Ariah (39 page)

“
I’m glad you didn’t.”

She rubbed a hand through her hair. She gave me a peculiar look, one that carried in it a newness, like she had never really seen me before. “Well, if the tahrqs are right, I only have this one life to live. Better not to waste it.”

CHAPTER 26

Travel on the Lost River was easy and full of solitude. The ground there is packed in, cooked by the sun until it shatters itself into a million interlocking polygons. It is banked on either side by huge dunes, unmarred dunes, that crest with edges sharp as knives. The Mother Desert is a windy place, but the height of the dunes on either side of us shielded us from the wind. The dunes cast shadows and blocked some of the beating heat during the day while we did our best to sleep. We traveled from dusk until dawn in the black night beneath a tremendous amount of stars. Each of us had a clockwork lamp on a pole, which hung out over the heads of our camels, lighting the few feet in front of us. When we traveled, we were four small spheres of light gently bobbing through the empty desert.

The Lost River did much of the navigation on this leg of the journey. Tamir was needed to chart a path through the badlands, and then to find the Lost River from there, but he had little to do but travel like the rest of us once we were on it. Every few days when we stopped at dawn, he would venture out into the loose sands, hauling himself to the top of one of the nearby dunes, and survey the land. There was always a chance that the land magic had turned the river and that we were being led off course. It was a slim chance, but it was there. He enjoyed this leg of the trip. He climbed those dunes with a sense of purpose, and when he fiddled with his compass, he did it half-smiling.

The magic embedded in the desert was a familiar thing to me. It feels different than the magic of Vilahna or the magic of the City. It’s a smoother, more sinuous thing, something with no rough edges. Magic slides in and out of you easily there. It felt like home. I found it easier to put the skills I’d learned with Vathorem into practice there. I was able to live that dual life—know my heart and someone else’s—without much struggle. I was even able to ignore it when the gift pulled me into someone else. Acknowledge it, know it had happened, but I was able to pay little attention to it. It was like letting someone talk at you, yammer on, but not really hearing any of the conversation they have forced on you.

Sorcha and Shayat warmed up to each other there in the desert. The narrowness of the Lost River forced us to ride single file in the black nights. I had to manage my own camel, which was a slow and arduous thing. Tamir led the way; I in my complete incompetence brought up the rear. Shayat and Sorcha always wound up in the middle together. I listened to them talk. “The one good thing about the Empire,” Shayat said one night, “is the plumbing.”

“
You all have proper plumbing there?” Sorcha asked.

“
We do, yes.”

“
I’d thought it was only the City.”

“
Well, it was only the City until a couple hundred years ago. When the Exalted took it as a protectorate, the first thing he did was send in a bunch of ours to reverse-engineer the running water. All the major Qin cities have running water, heated water, now,” Shayat said. “It will be good to be in a real city again.”

“
Oh, I know!” Sorcha said. “Alamadour, it’s little more than a town. And they’re so proud of it.”

Shayat laughed. “They really are. It’s not a city if you can walk from one end to the other in half an hour. It just isn’t.”

“
Ah, they don’t know better.”

They talked like this often. Sometimes, Sorcha played his violin as we rode. The thread of his music bobbed along with our small lanterns, cutting through the thick silence of the desert night. It was beautiful and haunting. It was pure and unencumbered. Sometimes after he finished Shayat would ask him questions about music and the violin, and about the lives of musicians in the City and Vilahna. She seemed fascinated by it, this idea that he could scrape by on his violin alone, that he had no job, no mark of employment. But, really, she was fascinated by him. Sometimes, in her tent, when we lay together sweating and half-asleep, she asked about him, and about the us that was him and me. Sometimes in the early morning, when we chewed on rations after a long night’s travel, she watched us from across the camp. Sorcha and I sat in the cold blue light, nestled close together to shake off the chill, contained in the ease of our relationship. I’d look out at the dunes—lilac mountains slowly turning a pinkish gold—and catch Shayat studying us with a strange and impenetrable expression. Sorcha had warmed to her and thought highly of her, but he seemed to have little reciprocal curiosity about her.

The question of Sorcha came up just once between us. I smoked at dawn and followed her into her tent as soon as we’d made camp. I’d watched her ride all through the night, the light of my lantern catching the silhouette of her body. She’d seen me smoking and smiled. I followed her into her tent, light-headed with anticipation, and leaned in to kiss her as soon as the flaps were tied shut.

Shayat darted back away from me. “Do you smoke with him, too?”

“
We don’t,” I said. I ran my fingers down her forearm.

“
Ariah, you can tell me.”

“
There’s nothing to tell,” I said, going to kiss her again. “We don’t.”

She let me kiss her, then took my face in her hands and pushed me back. Just an inch or so, just a little space between us, but enough distance to keep the conversation going. “You share a tent,” she said. “You shared a bed in Alamadour.”

“
I’m telling you, we don’t.”

“
You don’t.”

“
No, we don’t.”

She laughed. I toyed with the waistband of her leggings. “Ariah, come on. He is handsome.”

My hand drifted to the small of her back. “Oh, I know. And he knows it, too, trust me.”

“
And I see the way he looks at you.”

I sighed and dropped my forehead to her shoulder. My hands fell away from her. “Shayat. Why are you asking all this?”

I felt her blush rather than saw it. She burned with embarrassment, like a child caught stealing. She burned all the way down to her shoulders. “I don’t know. I’m just talking. We do talk, sometimes, Ariah.”

