Ashra’s jaw worked. Tsering has no wizardly powers, but she had enough common empathy that she could almost taste the vileness spilling across the back of her tongue.
“There’s an Aezin brew,” Ashra said, “a kind of millet beer—you know beer?—that is good against some fevers, though not all. But wound-fever and childbed-fever, these it can cure, if given in a timely manner and in sufficient quantity. Would you agree that the fever of a rot in the lungs is likely to be of a similar origin to wound-fever?”
Tsering saw Hong-la’s head bob before she realized her own chin was nodding as well. Something filled her up—a startled ache inside her ribs, a peculiar lightheadedness as if from hunger. It was long seconds before she realized that what she felt was elation. It was hope, a sensation gone unfamiliar with disuse.
“If given to children, it stains the teeth.” Ashra smiled self-consciously, revealing those odd bands of brown and yellow once again.
“Something like that,” said Hong-la, “it would require a mother, wouldn’t it? A culture from which to brew?”
Ashra reached into the keyhole collar of her tunic and hooked a thong, silk-soft by the way it folded. By contrast, the leather pouch she drew up was stiff and stained, an age-glossy, worn-shiny, unlovely thing. “I carried a mother from my father’s house when I was given in marriage,” she said. “But there was no brewing in the harem, and long before I was stolen from my first husband by Qersnyk tribesmen, it had died. My second husband traded this for me in Song; it can be had in certain markets along the Celadon Highway if you know what you are asking for and how to name it. We will need a brewery, of course—”
“And time,” Tsering-la said, feeling the inevitability of it like a lead blade in her chest.
Ashra’s forced smile flickered into something sadder and more honest. “It will take more than fourteen days.”
* * *
While Hong-la went to speak to Yongten-la about requisitioning a brewery and making arrangements with the palace for the refugees to stay, Tsering took Ashra to seek housing and a meal. They both ignored the reality that soon—too soon—she would be joining the patients in the vast tent wards sprawling below the Citadel.
For now, Tsering brought her to the temporary kitchens servicing the makeshift hospital, where volunteers greasy with exhaustion set bowls of soup and tea before them. The broth was thin, the noodles more salty than flavorful, but at the long tables and on the benches all around, heads were bowed over bowls. Wizards, novices, and volunteers ate not with the reverential contemplation tradition demanded, but with the determination of men stoking coal furnaces on a brutal winter night.
After a few sips of her soup, Ashra turned, pushed her cloud of hair behind her shoulder, and said, “I am looking for my son, who may have come this way.”
Tsering’s hands stilled on her tea bowl as she thought of the brown skin and broad features of the Qersnyk man she and Samarkar-la had rescued from the road near Qeshqer.
“He fought in the battle of Qarash, and so I had feared him dead. We rode out through the battlefield when we fled the city—” Ashra covered her eyes with her hand, as she had not when contemplating her own mutilation and death. “There were so many dead. The refugees of the city—the train wound past the horizon in both directions. Everyone fled, though I have heard that some are returning, that Qori … that the new Khan will rebuild, and reopen trade.”
“We miss the trade,” Tsering admitted. “But then, it seems likely that the lack of caravans is at least slowing the spread of plague.”
Ashra snorted. “‘Even a hard frost helps the hunter.’ As we traveled, in any case, I heard through the gossip of the refugee train that a Qersnyk warrior of Aezin descent had been seen with the Tsareg. I rode up the train to investigate and learned it was true, and that the warrior was my son Temur. And that he had gone on ahead to seek his woman, who had been stolen from him by the blood ghosts.”
Certain now, Tsering said, “He seeks her still.”
“He was here!”
“Here and left. In the company of one of our own, the Wizard Samarkar. And a Cho-tse warrior, and the breeding wife of the emperor’s brother who had been condemned for treason. Which was the reason they fled in such a hurry … that, and Temur believed he had discovered a hint on where to find or perhaps avenge his woman. Edene, he called her.”
“She is Tsareg Altantsetseg’s descendant.” Now Ashra drank her soup with better appetite, her eyes on Tsering’s face. “The Tsareg clan have not held a Khanate in generations, but they have given wives to nearly all of them. There would be rewards, if Edene lives.”