An Accident of Stars (36 page)

“No,” said Saffron, dizzied into unhesitating honesty by the power of the kiss, which had perhaps been the point of it in the first place. “You are who you are.”

“Well, then. Are you going to ask me whether I chose my name, or if it was given to me, or if it never changed at all?”

“No.”

“And why not?”

“Because it's not my business. Not unless you want to tell me, that is, and there's no worldly reason why you should do, just because I might or might not be curious.”

“Rightly so,” said Yena. She took her by the hand and pulled her onwards, over to the wide, pale sky that hung beyond a fat stone railing. They stood there, hands joined and smiling at each other, and just that moment all by itself did more to knit up Saffron's hurt than any amount of magic or medicine ever could, and then they were kissing, they were kissing and time stopped, they were kissing and the sun poured through them, knuckle to throat to hip to thigh, and they were seamless, they were light, and it was beautiful. Yena's hand splayed on the curving space above Saffron's right hip and below her ribs, and when they finally broke apart, Saffron leaned in and rested her head in the hollow where Yena's neck met her collarbone. They stood like that, silent and close, until a cool wind whipped so playfully past that they each stepped back a bit, laughing at it.

All at once, Saffron stopped smiling, chest tightening sharply at the realisation that she wanted more of this, whatever it was – but how was that meant to happen if she went home again? The question must have shown in her face before it ever reached her lips, or else Yena was thinking the exact same thing, because she reached across and brushed her fingertips gently against the scars on Saffron's head.

“This isn't fealty,” she said softly. “It doesn't exclude, doesn't obligate, doesn't demand or censor. This is what it is, and when you come back to me – yes, I say when, not if; I have that much faith in our turning worlds – then I'll be here, and you'll be here, and so this will be too.”

This time, it was Saffron who kissed Yena, slow and deep. “I'll hold you to that,” she said finally, and would have said more, if not for the sudden interjection of a firm, polite cough.

Turning in time with Yena, Saffron found herself staring at two Shavaktiin: Halaya, distinguished by her green veil and dark hands, and another robed in pale yellow.

“Forgive the interruption,” said Halaya, her voice coloured with genuine apology, “but Safi, you're needed for a conference.”

“Conference?” asked Saffron. “You mean, about the Council?”

“Among other things.” Halaya gestured at her companion, who bowed. “This is Kikra, our remaining dreamseer. He can link you and Zechalia to Oyako, and through her, to Iviyat.” She held out a hand. “Come with us.”

“What about Yena?” Saffron asked. “Can't she–”

Kikra shook his head. “There are limits to the ilumet. Just the little queen, and you. Yes?”

“But Yena may come for company,” Halaya added.

“My thanks,” said Yena wryly.

The moment was broken, but while it lasted, it had somehow been enough. Sighing, Saffron stepped away from the sky and back into Vekshi politics. “Whatever you say,” she said to Halaya.

The veil made it hard to tell, but from the tone of her voice, she thought the Shavaktiin leader was smiling. “Perhaps,” she answered cryptically. “One day. In a manner of speaking.”

Z
ech stared at the ceiling
, waiting for the inevitable fourth knock at the door. She didn't know who was coming, only that someone would. Since waking in her new room, she'd had a total of three separate visitations, each of which had burdened her with a new set of troubles. But four was a sacred number in Ashasa's lore, and after everything that had happened, Zech would have been a fool to discount its significance.
Three knocks brought problems,
she told herself,
but the fourth will see them solved.

Or so she hoped.

Her first visitor had been Gwen. The worldwalker had just been in with Safi – “I tried you first, but you were asleep,” she'd explained – and told her what nobody, not even Mesthani, had remembered or bothered to say earlier: that the Council of Queens was due to meet at dawn, and that she and Safi had best be prepared for it. Zech had schooled her expression into one of dutiful calm, all the while panicking internally. She'd undergone the trial in full knowledge that success would make her a queen, but even though she'd gambled Safi's life on the idea that they could pass, she still hadn't allowed herself to think about the consequences of doing so. All she'd wanted – all she'd really been thinking – was of a way to ensure they'd be able to speak their piece before the Council, and she'd somehow managed to say as much to Gwen.

