“Everything we have, we have because of our queen,” her father had always told her. “Just look at all the gifts she has given to me, and through me, to you. We owe her more than our lives. We owe her our very thoughts. Never doubt, she knows when you are not grateful and it disappoints her.”
Nezeru had never actually seen Utuk’ku, who had been slumbering all her short life and had only recently awakened, but she had seen the queen in dreams and imagination a thousand times. In those dreams the queen’s expressionless silver mask somehow seemed to convey her monarch’s sadness better than a living face ever could—sadness at Nezeru’s unfitness, her diluted heritage, her failures to hide her feelings properly and curb her temper. How much greater would Utuk’ku’s sorrow be now, to see how the halfblood had failed her?
She left the Garden for us, her father often said. The holy Garden. How can we give back to her anything less than all we have to give?
? ? ?
“Makho says that I may clean your wounds,” said Saomeji on the third night, when the Talons had finished their meager meal. “Will you let me see them?”
Nezeru was strangely reticent about showing herself to the Singer, not least because she could not guess whether he had some way to discover the lie she had told about carrying a child, although that was not the only thing about Saomeji that disturbed her. Perhaps her discomfort with him was because he was a halfblood like herself, but had not failed the Mother of All—a halfblood who had not lied to his chieftain, and who did not face shameful death several times over if the truth about him was discovered.
Reluctantly, she undid her jerkin. Though she removed it with great care, still it tugged at the healing skin of her back, each tug a knife stab. She threw the jerkin aside, but lifted her cloak to cover her breasts. Had she not felt so sick and so pained, Nezeru would have been sourly amused at her own modesty, something more befitting a lady of the Nakkiga court, some pampered noble, not a halfblood and certainly not a Sacrifice. The men and women of the Order of Sacrifice bathed together, ran naked in the snow together. Her body was only a weapon in the queen’s service. How could she be modest about something that was not her own?
But somehow the nakedness that had felt wholesome in the order-house of Sacrifice felt different in front of this Singer. She could feel Saomeji’s breath as he leaned close to examine her wounds. “Deep but healing,” he said. “The bite of hebi-kei is cruel but clean.” He sounded so matter-of-fact she could almost forget it was her own ruined flesh he spoke of until he dabbed at one of the weals with a dampened cloth and a bolt of hot misery crackled through her. She gasped and nearly dropped her cloak. “Ah,” he said. “Still tender. But this must be done, Sacrifice Nezeru. My mentor taught me that a deep wound untended is a death unlooked-for. And it would be a shame for you to have come so far only to fall before we see the gates of home again.”
After he had finished cleaning her wounds the halfblood Singer took something from inside his voluminous robe and removed the lid. “Ice moly,” he said of the pale substance in the small bone pot. “Precious. It is my own.”
“Why should you waste something precious on one such as me?” Saomeji had said nothing about the supposed child as he worked, so she guessed that Makho had not told him. It was doubtless safest just to assume so and remain silent, but she had asked the question without thinking.
“Why waste it on you?” said Saomeji. “Because I see something in you that intrigues me, Sacrifice Nezeru.”
She did not want to share anything with him, not even conversation, and for the moment it was easy to avoid talking: as he rubbed the paste into the longest, deepest cut, Nezeru had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. If she thought cleaning the wounds had been painful, she had been a fool. The ice moly felt like a handful of gravel being rubbed into the fissures in her raw, oozing flesh. But after a few moments she felt a coolness there, where before she had felt only hot agony; it did not make the pain go away but pushed it to a slightly greater distance so that she could regard it with a more philosophical mind.
Saomeji was talking again. “I do not know many others who share my . . . encumbrance. Unlike Makho and these other purebloods, I spent my earliest childhood alone, without even the company of my fellow halfbloods. I suspect you did too. Perhaps we have things to share . . . even to teach each other.”
Nezeru was having trouble concentrating on what he was saying. The soothing coolness in her back was making her realize how many hours, how many days that she had been forcing herself to take each step, to survive through the anguish of each moment. For the first time since the whipping she just wanted to let go and sleep. But what was he prattling on about? Was he offering some kind of friendship? What could it mean if he did?
“There, hand-sister—that should help.” He tucked the little pot back into a hidden pouch in his white robe. “I will tell Makho that your wounds are healing. And perhaps you will think over what I said.”
It was all too much, and suddenly the world and the night were pressing down on her like a great weight. Nezeru did not even pull her jerkin back on, but simply tugged her cloak around her and lay down on the cold, stony ground to sleep.
? ? ?
As they continued eastward along the base of the mountains the cold winds returned, scattering snow, and although the chill striking down from high peaks did nothing to relieve the ache of her wounds, Nezeru found that it helped in other ways. The swirling white felt like a curtain she could draw around herself, something to keep her thoughts private. She was glad, because those thoughts had grown strange.
She knew why she had lied about being with child—the idea of Makho forcing himself upon her when she was nearly dead from the whipping had been too much to bear. But she still could not say, even to herself, why she had hesitated to kill the young mortal on the island of bones. She had understood the danger as well as Makho himself, had known how much more difficult it would be to escape the island if the villagers were warned. And the child himself had almost certainly died anyway, along with most of the rest of his people, so her hesitation had accomplished nothing. And the most maddening part was that she had seen in that instant of hesitation all the likely consequences, seen them as clearly as if they had already come to pass. Yet she had not buried her knife in the fleeing boy’s back.
Destroying those who would destroy you is your solemn duty as a Sacrifice. If laying down your life for our queen is a joy, how much better to take the lives of the queen’s enemies? Nezeru had learned these lessons with her runes and numbers in her very first year at the order-house. She knew them as she knew her own name. But the first time the chance had come, she had bridled and failed. Why?
It is my blood. It must be. Somehow the mortal half, the part of me that is weakness and confusion, thwarted the better part.
It was not the anger of Makho and the others that filled her with shame, she saw now; it was the knowledge of her own impurity. It was the mortal in her, her mother’s shu’do-tkzayha blood, the blood of thralls and slaves. Look at how that Black Rimmersman captain and his men had stood by while women and children of their own mortal race fell beneath the blades of the Hikeda’ya! Only a weakness in the blood could explain such cravenness, such cowardice. If her own family were attacked, Nezeru knew that she would fight until she was killed and die with her teeth in an enemy’s throat. But how, then, had she failed to stop a single child to protect her people?
And now she had lied to her superior—a terrible, impious lie—simply to save herself discomfort. She had falsely promised to produce a child, a new subject for the queen, the thing the Hikeda’ya valued most. What madness had overtaken her?
I am at war with myself, she realized. If I am to be the queen’s woman, if I am to bring honor to the Order of Sacrifice, I must kill that weakness in my blood, that mortal weakness. It is the only way.