“Jaque, wonderful. God bless you. And who is this?”
“I have meant to introduce you for some time. Deni is our deputy ambassador’s special assistant to the Mhorian ambassador. Deni, this is Philie, your counterpart to Deputy Ambassador Leone in Ras Tieg.”
“A pleasure,” Philie said, and they bowed slightly to one another. Philie gestured to Inaya. “Allow me to introduce Inaya Khadija, wife of Khos Khadija of Mhoria.”
Deni’s eyes widened. “Khos Khadija?”
Inaya mustered up a smile. Shirhazi was a small place for refugees, especially Mhorian and Ras Tiegan ones. Few managed to leave their home countries, and those that did were often not wanted. She and Khos were considered a strange pair because of their backgrounds, and commented on more than Inaya felt comfortable with. This gathering of Mhorians was loosely mixed, but only loosely. Mhorian men and women did not live together. They had constructed entirely different societies on either side of the country’s Great Divide. Even here, Inaya watched women with their ornate hair and intricate robes cluster on one side of the yard, and their male Mhorian counterparts, in equally stunning robes and elaborate dreadlocks, milled about the other.
“Your husband is a… shifter?” Deni said, as if it were a bad word. Of course, in Ras Tieg, it was.
“Yes. And Mhorian. Among Mhorians it is not sinful.”
Jaque kept his tone light. “Yet he is not here tonight watching over his wife?”
“He did not wish to upset our Ras Tiegan partners,” Inaya said, still smiling at Deni.
“Excuse my bold words,” Deni said, “but how is it a Ras Tiegan such as yourself could possibly—”
“She is a half-breed,” Jaque said. “Pardon, from your features and complexion I assumed—”
“A quarter, to be precise,” Inaya said. Leave it to a Ras Tiegan to argue blood. Impurities. “My father was half-Nasheenian. My grandfather converted when he fled the war. In Ras Tieg, we have full citizenship.”
“Yet you stay here because of your shifter husband?” Deni said. “I’m sorry if my words are forward, but these things concern me, as someone striving to understand Mhorians. I will not ask if you share rooms—I would not be so bold—but what of your children? Do you not fear that they, too, may become abominations? And how is it a Mhorian man knows anything about raising children? Only women raise children in Mhoria. They have a whole cast one belongs to when—”
“I think you are being a little forward, Deni,” Philie said softly.
“I’m sorry. I understand Mhorians think differently. I do respect those differences. But you are Ras Tiegan. Are you not worried that your children may become as he is?”
“Perhaps I hope my blood is stronger than his.” Wouldn’t that be just the thing? Inaya thought grimly.
“Ah, of course. It is women’s wombs that determine whether a child is carried to term, but—”
She felt her face redden. If she had a drink, she may have dumped it on him. It was a popular, poisonous lie in Ras Tieg propagated by priests, that women chose to miscarry their non-shifter children, ensuring that only shifters were born. Why women would endure five miscarriages the way her mother had at a whim was anyone’s guess. The priests nattered on about women being unknowable. Inaya had a great respect and reverence for God, but it had been some time since she could stomach the words of His priests.
“Deni, I do think that is enough talk of wombs and shifters to an unescorted young woman,” Philie said. “Come, join me for some curried rice and we will speak of all things Mhorian.” Philie extended his hand.
Deni bowed his head slightly to Inaya. “Of course. My apologies. I am often too forthright, even among our own people.”
And I am unescorted, Inaya thought. What concern should one give to a woman whose husband did not see fit to protect her? It was an old Ras Tiegan assumption, but one that was dying only slowly. Unescorted women were still talked to and about as if they were loose women, whores. If her husband had been at her side, no one would have dared speak to her of wombs and bedrooms.
Jaque bowed to her as well and went off with the others, leaving her alone at the edge of the courtyard.
Inaya had left Ras Tieg without much care for where she was headed. She had simply stolen her first husband’s bakkie and started driving… and didn’t stop. She may not have gone as far as she did in a regular bakkie, but it was a prototype sun-powered hybrid from Tirhan, which meant she went twice as far on the full tank of bug juice. When the bakkie finally gave out, it had been full dark for three hours, and she was lost somewhere in northern Ras Tieg, near the Nasheenian border.
The land out there was rocky, barren, full of twisted, sappy evergreens with thorny crowns and bulbous roots. The bugs in the scrub-land weren’t as large or as plentiful as they were further south, but she didn’t know that then. She had never been that far north. The whole world was a void. A nothing. Just like she felt.
She had wandered most the night before she came upon the border station. It was minimally staffed, just three men. Men like these ones. Privileged, well-meaning, with old ideas about what could and should be done to women out wandering the desert alone. She had spent endless years wondering if she could have done or said something differently that night to make it end some other way.
It had taken her a long time to realize that it was not her and her behavior that was at issue, though she had often thought God had simply punished her for stealing her dead husband’s bakkie. But no, it was not God that had caused the events of that night, just as it was not God who beat her mother in the street for being a shifter. It was men, not God, who had done those things, and it was she herself who had retaliated.
And it will always be like that, Inaya thought, watching them walk back to the food tables, chatting and laughing as if nothing ill was said while she stood alone, feeling oily and vaguely dirty for the implication that she would abort her own wanted babies. It will be like that until someone decides to change it. All of it. But how did you change an entire culture? Revolutions were about politics, not perceptions, weren’t they?
