Chapter 21

Shao Maralah Daonia lowered her blade, resisting the urge to slice out at Rainaa with it. Maralah practiced bare-chested in the chilly air of the courtyard reserved for the women of the Patron’s hold in Caisau. As a general rule, she did not prefer segregated spaces, but since arriving in Caisau, she had enjoyed the relative solitude of the women’s quarter. Only half the Patron’s wives lived here, and they kept their personal slaves close. She sent her usual sparring partner, Shao Driaa Saarik, south to Alorjan on reconnaissance to shore up the city for their expected retreat south. That left Maralah with many hours of solitary training here.

She took up her tunic from the slush-filled fountain and wiped the sweat from her face. The pain in her torso was less today than the day before. A broad scar rippled up her body from navel to armpit, the gutting blow dealt to her by the invaders who’d taken Aaraduan. They’d left her to die, which was a blessing of the Lord of Unmaking, for a certainty. They didn’t realize she had the hold’s soul at her call, to repair her to some semblance of living.

Rainaa waited patiently, clasping her little hands in front of her. She was a big-eyed northerner; Maralah could always tell by the cant of the nose, with northerners. Like the rest of the Patron’s slaves, her head was shaved bald, and she wore a purple wrap around her flattened forehead. Those born into servitude had the same sloped foreheads, an easy deformation to manufacture and impossible to hide. Slaves often bore the deformity as a badge of pride; newly conquered people or those plunged into servitude by debt or misfortune weren’t so marked and were treated with more distrust. But flatheads like Rainaa surrounded the Patron and his family like loyal, well-prized dogs. The Patron thought them perfectly tame.

It was a foolish complacency, Maralah knew. She had been a slave, a long time ago, and trusted not one word or expression people like Rainaa tried to sell her.

In truth, Maralah had known the Dhai were coming three weeks before, when Taigan sent word of their acceptance of his terms and told her he had a possible omajista. But she had been in the middle of burning the fields behind her during the hasty retreat of their last remaining army in the west. When she shared the news with her Patron that they had lost all but three hundred soldiers, the Dhai scholars were the last thing on her mind. Not for the first time, she wished the Dhai were some fearsome people they could hire as mercenaries, not bookmaking philosophers.

Official word of the Dhais’ agreement had come to the Patron some time later, with the Dhais’ terms. They must have finished hashing out some kind of paper treaty by now. As if words on paper meant anything. Maralah remembered burning shelves and shelves of old treaties back in Aaraduan. Just so much ink on paper, or hide, or bone, or whatever other fool thing they thought to make marks on.

Above her, the sky was a gray wash. At night, the cloak of the stars sometimes rippled. Staring at the night sky too long now made her seasick. She had seen the invaders coming through the tears in the sky, driving omajistas far more skilled than Taigan before them. But countering their forces without an equal number of those who could channel the dark star was impossible. If Taigan did not find more people like him, they were lost.

“I come presently,” Maralah said. Her chest tightened, but she banished her anxiety in the next moment. Foolish thing, to lose even that bit of calm in front of a servant. Rainaa was one of the Patron’s little partridges; her every word and wince would find its way back to him.

Rainaa bowed stiffly at the waist.

Maralah watched her go. Every time a new Patron’s family ascended the throne, they killed all the prior family’s men and women, and raised their children as slaves. She wondered how much it delighted former Patrons to have the descendants of their enemies preparing their meals and washing their cocks. Maralah found the whole thing unsettling.

She walked back to her rooms and changed into a clean black tunic. She changed her padded shoes for a sanisi’s proper boots and donned her coat, though it was early in the season for it. Most days were still above freezing.

Caisau’s hold had been patched and rebuilt hundreds of times, so it was a hodgepodge of organic and inorganic matter. She walked from the tumorous growth that was the women’s court and across the sky bridge to the central keep. Air moved through the hold from its skin, but light was another matter. Skilled tirajistas had lined the ceiling with bioluminescent flora around the entire outer perimeter of the hold. Windows only made an appearance as one neared the core of the keep or one of the centralized courtyards. Wandering Caisau’s hold was like scurrying up and down four or five cities, each of them trundled up on top of each other, then suddenly bursting into the open spaces of the yards with their mosaic of fountains and shimmering green gardens. Even during the worst of the winter, yards in the central keep stayed warm, heated from below by great geothermal vents that carried heated air from the nearby hot springs beneath the floor and into the walls.

