Twelve Kings in Sharakhai Read online

  Then, in a sudden and furious move, Haluk lifted, slipping a forearm across her throat, managing to pin her down.

  Immediately the crowd was up, shouting, raging. But it all became little more than a keen ringing in Çeda’s ears. She heard her own heart thrumming. Felt Haluk’s arm tighten further.

  It was a strong move, a wise move under the conditions, but he’d left himself open. She slipped her right hand down along his left arm, near his elbow, where she’d have the most leverage, and pushed. She let out a guttural cry while muscling his arm up, which had the effect of propelling herself down along his body, just enough to slip her head under his armpit and out of the lock.

  He tried to slip his arm back under her neck, but before he could, she grabbed the buckles along the far edge of his breastplate and hauled herself away, and now she was halfway to his back. Exactly where she wanted to be.

  She reached her left arm—the one tied to the fetters—up and over his head. The rope slipped neatly down along his face and across his neck. Immediately she tightened her grip and drew the fetters back.

  Haluk knew what was happening—he tried to throw her off, at least enough to get his fingers beneath the fetters—but her grip was too sure. Still, he was a bull of a man. She grunted while gritting her teeth and arching her back. Her arms strained like cording on a ship’s sails.

  She thought surely he would have pounded his hand against the ground by now, giving up the match, or fallen unconscious, but he hadn’t. He still struggled for air, his breath coming out in a desperate hiss, his mouth frothing from it. And then finally, all at once, his body went slack.

  Çeda didn’t hear the strike of Pelam’s gong, marking the end of the bout.

  But the crowd she heard.

  Their elation could no longer be contained. They stomped their feet. They shook their fists. “The Wolf has won! The Wolf has won!”

  Ignoring them, Çeda pushed Haluk onto his back and straddled his chest. She unwrapped the fetters and saw the blood drain from him, casting his face in a strange, deathly pallor.

  His eyes blinked open. He stared into Çeda’s eyes with a look of confusion, then took in his surroundings as if he had no idea where he was. The roaring crowd and Çeda’s masked face soon registered, though, and a look of deep and inexpressible anger stole over him.

  Çeda leaned down until they were chest-to-chest and whispered into his ear. “The next time you take your hands to your daughter, Haluk Emet’ava”—she pressed the thumbnail of her right hand into his side, in the depression between his fourth and fifth ribs—“it will go much worse for you.” She leaned closer still and whispered, “The next time, it will be a knife in the dark, not a beating in the light.” She rose, her legs still straddling him, and stared down into his eyes. “Do you understand?”

  Haluk blinked. He made no acknowledgment of her demand, but there was shame in his eyes, a shame that spoke the truth of his crimes better than words ever could.

  Like a wedge driving ever further into a thick piece of wood, she pressed her thumb deeper. “I would hear your answer.”

  He grimaced against the discomfort, licked his lips, and glanced to the cheering crowd. Then he nodded to her. “I understand.”

  Çeda nodded back, then stood and stepped away.

  Pelam had watched this exchange with a glint in his eye that landed somewhere between curious and concerned, but he made no mention of it. He merely turned and presented Çeda to the crowd with a bow of his head and a flourish of his hand. As some howled and others collected their winnings, Çeda was surprised to see that Osman himself had come to watch—Osman, the owner of these pits, a retired pit fighter himself, the man she’d had to trick to earn her first bout.

  How far we’ve come since then.

  He stood with the crowd on the topmost row. He was one of the very few—along with Pelam—who knew her true identity. She had no idea how long he’d been watching, but surely he’d caught the end. She couldn’t tell if he was pleased or not. Çeda gave an exaggerated nod to the crowd, but she and Osman both knew it was meant for him.

  He nodded back, then tugged his ear, which meant he wished to speak.

  To speak, and perhaps more.

  A SHORT WHILE LATER, after Çeda had completed her victory circuit of the pit—raising her hands to the cheering crowd—and retreated to the room she’d been given before the bout, Osman came to her.

