The Winds of Khalakovo (16 page)

His stomach was growing worse. “You would do well to consider your answers more carefully the next time we meet.”

He left, locking the door with the gaoler’s keys, and rushed up the hall. Then he bent over and vomited, the contents of his stomach pattering against the stone. He heaved again and again—more and more sour liquid coming up. He knew Ashan could hear him, and the knowledge burned, but what was worse was the fear that was starting to well up inside him. The symptoms were growing stronger. Soon, everyone would know; it would be plain as day. And then, the long march toward death would be all that lay before him.

He stood, clearing his mouth of spittle.

Nasim’s door lay just ahead. He moved to it, listening for any signs of movement within. For no reason apparent to him, he was afraid.

Softly, he placed the key into the lock and turned it. It opened with a soft click. He found Nasim kneeling in the center of the room, holding his gut and rocking back and forth, a look of profound misery on his face.

Nikandr stepped inside. “Nasim?”

The boy didn’t respond.

“Nasim, can you hear me?”

Nothing.

Nikandr crouched down, hoping the boy would acknowledge him in some way. But Nasim only rocked, his breath coming in short gasps through flared nostrils.

“Nasim, please, speak to me.”

Father was going to demand answers, and soon. The life of the Grand Duke had been taken. The lives of everyone on the island—the gathered aristocracy included—were threatened, and they would all be looking toward these two to provide answers.

But Nasim appeared unready to grant this request, so Nikandr eventually left.

CHAPTER 20

Rehada often took walks around Volgorod. She told herself it was to steep herself in the ebbs and flows of the city, and that was true, but she knew deep in her heart that it was also because she was lonely. She catered to the richest of the Landed, pleasing them in the ways of the flesh, but none of them other than Nikandr had ever given her pause. She was shunned in Iramanshah for her refusal to cross the fires, to forgive those who had taken the life of her daughter, Ahya. Soroush, Ahya’s father, had told her many times to do so. What was one more lie in the stack you’ve created, he used to ask. There were many things she would do to make her life among the Landed appear innocent, but forgiving the murderous souls who’d taken Ahya from her wasn’t one of them. She would never forgive them. Never.

So she lived half a life—always on the periphery of Royalty, of the Aramahn, of the people of Volgorod. She traveled not only through the city, but all around the island and the others in the archipelago. She attended festivals, celebrations, even funerals, where the Landed would bury their dead in the ground instead of setting them onto skiffs and letting the wind take them where it would.

She approached the line where peasants stood in line for their dole. Today it was four blocks long, people waiting with barrows or straps to take home the grain they would be allotted. There were many of them—more than normal, it seemed—and they looked haggard, gray, as if they were slowly but surely becoming part of the stone of the city around them.

“Rehada,” a woman called, beckoning Rehada closer.

Her name was Gierten, and she was a woman Rehada had met several times at the summer festival in Izhny. She was holding the reins of a sickly donkey saddled with two baskets—one empty, the other with a nest of faded brown blankets.

She approached, trying to appear pleasant. Gierten had been heavy with child the last time she’d seen her nearly a year ago. Rehada had no real desire to see the child, nor talk to Gierten, but impressions must be maintained.

“How old now?” Rehada asked as she approached the basket.

“Praise to the ancients, she nears her ninth month, and she is healthy as can be.”

Rehada pulled the blanket back to reveal the red face of a babe. Gierten was thin, with a wiry strength to her, but this baby was round in the cheeks with strong color to her skin. She looked nothing at all like Ahya, but still it drove a knife through Rehada’s chest merely to look upon this child, this
Landed
child, while hers was gone, ripped from her when she had only begun to blossom.

“She is hale, indeed,” Rehada said to prevent herself from crying. She looked along the line, to those that seemed like it was a struggle just to remain standing. “I wonder, then, why you’ve come here.”

“We need grain as much as the next family.”

“Last year your husband’s nets were full.”

Gierten shook her head. “The fish have all gone. Even two months ago we could find enough to live on if not sell at market, but now we can’t even do that.” She smiled as she reached down and pulled the blanket over to protect her child from the breeze. “And my Evina needs all the food she can get.”

It was then that Rehada noticed something from the corner of her eye. Beyond the line, nestled between several tall stone buildings, was a patch of snow-covered ground with three white fir trees standing over it. On the far side, near the mouth of an alley that led up toward the Boyar’s mansion, stood a man. He was in the shade of the trees—with the clouds in the sky and his dark clothes it was difficult at first to pick him out. It was Soroush, still wearing his double robes, his ragged turban, daring anyone to notice him and call attention to it.

