Chapter 24

Traveling across Dhai unnoticed was not as difficult as Lilia imagined. The spaces between the clans were toxic, contaminated, crawling with poisonous plant life. Most people took the Line, riding inside the shining chrysalis that traveled along the tirajista-trained cables linking the temples and holds. The few who took carts stayed on the roads. And they always traveled during the day, unlike the night-traveling sanisi who urged Lilia on.

Taigan bought another bear – with no small amount of grumbling at the trouble Lilia had caused him – and escorted her across the Dhai valley to the pass at the Liona Stronghold. The stronghold was as old as Dhai, a massive construct of parajista-shaped stone wrapped in vines and tirajista-trained trees that clawed at the sky. The pass cut through the jagged mountain range separating Dhai from Dorinah – more a canyon than a rolling path – and the stronghold spanned the rent in the mountain range at its narrowest point. The stronghold was far vaster than Lilia thought possible, even from the illustrations she saw in books. She had thought the Temple of Oma the largest structure in Dhai.

“I can’t believe we built such a thing,” Lilia said. She looked forward to a bath and a meal that didn’t involve Taigan trying to press her into eating dead animals.

Taigan snorted. They were alone on the road. It was nearly dusk, and most people had stopped at the way house eight miles behind them. “Gifted tricks build great things,” he said. “But they can be torn down as easily as anything else.”

“How can you say that? It’s been standing five hundred years. The Dorinahs never once got over it.”

“Your Dorinahs have far greater priorities,” Taigan said, “and far fewer gifted people. It’s not your petty militia they fear, but your ability to call on the satellites.”

“So, you’re saying the Dhai are good at something?” Lilia said.

“No,” Taigan said, and began to lead the bear off the road.

“Where are you going?”

“Around Liona,” Taigan said.

“But… they interview any Dhai going in or out. If they don’t have a record that you left, you can’t get back. They’ll think I’m an exile.”

“You won’t be returning,” Taigan said. “Or have you forgotten your oath to me?”

Lilia gazed up at the hulking stone of the hold and felt a renewed burst of fear. She had agreed to leave Dhai forever. Twice now.

“We’re going around,” he said.

“You can’t go around the pass,” Lilia said. “It’s… impossible.”

“It’s not impossible,” Taigan said. “Simply not pleasant. You’ll need warmer clothes. Or perhaps I will cart you there in the belly of a bone tree.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Lilia said.

“It will give me time to train you privately,” he said. “Some place no one will get hurt.”

“I would never hurt anyone,” Lilia said, but then she remembered Gian.

“It’s not other people I’m worried about,” Taigan said.

Taigan couldn’t say how one spotted the difference between a person who could channel the satellites and a person who couldn’t. The old woman who’d mentored him spun great stories around seeing some bright essence about a person, but he had never seen it. Most teachers, he suspected, did as he did – probed at a person with the breath of the satellites and looked for resistance. Those who could channel had a natural inclination to resist the power of the stars. Many had drawn on that power from their birth – a function as innate to them as drawing their first breath. If one was lucky, the child might be able to draw on the same star as those who tested them. Then they could see the breath of the star when the child drew on it.

But this girl, this little scullery girl… she resisted his every effort. Perhaps she was too old to train. Or simply not as skilled as he had hoped. He had a week to break her, provided the way across the mountains progressed as well as he expected. But as he watched her huff her breath into her cupped hands that morning in the mountains, shivering despite four days of concentration exercises meant to take her mind away from such things – he didn’t think it would be enough. He began to wonder if it was worth it to find her mother, if all she had passed on to her daughter was this poor display.

Worse, he had caught a scent on the wind of someone following them. He suspected the only people who would follow them were those who thought the same about the girl as he did. And that meant invaders.

The girl looked up at him from her hands and made a moue. “What is it?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, and rose, somewhat painfully, from his crouch near the cold fire pit. “Let’s go through the songs again.” His gut churned. The twisting of his insides had begun. Already his male organs had tucked themselves back up into his body, and his chest had begun to swell. He hated the change, every time, no matter what he changed into. Soon he would retch and bleed, and then he suspected it would be time to switch his pronouns again. He was already thinking of himself as ataisa – someone in between. It still gave him some comfort to match his physical sex to a gendered pronoun, even if he longed for some term more unique to him and his constantly changing body. There was no word in any language for him, not truly. Sometimes he wondered if it meant he didn’t exist. If he lived outside history. His body was Oma’s to do with as it willed. Oma gifted him this unpredictably changing body and mind, which could not be killed and hardly aged.

