The Mirror Empire (4 page)

“What do these all mean?” Lilia asked. “There’s no temple or stronghold here. I know. I’ve been there. But it’s marked like the others.”

“You should find out,” Roh said.

She pulled her hand away. “That’s the other side of the country. Through the woodlands.” She wasn’t gifted. How was she going to get all the way out there by herself?

“So what are you going to do, clean up after novice Oras your whole life?” Roh crossed his arms. He was almost as tall as her, and more than a year younger, but leaner and stronger. For a moment, she wished she could have his perfect legs and powerful confidence.

“I’m glad you found this,” she said. She got down from the chair and made her way back to the scullery stair.

“Listen,” Roh said. “I can’t leave the temple without permission, but you can. You’re just a drudge.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

He sighed. “My mother once asked another seer about my fate,” Roh said, “because as much as she tried, she couldn’t see it. The seer told my mother I’d die an old man in an orchard. I’d be a farmer, with six spouses and dozens of children.”

“A parajista farmer? I can’t imagine that.”

“Me either,” Roh said, “but Para’s going to be descendent in another few years. What if it never comes back?”

“It always comes back.”

“Well, the seer saw something different,” he said.

Lilia gazed at the dark shape on the ceiling that followed Oma. “They always come back,” she repeated.

“Maybe,” Roh said, “maybe not.”

“You were passed some good pieces in life,” she said.

“Is everything some strategy game to you?”

“Well, yes,” she said, as she’d been thinking of kindar, a cooperative board game played with wooden pieces meant to represent family members. Roh had a large family, multiple mothers and fathers and siblings and other relations. “Be happy with how things turned out. You have a family that loves you.”

“
You
don’t love me,” Roh said.

That startled her. “What are you talking about?”

His color darkened, which surprised her even more. Parajistas from powerful Clan Garika did not make eyes at kinless drudges.

“We’re good friends,” she said. “Is that not enough?”

Lovely, arrogant boys like him only loved a person until they loved them back.

She turned and stumbled down the steps, gripping the rail hand over hand to keep from falling headlong back down all twelve flights. Her breathing was better, but she would need to see the temple physician. Spending time with Roh had gotten more and more confusing of late. He left her more frustrated than anything. Her focus was the promise she made her mother. That’s all.

She made it down almost a floor before she heard voices coming from below.

Lilia tried to step back, and fell. Roh grabbed her arm to steady her. He released her almost immediately and apologized for touching her without asking.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Someone’s coming.” Lilia tried to get past him up the stairs, but there wasn’t any room.

“You can kiss me,” he said, staring over her shoulder as the voices grew closer.

“What?” she said.

“What other reason do we have for being up here?”

“Para, Roh, stop ironing my head.”

“I’m not trying to annoy you,” he said.

“Since when?”

“Can I kiss you?” he whispered. “Should we tell them we’re doing laundry, maybe?”

It was a rude and sometimes dangerous thing, to touch without consent. No one had dared do more than grab at her sleeve since she was twelve. People in the temple might play strategy games with her, but no one cared to court her. She wasn’t entirely sure she was ready.

“No,” she said.

“What are you doing up here?”

Lilia jumped. Roh let out a squeak. Lilia covered her mouth to keep from laughing.

Ora Almeysia, Mistress of Novices, rounded the stair ahead of them. Almeysia was tall and wiry, like a bird, with a nest of tangled white hair knotted in pale ribbons.

“I’m sorry,” Lilia said. Her cheeks felt hot. She glanced at Roh. His color, too, had deepened, and that made her want to laugh even more. All this sneaking around for a mark on a map that she had no idea how to reach.

“We’re going,” Roh said.

“Rohinmey Tadisa Garika,” Almeysia said. “This is not the first time I’ve caught you where you shouldn’t be. I want you in my study at dusk. We’ll mete out your atonement for this indiscretion. And you… who are you?”

“Just a drudge,” Lilia said.

“Drudges have names. What are you called?”

“Lilia Sona.”

“No clan.”

“I’m a woodland Dhai,” Lilia said.

