CHAPTER THIRTEEN
T AMAR
Have they forgotten about us?” Janiya asked. It was late afternoon, and we were still alone.
“It’s not every day that a temple collapses,” Alibek said.
I glanced at the djinn, still fanning us. The women and men of the household might have forgotten us, but we weren’t alone—not alone enough to speak freely. I picked up a piece of fruit. “They said the gate made the temple collapse.” I glanced at both Janiya and Alibek. Janiya raised an eyebrow. Alibek was sitting on the couch, but when he saw my face, he pulled his legs up and leaned forward, his eyes intent.
Back when I had been Sophos’s slave, we’d had a way of talking, in the harem, that let us speak a little more freely even if we were overheard. We would say the opposite of what we meant, and then touch our lips as if to say, don’t believe my lying mouth. Surely Kyros’s slaves did something similar. Surely Janiya had done something like this, when she was a slave.
“I don’t have any idea what they’re talking about,” I said, and brushed my lips.
“That’s too bad,” Janiya said. “Right now, I feel like I’m standing blindfolded in a city I don’t know.” She turned away with a sigh.
I wanted to shout at her to pay attention. I bit my lip, frustrated. Alibek understood. He got up, caught Janiya’s arm, and spun her around to face him. “Well, we may not be blindfolded, but we are in a city you don’t know.” He brushed his lips. “Aren’t we?”
Her eyes went to him, then to me, then back to him. “Sure,” she said, and tentatively mimicked the gesture. “Yes.”
Now that she was paying attention…“I think by ‘gate’ they meant a person. I’d like to meet her. She doesn’t sound like anyone I know.”
“Certainly not like anyone in your family,” Janiya said, catching on.
“Nor our sisterhood, back with the Alashi,” I said.
“If this person were to join the Alashi,” Alibek said, “do you think the Alashi would want them?”
“Yes,” I said. “They’d never let a person like that go.”
Nods.
So now we all knew that Lauria was in Penelopeia—or at least had been, a few hours ago. “From what the djinn said, it sounded like she got away. They don’t know where she is.”
“Do you know where she is?” Janiya asked.
“No.” I shook my head and clasped my hands. “No.”
“Your own sister, now,” Janiya said. “Heard from her lately?”
We were still talking about Lauria. Janiya wanted to know if we’d met in the borderland. “Hmmm. Yes. Very recently.”
“After all this time?”
“It has been a while, hasn’t it? Turns out there wasn’t any particular reason. She just didn’t think about trying to meet me.”
“Some shaman she is,” Alibek murmured.
“Ha! What can you do? Zhanna would be shocked.”
“Did you tell her your own news?”
“Yes, of course.” No, of course not. “She wanted to hear everything. We had a really long chat, got all caught up.” I had told her about Zivar—how to bring that up? “An old friend of ours was going to visit her part of the steppe, so I told her about that.”
“Old friend?” Janiya was lost again.
“We’ve known her—hmm. All our lives.” Alibek was nodding. He knew who I meant.
“Think they’ll meet up?” Alibek asked.
“Oh yes,” I said. “If they manage to find each other. It’s a big steppe. Who knows, maybe they already have.” I had a plum untasted in my hand, and I rested it lightly on the table. “Speaking of family…” I looked at Janiya. “That most trustworthy person…” Xanthe? Why shouldn’t we trust Xanthe? Hearing that Lauria had gotten away should have made me feel better, but was Xanthe with her? Could I do anything about it if she was?
Janiya coughed, poured herself a drink, and sat down. “I’m not sure I can quite explain myself,” she said. She glanced around the room, at the djinn that fanned us. “Perhaps I can just speak plainly. There are four magias; they take the office in turns, so that power can be held by someone who is not fully in the grip of either melancholia or the cold fever. Naturally, they do not always agree on the best course of action. There are alliances that form. This was true thirteen years ago. I believe it’s still true now.”
I didn’t see what difference that made.
“I believe this person misleads many people about her loyalties. I believe that she was trying to mislead me, when we talked.” Janiya swallowed hard, then drummed her fingers on her cup. “So. I think I do”—not—“trust Rhea.”
“I feel the same way,” I said. Alibek nodded.
“I’m glad we’re agreed,” Janiya said. She swirled her juice for a moment. “I’m not sure what we’re going to do about it.”
We heard footsteps and fell silent. Rhea came in. She looked us over, and I thought that if she’d been listening, she hadn’t been fooled. “Let me speak plainly,” Rhea said. “We are quite interested in your offer. We believe that this might indeed be mutually beneficial.”
I tensed, fearful that some demand would follow, but she dismissed my concern with a wave of her hand. “It’s late,” she said. “I have always found it uncomfortable to sleep in a palanquin, and I’m sure you’re less fond of it than I am. Why don’t you spend the night here. Eat an excellent dinner and sleep in a comfortable bed. One of my associates will transport you back to the steppe in the morning; we want to come to an understanding as quickly as possible.”
I nodded. My stomach still churned, and I would not feel safe again until I was back on the steppe, well out of the grasp of anyone with a spell-chain. But they would be fools to mess up this opportunity, and it sounded like they knew that.
“That’s fine,” Janiya said. “Thank you for the invitation.”
We were shown to a single large room. Parvaneh arrived with an entire train of lesser servants with dinner: roast chicken, roast lamb, roast carrots and onions, two different kinds of bread, steaming rice that was a deep buttercup yellow, and another pitcher of chilled juice. My mouth watered. I wanted some of the crisp brown chicken skin. I’d seldom had roast chicken, and I could smell the nut-brown crispness from where I stood. But when the other servants had gone, Parvaneh still hesitated by the table.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
Janiya had started to reach for the food, but she turned and gave Parvaneh her full attention, so I reluctantly turned away from the chicken.
“I found out this afternoon that you’ve met an associate of mine,” she said. “At least one of you has. In Casseia.”
“The—” I clamped my mouth shut—someone might be listening. Was she speaking of the Servant Sisterhood? Zivar’s servants?
Parvaneh nodded. “Servants,” she said. “Yes.”
I wanted to ask if she controlled Rhea, but the djinn was still right there. I asked instead, “Who exactly runs this household?”
“Ha. I’m here to observe, really, not to run things. Unfortunate, but true.”
“And how far up…?”
“You don’t need to know that. What you need to know is that it’s not the Weavers who are behind the invasion of the steppe.”
“What do you mean?” Janiya asked.
“Sorcery is an art that is not open to all,” Parvaneh said. “Not to men, not to women without the right connections, not to anyone who hesitates at the price exacted. The army…” She glanced around and lowered her voice again. “There is a group, we don’t know who, that came from one of the Temples of Alexander. They have risen to positions of leadership in the army—they’re not the official leaders, but they’re kind of like the Servant Sisterhood. They’re controlling the army from the back rooms. When the conquest of the steppe is completed, they will control the karenite. They will measure it out and exact payment. The power is not in the sorcery; it’s in the control over aerika. The conspiracy of Alexander understands this.”
“Surely the Weavers must see that,” I breathed.
“Why are they allowing it to happen?”
Parvaneh shrugged. “They believe that they have enough power now to take the steppe from their allies once it is secured from the Alashi. I think they’re wrong. But they are not behind the invasion of the steppe, and if they fall to squabbling with the Younger Sisters, it will only make it easier for Alexander’s conspirators to take over, in the end.”
