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“What of Shalomon’s treasures,” I asked, “and the One God’s secret?”

Shoanete spread her hands. “These things the Melehakim took with them and hid, and no one has seen them since.”

Thus the stories of Kaneka’s grandmother, which I pondered at length. Eleazar ben Enokh had hoped to find that the Tribe of Dân had preserved customs lost by the Habiru, but I do not think he ever envisioned this Covenant of Wisdom. What is truth? History and legend are woven together like a Mendacant’s cloak, and when the gods themselves are silent, no mortal may say where truth ends and fabrication begins. I did not think the One God of the Tanakh would bind his people into such a covenant with a foreign Queen-but those stories were written by Habiru scribes. Makeda’s people told another story, passed from mouth to mouth.

…
great cries that struck fear into their enemies
…

Blessed Elua, I prayed, let it be true.

Let it be the Name of God.

Sixty-Nine

AS PLEASANT as our time in Debeho was, it had to end. There was a great feast on our last day, and no one in the village did any work save to prepare for the festivities, and afterward to eat and drink and make merry for hours on end, with much singing and dancing. Even Tifari Amu and Bizan were made welcome, for they were skilled hunters and contributed much game for the pot during our stay. Kaneka could not entirely maintain her professed dislike of the highland tribesman, and I thought it possible he might return to Debeho to court her.

Imriel was happy in the village. With a child’s quick ear-and his mother’s wit-he had become proficient at Jeb’ez, much to the chagrined amusement of Joscelin, who was not much past nursery-rhymes. He made friends easily there, adults and children alike, none of whom knew or cared that Imriel de la Courcel was the son of the deadliest traitoress Terre d’Ange had ever known. And he hadn’t had a nightmare since we arrived.

“We should leave him here,” Joscelin said, reading my thoughts. “It would be safer.”

“Do you think he’d stay?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Ask him.”

I did, and got the Courcel frown in answer, neat furrows forming between his brows. “You said the Tsingani helped you find me because of Hyacinthe. You said it was right and fair that I should go.”

“True,” I said, wondering why I’d said somewhat so foolish. “But you could help most of all by remaining safe in Debeho.”

That went over about as well as one might expect. “
I
got Joscelin’s sword for him in Daršanga!” he reminded me.

“Yes,” I said, and sighed. “You did. And if you try anything half so dangerous in Saba, I swear, I’ll get Tifari Amu to hold you down and sit on you.”

His eyes lit with hope. “You won’t leave me?” There was an unexpected plea in his voice.

“No,” I said, and this time I sighed inwardly.
Love as thou wilt
. Whether I willed it or no, Blessed Elua’s precept had come to encompass this boy, and I didn’t have the heart to abandon him. His trust had been violated too many times already. “I promise, Imri. We won’t leave you.”

After the feasting, Kaneka told the story of Drujan, and everyone fell silent to listen.

She had a touch of her grandmother’s gift. ’Twas strange, hearing it told from her perspective. The audience sucked in their breath at the catalogue of the Mahrkagir’s cruelties, although she did not list them all, no; not the ones I knew. Nor did she describe the daily squalor of life in the fateful
zenana
-the factions, the petty hatreds. And I … I did not enter the tale as a figure of contempt, Death’s Whore, despised by all, but as a cunning trickster, cleverly winning the Mahrkagir’s trust. It made me smile, a little bit. But the brooding presence of Angra Mainyu loomed over her tale, terrifying and oppressive, and that much was true.

And the battle in the festal hall, with all its attendant horrors-that, Kaneka told well, much to the Jebeans’ shivering delight. They looked in awe at Joscelin as she described how his sword wove and flashed in patterns of steel too quick for the eye to follow, and a ring of the dead rose around him. He smiled quietly, his hands resting on his knees. It was not a thing of which he was proud, nor ever would be.

When she described the column of flame bursting from the well of Ahura Mazda, they clapped and shouted in approval-even her brother Mafud, whose envy and long-born guilt were erased by his relief at her safe return. And thus the story ended in triumph. I looked at Imriel, whose expression was troubled.

“It wasn’t like that, Phèdre,” he said to me. “Not really.”

“I know.” I stroked his hair. “That’s why it’s important to remember. But the stories are important, too.”

