Twelve Kings in Sharakhai Read online

But her feet wouldn’t move as flame licked across the fort’s interior, racing over anything the oil had touched. A cart went up in an explosive burst. The fire moved quickly, hungrily, creeping up walls, slipping like thieves along the seams between the cobbles. More carts were engulfed as those trapped tried to back away, screaming, eyes wide as new moons. The flames did not discriminate; they embraced man and woman and child alike in a steadily expanding wave.

  Flames now roiled between her and the King. They were thick, but she could take one leap . . .

  But no. Gods above, it was too far. The flames too fierce.

  Bakhi’s chosen, we’re all going to die in these flames, Çeda thought, and yet it was the girl who had offered Çeda a strip of scented wood that truly brought Çeda beyond her thoughts of revenge. The girl had remained in place, petrified, next to Çeda, but now she rushed toward one of the burning men.

  “Papa!”

  “No!” Çeda shouted.

  She grabbed the girl and drew her back, pinning her writhing arms just as something wet and heavy draped over them. A strong arm reached around her waist and pulled them both back. The three of them fell to the cobbles.

  A carpet, she realized. Emre had soaked a carpet with scented water and thrown it over them.

  “Papa!” the girl screamed, fighting even harder to get away.

  “It’s too late,” Çeda said, putting her hand over the girl’s eyes to save her from the horror. The girl continued to struggle—and how could Çeda blame her?—but Çeda held her tight, refusing to relax.

  As Emre pulled the carpet low to protect them from the growing heat, Çeda peered through the still-dripping fringe. Wherever the oil had splashed or pooled, yellow flames now coughed black smoke, occluding the air, making it difficult to breathe, even beneath the carpet. One man tried jumping from a cart to one of the exposed beams, as the Maiden had. He managed to grasp it, but slipped and fell onto another cart, knocking several of the glass globes, which fell and shattered, momentarily spreading the flames in hypnotic blue-green whorls. A woman tried to douse the flames on a young boy even while aflame herself. Some few closer to Çeda tried to copy what Emre had done until two men—both burning and screaming—began fighting over one of the sopping carpets.

  In the corner where the King had been standing, the Maiden was shoving him through the hole she’d forced through the old stone. The flames caught up with her just as the King’s legs and feet were lost from view. The Maiden had been doused so heavily by the splashing oil she lit like a newborn sun, but she didn’t follow her King. By Goezhen’s sweet kiss, she knelt down and replaced the stone she’d worked free to allow his escape. The fit was imperfect, but it would prevent the flames from following the King, who’d been doused nearly as heavily as the Maiden. Only when the stone had been set back in place did she roll away in agony.

  Çeda stared at the black gaps around the stone. A King now lay on the other side, crawling away, vulnerable.

  Her chance had come and gone in the span of moments.

  Dear gods, the heat felt strong enough to burn them even beneath the carpet. The smoke became so thick it scoured Çeda’s mouth and throat, and she coughed uncontrollably, which only served to make it worse. Those who weren’t screaming were coughing as badly as she was; she worried that she and Emre and anyone else who’d managed to avoid the fire would die from the choking smoke. Through the fringe, she began looking for ropes among the stalls and wagons—perhaps she could tie it to a makeshift hook and cast it up to the ramparts—but moments later sounds came from the barrier behind them as the heavy wooden barricade rolled back and a dozen Silver Spears filed through the archway. They waved people out toward safety, helping some to stagger free of the blaze, throwing blankets over others in a vain attempt at dousing the flames.

  Soon Çeda was lifted up and led out of the inferno toward the shaded aisles of the market proper, which now felt cold as ice. The girl came with her, shivering horribly, those green eyes staring up at Çeda with a wide-eyed numbness that echoed everything Çeda was feeling.

  She and Emre were questioned by the Spears for a time, but Seyhan came and vouched for them both, and they were soon allowed to leave.

  All the while, the only thing Çeda could think was what a coward she’d been. “You couldn’t have done a thing,” Emre said late that night when they reached their simple three-room home.

