“Master Isar!” said Mai. “I am honored at your visit, but I admit I did not expect you—”
“Have you seen my daughter?”
She flinched, for his tone reminded her exactly of Father Mei in one of his tempers. So many months had passed since a man had spoken to her in that way she had almost forgotten how it felt, but of course she would never truly forget because it was the male voice she had grown up with. It angered her now more than it scared her. She cooled her voice to a pitch of such sincere graciousness that she hoped her demeanor would scare him.
“Ver, will you sit? Priya, might you bring wine? Here is a pillow.”
He paced the length of the room and back again. She waited. Chief Tuvi watched through narrowed eyes. The two soldiers shut the door to the warehouse and stood with backs against it. O’eki loomed, and the clerks retreated to the cabinets.
Isar was a good-looking man somewhat older than Father Mei, a man of considerable influence and wealth, accustomed to deference. Because he was Ri Amarah—outlanders who had settled in the Hundred about a hundred years ago and yet had never come around to worshiping the Hundred’s gods—he was also, it seemed, accustomed to being distrusted.
Still pacing, he spoke without looking at Mai directly. “I have come to you, verea, because of your friendship with my daughter, whose name we do not speak in public spaces. This trouble began when she was allowed to visit you in this compound. Not that I fault you, verea, for certainly you cannot understand our customs. But she has become unruly and disobedient since that day—”
Mai wanted to protest that Miravia had spoken discontentedly of her fate and the restrictions placed on her on the very first day the two young women had met, many months ago, but she knew better than to try to stop his flow of bitter words.
“—and now it appears she has utterly cast all honor and duty and sense of propriety into the dirt and run away from home.”
Chief Tuvi looked at Mai, and she wasn’t sure whether he was shocked, or ready to burst out laughing. Isar stared around the office.
“Must all these strangers stand here and listen?” he demanded.
Mai gestured. “Adit. Wori. You are released for the day. We will see you at dawn tomorrow, neh?”
With relieved nods, they hurried out.
“Seren. Valan. Bolt the door, and wait outside on the porch for my signal.”
As the two soldiers left, Mai turned to Isar. “Chief Tuvi and my advisors stay.”
“Your advisors? Your slaves, you mean!”
“Master Isar, surely you did not come to insult me, since you know perfectly well that my husband has supported your people. Your customs are not our customs.”
“My apologies, verea. I am distraught.”
“What has happened to Mi—to your daughter?” She was truly becoming anxious now, as dusk settled outside and the chamber darkened.
“She was to leave tomorrow morning.”
“Leave for where?”
“Leave for her wedding. To take her place in her new home.”
His words shocked her. “To Nessumara? You can’t possibly be sending her on the roads, Master Isar. Captain Anji has secured the roads in Olo’osson, but you know better than most that beyond Olo’osson the roads are not safe, not even for an armed caravan.”
“It has been arranged that a reeve will fly her there. A female reeve, I might add.” Surely his complexion was pallid more with anger than concern. Did he truly care for his daughter, or was she merely a piece of merchandise he could trade to benefit his family’s wealth and position?
“The reeves aren’t carters, hauling cargo for money. They enforce the law!”
“Master Esaf has repeatedly supplied foodstuffs for Clan Hall at no profit. Given transport to refugees likewise. He asked for one favor in return. Even a very pious man yearns for a wife when he has been without one for some time.”
As lecherous old goats lust after lovely young brides they’ve bought like animals at the market! she thought.
Something in her thoughts must have communicated to Master Isar, because he plunged on. “It’s a substantial sum that he’s forgone.”
As if coin answered all objections!
Yet, were Isar and his relatives any different from her own family? Anji had seen her at the market, and because he was a Qin officer in a town conquered by the Qin army, he had gone to her father to purchase her.
“I’m sure Master Esaf’s wealth is considerable, ver. But this is your daughter. Toskala has been overrun by a marauding army. They are marching on Nessumara.”
