Wild Magic

Chapter 18. Flight Plans

On the fourth day after the beating, Penhari woke sweating with Desantro bending over her, wiping her face with a cool, damp towel.

“Hai-hai, heshal, so you’re with us again.” Desantro set the towel aside and went away. She was back a moment later with a mug of clear soup.

It was too warm and too salty, but Penhari drank it and felt better. “Ahsan,” she murmured, closed her eyes and slept.

She woke in the middle of the night, her mouth dry, her throat sore; as she, struggled up, her bandages shifted, cut into her breasts and her nightshift stuck to the salve mixture the shifting uncovered.

She’d been hurt before, but never like this, never beaten half to death. It changed things. Her. Changed her. I can’t stay here. Her mouth worked and she reached for the water jug that had always been beside the bed, a stoneware bottle with a matching mug turned upside down over the neck.

It was empty. Desantro must have forgotten to fill it before she left.

For a breath and a half Penhari was furious. “I’ll have her…” She stared at the jug, dimly visible in the glimmer from the nightlight, ran her tongue over cracking lips. “Abey’s Sting, what am I doing?” She lifted a shaking hand, rested the back of it against her brow. A month ago she’d have laughed, given the maid in charge a short scold and let the thing drop.

She got to her feet, took the jug down the hall to the water room and filled it at the tap, then gulped down a mugful of the lukewarm water, filled the mug again, drank half, and splashed the rest across her face.

Back in the bedroom, she sat on the bed, scowling at the doorwindows that opened into her garden. Famtoche had enjoyed the beating and he’d be back. Given half an excuse, he’d be back. And after a while, he wouldn’t need an excuse. “I can’t stay here,” she said aloud. “I can’t face this again. I can’t.”

She got to her feet, pulled on the old linen robe she’d been wearing for days. She could smell herself on the folds of the cloth, something that she found comforting and at the same time disgusting, slave-stink. She blinked, then smiled as she tied the belt. Sisters under the skin, slave and mistress, the smell of their sweat much the same. She moved restlessly about the room, lighting lamps, opening closets, pulling out bureau drawers, tipping back the lids to chests. She ran her hands along the hanging clothing, picked up things, set them down again: If she did leave this place, she had no idea what to take.

Carrying one of the lamps, she wandered into the other parts of the suite, the several sitting rooms, the sewing room, dressing room, water room, the small library…

She lifted the lamp as high as she could and stared; half the scrolls were gone, others were on the floor, torn, dirty, mixed with shards of pottery from the holders. Books were thrown about, stamped on, soaked with urine. The stench was appalling.

“Everything,” she cried. “They’ve stripped me of everything!”

Pain forgotten in her rage, she swung round and went storming through the rooms to the door into the Falmatarr’s Common Hall.

A Cheoshim, one of the Royal Guard, stood slowly and turned to face her with barely concealed insolence, barring her way with his lance. “Go back to bed, Falmaree.”

She shut the door, set the lamp with careful precision on the cardtable built into the jamb, and stood hugging her arms tight across her breast as sobs of rage and frustration shook her body. “Honey Mother defend me,” she cried. “Help me, help…”

Slowly the shudders subsided; she rubbed her hand across her eyes, clawed up the hem of her robe and wiped her nose, her cheeks. “Sleep? I can’t sleep.”

She took up the lamp again and wandered aimlessly through the suite, fetching up in the largest of the sitting rooms, the one where Famtoche had beaten her. Her blood was wiped off the floor, but drops of it were splattered about on the furniture. She scratched a fingernail across a crusted spot on the back of a chair. Desantro could tend plants, but she didn’t know much about cleaning.

She put the lamp on a table and settled in the bloody chair, easing back until she was as comfortable as she was going to get, lifting her feet onto a rest. “I can’t stay here,” she repeated. “Not in the Falmatarr, not in Gom Corasso.”

Where could she go? How could she get away? “I’m ignorant. Worse than a slave.”

Lamentably, dangerously ignorant.

If she tried to leave, she wouldn’t get two steps before she was dragged back. She grimaced at the humiliation of that ignominious return, the fear of being beaten again. I never understood why slaves seemed so stupid and spiritless. It’s pain. Crude brute pain they can’t bring themselves to face again.

Ignorant!

She had no idea how the city was laid out, not a glimmer where she could hide if she did manage to get away from the Falmatarr. She touched the long gray hair, tangled and hanging loose over her shoulders. I can’t even do my own hair.

“I have lived fifty-two years,” she said to the ghostly shape mirrored in the window across the room. “I can read and write, I’m not stupid. I’ve survived rape and politics, sickness and childbirth, lust and indifference. I know the essays of Chaldeysir, the treatises on government by the Quiambo Kuigiza and his students, the philosophies of the Honey poet Yar-rai, I have read history and studied art. And I am more ignorant, certainly more helpless, than Desantro who probably can’t read a word. She’s come from the ends of the earth and I’ve never been outside the walls of this city, barely outside the walls of this one building.”

Her feet were just at the edge of the circle of light. She wiggled her toes and sighed. “I am going,” she said aloud. “Whatever happens out there, it will happen by my choice. At last by my own choice.”