CHAPTER SIX
L AURIA
The days grew warmer. I spent my days in the garden, pretending to embroider. I wanted to make a horse, but it wound up looking like a badly done dog, and I picked out the stitches in disgust and started working on flowers, instead.
My nights were dark. I tried to dream of Tamar, but could never find the borderland; my dreams were a confused jumble of images and intentions. I dreamed of Tamar once, but knew as soon as I woke that it hadn’t been a “true” dream. No djinni approached me.
The melancholia sapped my energy. This time I knew it for what it was, but that helped little. At least I didn’t feel as bleak as I’d felt during the winter, when I had barely risen from bed for over a month. I got up every morning, ate breakfast, then went to sit outside through the day. I knew that I needed to watch for an opportunity to escape, but the melancholia pressed in on my vision like a veil. Besides, my guard was always at my heels.
One day, my guard had visitors—friends of hers, fellow guards, who stood with her a while to talk. I had the opportunity to study the three women without their noticing, distracted as they were by their conversation. All three were about my age, and looked like they probably had Greek, Danibeki, and Persian blood. Like every guard I’d seen in the Koryphe, all three were women. Even the guards that came down into the pit to beat me had been female, or so I assumed from their voices. The sorceress I had apprenticed with, Zivar, had disliked men; I wondered if this prejudice was common among the high-up Weavers, if that was why their corps of guards were all female. Out in the provinces, Kyros’s soldiers had all been men. Of course, the Alashi separated their men and women warriors, too, during the summers. The Alashi did it to avoid the distractions, and the pregnancies. Perhaps the Weavers avoided using male guards for the same reason.
My guard was not happy about her current job; I bored her. I had been boring her for a while. She looked much happier talking with her friends. I studied the three women. All had long hair, bound in tight braids and pinned tightly to their heads; all wore gold hoops in their ears. My guard had three hoops in one ear and two in the other; one of her companions had a full half dozen hoops in one ear, and a single green glint in the other. The woman with the emerald in her ear also had a tattoo, I saw—a snake that wrapped around her left wrist.
My guard must have made a joke, because the other two women laughed. And it was in the smile that I saw it—the quirk of her lip, the tilt of her head. Janiya. The woman with the green stone and the snake tattoo looked like a much-younger version of Janiya. Was this Xanthe? Janiya had been a member of the Sisterhood Guard once. She left a daughter behind in Penelopeia, to be raised by the Guard, when she was exiled and sold into slavery. It certainly could be her daughter.
The tattooed guard caught me looking at her, and her brow furrowed; I lowered my eyes to my embroidery. The stems had started winding together like a net. I can’t even stitch flowers anymore. I started picking out stitches again, trying to take a covert look at the guards.
A fourth guard joined the three who were talking and said something to them, quietly. They all looked at me. My guard shook her head and her friends headed off as she trudged toward me. “Gather up your stuff,” she said. “We need you in your room.”
I picked up the embroidery and shuffled back upstairs. I sat down on my bed, once I arrived, wondering how long I would have to sit in there. Only a few minutes passed before I heard footsteps—Kyros. “Oh good,” he said, with audible relief, as he swung the door open. “You’re inside.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
There was a veil of gauze that I could draw across my window to offer privacy while still allowing light; Kyros pulled it shut. “The magia who condemned you to the pit has retaken the serpent,” he said. “You’ll need to stay in your room for now and not go outside. She mustn’t see you; I’m sure you understand why.”
“Wait,” I said, as he started for the door again. This room is going to feel very small the next time the cold fever seizes me. “Will you do something for me?”
“If I can,” he said, pausing and turning to give me a sympathetic look. The look of a father with an errant daughter. “What is it you need, Lauria?”
“A different guard,” I said.
“Why? Has this one mistreated you?”
I lifted my chin. “In the pit, I was beaten. I couldn’t see faces—the light hurt my eyes—but I think she was one of them. It’s the sound of her voice.” I actually had no idea who those guards had been, but it was a passable enough reason. “It makes it hard for me to sleep, knowing she’s the one guarding me. If she had the chance…”
“Of course,” Kyros said. “I understand. I’ll arrange a different guard.”
“Her friend…” I said. Kyros had started for the door, and now he glanced back. “She had a friend I saw today—a woman with a snake tattooed around her wrist. I know she wasn’t one of the guards who beat me, because I would have seen the snake, and remembered it.”
Kyros nodded. “I’ll see to it,” he said.
