Eternal Sky 01(40)

She laughed, though. She turned away and pressed her hands to the pillar to support herself and laughed the harder, shaking her head like a horse shaking off flies—in irritation rather than denial. “He wouldn’t have me,” she said, bitterly. “Not once. Either he was afraid of women or he was afraid of getting an heir on me that Rasa might someday use to claim a part of Song. But either way, I went to my husband’s pyre as virgin as I went to my marriage bed. So it’s not that.…”

She couldn’t look at him. She’d only once put this into words before, when she’d come to plead with Yongten-la for a place among his wizards, three years before, and begged him to consider her despite her age. She cringed, expecting to be reviled.

It was what her husband would have done. What he had done when she had tried to entice him to what should have been their marriage bed.

Anil put his hand on her shoulder. He sighed. He squeezed softly. “I do not care about him,” he said. “When you don’t care about him, either, you know where to find me.”

And then he was gone, the energy of his presence replaced by an emptiness behind her.

Samarkar stood for a long time listening to the music filtering down the colonnaded walkway, the party in her honor carrying on in her absence. It was not so different, after all, from being a princess. Except now she could walk off alone, and there was no one to say otherwise.

The long gallery led to a stair, and the stair led down to the river. Its rush and hiss spoke to Samarkar. It summoned her as surely as a voice calling her name.

And so she descended, down to the river she had loved all her life. Here beneath the Citadel, it ran tight and fast, a boiling current that could dash an unwary swimmer against the boulders or suck her under in a boiling eddy. Samarkar had swum it—she had swum the whole length of the Tsarethi where it passed through Tsarepheth, and the calmer waters far downstream—and she knew just how easy it would be to die in its embrace.

She didn’t strip off and dive in now. Strong as she felt, she also knew that strength was an illusion and could fail her at any moment. Instead, she climbed up amongst the jumbled boulders near the shore, skipping from one to another with well-timed leaps until she sat on a flat stone a body length from its closest neighbor in the midst of the churning water, the spray of its plunge dewing her cheek and jeweling her hair.

This boulder—and all the others that touched the water, and back from the water as high as the flood-waters rose—was carved all over with intricate sigils. Words. Prayers—prayers for luck and prosperity and good harvest and fertility and safety. Prayers for wellness and prayers for peace, all carved here in this hard gray granite so that the water might wash them downstream to Tsarepheth, to the fields that bounded it to the south, to the broad wide world below the Steles of the Sky, and eventually to the mythical sea beyond.

Samarkar stood there for a moment, hands fisted inside her black sleeves, and watched them go.

She imagined them shedding peace and grace on everything they touched—righting little evils, ameliorating great ones. She wasn’t sure she believed in it.

But she wasn’t sure she didn’t, either, and the roar of the white water plunging past was cleaner than anything inside her head. Where had the peace and certainty she’d known in the dungeon gone?

“It’s beautiful,” Yongten-la said, beside her.

She never knew why his voice did not startle her back into the water, to plunge to her death.

“It is,” she agreed. She glanced sideways. She was always surprised at what a compact man the master was; he was bigger inside her head. “I was going to come back.”

“I know.”

He waited; she waited too. Eventually, she imagined, the time would be right. Eventually, apparently, it was.

“I’m sending you and Tsering-la to Qeshqer the day after tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry?” She turned, startled, sure she’d misheard. But he stood there comfortable, hands behind his back, boots comfortably apart on the wet stone.

“To Qeshqer,” he said. “If there is war, they will need you. If there are refugees, they will need you. You have some power.…” He paused, considered, and shrugged, as if deciding to speak the whole truth. “You have some power. You may not be a mighty wizard, but you are patient and you study hard. You have the potential to become a crafty one. Which is in some ways better.”

She nodded. It stung. Of course every novice dreamed of being revealed as another Tse-ten of the Five Eyes. But then, every novice dreamed it, and that meant that almost all of them would be disappointed. “Thank you, master.”