“Gods.” Janiya rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. “So who can we turn against the army? How do we distract them, if they’re perfectly content to have the Weavers and Younger Sisters fighting among themselves?”
“I don’t know,” Parvaneh said. “I must say, this took us somewhat by surprise, as well. We had been preparing for years, working toward a certain goal—only to find that overnight, the ones we thought would someday be our servants were challenging us for control. It shouldn’t have surprised us, but it did.” She looked us over and said, “Let me tell you one thing. The Servant Sisterhood would be happy to come to an understanding with the Alashi. But what you need is to find a set of tongs that will allow you to grasp not the sorceresses, but the Greek army. And good luck to you, because we haven’t found one.” With that, she went out.
The chicken had cooled, and the skin was not as crisp as I’d hoped. We were silent.
“Well,” Janiya said, and fell silent.
“Excellent news,” Alibek said, finally. “I couldn’t have asked for better news.” Then he turned his head to the side and spat.
There was a great deal to discuss, but no privacy. When we were done with our food, and the lesser servants had cleared it away, I clasped my teacup and stared out the window into the darkness. My thoughts were jumbled. I wished I were back on the steppe. Or somewhere else—even Casseia or Daphnia sounded good right now. Anywhere but here.
But more than that—I wished I could talk to Lauria. And not the confused, rushed conversation that we could have if I found her in the borderland at night. I wanted to sit down with her face-to-face, tell her everything we’d done, and ask her advice.
On the one hand, we had the Sisterhood, with its generations of power and its four-headed leader. On the other hand, we had the Younger Sisters—restless for power of their own. On yet another hand, we had the Servants, like Zivar’s servants and like Parvaneh, who hoped to find power through controlling the Weavers. And on still another hand, we had the conspiracy of Alexander—soldiers, not sorceresses, who hoped to control the sorceresses by controlling the karenite that they needed.
This could not hold for much longer.
The alliances—particularly the peace between the army and the Weavers—couldn’t hold. It would shatter on the anvil of the conquered steppe, but that wasn’t good enough. To save the Alashi, we needed it to break now.
A faint breath of breeze came in through the window, making me think of the djinn slave that still fanned us. I’d almost forgotten that it was there. I looked around and saw that it had followed Janiya to fan her as she laid down to sleep. “I wish I could free you,” I said aloud. It occurred to me that I knew how Lauria did it, and I had never tried. For all I knew, I could free it. I got up, and went over to face it. I could see it in the air, when I concentrated. It hovered, a faint smudge of shimmer in the dark.
I saw djinni all the time in the borderland, but I rarely spoke with them here. Jaran had his friend the Fair One, but no djinn had adopted me the way the Fair One had Jaran. I touched it, and my hand tingled faintly as if it had gone to sleep. “Return to the Silent Lands, lost one of your kind,” I whispered. I felt foolish, doing this where Alibek and Janiya could see me. “And trouble us no more.”
Nothing. The fan continued moving. The djinn was silent.
“Are you forbidden to speak to us?” I asked. Not that silence would be an answer. Maybe it was forbidden, or maybe it didn’t feel like talking. I had just about decided it wasn’t going to talk to me when it spoke.
“You are not the one I wait for,” it said in a gravelly voice. “But your heart is kind.” I felt something lightly brush my forehead.
I turned back to the window and saw that Alibek was awake and watching me. My face flushed. I waited for him to say something mocking.
“Is that how she does it?” he asked, instead.
I nodded.
He rose and came to stand beside me. Then he touched the djinn and murmured the words. Nothing. There was a faint rustle from the djinn. A laugh, I decided.
“Surely there are other gates,” Alibek said. “Other people who could do what she can, if they ever tried.”
“Yes,” the djinn said.
“So you laugh, but should we wake Janiya, and have her try, too?”
“No,” the djinn said. “I would know.”
“Will they have you report on our conversation?” Alibek asked.
“Perhaps.”
“Will you tell them anything useful?”
“Unlikely.”
“Is anyone else listening? Can you tell?”
A pause. Then, “You must flee,” the djinn said.
“What?” Alibek said.
“Run!” The djinn spoke urgently though the fan never broke its slow rhythm. “I tell you this because you tried to free me. Danger approaches. Take your friend and go now!”
I bowed to the djinn, then shook Janiya awake. “We need to go,” I said. Janiya rose and followed without question.
The hallway was empty. “It didn’t say what kind of danger,” Alibek said. “Enemies? Earthquake?”
“Let’s just get out,” I said, and we went out to the courtyard. The outer door would be barred and guarded. “Should we climb the wall?” I asked. It was smooth marble, and didn’t look good for climbing.
“Bribery will be faster,” Alibek said, and held up a clay jug from our table. He’d snatched it up on the way out. “I doubt he’s been ordered to keep us in.”
Sure enough, we were out in the street moments later. We walked away, not running in case anyone saw us. “How far?” Janiya asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I—”
A bird’s screech cut me off. I tipped my head back and looked. The moon was about three-quarters full, and it was too dark to see the bird, but I saw something else. Something large, black, and silent moved swiftly over our heads. I caught my breath and pointed.
Janiya and Alibek looked up. Another one was passing overhead now. The Sisterhood. Or the Sisterhood Guard.
Was this because I had told Kyros to fear the Younger Sisters?
“Follow me,” Janiya whispered. “I know somewhere we can hide.”
We hurried through the streets. Behind us, we could hear shouts, but they didn’t grow closer. Rhea’s house was in a fancy neighborhood. Each house was like its own tiny city surrounded by a wall, with a statue in front. The streets were almost as well kept as the houses, paved with bricks so that even in the rainy season they wouldn’t be muddy, and even in the dark we could walk without falling. The walls loomed up beside us.
The air made my mouth dry. I smelled wood smoke and baking bread.
“Where are we going?” Alibek asked.
“A neighborhood where no one will look for us,” Janiya said. “It’s a long way from here.”
We rounded the edge of a closed-down market square. I heard a sheep bleating and smelled rotting garbage. We crossed a bridge over a small canal, and I pinched my nose shut to block out the stench. From there we passed more houses and closed-up shops. I heard raucous voices, somewhere distant. They grew louder, and I saw lights and smelled roasting meat. The voices came from a large tavern—no, I realized as we passed, three taverns side by side. We kept walking.
The houses were getting nicer again, though they lacked the statues Weavers put out front. I could hear distant voices again, and the scrape of shovels. Janiya paused at that and listened for a moment, then led us on, only to stop short when we saw a bright light in the sky, like a small, low moon. “What is that?” I asked.
Janiya shaded her eyes and squinted. “I think—I’m not sure—I think they’ve got a bonfire on a platform, or something, to shed light below. We’re very close to the temple….”
“The one that collapsed?”
“Yes. I think we can hear them digging it out.”
“That light makes me nervous,” I said. “Do we have to get any closer?”
“A little, but we’ll skirt the edge of the square. We’re almost there.”
We heard the voices clearly now, though we couldn’t make out any words. They had djinni to help them, but human soldiers were the ones digging. I wondered why, and then realized that if a djinn accidentally let a rock fall on a survivor and killed them, that would free the djinn and kill the sorceress.
