The glow did reveal them, but not as he expected. Or rather, the butterflies were exactly what he had thought to see—but the sky was not. One lone moon rose over the ragged silhouettes of the mountains, fat and copper-red shading to silver as it climbed.
One moon. Alone.
This was not the sky of the steppe. And it was not the sky of Rasa, either, or of Song. He had never seen this moon before, in all his travels, and he had not seen the constellations that shimmered behind it.
He had left the Qersnyk lands—and yet there were still miles to go to Qeshqer. Which could only mean that Qeshqer, too, had fallen and was no longer vassal to the Khaganate.
* * *
Temur would never know how all three of them came alive from the Range of Ghosts, except that Bansh brought them safely down. He had no memory of days or nights passing, just a jumble of fever and pain and the patient lurching of the mare as she descended the narrow switchback road step-by-step. There were moments of clarity in the nightmare blue-and-white, some of them more nightmarish than the fever-dream itself. The mist coiled like serpents in the mornings, and there were times when Temur was sure it blinked enormous lambent eyes and brushed his face with salty tendrils. There were supposed to be mist-dragons in Rasa, but if that was what these were, they seemed content to let him pass.
Another time, he had the sense of something huge and silent pacing him during the dark before sunrise, and when there was light to see by, he made out pawprints in the sandy verge of the road, big as a stallion’s hoof and shaped something like a tiger paw and something like the foot of a man. When the fever left him able, he searched the dark for the shimmer of yellow eyes. When it did not, he dreamed their existence and came back to himself clutching his knife in his hand, as if that could protect him.
But the worst by far was the figure he glimpsed again and again at the corner of his vision: a man, a strange leathery man naked as a prisoner, his belly caved in and carved out until there was nothing below or behind the ribs, his back and his skull caved in and scooped out like a polished wooden bowl, his buttocks and sex like empty sacks, his thighs and arms hard and shiny as polished brown twigs.
The man never came close. He never attacked. He never even showed himself plainly but always appeared for an instant, perched on a boulder, vanishing into mists, glimpsed as he strode between outcroppings of rock. But in Temur’s fever, he seemed the most terrible thing in the terrible mountains, and Temur greeted his appearance each time with wracking coughs and shuddering chills.
Finally, when he doubled over the belly-high pommel hacking, clutching at the front-boards to keep himself from toppling sideways, Bansh raised her head and craned back to regard him with one big brown eye.
“Foolish child,” she said. “He doesn’t exist. He can’t hurt you unless you let him.”
Temur’s gasp of surprise set him coughing again. And when he could force himself to stop, there was nothing but a plain bay mare, thin and weary, plodding forward along a descending trail. He reached out to touch her shoulder, reassuring himself of her solidity, and the pressure of the pommel against his stomach sent him into a fit of coughing and a fever-dream once more.
7
Whatever Songtsan feared from the Qersnyk, in the next quarter-moons it took second place for Samarkar to her training in wizarding ways. As a novice, she had read from books and attended lectures. She had studied chemistry and natural history, surgery and healing. As a novice, she had tended the stinking saltpeter beds; there was no special status appended to her as a once-princess. As a novice, she had learned the blending of explosive compounds and those that produced brilliant fireworks and those that were useful to bringing the rains—and she had learned the meticulous care necessary in working with them.
Now she was expected to begin the manufacture of such rockets. But the primary focus of her training became physical and practical: Once she was healed from her surgery, the emphasis was on making her talent manifest.
If it was going to.
* * *
As Tsering-la led her through the warren of passages hewn from the rock below the Citadel, Samarkar wondered if the failed wizard had been tasked with helping Samarkar find her magic because she could serve as a warning of the price of failure or because she was an assurance that even if everything went wrong, there would still be a place in the Citadel for Samarkar.
It wasn’t such a bad place, Samarkar thought. Teaching, studying. Building fireworks. Tsering-la seemed content—not even merely reconciled, but happy. Her stride was confident; her boots clicked with purpose. And for the moment, she had it better than Samarkar: Tsering was not lightheaded with fasting.