He laid the saddle blanket on the ground. His legs would hang off its edge, but it served to keep his back and flanks dry while he slept. He stepped aside to let Siora spread the blankets Halani had given them onto the saddle blanket. She smoothed the wrinkles with small hands and brushed her palms together, satisfied with her efforts. Her mouth turned down in a small frown. “Are you willing to share? It’s wide enough for both of us.” Her question carried a hint of challenge as if she waited for him to say no, in which case she’d most likely tell him he was more than welcome to enjoy his bed of grass then.
Gharek chuffed and allowed a smile to curve his mouth. “I don’t know why you bothered asking. It isn’t as if we haven’t done this before.”
He looked forward to it. Her presence was greater than her physical size and offered a comfort he hadn’t known before. When they’d shared the bed in the brothel, he’d wakened to her pressed to his back, her arm draped over his torso so that her hand dangled just below his chest. Gharek had lain still for longer than he should have, savoring the press of her body against his, watching that delicate hand, browned by the sun and marred with scrapesand scratches. Two of her nails were broken, one nearly to the quick, and he’d struggled against the temptation to lift that hand and bring her injured finger to his lips.
She hadn’t wakened when he eased out of the bed and quietly dressed. Nor had he commented on their closeness as they’d slept. He’d told her nothing then and said nothing now of those oddly sweet moments or his hope that he might experience them again in the brief hours they waited out the night under the willow tree.
They sat together on the blanket and shared a few of the foodstuffs Halani had packed in the satchel she’d given to Siora. Gharek had no doubt she would disapprove of Siora sharing with him, but he was grateful for the food.
He peeled an orange, handing half to Siora. “Still no visit from your father?”
Her eyes glossed with tears for a moment before she blinked them away. “No, though I truly believe I’d know or sense if he were in jeopardy. Whatever those creatures were roaming the Maesor, they aren’t a danger to ghosts even if they serve a more dangerous master’s will. The living though...” She shuddered.
Gharek understood the fear too well. His mind went back several times to the creature stalking the now empty Maesor, the weirdly extended limbs and featureless face except for the crimson stain of a mouth with its eel teeth. Worst of all was the sound it made; a whispering, chittering noise hovering just above a background gurgle, as if rats had chewed their way out of a bubbling fountain of blood. The sound was the fuel of any nightmare and sure to haunt his worst ones for many nights to come.
The last tendrils of silvery light that turned the nearby stream into a metal ribbon disappeared behind a swath of clouds. Thenight turned black enough to cut with a knife, and he no longer saw Siora beside him. The gelding snuffled nearby as it leisurely grazed on the lush grass growing around them. The willow sighed a lullaby. It was another world compared to the seething tension of a crowded Domora as it waited for an inevitable siege or the silent horror of the Maesor with its otherworldly wolves and only the memory of those who once traded there. For a moment, Gharek wished he might never leave the tree’s shelter but stay enrobed in its green peacefulness with the stream’s laughter to serenade him and a small woman of unshakable fortitude and steadfast honor to keep him company. There were nightmares like Midrigar but dreams like this as well.
He lay on his back and stretched out his legs, lacing his fingers behind his head, and stared into the tree’s shifting shadows above him. The rustle and twitch of blankets next to him told him Siora was settling down as well. He couldn’t see her, but even if she’d made no noise, he’d have known she was there. Her presence tickled the edges of his spirit as much as it thrummed along his skin.
Her voice was soft, close. “Why did you ask me if I had children?”
The question puzzled him until he recalled their previous conversation when she wondered why he’d go to such lengths to change Estred instead of accepting her as she was. It might have been no more than curiosity on her part, but a part of him had sniffed out its underlying criticism, its judgment. He’d bristled instantly and lashed out at her.
Hers was a hard question to answer because it forced him to reveal a part of his history, what he viewed as his failure as a husband and a father. He was a private man by nature, happier to cutout his own heart, or at least the heart of the nosy person who dared intrude on that privacy, before offering a sliver of information. Shame and the loss of hope burdened him, along with an icy rage that hollowed him out year by year, hour by hour. If not for Estred, he’d be more dead than the ghosts Siora spoke to and saw.Tell her, a small voice coaxed in his mind.Tell someone.
He blessed the obscuring darkness, afraid of what he might see once he told her what she wanted to know.
“If servant gossip didn’t already inform you, Estred’s mother left Estred in her sister’s care, walked out of the house, and never returned. I was a soldier in the Kraelian army at the time, serving in General Ceder’s battalions. We saw many battles in the Huzuran Archipelago. My wife, Tanarima, was pregnant when the general marched and then sailed us to conquer the islands. I didn’t return home until a few years later, when Estred was three. I found our hovel occupied by someone else and no idea where my wife and daughter had gone or if they were even alive.”
