FOURTEEN
BACK IN DIETER’S tent, Gerlach peered down at me, pressing a wadded cloth to my throat.
‘Amalia says you’re not Tamoran,’ I said, the words popping out of my mouth without time for thought. It was hard to talk past the force of his hands.
‘You were fighting over theologies?’ said Gerlach. ‘Not that I’m advising against passion in your beliefs, you understand.’
His voice sounded distant and faint to my ears. I must have lost a lot of blood. ‘Before,’ I whispered, an inadequate explanation. ‘The first binding wasn’t a Tamoran ceremony.’
He lifted the wadded cloth to peer at the wound, just as quickly pushing it down again. ‘My people, and Dieter’s, come from the northwest –’
‘The Marsachen tribe,’ I interrupted with illogical happiness. ‘They turned away from the rest of the Turasi.’
He accepted my lunatic cheer without qualm. ‘It would be more accurate to say they stayed Beneduin, while the other tribes turned to Tamor’s teachings.’
‘Is that where Dieter learnt his arcana?’ I asked, my voice slurring as drowsiness threatened to overcome me again. ‘From the Beneduin faith?’
‘No,’ said Gerlach.
‘Oh.’ I wanted to ask more, but it was hard to concentrate. The words kept slipping away unformed.
‘He knows the lore of many nations,’ said Gerlach. ‘In my experience, however, he’s most fond of the knowledge he learned from the Amaer.’
I nodded, and allowed my eyes to close. Someone had let the sunshine into the tent, I thought dreamily. The warmth was delicious, like sinking back onto baking sands.
The names Gerlach had given me – Beneduin, Amaer – chased through my head while I slept.
When next I opened my eyes it was Dieter’s face bending low over me.
‘You’ve quick reflexes,’ he said when he realised I’d woken.
‘Not quick enough,’ I said, an inexplicable shame burrowing through my chest.
He thumbed the cut on my throat, his touch gentle, then re-dressed the wound, carefully winding a length of clean linen around my throat, before fastening it and kneeling back.
I pushed up off the cot until I was sitting, a dull ache clutching at my throat and tension knotting my shoulders.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
The next part came harder. ‘I should have heeded your warning.’
He pulled a blanket close and wrapped it around my shoulders. ‘Don’t be too grateful. If I’d let Mali kill you here, it would’ve dissolved the alliance and seen us all slaughtered. I acted out of simple prudence.’
Humiliation stung my cheeks and I felt a flash of hatred for him.
‘The Skythes saw the tussle,’ said Dieter. ‘You’ll have to trot over and show them you’re okay. I told them it was a disagreement between sisters. The old woman was impressed, actually, to find you weren’t a weakling.’
When I didn’t answer, he lifted my chin with the tip of his finger. With his other hand he held before my eyes a small glass vial filled with a dark red liquid – blood.
‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘I drew it while you slept.’
‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘What do you need it for?’
‘I’m hoping I won’t,’ he said, drawing the vial away and tucking it into a pocket near his heart. ‘It’s clear, however, that you’re determined to make trouble. With the blood, I don’t need to be nearby to transform your brand. You remember your brand, don’t you, Matilde?’
Silent, I looked up into his pale eyes.
‘I can turn you to clay no matter where you are,’ he warned. ‘Or I can think up a few other uses for the blood. But that’s neither here nor there. What you need to know, Matilde, is this: one wrong move against me, and I’ll finish what I started at Aestival.’
I couldn’t sleep.
Not with Dieter in the tent, a few breaths away, though he attended to his papers, not even bothering to watch me. This increased my terror – that I was so completely his he might even forget me. Curled up tight around my nauseated stomach, I couldn’t calm the sense of nervous anticipation that pervaded me.
When eventually he stood, I watched him moving around, extinguishing the lanterns, progressively dimming the interior until only the red glimmer from the brazier traced the shadows around me. After a time, rustling told me he was peeling off his clothing in the dark, then he slipped into his bed on the other side of the brazier.
Even after his breathing told me he slept, I lay awake, wondering over my fate.
Two weeks before, my most pressing concern had been whether Grandmother would take me on the Aestival progression, and if I’d be able to conceal the clues, should one of my visions overcome me in the presence of the drightens. Now everyone dear to me was dead, slaughtered by my husband’s troops, and I was bound by a hex I could neither understand nor unravel. And should I reach for the shadows to escape Dieter’s binding, I risked a life in the cloisters of the mara.
The idea gave me pause, however. The Nilofen had lauded Dieter’s military acumen, but would they be so sanguine about his brand on my brow, and the power it gave him over me? And the drightens, I knew, would not countenance a shadow-worker on the throne. It was a small chance, but it was all I had.
I must have fallen asleep eventually, for between one blink and the next it was morning and a young boy was kneeling at my head, entreating me to wake.
‘Forgive me, my lady,’ he greeted my bleary stare. ‘The old Skythe lady claims you.’
‘Wait outside,’ I said, the effort of speaking, even quietly, paining my throat. ‘I’ll be ready in a moment.’
Dieter stirred as I finished dressing, rolling over and revealing a glimpse of bare chest. I quickly turned away and fled the tent before he woke fully.
Mathis and Gunther stood up as I appeared, both eyeing my bound throat. At least they didn’t question me; routine had settled that much into us.
Stepping up from behind them, a Skythe girl beckoned me. Points of black and gold paint outlined her eyes and swept up the line of her temples. I joined her and she led me to her camp in silence. When we reached the small breakfast fire before Shadi’s tent, I expected the girl to continue on or perhaps vanish inside. Instead she knelt and peered into the pot resting over the embers, for all the world as if I didn’t exist.
Emerging from her tent, Shadi took in my wounded throat and the soldiers behind me with a glance.
