The wind was born of a dreamshifter, playing a leg-bone flute. Fingers as nimble as a young girl’s danced across the smooth bone, its owner now gone to song and dust and tears and the memories of her children. But the sunlight that warmed her back was still the same. Akari Sun Dragon spread his wings over Atualon just as he did over the Zeera, blessing the mother, the child, and the murderess alike.
Born of pain and betrayal and the ferocity of a mother’s love, the wind danced in defiance and grace along the walls and ramparts of Atukos, sparking it to dark flame and a life of its own—a small life, snuffed and smothered as quickly as it kindled. The little fires deep within knew that theirs was a false life and short, and burned ever the brighter for it, for such a life has no time for regret.
The wind whistled and hissed through the wide, arched windows and doorways of the dreamshifter’s rooms. Red spidersilk curtains billowed in the wind, they writhed like wraiths from Tai Damat come for the blood of men. Cruel shadows, still warm with the day’s lifeblood, caressed the dragonstone floors and walls to a semblance of life, ran sharpened claws gently over the thick white fur upon which she sat, even dared to ruffle the long black feathers dangling from her cat’s-skull staff. Yet for all their muttered curses and promises of death, they never quite dared touch the dreamshifter. They wailed in defeat down the wide corridors, off in search of softer prey.
The wind was sickly sweet with sweat and laughter, and the day’s long dying, and the dreams of young girls pregnant with song. Though the dreamshifter was past caring about such things as babies and shared meals and wishing-wells, though her heart was dry and gritty as a sandstorm, the sound of children singing in the streets—singing Sajani Earth Dragon to sleep, as they had done every night for time out of mind—caused her breath to catch and her fingers to slow. Thus the timbre of her music shifted, its intent grew less dark, and it lifted the heart to light and life.
Akari Sun Dragon furled his wings at just that moment. He plummeted into the warm clear waters of Nar Bedayyan in search of his sleeping mate, plunging the world into a soft twilight and the scents of moonsrose and jasmine.
Hafsa Azeina’s dreaming eyes opened wider to catch the last redgold rays, her nostrils flared in appreciation of the night-flowers’ ardent celebration of life, and her intikallah unfurled, soft and scalding petals glowing white-hot with song for any echovete to see. She let the song take her where it would—when all paths lead to death, one might as well stop and watch a sunset.
The song carried her sa out the window and into the wide twilight. She spread herself thin upon the evening breeze and floated across the yard. Torches had been lit and they wrote their names in soot across the indigo sky. The light of the flames danced upon the oiled skin of a pair of massive wrestlers from the Black Isles as they stared at each other and roared like young bulls. But their violence was all lies and foolery, and she turned her mind back to the music.
The dreamshifter focused her dreaming eyes. She gathered herself in so that she was almost substantial and let herself drop like a stone, like a stooping hawk, down through the filtering starlight. She skimmed over a riotous mess of plant life, through the open window, and into a brilliantly lit room, and then she let herself go again to mist and memories and the faint smell of smoke. Her dreaming eyes did not see the world in the same light as her waking eyes, but Hafsa Azeina had been doing this for a long and bloody time.
She absorbed the bright songs, the loud blocks of color, the rich insistent pulse of life swirling about the floor like tide-pools seething with life. If she had been corporeal, she would have nodded in satisfaction.
I should have known he was involved, she thought. The loremaster is drawn to stories like a mantid to flowers.
Deep in Shehannam, she felt Khurra’an shift into wakefulness. He was irritated with her, and with his empty belly, and with the dark stone walls.
I should eat you, he grumbled. It would solve many of my problems.
She ignored that. Look what I have found.
He looked through her eyes, and gave a mental shrug. You should have known… he is a liar, after all.
That he is.
Loremaster Rothfaust sat as he often did, surrounded by an astonishing variety of flowers and an even more astonishing variety of children. His linen shirt was rolled up to reveal powerful forearms, and he had abandoned the robes of office for a gardener’s tunic and vest heavily embroidered in green and gold and brown with a riot of red and blue flowers along the hem. His hands were black with dirt almost to his elbows, his beard was so littered with twigs and leaves and flower-petals that he looked like a bird’s nest.
He was potting a young orchid, patting the bark and mosses gently into place about its roots, touching the pale leaves and talking to it as if it were one of the children who stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to finish settling the plant so that he might tell them a story.
“There you are,” he said, as he gave the moss a final pat and lifted the red pot with both hands. “Pretty little thing.” For a man his size he moved with surprising grace as he turned and set the little pot with its spray of tiny white and pink blossoms among a dozen or more of its kind.