  You’re wrong, Çeda thought. I could have killed a King. “I can’t talk,” she said, heading for her own room, “not now.”

  She lay awake long into the night, replaying everything that had happened, what she might have done differently. The attack, she had no doubt, had been orchestrated by the Al’afwa Khadar, the Moonless Host. They were men and women from Sharakhai or the desert wastes who’d sworn to fight the Kings. She wondered how long that one attack had been in the making. Months, surely. Perhaps years. Not only would they have had to know that one of the Kings disguised himself to walk as a commoner among the streets of Sharakhai, they would’ve had to know his patterns as well. How often he went, by which routes, and how many would guard him.

  It was times like this, when Çeda came near the Kings in some way, or returned to the foot of Tauriyat where her mother had been hung, that she felt so impotent she could scream it for all of Sharakhai to hear. The Kings left their House so very rarely. And here she had stumbled across one, almost defenseless, and she’d failed to honor her vow to her mother. Even if she’d somehow found the courage to try, she had no doubt she would have died at the hands of one of the Blade Maidens. They saw into the hearts of man. How could she hope to stand against them?

  She fell asleep wondering when the King’s response would come. Surely it would, and surely it would not be kind—the one thing that could be counted on in Sharakhai was that in the currency of vengeance, the Kings paid early, they paid in kind, and they paid with ample interest.

  The next morning, as the Silver Spears continued their nightlong sweep through the western quarter for intelligence, Çeda heard a roar far to the west. She stood from her breakfast of bean salad and bread and threaded her way west from her home. The sound grew ever louder until it shook the foundations of the city. Soon she came to Hallowsgate, one of the twelve fortresses spaced along the city’s outer curtain wall and the one situated due west of Tauriyat and the House of Kings, at the terminus of the street known as the Spear. Hundreds of Silver Spears were stationed along the wall, staring down impassively, their faces lost beneath the shade of their conical helms, sun shining brightly off steel-tipped arrows, ready against the strings of their short, curving bows.

  Çeda could spare little thought for them, however. As she stared at the fortress walls, her world was reduced to the forms hanging by ropes from the battlements. Girls, Çeda realized. All girls. Two dozen. She counted them with morbid fascination. Their throats were cut, their bodies left to bleed down the sides of the tower like gutted rabbits. The bodies and the blood read like some ancient scroll: Assail our walls, they said, and thine is the blood that shall flow; harm but one of our daughters, and twenty and four of thine own shall drown in their wake. Seeing it so starkly written, Çeda realized it could be no other way. The Blade Maidens were the daughters of the Kings, after all—each and every one, firstborn of the Kings, taking up the blade at an age no older than these slain girls, to protect not only their own, but the city the gods themselves had granted their fathers.

  Çeda stared at each body in turn, giving them a remembrance, a promise, especially the last. The little perfume girl with jet black hair and eyes like jade. What had she done to the Kings? Nothing. But she’d been there. She’d been present and had survived. That had been enough for the Kings to choose her. Or maybe it had simply been bad luck. A girl in the wrong place at the wrong time, not once but twice.

  The anger and sorrow seething within threatened to overwhelm her—as it already had for so many others weeping at the
tower’s base. But Çeda refused to give in. She refused to cry. Instead, she stifled the rage, buried it deep inside her and let it burn with all her other regrets.

  Then she turned and walked away.

  She had no use for the dead, nor they for her.

  ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER . . .

  SUNRISE OVER THE GREAT SHANGAZI was an achingly beautiful sight—a burst of amber and ochre and rust, a panoply of shadows engraved against the lee of the rolling dunes—yet Çeda was blind to the beauty of it all, for her mother had gone deadly silent again.

  Çeda was a skinny girl of eight hard summers, and she was sitting on a thwart within the confines of a skiff—a deceptively lithe skiff her mother, Ahya, had paid dearly to hire. The only sounds to fill the predawn desert were the sighs of the skimwood runners over the golden sand—that and the occasional shush as Ahya leaned into the tiller, sending the rudder to cutting the sand while the skiff leaned this way or that. The air was chill enough to make Çeda hug herself and shiver, but she said nothing of it. The desert’s pledge of unending heat was rarely broken, and soon, whatever her lingering memories of the biting wind, they would be lost beneath the sun’s brutal, unyielding stare.