She pulled her eyes back to Gierten, for she couldn’t let on what she’d seen, but as they continued to talk—Gierten regaling her with all manner of meaningless stories about the baby’s first months of life—Rehada caught several more glimpses of Soroush. Clearly he had been following her, or had been waiting, knowing somehow she would walk this way.

She bid Gierten
dasvidaniya
and began heading along the line, hoping to cut across and speak with Soroush, but when she looked for him again, he wasn’t there. She rushed across the street to the trees, looking up along the alley, but she did not find him.

She shivered, and not from the wind tugging at her robes. For some reason she felt more alone than she ever had since coming to Khalakovo.

Rehada woke to a soft knock at the rear of her home. She stood, wiped the crust of dried tears from her cheeks, and pulled her robe over her naked form. Another knock came—more insistent—as she took a small lamp from the mantel and limped along the creaking hallway to the rear of the house.

A third knock came as she opened it.

Standing there was Soroush, lit in golden relief by the light of her lamp. She had known he would eventually come, but she still felt watched from the scene in the city earlier that day.

She bowed her head, stepping aside to allow him entrance. It was not lost on her the parallel this made to Nikandr’s visit only three days before, the only difference being that Nikandr had used the front door while one of her own was forced to use the rear. She was ashamed, though she had to admit she wasn’t sure whether it stemmed from the fact that Nikandr had become so familiar with her or that Soroush, even after all they’d been through, still was.

Doing her best to disguise the pain she felt in her feet and shins as she walked, she led him into her sitting room and offered him vodka. He turned his nose up at that, clearly expecting araq or the sour citrus wines from the south of Yrstanla.

“It has fallen out of favor.”

“Even in Iramanshah?” His voice was deep and smooth, like the voice of a mountain. It was something she’d been so long without she’d forgotten how reassuring it could be.

“In case you’ve forgotten, the picture I’m painting is not of a woman in Iramanshah.”

He smiled. “You could still have a bottle hidden beneath the floorboards.”

She returned his smile and poured him a drink of the vodka anyway. “Perhaps
I
no longer prefer it.”

He accepted the glass, firelight flickering off of the golden earrings in what remained of his left ear. “Then I would know you had finally turned.”

He sat within the mound of pillows, his face haggard, his eyes heavy, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. As she sat across from him, she tried to hide the pain in her feet and ankles.

Soroush glanced down, then toward the fire, and finally he met her eye. “I would have guessed you would give that up long before the araq.”

She took a sip from her vodka, hoping he would take the hint and leave the subject alone. The fire crackled as the sting of the liquor crept down her throat to lie heavy, deep within her gut. She couldn’t bring herself to move closer to him, though she admitted there was still a part of her that wanted to. Despite his scars—or perhaps because of them—he was a deeply attractive man. But to think of Soroush she had no choice but to think of the pain that had been laid at their feet by the bloody hands of the Landed.

“Do you have a place in the city?”

“That isn’t something you should know.”

She knew the reasons for this, but it still hurt to be treated like a risk that he was forced to weigh. “Then why have you come?”

“It has been too long, Rehada. It is time for us to sit. To take drink with one another.”

She shook her head. “I am no girl just taking to the winds, Soroush. You have come for a reason.”

His dark eyes shone in the firelight. “Tell me first what you’ve heard.”

“Of the hezhan?”

He nodded.

“It crossed the wall of the palotza and murdered the Grand Duke. Dozens died with many more wounded. Bolgravya’s grand ship was lost.”

Soroush stared at his drink with a look of regret on his face. He took a healthy swallow and closed his eyes, perhaps wishing the dead a better life on their return to Erahm. “Your Prince?”

“Safe as far as I know.”

“That is good. We may have need of him before this is done.”

“In what way?”

“Who can tell?”

Rehada shook her head. “Fine, keep your secrets.”

“Bersuq has been having trouble with the third stone.”

She laughed. “I’ve given you your stone.”

“You have.” He shook his head, ignoring her jibe. “We thought we had mastered the way to sense the weakest points in the rift. You saw the effects yourself.”

“I did, but I may have had help.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think I would have succeeded in summoning the hezhan were it not for a presence I felt at the end. I was lost utterly, and the presence cleared my mind, allowed me to focus against the pain. When I woke there was a form in the woods. It must have been Nasim.”