“The servants only spoke to me when necessary. How did you find Estred?” Her voice was a caress as seductive as her touch.
History was a merciless taskmaster, its memories more brutal than any Maesor wolf. “I found Tanarima’s sister, Odigan, first. As poor as we were, she was in worse straits. She had six children of her own and had been made a widow shortly after Tanarima left Estred with her.”
A soft gasp and then, “That’s a huge burden placed on anyone’s shoulders. Poor woman. Was Estred cared for?”
He smiled in the dark, even as recollections best left buried hammered into him. She offered sympathy to his wife’s sister. It had taken years for his own hatred for both women to chill toindifference. “Estred wasn’t there. I think Odigan almost followed her unfortunate husband into the deathlands from fright when she found me standing on her doorstep wanting answers as well as my daughter. I was a different man then. Were I then what I am now, I would have snapped her neck once I learned what she’d done.”
“What did she do?”
The dark revealed a great deal in a voice, and he didn’t mistake the underlying dread weaving through Siora’s now. Old fury he thought snuffed out after so much time threatened to reignite within him. “She sold Estred to a grind show for a nice sum. It seems my daughter’s lack of arms made her into what’s known as an animal-girl. Exotic, not quite human. I don’t think I slept more than an hour a night for six months as I searched the Empire for that show. I finally found it. They kept Estred in a cage. Either she learned on her own or someone had taught her to eat with her feet and play a few notes on a whistle with her toes.”
“Oh, Estred.” Siora’s voice had thickened with tears. “I am so sorry.” Neither of them said anything, and while Gharek didn’t remember what it was like to shed tears, he listened to Siora’s sniffles and sorrowed inside. “I’ve heard her,” she finally said on a warble. “She played for me a time or two. I thought you taught her that skill.”
“No. I only encouraged it. Something bright should come from such darkness.” And the darkness nearly drowned him then. “The show master made up some crazed story of how Estred was the whelp of a sailor and a snake woman. They’d painted scales on her skin and taught her to wriggle on her belly like a serpent. The crowds loved her. I tried to buy her from the show master buthe refused to sell her. I then offered myself in exchange. He used me for a night, then threw me out of the encampment without Estred.” Her hand on his arm offered comfort, but he jerked away from her touch, horrified at the idea she might find him pathetic. “Save your pity,” he snapped. “I’d fuck every Kraelian soldier from the piss bucket boys to the generals themselves if it meant keeping Estred safe. I think that might be why Herself never showed interest, though she sometimes complimented me. For her, sex was power and power was subjugation. As her cat’s-paw, I was already subjugated to her.”
“What challenge is there in a willing victim?” The revulsion in her words wasn’t for him but for the empress and echoed his own at the idea of sharing a bed with the Spider of Empire. Her favorites hadn’t been so lucky.
“Just so,” he said.
“How did you manage to save Estred?”
“I slunk away, pretended I was defeated, and waited three days until the show master felt assured I was gone and no longer a nuisance. I returned in the middle of the night and cut his throat while he slept in his bed. I then strangled Estred’s caretaker or guard, whatever you want to call him, and took the cage keys. After being treated like an animal, my daughter was almost feral. I lured her out of her cage with sweets, then bound and gagged her before wrapping her in a blanket. I then unlocked every other cage there and set the supply wagons on fire before I fled with Estred on one of their horses.”
His heartbeat now mimicked its gallop of so long ago when he held a sobbing, squirming Estred in his arms and raced across awheat field toward a waiting horse and cart, leaving behind him a conflagration of tents and wagons, panicked animals and shouting people. And a show master choked to death on his own blood.
“I won’t tell you all the details of what it took for Estred to become the child you know her to be, but I will tell you this. I—more than you, more than anyone—know how clever she is, how beautiful she is, what strength she has. But that isn’t what people see when they look at her. We live in a world where crowds feel justified in trying to stone her to death for the sin of being born different. And one day, when I die, she will be friendless and left to fend for herself. Our society will never accept her. That is why I abducted Asil and extorted the draga, why I sought to physically change Estred, and why I will always look for some magic or chance that might give her the blessing of arms. Not because she’s lacking or because she failed me, but because this shit pit of a world has failed her, me most of all.”
The catharsis of revealing to another that grim time in his and Estred’s life was like lancing an infected wound, draining away a bucket full of pus from his spirit. He’d forever be tainted by his erstwhile profession, and the role of cat’s-paw had made him hated by many, turning him into a target for vengeance. In his opinion, he’d still failed Estred in his misguided efforts to provide her with a better, sheltered life, and now she paid the price for his role as the empress’s murderous henchman. He almost gasped for breath under the weight of guilt.