“Forty-two horses and six mules, then,” Mesar said to his men. “Help them load their wagon.”
By the time they’d saddled half of the horses—including Anna’s—and lashed their equipment to the pack animals, it was full dark. Anna stood with Yatrin and the others on the highest rise of the slopes, gazing out at the bruise-blue hills and flats and gorges to the north, her hands grasping the reins of her black mare. Far below, the lantern-like baubles dangling from the herders’ wagon wormed toward the shelter of watchtowers and mud walls. At every moment, Anna expected Ramyi’s markings to burst out of one of her fighters, sundering the earth beneath distant wagon wheels or consuming the peddlers’ flesh in a wreath of silver flame.
Ramyi was still, thoughtful, as she sat behind Khara on a circling horse. With her arms wrapped around the easterner and eyes bold with glossy lamplight, her gaze calmly tracking the wagon’s course, it appeared that Mesar’s short bout of circle meditation had settled her temper.
That was the worrying way of it, Anna knew: Anger formed and fell away with every breath, but hatred simply learned to sleep.
* * * *
The days passed slowly, sweeping by as a pall of droning crickets and dry heat and blue skies over valleys of moss and rust. Despite the fur-lined saddle, Anna’s legs were chafed and smeared with rosy blood by the end of the first day. That was the cost of existing beyond the hardships of the true world, perhaps. Between measured riding stretches Anna had paused and signaled for Ramyi to mark Khutai, who had the thickest, yet fairest, neck among her fighters. Ramyi’s meditation had uncovered countless runes, some more useful than other, but during this ride, the girl added a rune she’d come to term sprout. When Khutai tensed properly, the sand shot up around them in an immense, crackling dome, its walls firmer than iron, encasing them in lightless silence for an instant. Then it dissolved into a rain of powder-soft grit, as gentle as winter’s first flurry. Or so Anna had seen in training. Khutai had sharp reflexes, but ruji shavings rarely announced their arrival.
Their caravan had passed several farmers, but the only domestic troops—Chayam— they spotted along their procession were shadows upon the hilltops. In each of their seven encounters, Anna’s fighters had glinted a single mirror signal:
We seek negotiations in Golyna.
Each time, it was received without reply.
When Anna meditated within her tent on the low side of a windswept rise, burrowed into the ground and encircled by heated rocks like any skillful Gosuri shelter, the storm was deafening. She heard the wind shearing apart grass and sun-dried branches, chilling the horses as they snorted and stomped about, rattling the makeshift paddock formed by the tent poles that jutted up through the soil. It was difficult to focus without seeing the girl’s blooming golden pupils or envisioning Shem in the hallway of some distant palace. Soon she rose, pacing around the ring of cushions and hanging candle cages with air screeching and aching into her chest. Can I really control her? Should I? Shadows of truth. After some time she hung a kettle to boil over their hearth, crept past Yatrin, and climbed up the tent’s ladder, emerging into the moaning blackness of the palisade. Frigid air howled across the darkness, joined by flurries of glittering sand and the sound of watchmen’s boots raking over packed earth. She hurried to the tent housing Ramyi and Khara, peeled back its upper flap, and leaned her head into the candlelight alongside a flurry of mica and glittering sand.
“Ramyi, come with me,” Anna called out.
Khara stirred in her bundled quilts, but kept her eyes sealed.
Screeching wind was the immediate reply. Anna waited, rocking on her haunches and staring into the patchwork of shadows and candlelight, till Ramyi wandered forth in tan robes with eyes tucked low.
Déjà vu was more chilling than the next gust.
They sat in Anna’s tent with legs crossed, drinking mint and quince teas like the courtiers from Nur Sabah. Candlelight sifted through patterned iron boxes and danced upon the walls in orange, thorny swirls. It was rare to spend time with the girl outside of meditative sessions or schooling, but it hadn’t always been that way. Once Ramyi had been shy and tender and receptive to Anna’s knowledge of making bone-broth and tying knots. She’d never been much of a friend—Anna had few of those and wanted even less—but she was a vessel for kindness, for wisdom, for everything Anna had accumulated through steady breaths and murder, yet had never been able to pass on. But war had a habit of twisting things. Anna could sense the barrier between them as tangibly as the steam curling up from their cups: Two beings, more attuned to their interconnection than the countless masses around them, were unable to make amends or shave down the calluses upon their hands. They were both girls, after all. Again, war had obscured that simple truth. It felt so foolish to Anna, but she wouldn’t be the first to disarm. There was too much hurt in surrender. Perhaps the pain was just too immediate, too intense. Over time, separation brought its own suffering. Especially when Anna contrasted her life with the Claw’s virtues, sensing the roots of her legacy drying and blackening below a mighty oak…
Yatrin slept in the darkness at the edge of the tent, his quiet breaths a reflection of a shallow slumber. His presence seemed to unnerve Ramyi, who kept glancing at his covers, almost as though safeguarding a captive. There was understandable reproach, if not lurking envy, in the girl’s pursed lips. It must’ve been maddening for her to find the enlightened Kuzalem stocking her chambers with young men, then being forced under the cane of a female shepherd.
But reality was always a distortion of the truth, bending and fracturing through separate minds.
“How are your legs?” Anna asked in flatspeak.
Holding her tea near her lips, Ramyi glanced up. They’d spent the better part of an hour without speaking. “My legs?”
“All the riding,” she said. “The herbmen gave me something for blisters.”
“I don’t need it.” Ramyi sipped her tea. “But thank you.”
Anna had seen the way the girl carried herself, with a wide stance and gritted teeth whenever her thighs brushed together. Maybe stubbornness, not the clarity of a scribe, was their binding thread. “Do you feel guilty when people die?”
Ramyi resettled the blankets around her knees and ankles. “The past is immutable.”
“I’m not trying to teach you now,” Anna said. “Tell me how you feel. Leave out the proverbs.”
“I’m just so tired, Anna.”
“It was a hard day.”
“No,” Ramyi said. “I’m tired.” This time she’d opted for the word jashel’na, which left the stitches of time across the root adjective. It was a word usually found upon the lips of riders and old weavers.
“You must miss the hall-mothers,” Anna said.
“Sometimes,” Ramyi said. “We all miss people.”
A knot of discomfort formed in Anna’s throat. “Death is only a burden, Ramyi. Don’t bear it across your shoulders.” She softened her eyes. “My anger was misguided. Events occur beyond our permission, I know.”
The girl flattened her brow and flared her nostrils, meeting Anna’s gaze head-on. But she was well-trained, a product of Halshaf meditation from the time of swaddling, and she held back whatever retort was prickling on her lips. That muted veil came over her. “I understand.”
“And I’m proud of you,” Anna said. “Do you know that?”
“I appreciate it.”
“Ramyi,” she whispered.
“What? What do you want?”
“Be here with me,” Anna said, patting the quilt near her kettle.
“I am here,” she said sharply.
“If