“I have not forgotten the army’s trail of bitter conquests,” he said, jaw tight.
“I should hope not! An army that burned High Haldia and laid siege to Toskala. Your own people have died!”
He wasn’t willing to meet her gaze directly. “You are remarkably well informed, verea.”
“Captain Anji makes sure I receive daily reports.” She tried to remember her market voice and her market face, but she could not hold on to them. “Surely you can’t intend to send your daughter into a city soon to be attacked? The young scholar she was originally engaged to was killed in the attack on High Haldia, wasn’t he? Do you want to expose her to such risk just for coin and better trade opportunities?”
He was by now quite red in the face. “What do you think your husband would say, to hear you speak such words to a man of the same age as your own father? Are you challenging our right to do what we must? What we know is right for our house? Are you so lacking in respect? A mere chit of a girl, accustomed to getting her way because folk pet her for her beauty which is exposed in the most unseemly manner—?”
Chief Tuvi interposed himself between Mai and the Ri Amarah merchant. “I beg your pardon, ver,” he said in a voice the more threatening because he had not raised it.
In the silence, O’eki set down a sheaf of papers he had been holding all this time, its rustling like that of eavesdropping mice scattering away under the floorboards.
Isar swallowed. “I am not myself, verea. I beg your pardon. I will return another time.”
He went to the door. Tuvi drew back the bolts. As Isar vanished into the warehouse, Tuvi glanced back with an evocative shrug as if to say Men! Daughters! Outlanders! How does one make sense of them! Then he went out after the merchant, and Seren came back inside and bolted the door after him.
Mai drew in a shuddering breath.
“Those in desperate need of coin will do what they must to get it,” said Priya softly, still standing at her side. “Even sell their beloved daughter to the temple of the Merciful One. We must learn to forgive and let go when we see that their hearts are trapped in despair.”
“I should never have lost control like that,” murmured Mai, afraid her voice would crack and she would start weeping. “Said those things to him.” She sank down onto a pillow and rested her head in her hands.
“Mistress?” One of the women peered in through the open door to the porch. “Sheyshi sent me, Mistress. The baby is awake.”
It was a relief to fuss over tiny Atani, as cranky as she was herself until he latched on and nursed. She dozed off as he suckled, and started awake when Priya gently disengaged the baby from her breast and burped him. Mai settled him in a sling, and she and Priya lit lamps in the altar room. An image of the Merciful One gazed kindly on them, one hand upraised to signify awakening and the other cupped at the belly to signify comfort. One of the kitchen women hurried in carrying a mass of flowers, their fragrance filling the room.
“Mistress, I knew you would want an offering,” she said, bringing forward the bouquet. “We got these at the market before it closed.”
“Why, Utara, I thank you! Will you make the offering?” As the words left her mouth, she winced. Had she overstepped?
But the hireling smiled, color rising. “I would do so gladly.”
Trembling, she placed the flowers on the offering platter as Priya began the prayers.
“I offer these flo
wers at the feet of the Merciful One. Through the merit of offering may I walk the path of awakening. The color and fragrance of flowers fade, so does the body wither and disintegrate. Receive this with compassion.”
Other members of the household gathered, some murmuring the responses and others watching, rather like the infant, whose eyes were open, taking everything in.
The short evening service, and her nap, restored Mai somewhat.
“I’ll work in the office,” she said.
“Do you want me to take the baby, Mistress?” asked Sheyshi eagerly.
“No. I’ll shift him to my other hip. As long as he is quiet, I can work.”
Priya attended her, guards at each door, while around them the compound grew quiet as the rest of the household settled to sleep. Mai set a sheet of rice paper on the writing table and practiced her brushstrokes.
“Better,” said Priya with a smile.