Beyond the edge of the temple square, we scrambled down a steep bank to another canal. There was no bridge here, just half-submerged rocks we could hop across. It was hard in the dark. Janiya made it first. The rocks were slippery, and I almost fell into the stinking, garbage-laden waters. “Bleah,” I said, trying to wipe my feet on the dirt of the opposite bank.
“This is it,” Janiya said.
The houses here were squat and run-down, built from mismatched bricks mixed with rocks, mud clay, and odd scraps. The narrow streets were bare dirt. Fires glowed inside a few houses, shedding the only light. Some of the shacks looked barely larger than the palanquin that had brought us here. There were larger houses, too—some built fairly well, with sturdy doors barred shut against the hungry crowds outside.
I thought we were simply going to hide here, in this part of town where the city guards didn’t like to go, but Janiya seemed to know exactly where she was going. We followed her to a slouching, windowless house. The door was sturdy, and closed. Janiya raised her hand to knock, then hesitated. She looked back at me and Alibek, started to speak, then changed her mind and just knocked.
Silence inside the house. Then a voice called, “Who is it?”
“Janiya.”
A long pause, then a bent, gray-haired woman flung the door open and glared out. “What are you doing here?”
“I need your help. I—”
She slammed the door shut.
Janiya pounded on it. “Look, just let us in. I’m not going to shout my story from the street, all right? I need to talk to you.” She stepped back. I saw her shut her eyes for a moment, draw a deep breath, let it out. “You were right. I was wrong. I don’t need you to do anything for me but let me in, with my friends, who don’t deserve your scorn.”
The door opened again. “What made you think you could come here and get help?” the old woman spat.
“All I know is, you’re not going to hand us over to the Weavers.”
“Who are these two?” the old woman asked.
“Alashi bandits. Now let us in, because even if you won’t turn us in, your neighbors might.”
The old woman stepped back to make way for us. It wasn’t much of an invitation, but Janiya went in, and Alibek and I followed her. The old woman barred the door behind us. “It’s good to see you again, Damira,” Janiya said, her voice resigned. “You look well.”
“Don’t bother trying to lie. I don’t look well. You look well, though. Which was it that agreed with you so well—serving the Weavers or being a slave?”
“Neither,” Janiya said. “I escaped to the steppe and joined the Alashi. Quite some time ago.”
Alibek sat down by the hearth. He hadn’t forgotten how to fade into the furniture. I’d learned to do it as a slave, but it was a useful skill even for a free person. I sat down next to him. I did not want to get between these two women.
“You might have sent word,” Damira said.
“How? The Weavers’ messenger service? I’m no shaman. Besides, when I left to join the Sisterhood Guard, you said you never wanted to hear from me again. When did you change your mind?”
“Never,” Damira said. “But I don’t hate you enough to close the door on two other people who need help.” She gestured toward me and Alibek, her eyes still on Janiya. “If you’d never come back, I’d have died a happier woman.” She thrust her chin forward. “Go ahead and say it, Janiya. I saw the shock in your eyes when you saw me. I’ve gotten old. You were expecting to see the girl you used to know.”
“I was just glad you opened the door,” Janiya said, but she lowered her head as she spoke. “I suppose you’re right, but it’s not just you. When I come across a mirror, or a still pool, I’m always shocked by my gray hair. Who is that old woman staring back at me?” She raised her head, but turned away from Damira and looked at the light and shadows from the fire against the dark clay walls. “What happened to…”
“Anyone you’re going to ask me about is probably dead.”
“But you’re not. I knew you’d still be alive.”
“And still here.”
“Where else would you be?”
For a moment, I thought that Damira would grab Janiya in a fierce hug, but instead she turned away. “Who are your friends?”
“This is Tamar, and this is Alibek.”
Damira looked us over. For a moment, I was reminded of the eldress of the Alashi, and the way she had looked at me before presenting me with my first bead strung on a thong. Then she hobbled over to a cushion in the corner and sat. “Why are you here?”
“We’re on a mission for the Alashi,” Janiya said. “How much do you think you ought to know?”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I do. That’s why I asked you how much you want to know rather than just saying that I couldn’t tell you more.”
“Tell me what you think you can.”
“The Greek army threatens the Alashi,” Janiya said. “Even now they may be beginning their assault on the steppe. We left the steppe to sew dissent among the Weavers, hoping that this would distract their attack. There are cracks in the Sisterhood already—we hoped to widen them into schisms.”
“And what went wrong?”
“The sorceress who had agreed to our bargain was found out, I think. We escaped just ahead of an attack on her house. And also—it’s not the Sisterhood that’s behind the invasion of the steppe, but a conspiracy from the Temple of Alexander. The Alashi control something the Weavers need. If the army controls it, they will control the Weavers.”
“That is not an arrangement that can last,” Damira said. “The Weavers will not tolerate it for long.”
“You’re probably right. But my concern is the Alashi.”
“So now what?”
“We needed somewhere to go.”
“No.” Damira shook her head. “What are you going to do next? Walk back to the steppe? The war will be over before you arrive.”
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Janiya said. “Catch our breath, stay alive, and look for a way to turn the Weavers and the army against each other now, rather than later.”
“Hmm,” Damira said, her voice mocking. “Well. Despite your hard work, loyalty, and sacrifices, the Weavers turned on you, didn’t they? Just as some of us warned you they would. Seems like you should have no trouble thinking of things that would piss them off.”
Janiya turned away from Damira again, tense with anger. “You were always a troublemaker, Damira,” she said, after a moment. “I knew that if we came here, you’d hide us, at least, and that’s really all I’m asking.”
“Did you have anything to do with what happened today?” Damira asked.
“You mean the temple’s collapse?” Janiya laughed a little. “No. We heard the rumble, though. What happened?”
“I don’t know. One rumor said that someone freed the djinni that supported some of the walls.”
Janiya glanced at me, and Damira followed that glance. “You didn’t do it, but she knows who did.”
“We weren’t involved,” I said.
“But you do know who did it.”
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. Was there any reason at all not to tell her? After all, the Greeks knew who it was and were already trying to find her. “Lauria. It was a woman named Lauria. She’s—she’s a friend of mine.”
Damira raised an eyebrow. “That sort of friend?” she asked.
My cheeks grew warm. “She’s my sister,” I said.
“Ah.” Damira glanced at Janiya, and I saw, in that moment, that she and Janiya had once been that sort of friend. I felt a brief stab of envy, which I pushed aside. “Tell me about the woman who freed the djinni. How did she do it?”
“She touched them and spoke the words of banishment. She can free bound djinni. They call her a gate. It’s her gift. I don’t know how she does it.”
“I see,” Damira said softly. “And they let her slip through their fingers? Astonishing.”
“I don’t think they meant to.”
“No.” Damira rose and hobbled toward us again.
“Stand,” she said to Alibek. She put her hand on his chin, grasping his face like an apple, and gazed for a long moment into his eyes. Alibek shuddered a little and did his best to look back at her. He fell back a step when she finally let go of him, and I saw him tremble. “Now you,” she said, and I stood up, clenching my hands into fists. I refused to show her fear. Her wrinkled hands were cool and smooth against my chin. Her eyes were dark brown, but when she stared into me, I saw not only her but something else as well. Djinn. She had a djinn within her, and it looked at me through her eyes.
“You are possessed,” I whispered when she finally let me go. “But not unwillingly.”
