The Mirror Empire (39 page)

But he could go to her.

Once he made the decision, it seemed so easy, so obvious. He would go to her. She wasn’t far, if her letter to Daolyn about visiting Lake Morta was true. The lake was just a three- or four-day journey away, southeast. He had been there before during high summer with Zezili. The dog Zezili let him use was still in the kennels. The dajians would put on the tack. He would pack food. He would… But he would be a man traveling alone. Someone would stop him, ask for his papers, his chaperone. He might be able to pass as a woman, though, if he wore a coat and hood, left the girdle behind…

Zezili would understand.

He walked to Zezili’s wardrobe. Her clothes were too big for him, but he managed to tie on women’s straight-legged trousers and an under-tunic. He found a dark coat with a hood. He would have to wear his own boots. Bring gloves. It would be cold at the lake. Daolyn kept a little petty money in a box in the high cupboard in the kitchen for everyday things. He retrieved this, pocketed it, and went back to where Daolyn lay. He put a pillow from his bed beneath her head and draped her with his own quilt. The dajians had gathered in the doorway to the kitchen and stared at him as he moved about. He did not speak to them until he was dressed and walking to the door.

“Care for Daolyn,” he said. “Tell her I’m coming back with Syre Zezili.”

He shut the gate behind him. One of the dajians saddled his dog, silent and obedient as the mount. As the dajian handed over the reins, Anavha saw her brand in the light of the kennel lanterns. A raised scar of tawny flesh, Zezili’s initials branded onto the back of her hand.

He remembered his own mark, Zezili cutting her initials into him. You are mine. I own you.

He got up onto the dog and whistled him forward.

 

Zezili arrived at her estate four days later, well after dark. She let Dakar’s reins fall. The dajians weren’t expecting her. She pounded on the gate and called for Daolyn.

The door opened. Pale light spilled onto the walk. Daolyn held a lantern. She had a yellowish bruise along one side of her face.

Zezili pulled off her helm and pushed past her. “What’s happened?” she said.

“Your near-cousin ordered entrance,” Daolyn said. She called for dajians to tend to Dakar and shut the gate after them. “Half a dozen women arrived with her. They asked to see you. When I said you were not home, they turned on Anavha.”

“Where is he?”

“I do not know,” Daolyn said, and Zezili saw her flinch. “The women assaulted me. When I woke, your husband and the women had gone. Tanasai was dead in your husband’s room.”

“Did the other women take him? I will have them hunted down for thieves! If they’ve so much as
touched
–”

“No, I spoke with the dajians. They said your husband went alone.”

“Alone?”

“Took one of the dogs.”

Zezili let out her breath in one long puff. “Did you alert the priests, the enforcers, any of the others?”

Daolyn shook her head.

“Good girl. And the body?”

“Outside, in the barn,” Daolyn said.

“I must think,” Zezili said. She walked to her room, unshuttered the lanterns. She paced. Daolyn hovered in the doorway.

“He read your last letter,” Daolyn said. “He may have gone to Lake Morta to find you.”

“Why’d you let him read that?”

“I read him your letters,” Daolyn said. “You did not say to keep correspondence from him.”

Zezili swore. The journey had been wearying, and what she found here at the end of it only deepened her exhaustion. Her near-cousin had come here with the intent to use or perhaps harm one of Zezili’s possessions. If it had been Dakar, and Dakar bit Tanasai, killed her even, could the dog be faulted? No, that argument would not hold, not if the priests were called into the matter. No priest would speak of mercy for an act of violence, committed by a dumb beast or no. Would he be foolish enough to travel all the way to Lake Morta?

“Did he take money?” Zezili asked.

“A bit from the petty jar,” Daolyn said. “Not enough for a sea passage.”

“The roads are not safe for an unescorted man. He will not have gotten far.”

“Should I alert a hunter? Someone to track a missing man?”

“No. His disappearance coincides with Tanasai’s. A hunter would figure that out. She might ask questions.” Zezili stopped pacing and stared at her shuttered window. “He would not leave me,” she murmured. “Get me pen and paper. He may have gone to my sisters, seeking assistance. I’ll have Taodalain and her wife make discreet inquiries at the mardanas. Quickly, go!”

Daolyn moved into the dark courtyard.

Zezili crossed to her window, opened the shutters. The room was cold, but the outside air was colder and spilled onto her face like a slap.

She could send letters to her sisters and go to Lake Morta herself. It was on the way back east to the coast. She owed an explanation to Monshara, though, and perhaps the Empress.

Daolyn returned. Zezili penned the letters to her sisters and Monshara. But as she began the letter to the Empress, she could think of no words to justify her actions. She had deserted her post to run after her absent husband, a man who had committed violence against a woman. If she did not get to him first, he could be killed or sold into slavery. If the Empress never knew, if Monshara kept the confidence… a few days more. Monshara could slaughter that camp without her, and Zezili could join them at the next. It’s what she wrote in her letter to Monshara.

As she handed off the letters to Daolyn to post, she was suddenly drenched in a sheen of cold sweat. If she did not get to Anavha before the local enforcers… if the Empress found out… but those were a fool’s fears. She would sort this out the way she always had.

Zezili went to her desk and opened a handful of correspondence Daolyn had yet to forward to her, many of them addressed from Daorian. Three were letters from her sisters, likely relating gossip or asking for more money, and another was from Syre Kakolyn.

