“God,” Khos said. “Did you… did you pull her up? Was she in the well?”
“No,” Inaya said. She wiped the dirt and dried blood from her forehead. Elahyiah’s blood. “She was already up. They must have pulled her up.”
“The children?”
Inaya shook her head, then met his look. “Our children?”
“Safe,” he said.
She nodded and looked away. A conversation for another time. All she needed now was their safety. She didn’t care how they achieved it.
She followed Suha into the second, darker room. Rhys lay on a tattered mattress under the wan light of a handful of dirty glow bulbs. They’d bound the stumps of his arms. She had plenty of morphine and thorn bug juice stored here, but he would need a magician, a very good one, soon.
Suha helped Elahyiah ease down onto the mattress besides Rhys. Elahyiah saw him then, what was left of him, and began to cry.
Inaya wanted to take her up in her arms and comfort her. Say something soothing. But her mouth was dry. She had nothing to give her. Everything felt… She wasn’t sure, really. She wasn’t sure she felt anything at all.
“And Nyx?”
Inaya turned.
Khos watched her, blocking the doorway.
Inaya looked at Elahyiah lying beside Rhys. Together, the two bodies looked like casualties of war. A handless Chenjan. A broken, childless mother.
“She’s dead,” Inaya said. Flat.
“Dead?” Suha said from the other room. She appeared in the doorway. “The fuck you say?”
“Dead,” Inaya repeated. “You can look at her yourself.”
“You’re full of shit,” Suha said.
“Where?” Khos said.
“The park. She’s dead. We need to focus on staying alive.”
“The fuck you think we’re doing?” Suha said.
“We’ll need to move in the morning and collect the children. We have the insurance on the house and the cache here,” Inaya said.
“Rhys needs a magician. Elahyiah doesn’t look much better,”
“We can take them into town. Nyx is dead. They won’t be looking for us.”
“Are you so sure of that?” Khos said.
Khos moved inside and navigated the tight space, knelt next to Elahyiah.
Suha moved away and squeezed past Inaya and into the front room. She was shorter than Nyx, but heavier—a bulky Nasheenian woman. She stank like death.
Khos reached out a tentative hand to Elahyiah’s forehead. It still surprised Inaya sometimes, to see how gentle he was. The rest, though, there were times…
“You’re all right now,” Khos said. “You’re among friends.”
“My babies,” Elahyiah said.
“We’ll look for them,” Khos said.
Inaya frowned. But that was likely best, for now.
“Please.” Elahyiah reached up and grabbed hold of his collar. “Please, our children.”
“We’ll keep looking. Hush now. We’ll get you a magician.”
He turned to Inaya. “You speak with her.”
Inaya knelt. “We’re here, Elahyiah. Rhys is here too.” She turned and saw that Rhys’s face was covered in sweat. He shivered, opened his eyes. “Elahyiah,” he said.
“She’s here, Rhys,” Inaya said.
Rhys shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut.
“Can’t risk taking you to a magician yet,” Khos said. “You understand?”
“Do you know any magicians we can trust?” Inaya asked. “Someone we can call on?”
Rhys’s eyes were glassy, feverish. “The girls. Where are the girls? Elahyiah.”
“I’m here,” Elahyiah said softly. She grabbed at his dirty bisht and began to weep in earnest.
“We need one for you first,” Khos said. “You’ll die here on the table and you’ll be no good to anyone. Who can we ask? You must know someone.”
When Rhys just moaned, Khos looked up at Inaya. “Do you think we could bribe someone?”
Inaya made a sound of distaste. “Don’t be stupid. You want to bring someone here who can be bribed? Stop and think.”
“Stop it,” he said.
“You asked my opinion. Or have I turned into a Mhorian woman?” It tasted bitter.
Khos’s face got dark.
“Tayyib,” Rhys said. His eyes were open again. “Yah Tayyib.”
“He’s hallucinating,” Inaya said. She looked for the pack of bugs and drugging agents she’d stowed in the old prayer niche behind them. The images of the Ras Tiegan saints, even in this overgrown, forgotten place, had been defaced and mutilated. “I can give him something more for the pain.”
“Yah Tayyib,” Rhys said again. “He’s in the magicians’ gym. City center.”
“Yah Tayyib died in Chenja,” Khos said.
“No.” Rhys pushed the stump of his arm toward Khos. “He’s here. We have tea on weekend prayer days.”
“It’s true,” Elahyiah said, wiping at her eyes. “I have met this magician. What of him? Can he help Rhys? Our children?”
Inaya pulled out the thorn juice she’d been keeping to drug her own children. If the bel dames started stalking the mausoleums, crying children would have been deadly. She never thought she would be thankful for Khos’s other wife.
“Go to the magicians’ gym,” Rhys said. “He’ll remember you. Tell him what happened. He’ll come.”
“He’ll give us up to them,” Khos said.
“No. Go to him.”
Inaya pulled the stopper on the thorn juice, brought it to Rhys’s lips. He shook his head, pursed his mouth.
“Don’t,” Khos said.
“He’s talking craziness.”
She met Khos’s look. For a moment they regarded one another. His eyes were narrow slits, the mouth a thin line, and his skin all looked too tight. He was terrified, she realized. Though he did not tremble, and his voice remained steady, she could see the terror in him now. A terror that mirrored hers. God, she thought, dear God in heaven, how will we do this?
