When the man came to open her cage, she could barely stand. She pushed herself upright with her hands on her knees, her thighs and back screaming protest. She breathed out through her nose, fighting the cramps, telling herself they were no worse than the cramps of a day in the saddle.
It might be a lie, but it comforted her.
He thrust something into her hand—watered wine, she realized as she drank, and her head spun. There might be something else in it too—beef broth? She should cast it to the stones, but she needed it so badly, and was she not in his power anyway? If he wished her dead, all it would take was a knife.
The wine didn’t settle her nausea—if anything, her stomach cramped more viciously—but it did lend her strength and numb her pains. She finished the draught and let the cup slip from her fingers.
The man in the rust-colored robes caught it before it touched the ground. She stood blinking, wondering if exhaustion and wine had blinded her.
Carefully, he set it down.
“Honored guest,” he said in her own language, his words thick with a western inflection. “Welcome to the Rock. Ala-Din is its name in our language.” He waved a hand to the massive bird that rocked from foot to foot behind him. “Some call it the Aerie, but they are wrong. I am Mukhtar ai-Idoj, called al-Sepehr of this place.”
Edene blinked. She had fallen into a story, she thought, but that did not stop her from drawing herself up tall in her filthy, tattered sleepwear and squaring her shoulders before she spoke. “I’ve heard of you,” she said. “You’re the prince of some murder cult. You worship the Sorcerer-Prince.”
“You may have heard of us,” he said with quiet dignity. It bothered her that his face was hidden. “But it seems you have heard a great many lies. My God is the Scholar, and she speaks to us directly. As for Sepehr al-Rachīd ibn Sepehr”—she could not see the smile behind his veil, but she could imagine it by the way his eyes crinkled at the corners—“whom the ignorant call the Sorcerer-Prince, or the Carrion-King, or the Joy-of-Ravens…, while it is true he was the founder of my order, he is not a prophet. Nor do we worship him.”
His words were calm enough—calmer than she would have expected for a man who had had her snatched by ghosts and flown for days across the world, dangling in the shadow of a bird as big as a caravan—but the set of his shoulders unnerved her. That, and the way he said the Sorcerer-Prince’s name so lightly. With such comfort.
As if he did not fear to be overheard.
She would not take a step back. She folded her arms across her chest. “What do you want with me?” she asked.
He came no closer. “Oh,” he said. “It’s not you. But don’t worry. You will be made quite comfortable.”
* * *
Later, Samarkar leaned against a white pillar of the Citadel, the sun warming her collar, and let Anil press his cheek against her cheek. His arms were strong and slender, and he smelled of musk and sweet cinnamon, like something you should put in your mouth and suck. Maybe he had the same thought, because he turned and brushed his mouth over hers. She did not pull back; he looked in her eyes, as if seeking permission, and slowly drew her lower lip between his teeth, nibbling lightly.
A thrill ran up her spine, down her belly. She found herself hanging on him, pressing her thighs together. A heat burned her that was like the heat of magic, but lighter, tighter, more focused.…
She startled, jerked back, and found herself pinned between him and the pillar. He stepped back, giving her room. Though she felt the tug of disappointment when her hands fell away from the warm stone of his collar, she took the space he offered. “I—”
“You’re one of us now,” he said. “No harm can come of it.”
Every novice knew that the elevated and the masters were not chaste. Samarkar, once-princess, wedded, widowed—had been too old and alien to giggle behind her hand with the rest of the novices, but she knew, just the same. There were advantages to what they lost besides the wizardry. A man gelded as an adult could set as straight a branch as any other; a neutered woman lost only the ability to bear.
But she had somehow never made the connection that the enforced—and policed—celibacy of the novitiate would come to an end for her as well.
She pressed her collar to her throat, feeling the reassuring cage of its stiffness. “This is fast.…”
He nodded, and let his hands hang by his sides. “You were widowed.” He said it with sympathy, as if he did not know it was she who had called on her brothers to come avenge the slight to her family and wash it clean in her husband’s blood.