She lies against the mossy back of a log, her eyes fluttering, her hands across her distended abdomen. Her every breath pinches her throat at the clavicle. An acidic heat creeps between her ribs.
“What would you have us do,” she pants. “Run through the night?”
The old Wizard turns to her. The sky is overcast. The moon is little more than a lantern in the fog, so she can see nothing of his eyes beneath the coarse line of his brow. He is inscrutable and frightening for it.
Suddenly she has difficulty seeing past the blasted ache of his Mark.
“If we took more Qirri …” he says.
What is it in his tone? Elation. Appeal. Dread …
The craving fills her.
“No …” she gasps.
Yes-yes-yes …
“No?” Achamian repeats.
“I will not risk our child,” she explains, leaning her head back once again.
“But this is exactly what you do!”
And so he continues cajoling. The Scylvendi were a race like no other, he insists in wary tones. Godless. Worshippers of violence. As vicious as Sranc and far more cunning. “They are not the artless savages you think!” he cries on the back of worry and obstinance. “Their traditions are ancient, but not hidebound. Their customs are ruthless, but not blind. Trickery and deception are their most prized weapons!”
She lies with one hand hooked like a swing beneath her belly and another held to her forehead. Tiresome pendant!
“Mimara! We must keep running!”
She understands their peril. The Scylvendi were no small matter of concern upon the Andiamine Heights, but less so than in the days of the Ikurei. The Battle of Kiyuth had consumed an entire generation of their manhood—and more. The People of War had always depended on the Chorae their ancestors had accumulated as spoils through the millennia. Shorn of these, they simply could not cope with the sorceries of the Three Seas.
“Back to the mountains …” he says, gazing out toward the Demua. “They’ll be loathe to risk their ponies in the dark. By morning we could use bare rock to obscure all trace of our passage!”
There is a vacancy in his manner, one that repels her. She is suddenly sure that the Qirri, and not the Scylvendi, motivate his exhortations. He does not want to taste to run so much as run to taste.
A cannibal yearning for the ash clasps her as a lover might.
Even still, she will not be swayed. A sudden wave of heat afflicts her, and to the old Wizard’s disgust, she pulls her She?ra corselet over her head, dumps it and begins shedding her pelts. Her skin pimples in the chill air. She strips to her tunic, which clings like sodden leather for the accumulation of filth. Within heartbeats, it feels as cold as lizard skin about the dome of her maternity. Her eyes flutter shut, and she sees tumbling purple. The lost forests of K?niüri wobble like a top second-guessing its spin. She concentrates on breathing around her myriad discomforts.
“Are … Are you well?” Achamian asks from the oblivion above her, suddenly penitent.
“Now he asks,” she mutters to the boy, whom she cannot see. She undoes her belt, throws aside her scabbard, as much to infuriate the old Wizard as to relieve her belly.
Achamian eases himself to his rump, glaring, then, relying on his pelts for comfort, he rolls away from her. By some miracle, he manages to hold his tongue.
The sight of his back comforts her for some reason.
Do you see, little one? I bear you …
She lays back into her exhaustion, cooling, drifting.
And he bears me …
She sways and topples through something like a dream, a tempest flashing on some nocturnal horizon …
“What are you doing?”
Achamian’s voice, sharp enough to crack through the suffocating felt. She starts. Mere months ago she would have simply popped upright, but her belly forbids it, so she flails like an upturned beetle.
“Kirila meirwat dagru—” the boy is saying.
Night has claimed all the world as its spoil. She sees the old Wizard, but more as shape than substance. His ragged silhouette stands at a cautious distance, four paces or so from her feet. She whirls to the boy, who sits cross-legged on her immediate right. His eyes are luminous, searching. He holds “Chipmunk”—the bronze knife she plundered from the Library of Sauglish—flat across his left thigh. And in his crabbed hand he holds …
“It … makes … light,” the boy says in careful Sheyic.
As she watches, the boy scrapes the Chorae he holds in his right hand along the length of the sorcerous blade. Lightning whitens the hunched grotto of his fascination, engraving the grotesquerie of his maimed hand as vividly as the innocence of his face.
She strikes him out of some reflex, the way one might a child frolicking too near open flame. The boy catches her wrist without the least effort or worry. His look, as always, betrays nothing more than curiosity. She yanks her arm clear, fairly barges into his lap, scooping up Chipmunk and her Chorae both. She spares the boy a furious heartbeat, both glaring and grating.
“No,” she says, as if instructing a puppy. “No!”