Ruza ducked into the barracks for a quick glance in his shaving mirror, though he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—have said why. He knew what he looked like. Was he hoping to discover an improvement? The mirror was small, the light dim, and the four square inches of face looked as they had last time he’d checked. He tossed the mirror onto his bunk—apparently with excessive force, because it skidded into the wall and cracked. Perfect.
He did one more thing before heading on to the stable. He hit up the first aid box for a packet of bandages. He hadn’t known a grown man could have hands soft enough to blister and rip after a few hours hauling rope. The alchemist hadn’t complained, though, and he hadn’t quit. That was something, anyway. No reason he should keep getting blood all over the rope.
. . .
Both Eril-Fane and Azareen had remained at the garrison overnight. They would hardly go home at a time like this, with the soldiers all on edge, waiting for something to happen. So far, nothing had. The citadel hadn’t moved, or made any further transformation. They could only guess at what was going on up there.
Azareen slept for a time before dawn, and went to the Temple of Thakra at first light to make hasty ablutions. Returning, she sought out Eril-Fane. He wasn’t in the mess or barracks, the practice yard or the command center. She asked the watch captain, and when she heard where he was, her already ramrod soldier’s spine stiffened. She didn’t say a word, but turned on her boot heel and went straight there, the walk giving her anger and hurt time to fuse into something cold.
“Eril-Fane,” she said, coming into the pavilion.
He was in one of the silk sleighs. He appeared to be studying its workings, and looked up when she spoke. “Azareen,” he returned in a far too measured voice. He had been expecting, and dreading, her arrival. Well, perhaps dread was too strong a word, but he knew full well what she would have to say about this idea.
“Going somewhere?” she asked, icy.
“Of course not. Do you think I wouldn’t tell you?”
“But you’re considering it.”
“I’m considering all options.”
“Well, you can eliminate this one. The advantage is all theirs. We could carry, what, four fighters in that thing, to attack a force of gods and ghosts on their own terrain?”
“I don’t want to attack them, Azareen. I want to talk to them.”
“You think they’ll talk to you?”
She instantly regretted her tone, which conjured the specter of the man who had entered a nursery with a knife. She might as well have called him a murderer and been done with it. “I’m sorry,” she said, closing her eyes. “I didn’t mean—”
“Please don’t ever apologize to me,” he said in barely more than a whisper. Eril-Fane lived under such a burden of guilt that apologies overwhelmed him with shame. The guilt for what he’d done in the citadel was a constant acid burn in his gut. The guilt for what he could not do was different, more stab than burn. Every time he looked at Azareen, he had to face the knowledge that his inability to... get over ...what had been done to him—and what he had done—had robbed her of the life she deserved. To hear the word sorry from her lips...it made him want to die. Everyone else had managed to pick up the tatters and mend them into wearable lives. Why couldn’t he?
Of course, no one else had been the special project of the goddess of despair, but he granted himself no leniency on that account, or any other.
“I was just looking it over,” he told her, climbing out of the craft. “I don’t think I could fly it anyway. But if we don’t hear something today, from Lazlo, or.” He ended the sentence, having no way to finish it. Or who? His daughter? She was dead. Some other child who’d survived his massacre? The acid roiled within him. “We’ll have to consider calling on Soulzeren and asking for her help. We can’t go on without contact. The not knowing will eat us alive.” He sighed and rubbed his jaw. “We have to resolve this, Azareen. How long can they stay at Enet-Sarra?”
That was the place downriver where their people had gone when they fled the city. For years, there’d been talk of building a new city there, and starting again, free of the seraph’s shadow. But you couldn’t just move thousands of people overnight to set up camps in fields, with no services, no sanitation. There would be sickness, unrest. They had to get their people home. They had to make it safe for them.
“Shall I send for her?” asked Azareen, not contrite, but subdued. “Soulzeren.”
“Yes. Please. If she’ll come.” He thought she would. Soulzeren was not the type to shrink from being useful in a time of need. “I’m going to the temple. Do you want to come?”
“I’ve already been,” she told him.
“I’ll see you later, then.” He gave her a tired smile, and turned to walk away, and she wondered, as she watched his back—so broad, so impossibly strong—if he would ever turn back to her, truly turn back to her, and walk toward her again.
Chapter 25
Isagol’s Broken Toy
Azareen fell in love with Eril-Fane when she was thirteen years old.