Not in Nasheen, she thought, and pondered that. In Nasheen, women decided how they would be treated. They policed it. Enforced it. Was there a way to do that without becoming monstrous like them or building a whole new martyr the way the Tirhanis had? Inaya had no wish to be a martyr. But she wondered how she could continue to tolerate a world where men’s actions would confront her daughter with the same impossible choice she was forced to make that night on the border.
“Excuse me?”
A young man had approached from the rooms behind her. He was
dressed in yellow livery, like a servant, and as she turned she saw he had a clubbed foot. It was an odd affliction, something that should have been easily fixed by a magician. She caught herself staring at it and had to make herself look up, into his face. There was something sly and moppish there, something she did not like.
“And what is it you’d like to ridicule me about?” Inaya snapped.
The man’s eyes widened, and he grinned. She decided she liked the grin even less.
“Me? Madame, I was merely looking for the privy. Point the way?”
She pointed.
He bowed, absurdly, and trundled off across the courtyard.
Inaya firmed her mouth. She stared off toward the entrance. Her husband was not coming. He had thought she could handle herself at an embassy dinner, and perhaps that was true. But her whole life, she had expected to marry a man who would escort her. Protect her. Look after her. For a time, she thought she had found that in Ras Tieg as the lesser wife—well, not really a wife, but it suited the same purpose—to an old man associated with the persecution of shifters. He had never known what she was, and while he lived, she was safe. But her husband died, just like everyone else, and then she was alone again. Wandering along a stricken border. Fleeing a household in chaos.
Even after all this time, she still hoped Khos would appear now, looking proud and tall and intimidating, and push all these other men from her path. She wanted protection. She wanted autonomy. But she could not have both.
It is time you learned that no one is coming, she thought, and began walking back into the stir of strained contentment.
13.
N
yx steadied herself with her cane and listened to the radio in the tea shop window. She had her hood up. Suha had nicked an extra long organic burnous with wide sleeves. It kept her a lot cooler, a good thing considering how much she had to cover herself up now that she had baby-soft skin. She was chewing sen, but the pain was still bad, and her new skin itched like she’d ingested six jars of spider mites. Eshe stood next to her, looking anxious and girlish with his long hair and belled trousers. Suha sat on the lip of the fountain behind them, hood up, pistols visible.
The news was all about Mushtallah. Nothing about a rogue bounty hunter. Or a dead Queen’s messenger. No news of another slick magician hauled into Amtullah for interrogation.
“You think they think you’re dead?” Eshe said, passing Nyx a water bulb.
“Unlikely,” Nyx said. She shifted her weight to her right foot and leaned a little more on the cane. She hated the cane, but figured she could use it to bash somebody’s head in if the situation called for it. “Even if she killed and skinned the messenger, the glamour would wear off after a while. They’d know it wasn’t my body.”
“So we got borrowed time?” Suha said.
“Yeah,” Nyx said.
“You think they’ll send the bel dames after you?” Eshe asked.
“Likely.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. We don’t have much time.”
Nyx started toward the bakkie. Suha carried the supplies they’d bought. They were twenty kilometers outside Punjai, on the outskirts of the boxing town of Aludra. Border towns were still the best towns to get lost in. Nobody asked your business.
“You still haven’t said where we’re going,” Suha said.
“I haven’t been so sure we’d be alive to get there,” Nyx said. Yahfia had escorted Eshe up through the magicians’ twisting corridors and into the boxing gym in Punjai to change and wait. They got Nyx out on a stretcher, with a fine cicada glamour that left her skin still slightly ruddy. But no one had died. And Yahfia hadn’t broken their cover. Not yet.
“So, where?” Eshe asked.
Nyx spit sen. “We’re going to meet the only bel dame who doesn’t die,” Nyx said.
Suha grunted. “You two should have a lot in common, then.”
“You wouldn’t believe,” Nyx said.
+
Nyx had Suha look up Alharazad’s address with her bounty collector contact at the reclamation office in Aludra. The former bel dame was supposed to be living northeast of Faouda along the border, at the edge of the Khairi wasteland.
Nyx paid for a night at a roadhouse on the way north to Faouda, and slept late. Suha and Eshe were quiet. Nyx let the silence stretch. When Eshe went out to get them breakfast from the restaurant downstairs after midday prayer, Suha sat on the end of Nyx’s bed and started taking apart her pistols.
“You really think there’s been a coup?” Suha asked.
“I wouldn’t be out here if I didn’t.”
Suha looked up at her, frowned. “You sure about that?”
Nyx watched her. “What do you think?”
“I don’t want to run a revenge note, you know? We’re in a kettle now if the Queen puts out a note on you. Why not get out of the country, go set up in Ras Tieg? I got no problem with working out of Ras Tieg.”
“I couldn’t take Eshe with us.”
Suha sucked her lip. “Yeah. Fuck, Nyx. I did my time at the front, all right? I’ve done my time for God.”
“You don’t have to come. You signed an employment contract. You can break it any time you want.”
Suha gave a surprisingly savage shake of her head. “No. Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“You know I ain’t employable.”
“I employed you, didn’t I?”
“You take risks,” Suha said. She raised her head, met Nyx’s look. “Other folks don’t. I was an addict, Nyx. They can still count the worm scars on my arms. You think I could make money with anybody else?”
Nyx palmed some sen. “Go home, then,” Nyx said. “Your mother and sisters can get fucking jobs.”
Suha snorted. “You don’t know my family.”