The Diviner

18

Qamar al-Ma’aliq had never been so tired, hot, thirsty, and saddle sore in his entire life. In point of fact, he had never been any of those things before in the twenty-one pampered, privileged years of his existence. Choked by dust, wilted by heat, aching in every bone from a solid month in the saddle, he did not go to far as to curse his mother, but he did enquire forlornly of Acuyib as to why, of all the ideas for his future the Empress Mairid might have entertained, He had seen fit to put the army into her exalted head.

Qamar felt it keenly that he should have been back in Hazganni, dallying with a lissome beauty, sipping cool wine as she sang for him or told him how wonderful he was. The most wearying thing in his life should have been the choice of which robe to wear of the hundreds in his closets.

Instead, his Shagara-gold skin was sun-blistered, and his clothes were rank with sweat, and his last woman had been over a month ago, and he was convinced that life was no longer worth living.

Yet live it he did, every miserable hour of the ride, every rock-prodded minute of the nights in rough camp on this quick advance through the dry summer brownness of Ga’af Shammal, northward to Joharra. He was part of an expeditionary force sent in haste to the aid of his sister Rihana and her husband, Ra’amon al-Joharra—whose former Cazdeyyan hosts had belatedly decided to take exception to the marriage.

This circumstance was prompted by two women. One was an obscure peasant girl who had visions and heard voices that told her the Tza’ab must be evicted from all lands that believed in the Mother and Son. The holy men in the mountains of Cazdeyya, calling loudly upon their captive brethren in the south, had spread her vile spewings like a disease. But no attention would have been paid to the peasant if not for the princess. Cazdeyyan royalty had a turn for religious extremes; Princess Baetrizia’s grandfather had ended his days in a cave with a cat that spoke to him, or so he avowed, in the very voice of the Blessed Mother. In a quest for similar sanctity, Baetrizia had taken this peasant girl, Solanna Grijalva, into her household, where they prayed and fasted, sang and meditated, and emerged to exhort the King every hour of the day and night until he finally agreed to march against the Tza’ab.

Qamar found much to curse about the King of Cazdeyya, his fanatical daughter, and the simple-minded child who were all causing him so much misery. Why couldn’t they practice their silly religion in their great gray mountains, and leave the peaceful south alone? Consensus was that Chaydann Il-Mamnoua’a had instilled in them these evil notions, and it was the duty of the Believers in Acuyib’s glory to defend the green land against the invader. It was all yet another move in the vast game of chadarang that went on throughout eternity, for Chaydann forever refused to concede defeat in the conflict between death and life, darkness and light. Empress Mirzah’s pious prayers were said to have kept the Empire at peace for years even after her death; now her grandson Qamar was one of the pawns in the renewed game.

Qamar did not hold to this view of life in general and the Cazdeyyan threat in particular. But when others expounded upon it, more or less lyrically as their rhetorical gifts allowed, he did not mention the days he had spent sitting with his grandmother in her room of seven cradles, answering to the name “Azzad” instead of his own.

Ayia, he did acknowledge, reluctantly, that he was nothing more than a pawn. An exalted one, to be sure, mounted on a fine horse and jingling with hazziri. But a pawn all the same, and in no way enjoying it.

His father, Jefar Shagara, was not too old to command the army in the field, but he had given over the position to Khalila’s husband, Allil Azwadh. Someday, when Khalila was Empress, Allil would have authority over the Riders on the Golden Wind, and this was as good a time as any to get them used to him. Ten years Qamar’s senior, and a cousin of the famous Black Rose, Allil was as ill-favored as Ka’arli had been beautiful—but he knew how to lead troops. He inspired them with his steely will, underwent the same privations as they did, and had not even brought with him the silken tent that was his right as commander. Had he done so, Qamar could at least have claimed a portion of its floor and a few of its pillows and slept in comfort. But Allil was tough-minded, wilderness-raised, and had no use for even the simplest luxury. Still less had he time for the complaints of his wife’s little brother.

“I weary of listening to you, Qamar,” growled Allil one evening. “Today you have plagued me. Tomorrow I want you out of my sight.”

Qamar clapped his hands together with delight. “Excellent! You’re sending me home!”

“No, I am sending you forward with the scouts. Do exactly as they say, cause no trouble, make no mistakes, and perhaps I will consider giving you back your horse.”

“What?”

“Do you think a scout can gallop along, raising clouds of dust for the enemy to see? You go on foot, my fine Sheyqir.”

The twelve scouts left before dawn, ranging in a wide arc ahead of the army. The positions of farms and villages were reported back to Allim, who then guided his troops in maneuvers that skirted any habitation. Qamar thought this ridiculous. If they happened upon anyone, they should simply kill him so he wouldn’t be able to warn of the oncoming Tza’ab. Qamar supposed his sister’s husband was attempting to live up to his name: Allim meant “gentle and patient.” But as Qamar followed the experienced scouts into hills covered with scrub oak and dry brush, he wondered irritably why Allim couldn’t have chosen to exercise gentleness and patience on Qamar instead of the enemy.

The saddle soreness of these last weeks was a horror to him and a totally unforeseen imposition. It turned out that riding a cavalry horse from dawn until dusk, day after strenuous day, was a rather different thing from executing pretty patterns around a riding ring, or galloping off into the hills for an hour or two, or ambling along city streets. That first morning as a scout, the aching in his buttocks and thighs competed with blisters on his heels and toes. By midafternoon, the blisters had won the victory. He couldn’t even indulge in a satisfying moan of anguish; his fellow scouts would have gagged him, throttled him, or worse. They were singularly unimpressed by his status as a son of the Empress. Qamar knew why. His mother had given orders: no special treatment. Indeed, they should consider him as if he were nothing more than the lowliest youngest son of the humblest family in all of Tza’ab Rih.

Grandfather would have come to his defense, he told himself as he concentrated on not snapping twigs beneath his sore feet. Grandfather would never have allowed this to happen to him. Grandfather would have been appalled by the conditions his adored Qamar lived in, and the mockery visited upon him by the common soldiers, and—

The screeching of a hawk made his head jerk up, and for a moment he was stunned by the size of the creature, its wingspan half again as broad as his own shoulders. It cried out again and soared away into the silent sky.

He had spent time enough with the Shagara to know that birds did not scream and fly without reason. But he could see nothing that should not have been in the forest: oaks studded with green acorns, various kinds of undergrowth, a bird’s nest high in one of the trees, perhaps the hawk’s own. The good farmland was farther north; Qamar supposed people here gathered the acorns, but he didn’t much care as long as they did their gathering some other day.

Qamar brushed against a large bush, its prickles sticking into his shirt, scraping his skin. By the time he freed himself, his left arm was throbbing. His skin itched. His hand began to go numb. He had crossed a small stream about an hour ago—if he could find it again, he could bathe the rash in its coolness. He looked about him, swaying with sudden dizziness.

“Here’s another of them, Father.”

At least, Qamar surmised that was the meaning; the boy spoke a mangle of syllables combining civilized speech and barbarian gabble. Raffiq Murah, who had almost finished his biography of Alessid al-Ma’aliq, had drawn up a list of useful words for all troops of Tza’ab Rih to learn. Qamar had thought this pointless. Empty your hands and Be silent or die were hardly calculated to persuade a pretty girl into bed. Ayia, but when had he ever needed anything but his face and his big, melting dark eyes?

He rather wished right now that his eyes could actually see something besides sparks and great foggy swirls. His thorn-pricked arm hung heavy and useless from his shoulder. He staggered a few steps and leaned against an oak tree. On his finger the ring that had belonged to Azzad al-Ma’aliq, tawny topaz carved with a leaf, seemed to pulse with the pounding of his blood against swollen flesh. Dimly he perceived he was about to be captured and all his possessions stolen—stupid to have worn the ring to war, and the pearl ring of his great-great-grandfather al-Gallidh, but he’d promised himself he’d never take them off—indeed, the swelling would make them impossible to remove . . .

Ayia, of all the silly things to think! These barbarians would simply cut off his fingers. But before or after they killed him?

Another, deeper voice: “Let’s have a look at him.” His accent was excruciating, but he was comprehensible. Qamar saw two shapes, one tall and one shorter, approach through the trees, and wondered blurrily if he would ever see home again.

“Eiha, poisoned,” said the man. “Come, Raffael, help him.”

An unknown time later, Qamar came back to consciousness with no memory of passing out. He was propped against a wall beside a doorway, a hard pillow at his back, his left arm and shoulder bare and tingling.

“Never touch fire nettles!” scolded a woman’s voice, and he looked up to find a face framed in dark hair above him.

“Woman, into the house!”

That tone of voice, that curt a command, would have almost any woman in Tza’ab Rih lunging for the nearest blunt instrument. Qamar’s mother, his sisters, his cousins would all have reached instantly for their belt knives. And thrown them most accurately, too.

Alone in the sunshine with the man who had saved his life—an odd thing for an enemy to do—Qamar took the cup the man proffered, and drank. “Thank you.”

Evidently his pronunciation left much to be desired. It took the man a moment to stop frowning and nod his understanding. But then he frowned even more deeply. “Tza’ab. Your army, it moves.”

Had Qamar the use of both hands, he would have applauded the brilliance of this insight. “Yes.” There was no point in denying it.

The man sat on his heels, head tilted slightly to one side. “We know.”

Qamar shrugged and blinked in surprise when his left shoulder moved just as usual, without pain or stiffness. He looked down at his arm: normal size, the topaz ring fitting his hand again, with only a pink flush on his skin and a few darker pinpricks of red to show he had been poisoned. “Are all your healers as skilled as this?”

“We know plants to use. Your land is desert, so you know nothing.”

“Nothing at all,” he agreed cheerfully. “Our own healers have different ways.” He sat up straighter, glancing into the cottage. Humble but clean, replete with flowers—where had they found flowers in this dryness?—and more comfortable than anywhere he’d been in the last month. But he had to leave. “Ayia, my thanks again, but I must go.” He pushed himself to his feet—and remembered that he hadn’t the vaguest idea where he was.

“Your army,” the man told him, pointing to the western hills.

Qamar gulped and nodded. Then, curiously: “You won’t try to stop me?”

“Why? Your army, your Empire, your Acuyib—these are nothings.”

That stung his pride. “You won’t think that way when we’ve conquered your land!”

A sound that Qamar supposed was laughter rumbled from the man’s throat. “Ours. Not yours. Never yours.”

We’ll see about that, Qamar thought.

His expression must have invited further comment. The man said, “The Mother gives, the Son protects. This is all, and you are nothing.”

It took Qamar a moment to understand that he was speaking of religion. How unutterably uninspiring.

The wife returned then, with a little tin pot of salve for use this evening as instructed. She eyed Qamar with interest—though not entirely in the manner he was used to from women: she was more intrigued by his strangeness than his beauty. He thanked her politely and went on his way.

If he half-expected to be felled by an arrow in the back, he was disappointed. It seemed the man really had no interest in what went on in the world beyond his house. Qamar could empathize. He didn’t want to be anywhere but at home, either.

He slept that night beneath a shrub carefully chosen for its distance from anything that looked even remotely like that bush of stinging nettles. Perhaps sleep was the wrong word. He dozed, jerked awake, dozed again, and finally rose before dawn no more rested than he’d been when he lay down.

“I want to go home,” he told a small reddish-brown rodent that eyed him from a clump of twigs obscuring its nest. “I am a Sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih, and I do not belong in this Acuyib-forsaken wilderness!”

If he was being honest with himself, he would have to admit that he was no more impressed by this than the rodent. What irked him was that the creature obviously considered him no more of a threat than the insects that flitted past. He was nothing against which anything, man or beast, must defend his home.

His waterskin was empty, but he didn’t dare fill it at any of the sluggish streams he crossed. That he had absolutely no idea where he was did not prevent him from putting one blistered foot in front of the other. That the most beloved grandson of Alessid al-Ma’aliq should be reduced to this gave him the energy of anger. Besides, he knew his cousin’s men would be looking for him, and he was determined to greet them on his feet and not huddled like a coward beneath a tree. It wasn’t his fault the damned shrub had attacked him.

It was well after noon before he limped toward a sentry tent on the outskirts of the Tza’ab camp. He was hungry, thirsty, hot, exhausted, and his arm was throbbing again. Within the hour he was with the healers, who exclaimed over the nettle wounds and the salve as they tended him. Their learned discussion of local plants and indigenous medicaments interested him not at all, and especially not compared to the cool water assuaging his dry throat and his sore feet.

“Can you describe the exact shape of the nettles?”

“Was there any smell? Sweet, sour, pungent—”

“What was the length of time between touch and pain?”

“Was the pain sharp like a knife or acidic like a poison—”

“—or burning, like a—like a—”

“Like a burn?” Qamar narrowed his gaze at the little knot of Shagara healers. “I don’t remember, and I don’t care. I want to see my sister’s husband.”

“This salve,” one of them said, sniffing at the little clay pot. “Do you know what it’s made of?”

“If I had only brought my apparatus!” another mourned. “I wish I was back in my own tent, with all my instruments—”

Qamar scowled. “And I wish I was back in Hazganni! My sister’s husband Allim! Summon him now! And give me that damned stuff, my hand hurts.”

Rubbing the smooth cream into his arm, he smelled things he could not identify, odd pungencies that repelled him. He didn’t belong here; he had nearly been killed by this land. Yet the thorns that had poisoned him had been counteracted by plants that also grew here, and perhaps Ab’ya Alessid would have found meaning in that. Qamar simply knew that this land wanted him gone, and he was most willing to oblige.

He was still rubbing the cream into his wounds when Allim arrived—through no effort of the healers. Word had filtered up from the sentry all the way up through the various levels of qabda’ans to the Sheyqir himself that his wife’s wayward brother had finally returned.

“Your secret presence here is no secret,” Qamar said without preamble. “Even the most isolated family living in a shed I wouldn’t wish on a dying rat knows we’re here. And they also know where we are.”

“Explain yourself,” Allim ordered.

“Over a large plate of food and a very large jug of wine? Certainly. Lead on.”

By the time Qamar had finished his recital—and his meal—Allim was compelled to agree that he had earned a second jug of wine. “It seems you have stumbled across valuable information, Qamar. If the Cazdeyyans know we are here, and they know where we are, we have two choices. First, we can attempt to be where they think we are not.”

“That’s not feasible. They know their own lands, Allim. And I swear, their land is against us—or at least what grows on it is, which amounts to the same thing.”

Allim arched a brow, as if to enquire if Qamar truly thought his opinion was worth hearing. “Your reasons are not my reasons. In fact, I have no idea what you think you mean, but that matters not at all. I won’t march far and fast to outmaneuver the barbarians. It would be too great a hardship on the men.”

Qamar poured himself another measure of wine and said nothing.

“I have decided to pull these Cazdeyyans into battle as soon as possible. We will make no secret of our movements—”

“Not that they were secret before,” Qamar muttered into his winecup.

“—but we will move in such a way and to such a place as will invite them to believe us vulnerable to attack. Which, of course, we will not be.”

“Of course.” He did not say it as if he knew what he was talking about; they both knew he didn’t. But it seemed easier to agree with Allim, and besides, he wanted something. “May I have my horse back?”

“By Acuyib the Merciful, I wish I could lash you to the saddle and send you back to Hazganni! But the Empress would want an explanation of why I have failed to make a man of you, and I have no intention of failing.” He smiled grimly. “I trust we understand each other.”

“Perfectly.” Qamar smiled his sweetest and most innocent smile, rose, bowed, and left the tent—taking the second wine jug with him.

As far as Qamar understood, the Tza’ab then marched to a place no commander in his right mind would have chosen for a battle and waited for the Cazdeyyans to catch up. The barbarians accepted the invitation to a seemingly easy victory and hurried to the place Allim had chosen. Personally, Qamar didn’t see it—neither the apparent idiocy of the location nor the battle itself. If it had been his mother’s hope that he would find himself in war, she was wrong. He found nothing. In fact, he lost his horse, his sword, and his breakfast.

He’d had much too much to drink the night before, of course. But that wasn’t his fault: his arm was aching again, and the stench of the salve disgusted him past bearing. It had needed the best part of three winejugs before the pain was gone. Unfortunately, his balance went with it, and although he’d been aiming for his bedroll, he’d spent the night on the ground beside it. Dawn came hours earlier than it should have. The meal that came with it churned in his stomach, competing with the dreadful thud in his head. His arm hurt so much that it was scant wonder he couldn’t cinch the saddle girth quite tightly enough, nor grip his sword as firmly as he ought. So none of it was really his fault.

But his mother was going to flay him alive all the same.

A qabda’an screamed the charge. The onslaught of Cazdeyyan warriors on their tough little horses came over a hill like an ocean wave of dappled brown hides and red-and-yellow tunics and flashing swords. Qamar was never sure when exactly it was that his own sword slipped from his fingers, or when the saddle lurched to one side and he fell off his horse. But all at once he was sprawled on the ground, and the wave broke open to avoid him as if he was an inconveniently placed rock. All around him was the same disgusting pungent odor that had nearly turned his stomach in the forester’s hut. Nearly became definitely, and he curled onto his side and vomited.

This simply could not be happening to him. He kept telling himself that as the hoofbeats faded into the distance. He was Sheyqir Qamar al-Ma’aliq of Tza’ab Rih. Ayia, that didn’t matter as much as the fact that he had never fallen off a horse in his life. His arm hurt and his head ached, his blistered feet felt swollen inside his boots, and he was lying in the dirt with his cheek in his own stinking sickness, and there was a new pain all at once in his thigh that he didn’t understand. He began to wish he’d never been born.

“So much for your career as a soldier,” a voice said some unknown amount of time later.

Qamar’s body twitched fitfully, and his eyelids cracked open, and he saw one of his Shagara relations regarding him with sardonic brown eyes in a golden-skinned face.

“Whatever would your mother say?” the man went on.

Qamar considered it a genuine pity that he’d survived to eventually find out.

The man folded his arms across his chest, and Qamar saw the light shift on the hazziri around his neck. The stones were different from those he was used to seeing a healer wear. “Sheyqir Allim might have a pertinent word or two, as well.”

Qamar squeezed his eyes shut. His arm and thigh no longer hurt, but he still felt slightly sick, and the repulsive barbarian smell seemed stuck inside his nostrils of its own explicit will, for there could not be anyone among the healers who used native plants. Perhaps they were treating enemy wounded in the dawa’an sheymma. The stink really was insupportable; he wondered how anyone not born in this cursed land could endure it.

A different voice made Qamar’s eyes open in startlement. “Find out who this one is. The look of him is right, but perhaps he’s a Tariq or Azwadh cousin who merely looks like one of us.”

Empress Mairid had always maintained that her youngest son was in possession of a fairly good mind, even though he seldom chose to use it. He didn’t intentionally use it now, but it worked all the same.

They didn’t know who he was.

If nothing else about him, they ought to have recognized Azzad alMa’aliq’s topaz ring, if not al-Gallidh’s pearl.

These people were not Shagara healers.

No, they were Shagara—did not the first man have the eyes and golden skin, and had not the second man said one of us? Possibly they were healers—Qamar’s lack of pain suggested it.

But they were not Shagara healers of Tza’ab Rih.

There was only one conclusion, and it didn’t please him at all that his mother was right, and his mind had turned out to be a rather fine one after all, even when he wasn’t trying to use it.

These people were the renegade Shagara who lived no one knew where and did no one knew what. Tza’ab Rih had not heard from them in years—ever since Ab’ya Alessid had rid the land of them most gladly.

Ayia, they were living in Cazdeyya, and they were practicing the traditional Shagara arts of healing and of hazziri, and Qamar had the dismal feeling that Tza’ab Rih was going to hear from them again, and in very unpleasant fashion, once they found out his name.

Or they might just kill him, the way those of their angry persuasion had killed his great-grandfather Azzad.

19

He had absolutely no intention of telling them who he was. The influence of the local language had changed pronunciation, shifted emphasis, and added words to the language spoken by these Shagara, but two generations had not been enough to alter their speech so much that Qamar could not understand and then begin to copy it. Those two generations, however, had also seen the loss of several things and the introduction of several more.

They had lost knowledge of the specifics of the al-Ma’aliq. Most specifically, the ring that had been Azzad’s and then Alessid’s and was now Qamar’s. Gold, set with a dark tawny topaz carved with the family’s leaf symbol, it would have proclaimed his real name to anyone in Tza’ab Rih. It meant nothing to these people; neither did the al-Gallidh pearl. And so he was able to give them a name they had already surmised might be his. To them he was Qamar Tariq, whose Shagara father and great-grandfather had married into that tribe. This explained his coloring. He gave silent thanks to Acuyib for not making him Haddiyat—for this came only through the female line, and all sons of Shagara women had Shagara as a last name (except for the al-Ma’aliq line, of course; this was another grudge these people had against his family, the replacement of their ancient name), and trying to explain being a Tariq and also gifted was not a thing he felt equal to attempting.

It was difficult for a naturally gregarious, relentlessly glib young man to be deprived of his most effective arsenal. Long accustomed to talking his way into or out of just about anything, he was canny enough to know that he must keep his mouth shut until he understood much, much more about these Shagara. This meant he had to listen.

He had never been very good at listening. Neither were these people inclined to give him much to hear. When they spoke to him, it was to give orders or to demand answers to their questions. He meekly followed the first and resisted the second for quite a while by pretending not to comprehend. By the time this gambit could no longer be reasonably employed, he had worked out a story. He’d always been good at that sort of thing, as well, but this was not a fabrication made up on the spot to wiggle out of a belting. This was for his life.