Her elilith ceremony had been the week before; her tattoos—a circle of apple blossoms—were still tender when the artist, Guldan, came to see how they were healing. It was the first time she was alone with the old woman. During the ceremony, all the women of her family had been gathered around them; now it was just the two of them, and Guldan unsettled her with her piercing appraisal, seeming to examine more than her tattoos.
“Let me see your hands,” she said, and Azareen held them out, unsure. She wasn’t proud of her hands, rough as they were from her work mending nets, and scarred here and there from the slip of a knife. But Guldan ran her fingers over them and nodded with quiet approval. “You’re a strong girl,” she said. “Are you also a brave one?”
The question sent a chill down Azareen’s spine. There were secrets in it; she could feel them. She said she hoped she was, and the old woman gave her the instructions that would change her life.
Azareen didn’t tell her parents; the fewer people who knew, the better. Two nights later, she slipped alone to a quiet channel of the underground Uzumark, spoke a password to a silent boatman, and was ferried to a cavern she had never known existed. It was hidden in the maze of waterways beneath the city, where the roar of rapids disguised the sound of what went on there. Azareen, hearts pounding with foreboding and the thrill of secrecy, came round a corner and beheld a sight she had never witnessed in her life: swordplay.
Weapons were forbidden in the city. But here was the hidden training ground of the Tizerkane, legendary warriors who had been eradicated by the Mesarthim—or almost eradicated. That night, Azareen learned that their arts had been kept alive and passed down through the generations. They weren’t an army, but they were keepers: of skills and history, and of hope, that the city could one day be freed.
Azareen beheld some dozen men and women sparring. She would learn, in time, that there were more, though she wasn’t to know who they were. They were careful never to gather all together. If any were caught, there would always be some left alive to recruit and begin again. It was glorious, what she saw by glavelight: a dance of grace and power, swords flashing—the traditional Tizerkane hreshteks—their clash muted by the river’s roar. She had never known to want this. She’d had no idea it existed. But from the moment she first beheld the gleam and spin of blades, she knew she was meant for this.
She stood watching, mesmerized and a little shy, until someone spotted her and came over. He was the only other youth, a year older than her but already as powerful as a man. He was a blacksmith’s apprentice, and though he wasn’t from her district, Azareen had seen him in the marketplace. You couldn’t help but see him, if he was anywhere nearby. It wasn’t only that he was handsome. That seemed almost incidental. There was a warmth and energy about him, as though he were twice as alive as the next person, a fire burning in him and furnace doors thrown open so you could feel the flames. He radiated an extraordinary vitality. He held his eyes wide and saw everything, really saw, and seemed to love it, all of it, life and the world. Even though it was grim, it was precious, too, and fascinating, and when he looked at you...at least, when he looked at Azareen that night and after, she felt precious and fascinating, too, and more alive than she had been before.
His name was Eril-Fane, and Guldan had chosen her to be his training partner. Azareen would often wonder what the old woman had seen in her to offer her this chance. It made her want to be worthy—of the sacred legacy of the Tizerkane, of being alive, and of him, whom she loved from the moment he grinned at her, handed her a sword, and said, blushing, “I hoped it would be you.”
After that, her days were a fog, and real life was lived at night in a secret cavern with a sword in her hand, blade-dancing with a boy who burned with beautiful fire. A year passed, then two, then three, and he was no longer a boy. His face broadened; his body, too. His blacksmith’s arms grew massive. And always his eyes were open wide, and he loved the world and was fearless, but he blushed when he saw her, and smiled like a boy who would never grow up completely.
On Azareen’s sixteenth birthday, there was a dance in the Fishermen’s Pavilion. It wasn’t for her birthday; that was chance. She didn’t tell Eril-Fane, but he knew and brought a present—a bracelet he’d made himself, of hammered steel with a demonglass sunburst. When he clasped it for her, his fingers lingered on her wrist, and when they danced, his big, sure hands trembled on her waist.
And when the dance was broken up by Skathis arriving on Rasalas to carry off a girl called Mazal, they stood frozen, powerless and furious, and wept.
That night he walked her home by a towpath underground, and they spoke with the fervor of untested warriors of overthrowing the gods. He went down on his knees before her, and, trembling, kissed her hands. She touched his face with unreality and ease: She’d dreamed of this so much that nothing was more natural, but there were details she hadn’t known to imagine: how rough his jaw, how hot his brow, how soft—how soft—his lips. She brushed her fingers over them, dazed, half dreaming, dizzy. Time skipped, and then it wasn’t her fingers but her lips on his lips, all the better to feel their softness, because her fingers were callused but her lips felt everything, and he was everything she wanted to feel.