He had yet to see how either gift served any use to anyone. Some things, he resolved, had no purpose, no matter what the seers said. Maralah needed omajistas who could open gates, but that was not his best skill.

No, all he was good at was not dying.

“I’m making good progress, aren’t I?” Lilia asked. Her mind was tangled with Saiduan songs. Taigan told her the songs were supposed to help her concentrate and build things with the breath of Oma, but they were just nonsense sounds to her.

Taigan grunted. He was grumpier than usual, and even less responsive, since they had trudged into the mountains. The air here was colder and drier. After two days of ascent, the plant life thinned out. The mountains were a rocky wasteland – jagged, sometimes porous rock shot through with hunks of twisted metal. When she asked Taigan where the metal came from, he’d looked at her strangely and said, “They don’t teach you that?”

“What would they teach me?”

“Ignorant parasites,” he had muttered.

When they passed far grander things – massive slabs of soap-slick stones as tall as Lilia, shaped like hands or mossy, grotesque faces – he did not even glance at them. Lilia stared a long time at them, though, and traced the spidery writing on their bases with her outstretched fingers.

“Do you think these are older than Faith Ahya?” Lilia asked.

“The first Kai. Do you think she saw these things when she came here from the slave camps in Dorinah?”

“I should not be surprised that your primary political and religious figure was a slave,” Taigan said.

“We were all slaves, once,” Lilia said.

Taigan said something biting in Saiduan and yanked at the bear’s lead again. With Lilia riding and Taigan walking, they traveled very slowly over the rough terrain.

“Do you want to ride the bear for a while?” Lilia asked.

“No. You’re too slow.”

“If you’re such a great healer, why don’t you fix my foot?”

“A sound idea,” Taigan said. “If you’d like me to chop off your leg and then spend three months legless while it grows back. We have no time for that. It’s an inconvenience, not life-threatening.”

“But you could fix it,” Lilia said. “The tirajistas say they can’t, because the bone is ruined, not just flesh.”

“Most things can be fixed,” Taigan said, “if they’re organic. Perhaps if you’re a better student, I’ll chop your leg off someday.”

“You make everything sound so kind,” Lilia said.

“But there is one thing we should take care of,” Taigan said. He reached up and took her wrist.

“What did I tell you about asking?” she said.

Taigan’s grip was firm. He recited one of the songs he had taught her – the Song of Unmaking. Her skin prickled where he touched her.

“Stop it,” Lilia said.

Taigan released her.

Lilia rubbed her wrist. The burning stopped. Her skin looked the same. “What did you do?”

“I removed your ward,” he said. He squinted up at her. “Yes. You’ll be a bit easier to remember, now. I suspect you had few friends at the temple.” He picked up the bear’s lead again and started walking.

“Roh was my friend,” Lilia said. “He could always see me.”

“Some parajistas have the ability to see through or break wards,” Taigan said. “In truth, it’s impossible to bind a parajista with a ward. The pattern simply will not bind with their blood.”

Lilia considered her wrist again. “How did you do it? You just unraveled it?”

“The ward was created using the same symbol burned onto your skin,” Taigan said. “Any omajista could see it. You could too, if you’d only open yourself to the star’s breath. I suspect she meant for you to unravel it. Your first task. But I fear you’re not as gifted as perhaps she hoped.”

“You mean the trefoil with the tail? That’s the symbol?”

“Yes. The ward was sewn into your skin using that pattern as the base. It was just many trefoils bound together, all hooked by their tails. Wards are easy enough to unravel if you know what symbol was used for the base.”

“This is like being blind,” Lilia said. “I can’t see any of these things.”

“Work harder,” Taigan said.

“Would you tell me to work harder to see if I was blind?”

“Better to say that you should not be surprised to be blind if you continue to close your eyes.”

Every morning, Taigan ran her through a series of stretching and concentration exercises, not unlike those she started her mornings with at the temple in Ohanni’s dancing class. She found most of it boring, the same way she did in the temple.

