There was no chance the murderous brown eyes could stare him down-not this time. She felt too much like her mother pressed in the brace of his arm, too much like Esmenet. The Captain glanced to the ground for a meditative moment, seemed to nod, though it could have been a trick of the breeze through his squared beard. After a hooded glance, he turned to make his way back to the head of the trail.
'Either she carries her weight like a man,' he shouted as he walked away. 'Or she carries our weight like a woman!'
Catcalls and whistles from the Skin Eaters. Each of them, it seemed, glanced at Achamian and Mimara as they drifted back to resume the march. Their expressions ran the gamut from accusation to jeering lechery. But it was the blank faces that troubled Achamian the most, the eyes that seemed to commit Mimara's torn leggings to memory.
No one bothered with Moraubon's body, which continued to drain against a backdrop of booming water and towering debris. A white corpse on a red-painted stone.
'Who is he?' Mimara whispered. While Achamian had eyed the others, she had continued gazing at the Captain's receding back.
'A Veteran,' he murmured. 'The same as me.'
They lagged behind the others, passing from broken sunlight to green shadow, arguing over the rush and hiss of the river.
'You cannot stay! This is impossible!'
'Where would you have me go?'
'Go? Go? Where do you think? Back to your mother! Back to the Andiamine Heights where you belong!'
'Never.'
'I know your mother. I know she loves you!'
'Not so much as she hates what she did to me.'
'To save your life!'
'Life… Is that what you call it? Should I tell you the story of my life?'
'No.'
'All these men. Trust me, I've borne them before. I can bear them again.'
'Not these men.'
'Then I suppose I'm lucky to have you.'
She was nothing like Esmenet, he had come to realize. She tilted her head the same way, as though literally trying to look around your nonsense, and her voice stiffened into the same reedy bundle of disgust, but aside from these echoes…
'Look. You simply cannot stay. This is a journey…' He paused, his breath yanked short by the sheer factuality of what he was about to say. 'This is a journey without any return.'
She sneered and laughed. 'So is every life.'
There was something snide and infuriating about her, he decided, something that begged to be struck-or dared… He could not tell which.
No. She was nothing like Esmenet. Even the vicious dismissiveness of her snorts-all her own.
'Is that what you've told these scalpers?'
'What do you mean, 'told'?'
'That this journey will see them all killed.'
'No.'
'What did you tell them?'
'That I can show them the Coffers.'
'The Coffers?'
'The legendary treasury of the School of Sohonc, lost when the Library of Sauglish was destroyed in the First Apocalypse.'
'So they know nothing of Ishuдl? They have no idea that you hunt the origins of their Holy Aspect-Emperor? The man who pays the bounty on their scalps!'
'No.'
'Murderer. That makes you a murderer.'
'Yes.'
'Teach me, then… Teach me, or I'll tell them everything!'
'Extortion, is it?'
'Murder is more wicked by far.'
'What makes you certain I wouldn't kill you, if I'm a murderer as you say?'
'Because I look too much like my mother.'
'There's a thought. Maybe I should just tell the Captain who you are. A Princess-Imperial. Think of the ransom you would fetch!'
'Yes… But then why bleed all the way to Sauglish looking for the Coffers?'
Impudent. An almost lunatic selfishness! Was she born this way? No. She wore her scars the way hermits wore their stench: as a mark of all the innumerable sins she had overcome.
'This is not a contest you can win, Wizard.'
'How so?'
'I'm no fool. I know you've sworn by whatever it is you hold sacred to never teach anoth-'
'I am cursed! Disaster follows my teaching. Death and betra-'
'But you're mistaken to think that you can use threats or pleas or even reason with me. This Gift I have, this ability to see the world the way you see it, it's the only Gift I have ever received, the only hope I have ever known. I will be a witch, or I will be dead.'
'Didn't you hear me? My teaching is cursed!'
'We're a fine match then.'
Impudent! Impudent! Was there ever such a despicable slit?
That night they cast their camp a short distance from the cluster of others. Neither of them spoke a word. In fact, a quiet had fallen across all the Skin Eaters, enough to make the crackle of their fires the dominant discourse. Only Sarl's hashed voice continued to saw on as before.
'Kiampas! Kiampas! That was no pretty night, I tell you!'
Achamian need only look up to see several orange faces lifted in their direction-even among the Bitten. Never in his life, it seemed, had he felt so absurdly conspicuous. He heard nothing, but he listened to them mutter about her all the same: assessing her breasts and thighs, spinning expressions of longing into violent boasts, catalogues of what they would do, the vigour of their penetrations, and how she would scream and whimper; speculating on the whys and wherefores of her presence, how she had to be a whore to dare the likes of them, or how she soon would be…
He need only glance at Mimara to know that she listened too. Another woman, a free-wife, or a Princess- Imperial raised in cozened isolation, might be oblivious, simply assume that the white-water souls of men sluiced through the same innocent tributaries as their own, that they shared a common turbulence. But not Mimara. Her ears were pricked-Achamian could tell. But where he felt apprehension, the shrill possessiveness of an overmatched father, she seemed entirely at her ease.
She had been raised in the covetous gaze of men, and though she had suffered beneath brutal hands, she had grown strong. She carried herself, Achamian realized, with a kind of coy arrogance, as though she were the sole human in the presence of resentful apes. Let them grunt. Let them abuse themselves. She cared nothing for all the versions of her that danced or moaned or choked behind their primitive eyes-save that they made her, and all the possibilities that her breath and body offered, invaluable.
She was the thing wanted. So be it. She would find ways to make them pay.
