Chapter Thirty-three

PACING DIDN’T HELP, but Eluneke’s frustration pushed her to measure the small tent with her steps anyway. The count never changed, however many times she repeated the circuit of the single lattice, batted with ragged felt on the outside and with a dirty rug and a cold firebox within. Qutula’s Durluken stood guard at the door but would neither speak to her nor allow her to look out. They fed her at irregular intervals, leaving her to go hungry as often as not. Sometimes Qutula himself led the guardsmen. Sometimes Mangkut or another she didn’t recognize took turn and turn about as moonlight followed sunshine through the smoke hole at the top of her tent.

For news, she had only the movement of that dappled beam of light to tell her how the suns moved in the heavens, and the soughing of the wind in the trees rising above the rush of water nearby. They had hidden her in the forest near the Onga River, she deduced by these clues; not in the dell where she met with Prince Tayy but farther along its banks, where no one would think to look.

Since entering her apprenticeship, she’d had the comfort of knowing that wherever she went, she carried her teacher with her. That sensation of Toragana watching over her shoulder had vanished, however, when Mangkut slipped the jade talisman over her head. The shamaness would be looking for her pupil, though. And Prince Tayyichiut would have sent the Nirun to search for her as well.

“The prince will find me,” she’d warned her captor. “He’ll bring the forces of his Nirun and the armies of the khan with him when he comes.”

Mangkut had laughed at that. “My master has his own plans for Prince Tayy. He’ll find his ancestors before he finds this tent!”

“Your master suffers the pride of many fallen traitors, counting his corpses before they are laid to the pyre.” She’d faced down the sky god himself and refused to show her captors that they frightened her. “The prince has survived more powerful enemies than his cousin.”

The sky god hadn’t knocked her down on a filthy carpet or stood over her threatening rape or worse.

“Qutula will kill you if he comes back and finds you’ve damaged his bait.” Her shoulder hurt where she’d fallen on it and she rubbed at the soreness, settling her panicked breathing. It was a small injury compared to the ones he wanted to inflict, but her reminder stopped him.

Tense and angry, Mangkut had clenched his fists into tight balls and walked away, but at least now she knew why they were holding her captive. Qutula feared that her skills as a shamaness might defeat their plan. The court had its own shaman, with deeper wisdom than she could hope to possess, but Bolghai had also been her teacher. He’d be torn between his obligations, to a student and to the court. Eluneke hoped he had enough sense to stay at the gur-khan’s side and not fall into Qutula’s trap by joining the search. So far no one had brought news of the prince succumbing to illness or injury, but she couldn’t count on that for long. If their plan didn’t work soon, she had no doubt that Qutula would use her to lure the prince out where he might be murdered in private.

She had to escape. The talisman prevented her from shifting into her totem form or traveling through the dreamscape. She’d been trying for days. Though she thought she was growing stronger in the struggle, time was running out. Trying to fight her way through in human form had earned her some bruises and an angry red ring around her throat, where Mangkut had choked her with the gold thread around her neck. But she had to do something.

Fretfully, she stroked the rune incised on the jade talisman. She could, she had discovered, touch it as long as she left it where it lay. When she tried to remove it, however, it slipped maddeningly out of her fingers. “Damn it!” She dropped to her stomach and tried to escape between the crossed lattices, but her fingers burned when she touched the felted tent cloths.

“That won’t work, my lady. My mistress has bid me keep you here, and here you will stay.”

“Who are you?” she asked the creature who inhabited the jade. “Who is your mistress?” She had thought Qutula commanded the talisman as he commanded the guards who watched her.

She heard a chuckling in her head, and then a voice dripping acid. “A nameless minion, bound to do the bidding of my lady. I’m sure you know her name.”

Eluneke didn’t believe the nameless part, but he sounded too bitter for the second to be a lie. “The Lady Chaiujin.”

He didn’t deny that she had guessed correctly.

It took all her concentration to focus her shaman powers on the conversation, but she knew what to do. Settling with one leg crossed under her on the filthy rug and the other bent with her chin resting on her knee, she turned her vision inward, to confront the voice that rattled in her mind. “What does your mistress want, nameless one?”

“Power, of course, and revenge. The little prince will pay, as many others have before him, for standing between the lady and her desires. But he enjoys the favors of a toad; perhaps he will likewise enjoy the kiss of her fangs!” He snickered, taunting her. Eluneke refused to let him upset her.