“How do I write out the prayers?” Mai asked. “Maybe that would help my mind grow quiet. Anji is always out on militia business. I know he’s good about sending me word. I don’t expect anything else. And truly I am grateful to be in Olossi again. Yet what if he decides it’s too much of a risk. No one can control every least goat track! I’ll end up living in a stone tower, trapped within high walls!”
“You are troubled indeed, Mistress.”
“Thinking of poor Miravia makes me weep.”
Priya said nothing. Lamp flames hissed.
“She must have been desperate.”
Priya took her hand, meaning to comfort.
Mai clung to her. “But she’s no different from me, is she? When Anji made it clear he wanted me, my father could not have said no to a Qin officer. At least he bargained hard to get a high price for me! That shows he cared!”
“We cannot know under what constraints the Ri Amarah labor. They are still seen as outlanders despite living in this land for a hundred years or more.”
“It’s just I thought maybe because the women of her people do all their accounting, and seem to whisper of some kind of magic that causes them to know all kinds of things, like Atani would be a boy, that it would be different for their daughters. Was it any different for you, Priya? Sold to the temple in your own land, and then taken away over the mountains by raiders to be a slave in a strange country? Isn’t Master Isar right? That I can ignore all these things because I have always been petted and made a favorite?”
She shook off Priya’s hand and crossed to the drawer of maps. She opened the third drawer, that contained an incomplete map of the Hundred.
Anji spent considerable time working on his maps. He had engaged the services of a draftsman out of the temple of Ilu, because the envoys of Ilu were messengers who, in more peaceful times, walked everywhere. The temples possessed maps, so it was said, but they guarded their knowledge jealously.
Anji did not let that stop him.
The map was limned in loving detail in the regions he had himself traversed, and she supposed she could trace his travels over the last year. Farther afield lay regions marked in traceries of charcoal pencil, ready to be erased and redrawn if necessary. The map had the look of a thing still in motion, as if it needed simply a strong hand to set the brushstrokes that would confine it.
Here was south, here north, here east, and here west, roads and rivers laid as lacework across the land. Here stood the crossroads city of Toskala along the River Istri, and downstream on a delta at the sea lay Nessumara, where they would take Miravia and confine her in a house from which she could never after set foot in the world beyond without her husband’s permission. All ordered and tidy, lines drawn on a map.
“It’s late, Mistress,” said Priya quietly.
The baby smacked his lips, stirring restlessly as his infant thoughts turned to hunger.
“Of course. I am tired.”
They went back to her chambers, and she nursed the baby and Sheyshi brought water for her to wash and rolled out the pallet and unfolded the bedding. The slaves went to their own pallets; Mai snuffed the lamp flame and lay down on the pallet with Atani tucked in beside her, his soft breaths like a flame on her heart. She had no name for what she felt for him. It wasn’t any emotion she had known before.
He breathed. She slept.
“Mistress.”
She startled up, but Atani slept peacefully. A hand touched her shoulder. A flame flickered in the darkness.
“Priya! What is it?”
“Mistress, come. Sheyshi, stay with the baby.”
Mai wrapped a taloos around her body, tucking it in loosely as she followed Priya and her lamp. In the courtyard outside, a dawn-chat pipped. Because Priya said nothing, Mai remained silent. Chief Tuvi met them on the porch, fully dressed.
“Mistress, come,” he said in a low voice.
Her heart plunged. Had they news of Anji? Terrible news? But Tuvi led her into the office where the warehouse door stood open into the utter darkness of the building beyond.
A figure concealed beneath a long hooded cloak the color of twilight stood in the doorway, half in and half out as if unsure of its welcome. In this warm country, folk wore short cloaks to protect against the rain, and only the envoys of Ilu wore long traveling cloaks like this one. Or that demon girl who had ridden into this very house and killed two Qin soldiers with her demon’s magic.
Mai had learned in the market how to turn a bland face to any situation. Never let them know what your real price is, or how desperate you are.
“Who are you?” she asked in her coolest voice.