The door closed. A little elated, I lay down on my bed to wait for my next meal. This prison has daylight. I’m fed well. It won’t be forever. It was better, but it was still a cage. Breathe. Patience. There will be a chance.
With Xanthe guarding me, I will find a way.
Kyros visited me again that afternoon, and every afternoon after. The days were long, and I found myself looking forward to the visits. They broke up the monotony and soothed my loneliness. He didn’t push for information—we chatted about inconsequential things, or reminisced about old times, like my first trip to Daphnia. He described sights in Casseia that he wanted to show me—though he carefully avoided promising a trip anytime soon.
I do not trust you, I thought each time he came in. But I craved his company because it was the only company I had. Xanthe stood guard on the other side of the door, and the servants who brought my meals barely spoke to me. Kyros’s voice was warm and kind. He laughed at my jokes, even the poorly made ones. He looked into my eyes and praised me, though he didn’t call me his most trusted servant, since that would have been absurd.
I thought about Xanthe a great deal, during the long, boring days. If I could suborn her, she could help me escape. I knew her mother—surely that would prove an advantage. But I would actually have to speak to her, and she did not invite conversation. Also, she no doubt had been raised to believe that her mother was a criminal, unworthy of the Sisterhood Guard. It was possible she didn’t even remember her mother. The fact that I knew her mother, and that her mother was now a leader among the bandits, seemed unlikely to be welcome news. Still, at the very least, the first step would be to talk to Xanthe, to get to know her. To befriend her, if I could. But she was a difficult person to know.
I had a nightmare one night—not one of the old dreams about Sophos but a starkly vivid dream of being lifted from my bed, bound in webs of some kind so tight that I couldn’t move or scream, and could barely breathe; I was carried up and away as I struggled and gasped, Xanthe, knowing that I didn’t speak loudly enough to be heard. Then I wrenched myself awake and was in bed, in the dark, soaking wet from my own sweat and shivering. I lay for a few moments, still terrified from the dream, even knowing that it had been a dream. Just a dream. Not even a true dream, like my dreams of the borderland. I sat up in bed to collect my wits and saw a shimmer in the air. A djinn.
“What do you want?” I asked.
It said nothing.
“Are you bound, or unbound?”
Still nothing.
“Once I could free your kind,” I said. “I don’t know if I still can. Once I could go to the borderland, and I can’t do that anymore. Do you need my help?” I stretched out my hand. The djinn edged closer, and finally I touched it. I felt a coldness around my hand. “Return to the Silent Lands, lost one,” I murmured, speaking the words of banishment that I’d learned from Zhanna. “Trouble us no more.”
For a moment, I thought that it hadn’t worked. Then I felt a blast of wind as if someone had opened a door into midwinter; I gasped from the shock of it. The djinn vanished from before my eyes, and I felt it whirl into my heart. As it crossed the threshold it paused for a moment, and I could sense that it was holding on against the current that pulled it away. “This was a trap,” it whispered. “Do not trust the ones who keep you. They chain—” A gust of the unseen wind almost tore it away, and it fought back, staying long enough to say, “They chain your mind.”
I got up and lit my lamp and sat down. A trap. I thought that probably meant that Kyros or the magia had sent the djinn to me, to see if I freed it. I wondered why it thought I needed the warning not to trust Kyros and the magia, and what it meant by, They chain your mind. Kyros had used magic on me, to keep me loyal. Was he using magic on me again? Probably. It doesn’t matter. It’s not working. I may look forward to his visits, but it’s only because I’m lonely. I don’t trust Kyros; I could never trust Kyros again.
Still, I wondered what this would mean, if I had revealed myself. Would they have me killed? Were they coming now? I heard no footstep from beyond my door. The night guard must have noticed the light in my room, but she didn’t come in. I put out my lamp, then drew back the veil from the window and looked out. I could see stars I recognized in the sliver of sky from my window—Alexander’s throne, and if I craned my neck, part of Bucephalus, whose tail would lead you north if you followed him. No one wandered the gardens at this hour, and the air was crisp and chilly, even though the days now were hot. I let the curtain fall back after a moment or two and lay back down in bed. It was hours until morning. What else was I going to do?
Kyros said nothing about the djinn when he made his visit that afternoon. He seemed more tense than usual, though, and left early.
I glimpsed Xanthe as the door swung shut. “Xanthe,” I said when I was certain Kyros was gone. “Hey, Xanthe.”