“I understand revenge.” She nodded her head as if encouraging a patient to list his complaints. “I myself grew up an orphan in a weak and impoverished clan while my father sat upon the very dais.”

The facts, which the creature might read on the surface of her mind, were true. Since he was a creature of evil and so expected the same in others, the demon of the talisman accepted that the lie about her feelings must be true as well. One thing raised his suspicions, however. “Your affection for the prince . . .”

“Your lady herself sat on the dais with the prince’s father. Did she then trade her affections for the khan’s position, or merely offer the use of a body not even her own for access to his power?”

“Ah,” the creature cooed in her ear like a turtledove.

“With your help, between us we could take for ourselves what the lady would use us to win for herself.” Toragana would know how to defeat the creature who inhabited the jade circle; Eluneke needed only to escape the tent where Qutula had hidden her.

But: “Noooo,” the demon moaned. “She would not like it, and her reach is long.”

Eluneke’s hand slid over the disk. Distracted by her arguments, for a moment he didn’t notice. She whipped the golden thread over her head and flung it at the door, then dived for a tear in the felt.

“I don’t think so, my lady toad.” Mangkut grabbed her by the hair and shook her until her teeth rattled.

She thought herself a toad, felt herself shrinking and let out a croaking call before the talisman descended again. Her own magic met the magic of the demon in the jade, clashed, and she screamed, tearing at her throat. Caught in transition, her form remained half toad, half human.

“Ugh!” he released her, but by then it was too late. She could not escape with the talisman on her breast and knew that if she did, she would be stoned to death as a demon, the very thing she fought.

Prince Tayyichiut strode into the ger-tent palace of his uncle, dripping with rain that had obscured even the light of the stars to search by. Dropping his wet coat in the hands of a servant, he approached the dais. At his back the Nirun fell onto the carpets below the firebox, weary from a day of searching for the shaman-princess. For days they had looked, in the shadow of every rock and behind every tree. In every tent they found the same answer: no one had seen Eluneke. The troops who went out every day had given up on finding her well and now hoped only to find her alive.

Tayy kept to himself and his Nirun the belief that Qutula held her prisoner. His cousin was too clever to lead him to Eluneke. He knew that, but had assigned men to follow him anyway. Qutula would expect that. For himself, he had begun by riding out on an alternate shift, following the Durluken in the hope that someone would slip up and lead him to her hidden prison. His own experience matched the reports of his Nirun, however. He would follow Mangkut or another of his cousin’s men as far as the wood where the Onga rose out of the dell, then would lose them as if they had fallen through the river into the underworld itself. They always rode out of the wood again at shift change, but none of his own could ever follow them to where they searched, or where they might guard Eluneke as Qutula’s prisoner.

At first, they’d all spent long hours at the search, but as the days in the saddle produced no results, fewer stayed out to exhaustion. He still saw his cousin very little, but that owed less to strategy and more to the fact that he kept no schedule now but rode until he could stay in the saddle no longer, and returned only long enough to restore his strength to ride again.

Tayy staggered slightly as he neared the dais. Bekter, fingering an old, half-forgotten tune in the corner, laid a hand across the strings of his lute to silence them. Bolghai was absent still. The empty place by the musicians ached like a missing tooth, but many of the chieftains and nobles had gathered above the firebox, watching as he advanced. He saw Sechule in a new purple coat sitting among them. Chahar was gone, on an errand of his uncle’s to Yesugei, but Jochi had returned to his place by the gur-khan, a low table covered in maps between them. It didn’t take a map to find a girl lost in the tent city, but they had enemies on their doorstep, and half of their army far to the south.

“We’ve found no sign of her,” Tayy said, with a nod to his cousin Bekter to acknowledge the courtesy of his silence. He thought the song might have been a warning, if only he could remember what it was. Outside, his dogs howled their distress, but in front of his uncle’s court he kept his own voice cold as stone. “No sign, either, of the Tinglut.”

Qutula had returned ahead of him, and was already seated at the foot of the dais. His eyes were wide and dark with a false concern. “I fared no better,” he said.

The gur-khan nodded, accepting the report, but his glance at his blanket-son hid questions he wasn’t ready to ask before the whole court. Tayy would have asked them with a sword, but killing his cousin wouldn’t find Eluneke.

“Come, sit by your grandmother and calm her weeping,” Mergen invited him. Lady Bortu was doing nothing of the sort, but Tayy accepted his place beside her. She looked not much better than he guessed he must himself, but kept her thoughts, tight-lipped, to herself.