Qamar knew very well that if they found out who he really was, the best he could hope for was to be sold for ransom, either to the Tza’ab or the Cazdeyyans. Neither had much appeal. His mother would pay whatever was asked, but the humiliation of his capture and the manner in which his part in the battle had ended before it even began made him want to wrap his arms around his head and vanish into one of the dungeons these barbarians were so clever at building. As for the Cazdeyyans—should they be the ones to ransom him, they would either barter with his mother for an even larger ransom or kill him. His death was what he expected the Shagara here would prefer; poor as they obviously were, their loathing for anything al-Ma’aliq would demand his transport back to Joharra in an astonishing number of pieces.

His plan, such as it was, must be to regain his strength, learn everything he could, and then escape.

And so he listened, and when instinct told him they would accept his excuse of incomprehensible accents no longer, he answered their questions with what he felt was a rather ingenious story.

Yes, he was a soldier of the Tza’ab. A cavalry officer, in fact. No insignia of rank? Have a look at these hazziri. They did, covetous and trying to hide it—all that lovely gold and silver, and the gemstones! He was rather surprised that he still wore them, and his rings, but evidently the laws of the dawa’an sheymma still applied, and a patient’s belongings were safe.

Separated from his troops during the battle, he told them, he had been wounded in the leg, and loss of blood had toppled him from his horse, and he then became nauseated with pain and weakness and heat. And that was when the Shagara had found him.

So far, so good. What had happened after the battle, they knew better than he. It was the part before that was a bit dodgy.

“Young to be an officer,” one of the healers remarked. “Favorite of some sheyqa or sheyqir, are you?”

“Pretty thing like him? Of course,” said another.

“When I joined the Riders, an al-Ma’aliq sheyqa gave me these,” he said, quite truthfully, touching the hazziri at his breast and the one depending from his left earlobe. “That was the last time I saw her—or any al-Ma’aliq of Tza’ab Rih.” This was also true; he hadn’t seen his mother since that day, and all his cousins were al-Ma’aliq of Joharra, Granidiya, Ibrayanza, and Qaysh. He wasted no time or wit wondering if he’d ever see any al-Ma’aliq again. “I am loyal to my name, like all the Za’aba Izim.” When they looked blank as he used the term, he said, “The Seven Names. The desert tribes. Surely you have not been so long from home that you’ve forgotten—”

“This is our home,” snarled the oldest of the healers. “We are now part of this land, and it now belongs to us. And it will never become part of the Tza’ab Empire.”

“Ayia,” Qamar admitted, “they don’t even know where you are.”

“And it will stay so.” The old man hesitated, and an odd, reluctant yearning glazed his dark eyes. “I would know what you might tell me of the tribe whose name we share.” Qamar’s surprise made him add, “My grandmother was wife to a Shagara, one of those who first came here. Her name was Omaryya Tariq.”

Grandmother—? But suddenly Qamar realized that although this man looked old enough to be a grandfather himself, he was not. He never could be. He was Haddiyat and could not be more than 45 years old. Repressing a shudder of pity, he sifted through his brain for whatever he knew about the Tariq. “We remain in the desert, and live according to the traditional ways, making the usual yearly round of camps.” This was pleasing to the healer. Taking his cue, Qamar went on, “And of course we never send any of our people to the court, and we marry mostly with the Tabbor and Ammal—never the al-Ma’aliq!” This the healer liked even better. “In fact, we stay aloof from the larger affairs of Tza’ab Rih, except to contribute the finest soldiers in all the army, as befits our Name.” Tariq meant conqueror. Qamar wondered for a moment if he’d laid it on a bit thick, but the proud smile indicated otherwise. “So I can’t imagine anything is much different since your grandmother left.”

This was precisely what everyone wanted to hear. It was as if with all the changes they had been compelled to make, all the compromises, the difficult adjustment of staying in one place, the experimentation necessary to continue their arts in this land of strange and exotic plants, they needed to know that the life their grandparents had left behind remained just like the stories that had been told them about their ancestral home.

Qamar hid his amazement that they knew so little of the history of the last seventy or so years. Then again, they would not want their antecedents known to the local populace and so could not ask much about affairs back home—and the way the old man had declared that this was now their home held a certain defiance. The wicked ways of the al-Ma’aliq had exiled them. Very well; so be it. They were no longer of Tza’ab Rih.

But they remained Shagara. As Qamar rattled off pleasing little tales of how the Azwadh, the Tabbor, and the Ammal also remained faithful to the traditional ways—his audience was made up of healers who descended from those tribes—his gaze kept flickering to his supposed Tariq kinsman. White hair, lines, wrinkles; hands cruelly twisted by bone-fever; eyes dimming, muscles more feeble by the day . . . yes, they were still Shagara.

And so, through his father, was he. The distinctive Shagara coloring Jefar had bequeathed meant these people had let Qamar live. These distant cousins might honor him because of their shared ancestry, but honor and trust were two different things. Once he was recovered enough from his leg wound to rise from his bed and explore the intricate, inconvenient maze of alleys and passages between the stone buildings of their fortress, he was never left alone. One or another golden-skinned, dark-eyed young man shadowed him at all times. He was diverted from the outer walls, not permitted near the innermost fortification. As a Shagara, he was allowed certain liberties. As a cavalry officer of Tza’ab Rih, he was prohibited from taking advantage of them.

Some eight or nine days after he had fully recovered, a hammering rain woke him in the middle of the night. Just as well that it had: Someone was in the tiny cubicle he had been assigned, someone who moved in whispers of wool clothing and bare feet on cold stone. This person had not reckoned on lightning flashes through the high, barred windows. Nor, truthfully, had Qamar. When the sudden, fleeting illumination showed him the long gown and hooded cloak and startled face of a girl, it also showed her a man sitting straight up in bed with a clay candlestick in his hand.

“Who are you?” Qamar demanded.

“Singularly unoriginal,” she snapped as night devoured the room once more. An instant later came another crack of lightning, just enough to show her bringing a knife out of her skirt pocket. “I know how to use this,” she warned.

“I don’t doubt it.” He used the darkness to scramble out of bed, and tripped over his own boots. Her stifled giggle infuriated him. “That was a mistake,” he said, leaped to one side so she could not get a fix on his voice, tossed the candlestick toward a corner to further confuse her, and lunged for where he was sure she would be.

He grabbed empty air and lost his balance. Fetching up against a wall—hard, bruising his shoulder—he cursed and swung around. The room wasn’t that big; there weren’t that many places to go.

An abrupt rush of air and the faint squeal of a hinge told him she’d opened the door—which was always locked when he retired for the night—and gone back outside. More noise from the hinges, a stillness in the air—and a metallic rattle that meant she was about to lock him in.

He grabbed the bars of the grille set at head-height in the door and yanked.

A moment later he was on his backside on the uncarpeted floor, and brief lightning showed him wildly waving arms and a shocked face beneath hair the color of sand as she staggered into the room. By the time she landed on him, it was pitch black again.

He laughed and wrapped his arms around her. She was smart enough not to struggle; he was smart enough to pin her elbows to her sides so she couldn’t get at him with that knife. Lying back flat on the flagstones, he tightened his grip.

“Not that I’m not perfectly charmed by your visit, qarassia,” he said into her ear through a mouthful of her blonde hair, “but was all this stealth really necessary?”

She called him something unspeakably filthy in the barbarian language—Raffiq Murah’s little translation guide hadn’t included it, but it was a soldier’s obligation to learn how to swear at the enemy in his own language.

“Acuyib preserve me, such a mouth!”

“Let go of me!”

“Tell me why you’re here, and I might consider it.”

“I’ll scream!”

“If you haven’t by now, you won’t anytime soon. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I had the key, didn’t I?”

“Stolen or borrowed, it doesn’t matter. Nobody makes a social call in the middle of a rotten night like this one. If your visit was legitimate, or even sanctioned, you wouldn’t be sneaking about with no shoes on. Now, why are you here?”

“I—I wanted a look at you.”

He smirked. “To judge for yourself whether or not I’m as handsome as rumors must have it?”

“To see if you’re really Shagara, like they say you are.”

“No, sorry, not good enough.” It was increasingly apparent to him that it was a sweet, dainty little bundle he wasn’t quite cuddling. Beneath the bulky skirt and heavy cloak—which was soaked with rain, and getting his nightshirt wet—he could discern a slim body with inspiring curves. “Why are you here?” he asked for a third time.

“I told you. Let me go before someone hears us.”

“I’ve been rather hoping someone will. After all, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

“If I tell you, will you let me go?”

“Perhaps. If I believe you.”

She sighed, and relaxed atop him. He didn’t make the mistake of easing his hold; he’d played too many games with too many mistresses to be fooled by that trick. There was a blaze of lightning, and the rain pounded down harder than ever outside, but it was the roll of thunder that made her muscles tense again.

“I wanted to know if you really are the one I’ve been seeing.”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’ve seen you! How do you think they knew where to find you? I saw you, and—”

“They actually went looking? For me?” He paused as a thought occurred to him. “What’s your name?”

“Solanna. Solanna Grijalva. And yes, I’m the person you think I am—which is more than can be said for you!”

He crowed with derisive laughter. “Nonsense, girl! Everyone knows that Solanna Grijalva is a child and quite mad with her visions—”

“I’m fully seventeen, and I’m not mad! I saw you,” she repeated. “But I wanted to look at you with my own eyes, so I could be sure.”

“And you chose the blackest hours of a rainy night to do it?”

“Eiha, you’re the one who’s mad! Do you think I have any more freedom within these walls than you do? Didn’t you hear my name? Grijalva! The Shagara despise me as much as they do you!”

Qamar considered. Although it was quite nice, having an armful of girl again, the chill stone floor was not being kind to his backbone. He sat up, still holding her fast, but allowed her to turn so that she was seated between his thighs with her back pressed to his chest. Her head, he noted, fit just beneath his chin.“There, that’s better. Why should they despise you? Religious disputes?”

“So you believe the story Princess Baetrizia put around, do you? She thinks my visions and voices are visitations by the Mother.”

“And you did nothing to disabuse her of this notion, did you? Quite the rise, from humble peasant to confidant of royalty!”

“You know nothing about it!”

“The fact remains that you were a guest of the simple-minded Baetrizia for quite some time. How did you come to be a guest of the Shagara?”

“I’m here on purpose! Which is more than can be said for you!”

Ayia, she had him there. What puzzled him was why, if she was here in his room clandestinely, during all their conversation she had not troubled to lower her voice. Although he knew himself to be the only occupant of this particular floor (the third) of the building, and the clattering rain and rumbling thunder and occasional crash of lightning were admittedly very loud, surely someone ought to have heard their voices by now. “Did you drug or bribe your way in?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Having nothing but your delightful self to offer—and you really don’t seem that sort of girl—it must have been drugs.”

Grudgingly, she said, “I have trouble sleeping sometimes. They’re very good with medicines, you know. The Shagara won’t fight, but they sent healers to tend our soldiers.”

So that much at least of Shagara capabilities was generally known. Interesting, that the imperative to use their healing gifts in service to others remained so strong. He nodded, his lips tickled by her wildly curling hair. “You did come here on purpose, then. You want the Tza’ab out of your country, and you thought you could convince the Shagara to help you do it.” By the way she stiffened—and not in response to thunder—and then sagged against him, he knew he was right. Smarter than a seventeen-year-old girl; his mother would be so proud. “You might as well explain all of it,” he invited, “in as much detail as whatever you used on the guards will allow.”

“Only about an hour,” she confessed. “Eiha, what do you want to know?”

“That lazy old king of Cazdeyya not moving fast enough for you, I take it? And you know what the Shagara can do by way of potions and—and things.” How much did she know? “Poor qarassia, aren’t you aware of their history? They left my country because gr—greater men than they used Shagara knowledge in ways they didn’t approve!” He’d almost said great-grandfather.

“And thus they hate you Tza’ab almost as much as we do. In the end, we’ll make common cause and throw you out. You don’t belong here!”

“The land belongs to us now. You might as well accept it.”

“You don’t belong here, and you never will! Just because your troops march all over a country doesn’t mean you own it. Land belongs to the people who belong to it.”

This notion sounded vaguely familiar. He was distracted from chasing it down inside his head by her sudden wriggle to get free. To his surprise—and hers, to judge by her gasp—he let her go.

“The rain has slacked,” he said as he got to his feet in the darkness. “And it’s been nearly an hour, hasn’t it? You’d better lock me in. If you’ll forgive me, I’ll wait until you’re outside before giving you back your knife.”

“Whoever you are, you’re certainly a fool. An open door, sleeping guards—and you ask to be locked up again!”

“An open door, sleeping guards, and an entire fortress filled with many, many more guards between me and freedom. How far do you think I’d get?”

“How did I get here?” she taunted.

“Ayia, you are here, so why don’t you have that look at me that you say you want so much?” He went to the corner where he’d thrown the candlestick, not surprised to find it in pieces. The candle was still intact, and he groped on his bedside table for flint. “I warn you, I’m not looking my best. I need my hair trimmed by someone who actually knows how, and a nightshirt isn’t the most flattering of garments.” He struck her knife against the flint and the candlewick ignited. Turning toward the door, he smiled.

She caught her breath. He might have been pleased with the reaction but for the nature of her shock. “You—you’re so young! And there are no scars—”

His brows arched. “The nature of your visions dismays me, qarassia. You saw a scarred old man and mistook him for me?”

“I only saw you lying there in the dirt,” she snapped. “I didn’t see your face that clearly.”

“Yet you had an impression of age and scars? I must have looked even worse than I felt at the time!”

“You don’t understand! Nobody ever understands!”

With her brown eyes flashing and her chin jutting out, she didn’t look seventeen. More like five or six, and threatening an impressive tantrum. He had to laugh. She really was rather adorable. Not precisely pretty, not to his usual tastes, but the pale hair was intriguing, and he suspected she had an enchanting smile. Not that he was likely to see it anytime soon.

“I saw you old,” she hissed. “I saw it just as I saw Ra’amon al-Joharra’s death in battle! And it came true! I saw it last summer, and this summer he died!”

“Ra’amon is dead?” Qamar had no time to feel anything. A deep and angry voice echoed off the stone walls all the way to the third floor, bellowing about lazy stupid louts who got so drunk they passed out while on duty. Fresh lightning and an immediate thunderclap couldn’t drown out his roars.

Solanna flinched so violently that she dropped the key. Qamar bent to retrieve it, pushed her through the door, and blew out the candle.

“Go on, hurry! But don’t forget the lock!”

Swinging the door closed, he heard her fumbling attempts to insert and then turn the key. More lightning, more thunder—and the enraged voice almost shaking the walls as the abuse went on and on. But it seemed the guards were in no condition to appreciate the creativity of his invective; most of the yelling consisted of orders to wake up.

“He’ll have to go for help,” Qamar told the girl through the barred window. “If you’re careful, you can slip out then. Will you lock the damned door and get out of here?”

She said nothing, but in the darkness he heard the clink of metal on stone on the floor within his room. He had to wait for the next flash of lightning to be sure. But it was indeed the key.

No one accosted him the next day to demand what had gone on in the middle of the night. Thus he assumed that Solanna had safely reached her own quarters, wherever they might be. Over the next few days, on his walks around the rain-grayed alleys, he looked for possible “guest” accommodations—or, better still, a glimpse of her—but had no luck.

As for the key—ayia, guards who got drunk on duty were also capable of losing keys. That was what got shouted the next morning, and Qamar was disinclined to correct the mistake.

He kept it in his left boot, and Solanna’s knife in the right.

The building in which he was not quite a prisoner but not quite a guest was a narrow construction crammed against another building several stories taller. The entire fortress always smelled cold and harsh, for everything here was built of stone and iron. He missed the sweet fragrances of wooden floors and staircases polished with oils. But he supposed that this, like the stinking salve and the pungent herbs that flavored the food, was yet another example of working with what one had. The lowest floor was divided into treatment rooms and a dispensary; the second was a single large room with beds for recovering patients. The third floor’s dozen little rooms were all equipped with barred windows and lockable doors. Qamar wondered if this had been the doing of the original builders or if the Shagara had turned this floor into a prison.

One morning the healer who had Tariq forebears was the one to unlock Qamar’s door. After a silent walk downstairs, he was ushered into a room almost as small as the one he inhabited upstairs.

“Please sit.”

He did so, in a comfortable wooden chair at a table laid out with paper, pens, and bottles of different colored inks. Smiling brightly, he asked, “Am I to write my own ransom note?”

“You may be worth more than money.” From a pocket he drew a much-folded sheet of paper. “Copy these symbols using the green ink.”

What in the Name of Acuyib the Inscrutable was going on here? During boyhood he had spent a year with his Shagara relatives, but having no talent for even the most rudimentary talishann he’d been perfectly happy tending and training the horses instead. His Haddiyat cousins were forever writing and rewriting the protections at the family residences, and a few times Qamar had been bored enough with his other pursuits to watch. None of the symbols on this page looked familiar at all.

Shrugging, he opened the bottle of green ink, noting that the stopper was carved of green moss agate into the shape of a rather pretty flower he didn’t recognize. He dipped a pen and made his copy.

“Now write my name at the top. Zario Shagara.”

Qamar glanced up. “That’s unusual.”

“It commemorates the Cazdeyyan nobleman who gave us this fortress. One Shagara male at a time, and only one, bears the name. Do you want me to spell it?”

“Please.” He wrote as he was told. When he looked up, expecting further instructions, Zario was holding a small, thin-bladed knife.

“Your hand,” he said.

Qamar stared at him.

“I need a few drops of your blood. Hold out your hand.”

He very nearly blurted out “No!” They must think—they thought he was—but he wasn’t, he couldn’t possibly—

He tried to remember what most people knew about Shagara magic. He was wearing hazziri, so he had to know something, but how much?

“Your great-grandfather Azzad didn’t believe until it was demonstrated to him over and over again,” his great-grandmother Leyliah had told him a long time ago. “Ayia, a very stubborn man! Your grandfather Alessid, of course, was told directly when Abb Shagara thought it time to do so. And now I will tell you. It is not just the talishann, nor the skill of the maker, nor the metal, nor the stones that make hazziri potent. Neither is it only the particular combination of herbs or flowers or the amount of wine or water or vinegar in a medication that gives it the power to heal.”

They thought him Shagara, and he was—but not that sort of Shagara. He was certain of it. So let Zario do whatever it was he would do, conduct whatever test this might be.

Qamar shrugged and held out his hand.

Zario didn’t prick Qamar’s finger. He drew a long, shallow scratch across his own palm. He watched the blood well up, a meditative and bitter smile curving his lips. Then he wiped the blade between his fingers and seized Qamar’s hand and pricked his thumb. Before Qamar had time to cry out his surprise, Zario had squeezed drops of blood onto each of the six symbols and both words of his name.

“What do you—how dare you—” He looked from the smear of blood on his thumb to the Shagara’s face—but blocking his gaze was the man’s palm. His clean, whole, uninjured palm, without a mark on it.

“But I’m not!” he cried. “I’m not one of you—I’m not like you!”

The old man who was not really an old man eyed him with a certain grim satisfaction. “All evidence to the contrary,” he said.

“No—it’s not possible—” He cast about frantically for some excuse. Some reason. Some escape. “It was your blood, not mine—your blood still on the blade—”

“Are you calling me a clumsy fool, boy? I’ve done the testing these twenty and more years. It’s one of the privileges of bearing my name. There is only one of me, you see, and so only one person that the signs and the blood and the paper and the ink can touch.”

Qamar staggered up from his chair, dimly heard it crash behind him, backed away from Zario’s shrewd, pitiless gaze. “No! I can’t be one of you!”

“Certain of that, are you? Left a fine little collection of bastards behind you in Tza’ab Rih, did you?” He snorted a laugh, then drew himself up and squared his shoulders and said in cold and formal tones, “Qamar Tariq, it is my honor to inform you that you have been blessed by Acuyib and have the right to use the name Shagara.”

20

After having it proved to him that he was Haddiyat, that he would age quickly and painfully, that at not quite twenty-two his life was half over, he spent three days alone in his room at the Shagara fortress. The door was no longer locked. This was a good thing, for it took less time to open it when more wine was delivered, and speedy delivery was second only to generous quantity in Qamar’s bloodshot eyes.

On the fourth day, no wine arrived. Downstairs Zario Shagara was waiting for him in the room where his blood had proved what he was. It often happens like this, Zario said. Some cannot face the truth at first, he said. I remember once a boy only a bit younger than you broke into the dispensary and swallowed everything he could stuff into his mouth.

Now, despite the passage of many weeks, Qamar was still unable to decide whether or not he envied that boy. The fact that he was yet alive argued in one direction; the fact that he was planning to go on drinking argued in the other.

The first choice, Zario said, is acceptance or despair. But your next choice, he said, is one never given to any man before: Stay here and learn how best to use your gifts, or return to your own Shagara, with whom you would probably be more happy.

Happy. Ayia, of a certainty—happy as a colt in clover.

It was a dim, rickety little tavern he sat in now, a short walk from the palace in Joharra. He wasn’t quite drunk enough. The last weeks had refined his perceptions of how much wine it took to make him forgetful and how much rendered him oblivious. There were stages between tipsy and insensible he had never bothered to catalog before. At the moment, he was at that unfortunate point where nervous caution still existed. It was a somewhat delicate calculation, but the amount of wine left in the jug was sufficient to bring on just enough recklessness so he could accomplish his goal. He had only one, very carefully thought out while he was stone sober. Simple, really. He needed money.

