Chapter Seven
How We Left Quruscan, Soggily
After a nice, deep morning’s sleep, Kalyna, Dagmar, and I began walking through the steppe. We didn’t yet know that this would be our last clear and sunny day in Quruscan.
“Tonight I’ll decide exactly where we should go,” Kalyna told us. “For now, vaguely northward and away from Desgol will do.”
She then began to ask me a lot of questions: about myself, my history, and my problems. She made me feel as though no one in the world found me more interesting than she did. Including Silver.
“And who is waiting for you back home, Radiant?” she asked in Skydašiavos. “Who will we find and rescue?”
She sounded so confident when she said it, that I believed we would rescue them. The cold fear at imagining what might be happening in Loasht was warmed and diluted, for now.
“I have a spouse,” I said, “and their family, and many friends, and lovers.”
“A spouse and lovers?” laughed Dagmar, who was walking a bit ahead of us. “Smart Boy, I didn’t know you had it in you!”
I felt myself flush, rather proudly.
“Parents still living?” asked Kalyna.
“Yes, but we don’t get along.”
“I see,” said Kalyna. “What possessed you to leave Loasht in the first place? I mean, I love the Tetrarchia . . . but I also hate it.”
“I feel much the same about Loasht,” I replied. “But I came here to study.”
“Oh?” Kalyna’s eyes seemed to light up, and her smile got wider. “What are you studying?”
Dagmar, ahead of us, visibly drooped, as though she knew she would find my answer boring.
Kalyna’s interest in me was so captivating that I didn’t think to lie: “The history and methods of humans putting curses on one another. You know, harmful magic.”
Kalyna stopped, then, right in her tracks. I continued another step or two without noticing and so walked right into Dagmar, who had also stopped, and was looking back at us. The sun was warm on my back, while grasses up to my chest swayed in the wind.
I had gone too far. I knew it immediately. It had been foolish to be so forthright. The people of this land still thought of Loasht as some evil warren of sorcerers, and a worldly Tetrarchic citizen was still a Tetrarchic citizen. I winced, expecting Kalyna and Dagmar to leave me stranded in the middle of the steppe. Hoping for that, even, rather than that they kill me.
“Curses,” said Kalyna, feeling the word in her mouth. She looked intently at the sellsword. “Dagmar.”
“Yes, Kalyna?” Dagmar sounded unhappy.
“You have been on the run—”
“Yes.”
“—from angry mobs—”
“Yes.”
“—with—”
“Yes! Apparently with a sorcerer! It does seem that way!”
“And you didn’t—?”
“No,” Dagmar sighed. She sounded annoyed, mostly with herself. “No, I didn’t ask him to blight crops or strike a Headman with gout or force a mob to fight one another.”
“Dagmar, you have been traveling with a sorcerer and doing nothing with him.” Kalyna shook her head in disbelief, smiling.
Dagmar shrugged. “How was I to know Smart Boy’s a—”
“I’m not a sorcerer,” I muttered.
“How was I to know Smart Boy’s a wizard?”
I wanted to protest again, but she continued.
“I thought he was studying something like history, or etiquette, or, I don’t know, tattoos.”
“Whyever didn’t you ask?” replied Kalyna.
“Whyever would I? I expected the answer to be boring.”
“And you’d be right!” I added, as quickly as possible. “Please don’t get ahead of yourselves. I’m not a sorcerer, or a . . . wizard. I’m a scholar. To do any of what you described would take a lot of time, assistance, knowledge, and ingredients, and even then it still likely wouldn’t work!”
Kalyna cocked her head to the side and looked visibly confused. “Really? You can’t just . . . concentrate, and the magic comes to you?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Hmmm.” She put a hand on her hip and pivoted to one side, furrowing her brow and looking off into the distance, before returning her gaze to me. “Do you have to concentrate to keep the magic from coming to you? Assailing you?”
“What? No. Not at all.”
“You aren’t some sort of Magic Man?” Dagmar added.
“No, no. Magic is . . .” I snapped my fingers, looking for the right words. I’d read and thought about the subject so much that it was difficult knowing where to start. “Magic is just a ritual like any other, that anyone can attempt. It isn’t guaranteed to ‘work’ any more than praying is.”
“You see?” said Dagmar. “Boring.” She began walking again. “And useless.”
“Dagmar,” asked Kalyna, “would it kill you to ask questions?”