  She heard the two guardsmen intone, “Master Osman,” in unison, and moments later the red curtains parted and he stepped inside the starkly appointed room. She heard the guardsmen shuffle farther down the hall, as they always did when she and Osman met.

  She had already pulled her bracers off, but now she was unstrapping her white breastplate.

  “Çeda,” Osman said tentatively.

  She ignored him, easing off her breastplate and standing, knowing she wore only her white tunic beneath, knowing the sweat on her skin would give Osman easy view of her form beneath. After setting the breastplate on the bench, she unbuckled her battle skirt, slowly collecting the heavy leather garment and setting it on top of the breastplate. She set one sandaled foot on the bench and tugged the tunic higher, exposing her thigh as she worked on the four smaller buckles on her greaves. She did the same with the other, and then with deliberate care cupped one into the other and set them both on top of the battle skirt.

  Only then did she turn to Osman, who was standing several paces away, watching with no small amount of interest. He wore fine clothes—red kaftan, rich leather sandals, bracelets of yellow-and-white gold—but the vicious scar that ran across his face, from forehead, across the bridge of his nose, and down his left cheek, spoke of different days.

  One of his thick black eyebrows rose as he stared. He seemed to want to smile, but didn’t, perhaps waiting to see what she would do next. He was not the sort of man who could walk freely among the richer quarters of Sharakhai, but he was a master just the same. One could see it in how clean he was, how well cut his fingernails, how carefully groomed his short beard. He was a man who had risen from these very pits, but he was a pit fighter no longer.

  He was not shy about taking in her form. He never had been. It was one of the reasons she liked him. She had long since tired of quiet, reserved men.

  “What did you say to Haluk?” he asked.

  She took a half-step toward him, acutely aware of the trail of sweat tickling its way down the small of her back. “My business is my own.”

  “He’s not a man you want as your enemy.”

  She took another half-step forward. “Then it’s good he doesn’t know who I am.”

  “He’ll come to me, you know. He’ll offer me coin for your true name.”

  She doubted that. The laws of the pits may be unwritten, but they were ancient, not easily crossed, as she and Osman both knew. “He may,” she said, “but you won’t sell my name.”

  “Oh?” The smile that had been hesitant in coming was now in full display. There was no denying he was a handsome man, especially when he smiled at her as he was now. “And why is that?”

  “Because if you did—”

  She took one last stride. They were close enough now that she could feel the heat coming off him in the coolness of this underground place. She placed her thumbnail between his ribs, exactly as she’d done to Haluk, and pressed. Hard. He didn’t flinch, as many men would have, but his breath was coming stronger now, harder.

  “—you would seriously regret the decision.”

  His smile faded until it was a tarnished reminder of what it had been. “Is that so?”

  “Never doubt it.”

  His nostrils flared as she released the pressure and allowed her callused fingers to trail down his chest. To his waist. To his hip. And then she let her hand fall free. She stood still, sharing a jackal smile with him, but nothing else.

  For a time i
t appeared he would go no further, but then he stepped in and slipped his arm around her waist. Pulled her in tight and bowed his head to meet hers. His lips were warm as he kissed her. They pressed their bodies together, his strong hands running over her back, down her neck, pulling her in so tight it neared pain. Which she minded not at all.

  She pulled him to the tiled floor, dragged his tunic up and over his well-proportioned frame. He gripped her thighs with strong hands and ran his fingertips roughly down her stomach as she pulled her sweaty tunic up over her head and threw it into the corner. A heavy grunt escaped him as she rose up, slipped him inside her, and dropped roughly onto his hips. She moved slowly at first, while his breathing became more and more labored, but then she moved with a growing urgency, rising and falling faster and faster.

  He tried to pull her down toward him that their skin might touch, but she slapped his hands away. He tried again, and she pinned his wrists down, allowed her breasts to trail across his chest, ran her nipples slowly around his. She licked the scars that riddled his chest and arms and shoulders. She scratched his skin. Raked her fingers down toward the tuft of dark hair around his manhood.