I sat back, giving her space. “We can talk,” I said, though it made me blush right along with her. “We can talk about Sorcha if you want.”

She bit her lip. She let out a strangled laugh and peered at me from the corner of her eye. “It’s just…why wouldn’t you? With him, I mean.”

I looked away from her. “It’s not simple.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
I mean it’s not simple. If it were to happen, it would have to be a careful thing, and it would have consequences. The consequences keep us locked in this…I don’t know what it is, what Sorcha and I are doing, but there’s a line I think we’re both scared to cross. Him more than me, I think.” My gaze drifted while I spoke, landing on her dusty boots. I looked back over at her. “We don’t, Shayat, and it’s his preference that we don’t more than mine. Why are you so curious about this all of a sudden?”

“
I was just curious. About him. And about you and him. Together.”

And it came to me all at once what she was curious about. “Oh. You mean with you. Us with you.”

She glanced around her tent. She waved at me. “We don’t have to talk anymore.”

“
If you’re curious about him alone, you should talk to him, Shayat.”

She looked over at me. It was a searching, slightly suspicious look. “Do you really mean that?”

“
I…yes?”

“
Hmm.” She looked away again.

“
What?”

“
That would be all right with you? Really, it would?”

“
Well, it…I suppose so. You’ve made it clear you’re not attached. You don’t owe me anything. And it’s him. It’s Sorcha, which would, I don’t know why, but if it was him, it would make it easier on me for some reason.”

Shayat was quiet for a long time. Her eyebrows knitted together. She looked consumed, serious, like she was weighing something in her mind, making calculations. When she looked at me again, it was with a fierce and unassailable certainty. Some decision had been made about something. “This is good,” she said. “No reason to change things. Forget I said anything,” she said, and then she kissed me.

Afterward, in the late, hot afternoon, I slipped out of her tent and into my own. Sorcha was sleeping; he lay naked on the blankets, sweat beading on his skin, one arm thrown across his eyes to block the light seeping in through the tent flaps. I sat for a long time staring at him. The talk with Shayat had left me unsettled. She’d said he was handsome. Was he? I knew he was. But, was it a thing I knew, or a thing I saw myself, with my own eyes? I couldn’t be sure. It was true that the sweet and stinging ache Shayat stirred in me with a glance was different than when I looked at him, but there was part of me that wondered if it was to do with all those rules I’d tried to abandon. It can be hard to abandon them when they’re woven so thick in you, right from the start. Was it a case of admitting to one and not the other? I tried to remember that night in Vilahna when I’d kissed him, how it felt just before, and found the memories were murky. I looked at him, this handsome sleeping naked man who loved me enough to come to Rabatha, and there was at once great confusion and a crystalline clarity in how I felt. I loved him, of course I did, there was little me without him. But the question of want was elusive as a snake lurking in the shadows.

I woke him with a gentle shake of his shoulder. He stretched and blinked, looked over at me and smiled. “What time is it? We’re off?”

“
No, there’s some time yet before nightfall.”

“
Oh. You been with Shayat?”

“
Yeah.”

He rolled on to his side and patted the blankets. “Well, curl up. Get some sleep while you can, eh?” When I didn’t immediately fall in beside him, he looked over at me. “Something eating you, Ariah?”

“
Are we all right?” I asked. I hadn’t meant to ask it, or planned on asking it, but it came out anyway. The thing about trust, with Sorcha at least, is that it pulls things to the surface and lets them run wild.

“
Sure, yeah. Always are. Been thinking about the Empire, and you know, it won’t be so bad given there’s working showers. Alamadour had a good music scene, sure, but showers I have missed.”

“
No,” I said. “No, I mean are you all right with me? With us? That we haven’t, uh…”

He laughed. “Oh, sure. Told you true back there. I’m red enough to take what I can get. Besides, you wouldn’t have the first clue what to do with me if you had the guts to go for it.” He took my hand and pulled me into the blankets. “Get some sleep.”

* * *

There was a morning in the desert where I woke, startled into consciousness by nothing I could see or hear. I woke with a deep, urgent foreboding. It was a panic brewing in my bones, but one with no obvious source. We were well into the desert; by Tamir’s estimation we were perhaps five days of decent travel out from Iyairo. It had been an uneventful morning following an uneventful night of travel. I’d skipped smoking and bedded down as soon as the tent was up. I’d spent the day before at the mercy of Shayat’s sharp-sweet attentions, gotten no sleep, and was too tired to see straight when dawn broke. I had fallen into a deep, black sleep as soon as I’d had the chance. And then, all at once, I was awake.

Sorcha slept beside me. I poked my head through the tent flaps and found an empty, silent camp biding its time through an empty, silent desert day. Tamir and Shayat were in their tents as well, both sleeping. The air was still and crisp. The sky was a span of endless blue. The camels knelt on the sand with their long necks stretched out, their large liquid eyes closed. The only movement anywhere that I could see was the occasional flick of a camel’s tail to drive off an insect.

I tried to go back to sleep and failed. The panic drove me out of the tent. I paced the campsite, peering east, always east. I had slipped out without a robe, with no headscarf. The merciless sun beat down on me and turned me red. I did not notice. The sweat poured out of me, the dry heat of the desert air sucking the moisture from me, but I had no thirst. My full attention was turned to the eastern horizon, which was utterly empty. But I felt something lurking, lying in wait. I felt a trap.