But once the worldwalker had gone from the room, she'd admitted to herself that the truth wasn't nearly so simple or altruistic. It hadn't been about helping. It had been about proving herself worthy.

Zech had no memory of her life before she'd come to live in the compound. Right from the first, Yasha and Trishka had instilled in her the appropriate sense of pride and connection to her heritage, but despite their best efforts, Veksh had always been a distant idea, and they hadn't been her only teachers. Matu had given her more than just mastery over her magic: through his lessons, she'd come to feel a connection with Kena, a sense of belonging that her interactions with Pix and even Jeiden had only helped to cement. But living in Karavos wasn't the same as truly inhabiting it, and the walls of Yasha's compound were made of more than stone. Zech had prayed to Sahu at least as often as she did to Ashasa, but quietly, not knowing how to reconcile the one faith with the other. Did the gods exist, and did she truly believe in them? Sometimes it felt like they did, though admitting as much in Yasha's hearing would have earned her a smack and a scowl for blasphemy at the very least.

When, soon after her marriage to Vex Leoden, Kadeja had started saying that all the Kenan gods were really nothing more than Ashasa's shadows – divine aspects of a single goddess refracted into different beings by Kenan ignorance – Zech had been angry, but she'd also been uneasy too. Though the Vex'Mara's actions were horrible, like cutting off Safi's fingers, deep down part of Zech had wondered if maybe, despite her awfulness, there could be some truth to what she said. She'd repressed the idea violently, disliking the idea that she and the hated Vex'Mara could have anything in common.

And then she'd been revealed as Kadeja's daughter.

All her life, she'd been taught that knowing and honouring one's mother was key to her Vekshi identity. The fact that her own birth mother remained unknown – that she'd cast her off as a baby – had bothered her at times, but under those same laws, she'd come to see that Trishka was her real mother, Yena and Sashi her real sisters, Yasha the real matriarch to whom she owed ultimate obedience. That was right and proper. But if she was born a child of Kadeja's blood, then what did that make her, really? Was she a traitor too – was that why she'd prayed to Ashasa and Sahu both before she'd ever heard the Vex'Mara say they were one and the same? Once people knew who she really was, being judged for it – or worse, used as a tool because of it – felt inevitable, if not by Yasha, then surely by someone else. And the man from the dreamscape, Luy, he'd seen the truth at the same time Zech did; he'd
known
, and even though he'd helped to formulate her plan – even though, somehow, impossibly, he'd been there with her during the trial, relaying advice and lending her strength, which she'd lent to Safi in turn – she hadn't been able to trust that a stranger, a man she'd never met in the flesh, would keep her secret long.

And so she'd undergone the trial: a way to prove she was nobody's implement, least of all Kadeja's, but a queen in charge of her own life. All this she'd admitted to herself as Gwen closed the door of her sickroom, and the realisation had been paralysing.

What would happen next? With Safi's help, Luy's guidance and no small amount of luck, she'd done something that by rights ought to have been impossible. She wasn't just a queen of Veksh, but one of the youngest women in history ever to hold the title. Once they'd petitioned the Council for aid in removing Kadeja from Kena, there was a new life waiting for her here, a life lived free of Yasha's dominion and the compound's walls; a life of power and prestige and politics; a life lived in service to Ashasa, but not Sahu.

A life she didn't want.

Such had been her state of mind, overwhelmed by the implications of her actions and unable to see a way out of them, when her second visitor had arrived. It was Yasha, of course, and even though Zech had known she'd have to face the matriarch sooner or later, the prospect had still filled her with dread.

Without waiting for an invitation, Yasha took a seat on the single chair set at the side of the bed. Zech had been prepared for anger, resentment, accusation – even for hostile silence.

She hadn't expected praise.

“You brilliant girl!” Yasha crowed, gripping her hand so tightly it was a wonder the cuts on her knuckles didn't reopen. “I've always known Ashasa, in her infinite wisdom, had sent you to me for a reason, but I never suspected it was anything near this grand!”

