The rattle of the Rasan soldiers’ armor echoed off the great curved wall of the Citadel. They streamed around Hrahima wherever she leaped to try and slow them. Temur could feel the ground shake under their running feet: There must have been fifteen or twenty now, drawn from every neighboring stair.
Samarkar pushed Payma forward, and the momentum pulled him an extra step. The stair was there, less than an ayl ahead. He slung Payma in front of him and pushed her bodily up the steps—two, then four—while the stark jade light of Samarkar’s wards washed their shadows black and bottomless on white stone. Her voice boomed, rattling dust from the crevices between blocks of stone: “You will not lay hands on me!”
Above, Temur saw wizards gathering, a stream of black coats lining the battlements, trickling down the stairs, rushing to meet them. He could not leave Samarkar undefended at his back. He gave Payma one more push toward the wizards and turned around, his knife in his hand, not sure what he would do, afoot, against a score of armed and armored men.
Stand until he fell, he thought, because once the battle was joined, he knew he would not be able to force himself to back down.
But no—he would do nothing, it turned out, because the soldiers had stopped at the edge of the glare that burned from Samarkar. She backed away, hands outstretched, and they followed, still at the perimeter of her light. Temur had a sense that they were waiting for a signal, some command from a leader that had not yet materialized.
Samarkar’s foot touched the lowest stair. She turned and fled toward Temur; Temur, who was blocking her path, spun about and climbed as fast as he could. Above, wizards were lifting the princess off her feet, carrying her upward and out of harm’s way.
“Hrahima!” Samarkar cried.
As if her name had summoned her, like a djinn, the tiger landed whisper-soft on the stair before Temur. She was scratched and bleeding from a dozen superficial wounds, and her eyes glared green as jewels in the light of Samarkar’s magic. Her tail lashed, but she spun feather-light on the pads of her feet and bounded up the stairs to the descending wizards. One or two cowered from her—more from instinct than personal fear, Temur thought—then she crouched and leaped over them, gaining the battlements in an impossible bound.
“Hrahima is fine,” he said, and reached behind himself to offer Samarkar a hand.
* * *
Yongten-la met them at the top of the stairs and promptly swept them down the other side again. Samarkar struggled to keep up with him. Payma was simply bundled into a litter and carried, while a wizard trotted alongside tending her feet. Temur and Hrahima followed as if bobbing in the eddies of a wake.
“You must leave tonight,” Yongten-la said. “Before he can move troops around the mountains to intercept you. We will clear the Wreaking that you may pass in safety. I have had your luggage prepared, and Temur-tsa’s horses stand ready. We have taken the liberty of saddling a gelding for the princess.”
“I am grateful. But how did you—”
He interrupted with a smile that made Samarkar want to smite her own forehead. Of course he knew. She said, “The bstangpo will not be pleased.”
Yongten-la snorted. “I’ve crossed worse emperors than he. On with you, wizard.”
He tapped her shoulder affectionately, like a father. Samarkar felt the sting all the way down her chest to her belly.
“Where will we go?” she asked. She glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “We cannot take Payma all the way to Ctesifon. Even if she and the babe survived it, she would come to term on the road.”
“Nilufer,” Temur said.
She turned, feeling the surprise blank her face. “Your aunt?”
“You mentioned her,” Temur said, spreading his hands. He’d resheathed his knife. “What better portent than the uttering of a wizard? Her husband Toghrul was my father’s brother, and she no doubt still holds influence over her children. We honor our mothers and grandmothers among the Qersnyk, for who can know what man fathered him? I can claim some kinright with her. And if she or her sons have fallen in with Qori Buqa, well…” He waved a hand. “Better to find out, I guess.”
“So be it,” Samarkar said with a smile, and lowered her voice to add, “Your highness.”
Temur glanced down. “Come on. There’s no time to waste.”
* * *
Even as her hands carried out necessary tasks, as her feet carried her through the familiar halls of the Citadel, Samarkar felt unreal, as if she had become someone out of a story. She might have been mist, blown through the corridors as on a gale. She might have been one of Temur’s enslaved blood-ghosts, flying on the wings of the dead. Later, she could never remember how she came to be in the stables, faced with three horses—Temur’s two leggy mares and a stoic, shaggy, thick-necked Rasan gelding in an unexceptional pale-nosed dun—and three mealy-colored, pack-laden mules. Temur—Temur Khanzadeh, and in truth Samarkar could not say she hadn’t suspected something of the sort—stood at her left hand.