And we can bear to hear it now, I thought; not the whole truth, no, but Kaneka’s truth, the one she will carry to sustain her, that she will weave into legend and one day her grandchildren will tell to their children, holding up an ancient Drujani war-axe and saying, this was hers, and this was her story.

If it is so, mayhap we can learn to endure our own.

This was her land, and these were her people. I envied her that. Her story was done, and I prayed for her sake it was so. Of a surety, she had earned it. Still, mine continued. A sacrifice had been made, and I had allowed another to take my place. I had promised to walk the
Lungo Drom
, the longest road, for Hyacinthe’s sake. The end of his story was yet unwritten. I prayed it would find an ending half as meet, in debts forgiven and joyous reunion.

I prayed it would end in love. I prayed we could come
home
, all of us.

In the morning, we departed for Saba. Kaneka held me hard and I returned her embrace, feeling her warm and solid presence. “Take care of yourself, little one,” she whispered. “Take care of them all. May your strange gods watch over your every step.”

I nodded and swallowed. She had been a good friend, and I was sorry to be leaving her. “And you, Fedabin. I think, after last night, you have a long life as the storyteller of Debeho ahead of you.”

“It may be so.” Kaneka released me and grinned. “It may be so!”

Onward we rode, turning back in the saddle to wave a half-dozen final farewells. At length, the village faded into the landscape, the mud huts indistinguishable from the tawny plains. Once again, we were on our way.

On the second day, we reentered the mountains, climbing treacherously narrow trails in single file, ascending to dizzying heights with the valley spread below us like a green carpet, deceptively smooth. Our guides Tifari Amu and Bizan relaxed in the mountains, chatting amicably back and forth as they rode. Joscelin too was at his ease, at home in the highlands of Jebe-Barkal as in his own Siovale, and Imriel-I had forgotten that he had been reared in the heights. I watched him scrambling about the crags in the evenings, gathering deadfalls for the fire, agile as a mountain goat.

A lost prince raised in secret by the priesthood of Elua, innocent of his origins. That had been his mother’s plan. Watching him in the mountains, I nearly wished it had been so. Too late, now. The goatherd prince was not to be.

Once, a party of Tigrati tribesmen came upon us. For a few minutes, our welcome was uncertain. Hands hovered over swords, and all of us eyed one another. I held my arm out, extended as Tifari had taught us, revealing the Ras’ passage-token, and Imriel did the same. Joscelin was tense, his hands crossed low over his daggers; he had not fought since his injury. Then one of the men grinned and made a jest, and Bizan replied in kind, and all was well.
Give every courtesy, and never reveal fear
. We made camp together that evening and shared our goods in a common pot.

I heard the “mountain-talkers” for the first time that night, the speaking drums that Audine Davul’s father had studied. The hunters carried a smaller version, a short length of log hollowed and polished, which their percussionist beat on with mallets. It made a sharp, staccato sound, carrying over the highlands in a series of complex rhythms. After a time, we heard the great drums of their distant village boom in answer.

“We will pass undisturbed,” Tifari Amu said in satisfaction. “The news has been spread.” And it must have been so, for we encountered no one else in the highlands.

After a week, we began to descend once more, following a series of plateaus to rejoin the river. Wildlife abounded in these regions. I cannot even begin to count the species we saw. Antelope and gazelles were plentiful, graceful creatures with russet hides and spiraling, pronged horns. They had a trick of springing straight into the air with all four feet off the ground when startled. Bizan and Tifari Amu hunted them on horseback, with spears. It was an astonishing thing to see the swift Umaiyyati horses keep pace with the fleet beasts, swerving and doubling.

There were camelopards, too, which is another beast I would not have credited without seeing it. They are immensely tall and angular, with legs like knobbled stilts and necks that stretch to the treetops, pale hides covered with a crazed pattern of darker blotches. For all their size, they are gentle creatures and merely watched us pass, wondering.

Of a surety, there were other, less benign inhabitants. At night we heard the roar of lions, a fearsome sound. When we could, we would cut acacia branches, dense with sharp, hooked thorns, and assemble a makeshift stockade around our campsite, for beasts of prey would come for our horses if they dared. There were sharp-faced jackals like great black foxes, and hyenas, the carrion-eaters, with their ungainly bodies and spotted hides. After a successful hunt, one could always hear them, the eerie barking laughter ringing out in the night as they fought over the bones, which they cracked in their strong jaws.