Almeysia snorted. “Woodland. Not surprising, then, to see this sort of behavior from
you
. I’ve told the Kai time and again not to permit you feral dissidents here. The scullery master will be informed of this trespass. Go, before I toss you to the pitcher plants.”

Lilia squeezed past skinny Almeysia and limped down the steps as quickly as she could.

They made it down four more flights before Roh said, “Why was Almeysia taking the scullery stair? She’s allowed to be up there. She could have taken the main stair.”

“She was talking to someone,” Lilia said. “I heard voices.”

“But she was alone.”

“Should we start spying on her, since we’ve already broken a temple law?”

“It wasn’t a very
big
temple law,” Roh said cheerfully.

“I bet when you’re that old, you’ll talk to yourself, too.”

“It’s a lot like talking to you,” he said, “only I get a lot more compliments.”

They walked down the rest of the stairs in silence. Little lightning jabs of pain spread up Lilia’s leg from ankle to knee. Every few breaths, she coughed. She focused on her breathing and pushed out of the scullery stair and back into the banquet hall. A few Oras generally worked there between meals, sipping cinnamon tea or smoking Tordinian cigarettes, but she saw no one there now. She limped to where she had hidden the laundry, hoping Roh wouldn’t follow.

That’s when she saw the stir of figures standing under the entrance to the foyer. At least a dozen novices and drudges fixed their attention on the giant amberwood door.

Lilia came up behind them, dragging the laundry. A very tall, dark man stood in the foyer, speaking with four of the senior Oras. He wore a long black coat. She saw the hilt of a blade sticking up through the back of it. In Dhai, only trained members of the militia were allowed to carry weapons.

“Who is he?” Roh asked as he came up behind her.

One of the novices, a boy named Kihin, glanced back at them and said, “He’s a sanisi, all the way from Saiduan.”

“I’ve seen sanisi in books,” Roh said. “He doesn’t look like a sanisi. Not a real one.”

“Ora Ohanni found him trying to get through the webbing around the garden,” Kihin said. “I guess they don’t have web fences there. My father says–”

But at that moment, the sanisi raised his voice and turned toward them. “Bring me to your Kai or I will cut my way to her. I’m here to save your maggoty, cannibalistic little country. Against my better judgment.”

The sanisi’s gaze met Lilia’s. He frowned. She stepped behind Kihin, trying to avoid the stranger’s look. Roh glanced back at her.

“My name is Taigan. I need to speak with the Kai,” the sanisi repeated. As Lilia peered around Kihin, she saw the sanisi still looking at her. “If things are progressing here as they did in my country, it’s time you all stopped dancing around the olive trees and prepared for war.”

3

Ahkio started awake in the arms of three strong women whose names he was pleased to remember. His cousin Liaro lay sprawled naked beside him: a long, lean man with a face that would inspire no poetry. The number of infused everpine weapons and baldrics scattered across the floor reminded him that their bedmates were members of the Dhai militia posted at the Kuallina Stronghold.

It was not an unpleasant way to start his morning.

After untangling himself from bed, Ahkio snuck out the back of the house to avoid bumping into his housemate Meyna and her child. Her husbands were likely off working in the sheep fields, which made his exit that much easier. He walked down the ramp leading to the knotty exterior of their living house. Most homes in central Dhai were hollowed out of gonsa trees, their crowns so great they blotted out the sky. It took a good half hour of walking to clear the shadow of the gonsa trees and reach the Osono Clan square.

The dozen students he taught religion and ethics were already assembled under the immature gonsa tree next to the square, the one that would be big enough to house a proper school in another twelve years, when Tira became ascendant, and the tirajistas would use that power to sculpt it. In the distance, he saw the silky threads of the webbing that dissuaded the worst of the walking trees from inundating the square. Most homesteads beyond the webbing had only thorn fences and homegrown defenses like fox-snaps to protect their families and livestock from creeping vegetation with a taste for blood and bone.

“Ahkio!” the students called when they saw him, and he waved, for a moment forgetting to be self-conscious of his hands. The children had stopped asking about his scars when he told them he once fought a fire-breathing bear. It was a prettier story than the one their parents might have told them.

