Samarkar watched him go, frowning until she felt more than heard Hrahima come up beside her. The Cho-tse watched him go, and huffed. “Will you come with him to Asitaneh?” she asked. “Or will you stay with Payma and her son?”
Samarkar glanced at Payma. The princess’s hair was bleached to a reddish black by the sun, her face burnished as bronze as any Qersnyk girl’s. She was unselfconsciously laying wet clothes across clumps of grass to dry, like a peasant woman, her belly and breasts and back bare to the warmth of the sun. The dark wings of vultures drifted lazily overhead in the heat of the day, and Samarkar—reluctant though she was to succumb to it—felt a still peace steal over her.
“Asitaneh?” she said. “I thought once we found safety for Payma, he was raising a Qersnyk army to oust his uncle and wrest his woman away from your necromancer priest.” And make himself Khan or Khagan, as the case may be.
Hrahima laughed, a ch-ch-ch with a rumble that seemed to come from deep in her chest. Samarkar remembered from legend that the Cho-tse could not lie; it was why they were so often paid as messengers. She wondered if that had something to do with the religion Hrahima claimed she had abandoned.
The Cho-tse said, “Do you recollect what he said about Ato Tesefahun?”
“Your patron? That his daughter married a horse-lord—”
Hrahima made a left-handed brushing gesture, as if dismissing the word patron. But she said, “Ato Tesefahun is Temur’s grandfather. Why do you think he has you teaching him the Uthman tongue? He means to go on to Asitaneh, to cross the White Sea and the Uthman Narrows and present himself to his grandfather.”
She paused. Samarkar was learning to distinguish that motion of Hrahima’s ears and whiskers as the Cho-tse equivalent of a smile. The tigers only curled their lips to snarl.
“I thought Ato Tesefahun was in Ctesifon.”
“He was,” Hrahima said. “But I am to meet him in Asitaneh.” She gestured to Temur’s back. “His grandfather will likely welcome him,” she said, confidingly. “Especially if he brings news of his mother.”
Samarkar pressed her hands together. “Don’t you think it strange—coincidental—that you met him, and me, as you did?”
Hrahima shrugged. Her tail lashed. “My people would say there is no strangeness. No coincidence in destiny.”
“But you don’t believe in destiny. Even when it presents itself at your door?”
The Cho-tse bent, picked up a flat stone, and skipped it across the rushing river. The smile left her ears. “Ah,” she said. “You remembered.”
Whatever Samarkar might have said next, she lost it in the shriek of a bird of prey. Something big beat blue-gray wings against the sky, mobbed by vultures behaving as Samarkar had never seen vultures behave. The larger bird side-slipped below the carrion fowl, as in turn they folded wings and dive-bombed it like angry hawks. Samarkar heard the impacts clearly, each time it failed to dodge the assaults. She winced as one last vulture struck the larger bird, knocking it in a tumble of limp plumage from the sky.
Instantly, Hrahima was off in pursuit, leaping through tall grass. A moment later, she returned, carrying some crested raptor that Samarkar did not recognize by its long, broken neck.
“What’s that?”
Hrahima shrugged.
Temur had somehow appeared beside them. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he said. “Vultures attacking a—what is that?”
Hrahima held it up, pulling a wing wide to display the span. “Food?”
* * *
In her new freedom—if you could call veiled anonymity in such an inescapable fastness as Ala-Din “freedom”—Edene toiled with all her will. It was better than thinking, and Saadet’s company was pleasant. Because they did not share a language, Saadet had to first show Edene every task and how it was done. But Edene learned quickly, and in short order they began exchanging a few words. They developed their own shorthand language, and through it, Edene began to learn a little of the Uthman tongue.
At least there was enough sky, stretched out on all sides, even if it was the wrong color. And at least she had the filthy, exhausting, but ultimately rewarding work of caring for the mewed birds to distract her. She had always enjoyed caring for animals over other work. Now she lost herself in it, scrubbing and carrying as her belly swelled, and tried not to remember that she toiled as a slave.
She particularly enjoyed working with the male rukh. She felt a bond to him, in the clipped wings and chains he wore physically and she in her heart.
Though she worked almost ceaselessly, like any Qersnyk woman bearing, she still found time to explore the bastion of the Nameless—and to learn what she could of the group. They brought her to services, where she knelt with the other women, divided from the men by filigreed barriers. She heard al-Sepehr’s prayers in Uthman and learned a few more words, but not enough to understand the sense of the thing. His charisma moved her, though, and she noticed he still made time to dine with her a few times in a hand of days.