His Shagara relations—by Acuyib the Incomprehensible, how he loathed having to acknowledge them as such, and especially the reason he must acknowledge them—had no money to give him. What they had given was food enough for three days and a horse. This was after they’d drugged him for an unknown number of days, and taken him on a journey to Acuyib didn’t want to know where, and left him with a vicious headache and the food and the horse and instructions to ride south for two days and then east. Or perhaps it had been east for one day and then south. He’d been beyond caring.

He’d ridden sober back into territory controlled by Joharra. That had been his last piece of luck—the right choice of direction, not the sobriety.

Seated in a corner of a tavern in Joharra, Qamar poured a precise amount of wine into his cup and wasted a few moments picking little floating bits of debris from it. Happy. He would not go to the desert, to the Shagara, to waste precious years of his abbreviated life crouched at some mouallima’s knee, memorizing talishann or pounding designs into silver or mixing up healing potions, and dripping his blood onto or into his work.

Neither would he stay with the other Shagara in their Cazdeyyan fortress. The studying would be the same, and the bleeding. But his tools would be paper and pen and ink and the strange plants of a realm that had already tried to kill him once with lethal thorns. Besides, being pent up inside stone walls in a land not his own was not the way he wanted to live. Happy? He would go insane.

Not that this wasn’t an intriguing thought, for a little while. Empress Mirzah had been quite, quite mad. When Qamar thought of the afternoons spent with her as she tended her dolls and called him by his great-grandfather’s name, he was both attracted and repulsed by the prospect. To live out his days not understanding or caring; to lose all awareness of reality . . . to be shut up someplace safe and private where he could shock no one . . .

Ayia, he was here, in this filthy little tavern not far from his cousins’ palace, so he had made the choice not to go mad, at any rate. Now that he thought about it, he had made quite a few choices. To stay alive, to leave Cazdeyya, to retain his sanity—although what he planned to do this evening would not be considered entirely sane.

Halfway through the last measure of wine now. He could feel nervousness turning to excitement, and smiled. He was still in an alien land that had first tried to kill him by piercing his body with poisoned thorns and in essence had succeeded in killing him with the truth about what he was. But a transplanted piece of Tza’ab Rih was a few streets away, eminently exploitable. He did not know how to live, let alone thrive, in this country that was full of barbarian people and poisonous plants and all manner of hideous things. Happy? he thought again, with a muffled snort. Here? He could not go home, but at least he could have one last hour of sensing home things all around him.

He began to be grateful, grudgingly, that the Shagara had let him go. It is not so much that we trust you not to try to find us again, Zario had said, and lead your army to us. You have no idea where you are, and will have even less idea of it by the time you ride away.

Then why? Qamar demanded. Why allow me to leave?

We value honor, Zario said. My grandfather exiled himself from his homeland because the honor of the Shagara had been compromised by the unspeakable crimes of Azzad al-Ma’aliq—who must have been a truly vile man, to have used his friend Fadhil in such a fashion, killing his enemies.

He didn’t kill them, he gelded them, Qamar said—and in a moment of sheer spite added, He made them like you.

And you, Zario had said without a twitch of an eyelash. Alessid al-Ma’aliq was even more shameless, for he corrupted his own sons to his purposes. Many more departed from the Shagara tents in disgust after that. Indeed, it is a wonder any stayed at all. Perhaps all honor is lost to them. But not to us.

Ayia, perhaps Zario’s implication had been correct, and all honor was lost to Qamar. What he was about to do was scarcely praiseworthy. Not that he much cared.

He left a swallow of wine in the cup, not needing it. Rising, he stretched widely, not thinking about the supple play of muscle and how it felt to be young. What he still possessed, he would use. A strong body, a beautiful face, melting dark eyes, and the infallible charm he had inherited from Azzad al-Ma’aliq—who had not killed his enemies, no matter what the renegade Shagara believed. He had exacted revenge, just as Ab’ya Alessid had done. As Qamar made his way through the dark city streets toward the palace, he wondered if Alessid had seen it as vengeance—whether of Acuyib or Chaydann al-Mamnoua’a—that his beloved wife had gone mad. But if there was one thing Qamar had decided without even having to think about it, it was that his mother would never ever learn that she too had birthed a Haddiyat son. Not that it would break Mairid, as it had broken Mirzah; he simply did not wish to see anyone ever look at him the way he had seen them look sometimes at Mairid’s brother Kemmal, with sadness and pity.

The palace guards did not recognize him. He had not expected them to. During his one night and one day back in Joharra, he had neither trimmed his beard nor changed to more conventional clothing. Both would have cost money much better spent in the tavern, achieving this lovely, carefree courage.

They did recognize his topaz ring.

“Sheyqir! Your whole family has been frantic with worry for months!”

“Not so loud!” he begged, laughing, and flicked a casual finger against one of the hazziri dangling from the gates. He didn’t know what this particular one signified, but that he could touch it at all meant the magic recognized him. There were similar protections in every palace he’d ever lived in, things that admitted family and kept doors locked for all others. “I’m a surprise for Queen Rihana’s birthday. A little late, of course, but—what? What is it?” he demanded as the two men exchanged agonized glances.

“The Queen . . . she has joined her beloved husband, may Acuyib gather them both into His Arms.”

Qamar felt his stomach lurch and the wine within it turn sour. Solanna Grijalva had said she’d seen Ra’amon’s death, and it had turned out to be true that he had died. Qamar had heard it in the taverns. But Rihana—“How did this happen? When? How did she die?”

“Earlier in the summer, after word was brought that her noble lord had been slain in a skirmish with the Taqlis—”

“The what?”

“It’s another barbarian country, Sheyqir, somewhere west of Cazdeyya.”

“By Acuyib’s Glory, do these damned nations breed while we’re not looking? And what was Ra’amon doing so far north?” He shook his head. “Ayia, I will learn all of this later.” After tonight, once he could afford it, he’d find a better class of tavern, where men conversed civilly with each other rather than muttering glumly into their wine. He would not be asking any al-Ma’aliq for information. He did not intend to see any of them at all. “I assume the family still lives in the same apartments? Excellent. Thank you. And not a word to anyone! Please?” He gave them a subdued version of the cheery, conspiratorial smile he’d planned, and they nodded and bowed.

Having successfully passed the gates and their protective hazziri, he was assumed by the rest of the guards to have legitimate business within. His body remembered the saunter appropriate to, and his face effortlessly arranged itself into the proper expression of, a casually arrogant al-Ma’aliq sheyqir. As he neared the Queen’s chambers, it was necessary to display his topaz ring once or twice more, but persuading the sentries to secrecy was so simple that it would have distressed him had he been the one these guards were guarding. Ayia, once they discovered what had happened tonight, they would be more cautious. They exclaimed at his presence, as the others had; they yielded to his authority, as the others had. It was a bitter amusement that these were the last orders he would ever give as a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih. Tell no one I am here. No one.

This time of night, the family would be sleeping. He had no need of private chambers—though his bones whispered a plea to rest in a soft, silken bed again. The first whimperings of what would eventually become screams . . . had not the girl Solanna seen him old and scarred? It was in him: His own early decay and death were inside him. How long before the whimpers turned to gasps of pain, and then moans, and then—

A little of the wine-inspired recklessness seeped away. There was only one remedy for that, and the maqtabba was entirely adequate to his purpose. It took him very little time to denude the room of all the lesser gold and silver fittings—doorknobs, drawer-pulls, and the like. From one of those drawers he took a large drawstring pouch of money kept there for incidentals. He was al-Ma’aliq, and the Shagara working did not defend against him. There was no lock because none was needed. Others could not even slide this drawer open, but he could.

Praising his deceased cousin Rihana for being royal enough to scorn carrying money on her exalted person, he weighed the pouch in his hand. He untied the sash from his waist and spread it across the table, then quickly folded the coins and doorknobs and such into it, twisted it to secure his booty, and wrapped it once more around him. He paused to smile slightly, recalling that great-grandfather Azzad had carried the famous necklace of pearls this way, long ago, the only wealth he had saved of all the vast al-Ma’aliq fortunes.

At the maqtabba’s door he hesitated, then returned to the desk. In the drawer that had held the money he left behind his grandfather Alessid’s hazzir, the necklace that had kept him safe through dozens of battles. Whoever found it would know who had been here; what they might think about why he had left himself unprotected, he cared not.

He kept the two rings. He had promised himself he would never take them off. All the other hazziri—the earring, an armband, two silver discs sewn into the heels of his boots—these he had already sold. But the rings he would keep as long as he lived. They were reminders of who he had once been: al-Ma’aliq, al-Gallidh.

Qamar walked unchallenged out of the palace at Joharra. At just past midnight he was enjoying a tasty meal and a large jug of very good wine at a clean, refined tavern that specialized in traditional Tza’ab cooking. Tomorrow, he decided, on his way out of Joharra, he would take the time to find out exactly what had happened to Rihana and Ra’amon and who was in charge now. On reflection, he decided it was probably Allim, a seasoned war-leader who could take care of the incursions from Cazdeyya and—what had the guard called it? Taqit? Taqim? Qamar didn’t have it in him to care, not tonight. Tonight, he cared only about getting very, very drunk.

He stayed drunk all through the autumn and winter.

He found a congenial seaside town and called himself Assado, and said he was from the newly established Tza’ab town of Shagarra in the southeast, which his atrocious accent and somewhat limited vocabulary seemed to confirm. No one ever discovered much more about him than his name. He kept to himself and his wine jars. Indeed, he had chosen the town for the potency of the imported wines in its dockside taverns. Once or twice someone saw him ambling drunkenly down the pier or along the beach, and several of the tavern girls had graced him with their favors, for he was a handsome youth—at first, anyway. As autumn became winter, and the wine did its work on his body as well as his mind, all that remained of his beauty was the large dark eyes with their extravagant lashes and a certain withered sweetness to his smile.

At about the same time his money was running out, there arrived in the seaport an old man and a young girl. No one in the dockside taverns had ever seen them before, and no one ever saw them again. Nor did they ever see again the youth who called himself Assado.

Something smooth and gentle was beneath his back, cradling his relaxed body. The quiet soothed him. His skin and hair felt soft and clean, and his muscles were loose, as if he’d just had a hot bath and a shave and a long rubdown with expensive oils, the sort of thing one expected when one was a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih. There was a scent of green grass, a tang of sandalwood, accented with a subtle hint of a woman’s perfume, and a taste on his lips of mint tea.

All in all, he felt quite blissful. He must remember to remember whatever tavern it was that served wine as good as this.

“Eiha, about time you woke up.”

Head turning lazily, he sought the voice above him. Her face was indistinct, a pale oval framed in wildly curling fair hair, backlit by white-gold sunlight. The eyes were brown, nearly as dark as his own. He wished she would lean closer so he could see her more clearly, hoping her face was as fascinating as her voice—low and soft, the oddities of a barbarian accent attractively negated by the lilting rise and fall of the syllables.“So what’s your name, qarassia?”

She sat on the bed beside his hip, facing him, hands folded and head cocked to one side. She wore something white with a dull sheen to it, no embroidery or decoration. He still couldn’t quite focus on her face, but her voice told him she disapproved of him. “You still look dreadful. Better than before, but still—”

Whenever before was a total blank, it usually meant he’d been very, very naughty. Father would glower, Mother would glare, and Ab’ya Alessid would shake his head and turn away to hide a smile.

He realized that there was a lot of before that he couldn’t remember. The days all blurred together—or, rather, the nights did, for he spent the daylight hours sleeping. Ayia, to be honest, he spent them insensible, sometimes in his rented bed, sometimes on the street, sometimes on the beach, sometimes in a back corner of whatever tavern he’d honored with his noble presence that evening. Never yet, though, had he woken in a bed like this one. He was stretched out on a fine, soft mattress with sheer white curtains languidly swagged around carved wooden posts. White velvet was under his back, and his head rested on a white silk pillow. The whole of it was rather cloudlike and quite lovely.

“Would you like something to drink?”

“By Acuyib, yes!” He struggled to sit up; a light, insistent hand on his chest pushed him back down.

“Not just yet. Here.”

He slurped from the glass she held to his mouth, then spluttered. Water? “Take that goat piss away and bring me wine!”

“Look like a tavern maid, do I?”

“I can’t be sure if I can’t see you properly, can I?” He gave her his best big-melting-brown-eyes smile—the look was a good one on him, and he knew it. “Come closer, qarassia, so I can see your face. And if you’d be so kind, please tell me where I am.”

“Can you manage to take a single breath without trying to use it to seduce someone?”

“I’ve no idea,” he replied blithely.“Though I must admit I don’t usually find myself in bed with women like you.” Abruptly aware that he had been rude without meaning to be, he blinked up at her. He still couldn’t quite see her features.“Forgive me, I really didn’t intend that for an insult. I meant that it’s so rare to exchange more than a few words with a woman in these circumstances.”

“These are not those circumstances.”

He arranged his face into a sulk. “Why not?” Squinting up at the face that slowly came into focus, he gave a snort of disappointment, because she was really rather plain. The dark eyes were lovely, and the masses of pale curling hair, but the rest . . . ayia, had he caught sight of her at a feast, he wouldn’t have troubled even to find out her name.

But it came to him that he already knew it.

“You truly don’t know where you are, do you? And before you begin worrying about it, you didn’t succeed.”

“At what?”

“Drinking yourself to death.”

“So much I had already realized,” he drawled. “For instance, this cannot be Acuyib’s Glory. Aside from the fact that it’s the last place I’d ever end up—again, forgive me—you aren’t my idea of the sarhafiya The Lessons so confidently promise.”

Solanna didn’t seem offended. “If I understand correctly, I would imagine such beings keep well clear of dangerous boys like you.”

“Dangerous! Me?”

A breath of breeze fluttered the white gauzy bed hangings. “Do you intend to stay a little boy for the rest of your life?”

“What fool wants to grow old?” And then he remembered what he had been drinking in order to forget. He remembered what he was.

“I can see where the prospect wouldn’t attract you. But not for the reasons you’re thinking.”

“How do you know what I’m thinking?’

“Simple. You found out that if you live, you’ll grow old. So will all the rest of us. What’s so special about you? That it will happen more quickly? You spent all autumn and winter encouraging it to happen very quickly indeed. You don’t want to grow old. You’re very good at being young, and you’ve enjoyed it very much. Eiha, of course you’re good at it—it’s all you’ve ever been. But isn’t that true of everyone?”

“I’m only twenty-three years old—and at forty I’ll be dying!”

“There are choices, you know. You can choose to grow old, and die. You can refuse to grow old, and choose to die. Or you can die, but choose not to grow old. Stop frowning as if you don’t understand me.”

“All I understand is that there is no choice. I’m going to die.” The misery of it was that he’d lost what it felt like to be young. He’d drunk and whored just as he’d always done, but the sensations of true youth were lost to him. Every time he thought they might have returned, he would remember the symbols and the name and the blood on the paper, and Zario’s voice saying he was entitled to the name Shagara.

“Everyone dies. That is a truth. Here’s another: You are what you are, and you will die sooner than you expected. But that’s true of everyone, as well.” She rose from the bed. “No one wants to, everyone does. King of Cazdeyya, peasant farmer in Ghillas, sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih. Whatever you were born, you will die just like everyone else. The only thing you can choose is how old you are when you die. There are people, you know, who are walking around with unlined faces and not a single gray hair who are already quite, quite dead inside.”

True enough, he had to admit. His grandmother had been one of them.

“If you want to be like them, I will send in the biggest jug of wine I can locate, and you can go back to killing yourself. And you will die having been a little boy and an old man, with nothing in between.”

“Dead is dead. Get out.”

She bent her knees and her head, mockingly, and her white skirts sighed across the stone floor.

He waited a long time. She sent no wine to his room. At length he slept, and woke to candlelight, wondering if he’d dreamed the whole thing.

A little boy, an old man . . . and nothing in between.

“I do not belong here,” he said aloud. “This country is not mine. These people are not mine.”

“Next you’ll be whining for your mother.”

His limbs were sluggish, but his mind was not; he recognized Zario Shagara’s voice. Struggling to prop himself on his elbows, he succeeded only in collapsing onto his back once more.

And he could not move his legs at all.

“Calm yourself,” Zario told him. “Don’t fight against the medicine—you’ll only prolong your stay in bed. What all that wine did to your belly and bowels—it was days before the contamination cleared from your body. As for your brain . . .” He folded his arms across his chest, head tilting to one side. “You would know best about that, I suppose.”

Qamar lay back on the white bed, closing his eyes to the sight of the old man who was not truly old.“Now you will tell me she had another vision that led you to me again.”

“In fact, yes. Several of them. Including one that showed you in a palace of the al-Ma’aliq.”

He snorted. “Prove it.”

“She saw a table, and a drawer you opened without a key, and the bag you took from within. Green velvet, stamped in gold with the same leaf carved on your ring.”

“Nonsense.”

“And the necklace you left in its place. She was adamant that we find and retrieve you before you either killed yourself with wine or someone killed you for those rings. It amazes me that they’re still on your hands, considering where you were living.”

“She is the one who needs medication, something to cure outrageous fantasies. It remains, Zario, that I do not belong here. And I do want to go home.”

“It was not just her visions that prompted us to find you.” His eyes gleamed with malicious amusement. “It was the description that reached us of the young al-Ma’aliq sought by his frantic family—including mention of those rings.” He smirked. “Imagine our shock—and our shame that we had not treated a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih with all due ceremony! We had to have you back, if only to remedy our earlier oversight.” But as Qamar opened his mouth to protest further, Zario pushed himself to his feet and said, “Enough for now. You do not belong here, that is true. But you will not be going home.” He left, and though it was not the austere third-floor room of Qamar’s previous guesting here, it did lock.

This did not particularly impress him. Reaching for his boots, he slipped a hand inside the left one and smiled. The Shagara were indeed honorable people—they had left him his possessions, such as were left of them anyway, and had not even searched them.

Over the next few days as he rested and recovered his full strength—it seemed he was always doing that, these days, and it came to him that he would be doing it more and more as the years went on—he formulated and began implementing his plan. The key he possessed, the key to that other door, was useless in this one, of course. But locks could be persuaded, if one knew the right talishann. From his year in the desert tents he recalled some of them, though too imperfectly to be of use. He remembered a few more from watching Haddiyat rework the protections around the palace. He did have a good brain, when not befuddled with liquor. Yet it seemed during those days, and especially during the nights, when he lay restless and frustrated, that all he really remembered with any clarity were symbols for things that were of absolutely no use to him whatsoever. Safety; clean water; the neverfall used on shelving; wash twice sewn into the corners of his clothes when he was a child because, as his father avowed, he was surely the first place dirt went when looking for a new home . . . After thinking this, he spent a whole hour musing on an entirely new means of employing Shagara talents: tapestries. It was another kind of artwork impractical in the desert, for, like the huge folios of drawings on paper, who would wish to lug such bulky things around? His father’s people were ruthlessly practical. The metals they worked all year, for instance, were made only in the winter camp, where the permanent forge was. Thinking of this, he saw in his mind the talishann for touch-not, which neatly discouraged both curious and careless hands and possible thieves. Yes, very practical, his ancestors.

But nothing was coming to him that he could use right now. He tried to recall the symbols for freedom, liberty, unlock, unbind, open, but none of them coalesced in his mind.

He remembered other talishann, though, the ones he had written on the corners of Ab’ya’s letter to Rihana and Ra’amon. He recognized it now as the first time he’d used his Shagara blood. He was the only one who could connect the arrogant cruelty of Allim’s rule, about which he had heard much in the taverns during the autumn and winter whether he wanted to hear it or not, with that letter. Ab’ya had urged them to serve the land, and Qamar himself had added love and fertility and happiness and fidelity to the paper that had known the touch of his blood, however briefly. Binding on Rihana and Ra’amon, it was useless on Allim.

But none of those signs would help him now.

And then one morning when he woke he had it, and he muffled laughter in his pillow.

The key was brass—not the most potent of metals, but at least it wasn’t iron. First he honed the handle of a spoon by scraping it against the stone walls. When the end of it was thin enough, sharp enough, he used it like a pen to scratch the appropriate lines onto the grip of the key. It was flat, undecorated, and the relatively soft metal responded to the abrasion as iron would not have done. Blessing Acuyib for inspiring the Shagara to make this talishann a simple one of straight lines and no curves, he tried to remember how deeply the work ought to be carved into wind chimes or bowls or hazziri for maximum effect, but could not.

At length he told himself he would have to be satisfied. He used the end of the spoon to prick his little finger and smeared the blood on the sign engraved into the key and then all over the key itself. As he passed his finger over and over the brass, he was reminded of the days spent passing the spoon handle over and over the walls, and how the steady, rhythmic motion had formed a framework for his thoughts.

Or, more accurately, for certain words that he knew now truly had been spoken to him while he was awake, not while he was dreaming. He sucked gently on his finger to bring up just a bit more blood, and heard the words again.

You can choose to grow old, and die.

You can refuse to grow old, and choose to die.

Or you can die, but choose not to grow old.

Crossing the room from the white-draped bed to the door, he slid the key into the lock and began laughing softly to himself.

For there was another choice, one Solanna had not considered.

He turned the key in the lock—the key stained with his blood and bearing the talishann marked over the interior of every gate in every al-Ma’aliq palace, in combination with others that warned or made the gate exclusive to merchants or servants or guards, or in extreme cases halted anyone approaching it in their tracks. The lock caught, the door opened, and he strolled down a long hallway lit by brilliant spring sunshine, all the way down six flights of stairs and into a large chamber filled with desks and paper and pens and adolescent boys.