“Not asking questions was my greatest virtue in the army. It’s how I became trusted enough to start guarding you.”
“So then,” Kalyna asked me, as we began walking again, “how does magic work?”
“Why? Do you wish to learn it?”
“She wishes,” muttered Dagmar, “to learn how she can best use you.”
“Well,” I replied, “very little, I expect.”
“Humor me,” said Kalyna.
I wondered whether this knowledge was actually part of her price for helping me, in lieu of money. Well, that was fine with me: curses are difficult to do, and I like talking about them (even now).
“How much time do you have?” I asked. “I’ve spent decades studying ‘how magic works.’”
Instead of recoiling from this answer, Kalyna sucked her teeth thoughtfully.
“Let’s try an hour,” she said.
“Oh! Really? I’m no lecturer, but I’ll do my best!”
“And perhaps,” she began in Skydašiavos, before switching midsentence to Loashti Bureaucratic, “this will be easier for you to discuss it in.”
“How do you do that?” I asked instead, in the same. “Do you even mean to?”
“Habit from my own family—we would change languages constantly without a thought.” She shrugged and looked at me intently as we walked. “But anyway. Magic, Radiant.”
“Well, essentially, spells and curses are more of a state of mind than they are clear actions with proven consequences.”
“Sounds like an awfully loose discipline to study.”
I smiled, I hope, charmingly. “That is why I’m not an architect.”
Kalyna graced me with a chuckle in answer. We each had our own ways of drawing people in.
“Magic,” I continued, “is about ritual, intent, and imitation. You need all the pieces in place, but you also need to feel that you are affecting the world. Which can, of course, convince you afterward that you have affected the world, even if you didn’t.” I threw up my hands. “My academic work was often torn between attempts to prove its power and attempts to prove its falseness.”
“Which would you prefer?”
I thought about that for a moment. “Depends on the day. And the curse. And how angry I am.”
“Does that mean that if I went through the motions of something I could not do, I don’t know, hard enough, it might start working for real? If I believed it?”
“Oh no, absolutely not! You would need to effect all sorts of intentional, purposeful incantations, rituals, and likely concoctions. It does not happen by mistake, and never lasts for long.”
She looked thoughtful.
“Curses are different, though,” I added. “They can, theoretically, happen more organically, which is why they’re so fascinating. If you were imitative in the other direction, you might be able to negatively affect the person you were imitating.”
Kalyna’s pace slowed, and there suddenly came to be more tall grass between us than there had been. Perhaps this was on purpose.
“I could curse someone I imitate?” she asked quietly. “Even someone I loved?”
I wasn’t sure what fear I’d touched in her, but I found myself stumbling to assuage it anyway.
“No, no, I don’t think so! And it’s all theory anyway. Curses are normally—insofar as anything about them is normal—carried out through imitation, ritual, drugs, and lots of help. Even then, they can still fizzle out and do nothing.”
“I see.” She seemed to sour on methods, for the moment, and quickly switched to a different aspect: “Why do you study something so imprecise?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s hard to be constantly wrong about something imprecise.” I grinned, and she smiled back weakly. “But, originally, I chose to study harmful magics in order to prove that, by comparison, there was nothing inherently evil, nor even particularly ‘magical,’ in historic Zobiski practices.”
“To redeem your people in Loasht’s gaze.”
“And to redeem them in their own,” I replied. “Many in my own community don’t much like that one of the few Zobiski visible at the Academy studies something so ‘backward.’” I wondered again what was happening in Yekunde—perhaps they had been right. “They worry I’m giving those who hate us false examples of our evil; or, even worse, some think I’m giving them true examples—that in the past, our people were base and savage.”
“And that Loasht ‘civilized’ you?” asked Kalyna, with an arched eyebrow.
I nodded. It was a revelation to have someone grasp these currents of Loashti conflict and distrust so quickly, which made me feel I could be honest with her.
“Truthfully,” I said, “I don’t only work to prove that our old ways are harmless.”
“Of course.” She grinned. “What’s a little harm, here and there?”
When the evening came, I learned how the Quru steppes could maintain all those charming little shallow pools: torrential spring rains rolling across the expansive sky. We saw the dark and unending clouds coming toward us for hours, but there was no escaping them. Soon enough, we were caught in a downpour where every drop seemed bigger than the last.
“We’d better find a place to try sleeping,” sighed Dagmar. “Kalyna, you didn’t pack a tent, did you?”
