“We won’t always be,” Anna said. “I forgot what it’s like to have your years.”
Ramyi tucked her hands into the folds of her shawl and bowed her head. Again she was burying spiteful words, tucking away the obvious protest that Anna was barely her senior.
“You spoke of cleaning up my mess,” Anna said. Noting Ramyi’s discomfort, she teased a smile. “You were right.”
“I don’t want to speak about it.”
“Does it frighten you?”
Ramyi set her teacup down and picked at her nails. “Sometimes everything is scary,” she explained. “Blood used to make me sick, you know. But now, at times, nothing frightens me at all. When I was angry with that horse peddler, I wasn’t afraid of what he’d do to me. He could’ve torn out my eyes, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Is that how you feel?”
Anna studied the endless depths in the girl’s eyes. At times. Fearlessness was a sheer drop, a nudge over some precipice where time and death and life were concepts, not constraints. When such moments occurred within Anna, the winds of the world had always managed to cushion her fall and sew her back into her body. But she’d known minds that had taken the leap and never regressed, never scrambling or clawing at the cliff’s vanishing edge.
Ramyi’s feet already knew the ecstasy of weightlessness. In times of war, it was a threatening addiction.
“If you stay aware,” Anna said, “you’ll know how to act. Fear won’t sway you.”
“I can still fail.”
“You won’t. We’ll both do our best to focus, won’t we?” Anna grinned at Ramyi, but was met with flitting, wounded eyes. She reached out, ignoring the girl’s instinctive recoil, and touched her smooth black hair. “This isn’t our fight, but nobody else will do it for us.”
She nodded, coaxing a smile out of crooked lips. Compassion was still a foreign thing to her, a doe apt to be startled and set to flight by a careless breath.
“And when this is over, we’ll have a life,” Anna said.
Ramyi’s eyes dimmed. “I’m not sure it’ll end.”
“We’ll end it,” she said, stroking her hair. “By any means.”
“We.” Spoken like a foreign word, bitter and vague on Ramyi’s tongue.
Anna embraced the back of the girl’s skull, pressed their foreheads together, and nodded. Their breaths slowed till they cycled in tandem, their warm exhales and shallow inhales bleeding together, smudging the threshold of separate selves. Soon Anna had the sense of holding herself, of issuing and receiving kindness she’d once craved so dearly. “We.”
* * * *
By the end of the second day, the railway at Zakamun was well within reach. Mesar’s trailcarver led their procession into the wide, sloping bowl of a grass valley as dusk fell, spurred by Anna’s order to reach the kator by midday. It was a practical decision, all things considered: The horses rode well in the day’s heat, but they became tireless in the final stretch of day, when the air cooled and the sun was ragged on the horizon. Everybody mulled about as the horses fed, drinking plum wine and sharing jokes unsuited to Ramyi’s ears, growing unexpectedly animated with a dose of rest and conversation. Throughout their ride, the roads and causeways spanning the mountains had grown more desolate and worrisome with the risk of ambushes or full assaults.
The land spoke its warnings, Anna supposed, but isolation screamed them.
Most of the riding posts they passed had been abandoned recently, with overturned buckets and the deep impressions of hooves littering the grazing strips. Those who’d remained in spite of evacuation warnings—Huuri groomers, fatherless children, scattered southern settlers—were quick to fetch bales of hay, brush the horses down, and collect their keep, rarely offering anything beyond the most functional greetings and idle chatter.
“Speak with them,” Anna had suggested to Jenis’s fighters as they gathered along a fence. They were hard, scar-shrouded men, but they’d listened. They sensed the fields and their slowness as well as Anna. Slowness—that was truly what heralded war. “Right now, they treat you like outsiders, and yes, that’s what you’ll always be. But they can trust outsiders. They’ll need to.” She’d watched two Huuri children chasing their sheep around the yard, giggling and imitating its baa-baa call. “Ask them if they know how to dig a trench.”
But when Zakamun and its garrison grew near, there was no terror around the outlying manor complexes and sprawling estates. At dawn the gatherers paced through apple orchards, children splashed one another at the watering holes, and dogs slept within the shade of the mud walls hemming in dirt paths. Some of the older boys even gathered on stilted porches and whistled down at the passing women, including Ramyi, though the girl’s glares were enough to ward off most attention. It all seemed akin to a parade, not a military maneuver. Even as they entered Zakamun’s commercial district, filing past the windows of curious bakers and seamstresses, there was an air of normalcy. Violence had once been a potential tool for Anna’s unit, but now, as they were close enough to smell the burning grit of the kator lines, it was a wick they were unprepared to light.
In fact, the polish and radiance of the Nahoran city lured most of Anna’s attention. She hadn’t examined nor appreciated the world’s beauty in a long while, perhaps ever. Zakamun made it natural, made her lose herself in the azure roofing and hanging gardens and narrow archways, which featured such precise masonry that Anna rarely noticed the fissures between white slabs.
“Have you been here?” Anna asked Yatrin as they passed a public bath and its canopy shroud of vines and woven branches. Children ran past, giggling and pointing at the Alakeph brothers’ white coverings, which surely hadn’t graced their streets in years. There was history in their presence, almost a playful aura, and Mesar’s unit reflected it in their smiles.
“My sister—by blood, I mean—was ordained at the monastery atop the northern hill.” Yatrin gestured to a collapsed dome on the nearby rise. “We’ll see it repaired in time, I hope.”
“Perhaps someday,” Anna said. “I think there will be more demanding tasks to come.”
“In Nahora, parts reflect a whole, you understand. Structures form a city, and cities form the state. The morale of our people is bound to this truth.”
Ramyi hummed, breaking her longstanding silence. “The state’s about to have its spine broken, then.”
Anna didn’t offer any reproach, nor did she even glance at the girl. There was some truth in her words, after all. War broke everything, and there was no sense in mourning rubble to avoid the bodies pinned beneath it. Perhaps Nahora had forgotten the agony of domination, of invasion, of massacre. But life was a patient tutor.
Yatrin’s lips tensed into a hard line. He looked past Ramyi, instead focusing on a group of young men splitting pomegranates in the shade. “It’s good to return.”
Some of Jenis’s men muttered to one another in river-tongue and garbled grymjek, training their eyes on the limestone balconies that jutted out over the road.
“They’re watching us,” one said.
“There, just behind the cart,” another said.
“Get ready for them,” a third added.
Anna halted and spun around, glaring at the southern troops. “Mind your weapons,” she said in the river-tongue. “We didn’t come here to fight.” Mesar’s men slowed at the sound of her voice, and some even complied with the command, having acquired the southern tongue during their time in the Nest or plains monasteries. Anna studied the motionless fighters, including Mesar, before switching to flatspeak. Memories of Nahora—its little mechanical bird, its savage fighters, its incessant hunting—played through Anna’s head. “If they cast stones at