An Accident of Stars (19 page)

“We need to go!” he yelled, fighting to keep the beast under control.

And then Trishka began to glow, a pink-tinged halo forming around her head and upraised arms. She'd dropped her reins, and Gwen, who was closest, swore and grabbed them, pulling them over the unhappy mare's head. Sweat beaded on Trishka's skin; her eyes rolled back in their sockets. The light around her expanded, crackling with lightning, all her strength concentrated on this single use of the jahudemet. As fire ripped through the compound roof and the clash of fighting came from the gates, Trishka cried out – half pleasure, half pain – and ripped a hole in the world.

The gateway tore itself into existence with a whine like the world's largest mosquito: a portal linking not different realities, but two different parts of Kena. Though initially little larger than a melon, it rapidly grew in size, arising open until it stood tall and broad enough to accommodate a horse or roa and rider. The edges roped and wobbled; Trishka couldn't hold it for long.

“Ride through!” Gwen bellowed, waving at the others – they hesitated, clearly stunned by the sight, and only then did she realise that Trishka had kept this part of her plan a secret from all but her and Sashi. “Through, through, through!”

And for a miracle, they obeyed; even Yasha, whose face was pale and furious in the firelight. Gwen watched them pass the gateway, and noted too the fierce pride in Yena's eyes, the undisguised awe in Saffron's. Only once everyone else was through did she move, still leading her friend's horse. But as the mare surged forward, Trishka gasped and dropped her arms. Her trance was broken, the magic gone. The portal began to telescope shut, shrivelling as they approached. Terror took Gwen. If they didn't make it all the way through; if the gate collapsed while they were still crossing–They reached the portal. Heart thundering wildly, salt on her cheeks, arrows flying past and the smoke from the compound burning her lungs, Gwen closed her eyes, skin stinging as the collapsing magic burned her flesh, and prayed.

T
hey emerged into darkness
, a nothing so deep and featureless that for a dizzying moment, Zech thought the portal had gone horribly wrong, trapping them all in the black between the stars. But then she looked up and saw that the greater moon, Kei, was still full and bright beside its smaller twin, Mei, as they turned through their curious orbits. All around them shone constellations she knew by heart: the Trickster, the Lovers, the Man-and-Mare. They were still in Kena! Only then did the darkness make sense: the fire had left her night-blind.Around her seethed a chaos of shouting and snorting horses, the softer
krees
of the roas an eerie counterpoint. Her gelding pranced beneath her; Zech reined him back, squinting to make out the crest of his neck, the shape of his ears, and beyond that… what? Everyone was talking at once; there was no point adding to the confusion.

“Light, light!” Yasha demanded. “Someone make light!”

Fire bloomed to Zech's left, momentarily dazzling her – it was Yena, holding a lit torch. Her face beneath it glowed like hot gold, while everyone else was limned in bronze and shadow. They all stood in a disorganised cluster, horses and roas facing every which way as their riders, unable to see where they were and therefore unwilling to risk separation, swivelled in saddles to stare at those around them.

“Quiet!” Yasha bellowed. Her voice cut through the shouting, and the group fell silent. “That's better. Yena, do a headcount – there ought to be ten of us.”

A moment of tension while Yena counted; then she called the all-clear. No one was unaccounted for. Everyone had made it.

“Good,” said Yasha, and Zech was surprised to hear a note of relief in her usually steady voice. “Now, where's my fire-blessed fool of a daughter? Trishka! Where in the world have you brought us?”

But it was Gwen who answered, her tone made sharp by worry. “She's unconscious, Yasha,” she snapped. “I think the gateway burned her. Bring that light over here!” This last to Yena, who blanched and hurried to obey.

Fear fluttered in Zech's stomach like a swallowed moth. Her mother – her bloodmother, Kenans would say – had given her up at birth to a woman who had in turn given her to Yasha when she was two years old, so long ago now that Zech had no memory of it. Yasha had never been coy about the reason why: it was because of her skin, her shasuyakesani markings too obviously a bad omen. Her mother was simply gone, and in her place, despite Yasha's nominal guardianship, had been Trishka. Zech knew about Trishka's nameless, strength-draining affliction; how it punished her use of the jahudemet. And she knew, too, that under normal circumstances, Trishka ought still to have been recovering from the portal that summoned Safi and Gwen. To make another major gateway so soon afterwards must have taken extraordinary strength of will, to say nothing of courage – and now she was paying the price.

