Kai didn’t hear from Mara for two weeks. When the other woman finally made it up the steep cliff steps to the balcony where Kai lay convalescing, she waited out of sight by the stairs, presumably working up the will to speak.
At first Kai—pillow propped in bed, white sheets pooled around her waist, wearing a hospital gown and reading the Journal—ignored her. Mara didn’t like pain, physical or emotional, always last to shed her blood on an altar stone. Kai’d mocked her reluctance, but fourteen days into recovery, she was coming to understand the woman’s caution.
So she read the business section, waited, and pretended not to notice Mara. She ran out of patience halfway through the stock columns. “You should short Shining Empire bonds,” she said then, loud so her voice carried. “Hard and fast. Today. Exchanges don’t close in Alt Coulumb until eight. Plenty of time to arrange the trade.”
“You knew I was here.”
“Saw you climbing the stairs.”
“Glad you’re in good spirits.” Kai didn’t need to look to know the shape of Mara’s smile: slantwise and sarcastic.
“The nurses won’t let me anywhere near spirits.” Kai turned the page, and scanned an editorial by some bleeding heart in Iskar, suggesting that all the other bleeding hearts in Iskar join a crusade to stop the civil war in the Northern Gleb. No plan, just hand wringing and noble rhetoric. Fortunately: Iskar didn’t have a good history with crusades. “Alt Coulumb’s index funds are up, and the Shining Empire debt market’s rebounded. Turns out the rumors of open trade on their soul exchange were wrong after all.”
“Does that matter now?”
“False panics make for overcorrections. Shining Empire soul-bonds are trading twenty points higher than a month ago. The price will normalize in a week. Short-sell. Borrow against our AC index holdings to finance the trade. Act fast, and you’ll make back everything the Grimwalds lost when Seven Alpha died. A peace offering. I’d do it myself, but nobody’ll let me near the trading office. I had to take a nurse hostage to get them to give me a goddamn newspaper.”
Mara strode past Kai to the balcony’s edge. Slope wind whipped the hem of her dress like a luffing sail. “It’s too late for peace offerings. They want a sacrifice.”
“You mean the Grimwalds. And their Craftswoman.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what it sounded like in my deposition, too,” Kai said. “How’d yours go, by the way?”
Mara shuddered, and stared out over the rail, down the volcano.
Kai did not bother to look. She’d grown accustomed to the view. Kavekana, beautiful as always: stark black stone slopes, colonized even at this violent height by lichen, moss, and adventurous ferns. Farther down, grasses grew, and farther still palms, coconut, and imported date. Epiphytes flourished beneath the trees. Past those Mara would see signs of humankind, the fiercest invasive species, asserting presence with rooftop and stone arch, temple and bar and gold-ribbon road, traces thicker as the eye proceeded south until slope gave way to city and beach and the paired peninsulas of the Claws. In their grip the glittering harbor thronged with tall-mast clippers, schooners, the iron-hulled hulks of container ships anchored near East Claw’s point where the water was deep enough to serve them. Other islands swelled, purple ghosts, on the horizon. Craftsmen’s spires hovered out there, too, crystal shards almost as tall as the volcano, flashing in the sun.
Kai had tired of it all in her first week of bed rest with nothing to do but watch the sea beat again and again on Kavekana’s sand. Boring, and worse, a reminder of her own atrophy. No doubt the nurses thought the physical therapy they guided her through each day would help, but to Kai it felt like a joke. Raise this arm, lower it, raise it again. No weights, no failure sets, no rage, no fight, no victory. If it hurts, tell me and we’ll stop. The first time she tried not to tell them, they threatened to give her even easier exercises unless she cooperated. Not that she could imagine easier exercises. Perhaps they would devise a system to help raise her arm, some elaborate contraption of counterweights and pulleys.
She set her newspaper aside and watched Mara’s back. Her dress was the kind of blue desert folk said skies were: dry and pale and distant. A curve of calf peeked out beneath her skirt’s drifting hem. Whatever bravery brought Mara here had given out, or else the scenery had crushed her into silence.
“If my mother saw you like this,” Kai said, “she’d have you lacquered and mounted on a ship’s prow.”
“Do they do that? Living ships?”
“I think someone made real ones back in the God Wars, for the siege of Alt Selene. Forget whose side it was, or whether they kept the spirit’s source body on ice for later. Probably not. It was a rough war. So I hear.”
“I feel like that, sometimes. Don’t you?”
“Mounted? Only on a good day.”
She laughed, without sound. Kai could tell by her shoulders’ shake. “No. Like those bowsprit figures, I mean.” When Mara turned from the view, Kai saw she wore a blush of makeup. Interesting. She’d come armored. “Other people trim the sails and turn the wheel and the ships go where they want. The bowsprit woman’s stuck. She’s the ship’s point. Whatever danger they meet, she meets it first. She can’t even mutiny, or leave.”
“Maybe she does,” Kai said. “Maybe she bails, and takes the ship with her. Breaks it on rocks. Dashes it to pieces in a storm.”
“Hell of a choice. Live imprisoned or kill everyone you know breaking free.”
“Is it life if you’re trapped inside it?”
“As long as you’re breathing, that’s life.”
