The others at the table busied themselves with their cups and plates, granting Samarkar and Temur a moment of privacy even in their midst. Samarkar could feel in that instant how something between Temur and her that might have stretched and snapped, otherwise, suddenly made itself solid and correct. A glorious, uneasy sensation rose up inside her. It could have been the feeling of the future rearranging itself a new pattern—but wasn’t that moment long past?
“She’s never unsound,” Samarkar said, a peace offering of her own. In her head, she heard her father calling her his heir, a near son, telling her that as she had no brothers, she must learn to be a man in their place. All that had changed with the birth of Songtsan … and yet none of it had changed at all. A wizard knows that to name a thing is half of making it. What you call someone … defines them.
Samarkar took a breath, and—willing it to be prophecy—said, “That horse is an immortal, Temur Khan.”
Temur hid his wince. Tightly, he nodded.
“So Samarkar is the first,” said Hrahima, pushing a salted fish across her plate with a claw tip.
Samarkar had filled her nervous mouth with coffee, so it was Temur who asked, “The first?”
The Cho-tse puffed her whiskers. “The first to call you King.”
* * *
It was Temur who came to help Samarkar into her wizard’s armor, to tighten her buckles and check the corded lacings that held the armor skirts to the cuirass. He did not speak, and she did not ask him how he had persuaded Ato Tesefahun’s omnipresent, self-effacing servants to allow him this role. She watched him in one of Ato Tesefahun’s huge silvered mirrors while silently he attended her buckles, and silently he combed her hair and braided it—with fair facility—and coiled it around her skull … and silently he kissed the side of her throat before he set the helm over her head.
She might have spoken: she had a thousand things to say. But he didn’t, and so she left her wistfulness silent too. Silent, she thought, but understood.
“I’ll see you for dinner,” he said when the helm was secure, his fingers gentle under her chin, still resting where he’d fastened the strap. He hadn’t lowered the faceplate. She could still see her own eyes in the mirror. Not his; his face was lowered, his gaze turned away. A grayish color dusted his face along the hairline; the desert drying his skin. She made herself a promise to oil it for him when she got back.
“Though all the hells of Song bar the way.” She craned her head to the side; he leaned around the helm to kiss her, wincing as the motion pulled his scar.
She brushed it lightly with her fingertips. This time, he didn’t recoil. “And don’t forget to stretch that while I’m gone.”
“I’ll use Bansh’s liniment on it,” he promised.
Imagining the sting and burn, she said, “Ow.”
* * *
She could not have walked alone through Asitaneh in any other garb, and now Samarkar relished what might be a unique opportunity. Ato Tesefahun had offered her a retinue, bodyguards and a chaperone. Samarkar had turned him down, saying that if the caliph was intrigued by the exotic reality of a woman who wore armor and a wizard’s weeds, she would only reinforce that with a show of independence. “And if he should decide to slay me or take me prisoner in his own house, what exactly could your guards do to prevent it?”
Ato Tesefahun had ducked his chin in agreement. Samarkar knew he was thinking, as did she, of the ranks of kapikulu and more—of the caliph’s personal bodyguard of Dead Men. She was placing herself completely in his power, and the only defense she’d have was her own ability to convince the priest-prince of her authority.
As a sort of apology, Temur’s grandfather had given her a map to memorize.
Now Samarkar walked alone through Asitaneh, head up and striving to remember everything. Once she left the hustling boulevards, the red stone streets were close and winding. Often, Samarkar could reach out and place a hand flat on either wall, and the leaning balconies kissed overhead. Asitaneh was not built on flat land, and more than a few of the streets were constructed as stairs—an architectural tactic familiar enough to her from the rugged terrain of Tsarepheth.
She had left Ato Tesefahun’s house early enough to spend some time exploring the side streets near the palace, lest she need to escape her appointment with the caliph in haste. The maps were good—she didn’t think Ato Tesefahun would tolerate a bad one—but a map was not the same thing as a city, and if Samarkar were to find herself running down alleyways with blind speed, she’d hate to suddenly fall over—or into—sewer repairs in progress.