“We are companions,” she said. “We have lived together, like this, for a very long time.” She caught the quick look Janiya gave her and laughed a little. “Not quite that long.”
“I have known a shaman with a djinn he spoke with regularly. But she only visited.”
“Hmm.” Damira said. “My djinn is a barley-eater, like me. Most of the rogue djinni are rice-eaters, like her.” She glanced at Janiya, then smiled and brushed my hair back from my face. “You have been touched by the djinni—perhaps in time you’ll understand what I mean. I will help you.”
“Great,” Janiya said, and sat heavily down on the floor. “All we really need is somewhere to stay.”
“I expect you’re hungry and thirsty.” Damira dipped water from a jar in the corner to a kettle and a pot. “I’ll go out and get water for breakfast.” She lifted the jar onto her shoulder. Janiya started up to assist her, then fell back at Damira’s glare. “Don’t be ridiculous. Stay here and start tea. I’ll make porridge after I get back.”
I had thought it was still the middle of the night, but when Damira opened the door I saw that dawn had come. The sky was violet-blue, and people were out on the street. Damira closed the door quickly, leaving us in lantern light.
Janiya sighed and got up, lighting a fire on the hearth from the lantern, then putting out the lantern’s flame. The house was already stuffy, and with the fire kindled it quickly grew warm. “Tea,” she said, when it was ready, and handed Alibek and me each a cup. My stomach rumbled. Rhea’s roast chicken had been a long time ago.
“Can we trust Damira?” Alibek asked.
“I don’t see what choice we really have,” I said.
“We can trust her, I think,” Janiya said. “We were good friends—a long time ago. When I volunteered to join the Sisterhood’s Guard, Damira was opposed. She considered them enemies, even then…She said I’d regret it, and when I refused to change my mind, she cursed me and told me not to ever speak to her again.”
“Ah. So that’s why you came back here?” Alibek asked. “You had such fond memories of each other?”
“I had a hunch she’d still be here. And I thought she’d take us in, for your sake if not mine. And I was right.”
“So what are we going to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet. This way we have some time to sit and think about it, though.”
Damira came back a short time later and started barley porridge cooking over the fire. “There are all sorts of interesting rumors flying about,” she said. “Some about the temple’s collapse, some about several sorceresses who were taken from their homes last night by the Sisterhood Guard. Soldiers dug among the temple ruins through the night, trying to rescue anyone who might still be alive under there. Today they’re offering sacks of rice to anyone who can lift a shovel and comes to help.”
Damira dished porridge into bowls. It was bland but filling. I washed it down with tepid tea.
“I’m thinking we should go dig,” Janiya said, as we ate. “We can wear scarves to protect us from the dust, and that should hide our faces as well. The Guard won’t be looking for us there. And we might hear something useful.”
Damira raised an eyebrow, but didn’t argue. “Bring back the rice,” she said.
Alibek peered out the door and into the street. “If we go out, all the neighbors are going to see us,” he said.
“They’ve seen us already,” Janiya said without looking up. “Everyone knows we’re here. They’ll likely assume we’re fugitives, but probably no one will turn us in.”
“No one will,” Damira said sharply. “The people here are the ones who didn’t join the Sisterhood Guard.” She spat. Janiya shrugged.
“We’re going to be conspicuous,” Alibek said. “Our clothes, our boots…”
“Fall into the mud when you’re crossing the canal,” Damira suggested. “That should take care of your finery.”
I looked down at my clothes. I’d had them made just a few days ago. At least they were dirty. I ripped off part of my tunic to make a scarf. Fortunately, the tailor had used cheap cloth, and the fabric gave way easily. We tromped through mud crossing the canal, and passed through clouds of dust going up the hill to the temple courtyard. When we got there we didn’t stand out anymore, and the soldiers hardly looked at us anyway. If Lauria was still in Daphnia, she could probably hide in the temple courtyard.
The dust clogged my throat and made my eyes burn. Even at the canal, the breeze brought the stench of rot. At the fallen temple, the smell was overpowering.
The place where the temple had stood was now a shifting mountain of broken rocks. I’d expected to dig with a shovel, but instead we were sent to scramble up the heap and join a line passing buckets of loose rubble. “Do you know,” said the man to my left, as he handed me the bucket, which I handed to Alibek, “there was a soldier killed doing this yesterday. The stones shifted and he fell and died. That’s why they were so eager to hire people today.”
“Why don’t they just use djinni?” asked the woman to his left.
“They might kill someone underneath,” I said. “Someone who’s still alive. And free the djinn.”
“There can’t be anyone alive under there,” the man said.
“They found a priestess alive yesterday,” said a man farther down the line.
“No!” the woman said, amazed. Another bucket swung from hand to hand, followed by a rough boulder the size of my head, followed by a piece of one of the big marble blocks. My arms ached. In the square below, people dumped out the buckets. Soldiers with shovels dug through the rubble there.
“They are using djinni,” someone else said. “They’re sending them hunting through the rubble to find the people who are still alive.”
Weavers and soldiers mixed in the crowd. There were few people in Penelopeia who could recognize me—was Kyros here? He was nowhere in sight, of course. No doubt he was somewhere comfortable. Sweat trickled into my eyes. One of the Weavers scrambled up past me. I tensed, but it wasn’t Rhea or anyone else I recognized. She climbed back down to argue with the military officer in charge. Soon after, a djinn lifted a wagon box to the top of the pile. The breathless sorceress climbed back up and reorganized us. She had us shovel debris into the wagon box instead of passing it down in buckets. The djinn carried full loads down and dumped them in the square. This went faster.
“How did this happen? Did you hear?” I asked the man who’d told me about the soldiers. “Was there an earthquake?”
“The official word was an earthquake—but I didn’t feel any tremors until after the temple began to fall,” he said. He lowered his voice. “I don’t know what caused it, only that the Sisterhood of Weavers wants to hide the truth. They kidnapped one of their own last night—she had something to do with it.”
“I know what caused it,” said a woman nearby. “It was Zeus escaping his prison.”
“Isn’t his prison supposed to be thousands of miles away?”
“Sure, that’s what they say. But who’d look for him here? Pretty good place to hide him!”
“It wasn’t Zeus,” said an older man who looked Danibeki. “It was the lost rivers returning.”
“Those are thousands of miles away.”
“It wasn’t either one. There were aerika who held up the temple. Someone broke the spell-chain that bound them, and it collapsed.”
I knew that voice. My hands and feet tingled as my blood turned cold. Lauria. That’s Lauria’s voice. I dropped my shovel and lurched sideways to grab her before she could slip away again, my certainty that I’d heard her voice overpowering all sense and the knowledge that she had to be far away by now.
I found myself staring into the face of an older woman, perhaps the same age as Janiya. Definitely not Lauria. “Excuse me,” I said, trying to gather my wits, and let go of her. My face was already flushed from the heat, but my cheeks burned even hotter.
I heard a shout. Someone had been found in the rubble, alive or dead was not yet clear. We rushed over to help move rocks, though some rocks slid under my feet and I thought that anyone alive might be killed by the effort to get them out. The soldiers didn’t want to risk climbing on the unsteady pile, though, and the sorceresses didn’t want to risk having their djinni accidentally kill someone. So we did the best we could, and in the end uncovered the body of a woman who had clearly been dead for a while. I wondered if she were a priestess, a sorceress, or something else—it was hard to tell. One of the sorceresses sent up a small palanquin for the body, and we lifted the woman onto it to be carried down.