  Neither Çeda nor her mother had said a word to one another since their journey began. Çeda yearned to coax her mother into talking about the reasons behind their sudden and unexplained flight from the Amber City, but she had long since learned that to push her mother at the wrong time would have the opposite effect. Her mother could be incredibly mule-like that way.

  At the very least she wanted to understand the fears that drove her mother so. And fear she did. Çeda could see it in her mother’s bearing—as stiff as the thwart upon which she sat—and in the eagle-eyed way she watched the sands ahead, adjusting the tiller and occasionally glancing up at the sail but never looking at Çeda. Grim lines of worry and toil were etched into the corners of her eyes—eyes that were so often fierce, but on this strange day were heavy with exhaustion and a disquiet that bordered on panic.

  As tired and worried as Ahya may be, though, she sailed onward, chin set stoically, her long black hair caught by the wind like a pennant set for war. Her mother was nothing if not driven.

  For a moment, Çeda could think of little but the way Ahya, in preparation for another of her clandestine forays, had fallen asleep in their shared bed well before sundown the night before. Ahya’s sleep had been fitful. Several times she’d called out Çeda’s name, long and slow—Chaaay-daaa, Chaaay-daaa—with such sorrow it had made Çeda want to hold her mother and weep. She hadn’t had the heart to wake her, but she had laid down behind Ahya, body to body, stroking her hair and wondering what wicked fears had been given life inside her dreaming mind.

  Ahya had woken at dusk and left for many hours, returning only when the twin moons had set. She’d rushed into their hovel wearing her black dress and veil—not so different from what the Blade Maidens wore—and barked at Çeda to pack some clothes while she stuffed food and water into a bag, enough to sustain them for a day or two in the desert. Strangely, she’d also insisted on packing their books—the ones that had always moved with them from place to place, without fail. After changing into a dress that wouldn’t get her killed were she to be caught wearing it, they were out and into the city with Çeda desperately wanting to know more.

  In this, however, Ahya had trained her daughter well. They’d moved on short notice before—a dozen times at least that Çeda could remember—and Ahya had always insisted that Çeda remain silent until they’d reached a place where there was time to explain.

  They’d gone to the sandy western harbor well before first light and paid good coin to hire this skiff, not to mention a healthy dose of prudence from the handsome, dark-skinned man who owned it. Ahya had struck a northerly course upon leaving the harbor, sailing them swiftly away from the Amber City of Sharakhai—the city whose cramped and twisted streets harbored endless thousands, the city that had instilled such fear in Ahya, she’d rushed them from their home in the starlit hours of the night.

  “You went to the desert last night,” Çeda said, unable to take the silence one moment longer. “Was it to collect more petals?” She said this knowing something else entirely had happened, but she had to get her mother to say something. Anything.

  Ahya pulled on the tiller, making the skiff lean around a blunt black stone. “I went to the desert, but found no petals. Not this night.” Çeda was going to ask what she had found, but her mother met her gaze and shook her head, an indication that she wasn’t ready to speak. Not yet.

  Only when they had navigated the last of the standing stones near Sharakhai, and the sand had opened up, did Ahya tie the tiller in place with two lengths of rope and face Çeda at last. She stared at her as other mothers looked upon their children—not with a frown, or with unkind eyes and a biting command, but with simple compassion; it was a thing Çeda so rarely saw she immediately understood that this voyage was far more serious than she’d guessed. Reluctantly, it seemed to Çeda, Ahya tugged one of her few prized possessions free from inside her dress: a silver locket, roughly the size and shape of a lantern’s flame.