“I’ll take the bakkie downtown and ask,” Khos said. “That may be the only hope we have for the fever.”
“A regular surgeon or hedge witch could take down the fever,” Inaya said.
“We need to do something about his hands.” Khos stood.
“Khos—”
He walked out into the front room. She followed, still carrying the thorn juice.
“Leaving him here risks his death,” Khos said.
As they came in, Suha stepped outside. Inaya had not seen the other one, the shifter boy. She wondered if he was dead too.
“Nyx is dead,” Khos said. “She was a bel dame. Maybe not the best of them, but one of the toughest. Whoever she had after her is better than she is.”
“Which means that if they wanted us dead, they would have done it,” Inaya said. Then, low, “I would be like Elahyiah, and you would have no children.”
His face looked sad. Stricken. Something knifed through her, then, some sympathetic emotion. How many years had they stumbled through all this together? How much had he given up for this, just as she had? How much had he risked to keep them safe? She’d never considered it before.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You just don’t understand. You don’t know what it feels like to be—”
“Someone who’s lost everything?” he said quietly.
She caught herself, and remembered his other life. As dark as hers, truly? When they came to Tirhan, he had been looking for his son.
“I have not thanked you for what you’ve done. Or… appreciated it. Your son… I’m sorry.”
“He went to a good Tirhani family. I know I’m not much of a father.”
“You’re a fine father,” she said, and caught herself, shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
He reached out, tentatively, gently. “I came here to build my own family.”
She flinched from his touch. He pulled his hand away.
“You lied to me.”
“I didn’t.”
“That Mhorian woman—” Inaya caught her breath. It was only the second time she’d said it aloud. The first she’d done only to save her children. She wrung her hands.
“I’m sorry. You don’t understand—”
“I understand perfectly well. I understand that you despise me and fear me. That you—”
“What?”
She looked up at him.
“Do you even know who she is to me?”
“Your wife?”
“No. Before that. You said nothing. I thought you knew.”
“About what?”
“Inaya, she’s the mother of my son, the half-breed boy the underground smuggled out of Nasheen. She isn’t Mhorian. She’s mostly Nasheenian, and she fled here after I did, to get away from the war. She would have lost her Tirhani visa if I hadn’t married her. It was my duty. Any man’s duty.”
“I… why didn’t you tell me who she was?”
“You never asked. With all the work that you do… I assumed you knew. You always know everything.”
“You’re a bloody fool.”
“I’m the fool?”
“Hey!” Suha yelled.
Inaya turned.
“Get the fuck moving. Work out your shit later. Magicians first. Catshit later,” Suha said, moving back into the room from the yard.
Inaya felt heat rise in her face. “What do you know about it?” Inaya said.
Khos met her look. For a long moment, Inaya wondered if the last year had been some kind of bloody nightmare. She wondered if she would wake up tomorrow to a warm house, a content husband, children without a shifter’s burgeoning allergies, and an intact house.
“Go,” she said.
He did.
Inaya bolted the mausoleum door and turned back inside where Suha sat in a far corner, taking apart her pistol.
“God in heaven protect us,” Inaya murmured.
“God ain’t got nothing to do with it,” Suha said, and spit a wad of sen on the floor at her feet. “Ain’t you learned that yet?”
+
Khos returned on Suha’s watch, just after dusk. Inaya heard them come in. Khos carried a red carpet bag in one hand and a black case in the other. The magician walked in behind him.
“Yah Tayyib,” Inaya said.
She had never seen Yah Tayyib, but she had heard that Nyx put a knife in him in Chenja. He was a rebel and a traitor to Nasheen, implicated in at least half a dozen deaths and the attempted murder of several of the Queen’s magicians. He was a war veteran, and the image of him she had conjured in her mind was one of a stocky, brutalized soldier, one arm the wrong color, an organic green plate in his head, one leaking eye.
But the man in the door was tall and slender and intact. He carried himself aloof and erect, like a court magician. He wore his hair white and long. A beard the same color made a soft point from his chin to the center of his chest, hiding much of the severe expression on his deeply lined brown face. His eyes were two dark pools, the nose mashed, but his hands, his magician’s hands, were long-fingered, smooth, beautiful. He clasped them in front of him now as he walked toward her.
Inaya shouldered her shotgun and gave Yah Tayyib a brief bow of the head, proper in Ras Tieg and Tirhan.
“I am Inaya,” she said, in Tirhani.
“I know who you are,” he said coolly—in Nasheenian.
You have no idea, Inaya thought, with equal calm. “He’s this way,” she said. She took him to Rhys’s side.
Elahyiah lay next to him, holding him.
The magician stared down at Rhys and Elahyiah. Frowned.
“We’ll need a table. A slab. Elevated. Are there pedestals in here?” he asked.
“In the room in the back,” Inaya said. Someone had stolen the urns from the top of them long ago, and no one put bodies on them anymore. The Ras Tiegan mausoleums had been defiled and abandoned a hundred years before.
“And light,” he said.
“I can string the globes,” Inaya said.
Suha and Khos moved Rhys into the back room. Elahyiah stayed behind, hugging her knees to her chest. Inaya dusted the old globes, smeared them in unguent, and placed them in sconces.