Miravia trembled as she brushed fingers over the sopping fabric of Mai's taloos. 'Commander Anji took him, of course. He thought you were dead. Everyone thought you were dead, because you were stabbed and blood was everywhere and you sank into the pool and no one could reach you. Mai, sit down.'
Mai sat, coughing as though there were more water in her lungs, but there wasn't, just a sick weight of dread. She spread a hand over her own belly, where she and Anji had seeded another life, although no one could possibly yet suspect. 'Miravia, how are you come to be so obviously pregnant, when this morning you weren't pregnant at all?'
'Don't touch her!' cried the reeve.
Keshad sat down, so Mai was boxed between him and Miravia. 'Careful, lilu. I have a knife and I'm not afraid to use it.'
'Kesh! Don't you dare!' Miravia took Mai's hand and turned it over, opened her fingers, traced the lines that creased her palms, although in truth her hands were horribly wrinkled as they would be after being immersed in water for a long time. 'Mai. Listen to me. Sheyshi stabbed you. Then the Qin killed her. It seems Sheyshi wasn't stupid at all but only playing a part. She was an agent for Anji's mother all along.'
'Anji's mother! The old bitch! She warned me she wouldn't let me get in the way of her plans for Anji. When he finds out what she did-'
'Mai! Listen! He already knows. It's been seven months — two hundred and fifty-two days-'
'Two hundred and fifty-three,' said Keshad.
'You think it's really Mai, don't you?' demanded Miyara, keeping her distance.
'Of course it's Mai,' said Miravia as she stroked Mai's arm and smiled, her face as bright as the threads whose glow made the pool shimmer both on its visible surface and in its depths. 'She's annoyed with me for getting pregnant by Kesh, because she wanted me to marry Chief Tuvi. No lilu would care about that. Anyway, isn't it obvious? The firelings saved her. They hid her away until they healed her. Just like in the tales.'
She wept tears sweetened by joy, but Mai had heard a different melody in Miyara's voice, and she captured the reeve's gaze until,
at last, Miyara shook her head with a twisted smile.
'I could believe it. I want to believe it. But Mai-'
'Tell me what you fear to tell me,' said Mai. 'I beg you.'
'Think of what Anji will say when he finds out she's alive!' cried Miravia with happy abandon.
Miyara made an awning with a hand over her eyes, thinking. After a while, she looked up. 'Maybe a bowl of rice and a cup of cordial first.'
'No.' She opened her hand, displaying the ring. 'What does this mean?'
The reeve shrugged. 'Your uncle Shai left that as an offering on the altar.'
The Merciful One's touch might untwist the knot in your heart, dizzying you. 'He's alive, then. He survived.'
'He did. But he's gone, Mai. He left the Hundred with that scout, Tohon.'
'Taking Hari's bones back to Kartu Town. Poor Shai. He'll hate it there. And I'll'never see him again.'
'He may have said something about a Kartu Town, but I think he was going on with Tohon, to wherever the Qin live. They were like father and son, if you know what I mean.'
Ah. The words eased the ache a little, knowing that Shai had a hope of being happy. 'And what about my son? Is Atani dead? Did that old bitch have him murdered, too, so the emperor's sister could marry Anji and make a treaty and fine fat children between them?'
'The child was taken away by his father,' said Miyara. 'Everyone knows Commander Anji dotes on the boy. But the rest is as you say, Mistress. His mother took over the running of his household. He married the Sirniakan woman.'
Mai wiped beads of moisture from her face, her heart as cold as her chilled skin and damp hands. Anji had betrayed her.
'There's one thing I need to do first. Miravia, will you help me?'
'Of course.'
'Wouldn't it be wise to ask what it is before you agree to it?' demanded Keshad, but Miravia cast him such a look that Mai would have smiled if she had remembered how.
She rose. 'After that, I beg you, Miyara, please take me to my son. I'll never leave him in the clutches of those women.'
By stages.
First she sent Keshad.out with Miyara to Astafero. Miyara returned with Siras and a brash young reeve named Ildiya so passionately infatuated with Siras that she would do anything he asked. Ildiya flew out with Miravia, while Mai followed with Miyara. Siras hauled the single heavy chest of the few but precious items worth taking away from Merciful Valley.
They flew to Naya Hall, now a training hall for all newly jessed reeves from across the Hundred. After a period of training, these novice reeves were assigned to one of forty-six secondary halls and outposts according to family groupings and flight assignments. It was a new system, devised by Commander Anji.
'Anji is commander of the reeve halls?' Mai demanded. 'How can that be? What happened to Joss?'
So it was with the shattering news that Anji had also killed both Joss and his eagle thundering in her heart that Mai spent a miserable night in Astafero. The house built for her and Anji lay abandoned but for a few desert mice, chirping geckos, and two stout clothes chests shoved forgotten into a back storeroom. At dawn, having sent a message ahead asking Mistresss Behara to meet her, she walked down to Astafero's council square.
Several hundred people had gathered, and they wept, and touched her, and showed her the flower-bedecked altar they'd set up under a roofed shelter at Hasibal's stone.
'Do you want to pray to the Merciful One, Mistress?' Behara asked her. 'Many of us do, remembering the prayers. How can it be you are alive? Everyone said you were murdered by the red hounds out of Sirniaka.'
'Is that what they said?' And yet, how to explain what would only make them distrust her? 'In truth, verea, I was sorely hurt and I suppose it was deemed better to set it about that I was dead than to risk a second attack.'
Ah. Of course. This made perfect sense. Exactly the kind of wise decision Commander Anji would make to confound his enemies. They showed her the sprawling market, the burgeoning fields, the expanding docks, the steady expansion of the irrigation channels being dug mey by mey up into the hills. The garrison fort with its well- behaved soldiers.
No one feared attack from the empire. The commander had taken care of that even if he had had to marry that foreign woman who, it was said, no one ever saw. Those problems with bandits
and renegades in previous years? Neh, not a problem at all any longer, at least not here in Olo'osson. Trade was brisk and profitable. Why, a woman walking alone could carry a precious vessel of water-white all the way from Astafero past Old Fort and to Horn, and not fear she'd be assaulted! The commander had taken care of that.
They prayed the prayers to the Merciful One at the altar of Hasibal every day, they told her, and their prayers had been answered.
They flew north in stages.
The second night they slept over in a village on West Track, a quiet town whose innkeeper welcomed them gravely. He proudly showed them a newly built dormitory set aside for traveling reeves and soldiers. A much smaller chamber was set aside for female reeves, with only two pallets folded up in the bedding cupboard.
He had no idea who Mai was, although he looked twice and then three times'at Miravia and, when Kesh pointedly draped an arm around his wife's shoulders, smiled apologetically as he explained he'd recently been serving numbers of Ri Amarah men hastening to and from Toskala on business for the commander.
'I thought they kept their women- Never mind. My apologies, verea.'
He invited them to dine in the main room of the inn and hurried off to the kitchen. The inn wasn't crowded but the locals were drinking, eyeing them with the satisfaction locals take in seeing outsiders look unsure of themselves. A pair of young men really looked Mai over, and then began arguing in low voices. The innkeeper and his wife brought their party cordial and a big pot of well-spiced barsh to share for their supper.
'How much?' asked Mai, preparing to bargain.
He looked surprised. 'Eh, verea, any reeve or soldier or messenger receives free lodging and food. It's part of the tax, isn't it? The militia tithe.' He grinned. 'However, I'm only obligated to serve you a single cup of cordial. After