Kai touched her chest through the stiff scratchy gown. “I’m breathing now. I don’t know if I’m alive. Don’t feel alive wearing this thing, anyway.”
“It looks good on you.”
“There hasn’t been a person made that a hospital gown looks good on. They say I’ll have my own clothes back next week, Seconday probably.”
“That long?”
“Jace doesn’t want me to leave before I’m healed, and he knows he won’t be able to stop me once I can put on my own pants.” Using her arms as a prop, she sat up, twisted sideways, and rested her feet on the stone floor. Mara stepped forward to help, but Kai waved her back, groped for, and found, her bamboo cane. She leaned into the cane, testing its strength and hers. Satisfied, she stood, though slower than she liked. “So, why did you come?”
“There has to be some secret motive?” Mara’s face betrayed no pity, only the fear Kai had seen in her few visitors’ eyes already, the fear of the healthy in the presence of the hurt. “I miss you. Gavin does, too, but he’s afraid if he visited you’d get the wrong idea. You can’t imagine the turnings in that boy’s mind. He asked me how much I knew about your family, because he wants to come visit, but he wants to bring orchids because his mother always told him to bring orchids to convalescent women, but he wants to know if you were raised traditional enough to get the reference, because he doesn’t want you to think that he’s bringing you flowers because he likes you, not that he doesn’t like you, but. You see. He thinks of conversations like a chess game, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”
Mara paced as she spoke, addressing cliff face and ocean and empty bed and her own hands, everything but Kai herself. “I’m glad you miss me,” Kai said, “but that’s not why you’re here, especially not in that dress.”
Mara stopped midstride. “I like this dress.”
“So do I, but you dress fancy when you’re scared. What of? Kevarian? The Grimwalds?”
“Of you, I guess. A bit.”
“I got hurt. It happens sometimes.”
“Hurt. People pull a muscle dancing, or break their arm rock climbing, or if they’re having a bad year they tear a tendon. That’s what hurt means. You, though. Do you even know what happened to you?”
“They read me the list. I recognized most of the words.”
“You almost died.”
“I almost a lot of things.”
“I saw Jace’s eyes when he looked into the pool as you were drowning. I didn’t think he could feel fear. Or pain. You scared him down there. I’ve only seen him look that way in prayer: awed. By you, and what you’d done.”
“Awe,” she said, tasting the word. “Awful, maybe. I tried to help, and it didn’t work. That’s all this is. If I’m lucky Jace won’t fire me.”
“I wouldn’t have done what you did.”
“That’s obvious.” Kai saw Mara flinch, and regretted her choice of words.
“That idol was my charge, and I didn’t try to save her. And don’t say it’s because I’m smarter than you.” She held up a hand. “Don’t say it. You talk tough, but you jumped into the water. I keep wondering why.”
“The Craftswoman asked the same thing.”
“She scares me.”
“Me too.”
“I read your deposition,” Mara said.
“I didn’t think they were showing those around.”
“Do you really think you were wrong to jump in?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. Because if you lied, that’s twice you’ve thrown yourself on a sword for my sake. By the pool, and in the deposition.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. We’re all at risk here. Jace. Me. The priesthood. The island. It’s easier if I was wrong.”
“Why did you jump?”
I jumped because she screamed. Because her eyes were open. Because she was alone. Because you were frightened. Because no one else would. “You and Gavin were boring the twelve hells out of me.”
Softness in Mara’s eyes, and in the declination of her head. “Don’t be cute. Please. I want to know.”
Kai felt naked on that balcony save for bandages and scars, in front of Mara in her makeup and her dress. She ground the tip of her cane into the floor. Her left shoulder ached where Seven Alpha’s teeth had torn her. “Haven’t you ever felt sorry for a hooked fish on the line?”
Mara smiled slantwise once more, not sarcastic this time. Some weight kept her from smiling in full. She approached, heels on stone, and stood warm and near. Before Kai could pull away—cane, injury, two weeks’ rest slowing her down—Mara grabbed her arms, then hugged her, pressing against Kai’s bandages. Her touch was light, but Kai still bit down a gasp of pain. Mara withdrew. “I do now.” Another step back, and a third. “I didn’t come here to thank you. You took the worst moment of my professional life and added the guilt of almost killing a friend. And even if Jace fires you he never will look at me the way he looked at you drowning. I came here planning to cuss you out, but I don’t have it in me. I’m glad you’re alive, is all.”
“Thanks,” Kai said. And, because there was no other way to ask it: “Mara. Did your idol … did you ever hear anything in the pool? A voice? Words?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”
Howl, bound world, Kai heard again, on the mountain wind.
“Did you?” Mara asked.
Kai did not meet her gaze. “Will you make the trade?”
“Short the Shining Empire bonds, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“You should.”
“You’re no good at letting things go.”
“So folks have said.”
Mara stood still as a shoreside Penitent or a bowsprit maid. Then she shook her head, smile softer now and wistful sad, and walked away.
Kai sagged into her cane, but tensed again when Mara spoke behind her. “Get better. And be careful.”
“I’ll try.” She listened to the wind and to Mara’s receding footsteps. When only wind remained, she walked three-legged to the balcony’s edge. The cable car descended the slopes below. Through its window she saw a flash of blue dress.