We’re inside the tunnel now, and as darkness descends, I begin counting my heartbeats.
No, not my current heartbeats, the soft, too slow ones, but the ones I remember from before.
Five… six… seven…
Eleven heartbeats until that first turn to the left. Six heartbeats and then a pause for an arrow to swoosh harmlessly through the thick black. Five heartbeats and a right turn. Twelve and the hoofbeats change, no longer muffled by the damp but loud, rattling, cracking like Highwind firework cannons.
We stop and there’s a figure in the dim light, with a hand on my bridle.
I dismount in one quick shivering movement, tearing myself from the horse. I think I should hear the noise of it, like a ripping bandage, but the transition is soundless, if not painless.
The horse’s hide ripples all over, and I put myself out of the reach of its teeth and hooves. I spread myself thin against the warm walls. I could just sink into the porous rock, right here, right now, sink into the bones of the earth and sleep away the heartache and the end of this age and the coming of the new one.
Perhaps I would wake in a land made anew, with angels walking the world.
Mehmet grabs a handful of my cloak, and the choice is no longer easy.
It’s so much easier to let him lead me, and I follow him meekly enough, into the atrium.
It’s a round chamber, rough in shape, with flecks of mineral glistening in the ruddy walls. Light falls from a circular opening at the top, creating a pool of brightness in which green things grow. The sharp scent of herbs stabs me. For a moment the garden of potted plants, Mehmet’s hand on my arm, and the brown and cream robes of novices and full-fledged eilendi are a smear in my vision.
“Take us to the khavan,” Mehmet is saying. He tugs on my arm. I stumble after him, my head down, hair covering my face. My feet remember the step down into the meeting cave, the one that catches most visitors by surprise.
Woven rugs and wooden legs go past. Mehmet puts me against the wall, drops my arm, paces the chamber. His boots are dusty; he waves away the novice with the basin of water, accepts a traditional roll of sweetbread from another. The rest of his men are with their horses, it’s just him and me and…
Footsteps from the far end of the chamber, behind a curtain of beads. A moment later the beads clatter aside, and the khavan sweeps into the room.
My head spins. I want to throw up.
Not her.
First Daral, now her? Taurin, this trial is too hard.
She’s aged, her face more lined and yet softer than I remember. Her shining hair is hidden under a wimple, and she turns mild eyes on Mehmet.
“Welcome to Taurin’s house, my child.” She dips her hand into a small bowl of clean water. Mehmet bends his head, the motion impatient and jerky, but she performs the ritual of blessing with practiced care.
She half-sings, half-chants as she sprinkles water over Mehmet’s dark hair. My lips shape the words along with her. I press them together when I realize what I’m doing.
Mehmet waits for just a fraction of a moment after she’s done, before lifting his head and beginning, “Now, then, khavan…”
Rockhead, I think, indignantly. Must he always rush about so? Doesn’t he hear her prayers for him, her intercession on his behalf? What can man do that Taurin couldn’t match a thousandfold?
This was the way of warriors—always wanting to be doing something themselves, instead of waiting on Taurin.
“A moment, Taurin’s child.” The khavan—Couldn’t it have been someone else on duty today? Someone I didn’t know?—dips her hand in the bowl again and turns to me.
She turns to me.
My first reaction is to mist, to hide. My second is to stay absolutely still. My cloak clenches with my indecision, sigils flaring to brief life.
“A darkchild,” the khavan says.
“Less than that, even,” Mehmet says, offhandedly, as if I were a monkey or a halfwit. “A Highwind demon. A twisted thing with no soul.”
“We cannot know that,” she says, gently. “It is not written in our scrolls, and when matters are outside Taurin’s given revelation, we must tread with much humility and care.” She lifts her hand.
I flinch.
“It may shrivel if you do that, khavan,” Mehmet’s eyes are black with a dark humor.
I want to hit him. He doesn’t know who she is. He doesn’t care. Only horses and swords and campfires matter to men like him.
She ignores him, makes a slow sign in the air. Her blessing to me is different, the one given to a stranger. An ishtaur.
I wish Kato were here, if only to share this lonely place with me.
“Khavan…” Mehmet breaks in, then says, plainly annoyed with the rites of politeness, “…forgive me, I do not know your name.”
I slant a sideways look at her, then watch Mehmet, eager to see his face change.
“I am Jazala,” she answers, serenely.
She changed her name. My wings twitch. She changed her name.
She changed her name to Sorrow.
I stand outside the meeting chamber, doing my best imitation of a wall hanging.
No, this is not my best imitation. I could spread myself in a rectangular shape on the wall, but I think the eilendi would have a collective fit if they saw me.
The elders are inside the meeting chamber, a place dappled with sunshine from air holes in the high ceiling. There’s a polished stone in there that serves as a tabletop, its edges smooth and rounded from centuries of use. Water trickles out a spout in the rock wall, splashes into a small pool, and disappears underground again.
It’s a shocking sound in the desert, that happy tinkling.
It also masks the noises of the meeting, already distorted from reverberating off the walls.
But I’m no longer human, and I hear their conversation, the khavanum and Mehmet’s, threading through my wings and