“I thought you had one.”
“We do,” sighed Dagmar. “It’s very small.”
Dagmar pitched the little tent by herself, insisting we would only get in the way. Kalyna graciously allowed this but smirked at me.
The tent was erected beneath the largest tree in the copse, which would offer only the slightest protection. What’s more, this spot sat uncomfortably between two shallow, but widening, pools. Still, it was the best we could do, particularly as Dagmar was quickly losing light by which to see.
The three of us spent a truly miserable night packed into that tent on top of each other. The skins of the tent had been decently oiled to resist water as much as possible, as all Quru tents are, but a person still got very wet when pressed right up against the side. Since there was only comfortably room for one, we were all pressed up against the sides. I suppose we got less wet than we would have outside of the tent, but it certainly didn’t feel that way.
“So,” said Dagmar eventually, in the dark, speaking over louder and louder rain, “what’s your plan then?” She made some sort of gesture we couldn’t see and accidentally rubbed my face with her clammy hand.
“For getting out of the rain?” asked Kalyna, rearranging her legs and kneeing my ribs.
“No, there’s nothing for that,” replied Dagmar. “How are you getting into Loasht with Smart Boy here?”
“Dagmar,” I sighed, “I am older than you.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” she replied.
I turned over and inadvertently elbowed Dagmar in the back.
“I don’t know yet,” said Kalyna, answering the initial question. “Or rather, I don’t know which plan yet. Too many possibilities, and we don’t yet know the situation at the borders. I will have to think it over as we travel.”
Dagmar made a dissatisfied grunt.
“If you must know,” continued Kalyna, “I have four distinct plans right now, but they depend on what we find.”
“And can you tell us these plans?” asked Dagmar. I couldn’t see her, but she was clearly beginning to remember why she hadn’t wanted to come with us. The rain wasn’t helping.
“You know very well I’d rather not,” said Kalyna, sounding quite unbothered by everything. “Because you probably won’t like them. Or they may seem ridiculous out of context.”
I could hear Dagmar’s irritation. Feel it in the way she shifted (and hit me with her shoulder). So I tried, desperately, to lighten the mood.
“Well, if you want ridiculous, you should hear how we left Abathçodu!” I offered. “I never will forget Farbex the Good Donkey.” I tried to laugh.
The only sound after my forced laugh was the rain positively hammering our tent and the ground outside. Dagmar did, at least, seem to become less tense; we were pressed so close together that I could feel her relax slightly.
“Do we at least know which way we’re going?” I asked.
“Oh yes, of course!” Kalyna answered. “To the Skydašian border, naturally.”
“Naturally,” Dagmar echoed.
“It’s much wider and more accessible than Quruscan’s,” Kalyna continued. “Better guarded, of course, and there’s the Tail to deal with.”
“The Tail?” I asked.
“The Thrashing, Bone-White Tail of Galiag,” Dagmar clarified.
“That’s real?” I replied. “I read about it in a ridiculous old romance and assumed . . .”
“Well, it’s not really anyone’s tail,” explained Dagmar. “But it’s a real gorge full of howling and burning winds.”
“Once we’re at the Skydašian border,” Kalyna continued, “I can begin to narrow down my plans. I’m better at sweet-talking officials than I am at scrambling over deadly Quru mountain paths.”
“My home is actually closer to Skydašiai than Quruscan anyway,” I said.
“Even better!” Kalyna clapped her hands, which was very loud in that small space. “Easy enough for us to get you to your home then!”
“Kalyna, might Skydašiai be any safer for me to move around in than Quruscan?” I asked.
“Now there’s a thought,” said Kalyna. “Certainly, they’ll have a different attitude—they’re a rather nosey people, which could be a problem. The Skydašians have the Tetrarchia’s longest and most involved history of fighting your native country, which has made them less unreasonably scared of Loashti people, but perhaps more, you know, reasonably scared. On the other hand, they also have the most experience trading with Loasht.”
“If Skydašians are so familiar with my home,” I began, “would more of them be able to tell I was Zobiski?”
Kalyna shrugged, which I felt but did not see. “Possibly. But will ideas spreading over the border predispose Skydašians to believe what Loasht is spreading about your people? Or will they be more likely to see you as, now, the enemy of their enemy? And how has Skydašiai—particularly its North Shore—changed as the Blossoming has continued to, well, bloom?”
