“I promise you that, Tecuhtli Citlali,” Niente told him. His hand had loosened from his staff, and he let his head droop and his spine sag.
“You need to speak with your son, Nahual,” Citlali said. “A son should believe his Taat, and a nahualli should believe his Nahual.”
“I will do that, Tecuhtli.” I will, because this was far too dangerous a moment… Niente bowed to the Tecuhtli and the High Warriors. “I will indeed.”
When he returned to his own tent, Niente pulled the scrying bowl from his pack. He filled it with fresh water, took the scrying powders from the pouch at his belt and sprinkled them over the surface once it had stilled. He chanted over the bowl, the ancient words of the X’in Ka coming unbidden as he called upon Axat, praying to Her to show him again the paths that might be. The water hissed, and the emerald light burst from somewhere in the depths, the mist rising above the water. He leaned over the bowl, opening his eyes…
There was the great city, with its odd spires and domes, and there was the fire of spells and black sand trailing smoke in a grim sky. He was outside the walls with the rest of the nahualli, and like the rest of them, he was exhausted. They couldn’t hold back the assault. A fireball screamed down from above them, and though Niente raised his spell-staff to block it, there was nothing there. The fire descended like a shrieking carrion bird, and it slammed into him, and in that future, even with the Tehuantin razing Nessantico to the ground, in the mists beyond that time he also saw the pyramids of Tlaxcala tumbled in smoke and ruin and the eagle banners cast down, with Easterners walking amidst the rubble…
… In the mists, he sought the path that he’d seen before, but the landscape had changed and the futures were all tangled and snarled, the mists rising high in all but that first, terrible vision. He could still see it, vaguely: the two armies clashing in fire and blood, the battle turning suddenly and unexpectedly as Niente-was it him? The mist made it difficult to see-raised his spell-staff a last time… And beyond, in the the future of that path, a city rising higher than before in the east, and the pyramids of Tlaxi strong against the backdrop of the smoking mountain…
… but there was a figure standing before that path, barring it, and Niente tried to pierce the mist around the man. It was his own face gazing back at him… No, it was a younger version of himself, the features shifting… Atl! It was Atl, his spell-staff raised in defiance, and lightnings crackled around him, licking hot and fierce toward Niente…
Niente lifted his head from the bowl with a gasp. The green mist was swept away, vanishing in the sun and leaving Niente staggering in the midst of a reality that seemed thin and unreal. He shook his head to clear it, allowing himself to come back from the vision. His legs threatened to stop supporting him, and he sank onto the ground, the rickety table that held the scrying bowl falling over. The water spilled from the bowl, the brass bowl rang as it hit the stony ground, and one of the nahualli stuck his head through the tent flaps. “Nahual?”
Niente waved him away. “I’m fine,” he said. “Go away.” The nahualli stared for a moment, then withdrew.
Niente sat there, hugging his knees to himself. Atl… It was Atl who now made the path he’d glimpsed difficult to find. It was Atl who blocked the way.
Atl. “You can’t give me this burden,” he said. He was weeping-from the exhaustion, from the fear, from his love for his son. “You can’t expect me to pay this price.”
Axat, if She listened, remained silent. Niente stared at the bowl, upturned in the grass, and he shuddered.
Rochelle Botelli
Before she’d left the encampment, she’d gone back to her own tent, taking the coins she’d hidden there-the money she’d received for killing Rance and the others she’d slain in her short career. She’d bound the coins under her clothing so that they made no noise; Jan’s dagger was sheathed just above her boots under her tashta.
She watched the encampment for a few days from a clump of trees near the royal tents, twice having to evade searchers beating the brush for her. She saw Hirzgin Brie, saw that fool Paulus, saw the Starkkapitan. She saw the Archigos and Sergei arrive. And finally, she saw her vatarh. She stared at him until his figure wavered in the tears forming in her eyes.
Then, finally, she slipped away.