Smiling, he chose a desk at the back and sat down. And when the mouallima—a severe matron with a face like a sour plum—stalked up to demand what he thought he was doing, he replied, “My education is sadly lacking, I fear. Please, return to the lesson. I’m eager to catch up.”

“What’s your name? Who are you?”

“Qamar al-Ma’aliq,” he said amiably. “Sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih.”

And thus he made the choice that for all her talents Solanna had not envisioned.

I choose not to die.

21

“White is the color of purity, of chastity, of clarity, of sincerity, of energy, of harmony, of serenity, of spirituality . . .” . . . of truthity and of protectiony and of meditationy and of sheer stark raving lunacy if this old fool doesn’t end the class soon! Qamar didn’t say it out loud, of course. The man had knowledge he wanted—needed—and in the last year, if he had not learned patience, then at least he had discovered endurance.

As the mouallima’s voice droned on about the properties of white, Qamar dutifully made notes to be added to the sheets already plumping the tooled leather folder at his feet. He had six of these folders, bulging with pages on each of six subjects: Color, Flowers and Herbs, Ink, Paper, Talishann, and Al-Fansihirro.

As for the first, had anyone asked him back when he lived in Hazganni, he would have said there were eight colors that looked very good on him, and why should he bother with the rest? In fact, according to these Shagara, there were scores of colors, and all of them had names and influences and powers and meanings, and the slightest variation could mean the difference between health and illness, even life and death.

The lessons about plants he found simply loathsome. This country had tried to kill him with its poisoned thorns. That it had also healed him was neither here nor there. It did not like him. He returned the sentiment.

When it came to the formulation of inks, it transpired that he had a real flair for the work. He got lampblack ink right the first time, for instance—not easy to do, as the mouallima grudgingly admitted. While the rest of the class was busy chasing down smuts of soot (lampblack was lighter than air and gleefully floated anywhere it pleased), Qamar was adding hot water one drop at a time to his little bowl and mixing it with a finger until the lampblack dissolved (again, difficult, as the soot tended to float atop the water). Subsequent formulations with various roots, leaves, flowers, nutshells, and tree barks were equally simple for him to master. And he found that he rather enjoyed it. Satisfying, to be good at something again without having to try much at all.

Paper turned out to be rather more physical than he’d anticipated. It seemed students were required to learn not just its properties but how to make it, and in several different varieties, too. His notes on this subject were scanty technical descriptions of various processes; the width of the folder was due to the samples. His work did not compare favorably to that of the masters who tried to teach him. Perhaps he had difficulty overcoming a Tza’ab’s ingrained horror of cutting down trees instead of planting them.

The masters of the craft were known as Qa’arta, which seemed to be an adaptation of a barbarian word for paper. Their work was as messy as tending dye vats and not nearly as colorful, as smelly as a tannery—almost—and surprisingly demanding physically. The slurry of soaked fibers from wood, cloth, lint, fishing nets, bits of hemp rope, and seemingly anything else they took it into their heads to add must be stirred in vats with great wooden spoons. The screened frames dipped into those vats could weigh so much it took two men to maneuver them. The presses that squeezed all the water from the pages must be screwed down as tightly as possible. And all had to be done with precision.

“Tilt the frame to gather the fibers, Qamar—not when removing it from the vat! You’ll end up with all the slurry at one end and all the water at the other! Do it again.”

“The sheet should peel off smoothly, Qamar, in a single piece—not in shreds! Do it again.”

“The task was to produce paper, Qamar—not a piece of shelving! Do it again.”

He sincerely hated papermaking class.

The memorization of seemingly thousands of talishann had a tendency to make his eyes cross. From the simple to the intricate, the mild to the dangerous, every stroke of the pen that formed the symbols demanded absolute concentration. Qamar’s mother had once accused him of having the attention span of a flitwing drunk on Challa Leyliah’s best stimulant tonic. Whole afternoons of copying and recopying and copying yet again the twists and turns of symbols that, if not perfectly formed, ended up as at best useless and at worst potentially lethal—ayia, more than once he was shocked from a doze by the rap of a willow switch across his shoulders.

It was the class taught by Zario that combined all the other subjects into the craft of the gifted Shagara male. Al-Fansihirro: art and magic.

“The thought you invest in your work will determine its success. The color of the ink is as vital as the paper. What you add to the ink intensifies your intent. The talishann must be perfect. Never think that a hasty sketch on a scrap of paper with whatever ink is to hand will function as you wish simply because you bleed onto it. What we do is an art, as truly as our lost brothers pound out their hazziri in metals.”

This last sentiment occurred often in his lectures, and when it did he invariably looked at Qamar. Qamar looked right back, unblinking. His complete lack of knowledge about anything to do with the making of hazziri—despite the key carved with the talishann for exit he had used to open the locked door of his room—irked Zario. Something, anything, the slightest hint of vague rumors—Qamar was a total disappointment to him regarding the traditional arts of the Shagara and, Zario implied, a total waste of his valuable time. For although they could not refuse education to one of their kind, they all suspected he would take what he had learned back to Tza’ab Rih at the first opportunity and use it in the service of the Empire’s ambitions exactly as his great-grandfather and grandfather had done.

Qamar did not disabuse them of this error. It amused him to see them grind their teeth as they imparted some arcane magical formula, some obscure piece of herbal lore. He knew they were thinking that they were facilitating the very thing their forebears had fled Tza’ab Rih to avoid. He did not tell them that he had no intention of returning home.

He had two reasons for this. First, no one among the Shagara had ever succeeded even in slowing the rapid ageing of a Haddiyat. This told him everything he needed to know about the state of magic and medicine in his country. They could not do what he was determined to do. He could have received much the same education in signs and symbols there as here, but the people inside this fortress had something his kinfolk did not: plants the desert-dwelling Shagara had never seen and did not know how to use. The tools were here. He knew it. Whether it happened in metal and gemstones or ink on paper, he was positive that somewhere in the compendium of tradition and experimentation lay his answers. This land that had tried to kill him would be his salvation. He knew it.

The second reason was just as personal, though it became a reason almost without his being aware of it. Solanna Grijalva had not returned to her own people. If she had her reasons for this, Qamar was unsuccessful in discovering them. Her original purpose—to convince the Shagara to come to the aid of those fighting the Tza’ab—had failed. They would never turn directly against their “lost brothers.” Why she had lingered at the fortress, when she had had the vision that had sent her and Zario to the seaport, and why she stayed now that he had been rescued from himself, Qamar could not have said. Perhaps she found the mountain air beneficial to her health.

She stayed. Rather than work with the other women in the daily chores of the fortress, she became a teacher. Every child between the ages of four and ten was required to sit in a schoolroom five hours of every day, learning to read, write, and cipher, reciting long passages of The Lessons, listening to lectures about the history of all civilized and barbarian countries and especially about the history and beliefs of the Shagara. Solanna’s residence here allowed a new subject to be taught: her language.

Naturally, he attended her classes. He was not the only adult to do so. The men and women who had dealings with the world outside the fortress already knew much about the local tongue, but within a few months Solanna had everyone speaking nothing else in her classroom.

That she used these lessons to disseminate her version of history amused Qamar endlessly. He never actually laughed aloud, but every time he smirked or smiled, she scowled at him and demanded to know his view of whatever event she claimed had taken place or whatever motive she ascribed to the Tza’ab.

And then they would argue.

One early evening in autumn—Solanna’s classes were held after work had finished for the day but before the evening meal—she began the lesson by saying, in her own language, “The invading army that came northward from Tza’ab Rih was a blatant violation of all decency and honor—”

“Or it would have been,” Qamar agreed, “if we hadn’t been invited.”

Solanna gave him a glower, and continued, “Count Garza do’Joharra and King Orturro do’Ferro da’Qaysh—”

“—were each so incredibly furious with the other that they committed the same act of desperation,” Qamar said, “because they knew neither could best the other on the battlefield.”

“—were betrayed by underlings who wished to seize power for themselves—”

“Eiha!” Qamar exclaimed, wide-eyed. “Was that why Orturro had Don Pederro’s throat cut?” To the others in the class, he continued, “I was always told that when it was seen that the Tza’ab had won the battle—”

“By treachery!” Solanna snapped.

“—Orturro ordered his nephew’s death. He’d acted as ambassador to Sheyqir Alessid, you see.” Turning back to Solanna, he said, “But I never learned what happened to Baron do’Gortova, who acted as emissary for Count Garza.”

Solanna did not reply. Another of the students said, “I think he killed himself, didn’t he?”

“No,” an older man corrected, “his wife was unable to live with the disgrace and poisoned him.”

“I thought it was his daughter.”

“I heard he went into exile in Merse.”

“No, it was Ghillas. Or maybe Elleon.”

“Eiha, enough!” Solanna cried. “The fact is that the baron was heard of no more. And the fact is that the Tza’ab took control of both regions. They set up puppet rulers—”

Qamar couldn’t help it. Laughter rendered him breathless for a few moments, while Solanna glared and the other students wondered what was so funny. At last he managed, “I would dearly love to hear you call Ra’abi that to her face!”

“As I was about to say,” she went on, tight-lipped, “all real power rested with the husband of the Empress because the Empress, of course, was incapable of governing. She was, in fact, entirely mad.”

Qamar felt the smile freeze on his face.

“They will tell you, in Tza’ab Rih, that she withdrew from public life to devote herself to prayer. This is not true. She was of the Shagara tribe, like all of you, and her shame at the uses to which her people’s knowledge had been put by her power-hungry husband was at last too much for her. She agreed with your ancestors, in fact, that Shagara gifts ought not to be used for evil purposes but for healing and protection and all the other things you’re learning how to do. And it serves as a warning, I think, to adhere strictly to these ways and not allow yourselves to be corrupted. Remember always how the Empress, unable to bear the wickedness her husband accomplished with the help of the Shagara, in the end lost her sanity.”

Qamar discovered he was on his feet, and trembling. “You will apologize.”

“I will not. It’s true.” She met his gaze calmly. “I saw it.”

Everyone in the fortress knew what she claimed to be. That she had located Qamar and brought him back proved it. Qamar himself, however, kept recalling their first encounter, when she’d been surprised that he was young and handsome, not old and scarred. He didn’t care for her visions, frankly. It wasn’t so much that he doubted that she had indeed seen his grandmother somehow; it was that she was so wrong about why it had happened.

But it wasn’t something he could tell the truth about. He knew that, even as he drew breath to do so. All around him, staring with astonishment, sat a broad sampling of the population of the fortress, here to learn Solanna’s language. Children, young women and men, older people wanting to keep their minds alert—and mothers. If he corrected Solanna’s interpretation of his grandmother’s . . . difficulty . . . he would have to admit that it was not the shame of seeing her heritage misused but the misery of having birthed Haddiyat sons. There had to be at least one woman in this classroom who would know exactly what that meant, who had felt the unique anguish of knowing a son would die early and in pain. And even if there were no such mothers here tonight, everyone knew everyone else in the fortress, and he would not be thanked for bringing up a subject no one ever discussed. The women had to feel it; of course they felt it, before schooling themselves to feel only pride in having given birth to so valuable a son who would maintain Shagara traditions for one generation more.

Solanna was watching him through narrowed eyes. “You had a comment to make, Qamar?”

“Yes,” he said softly. “Empress Mirzah was an unhappy woman, but not for the reason you give. She . . . she very much disliked living in palaces. She missed the desert tents.” It was the truth, just not all of it.

“How would you know how she lived or how she felt about it?”

He looked her straight in the eye, and in the language of Tza’ab Rih—and of the Shagara—said, “She was my grandmother. You will excuse me, I trust. Sururi annam,” he added to the class in general and walked out.

By the time he reached his own quarters—a few twisting alleys off the big eastern courtyard, which the locals called a zoqallo—he was shaking again with anger. Acuyib curse the girl, what business did she have telling her distorted version of history? And how dare she compel him to the unspeakable vulgarity of reminding her who he was and why he knew much better than she what went on in the palaces of Tza’ab Rih? The class had watched with fascination or amusement or boredom as their varying natures prompted, but he’d sensed a flinch run through every one of them at the reminder that this charming young man who lived in their fortress and studied their ways and was a gifted Shagara male was, in fact, a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih.

Climbing the stone stairs three at a time to his second-floor room, he slammed the door shut behind him and fell across his bed without bothering to light the candle. What was he doing here, anyway? He could be at home, lolling on silk pillows, nibbling wine-soaked pears, and his most worrisome thought would be deciding which woman to invite to his bed that night. He did not belong here. This country was not his.

He lit the bedside candle, then the three-armed branch on the desk by the window. The light would glow down into the alley. He picked up a sheaf of notes on the uses of flowering plants found above a certain altitude in the mountains, read five words, and threw it aside.

She wasn’t coming, not to apologize or to continue the argument or even to rebuke him for being rude.

He opened the folder of notes from Zario Shagara’s class and began sorting through to find the first page so he could begin copying his one- or two-word prompts into sentences that actually made sense. For a moment he thought he’d lost the sheets and cursed aloud.

She wasn’t coming.

Not that he had any reason to expect her. Still, their discussions often continued as they walked through the fortress passageways, until he took the turning that led to the eastern zoqallo. He still didn’t know exactly where she lived. And how she could possibly go home tonight and sleep after insulting him so appallingly, he really didn’t know—

Qamar’s eye and his whole mind were suddenly fixed on the single word written in very large letters on his page of notes from this morning.

WILL.

Zario had said something different when it came time for his usual cautions about blood being insufficient—and indeed completely inadequate—if the work had not been properly prepared.

“It is not the paper, nor the talishann written on it, nor the ink in which they are written, that secure the achievement of your goals. It is not even the addition of your own blood. None of these things can do what your own mind can do. You must will your work into being. You must believe that all these things so meticulously chosen shall combine at your bidding to do your will. You are the most powerful ingredient of any magic. Not just your blood, not just your knowledge, but your will.”

Qamar heard the words echo in his head. This was not something a Shagara of Tza’ab Rih would have said. They were the conduits of magic. They crafted the hazziri or concocted the medicines and took justifiable pride in their work. But they were not part of the magic. They contributed nothing of themselves except their blood. They would not agree that one man’s force of will could play even the smallest part in his creations.

Yet Zario Shagara, only two generations removed from the desert, had spoken of that very thing. Of willing one’s work into being.

Qamar happened to agree. And for the first time, he began to think that he might truly belong here. So intent was he on this thought, and others that followed after it, that he did not hear the soft, tentative tapping at his door.

Nor the less gentle knocking that followed.

He did hear a woman’s voice call out his name. He turned in his chair, wondering bemusedly why she was coming to visit him at this hour.

“Qamar—I’m sorry, all right?”

Frowning, he tried to think what she might be apologizing for.

“I shouldn’t have said that about—about the Empress.”

He remembered now. He stood, about to walk the ten paces to the door—it was a much larger room than the one he’d lived in before—when she spoke again.

“It’s just—I forget sometimes that you weren’t born here. That you’re one of them.”

He unlatched and hauled open the door. “Say that again.”

“What?”

“What you just said. Repeat it.”

“I’m sorry for what I—”

“No, not that, who cares about that? Say what you said just now.”

“That you’re one of them?”

“Exactly. I wasn’t born here. I don’t belong here. I’m one of them.” He grinned at her befuddlement. “Don’t you see? So were the Shagara when they first got here. Yet you wouldn’t call them foreigners now, would you? Different from the rest of the populace, to be sure, but not outsiders, not anymore. You originally came here to get them to work with you against the Tza’ab. That’s not something you do with people you don’t trust.”

“Thanks to your grandfather’s example!” she retorted.

“Exactly!” he said again. Then he paused, and frowned down at her. “You admit that it happened the way I said it happened?”

“I said the invasion was unprovoked and dishonorable. I said nothing about the reasons why it happened.”

Qamar laughed again. He could see things, too: long, contentious talks with this girl, arguing out the finest details and most obscure implications.

“I find nothing amusing about any of this.”

“Of course you don’t. I haven’t explained it yet.” Then he had to admit, “I’m not sure I understand much of it myself—yet.”

Solanna regarded him as if suspecting that despite all the healing Zario had done and the precautionary talishann around his room, he’d deliberately plunged head-first into a wine vat and drunk his way out, with predictable effects on his reason.

Grinning at her, he went on, “Would it help if I told you that you were right? What you said about the Tza’ab not belonging here.”

“You’re admitting to that?”

“Of course. You were right. But what came next—you were wrong, and the Shagara here are the proof. They were strangers here once. Generations ago. In the time since, they’ve married and had children with local women and men, haven’t they? Of course they have—names like ‘Zario’ and ‘Evetta’ confirm it.”

“Just because their blood is mixed with—”

“You’re not seeing it.”

She stiffened with insult, aware that he had used that word deliberately. When he laughed again, she turned for the door.

“No, wait—you haven’t heard—”

“I have heard more than enough. And I have seen more than enough as well!”

“Have you? More than me, wallowing in wine?”

And then something else occurred to him. She had seen him old. She had seen him with—what, lines on his face? White hair? She had said scars, but couldn’t they just have been wrinkles? It didn’t matter. She had seen him old.

Old!

It meant he would succeed. It had to mean that. It must meant he would grow old the way other men grew old, and if he didn’t actually conquer death, then at least he and his kind would no longer have to die too young.

“Wallowing with your whores, you mean,” she snapped. “You were disgusting, and I don’t know why I bothered to bring you back here. Filthy from your hair to your toenails, and the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”

With difficulty he dragged his attention away from his glorious new realization. What he saw in her eyes was just as glorious. He knew that the damage of that autumn and winter was long gone. Bloodshot eyes, puffy face, thickened body—ayia, he had been ugly. But he wasn’t ugly now, and he knew it.

“Why did you bring me back here?” he asked softly. “And why do you stay?”

Her back was to him, and he spent the moments of her silence admiring the coil of pale hair at her nape and the way curling tendrils escaped down her neck.

“What else have you seen, Solanna?”

“Myself,” she whispered, not facing him. “Here. As a young woman, as I am now, and—and as a very old woman. I know what it means. I will spend most if not all my life here.” Turning, she gave an unconvincing shrug of indifference. “So it would be absurd to leave, wouldn’t it, for I will only return again. Why put myself through the bother of the long journey to my home, when I already know—”

“It’s farther to the seacoast, where I was, than it is to Cazdeyya,” he pointed out. He was enjoying this far too much, he knew, but he owed her a few moments of discomfort. Time to bring in another contender for the dominant emotion in her eyes, he told himself. “Did you see anyone with you, when you were old? Did you see me, Solanna?”

The victor turned out to be fury. He hadn’t expected that. She took the four steps separating them, slapped him full in the face, and was gone before he could do anything more than gasp.

That slap was most inconvenient to the rest of his evening. The impatient and at times fretful exploration of new and puzzling ideas was interrupted by a stinging pain every time he grinned or laughed when another suspicion became a certainty. He managed to work out quite a bit of it all the same, even while being reminded of another puzzle he had some very good ideas about how to solve. And each time he thought this, he grinned again, and laid a hand to his cheek.

22

Over the next years Qamar discovered several things, not all of them to do with his newfound art. He learned, for example, that a man could woo a woman with exasperation instead of exuberance, and manage it quite successfully, too.

He found out that his wife’s visions of the present were spontaneous, but that to see future events required the burning of a complexity of herbs that sometimes worked and sometimes did not but that always left her helpless with exhaustion for a full day afterward. When he had refined enough of his ideas to share them with her—knowing that imprecision would only annoy her and leave him open to criticism—she commented that by this way of thinking, her susceptibility to the smoke of these herbs seemed just one more way the land provided for the people who belonged to it.

He agreed with her and added the observation to the notes he was assembling. For the most important thing of all that he discovered was that he must learn everything—everything—about this land before he could truly begin what he saw as the great work of his life. The work that would mean his life.

Upon their marriage, Qamar and Solanna were assigned three rooms on the second floor of a building overlooking the west zoqallo. It was a corner apartment, with the reception room and Qamar’s study—which he persisted in calling the maqtabba—facing south, a coveted advantage; they were given the chambers only because Zario Shagara, just before he died, asked that his rooms should become theirs as his wedding gift to them. Their bedroom window had a clear view of the western mountains. It became their habit, on clear days, to sit and watch the sunset together. Qamar both loved and dreaded that little ritual. Each nightfall meant that soon he would be in bed with Solanna—but each also meant that another day had passed without his solving more than a tiny fraction of the puzzle.

They had also inherited all of Zario’s books. These included volumes that were relics of the exile, made of parchment in thin, light leather covers, bound in the outdated method of sewing together the tops of the pages. These days books were assembled with the stitching on the left. It was a small, eccentric collection, mainly poetry, and included the collected works of Sheyqir Reihan al-Ammarizzad.

“It’s easy to tell which poems he wrote before, and which after,” Solanna remarked one night. He had been teaching her to read and write the more ceremonial version of his language, the style used in all poetry. “I expect you have no need to ask‘Before and after what?’”

“None at all.” He did not look up from drawing acorns. A dozen types of oak trees grew in the foothills, and he was discovering that each had subtly different properties.

“Neither do you feel any remorse for what your great-grandfather did to him.”

“None at all,” he said again.

“Using Shagara magic to help him do it.”

He set down his pen. He recognized that note in her voice, the one that meant she would pursue the topic until he answered in a way that either satisfied her or angered her so much that she left the room. “Would you like me to write him a letter of apology? He’s dead. What happened is what happened. Nothing I can do, say, think, or feel can possibly make any difference.”

“It might, if you knew what his kinswoman has it in mind to do.”

