get a better look.

  Eofar trudged along behind her with his head down, unaware or uninterested in the sensation his companion was causing. They disappeared behind a stack of hay-bales and as they emerged on the other side, Daryan saw the woman stumble and fall heavily against the bales. She fumbled in her clothes for a moment and brought out a flat silver flask, but as she tried to unscrew the stopper the flask clattered to the floor. Eofar retrieved it for her and she gulped down a few swallows. Then she stowed the flask away again beneath her vest and took another moment to adjust her eye-patch before straightening up.

  “Run!” Shairav cried out again, clutching his shoulder as the strange woman started toward them once more, but Daryan couldn’t have obeyed if he wanted to. His legs had turned to stone.

  He knew her. He didn’t know how, or what it meant, but he knew her: she was part of something he had forgotten; something he’d been meant to forget. And she wasn’t supposed to be here. He didn’t need his uncle’s histrionics to tell him that; he could feel it with every step she took toward him: like an alarm bell, ringing louder, and louder, and louder.