Page 16 of Fate of the Argosi

‘Why not let him play?’ Chedran asked acidly. ‘It’s not as if he’s a runaway child in the middle of hostile territory being led to certain doom by petulant teenagers who think themselves too grand to toil alongside their people.’

‘You’re being unfair!’ Kievan shot back. ‘You haven’t lived among us for years. You ran off an—’ She stopped herself, wincing at her own choice of words before trying again. ‘Forgive me, Chedran, I misspoke. I meant only that a great deal has changed since the Jan’Tep massacres decimated our numbers. Despair bedevils our elders, leaving the rest of us . . . unmoored.’

Shame stabbed me right in the gut. I’d barely thought about my people since I was eleven years old. It never occurred to me that the slaughter of my clan had been only one of many.

‘Grief, guilt and shame are just three words for wasted love,’Enna would’ve reminded me.‘Make restitution if you can, walk on if you can’t.’

‘We brought their protector back to them, Rat Girl,’ Arissa said quietly, almost like she could see my guilt in the slump of my shoulders. ‘Time for you and me to hit the road.’

She was right. There was nothing here for me, for us. Happiness awaited on a long road far from this place. All I needed was to turn around and walk out the door. Quadlopo and Arissa’s poncy bronze stallion were waiting for us a quarter mile up the path. Once we’d saddled them up, we’d ride fast and far, put a hundred miles between us and the past before it even knew we were gone. Not even the certainty of our paths diverging soon after could keep the itch to get moving from my soles of my feet. Instead, I found myself staring at Kievan, and the flame inside her that burned just as bright as Chedran’s. ‘You said the elders had changed. How?’

She was only too eager to answer, and Chedran’s groan told me he’d heard it all before. ‘They huddle among themselves, endlessly bemoaning the long-lost glories of the Mahdek,’ Kievan replied. ‘The council makes no plans for our future, no efforts to educate the young – all while forbidding us the chance to forge our own destinies.’ She pointed to the giggling girl nestled in Chedran’s lap. ‘They offer the youngest among us nothing but the conviction that fate has cursed her people to end in dust and misery. Would you condemn a child to a life without purpose, without hope?’

Chedran lifted up the girl by her armpits, rubbed his nose against hers before setting her down next to her brother. ‘I would see her grow to a ripe old age.’ He rose and approached Kievan, his steps slow, relaxed and reminiscent of a mountain cat preparing to pounce. ‘You denounce the elders for excessive caution, yet I came upon you half-starved and already rounded up by a coven of war mages after having stumbled into Jan’Tep territory.’

Kievan held her ground. ‘Why must you always defend the elders who cast you out? Forgive me, Chedran, but it’s true, and though it breaks my heart, I must be grateful for the council’s callousness, because when we were captured, it wasn’t our elders who came searching for us. It was the boy they’d exiled years ago, grown strong and cunning – through hardship, yes, but also because he’d been free to become so.’ Her tone softened, the plea in her voice full of admiration and, maybe, something more. ‘Our people were once strong, like you. We were the first mages on this continent. We hadmagic, Chedran! Mahdek shamans and spellshapers erected wondrous cities and—’

‘Magic?’ Chedran cut her off, suddenly leaning in so close that I could’ve sworn he was about to rip out her throat with his teeth. He stopped though, his lips next to her ear, making me wonder if maybe they were lovers. When he spoke though, barely over a whisper, it became obvious he was just making sure the little ones playing at the back of the barracks wouldn’t hear. ‘The Jan’Tep teach their initiates that all Mahdek are demon spawn. Imagine you were a young war mage, eager to test out your spells of ember, iron, blood and all the rest. Imagine you believed with all your heart that the great and noble Jan’Tep were endangered once again by the filthy, devilish magic of the Mahdek.’

‘I wasn’t saying th—’

Again he cut her off. ‘Have you ever witnessed what those brave young mages do when they capture us, Kievan? They cheer each other on, competing over whose magic can inflict the most spectacular and painful executions. Sometimes they perform experiments on us . . .’ Chedran’s head turned just enough for his eyes to lock on mine. ‘I wonder which is worse?’