Frowning, he stoppered his ink bottle—he would get no more work done this afternoon—and said, “What have you heard?”

“Miqelo returned from Joharra yesterday.”

She put the book aside and began pushing hairpins back into the coil at her nape. It was a very hot summer day, one of the few each year when Qamar regretted the south-facing windows that were exposed to fierce sunlight from dawn to twilight. The heat rarely bothered him, but Solanna suffered terribly on days such as these. Not that she would countenance a change of clothing to the practical silks and tunics worn in Tza’ab Rih; that would be conceding to those she considered her enemies. Qamar never quite understood how she could love him, seeing as how he was technically her enemy—but he never said a word about it. His mother would have told him he was learning wisdom, and about time, too.

“What does Miqelo have to say?” he asked.

“That there is a new Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.”

“New? Kerrima is dead?”

“This winter. Someone called Nizhria sits on the Moonrise Throne now. A cousin of yours in some way, but I’m not sure how.”

“Kerrima’s younger sister. And before you say it, I am quite sure the death was not a natural one. They’re worse than spiders, those al-Ammarizzad. They not only eat their own young, they devour anything they can find.”

“I thought the name was al-Ma’aliq these days, not al-Ammarizzad?”

“Only part of it.” He rose and went to the cupboard where fruit juice was kept cool by their daily summer ration of hoarded winter ice. “Considering the woman Nizhria’s name recalls, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she gets rid of it. And, to be honest, it’s been a very long time since any al-Ma’aliq set foot in Rimmal Madar. The people will have forgotten us, I think. If Kerrima, who was a good friend to my grandfather and my Aunt Ra’abi, did not die a natural death, then I suspect it was done by the faction at the palace more loyal to the al-Ammarizzad than to the al-Ma’aliq.”

Solanna had finished repinning her hair, and now shook her head in amazement—an action that threatened to loosen the hairpins again. “How do you keep track of them all?” she asked, accepting the clay cup of juice he gave her. “No, never mind, it makes my head ache even to think about it. And it doesn’t matter anyway. Nizhria has decided that our land was so easy for the Tza’ab to conquer, surely her armies will do even better. From what Miqelo heard of the talk in Joharra, they fear she may have it in mind to use us as a base for conquering Tza’ab Rih itself. Or it may be simply that she hates the idea of the Empress owning more land than she does.”

Qamar hid a smile behind his cup. Solanna would never accept the notion that the Empress of Tza’ab Rih was her mother-in-law. “Has Nizhria taken into account that she could be fighting both the locals and the Tza’ab here?”

It turned out that she had. Qamar couldn’t decide if the new Sheyqa was worthy or unworthy of the woman for whom she was named. Nizhria certainly had the acquisitive instincts, but she was also about as subtle as an avalanche.

She sent emissaries to absolutely everyone who had any stake at all in a prospective war. To Empress Mairid, she wrote that whatever troublesome resistance was still to be encountered in the conquered lands, her armies would help the Tza’ab make short work of it. To the nobles, in power or not, of these same conquered lands, she wrote that only her assistance could free them of their hated Tza’ab masters. To everyone she promised that the price of her support was nothing more than a trading outpost here and there for her merchants.

Nobody believed any of it.

“Not that she expects anyone to believe it,” said Qamar as he poured qawah for Miqelo that evening. “But she’ll have everyone eyeing everyone else, wondering who will join with her and who will not.”

“And too suspicious of each other even to bring up the subject of an alliance,” Solanna added, then shook her head in disgust. “Trading outposts!”

“You will excuse me, Qamar, I’m sure,” Miqelo replied with a grimace, “when I say that we learned with the Tza’ab that once an army is here, it stays.”

Qamar shrugged. “Yet it seems there are those in Taqlis and Ibrayanza, and even in Cazdeyya, who are willing to take a chance.”

“Taqlis,” Solanna mused, “is quite a long way from everyone else. They may think the Sheyqa won’t bother coming that far.”

“I think the Cazdeyyan nobles have this in mind as well,” Miqelo agreed. “This lamb is excellent, Solanna, I’ve never tasted it dressed with mint before.”

“An experiment,” Qamar said, smiling. “When you or my other roving friends bring me samples, once I’ve done with them we use them for cooking—after testing them for poison, Miqelo, I promise! This isn’t our mountain mint but another kind—Ibrayanzan. It’s odd, you know, that in the desert there are at most two or three varieties of any one plant—as if they learned early on what they must do in order to survive and just kept doing it. But here—ayia, my friends bring back for me four types of daisy, or six different grasses, and all from the same hillside! I’ve cataloged seven different sorts of mint, for instance, and of those acorns you brought me last time, three were entirely new to me. It’s—” He broke off suddenly as Solanna clapped her napkin to her mouth, her dark eyes sparkling merrily. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” he sighed. “Your pardon, Miqelo, I’m afraid I become worse than boring sometimes. Please go on with your news.”

Grinning, the merchant ladled more mint sauce over his plate of lamb. “It’s good to see a young man with a real purpose in life, Qamar. My son—eiha, if he ever had a thought, it would die of shock at finding itself in his of all brains!”

Qamar laughed and did not look at his wife. His real purpose in life . . . after twelve years of marriage, after watching him do his research and helping him with it, she still had no idea what his real purpose was. That was how he preferred it.

“So our people—some of them, anyway—want to ally with Rimmal Madar to throw out the Tza’ab,” Miqelo continued. “I think it’s possible that Sheyqir Allil would unbend his stiff neck and accept the Sheyqa’s help to subdue the outlying regions of Joharra. They do keep him busy, you know.”

“I never much liked him,” said Qamar. “I can imagine what would happen if he even hinted at such a plan to the Empress.”

“It’s a pity he won’t dare,” Solanna said. “She’d be so outraged she’d throw him out. If that happened, at least the Joharrans wouldn’t have to suffer any more.”

“Ayia, but what would happen then?” Qamar grinned at her. “Joharra might get to like their new ruler, and then what would happen to the spirit of rebellion?”

She scowled her opinion of his teasing. “And what if Sheyqa Nizhria simply attacks and succeeds in gaining a foothold? Do we join with her against the Tza’ab, or join with the Tza’ab to throw out this new enemy? And where, finally, stand the Shagara?”

“Aloof, as always,” Miqelo said firmly.

Qamar exchanged a glance with his wife. “More wine?” he asked their guest, and poured from the chilled flagon. He would have liked a taste of it himself, but since that last tavern night in the seaport—so long ago now!—he had not touched a drop. He had promised Solanna.

So much to learn. So much to codify. So much to organize into useful, useless, and possibilities to be investigated further.

Berries, for example. Mulberry for peace and protection, raspberry for protection and love, strawberry for love and luck. Blackberry brambles prevented the dead from rising as ghosts, but in combination with rowan and ivy warded off all other sorts of evil.

The plants and trees that grew here gave fascinating promise. So many of them were unknown in Tza’ab Rih. Qamar wished that the Shagara in his homeland had thought to study them before now. If nothing else—and there was a great deal else—there was help here for the pains of the bone-fever that afflicted Haddiyat, help in the form of the humble walnut. Yet the tree had another tantalizing association: it expanded things. Wealth, horizons, the mind, the emotions, the perceptions, the soul...and magic. Its use in inks was long established, but Qamar had from the first seen other ways of using the tree. Specifically, the wood. More specifically, to write on the wood. And finally, and most specifically, to draw on the wood of the walnut tree that expanded magic.

A few months after their marriage, when they were still telling each other things about their families and childhood homes, the sort of idle reminiscences sparked by a word or a scent, Qamar was describing the palace where he had grown up. Gardens, gravel paths through them, intricate mazes of shrubs or walls that led to cooling fountains—all the serene beauties he had so taken for granted.

“But the most beautiful garden and fountain were inside the palace itself. It was all made of tile—the grass underfoot, the trellises of climbing roses, the sky above them, darker and still darker blue until they reached the domed ceiling, sparkling with millions of stars. In the middle of the room was a fountain . . .”

“Made of water, I hope?” An instant later she exclaimed, “Qamar! Stop that, you’ll burn your hand!”

Startled from his thoughts, he snatched his hand back from lighting a candlebranch with a twig and blew out the flame that had indeed come almost near enough to scorch his fingers. And as he felt the heat that had not quite burned him, two separate memories swirled together like different inks combining to make a new and different essence.

“Qamar?”

“Yes,” he said mindlessly. “The fountain. It stopped working. There was a book of drawings, and he drew the fountain from memory, and it worked again—but then it didn’t, and he was dead with burned paper in the hearth—”

“Meya dolcho,” she said with a worried frown, “what are you talking about?”

So he explained it to her, the curious thing he had heard about from Ab’ya Alessid years after the fact. The fountain, the drawing spoiled by blood from a cut finger, the dead fountain and the dead artist and the dead ashes in the hearth.

Solanna stared wide-eyed as he spoke. “Do you think—no, it’s not possible.”

“Isn’t it? Fadhil was burning the drawings he didn’t like or couldn’t use, including the one with his blood on it—the one that had reawakened the fountain.”

“With a picture?”

“Why not? We do it with words and symbols, why not a literal depiction of the thing we wish to influence?”

Suddenly she gripped his arm. “Or the person,” she whispered. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? You could draw a person, and in such detail that it would look real, and—and—”

“And I could do to it whatever I pleased,” he said slowly. “I can do it now, with a name and ink and the right talishann and my own blood—but those are mere curse-tablets, like the Hrumman used to make. Piles of them are found every so often where their temples used to be. But they were superstition, useless. Powerless. If a likeness could be made that looks absolutely real—”

“Stop. I will hear no more of this.” And to emphasize her determination, she rose from the chair beside him and went into their reception room and stayed there the rest of the evening.

So she did not hear his other story, the one about burning his hand as he wrote the letter to Rihana and Ra’amon for Ab’ya. His blood had surely been on that paper commanding them to rule wisely and gently, to unite his name with her power for the benefit of Joharra. Had they not done just that? Even when logic suggested otherwise, they had found ways to combine their strengths and—

—and he had even playfully included talishann for love and fidelity and fertility and happiness, and they had known all of those things in abundant measure.

But Rihana and Ra’amon were both dead, and Allil was ruling unwisely and ungently on behalf of the next queen, who was years away from taking power herself—if Allil was willing to give it up, which Qamar very much doubted.

Neither did Solanna hear his further conclusion: if someone had thrown that letter into a fire or ripped it up, was it likely that Qamar would not be alive?

In all the years since that night, he had never spoken of those things again, except to ask a casual question of one of his teachers. What was done with old pages? Once a healing had been accomplished, what became of the paper used to accomplish it?

“Back into the slurry, of course, to be used again. We’ve always done that—ever since the first years here, when we didn’t have mountains of paper to waste.”

So the blood was diluted, not actually destroyed by fire or its substance ripped apart by tearing the fibers into which it had soaked.

No one knew. No one knew about drawings, and no one knew about destruction.

Qamar kept these things to himself.

The original Shagara magic, in the desert wastes, had been medicine—potions and unguents and dressings made with precision and care—and then the hazziri, made with Haddiyat blood. Here, the medicine still obtained, though with new and different plants replacing the old familiar ones. The hazziri were much the same as well, though the materials used had changed drastically. From gold, silver, and gems to tin and brass, the traditional arts had been translated as best they had been able. But these Shagara had added something no one in Tza’ab Rih had ever even dreamed of—and whatever isolated instances might have provided the clues, no one had put everything together.

Qamar had recognized the entirety of it. The vastness of the magic that no one else had ever guessed. The art of the healer added to the art of the talishann, with quickening blood to kindle the magic, could find its ultimate potency in art.

As he researched and learned and organized his findings, he realized that in hundreds of instances the Shagara here had adapted old formulas without fully understanding the additional significances of the indigenous plants. Solanna knew much of the lore her people had assembled over the years; in remote villages, lacking formally trained healers, most people learned at least the basics and usually rather more than the basics. And whereas every healer—Shagara or otherwise—knew that the poppy was used for sleep potions, Solanna told him that among her people, the white poppy brought the gift of consolation and the yellow, success. How such things had originated, no one knew. But Qamar made note of them all, and through the years had been indulged in his obsession by Miqelo and other friends who traveled for the Shagara, who brought back not just herbs and flowers but books.

In one thing he was stymied. He could not draw. There were people here who had talent and tried to teach him, but it was all quite hopeless. He didn’t dare experiment. What if he had asked someone to draw one of the climbing roses in exact detail, only with summer flowers heavy on its canes, and then added his own talishann and blood—and what if the roses changed, right in front of everyone? Temptation gnawed at him to try it, but his wife’s reaction to the little he’d shared with her cautioned otherwise.

He spent a great deal of time walking the hills near the fortress, not to collect specimens but to escape the noise and bustle that necessarily resulted when hundreds of people lived in such close proximity. He needed to think. He needed to make sense of what he had learned, what he had intuited, and what he suspected might be true. He could not act on any of it until he was sure. But there was always so much more to be discovered, so many things to compare and balance with each other.

One thing became clearer to him the more he considered it. To influence a person, that most wondrous and complex of Acuyib’s creations, a drawing would have to be not just accurate to the last detail but done in colors. The rosy flush of cheeks and lips, the dapple of freckles across a nose, the highlights of red or gold or bronze in dark hair—all these things would have to be depicted. So it was fortunate that he had turned out to be good at mixing inks. He secured a small chamber one floor down from their living quarters, stocked it with the usual and the unusual for making ink, and put to use his ever-growing knowledge. Solanna called this room the Inkwell, more than pleased that her husband’s experiments were not cluttering up her home.

Qamar spent many long hours fussing with various recipes, even though he knew that ink would never be able to capture the delicate coloring of a human face, however subtle the artist. There had to be an answer to the difficulty, and he must be the one to find it—for the rest of the Shagara could not learn that there was any difficulty at all.

Sheyqa Nizhria grew weary of waiting for replies to her letters. Her next action was to send proclamations to all parties. Those who accepted her, she would not annihilate. Those who defied her would be destroyed. These were her terms.

She received many replies this time. All of them defied her, sometimes in language that had never before been read aloud in the presence of a Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar.

The Empress of Tza’ab Rih sent no answer at all.

With the early spring, ships sailed. Landing on isolated shores, they offloaded thousands of the Sheyqa’s warriors, including a large contingent of Qoundi Ammar and their magnificent white horses. When word of the invading forces reached Joharra, Cazdeyya, Elleon, Taqlis, and the new city-state of Shagarra, men who had been training all winter in anticipation of just this event began to march.

This was precisely what the Sheyqa wanted.

Miqelo and his son Tanielo returned early and shaken from their first expedition after the snowmelt. More than half the goods loaded onto pack animals for sale in towns and cities was still securely in place, and on seeing this the crafters groaned. There would be no profits this year from the rolls of paper or the pretty tin hazziri wind chimes, the lush woven woolens or the hundreds of bottles of medicine coveted by traditional physicians. Worse, there would be no sacks of fine grains, no bolts of new cloth, no citrus fruits or dried dates or figs. The only thing Miqelo brought back with him was news. None of it was good.

For the first time in years, Qamar began to feel himself an outsider. Not just gharribeh, foreign, but dangerous. He was Tza’ab. His wife was Cazdeyyan. It had taken a long, long time for the people here to greet them as equals in the zoqallos and streets, then to speak with them, and finally to invite them into their homes for afternoon qawah or a casual meal. Yet Qamar knew that he and Solanna were still looked upon as outsiders. So he was surprised when a girl came to the Inkwell and said she had a message for him. She was a pretty little thing, so much Shagara in her looks that she might have just ridden in with her parents from the winter encampment in the wastes of Tza’ab Rih.

“Please, Sheyqir, I am to say you must be as quick as you can, please. There is an assembly—at the Khoubri.” Her eyes widened like those of a startled fawn at the array of flasks and bottles on the shelves, the tables cluttered by heating rings with iron bowls nestled in them, jars of glass stirring rods, stacks of paper, bundles of unused pens. “The Khoubri, please, Sheyqir,” she said, as if worried that the oddities had made her forget to mention it.

“I shall be there at once. Thank you.” He watched her run out the door and heard the clatter of her shoes on the stairs. A sound he would never hear his own daughter making. There would be no daughters, no sons.

Shrugging off the thought as something he could never afford to dwell on, he rinsed his ink-stained hands in a bowl of clean water and ran his wet fingers through his hair. He was thirty-eight this year, but other than a few strands of gray and some lines around his eyes from squinting at his books too much, his age rested lightly on him. Especially for a Haddiyat. He knew this wouldn’t last much longer. He dreaded every winter morning, positive that he would wake to pain in his hands, his knees, his back. Not yet, praise Acuyib. But soon.

The Khoubri was one of the oddest features of a very odd fortress. Its name was its description, for it served as a bridge between the outer wall and the building that housed the unmarried guards. At the junction, the bridge descended in a series of steps that gave out onto a large room with no windows and only one other exit. The idea, Qamar supposed, was that enemies gaining the walls would be funneled through the passage, push each other into the open, and discover they had only two choices: go forward through the single door and down the stairs, or shove their way back across the bridge and try to find another way in. Swords and spears would be waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs, of course.

Whatever the case, the room turned out to be a good place for general meetings. A speaker could stand a step or two above, to be seen more easily. The echoes in the Khoubri were annoying, but after a while one learned to deal with that.

Qamar climbed the stairs and sidled along with his back to a wall. There was no place to sit and no time to wriggle himself a space, for Miqelo was already standing on the second step, holding up his hands for quiet.

“The Sheyqa of Rimmal Madar has a new weapon. It is called a ballisda, and it need not be brought in the ships. These things can be built here in a day or two. It is a mechanical arm that throws giant stones, burning pitch, anything at all either into or over any walls.” He paused. “Even ours.”

Snorts and a few shouts of laughter greeted this. Miqelo again raised his hands.

“Listen to me! I have seen for myself what these things did to the walls of Granidiya! Nearly the height of our own, nearly as thick, and blasted in places to rubble as if Chaydann al-Mamnoua’a had directed a bolt of lightning! I saw from the nearby hills, I watched the smoke still rising from the city, and the only reason I was not here yesterday is that my son disobeyed me, and ran down to the walls, and came back the next morning with the whole story. And it is as well that he did.”

Tanielo came forward when his father beckoned. Tall and gangly, with golden Shagara skin, though his golden-brown hair proclaimed at least one local man or woman in his ancestry, he cleared his throat nervously. “She—the Sheyqa—her ships did not land near Shagarra alone. More of them sailed on to the shores of Ibrayanza and began the march northward. The others marched west, and they met at Granidiya and destroyed it. But before this, they laid waste to every town in their path. Those with walls, they attacked with the ballisdas. Those without, they simply attacked and burned. But here is the terrible thing. This army has now split in two again, with one section heading for the palace at Praca, where the Queen of Ibrayanza lives. It may be there now. But the other part is marching north, due north.”

“For Joharra!” someone called out.

“No!” Tanielo cried. “No, not Joharra at all! They won’t touch Joharra, not a handful of its soil! Sheyqir Allil is her ally, he gave them maps of the easiest routes, and—”

“Why would he do such a thing? Doesn’t he understand?”

“He’s not one of us—he was never one of us—”

“And what of our own people?” another man yelled. “I thought that soldiers were coming from Taqlis and even Elleon, and everyplace in between, to fight the Sheyqa’s army!”

Miqelo waited until the cheers and shouts had faded a bit, then told them, “I’m sure that was their intent—until they saw what happened to Granidiya! There is no army to oppose her, there is no one who—”

The uproar and the outrage shivered the stones of the Khoubri. Qamar didn’t hear most of it; he was staring at the wall opposite him, and in his imagination its blankness was overlaid with a map. Tza’ab Rih to the south; Ibrayanza just beyond the narrowing; Shagarra to the east. Joharra just north of Ibrayanza . . . but not in the path of an army marching due north. Toward Cazdeyya.

He pushed away from the wall and waded into the eddies of seated men, trying to be careful not to step on anyone but intent on joining Miqelo and Tanielo at the stairs. When he was halfway there, someone called out his name.

“Qamar! Why don’t you tell us all about Sheyqa Nizhria al-Ammarizzad al-Ma’aliq!”

He stopped, and turned. “That, I am unable to do. But I believe I can tell you what she wants.”

“Our lands! All of us dead!”

“No.” He glanced around the Khoubri. “The last thing in the world that she wants is the death of a single Shagara.”

23

It was maddening, the question of how Sheyqa Nizhria had learned that there were Shagara within her grasp.

Qamar could only postulate that someone, or several someones, had been extremely curious and extremely clever. After Ra’abi’s marriage to Zaquir al-Ammarizzad, his cousins and his friends had visited, and of course he had brought servants with him, any one of whom could have been gathering information. And of course there were the Geysh Dushann. They would not hesitate to share knowledge of the Shagara with those in Rimmal Madar who considered themselves more al-Ammarizzad than al-Ma’aliq.

But few had ever tried to learn why the Shagara were such renowned healers. Rare plants in the desert, ancient lore, talents given by Acuyib the Merciful—there were explanations enough. No one had ever connected the trinkets and jewelry, the wind chimes and charms, with the healing arts of the Shagara.

Qamar was certain that now someone had.

And when he learned that Sheyqir Reihan, the poetic son of Nizzira, had been the power behind Nizhria’s seizure of the Moonrise Throne, he had a fairly good idea of whose curiosity and cleverness had made the right connections. Reihan’s poetry had indeed changed after Azzad al-Ma’aliq had exacted his vengeance. For one thing, he became obsessed with the ring that had been placed onto his finger, which he had worn to the end of his life. Scholars had many pretty things to say about this “symbolism” within his poems. None of them guessed that when he wrote that he was unable to remove the ring from his hand, he wrote the literal truth.

