A Magic of Dawn

Rochelle Botelli

Before she’d left the encampment, she’d gone back to her own tent, taking the coins she’d hidden there-the money she’d received for killing Rance and the others she’d slain in her short career. She’d bound the coins under her clothing so that they made no noise; Jan’s dagger was sheathed just above her boots under her tashta.

She watched the encampment for a few days from a clump of trees near the royal tents, twice having to evade searchers beating the brush for her. She saw Hirzgin Brie, saw that fool Paulus, saw the Starkkapitan. She saw the Archigos and Sergei arrive. And finally, she saw her vatarh. She stared at him until his figure wavered in the tears forming in her eyes.

Then, finally, she slipped away.

It had been easy enough to evade the patrols looking for her-they were noisy and large, giving her ample time to conceal herself. She was good at that, at blending in. She found a bitter-eye tree and stripped long peels of the bark from it, boiling them in a small pot she stole from a farmhouse she passed, and washing her hair with the pale, caustic extract until her black hair became a paler nut-brown. The bitter-eye extract made her hair brittle, coarse, and untamable, her natural curls gone, but that only enhanced the effect. She looked like some ragged, unranked young woman, a farmer’s daughter. She took on the accent of the region; she stole a chicken and basket from another farm, and walked the road with that as if she were on her way home or to a market. Once, as a test, she even stayed on the road when a quartet of chevarittai in Firenzcian livery came by on their warhorses, greeting them as if she had no idea they were searching for her. They looked at her, talked among themselves for a moment, then asked her if she’d seen a dark-haired woman about the same age. Rochelle shook her properly-downcast head shyly, and after a moment, they cantered on.

She held back the angry laugh until they’d gone.

She moved south and west, crossing the border into Nessantico at Ville Colhelm. There she took a room at one of the inns, calling herself “Remy.” She remained there, restless but not yet certain what she must do.

The nights were the worst. She could hear the revelry in the tavern downstairs, and yet it repulsed her. People should not be happy here, not when her own mind was in such turmoil. Her dreams were haunted by memories of that final confrontation with her vatarh. Sometimes Matarh was there with her. “I told you,” she said, her face touched with sadness as she looked from Jan to Rochelle. “I told you not to go there…”

“But he’s my vatarh, and I knew you loved him,” she answered, and they were no longer in the tent-palais, but in the home she remembered best, the cottage in the uplands sheep country of Il Trebbio. “You should have known that I’d be drawn to him.”

“I know, and they know,” she answered. She touched the stone she kept around her neck, the pale stone that held all the voices that haunted her, that drove her mad, and Rochelle pressed a hand to her own neck to where the same stone hung, its presence reassuring. “They told me that you would be the one to finally pay for my sins, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for that.” She was sobbing, and her tears dissolved the daub-and-wattle side of the cottage. The smell of burning peat was heavy in her nostrils, but the scene had shifted again, and she and her matarh were standing in a meadow under a starlit, moonless sky, with silvered clouds hurrying along the horizon as lightning licked at the distant hills with white snake tongues. Thunder growled imprecations and curses around them.

“But you’ve not done what I’ve asked,” Matarh said, and she was no longer weeping. The fury of madness was on her face now, and her fingers gripped hard at Rochelle’s shoulders. She was thirteen again, still a few fingers shorter than her matarh but more muscular, her first few kills already behind her. Her matarh lay back on the bed, and they were no longer on the hilltop but in that last home they shared, in Jablunkov, Sesemora. The painted, great oaken timbers loomed over them. Matarh was gasping for air, on her deathbed. She’d picked up the red lung disease and begun coughing up blood a week before. The healers had all shaken their collective heads at the symptoms and told Rochelle to prepare for the worst. “Listen to me now,” her matarh said, still grasping Rochelle’s shoulders as she leaned over the soiled rag she’d held over her mouth and nose.

“Listen to me, Rochelle. There is one responsibility that I place on you, something that-no, just shut up! You can’t stop me from telling her…” That last was to the voices in her head. Matarh shook her head as if trying to dislodge a persistent fly. She turned her head to cough, loosing a spray of red flecks that coated the pillow. “… something I intended to do myself, but now… No, I will not be with you, you bastards. I killed you all, and I’m going to where your voices will be silent forever. Do you hear me?”

Then Matarh’s eyes cleared again and her fingers tightened on the cloth at Rochelle’s shoulders. “I wanted to kill her for what she did to me,” she husked. “If it weren’t for her, I could have been happy, could have stayed with your vatarh. I wanted to hear her scream in torment in my head as she realized what I’d done-not because someone paid me to do it, no, but because I wanted it. I could have been happy with him, Rochelle. Your vatarh… The voices were gone when I was with him, but she… She ruined it all, for me, for Jan, for you too, Rochelle. She ruined it…”

Her hands loosened, and she fell back on the bed. For a moment, Rochelle thought that Matarh was dead, but her breath shuddered in again and her eyes focused. Her hand, trembling, lifted to touch Rochelle’s cheek. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me you will do what I couldn’t do. Promise me. You will kill her, and as she dies, you will tell her why, so she goes to Cenzi knowing…”

“I promise, Matarh,” Rochelle husked, crying.

The smell of peat overcame the odor of sickness. Rochelle sat up, startled, in her bed in the inn. She could hear the wind blowing outside as a storm came through, the chimney to the hearth in her room losing its draw and the smoke from the peat chunks glowing there wafting back into the room. Then the wind changed and the smoke was sucked upward again. The wind screamed, and Rochelle thought she heard a fading whisper in it. “Promise me…”

She’d not yet kept that promise. She’d told herself that she would, that one day she’d go to Nessantico as the White Stone, and there she would find the woman who had ended Matarh’s affair with her vatarh.

Allesandra. The Kraljica.

Why not now? Jan would be going there, also, she was certain. That was what all the offiziers and gardai were saying. He would be taking the army to Nessantico.

She could be there first. She could keep the promise to Matarh, and Jan would know who had done it, and he would understand why.

Rain spattered against the shutters of the room. Thunder boomed once. Rochelle brought the covers around her, suddenly awake.

“I will go to Nessantico, Matarh,” she whispered. “I promise.” The peat hissed in response.