“Smart Boy here was hoping you’d answer questions, not ask more of them.”
“I’m sorry, Radiant,” said Kalyna. Even in that small, cramped tent, pelted with rain, her voice was sonorous and intimate—I believed that she was sorry.
I nodded, which no one saw, and then muffled a sob, which they must have both heard. I think Dagmar actually tried to put a hand on my shoulder, but, crammed together in the dark, it came across more as a punch to the throat.
Kalyna, Dagmar, and I trudged through the soaked Quru steppes for two weeks. The rain simply did not stop. Or, at least, never for more than a half hour. We spent night after night pressed together in that little tent, except for when Dagmar decided she’d rather sleep outside in the rain. I began to feel that I would never be dry.
Kalyna did not complain of discomfort. She complained of her hair looking lank and flat, of her clothes being ruined, of our food being destroyed, of our chances against venomous marsh snakes, but never about how she felt. Dagmar punctuated long stretches of tense silence with bouts of all-encompassing complaints: about her feet, about her joints, about her crevices, about how she did not want to look at either of us ever again. In such company, I did not complain at all (except now, to you), because I was terrified of driving my companions away. Instead, I spent a lot of time trying to mollify Dagmar when she threatened to leave.
“My sword cannot save you fools from drowning in your sleep!” she yelled one day.
“Of course it can,” said Kalyna. “With a quick death.”
“You should be so lucky.”
“Dagmar, where would you even go?”
“Anywhere! Away! To go lie in a ditch!”
“Look! Look!” I called, voice cracking. “There’s a village!”
This was the first of a few villages we passed through during that rainy, soggy, terrible trudge. Even when we would sleep for a night in a tavern, I never felt fully dry. Their roofs were perfectly sound, but the rainwater felt as though it had permeated me deeply and permanently. Like it clung about us, sneaking inside on our backs.
Kalyna paid our way when needed, insisting that I could reimburse her back in Loasht, although I never saw her write the prices down. Sometimes I’d ask her what the “family business” was that filled our purses, but she always evaded the question—seemed, even, to enjoy finding new ways to evade the question.
Not that I had any deep need to understand where her coin came from, just then. I was simply happy it existed. After all, upon reaching my home, the rest of my silver would go to Dagmar, as well as: “A few gold, Smart Boy. Depends on how difficult the journey, and what you have available to you. If you must run from your home, I won’t leave you with nothing!”
She had said this quietly in a warm tavern, while Kalyna was in front of us, making arrangements for the night. “Although she might,” added Dagmar, nodding toward the other woman. “Her tastes have gotten expensive.”
The following day, we got an unexpected windfall when some townsfolk decided to take me to the Headman, or kill me, or what have you. Dagmar dissuaded them forcefully. She left them with their lives but not their coin, which she cheerfully used to buy dried meat for the next stretch of our journey.
Sometimes, I found myself perversely hoping we would be accosted again, just so that I would owe less money by the end of this. Would I have to sell all my possessions to pay these two and, most likely, somehow escape Yekunde with my family? All of Silver’s possessions, and their parents’? By the Eighty-Three, would I have to go ask my parents for money?
That trek is a blur of rain and mud and complaints. I think my mind has rejected most of the memories. I fancied that Dagmar was always on the cusp of leaving us and remained only through momentum. Or, perhaps, through just how pathetic and helpless I was. The only way I knew to mark time or distance was by watching the steppe grasses slowly shrink, getting shorter and shorter by the day, until they almost resembled normal grass.
During that trip, the memory of Kalyna’s initial deception back in Desgol, of the lives she had endangered (or taken), sat numbly at the base of my skull. It buzzed about my head like a gnat, always just out of sight, reminding me of my growing complicity. Every day I didn’t tell Dagmar dug me deeper into the lie. Every time the mercenary beat or cut or scared away a threat—which was quite often, given my features and tattoos—I was actively benefitting from my passive omission.
But then, wasn’t Kalyna drawing me deeper into her lies for my own sake? I began to find that initial lie, and the possibility of further deceptions I did not see, as comforting. I was in good hands. Was her ability to deceive on my part any less morally justified than Dagmar’s easy violence? I began to feel so safe with these two that even the Zobiski memory became but a quiet nagging.
Yes, a voice in my head told me, everyone else is indeed waiting for the chance to turn on you, ruin you, drag you to their masters in exchange for scraps. But Kalyna will trick them all, or Dagmar will kill them all.
