The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Eight

  “Absu?” Kavian lifts a hand to ward off sudden light. They are launching fireworks from the mountainside. “Absu was Irasht’s mother?”

  Fereyd Japur lowers his face to her in the red glare. His skin looks kiln-fired. “She loved me.”

  It makes sense. Fereyd Japur is common-born: powerful blood without the politics of a highborn father. No mind as apt as Absu’s could pass up the chance to make an abnarch weapon without another parent of good blood to fight the entombment.

  Kavian cannot believe there was any love.

  He must see the thought in her eyes. “She did,” he croaks. There are tears in him, but his rage and his pride and his obvious, agonizing need to be more than just a man hold them back. “She did. She did. You think I invented it? A tourniquet for a broken heart? Damn you. Damn you.”

  Kavian watches him stumble away. It is pity she feels, old and strange.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Efficate outflanks the Cteri counterattack and marches on the dams at Tan Afsh. Absu orders Fereyd Japur and Heurian to remain with the main thrust and sends Kavian and Irasht to save Tan Afsh.

  Kavian is not ready. So much rides on Irasht, and Fereyd Japur’s words still ring in her: you are too weak to use her!

  She wants to save isu-Cter. This is what she’s always fought for. Yet she can’t believe that the girl she holds and soothes in the night is only a weapon.

  And she wants to believe, now, that what they have done to their daughters can somehow be undone.

  But she pushes Irasht out onto the stone above the battle and shows her the sign for wrong alongside the stone-eyed owl banner of the Efficate. It is not Fereyd Japur’s method—an image that demands to be real. All she says to Irasht is: this is wrong, this army. The rest she leaves to the girl.

  Irasht makes a raw noise deep in her throat, as if she is trying to vomit up everything that has ever hurt her. For one instant she burns so bright with will that Kavian cries out in pain.

  In the valley beneath them, in the space of a single eyeblink, the Efficate army vanishes. Fifty-five thousand scoured from the sight of God. Even their bootprints.

  There are no survivors. It is the most powerful exercise of magic in Cteri history.

  After the battle Kavian casts aside all laws of language and isolation, holds Irasht, and whispers love until the girl stops clawing at her own skin. Irasht has learned a few words. She can say:

  No more. No more. No more.

  A little more, Kavian promises. I’ll protect you. Just fight a little more.

  Irasht clings to her in silent need, and with a wizard’s ken Kavian knows she will not survive many more battles. Knows that she would prefer to erase herself and end the pain.

  Word comes from the Cteri spearhead at Cadpur, Fereyd’s army, her daughter’s army: we have met the main body of the Efficate invasion force. There are more men than ants upon the earth. More wizards than stars in the sky. Qad-ai Vista leads them. Make haste to join us, Kavian.

  And then an order from the warlord Absu:

  We cannot risk both abnarchs in one day.

  Fereyd Jaypur. Your weapon is battle-tested. You will defeat the enemy at Cadpur. Attack now.

  By the time Kavian reaches the front, the battle’s already over. The Efficate army has withdrawn with extraordinary casualties. Fereyd Japur killed Qad-ai Vista’s elite cadre and nearly claimed the brother-general himself.

  The price was small, as the reckoning goes.

  Kavian’s daughter Heurian is dead.

  ~ ~ ~

  She leaves Irasht with her dolls and a retinue guard and goes down into the sleeping camp, to find the man who lost her girl.

  Fereyd’s tent has no guards. Kavian ties the privacy screen behind her, lace by lace. Everything inside is silk. Fereyd Second-Best travels like the highborn he never was.

  “I prepared tea,” he says. The candles he has set out around him light him from below. Braided hair, proud chin, empty eyes. An iron chain ornament around his neck, another around his left wrist. Silver on his bare ankle.

  She sits across from him on the cushions. The arrangement of the tea service is exact. He’s measured the angles with a courtier’s geometry pin.

  She sets her hands before her knees, palms down. “My daughter.”

  One tremor in his jaw. “I asked too much of her.”

  “So,” she says, each word a soft considered point, like a blow, a kiss, “I had concluded.”