Clutching her horse's reins, Zech watched as Yena pushed through to Gwen's side, wincing to see the angry, cauterised burn that ran from Trishka's right temple down to the underside of her jaw. Her horse had been burned too, though of course no one else was concerned about that now; the poor animal was burnt from behind its right ear to midway down its neck, at which point the scarring transferred itself to Trishka. The horse was trembling, its breath a rasping pant; the gate had collapsed on both of them, but without proper light or access to a healer, there wasn't much anyone could do to alleviate their pain. At least Trishka had the benefit of being unconscious, though as Gwen dismounted and tried ineffectually to wake her friend, Zech had a hard time seeing it that way.

“Well!” said Yasha. This time, the shake in her voice was unmistakable. “We still need to know where we are. If it's within a night's ride of Karavos, we need to get out of Leoden's reach.”

As the others began to murmur in answer, Zech felt a jolt go through her. The year before, one of Yasha's guests at the compound had taught her how to find her way by the stars, but she needed an astrolabe to do so properly. A strange frustration welled in her. She wanted to help – there had to be a way she could help…

“We're on the Envas stretch of the North Road,” Jeiden said quietly. Though his voice was soft, every adult stopped speaking and stared at him. “I remember it from when Matu and I passed through. That tree over there–” he pointed at a forked shape Zech could barely make out in the darkness, “–reminded me of a snake's tongue. We had lunch beside it.”

“Gods in heaven,” Matu murmured. “So we did!”

“We're four days' ride from Karavos,” Jeiden went on. “Almost halfway to the border. They'll never catch us now.”

“You're sure about this, boy?” Yasha growled.

Jeiden straightened in his saddle. “I am.”

The matriarch let out a breath. “Good then.” After a pause, she added, “Well remembered.”

Before their conversation in the stables, Zech would have felt intensely jealous of Jeiden for this – and if she was honest, she still was, a little.
Of all the luck, landing right by a place he's been before!
But now she could hear how grudgingly Yasha praised him, when the same information from her or Yena would have earned them more and warmer words. Worse, Jeiden knew it; he'd slumped once the matriarch's gaze was elsewhere, and though Matu had reached out a hand to comfort him, she could tell that the slight still hurt.

“We'll rest here for the night then,” Yasha declared. “It won't be comfortable, but we'll cope, and in the morning, we can–” her eyes slid to Trishka, “–better assess our position.”

With that, it was like a spell had been lifted. Everyone began moving and talking at once, dismounting as they discussed whether to keep a watch, sleep on this side of the road rather than the other, to hobble or merely hitch the horses. Zech glanced at Safi, wondering how she'd cope with a night spent outside. From their conversations together, it likely wasn't something she'd ever done before. For a moment, Zech thought she ought to take her aside and help, but then she realised Yena, having left the torch with Gwen, was already doing just that, and so decided to speak with Jeiden instead.

He was one of the few still mounted, apparently frozen in place. Careful of those on foot, Zech nudged her horse over to his side. His face was dejected, and when she placed a hand on his arm, he startled.

“What?”

“That was… that was really impressive,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Yasha should have said so. It's wrong that she didn't.
She's
wrong,” she added, and was instantly shocked at her own defiance. “Anyway. I just thought you should know.”

Slowly, like the onset of dawn, a smile spread across Jeiden's face. It was shy and sweet and, like the rest of him, beautiful, and Zech felt something in her rejoice at having caused it.

“Thanks,” he said. “I–”

But whatever he'd been about to say was lost in a sudden, outraged shriek. Zech jumped in her saddle, fearing they were under attack – then burst out laughing when she realised what had happened.

The Cuivexa was awake.

