Sword Catcher (Sword Catcher, #1)

So Chana had succumbed. She’d helped Lin get Mariam into a clean nightgown, and wrapped her hands and forehead in wet cloths to break her fever. Lin had brewed evening primrose into poultices and placed them on Mariam’s chest to reduce inflammation; she’d fashioned tisanes of cinnamon and turmeric to make her cough, of ginseng, lemon, salt water, and honey to open her lungs, and spikenard to soothe her. When—despite the cloths—Mariam’s fever rose, Chana had gone to the physick garden to fetch willowbark to bring it down.

Mariam’s fever had broken after midnight, as fevers often did. The end often came in the late watches of the night, but so did healing: Life and death both struck in the shadowed hours. When Mariam had woken, restless and aching, Lin had decided to read to her from a book of the old tales she’d found on the windowsill. She and Mariam had loved the stories when they were small: tales of Adassa, of her bravery in defeating the Sorcerer-Kings of old, of her cleverness in keeping back a small part of the magic that had been destroyed by the Sundering and holding it for her people. It was because of her that the Ashkar could still work even small magics; without the Goddess, they would be as bereft as others.

“Do you remember when we were children?” Mariam asked. “We both thought we were certain to be the Goddess Returned. We would dress up in blue robes and try to cast spells. I spent several whole afternoons trying to move bits of sticks and paper with my magic.”

That was a long time ago, Lin thought. Not quite her earliest memory. Far, far back she could recall her mother and father; both traders on the Gold Roads, they had smelled of cinnamon and lavender and faraway places. She recalled them swinging her between them while she laughed; recalled her mother cooking, her father holding baby Josit up, his chubby hands reaching for the clouds.

She did not recall learning that they were dead. She knew it must have happened, that someone would have told them. She knew she had cried, because she had understood what was happening, and that Josit had cried because he did not. Bandits had overtaken her parents’ caravan near Jiqal, the desert that was all that remained of what had once been Aram. Their waggon had been seized, their throats slashed, their bodies thrown into the Road to be picked over by vultures. Though surely no one had told her that; still, she had overheard whispers: Such a terrible thing, people said. Such bad luck. And who would take the children?

Children were precious to the Ashkar. They represented the survival of a people who had no homeland, and thus had been in danger of extinction since the Sundering. It was assumed Lin and Josit’s one surviving relative, their maternal grandfather, would take them in. Lin had even heard envious muttering. Mayesh Bensimon, the Counselor to the King. Save the Maharam, he was the most influential man in the Sault. He owned a grand house near the Shulamat. A lucky life they would have with him, surely.

Only he had not wanted them.

She recalled sitting in her bedroom with Josit in her lap, listening to Davit Benezar, the Maharam, arguing with Mayesh in the corridor outside. I cannot do it, Mayesh had said. Despite the words he was saying, the sound of his voice was, briefly, comforting to Lin. She associated it with her parents, with feast nights when the whole family gathered and Mayesh read aloud, as the candles burned, from the Book of Makabi. He would ask Lin questions about Judah Makabi, the wandering of the Ashkar, and the Goddess, and when she got the answers right he would reward her with loukoum, a sweet candy of rosewater and almond.

But: “No, no, no,” he said to Benezar. “My duties will not allow for raising children. I do not have time, nor attention. I must be at the Palace every day, at any hour they call me.”

“Then step down,” snapped the Maharam. “Let someone else counsel the King of Castellane. These children are your blood and flesh.”

But Mayesh had been curt. The children would be better served in the community. Lin would go to the Etse Kebeth, and Josit to the Dāsu Kebeth, the House of Men. Mayesh would look in on them from time to time, as their grandfather. That was the end of it.

Lin still recalled the pain of being separated from Josit. They had pulled him wailing from her arms to take him to the Dāsu Kebeth, and though he was only a street away from her, she felt his absence like a wound. Like the Goddess, she thought, she had been wounded thrice, each name a scar of fire beneath her heart: mother, father, brother.

Chana, who headed the House of Women with her wife, Irit, tried to console Lin and make her comfortable, but Lin’s rage would not allow it. She was like a wild thing, clambering up into trees from which she could not be fetched down, screaming and smashing plates and glasses, tearing her own skin with her nails.

“Make him come,” Lin sobbed, when Chana, at her wit’s end, took her only pair of shoes to stop her running away. But the next day, when Mayesh did come to her in the physick garden, bringing an expensive gold necklace from the Palace as a gift, she only flung it at him and ran back inside the Women’s House.

That night, as Lin lay shaking on her bed, someone came into her room. A small girl with smooth dark braids wound around her head, pale skin, and short, spiky lashes. Lin knew who she was. Mariam Duhary, an orphan refugee from Favár, the capital of Malgasi. Like Lin and several others, she lived here in the House of Women. Unlike Lin, she didn’t seem to mind.

She climbed onto the bed beside Lin and sat quietly while Lin thrashed and hit her pillow and kicked at the walls. Eventually, kicking and thrashing in the face of so much quiet patience became unrewarding. Lin settled into silence, glaring up at Mariam through her tangled hair.

“I know what you’re feeling,” Mariam said. Lin got ready to snap; no one knew what she was feeling, even if they all claimed they did. “My parents are also dead. When Malgasi turned against the Ashkar, they sent the vamberj—the wolf-masked soldiers—to hunt us down. They would call out through the streets: Ettyaszti, moszegyellem nas. Come out, wherever you are. They caught my mother on her way to market. She was hung in the main square of Favár, for the crime of being Ashkar. My father and I fled, or the Malgasi would have killed us, too. We traveled the Gold Roads until he grew too sick. We came here, traveling through the night. My father had said things would be better for us in Castellane. But by the time we arrived in the morning, he was dead in the back of the waggon.” Her voice was matter-of-fact as she recounted these horrors, so much so that Lin fell silent. “Everyone wants to tell you that it isn’t so bad, but it is. You will be so sad that you will feel like you will die. But you won’t die. And with every day that passes, you will get back a little piece of yourself.”

Lin blinked. No one had spoken to her like this since her parents’ death. There was something extraordinary about it.

“Besides,” Mariam added, “you’re lucky.”

Lin sat up, angry, kicking at her covers. “What do you mean, I’m lucky?”