The Mirror Empire (52 page)

“You would call him to help even if I wasn’t going to be Patron.”

“Would I?” she said.

Her tone chilled him. “You insult me,” he said. “When have you ever had to threaten me?”

“These are dark times, brother.”

“And you need my army.”

“Saiduan needs your army.”

Rajavaa closed his eyes. He could not bear to look at her face so close. It reminded him too much of their mother’s face. He wondered if that was what made it so ugly.

“Call your omajista,” he said.

“Come upstairs, Patron,” she said, and pulled away.

 

43

Lilia turned Gian’s care over to Emlee long before the woman regained consciousness. She knew it could not be the same Gian, but her heart had swelled at the sight of her, and that frightened Lilia too much for words. A week after seeing Gian again, Lilia sat alone in the meeting house at the center of the camp, huddled in a tattered coat and new mittens Emlee had made her. It was far too late for her to be out alone, but the day after prayer days, members of the camp congregated to drink homebrewed liquor and tell stories. The warmth and camaraderie reminded her of the temple.

As she listened to the drunken rambling of the young man on the stage, she noticed a tall woman walk into the room. She had a bold, regal face and broad shoulders. She was too skinny for her big frame and had the hollowed look of those who had spent some time in the camps. There was something in the kiss of her mouth that reminded Lilia of someone. The woman’s hair was a spill of black knotted at the back of her head, very long and well kept.

It was Gian. A thinner, warier version of Gian. She did not have the same confident walk or lustrous skin as the woman Lilia watched die in the mountains.

Gian came over to her. She wore a skirt that was too short for her, and her ankles were muddy.

Lilia tensed. She looked straight ahead.

Gian sat next to her.

“I know you,” Gian said.

“I’m sorry,” Lilia said. “All the things I did, it didn’t-”

“You’re the one who saved me,” Gian said. Her voice was very soft, much softer than Lilia remembered, and she had a Dorinah accent, the same accent all the Dhai had when speaking the patois of the camps.

Another man took the stage. He told the tale of Faith Ahya’s death. Lilia had heard the dajian version before. It was different from the one in Dhai, where Faith died in childbed, birthing the first Kai and ushering in Dhai’s five hundred years of peace. In the version here, she was betrayed by her lover and confidant, beheaded and spiked up on the ramparts of Daorian long after her child was born. Lilia did not like the story, not until the end. Because at the end of this story, Faith Ahya flew.

“I’m Gian,” the woman said. “You remember me? You and Emlee cleaned me up, my leg. I was half mad, I think.”

“Oh,” Lilia said. “You aren’t Gian.”

“But I am.”

Lilia remembered what Gian had said about her twin having a double in this world. This was, of course, not Lilia’s Gian. It was the twin Gian would have had if she’d been born under a lavender sky.

“I’m sorry. Yes,” Lilia said. “Of course you’re Gian.”

Gian frowned and hunched her shoulders. “I understand if you don’t want to talk to me,” she said. “It’s just that you’re a temple Dhai. I thought you must be different.”

“Because you betrayed the Empress?”

“It isn’t like that.”

Lilia gestured to the stage. “You should tell them your story.”

“My story is mine,” Gian said.

“We’re one people,” Lilia said.

“You really are a temple Dhai.”

“Yes.”

“You have yet to tell a story here, either,” Gian said. “I know. I’ve been standing at the back, watching to see if you’ll speak.”

“Why didn’t you come up to me before?”

Gian’s color deepened. “I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“This,” Gian said.

Lilia shifted in her seat and tried to think of something else to say. “I don’t think they’d be interesting, my stories. Mostly, I tell stories about what I’ve read.”

Gian spoke softly into her ear, “I think you could spin a beautiful story.”

“I–”

Gian pressed her hand to Lilia’s. She had strong hands with long, slender fingers. Just like the other Gian. Lilia stared at their joined fingers.

Lilia withdrew her hand. “You should ask first,” she said. “I’m not a dajian.”

“I apologize,” Gian said. “I want to know the woman who saved me. Most of these people would have let me die.”