If she was a sorceress, she might have left behind a spell-chain. I went to work digging near where we’d found the body, trying to sift through without anyone noticing. I had, barely a half year earlier, convinced Lauria not to bind a djinn, but right now, a djinn seemed so very useful that I was more than willing to use a spell-chain if I could find one. I promised myself that I would free the djinn when I was done with it. Lauria, of course, had made that promise and I’d ignored her. Though now I’d helped put thirty pieces of karenite in the hands of the Sisterhood of Weavers.
If I was going to compromise my beliefs again, I hoped this time it did enough good to be worth the guilt.
The woman with Lauria’s voice was digging near me. I wondered if she’d had the same idea about looking for spell-chains. She glanced at me warily, and I gave her a sheepish smile, still embarrassed by my mistake earlier. We dug side by side for about an hour, silently. No spell-chain turned up.
Just as well, really. Near sunset, we were all ordered off the pile and searched by the soldiers to make sure we weren’t taking anything. If I found a spell-chain, I’d have to hide it well if I wanted to keep it.
I thought they might send us back up to dig through the night, but they handed out sacks of rice and sent us home.
“This is ridiculous,” someone yelled. It was the sorceress who had thought of using wagon beds to move rubble. “Where are the cold chains? Let’s use aerika bound by dead Weavers. I’ll hold the chain and give the order, if you’re afraid.” One of the soldiers said something I couldn’t hear, and the sorceress said, “Oh, I’ll tell you where they are. They’re off to war—the army has them. They’d rather slaughter bandits than save Weavers.”
I nodded, wanting to shout, “Yes! Keep thinking that way!” Though thinking about her words made my stomach hurt. Cold chains. Dead sorceresses. You could use these spell-chains for murder without killing the sorceress who did the binding. I’d heard that if you used a spell-chain to kill someone, the djinn often killed you, too. But soldiers already risked death. They wouldn’t hesitate to give the order to kill. At least each cold chain could be used that way just once. They’d run out eventually.
Though they’d get a lot more if they tracked down and executed all the Younger Sisters…
I found Janiya and Alibek at the edge of the square with sacks of rice under their arms. The sun was going down, and it was a little cooler. We slid down the bank, waited our turn to scramble across the canal on the rocks, and went back to Damira’s house, putting the rice by her hearth. She scooped some into a pot and started it cooking.
“Did you learn anything interesting?” Janiya asked as we waited for the rice.
“One woman today knew why the temple collapsed,” I said. “But no one believed her. Others thought it happened because Zeus escaped his prison, or because the rivers are returning. Or that Rhea did it somehow.”
Janiya nodded, then looked at Alibek. He shrugged and said, “There was another woman working today named Tamar.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “It’s not a common name. Did you learn anything, Janiya?”
“I’d been thinking, maybe we could make trouble by organizing an uprising from within the barley district here in Penelopeia. I’ve decided that won’t work. People may not trust the Weavers, but they have just enough comfort they’re not going to risk losing it.”
Damira snorted.
“Barley district?” Alibek asked.
“You know. This neighborhood. The poorest part of town. The people here eat barley because it’s cheaper than rice. But they’re not going to rise against the Weavers. They’re poor but not desperate.”
Damira had said something about barley-eating djinni and rice-eating djinni. I’d never seen djinni eat, though. Janiya rested her head on her hands and said, “I’m exhausted. I think we should sleep. Even if there’s a simple way to snap the alliances like a dry twig, I won’t see it right now.”
Alibek and I nodded. We ate dinner, then lay down on the floor—Damira had only one bed, and she wasn’t offering to share, even with Janiya—and tried to sleep.
I roused in the night and thought at first I was dreaming of the borderland. But the voices I heard were Damira and Janiya, speaking quietly from beside the open door.
“I never should have let you go.”
“How were you going to stop me?”
“I should have tied you down. Refused to cut you loose until you promised you’d change your mind.”
“You tried something along those lines, as I recall. I beat you.”
“Only because I let you.”
“Hmmm.”
“Think what you like.” A low chuckle, and then the sound of a kiss. And then another. I closed my eyes again. I’d overheard this sort of thing before, but this was Janiya. My cheeks grew hot, but I also felt another stab of envy. Not because I wanted to be with Janiya or Damira. They were old. Well, older than me. But I could hear their ease with each other. They shared something I still shied away from.
Zhanna had flirted with me at the spring gathering. What would it have been like to say yes? Did I desire her the way Janiya and Damira desired each other? I didn’t think so. Did I desire anyone at all?
I heard another kiss, and then a faint gasp. I rolled over onto my side, turning my back on the noises, and saw that Alibek was also awake. He met my eyes in the dim light. I expected him to laugh at me, but he didn’t. Instead, I saw faint yearning in his eyes, then he turned his face away.
Before Kyros raped me, I was too young to desire anyone. In the harem, all I ever wanted was to be left alone. Now I was free. Free women could have desires of their own. They could choose, freely, to take others into their beds. I closed my eyes and tried to find that place in my own heart.
I didn’t find anything, but eventually I drifted back to sleep.
A rooster crowed at dawn, over and over and over. I wished someone would wring the damn bird’s neck, but the floor was too hard to sleep much longer anyway. Janiya was already up, pouring water into the pot for morning porridge. “Any ideas, now that you’ve slept?” I asked.
“Tea first,” she said.
Damira was out. Janiya, Alibek, and I sat down to drink tea and stare out Damira’s open front door to where chickens scratched in the dirt. “What did Damira mean yesterday?” I asked Janiya. “About the Weavers turning on you?”
Janiya didn’t speak right away, and for a moment I thought she would refuse to answer. “You know I used to be in the Sisterhood Guard,” she said finally. “I grew up here on the muddy side of the canal, but when I was a young woman they offered me a place with them, a sword…Damira was opposed, I think you probably guessed that, but I shrugged her off and signed up.” She stared bleakly forward for a moment. A gust of wind stirred up a cloud of dust. “Is it horrible to admit that I loved it? In the same way that I love my summers with the sword sisterhood. I had a daughter, Xanthe. When she was a few years old…” Janiya sighed. “Ha. When I told Lauria about this, I said I was falsely accused, but I’ll tell you the truth.”
I waited.
“I stole a spell-chain. And not just any spell-chain—I stole the one that binds the great northern river. The Jaxartes.”
“You what?” I said. “Why?”
Alibek spoke at the same time, asking, “Why did they let you live?”
Janiya looked down into her teacup, a faint smile on her lips. “The magia who held the golden serpent—that means, the one who was in charge, who held the symbol of power—entered a dark fever. She meant to free the river—smash the binding stones, loose the djinni in a terrible flood. She told me what she intended. I could have killed her, but that would have gone against my vows to protect the Weavers, and especially the magias. I did tell someone, but they chose not to act as quickly as I thought they needed to. I was young, arrogant—so I acted. I stole the spell-chain, to hide it. To keep it safe.”
“Surely they didn’t want to let her break it,” I said.
“No. In fact, after the incident, she was removed as magia. There are comfortable cages within their palace, the Koryphe, where they keep safe the sorceresses who are too disordered to be trusted, and she went to live in one of those cages.”
