10

When Lilia came to the crossroads, she did not halt the bear, though foam lathered its snout. She pulled out a short blade sheathed behind her with the sanisi’s other supplies, and used it to cut back the worst of the plant life that barred their path. Her wrists and ankles were covered in red welts and broken thorns. A giant swinging vine nearly knocked her from her seat. She untied the sanisi’s supplies and used the cord to tie herself to the saddle.

She sent Kalinda letters six times a year, on the major festivals and religious holidays. Kalinda had her address them Way House Hyacinth, Mark 21, Oma to Garika. It meant Way House Hyacinth was at the twenty-one-mile mark on the road that ran from the Temple of Oma to Garika. Dhai had no regular mail service; it was all taken up by traveling merchants and delivered along with other shipments.

When Lilia came to the door of the way house, she was bleeding and exhausted from her tangle with the hungry plant life along the road. She slid from the bear, filthy and aching, and climbed the steps of the porch with great effort. The door – as all doors were in Dhai – was not locked.

She stepped inside.

Kalinda Lasa sat at one of several round wooden tables at the center of the room, speaking to two older women and a boy. Another young woman stood to the rear of the room, leaning easily in the doorway to the kitchen. She moved immediately forward when Lilia entered. The others stayed seated.

Kalinda cocked her head at Lilia. She was much older than Lilia remembered. Her white hair was wound about her head in one easy spiral, as if some tornadic wind had shaped it. She wore a bright red skirt and purple blouse beneath a leather vest buckled at the front with three large, eye-shaped silver buttons.

“Are you all right, child?” Kalinda asked as she rose.

Lilia had a terrible fear that Kalinda did not remember her. Oma, she had come all this way and given up the only friend she had for nothing.

“I’m Lilia Sona, and there is a sanisi coming here for me. Maybe something worse.”

Lilia saw recognition pass across Kalinda’s face. Lilia’s relief was so sharp that her eyes filled with tears. There is a time to mourn, and a time to act, the sanisi had said. She wiped her eyes.

“It’s all right, Gian,” Kalinda said.

The tall woman who had been standing far across the room was now within just a few paces of Lilia. The woman, Gian, took a step back and crossed her ropy arms. Her long, dark hair fell nearly to her waist in a thick braid. Lilia found herself a little jealous of it. No one in the temple had long hair.

“Get inside,” Kalinda said. “Gian, bolt that door. You remember how? Lilia, come with me.” She gestured to the others at the table. “Go home. Quickly and quietly. Wake our guests and send them on their way. We need the house clear.”

Kalinda came forward. Her plump, round face was heavily lined, very serious, the thin lips pressed tightly into something that was not quite a frown.

“When did they come?” Kalinda asked.

“A day… two days ago. He wanted me to go with him.”

“You specifically? Did he forcibly take you?”

“No. He saved my friend. I agreed to come with him.”

“Come downstairs. Gian, you too.”

Gian reentered from the kitchen, carrying a large beam with her. It was a knotted thing, silvery with some still-living plant compound that Lilia did not recognize.

“Why does he want me?” Lilia said. “Why are there people chasing me?”

“Come,” Kalinda repeated.

Lilia followed her into the cellar. It was built among the roots of the massive tree that made up one wall of the way house. The large roots bore carved compartments for storing foodstuffs and supplies. Lilia passed row upon row of pickling jars and fibrous, knee-high seed pods that held water and wine.

Kalinda walked to one of the tree roots at the back of the cellar and released a catch that let a chunk of the root pull away. Inside was a dark space. She held a flame fly lantern ahead of her. As they entered, Lilia saw that the room was a perfect sphere lined in the decayed skin of an old bladder trap plant. Lilia recognized the shape from her classes in ecology and vegetal manipulation. She had heard they grew beneath the soil of trees like these, feeding on bears, giant shrews, and careless people, but it was the first one she’d seen up close.

Kalinda set the lantern on the carapace of some giant dead thing, its form lost as it was digested by the bladder trap. Whatever the bladder trap secreted, it kept this creature more or less mummified.