There were scavenger birds, too; the sky would darken with them when Bizan and Tifari made a kill … buzzards, and vultures with their vast wingspans and bare necks, and strangest of all, great storks that flew with their long legs trailing and landed to pick their way through the throng of bird-life with long, pointed beaks.

’Twas a beautiful land, that much I will own. I could understand why Audine Davul’s father had loved it. I could understand, too, why she longed for home. For all the wonders of Jebe-Barkal-and I am glad, to this day, that I have seen a herd of oliphaunts bathing in the river at sundown-I could not help but think that the lavender must be in full bloom in Terre d’Ange, perfuming the air, grapes beginning to ripen on the vine.

Still, there were far worse places we could be.

I knew. We had been there.

And whether it had been madness to bring him or no, Imriel thrived on the journey. Although the loose Jebean burnoose kept off the worst intensity of the sun, the pallor of the
zenana
had given way to healthy color. He had lost the skulking wariness I had first known, and the shadows under his eyes were gone. Although he was far from sturdy, his bones no longer seemed quite so frail and vulnerable beneath his skin, and I swear, he’d grown a full inch since we left Daršanga.

“He must be eleven, you know,” Joscelin remarked one evening, watching Imriel lay tinder and branches for the campfire in accordance with Bizan’s careful instruction.

“Eleven!” It startled me somehow; his age was fixed, in my mind, at ten.

“Do you remember, he was born in the spring? Six months old, when he vanished in fall.” From the Little Court of La Serenissima, he meant; he’d been part of that search. “Somewhere between Drujan and here, he would have turned eleven.”

“You’re right,” I said.

Joscelin watched him without speaking for a time. “He’ll hate it at court,” he said eventually. “They’ll watch him like a hawk, every minute of every day, waiting for him to turn into his mother.”

“Ysandre won’t allow it,” I protested.

He gave me a deep look. “Her own cousin tried to have him killed. Elua knows whether or not Barquiel was behind it. What’s Ysandre going to do? Bring back the Cassiline Brothers, assign him as someone’s ward?”

“If she has to.”

“She won’t like it.” He shook his head. “Not after La Serenissima. And that won’t stop the talk. Nothing can stop the talk. He’s already pulled one of Melisande’s own tricks, eluding Lord Amaury like that.”

“He didn’t know,” I said softly.

“You think that will matter where gossip is concerned?”

I looked away. “No.”

“It will make him hard,” Joscelin murmured. “I hate to see it, that’s all.”

“I know.” I watched Imriel crouch beside the firepit, coaxing a spark from Bizan’s flint striker and blowing softly on a nest of dried grasses at the heart of his arrangement. “Well, we’ve a long way to go yet, and a longer way back.”

“Not as long as it was,” Joscelin said. “Not nearly so long as it was.”

And I was not sure, then, if we spoke of the journey or somewhat else.

Seventy

WE OWED our respite to the rhinoceros.

’Tis passing strange, to owe so much to such a monstrous beast; and yet it is true. We were yet in sight of the river when the creature burst through the dense underbrush of the acacias, the hooked thorns troubling its thick hide not at all. I sat my horse stock-still, feeling it tremble beneath me, staring at the looming head like the prow of a warship, small, maddened eyes set on either side of that great central horn. All I could think of was the Black Boar of the Cullach Gorrym, and how it had emerged from the wood to lead Drustan’s troops to victory in Alba. I’d thought that was big.

Then Tifari Amu shouted, and Bizan, and both of them wheeled their horses in opposite directions, seeking to draw the beast off. Having none of it, it lowered its head and charged, swerving at the last minute to miss me, scattering our bearers and our donkey-train, scattering all of us. It was fast, faster than one would imagine, and its passage shook the very earth. I heard cries of dismay and a yell of pain as someone was entangled in the thorns.

And then-

“Joscelin!”

Like in Daršanga, Imriel’s voice, high and true, rose above the shouting and the drumming of mighty hooves. I saw, and breathed a curse. Joscelin had dismounted and stood between me and the beast as it made its turn, rounding. His sword gleamed, angled in his two-handed grip, and he stood light on his feet, waiting.