“Where am I?” she screamed. “Untie me at once! You
peasants
, you lousy, filthy spittle-skinned snakes! You freaks, you worms, you, you–” And then, with her face screwed up in genuine horror, she wailed, “–and
why am I still on a roa
?”

S
affron fidgeted in the saddle
, wincing in her futile search for a posture that didn't hurt her back. They'd been riding since dawn, and even though she'd stretched at lunch, the pain was only getting worse. It was last night's rest that had done it. She'd been camping before, of course, but never without a tent, and certainly not without a blow-up mattress or camp bed to sleep on. Though the roadside grass was comfy enough at first, the ground beneath had soon turned hard and uneven. She'd slept shallowly, tossing and turning against the press of cold earth into her shoulders, and had woken that morning with stabbing pains in her neck and lower back. It was small comfort that everyone else had suffered just as much; she'd never had to keep doing something that truly hurt before.

She tried thinking of Trishka, whose awful burns and magic-wracked body inarguably meant she was in more pain than anyone. Dawn had revealed the extent of her injuries more fully than Yena's torch: the skin of her face was taut and shiny red, a smatter of blisters weeping clear fluid down her cheek. Her poor horse, too, was suffering. Gwen had given it something called moonsleep the night before, allowing it to rest peacefully, but with a long road still to travel, the only possible concession to the mare's injuries was to have Zech, who was smallest and lightest, ride her instead. Trishka was now on Zech's old horse, tied in place with the ropes that had previously been used to restrain Viya, after the Cuivexa had agreed, however peevishly, to refrain from running off. Trishka's consciousness was intermittent, but whenever she did wake, they halted immediately so that Gwen, who'd taken charge of her friend, could check on her.

Saffron had never seen burns like Trishka's. Looking at them made her stomach twist. She was frightened of what might happen if they became infected, if they couldn't find a healer in Envas. It ought to have put her own problems in perspective, but no matter how she berated herself for being spoiled and selfish, she couldn't push through her own discomfort.
You lost your fingers and lived!
she told herself fiercely.
This doesn't hurt more than that!
But the reminder that she was maimed forever only made her feel worse, as though she was compounding her moral failings with the sin of vanity. Was she really so shallow that she was worried about how the loss of her fingers made her
look
? Her thoughts began to spiral inwards, down to a place they hadn't been since before she'd come to Karavos; the place where she felt stunted, inadequate, wrong. Tears welled up and she dashed them furiously, hating that she couldn't control herself.
Stop it,
she told herself.
Just cut it out. Stop crying. Stop crying right now!

“Are you all right?”

It was Yena, looking at Saffron with a mixture of concern and uncertainty. Her curls were covered by a faded red headscarf, accentuating her forehead and cheeks. There were circles under her eyes – attributable both to her mother's condition and a poor night's rest – and a long smudge of dirt on her neck.

“I just…” Saffron gulped, faltering. “I mean, it's nothing. I'm just not used to any of this, and I know that shouldn't matter right now – there's so much more going on – but I still keep getting stuck on it. I'm sorry.”

Yena blinked at her. “Why are you sorry for that? Feelings are feelings, no matter when they happen. Our bodies don't stop being ours just because worse things happen to other people. And why should you be used to anything here? This isn't your world.” She hesitated. “Gwen's told me a little about
Earth
–” she dropped the English word haltingly into her speech, “–and how different it is. How all your magic is scrunched and hidden, so no one believes in it anymore. How you only have one moon, and a yellow sun, and your kings and queens have no power, but that men who look like Vekshi men do.” She grinned suddenly, foxish and fey. “To me, it sounds like a challenge. But if you stranded me there by accident, made me ride through strange streets on an animal I'd never even seen before, if I fell into rituals I didn't understand, and a stranger cut off my fingers – if all of that happened, and then I had to run away with people I'd only just met as part of a fight that started before I arrived and was bound to continue after I left – well, then, I would certainly feel at least a
little
lost.”She said it simply, a kindness so matter-of-fact that Saffron almost stopped breathing. Yena smiled, her cheeks dimpling with empathy, mischief – and then she reached out and grazed her knuckles gently along Saffron's cheek. It was an incredibly intimate gesture, and despite the context, it was also the single sexiest thing that Saffron had ever experienced. Her breathlessness intensified for a very different reason.