The figure tipped back its hood to reveal a face that Mai stared at, at first unable to recognize one she did not expect to see standing so boldly like any ordinary person in the door of her residence.
The figure spoke.
“Mai. I’ve run away.”
By wearing no veil in a public room with others looking on, Miravia made plain her determination to break utterly from her family. She dropped to her knees and raised her hands, as might a supplicant begging for her life or a desperate woman come to pray at an altar.
“Will you help me?”
15
ARRAS HAD GROWN up in the highlands, where ridges and hills and peaks cut into the sky. Here in the delta, as night pressed down over the mire, the flat land troubled him. How did you distinguish sky from land, or land from water? Divisions ought to be clear; that which was blurred was untrustworthy. Here the only consistent element was the humid, musty smell of water and vegetation like a two-finger porridge coating his tongue.
But as he gazed upward at the stars and strands of cloud streaking the moonless sky, he smiled. No reeves out spying. Night was a good time.
“They’re coming back over the bridge, Captain,” said Giyara, who was standing beside him.
A lantern detached from the enemy lines and swayed in a cautious journey over the dismantled span. Subcaptain Piri walked forward with a detachment to meet the negotiators, but he brought back to Arras only Zubaidit in her tabard with its sergeant’s badge and young Navi, the runner.
“Where’s Laukas?” Arras asked.
“They took him,” blurted out Navi.
“What do you mean, they took him?” He fixed his gaze on Zubaidit. “Give me your report, Sergeant.”
He thought she’d been about to smile, but at his tone her brows furrowed. “Navi and Laukas and I were taken to meet with their captain. He’s an old fellow, walks with a cane and a limp. He made the offer you expected: He’ll call his people off if you’ll turn your men around and march back to the mainland and leave Nessumara alone.”
“He could have shouted that offer over the channel. Why did he keep you there so long?”
“He took us on a tour of the militia awaiting us on the island. Wanted to make sure we saw how many armed men were waiting to hammer us should we not agree to retreat.”
Arras scratched his chin. “How many?”
“About five hundred, that I counted.”
“And Laukas?”
/> Zubaidit smiled almost mockingly. “I guessed you sent the lads to spy on me as much as to pretend to be my personal runners, make it seem I was a real sergeant. Now you’ll never know if I meant to betray your secrets to the Nessumarans.” Her gaze sharpened as her amusement faded. “Because it seems that your lad Laukas was a traitor. I’m not sure what signal he gave, because he never spoke one word out of our hearing. But all at once the captain signaled and a pair of guards hustled him away. I’ll bet he’s spilling his guts right now, telling them everything.”
Arras glanced at Navi. “They never separated us,” the youth said. “It’s just as she says.”
“The strange thing is,” Arras added, “that I still can’t know what you would have done if it weren’t for me threatening to kill the other Toskalan hostages if you didn’t return.”
“Then I won’t waste my words trying to convince you of what I know is true.”
He grunted, lips twisting into half a smile. “Laukas seemed so competent, willing to work hard to prove himself. Ambitious, even. That will teach me to trust new recruits before they’ve proven their loyalty.”
“They could attack tonight,” she said.
“It’s what I would do. But they’ll see we’re digging in. They may hesitate. They may have only five hundred men, and no more. Anything else?”
“I need a stick to mark with—” Arras handed her his dagger. She cocked an appreciative smile as she handled it, getting its weight and balance, then crouched and began scoring lines in the dirt: a double line for the causeway that ran into a double line crossed by vertical lines to suggest the bridge joining the two islands; the buildings and structures and paths she had seen on the second island; the pattern of their troop disposition. “Note how they are massed here along the road. They expected First Cohort to push all the way over, so perhaps their counterattack was more successful than they expected. They’re city militia, not as disciplined as your men. Also, I saw heaps of dead—piled here, and here—so it’s impossible for me to know how many Nessumarans were killed and wounded by First Cohort before the First collapsed.”
“You’re observant, Zubaidit. Not a common skill.”