“Here, Loremaster.” One small boy held a bowl of water so full it sloshed over his dimpled hands and soaked the front of his grubby tunic. Rothfaust smiled and took the bowl, but set it aside and wiped his hands on a bit of cloth.
“It is rest she needs now, rest and time to get over the shock. Orchids do not like to move from place to place, even when their feet are cramped. Now, who wants a story?” He laughed at the enthusiastic response and walked over to sit on a low wooden bench. The children arranged themselves on the floor around him, and Loremaster Rothfaust smiled at them. “What would my little flowers like to hear tonight? A sad story? A funny story?” He tweaked the nose of the grubby child with the wet tunic. “A scary story? No?” He laughed as the boy shook his head vehemently. “Not a scary story, then.”
“A love story!” giggled one of the middle-sized girls.
“A hero story!” one of the bigger boys countered. “And no kissing!”
“Hmmm. A heroic love story with no kissing. Hm.” He stroked his beard, hiding a smile behind his hand. “I believe I know just the tale. Have you ever heard the story of Zula Din, and how she learned the name of the sun?” He stretched his large, sandaled feet out in front of him, crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned back with a smile.
“Everyone knows the name of the sun,” complained the older boy. “It is Akari.”
“Nobody knows the real name of the sun.” This from one of the smallest children, a dark-skinned girl with the look of the Zeera about her almond-shaped eyes. “Our mouths are too small to speak his name.”
“Just so, Annana, just so.” Rothfaust nodded. “But Zula Din was a warrior and a storyteller, and she was a daughter of the First People besides—she was made of sterner stuff than you or I.
“It so happens that in the First Days, the world was a cold place and dark. Illindra had not yet hung the stars in her web, and the moons were young and shy, so the First People hid in the dark, cold and afraid…” His voice sank into the low singsong of a true storyteller, wrapping the children in a web of his own.
Excellent. This would make her work so much easier.
As the loremaster wove his tale of love and adventure, Hafsa Azeina breathed her own song into it. As she wove the music of the leg-bone flute into and through and around his story, the children began to fidget, and then to droop, and finally to slump one after the other, eyes glazing over and breath leaving their little bodies in long, reluctant sighs.
Rothfaust never ceased in the telling of his tale, never broke the line or the cadence of his words. He leaned forward and gathered the grubby child into his lap. He stroked the boy’s drooping curls, and with gentle fingers, closed his dark eyes.
“And this is how Zula Din pinned Akari Sun Dragon to the sky using his true name, and how he came to love her. But there was no kissing.” Rothfaust looked up from the child’s face, his mouth a straight hard line and his eyes snapping with fury. He looked directly at her. “If you harm them…”
Hafsa Azeina was so startled that she almost dropped the tune.
I would never.
“You would, if you thought you had to. You would. I am warning you now—if you bring harm to these children, I will hunt you as you have never been hunted in this life.”
She allowed herself to take a more substantial form and floated down to hover near him, careful not to brush against the sleeping children.
I will not. His mind was hot to the touch, his thoughts the blue-white of a flame’s heart, and they smelled of things that grew in the warm shade.
“What do you want?”
She saw no benefit in lying. An ally.
“Ah. And why would you seek an ally in me, Dreamshifter?”
The air shuddered at her laugh. We have a history, you and I. We were friends, once.
“You came to me then as a frightened little hare, desperate to save the life of her child. You return now as the hawk. Indeed, if the stories I hear hold any truth in them, you have become a monster. What need does a monster have of friends?”
I am a monster, she agreed, though not the monster you imagine. And my daughter is no monster at all—she is innocent.
“If by ‘innocent’ you mean ‘ignorant,’ I have to agree. You cannot protect your daughter by keeping her in the dark, Queen Consort.”
The queen consort is dead. I killed her myself.
“Indeed?” He raised his eyebrows.
There is no escape from Atualon save through death. It was necessary.
“A pity, that. I would dearly have loved to have a long talk with her… a very long talk. There are things I cannot tell anyone else, and especially not to a barbarian dreamshifter who comes to me with blood on her tongue.” He reached up to stroke his beard, and looked down at the child in his lap. “It occurs to me that the way out is often the way in, as well. If the dreamshifter were to die…”
Die again, live again. Scorn dripped from the words like venom. Do you think it is so easy?
“As easy as falling asleep and waking to the sun of a strange world. I risked much to help the queen consort, and I would do so again—but I cannot do as much for a foreign sorcerer, no matter how much she may look like an old friend. I am bound to serve the rulers of Atualon, and some rules even I will not break.”
