They turned toward one another, knee to knee, and Bijou touched her cup to Salamander’s. The wine was cool from the cellar, sweet and tangy with the flavors of green berries and spice. The vapors made her lightheaded as witchcraft.
Bijou sipped twice before she spoke again. The wine might not give her strength, but at least it could buy her time.
“I’m sorry about your mother’s death,” she said, hearing the words as alien. They each had meaning, surely—I and am and sorry, about and your and mother. And death.
Each one had a definition, a usage. Together they formed a sentence. It wasn’t the words, really, was it? It was the sentiment. Mothers. So much need. So much love. So much opportunity for misery.
But Salamander paused, the wine raised to her lips, and set it back down untasted. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “She made her choices a long time ago.”
“Still,” Bijou said. “Still.”
“Yes,” said Salamander. “Still.”
A silence followed. Bijou heard the wind soughing through the leaves of the date palms and pomegranates in the courtyard. The heady scents of a thousand flowers rose from the cultivated beds.
Salamander pushed her cup aside with her fingertips and stood. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”
The courtyard garden was big enough for strolling, and deserted—except for the kapikulu who dotted it like statuary. They walked along paved paths between the bowering leaves, the tangle of branches. It reminded Bijou of the jungles of the South, beyond the Mother Desert—but here it took a rich man’s will to create what nature had decreed would not exist.
Golden tamarins—a monkey imported from halfway around the world—scampered in the tree limbs. They were smaller than a cat and far more agile. Their long tails flashed behind them like banners as they leaped from branch to branch. Behind the flowers and the shrubberies, Bijou could make out the roofline and the fluted golden pillars of the Bey’s palace defining the space.
Salamander spoke in a low voice, encouraging Bijou, too, to hush her tones. “I had nowhere to go.”
“Back to Avalon?” Bijou asked.
Salamander shrugged. “Maledysaunte gave me the excuse. But I’ve been needing something different. To get away from the mistakes of the past, I suppose.”
That pang of identity that Bijou had felt far too often in Salamander’s presence pierced her again. It was unfamiliar, that familiarity.
“I’m sorry for how it came about,” Bijou said. “But I am glad you’re here.”
Salamander gave her a smile. “Maledysaunte and Riordan have each other: after a few hundred years, I suppose you grow accustomed to thinking of outsiders as temporary.”
Bijou nodded. “I don’t envy her.”
“Or him?”
Bijou shrugged. She’d been thinking of the bard as Maledysaunte’s familiar, she realized. As something like Ambrosias: an artifact of wizardry. But he’d had an identity before he died, hadn’t he? He’d been a person. And that person was still intact.
So what was it? A transformation? A state change? When did he lose his own identity?
Ambrosias, she realized uncomfortably, had had an identity before she created it, too. Many identities. Cats and a ferret, although they’d all been long dead before she salvaged their bones. Did stones have minds? Did metal? She knew that across the sea and the salt desert to the East there were stones that lived, and moved, and ate other stones.
That way lay madness, she thought, and the lives of the religious ascetics who would not wear shoes, because they were walking on the face of the Earth, and who starved themselves rather than eat a once-living thing.
“He has something he believes in,” Bijou said. It was inadequate, but it was what she had.
Salamander nodded. “The Hag of Wolf Wood.” Then she sighed. “It’s hard when one is alone in the world.”
Thinking of Kaulas and of what passed for a love affair in her life, Bijou opened her mouth for the obvious comment. Everyone is alone. We come into this world alone, and so do we leave it. Then she realized it was a lie—a facile, comforting lie disguised as bitter cynicism. Did the bitterness make it seem like medicine and truth, when in fact it was a lie?
Because no one was alone. Every action, every choice—it vibrated like a fly’s wings in a spiderweb. It shook the lives of everyone else in the vicinity, and the resulting vibrations shook other lives, and so on until the whole world was a-tremble with the shock waves of that one single choice. The world, Bijou suddenly saw, was nothing but a web of these interactions. Everything qualified everything else.
She felt lightheaded with the implications, and wondered if this was how a precisian saw the universe.
She had no idea how to explain what she had just comprehended to Salamander, though. So she just said, “You’re not alone, my dear. You have us. I’ll find a way to prove it to you.”
The look Salamander gave her was serious, thoughtful. Bijou felt a warmth in her chest. A sense of sisterhood, she thought suddenly. Belonging. This was what they meant by that.
She had made a friend.
Eleven
When the sun set, Bijou went into the desert. By herself, this time, except for a driver who she instructed to wait by the vehicle. Only a fool or a Wizard—or a fool of a Wizard—braved the Mother Desert alone. And having done it once didn’t make Bijou eager to try it again.
She wasn’t going into Erem this time, but only to the edge of the erg—the shore of the sea of sand.
No one is alone, Bijou told herself for the humor of it as she picked her way across moonlit sand. She carried a spade and a sieve and a bucket. She walked along the ridge of the dune where the sand was firmest, allowing her Wizardly intuition to guide her. She held the spade out before her like a dowsing rod.
The car was a dim shape at the edge of the road behind her. The dunes stretched out under the single moon’s silver light, their sunlit colors of caramel and cinnamon faded to charcoal mystery.
The sound of sand grains hissing against each other filled her awareness. The same unrelenting wind that hopped the grains one over another, walking the dunes across the desert like endless stately waves of solid earth, whipped the snakes of her hair forward, slapping her cheeks. She drew a fold of her scarf across her nose and mouth and—rather than shutting the desert out—let it in.
The dune beneath her feet was a virtual mountain of sand. Even now, with sundown hours behind, it radiated heat through the soles of her shoes. Bijou shuffled forward, every step raising the starched-linen scent of hot sand and starting another cascade of sand grains hopping before the wind.
The spade dipped toward earth.
Where it pointed, she crouched down and began to dig. She reached deep with senses honed by over a decade of wizarding, and found all the things that had once been alive, buried in the depths of the dune. One in particular interested her. She let her awareness fill it, tickle it up, call it wriggling through packed sand while she, in turn, dug to meet it. A long-mummified horned viper slept beneath the sand waves of the Mother Desert. Bijou called it forth.
As with the horses and the camel, it was only Bijou’s will that animated the snake. She felt the pressure and slip of the sand against its bones. She felt the dead snake’s rib-bones grab at that sand and pull it forward, dried sinew crackling. Magic held its bones together now, when no mere withered hide could do so.