The sanvaartain took one look at you and shook her head. Like any sanvaartain interested in healing, she looked eighty. In reality, she could not have been older than Otgar.
“Burqila,” she said, “if you asked me to journey into the center of the earth, where Grandfather sleeps—if you asked me to steal his belt and bring it to you, I would. But I cannot heal this girl.”
My mother did not bother signing. She shattered a divining bowl instead. I recoiled from the sound, my head already throbbing with pain.
“Burqila is displeased with your answer,” Otgar said, as if it needed saying. “You tell her you can reattach a man’s severed arm, but you cannot cure a simple fever?”
The sanvaartain showed no fear in the presence of my mother. “I cannot,” she said. “The girl is not mine to heal. Even if she were, this is no simple fever. Look at her eyes.”
Glassy. You did not focus on anything; your eyes flittered everywhere like shy birds. When you lay down like this, the skin of your face sank into your skull.
“This is her fourth day of fever,” the shaman said, “that is the face of a girl who sees the Mother coming. Pray that she does not carry her home tonight.”
How long had you been sick? How long had you hidden it from us?
Guilt tore into me. You could die. You’d driven yourself day and night, you’d fought and fought and fought. And I’d done nothing. I watched. I let you do it all, and now, here you were—your own ghost.
“And if the Mother does not come for her tonight?” Otgar asked.
“Then she will live. But only if she wakes in the morning,” said the shaman.
After an hour of haranguing, the shaman admitted that water from the Rokhon might help your body rid itself of toxins. That did not make much sense to me; water is water, even if it is taken from a holy river. And what good would that do us? The Rokhon was a whole day’s ride away. By the time someone made the trip and returned, you’d be better (because you were not going to die, could not die, would not die).
But things like logistics never stopped my mother. Especially not when her best friend’s daughter lay on what seemed like her deathbed.
I glanced over my shoulder. Otgar and Alshara signed furiously at each other. I caught a few words here and there. “Madwoman,” “insane,” “impossible,” from Otgar. “Must,” “do not challenge,” and “soon,” from my mother. Eventually my mother stormed out of the ger.
“Burqila is riding to the Rokhon,” Otgar said. “Because she seems to think roads are shorter for her than for anyone else.”
The sanvaartain shook her head. “She’s going to kill that liver mare of hers,” she said. Nadsha—my mother’s liver-colored mare, with a star, strip, and snip—was getting old. It was true she could likely not survive being driven so hard.
It is fortunate, then, that the Burqila clan possesses more than ten thousand horses.
“She will not take the liver mare,” Otgar said. “Or if she does, they will not go alone. She will take a gelding, or a stallion, or a hot-blooded colt with something to prove. She would not risk the liver mare.”
“Then she will run two good horses to death,” said the sanvaartain. “For some Hokkaran girl. When has a rice-eater done anything like that? The only gift they’ve ever given us is plague.”
Liquid flame shot through my veins. How dare she? While you lay in bed, fever robbing you of your strength—she insulted your people? As much as our Hokkaran wounds festered and turned to rot, now was not the time.
I rose to my feet and locked eyes with the sanvaartain. “Out,” I snarled.
Otgar scowled. “I would listen, if I were you,” she said.
Perhaps the sanvaartain was used to be snarled at. She did not move.
“This is my mother’s ger,” she said. “I am entitled to stay in my mother’s ger at night.”
Pain shot through my jaw, from clenching it too tight. No, I could not remove a woman from her own ger. Raiders might do such a thing, but never a clanmate. This woman was my blood in some small way. Making her leave the ger her mother built with her own two hands was the same as dragging her away from her mother’s soul.
So instead, I picked you up in my arms. In thick fur pelts, I swaddled you. You muttered my name; I whispered that all would be well soon. And I carried you out of the sanvaartain’s ger.
Otgar followed us. “Are you going to take her to your mother’s?” she asked. “With our aunts and uncles, too?”
I had not thought this through, so I shrugged. When you shivered, I held you closer.
“Auntie Khadiyyaar’s little one isn’t old enough to be left alone yet,” Otgar said. “If whatever Barsatoq has is contagious…”
My eyes lit up.
Otgar paused, holding up her hands to try to soothe my rage. “Cousin,” she said. “Barsalai. Shefali. That girl might be the most self-absorbed person under the Eternal Sky, but she is important to you. And, if I’m being honest, she is almost as talented as she claims. But she is one person. You must think of the clan, Shefali. A Kharsa must put her clan first. You cannot keep her around the children.”
Send the children away, then! Let them sit in their own ger! But … No, they would fall into the fire, and someone had to watch them.
I looked down at you, swaddled like a baby, pale in the moonlight. Gods, Shizuka, you looked so weak.
“My ger is empty.”
What? Otgar had a ger? Auntie Zurganqaar stayed with us. Why did Otgar have a ger?
She shifted her weight. “I enjoy a bit of peace and quiet every now and again,” she said. “I am a woman grown, I am allowed to begin my own ger if I want.”
But Otgar was unmarried at twenty—itself an anomaly. And only married women began their own gers. What was my cousin up to? And how, exactly, had she gotten out of her marriage when that boy had already paid his bride-price? Yet I did not have the time or the wherewithal to question her. Instead, I followed as she led us to the very edge of the camp.
Otgar’s ger was the one tree in autumn whose leaves fell before all the others. Small, with a frame half the size of a normal one, only the barest sheet of felt lined it. Once we stepped inside, we saw a few carpets draped from the supports in some effort to provide warmth. In the southern corner was a single bedroll, and in the center, the smallest fire pit it’s possible to have in a ger. I felt as if I were not standing in a ger at all, but something in between a tent and the white felt palaces I am so used to.
“It is not much to look at,” Otgar said, “or to sleep in. But it is mine, and tonight it is yours.”
She stoked the smoldering coals that passed for a fire and laid out the bedroll. As I lowered you onto it, she tucked you in, rolling the sheets up to your chin. I took my place at your side.
“I must wait for Burqila to return,” said Otgar. “I’d ask if everyone in your family is such a foolhardy, mule-stubborn pain, but we are cousins. I still say it’s only your branch. But…”
She paused by the red door. Her pale eyes fell on you, sputtering meaningless syllables.
“May Grandmother Sky smile on her,” she said. “No one deserves to suffer like that.”
The door closed behind her.