The door opened again. “How did you know my name?” she said.
“Can you come in? I would really like to talk to you.”
“Do you need something?” When I couldn’t answer, she shrugged. “Let me know if you need something.” She stepped back out and shut the door firmly behind her.
I knocked from the inside a few moments later. “Can I ask you something?”
She opened the door and glared in at me. “What?”
“Are there really four magias? What happens if one is seized by a dark fever and refuses to give up her authority?”
“You should ask Kyros your questions,” she said, and shut the door again.
This is impossible, I thought, and sat back down. She was never going to talk to me. She had probably been ordered not to talk to me; Kyros wouldn’t want me talking to anyone but him. Still. I held one set of weighted dice—weighted which way, who knew, but it was worth a throw. I knocked on the door one last time. Xanthe didn’t say a word this time, just opened the door with a weary expression.
“I know your mother,” I said. “Janiya. You look a lot like her.”
Xanthe’s face was briefly alive with something—rage, horror, amazement; she slammed herself shut too fast for me to tell. “You’re crazy,” she said flatly, and closed the door again.
Knowing that she could hear me through the door, I stood by the crack and kept speaking. “You’ve probably been told that she was a criminal and was punished. It was a lie—she never betrayed the Weavers or the Guard. She was sold into slavery and sent east…But think about it, Xanthe, if that happened to you, if you were sold as a slave, would you serve, then, contentedly, for the rest of your life? Or would you take your chances with the bandits and run? You’d run, wouldn’t you? Your mother ran. She’s with the Alashi now; that’s where I met her. Did Kyros and the magia tell you that I was with the Alashi for a while? Kyros sent me there to spy. Anyway, Janiya leads one of the sword sisterhoods. She taught me to ride like an Alashi bandit, and to fight and use a bow. She taught me how to be free.” I was treading on dangerous ground now, so I stopped for a moment, realizing that for all I knew, Xanthe was standing on the other side of the door with her hands clamped over her ears. I paused for a moment and listened to hear if she was saying anything. Silence.
“Janiya told me about you once,” I said. “She said that she had a daughter back with the Greeks, named Xanthe. Leaving you was the only thing I think she regretted, even though it hadn’t been her choice. I asked her why she had never gone to look for you, and she said that you had probably been told that she was a traitor and a thief; that you would have your own life, your own loyalties, and she had no right to intrude.”
Silence, then a soft mutter, something I couldn’t catch.
“I’ll tell you anything you like about your mother,” I said. “I wish you could meet her. She would be proud, even though you serve a different master than she does.”
“She has no right to be proud,” Xanthe said, just loud enough for me to hear. “I am not her daughter anymore.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “She’d probably agree that she had no right to claim you. But she’d be proud anyway.”
“How did you know I was her daughter? There are other women named Xanthe.”
“I knew before I asked your name. I knew from the way you smile. I saw you laugh, once, in the garden, and I knew then.”
“Hush; someone’s coming.”
I fell silent. It was the servant with my meal. When she left, Xanthe stepped inside and said, in a voice cold enough to freeze molten metal, “Do not speak of my mother again. Not to me. Not to anyone. She is dead to me, and to the Guard. Dead.” The door closed.
I stared at my meal for a moment. It had been going so well. Probably best to obey, at least for now. She couldn’t really shut me up, not without doing me violence, but she could ask to have another guard put to guard me—someone I’d have no tie to. Perhaps her curiosity would get the better of her eventually. I knew my own curiosity would eat me alive, in her place.
And perhaps she would have had questions for me, in a day or a week. But that night, I got sick.
I woke up in a cold sweat with a feeling of impending doom. I bolted from my bed and just managed to pull out my chamber pot to vomit in; then I realized that my bowels were at least as urgent. I heard my door open—the night guard, whose name I didn’t know, must have heard me. She lit the lamp, swore when she saw me, and sent for a servant.
I had been sick plenty of times, but never like this. My stomach hurt so badly it felt as if it would rend itself apart, and throwing up brought only slight relief. My head ached, my back ached, even my arms and legs ached. Lying down brought no relief, but sitting up made it worse. The slave they sent to sit with me and nurse me tried to give me sips of cooled tea to drink, but anything I drank came right back up. What am I even vomiting? I wondered at one point. There can’t be anything left in my body; will I vomit up my own blood next?