Zezili broke the seal on Syre Kakolyn’s letter. There was a signature at the bottom that was not Kakolyn’s. Kakolyn had her second pen all of her correspondence, as she herself could not pen a word much beyond her own name.

 

Zezili set the letter aside. Killing Seekers? How much more madness could the country take? Zezili’s legion would be worthless against the Tai Mora without the aid of Tulana’s Seekers. Zezili opened one of the missives from her sister Taodalain and read about the news from Daorian. She skimmed most of it until she came to a particular passage:

 

Zezili pondered both reports and looked through the papers Taodalain had sent. They were poorly printed, sloppy, on low-quality paper, and full of propagandist ranting. Monshara had told Zezili to stay out of things. Told her she knew nothing and understood less. But even Zezili could see that eradicating the entire country’s labor would result in famine and strife. The Tai Mora would coax them into destroying themselves.

And no one stood in their way.

Zezili moved, of habit, toward Anavha’s room. She stopped halfway across the courtyard, realized her error, and turned back to her own room. No, she could not summon him from sleep. Tanasai had stolen him from her.

She got into bed, alone. Daolyn had turned down the sheets, but not warmed the bed; an understandable oversight, considering the circumstances. Zezili lay awake, staring at the canopy hanging from the posts of her bed, listening to the stillness of the house. The fountain had been turned off for the winter. She heard laughter somewhere. The dajians’ quarters, likely. She closed her eyes and saw a tide of blood, a field littered in dajian bodies.

She pushed back her blankets and walked across the courtyard. She pushed open the door to Anavha’s room and unshuttered one of the lanterns by the door. Whatever mess had been done by Tanasai, there was no immediate trace of it. Anavha’s bed was made, his dressing table in order. His dog-eared copy of
The Book of Rhea
lay at his bedside table. Zezili walked to the book, pressed a finger to the hard leather cover, and moved away, to the dressing table.

She leaned over and looked at the bottles of scent, the containers of gold powder, rouge, and kohl. She opened the big standing wardrobe and gazed into the interior. It smelled heavily of everpine and the musky scent of Anavha, mixed with saffron and lemon grass. She tugged at the white sleeve of one of his coats. She had the ridiculous urge to press it to her nose and inhale the scent of him lingering on the clothing.

Zezili curled her lip, disgusted at her own sentiment. She left the room, closed the door. She would have Daolyn lock it until Anavha’s return.

She walked back to her room, went to the window, and stood leaning out into the air, inhaling cold like a drowning woman first tasting air, her head thrown back, fingers gripping the sill.

She wanted her husband. She wanted the world back the way it was. She wanted the Tai Mora dead and their mirror smashed to dust.

32

Anavha was lost. He had passed the previous two nights in dodgy way houses along dark roads. The dog was hungry; whenever Anavha dismounted, it pushed its nose into his hand. He hadn’t shaved in three days, and his face itched. Daolyn would have had time to alert the priests and the enforcers by now, and he trembled to think of what would happen if they found him before he found Zezili.

He got back onto the dog and turned it round the way he had come. He had no idea what direction that was. Didn’t the moons rise in the west where the sun set? He had located himself by the cobbled road in the beginning, but he didn’t know a lot about roads. He had never seen a map of Dorinah, and his schooling had been limited.

He urged the dog down a dirt track. He clung to the dog with numbed hands and prayed to Rhea to help him find the right way. The moons moved across the sky. His dog halted once, to sniff at the frozen body of a big spotted rabbit lying in a ditch.

Anavha nodded off in the saddle sometime later and woke to find that the dog had paused again at the edge of a vast snowy expanse ringed in jagged mountains. He thought perhaps he had come to Lake Morta at last, but it was too small and not the right shape. Where on Rhea’s face was he?

Anavha saw a flicker of light on the other side of the crooked lake. His dog barked. The sound echoed eerily across the lake. Anavha whistled the dog forward. They followed the snowy path around the circumference of the lake.

It was another hour before Anavha reached the porch of the inn, but by that time, the thought of finally finding Zezili had invigorated him. He would need a bath, a shave, a change of clothing. He could not allow her to see him this way.

He slid off the dog’s back, so sore he could barely walk. No one came out to greet him. He pulled his hood low over his face and walked up to the porch, tried the door. It was open.

He walked into the common room. The light was bad; most of the lanterns had been shuttered. Candles threw shadows. A woman sat behind the bar counter, reading a battered copy of a book he recognized called
Guise of the Heart
, a romantic political thriller set in Daorian a century prior. Taodalain had loved that book.

The stout woman put the book down. Candles drooled great runnels of wax along the edges of the bar. The weather was too cold for flame flies.

Anavha stayed a step away from the light.

“A little late, isn’t it?” the woman asked. She could have been his mother with her big squared shoulders and disgruntled mouth.

“I would like a room, if that’s all right,” Anavha said, careful about the pitch of his voice. “Maybe a bath. And… my dog is outside.”

The woman nodded at an arched doorway near the stair. “Bath’s through there. How many nights?”

“One, I think. Is Syre Zezili Hasaria here?” he asked. He could not keep the trembling from his voice.

“No Syres here, child.”

“Which lake is this, matron?”

“Which lake?” she said. “Are you so lost? This is Lake Orastina.”

“Is that close to Lake Morta?”

“Morta’s another day south of here. Where are you coming from?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just need a room.”

The woman demanded payment. Anavha fumbled through his purse for the correct amount and paid over the last of his money. He hadn’t realized how expensive things were. The woman handed over a key.

“You’ll have number eleven, last door on the left, second floor.”