It mattered nothing that Reihan could not possibly know the exact methods of the magic. Qamar guessed that he had guessed. And if not him, then someone else. All that mattered was that Sheyqa Nizhria, positioned by Reihan and now in possession of the Moonrise Throne, unable to lay hands on the Shagara of Tza’ab Rih, had targeted the Shagara within her reach. The Shagara of Cazdeyya.

“This is for you.”

Qamar followed the mouallimo’s gesture to a book lying on the table. A beautiful book, folio size, bound in plain dark green, it was so new that the scents of paper and leather and glue clung to it still. There was no tooling, there were no symbols stamped into the covers or the spine. The most remarkable thing about it was the lock: made of gold, so much more precious here than in Tza’ab Rih, delicately wrought and fitted with a small key.

“The paper is all of your making, of course,” said the crafter, Miqelo’s brother. “Solanna gave it to me when I asked. Eight different kinds, fifty pages each. I hope that will be enough.”

“Enough? Enough for what?” He reached a reverent finger to stroke the cover. “Yberrio, what is this for?”

“The book, of course. The one you will write that preserves everything we are.” He sat wearily in a cushioned chair, rubbing absently at his swollen fingers. “All that we have learned since we came here about the plants, flowers, herbs, trees—how to make ink and paper—eiha, the talishann, those are safe with our kinsmen in the desert. But you must finish the work you began years ago. And this is the book in which you will do it.”

Qamar nodded slowly. “It has been decided, then.”

“Yes. Perhaps tomorrow, certainly within the next few days. As soon as everyone is ready.” He paused for a grim smile. “And even if they are not.”

Qamar weighed the book in his hands, looking at it so he would not have to look at his friend. Yberrio was one of the unlucky ones; he was a year Qamar’s junior and looked twenty years his senior. “You haven’t asked if I’m certain that they will come for us,” he said abruptly. “Everyone else has asked if I’m certain.”

“Everyone else wants it all to go away. And you forget that I have a reason for believing that others do not. Even if I didn’t trust you, I trust Solanna. She has no reason to lie. Not that you do, either. If all you’d wanted was to steal what we know, you could have done it and left years ago.” Leaning back in his chair, he waited until Qamar met his gaze, and chuckled. “I was one of those guarding you, when you returned to us from the seaside. By Acuyib, how I hated you! Never once did you set foot inside either of the taverns. And on cold nights, after you’d finished late with your work, I could have used a nice cup of mulled wine.”

“So could I,” he admitted wistfully. “Were you one of those who made sure I’d think thrice before ever really wanting one again?”

“Ayia, that was Zario.” Yberrio raked the graying hair from his brow and said, “You know the present one is resisting. Doesn’t want to leave his parents.”

“He has to come, and all the other Haddiyat boys with him.”

“And their mothers.”

So that even if Sheyqa Nizhria succeeded in taking the fortress, she would find no useful Shagara within it.

That the fortress was indeed her aim became clearer with every city ignored on the march northward. Small groups of her soldiers peeled off from the main force every so often to burn a few villages as a warning. When, at one night’s camp halfway to Cazdeyya, a well was found to be poisoned, every human being within a day’s ride was slaughtered. There were no more attempts to interfere with the advance of the Sheyqa’s army.

“I keep wondering,” Qamar said suddenly, “how much Allil has revealed.”

“Does it matter?”

“Joharra has been spared,” Qamar said. “Allil bought this with maps and advice, that much is obvious. But I wonder how much he told her about the Shagara of Tza’ab Rih. That they provided hazziri to my grandfather, Sheyqir Alessid, when your people would not.”

“You mean that we shall be easy for them to take and use, whereas our kindred of the desert would not?”

“They would defend themselves with the arts. You will not. They would aid the Empress in any attack against invasion—but you will not.”

It was a major point of contention. Some of the younger Shagara here wanted to abandon their principles and create hazziri for war. Their elders utterly forbade it. But the Sheyqa could not know this, and so she marched northward as quickly as she could, to take the one place that she was certain would win her everything.

Including Tza’ab Rih. Solanna had seen it. Not in the smoke that deliberately incited visions, but unexpectedly one morning while helping him sort herbs in the Inkwell. The crash of glass as she leaped from her chair and backed into a table had brought other people running in time to see the stark unreasoning terror on her face. Qamar carried her upstairs, grateful that these attacks of sight had been rare these last dozen and more years; nobody knew what that look in her eyes meant except him.

And, it turned out, Miqelo. Someone had mentioned to someone else that Solanna had been taken ill, and Miqelo had heard of it, and by sundown he was in their reception room asking with brutal directness exactly what she had seen.

“A map,” Qamar had answered for her. “Not of this land, but of Tza’ab Rih. All the towns and cities, the desert, everything.”

“Labeled in Tza’ab script, not ours,” she added. “And I saw a hand, a woman’s hand thick with rings, and one of them was of silver and carnelians.”

“I don’t see—”

Qamar interrupted with, “Each sheyqir my great-grandfather gelded was given a ring. Carnelians set in silver, with rows of tiny ants etched into the bands. You know the symbolism, of course.”

“Harvest,” said Miqelo. “Izzad. Whose ring, do you think? All of them are dead by now, of course, so the rings would be no longer binding—”

“Reihan’s, at a guess. He worked to put her where she is. What’s obvious is that Nizhria intends to use you Shagara against those of Tza’ab Rih. She can’t hope to conquer that land without you. I will wager that her troops in Ibrayanza are even now scouting the best place to do battle against the Empress.”

“But we will never help her. Never.”

Solanna, still very pale and shaken, said, “Do you know what that hand was doing? Stroking the map, like it was the naked skin of her lover. You can tell her No until the sun turns cold, and all she will do is laugh—and start killing your families until you cooperate. And the first hazziri that doesn’t work precisely the way she orders it to work, she’ll kill more.”

“Her armies destroy without mercy. She’s showing herself as ruthless as her great-great-grandmother,” Qamar added. “And that, my friend, is ruthless indeed.”

The Shagara here would not use Al-Fansihirro for war and destruction or even self-preservation. Qamar admired their adherence to their beliefs but deplored their stubbornness. What little he had seen of war, he hated; these people hadn’t seen war in over eighty years. They didn’t even paper the fortress walls with talishann drawn in appropriate ink. Once the paper was slashed or burned the protections would be nullified, and the men who had worked them would die. Paper was frangible; it made the Haddiyat vulnerable.

And so . . . this book he held in his hands. In it, he would record everything these Shagara knew of magic.

To do this in safety, he must find a haven. Solanna had sent messages to every Grijalva connection she could think of, but it had been many long years since they had seen or even heard of her. Only a few wrote back, and only one did not berate her for abandoning her people. This one letter, from an elderly aunt, told her that if she needed a place to go, there was a valley three days from the great river, a box canyon where no one lived because it was useless for farming or cutting lumber or indeed anything but hiding in. It was to this lonely place that Qamar, Solanna, all the Haddiyat boys under the age of fifteen, and their mothers were preparing to go.

At least, this was what they told everyone. Qamar was under no illusions about what would happen to any Shagara left alive in the fortress after Nizhria’s ballisdas had demolished it and her troops had overrun it. When they talked—and they would talk, the Geysh Dushann would make certain of it—they must speak what they thought to be the truth.

The only person who knew where they would really go was Miqelo. Twenty-five years of roaming these lands, first with his father and now with his son, had made him a living map. He assured Qamar that there were several places he had in mind, and he would decide only when they were at least three days away from the fortress.

Qamar walked back through the zoqallos, the green leather book cradled to his chest. The Shagara were learning why their forebears in the desert traveled light. He walked past buildings where paper was made, and ink, schoolrooms and forges, storehouses and binderies and the healer’s quarter—each little street and narrow alley was congested with people doing one of three things. They carried items that would be taken out of the fortress, or ones to be hidden in hopes that they would survive, or ones that must be destroyed rather than fall into the hands of the Sheyqa. Qamar could always tell when someone had been assigned to that task: Their faces were either grim with purpose or bleak with sorrow.

There were armfuls of paper to be dumped into the slurry, even though no new sheets would be made from them. Metal dies to be melted in the white-hot forges, never to stamp talishann into tin or brass again. Crates of glass bottles and ceramic flasks to be emptied outside the walls and the containers smashed, some containing medicines, others full of inks. Bins and baskets of herbs, flowers, leaves, all the tools this land had given to the healers, burned.

And books. Beautiful, precious books, some of them as old as the Shagara’s time here, many more made and bound since. Qamar held to his chest an empty book, and vowed to Acuyib that he would fill it.

They left at dawn two days later. Three wagons laden with food and other supplies followed thirty-seven horses carrying fifty people—most of the boys were small and light, and so could double up on horseback. The women rode in and sometimes drove the wagons. Tanielo and Solanna led the way out the gates. Miqelo and Qamar left last.

Yberrio saw them off. “Miqelo, my brother, we will not meet again this side of Acuyib’s Great Garden, but it had better be many long years before I welcome you there. As for him—” He glanced up at Qamar, then at his brother once more, fiercely. “Miqelo, make sure this man lives.”

Qamar was still thinking about those words when they made a rough camp that evening. Saddle sore after so many years when riding was only an occasional recreation, he came close to breaking his vow and asking for a flask of wine. But all he drank was strong, bitter qawah, and for the first time in a long time considered what life had made of the youngest and favorite son of an Empress, a Sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih.

“How delightful to hear you laughing,” Solanna said in sour tones as she sat down beside him at the small fire.

“Qarassia,” he said, slipping an arm around her, “there is laughing, and then there is laughter. Just as there are women, but only one woman.”

“Sometimes I wish I didn’t understand you,” she replied, nestling close to him.

He tilted his head to look her in the eyes. “You know what my name means in my language. I know the meaning of yours. I always found this significant.” When her brows quirked, he told her, “The moon has no light of its own. By itself, it’s all in darkness. It’s the sun’s light that makes the moon shine.”

Solanna’s eyes filled with tears. “Qamar—”

“Ayia, none of that,” he whispered, pulling her nearer again. “I will finish the work, and you will help me. When all his family died by poison or the sword or fire, Azzad yet lived. When his father was betrayed and murdered and his mother and sisters and brothers burned alive, Alessid yet lived. I—”

“Azzad was spared to wreak vengeance,” she said tightly, “so that the souls of his family could be at peace. Alessid—”

“—threw out the usurpers and built a nation so that his family could never be destroyed again,” he finished for her. “Think who it was who saved the lives of Azzad and Alessid. Shagara. They have done the same for me. I am in their debt, and they have told me how I must repay it. But I have been given what my forefathers did not have. And it is this land that has given it to me, given me you.” Pressing his mouth to her fragrant hair, he finished, “I would truly be lost in darkness without you.”

Miqelo, his son Tanielo, and four young men who regularly guarded them on trading journeys: These were all that stood between the Shagara and anyone who wanted a look at what might be in their wagons. The women, some of whom had never been farther from the fortress than the riverbank, wept or fretted or rode in stoic silence as their characters prompted. The boys, resentful at first that they were not allowed to stay and fight the invaders, awoke to the unaccustomed freedom of travel and could barely be restrained from galloping off in all directions. Qamar and Tanielo spent a lot of time chasing after them.

On the fourth day—one day after the proposed day of decision about their destination—Miqelo approached Qamar and Solanna very early in the morning and asked them to walk with him for a way.

“The more I think about it, the less I like it,” he said. “We all know what will happen to those we left at the fortress. We have with us the hope of the Shagara. Those boys must be protected at all costs.”

“I recommend poppy syrup in their morning qawah,” Solanna said. “It’ll make it easier to throw them in the wagons.”

“I’ve been tempted,” he replied with a brief smile. “But it seems to me that we have two separate aims. First is to keep these boys and their mothers safe. The other is the work you must do, Qamar. I think we must divide our group in different directions.”

It was decided that the women and boys would travel as far and as fast as possible, find a place to hide—though not the box canyon recommended by Solanna’s aunt—and wait until it was safe to return to Cazdeyya. The guards and Tanielo would go with them. All of them, schooled by Solanna in the basics of the family, would call themselves “Grijalva.”

“Our tile makers have gone to many places,” she explained. “Some of them came home, some stayed. You will be refugees from the conflict, returning to our native villages for safety. They will take you in. Your Shagara coloring can be explained by a generation or so of marriages in foreign towns.” But they were never to mention her name, for the letters she had written earlier in the year had yielded no help they could actually use.

That left Qamar, Solanna, Miqelo, and a woman named Leisha, who volunteered to assist Solanna, and her thirteen-year-old son, Nassim, to assist Qamar. Leisha was quite frank about her reasons: she was convinced that she and her son would have a much better chance of survival with Qamar.

“I think,” she said, “that Miqelo will work very, very hard to be sure you are not found.”

The fourth day was spent making arrangements. Wagons were unloaded, the goods sorted evenly, and packed again. By sundown all was complete, and Miqelo recommended that everyone sleep soundly, for the next days would be difficult.

Qamar sat cross-legged in the dirt beside a small cookfire, listening to the sounds of the camp settling. Familiar to him from his year in the desert, yet there were differences—primary among them being the rustle and slur of the tall pine trees. He reached over to stir the pot of qawah, pleased to find there was still some left for Miqelo, who came to talk with him every night before rolling himself in a blanket to sleep.

Solanna joined Qamar by the fire, kneeling at his side. She had abandoned long skirts, as most of the other women had done, for riding clothes: snug trousers beneath a tunic that fell to midthigh, cut almost like a workingman’s smock. The outfit concealed all feminine curves, and she had concealed her hair within a scarf to protect it from the dust of the road. For all her blonde hair, she looked like a woman of Tza’ab Rih.

Miqelo crouched down on the other side of the fire, not looking at either of them. Qamar was about to offer hot qawah when all at once Miqelo tossed a little woolen pouch into the heart of the fire. His dark eyes fixed on Solanna’s face with a piercing intensity. Smoke billowed up from the fire, as fragrant as it was stinging. Qamar coughed. Solanna gasped—and in doing so inhaled a full lungful of smoke.

“Forgive me,” Miqelo said softly. “But I must know.”

Belatedly, Qamar recognized the scents. Herbs, some spices to disguise the odor, scorched wool from the little bag Miqelo had stored them in. Only a few times through the years had he smelled this exact combination, and the recollection made him want to grab Miqelo by the throat.

Too late. Solanna was trembling beside him. He tried to put an arm around her but she shook him off, scuttled sideways, and began to rock back and forth as she stared blindly into the fire. No, not blindly, but what she saw was not the flames.

She did this rarely and unwillingly, because the future ought to be opaque to all but Acuyib in His Wisdom. Sight frightened her. It also compelled her—as it had when she had first come into his room on a rainy night long ago, to see if he was truly the one she had envisioned. That seeing, undertaken reluctantly at Princess Baeatrizia’s plea, had been of him, but old and with scars on his face—or so she had said. He had come to believe they were only the lines and wrinkles of great age. Another time, she had taken pity on Miqelo’s dying wife and tried to see whether or not he would be home in time to bid her farewell. She had not quite lied to her friend, saying that Miqelo would be at her side very soon. She had chosen not to mention that she had seen him beside a casket being lowered into the ground.

Her other seeings, those unaided by the herbs, were always spontaneous and always of that exact moment in some other location. The hand she had seen caressing a map, the hand wearing a ring of Shagara making that could only have been taken from the finger of a dead man, had been illuminated by the setting sun; the vision had come to her as dusk fell over the Shagara fortress. The seeing that had shown her Qamar himself, stealing from the maqtabba in Joharra, had come to her—as nearly as they could tell—at the precise moment he put his hand on the money drawer and opened it.

But these visions, the ones prompted by the smoke—they were always of the future. As she shivered and swayed with the smoke swirling around her, Qamar glared across the fire at Miqelo.

“I must know,” the other man repeated.

“How kind of your brother Yberrio to anticipate your need,” he snapped. “Did he prepare it himself, or have a healer do it? Ayia, did he remember to send along something to help her through the next day or two, as she returns to her right mind?”

“The hawk,” Solanna whispered, arms wrapped around herself. “The hawk flies from the empty mountain—across the river—”

Miqelo leaned toward her, his face obscured by flames and smoke. “Who is still alive?” he demanded. “Tell me what the hawk sees—”

“Be silent!” Qamar snarled.

Solanna heard neither of them. “Tents . . . carpets . . . the river and the hill . . . the white horses and—and—”

“And what?” Miqelo urged.

“—the book, the book—by lantern light—the boy has come, he’s finishing—”

“Qamar’s book? What boy? A Shagara, to take and preserve the book? Do you see our success? Solanna, answer me!”

But her eyes rolled up in her head. Qamar caught her as she collapsed toward the fire, barely keeping her from the flames. Without another word he gathered her into his arms and rose, carrying her to the deeper darkness beneath the trees. There he held her until dawn, ignoring the sounds of bridles and harness as the others made ready to go separate ways. At length all was silent. Qamar cradled his unconscious wife against his chest and did not stir from his place beneath the trees.

The boy Nassim eventually called out very softly, “Sheyqir, Miqelo and the others have departed. If the lady is well enough, we ought to go. Sheyqir?”

He rose to his feet, still with Solanna in his arms—and almost stumbled as his stiff knees grated with pain. So it was beginning for him, he thought; he could not blame this on the cold, for it was high summer, nor on the damp, for it had not rained in a month. It was beginning.

“Where is Tanielo?” he asked.

“Waiting with the horses. The others—”

“I don’t care about the others.” So Miqelo had assigned his son to protect Qamar, had he? Unable to face him or Solanna after what he’d forced upon her with the fire and smoke? “Bring my horse. We cannot ride far today, but we must ride.”

Tanielo was wise enough to stay as far as he could from Qamar. By midafternoon, his whole body aching now with the strain of holding Solanna secure in the saddle before him, Qamar was more than ready to call a halt. But this morning’s sharp ache had warned him that from now on he would have to learn how to hide pain. So it was nearly twilight before he reined in and told Nassim to bring Tanielo to him.

“Your father was my friend,” he said flatly. “I will treat you with the respect I would show to the son of a friend who has died. Because he is dead to me now, for what he did last night. Don’t even think of doing the same. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Qamar.”

“Sheyqir. You will address me as Sheyqir. All of you will. Bring Leisha to me now, and tell Nassim to make camp.”

Just after dark, Solanna woke. Qamar was still holding her, dozing at her side beneath a light blanket. That day they had climbed far enough so that the air was thinner, colder, sharper with the scent of pine. It reminded him of his journeys to Sihabbah.

“How much did I say aloud?”

Qamar jerked awake, arms tightening around her. “Don’t worry about that now. You need to eat.”

“Tomorrow morning,” she murmured. “Water will do, tonight.”

As he sat up and reached for the nearby jug of stream water, he said, “I can’t believe Miqelo did that to you.”

“It was wrong of him, but I understand it. Did I say anything?”

“Something about a hawk.” He handed her the water jug and wished there was a fire nearby, so he could see her expression.

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

“Good.” She drank long and deep, then set the jug aside. “Miqelo wouldn’t have liked it.”

He waited. At length she pushed her tangled hair from her face and sighed.

“The Sheyqa’s army was camped on a wide, flat plain. It was autumn—the trees were red-gold and the river was shrunken from its banks.”

“White horses, you said.”

“Yes. The—what did you call them? The Qoundi Ammar. Many tents, many flags. One tent especially, red with gold, on the highest ground, with carpets flung all around it, as if to spare someone actually touching the earth—”

“—with her exalted feet,” he finished. “The Sheyqa’s tent, then.”

“Likely.” She sipped more water. “There was another army, behind a hill to the north. Cazdeyyan, Ibrayanzan, Qayshi—but some were golden-skinned. Tza’ab, Shagara—” She shook her head. “There were no walls to be toppled. Only the plain, and the two armies. Thousands of men, thousands.”

Again he waited. When he could bear it no longer, he asked, “What did you see by lantern light?”

Solanna gave a start of surprise. “Did I say that?”

He nodded. “And something about the book.”

Her smile was weary and triumphant. “Your book, meya dolcho. I saw your book!”

Then she had seen success. He smiled back and kissed both her hands.

24

Qamar was sure that it would not happen that autumn. The assembly of so many soldiers from so many places simply wasn’t possible in so brief a time. It might be the next autumn, or the one after that. But it would not happen this year.

This did not mean he worked any less persistently at the task he now believed Acuyib meant for him to accomplish. And if it was destined that he do this thing, then it was also destined that, like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he would succeed. Solanna had seen it.

The pocket in the mountains where Tanielo guided them was inhabited only by sheep. But there were stone huts already built for the convenience and comfort of the shepherds when they came at irregular intervals to check on their flocks. Within these snug little shelters were sacks of flour, dried fruits, and other provisions. There was even a small garden planted with root vegetables that were evidently unappetizing to the native animals, for no fencing had been placed around it.

Qamar took the largest of these huts for his workroom. The second he and Solanna used as living quarters; the third, which contained the provisions and a cooking hearth, was gradually expanded over the summer to provide sleeping room for Leisha, Nissim, and Tanielo. Qamar tried to ignore the noise as a wall was knocked down and the stones rearranged to form a foundation for the wooden slats of the disassembled wagon. But sometimes he needed absolute quiet, and took a sheaf of notes, a pen, and a bottle of ordinary ink and walked up to the narrowest part of the tiny valley, where a spring rippled down the rocks to a small pool. Seating himself beside the stream that whispered into the valley, he would mark off what was essential, what was important, what could be included if there was room, and what could be eliminated without damaging the whole. As the summer went on, he had to become more ruthless in his editing. The notes made over a dozen and more years had been distilled into sharp summations of his classes, his talks with fellow Haddiyat, other books, and his own experimentations. But he did not possess the luxury of infinite pages within his green leather book. He must restrict the final text to what was vital.