Are you not bound to protect my daughter, then? What if I were to tell you that the Nightmare Man is real, as we had suspected? That I believe he was involved in the Araids’ attack on Sulema? I may be a monster, but I have my limits. I do not eat children.
His hand tightened spasmodically on the boy’s tunic, but Loremaster Rothfaust shook his head, stubborn as ever.
“You have no power here, Dreamshifter. Such things as I might know, such things as I might say are for the ears of the queen consort.” He looked straight at her then, and his eyes held a warning. “Or for the ne Atu, if they were to come asking. As I said, I am bound.”
Bound by whom? she wondered, but there was no time to ask. The song trailed off into wind and memory, calling her back, carrying her home. Loremaster Rothfaust and his tender little flock faded from her vision as if they had never been.
As she sped back to her chambers on the wings of a dying song, Hafsa Azeina came upon her apprentice Daru sitting on the wide steps of the Queen’s Tower, sitting cross-legged and playing a strange little tune on his bird-skull flute. His eyes were closed, a look of serenity lit his thin face, and his intikallah spat and glowed with sparks like a campfire made from too-green wood. The boy’s knives lay to one side, and shadows thick as poisoned syrup gathered about him, so much like the children had gathered about Loremaster Rothfaust that she paused in her flight, though the song had grown dangerously quiet.
Daru, she sent softly so as not to startle him, what are you doing?
I’m playing for them, he answered in kind, never pausing in his playing. They are hungry.
Yes, but… why? That is very dangerous.
I am used to it. His music shrugged and took on an amused violet-green tint. Better they follow me than the other children. Besides… if I play for the shadows, they let me throw my knives at them.
She felt her dream-self flicker. Throw your knives at them?
Ashta says that a knife dancer practices even in his sleep, and they are the only things that come into my dreams besides you. They think it is funny.
Ashta said you should throw knives at shadows?
His music took a dark turn. Ashta said I should throw my knives at birds… and small-cats. But she also said I should never throw my knives if I did not mean to kill. I like birds. His whistle piped plaintively. And cats… I do not think Khurra’an would like it if I started killing cats. Even the little ones.
No, she agreed, he would not. I suppose if the shadows do not mind, there is no real harm in it. Still… it is dangerous for you to spend so much time near them. You look like the piper in the old stories, the one who stole all the little children.
The shadows whispered and hissed among themselves at this, with a sound like hot wind through dead leaves.
Daru played a sterner note, and the shadows subsided.
They are always with me, whether I play or no. He played the final notes of his odd little tune and let the music disperse among the shadows, swirling into nothingness like so many sparkling sand-dae. The shadows dispersed as well—most of them, anyway—and Daru sat still as death on the dark steps, hand holding the little flute in his lap. He did not open his eyes, and his intikallah still shot off bright-hot sparks in every direction.
“They used to try and steal me,” he said, his voice ringing oddly in the empty dragonstone stairwell. “Sometimes they still do. Someday maybe they will succeed. They have stopped trying to steal Sulema… does that mean she is all better? She has come to the city and met her father, so will we be going home now?”
Not for a long time, no, she answered. She still tires very easily. It may be some time before she regains her strength for such a journey.
His smooth young brow furrowed like an old man’s. “Ashta says she may never go back home. What does that mean? Sulema is Ja’Akari. She belongs to the people. How could she not go back? This is not her place.”
Hafsa Azeina felt herself fading, and shored up her music. The boy deserved an answer.
There is no need for Sulema to hurry back to the Zeera, Daru. For now, it is enough to know that she will live. There are skilled healers in Atualon, and her father is here. It is right that she gets to know her father, and that he should spend time with her as well. He loves her. Her brother is here, and there are cousins… family is important. Blood is important. You know this.
“Blood is important,” he agreed, “but her blood is the wrong color for Atualon. Her song is not here. Her song is in the Zeera.” Deep in the corners, the shadows shifted and chuckled, a nasty sound. “Your blood is the wrong color, too. It is blue and green. Like the sea.” He turned his bird-skull flute over in his hand, caressing it with his fingertips. “You are a long way from home. We all are. We should go home.”
The absence from her body was beginning to burn as her song played itself out, but still the dreamshifter lingered.
Is this a foretelling?
Daru waited a long time, so long she could feel the mist of her substance tearing itself thin, so long that she wondered whether he had fallen asleep. His intikallah dimmed and spluttered as if he were unsure of his answer.
“No,” he said after long last. “I do not think so. It is probably just a dream.”
