Chapter 49

Ahkio walked into the low bedroom of the private home in Raona where Liaro lay. He looked small. Ahkio sat on the edge of the bed. With the council house burned to the ground, the wounded were bedded down in whatever homes would take them.

Liaro reached out a hot, sweaty hand to him and said, “Ahkio.”

“I hear you’re supposed to live,” Ahkio said. He pulled Kirana’s book from his pocket. “If I practice reading aloud, I might get better at it, and you might get some sleep.”

Liaro laughed. It turned into a cough. “Run a man through, then tell him stories. Sounds very Dhai.”

“Ghrasia told me what you did just outside the square. It was brave.”

“I tripped over my own sword and fell on it,” Liaro said. “That’s just stupid. It wasn’t even an infused blade.”

“But brave that you tried,” Ahkio said.

“How is your friend Ghrasia?” Liaro said slyly.

“She’s as well as can be expected,” Ahkio said.

“Caisa told me you took that horrible painting down in Clan Leader Talisa’s room before you blew it up.”

Liaro leaned toward him conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t want all those dour people looking at me while some hero took me to bed, either.”

Ahkio’s face burned. He cleared his throat.

Liaro smirked. “I knew it.”

“Can I read to you or not?”

“You know, I always thought Caisa played for the other side,” Liaro said.

Ahkio’s fingers lingered over the text. He still needed to deal with Caisa. But not yet. “Which one?”

“Good point. Not ours.”

“Don’t tell me you’re becoming as paranoid as Nasaka.”

“I’m just worried,” Liaro said. He bunched up his bedsheets in his fists.

“Because you care for her?”

“We’d have been a merry union in another life,” Liaro said, “me and you, Meyna and Caisa.”

“You never liked Meyna.”

“I didn’t dislike her.”

“Let me worry about Caisa,” Ahkio said. “I’m good at it.”

Liaro waved a hand. “Fine, fine. Read. It’s been one person after another jabbering away in here, asking when I’ll be ready for cards and bendar.”

Ahkio turned to the last story in Kirana’s book, titled Faythe. It was the story he heard at every Festival of Oma. He should have known it by heart. But as he read the story to Liaro, he found it was not at all the story he remembered. In this version, Faith was a slave from Aaldia. The child she carried was not Hahko’s but an enslaved Dhai condemned for thievery in a dajian camp. Faith was not strong and brave and passionate. She was petty and weak and self-serving. The book made Faith into a figure of pity, not worship. Ahkio did not know if he liked it, and could not say if Liaro did, for he had fallen asleep.

Faith lay in childbed to give birth to the first Kai of Dhai. But when Hahko burst in, it was not to claim her child and free her, but to steal the child and proclaim it Kai. Ahkio decided that no, he really didn’t like this story.

At the end of the last page of the book, Faith Ahya was still alive.

And though Ahkio had read the story, he was not certain how it would end. He would remain forever uncertain, because the last page of the book, the page following the broken sentence at the end of the final, intact page, recorder of the last days of Faith Ahya, had been torn out.

He had used it as kindling to light the fire that drove back the shadows.

After Liaro was asleep, Ahkio made his way back to the clan square, where the last of the Oras and militia Ghrasia had sent out to net the assassins had returned. They had sent out over a hundred Oras and militia, but he counted scarcely twenty in the square.

Ghrasia stood talking with the group’s leader, a grizzled militia man named Farosi Sana Nako.

“Is this all?” Ahkio asked.

“Afraid so,” Ghrasia said.

“And the assassins?”

“Here,” Farosi said, and pulled back the cover on a cart. Ahkio counted five bodies.

“The full dozen, then,” Ahkio said.

“At a great cost,” Farosi said.

“Walk with me, Kai,” Ghrasia said. She led him across the courtyard and onto a winding lane leading out to the rice fields. He kept his hands in his pockets.

As they walked, he noticed the sightless, feral little girl trailing after them along the weed-tangled road. He hadn’t asked Ghrasia if the girl followed her all the time, but he suspected that unless she was inside a building, the girl was always within shouting distance.

“You were right,” Ghrasia said.

“Me lording over the militia,” she said. “Those assassins did what they did out of blind obedience to their Kai. They made things like that.” She nodded to the feral girl. “And if they’re what we’ll fight… I’d rather we lost than become as they are.”

Ahkio stopped walking. She came up beside him. “What is it?” she said.

“You know this was the easiest part,” he said.

“May I touch you, Kai?”

“Always,” he said.

She put her arms around him. Her head rested just above his heart.

“I know it will get more difficult,” she said. “Just swear to me you’ll keep us the people we are.”

“I swear it,” he said. But even as he spoke the words, he remembered standing over the dying man in the blazing council house basement, ready to impale him with his own blade.