  She rode him hard, and for a moment, as she crested, all the aches and pains in her body became little more than faint memories.

  As she lowered from her heights, she allowed herself to fall against his chest. Osman gripped a fistful of her hair and thrust into her as she bit his neck. She felt him release as well, felt his throbbing slowly ebb, felt his seed slick her thighs. And for a time the two of them lay still, their breathing falling into a steadily slowing rhythm that felt like the setting of the sun and the quieting of life over the desert.

  When at last she lifted off his chest, she did not kiss him. She whispered no sweet words in his ear. She merely admired the landscape of his scars, wondering at the stories they told. She had often thought that this was as much a reason to be attracted to him as any other. Here is a man skilled in the arts of combat, she remembered thinking, who knows how to debilitate, to harm, to kill. And if he knows those things, what might he know of the body’s more subtle ways?

  She hadn’t been wrong. He was as skilled as anyone she’d bedded—which admittedly hadn’t been many. Although the emotions between them had never included love. At least not for her.

  As Çeda ran her fingers lightly down his stomach, outlining the broadest of his scars, her closeness to him—as it always did sooner or later—became uncomfortable. She tried to hide it, but he noticed, and he’d always been a proud man, even if he wasn’t proud enough to leave her once and for all.

  “I’ve a task for you, Çeda,” he said while shifting his hips, a cue for her to rise.

  She stayed, provoking him. “I’m no servant to do your bidding, old man.”

  “So you keep telling me.” He arched his neck, closed his eyes in pleasure as she squeezed him, but then, almost regretfully, his tone became serious. “It’s a simple shade. Nothing more.”

  Çeda rose and from a shelf in the corner took a folded cotton rag. “If it were simple, you wouldn’t be asking me.” She wet the cloth in an urn in the corner and ran it over her body, collecting his seed from her thighs, then folding it and carefully washing away the sweat and dirt and blood. For a moment, just a moment, she was glad of the handful of years she’d spent with Dardzada. He’d been a hard foster parent—and there were days under his care that made her want to beat him as mercilessly as she beat those in the pits—but there was no doubt he had taught her much, not the least of which was the herbs a woman might steep in boiling water to deaden a man’s seed.

  Yerinde forbid, she thought.

  Osman sat up. “The shade is simple, but it’s important it be done right.”

  “You’re not listening.” After drying herself, she pulled on her black thawb, then pulled the matching niqab over her head. “Send Tariq if you need it so badly.”

  Osman laughed. “Were it a brawl in a southern quarter tavern, I’d send Tariq, but not for this.”

  “Why not?” Çeda adjusted her veil, the beaten brass coins worked into it jingling as she did so. “Tariq can run a package as well as I.”

  He stood now and pulled his tunic back on. “This package needs to be run one week from now. At sunset.”

  Çeda paused for a moment, then continued her final adjustments to her niqab as if his words meant nothing. “One week from now is Beht Zha’ir.”

  Beht Zha’ir was a holy night. It came every six weeks—the night the twin moons, Tulathan and her sister, Rhia, rose together and lit the desert floor. It was the night the asirim roamed the streets searching for tributes and the Reaping King went with them. For Osman to ask her to shade a package—to do anything on that night—was bold, and for a moment she’d mistaken his desperation for a deeper understanding of her other pursuits.

  “Does that mean you won’t do it?” Osman asked, a bit too casually.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’ll need to speak more plainly, Çeda. My mind isn’t what it used to be.”

  “I’ll run your package.”

  “There will be two.”

  This was a message to be delivered in two parts, then; the key to decipher the message would be in one package, while the message itself would be contained in another. And since he hadn’t mentioned anyone else so far, he was letting her choose the second messenger.

  “I’ll bring Emre,” she said.