  “She struck three times. Made their flesh into earth, and then air, and then water. Their wizards tried to kill her and I held them back. I was distracted. But after her third blow—” He sits with stiff formality and pauses, once, to breathe into his cupped hands. “It was too much. She had done so much and the world wasn’t better and she, ah, she had to go. She made herself into water along with all the soldiers she killed, and flowed into the earth. I tried to—I tore down a banner and I tried to—to sop her up—”

  His mouth opens in rictus and he makes a terrible sound that cannot be a laugh, is not gentle enough to be a sob.

  Kavian moves the tea set aside, piece by piece, and takes him in her arms.

  “I killed your daughter,” he says into her shoulder. “I killed her.” He puts his hands against her shoulders and tries to force her away. “I killed her. I killed her.”

  “Fereyd.” She will not let him go. “You can grieve. I will not mark you weak.”

  “You will. You always do.” The plural you.

  She takes his face between the palms of her hands and ohhhh her muscles have not forgotten how to twist, to snap, to hear the bone go and feel the last breath rush out. He killed Heurian. He killed—

  She will not do it.

  “You have every right to grieve,” she says, though some part of her resents each word. “You have given more than anyone. Today you did what you have always done. Paid too high a price.”

  “It was your price too. She was your blood.”

  She doesn’t answer that. Doesn’t know how.

  “I loved her like my own,” he says, and lets himself begin to sob.

  They speak a little. Mostly not. After a while, moved by the fey mood that comes after deep grief, by the closeness of him, by months of watching him on the march, Kavian takes his chin and kisses him.

  “No,” he says, turning away. “No. Not you as well. Enough.”

  “I don’t make prizes of men.” She regrets this even as she says it. It’s not the right assurance.

  “You think it’s the only way I know how to speak.” He laughs with sudden snapping cold. “I win the greatest victory of our time. I lose your daughter—and mine, and mine—to buy our triumph.” A pause while he gathers himself. She respects it. “And here I am, in my own tent, still Fereyd Second-Best. Still the beauty.”

  “Fereyd,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I wanted distraction. It was wrong.”

  He draws away to make a fiercely focused inspection of the tea ceremony, the cushions. “You highborn always forget this: when you break someone, they stay broken. You cannot ask a broken thing to right itself. You cannot ask that, and then laugh at it for falling.”

  She’s found some strange kind of comfort here, holding him. So she says this, against her pride, as the only thanks she can manage:

  “Now you have seen me broken too.”

  “I haven’t.” The truth of pain is in his voice, beneath the grief. “Not yet.”

  It hurts, but it is true. She never knew her daughter as he did.

  She gets up to go but pauses by the screen, uncertain, and when she looks back she catches on the care of his makeup and the suggestion of his body beneath his garments. She hesitates. He speaks.

  “Come back.” He says this like it’s ripped itself from him. “I want to help you. I want to be what you need.”

  “Fereyd. . .” she says, warning him, warning herself.

  “I want to be something for someone,” he says, eyes fierce: and she cannot deny him that.

  Wh
at happens between them isn’t all grief. He’s been watching her too—he admits that, though not in words. Her pride likes this.

  When she’s done with him he touches her shoulder and says:

  “I will always do my duty, no matter how it hurts. But you—you are not yet so utterly bound.”

  She touches his lips in gratitude. The pain is worse than ever. But it runs clear. It feels true.

  ~ ~ ~

  Kavian leads the army through the Cadpur pass into Efficate land, and there on a plain of thin grass and red stone they meet Qad-ai Vista at the head of another numberless host.

  This time the brother-general asks for parley.

  She meets him in the empty space between the armies. Qad-ai is a tall man, ugly, weary, and he speaks accented Cteri in bald uncomplicated phrases. “We will not seize your water this year,” he says. “We ask truce. Next year, or the year after that, we will come again. This year we will go thirsty.”

  She spits between his legs. “There. Water.”

  “We will eat you.” There’s more sadness than anger in his voice. “You understand that, don’t you? You buy your proud centuries by visiting atrocity on your own children. You stand on a mountain of chains. Soon they will swallow you.”

