For now, Bijou peeled back necrotic tissue around the edges and irrigated the wound with spirits of wine, which made the jackal shriek and snap and thrash, and the child—whose hands, bone and flesh, were full of struggling animal—stare up at Bijou’s face worriedly.
But that was all it took. All she could do, other than packing the wound with spiderwebs and honey and bandaging it with clean boiled cloth. “We’re lucky,” Bijou said. “It was a fresh infection. But I don’t know if that got it out.” She glanced at the hearth, at the fire.
She didn’t say, we should burn it out. But Brazen nodded. “We can give it opium first. If that would make it easier.”
“Thank you,” Bijou said. “And if that’s not enough either?”
“We have a cage,” Brazen reminded, jerking his chin towards the wheeled apparatus the child had arrived in.
“To keep it quiet and away from the others,” Bijou said. “So we have half a chance of keeping its bandages on.”
“And so if it wakes up dead tomorrow morning, there’s a chance of it not flying at the throat of the first one of us it sees. Do you supposed the infection is spread by biting?”
“Like hydrophobia?” Bijou laid her tools across the bottom of an iron pot, for boiling. “No. Every sufferer we have seen has had the same foreign matter in the infected wounds. He is doing this himself. And then sending us the afflicted.”
“So we’ll know he’s coming for us,” Brazen said. He shrugged, streaked locks moving over his gaudily-clad shoulders. “Why now?”
Bijou, having known the Necromancer very well, once upon a time, sucked her gums and said, “Fetch me my fine-tipped pliers and the snips, please, Brazen?”
It was decades since he had been her apprentice, but her tools still hung in the same place. In some cases, they were the same tools. He was back in only moments with the pliers, which he laid into her hand.
She lifted the silver pellet between them. Brazen held the magnifier for her without being asked while, with the snips, she opened the pellet along the seam. As she had expected, a curl of parchment wedged inside. She lifted it free and smoothed it open, careful not to touch anything with bare fingers.
Neat and precise in black ink, it contained a drawing of a scarab.
When Bijou snorted, the parchment fluttered. “Of course, you old bastard. It wouldn’t be any fun if I didn’t know.”
Bone scraped bone inside the joints, but her hand was firm as she dropped the parchment and the pellet into another shallow dish and set in place a silver lid that chimed. She lay her tools aside and stood, staring, at her own twisted fingers.
“Bijou?”
She lifted her chin, but didn’t manage to drag her gaze any higher than Brazen’s chest.
“What do you know?” he asked.
“Funny,” she said. “I was just about to ask you the same thing. What do you know?”
“About what?”
It was too much effort holding her head up. “About how the Young Bey’s father got to be Bey before him.”
“Funny,” Brazen echoed. “Not much. You never did like to talk about it.”
“Right,” she said. “Let me cauterize this wound, and then go and make some tea, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
He laid a hand upon her wrist. “The kapikulu can make your tea tonight, Bijou.”
When the room stank of scorched hair and flesh and the jackal slept in the child’s old cage, Brazen and Bijou sat on stools beside the fire together. The child curled on a rug with its back against Bijou’s knees. Brazen watched her hands as she spoke, because she had to keep shifting her eyes away from his.
“Before you were born,” she said, stroking the child’s matted hair, “your father left me for a foreign Sorceress.”
“My mother.”
Bijou’s old face creased. “After a fashion.”
A surge of emotion silenced Brazen, almost blinded him. Bijou, he knew, would believe it pity—and find it intolerable. So he did not touch her, even to lay a hand on her shoulder or push back the forbidding snakes of her hair.
He held in a breath while he thought, then said softly, “You were my mother in every manner that mattered.”
It was not a lie. She was the only mother that mattered. Any other longing he might feel was only a child’s fantasy.
“I did not mean to provoke reassurances,” she said, without looking at him. But he saw how her chin lifted, and the small straightening of her spine. “What I meant was that she died before she could birth you. Your mother had the ear of all crawling things, every beast that creeps with its belly to the earth, and that was her power. Her name of craft was Salamander, but I knew her first-name, and she was Wove to me.”
Her voice had taken on a sing-song quality, something of a chant such as you might hear of a storyteller from her distant long-forsaken homeland. Brazen did not interrupt her; he dared not, when she was bringing him this gift of memory. But he let his lips move on the word, the name he had never before heard.
Wove.
His mother’s name, and a gift of power.
“She named me Michael?” he asked, because it was important to him, suddenly, to know.
Bijou shook her head. “That was your father’s choice.”
She paused, as if to give him a moment to collect himself, and now she turned her head to look at him directly. When his focus returned to her, she again looked down and spoke.
“We were adventurers, Brazen. Salamander and Kaulas and the Old Bey, who was but Prince Salih in those days. We fought in the name of the old Old Bey, for it was not expected that Prince Salih would inherit his father’s title. He was a younger son, you see.”
Her pause might have been to gather her thoughts, but Brazen felt the need to fill it. “I did not know that. I mean, I knew there had been a quarrel when the Old Bey came to power, because the old Old Bey’s advisors in their wisdom chose to pass over Prince Salih’s brother and give the title to Prince Salih. But I did not know—”
“It was our quarrel,” Bijou said.
This time, Brazen left the silence empty.
She filled it, after a time. “Salamander and Kaulas and I stood with the Old Bey against his brother. Kaulas had spurned me to pursue Salamander, but she and I were sisters-of-decision and we had agreed that he would not come between us. When the Old Bey’s brother came against us, she was swollen with Kaulas’ child—with you, Brazen.”
“Were you not angry?” he asked.
She managed to hold his gaze when she looked up again. “Wove and I had decided to raise the child together.”
Brazen’s heart shivered in his chest like a watch gear. “That’s not what happened.”
“She died,” Bijou said. “She died, and Kaulas—he arranged things. So that you could be carried to term. Or near enough.”
“Vajhir,” Brazen breathed. “Kaulas the Necromancer. No, he never told me. How…”
“How did he do it?”
“How long?”
“Eight weeks,” Bijou said. “I stayed with her.”
Brazen wanted to ask, as if in asking he could force her to deny the implications of what she said. As if he could rewrite history and make it somehow less terrible. “She knew what had happened?”
Bijou smiled. “She knew she was dead. But she gave you life, my dear, and named you. She named you Harun. It was your first name, and your true name, and your father never knew it. And when you had eight years, you came to live with me.”