“It's all right to be lost,” Yena said, softly. “How else can we find ourselves?'”

And before Saffron could answer, she pulled her hand away, grinning, and cantered back to see how her mother was faring.

Saffron sat still for a moment. “Whew,” she breathed, exhaling the word like a promise. “Wow.”

She didn't stop feeling terrible, of course. But something inside her eased that only moments earlier had been close to breaking.

It was a start.

V
iya was livid
, full to bursting with fury and humiliation she couldn't afford to show. Waking up tied to a roa four days distant from where she'd gone to sleep was the least of the indignities she'd been forced to suffer – far more distressing was the fact that the awful Yasha was genuinely in charge. The reason for this completely escaped Viya. Pix, after all, was a noblewoman: a skilled politician, mother and warrior in the prime of her life, to say nothing of the fact that she was actually Kenan. The idea that such a woman would voluntarily submit to the authority of a dried up, heretical, spittle-skinned crone like Yasha was inconceivable. It angered her as an affront to the gods and the natural order of things; an affront made all the more personal by the fact that only now, too late, did she understand how badly she'd embarrassed herself.

Over and over, bloodfather Iavan had drilled into her the importance of always paying attention to eddies and shifts in power, no matter what else was happening – and despite what she might think of the people involved. Not long before his departure with Rixevet and Kadu, he'd sat her down for what was to be their last such conversation. His handsome, scarred face – half frown, half smile, the legacy of some distant squabble never fully explained to Viya – had turned oddly grave as he dropped a kiss on her forehead, his marriage-braids swinging down to brush her throat.

“Listen carefully, Ivi,” he'd murmured. “One day soon you'll be at court. Enemies might charm you. Allies might disgust you. Supplicants might bore you. Elders might condescend to you. And sometimes, you'll be in a position to let them know it. Sometimes – but not always. Not even often. Instead, you show them all a calm, smiling face and hide your truth with innocence, like a pretty knife tucked in a sleeve. You listen to everything they say and everything they don't, and you
remember
, because knowledge is greater than magic. You understand?”

And Viya had nodded and said she had, though Iavan must have known it wasn't true. Three days later, he was gone, and Viya had been left in Hawy's care – Hawy, who had all but sold her to Leoden.

She frowned at her use of the word.
Sold
. As if she was a horse or roa, with no say at all in where or with whom she went. The thought irritated her, hinting at implications she was in no way inclined to entertain; and so she set it aside, more concerned with how she was going to get to Rixevet. She didn't doubt Pix's version of last night's events, though she might have done, had one of the other women, Trishka, not been so clearly injured.
At least,
she thought sourly,
we're heading in the right direction
. But even though her arms and legs were no longer bound – she quivered with anger that it had happened at all – she was still stuck in Yasha's company, and stuck riding Mara, the same wretched, stinking roa Luy had foisted on her back at the palace.

Had she been nicer to the Vekshi woman – had she intuited, as Iavan doubtless would have done, that Yasha was the one in charge – she might have been given supplies and permitted to ride off alone, as they'd originally planned. At the very least, she could have made a case for departing once they'd travelled closer to Rixevet's holdings. Instead, she was under suspicion of having been somehow involved in the compound raid, and therefore bound to the group by Yasha's ominous intimation as to what might happen if she strayed. It was ludicrous – why would Leoden involve the Cuivexa in such a petty escapade?

A memory twitched against Viya's consciousness, trying to make itself recognised. She frowned, unable to place it for several minutes – and then it hit her. The conversation she'd overheard between Luy and Leoden.
She's meddled enough, her and the Vekshi crone both
, her husband had said, and all at once she realised he must have been talking about Yasha; it was too big a coincidence otherwise. That same conversation had also mentioned a worldwalker, which Viya had thought was pure nonsense, dismissing it out of hand. But she'd already been mistaken in one such assumption, and refused to lose any more allies by leaping to another.