“Emlee–”

“It’s your face I remember.”

Lilia looked into Gian’s eyes. Dark eyes. The same as the Gian she had watched hack through the undergrowth in the Woodland. It was unsettling.

“Tell me a story,” Gian said.

The man on the stage reached the end of his story.

Lilia stood. She had done so much else. Why not tell a story, a real one, instead of pretending?

Lilia walked up onto the stage and looked out over the long rows of benches. She felt different up there. Taller. Stronger. She could be anyone, up there. The three or four dozen people before her looked cold and tired, but their eyes were bright – mostly with drink – and only a few were talking among themselves.

“I once made my mother a promise,” Lilia said, “and I still intend to keep it.”

It was an easy story. She thought it would make her sound brave. But as she spun out a story of Roh’s arrogant swagger and Taigan’s sour sense of humor, she felt like she was telling the story of someone who
could
be brave, if only she let go of all the bloody things that came before her, and forged some path not constrained by old promises.

Lilia finished her story at the point when she fled from the sanisi and started down the road to Kalinda’s. She could not say much more, because that’s when Gian entered her story. The real Gian.

As she left the stage, Gian’s twin walked toward her.

“It was a fine story,” Gian said. “Did that really happen?”

“Yes.”

“Then how did you end up here?”

“I made a lot of bad choices,” Lilia said. “Can we be friends, do you think?”

“I don’t know you.”

“No one really knows anyone. Do you have a better place to go?”

Gian shook her head.

“Then come with me,” Lilia said. “I’ll protect you.” Which sounded strange when she said it, because she had done so poor a job of protecting herself. But it was something Faith Ahya would say.

Lilia invited Gian home to live with her, though Emlee made faces and Cora turned up her nose. At night, she watched the light play across Gian’s fine face but dared not touch her.

Sometimes, she thought of the girl torn asunder by the gate. She knew, gazing into Gian’s gaunt, tired face, that despite her horror at the girl’s death, she would do it again to save herself, to have this moment. The Oras would say it was the direst kind of selfishness. Oma would eat her; Sina would not collect her soul.

But Lilia had no soul. She wasn’t even of this world.

More people began to come to Emlee’s door, but no longer solely for the help of Emlee. They asked about Lilia. They asked her to tell stories and mend their flesh while she did it. Emlee told her that storytelling could get her new shoes, more food, vials of everpine to scrub the lice from her hair and clothing. And those things could buy her respect, too. Even more respect than she was earning from mending broken bones and fevers and delivering babies.

So Lilia told stories. All the old stories from the books she read in the temples, and the history lessons she learned from Dasai and Chali. And when she ran out of those, she made some up. She began to ask for scraps of white cloth instead of payment. When she went home each night, she spent an hour sewing the pieces together into a dress, which she kept folded up and hidden beneath her pillow.

Gian listened to all of Lilia’s stories, even the ones about Aaldian merchants who led rebellions and dog thieves who became empresses.

“Why did you come to me?” Lilia asked her one night.

“You have a very memorable face,” Gian said, tracing the karoi scars on her cheek.

Lilia flinched. “You should ask.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What happened to your leg? You haven’t said.”

“There are some stories that don’t want telling,” Gian said. “Some stories you tell, they make things worse. Not better.”

Lilia didn’t ask again, even when Emlee confronted her about it some days later.

“That woman’s a danger,” Emlee said. “They don’t dump dajians there for just anything. She clings to you for your reputation and your warm bed. Don’t think it’s more than that.”

“You don’t know her,” Lilia said. “Or me.”

“Better than some man, I suppose,” Emlee said. “There’s only so much you can clean out of a womb. But you watch her, Lilia. She wants you for more than your quick tongue.”

Lilia spent hours combing out Gian’s long hair. Gian tried to endear herself to Emlee and Cora and Larn by bringing them food, warm tea, clean water. Larn was still often gone, consorting with the man she called a priest and his priestesses, though Lilia doubted any of them was any such thing. Larn came home from those meetings pale and drawn, and Gian made her tea.