  She chews blood from her cheek and spits that on the sand too. “I’ll see you next year.”

  He squints at her with pragmatic distaste. “Not too late to use the other girl. The one you still have left. Worth her life to kill us, isn’t it?”

  She says to him what she cannot speak to her own: “She is worth more to me than this victory.”

  ~ ~ ~

  What she does next is not her duty: not what Fereyd Japur could ever do. But it must be done. Not the easy rebellion of the sanctimonious, Kavian roaring home to say, give up the abnarchs, give up the war! Not that. Because that would be Kavian’s choice, Kavian’s anger, and Kavian is not the wounded woman here.

  What she does she does for Irasht.

  It has to happen now, while the hurt is fierce in her, while Irasht’s power still permits it—before she learns too many laws, like it will always hurt, like Kavian will never leave me.

  But the journey home to isu-Cter nearly breaks her determination. The shining reservoirs and the waterfall-terraces glistening in summer gold. The lowborn turning out to cheer.

  Kavian has spent two decades fighting for this nation, with her fists and voice and womb.

  But when she reaches the summit, she revolts.

  The Paik Rede turn out in force to stop her, once they realize her intent. “I am coming to give Irasht a choice,” Kavian tells them. “That is all I ask. A choice for all of them.”

  “She cannot choose,” the Paik Rede answers, all of them together, and their speech roars like spring sluiceways.

  So Kavian fights. She fights with all her art. She sings a song of rebellion, and at her call the air revolts against the wind, the stone rises up against the earth, she cries out as a hero with a cause and the brave world answers her so that she climbs the steps in a whirlwind of fire and black burnt stone that reaches up to the clouds.

  “This is the way things go!” the sorcerers of the Paik Rede reply, and they are as the avalanche, as the river going to the sea. This is how things are. Inevitable.

  The wrath of their confrontation breaks the monoliths that line the Summit Steps, and in the end Kavian finds herself at a screaming standstill.

  “The abnarch!” she cries. “I will set the abnarch loose!”

  They must believe her, for they retreat.

  Kavian walks into the chamber of the ceremonial pool and the great stone doors to the catacombs, Irasht hopping at her heels, agitated and nervous, chattering in her high-pitched monotone.

  At the catacomb doors the warlord Absu stands with Fereyd Japur at her side. “Kavian. Stop.”

  Kavian crosses the floor, hobnailed boots hammering on stone and gem. Headed for Absu, and the doors, and the children in the dark.

  She won’t stop.

  “I know why you’re here.” Absu’s voice says: this is true. I do understand. I do. “These are our beloved children. They deserve better than darkness and suffering to buy another year of war. But we make this bargain every day, Kavian.”

  Kavian arranges her wards. Beckons to Irasht—come, come. They circle the ceremonial pool. The herons watch them.

  Absu takes a step forward. “The worker suffers in his labor. The lowborn die on the battlefront. But we give them laws and reservoirs, and we keep the Efficate back. That is the bargain: they suffer, so that we may rule. Does it sound callous, put that way?”

  Kavian cannot check her tongue: “Not as callous as it looks written on those doors.” Silk is still beautiful. Silk is still necessary.

  Fereyd Japur’s shoulders twitch at that. But Absu doesn’t stop. “If isu-Cter falls, the world loses its center. Chaos reigns. So I must take the awful bargains upon myself. I have been ruthless for you, Kavian. Will you turn your abnarch on me for that?”

  Kavian does not have to answer. She was not born with a sister, but she has one. And she knows Absu understands:

  This is not the Efficate, devoted to common fraternal good. In green isu-Cter, ruled by the blood and will of the highborn, one woman’s pain and wrath and love is argument enough.

  Fereyd Japur steps forward. “Lord of hosts.” The pain in his eyes when he looks at Absu is the sharpest and most beautiful thing Kavian has ever seen. “This is Kavian Catamount, who gave her blood to the dark. We are bound to her by duty and gratitude. I beg you. Let her pass.”

  Absu looks to him with slow regard. The shadow of the weight of a nation moves across her.

