* * *
There was no coolness in the predawn dark to which Temur awakened. He lay in yet another unfamiliar sort of bed—he’d learned so much about how the foreigners slept on this journey! This one was a mattress on the floor stuffed firmly with what, by its spring, might be bats of wool. The coverlet was cotton, woven with an open hand, but even that was too warm on such a night and he’d kicked it away.
The air was warm too, if not still. It moved softly beyond the stone-latticed window. The stone walls re-radiated the heat of the day, and the leaves in the garden beyond rustled. A whisper of light fell inside, from the foreign stars and from the city beyond the garden walls: enough that his dark-adapted eyes could pick out the curve of warm flesh in the darkness, the line of shadow below a shoulder blade, dark and sharp as if drawn with a pen.
A woman lay in the bed beside him, her hair drifting across his arm, starlight pooled in the cup of her palm. He knew he should have felt frustration, impatience with the slow grindings of Uthman politeness in this foreign city of Asitaneh when another woman for whom he cared needed his help—but it was hard, at just this instant, after so much fear and exhaustion, to do more than lie in the dark and fill himself with the scent of the person he rested beside.
In the morning, he thought. I will make my grandfather help me find Edene. In the morning.
We can have this one night.
The woman breathed softly—but not with the slow regularity of one asleep. As he lifted his head, he could see the gloss of light across dark irises.
“Samarkar,” he breathed.
“You felt it?” she asked, speculation altering the contours of her face as it had when he admitted sometimes dreaming true.
He shook his head. “I was asleep.”
“I wasn’t.” The Wizard Samarkar turned in the covers, and that starlight spilled from her hand, running across the bed to thin and vanish. The room was darker than before; now he could see her only as a dim outline of greater darkness against the night. He heard the faint consternation in her voice, but she made herself say, “I wanted to remember this.”
He might be younger than she, but he wasn’t so young he couldn’t read all the pain of her loveless marriage and early widowhood in her words. He opened his mouth to soothe her and shut it again. Given everything they were hunting—the lord of the Rahazeen cult called the Nameless, Temur’s stolen lover, vengeance for his slaughtered brother and hers—and everything that was hunting them—his uncle, her surviving brother, assorted murder cults, the dread memory of an ancient sorcerer—he could not promise much.
“I’m at your side,” he said at last. “And I will remain there so long as fate permits. Sleep; there will be other nights to remember.”
She kissed him in answer, a foreign custom for which he was developing a taste. Then she pulled back and said, “I think I shall not be sleeping in any case. Something cold and chill has passed across the world this night; I think I would have felt it even in my dreams.”
“Cold and chill? Something sorcerous?”
“Only as your blood vow in Tsarepheth was sorcerous.” Her shape moved against lesser darkness as she stood. Her hair swept his face again, full of the scent of the sea. “A true word from a man or woman of power has the strength to change the world, so the sages say. If you did not feel it, what wakened you?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps just your breathing—” He cast from side to side, listening in the night. “No,” he said. “Wait. No birds.”
She cocked her head, a hand to her ear. But Temur did not need the confirmation. There were birds, heralding the first paling of sky before an incipient sun—but not outside the window. Birds in the city. But no birds in the garden.
Silently, Temur found his feet. Samarkar slid into a pair of breeches she’d discarded. Temur grasped his knife, which was laid against a bolster beside his bed—on Samarkar’s side, but he had not been planning to share the couch when he retired.
He pulled on his clout, holding his knife between his teeth. She struggled into a tunic and found her own knife—a much shorter, square-pommeled one, meant for chores and not fighting. All Rasans seemed to carry the like. “Follow me,” she said.
He did without hesitation. Samarkar had grown to adulthood in the terraced cities of Rasa and Song. She could find her way around a permanent dwelling place as Temur could not. But he could guide them across a steppe that would seem featureless to the uninitiated.
Barefoot, padding on blood-hot stone, she brought them to a door beside which paced one of the household guards, broad-shouldered and stocky beneath a robe of dark browns that blended into the shadows.