It was occasionally maddening. It was always frustrating. And each evening when the light grew too dim for him to work outside in the fresh air, he had Tanielo move his table back indoors and light the lamps, so that he might work well into the night.

When they first arrived, there was a particular notch in the cliffs where the sun disappeared. As the days shortened and the sun vanished earlier and earlier, farther and farther north of that notch, Qamar counted the pages he had written that day and began to despair. He knew he would finish, for Solanna had seen it, but he was afraid he would not be able to include the finer details, the subtler points. He wanted to finish quickly, because he had it in mind to have Nissim begin making a copy as soon as possible. And after that, another copy, and another. It would keep them busy during the winter when snow would trap them inside the huts. As his knees twinged more severely and more often, he began to fear that as the nights turned colder, the ache would move into his fingers. He told himself that the stiffness in his back was due only to long days bent over the manuscript. And if he must squint to see into the distance, to mark the movement of the sun farther and farther from that notch, it was only eyestrain from reading too much.

There was no word from the larger world until the shepherds came to attend to their flocks. From these men there was no astonishment that someone else was living in their little valley, no anger that their supplies had been used. On the day Qamar and his little group had ridden in, Tanielo had pointed out a series of wind chimes fashioned out of tin hanging from sapling pines: hazziri. Qamar had renewed them, added to them, and in some cases improved upon them, to ward away thieves, wolves, and lions. So the shepherds, already familiar with Shagara magic, had no complaints. They were getting more Shagara magic for free.

From these shepherds Qamar learned that Sheyqa Nizhria controlled Ibrayanza. She controlled Shagara. She controlled the passes that led to Tza’ab Rih. She controlled half the length of the great river, and portions of Elleon. She did not control Joharra, nor yet all of Cazdeyya.

“But there’s two reasons for that,” the most talkative of the shepherds told Qamar over an outdoor fire the evening they arrived. “That filhio do’—” Breaking off, he bowed slightly to Solanna and Leisha. “Forgive me, ladies, my mother would scrub my tongue with lye for my manners.”

Another of the men grunted. “We don’t spend much time around decent women.”

“Eiha,” the first went on, “Sheyqir Allil, he’s kept Joharra out of it by keeping Joharra in it, if you see what I mean. His soldiers are wearing the colors of Rimmal Madar. They only change back to their own shirts once the Sheyqa’s army has moved on. And then—surprise! The nicer bits of Ibrayanza and Shagarra are redrawn on the maps as part of Joharra. He’s acting for the Empress, of course, cursed be her name.”

Tanielo asked quickly, “And Cazdeyya?”

A shrug. “The Sheyqa is about halfway up the great river, camped in a huge red tent all hung about with gold and silk. Her feet never touch the bare ground, they say, for all the carpets flung about.”

“She’s not in one of the palaces?” Leisha asked.

“You’d think there’d be enough to choose from, wouldn’t you, that she could live in one of them instead of a tent? But she’s taken a vow of some sort, to live as her soldiers do until she rules from Cazdeyya to Ibrayanza.” He snorted. “I’ve yet to hear that her soldiers dine off golden plates!”

“For myself,” said the oldest of the shepherds as he politely poured out qawah for them all, “I think she has a yearning to rule more toward the south, if you see what I mean.”

“That has always been my thought,” said Qamar. He had given them only his first name, and let them assume he was called Shagara just as Tanielo and Leisha and Nissim were. Ayia, how very astonished they would be if they heard his full name—and how very dead they would make him within moments of hearing it.

Solanna fidgeted for a moment, then said, “I know it is very silly of me to ask, for we are an obscure family, but—have you heard anything, anything at all, about anyone named Grijalva?”

“Never heard of them,” said the talkative shepherd, at the same time as the oldest was saying, “The tile makers?”

“Yes!” She rewarded him with her most ravishing smile. “Do you know them?”

“Their work. But I’m sorry, I know nothing current about them.”

Late that night, as Qamar made ready for bed in his workroom—having given their usual hut to the visiting shepherds, who after all had built it—he watched his wife brush out her hair and pondered how best to ask his questions. At last he shrugged and decided on the direct approach.

“You haven’t seen any of your family in years and never felt the lack that I’ve ever been able to tell. Why ask about them tonight? Are you worried for your aunt?”

“Yes,” she answered. “If the women and boys now calling themselves Grijalva had been caught and discovered to be what they truly are, wouldn’t the Grijalva name have been connected with the news? That nothing has been heard about them means there’s nothing to hear.”

He hoped she was right. All this long summer he had been too preoccupied to worry much about the other Shagara. To learn that the mountain fortress had not yet fallen to the Sheyqa was incredible news. But they must be running out of food, and as clever as the Haddiyat were, they could not make bread out of a few talishann and a drop or two of blood. Those who had taken the Grijalva name could be halfway to Ghillas by now. He had to believe, with Solanna, that if no one was talking about them, there must be nothing to talk about.

The shepherds were with them for three days. They left with their flocks after slaughtering two fat lambs as additional thanks for the hazziri. Tanielo and Solanna rode with them down to the narrow neck of the valley, and Qamar waited until they were out of sight before seating himself at his worktable.

Even after so many years absence from his home and family, it came to him every so often how amused his parents would be to see him now. Everyone had always said he was Azzad al-Ma’aliq all over again: a capricious, charming wastrel. It was interesting to him that he seemed to have taken on certain aspects of Ab’ya Alessid’s personality now: the single-minded dedication, the commitment to a goal.

It was odd, how purely personal, purely selfish acts had such unexpected consequences to the larger world. If Azzad had not taken his vengeance on Sheyqa Nizzira, the army of Rimmal Madar would not be in this land right now. The sequence was clear. Nizzira’s obliteration of the al-Ma’aliq; Azzad’s revenge for it; his death at the hands of the Shagara faction that did not approve of his actions; the conquest of lands that would become Tza’ab Rih by Rimmal Madar; Alessid’s retaking of those lands using Shagara magic; the exile of still more who deplored what they saw as misuse of their arts; the establishment of first a nation and then an empire; the jealousy of a rapacious new Sheyqa, named for the old one, that led to invasion.

Very little of it could be attributed to anything resembling a noble motive. And Qamar came to see it as a linkage of death. So many deaths: the al-Ma’aliq, Nizzira’s sons and grandsons; Azzad; the people caught in the middle of Rimmal Madar’s invasion; the soldiers of the Za’aba Izim who died to establish Tza’ab Rih; the Shagara who had died on their way to this land; more Tza’ab troops and more people here, killed in battles that created the Empire; thousands who had died and would die before the Sheyqa was defeated.

Death connected to death, death causing death. It was endless. Inescapable.

But he would bring an end to it. He would escape. And so would those who heeded him.

He was the codifier the Shagara needed. He was the one who could recognize all the separate parts of their magic and relate them each to all the others. But more than that, he was an outsider who discerned the correlation between the magic and the land. When he had first mentioned this idea, casually and rather diffidently, to Zario, the startlement in the old man’s face had told him all he needed to know. The concept was alien enough, coming from him. He never dared tell anyone that it had come first from Alessid al-Ma’aliq.

Air, water, soil, and the plants that provided food and medicines. These things became part of the people who lived in a particular place. An army might invade and conquer; farmers and crafters and merchants and all the different sorts of people who made up a thriving population might come and settle; but a place did not belong to someone simply because his house was built upon it. It was a mutual growing together, an entwining of water with blood, soil with flesh. This country had almost killed him with poisoned thorns, for he did not belong here—never mind that anyone foolish enough to grasp those thorns was in danger of death. The point was that he hadn’t known not to touch. But medication concocted here had saved his life, and with the poison and the cure he had in some way taken part of the land into himself.

Curiously enough, the wine he had nearly succeeded in killing himself with had not been the product of this country. He had never been able to stand the slightly tarry taste of what no one with any perception at all would term “vintages.” He had gotten drunk night after night on wines imported from Tza’ab Rih. He supposed, looking back, that his own land had almost killed him, too. But the cure had come to him here, in the form of Solanna, whose ancestors had lived here forever, and Zario, a man whose magic originated in another country but who had learned to adapt as this land demanded. Solanna’s sight had found him; Zario’s paper and ink had combined with the talishann of the desert to heal him.

As Qamar sorted and wrote and made a hundred decisions each day about what was vital and what was not, the interrelation of land and people was always in his mind. The colors, for example. Surely there were just as many at home, but who had ever thought to delineate them in such fine detail? No one had ever needed to. Their symbolism had been contained in other things, things unavailable here. The plants and flowers and herbs—such an obvious connection, land to herbs to medicine or food to people. This was nothing new to him. But paper—ayia, paper was intriguing, both for its own properties and for what it had led him to discover about trees. He’d heard, now and then, that paper made from a particular kind of wood was better for certain magic. From the paper to the tree was a simple step. He was surprised no one had ever figured this out before.

That it had never been guessed that there could be a connection between realistic drawings and magic did not surprise him at all.

And the inks—they especially fascinated him, for he saw them as akin to blood. They were blood he could manipulate, change, cause to do what he desired. And mixing his own blood into them had produced astounding results.

But he had never told anyone about the new knowledge he was adding to the Shagara wisdom. They were traditionalists, these distant cousins of his. Adjusting mixtures to accommodate different plants, learning how to make paper and ink, these things they had done of necessity. Had the same things been available to them here that their forebears had known in the desert, they never would have made any discoveries at all. But the real clue to their conservatism was in their unfading hatred of Azzad and Alessid alMa’aliq for perverting Shagara ways. Change born of inescapable circumstances was one thing. Change for its own sake was quite another. They would not have been pleased, even if he had demonstrated the usefulness of his discoveries, simply because he was the one to have made them. Shagara he was, Haddiyat he was—but also al-Ma’aliq.

Besides, they must not know his ultimate aim. Not until he could prove it.

There were so many possibilities, so many combinations of symbols and influences, medical certainties and hidden meanings. This country had saved his life twice. It would do so again.

Qamar had settled into the rhythms of this tiny world. Leisha made sure the huts were clean, the bedding aired, the meals appetizing, the clothes washed. Tanielo gathered firewood, cared for the horses, brought water from the stream. Solanna worked sometimes with Leisha after she had read Qamar’s work of the previous day for clarity, and she spent her afternoons tending the garden. Within days of their arrival she had planted vegetables that by the end of summer were almost ready to be eaten. Nissim helped everyone with everything, but his major duties were with Qamar. His tasks ranged from sharpening pens to serving as Qamar’s extra memory regarding what information was in which sheaf of notes. The days melted together, each very like the last. Only the inexorable northward shift of the sun from that notch in the crags reminded him that he must hurry, hurry.

Tanielo was also responsible for catching small animals for the cookpot, and when Qamar had no need of Nissim, the boy learned the fine art of setting snares. Squirrels and rabbits soon avoided the area around the huts—no matter how tempting the above-ground vegetables were—and thus traps were laid down farther and farther away. One morning Qamar was waiting impatiently for the pair to return from checking the night’s pickings, for he needed Nissim’s help in finding a particular reference to verbena that the boy had located only the day before, when a hawk appeared in the southern sky. Qamar watched it circle slowly, then settle on a treetop to preen its wings.

“Qamar? Someone’s coming.”

He looked down the valley to where Solanna pointed.

“And he’s jingling,” she went on, wringing out a shirt and handing it to Leisha for the drying line.

“More like ringing, isn’t it?” Leisha asked. “Bells.”

Qamar didn’t admit that he could not hear what they did. He didn’t even admit it to himself, any more than he admitted that their eyes at a distance were much better than his. The rider was discernable to him only because of the bright yellow shirt he wore.

“Wait a moment—isn’t that Miqelo?” Solanna shook her hands free of water and started down the rise to the stream. After another moment she raised her arm and waved and called out his name.

At the same moment he let out a shrill whistle. The hawk bolted down from its perch and circled him once, then settled onto Miqelo’s outstretched arm. Squinting, Qamar could just make out the gift of a scrap of meat and the skillful hooding of the bird.

“I won’t ask whether or not I’m welcome,” Miqelo began abruptly as he dismounted, the hawk still on his arm. The jingling had come from the bells decorating the ties of the leather hood. “That doesn’t matter. But why in Acuyib’s Holy Name are you unguarded? Where is my son?”

“Collecting dinner,” Solanna said. “And a good thing, too, with an extra mouth to feed. Whatever your news, Miqelo, and I suspect it cannot be good, you are always welcome for yourself.”

He searched her face for a moment, then bowed his head. “Thank you. Leisha, I would not turn away from a very large cup of water.”

Qamar stayed where he was at his worktable, silent, watchful. While Miqelo downed first one cup of water and then two, he began tidying his pages and stoppering his ink bottles. Whatever had brought Miqelo here, he knew there would be no more work done today.

After coaxing the hawk to settle on the top rail of the chair Leisha brought for him, Miqelo sat and pulled off his riding gloves. “It’s quite a distance from the Cazdeyyan court in exile,” he remarked. “I was given this bird by the king.”

“In exchange for?” Qamar asked.

“She hunts while I’m on the road,” he went on, ignoring the question. “Very convenient, having roast pigeon or sparrow every night—and someone to talk to. The king is Baetrizia’s nephew, by the way. She sends greetings, Solanna, and hopes to see you again before very long.”

“She was always very kind.” Solanna set a cup of spiced qawah before Qamar. “The nephew would be Bertolio?”

“Pedreyo. He’s leading the Cazdeyyans south right now.”

Qamar turned to his wife. “It cannot be this year. We’re not ready. I’m not ready.”

“Eiha, it begins to look as though we’ll have to be ready.” She nodded at the hooded hawk.

Miqelo looked from one to the other of them, then caught his breath. “So you did see something that night!”

“I swear to you, Miqelo,” Qamar told him through gritted teeth, “if you do that to her again—”

“Do you know what’s happening out there?” the older man cried. “Constant, pointless, tawdry little brawls from Ibrayanza to Elleon and all places between—eiha, except for Joharra, of course! Sheyqir Allil sits in the palace and redraws his maps to include pieces of other lands, but tells the Empress that she’d better send an army soon or there’ll be nothing left to be Empress of! Yes, they’re marching, the Tza’ab—”

“My mother is not such a fool!”

“Possibly not, but what does that matter when her sisters and nieces reach back to their desert blood connections and create their own armies? Azwadh, Tariq, Tallib—they come north to ride with the Queen of Qaysh, or Shagarra, or Ibrayanza—”

“Cazdeyya will join with them?” Leisha asked. “Against our common enemy?”

“Which enemy we have in common depends on who you hate more, the Sheyqa or the Tza’ab.” Miqelo leaned forward in his chair, so vehemently that it rocked, disturbing the hawk. She unfurled one wing to keep her balance, then settled again. “Did you see the armies, Solanna? Could you tell who was fighting on whose side?”

Slowly she shook her head. “I saw the Sheyqa’s tents and the white horses that Qamar tells me are the special privilege of her personal cavalry, the Qoundi Ammar. On the other side of the hill were our people—and, yes, there were Tza’ab among them. And Shagara. But whether they were the soldiers of the Empress, or those belonging to Ibrayanza or Qaysh, I don’t know.”

“But the battle itself—did you see it? Do you know who will win?”

“No,” Qamar answered for her. “And she will not look again, Miqelo,” he warned. “If it is this autumn, and not next, then I will manage. But there will be only one copy, and that’s not nearly enough—” He broke off, frowning. “The fortress. Does it stand?”

“A few walls of it, yes.”

Briefly he closed his eyes. After a moment he whispered, “How many dead?”

“Almost all. It turns out the Sheyqa’s troops did not need their ballisdas. All they required was enough time to dig beneath the walls. And even then they did not need to go very far. When their tunnels began to fill with water, they used poisons that seeped back into the wells. There were very few wounds for the healers to treat, Qamar. Almost everyone was poisoned.”

“Those who survived?”

“Told to create the magic required by the Sheyqa, or die. They died.” He hesitated. “But not before torturing them revealed there were others who had left the fortress.”

“Geysh Dushann,” Qamar murmured.

“What?”

“A special group of assassins, kin of the al-Ammarizzad. The poison used by Sheyqa Nizzira on the al-Ma’aliq was of their making, or so Azzad always understood. They tried many, many times to kill him, but no one succeeded—until you Shagara,” he finished bitterly.

Miqelo stiffened. “Not everyone agreed with what happened—”

“It doesn’t matter. The poison released into the groundwater seeped into the wells. That was Geysh Dushann.” He laughed without mirth. “Just like before!”

“Only now it is not the al-Ma’aliq but the Shagara—”

“Vengeance!” Qamar pushed himself to his feet, fists clenched. “That’s how it all started, don’t you see that? Over and over and over, people killing, ordering others killed, people dying in battle or when their towns burn—”

“Qamar,” Solanna asked in a soft voice, “are you saying Azzad al-Ma’aliq was wrong to avenge the slaughter of his entire family?”

“Ayia, the chain reaches farther back than that. Nizzira hated the al-Ma’aliq for their power, for being beloved of the people. They hated her family for seizing the Moonrise Throne based on lies—claiming the al-Ammarizzad were responsible for what al-Ma’aliq warriors did, when the barbarians were thrown out of Rimmal Madar. Yes, barbarians—the same thing the Tza’ab call you!” He began to pace. “A chain I termed it, and a chain it is. Iron chains, fetters, shackles—every generation forging more links, and doing it willingly! Death following death following death—by Acuyib, does it never stop? Does the ground have to be soaked in blood before it stops?”

Words came to him then, with such suddenness that it made him breathless, unable to speak. So many words, crowding his mind, demanding to be written. No one but Solanna noticed it, because Tanielo and Nissim had returned, and the young man recognized his father and ran to greet him. But Qamar knew that Solanna saw it in his face, in his eyes. He could sense her watching him as he turned away, wrapped his arms around his ribs, shook his head as if to clear it of the words.

He made no excuses, simply walked away from them all into his workroom and lit all the lamps. He had left blank the first few pages of the green leather book, believing that once he was finished he would write an introduction to guide students through what followed. He had believed wrongly. It was not an introduction but a justification, an argument addressed to everyone, not just the Shagara.

It took him all night to write it. In the morning, Solanna brought him heated wine and made him drink it.

“It will help you sleep, and sleep is what you need after all that,” she told him, gesturing to the tightly filled pages. “Don’t quarrel with me, Qamar. You may not be unconscious, the way it happens to me, but you have seen things, and you need sleep and quiet just as I always do.”

He felt himself stagger as she helped him into their stone shelter and had to admit she was right. After so long an abstinence, the wine hit him like a sandstorm in the desert. He slept all that day and into the next. And when he woke, it didn’t particularly surprise him that for the first time, he felt old.

Solanna was sitting beside their bed when he finally woke. In her lap was the green book. As his gaze met hers, he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

“Azzad and Alessid—they truly believed these things that you have written here?”

“Yes.”

“About land and people, and—”

“The ideas are theirs. I put words to them.”

“As you have done with the knowledge of both Shagara tribes.” She paused. “This has been inside you all these years?”

“I think so, yes.” He propped himself on an elbow, biting back a groan of pain as every bone in his body protested movement. “Waiting for light,” he added, and reached for her hand.

25

It was as Solanna had seen it.

The army of tents and carpets, white horses and red banners, encamped on the floodplain. The red and gold of autumn trees. The second army behind a hill to the north, made up of Tza’ab and Cazdeyyan, Ibrayanzan, Qayshi, Andaluz, even Joharran. For Sheyqir Allil had at last realized his mistake and sent his troops to join the fight against Rimmal Madar. Or so he said. But whether they had been ordered there by their commander or came of their own accord, the Joharrans were indeed present.

The Sheyqa’s forces now included many who, having learned what it was to be conquered, joined with her rather than be slaughtered. Some probably hoped that this would earn them the right to be left alone; others, that they might even enlarge what they owned, as Allil had done. All of them were afraid. It was their fear that Solanna proposed to exploit.

“Letters,” she told her husband as they left their little valley and rode south. “You can send them letters, permeated with magic, that would—”

“No. I’m sorry, qarassia, but I cannot.”

“But you don’t have to harm them—just make them afraid. Didn’t your uncles suggest that very thing to your grandfather? Didn’t they offer to make hazziri to terrify the al-Ammarad?”

“They did, but he decided otherwise.”

“Eiha, it sounds to me like a very good way to accomplish—”

“No, Solanna.”

“It isn’t as if you were making them ill, or physically hurting them, causing them pain—it would only be to enhance what they already feel, the fear and tension they must be feeling, to be in the army of the Sheyqa. We know their names,” she coaxed. “All that need happen is that they touch the letters—”

He shook his head.

“Would your mother hesitate?”

It was the first time she had ever acknowledged that his mother and the Empress of Tza’ab Rih were one and the same woman, but he had no inclination to exclaim upon it now. “If the Shagara could choose to die rather than betray their beliefs, I cannot dishonor them.”

“But this is different! You’d be using their knowledge to stop people from fighting!”

“A meticulous distinction,” he admitted. “I will think about it.”