“Tell me precisely what happened,” Kalinda said.

Lilia told her. Not just about the sanisi, but about the mark on her wrist the sanisi said he could see, the map on the Assembly Chamber table, and the familiar weapons of the sanisi’s attackers.

“Why did you go looking for that mark?” Kalinda said.

Lilia straightened. “I made a promise to my mother.”

“You were a child.”

“I’m not a child anymore.”

“No,” Kalinda said, eyeing her. “You are not.”

“What happened all those years ago matters,” Lilia said. “I thought I was mad, or misremembering, but whatever happened that day is the reason these people are after me, isn’t it?”

“You should tell her,” Gian said.

“Yes, I must,” Kalinda said. “Your mother led a resistance against the Kai, and powerful people wanted to destroy her and take you. They thought you might be powerful too, someday.”

“The sanisi thinks that,” Lilia said. “But I’m not gifted.”

“Someday you might be,” Kalinda said. “Your mother was supposed to send you and six other children here that day, so we could protect them. But only you showed up. I came back to look for the others after I brought you home, but there were none. I suspect the other side has them now. You’re all we have.”

“We?” Lilia said.

“The resistance,” Gian said. “Against the Kai.”

“But what’s the Kai done?” Lilia said.

“It’s complicated,” Kalinda said.

“It’s not the Kai you know,” Gian said. Kalinda shushed her.

“We need to hide you again,” Kalinda said. “The sanisi will easily find you here.”

“No more hiding,” Lilia said. “Take me to the place on the map.”

“We can’t do that,” Kalinda said. “There’s nothing there.”

Lilia got angry. She was exhausted and bleeding from her trek through the seething forest, and it felt like a betrayal. “I came here for your help. If you can’t help me, I’ll go back to the sanisi.”

“You’re as stubborn as–” Kalinda broke off, started again. “This isn’t some duck chase, child.”

“I’m not a child. I’m far past the age of consent. I won’t consent to go anywhere or do anything until you take me to that place on the map. That was my home, Kalinda.”

“It’s not what you think it is,” Gian said.

“That sanisi may be just behind you,” Kalinda said, “or, worse, his attackers. Let’s leave this place together. We can discuss our destination on the way.”

Lilia hesitated. It was her best option. She nodded curtly.

“Good girl,” Kalinda said.

But as Kalinda withdrew, Lilia felt the same way she did when the sanisi asked her to trade her freedom for Roh’s life. It was as if she had been offered a choice that was not a choice at all.

Kalinda and Gian moved around Lilia as if she wasn’t there, busying themselves with packing and preparing. They left her alone with the flame flies. Standing in the dark while the world moved around her, while others made decisions about her fate, had been a constant her whole life. She felt pulled in every direction, with no control over any of them.

She picked up the lantern and moved toward the back of the bladder trap. At the far end, the spiky protrusions that kept those trapped from exiting had been cut away, so the long tube of the trap that led to the surface could be reached freely from either direction.

If she left alone now, she would eventually be eaten by something unsavory. And where would she go? The Woodlands? The coast? Where could a hunted Dhai go when it was not only foreigners who hunted her, but her own people?

Trapped. No matter which way she turned.

Lilia set the lantern onto the table. She heard a commotion above her. Pounding at the door. Loud voices.

She looked again to the bladder trap’s tiny exit. She had no map but the one from her memory, and no gift but the knowledge of woodland plants her mother had passed on to her.

But she’d made a promise to her mother and to herself. She was done with doing other people’s laundry and being pushed around in service to other people’s causes.

Lilia hooked her good foot into the side of the bladder trap and pulled herself up through the kill hole. She hauled herself forward on the nubs of the old spiky protrusions. They dug into her chest. She had to let out her breath to squeeze through. For one horrible, black moment, she thought she was stuck. She huffed out more air and pushed into the open air.

Outside, dawn was still only a promise on the horizon. This time, she did not look back, not even once. She located the blue blush of Para as it rose through the trees in the pre-dawn sky. She stumbled out onto the road heading east, to the woodland, to the sea.