  Kavian thinks she’s ready to battle her sister Absu to the death. It would be a contest of equals, a duel worthy of legend. The respect between them would permit it.

  But she knows that Fereyd Japur would come to Absu’s defense. Or to hers.

  She cannot bear to force that choice on him.

  Perhaps Absu weighs her duty against the loyalties of her heart. Maybe she looks on Kavian and the abnarch behind her, Irasht her daughter, with eyes that have never mismeasured a war: and she decides she can’t win. Maybe she’s secretly glad that someone has come to do what she cannot ever permit herself.

  Whatever the reason, Warlord Absu lowers her head and stands aside.

  Kavian goes forward with Irasht to stand before the catacomb door. “It’s your choice,” she whispers, stroking the girl’s hair. “All the other Irashts are waiting down in the dark. And you could be their Kavian, if you let them out. Do you understand? You could let them out of the dark. Do you want to let them out?”

  Irasht’s brow furrows. She doesn’t understand. Fereyd Japur watches in expressionless agony as Kavian struggles to make it clear. At last she resorts to signs: bad, the dark empty square, and good, the sky full of stars. And an image in the air, the doors opening, the children decanting from the celled dark to live hard lives of broken speech and brutal nightmare and, maybe, in the end, hope.

  Is this good, Irasht? Do you wish you’d had this life instead? Can you wish you’d had this life instead?

  Or would it have been better if we’d left you in the dark forever?

  It’s an impossible question. No one could answer it. Do you wish you could have been some other way? Some way you’ve never known or even been taught how to know?

  Kavian wants to beg: Please choose. Please be able to choose. You can leave them, if you must, or let them out, though we may all perish for it, if they awaken as abnarchs and turn on us.

  Just show me you can choose.

  Irasht reaches out to the little sign for good, the crowded sky, and then draws Kavian down to her. Kisses her brow. “Kavian,” she says, and strokes the stars, to put them with her name: “Kavian.”

  Kavian is good.

  “Please.” Kavian tries to aim the abnarch girl back towards the door. “Please decide. Do you want to let them out? Do you wish you’d been let out? You c
an choose. You can choose.” Behind her she can feel Fereyd Japur, watching, and Absu at his side, one hand on his shoulder, to quiet him or to give him strength.

  But Irasht touches the stars again, as if they are all she can see, and then Kavian’s cheek, and then her own brow.

  You are good. We are good.

  No, Kavian wants to say. No, no, we are so far from that. We did this to you and so we are not good. But she came here to listen to Irasht’s choice. Not her own.

  In the ceremonial pool a heron spears a fish.

  They wait, Kavian and Fereyd Japur and the warlord Absu, for the child of the dark to make a judgment.

  But she will not. Irasht cannot choose. She will stand here forever, hoping for Kavian’s command. Kavian thinks Absu knows this but won’t say it, out of mercy.

  Irasht looks up at the door, patient, perched like a little bird. She looks up at the great doors and she waits.

  Fereyd Japur said, you highborn always forget this: when you break someone, they stay broken. You cannot ask a broken thing to right itself. They put Irasht into a cell and starved her even of this choice. And Kavian shouldn’t say they, for Kavian did this, didn’t she, and now in her cowardice she wants this child to choose, and lift the guilt from herself. But the child cannot choose.

  Irasht looks up at the door, patient. She waits.

  “Kavian. . .” Fereyd Japur says, with the most rigid and agonized formality.

  And then Kavian shouts in hope, because she remembers Irasht’s strange habit on the march. When Irasht finds a door she goes up to it, and waits patiently, hoping, Kavian imagines, that someone will invite her in.

  “Irasht,” she whispers, kneeling, for Irasht is not a weapon but a person to be loved and taught, and if she cannot make the choice, let a mother give her guidance. “Do you see?”

  She shows Irasht an image in the air, and it is only themselves, kneeling before the great door.

  And then she turns the image, so that Irasht can see the other side. The children below, in the dark. And now Irasht is inside the door, and the children in the dark are the ones waiting for her to invite them in.