The wild Tsarethi flowed through its foundations in an arched tunnel; the hot springs heating its belly sprang from the quiescent volcano that guarded its left flank. A thousand steps climbed its face; there were no doors at ground level, and no windows for thirty spans above the ground. Trade goods had to be hauled up in a basket, and for that reason bannered winches stood along its battlements.
On winter nights, mist dragons might creep down from their lairs among the heights of the Steles and drape themselves over and around those battlements for warmth. Samarkar had even once seen one, a translucent, ghosty thing with blue eyes winking along its feldspar length.
From the city below, the Citadel had the aspect of a great stone dam, a massive thing wrought of white and red granite, and in time of need it could become one, walling the sacred Tsarethi behind steel gates that only waited a command to fall into place across its tunnels. The city itself lay just below, rising in ranks to the steep valley walls above the river. Farther downstream, where the slope of the river’s descent lessened and the valley widened in response, brown fields and paddies that would soon hold rice and vegetables and oats lay tiered like ruffles on a gown.
Samarkar’s rooms, as befitted a new wizard, were in the highest and winter-coldest corner of the place. Twenty flights of stairs lay between the room where she slept and healed and the ones where hot baths pooled in cisterns scoured from the black basalt of the Cold Fire.
She would not have made it on her own.
Even being carried exhausted her beyond words. The ceilings in the pale granite corridors were high, so her bearers could hold her level even as they descended, but she fought not to clench her fists on the rails. She had not ridden in a litter, she realized, since her ill-fated trip to her husband’s court when she was fourteen.
When they set her down and the newly ranked wizard extended a hand, she took it gratefully. She had been trained from the age when she could stand by herself to move with the grace and dignity befitting a princess, but now it was all she could do to not lean too hard on the man’s arm as the bath attendants came for her, extending their tongues to show respect.
Two young women led her into the heat of the bath chamber. They were clothed in sheer white gowns that fell straight from the shoulder. Their arms were scandalously bare. Each of them was careful to hold Samarkar upright while making the touches seem natural and solicitous.
A heavy curtain fell behind Samarkar, and the heat of the bath chamber rolled over her. One of the servants opened her bed gowns and stripped her cloaks away while the other steadied her. She soon stood naked. It was an effort to hold her hands wide while the smaller of the two—a moon-faced beauty who could almost have been Samarkar’s daughter, if Samarkar had had a daughter swiftly upon her marriage—unwound the gauze and silk across her belly. Samarkar wanted to defend the wound, to hide it with her hands as if it shamed her. She forced herself to stand proud.
The young women conferred over her abdomen—shrunken now by her fasting and recovery, and the taller and perhaps older one nodded. “It is healing well,” she said. “Shall I help you into the water?”
“Thank you,” said Samarkar. “I shall walk. If I can.”
The entrance to the pools was shallow, not stepped but slanted, and scattered thickly with white sand that lay in pleasing ripples against the black basalt. Samarkar walked in slowly, as if savoring the warmth rising across the arches of her feet and the bones of her ankles, but in truth she did not trust her stability if she walked fast. From the way the attendants hovered, they were as worried as she. For the sake of her pride, though, she stayed upright.
The descent grew easier as the water took her weight. As the gentle swirl of the current washed her thighs and belly free of sweat and the crusts of dried blood and strong wine, as they soothed her shoulders and her neck, as they lapped her until she stood on tiptoe in hot water to her chin and felt it untangling her oiled hair down her back, she sighed and let go of a breath she had not known she was holding.
She stepped deeper. The water lifted her off her feet. Her toes dipped to brush the sand when she exhaled; her breasts bobbed weightlessly when she inhaled. Warm water licked her collarbone, shading hotter as she stroked deeper into the pool.
Each time she drew her arms forward, each time she lightly kicked, she felt the pull through the cramped and damaged muscles of her abdomen. But still she swam, as she had swum all her life except for the three terrible years in Song. She swam. And soon she would swim strongly once more.
Samarkar would live. And she would grow to become something new. Whatever the future held for her.