So who, then, was the worldwalker?

Viya decided on a process of elimination; Iavan would approve. The thought steadied her, and for the first time that day she felt her frustration settle.
Now, what do I know?

It wasn't Pixeva, her feather-haired cousin Jeiden or her disreputably unmarried brother, Matuhasa idi Naha; they were all Kenan, their family known to hers. Nor was it Yasha or Trishka: the former was too obviously Vekshi-born, while the latter had the jahudemet, which suggested she was the portal-maker Leoden and Luy had also mentioned. Zech was a real possibility: she certainly looked strange enough to be from another world, and nor did she appear to belong to anyone. True, she was young, but having already mistaken Yasha's role in things on the basis of first appearances, Viya wasn't about to make the same mistake twice. Yena was disqualified on the grounds of being Trishka's daughter – she'd picked up this last by inference after watching how the younger girl kept hovering by the wounded woman's side, as well as noting the similar shape of their faces.

Which left only two other possibilities: the Vekshi girl, Safi; and the Uyun woman, Gwen. Both were equally likely prospects, but as Gwen was completely preoccupied with caring for Trishka, that left Safi as the most logical person for Viya to talk to. Not, of course, that she had any inherent desire to learn about other worlds: however else they disagreed, she shared her husband's conviction that only Kena mattered. But as he'd held both Yasha and the worldwalker in equal disdain, as though they were two separate, albeit related, nuisances, it opened the possibility that the group might, in fact, have another power-broker. There was no chance of redeeming herself in Yasha's eyes, and in any case, the self-abasement required by such a gambit would have crippled Viya's pride. Which meant that her best bet now of being set free was to get the worldwalker onside.

Thus determined, she hauled Mara around – more harshly than was needed, as she was still annoyed at being lumbered with the wretched beast – and rode over to Safi. The Vekshi girl had just finished talking to Yena; her cheeks were slightly flushed, and her hands clutched tightly at the reins.

Her hands.

Viya stared, heart beating faster, as she stared at Safi's left hand. The two smallest fingers were missing, just like Kadeja's were. A mark of disgrace among the Vekshi; yet how many young white girls with such a mark lived in Karavos? Even before she'd opened her mouth to confirm it, Viya knew, bone-deep, what the answer would be: that Safi was the Vex'Mara's heretical omen.

“Hello?” asked Safi, a note of surprise and uncertainty in her voice. Viya had been silent for too long, and winced – not in sympathy, but at the thought of ruining this opportunity too.

“Hello,” she replied. “My apologies. I didn't mean to be rude. It's just, your hand… are you the one Kadeja cut?”

Safi's cheeks turned even redder. “Yes,” she said softly. “I didn't understand what was happening.”

Viya exhaled, exalting in her deductive success, though she was careful to keep her delight from showing on her face. Safi was a worldwalker! Nothing else could explain her ignorance of Vekshi customs. She might look like one of Yasha and Kadeja's people, but underneath she was alien to them.

She turned back to Safi, and found, with some small shock, that she was sympathetic.

“I'm sorry for that,” Viya said honestly. “My marriage-mate is… well, I'm not sure what she is.”

“Don't be. It wasn't your fault.” The ghost of a smile flickered on Safi's face. “And I'm sorry, too, that the others tied you up. I asked Gwen why they'd done it, but she didn't have time to tell me.”

The apology took Viya by surprise – so much so that, before she could think to check her response, she exploded with, “How
dare
they suspect me! I
ran
from Leoden – I came to them by accident – and they drugged me, tied me, brought me here and accused me of making it happen!” And then she clapped a hand to her mouth, mortified that, once again, she'd let her tongue get away from her.

But rather than being outraged, Safi just nodded gravely. “Yasha's pretty frightening,” she agreed. “I don't think she really likes or trusts anybody – but then, I'm not sure if anyone really likes or trusts her either. Well, except for Trishka, but she's her daughter, so…”

Viya goggled. “Trishka's her
daughter
?” She swivelled in the saddle, craning for a look. “But she's Kenan!”