“Rest,” Mergen ordered them all. “You can’t do anything more until the rain stops. Then perhaps Lun and her brothers will help us find one of her own.”

Great Moon watched over shamans in their dream travels. Tayy didn’t think that would help Eluneke now. Humans had taken her. He didn’t think it was the Tinglut, though not from Qutula’s assurance, “I sent Durluken to follow Prince Daritai. They returned today, but report no sign of my sister on the march.”

“Wisely done,” the gur-khan thanked him, though he must have wondered, as Tayy did himself, why Qutula waited until now to tell him. His cousin’s eyes were gleaming, though he kept his mouth turned down as if in sorrow.

He enjoys our grief. He did it to see me flinch. The prince reached that conclusion even through his exhaustion. He’d already dismissed the Tinglut as the thieves, though like his cousin he had sent a precious few of his Nirun to shadow the movements of Prince Daritai. The one report he’d received had given him nothing about Eluneke, but he’d learned that the Durluken were watching. Mergen Gur-Khan’s scouts had followed the Tinglut forces as well, but they wouldn’t find what wasn’t there.

No, someone closer to home had taken her like a bride thief, or a murderer. Whatever he had done to her, Qutula’s face gave nothing away as he watched, with false concern, Tayy fall loose-limbed with weariness to the dais.

Servants were called then, food and drink brought. Tayy chose a pie from a laden silver tray, but Qutula took it from him, bit into it and swallowed before he offered it to the prince. Tayy didn’t trust his cousin, but he didn’t think Qutula wanted him dead badly enough to poison himself first. So he ate when Qutula found his food safe and sipped when the kumiss bowl came to him. His mind, however, was on Bekter’s tale.

“Play,” the gur-khan asked with a gesture to his blanket-son. “Let music ease our minds a little, if it can.”

The usual court entertainment had been dismissed for the duration of the crisis, but Bekter’s music always seemed to soothe the gur-khan’s distress. He came forward, his instrument in his hand, and made a low bow.

“As you wish, my lord.”

A servant brought a low stool and Bekter sat on it. If his mouth were as choked with secrets as his eyes, Tayy thought, he would never get a song out. Presently he began to play the song he had practiced earlier. As he listened, Tayy realized the poet’s secrets were all there in his voice.

“Long ago a princess lived,
A child among warriors.
Alaghai of seven summers
bright with blood and sword
Walked barefooted among the dead,
weeping for their fate.”

Tayy set aside the kumiss, concentrating on the meter. He knew the story, a popular one from childhood, of the little princess who was later known as Alaghai the Beautiful. Beside him, Mergen picked up the cup the prince had abandoned.

“ ‘He’s gone to his ancestors,
magnificent in battle,
With sacrifices of enemies
to pay his way
And crowned with a silver cap,
the bloodied khan.

“ ‘Until I see his crow-pecked eyes,
and touch his mortal wounds
Your words are the wind to me,
crying false sorrow.’
She left them, to search barefoot
through the red fields of her father.”

In the end, of course, little Alaghai would find her father the khan, wounded but living on that dreadful battlefield. Because of her timely aid he would survive. An appropriate, if somewhat pointed, choice for a party resting from a search, it reassured that their efforts would not be in vain. Like the child princess, they would also have success. One might even smile at the reversal of roles in the tale in which a princess sought a khan to amuse their own khan seeking a princess.

The tale might mean nothing more, except that Prince Tayyichiut remembered another night when his own father Chimbai-Khan had told the story of the grown Alaghai the Beautiful. Angry at her choice of the foreign king Llesho the Great as her husband, her brothers had kidnapped her and murdered her child before her eyes. Her husband, that foreign king, died of spell-crafted murder when a cursed spear turned in his own hand and killed him. The brothers likewise fell, in the war they had begun. Only Alaghai had survived, but as a madwoman alone in the tent of her captivity.

Few in the court would connect the hopeful story of the little princess saving the life of her father with the tragic aftermath of betrayal and death. Tayy wouldn’t have done so himself, except that he had traveled in the company of that foreign king’s successor and repaid that debt of long-ago murder with the wounds on his own flesh. But he thought, looking into Bekter’s eyes, that the poet remembered, and that he sang the early tale only because he daren’t sing the later. Beside him, he heard a groan, and turning, saw his uncle wipe his lips.