Konrad’s smile faltered. “Where’ve you heard that name?”
“We’re not sheltered fools.”
“Through my eyes, it’s a peculiar sight,” Konrad said. “You marched across western Nahora, banging your pots and pans the whole way. Don’t you think it’s time to stop playing soldiers?”
It was difficult to keep the hot, pulsing anger out of her face. She couldn’t read him, not at all. He seemed to wander the world with no roots, no sense of guilt, no curse of lineage nor knowledge of eternity’s true span. Nothing moved his heart. “Rzolka is burning,” she said finally.
“And midnight is dark,” Konrad said. “After three years, it’s a struggle to keep holding your breath and waiting. At least our Council sheared the wool. The state’s flourishing without all of those extra blades, you know. Think of how many resources are being put to use in the fields and shipyards. Malchym and Kowak always shouted that into the soil.”
Anna drained the burning air in her lungs, then straightened. “At the very least, you could give up on provoking my people.”
“They’re a people now. Conspicuously similar to an army, though.”
“I’ve learned where practicality is needed,” Anna whispered.
Konrad snorted, taking up another hookah pipe and puffing. “Who’s that little fawn you’re dragging around?”
“She’s a scribe,” Anna said. She drew a breath and held it at the apex of her inhale, letting the silence settle and drift down like the dust motes suspended in lantern light. Clarity was a rare gift, but an illuminating one: She noted the vicious curl in Konrad’s lip, the way his back straightened and spasms worked through his brows.
“A scribe.” His tone wasn’t angry, but perplexed. “One of the cartel’s apprentices?”
“She was, is, a foundling.” Anna watched Konrad’s face darken and his lips draw tighter. “Whatever she is now was done by Nahora, and it’s not something you can justify. But you should understand her mind, why she acts the way she does.”
“It’s not strange for a young girl,” Konrad said, winking, “but it’s strange for you, panna. I half-expected you to tear my throat out on sight.” His grin shifted. “What happened in Malijad was never about you. You, Anna, I mean. It could’ve been that girl, or it could’ve been some Gosuri worm. But it was you, and that’s unfortunate.”
“It’s unfortunate that you know a young girl’s mind so well.”
“This is how it was meant to be, Anna,” Konrad said, clouding the air with a roiling exhale and coughing. His stare ran up and down her body, lingering on the folds of her tunic. “Nevertheless, you’re not a young girl anymore, are you? Whatever communion you have with the stars must be working, because you’ve sprouted into a particularly stunning young woman.”
Woman. Panna. The terms felt vapid as he inspected her, unearthing the same disgust she’d felt in Malijad or Bylka before it. She’d sought those titles for so long, but their true forms—their burdens, as it was—were revealed entirely too late.
“How long till we reach Golyna?” Anna asked.
Konrad glanced at the hourglass set into a brass apparatus. “After a bout of beauty rest, you’ll be staring at its main station. Quite a sight as you’re passing from the mountain tunnels to the Crescent.”
Anna set her teacup and saucer down, rose, and moved to the door.
“Before you go,” Konrad said, “where’s our old friend? Bora, wasn’t it?”
Anna rested a hand on the doorknob. “My people will be retaining their weapons and conducting their own patrols.”
“Naturally, fine. Now, what about the scrapper? Granted her death wish, or is she hunkering down in your invisible palace, or whatever it really is? Has she got any babes?” He sat upright. “Oh, and that nagging little Huuri boy too. How’s he faring?”
“Have you heard what they call me, Konrad?”
“Kuzalem.” He cackled, filling the air with the wet popping of a smoke-stricken throat. “It’s a fierce title, but death? The Anna I know was afraid of wasps.”
She imagined that the southerner’s Anna, who she hadn’t seen in years, was shriveling under mounds of Hazani sand and pulverized stone. Without turning back, she opened the door.
“Don’t you find it a tad funny, Anna?” Konrad asked.
Anna stepped into the tapestry-laden hallway and shut the door slowly. “Call me Kuzalem.”
* * * *
In the honeycomb arrangement of bunks that filled a bulbous, towering sleeping pod, Anna found most of the fighters drinking out of their ration bundles’ tin cups. They sat in clusters around the strange, ever-burning lanterns, murmuring and shushing one another as Anna searched the various passageways for Ramyi and the others. None of her unit had been in the lavish, sweet-smelling dining pod, nor in the communal bathing pod, which featured braziers with burning turquoise stones and petal-dusted water that swayed to the cylinder’s leaning. In their place she’d found crowds of calm, curious Nahorans that gestured and whispered, none of whom had the look or armaments of fighters. But Anna’s own fighters were apt to wander; Ramyi’s absence was the concerning one.
She ascended the zigzagging stairwells to the uppermost level of the pod, which resonated like a leaf in the wind and seemed possessed by an eerie whistling. Still holding Konrad’s sickening grin in her mind, she found the bunkroom’s soft amber lighting and laughter maddening. Everybody except her could relax, be reckless, live. Perhaps they truly didn’t care for her presence. It wasn’t that being ignored upset her, really, but it disturbed her. It was a reminder of a time before she’d been known by her runes, when she barely had a name or any legacy at all. And as swiftly as that torrent of infamy had washed over her in Malijad, it now seemed to break and fall away, promising the same insignificance she’d spent so long trying to retain. It felt foolish, if not self-absorbed, to fear it so much. The things we want are seldom what we truly want. A wise, recurring Kojadi motif, easily drowned under the terror of survival.
Ramyi sat on a mound of cushions with an assortment of Mesar’s men and Jilal fighters, whose lips and eyes were ringed with ritual scars. Her head was thrown back in a giggling fit, her cheeks flush and eyes clenched. One of the Jilal fighters was babbling, amusing Ramyi and the others, making her swing her tin cup and spill its contents across the rug.
Further back, almost consumed by shadow, Khara hunched over her cup.
“. . . and the widow didn’t know them!” the fighter finished, howling the final words.
Moving to a metal column, Anna paused and observed. Two bottles of arak and an empty flask of grain liquor sat on a nearby table. Yatrin was sitting upright in a wooden chair, grimacing at Ramyi’s antics. Before she could edge closer, the easterner spotted her and stood, skirting gracefully around the gathering to approach her.
“They’re drunk,” Anna said.
Yatrin’s lips shifted. “Most of the others refused to touch the dishes and drinking water.”
Anna sighed. Others had a pointed meaning, in that context: Those who weren’t Nahoran by birth.
“They’re suspicious of everything,” Yatrin explained.
Anna bristled at that; it was yet another setback to cooperation, even if she harbored her own misgivings. An army with hairline fissures could only hold until first contact with the enemy. “Where’d they get it?”
“Ramyi marked one of the southerners. I’ve never seen the rune before, but it made