“I’m afraid, Ora Dasai.”
“We’re all afraid, child,” Dasai said. “It’s what we do with that fear that sets us apart. Bid farewell to your sister.”
Dasai murmured a prayer to Sina and opened the door.
Inside, the windows were covered. The darkness was complete.
Dasai picked up a lantern in an alcove and shook the flame flies awake. The flickering light cast wide shadows, illuminating a raised bed draped with sticky webbing. Ahkio heard someone else breathing in the darkness – wet and ragged.
Ahkio approached the unfamiliar bed and sat on a stool beside it. Dasai brought the light closer. Ahkio took it.
Kirana’s face was a gaunt mask with deep circles under the hollows of the eyes. She had the look of their mother: the long, plain face, high forehead, sloping nose, strong, square jaw. Her black hair was thin and tangled, tied at the nape of her damp neck. Displaced curls clung to her forehead. Her skinny hands clasped at the bed sheets like claws.
It was high summer in Dhai, and Ahkio felt cold.
“Ahkio,” she said. The clawed hands reached for him. He took her fingers. Her eyelids flickered. “Asked for you… weeks ago. There’s something coming.”
“You’ll meet it,” Ahkio said. Weeks ago? He glanced at Dasai.
“I was never Kai,” she said. “Everything’s burning.”
Ahkio rubbed her warm fingers. “That was a long time ago,” he said.
“Get the others out,” Kirana said. “Out!”
“Ora Dasai,” Ahkio said.
Dasai stood at the end of the bed, his face mired in shadow. “Call if there’s a need,” Dasai said.
After Dasai closed the door, Kirana urged Ahkio to lean in close. She smelled of rot from within. He saw his father in her, his mother, and the dead sisters his mother had buried before they had names.
“Don’t go,” he said. He pushed the damp hair from her face. Her skin was hot. She looked so much like their mother… “You promised,” he said. “You promised me you wouldn’t die like they did.”
For over a year after that day in the Dorinah slave camps, when he watched his father’s head lopped off and saw his mother burn, he had expected Kirana to die, too. The dreams got so bad, they stalked him during the day. The Oras, especially Nasaka, thought him mad. It was Kirana who brought him back from madness, Kirana and her promise.
“You said–”
“I can’t make the future, Ahkio,” she said. “It’s yours now. I shouldn’t have pulled you from the fire, I know. Another woman would have chosen Mother instead, wouldn’t she? But I chose you, brother. You were supposed…” She started coughing, great hacking sobs that shook her body. Blood appeared at her mouth, flecked the sheets. “It was all…” she gasped. “All wrong, this turn. I’ve made it right.”
“Hush, Kira,” he said softly.
“But you should know… about Yisaoh.” She gazed up at the long lines of poetry running along the ceiling. Ahkio tried to read them, but the light was too dim. He said a prayer to Sina instead.
Ahkio tried to pull his hand from her grip. “I’ll get you tea. Do you–”
She squeezed his fingers. “I’m too late.” She coughed blood onto their joined hands, and said through bloody lips, “Dhai’s peace…” Her fingers clenched his once.
She made a strange strangling cough, almost a sigh.
“Don’t,” he said.
Her eyes lost their focus. Her fingers relaxed in his.
Ahkio bent over her body. The flies in the lantern began to dim as they settled. Kirana’s fingers cooled in his hands. He prayed to Sina to take her soul, and Oma to bless him with wisdom in her absence.
He sat next to his dead sister in silence. The world did not move. The air did not tremble. Nothing was different at all, except he was alone now, because someone had killed his sister.
He did not weep. He had wept over their parents for a year. It changed nothing. He knew what he needed to do.
When the door opened, Ahkio lifted his head. His neck and shoulders were stiff.
Nasaka stepped through the archway, her expression stern. “We must meet the sanisi now. The Ora council is ready.”
“Kirana,” Ahkio said.
“Has she passed?”
Ahkio stared into Kirana’s slack face, the still-open but blank eyes. He thought of Meyna. Oma, how he wanted to go home to Meyna and Rhin and Hadaoh and Mey-Mey. But they weren’t going to be his kin anymore, were they? It’s why they had never married him. They knew this day would come. Someone would kill the Kai, and Ahkio would take her seat. Did they hope he would grant them favors on that day?
