The debate, punctuated by staff-blows to the beast’s flanks, proved short and productive. The camel agreed to bear Amalya as directed and keep its complaints to the traditional spitting and passing of wind.
Eyul took the lead. He had crossed to the Cliffs of Sight before, but that had been ten years ago, and no trail lasts long in the desert. He found his bearings by the stars; in the hot season the Scorpion’s tail pointed the way.
They rode in silence. Eyul liked it quiet, but the wizard took the comfort from desert’s calm. Each mile added to Eyul’s unease until he longed to speak, and he had never been one to make talk for its own sake.
Eyul followed the line of the dunes where he could, but as the night wore thin their course took them from crest to crest, labouring up from the dips with the sand slipping around the camels’ pads, sapping energy.
“Dawn,” Eyul said, the first word to pass between them since their journey started.
The eastern mountains glowed gold and orange: the full heat of day would be upon them soon. Eyul slid from his camel with a groan. Months in the palace had left him soft, and his wound smarted. He watched Amalya climb down and took quiet satisfaction in the stiffness she tried to hide.
“Show me how they cook in the Islands,” he said.
Amalya smiled and turned to unbind the roll of her belongings. Wizard or no, Eyul could see she had a magic to her. Her robes fell against her as she moved, showing her to be long in the leg and generous in hip and breast.
Maybe not such an old man after all. Eyul’s lips twitched at his own foolishness.
Amalya brought out pans, small jars filled with spices, strips of dried meat, a bag of grain, and slices of dried apricots on a string. Eyul placed his own contribution on the sand in front of her: five cakes of camel dung, dried and pressed.
Amalya gathered the dung between two fire-stones and blew on it, softly, as a musician might blow upon a singing stick. Flames licked at the fuel.
She was flame-sworn, Eyul realised, like Govnan the high mage. He had met Govnan once, by chance, in the dark halls beneath the throne room. Govnan had lit a flame in his bare hand and asked to see Eyul’s Knife. Neither had queried the other’s purpose in the secret ways; it hadn’t seemed polite. That same sense of etiquette kept him from asking too many questions of Amalya, but he knew that within them all mages carried an elemental, air, water, earth or fire.
Amalya wrinkled her nose as she brought her pot to sit across the stones. “In the Islands we don’t cook on dung,” she said. A gentle humour softened her words.
Eyul reached for a handful of sand and let it trickle through his fingers. “We could burn the dune instead, if you’ve the magic for it?”
Amalya did not rise to his bait. She poured water from her skin into the pot, careful, spilling none. “I’ll save my magic for the sauce.” She sprinkled cornflour from a small bag. “Some things are best left to simmer.”
Eyul smiled. He yawned and leaned back against his pack. The sky shone with a faint shade of pearl, and as he watched it brighten he wondered who had sent Amalya, and why. Get across the desert first. Then we will see. He closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of her cooking…
He must have drifted off, because he opened his eyes to low sunshine and a bowl of stew. He accepted the dish, and Amalya crouched in the sand to eat her own meal.
“This is very good,” he said, rolling the mint and pepper together on his tongue. He remembered the foods he’d passed up outside the city wall; this tasted better than rose-camel.
“Island cooking,” she said with a smile.
“I should move to the Islands.” He took another bite.
Amalya blew on a small morsel of meat on her spoon. “I couldn’t tell you what it’s like there now.”
He nodded, understanding. “How long have you served?”
“Oh…” She tilted her head, fingers drumming a beat on the wooden bowl. “Fifteen years, just about. They told me I would protect the Boy Emperor. He and I are the same age, you know. I had romantic notions-Not that kind,” she said when Eyul smiled. “But the idea of children ruling and defending the empire-it appealed to me. It made it easier to leave.”
“They took you.”
She nodded. “They came for the tribute-children when I was eleven.”
Eyul scraped the last of the stew from his bowl. He remembered the terror of being taken by the guard, rough hands on his shirt collar, tears on his face. How old had he been? Seven? Eight? “You must have been frightened.”
“Not for long. Govnan saw me-he wasn’t the high mage then; it was before his great journey through the desert, before Kobar chose him as the Second. Govnan pulled me out of the line and claimed me for the Tower.”
“And now you carry the Star of Cerana. You’ve come a long way. To think that Lord High Vizier Tuvaini himself would design a mission for you-”
Amalya put her bowl down in the sand and chuckled. “Nice try, KnifeSworn. But I won’t tell you who gave me the Star, or who didn’t.”
“But you will give me your leftover stew?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Only if you tell me how you became an assassin.”
She meant it as banter, but the words cut, unexpectedly. How many years since he had thought of it? The cold stone floor, the stink of urine, his own voice, pleading… the pain. That broken boy reached out to him through the decades. No. “I… I can’t.”
Amalya handed him her bowl without speaking, no doubt regretting her question.
Eyul took a few bites in the silence and she watched him, kindness in her eyes. It made him uncomfortable. “Why don’t you get some rest?” he asked. “I’ll clean the bowls.”
“All right,” she said. Was that relief in her voice? “I’ll see you at sundown.”
“Sundown,” he agreed.
After she crawled into her tent, Eyul scrubbed the bowls clean with sand. His eyes felt dry and tired; his head ached. The memories were as fresh to him as his ride across these dunes, but the emotion felt ancient, rooted in him. The farther he travelled from the past, the more he lived in it, each day an inexorable step, closing the circle, bringing him back to what he’d left behind.
His work done, Eyul crawled into his tent. He dreamed of blood in a courtyard and a young emperor with dead eyes.
Chapter Five
Sarmin sat and watched the wall, listening for the telltale scrape within it. In the courtyard the Blue Shields made their first round of the evening, and beneath the regular tramp of boots on flagstones, Sarmin could hear the distant cries of moorhens on the river. He stilled his breath and opened himself to all the soft noises of the night: the creak of waggon wheels in the souk, tent poles straining under a sudden breeze, shouts and cries muffled and muted into an unintelligible hubbub. The Sayakarva noises, he named them, because he heard them through the window, where the name Sayakarva was engraved in a tiny, block-like script-the craftsman’s mark, no doubt.
He stared at the alabaster pane: a window that let in light, but no meaning. He had broken that window once and been rewarded with a view of his brothers dead and dying. He let them keep him blind now. He looked away.
Sarmin watched the wall, following the scrollwork, tracing a single line through the complexity. In a strange way the hidden door felt as much a betrayal as an opportunity-a greater betrayal, perhaps, than even his mother’s abandonment. The walls of his room had held him longer than ever she did. For nearly two decades, these four walls had been the certainty in his life-but now? Sarmin wondered where his certainty lay; not in painted stone, nor in those who hid inside it. He traced the line to its end and looked to the next wall. That hook, that flourish-had they been there before? He struggled to see the face that belonged to those brush-strokes.
A scrape, a scratch, and then a grinding of stone on stone. The door opened by feather-widths. Lamplight fingered then flooded through the crack as Tuvaini slipped through into the room.