‘Sit,’ she said, waving me to a cushion on the ground some distance from both herself and the girl by the cookfire. My heart fell. There could be no soft speaking over such a distance.
When Mathis and Gunther followed me, Shadi banished them. ‘Don’t crowd her! You’re a strange lot, aren’t you? Huddling beneath stone walls, always mobbing each other. Don’t your lungs ever ache for fresh air? Go, break your fast somewhere else. No harm will come to her in this camp.’
Once they’d retired out of earshot, Shadi turned back to me.
‘See what your stone roofs do to you? They make you lazy, sleeping past the dawn. I hope my daughter never fell prey to such a custom,’ she said, a savage sorrow twisting her face.
I had watched my family die. I had bargained and schemed and manipulated, biding my time until yesterday – only to earn a cut throat. I was through with being insulted.
‘Would you have preferred her to remain different to the people she chose?’ I said, although in truth I had no idea whether my mother had been in the habit of sleeping past dawn or not. ‘To be an outcast in her new home?’
‘Better that she had never chosen them,’ Shadi said, ladling some of the pot’s contents into a bowl worn smooth and dark by generations of hands.
The food was a uniform mucky yellow colour, and had a curdled texture. It smelt burnt, hot and cinderous. Eggs, my first mouthful told me, flecked with onion and sprinkled with cheese, probably goat’s from the crumbly texture. It tasted better than it looked or smelled, though, and resolution flooded through me with every mouthful.
‘Nothing like eggs to put colour back into the flesh,’ said Shadi, watching me eat, ‘even for a creature so pale as you. I was beginning to think you were weak. You did lose the squabble, after all.’
‘Constrained, not weak,’ I said, savouring the final mouthful.
‘Bah! What is there to constrain you? You’ve the sky in your blood, the wind in your marrow, a strong husband.’
Fury kept me silent.
‘Young Roshi here,’ she continued, gesturing towards the girl who’d fetched me. ‘She has constraints. Poor Roshi will relinquish all this’ – a sweep of her arm took in the tents, plains and sky – ‘to accompany you back to your stone boxes. Do you see her moping?’
I made no reply, though I thought Roshi’s studied refusal to look up during this exchange did look rather like moping.
‘Of course not,’ Shadi said. ‘She knows what is due her kith. She will do her duty, without griping.’
‘I’m not griping, and I’m not shirking my duty,’ I snapped, weary of lectures. ‘Forgive me if I’m not thrilled about the turn my life has taken. Crawling on my hands and knees through my family’s blood has left me in no mood to be harangued by strangers.’
Shadi blinked, taken aback, and Roshi stared at me, the morning sunlight twinkling off the gold specks of paint around her eyes.
At last I’d gotten through to them! The alliance would crumble around the man’s damnable ears while he slept.
‘We’re not strangers,’ said Roshi, in scandalised tones.
‘With everything I said, the “strangers” part is the most upsetting?’ I said, incredulous.
‘You came here seeking an alliance in the name of kinship, yet now you call us strangers,’ Roshi retorted, her eyes narrow and dark. ‘We’re not here to be claimed and dropped as it suits you!’
‘Nor are we lecturing,’ Shadi added.
‘With respect, buapi,’ said Roshi, turning a decidedly disrespectful look on the older woman, ‘you were lecturing her. She has that part of it right.’
‘Ingrates, the both of you,’ said Shadi, scowling. ‘Grandmothers should be listened to, not constantly interrupted. I’m sure I was never so rude as the both of you. How is it that I produced rude daughters who produced rude daughters?’
‘Don’t you think you’re straying off the point?’ I cried, battling to control the edge of hysteria in my voice.
‘What is the point?’ Roshi demanded, glowering.
‘There, you see? Rude daughters. Can’t you see the girl’s worried?’ Shadi said, rounding on Roshi. ‘Yet still you want to bicker –’
‘Enough!’ I cried, then stared them both down until I was sure I wouldn’t be interrupted. For a moment I studied Roshi, stunned by the revelation that she was my cousin, the daughter of my mother’s sister. Perhaps it was the paint, but I could trace no similarity to myself or my mother in her features, nor did I feel any kinship to her.
I didn’t have time to explore it; the hex was the most important subject. Now that both Shadi and Roshi had calmed, I continued, speaking quietly but firmly.
‘I’m sorry you think so highly of my husband, both of you, because I suspect that will change,’ I said, after looking around to make sure Mathis and Gunther were still well out of earshot. ‘If the circumstances of our binding don’t trouble you,’ I continued, turning back to Shadi, ‘the truth of that night may.’
Shadi grinned.
I flushed, embarrassed by her assumption, and ashamed, too, at having been so easily duped by Dieter in the first place. I summoned the words, practised them first in my head: He hexed me. He branded me to remind me of it, and he holds my life in thrall to his whim; but when I opened my mouth to speak them, no sound emerged.
‘Well?’ Roshi demanded.
He bound me with shadows, and holds my life hostage, I tried to say, but the words which emerged were, ‘He didn’t touch me. He left me alone.’
Shadi reached over to pat my hand, but I snatched it away, cutting short her pity.
He can kill me whenever he wants simply by erasing a single symbol branded on my forehead, I wanted to say, but, ‘We haven’t spent the night together since,’ came out instead.
I snapped my teeth shut on my damning words. It seemed Dieter’s hex not only held sway over the pulse of my life, but also controlled my tongue and blocked my words like a weir across a river.
Perhaps if I unbound my veil, I thought desperately, but my hands gripped each other until the knuckles seemed fused and I couldn’t pry them apart. I wanted to scream with the frustration of it, but my throat was still locked. The extent of Dieter’s trap threatened to overwhelm me.
How could I ever unlock the hex if I couldn’t find a way to speak of it?