“You’re not actually making any progress,” Taigan said. They sat around the remains of a fire, the charred ends of sappy crackling brush covered over in ash. It was the only thing that burned well in the mountains.

“Then why are we still doing this?” she said.

“Because you’re incompetent,” Taigan said.

“That bone tree might have a different opinion.”

Taigan stood. Lilia started. She clenched her fists and prepared for the worst, but he only sighed and said, “I have a story for you.”

“A Saiduan legend?”

“Something like that,” Taigan said. “A problem. A puzzle.”

“I’m good at those,” Lilia said.

“Let’s say there’s a man who does tricks. Not the sort someone gifted does. Do you have these sorts of tricks in Dhai? Sleight of hand?”

“Yes, of course. We play all sorts of strategy games, too. Screes, kindar, bendi-”

“Fine, fine,” Taigan said. “There are two men in a small village. Like most people in their village, they are illiterate.”

“You’re saying they can’t read? Everyone can read.”

“No, not everyone can read.”

“Every clan has schools.”

“They are Saiduan. Not Dhai. We are a very large country. We cannot school every child.”

“That’s very sad.”

“Be that as it may,” Taigan said, and she could already hear the rising irritation in his voice. “A younger man approaches an old man and asks him to pick a stone from a bag. He asks the old man to write a symbol on the stone. Any symbol he likes but preferably one of great power. The young man puts the stone back into the bag, hands the bag to the older man, and instructs him to find the stone he marked. But the stone is not in the bag. The young man tells him he can find the stone one mile from their village, in the belly of a bladder trap. When the older man goes off with the other villagers, they dig up the bladder trap and find the stone, with the same exact symbol the older man wrote on it, deep within the flesh of the trap. How did the young man perform the trick?”

“What does this have to do with magic?” Lilia asked. “Was he a tirajista?”

“No. The whole village was full of ungifted, I told you. Not one could draw on the satellites.”

“That’s not very realistic.”

“Not in Dhai, perhaps. But in Saiduan and other places, it’s quite typical.”

“The men lived in the same village together? All their lives?”

“Where were the women?”

“You said they were all men.”

“It’s just what one says.”

“What did they do for a living?”

“What does that matter?”

“Details matter.”

“Let’s say they were fisher people.”

“Were the men in on this together? Or was it just the young man who knows how the trick is done?”

“Just the young man.”

Lilia pondered that. “If I was old and I didn’t know any letters, what letter would I know? What symbols? I don’t know. That just doesn’t happen in Dhai.”

“So, you give up? Just like you give up learning to channel the satellites?”

“You’re not giving me enough information.”

“You can’t even think through a proper problem,” Taigan said. “Perhaps that’s why Oma’s breath eludes you.”

“Your litanies and songs don’t go anywhere,” Lilia said. “There’s no… no problem.”

“The problem is you’re shaping up to be a very poor omajista.”

“Just because you want me to be something–”

“Here’s a problem for you,” Taigan said. He scuffed away the large stones on the ground before them and drew a circle in the dirt. Then he placed three sets of six stones facing one another. It looked much like a game board. “We have two opposing forces here,” Taigan said. “The line of stones closest to you is the defending force. The line closest to me is the offensive. You have three legions of mounted cavalry, two with long-range weapons, and one infantry. I have four mounted cavalry and two infantry. If I move my mounted cavalry forward–” Taigan pushed four of his stones toward her. “How would you respond?”

“This is a war game. We don’t play war games.”

“Then pretend we’re throwing bread at one another,” Taigan said. “While riding bears.”

Lilia contemplated the stones. It was like a game of bendar, she decided. “I move one of my ranged fighters to flank you on the right and meet your cavalry with mine.” She took her two infantry stones and one ranged fighter stone and positioned them on the left flank of the cavalry. “I meet your exposed infantry with my ranged fighters, clear them with my infantry, and once they are out, have them come at the cavalry from the rear, with the support of the ranged fighters.”

Taigan scrutinized her. “You said you didn’t play war games.”

“We learn about war,” Lilia said. “I studied all the great Dhai battles from before our exile. They made me better at strategy games. I won against my friend Roh all the time. I even played Oras and novices sometimes.”

