Her smile widened. “And you have no intention to make yourself Khan of Khans, Re Temur, Khanzadeh?”
It stung. She meant it to, and he deserved it. “I’m not in it for the riches.”
“Of course not,” she said. “More tea?”
* * *
As they were leaving the room, Nilufer caught Samarkar’s arm and pulled her aside. Samarkar had not expected to be manhandled by a Dowager Khatun; she stood as still as if frozen. But the woman treated her like a long-lost confidante, and that seeming openness had its charms. Even if Samarkar was sure it was entirely feigned. “She’s young for childbearing.”
“She is,” Samarkar said. “And I would stay with her until she was delivered, but—”
“—More is at stake,” Nilufer said. “Yes, I gathered. Never fear. I have a witch, and if the girl or the babe can be saved, she will save them. You may go on without guilt.”
“Unlikely,” Samarkar said, feeling a real smile split her face in the first time for spans of days.
Nilufer released Samarkar’s arm and spread her hands. “Still worth trying. You know, you are not the first travelers seeking refuge to arrive here from the east this month. There is a monk, who by his habit and the condition of his feet could have walked all the way from Song.”
“What news?”
Nilufer shrugged. “He is either mute or he’s taken a vow of silence. I gave him some of the Song watercolor ink in solid bars, though that is not what we use, and some brushes he seemed to find acceptable. But I cannot read his writing. I thought perhaps one of you—”
“I can read Song script,” Samarkar said. “And Temur can, a little.”
Nilufer made a beckoning gesture, languid and graceful, that spoke volumes to Samarkar of the training in deportment and bearing that Samarkar, too, had suffered through.
“By all means,” the Dowager Khatun said. “Come with me.”
As they walked, Samarkar made polite conversation, allowing Temur and Payma and Hrahima to trail behind in what she hoped was comfortable silence. When she stole a glance backward, Payma and Temur both looked relaxed, and who could really read a Cho-tse’s expressions, unless the tiger were making an effort to be intelligible?
“You have children?” Samarkar asked, casting about for a subject.
Nilufer nodded. “Three,” she said. “The eldest is a daughter; the others, sons. The girl is married out to the son of one of Mongke Khagan’s generals, north near the city of Kyiv. My elder son has little use for politics, and so I am left to rule while he hunts bandits in the hills.”
“And the younger son?”
“Chatagai is his name. Away to war,” Nilufer said. “He was born before the Great Khagan’s death, and so I can check the sky each night for his moon and know he lives.”
For a moment, her trained facade cracked, and Samarkar saw the woman beneath. It was easy for a peasant to forget that queens and kings were merely mortal, nothing more—especially when the queens and kings in question were trained from birth to hold themselves apart. Some of ruling was creating your legend, enforcing your authority.
But that was a lonely place to stand.
As lonely as being a wizard, perhaps.
“I will pray he comes home safely,” Samarkar said. “Who does he fight for?” Now Temur was listening—listening, and trying not to look as if he listened.
“He fought for Mongke Khagan,” Nilufer said. “I do not know who he fights for now. If, as you say, two cities have fallen—”
“Aye, indeed,” Temur put in. “If he was with Mongke’s army, he may not even be in the fighting, unless some loyalty constrained him to join my brother’s ranks or those of Qori Buqa. I did not know every man who fought for Qulan, but I knew when cousins joined us. He could be in Song, or he could be just about anywhere. But if his moon still shines, he is alive. And that is the best we can hope for in these times.”
He sounded so young, so naïve, that Samarkar hid a smile. Nilufer saw it, though, and hid her own in return. “Through here,” she said, gesturing them to a side passage.
Nobility in the borderlands was not like nobility in Rasa. Samarkar tried to imagine her brother leading guests through the palace by himself, but wound up shaking her head.
They came at last to an airy stone room, bright with sunlight from the courtyard, in which two equally outlandish folks awaited. One was a bald man, barrel-chested and fit, perhaps Samarkar’s age, who wore the onion-dyed robes of a Song monk kilted up to reveal his legs and sandals. The other was an old woman who hunched under layers of tattered rugs, as if she wore the mossy carapace of a talus on her own back. The man, who had been idly staring out the window, turned and stood as they entered. The woman did not. She did not even look up from the beads and buttons she was sorting.