Something stirred sluggishly. Anger. Desperation. A kind of pain I’d never felt because I’d never cared before. Not the way she made me care. “I was fifteen.” I didn’t know how to explain it; not so she could see, could understand, could comprehend. “Fifteen when I met Sula. By then I knew better than to ask. By then I didn’t care. By then there was nothing in me to even wonder who I was.”
“That’s a lie,” she said.
Despair cuts like a blade. “Oh, hoolies … oh, bascha, you just don’t know …” I scraped stiff fingers through my hair. “There’s no way you can know.”
“No,” she agreed.
I stared at her in the moonlight. It hurt to look at her. To think about what she’d said. To wonder if she was right.
“You were wrong to do this,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done it, bascha. You should have left it alone—should have left me alone … don’t you see what you’ve done?”
“No.”
“Before, I knew what I was. I knew what had happened. It didn’t make me happy—who would be happy knowing he was abandoned?—but at least I had an idea. At least there was something to hate. At least I didn’t wonder if it was falsehood or truth.”
“Tiger—”
“You took it away,” I said. “And now there’s nothing at all.”
Del’s face was stricken. She stared at me blindly a moment, then drew in a noisy breath. “Wouldn’t you rather know you weren’t abandoned?”
“Do you mean would I rather know my parents were murdered by borjuni? Or maybe murdered by the Salset, who then took me for a keepsake?”
She flinched. “That’s not what I—”
I turned my back on her again. Stared very hard into darkness, trying to sort things out. She had changed everything. Altered the stakes. I had to regain my footing. Had to find a new way of playing.
My turn to suck a breath. “What do I do now? What do I do, Del? Drive myself sandsick wondering about the truth?”
“No,” she answered harshly. “What kind of life is that?”
I swung around. “Your kind,” I told her. “You punish yourself with your life. Shall I punish myself with mine?”
Del recoiled. Then swallowed visibly. “I only meant to give you a little peace.”
All the anger died out of me. With it went the bitterness, leaving emptiness in its place. “I know,” I said. “I know. And maybe you have, bascha. I just don’t know it yet.”
“Tiger,” she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
The moonlight was on her face. It hurt me to look at her.
“Go to bed,” I said abruptly. “I’ve got to check on the stud.”
The stud was tied all of four paces away. He was fine. He was asleep. He needed nothing from me.
But Del didn’t say a word.
Two
Iskandar was a child’s toy: a pile of unfired clay blocks left too long in the sun and rain. There were no corners left on the buildings, only rounded, slump-shouldered shells being transformed slowly to dust. Into the dirt and clay and piles of shale from which the city had come.
“This is stupid,” I said. “All these people, on the word of an unknown zealot, are leaving behind their homes to come to a ruined city. And for all anyone knows, there isn’t even any water.”
Del shook her head. “There’s water; too much green. And don’t you think the jhihadi will provide if this is where he plans to return?”
Her tone was dry, ironic. A reflection of my own. Del believes in religion more than I do—at least, in the worth of faith—and she had not, up to now, shown any intolerance for the predicted return. If anything, she had admonished me for my cynicism, saying I should respect the beliefs of others even if they didn’t match my own.
But now, faced with Iskandar, Del wasn’t thinking of faith. Nor even of religion. She was thinking of Ajani. She was thinking of killing a man.
And of the oaths to her own gods, far from Iskandar.
“Where’s the border?” I asked. “You know all these things.”
Which she did, better than I. Part of Del’s training on Staal-Ysta was something she called geography, the study of where places were. I knew the South well enough, particularly the Punja, but Del knew all sorts of different places, even those she’d never been to.
“The border?” she echoed.
“Yes. The border. You know: the thing that divides North from South.”
She slanted me a glance that said precisely nothing. Which meant it said a lot. “The border,” she said coolly, “is indiscernible.”