Probably, she agreed, as the world ran red with pain and she fled back to her mortal shell. It is probably just a dream. But she was a dreamshifter, and he was a dreamshifter’s apprentice. They both knew better.
The song had ended by the time Hafsa Azeina returned to her body. She could feel her heart and lungs screaming, could hear the silence in her blood vessels as the blood forgot which way it was supposed to go. There was no song to guide her, so she flew up the dead bone and into her own mouth like corpse-breath, foul and poisoned, and when ka and sa recombined, she stiffened and arched her back and fell over as if she had been struck on the side of the head by a hammer.
Khurra’an was roaring inside her head, but her blood roared even louder and she could not make out what he was saying. Certainly it was not complimentary.
By the time she pulled herself together and sat up, the vash’ai was gone. She could feel his disgust with her carelessness through their bond, and sent a wordless apology.
No, he rebuffed her. No. Stupid cub, you. Get us all killed. I am going to go break something’s neck and lap up its blood and pretend it is you. Then she was alone in her thoughts.
But not alone in her room. Mattu Halfmask stood at a respectful distance, hands behind his back like a small child trying to conceal a forbidden treat.
Or like a grown man, she thought, scrambling to her feet, concealing a knife. Tonight he peered out from behind the gilded eyes of a white crane, framed all in feathers the color of soot and blood.
He stepped toward her as she swayed on her feet but stopped again when she threw her hands up between them. He pursed his eyes as he stared at the leg-bone flute.
“I had heard…” His smile was sardonic. “No one I knew, I hope.”
Hafsa Azeina turned her back to him as she replaced the flute in her box. She clenched her fists, hard, and shook them out again to still the shaking.
Too close. She had cut it far too close.
Stupid cub…
She continued to ignore Mattu as she washed her face with chill water from an ewer and dried it on a soft cloth. Both the water and the cloth went pink with her blood. She scowled and rolled her shoulders free of stiffness before turning to face her uninvited guest.
“Yes?” she asked, folding her arms over her chest. She was still scowling.
Mattu Halfmask turned half away from her again, and looked out the wide window overlooking the palace yard.
“I love to watch my sister’s troupe rehearse. She wrote this play herself, you know… it is about a young boy who mistakes a mymyc for a horse and tries to ride it. This spectacle will give her the audience she so desires, and she is quite beside herself with excitement.”
His hands were empty, and still clasped behind his back. Hafsa Azeina stepped closer for a look. Down in the torchlit yard, a handful of fools were play-acting. Two of them, dressed head-to-foot in black, stood close to each other and pranced like a horse, while another waved a red halter and chased them around in a circle.
Several of the Ja’Akari stood in a knot, watching the rehearsal and laughing. Their vests hung open as if they had been sparring. The young Zeeranim were watched, in turn, by a group of young Atualonian men with short straight swords at their hips and fatuous looks on their faces. It was a lovely night, fragrant and warm, and the torches and the stars winked at each other playfully.
She could not remember the last time she had seen such a ridiculous display.
“I can see why they call it a spectacle,” she said. “Whose idiot idea was this?”
“Oh, it was Leviathus’s idea, a grand celebration of his sister’s return, but Ka Atu was only too happy to oblige.” Mattu grinned beneath his mask. “It will be a grand celebration—fools and wrestlers, fireworks and dancers. Some of your barbarian warriors have even agreed to a demonstration of their fighting skills. Of course there will be magic. I am surprised that Leviathus has not tried to talk you into a performance.”
She snorted. “He knows better than to ask.”
“Does he? I wonder. He does not always know when to keep that pretty mouth of his shut. Not two days ago, he asked me if I knew anything about the Nightmare Man.”
The breath froze in her lungs.
“I told him nothing, of course. My dear cousin has so much on his mind these days, what with watching his father fade away, his sister nearly die, and his beloved stepmother almost kill herself with death-music. Now he has this spectacle to plan.” He waved out into the night. “I figured I would save him a bit of worry, and come straight to you. You were bound to find out in any case, sooner or later, unless you do kill yourself.
“Tell me, Queen Consort—where would your ka fly off to, if it were separated from your body when you die?” He shuddered theatrically. “Somewhere dreadful, I assume. Stuck in Illindra’s web, perhaps? Into the shadow-realm of Eth? Or would it simply fade away? I have always wondered.”
Hafsa Azeina leaned her back against the window frame and looked out into the night, letting her eyes grow cold and distant, and running an idle hand over the sill.
“Did you come here to speak in riddles? I am tired, Mattu. Perhaps I will feel like playing your game another day.”