His head tilted incrementally. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“It was not until hours later that I was thinking clearly. Memories were streaming from my mind, and it was all I could do to sort them from reality. I thought on it for a long while afterward, and I think it was him. I think he was watching the whole time.”

He downed the last of his vodka in one gulp. His face soured as he stared at the glass, then he set it aside and gazed into the fire. He looked like the Soroush of old, then. Peaceful. Contemplative. He had been a man on a path toward greatness before Ahya had been killed.

“Did you know he is in the palotza, taken by your Prince?”

She was surprised at how strongly her heart beat at even this small bit of news of Nikandr, but the alcohol was already helping to mask her emotions.

When she remained silent, he continued. “Don’t worry. Nasim will keep well enough in the palotza. What’s important are the stones. Bersuq has tried several times to summon the vanahezhan. But the way has proven blocked.”

“We have time.”

“
Neh
. There is no time left.”

“You have always preached patience.”

“I have, but where has patience gotten us these last dozen years?”

“We have done much,” Rehada said, insulted.

“What have we done? Stolen a handful of ships, destroyed a few more, and all the while the Landed have pushed us from two more islands in the north and further cemented their hold on one of the others
despite
the blight.”

“They cannot hold forever.”

“And neither can we. You have been gone a long time, Rehada, and I’ve hidden much of the truth from you, so you have no idea how thin our ranks have become, but believe me when I tell you that the situation is dire. We have so little food that some are taking to the winds simply to feed themselves, and who can blame them? More of our qiram have been scarred by the Aramahn, leaving our ability to attack the Landed tenuous at best. We are in much more danger of driving ourselves off the edge of our islands than the Landed will ever be.”

“We will recover, as we always have.”

He waved his hand as if she were a girl offering him dates.“There comes a time when one must act and trust to the will of the world.”

“The will of the world may be against the Maharraht.” Rehada surprised herself by voicing those words, but Soroush’s response was even more surprising.

He shrugged and avoided her gaze, not with any sense of discomfort, but with contemplation. “If it is so, then it is so. I am willing to give myself to the will of indaraqiram, but I will have its answer now, before there are none of us left to hear its words.”

Rehada considered this thought, finishing her drink while doing so. They were strong words. Had they come from any other man, she might have found herself repulsed, for such had been her upbringing, but Soroush’s ways had always been an intoxicant for her. She had found herself attracted to him from the first day they’d met.

“What can I do?” she asked.

Soroush stood and held his hand out to her. “We’ll have those words soon. For now I would simply hold you, as we once did.”

She paused and found herself thinking of Nikandr, and what
he
would think of this. It wasn’t fear of discovery, she realized—her life would be forfeit were Nikandr or any of the Landed to discover the truth—it was fear of how it might hurt him. She had never wanted to fall in love with Nikandr. Their first meeting had been a random one, and she had taken it for a blessing of the fates. In their four years together, she had always felt in control until these last few months—the point at which, she realized with growing horror, Atiana had come into the picture.

“There is
fear
in your eyes,” Soroush said, still holding out his hand.

She took a deep breath. “Not fear, my love.” She stepped forward and fell into his embrace. “Uncertainty.”

She warmed herself and in so doing warmed him.

“Treat me not like a man from the Hill bearing coin.” He pulled the circlet roughly from her brow. A chill fell over her as if she had plunged into the waters of the sea.

She hid her eyes from him. It was an insult, what he’d just done, but the look on his face made her feel like
she
was the one at fault. “I am sorry. I did not mean—”

He pulled her chin up until she was gazing into his deep brown eyes. He leaned down and kissed her. His beard tickled her neck, but his lips were warm, and she could feel him rising as she held him longer and their breath fell into time.

Without another word, they pulled their clothes from their bodies. She saw upon his shoulder a fresh wound—stitched—a puncture from a gunshot, perhaps. When she moved to examine it, he grabbed her hand and stared down into her eyes fiercely, as if acknowledging the wound were an insult. He had always been this way—proud, too proud at times—and she knew better than to challenge him.

She pulled him down among the pillows, kissing him to make him forget. As the night deepened, as their bodies became one, for the first time in a long while she no longer thought of the Prince of Khalakovo holding her.

She woke with Soroush watching her. They were in her bedroom, and he was propped up on one elbow, watching her as the faint light of dawn shone through the small window on the far side of the room.