“Today, we talk about Dhai government,” he said.

“Does this mean you’ll tell us about your mother,” one of the girls asked, “and how she died so your sister could become Kai?”

Ahkio winced. “Terrible things sometimes happen to Kais,” he said, “like what happened to my parents. We’ll discuss that when we speak of the line of the Kai, and I’ll also tell you about Faith Ahya, who birthed the first of us.”

Ahkio tried to smile, but it took a great effort. His sister Kirana was Kai now at thirty – almost eleven years older than him – and talking about her supposed divinity always made him uncomfortable. His sister hadn’t blazed down from a satellite the way it sounded like Faith Ahya did in
The Book of Oma
, though there were days he wished she had. Mostly, she was just his sister – a warm, sometimes aggravating, and often wise woman who believed in him even when the rest of the country wanted to see him exiled for madness after the death of their parents.

“Government is not determined by Oma,” Ahkio said. “If you learn nothing else in this class, remember that. It’s created by people like you. When we were slaves to those Dorinah witches across the mountains five hundred years ago, a woman named Faith Ahya fell in love with a man named Hahko, and the Dhai people followed them and their kin out of bondage in Dorinah, not because of their brute strength or cunning but because of their faith in the vision Faith and Hahko spun for them. This was the refuge they created. Now each of you is a part of building its future.”

Only one student rolled her eyes. Ahkio made a note to tell her some terrible story later about how people from Saiduan spirited away arrogant young students who didn’t listen to their teachers.

“Oma,” he muttered aloud, because he realized he’d heard precisely that type of story from the Oras in the temple when he was younger. He was going to end up an old man teaching the children of shepherds to fear monsters in the woods.

At midday, most of his students went home to help move their family’s thorn fences so they could rotate their sheep from one plot of community land to another. Ahkio napped and spent some time at the local tea house playing kindar with Saurika, the clan leader of Osono, a pleasantly plump, beady-eyed old man who kept claiming his leader piece long before he’d swept Ahkio’s family pieces off the board.

“You’re a cheater,” Ahkio told him.

“You’re one to talk,” Saurika said. “I taught your sister to play kindar, and now I see you using my own defenses against me.”

Later in the afternoon, a few students returned for a lesson in arithmetic, something Ahkio was not nearly as qualified to teach as religion and ethics. When he tired of it, he invited everyone home to dinner with Meyna and her husbands.

They arrived at Meyna’s house and sat at the big communal table out back – Ahkio, three of his students, his cousin Liaro, and Meyna’s husbands, who were also brothers – big Hadaoh and skinny little Rhin. The brothers shared a father, and one could see their kinship in their faces, their postures. Hadaoh stood at the outdoor stove, poking at the embers and drinking from a mug of wine. Rhin rubbed Meyna’s swollen feet and told her some bit of gossip from the square about a merchant’s new husband. Meyna was hugely pregnant with her second child. Her first, Mey-Mey, was two and danced around the table with a large day lily stalk, singing nonsense songs about angry sparrows that lived in the bellies of bears.

The night was hot, and moths circled the lanterns along the path to the house. His students were deep in a discussion with Liaro about the virtues of the country’s second Kai, and whether or not Faith Ahya actually glowed when she appeared to prophets and seers.

Ahkio kept his hands tucked beneath his long sleeves. He gazed out past the students to the lights and laughter coming from the families nearby who were doing just as they were – congregating for good food and good company on one of high summer’s last vital nights. He heard someone swear and stab out into the darkness at some flailing thing. The woman came back from the shadow beyond her table carrying a limp flower, its sticky tentacles still seething. She tossed it into her outdoor fireplace. Even from a hundred paces away, Ahkio heard the plant hissing.

“Ahkio?” Meyna said.

He started. “Yes?”

“Go get me wine, love. It’s your turn to fetch drinks.”

Ahkio touched thumb to forehead in a mocking way – an overly formal gesture between kin – and rose from the table. He paused a moment to admire her. She tilted her head, smiled; she was beautiful by any measure and a formidable businesswoman.