‘Rat Girl?’ Arissa gripped my shoulder. I hadn’t noticed her walk up behind me, any more than I’d realised how bad I was shaking.

Kievan and the kids were all staring at me. My hand had gone to the collar of my shirt and tugged it down, my fingernails scratching at the faded symbols engraved around my neck. They still itched sometimes. Suddenly, I was twelve years old again, strapped to a table inside a cave, begging for mercy over and over. The stench of molten metallic inks was choking me, silver and copper instruments burning as they pierced my skin. I could hear the old lord magus again, praising his young, handsome apprentice for such elegant work as he etched his first mystical collar into the throat of a filthy Mahdek.

‘Hey,’ Arissa said, squeezing my shoulder. She sounded worried. The kids looked terrified. Chedran, though . . . Even through the haze of those horrible memories, I saw the sneer come to his lips. All those awful things he’d said to Kievan? They’d been meant for me. The girl had tried to use me to strengthen her case against his insistence that the runaways needed the guidance of the elders to survive. All my so-called adventures, spun into myths with each retelling, were a tool for her to convince a bunch of teenagers that they too could wander the world, wild and free, never having to settle for unrelenting gloom and despair. Never having to be Mahdek.

Chedran, though, he’d had his own adventures. He knew there were gaps left out of those stories. The bad parts. The ugly parts. Scars left behind that never stop itching. And mixed in with the memories of my own screams, the Scarlet Verses whispering promises of vengeance over all my enemies if only I’d give them voice.

‘Remember what I told you about not dragging around somebody else’s pain?’I could hear Durral asking. The memory of that smooth frontier drawl of his was the only thing that ever drowned out the verses.

‘Some crap about it being a bad idea, Pappy.’

‘Well, that crap goes double for your own pain, kid, especially when someone’s playing your suffering like an ace snatched from your own hand.’

The problem with Durral’s endlessly obscure proverbs is that they get under my skin twice as deep when he’s not there.‘You think I don’t know what Chedran’s doing? He’s trying to make the others see that I’m messed up, that it’s a dangerous world out there and those kids should go back home where it’s safe. And you know what? He’s right!’

‘Maybe, maybe not. But he ain’t the only one playing those cards right now.’

‘Who else is . . . ?’

I’d gotten so wrapped up in the anguish of my own memories that I’d almost missed what Kievan, with her strawberry hair and earnestly clenched jaw had been doing to Chedran. Twice she’d played him, just like he’d tried to play her, each time when he was getting too close to a topic she didn’t want discussed. The first had been when she’d implied he’d ‘run off’ before things got tough for the Mahdek. That was to keep him from making the other kids feel guilty over abandoning their families. An obvious gambit.

The second time she’d played that ‘exile’ card had come when his accusations had been probing something specific, something she’d been keeping purposely vague . . .

‘You found them in the Jan’Tep territories?’ I asked Chedran.

‘What of it? I told you, they’re stupid, petulant little chil—’

I raised a finger to shut him up. ‘No Mahdek child, petulant or not, would ever be stupid enough to “stumble” onto the lands of those who’ve been slaughtering our kind for three hundred years.’ I strode up to Kievan, grabbed her by the shoulders and worked hard to keep my fingers from clenching so tight I’d leave her with five bruises on each one. ‘You didn’t accidentally wind up in Jan’Tep territory. You went there on purpose. Why?’

Give the girl this much: she knew how to bluff. ‘We aren’t so easily frightened as our elders would have us be. We believed we could stay hidden from any—’

I didn’t slap her, but I did shake the stupid out of her. ‘Every Mahdek alive knows that Jan’Tep sentry mages set breath spells along their borders to warn against outsiders entering their lands. Why do you think all those clan princes and lords magi don’t get assassinated by foreign agents of Darome, Berabesq and all the other countries that would love to find a way to take control of the oases and find out if maybe some of their people could learn to wield magi—’

Oh, three hells and a hangnail, I swore silently, letting go of her.

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