It was idiocy, obviously.
Ananshael’s faithful are trained to practice a ministry of silence and shadows. We are taught to slide through unlatched windows, to open throats, then to slip away again like ghosts. A little poison smeared on the bottom of a drunkard’s crock, a black-fletched arrow through the neck—these are the ways of Rassambur. And yet, here I was, standing in the middle of the street, boasting about killing.
It wasn’t love. Ela was wrong about that. She might manage to fall in love during the first movement of a mass, but that degree of abandon lay far beyond the ambit of my heart. It wasn’t love, and yet something blazed just under my skin; some emotion had goaded me from my seat, some eagerness I couldn’t name made me fling my idiotic taunts at him as though they were kisses or knives.
I hadn’t noticed when he first sat down, but he was handsome under all the blood and bruises, even beautiful. The swelling could only partially obscure the high, bold bones of his cheeks. Even discolored, even broken, his brown skin looked warm in the torchlight. And there was more: he wasn’t just a moss-eyed beauty, but a fighter, too, broad-shouldered and wiry, and not just a fighter, but a fighter who wept at Antreem’s Mass. I’d never encountered someone quite like him, not even at Rassambur.
The feeling seemed not to be mutual.
“‘If I wanted you dead, you would be dead’?” He sucked some blood from between his teeth, then spat it onto the cobbles. “What is that? A line from some mid-century melodrama? You hear that onstage a few nights ago?”
He didn’t look intrigued. He looked disgusted.
Again my fingers itched for my knives. Rather than reach for them, I sang in my mind the chorus to one of Ananshael’s oldest hymns:
Death is an embrace,
Not an escape.
The tune is simple. It is taught early to the children of Rassambur, and with good reason. Most people raised outside our faith must face their problems without recourse to killing. The average woman has only the vaguest idea where to place a knife in a human body to end its operation, which means, when she is angry, that the knife is not the first thought in her mind. People raised outside Rassambur learn early to argue, to barter, to protest, to apologize, and only in the most dire cases do the blades come out. To Ananshael’s faithful, however, the knife holds no mystery. To so many questions, it seems the easy, obvious answer, and yet our problems are not the god’s; his ways are meant to be more than the means of our petty escapes. Hence the hymn. Hence the fact that I kept talking to Ruc Lan Lac—though even then I didn’t know his name—instead of cutting out his liver for making me feel foolish.
“If you’re going to pull that blade on me,” he said, staring pointedly at my thigh, “go ahead and pull the ’Kent-kissing blade. If I had time to waste, I’d still be in there,” he stabbed a finger past me, toward the faceless statues standing vigil at the temple’s door, “listening to Antreem, not out here enduring your babble.”
Shame blazed in my cheeks. It was a strange sensation.
He spread his arms as though inviting my attack. “Well?”
For the first time, the people crowding the street seemed to notice him. They saw the dried blood on his face, followed his one-eyed gaze, glanced over their shoulders to find me, and then shied away, leaving us standing like two stones, motionless in the larger current.
“I followed you…” I began, lowering my voice.
He shook his head. “I don’t care. I have a fight to get to. If you’re supposed to keep me from getting there, by all means, have at it.”
He didn’t sound scared. He sounded, if anything, almost bored. Intrigue and irritation warred inside me. I wanted him to know the truth of me, of what I could do. I wanted to show him, to see that beautiful green eye widen in surprise.
By the age of nineteen, I had grown accustomed to feeling stronger, smarter, faster than anyone outside Rassambur. Ananshael’s elder priestesses and priests could take me apart joint by joint, of course, but I’d started to think of everyone beyond our white sandstone walls as slow, almost bovine. The muscle-bound men boasting in wharf-side taverns, the crook-nosed merchants’ guards, the hard-eyed harlots on the street corner with their bright-pleated dresses and half-hidden knives, the angry drunks and the huge, slow bodyguards of the rich, who carried their own wide shoulders as oxen carried their yokes—they all seemed weak, ignorant, irrelevant. This is a danger, for those of us who follow the god of death. When you can unmake a woman as easily as breathing, it becomes easy to believe that you are somehow greater than that woman, more.
Ananshael loathes this type of hubris. It runs counter to all that he holds dear. In the grave’s slender space, there is no room for pride. The final truth of our inevitable ending erases all line between the weak and strong, the great and small, between the priestess with her knives and her pride, and the carter on the street, bent double beneath his load. I used to imagine my god as an avenging force wide as the sky, his hundred hands wielding a hundred weapons. Now, I see him as an old man, patient and slow. He holds spring’s wet dirt in his hands, lifts it up to the light so that we can see, repeats the same words over and over, endlessly patient—You are this. You are this. You are this.—until we understand.
Back then I didn’t understand; not really, not fully. And so the scorn in the beautiful young fighter’s voice scalded. I could have borne his rage, but I could not bear this weary dismissal. I could not kill him, not while my mind was disarranged by my own pride and anger, but neither could I let him go.
“What fight?” I asked.
*
“Pyrre, you minx,” Ela cut in, shaking her head in good-natured amazement. “The whole way from Rassambur you’ve been pissing and moaning about love, and all this time you’ve been hiding this delicious little story under your skirts.”
“I haven’t been hiding—”
“Of course you have. You’ve been treating it like one of those jade cocks we saw back in Mo’ir, getting all sloppy and bothered on it when you thought Kossal and I weren’t looking, then tucking it away in your pack and playing the stone-hearted, loveless, unlovable killer all the long day long.”
I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me that you didn’t see the cocks. That huge woman with the headscarf and knives was selling them in the morning market. They were thick as my wrist!” She circled her wrist with her fingers by way of demonstration, then narrowed her eyes, suddenly sly. “You bought one, didn’t you?”
“What would I want with a wrist-thick jade cock?”
“I’ll go ahead and assume that the question is rhetorical.”
“I’ll go ahead and assume you understand that a polished stone phallus has nothing to do with love.”