White teeth flashed at her. “You were always my favorite, Hafsa Azeina. Sharp as that flayer’s knife. Not like my sister’s fools, or her foolish audience… who would ever be short-sighted enough to try and ride a mymyc? That idiot would surely have a short life.”
“Idiots often have short lives,” she replied. “Good night to you, Mattu.”
“Oh, very well, if you will not play, I will simply say what I have come here to say and be done with it. I dug around in the musty old box of my memories and found a bit of something that may interest you. Do you remember my brother Pythos?”
“I remember the stories, though I never met him.” The second-eldest son of Serpentus Ka Atu, Pythos had been killed when Wyvernus seized the Dragon Throne.
“It was rumored back then—I remember well, though I was not much higher than my mother’s knee, and not expected to understand what the adults were whispering back and forth over my head—that Pythos had taken an interest in his twin siblings. An unhealthy interest. It was said that he had been seen visiting the herb-sellers’ carts on market day… also that he had been to visit a certain child-seller in Eid Kalish.”
“A child-seller?” She did not mask her surprise. “He could not have been much more than a child himself.”
“Thirteen or fourteen at the most,” Mattu agreed. “Fifteen when he died. It was rumored at the time that he was interested in selling off his competition, but before he could act on his plans Serpentus was deposed and killed—or killed and deposed, I am not clear on how that works—and my brother was tossed down the side of the mountain. Lucky for me, I suppose. His Draiksguard were all executed, of course, as was his secretary, but our old wet-nurse is still kicking around here somewhere, and Pythos’s body double—and better yet, his favorite concubine. They were both very young at the time, and she was rumored to have been with child, but no child ever surfaced.”
“Why was his body double spared, when the guards and servants were executed? That seems unusual.”
“Ah, that is a curious story as well. The official version is that the lad was visiting sick relatives in the countryside when Atukos came under siege.” He smiled, and his eyes lit in the torchlight. “Darker rumors would have it that this boy was a distant relative… some by-blow of a cousin of Serpentus, or some such.”
“This is all very interesting, but I am not sure what it has to do with the Nightmare Man. Or with me.”
“Intrigue, and rebellions, and plots against the king? And you are forced to return Sulema to Atualon just as the old king breathes his last. This is the very stuff of nightmares, or I am one of my sister’s fools. I will leave it to you to sift through rumor and innuendo. As for myself, I believe I will head down to the yard and enjoy my sister’s play, and the sight of your young barbarians. Their penchant for flaunting their tits is causing tongues to wag among our older citizens, you know. That is a spectacle in itself.”
He stepped away from the window and sketched a mocking little bow.
Hafsa Azeina nodded to him, reluctantly. “I appreciate the information, Mattu. I may have misjudged you.”
He laughed at that, and turned to stride from her rooms. “Oh, Hafsa Azeina,” he shook his head. “I doubt that very much.”
* * *
Once she had made up her mind to do a thing, Hafsa Azeina never hesitated.
The hairdresser she had summoned gathered up the dreamshifter’s locks in both hands, tugging and twisting at the tangled mess, unable to hide the dismay in her voice. “It will all have to be cut away.”
“Not cut,” she replied, and scowled irritably at her own reflection. She hated mirrors. “Combed out. I wish to save as much hair as possible.”
“But, Meissati…”
“You will address my mistress as ‘Queen Consort,’” Daru corrected, as he had been instructed.
“Queen Consort, forgive me,” the woman stammered, “I will need to fetch my apprentices. And oils. And…”
Hafsa Azeina raised her hand, forestalling any further protest. And smoothed the scowl from her face. Again.
“Your command, Meissati.” The woman bowed her way out of the rooms.
Hafsa Azeina smoothed the scowl from her face. Again.
Cool as rain, she reminded herself, calm as a windless day.
Timid as a tarbok, scoffed Khurra’an. Why would you disguise yourself as prey?
The better to lure them in, she replied.
Ah… an ambush predator, then. Like the mymyc.
Exactly so.
The Ja’Akari do not approve of liars. I do not think your Zeeranim would like this.
What of you? Do you approve?
I am a cat, he answered, which was no answer at all. Enjoy your game, Dreamshifter. I am going to go find something to eat. He sauntered from her rooms, tail-up and laughing.
Hafsa Azeina glanced at the mirror, and smoothed the scowl from her face. Again.
Serene as a mountain lake, she reminded herself, confident as the stars, steady as the moons.
There she saw it, at long last, peering out at her from her own eyes.
The face of a queen.