Suddenly she squeezed harder and I was having trouble drawing breath. ‘I can’t understand? Is that right, Kellen, son of Ke’heops, child of the Jan’Tep?’
She’d never referred to me in such a formal way. She’d said it the same way she said everything, as if it were all some mildly curious, sardonic observation about the world around her, as if nothing really mattered. The darkness in her eyes told a different story. I knew now, finally, the secret she’d kept hidden behind her smirks and jokes. Somehow, in that knowing, I felt the dark rage inside me slip away.
Ever since she’d shown up, I’d wondered who Ferius Parfax really was – what she really was. Despite all her claims about being a simple Argosi wanderer, her denials about being a Daroman spy were so feeble that all it did was persuade everyone – me included – that she probably was working for their king. I always wondered why somebody so clever, so full of tricks, did such a bad job of convincing people she wasn’t a spy. Now I knew. ‘You aren’t Daroman,’ I said.
‘Never claimed to be.’
‘And you’re not just an Argosi either.’
‘Sure I am, kid.’ She reached into her waistcoat and fanned out a deck of cards. ‘See?’
‘Show me,’ I said.
She tilted her head. ‘Show you what?’
‘Show me your card. The real one.’
Without her hand moving at all, one of the cards slowly slid up from the others. I took it and turned it over. It was a jack, just like others I’d seen in the deck, but not a septagram for the Jan’Tep or a sword for the Daromans or even a chalice for the Berabesq. This one depicted a black leaf on the top-right corner. ‘You’re Mahdek,’ I said.
‘Now that’s just silly, kid. Everybody knows there ain’t no more Mahdek.’
‘Because my people massacred them. Only … no one can massacre an entire people, can they? Some have to escape. Some wouldn’t have been in the cities when the attacks came.’
Ferius took the card back and packed the deck back into her waistcoat. ‘Oh, they got rid of us all right. There isn’t enough Mahdek blood in the world to bring my people back. What’s left are just … ghosts, I guess you could say.’
‘Did you …?’ I hesitated to ask the question, not sure I could live with the answer. Ferius had changed my life. She’d given me so much, I couldn’t bear to think that she was just as cold and mean as everyone else in the world had turned out to be. ‘Did you come to get revenge? Is that why you’re here? To kill my people for what they did to yours?’
She leaned back against the side of one of the horses and pulled out a smoking reed from inside her waistcoat. ‘Toss a little of that powder together, would you, kid?’
Not knowing what else to do, I did. It created a tiny burst of flame in the air. With the speed of a whip cracking she reached out the reed and the end caught fire. ‘When I was a girl,’ she said, taking in a breath of the smoke, ‘my grandma and grandpa – my folks had died a while before – anyway, they made me swear the same oath they’d taken, the same one my folks had taken and every one of us had taken since the days when that old clan prince of yours and his mages killed off my people.’
‘You swore revenge,’ I said, almost surprised to find there actually was one paranoid fear my people held that turned out to be true.
Ferius nodded, sending twin puffs of smoke from her nostrils. ‘That’s just the way it is sometimes.’ She motioned towards Ra’meth. ‘Blood for blood.’
‘So all of this … saving my life—’
She cut me off. ‘My grandparents died when I was still too young to fend for myself. We’re not a long-lived people, I guess. Life without a land of your own is hard. I wandered the long desert roads for a while, not knowing what I was doing. Pretty soon I was at the end of my rope. Starving, dying of thirst, covered in a dozen wounds from one scrape or another. I was pretty much done for.’
I tried to imagine what that would be like – to be completely alone in the world. ‘The Argosi,’ I said. ‘They took you in.’
She chuckled. ‘What a bunch of weirdos. Everything is cards with them. Cards for this, cards for that. But they saved me that day. Kept saving me too, every time I’d run off and nearly get myself killed. Every time they did –’ she reached into her waistcoat and pulled out her deck of blood-red cards – ‘they made me take one of these.’
‘They’re debts? For saving your life?’
She nodded. ‘Every one of these is a life I have to pay back.’
I reached into my own trousers and pulled out the dark red card she’d forced me to take the day she’d gone on about debts. ‘And this is a life I have to pay back.’
‘Yep.’
‘So … you just gave up on revenge for your people?’
Ferius looked up at the night sky, where the flames still burning around us lit up her face, making her suddenly terrifying. ‘No, kid, I just figured out that no matter how many Jan’Tep I killed, I’d never be able to bring my own people back.’ She dropped the smoking reed and stamped it out with the heel of her boot. ‘The Argosi believe that the world hangs on a delicate balance. Some things – like the way your people abuse magic, like the way the Daroman roll over the rest of the world with their empire – those things bring us closer to destruction. Other things, sometimes just little things, they help push us the other way. Reckon if I can’t bring my people back, least I can do is save the world.’ She reached out a hand and held my arm, just for a moment. ‘Feel like helping?’
I reeled back, as much from her words as her unusual gentleness. How could anyone live that kind of life? How could she sit back and let the people who had murdered her tribe just keep living in the same cities they’d stolen from them? I looked down at Ra’meth and remembered the look on my uncle’s face as the bolt of fire had burst through his chest. ‘I don’t think I’m like you, Ferius.’
‘Never asked you to be.’ She walked over to where Reichis lay on the ground and very gently scooped him up and placed him in a bag that she slung over her shoulder. ‘Tough little bastard, isn’t he?’ She looked over to me. ‘You’ve got a decision to make, kid. There’s a little shack a few miles out of town. Fella there knows some healing ways. Figure he can help the squirrel cat. He also brews up some kind of drink that makes a sane person’s head spin round and round. It’s a safe bet that I’ll be there a few hours. If you want to learn the Argosi path, come find me.’ She put a foot into the stirrup and got up on the horse. ‘If not, well, then I reckon that’s one less card I have to worry about.’