The ring warm on her hand, Edene smiled. I will be the best of queens. But was not her own plan to use the ghulim to fight an outside war?
It was the curse, perhaps, of being commanded by a ring. Could she choose not to command them? Could—
She must. She must bring an army to Temur.
Her finger sweated under the warmth of the ring. The scent of frankincense suffused her senses. She closed her eyes, turned her head. You are not real. You are not real.
It was like pushing back the felted wall of a collapsing white-house: a muffling pressure that wanted to overwhelm her, smother her under softness and weight. She breathed deep—pulled in, pulled up. I am free of you! I am Edene!
The pressure broke. The stench of resin and guano faded.
Edene opened her eyes to see Besha Ghul. Its head cocked in concern.
“I’m fine,” said Edene, and fainted against the wall.
* * *
Al-Sepehr jerked his hands from the browned, burnished surface of a bone-dry skull and gasped as if he had been struck in the solar plexus. The image of a woman shivered in the air before him as if painted with smoke. When he breathed out, it blew to shred.
Rage washed him. That a Qersnyk whore would oppose the Nameless! But rage was a young man’s weakness, and after a moment of contemplation he folded it and set it aside.
“So,” he said. “Another way.”
* * *
In the morning, Samarkar sought out Hrahima. She found the Cho-tse in the still-shady courtyard, lying on her back with her head pillowed in her arms. Samarkar settled beside her, legs folded and fingertips resting on her knees. Assuming the pose brought back a powerful sense memory of cold wet and darkness in the proving chambers in the belly of the Citadel, and, though the heat of the day was already rising, Samarkar had to fight back the dry warmth that wanted to crackle from her fingertips.
The silence she sought eluded her at first; her awareness churned and fretted, returning again and again to Temur’s dreams, to the image of an army of demons bred in the bodies of the unsuspecting. Samarkar knew from practice that forcing her ill thoughts away would only bring them back increased in strength. Instead, she allowed the worries to enter her mind, acknowledged them, dismissed them. She came into a place where the heat could not trouble her, nor the press of responsibility, nor the threat of dire futures.
“Wizard,” said the Cho-tse lazily, after some time.
“Hrahima,” Samarkar answered, rising from the depths of a quieted mind. “I did not mean to disturb your rest.”
She opened her eyes to find the Cho-tse unmoved, still lying sprawled, but now regarding Samarkar with an unnerving tourmaline stare.
“It was only rest after a fashion.” Hrahima stood balanced on the pads of her hind feet before Samarkar had quite registered that she was rising. “A discipline of my tribe; the contemplation of the sun without and the Sun Within.”
Samarkar thought about questioning Hrahima about the Sun Within—that deity the Cho-tse both denied and yet, seemingly, venerated. But Samarkar deemed it likely that questions would beget only evasions, yet again. The wizard rose less gracefully, but—she flattered herself—with sufficient nimbleness for a mere human.
“There’s no sun here yet,” she said with a smile.
Hrahima crouched again like a fall of water and laid one massive hand flat on the stone. “But there has been, and there will be again, and a little of the old warmth lingers.” She looked up, whiskers flat against her cheeks. “Why do you seek me, Wizard Samarkar?”
“A favor,” Samarkar said. “Will your travels take you anywhere near the caliph’s palace this morning? If you are willing, I need you to be my messenger.”
* * *
But it turned out she did not, after all. Because the messenger from the palace arrived while Ato Tesefahun’s household (and guests, and those who—like Temur—hovered somewhere between) were sitting to breakfast. Bidden enter, he approached Ato Tesefahun and bowed beside the Aezin wizard’s seat. Ato Tesefahun acknowledged him immediately. Samarkar noticed that the messenger avoided even glancing in her direction. An unveiled woman at the table with men! She comforted herself that no matter how far she traveled, no matter how changed her role, she was still and always would be a scandal.
The messenger did not rise but extended a folded and wax-sealed packet: rag paper, by the look of it, less rare here than from whence Samarkar hailed. Ato Tesefahun accepted it, flipped it, and read the elegant script aloud.
“Once-Princess Samarkar-la,” he said, eyebrows rising. “Wizard of Tsarepheth.”
Someone less schooled by years of court than Samarkar would have glanced at the messenger in confusion, or at least lowered her gaze. Samarkar felt her own face grow still, the traces of amusement dropping from the corners of her mouth and eyes. It was almost a numbness, the creeping tingle of impassivity that she had learned so early and well.