There is a progression to all things. Madness, miracles, even dreams broken into their most feverish extremes follow some thread of association. The unexpected, the astonishing, are always the effect of ignorance, no matter how absolute they may seem. In this world, everything has its reasons.
'So,' she said, her tone balanced between many things, hope and sarcasm among them, 'the Great Wizard.'
There was a strangeness to her, something like the stare of children with ill-mannered smiles.
'What are you doing here?' Achamian snapped.
He had sent Tisthanna and the children away and now stood with the woman in the sunlight to the lee of the tower, on the broad white stone the children called the Turtle Shell. For years they had been drawing on it with the tips of burnt sticks: grotesque faces, oddly affecting pictures of trees and animals, and, lately, the letters Achamian had taught them to write. There was an order to the drawings, with the steadier lines of symbol and verisimilitude struck across the pale remnants of fancy, like the record of the soul's long, self-erasing climb.
She had instinctively sought out the highest point-something that inexplicably irritated him. She was short, obviously lithe beneath her leather and woollens. Her face was dark, beautiful, with the colour and contours of an acorn. Save for the green irises and a slight elongation of the jaw, she was exactly as he remembered her…
Except that he had never seen her in his life.
Was she the reason why Esmenet had betrayed him? Was she why his wife-his wife! — had chosen Kellhus over a sorcerer, a broken-hearted fool, all those years ago?
Not because of the child she carried, but because of the child she had lost?
The questions were as inevitable as the pain, the questions that had pursued him beyond civilization's perfumed rim. He could have continued asking them, he could have yielded to madness and made them his life's refrain. Instead he had packed a new life about them, like clay around a wax figurine, then he had burned them out, growing ever more decrepit, ever more old, about their absence-more mould than man. He had lived like some mad trapper, accumulating skins that were furred in ink instead of hair, the lines of his every snare anchored to this silent hollow within him, to these questions he dared not ask.
And now here she stood… Mimara.
The answer?
'I wondered if you would recognize me,' she said. 'I prayed you would, in fact.'
The morning breeze sifted through the dark edges of her hair. After so much time spent in the company of Norsirai women, Achamian found himself struck by memories of his mother and sisters: the warmth of their olive cheeks, the tangle of their luxurious black hair.
He rubbed his eyes, dragged fingers through his unkempt beard. Shaking his head, he said, 'You look like your mother… Very much.'
'So I'm told,' she said coolly.
He held out a hand as though to interrupt her, then lowered it just as quickly, suddenly conscious of its knob-knuckled age. 'But you never answered me. What are you doing here?'
'Searching for you.'
'That much is obvious. The question is why.'
This time the anger shone through, enough to make her blink. Achamian had never stopped expecting the assassins, whether sent by the Consult or the Aspect-Emperor. But even still, the world beyond the horizon's rim had grown less and less substantial over the years. More abstract. Trying to forget, trying not to hear when your deepest ears were continually pricked was almost as difficult as trying to hate away love. At first nothing, not even holding his head and screaming could shut out the murderous bacchanal. But somehow, eventually, the roar had faded into a rumble, and the rumble had trailed into a murmur, and the Three Seas had taken on the character of a father's legendary exploits: near enough to be believed, distant enough to be dismissed.
He had found peace-real peace-waging his strange nocturnal war. Now this woman threatened to overthrow it all.
He fairly shouted when she failed to answer. 'Why?'
She flinched, looked down to the childish scribble at her feet: a gaping mouth scrawled in black across mineral white, with eyes, nose, and ears spaced across its lipless perimeter.
'B-because I wanted…' Something caught her throat. Her eyes shot up, as though requiring an antagonist to remain focused. 'Because I wanted to know if…' Her tongue traced the seam of her lips.
'If you were my father.'
His laughter felt cruel, but if was such, she showed no sign of injury-no outward sign.
'Are you sure?' she asked, blank in voice and expression.
'I met your mother sometime after…'
In a blink Achamian had seen it all, written in a language not so different from the charcoal scrawlings beneath their feet. It was inevitable that Esmenet would do this, that she would use all her power as Empress to recover the child she had forbidden him to mention all those years ago… To find the girl whose name she would never speak.
'You mean after she sold me,' the girl said.
'There was a famine,' he heard himself reply. 'She did what she did to save your life, and forever wrecked herself as a result.'
He knew these were the wrong words before he finished speaking. Her eyes suddenly became old with exhaustion, with the paralysis that comes from hearing the same hollow justifications over and over again.
The fact that she refused to reply to them said it all.
Esmenet had recovered her some time ago-that much was obvious. Her manner and inflection were too studied, too graceful, not to have been honed over years in the court. But it was just as obvious that Esmenet had found her too late. The damaged look. The rim of desperation.
Hope was ever the great foe of slavers. They beat it from your lips, then they pursued it past your skin. Mimara, Achamian knew, had been hunted to the ground-many, many times.
'But why do I remember you?'
'Look-'
'I remember you buying me apples-'
'Child. It wasn't-'
'The street was busy, loud. You were laughing because I kept smelling mine instead of biting. You said that little girls shouldn't eat through their nose, that it wasn't-'
'It wasn't me!' he exclaimed. 'Look. The daughters of whores…'
She flinched once again, like a child startled by a snapping dog. How old would she be? Thirty summers? More? Nonetheless, she looked like the little girl she said she remembered, joking about apples on a crowded street.
'The daughters of whores…' she repeated.
Achamian gazed at her, filled to his fingertips, suffused by an anxious prickle.
'Have no fathers.'
He had tried to say this as gently as he could, but in his ears his voice had grown too harsh with age. The sun limned her in gold, and for a moment she seemed a native of the morning. She lowered her face, studied the lines scraped about them, etched in burnt black. 'You said that I was clever.'
He ran a slow hand across his face, exhaled, suddenly feeling ancient with guilt and frustration. Why must everything be too big to wrestle, too muddy to grasp?
'I feel sorry for you, child-I truly do. I have some notion of what you must have endured…' A deep breath, warm against the bright cool. 'Go home, Mimara. Go back to your mother. We have no connection.'
He turned back toward the tower. The sun instantly warmed his shoulders.
'But we do,' her voice chimed from behind him-so like her mother's that chills skittered across his skin.
He paused, lowered his head to curse his slippered feet. Without turning, he said, 'It's not me you remember. What you believe is your affair.'
'But that's not what I mean.'
Something in her tone, the windy suggestion of a snicker or a laugh, forced him to look back. Now the sun drew a line down her centre, violated only by the creases of her clothing, whose contours smuggled light and dark