After a day or so I realized that I was alone. There were voices in the hallway, arguing. I heard a woman say, You can beat me bloody; I’m not going in there, then a low voice—Kyros?—saying something I couldn’t hear. The woman was speaking very quickly, or maybe it was the fever. “She made Euthalia sick—I’m not going in there.” I had made someone sick?
“Euthalia ate some of the same bad meat.”
“No, that was Eutropia. Euthalia was fine until she threw up on her. If you’re so certain she won’t make you sick, nurse her yourself. Has she no sister? No mother?”
My sister is far away, I thought, far, far away, and so is my mother, and everyone else who cares enough to risk sickness to feed me sips of tea… I remembered how Tamar had sat by me in my melancholia, last winter, urging me to drink broth, honey-sweetened tea, anything I would take the trouble to swallow. I was seized with a longing for Tamar’s presence that was so intense I felt it in my bones—then I realized that what I felt was the urge to vomit, and there was no one in the room to bring me the basin so I stumbled out of bed and heaved as I knelt on the floor. Nothing came out of my mouth except a thin line of drool.
Back in bed, I could hear the argument increase in pitch and fury, and I closed my eyes and tried to let the fever take me away. Even in my sleep, though, I could still hear them. I dreamed that there were insects on my pillow, singing, screaming insects, shouting words I couldn’t understand into my ears. “I can free you,” I said to the giant singing cricket that loomed just outside of my sight. “I can send you home. Will you take me home if I help you get home?” I laid my hand on the cricket, marveling at the smooth, cold surface of its insect skin, and realized that it was far too solid to pass through my heart, at least without killing me. “Perhaps I will die to get you home,” I said. “Well, maybe that’s all right. Return to the Silent Lands, lost one. Trouble us no more.” But it went nowhere. Perhaps it didn’t want to go home. I wished it would be quiet, at least, if it were going to stay with me. After a while, its voice at least got a bit more melodic, like real singing, and I passed into true darkness.
The darkness was singing. Not the grating, high-pitched squeal of the crickets, not the singing of a human voice, but the singing of the beads of a spell-chain. It had been so long since I’d heard that sound that for a moment I couldn’t remember what it meant. Then the knowledge swept me up in a rush: I was in the borderland.
Tamar, I thought. I need to find Tamar. I pictured her—her smile, her grumpy voice, her eyes, the smell of her hair. You are my blood sister; my thoughts should bring you to me. But I remained alone in the darkness. “Tamar,” I called tentatively. “TAMAR.” Silence.
What does this mean? Is something wrong? Is she hurt—dead? It probably just means that she’s not asleep, or not in the borderland. I suppressed a shudder. I didn’t know when I was going to be back. Zhanna. Can I find Zhanna?
Instead, I felt myself seized by the hands and dragged, as I had been before when the djinni had decided to show me something, in a whirl of light that made my stomach lurch again with nausea until we settled, finally, in a lamplit room. “Listen,” hissed a voice in my ears.
There were three people in the room: two old women, and Kyros. They were in a vast room of shelves full of books; I had never in my life seen so many books. Several volumes, one so old it was nearly crumbling to pieces, had been spread out on a table before them. One of the women was the magia, I realized, though not the one I had encountered before. The gold serpent bracelet was coiled around her arm; she slouched back in a cushioned chair. The other woman, divested of her authority, was in fact the woman I had met as the magia, the one who had condemned me to the pit. She looked tired and worn, her inner fire a flickering candle. Her hands were folded in front of her; her long red nails rested against the backs of her hands. Kyros sat at the end of the table, withdrawn almost into the shadows. He told me she’d retaken the serpent, I remembered. As if it overheard my thoughts, the djinn hissed again, Listen.
“I don’t see what the problem is,” the not-magia said. “Cut her throat and be done with it. It’s what Kyros was supposed to do if he laid hands on her again.”
“I got you out of bed because it’s not that simple, Lydia,” the magia said. “She’s a gate. Right now the gate opens at her will, but when she dies…”
“When she dies, it will be flung open and will stay that way,” Lydia said. “That’s what always happens. So take her to some remote place and cut her throat there.”
“I dislike that idea,” the magia said. “It is untidy.” She leaned forward and counted off on her fingers.
“The first one was executed, and the gate closed. The second was executed, and the gate stayed open—and somehow, it was moved, but the books don’t say how. The third was killed by an aeriko. The book goes into a great deal of detail about the act: how he had to be drugged senseless to keep him from freeing it; how they had the aeriko rip his heart from his chest; the copious quantities of blood that flowed out; the death of the magia who had bound that aeriko. The gate closed. But the fourth was killed the same way, and the gate stayed open. And again, the books are vague on what was done then. But there was a fifth.”
