to aggravate him.
And he surely deserved it, Tazi thought, but he'll make me pay for it. He always did.
Aloud, she shouted, 'Run!' to her six-year-old version.
As though the girl-child could hear her, she tore down the hallway. The older Tazi found her heart pounding and a wicked grin spreading across her face.
'That's not right, Thazienne,' Cale chided her.
Tazi turned to see herself when she was thirteen or fourteen. Teenage Thazienne was bent over a chest with a finer set of lockpicks in her delicate hand than the set she had first owned. Cale was standing beside her in his pantry, scrutinizing her actions carefully.
The older Tazi watched in fascination as Cale reached over and covered her young hand with his long fingers. Tazi could feel her heart skip a beat as though he was touching her hand now.
'There is a certain finesse to what you are doing,' he told her in his deep voice. 'You must trust your feelings.'
Tazi watched as the teenager gazed up at Cale with admiration and the beginnings of something more. Tazi swallowed hard at the scene that was played out in front of her.
'I'll show her,' Tazi heard herself say.
She turned and found herself in her bedroom in Stormweather Towers. The version in front of her now was from only a few years back. She watched as the young woman stomped around before sitting in front of her dressing table. Tazi pursed her lips together angrily and knew what her other self was about to do.
'You show her,' she egged the younger Tazi on.
The young woman grabbed a pair of shears from her collection of bottles and sundries on the dressing table and stared at herself in the mirror.
'Try to explain your daughter's latest shenanigans to that circle of hens you call 'friends,' Mother,' she spat.
She gathered up a handful of her waist-length hair in one hand and held the shears in the other. In one snip, the tresses fell to the floor. After only a few moments of hacking, the young Thazienne sported the hairstyle Tazi wore ever since, highly unfashionable in the ever fashion-conscious Selgaunt.
'Good work,' she complimented the young Thazienne, and the two women wore the same expression in the mirror.
When Tazi turned away from herself and the dressing table, she watched as a still older version was by the window, dressed entirely in black leathers. Tazi could see down through the window a younger Steorf anxiously waiting for Tazi to join him. He was also suitably dressed for a late night wilding, and Tazi could feel her heartbeat quicken in anticipation of the night's events. She could see that her younger self felt the same way.
A scream tore through the room. When Tazi turned again, she found herself in the cellar of Ciredor's tallhouse. Her blood turned to ice. She saw her other self hammered to her knees by Ciredor's magic. As she watched herself struggle with Ciredor, Tazi ran her hands through her hair, momentarily surprised that it wasn't waist-length again. When she fought Ciredor then, he had toyed mercilessly with her. One of the things he had done was to restore her hair to its former length. The process had been excruciatingly painful, as Ciredor had meant it to be, and Tazi rubbed her scalp as she watched those horrible moments from two years in the past once again unfold.
Her past self gazed from the view of the young boy Ciredor had disemboweled to feed his dark magic to Steorf manacled to the cellar wall. Tazi's heart was pounding, and her mouth was devoid of moisture as her other self whispered the word inscribed on the emerald ring that Durlan had given her.
She gasped as Ciredor's bolt was deflected by the gray shield that had formed around her other self. Tazi, near to tears observing the old battle, realized that she didn't feel the resolve that she had felt in that moment. As she watched herself pull a small dagger hidden in her boot and expertly strike Ciredor just below his heart with it, she was not able to remember what her other self so obviously possessed: courage.
'No!' Tazi yelled, absolutely terrified.
She hoisted herself out of the sacred pool and stood shivering at its edge. Someone placed a calming hand on her shoulder, and Tazi wheeled around, breathing hard.
Not knowing what to expect, Tazi had to calm her beating heart. It was only Fannah who stood behind her, holding out a large, white towel. Tazi accepted it and wrapped the towel around herself with shaking fingers. Fannah motioned for her to sit on one of the benches and joined her there.
Tazi blotted at her face and tried to control the wild beating of her heart, not saying a word.
Fannah smiled at her and said, 'It is always shocking to truly see yourself.'
She patted Tazi's hand.
'As long as you encountered these ghosts of yourself bravely,' she continued, 'then you will be ready for what lies ahead. Just as a desert is not comprised of only a single grain of sand, you are not merely one facet, but thousands.'
The steam had almost evaporated, and Tazi thought carefully before she answered, 'I believe you're right, Fannah.'
'Rest for a few minutes,' she told Tazi, 'and we will go up to Steorf and see what he has uncovered.'
Tazi leaned her head back against the cool tiles and closed her eyes.
I didn't remember what it was like to know I possessed the ability to defeat Ciredor, she thought to herself. If I can't remember what it was like, how can I possibly beat him now?
She absently rubbed her bare finger. I'm not the woman I was, she thought. There was no one in the room who could argue otherwise.
CHAPTER 12
'I think I've got a little more figured out,' Steorf informed Tazi and Fannah.
Tazi nudged her mount with her knees and moved closer to Steorf's horse.
'Is that why you've been so silent these last few hours?' she asked.
'I've been trying to conserve energy,' he told her. 'And, yes, I've been mulling over those writings. I wish we'd had a little more time to go over them in Calimport. It was more conducive to study, and it was more comfortable there.'
He shifted in his saddle, and Tazi smiled at his last remark. The three of them had been in the desert for two days, and comfort was no longer an option. When they had left Malikhan Gate in the Trade Ward and first glimpsed the massive expanse of the Calim desert, Tazi had been dumbstruck. Calimport had been fantastical enough for her, but in the end, it was still a city.
In the few days she spent there, Tazi began to catch the rhythm of the wards. Commerce was as much a part of life in Calimport as it was in Selgaunt.
The city was easy enough to understand, but she had no words to describe the barren wasteland that stretched before her eyes as she and her friends left the city behind. The Calim desert extended nearly two hundred miles to the north, east, and west of the city.
'How can this desert even exist?' she asked Fannah. 'It's surrounded by the ocean.'
'Many millennia ago, two powerful djinn, Calim and Memnon, battled for control of this area,' Fannah replied. 'They were finally bound by elven spells, and their captors felt the damage they did to their personal battleground was nothing compared to what they could have done if left free.'
Fannah spread her arm to point at the desert.
'This,' she told Tazi, 'is the price of their confinement.'
Tazi stared at the lifeless dunes of sand and the miles of salt flats. The golden-white vastness was something she had never seen. Her youth had consisted of towers and streets packed with nobles and the grimiest of urchins. Parks and forests, all things green and lush, were as much of nature as Tazi had ever seen until then, until she was faced with a sea of white. It was almost incomprehensible.
