Shahruz cleared his throat and said, “So whose arrival am I awaiting?”
“Not his,” al-Sepehr said. “But we found his woman. With that, we can bring him to us. Until then, I will send you back the rukh. The wind will bear you to Qeshqer. I will have the woman brought there. You can send her on to me, and it’s possible we’ll have another opportunity at Re Temur soon. Qori Buqa cannot be permitted to win his war so easily. We do not have the armies to oppose generals who would rather fight us than each other.”
Shahruz-in-Saadet nodded, his/her eyes revealing nothing but concentrated intensity. “For the Nameless,” he said, his intonations making a woman’s fair voice into a dark and knifelike thing.
“For the world,” al-Sepehr answered.
6
No one could have tended to so many dead. But that did not stop the mute monk from trying.
He should have raised scaffolds, lifted the dead into the air, where the carrion birds could come for them in convenience, unharried by the earthbound predators who squabbled and snarled all around. But there was not enough wood in the whole of the steppe for this many bodies, not if the monk could hew each tree that huddled in every river valley or climbed every sacred hill, where the dry and endless sea of grass could not choke the life from its seedlings, and enough deep water remained to feed deep roots.
So instead, the monk laid out each dead man—or boy, or in a few cases woman—anointed the eyes and mouth with a vulture’s pinion soaked in sweet oil, and gestured a brief prayer. The first day it wasn’t so bad, in the cold. By the second, the bodies were stiff with frost and age.
By the fifth, they were rotting.
That was the day on which the monk began to see the butterflies.
It was unseasonable for butterflies, and so he turned to watch the first one beating strongly into a headwind, its pale green-gold wings shimmering like a mare’s hide in the sun. As he watched, the wind lashing his stringy hair about his face, it dipped down and lighted on the face of a corpse, a boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen who had fallen with a red-fletched arrow through his throat.
The monk had chosen silence, and he respected that vow even now, when there was no one to hear but the dead. He had not chosen to lose his sight, but it was failing him anyway. The dark irises of his eyes had a blue sheen in sunlight, and he saw the world—already—as if through dirty glass.
But he was not so blind yet that he could not see the color and motion as another butterfly flitted past—this one brilliant orange—then another, and another, and one more, until they filled the air with a tumult of wings so thick one could hear them whispering and smell their dusty scent. His fingertips crept to his lips and pressed there, as if to hold the exclamation in.
The butterflies swirled around him, shimmering changeable colors like rare jewels: blues and golds and greens and vermilions, pearl-whites, purples verging on blacks, reds like the heartsblood that twined slender vines up the steppe grass to wave above it, throwing its bright heads high into the ceaseless wind. He felt the brush of their wings. He breathed between his fingers so as not to inhale one.
If the monk had been able to see from the perspective of a falcon or one of the black birds to which he commended the dead, he would have known that each butterfly flitted into existence over the lips of a dead man or boy or occasional woman. That each one then beat wings to gain altitude and joined the general migration.
If the monk had seen from the perspective of a falcon, he could have seen that the butterflies numbered in the tens of thousands, and that all their myriad beating wings in myriad brilliant colors marked a general migration south.
He couldn’t see that, but he could guess at it. It was the scarlet butterflies that gave it away.
Because all over the steppe, deep into the Rasan Empire, all across the lands of the Song, it was known that scarlet butterflies were the souls of witches. And it was said that they would whisper secrets and magic into your ears if you were silent and listened hard.
No one was more silent than the monk. But no matter how he strained his ears, the butterflies kept their peace, as silent to him as he was to them.
* * *
Edene’s cousins led Temur into the camp, to the fire that had been allowed to die to embers overnight and was now being coaxed to flame for the boiling of tea. One of them—the one who’d all but lost her eye—kept bloody fingers pressed to the socket as swelling puffed the lid closed and pink-tinged fluid ran down her face. She might keep it. She might even keep some of the sight in it: Temur had seen worse healed, with time and good nursing, but he wouldn’t care to wager a mare on it.