  Her mother cupped the locket in her lap, hiding it from the wind. After prizing it open, she liberated two dried flower petals from within its folds, each white with a tip of palest blue. They’d been harvested by Ahya weeks ago from the night blooms of the adichara—twisted and wickedly thorned trees that only spread their flowers to the face of the twin moons. Her trespass was a thing expressly forbidden by the Twelve Kings of Sharakhai, but this wasn’t what concerned Çeda; her mother had been liberating petals from the blooming fields since before she was born. Nor was it the fact that her mother was granting her a petal; she’d done so many times before, most often the day following the holy night of Beht Zha’ir. It was the fact that this was no mere fragment measured for a child, as it had always been before. No, this time it was an entire petal.

  Why? she wondered. Why now? And why here?

  “Open,” her mother said, waving the petal near Çeda’s mouth.

  The petal eased her mind not at all, for it meant that Ahya thought this day important—important enough to give Çeda an entire petal; important enough to shape Çeda’s life in some way—and it was with this realization that Çeda pieced together the clues at last.

  “We’re going to see the witch, aren’t we?”

  Her mother waved the petal again, ignoring her words. Afraid to disobey but every bit as afraid to comply, Çeda opened her mouth wide. With clear reverence, Ahya set one petal under Çeda’s tongue while placing the other beneath her own. She watched Çeda carefully, though what she was hoping to see Çeda couldn’t begin to guess.

  Çeda felt the changes that always came over her, but this time to a much higher degree. Her tongue tingled. Her lips soon after. The skin of her face, the tips of her fingers, the soles of her feet. Even the place behind her naval—the place, her mother always said, where Çeda’s shouts should come from when swinging a sword—came alive with the dizzying verve these petals granted. Her mouth filled with spit, forcing her to swallow constantly. Her hearing became sharper. The shush of the skimwood runners over the sand became raucous. Her mother’s breathing sounded loud in her ears. She could hear the whine of a maned wolf pup far in the distance. She swore she could even feel the adichara trees that ringed the city, the trees from which her mother had harvested this very petal.

  She felt more alive than ever before. As if she could take down one of the mangy bone crushers she’d seen prowling the desert as they’d left Sharakhai by morning’s light. As if she could leap from the skiff and chase the sister moons, follow them until they set along the edge of the world. There was nothing she couldn’t do. And yet her mother looked at her ruefully, as if this were a test Çeda had already failed. Why, she had no idea. Her mother had often given her petals the morning after Beht Zha’ir, but there had been other times too:
on the eve of Çeda’s birthdays; on Beht Tahlell, the night the goddess Nalamae had touched her crooked finger to the sands of the Great Shangazi, creating the River Haddah and granting life to the desert; sometimes she even gave Çeda a bit of the petals when they danced with blades. Why, then, would she give Çeda a petal now and then frown when it filled her with golden light?

  “Tell me,” Çeda said, if only to shake that look from her mother’s face. Ahya set her jaw stiffly, muscles working along gaunt cheeks. She was stubborn, but Çeda was her mother’s child. “Are we going to see the witch?”

  “Saliah isn’t a witch,” Ahya said finally, perhaps allowing that it was time for Çeda to know more of her secrets now that they were well out onto the sands and removed from those who might hear, including the King of Whispers.

  Çeda begged to differ. Everyone knew that Saliah could peer beyond the day and into one’s future, could cast spells if mood and need conspired to suit. Çeda smothered her biting reply, though. Her mother looked tense as the string of a tanbur—more tense, as if she might snap at any moment.

  “Are you going to sell her petals?” Çeda asked, hoping it was true, and that they could leave quickly. For some reason, she now feared the future.

  “Never you mind.”

  “I’m eight, Memma. I’m old enough to know.”

  With a reproachful look, her mother pulled her eyes away from the dunes ahead and stared into Çeda’s eyes. She burst into a fit of nervous laughter, a thing tempered only by the feelings of dread and doubt that were clearly roiling inside her. Then the feelings seemed to break, and she leaned back and laughed, good and long, the sound of it bathing the bright desert sky. It seemed in that moment as if all the tension from the morning and from the night before shed from Ahya’s frame and left her a woman reborn. She took Çeda’s hand and kissed it three times. “Perhaps you are, Çedamihn, but I’ll not tell you. Not yet. Not until I’ve spoken with her.”