Eternal Sky 01(10)
3
When word of the fall of Qarash first reached Tsarepheth, the Once-Princess Samarkar did not hear of it. On that cold spring day, Tsarepheth shone bright with prayer banners strung between its granite towers. Its walls hummed loud with mills that turned relentlessly under the force of waterwheels hung horizontally, borrowing the strength of the swift Tsarethi. Trade bustled through cobbled streets in the swinging belly of a crooked mountain valley.
Fourteen hundred li away, the center of creation shifted. The world’s mightiest empire fell, along with the walls of a place Samarkar would barely have recognized as a city, with its dusty paths and felted walls—though the beauty of the treasures those walls girdled round would have moved even a Rasan princess.
When the news of the fall of Qarash reached Tsarepheth, the Once-Princess Samarkar did not even know that a woman in red and saffron robes sat alongside her, because on that day Samarkar lay drowsy with poppy among rugs and bolsters in her room high up in the Citadel of wizards. Silk wraps wadded absorbent lint against a seeping wound low in her abdomen. When she woke—if she woke—she would no longer be the Once-Princess Samarkar. She would be the wizard Samarkar, and her training would begin in truth.
She had chosen to trade barrenness and the risk of death for the chance of strength. Real strength, her own. Not the mirror-caught power her father, his widow, her half brothers, or her dead husband might have happened to shine her way.
It seemed but a small sacrifice.
* * *
Samarkar was not sure how often she had opened her eyes before the time she managed to keep them open. A woman still sat by her bedside, and she had a fuzzy sense that that woman—or one like her—had been there for some time. Samarkar’s eyelids and lips stuck together; her tongue adhered to the roof of her mouth. Her belly cramped with emptiness and injury.
She peeled her mouth open to speak, but the only sound that emerged was a hiss of air. It must have been enough, because the woman turned. Samarkar saw now that it was Tsering-la, one of the teachers and mechanics and scholars—a wizard who was without magic of her own. Tsering’s black hair hung oiled and glossy over her shoulders, unbraided in her leisure. She wore a wizard’s high collar; it would be folly to let the uninitiated guess which sworn and neutered magician could defend herself with eldritch power and which could not.
No matter what, now Samarkar had earned that river-pearl-and-carved-jade collar. When she died, she would be buried in it. Whether the power blossomed in her empty belly or not.
Something of her own. Something she had bought with her own currency. Something that had not been given her.
“Don’t speak,” Tsering said. “I know what you need.”
Effortlessly she knelt on the thick rugs beside Samarkar’s mat. A tray of mahogany and gold held offering bowls and a pot. Into a round cup no bigger than the dish of her hand, Tsering poured faultless water, either filtered through layers of silk or drawn from some way upstream, where the Tsarethi’s tributaries crashed among the steep valleys of the mountains called the Steles of the Sky. Safe water, which would not transmit cholera.
Samarkar thoughtlessly reached out her left hand for the cup. If she could have made a sound, the stitch of pain in her abdomen would have had her cry aloud. Instead she gasped.
Tsering’s free hand fell gently on Samarkar’s shoulder, fingertips pressing her back against the bolsters. Samarkar had grown to womanhood scrambling up the slopes and across the ridges of the terraced fields, swimming the wild Tsarethi as befitted a princess of the Rasa dynasty. But even that slight pressure was more than she could resist.
“I will hold the water for you,” Tsering said. “You need some but still should not have too much. And no food yet.”
Samarkar nodded, grateful for even the small wetness on her lips, the three measured swallows she was now allowed. If the surgeon’s knife had perforated her intestine, she would probably be dying already. But there was no sense in taking risks, and the poppy destroyed her appetite anyway.
“My passionate thanks,” she said, when her tongue worked properly.
Tsering smiled and set the cup aside. She must have dipped a bit of felt in cool water, because now she bathed Samarkar’s face and scrubbed the crusts from her lashes. Samarkar sagged back on silk and wool and let her do it. The touch soothed and cooled, telling her by contrast how fevered she was still.
Fevered but awake and clear-headed. She was recovering.
The surgery was worse physically for women and emotionally for men, she had been told. Men almost always survived it. There were many fewer female wizards. In olden days, only those set aside as barren and those widowed and too old to bear had been allowed to present themselves before the Citadel of Tsarepheth. Now the surgery made wizardry an option for young widows such as Samarkar as well.