“We have a duty to Dhai,” Nasaka said, following his stare. “We must get you dressed in something befitting your… title.”
“That’s like you,” Ahkio said. His voice broke. “You’ll watch another Kai perish, just like you watched my mother die. You pull all the strings.”
“No,” Nasaka said. “I don’t watch Kais die. I call tirajistas to save them. I use my sword to defend them. They may die regardless. But I always act. You’re the one who bides his time, waiting for someone else to make his fate. So get up, Ahkio. I don’t pull strings. I pull the people attached to them.”
“I’ll find out who killed her, Nasaka, if I have to burn this whole temple down around me.”
“One fire at a time,” Nasaka said. “That sanisi upstairs is asking for you.”
Ahkio stood.
6
Lilia sat on the edge of the bed in the infirmary, waiting to hear the worst. The temple physician, Ora Matias, pressed two cool fingers to her chest. He watched her face as she took a deep breath. Halfway through her exhale, she began to cough. She kept coughing for several minutes, even after he gave her a sip of water.
Above, the dome over the infirmary let in the light of the triad of moons. The flame flies in the lanterns filled the darker spaces. The soft organic walls here had been smoothed over in lavender plaster. Lilia found the temple infirmary very soothing. Though most were kind to her in the temple – when they noticed her – it was the Oras in the infirmary who brought her relief from pain and discomfort, whether from her twisted leg or labored breath.
Matias was new to the temple, though, and she had not been in since his appointment. He was an agreeable-enough person with plump, ink-stained fingers and a habit of smoothing over his eyebrows.
“It’s a very mild case of asthma,” Matias said, “as I’m sure you know. A girl with lungs like yours should be a seamstress or a typesetter, not a laborer. I always wanted to be a typesetter, you know.”
“Then why are you a physician?”
“Well. Talent cannot be wasted. Tirajistas must serve Dhai. It’s not a terrible profession, and it still impresses my mothers.”
“I know I don’t look very strong,” Lilia said. “But I like the exercise. My leg’s worse when I don’t use it.”
“I can’t argue with that,” he said. “But be careful. Let’s give you something to ease the constriction. Have you been given wax wraith before?”
“Ora Shotai always gave me mahuan.”
“Let’s go with what you know works, then.” He went to the vast wall of medicinal jars at the far end of the room. “You’ve been like this all day?”
“The scullery master sent me here after bed check. I was coughing so much, it bothered the other drudges.”
“Ora Matias!”
Lilia heard fear in the cry. She was on her feet even before the woman entered. It was Ohanni, the temple’s dancing teacher. She carried a limp form in her slender arms. The body was lax, like a doll. But it was the blood that made Lilia’s stomach seethe.
The body was covered in blood. Soaked in it. One arm hung free. Drops of blood collected at the ends of the fingers, spattered the floor.
Matias stood frozen at the wall of medicinal jars, mouth agape.
Ohanni carried the body into the room. Behind her were two novices. Their aprons were rusty with blood.
It was only then that Lilia realized the body was Roh’s.
Ahkio leaned over the table in the Assembly Chamber at the top of Oma’s temple. He watched the gathered council and wondered which of them had murdered his sister, and to what purpose. He was a little unsteady, so he sat in the chair to the right of the Kai’s seat, the chair reserved for her heir, which he’d sat in only once, the day they returned from the Dorinah camps and Nasaka called the circle of Elder Oras and the temple’s Ora council – the same faces he saw now.
Gaiso frowned at him from the other side of the room but did not break in conversation with her assistant. Elder Ora Masura of the Temple of Tira waved to him from the hall. Masura was a splendid, regal old woman, and one of his mother’s many lovers. She came around the table and asked to take his hands.
He consented, only because he did not want to draw her suspicion; he was exhausted and angry, and he feared what he would say. She took his scarred hands in her smooth, cold palms and blessed him.
“It’s been a decade since I saw you last, hasn’t it?” she said. “I wish it were under better circumstances.”
In truth, it had been twelve years since he sat with these people. He could have gone a lifetime without sitting here again.
Gaiso dismissed her assistant and rounded on Ahkio. “Has the Kai passed, then? Is that why you’re here?”
“Are you questioning my right to be here?” Ahkio said softly.
Gaiso looked taken aback. “What did you say?”