  He considered this, nodded, and then reached into the leather pouch at his belt, pulling out a cinched cloth purse. “Your winnings,” he said, casting it to her with a speed that made it clear he was testing her.

  Quick as a hummingbird, she snatched it from the air. She weighed the purse in her hand.

  “Plus coin for the shade,” he said before she could say anything.

  “Paying up front now, are we?”

  “Half. You’ll come by my estate for the rest.” He said it gruffly, like an order, but there was a clear request in the way his eyes took her in, a subtle plea for her to come, perhaps spend the night.

  After wrapping her gear in a tight bundle and slinging it over her shoulder, she strode toward the doorway with a distinct limp, wrapping the persona she used outside the pits around her like an old and favored shawl. To most she was simply a swordmistress, a woman who was skilled but for the injury to her knee, who could still show the children of rich merchants how to swing a sword or raise a shield. It suited her well enough. She enjoyed teaching, and it gave her all the excuse she needed to be seen near and within the pits.

  She stopped when she came abreast of Osman. “Your estate.”

  He nodded.

  “We’ll see,” she said, and then walked out and into the scalding city streets.

  THE NOISE OF THE SPICE MARKET swept over Çeda like a sudden summer sandstorm. It was raucous and biting after the quiet of the streets near her home. Hundreds of stalls occupied the great old building—one of the oldest in Sharakhai—a ramshackle mix of patchwork colors, milling patrons, and heated barter. Çeda had taken her armor to the rooms she shared with Emre, her oldest and closest friend, but even unburdened she retained her limp as she moved through the crowd, many of the stall owners sending her a nod or a smile as they filled small burlap bags with peppercorn or star anise or coarsely ground salt.

  A girl with curly brown hair and bright brown eyes broke away from a group of children who were hanging about near the entrance. Çeda had known Mala for years, paid her from time to time for simple things, to act as a lookout, to collect a bit of information, things a girl Mala’s age could do where a grown woman could not. It was surprising how often children were overlooked in a city that at times seemed overrun with them.

  “Watch,” Mala said, spinning and drawing a beaten old stick she used as a sword, then bringing it down across her body in a clean, sharp block. It was a move she’d failed to master
for weeks now. If Çeda was truthful, it was still a bit clumsy, but it would come.

  “Better,” Çeda said, mussing her hair.

  Mala frowned and skipped away, pulling her hair back while moving into a mock-serious pose, sword raised. Her sister Jein came soon after, and then more of their band, all of whom Çeda knew. They bore stick swords, and one even a proper shinai. To a child, they raised their swords as Mala was doing, hoping for a lesson. It wasn’t something she’d ever reveal to her students at the pits, but she taught the children of Roseridge for free when she had the time. The trouble was, she didn’t always have the time, and Mala and her pack could be an insistent bunch.

  “Not now,” she told them, slipping around one of the market’s stout mudbrick columns and into the shade of the building proper. “Not now.” They were disappointed, but it couldn’t be helped. Çeda had business. “Tomorrow,” she told them. “Tomorrow we’ll dance.” And then she was in among the throngs, working her way deeper into the market.

  “Try, try,” old Seyhan called as Çeda neared the four beaten tables that marked his territory within this mad place. He was handing out pieces of biscuit made by Tehla the baker. “Try, try,” he called again, this time in Kundhunese to a tall, ebony-skinned woman and her servant, then once more in Mirean to a jowled man with long, thin mustaches.

  Çeda snatched a piece as she came close, stuffing it in her mouth before Seyhan could frown at her.

  “For customers,” Seyhan said, shooing her away.

  The bright flavor of cardamom and caramelized onion and lemon zest filled her, making her mouth water so much it pained her jaw for a moment. “I am a customer,” she shot back.

  “No, no, no,” he replied, wagging his finger first at her, then at Emre, who stood a few paces away, untying a fresh bag of bright red paprika. “You get everything you need from his thieving hands. Don’t tell me you don’t!”