Somehow, Zech managed to speak. “You never knew? All this time, and you never knew I was Kadeja's daughter?”

Yasha snorted. “Of course I didn't know! If I had, I'd never have agreed to take you in, which is doubtless why Ashasa saw fit to keep the truth from me all these years. No, girl, no. I heard about you from a friend of a friend – a little shasuyakesani girl, her mother dead in childbirth with only an unwilling, undaughtered uncle to claim her. And I thought to myself, well, I could always use an extra pair of hands, and of course it didn't hurt any that Jeskia a Keta owed me a favour for it. Hah! More fool her!”

Zech endured this gloating speech in silence, though the effort cost her six new cuts, three on each palm, from clenching her fists so tightly that her fingernails broke skin.

“I knew Ashasa wouldn't deny me forever,” Yasha said, with a fervency that was downright alarming. “I gave up my queenship to save Trishka's life, but the cost, the cost! Living in exile, forced to sweat and toil and bleed in the shadow of heathen gods, to ally myself with the disreputable, the dissolute, the deranged – making myself a spider, a skulking creature, kept from prestige and power until my youth and strength were spent, and all that was left was this–” she plucked angrily at the wrinkled, hanging skin of her arms, “–this decrepit flesh. All these years a mockery of myself, of my goddess. But you have redeemed all that, my Zechalia.

“Here is what we must do.”

For the next twenty minutes, Zech sat, miserable and helpless to offer a contradiction, as Yasha laid out her plans for how she thought Zech ought to deal with the Council of Queens. Kadeja was still to be taken and held accountable before Ashasa's Knives – “We've done this much, it would be a waste not to see it through,” she said – and a Vekshi force still sent to help pacify Leoden's troops, but afterwards, she was determined that Zech would persuade Iviyat to cede certain disputed northern territories back to Vekshi control as payment for their aid. She wanted Vekshi women at court; she wanted herself installed as the Vekshi ambassador to Kena.

“That might take some doing,” she admitted, “but if you are able to reclaim even so small an area as the Bharajin Forest for Veksh, it will give you enough clout with the other queens to make the bargaining easier.”

In addition to these and other plans, she also delivered a monologue on the ins and outs of Council politics as Yasha remembered them, her theories about what had changed, and her impressions on which of the queens she'd known during her own tenure who were trustworthy (Cehala, Mesthani, Jairin) and those who weren't (Ruyun, Taksha, Vosi). Her words washed through and over Zech like a river, and rather than fight the current, she let that river carry her, nodding when it was appropriate and praying fiercely in her heart – to Ashasa, to Sahu, to any god that was listening – that the ordeal would end before she reached her breaking point.

Finally, mercifully, her prayers were answered. Having scarcely drawn breath for her entire visit, Yasha fell silent, her hawkish face turned thoughtful.

“Forgive me,” she murmured. “I had not… I have been in exile from Veksh a good many years, Zechalia a Kadeja, years in which I have dreamed of return more often than…
tcha
!” She broke off, dismissing her words with a single cutting gesture, and stood. “Doubtless, I have given you much to think on. Heed my advice or don't. Our Mother Sun has ever held my heart to her coals and let the flesh blacken. You know where I'll be.”

Zech opened her mouth to reply, but Yasha had gone before she could find the words. Heart hammering in her chest, she was left alone again – but not for long. Just as she was beginning to wonder whether she might go in search of Safi, or failing that some food, there was another knock at the door. By then she was resigned to receiving unwanted visitors, and so was pleasantly surprised to find that her new guests – two of them, this time – were both people she actually wanted to talk to: Matu and Jeiden.

“Come i–” she began, but didn't get out the rest of the sentence; Jeiden ran across the room and flung himself at her, wrapping her in a hug so tight it squeezed the air from her lungs. Much to her surprise and delight, Zech found herself hugging him back, his head pressed to the crook of her neck as his feathery hair tickled her face.

“The next time you're planning something like this,” he whispered fiercely, “you tell me, all right? You
tell
me. I wouldn't have stopped you.” He leaned back, his dark eyes black with intensity. “I would only have wished you luck, or helped, if you wanted help.”