That makes Gavatra grimace. She has known me since I was a child.
Rasida’s people line the halls eight and ten deep, the smaller ones sitting on the shoulders of the larger, back and back and back, so many that I find it a wonder she can care for them all here on the first level. Where is she getting the resources to care for them up here? From that dead worldship they are scavenging? How functional is the heart of her world? I stare at the spongy floor at my feet. As I walk, my footprints do not fill with a thin film of water the way they do on Katazyrna before the fleshy floor springs back up behind me. Bhavaja is dying.
I glance at Rasida beside me as we continue on, and consider the rumors I have heard about her. If she has the ability to do what Zan and I believe she can do, why has she let her world deteriorate like this? I have to understand her, and to do that, I must get close to her.
Rasida parts a shimmering curtain, and suddenly we are alone in a broad room with sweeping high ceilings. There are no patterns of light here; instead, there are fanciful geometric shapes carved into the walls, all painted in reds and blues and golds. I caress the nearest wall, running my fingers into the rivulets, and find that the walls are not porous here but hard and calcified. I snatch my fingers away.
“Your rooms are here,” Rasida says, and she rolls open a great slab to reveal a long series of rooms. “I’m farther away,” she says, “but you’ll have access to this whole area.” She waves at the great room I’m still standing in, and I see that all seven of the round slabs that ring the room like great eyes are doors like this one.
Two young girls appear from the interior of my rooms, their eyes big and black, hair bound back from identical round faces. They are painfully thin. They wear no shoes, and their feet are callused and dirty.
“These are your attendants,” Rasida says.
“What are your names?” I ask, leaning over, because they look to be several rotations from menarche as yet.
“They don’t speak,” Rasida says.
A chill crawls up my spine, but I straighten and smile. “I see,” I say.
“I don’t want them to bother you with needless chatter,” Rasida says. She runs her fingers down my arm, takes my hand, and opens my fingers. Her lips press against my palm. “I don’t like chatter,” she says.
“I see,” I say again, because for all the preparation Zan and I have done these many turns, I find that I am not at all ready to be here in this place with a woman with such power and so many unknown whims. What do I know about her, really? I have seen her at negotiations and across skirmish lines. But I know nothing of her world but what I have seen, and nothing of the woman who rules it, not really.
It’s not until I see her crinkling up the edges of her mouth into a smile that does not touch her eyes that I realize I have dealt with a woman just like this my whole life.
She is like Anat. She is my mother.
I smile back at her and press my fingers to her cheek.
“When will we be joined, love?” I say. “I look forward to the binding.”
“Soon,” Rasida says, and I cannot help but shiver.
*
The nameless girls comb out my hair and clean my clothes and fetch food. I feared the food would be as miserable as the rest of the world, but it’s fresh tubers and broth, not some twice-baked gelatin made from the dead. That eases my concern somewhat.
Time here is strange, as the ship does not seem to regulate it anymore. It’s the girls who wake the lights, rubbing their hands over the walls of the room after they have deemed my sleeping period has gone on long enough. Whatever is in the walls brightens for the length of the waking period, and then it is time to sleep, and we do it all over again.
When I wake, Rasida comes to me bearing wine and sweet treats, and sends the girls off into the main room.
“I thought you’d forgotten about me,” I say lightly. “I missed your company.” When I came up with this bit of fluff, I didn’t think I’d mean it, but I realize on seeing her sit down at the end of my bed that it’s true. The girls make for poor company. They won’t look at me, and they will not speak. I found a loom in one of the far rooms, and I’ve been re-teaching myself how to use it. Making textiles was always a bottom-world pastime. I prefer my numbers and reports. But there’s little of that here.
I have spent so many nights locked in my rooms on Katazyrna, cursing my mother, that this treatment is not surprising, only disappointing. I will need to work harder to get close to Rasida if I’m not allowed to go to her. I have already tried the great door out of the foyer, but Rasida has two stout guards there who glare at me whenever I open the door.
“You wish to know me better?” Rasida says, passing me the bulb of wine.
“We’re to be paired,” I say, and drink.
To my surprise, she lies down in my lap and rests her head against my stomach. She presses her ear to my belly and sighs. I carefully smooth the hair away from her brow, uncertain as to what comes next.
“You will be the mother of a new generation,” she says. “My witches foretold it.”
“Your witches still live?” I ask.
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Well, so much of this world is . . . I’m sorry.”
“No,” she says, sighing and pressing herself closer to me. “You are right. Bhavaja is deteriorating. But all that will change soon.”
“How?”
She moves her mouth into that smile-that-is-not-a-smile. “You will see.”
“I have heard . . .” And I must be careful here. My breath catches. “I have heard you can birth worlds. Is that what you will do?”
She sits up. My heart races, and I lean back, instinctively, fearful I have overstepped.
Rasida gets up and opens the door. She gestures to me. “Come to my quarters,” she says.
I finish the wine, and I follow her. I tell myself that my smile is more convincing than hers.
Rasida takes me through a circuitous route to another level of the world. It seems we have gone up, but I can’t be certain. There are heavily armed women on this level, posted every hundred paces. Rasida invites me inside a great room with high ceilings layered in lacy bones. She urges me to sit on a lavish divan layered in hemp cloth. Golden trinkets grace the walls. It takes me a moment to understand what they are. They are trophies, of a sort—pendants and religious symbols from lost worlds. I recognize two of them from a dead world called Valante, a silver-striped pin that was worn by all the daughters of the lord of that world. Now they lie scattered across whatever worlds salvaged the wreckage of that place before it rotted away.