They rode on in silence for a little while. Then she said, “I know where your thoughts take you, Qamar. Even if their qabda’ans are taken ill, the soldiers will fight anyway—and die. But if they withdraw—or try to—”

“The Sheyqa, and especially her Qoundi Ammar, will kill them. There are so many reasons not to do as you suggest. But in the end there is only one that matters. How could I have made this book, and then do this? How could I write these things, and then use them to kill? Because people will die, Solanna, we both know it. I cannot shame those Shagara who sacrificed their lives to keep us safe.”

She had said nothing more about it, not during all the long journey to the broad plain where the two armies would meet.

Miqelo’s hawk, gift from the King of Cazdeyya, soared sometimes overhead, and to Qamar it was yet another sign from Acuyib. He had rarely believed in such things before, but now it seemed that every turn of his head, every thought that occurred to him, held in it something of destiny. It seemed a hundred years ago that Challa Leyliah had told him the story Azzad had told about a hawk in the desert—ayia, how Ab’ya Alessid had rolled his eyes, and reminded her that the tale had grown more and more elaborate through the years about the hawk that had warned him about the gazelle and led him through the desert to the Shagara. Eventually the tale came to be that the hawk had alighted on his shoulder and guided him with cries and flapping wings to the rockslide; eventually, too, the very same hawk had flown ahead of him and Khamsin, dropping a feather here and there to make sure he reached the Shagara camp.

Qamar knew that this hawk was the very same one Solanna had seen flying over the opposing armies. And after they reached the hills above the plain, and Miqelo had found acquaintances among the Cazdeyyans, Qamar knew on the afternoon he saw the hawk flying overhead once more that the eve of battle had come.

He sought the shelter of a thicket of willow trees, private as the Sheyqa’s own tent. He sat in the dirt with a single lamp beside him, his whole collection of inks in a case that formed a desk of sorts, the green book open atop it. So beautiful a binding, plain and yet luxurious, worthy of the unique papers within. He could only hope that the words were as beautiful, as valuable.

He leafed through the book, all the way to the back where he had tucked a few loose pages. They were one of his more interesting papers, made after much thought and careful collection of ingredients. The cypress in particular had been difficult to obtain; he owed it to Miqelo, of course, who had collected such fascinating things for him on his travels. Cypress, which local lore connected with longevity. Comfort. Health. Youthfulness. The immortal Soul.

He closed the book, set it aside. Opening the case of inks, he trailed his fingertips across the stoppers of each. They were as crucial as the paper. The colors, the composition—dragon’s blood for power, vervain for enchantment, fern for magic, lavender for luck, yellow poppy for success . . . Qamar contemplated the largest bottle, full of black ink, and heard across the years Zario’s voice: “For wisdom and control, resilience and discipline. And although it is the most emphatic of colors, it has this curious quality: Black is the color that hides your thoughts and motives from others.”

More esoteric was the inclusion of fir bark, which symbolized time. But the commonest ingredients, white heather and acorns, were the most powerfully ambitious. Ground to powder, carefully mixed, each signified immortality.

Qamar was overreaching himself, he knew. There was in all likelihood a very good reason why no Shagara had ever sought to create the results he intended from these papers and inks, these talishann and his own blood. But whenever he thought about the first pages of that book, written in a controlled frenzy, he actually felt humbled: his selfish impulse of so many years ago, his determination to live, had turned out to have a greater purpose. The life he wanted so much was meant to be spent enlightening the peoples of two separate lands. Acuyib had shown him how to make the killings cease. And to do it, he must live. This was what he had been preparing for, this was why he was destined to succeed. Solanna had seen him old. He would succeed.

“Qamar? What in the world are you doing down here?”

The curtain of willow branches rustled opened, and Miqelo sidled in, an expression both worried and whimsical on his face.

“Not as grand as the Sheyqa’s tent, but just as useful,” Qamar said, smiling. “And much prettier, don’t you think? Wonderful inside, but I’d imagine that from the outside it looks rather like a lantern with a green beaded shade.”

The older man crouched down on the other side of the lamp. “We’ve caught a spy.”

“Really? Whose?”

“I’m not sure he knows,” Miqelo admitted. “Of course, that’s not particularly unusual around here, is it?”

“I would think that their Mother and Son are conferring with our Acuyib, trying to sort out whose believers are in which army.”

“And where their loyalties truly lie.”

“Are we interested in this spy, or he merely a curiosity?”

“He says he’s Grijalva.”

Qamar sat up straighter, eyes wide. “Have you told Solanna?”

“I thought I’d bring him here first. In case he says things she might not wish to hear.”

About her family, her home, her people who ought to have been at home making their beautiful painted tiles, who might be fighting on the wrong side tomorrow. Nodding, he said, “That was thoughtfully done.”

Miqelo stood, swept aside branches, and called softly, “Tanielo!” Then he took up a position beside and slightly behind where Qamar sat: guarding him. His brother Yberrio’s words whispered with the movement of leaves. “Make sure this man lives.”

There was nothing about the young man to connect him in feature with Solanna except for the wild curling of his hair. A considerable nose, a very long jaw, a rather too-wide mouth—not a handsome face at all. Moreover, the eyes were of a color Qamar had rarely seen before: they were blue. Startlingly so, with the long black eyelashes and dark skin, those eyes met his without defiance, anxiety, fear, or indeed anything one might have expected to see in the eyes of a captured spy. Instead, as he took in Qamar’s face with one coldly appraising stare, an emotion more familiar to Qamar tightened the thin lips. He had seen it a thousand times: the resentment of a conspicuously homely man for a conspicuously beautiful one.

Qamar addressed him in his own language, fully aware that his accent would mark him as one who had learned from a resident of Grijalva lands. “A pleasant evening, is it not? You seem to have strayed a bit.”

A shrug of skinny shoulders. But the expected surprise flashed across his face as he recognized the accent.

“My friend says you call yourself a Grijalva. But I think there must be something of Ghillas in your background, eiha?”

There was open astonishment in the blue eyes now. “My grandmother’s grandmother,” he said, then looked just as startled that he’d actually responded to the question.

“And her name was Ysabielle, wasn’t it?”

His jaw dropped open.

Qamar smiled. “I’ve been interested in the Grijalva family for quite some time. From Ysabielle came blue eyes in some, fair hair in others. Have you a first name?”

“J-Jaqiano,” he stammered. “But how did you—?”

“The art of the Grijalva tiles is known to me—as it is to everyone with an eye for beauty. Please, sit down. I cannot offer you a chair, but the ground is soft enough.”

The young man dropped as if his knees had suddenly given out, and then hastily arranged long limbs in a more dignified position. “You know my name—what’s yours?”

“Qamar.”

“If you’re a soldier of the Tza’ab, where’s your armor?”

“What makes you think I’m a soldier of the Tza’ab?”

“Your name. Your skin.”

“But haven’t we just established that while your name is Cazdeyyan, your eyes are not? There are Tza’ab and Tza’ab—just as there are Joharrans and Joharrans, these days. Perhaps the one thing we can agree upon is that there is only one type when it comes to Rimmal Madar.” He paused. “Or perhaps I should say one type with three variations.”

“Three—?”

“The regular soldiers. The elite cavalry. The assassins.”

Jaqiano was silent for a moment. Then: “You know too much about them not to be camped with them, ready to fight for them tomorrow.”

“Too much? Not nearly enough. But that doesn’t matter.” Nothing else had mattered the instant Miqelo had said Grijalva. “Tell me, Jaqiano—did you lose your sketchbook?”

And he nearly laughed aloud when shock scrawled itself across the young face.

Jaqiano Grijalva was precisely what Qamar had hoped he was. What he had known he would be from the instant he heard the name. Since the night he had spent writing, writing, he had felt the touch of Acuyib at his elbow, urging him gently onward. He had been mistaken about which autumn would be the decisive one. He had not been mistaken that Acuyib would provide.

The Grijalva craft was tilemaking. Wherever clay deposits were found, there also were Grijalva workshops. Some of them mixed clay to the correct consistency; others blended glazes; the women had charge of forming the tiles, and the men oversaw the kilns. At his age, Jaqiano would have been taught the basics of all of it. But Qamar had made a guess that was not truly a guess when he asked about the sketchbook. Jaqiano’s long-boned, sensitive hands showed no scars from burns, as a kiln worker would have, but there were stains of a dozen different colors on his fingers. They were days from any workshops, and yet his fingers were stained. Qamar had hoped, and he had been right. The colors were paint, and Jaqiano was an artist.

Moreover, he was the son and grandson of artists, and proud of it. “We’d just won the commission to make the tiles for the new palace at Shagarra,” he told Qamar. “But while we were there to plan it and take the dimensions, the Sheyqa came, and we were stranded, my father and I. It took us all spring to find any kind of armed resistance we could join—”

“I can well imagine. More qawah?” He poured from the pitcher Tanielo had brought. “So you found an army. Whose?”

“No one’s. At first there were only about fifty of us, then twice that, and then we found another group—they were from Qaysh—it was all very tangled, and everyone argued about where to go, except then we happened upon a troop of real soldiers from Andaluz. And now we’re here, and there are thousands of us!”

“We are on the same side, you know,” Qamar said.

“Are we? Who do you hate most?”

Qamar understood very well what he meant. The Sheyqa Nizhria was at the top of the list; once she was defeated, the Tza’ab would be next. And then the peoples of this land would all fall upon each other, and lay waste whatever they touched. He could stop this. He could show them how futile it all was. He would do it. Solanna had seen him old; he would succeed.

“Do you draw patterns or scenes?” Both figured in Grijalva tiles, designs and landscapes.

Bewildered by the abrupt change of subject, Jaqiano took a moment to reply. When he did, it was with pride bordering on arrogance. “I can do all of it, and more besides. I’ve been sketching the soldiers—”

“—and they encouraged you to do their individual portraits to take home,” Qamar murmured, “or to send home, just in case. Which is a thing nobody talks about, of course.”

“How did you know that? How do you know any of this?”

“If I told you that it’s necessary, all of it is necessary, you wouldn’t understand. So you have learned how to draw the human face and form. Are you any good?” He asked the question only for effect. He already knew the boy was talented. He would not be here otherwise. Acuyib had provided.

“If I had my sketchbook, I’d show you. The sentries took it. I was only making the drawings for—”

Qamar waited, hiding a smile. At length, when the boy said nothing more, he finished for him, “For the grand great tile wall that will tell the story of victory over the Sheyqa. You are ambitious. Tanielo!” he called. “Find the guards who found this young man, and restore to him his sketchbook!”

“At once, Sh—Qamar,” he amended hastily, for as adamant as Qamar had been about his title before, now he had given even stricter instructions that no one call him anything but his name.

Turning his attention back to the boy, he asked, “Do you mix your own glazes? Or perhaps the inks for your drawings?”

“I am an artist. There’s no more imagination goes into mixing colors than there is in boiling water.”

“I think you may be wrong about that.” He opened the case of inks and pulled out a bottle. “Have you ever seen this color, for instance? Or this?”

The boy was indeed an artist. His blue eyes lit with longing at the diversity of inks, and his fingers actually reached for them before he remembered they were not his. Not yet his, Qamar thought. Not quite yet.

“You may be interested in the recipes, Jaqiano, for when you create your depiction of victory.”

“Not just that—not just a single scene. I’ll do a whole wall, as you said, but it will be the whole battle, a series of images, each tile moving seamlessly into the next.”

Qamar remembered the beautiful garden of tiles his grandfather had ordered and the fountain that had not worked, and then had worked, and then had died once again. And the Haddiyat who had died in agony with the burning of a page.

Jaqiano mistook his silence for skepticism. “I can do it,” he stated. “I will do it.”

“I haven’t a single doubt that you will. But perhaps you will oblige me, do me a great favor.” He gave the boy a self-deprecating smile, a shrug. “Before you return to your fellow soldiers, would you be so kind . . . ?”

The portrait looked exactly like him. Not that he had expected anything else, but still—it was an extraordinary experience, looking into one’s own face. Nothing like a mirror, he discovered: when he felt his own brows arch and his own eyes widen with surprise, the portrait did not respond as a reflection would. And all the tiny flaws that inevitably distorted glass were not to be found here. It was his perfect face he saw. Perfect.

Jaqiano watched him react, a smug grin spreading across his face. He had reason for his arrogance. Each subtle black line that delineated face and body was a stroke of brilliance. Delicate washes of ink defined golden skin and dark eyes, the flush of blood in cheeks and lips, the threads of silver in black hair, the shadows that marked the bones of his face. These were Qamar’s eyes, dark and beautiful; these were his shoulders, his hands, down to the tiny scar left by a burning feather so many years ago. Down to the topaz leaf ring and the al-Gallidh pearl.

Yet there was more to the artist’s self-satisfaction than pride in his own skill. It was as if this young man with the not-quite-ugly face had, in replicating the beauty of another, taken some of that beauty unto himself. The perfection of this portrait could not exist without him. He could rightly claim a share in that perfection.

Equally fine was the rendering of Qamar’s plain white tunic, the brown trousers of lightweight wool. Feeling their softness against his body, he was convinced that a fingertip touched to their likenesses would feel just as soft. The gleam of polished leather boots was also taken from life, but the sash around his waist—white with green and glittering gold stripes—was entirely of Jaqiano’s doing, suggested by Qamar and interpreted by imagination.

There was no background to the portrait, not even the suggestion of the willow leaves that sheltered him. Only darkness. In all the long hours of the night that it had taken to complete the picture, the lamplight had not wavered, providing a steady soft glow. The work contained time, for it had taken time to make—yet there was no sense of time within it, no specific shadows that would mean morning or afternoon or evening.

Qamar stared at himself, and after the first shock, he realized he looked much older than he’d expected. He didn’t remember these lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes, the furrows of determination crossing his forehead. It was still a beautiful face, just not in the way he recalled it.

They were both exhausted, of course. Qamar poured out the last cold cups of qawah, and they sat with the picture lying atop the closed case of inks, looking at it in silence as they drank.

At last Qamar said, “You have done me a greater service than you can ever understand.”

Jaqiano glanced briefly at him, but seemed incapable of taking his gaze from his own work for more than a few moments. “Doing this . . . it was different from all the others. Your inks are supple enough that the lines nearly draw themselves with the pen. And the colors blend almost without effort.”

Recognizing the craving, Qamar smiled. “I have need of them yet, but once the battle is won, come back and I’ll give them to you. Poor enough payment for such work, but—”

“I accept,” he interrupted. “All of them? The whole case of inks?”

“All of them.” He set aside his cup and stretched. “And now I think you had best return to your people. Some sleep before dawn would not be a bad thing. Again, I thank you. And—Jaqiano, do try not to get yourself killed, won’t you? You’re worth far more than your ability to wield a spear.”

A blush stained the boy’s cheeks. “I’m not very good in battle, it’s true,” he confessed, low-voiced. “The first time I was in a fight, I—”

Qamar lifted a hand to stop him. “I fell off my horse and threw up. You can’t have done anything worse than that!” They traded grins, and Qamar finished, “Go, and give my compliments to your father—and to your mother, when you see her again, on having birthed such a son as you.”

“You won’t forget about the inks?”

“I won’t forget.”

When he was alone, Qamar unstoppered several bottles and picked up a fresh pen. With the portrait flat atop the green book, he began designing the border. Talishann after talishann, elegant and potent, gradually framing one side, then two, then three. He kept glancing into his own eyes, and smiling. He took up a finer pen and traced barely visible symbols into the subtle shadows on his clothing, entwined them in the lines of his sash. Only a little while until dawn, only a little while before he would be able to fulfill the mission with which Acuyib had entrusted him, for which he alone had the daring and ambition—

He shook off the momentary dizziness and dipped his pen once more in black ink. Another talishann, and another, along the bottom of the portrait now, adding one to each side so that soon they would meet in the middle and only one would be left, the one he would seal with his blood. Connected through the flowing lines of interwoven symbols, through the fibers of the paper saturated with inks forming his own image—

Perhaps it was the magic, awakening. He would sense the power, feel it, of course he would—he was kindling magic such as no Shagara had ever dared do before, no wonder he was growing dizzy—but in a few moments he would feel other things, he would feel younger, the aches in his fingers and knees gone, and the gray would vanish from his hair and all the lines from his face, not that any of that was important, not really, not compared to the work he would use these coming years to accomplish—his selfishness had ended up having a greater purpose, just as Azzad’s and Alessid’s individual desires had resulted in so much that they had not envisioned—they had changed their worlds, and he would do the same, only he would not have to kill anyone to do it—people would live, they would understand, they would spend their lives in peace, and surely his desire for more years than his kind could expect was a small thing to exchange for what he would tell them, what he would make them understand—

The breath was rasping in his throat. The edges of his vision were turning black, black as the ink staining his fingers, he couldn’t find the little knife he’d intended to use to prick up drops of his blood and so he used the sharp point of the pen—dug it into his thumb—squinted to see that crimson dripped thick onto the last talishann the one that meant life—

He thought he heard Solanna’s voice, through the screen of willow branches he could no longer see, and tried to call out to her that it was all right, everything would be perfect from now on, they would have years and years together, that she was right and he would grow old and there would be lines on his face.

His lips would not move. His head would not turn. He felt a great wrenching pain, heard a shrieking as of a furious storm, and knew nothing more.

She sat with the green book on her knees and the portrait of her husband smooth and beautiful atop it. Nissim had told her what most of the talishann meant. She had looked up the others in the book. She had taken all day to do it. With the battle raging over the hill, a battle for which she cared not at all, she had nothing else to do.

Which of the Tza’ab had betrayed the Sheyqa, which had stayed loyal to the Empress, and which had decided to fight on the side of their new land, she did not know. Which Joharrans and Cazdeyyans and Qayshi and Shagarrans and all the confused clutter of soldiers had fought with or against or for each other, she did not know. She was certain nobody else knew, either. Those who survived would tell whatever tale would allow their continued survival. They would go home and brag about their courage, their cleverness. Someone would end up taking the credit. It didn’t matter. They would all go on fighting each other until someone emerged who was strong enough to make them stop.

Qamar had thought to do that. She had read it in the first few pages of the book.

Each people belongs to its own land by virtue of oneness with the air they breathe, the water they drink, the soil that grows their food. Over the generations the land hallows their blood. Their blood spilled in its defense hallows the land. And when this has happened, they are the land’s, and the land is theirs. No one may come to claim it who is not willing to live on and with and for it, to take it into his blood and be willing to give that blood back in its defense.

So you must understand the madness, the fatal madness, of believing that to stand in a field means you own that field. That to build a palace on a hill means you own that hill. That to construct a bridge across a river means you own that river. It is not until the field and the hill and the river own you that balance is achieved.

How futile it is, how fatal, to make war for land that is not your own.

“Solanna? I’ve found the boy.”

Miqelo’s voice made her glance around. It was growing dark now. She had been staring at her husband’s face for many hours. Perhaps the battle was over. Probably it was. She didn’t care. “And?”

“He was coming here anyway. Qamar promised him the inks.”

“Did he.” She looked down at the case that she had repacked, all the bottles with their carved stone stoppers nestled neatly together, the extra loose papers folded atop them. “Take them. He can have them.”

“Perhaps you might want to talk to him. He’s a Grijalva, after all.”

“Yes, you already said. It may be that he and I shall meet one day. But not this day, Miqelo. I’ve changed my mind. Not this day.”

She returned her gaze to her husband’s beautiful face as Miqelo came inside the green canopy of willow leaves and picked up the inks, took them away to give to the young Grijalva who had all unknowing helped Qamar do this incredible, insane thing. Not the thing he had intended, of course. But it had happened all the same.

“Did you think you could stop a war?” she asked the portrait. “Did you truly think that? Did you think that if you showed them what was possible—” Her gaze flickered to the talishann so finely drawn, so thick around the borders of the page. Life. Youth. Health. Strength. A dozen more, repeated again and again, signs that originated with the Shagara in his desert homeland and variations discovered by the Shagara in their mountain fortress. The scents of the paper and the inks were still discernable, some of them still pungent. Many of them he had learned from his fellow Haddiyat. Some of them . . . some of them he had learned from her.

“Did you think,” she resumed softly, “to show them the power of this land? And that they could not hope to conquer it, but only to become in time a part of it? That, Acuyib and Claydann and their great game aside, it is the Mother who gives, and the Son who defends?”

She saw her hand tremble slightly as a fingertip traced one of the talishann. There was the faintest tinge of dark crimson to the ink, telling her that this had been the last, the one drawn with his blood. Life.

Eiha, he lived. Just not in the way he’d intended.

A perfect likeness, his inks on his paper, though drawn by a hand not his own; sealed with Shagara symbols and Shagara blood. Youth. Health. Time. Strength. Safety. Permanence. Life. Woods and herbs and flowers and water had intensified the meanings of the talishann, amplified the potency of his blood. The magic had done what he had insisted it do, in the only way it could.

Just not in the way he’d intended.

Opening the book, she used a knife to slit the inside back cover. She wasted another moment looking at the portrait, then slid a protective sheet of paper across it and carefully slid both pages between the leather and the wooden backing. She would glue it closed later. It would be safe enough for now.

He would be safe enough. For now.

She closed the book, locked it, and slipped the small golden key into her pocket. Rising, she held the book to her breast with one hand and took up the dead lamp in the other. Nothing was left behind as she emerged from the willow tree and went to find Miqelo, to tell him she was ready to leave.

He waited for her beside their horses. In the darkness campfires sparked here and there on the hillsides. There was no moon.

“You still haven’t said where Qamar went,” he reminded her. “Or when he’ll come back.”

She held the book tighter. He never left, was the truthful answer. What she said was, “In his own time, I suppose. Come, Miqelo, I want to be far away from here by morning.”