“How did they catch you?” Alibek asked. “You had a spell-chain. Couldn’t you have gotten away?”
“I had a spell-chain, but I feared to use it. Had I called on the djinni in the spell-chain to help me, they might have come—but that would have loosed the waters in precisely the cataclysmic flood I wanted to avoid. So I fled on horseback, and was found and brought back. And punished.”
“Why?” I said. “You stole it to protect the Empire!”
“Oh, Tamar.” Janiya eyed me. “Surely you don’t think that would excuse theft of a spell-chain. Of this spell-chain. This is the Sisterhood of Weavers we’re talking about.” She had a faint smile. She had believed they would excuse her theft. She had trusted them to trust her. “You recall that I mentioned allegiances to members of the four. It perhaps hurt my case that I had gone against my own secret allegiance, and there was no one in power to speak for me. Still, I think they did believe me. That’s why they didn’t execute me—only stripped me of my rank and freedom, took away my daughter, sent me to Casseia…”
“How long were you a slave?” I asked.
“Hmm. All my life, before I came to the Alashi. That’s not what you asked—I know. But it’s the true answer.”
“Why did she want to free the river?” I asked. “I thought the river’s return would be bad for the Greeks.”
Janiya rested her cup on the ground. “There are some who believe that Zeus is imprisoned under the reservoir where the river is bound.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Alexander is supposed to have bound Zeus long before the reservoir was even there. And the stories all say he was imprisoned under a mountain.”
“The reservoir is in the mountains.”
“So the sorceress wanted to find Zeus?”
“Yes. They say—well, you know the story, that if you free him, he’ll make you a god. The sorceress I knew believed that he would also restore her to herself. The sorceresses all know they’re mad; this one could feel the last threads of control slipping away. She was desperate.”
The porridge was ready. Janiya spooned it into bowls, and we sat down in the shadow just inside the door where we could get a little bit of a breeze.
“What did they do with the spell-chain after they caught you?” Alibek asked as we ate.
“They certainly didn’t tell me,” Janiya said. “Before, it was guarded by the Sisterhood Guard, in a locked room deep under the Koryphe. After—I heard a rumor that they were going to use djinni to guard it. They can’t hide it under a mountain with Zeus, because they need to keep it close at hand. The lake waters rise over time, and have to be drained off—some of the djinni carry it places that the sorceresses find useful. Also, when a sorceress dies, her bindings weaken. The bindings on this necklace sometimes have to be remade.”
“I bet I know where it is,” I said. “I bet it’s at the top of one of the towers. You need a djinn to get into those, right? There aren’t any stairs. You need a djinn to carry you to the top.”
We could see some of the towers from where we sat, faint in the morning haze. Janiya stared off at them. “Maybe,” she said. “But any sorceress can get into those towers. The four don’t trust the other sorceresses any more than they trust their guards.”
“Zivar had a locked box in the wall of her workroom,” I said. “She had a djinn guard it. Lauria told me about it. If I were one of the magias, I think I would keep it at the top of one of the towers and guard it with djinni. That would keep it safe from everyone but Lauria.”
“But Lauria was in the Koryphe just a few days ago.”
“Surely she was closely guarded,” I said.
“But she got away,” Alibek said.
Janiya stared off at the towers again, resting her spoon on the edge of her bowl. “If they do have it in one of the towers, I bet I know which one,” she said. “There’s one that’s plainer than the others. Most have carved marble blocks built into the base, but there’s one that doesn’t. It also has a larger base—plain gray rocks, cut large. It was used once to hold a prisoner.”
“A prisoner?”
“Before my time,” Janiya said.
“Surely you heard stories,” Alibek said.
Janiya thinned her lips. The barley district was waking up beyond Damira’s door. I smelled wood smoke and porridge, mixed in with dust and garbage and the faint reek of death blowing in from the collapsed temple. “Yes,” she said.
“And…?”
“Lauria isn’t the first person able to free djinni. There have been others. One was, hmm. Over twenty years ago. The magias kept her imprisoned in that tower.”
“Why did they lock her up, rather than kill her?”
“She was the daughter of one of the magias.”
“What happened in the end?” I asked.
“She jumped out of the tower.” Janiya set her empty bowl carefully down beside her. “And then…Well, the story said because she had opened her heart to the djinni, Hades refused to allow her into the kingdom of the dead. She stayed in the Koryphe as a ghost and wreaked all sorts of havoc. In the end, her mother had to die, as well, in order to plead her daughter’s case before Hades, and Persephone took pity on them—thinking of her own mother—and they were both allowed in. That’s the story I heard.”
I shivered, despite the rising heat of the day.
“Well,” Alibek said as we cleaned out our bowls, “I think we should do exactly as Damira suggested. We should climb to the top of the tower, steal that spell-chain, then make them think it was stolen by someone from the conspiracy of Alexander.” His voice was mocking. Of Damira, I thought—not me, for once.
“Excellent idea,” Janiya said. “All we need is to figure out who to fix blame on.”
“Kyros,” I said. “Surely he must be in on it. And he’s here, in Penelopeia…or he was. We could steal it and kidnap him.” I realized a moment later that my voice was far too earnest.
Alibek turned his mocking eyes on me, but instead of cutting me he said only, “I’d rather kill the bastard than kidnap him. Couldn’t we kill him instead?”
“No,” I said. Because if someone went looking for him in the borderland, they’d know he was dead…I shrugged back the words.
“Hmph. Kidnapping it is, then.”
Janiya stroked her chin. “It would probably be easier to track down Zeus, break his chains, and recruit him for our side.”
“I don’t believe in Zeus,” I said. “But Lauria and I freed a mine full of slaves once. If we somehow got a spell-chain…”
“Ah, yes. That would make many things easier.” Janiya stacked our bowls by the hearth and stood up. “There are, no doubt, some spell-chains buried in that rubble heap. The soldiers are watching, but smuggling a spell-chain out should be easier than scaling a tower. Shall we go dig?”
The rubble pile looked nearly as big as it had yesterday. I wondered how long this would take, and if eventually they’d conclude that anyone underneath had to be dead and switch over to using djinni. Maybe not. By now, they were probably more interested in finding spell-chains than survivors, and djinni were nearly useless for finding things. Also, I’d heard Zivar say something once about the risk of having djinni touch karenite. Sometimes they found a gate, like the one they’d found in Lauria, and slipped away.
We spent the morning shoveling rubble into floating wagon beds again. Then someone decided that the largest stones had to be taken out. They cleared all the people off the ruins, and two djinni were sent to pull out a couple really large blocks of marble. The sorceress watching from overhead shouted—there was a body down in the hole, where two blocks had leaned against each other. She sent her djinn down to bring the body up. The woman’s body had not a mark on it, just dirt. Then someone shouted, “She breathes!” The sorceress elbowed everyone aside and knelt by the woman, tipping water into her mouth from a waterskin.
Alibek found me in the crowd. “Who is that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some priestess.” If a sorceress had found herself alive under the rubble, she’d have used her spell-chains to get out.
The sorceress who’d brought out the survivor now wanted to pull out the rest of the big rocks, to see if they found any more people alive. The officer overseeing the digging thought that was too dangerous. I sat down in the shade while they argued about what to do next. I saw the woman with Lauria’s voice, looking at the injured woman with an anguished face. I edged over to her. “Do you know her?” I asked.