“I’m so sorry, Ahkio. No one wanted this,” Masura said.
“I wanted twenty babies,” Gaiso said. “I was made Elder Ora of Oma’s temple instead. We don’t all get what we want.”
Masura made a sound of distress. “Don’t speak as if your life decisions were not made just as politically as your cousin Tir’s.”
“For a clucking, drunken little bird,” Gaiso said, “you spend far too much time aggravating cats.”
“I see you’re all getting along as expected,” Nasaka said from the doorway.
“Who else is coming?” Ahkio asked. He wanted to see the reactions of the other Elder Oras to Kirana’s death.
“Just Ora Almeysia,” Nasaka said. “Elder Ora Koralia of Sina’s Temple and Elder Ora Saraba of Para still haven’t sent a response. Ora Dasai will be here, of course. He’s bringing up the sanisi now.”
“It’s curfew for the novices,” Gaiso said. “Ora Almeysia will be doing a bed check. Let’s start without her. I don’t want to keep that sanisi waiting any longer.”
Nasaka nodded to Ahkio. “I see you found your seat.”
“I expected you wanted me in another.”
“That will do,” Nasaka said.
Ahkio glanced next to him at the seat of the Kai, his sister’s seat. He wanted to sit there just to spite Nasaka, but though he made to press himself out of his chair, the rest of his body would not obey him.
He heard footsteps in the hall.
A young Ora entered – one Ahkio did not know – and made a sweeping gesture as the sanisi pushed up ahead of him. The emissary’s rudeness was shocking.
“May I present Shao Taigan Masaao, a sanisi messenger from Saiduan,” the Ora said.
The sanisi was tall, taller than Ahkio expected. He easily towered head and shoulders above Ahkio, like some giant. For all that, he moved like water, with a slightly hunched posture that made Ahkio wonder if he’d been injured.
“Which of you is the Kai?” Taigan asked.
Ahkio put his hands on the table and made to stand.
Nasaka waved him back, said, “I’m afraid you’ve reached us at a difficult time.” She had not yet made it to her chair, the one at the right side of the Kai seat, reserved for the Kai’s religious and political advisor. “Let us sit–”
“What I have to say is for the Kai,” Taigan said. “We have very little time to chatter on about complications and niceties and backward Dhai customs.”
“Excuse my tardiness,” Dasai called from the hall. He limped in, leaning heavily on his cane. “Thank you, Ora Chali,” he said, dismissing the sanisi’s escort.
Chali looked more than happy to leave them, and ducked past Dasai into the hall.
Taigan peered at each of them in turn. His gaze settled on Ahkio. “You’re no Ora,” the sanisi said. “What is your function?”
“I am the Kai’s brother,” Ahkio said.
“Ah,” Taigan said. “A boy. Yes, this explains much. You’re not gifted, though, are you? You’re not who I was looking for. Is this all there is? No other relation to the Kai? I have no time to be politic.”
“Let us be seated,” Dasai said. He clutched the top of his walking stick tightly. Ahkio wondered how many polite rituals and welcomes they had already trampled past.
What he wanted more than anything was to go sit by his sister’s side. He should have been here when she got sick. If she’d called him weeks ago, why had no one told him? They could have uncovered together who cursed her with the illness that took her.
“That won’t be necessary,” Taigan said. “Oma is rising.”
Ahkio raised his head. “What?”
“Not according to our stargazers,” Nasaka said.
“Then they are ill informed,” Taigan said. “Oma, just like any other star, has been known to appear suddenly. One cannot always track its path. Now I tell you its effect is being felt across my country. With Oma come invaders. Such is as it’s always been. This time, they’ve found a way to come through before Oma’s full appearance.”
“Who are these invaders?” Ahkio asked. “What do they have to do with us?”
“The last time Oma rose,” Nasaka said, “two thousand years ago, the Saiduan invaded what was then Dhai, when we ruled the continent. There is always a great power that unseats another during Oma’s ascent. Always. I do not contest that. But I see no proof of Oma’s rise here besides your word.”
“If you had seen what I have seen, you would not question it,” Taigan said.
“Shao Taigan,” Dasai said, “we respect you greatly. Yet you do not use the speech we have come to expect of the Patron’s emissaries. What is it we can do for you, sanisi, during your time of trouble?”