That meant that as Maralah ascended, the air got warmer, and she soon regretted bringing her coat. Before the routing of the western army, she had thought they might hold Caisau another three months, maybe even all winter, but every report she received from her scouts said the invaders were marching straight for Caisau, stopping only to pick over any field or farmhouse Maralah’s razing party had overlooked. It would only be a few weeks before they had to abandon Caisau and move further south. Only her brother’s army remained intact, and they were still holding the east. Eighteen armies massacred in just five years, cities swallowed, villages leveled. Some days, she felt like Saiduan had turned to sand, now slowly trickling through her clenched fingers.

Maralah asked after the Patron at his diplomatic secretary’s desk and was directed to his private garden. One of his personal sanisi, Ganaa, held her up at the entrance and insisted one of his body servants announce her.

Maralah remained relaxed, despite her annoyance. She had saved the Patron’s life numerous times. To be treated like one of his servants, like Rainaa, sometimes grated. She thought their sense of ceremony would have broken down here at the end, but it was the opposite: the closer they were to annihilation, the tighter they all clung to ritual and ceremony.

“You may enter,” the Patron’s chief attendant said, and Maralah moved past him into the garden.

The garden was a riotous mass of color. Massive bamboo bird cages hung from weeping willow and birch trees entangled with ivy and holly and some hardy purple flowered thing that looked like wisteria. A great copper-colored stone at the center of the garden pushed gouts of water over its surface, where it tumbled into elaborate channels carved into the floor. Maralah walked over them; the mosaic of the grate above the streams of water was solid and very old.

At first glance, it appeared the Patron was alone. He was a tall, straight-backed man with soft hands and bright eyes. He was about her age, though she would not have believed it if she hadn’t read his birth date in some scandalous rag put out by the merchants in Albaaric on the occasion of his forty-fourth year. His face was a puckered morass of scarred tissue just below his jawline; he had grown a fine beard in an attempt to mask the scars, but it only drew attention to them. The Patron’s beard had become all the rage among Saiduan men and a few hirsute women, though, and now they all grew them out and trimmed them to the same squared-off wedge at the end.

The Patron wore a single piece of jewelry – a gold ring on his little finger with a pale blue stone the size of a robin’s egg. For a man so often shielded by the flesh of others, he dressed remarkably practically, a fact she had always respected. Unlike more established Saiduan families, he had fought for his seat, murdering eight of his brothers for it. Or, rather, Maralah had killed them for him. She had joined the Patron because he had an eye for economics and infrastructure, something she felt the country sorely needed. She and her brother provided the teeth. It was a cruel irony that the man she chose for peace now led them in the bloodiest assault the country had seen in two thousand years.

As he turned, she saw another sanisi on the other side of the garden, one of the younger men she had trained four years before. The Patron went nowhere without one of her people, preferably at least two of them. She had seen to that.

“Do you have any new reports for me?” the Patron asked. “Perhaps some good news, like the northern half of the country sinking into the sea and taking these blighted people with it?” He had a warm, soothing voice, the sort of voice that could lull a man to sleep, making it easier to slit his throat. But this Patron was more likely to use his voice to sway a man to his side of an argument.

“I do not, Patron,” Maralah said.

“Nothing from Taigan?”

“We’ve finalized our treaty with the Dhai,” he said. “They should arrive in a few weeks if all goes well. I’d like your counsel on who to send with them, if we’re all still alive by then.”

“Wraisau and Driaa,” she said. “Wraisau is already in Alorjan, and Driaa is on the way there for a reconnaissance mission. I need Kadaan here to oversee the patrols.”

“We’re spread very thin.”

“How many dead on the coast?”

“The last skirmish? A dozen, as well as General Araalia.”

“Araalia, too? Who’s taking his place?”

“I’m promoting his son.”

“His son isn’t even eighteen.”

“There were only two hundred men left under Araalia’s command. I thought to combine them with what’s left of Aaraduan’s forces, but two hundred men with a boy to lead them will move more quickly, and I needed someone to begin shoring up our defenses in the south. Should it come to that.”

“I am sorry about your brother,” the Patron said.

“I had reason to send him there instead of Araalia,” Maralah said. “He would have been the smarter strategist on that field. We grew up there. But I understand your decision.”

“With your children dead, it benefits–”

“I understand your reasons,” she said, because if he used his warm voice to talk any longer about how the fate of her line now rested on her thirty-six year-old brother’s ability to seed heirs, she might betray her annoyance. Her brother’s interest in women was generally only incited by strong drink, and then only if there were no strapping men about bearing traders’ tattoos. No doubt he would settle in with a family eventually, but with events taking shape around them, odds were their line died with them. She had given up seeing anyone of her blood survive the season. Her hope now was far less – that when it was all over, a single Saiduan person still lived. Maybe even a whole village. Somewhere remote. It was possible.

