Solanna didn’t seem offended. “If I understand correctly, I would imagine such beings keep well clear of dangerous boys like you.”
“Dangerous! Me?”
A breath of breeze fluttered the white gauzy bed hangings. “Do you intend to stay a little boy for the rest of your life?”
“What fool wants to grow old?” And then he remembered what he had been drinking in order to forget. He remembered what he was.
“I can see where the prospect wouldn’t attract you. But not for the reasons you’re thinking.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking?’
“Simple. You found out that if you live, you’ll grow old. So will all the rest of us. What’s so special about you? That it will happen more quickly? You spent all autumn and winter encouraging it to happen very quickly indeed. You don’t want to grow old. You’re very good at being young, and you’ve enjoyed it very much. Eiha, of course you’re good at it—it’s all you’ve ever been. But isn’t that true of everyone?”
“I’m only twenty-three years old—and at forty I’ll be dying!”
“There are choices, you know. You can choose to grow old, and die. You can refuse to grow old, and choose to die. Or you can die, but choose not to grow old. Stop frowning as if you don’t understand me.”
“All I understand is that there is no choice. I’m going to die.” The misery of it was that he’d lost what it felt like to be young. He’d drunk and whored just as he’d always done, but the sensations of true youth were lost to him. Every time he thought they might have returned, he would remember the symbols and the name and the blood on the paper, and Zario’s voice saying he was entitled to the name Shagara.
“Everyone dies. That is a truth. Here’s another: You are what you are, and you will die sooner than you expected. But that’s true of everyone, as well.” She rose from the bed. “No one wants to, everyone does. King of Cazdeyya, peasant farmer in Ghillas, sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih. Whatever you were born, you will die just like everyone else. The only thing you can choose is how old you are when you die. There are people, you know, who are walking around with unlined faces and not a single gray hair who are already quite, quite dead inside.”
True enough, he had to admit. His grandmother had been one of them.
“If you want to be like them, I will send in the biggest jug of wine I can locate, and you can go back to killing yourself. And you will die having been a little boy and an old man, with nothing in between.”
“Dead is dead. Get out.”
She bent her knees and her head, mockingly, and her white skirts sighed across the stone floor.
He waited a long time. She sent no wine to his room. At length he slept, and woke to candlelight, wondering if he’d dreamed the whole thing.
A little boy, an old man . . . and nothing in between.
“I do not belong here,” he said aloud. “This country is not mine. These people are not mine.”
“Next you’ll be whining for your mother.”
His limbs were sluggish, but his mind was not; he recognized Zario Shagara’s voice. Struggling to prop himself on his elbows, he succeeded only in collapsing onto his back once more.
And he could not move his legs at all.
“Calm yourself,” Zario told him. “Don’t fight against the medicine—you’ll only prolong your stay in bed. What all that wine did to your belly and bowels—it was days before the contamination cleared from your body. As for your brain . . .” He folded his arms across his chest, head tilting to one side. “You would know best about that, I suppose.”
Qamar lay back on the white bed, closing his eyes to the sight of the old man who was not truly old.“Now you will tell me she had another vision that led you to me again.”
“In fact, yes. Several of them. Including one that showed you in a palace of the al-Ma’aliq.”
He snorted. “Prove it.”
“She saw a table, and a drawer you opened without a key, and the bag you took from within. Green velvet, stamped in gold with the same leaf carved on your ring.”
“Nonsense.”
“And the necklace you left in its place. She was adamant that we find and retrieve you before you either killed yourself with wine or someone killed you for those rings. It amazes me that they’re still on your hands, considering where you were living.”
“She is the one who needs medication, something to cure outrageous fantasies. It remains, Zario, that I do not belong here. And I do want to go home.”
“It was not just her visions that prompted us to find you.” His eyes gleamed with malicious amusement. “It was the description that reached us of the young al-Ma’aliq sought by his frantic family—including mention of those rings.” He smirked. “Imagine our shock—and our shame that we had not treated a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih with all due ceremony! We had to have you back, if only to remedy our earlier oversight.” But as Qamar opened his mouth to protest further, Zario pushed himself to his feet and said, “Enough for now. You do not belong here, that is true. But you will not be going home.” He left, and though it was not the austere third-floor room of Qamar’s previous guesting here, it did lock.
This did not particularly impress him. Reaching for his boots, he slipped a hand inside the left one and smiled. The Shagara were indeed honorable people—they had left him his possessions, such as were left of them anyway, and had not even searched them.
Over the next few days as he rested and recovered his full strength—it seemed he was always doing that, these days, and it came to him that he would be doing it more and more as the years went on—he formulated and began implementing his plan. The key he possessed, the key to that other door, was useless in this one, of course. But locks could be persuaded, if one knew the right talishann. From his year in the desert tents he recalled some of them, though too imperfectly to be of use. He remembered a few more from watching Haddiyat rework the protections around the palace. He did have a good brain, when not befuddled with liquor. Yet it seemed during those days, and especially during the nights, when he lay restless and frustrated, that all he really remembered with any clarity were symbols for things that were of absolutely no use to him whatsoever. Safety; clean water; the neverfall used on shelving; wash twice sewn into the corners of his clothes when he was a child because, as his father avowed, he was surely the first place dirt went when looking for a new home . . . After thinking this, he spent a whole hour musing on an entirely new means of employing Shagara talents: tapestries. It was another kind of artwork impractical in the desert, for, like the huge folios of drawings on paper, who would wish to lug such bulky things around? His father’s people were ruthlessly practical. The metals they worked all year, for instance, were made only in the winter camp, where the permanent forge was. Thinking of this, he saw in his mind the talishann for touch-not, which neatly discouraged both curious and careless hands and possible thieves. Yes, very practical, his ancestors.
But nothing was coming to him that he could use right now. He tried to recall the symbols for freedom, liberty, unlock, unbind, open, but none of them coalesced in his mind.
He remembered other talishann, though, the ones he had written on the corners of Ab’ya’s letter to Rihana and Ra’amon. He recognized it now as the first time he’d used his Shagara blood. He was the only one who could connect the arrogant cruelty of Allim’s rule, about which he had heard much in the taverns during the autumn and winter whether he wanted to hear it or not, with that letter. Ab’ya had urged them to serve the land, and Qamar himself had added love and fertility and happiness and fidelity to the paper that had known the touch of his blood, however briefly. Binding on Rihana and Ra’amon, it was useless on Allim.