“You’re serious?”

She shrugged. “I studied a lot of things.”

“You never mentioned this.”

“I studied anatomy, too, and agricultural science. I studied magic, and astronomy, and plant biology. I didn’t clean sinks all the time.”

“You are serious about everyone in Dhai knowing how to read?”

“When you forget your history and where you came from, you might forget where you’re going. That’s what Ora Gaiso always said.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen, almost.”

Taigan shook his head. “Too old for magic,” he said. “It’s a shame. You looked much younger.”

“What are you saying?”

He kicked the stones away. “Only that I wish we’d found you ten or twelve years ago, so we could have shaped you into something useful.”

Taigan sat above the camp several nights later, perched on a massive boulder that still retained the suns’ heat. Below, the scullery girl tossed and turned in her bedroll. By all counts, she should have been so exhausted that sleep came easily. But her stamina was better than he expected for a cripple.

He saw a swarm of long-tailed swallows dive toward him in the semi-darkness. He held out his hands and dismantled them. They broke apart into the wispy tails of Saiduan characters. He smelled burnt bread and something more pungent: mold, rot.

Over the last few days, he had run the scullery girl through a number of famous battles, using stones as markers – battles the Saiduan had fought against the Dhai while they warred for the continent for a thousand years. Taigan considered himself fair at strategy, and he had the advantage of already knowing both the best and actual outcomes, but the girl seemed to have a knack for it. He played through multiple scenarios and watched her trounce him in three out of every five. This from a pacifist with no training. What could she do with instruction? With actual knowledge on the field?

The Saiduan characters unfurled into Maralah’s message, a response to the update he had sent her two days before. It was a much shorter, simpler message than he expected.

Taigan stirred the characters with a breath of wind for a long time, watching them swirl and pull apart until they were completely illegible. Then he crawled down from the boulder and walked back into camp.

“Was that Saiduan writing?” Lilia asked.

“Was the symbol the man wrote on the stone a Saiduan character?”

“What, in the riddle?”

“Yes, the one about the illiterate men.”

“Yes, the symbol he wrote was a Saiduan character.”

“It was his name, then,” Lilia said. “If you’re illiterate, you still have to sign documents. Agreements. Papers. Those sorts of things. You do those in Saiduan, just like here. We’ve had treaties with you. So if you were illiterate, the one symbol you would know for sure, the one with the most power, was your name. The young man knew that.”

“And how did he get it into a bladder trap, then?”

“He lived in the same village with the older man,” Lilia said. “He planned the trick a long time before, when he was a child. He wrote the man’s name, the symbol, on the stone and planted it many years before. Then he chose that same man for the trick. He knew that man would write the one symbol he knew. His name.”

“Is that what you’ve been up thinking about?” Taigan asked.

“I tried to think what one symbol everyone would know,” Lilia said. “Something that was the same across Saiduan and Dhai. We’d have to know our names. To sign public records.”

“See, I’m doing well,” Lilia said, and rolled onto her side.

But he needed a gifted young girl, not a clever one. He had been a clever girl once, and Oma, Lord of Heaven, knew how that turned out for him. He scratched at the wound at the base of his spine.

Taigan suspected being clever would not turn out any better for her than it had for him. He sniffed the air. Their trackers were closer. Another day, and they’d be upon them. He needed to decide how much of the girl to leave to them.

At midday, Lilia stopped to gather water in the trickling gully of a streambed that looked like it was once a huge clay pipe, as big around as Lilia was tall. The water came from a massive hole milled from the side of a sheer rock face that stretched on and on, covered in scraggly trees and vines Lilia had no name for. She was tired, and Taigan had been surly all morning.

Taigan regarded the cliff face as Lilia rubbed at her sore rump. “Where now?” she said, gesturing to the cliff. “It’ll take a long time to go around.”

“We can’t climb that.”

“Up,” Taigan said. “Draw on Oma, as I’ve taught you, and propel yourself up.”

“Taigan, I’m–”

“Up,” he repeated, and raised his hand. A whirlwind of air threw dirt and small stones at her. Taigan kicked up and grabbed hold of the tiny crevices and spurs of the rock. He jumped up the rock face like he weighed nothing – a feather pulled by a string, leaping from point to point, sixty feet up the face of the cliff.

