“Please, Bri-oh-nee-zisaya,” the small woman said, “you are cold and tired. You are a guest for us, yes? You cannot eat in the hada until you are bathing, yes?”
“Bathing?” Briony suddenly realized that the great dark rectangular emptiness in the middle of the room, which she had thought only a lower part of the floor, was a bath—a bath bigger than her own huge bed in the Southmarch royal residence! “There?” she added stupidly.
The women, sensing a lull in her resistance, swooped in and pulled off the rest of her sodden clothes, murmuring in pity and amusement as Briony’s pale, goose-pimpled skin was exposed. She was helped to the edge of the bath—it had steps leading down!—and, to her further astonishment, several of the women disrobed and climbed in with her. Now at least she understood why the bath was so large.
The first shock of the hot water almost made her faint, then as she settled in and grew used to it a deep languor crept over her, so that she nearly fell asleep. The women giggled, soaping and scrubbing her in a way she would have found unduly intimate if it had been Rose and Moina, who had known her for years, but somehow she could not make herself care. It was warm in the bath—so blessedly warm! —and the scent of flowery oils in the steamy air made her feel as though she were floating in a summer cloud.
Out of the bath, wrapped in a thick white robe like those the women wore, she was led to a room full of cushions with a fire in a brazier at its center. Here too an inordinate number of candles burned, the flames wavering as the women walked in and out, talking quietly, laughing, some even singing.
Have I died? she wondered without truly believing it. Is this what it will be like in Zoria’s court in heaven?
They seated her amid the cushions and the older woman brought her food; the others whispered in fascination at this, as though it were an unusual honor. The bowl was heaped with fruit and a cooked grain she did not recognize, with pieces of some roasted bird sitting on top, and Briony could not help remembering the woman back in Kinemarket with her broods of chickens and children. She wondered if that woman in her damp, smoky cottage could even imagine a place like this, less than a day’s walk away.
The food was excellent, hot and flavored with spices Briony did not know, which at other moments might have put her off, but now only added to the waking dream. At last she lolled back on the cushions, full, warm, and gloriously dry. The younger women cleared away Briony’s bowl and the empty goblet from which she had drunk some watered wine, and the older woman sat beside her.
“Thank you,” Briony said, although that did not suffice.
“You are tired. Sleep.” The woman waved and one of the others brought a blanket which they draped on Briony where she lay among the embroidered cushions.
“But...where am I? What is this place?”
“The hada of Effir dan-Mozan,” the woman said. “My... married?”
“Your husband?”
“Yes. Just so.” The woman smiled. One of her teeth was covered in gold. “And you are our honored guest. Sleep now.”
“But why...?” She wanted to ask why this house in such a strange place, why the bath, why all these beautiful darkskinned women in the middle of Marrinswalk, but all that came out was that word again. “Why?”
“Because the Lord Shaso brought you here,” the woman said. “He is a great man, cousin of our old king. He honors our house.”
They didn’t even know who she was. Shaso was the royalty here.
Briony slept then, floundering through confusing dreams of warm rivers and icy cold rain.
5. At Liberty
But the first son of Zo and Sva, who they named Rud, the golden arrow of the daytime sky, was killed in the fight against the demons of Old Night.
Their younger son Sveros, lord of twilight, seized Rud’s widow Madi Oneyna for his own, and swore that he would be a father to Rud’s son Yirrud, but in truth he sent a cloud to breathe upon Yirrud where Onyena had hidden him in the mountain fastness and the child sickened and died.
Instead of giving Oneyna a new child to replace the one he had taken, Sveros also took her twin, Surazem, who we call Moist Mother Earth, and fathered three children upon her, who were the great brothers, Perin, Erivor, and Kernios.
Freedom was both frightening and exhilarating. It was wonderful to be able to walk the streets on her own, with nothing between her and life but a hooded robe—she had not known such liberty since she was a young child, when she had known nothing else and had not appreciated what a sublime gift it truly was.
In fact, it was a bit confounding to have so many choices. Just now, Qinnitan couldn’t decide whether to return to the main road winding through Onir Soteros, the neighborhood just behind the Harbor of Kalkas which she had called home for almost a month, or to continue following the winding streets farther into the great city, expanding her area of conquest as she had almost every day.
What a place in which to have gained her freedom! Hierosol was a huge city, perhaps not quite as large as Xis, the place she had escaped, but not a great deal smaller, either—a massive rumpled blanket of hills and valleys sitting athwart several bays, commanding both the Kulloan Strait and the Osteian Sea, nearly every inch covered with the constructions of several different centuries. Ancient Xis sat on a high plain as flat as a marble floor, and from any of its high places you could see all the way to both the northern sea and the southern desert. Here in Hierosol she had not yet managed to climb high enough to see anything but other hills, Citadel Hill the tallest of them all, looming above the others like a noble head gazing out across the straits, the rest of the city trailing down the slopes behind it like a cape.
Hierosol was so old and complex and ingrown that to Qinnitan every neighborhood seemed to be its own city, its own world—tree-covered Fox-gate Hill sloping gently behind her, home of rich merchants, and just below the sailmakers’ and shipwrights’ quarter of Sandy Head, bustling with work from the adjacent Harbor of Kalkas. Not just a new city to explore but dozens of new worlds, all waiting for her and her newfound freedom. For a girl who had spent the last several years in the cloistered ways of the Hive and the Seclusion, it was dizzying to contemplate.
She had been brought here across the narrow sea from Xis by Axamis Dorza, the captain of the boat that had carried her away from her lifelong home when Dorza’s master Jeddin fell suddenly and precipitously from the autarch’s favor. When word of Jeddin’s capture had caught up to them in Hierosol, most of the sailors on the Morning Star of Kirous had melted away into the shadowy alleys of the port. Those few that remained were even now scraping the ship’s old name off the hull and repainting it. Qinnitan supposed Jeddin’s slim, fast ship would belong to Dorza now, which must be at least some small compensation to him for being associated with the now infamous traitor.
It had been kind of Axamis Dorza, she knew, if also pragmatic, to take her into his home in the Onir Soteros district at the base of the rocky hills that leaned above Sandy Head. Although he could not know it, Dorza must suspect that Qinnitan was in even greater jeopardy than himself, and though hiding her from the autarch’s spies might keep Dorza himself safe in the short run, it was bound to look bad if she was ever captured. In fact, the captain had made it clear that he was not happy with Qinnitan roaming the streets, even dressed in the fashion of a respectable Xandian girl (which left little of her visible) but she had made it equally clear to him that she would no longer be anyone’s prisoner, especially in Dorza’s small house. It was not his house at all, really, but the property of his Hierosoline wife, Tedora. Qinnitan suspected the captain had a larger, more respectable house and also a more respectable wife and family back home in Xis, but she was too polite to inquire. Qinnitan also suspected that she would not have been allowed such freedom in that other house, but Tedora was a woman of Eion, not Xand, and was more interested in drinking wine and gossiping with her neighbors than watching over the moral education of a fugitive Xixian girl. Because of that, and a certain confused subservience Qinnitan inspired in Dorza, most of the freedom which had been stolen from her since her girlhood in Cat’s Alley had been returned.