It had been easy enough to evade the patrols looking for her-they were noisy and large, giving her ample time to conceal herself. She was good at that, at blending in. She found a bitter-eye tree and stripped long peels of the bark from it, boiling them in a small pot she stole from a farmhouse she passed, and washing her hair with the pale, caustic extract until her black hair became a paler nut-brown. The bitter-eye extract made her hair brittle, coarse, and untamable, her natural curls gone, but that only enhanced the effect. She looked like some ragged, unranked young woman, a farmer’s daughter. She took on the accent of the region; she stole a chicken and basket from another farm, and walked the road with that as if she were on her way home or to a market. Once, as a test, she even stayed on the road when a quartet of chevarittai in Firenzcian livery came by on their warhorses, greeting them as if she had no idea they were searching for her. They looked at her, talked among themselves for a moment, then asked her if she’d seen a dark-haired woman about the same age. Rochelle shook her properly-downcast head shyly, and after a moment, they cantered on.
She held back the angry laugh until they’d gone.
She moved south and west, crossing the border into Nessantico at Ville Colhelm. There she took a room at one of the inns, calling herself “Remy.” She remained there, restless but not yet certain what she must do.
The nights were the worst. She could hear the revelry in the tavern downstairs, and yet it repulsed her. People should not be happy here, not when her own mind was in such turmoil. Her dreams were haunted by memories of that final confrontation with her vatarh. Sometimes Matarh was there with her. “I told you,” she said, her face touched with sadness as she looked from Jan to Rochelle. “I told you not to go there…”
“But he’s my vatarh, and I knew you loved him,” she answered, and they were no longer in the tent-palais, but in the home she remembered best, the cottage in the uplands sheep country of Il Trebbio. “You should have known that I’d be drawn to him.”
“I know, and they know,” she answered. She touched the stone she kept around her neck, the pale stone that held all the voices that haunted her, that drove her mad, and Rochelle pressed a hand to her own neck to where the same stone hung, its presence reassuring. “They told me that you would be the one to finally pay for my sins, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for that.” She was sobbing, and her tears dissolved the daub-and-wattle side of the cottage. The smell of burning peat was heavy in her nostrils, but the scene had shifted again, and she and her matarh were standing in a meadow under a starlit, moonless sky, with silvered clouds hurrying along the horizon as lightning licked at the distant hills with white snake tongues. Thunder growled imprecations and curses around them.
“But you’ve not done what I’ve asked,” Matarh said, and she was no longer weeping. The fury of madness was on her face now, and her fingers gripped hard at Rochelle’s shoulders. She was thirteen again, still a few fingers shorter than her matarh but more muscular, her first few kills already behind her. Her matarh lay back on the bed, and they were no longer on the hilltop but in that last home they shared, in Jablunkov, Sesemora. The painted, great oaken timbers loomed over them. Matarh was gasping for air, on her deathbed. She’d picked up the red lung disease and begun coughing up blood a week before. The healers had all shaken their collective heads at the symptoms and told Rochelle to prepare for the worst. “Listen to me now,” her matarh said, still grasping Rochelle’s shoulders as she leaned over the soiled rag she’d held over her mouth and nose.
“Listen to me, Rochelle. There is one responsibility that I place on you, something that-no, just shut up! You can’t stop me from telling her…” That last was to the voices in her head. Matarh shook her head as if trying to dislodge a persistent fly. She turned her head to cough, loosing a spray of red flecks that coated the pillow. “… something I intended to do myself, but now… No, I will not be with you, you bastards. I killed you all, and I’m going to where your voices will be silent forever. Do you hear me?”
Then Matarh’s eyes cleared again and her fingers tightened on the cloth at Rochelle’s shoulders. “I wanted to kill her for what she did to me,” she husked. “If it weren’t for her, I could have been happy, could have stayed with your vatarh. I wanted to hear her scream in torment in my head as she realized what I’d done-not because someone paid me to do it, no, but because I wanted it. I could have been happy with him, Rochelle. Your vatarh…