“Who? Oh, the priestess? No.” She shook her head. Her voice was still Lauria’s, but it didn’t rattle me now that I knew to expect it. “You’re the girl who ran into me yesterday, aren’t you?”
“Yes…sorry…”
“It’s all right. Do you suppose they’re going to send us back up?”
“Not right away. I think the sorceress is going to win the argument.”
I was right. I stood in line by a well to get a drink of water as the sorceress’s djinn lifted out huge blocks of stone and marble, stacking them neatly in a clear spot on the western edge of the square. “They could have the djinn rebuild the temple,” I said.
My companion laughed darkly at that. “That’s what got them into this mess.”
I remembered from yesterday that she knew what had caused the collapse, but I gave her a surprised look anyway, to see if she’d tell me what else she knew. She raised an eyebrow. “They had aerika holding the temple up,” she said. “Keeping the statues from toppling, the walls from tumbling, the roof from crashing down.” She picked up a loose brick, holding it out with one hand, and piled pebbles on top. “Then something loosed the aerika, and…” She let go of the brick, and it fell in a rain of pebbles. “If they’d built it properly in the first place, they wouldn’t be in this mess. Half of Penelopeia is built this way.” She looked around thoughtfully, then fell silent.
No wonder they wanted Lauria dead.
We reached the front of the line. I drew up the bucket. The water was shockingly cold, and I drank deeply, then passed the bucket to my companion. “What’s your name?” I asked, as we stepped aside to let the next person drink.
“Tamar,” she said.
“You’re the other Tamar?” I said. “I mean—my name is Tamar, too.”
“Really?” She had started to look away, but now she turned back to take a long, careful look at me. “I think—” She broke off. “I think they’re ready to send us back up,” she finished, and hurried away, leaving me to pick up my shovel again and scramble back up on to the heap.
We didn’t find any more survivors that afternoon, though with the big blocks moved, we did start to find bodies. My shovel hit a leg in mid-afternoon. My first thought was fear that I had hurt someone. Then I realized my shovel had sunk into the flesh like a knife into ripe fruit, and I gagged. “Body,” I said, and backed away. I remembered a moment later that I should have dug for a spell-chain, but it was too late. Others were arriving to dig out the body a rock at a time.
The stench of dead bodies was horrible everywhere in the square, but I tasted it when I found that body. As I tried to catch my breath and not throw up, Alibek appeared beside me. “Let’s go get a drink,” he said, and led me back down to the square.
There was still a line to drink at the well, of course, and we waited our turn. “I am weak,” I said. There were soldiers nearby, so I said no more than that. Alibek knew what I meant.
He shrugged. “You know, it doesn’t matter. I really don’t think it does.” He jerked his head toward the soldiers, very slightly. He meant that it didn’t matter because we’d never manage to smuggle a spell-chain out.
“You don’t know how resourceful I can be,” I said.
“I’ve seen a fair sample.”
“Anyway, even if it didn’t matter—I was weak. And I’ve been around death before, so why?”
We reached the well, and took turns drinking. “Let’s sit and rest a minute,” Alibek said.
We sat down in the shade. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Alibek said. “Normally, if you leave a body sitting out, scavengers take care of it. The scavengers can’t get to the bodies, with all the rocks here. So they rot, and overwhelm us with the smell. Don’t mourn your weakness too much. Bodies aren’t meant to sit like this. It’s not natural.”
I thought of the shovel sliding into the thigh and tried to shake the picture out of my head. “No,” I said.
“Are you ready to keep digging?”
I nodded, and we went back up. I couldn’t bring myself to use the shovel, though. Instead, I picked up rocks, one at a time, and moved them, until it occurred to me that I could put my hand onto—into—one of those bodies. Fortunately, when I had that thought, it was almost sunset. I slid down from the pile, got my rice, and headed for the canal.
“Hey,” Alibek said, and fell into step beside me. “We should walk slowly tonight.”
“Why?”
“Janiya left a little early, did you notice? I think she’d like some privacy.”
“Oh,” I said, and blushed. I hadn’t noticed.
“I can’t believe you’re blushing. What kind of former concubine is embarrassed at the thought of someone having sex?”
“Don’t say that,” I hissed, and looked around to see if anyone had heard. No one was close enough. “We’re not among friends here, remember.”
“No one’s listening. Let’s cross the canal and go for a walk.”
We scrambled across the canal, then walked along the bank. I still had my rice tucked under one arm. I wondered how long we needed to leave Janiya and Damira alone—I was hungry. In the warm evening, the canal stink hovered in the air, but it was nearly wholesome compared to the dead-body smell of the temple square.
“Did you ever take a lover?” Alibek asked as we walked. “Back, you know. Did you ever have a lover you chose?”
“One of the other concubines, you mean?”
“Or another slave. Or a Greek, even, if it was your choice, not theirs.”
“No,” I said. “When I had the choice—any choice—what I wanted was not to be touched. By anyone. Some of the others did, though. Why do you ask? Did you ever have one?”
“Yes, one time. One of the other young men.”
“You wanted a man? I’d have thought—well, you know, just for the variety, if nothing else.”
“I know, and there was actually a woman concubine…but I didn’t trust her reasons, so I said no.”
“I haven’t had anyone touch me that way in a long time.”
“Since the harem?”
I shook my head. “There was one time, after we escaped. We saw some bandits…Lauria told me they couldn’t be Alashi, but I didn’t believe her. Anyway, I decided to take a look on my own, and they saw me.”
“Bandits.”
“Yeah, the real kind.” I forced out an awful-sounding laugh. I wondered why I could talk about the harem easily now, but not this. “When Lauria and I escaped, I kind of forced her to take me with her. So when the bandits caught me, I figured, that was it. I had defied Lauria and gotten myself captured—she wasn’t going to help me. So I made the best of it. I pretended I was one of the girls who liked—you know the type. I figured they might not watch me as closely if they thought I wanted to be there. It didn’t work.”
“How did you get away?”
“Lauria came for me.”
“Into the bandit camp?”
“Yes. I found out later—much later—that Kyros sent a djinn to make sure Lauria reached the Alashi alive. She made it help her get me out. They loosed the bandits’ horses as a distraction.” I rubbed the palm of my hand with my thumb. “I know you don’t like her—I understand why you hate her, honestly. But I knew a different person.”
Alibek nodded. He didn’t really agree, I thought, but he didn’t want to argue.
There was a bend in the canal. We found a spot that was clear of rubbish and not too muddy, and sat down. This time of day, the dogs and crows had returned to their dens or nests, but I could hear the scrabble of claws in the garbage behind us and knew that rats were nearby.
“So you didn’t have a lover among the Alashi?” Alibek asked.
“Why do you care?” I shot him a glare, but he was looking at me so mildly that I lowered my eyes and turned it into a shrug. “It’s not as if we had any privacy.”
“Surely people managed. There were plenty of ‘summer friends’ in the brotherhood.”
“People managed. Yes. But not me.” Zhanna was none of his business, and nothing had happened anyway. “Why are you asking me about this?”
Alibek shrugged uncomfortably. “As a concubine, I was only ever—used. My body, another’s pleasure. When I was with the Alashi, there was a man in the brotherhood who wanted to show affection to me, but I was terrified. So he left me alone. I have thought, of late, that I am tired of being terrified. You and I are a lot alike. I was wondering…” He stopped, suddenly awkward again. “Never mind.”
