Page 63 of Fate of the Argosi

‘Shut up.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Chedran demanded. That guy was always demanding something.

Nobody understands, I thought, holding back the tears.They’re going to want to cheer and clap me on the back. Tell me how heroic I was. Those stupid runaways are going to start peppering me with questions about being an Argosi and would I teach them because they want to be just like me.

‘Sounds awful,’Durral said.‘Positively, stultifyingly horrendous. I don’t know how you’ve endured the agony of being admired this long, kid.’

He’s never been good at sarcasm.

For once I didn’t give my imaginary mentor the satisfaction of a response. Instead, as I lay there slumped against Quadlopo’s back on the deck of the spellship, my eyes still squeezed shut, I went through the slow, painstaking work of removing the armour of my arta forteize, releasing each and every one of the memories that had protected me out in that land of onyx ice and obsidian gravestones. The Way of Stone can be tempting to hold on to. It makes you strong. Certain. Unbreakable. Pursued too long, though, it becomes a trap as pernicious and inescapable as despair. You become hard and unforgiving.

That ain’t the Argosi way, I said silently, mimicking Durral’s favourite denunciation so I wouldn’t have to hear him say it.

I love his voice, that frontier drawl of his that so often infects my own tongue, and when it does, I know I’m at my best. But I wasn’t ready to hear it yet, nor Enna’s, nor Arissa’s, nor anyone’s.

At last I opened my eyes, slid off Quadlopo’s back and handed the reins to Ala’tris. Conch leaped out of her arms so he could start butting my knees. I shooed him away and slipped through the throngs of well-wishers to the stairs that led below decks. I needed to be alone a while.

A hissing laughter inside my head followed me all the way down.

35

The Cabin

Those next three nights were hard. I’d stumbled into what I’d thought was a small cabin with a narrow cot that took up almost the entire floor and blocked the door from the inside. Turned out I’d crawled into a storage room and collapsed on a bunch of grain sacks. On those rare occasions when someone knocked to inform me there was a proper cabin available or offering to bring food, I’d tell them to go to hells. Impolite, to be sure, but I blamed it on the fever that left my entire body slick with oily black sweat.

When awake, I shook and shivered, wrestling with my darkest thoughts. No longer a dancer, I’d become little more than a punch-drunk boxer on her last legs, tripping over words and meanings that sought to ensnare me with their insidious shackles. When asleep, I tossed and turned, reached for dreams of brave smiles and stolen kisses. Sometimes I’d shudder awake, the soft tickle of lips pressed to my cheek. My hand would reach out in search of some presence next to me on the pile of sacks. I never found anyone, but always it seemed as if the rough fabric was warmer than it should be. Fever makes for a strange bedmate.

None of this was unexpected. On that hellish ride through the necropolis, I’d pushed myself to the brink of madness. You don’t return from something like that all at once. You almost never come back all the way.

Eighteen is too young to feel so old, I thought.

A chuckle roused me.‘Seventy-two is too old to be burdened with the work of the young.’

There was that same foggy, muffled distance to the words that I associated with memories or imaginings, but since neither Durral nor Enna are more than forty I realised the voice wasn’t coming from inside my head.

Drawing once more on my arta forteize, I employed a technique for bringing myself out of sleep quickly: three sharp, shallow breaths followed by a sneeze you don’t let out, but instead send through your entire body like a whip-crack. Try it sometime. Wakes you right up, all at once.

The door to the storage room creaked open and my first visitor entered. Almost certainly the last person I wanted to see. Guess I hadn’t blocked the door like I’d thought. Stoika stepped inside, bearing a tray with two wooden cups and a steaming clay pot. A travelling people learns to brew a great many kinds of tea over the generations. I disliked pretty much all of them.

Stoika ignored the look of distaste that was surely plastered on my face and sat down on my most favourite grain sack, balancing the tray shakily across her lap. ‘Don’t pout at me, girl,’ she said, making herself unduly comfortable. ‘Petulance is unattractive at the best of times, and entirely unconvincing in one’s saviour.’

‘Saviour?’ I barked that one out. Not quite a laugh, not quite a cough. Something in between. Something a little poisonous.

Stoika folded her hands on the tray. ‘Tell me, child, is it considered virtuous among the Argosi to deny the heroism of saving nearly three hundred lives? Or is it that, to you, those lives are worthless because they are Mahdek?’

‘Don’t start that we-are-the-forgotten-people crap with me, lady.’

I sat up, which for reasons beyond understanding unleashed all the stenches I’d been carrying with me in an all-out assault on my nostrils. I needed a bath almost as badly as I needed to punch this mean-spirited woman in the face, just once. Alas, necessity and circumstance had been twisting my path too far from that of the Wild Daisy already. I needed to get my head straight before I stumbled off the road entirely.

I put up a hand, pivoted my palm to the right in the traditional Mahdek gesture of repentance. ‘My apologies, elder. My words were ill-considered, my insinuation unfounded and churlish.’

Stoika’s eyes widened for an instant before she broke out laughing so hard she almost tipped the tray over. ‘Oh, how honoured am I, that the legendary Ferius Parfax chooses to express repentance to me with such graciousness.’ She wagged a finger in my face. ‘Don’t use me as some sort of . . . totem to settle your nerves, girl.’ She leaned back, resting against the side of the narrow storage cabin with a weary sigh. ‘How perfect I must seem for such a purpose, eh? Bitter. Domineering. Unfeeling. If you can force yourself to show me courtesy, find a way to tolerate my presence and even forge some sort of fledgling rapport with me, then you haven’t abandoned your Argosi ways at all. Isn’t that so?’

‘That is so, revered elder.’

‘Oh, do shut up with your fumbling attempts at proper manners. I never liked you before you saved all our lives, and, somehow, you manage to make me like you even less now that I owe you everything.’ She began pouring hot water into the wooden cups, dropping in leaves that looked black and bitter in this realm and I was pretty sure were black and bitter in any other too.

My arta precis wasn’t coming back very quickly. Something about exerting too much arta forteize makes one less perceptive. But I didn’t need any arta precis right now, because Stoika wasn’t trying to hide her intentions from me. I just needed to allow my arta loquit to hear what she was really saying.

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