Lilia watched him, breathless, as he came to the top. He crouched. Peered down at her. “Your turn,” he called.

“You know I can’t!” Lilia said.

“You will,” he said, “or you’ll die down there.” He moved away from the edge of the cliff. She lost sight of him.

“Taigan? Taigan! You promised to take me to my mother!”

“Fly, fly little bird!” Taigan called, his voice growing distant.

“Taigan!” She moved up against the wall. She saw nothing that looked like it could hold her weight. She screwed her courage and jammed her good foot onto a small spur beneath her. She tried to lever herself up. The spur broke. She fell.

“I’ll play your stupid game,” she muttered. But not as he would expect.

Lilia led the bear over to a nearby rock. She climbed up onto the rock and slid onto the bear.

Left or right? She looked back at the streambed. The broken pipe curved to the right. If whoever had built this pipe built them the way they did in Dhai, the pipe would be going downhill. She would go north, following the cliffside until she found a way across it, and then come back south until she either found Taigan or found where Taigan waited for her. If he had waited.

She heard the call of a bird, close, and urged the bear forward. In places, the way was impassable. She had to crawl around large boulders and knotted trees. The bear looked behind them often, snuffling, and she worried about predators. She found shelter that night in the arms of a tree, and tied herself tight so she didn’t fall off. In the morning, she went on, stopping for water when she found it.

After two days, the long curve of the cliff tapered away. She crawled up the loose stone and shale, grabbing at knotted roots and bushes. At the top, she yanked on the bear’s lead and urged it to follow.

She rode the bear the rest of the way, heading south again, back to the place where Taigan had abandoned her.

It was midday when she heard Taigan say, “That was clever but wrong.”

Lilia started. Taigan dropped from the draping of a cluster of dense trees, twenty feet above her. He landed neatly in front of Lilia, sending up a little puff of dust, agile as a cat.

“I’d rather be clever,” Lilia said. She slid off the bear.

Taigan walked past her, to the lip of the cliff. He gazed at the streambed below. “Three days I waited, expecting you to fly back,” he said. “Then I realized what you’d do and came to meet you. You really are just a plain little scullery girl, aren’t you?”

Lilia dropped the bear’s lead and met him at the edge of the precipice. “I’m sorry I’m not what you thought I was,” she said.

“I don’t understand why you’re unteachable,” he said. “Perhaps you’re too old. That was a concern. The ones I’ve worked with before were still children, and most were from Dorinah. They had more discipline, and more…” He stared intently at her. “Fear. It made them easier to train.”

“You know you’re fighting Dhai, don’t you? Another kind of Dhai.”

Taigan sighed. “Yes. Some of us know. Why do you think I came to Dhai to find omajistas? What better way to fight the enemy than with the enemy himself?”

“I’m sorry,” Lilia said. “I’m just not what you think I am.”

“It’s a pointless exercise,” Taigan said. “I’m losing time. The world is losing time.”

“But my mother–”

Taigan’s palm thumped hard into her sternum. Lilia lost her balance. Tipped over the cliff. Her ankle knocked a jutting spur of rock. Pain. The freedom of falling. She had a moment of abject terror. Shock.

Taigan’s dark form, the edge of his coat fluttering in the wind. Gazing down at her, receding, falling away and away and away…

This is a long fall, she thought. It’s a mistake. He’ll stop it.

“Fly, fly little bird,” Taigan called.

Her mother used to call her that. There were three intonations in Dhai, and “Li” with the third intonation meant “bird.”

But she had always been broken, for as long as she could remember.

And broken birds didn’t fly.

Lilia pinwheeled her arms, clawing at air that whistled around her; a pretty, perfect song.

Songs. Trefoils. Oma.

If she could just–

She grabbed at all of it as she fell.

Her fingers found only air.

Lilia opened her mouth to scream–

Jutting branches and twisted tree limbs splintered beneath her. Snapped her ribs. Raked flesh. Crack and heave. She broke through the low canopy of stunted trees at the base of the cliff and crashed into the sandy streambed below. She landed on her right side. Her right shoulder fractured beneath her. Her right arm snapped.