Qamar discovered he was on his feet, and trembling. “You will apologize.”
“I will not. It’s true.” She met his gaze calmly. “I saw it.”
Everyone in the fortress knew what she claimed to be. That she had located Qamar and brought him back proved it. Qamar himself, however, kept recalling their first encounter, when she’d been surprised that he was young and handsome, not old and scarred. He didn’t care for her visions, frankly. It wasn’t so much that he doubted that she had indeed seen his grandmother somehow; it was that she was so wrong about why it had happened.
But it wasn’t something he could tell the truth about. He knew that, even as he drew breath to do so. All around him, staring with astonishment, sat a broad sampling of the population of the fortress, here to learn Solanna’s language. Children, young women and men, older people wanting to keep their minds alert—and mothers. If he corrected Solanna’s interpretation of his grandmother’s . . . difficulty . . . he would have to admit that it was not the shame of seeing her heritage misused but the misery of having birthed Haddiyat sons. There had to be at least one woman in this classroom who would know exactly what that meant, who had felt the unique anguish of knowing a son would die early and in pain. And even if there were no such mothers here tonight, everyone knew everyone else in the fortress, and he would not be thanked for bringing up a subject no one ever discussed. The women had to feel it; of course they felt it, before schooling themselves to feel only pride in having given birth to so valuable a son who would maintain Shagara traditions for one generation more.
Solanna was watching him through narrowed eyes. “You had a comment to make, Qamar?”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Empress Mirzah was an unhappy woman, but not for the reason you give. She . . . she very much disliked living in palaces. She missed the desert tents.” It was the truth, just not all of it.
“How would you know how she lived or how she felt about it?”
He looked her straight in the eye, and in the language of Tza’ab Rih—and of the Shagara—said, “She was my grandmother. You will excuse me, I trust. Sururi annam,” he added to the class in general and walked out.
By the time he reached his own quarters—a few twisting alleys off the big eastern courtyard, which the locals called a zoqallo—he was shaking again with anger. Acuyib curse the girl, what business did she have telling her distorted version of history? And how dare she compel him to the unspeakable vulgarity of reminding her who he was and why he knew much better than she what went on in the palaces of Tza’ab Rih? The class had watched with fascination or amusement or boredom as their varying natures prompted, but he’d sensed a flinch run through every one of them at the reminder that this charming young man who lived in their fortress and studied their ways and was a gifted Shagara male was, in fact, a sheyqir of Tza’ab Rih.
Climbing the stone stairs three at a time to his second-floor room, he slammed the door shut behind him and fell across his bed without bothering to light the candle. What was he doing here, anyway? He could be at home, lolling on silk pillows, nibbling wine-soaked pears, and his most worrisome thought would be deciding which woman to invite to his bed that night. He did not belong here. This country was not his.
He lit the bedside candle, then the three-armed branch on the desk by the window. The light would glow down into the alley. He picked up a sheaf of notes on the uses of flowering plants found above a certain altitude in the mountains, read five words, and threw it aside.
She wasn’t coming, not to apologize or to continue the argument or even to rebuke him for being rude.
He opened the folder of notes from Zario Shagara’s class and began sorting through to find the first page so he could begin copying his one- or two-word prompts into sentences that actually made sense. For a moment he thought he’d lost the sheets and cursed aloud.
She wasn’t coming.
Not that he had any reason to expect her. Still, their discussions often continued as they walked through the fortress passageways, until he took the turning that led to the eastern zoqallo. He still didn’t know exactly where she lived. And how she could possibly go home tonight and sleep after insulting him so appallingly, he really didn’t know—
Qamar’s eye and his whole mind were suddenly fixed on the single word written in very large letters on his page of notes from this morning.
WILL.
Zario had said something different when it came time for his usual cautions about blood being insufficient—and indeed completely inadequate—if the work had not been properly prepared.
“It is not the paper, nor the talishann written on it, nor the ink in which they are written, that secure the achievement of your goals. It is not even the addition of your own blood. None of these things can do what your own mind can do. You must will your work into being. You must believe that all these things so meticulously chosen shall combine at your bidding to do your will. You are the most powerful ingredient of any magic. Not just your blood, not just your knowledge, but your will.”
Qamar heard the words echo in his head. This was not something a Shagara of Tza’ab Rih would have said. They were the conduits of magic. They crafted the hazziri or concocted the medicines and took justifiable pride in their work. But they were not part of the magic. They contributed nothing of themselves except their blood. They would not agree that one man’s force of will could play even the smallest part in his creations.
Yet Zario Shagara, only two generations removed from the desert, had spoken of that very thing. Of willing one’s work into being.
Qamar happened to agree. And for the first time, he began to think that he might truly belong here. So intent was he on this thought, and others that followed after it, that he did not hear the soft, tentative tapping at his door.
Nor the less gentle knocking that followed.
He did hear a woman’s voice call out his name. He turned in his chair, wondering bemusedly why she was coming to visit him at this hour.
“Qamar—I’m sorry, all right?”
Frowning, he tried to think what she might be apologizing for.
“I shouldn’t have said that about—about the Empress.”
He remembered now. He stood, about to walk the ten paces to the door—it was a much larger room than the one he’d lived in before—when she spoke again.
“It’s just—I forget sometimes that you weren’t born here. That you’re one of them.”
He unlatched and hauled open the door. “Say that again.”
“What?”
“What you just said. Repeat it.”
“I’m sorry for what I—”
“No, not that, who cares about that? Say what you said just now.”
“That you’re one of them?”
“Exactly. I wasn’t born here. I don’t belong here. I’m one of them.” He grinned at her befuddlement. “Don’t you see? So were the Shagara when they first got here. Yet you wouldn’t call them foreigners now, would you? Different from the rest of the populace, to be sure, but not outsiders, not anymore. You originally came here to get them to work with you against the Tza’ab. That’s not something you do with people you don’t trust.”
“Thanks to your grandfather’s example!” she retorted.
“Exactly!” he said again. Then he paused, and frowned down at her. “You admit that it happened the way I said it happened?”
“I said the invasion was unprovoked and dishonorable. I said nothing about the reasons why it happened.”
Qamar laughed again. He could see things, too: long, contentious talks with this girl, arguing out the finest details and most obscure implications.