What’s more, through it all, whenever there was the energy or inclination for conversation, Kalyna remained a smart and engaging person to be around. She could even draw Dagmar out, now and then, and I began to see how the tall swordswoman had fallen for the cutthroat in the first place. Who else had ever shown such genuine interest in the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of a Dagmar Sorga? (Not I, I must admit.)
Then one day, one blessed day, the rains began to lessen. The grasses were, by that point, only up to my ankles, and I had already been relishing the town that had appeared in the distance. There, I might at least approach dryness for the first time in days. I hardly cared whether Dagmar would have to bloody some fools who wanted to turn me in—drudgery and numb discomfort had killed most of my sympathy.
Until the downpour fully stopped. The sun shone through, and we saw no more bloated clouds on the horizon ahead of us. Suddenly, I wanted to hug everyone in that town when I got there, even if they hated me.
None of us said a word for the next few minutes, so terrified were we of breaking the spell. Finally, it was Kalyna who cheered and began to caper in the sunlight. It seemed the freest I’d ever seen her, devoid of artifice or control. (In hindsight, I wonder if it was purposefully calculated to convey exactly that.)
So, with the sun finally shining, we strode into the bustling little town like we owned the place. Or perhaps like local heroes returned from war. I am sure we looked like wet rats.
Somewhere in all that rain and tall grass, we had apparently crossed an invisible line and were now in Skydašiai. It occurred to me that I should have felt something other than relief at being out of the rain. I had, after all, spent almost a year living in Quruscan, and I now expected never to return. It seemed to me I should have been having grand, complex, mournful feelings, but had instead simply skipped over them.
This first Skydašian town seemed no different, to me, than the last Quru one had, and I wouldn’t have known we’d crossed a border if we hadn’t stopped by a changing bank, where the money of one Tetrarchic kingdom could be exchanged for another, for a fee. It seemed absolutely ridiculous to me that the Tetrarchia’s four little governments couldn’t be bothered to decide on one unified currency. Loasht’s countless princes and margraves and obas and beys and arkas and so forth had all been forced to use the same coins for at least five thousand years.
We handed our Quru coins—silver abazi and copper puli, because the Quru didn’t like using gold coins—to a pale South Shore Skydašian clerk. In return, we received a small stack of Skydašian kudais, bronze-colored slips of paper which seemed awfully flimsy to me.
As we walked out of the changing bank, Dagmar knocked a fist against its outer wall and asked, “You think the Gustavus brats own this one?”
“Maybe,” said Kalyna. “Who knows? I lost track of all that.”
“Got lazy, you mean.” Dagmar let out a melancholy sigh, but her tone was light.
The clear sky had put us all in a better mood, and Dagmar into a reminiscing one. Kalyna left the shade of the bank to stand in the sunlight, basking in it.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Rich horse-fuckers,” said Dagmar. “Upon whom we planned to take revenge.”
“What even was the point, Dagmar?” sighed Kalyna. “It took months of hard work to get to Klemens, and the other two are still quite alive and much richer than we’d ever be from robbing them.”
“You also took Bernard’s little finger.”
“I can’t very well spend that.” Kalyna closed her eyes and turned her face up toward the sun. “I hardly remember why I hated them.”
“I think,” said Dagmar, “you have come to care so little about other people that you can’t even be bothered to hate those who deserve it.”
“That may well be,” replied Kalyna. She opened her eyes and laughed. “Maybe without Grandmother around modeling the most perfect hatred, I’ve forgotten how.”
“You probably shouldn’t speak of the dead that way,” said Dagmar.
I saw Kalyna’s smile, and body, tighten slightly, but she seemed to let whatever it was go. We began walking to the nearest market, as Dagmar made a series of uncomfortable noises in her throat.
“How did your grandmother die?” I asked.
Kalyna looked blank for a moment, and then she began to laugh. She put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself.
“The thing about it is,” she struggled to say through laughter, “I don’t know! She couldn’t . . . she couldn’t bear the indignity of anyone seeing her die, so one day she just . . . walked out into the steppe and never came back.”
Dagmar began to laugh as well. “She might still be out there!” she added.
“Oh yes!” Kalyna hiccupped. “Just walking angrily, hands on her hips!”
