“You may be worth more than money.” From a pocket he drew a much-folded sheet of paper. “Copy these symbols using the green ink.”
What in the Name of Acuyib the Inscrutable was going on here? During boyhood he had spent a year with his Shagara relatives, but having no talent for even the most rudimentary talishann he’d been perfectly happy tending and training the horses instead. His Haddiyat cousins were forever writing and rewriting the protections at the family residences, and a few times Qamar had been bored enough with his other pursuits to watch. None of the symbols on this page looked familiar at all.
Shrugging, he opened the bottle of green ink, noting that the stopper was carved of green moss agate into the shape of a rather pretty flower he didn’t recognize. He dipped a pen and made his copy.
“Now write my name at the top. Zario Shagara.”
Qamar glanced up. “That’s unusual.”
“It commemorates the Cazdeyyan nobleman who gave us this fortress. One Shagara male at a time, and only one, bears the name. Do you want me to spell it?”
“Please.” He wrote as he was told. When he looked up, expecting further instructions, Zario was holding a small, thin-bladed knife.
“Your hand,” he said.
Qamar stared at him.
“I need a few drops of your blood. Hold out your hand.”
He very nearly blurted out “No!” They must think—they thought he was—but he wasn’t, he couldn’t possibly—
He tried to remember what most people knew about Shagara magic. He was wearing hazziri, so he had to know something, but how much?
“Your great-grandfather Azzad didn’t believe until it was demonstrated to him over and over again,” his great-grandmother Leyliah had told him a long time ago. “Ayia, a very stubborn man! Your grandfather Alessid, of course, was told directly when Abb Shagara thought it time to do so. And now I will tell you. It is not just the talishann, nor the skill of the maker, nor the metal, nor the stones that make hazziri potent. Neither is it only the particular combination of herbs or flowers or the amount of wine or water or vinegar in a medication that gives it the power to heal.”
They thought him Shagara, and he was—but not that sort of Shagara. He was certain of it. So let Zario do whatever it was he would do, conduct whatever test this might be.
Qamar shrugged and held out his hand.
Zario didn’t prick Qamar’s finger. He drew a long, shallow scratch across his own palm. He watched the blood well up, a meditative and bitter smile curving his lips. Then he wiped the blade between his fingers and seized Qamar’s hand and pricked his thumb. Before Qamar had time to cry out his surprise, Zario had squeezed drops of blood onto each of the six symbols and both words of his name.
“What do you—how dare you—” He looked from the smear of blood on his thumb to the Shagara’s face—but blocking his gaze was the man’s palm. His clean, whole, uninjured palm, without a mark on it.
“But I’m not!” he cried. “I’m not one of you—I’m not like you!”
The old man who was not really an old man eyed him with a certain grim satisfaction. “All evidence to the contrary,” he said.
“No—it’s not possible—” He cast about frantically for some excuse. Some reason. Some escape. “It was your blood, not mine—your blood still on the blade—”
“Are you calling me a clumsy fool, boy? I’ve done the testing these twenty and more years. It’s one of the privileges of bearing my name. There is only one of me, you see, and so only one person that the signs and the blood and the paper and the ink can touch.”
Qamar staggered up from his chair, dimly heard it crash behind him, backed away from Zario’s shrewd, pitiless gaze. “No! I can’t be one of you!”
“Certain of that, are you? Left a fine little collection of bastards behind you in Tza’ab Rih, did you?” He snorted a laugh, then drew himself up and squared his shoulders and said in cold and formal tones, “Qamar Tariq, it is my honor to inform you that you have been blessed by Acuyib and have the right to use the name Shagara.”
His first encounter with Solanna Grijalva came when both were guests, or prisoners, or perhaps both, at the Shagara fortress, from which he escaped with great cunning. It would be more than half a year before he saw her again. Little is known of that portion of his life, although rumors have gradually transformed over time to legends, none of which are true. The most repellent of these stories would have it that he slaughtered a dozen or more Shagara during his escape from the fortress, and spent the next autumn and winter carousing from town to town. Any recounting of his life and deeds that asserts these things is a lie.
20
After having it proved to him that he was Haddiyat, that he would age quickly and painfully, that at not quite twenty-two his life was half over, he spent three days alone in his room at the Shagara fortress. The door was no longer locked. This was a good thing, for it took less time to open it when more wine was delivered, and speedy delivery was second only to generous quantity in Qamar’s bloodshot eyes.
On the fourth day, no wine arrived. Downstairs Zario Shagara was waiting for him in the room where his blood had proved what he was. It often happens like this, Zario said. Some cannot face the truth at first, he said. I remember once a boy only a bit younger than you broke into the dispensary and swallowed everything he could stuff into his mouth.
Now, despite the passage of many weeks, Qamar was still unable to decide whether or not he envied that boy. The fact that he was yet alive argued in one direction; the fact that he was planning to go on drinking argued in the other.
The first choice, Zario said, is acceptance or despair. But your next choice, he said, is one never given to any man before: Stay here and learn how best to use your gifts, or return to your own Shagara, with whom you would probably be more happy.
Happy. Ayia, of a certainty—happy as a colt in clover.
It was a dim, rickety little tavern he sat in now, a short walk from the palace in Joharra. He wasn’t quite drunk enough. The last weeks had refined his perceptions of how much wine it took to make him forgetful and how much rendered him oblivious. There were stages between tipsy and insensible he had never bothered to catalog before. At the moment, he was at that unfortunate point where nervous caution still existed. It was a somewhat delicate calculation, but the amount of wine left in the jug was sufficient to bring on just enough recklessness so he could accomplish his goal. He had only one, very carefully thought out while he was stone sober. Simple, really. He needed money.
His Shagara relations—by Acuyib the Incomprehensible, how he loathed having to acknowledge them as such, and especially the reason he must acknowledge them—had no money to give him. What they had given was food enough for three days and a horse. This was after they’d drugged him for an unknown number of days, and taken him on a journey to Acuyib didn’t want to know where, and left him with a vicious headache and the food and the horse and instructions to ride south for two days and then east. Or perhaps it had been east for one day and then south. He’d been beyond caring.
He’d ridden sober back into territory controlled by Joharra. That had been his last piece of luck—the right choice of direction, not the sobriety.