Samarkar remembered hearing such parties before, during her own novitiate, and wondering what was occurring that she was not invited to. “Slowly?” she asked. And then she paused. “How long has it been?”
Yongten-la smiled, sweet and sudden, the creases around his eyes and mouth standing out like a landscape seen from a height. Samarkar was not sure she’d ever seen him smile like that before.
“Three nights,” he said. “Not so long, as such things are reckoned.”
The light that she had forgotten had wreathed her flickered and died, left her blinking as its blue glacial purity was replaced by the slowly warming grayness of morning. No wonder the raktsi made her head spin.
Slowly, she took a second bite of rice cake. Cardamom and coconut, spices from the faraway tropical coast. Someone had brought out instruments, and the first tentative sounds of improvised music trailed through the distant, habitual noise of the river. A round-faced wizard a few years younger than she but more advanced in his training—not the one with the pampered moustache—came by as she finished the rice cake. She wondered if Yongten-la had subtly waved him in; deviousness would be like the master wizard.
His name was Anil. He took her hand and asked her to dance, and when she would have demurred—she knew dances, but they were court dances, not these bawdy country things—he showed her the steps over and over, until laughing, her head spinning, she halfway got it.
She was the guest of honor today. She could do no wrong, and dancing drunkenly with a handsome child—unthinkable in her past life—was suddenly no disgrace. Freedom made her more giddy than the whiskey.
She should not have been so strong, so full of energy after three days sitting on a cold stone floor. She knew that, and she understood intellectually that there would be a price to pay later. But for now she let Anil swing her into a line of men and women holding hands, and let the wailing of voices and shawms and strings pick her up and carry her in a whirling of six-petal coats and joyous laughter.
She was alive. She was alive, and she had found her power—or it had found her.
Tomorrow’s problems she’d take care of tomorrow.
* * *
Edene knew she was not dead. Not unless death meant stinking (possible) and itching (unlikely) in a filthy shirt and trousers while a thin, icy wind cut her to the bone and burned her lungs with altitude. She didn’t think ghosts suffered nausea or aching bones. She didn’t think they quailed with terror at the unspeakable drop beneath the bars of the cage they huddled in. She didn’t think they clung to those bars until their hands ached and their fingers locked in place.
Ergo, she must be alive.
She dangled below the hooked yellow talons of a bird with wings so wide she imagined it could have carried off an Indrik-zver. It certainly had no difficulty with her weight, iron cage and all. The wind of its wing beats buffeted her. Her tears did not quite freeze on her face, but it was a near thing.
She squinted through waterlogged lashes to see where the bird carried her. Below, the golden sweep of the steppe gave way to glaring white—sand or salt flats, she did not know—then the endless wrinkled blue that Edene knew must be the sea, though she had never seen it before. She had water in her cage, but no food, and her feet ached from balancing on the bars until she gave up and sat, whereupon her haunches ached instead. The sky overhead changed several times while the bird bore her—night and day, many moons and one, a sun that rose in the east and one that rose to the west—but she had a sense its direction had not changed.
“As the crow flies,” she muttered, as the sea fell behind and a brown desert unscrolled below. If the bird were to carry her to the Eternal Sky, it was not doing a particularly good job. They were dropping now, and she could see some details of the land—the dry riverbeds, the sinuous ridges.
She saw stones standing high above the valleys, and one stone in particular—a stark rock upon which a castle of five mismatched towers perched. It must be their destination, because the great bird banked and came around to the tallest tower, landing into the wind.
Someone waited there, so tiny with distance that Edene at first saw only windswept robes and a veil of deepest indigo. Her cage scraped stone as the bird released it. She hastily made sure her toes and fingers were pulled within.
Sparks flew, metal bumping to a halt on stone. The great bird landed beyond, hopping to halt before it reached the battlements, and resettled itself facing inward with a flip of wings. The blue-veiled man tossed it meat—a leg of goat, she thought, that disappeared into the bird’s great maw like a grape into a man’s mouth. The bird gulped it like a crow gulping a locust and looked around for more.