As high winter dragged on, Gian presented her with a gift: eight white ribbons in a little box.

“Where did you get these?” Lilia asked.

“They will go with your dress,” Gian said.

“You don’t know what the dress is for,” Lilia said.

“I know you’ll tell me when you’re ready to.”

Lilia kept the ribbons with the dress and sat up at night imagining that she could fly.

The days spun out. As winter hinted at low spring, the camp began to stir with rumors of other camps. Camps purged by bloody legionnaires.

“There have been rumors for months,” Emlee said one night while Cora cooked dinner. “About the other camps. Refugees, sometimes. But they won’t kill us all. Who would care for their children? Who would work in their fields?”

“Why don’t you leave?” Lilia asked.

Emlee glanced at Cora, who guffawed. Cora said, “And go where? To Dhai? You think they’d let us through the pass? You think it hasn’t been tried?”

“They’d let you in,” Lilia said.

Emlee said, “My mother died at those gates during the Pass War. This is our place. We will die in it, if we must. Birth is everyone’s beginning. Death is everyone’s end. Doesn’t much matter where you do it.”

Lilia left her with a poultice of everroot and strawberry and started toward the dwelling of her next case. She waved to those she passed. They greeted her by name. It was still strange to be seen.

She walked in a filthy, tattered skirt and tunic, on shoes that were no longer Cora’s but her own. Gian had combed out her hair and worked it into a whirl of braids knotted in colorful string, the way Gian said she had done the hair of noble Dorinah women.

Lilia heard the muttering slosh of footsteps approaching, and turned to see one of the bands of orphans running toward her.

“There’s a man asking for you!” one of the children yelled.

Lilia stilled her steps. The rider rounded a collection of tents just behind the children. The rider wore black. The hilt of a blade stuck through the back of his coat. He called his bear to a halt and dismounted.

“You look terrible,” Taigan said in Dorinah. He had a new scar running from his left cheek to his left ear, and there was something different about him, something in his voice and posture.

“So you can fly after all, can you?” Taigan said.

“I can,” Lilia said.

“I’d very much like to see that,” Taigan said. “There are legionnaires outside the gate. One of them is passing about a picture of you. It won’t be long until someone turns you over.”

“They won’t,” Lilia said.

“Won’t they?”

“No,” Lilia said. She looked at the wide-eyed children and remembered her mother’s hands and her mother’s face back at the lake, when she said Lilia was not her daughter.

Lilia said, “These are my people. I’m not going anywhere without them.”

“The woman with your picture says she’s your mother,” Taigan said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“We’ll see about that.”

“I think you may be mad,” Taigan said.

“No,” Lilia said. “I’m a bird. And we’re going to fly away from here.”

44

Zezili rode Dakar into the camp at the mouth of the pass to Dhai with Jasoi and two pages close at her heels. Isoail and four more legionnaires met them on the muddy field outside the sprawl of stinking tents and blocky housing. Monshara only gave her an hour before every purge to find the girl, and they were already forty minutes into it.

“They say they don’t know her,” Isoail said, “but their eyes say differently. They also say there’s a sanisi in there.”

“Dajians will say anything,” Zezili said, “especially to legionnaires.”

“There’s only one more camp after this,” Isoail said. “If she isn’t there, then we’ve come–”

Zezili shushed her and pointed. A small group of dajians was moving toward them from the camp.

Isoail sat a little straighter. Zezili felt the air shift. “Gifted are culled from the camps,” Zezili said, “and shipped off to your Seeker Sanctuary. The most they’ll do is throw stones.”

“A well-thrown stone is equally deadly,” Isoail said.

Zezili shrugged. She was cold and tired and more than a little sick of Isoail. They had spent all winter slaughtering dajians across Dorinah. Every public-owned dajian from here to the sea was dead. It was just this camp at the base of the Liona Mountains and another farther south, close to the range that separated Dorinah from Aaldia. With every dead dajian and every cold day, Zezili lost a little more hope. She had nightmares about Anavha being swallowed by a great winged beast, and Daorian burning.