After two more days of travel, I finally began to feel dry. What’s more, now that we could see the sun, I knew in what direction we were heading, and it made sense with the vague map of the Tetrarchia I had in my head. We had been traveling westward; here in Skydašiai, and past the mountains entirely, we turned north toward the port city of Žalikwen. From there, Kalyna assured me, we would be able to cross the Skydaš Sea, which bisected the kingdom.
North Shore and South Shore, as Skydašiai’s halves are called, are officially on different continents. I don’t know the full history, but North Shore and South Shore used to house entirely distinct peoples, who have long since all become Skydašian. Many people in the farthest south still look like their sallow, lank-haired, robustly built ancestors; while many in the farthest north have the dark complexions, tight curls, and slim musculature of their own ancestors. But most Skydašians are somewhere in the middle, literally and figuratively.
South Shore Skydašiai was a verdant, sunny place that supplied much of the Tetrarchia’s produce and grains. According to the locals, South Shore fed the Tetrarchia, while North Shore protected it.
I wish I’d seen more of South Shore Skydašiai, but I spent most of that time hidden from view. Kalyna bought a rickety cart and a sturdy old horse, which we used to cut northward as quickly as we could. “Cheaper and more private than a tavern,” she said, so we slept in the cart, and I kept my head down whenever people were around.
Kalyna and Dagmar’s relationship had improved with the weather, but still fell into an awkward rhythm of laughter and reminiscing followed by uncomfortable quiet. It seemed to be one-sided on both sides: Dagmar feeling an unrequited love, and Kalyna feeling an unrequited friendship. But both feelings could be disguised as camaraderie, for now.
Through the slats in the side of the cart, I got glimpses of colorful clothing, often in leaf prints of green, orange, yellow, or brown, sometimes accompanied by jewelry and beads. From my hiding place, I heard a number of different local opinions on Loasht, the Blossoming, and “ex-Loashti” like me, but the people voicing them usually sounded resigned, almost fatalistic. They had lived in the shadow of Loasht for so long that it was simply a fact of life for them. (Perhaps they would have reacted differently if they’d known I was there.)
When I was not hiding, I got to enjoy the beauty and fragrance of Skydašiai’s miles and miles of fruit trees. I also finally got to improve my own beauty and fragrance, as Kalyna allowed me the use of her oils and lotions and so forth. She handled her own upkeep in a brisk and matter-of-fact way, as though she didn’t even realize she was doing it.
“My family’s business has always relied on our presentation,” she explained as she rubbed something lightly into the bags of her eyes, unbothered by the jumping cart. “I’ve been doing this since I was old enough to reliably use my hands.” She still did not explain what that “family business” was.
I almost began to feel presentable again, although I still mourned the many (many) bottles and gourds of ointments, unguents, and cocoa butters that Dagmar had not thought to pack for me in Abathçodu.
Upon reaching the Skydaš Sea, and the small, breezy port city of Žalikwen, I realized it had become summer without my realizing it. The sun was warm on my back, and I could almost forget, for a split second, how uncertain and dangerous the world had become for me, my family, and my community.
The sea itself was a brilliant, shimmering band of blue like nothing I had ever seen. North Shore Skydašiai was just visible in the distance, and off to the west, the little sea emptied out into the great ocean. Not only was the sun high in the sky, but the Skydaš Sea seemed soak up all the beautifully bright colors of Skydašian clothing and buildings. The houses closest to the sea were mostly painted in pink, which reflected brilliantly off the water.
Žalikwen shimmered as we approached it, made of bright colors and sunlight. Light and pale pinks, blues, yellows, and greens, dotted with a deep, luminous orange.
“Hmm,” grumbled Kalyna. “That’s bad.”
“What? It’s beautiful here!” I replied.
“I have a contact who may be able to get us across the sea, but we’d have to get to the docks to find him.” She pointed. “The Skydaš Sea has been open and free to all passengers since before Skydašiai became one people, centuries before the Tetrarchia began. But today, the docks are overrun with soldiers.”
I blinked. I did not think I saw soldiers. Then I realized that the deep orange peppering the city—contrasting with the bright bursts of architecture and sea, darker but also somehow shining—was the color of a uniform.
All at once, Zobiski memory (and indigestion) roiled into my guts, the same way it had when the mob came for me in Abathçodu. The same way it had five years earlier, on the day Aloe Pricks a Mare upon the Mountain Bluff returned to Yekunde.