I realized a moment later what he’d been thinking—Me. He was—and felt my ears, cheeks, and forehead begin to burn.
“I’m sorry,” he said a moment later. “Don’t worry, Tamar. I won’t so much as touch your foot without your permission.”
I thought about that night years ago with Kyros, and all the horrible nights that had followed. I thought about Zhanna, and Damira and Janiya. Alibek was right. I was tired of being terrified.
I stole a look at Alibek. He was a pretty enough boy. And he was here. And most importantly, he understood what it was like to be a former slave.
I stretched out my foot toward him. “Well, if you want to touch my foot, I suppose that wouldn’t be too bad.”
He pulled my boot off, gently. My feet were rank, but he made no comment, just ran his thumb down the curve of my foot to my heel. I remembered he’d told me about the woman who’d wanted her feet rubbed. He pulled my other boot off, and rubbed that foot, as well. My feet hurt, I realized, and my legs ached—from weariness, from walking, from the cords inside me drawn tighter than a bowstring. He rubbed my feet for a while, patiently.
“If you want to touch the rest of me, I guess that would be all right,” I said.
“Don’t sound too eager,” he said.
“Well, what do you expect? How eager do you feel? You want to try it, I want to try it, so let’s try it.”
Alibek nodded. “If you want me to stop,” he said. “Just tell me. And—you understand—I’m not going to promise that I won’t want to stop.”
Our eyes met and locked. I saw the fear in his eyes, and I knew he saw the fear in mine.
“It always hurt,” I said. “Every time.”
“I won’t hurt you,” he said.
He began to rub my feet again, then began to work his way up. His hands traced the muscles of my calves, around my knees, up to my thighs. Then one hand brushed the inside of my thigh, and I felt a shiver run through my body even as I also felt a jolt of fear. I almost told him to stop, then took a deep breath. Maybe I would tell him to stop in a minute.
Still, his hand wandered up my side and touched my cheek. He cupped my chin with the heel of his hand and drew my face close to his. He kissed me lightly on the lips. I could feel his breath, warm against my face. His lips were very soft, though his chin and upper lip were scratchy. I had never been kissed before. The men who chose me as their concubine were not the kissing type.
Alibek’s hand stroked my face, then down, tracing the side of my neck, my shoulder, the curve of my breast. I felt warmth flush through my body, and I reached out my own hand to Alibek’s face, bringing his lips to mine for another kiss. Then he pulled my body against his. Even through the layers of our clothes, I could feel the warmth of him. Something hard pressed against me, rubbed between my legs, and for a moment I caught my breath; it felt good. Then old fear caught up with me. I didn’t shove Alibek away, because of course when I was a concubine, resisting only ever made things worse. But I lay still out of terror, not anticipation, even though I told myself that this was Alibek, just Alibek.
After a moment Alibek realized something was wrong, even though I didn’t say anything. He touched me again, tentatively, then pulled back.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m the one who should apologize,” he said.
“No—” I got to my feet, a little unsteady on the bank. “Do you think we can interrupt Janiya and Damira now? I’m hungry.”
Alibek stood up beside me and really did lose his balance, skidding into the canal and soaking himself to his knees. He swore, then scrambled back up. We picked up our bags of rice and walked back to Damira’s house in awkward silence.
The door was closed, so we knocked. “Oh, there you are,” Damira said, as if they’d been waiting—but the inside of the house was stuffy, so I knew that the door had been closed for a while. We sat in silence while the rice cooked.
“I met the other Tamar today,” I said, trying to fill the silence.
“Another Tamar?” Damira poked at the fire with her stick, then wiped sweat from her face. “Not someone I know. Perhaps she’s also new in town.” The rice was done. She set it on the table.
“More digging tomorrow?” I asked Janiya.
She sighed and rested her head against her hand. “I don’t know. We aren’t getting anywhere, but I keep hoping we’ll get lucky. Or see some other chance. What do you think?”
I shrugged. Alibek shook his head.
“More digging tomorrow,” Janiya said finally, and we lay down to sleep.
Alibek was close by, and I found myself thinking about our encounter that evening. Heat rose to my face, from cast-aside pleasure or pure embarrassment I wasn’t sure. I rolled onto my side, away from him, then tried, unsuccessfully, to get comfortable. I wondered if Janiya and Damira were waiting impatiently for us to fall asleep, which of course made me even more awake. I rolled onto my back again and stared up at the ceiling, wishing I could go sleep outside.
Lauria once told me that during our summer with the Alashi, the djinni showed her a vision of herself in chains. She’d found that confusing, because she had not been born a slave, but she came to understand that as Kyros’s servant, she wore a different kind of chains.
I was still in chains as well.
I thought about reaching out to take Alibek’s hand. But the longer I thought about it, the more impossible it seemed. Finally, I decided to just do it, but in the darkness, instead of taking his hand, I put my cold fingers on his bare stomach. He jumped like a mouse had bitten him. I snatched my hand back and whispered, “Sorry.”
Alibek rolled over. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I heard a rustle. He’d held out his hand for me to take. I laced my fingers through his. His palm felt warm against mine. The skin was cracked from labor in the temple square. He squeezed my hand gently, and whispered, “Thank you.”
After a time, I felt his hand relax into sleep.
I still lay awake, thinking about the steppe. I wished we were back there. We weren’t accomplishing anything in Penelopeia.
I wondered how the slaves we’d freed were getting on. Prax, the mine slave. Jaran. Uljas. Nika and her daughter Melaina—Lauria had refused to let me come when she freed them. Nika had recognized Lauria, but had pretended not to, in a strange gesture of courtesy. That was why Lauria had called herself Xanthe for a while—she didn’t want to reject that gesture, yet she wanted Janiya to know it was she who had freed Nika. I’d have to remember to ask Janiya tomorrow if it worked. It was a strange way to tell her, coming at it from a slant. Kind of like the way we talked when we knew the sorceresses might be listening to us.
If Lauria wanted to send me a message with a name, but had to hide from others who might be looking, what would she call herself? Xanthe again, perhaps. Or Zhanna, or Ruan. Or maybe Tamar. That would certainly get my attention.
That other Tamar. Was that a false name? Was that a message to me? No, surely not. When she heard my name was also Tamar, she never batted an eye.
But it was a false name, I realized suddenly, and I knew who the other Tamar was, and who the message was for. She wanted Lauria to find her—that’s why she was using my name. She was hiding from someone else—that’s why she wasn’t using her own.
It was Lauria’s mother. That was why she spoke with Lauria’s voice.
I wanted to find Lauria, to tell her, to see what she said, if I was right…My excited discovery had pushed sleep even farther away, but I gently pulled my hand away from Alibek, closed my eyes and focused, and sank, finally, into the darkness I was looking for.
The web shone out for me like a dew-covered spiderweb. Lauria had gotten away, so surely I would be able to find her tonight…I looked for the thread that led to Lauria.
But it was gone.
I had to be mistaken. I looked again. Perhaps she was awake, but the thread should still be there.
It was gone.
Completely gone.
Where was she? Where could she have gone?
I kept looking, sure that I must just not be seeing it.
She’s dead, my mind whispered. I shook my head, refusing to believe it, but I could think of no other explanation. She didn’t get away after all. She’s dead.