Now, despite the passage of many weeks, Qamar was still unable to decide whether or not he envied that boy. The fact that he was yet alive argued in one direction; the fact that he was planning to go on drinking argued in the other.
Happy. Ayia, of a certainty—happy as a colt in clover.
It was a dim, rickety little tavern he sat in now, a short walk from the palace in Joharra. He wasn’t quite drunk enough. The last weeks had refined his perceptions of how much wine it took to make him forgetful and how much rendered him oblivious. There were stages between tipsy and insensible he had never bothered to catalog before. At the moment, he was at that unfortunate point where nervous caution still existed. It was a somewhat delicate calculation, but the amount of wine left in the jug was sufficient to bring on just enough recklessness so he could accomplish his goal. He had only one, very carefully thought out while he was stone sober. Simple, really. He needed money.
His Shagara relations—by Acuyib the Incomprehensible, how he loathed having to acknowledge them as such, and especially the reason he must acknowledge them—had no money to give him. What they had given was food enough for three days and a horse. This was after they’d drugged him for an unknown number of days, and taken him on a journey to Acuyib didn’t want to know where, and left him with a vicious headache and the food and the horse and instructions to ride south for two days and then east. Or perhaps it had been east for one day and then south. He’d been beyond caring.
He’d ridden sober back into territory controlled by Joharra. That had been his last piece of luck—the right choice of direction, not the sobriety.
Seated in a corner of a tavern in Joharra, Qamar poured a precise amount of wine into his cup and wasted a few moments picking little floating bits of debris from it.
Neither would he stay with the other Shagara in their Cazdeyyan fortress. The studying would be the same, and the bleeding. But his tools would be paper and pen and ink and the strange plants of a realm that had already tried to kill him once with lethal thorns. Besides, being pent up inside stone walls in a land not his own was not the way he wanted to live. Happy? He would go insane.
Not that this wasn’t an intriguing thought, for a little while. Empress Mirzah had been quite, quite mad. When Qamar thought of the afternoons spent with her as she tended her dolls and called him by his great- grandfather’s name, he was both attracted and repulsed by the prospect. To live out his days not understanding or caring; to lose all awareness of reality . . . to be shut up someplace safe and private where he could shock no one . . .
Ayia, he was here, in this filthy little tavern not far from his cousins’ palace, so he had made the choice not to go mad, at any rate. Now that he thought about it, he had made quite a few choices. To stay alive, to leave Cazdeyya, to retain his sanity—although what he planned to do this evening would not be considered entirely sane.
Halfway through the last measure of wine now. He could feel nervousness turning to excitement, and smiled. He was still in an alien land that had first tried to kill him by piercing his body with poisoned thorns and in essence had succeeded in killing him with the truth about what he was. But a transplanted piece of Tza’ab Rih was a few streets away, eminently exploitable. He did not know how to live, let alone thrive, in this country that was full of barbarian people and poisonous plants and all manner of hideous things.
He began to be grateful, grudgingly, that the Shagara had let him go.
Ayia, perhaps Zario’s implication had been correct, and all honor was lost to Qamar. What he was about to do was scarcely praiseworthy. Not that he much cared.
He left a swallow of wine in the cup, not needing it. Rising, he stretched widely, not thinking about the supple play of muscle and how it felt to be young. What he still possessed, he would use. A strong body, a beautiful face, melting dark eyes, and the infallible charm he had inherited from Azzad al-Ma’aliq—who had
The palace guards did not recognize him. He had not expected them to. During his one night and one day back in Joharra, he had neither trimmed his beard nor changed to more conventional clothing. Both would have cost money much better spent in the tavern, achieving this lovely, carefree courage.
They did recognize his topaz ring.
“Sheyqir! Your whole family has been frantic with worry for months!”
“Not so loud!” he begged, laughing, and flicked a casual finger against one of the hazziri dangling from the gates. He didn’t know what this particular one signified, but that he could touch it at all meant the magic recognized him. There were similar protections in every palace he’d ever lived in, things that admitted family and kept doors locked for all others. “I’m a surprise for Queen Rihana’s birthday. A little late, of course, but—what? What is it?” he demanded as the two men exchanged agonized glances.
“The Queen . . . she has joined her beloved husband, may Acuyib gather them both into His Arms.”
Qamar felt his stomach lurch and the wine within it turn sour. Solanna Grijalva had said she’d seen Ra’amon’s death, and it had turned out to be true that he had died. Qamar had heard it in the taverns. But Rihana —“How did this happen? When? How did she die?”
“Earlier in the summer, after word was brought that her noble lord had been slain in a skirmish with the Taqlis—”
“The what?”
“It’s another barbarian country, Sheyqir, somewhere west of Cazdeyya.”
“By Acuyib’s Glory, do these damned nations breed while we’re not looking? And what was Ra’amon doing so far north?” He shook his head. “Ayia, I will learn all of this later.” After tonight, once he could afford it, he’d find a better class of tavern, where men conversed civilly with each other rather than muttering glumly into their wine. He would not be asking any al-Ma’aliq for information. He did not intend to see any of them at all. “I assume the family still lives in the same apartments? Excellent. Thank you. And not a word to anyone! Please?” He gave them a subdued version of the cheery, conspiratorial smile he’d planned, and they nodded and bowed.
Having successfully passed the gates and their protective hazziri, he was assumed by the rest of the guards