“Yes.” Lydia narrowed her eyes.
“You are the oldest. Surely you remember.” Lydia’s mouth opened, and the magia waved her to silence. “Think hard, Lydia. Don’t just say you don’t.”
“Ask your aerika about it. Aren’t you the one who swears you could get answers from a stone?”
“I want your answers.”
“It happened years ago,” Lydia said, her voice reluctant. “I was magia, but the most junior of the four. The girl was held prisoner for a time. Years.” Lydia waved vaguely as if pointing toward the prison. “She was the daughter of one of the other magias.”
“But she did die, in the end.”
“She threw herself from the tower.” Lydia grinned at the other woman. “The gate opened and stayed open. Here, in the heart of Penelopeia. You can imagine the problems that caused. One of the other four believed that blood magic could be used to bind a gate, if not close it. In the dark of night, we set the girl’s mother over the gate and cut out her heart ourselves. We were right, that time. The gate was bound to the magia’s corpse. We took her well away from the city and burned her body. The gate closed.”
The magia sat back, her face showing clear relief. “Well, if it just takes a mother—that’s not so bad. This one’s mother is a former slave, Kyros’s mistress….” She glanced at Kyros; his face was grave, but he made no protest. Lydia chuckled nastily. “Why are you laughing?”
Lydia shook her head. “Nothing ever works twice. The aerika are clever that way—it is their magic that creates these difficulties. You would slay her mother for nothing. You could slay Kyros…” She gestured at him, and again his expression did not change. “But you’ll anger our friends in the army—and again, probably for nothing. Perhaps you’d slay me, out of frustration. Her servants, a bandit dragged here from the steppe…All for nothing.”
“There must be a way,” the magia said. “You found lore in the books.”
“The books will do you no good. Cut her foolish throat. Don’t wait for her to take another fever and die of it. Or to take matters into her own hands as the last one did.”
“If things get worse every time, how do we know that the gate will stay at the place where we cut her throat?” the magia asked.
“Well, if it doesn’t, we’ll hardly be any worse off.”
The magia jerked her head toward Kyros. “We will consult the books. Keep her alive for now, if you can. As long as we hold her, and keep our own aerika away from her, she’s harmless.”
“She’s mortal,” Lydia said. “She’ll die eventually, no matter what we do.”
“Are you volunteering to have one of your aerika slay her?”
“How many times do I need to say that we should just kill her? I’ll volunteer to hold the knife, how’s that? Or we can use one of the cold chains, and I’ll take the risk of the aeriko’s wrath if you shrink from the danger.”
“You’re a fool,” the magia said, and I saw her hand stray to the golden serpent.
They rose and began to prepare to leave. I thought the djinni would probably take me away—what was there still to see?—but then I gasped as the world tilted, and I wrapped my hands around my spinning head. When things steadied, I opened my eyes again and found myself looking down at one of the books on the table—the ancient one that threatened to crumble to pieces. There was a drawing on one page, beautifully rendered in rich detail, of a gate into a tunnel. It disappeared into darkness, despite the fact that from another angle it appeared to be simply a gateway through a wall, no thicker than the wall around Elpisia. The Passage, the book said. In different handwriting, below, someone had added, Now Drowned.
The darkness was fading to gray, and the singing had changed; it was a human voice now. I was waking, if it was reasonable to call it waking when you felt as sick and exhausted as I did. At least now I was no longer alone. Someone fed me sips of tea, then held the basin when I vomited them up again, waited a bit, and offered more. “Leave me alone,” I muttered.
“Shhhhh,” she said. “You need to try to drink.”
“I’ll make you sick. You should leave.”
“I’ll take my chances. Drink.”
I recognized that voice. What is she doing here? “Mother?”
“Yes, darling. I’m right here. Now drink some tea.”
I had never gotten along well with my mother. Even when I was a little girl, I had spent most of my time trying to get away from her. But right at that moment there was no one else I would have rather had at my side—not even Tamar. Even knowing that she might well have been brought here as a sacrificial goat, to bear my inner passage to some more convenient location. I closed my eyes, drank the tea as she bid me, let her wash my face and comb the flecks of vomit from my hair. “Mama’s here,” she murmured, unperturbed, when the tea came back up again. “You’re going to be all right.”