“I apologize,” the Patron said. “I still treat you as a colleague, not a subject.”

“We won the contest for the seat,” Maralah said. “No doubt your sons would have treated mine differently if I had them.”

“You know I rely on your loyalty now,” the Patron said. “More than ever.”

“I promise you, Patron, whatever I do, I do with your interests at heart.”

“And what you keep from me?”

“If I were to ever keep information from you, it would be for your protection,” she said.

“But you would keep it?”

“To save you? And Saiduan? Yes.”

He walked to the fountain. He washed his hands, then his face. Murmured a prayer to Para, Lord of the Air. Para was not his satellite; he was a tirajista, but Maralah had caught herself praying to every god in recent days. She had never spent so much time calling Oma’s name.

“Are the Dhai meant to kill me?” the Patron asked. He still had his back to her.

“No,” Maralah said. “I’m sorry I set that in motion so quickly. It was a desperate effort. I knew Aaraduan was lost.”

He straightened. “The Maralah I know would have died on the wall at Aaraduan.”

She rolled that over. He had been distant and dismissive since she crawled back from Aaraduan alone, bleeding out from a wound that should have killed her. She might have died, even with the soul of the hold to keep her upright, if Kadaan had not come back through the upper tiers of the hold before their final retreat, doing one last sweep as she’d taught him, and hauled her out the rest of the way.

“I’m yours, Patron.”

“I wonder,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the first time one of these invaders replaced a woman I trusted with her shadow.”

“I’m the Maralah you know. No other. We’ve been over this.”

“Is Taigan yours or mine, Maralah?”

“We’re all yours,” Maralah said. “I burned that ward into Taigan to make sure Taigan was yours. If they replace one of us again, you’ll know.”

The Patron turned and pressed himself into her space. She held her ground, so their faces were inches apart. In her boots, she was nearly as tall as he. His beard tickled her chin. She felt the heat of him and smelled cloves and brandy on his breath, his afternoon repast.

She expected a knife in the gut. It would be a fitting way to end things. Unexpected, from his hand, but fitting.

“You killed a good many men to get me this seat,” he said. “I ordered more put to death to keep it.”

“Yes,” Maralah said. She dropped to her knees. It hurt. She wasn’t twenty, and her body let her know it. She gazed up at him. He towered over her now, and in his soft eyes she saw anger and something that unsettled her more – fear. “I was yours then, and I am yours now,” she said. “They can read ancient Dhai. We can’t.”

“Get up,” he said.

“You infuriate me,” he said.

“I told you I was not a soldier, nor a wife,” she said. “I am a sanisi. You’ve trusted me to get you into this seat. Trust me to keep you in it.”

He leaned into her again, so his lips brushed her ear. “I am afraid this is a fight we will lose.”

“I’m not,” Maralah said. She placed her hand over his left breast. She felt the spongy mass of his tirajista-manufactured heart there, warm and taut, but so terribly fragile.

He caught her wrist but did not pull her hand away.

She said nothing. Just rested her hand there, a reminder. Seven years ago, she and an especially skilled tirajista had built that bloodthirsty, plant-based organ when a bolt passed through his original heart, striking him down on the field. She still counted it among her greatest accomplishments.

“We’ll win,” she said. “All looked lost that day, too, when you dropped on the field. But we came back. We will always rally, Patron.”

He had become more short-tempered after Aaraduan. Four of his cousins had died when their retreating caravan was ambushed by a small force of invaders. She worried he was losing his faith in her and the sanisi who had risked everything to keep his heart beating.

He drew away. “Set things up with Driaa and Wraisau,” he said. “I’ll want to meet with these Dhai before we let them into the archive room, though. I want to be absolutely certain there are no enemies among them. We can’t have Caisau compromised.”

“I understand,” Maralah said.

“You can go,” he said.

Maralah relaxed and moved toward the archway.

“Yes?” She did not turn. There were times when she could not bear to look into his face, because she saw the young man he had been, the sparkling, handsome youth with the black eyes that everyone – man or woman – fell headlong into, until all they could see was his vision for Saiduan, for the restoration of a bloated empire stretched far too thin. Twenty years he worked to make them stronger. But it hadn’t been enough. Now, to her eyes, he looked tired and broken, and she feared that if she looked too long at him, too often, she’d see her own broken face reflected back at her.

“If you betray me,” the Patron said, “by twisting Taigan or anyone else, or if you are not the Maralah I know, I will have your hair, and then your life, however little that means to you now, and however much I cannot spare you.”