My thoughts, unbidden, took another leap. I remembered the time Temellin and I had spent together. I remembered his body, his tenderness. The way he laughed. His intelligence. The way his voice softened when he spoke of things he loved. The way his language became poetry. I remembered how the children of the freed slaves adored him. Sweet Elysium, I thought, stop me from being so – so witless. Just because no one has ever loved me before is no reason to fall apart like – like a broken amphora spilling its contents. I cannot crack simply because I find a man attractive and his love flattering.
'Derya -?' Temellin asked. 'Are you all right?' His concern was palpable. I was far too aware of his unconcealed emotions.
My eyes searched for Pinar. The older Magoria was staring at me, hatred-filled, but with her emotions under tight control. 'Pinar will kill me,' I said involuntarily.
'Don't be silly! She and I don't love one another, not that way. It was to be a marriage of – of friendship. For children. She will be glad for me.'
I blinked at this extraordinary self-deception, but before I could comment, Korden was there again, saying, 'Temellin, shouldn't we continue with what we intended? We wanted to find out who Derya is; let's do so.'
'How?' I asked. 'Is it possible that I – that I have
family here? That -?' I couldn't give voice to the words,
mm: ' °
but my mind was suddenly filled with my childhood memory of a woman with a mane of russet hair, a woman bathed in gold light and splattered with scarlet. Perhaps I had been loved before this, once. I felt I was choking on memories and emotion and sentiment.
Goddess, Rathrox would never believe his eyes if he saw me like this.
Temellin slid an arm around my shoulders. 'Illusa-zerise,' he said, indicating the woman who had kissed my cabochon, 'was the Magor in charge of the palace nursery in Madrinya at the time of the invasion. She knew all the children. Including, therefore, you. She was one of the few people who survived the massacre of the Shimmer Festival.' He led me across the room to the Illusa.
My immediate thought was that if I had indeed been one of Zerise's charges, she would have scared me out of my swaddling clothes. She was all sharp edges: face, body, hands, all honed to acute peaks and ridges with no softening flesh. One cheek was badly scarred by two deeply gouged holes and two flanking lesser marks, all in a straight line. Her eyes had a sharply focused intensity and she held her body as if it were a poised axe. She was aged about fifty, not quite as old as I had first thought; the sparseness of her iron-grey hair and the angular thinness of her body were deceptive.
'Zerise,' Temellin was saying, 'who can Derya be?'
The woman looked at me with those sharp eyes, searching my face as if to find the imprint of the child there. 'What do you know about yourself?' she asked finally. 'Your real name perhaps? There was no child called Derya. Anything at all might be helpful.'
Her voice was soft, at complete variance with her looks, but I was breathless with the tension of that moment; truth was suspended somewhere in the
minutes ahead and I longed for it to be plucked and given to me. Yet when I spoke, my voice was calm; that, too, was a Brotherhood skill.
'I can't remember my real name. General Gayed renamed me.' True enough, although the name had been a good Tyranian one: Ligea. 'He found me and took me to Tyr when I was just a little less than three. That was in the tenth year of Senna Timonius's Exaltarchy, in the fourth month, I think. Before that – I remember the woman I think was my mother. A Magoria, I guess. She had a sword and there was gold light streaming out of her. There were people shouting and screaming. There were curtains. I wanted to look through the curtains, but someone wouldn't let me. Another woman. And then she disappeared too and I was horribly afraid and surrounded by strangers. There was a lot of fighting. And blood.' My left hand had curled up into a fist and it was an effort to relax it again. T can't remember much else.'
Zerise bit her lip, considering.
I stared at her face and thought, I've seen that kind of scar somewhere before… Then I remembered. It had been on the cheek of a man held in the Cages in Tyr, a rebel. I'd been told that a legionnaires? weapon, a circular piece of metal with jagged edges hurled from a whirlsling, left just such a mark. A rip-disc, the legions called it.
'Almost three in the fourth month of the tenth year of the previous Exaltarchy,' Zerise was saying. 'Let me see, that would mean you were born around the fifth or sixth month of the Kardi year Veshol-twenty-three. There were two Magorias born about then -'
'Mirageless soul!' The exclamation was Temellin's.
Zerise nodded. 'Yes. Shirin. Magoria-shirin was born in the fifth month. It's got to be her.'
'And the other?' Korden prompted.
She addressed Temellin. 'Your cousin Sarana, Mirager-temellin. Magoria-sarana was just a month younger than Magoria-shirin.'
The silence in the room developed an intensity so widely shared it could almost be touched. I darted glances from one person to another, not understanding why everyone was so tense, knowing something significant was not being said, hating my ignorance, but not sure I wanted to dispel it. They were all horrified – no, more than that – they were devastated by the idea I might be Sarana. Emotion skipped around the room in flurries.
Even Garis was aghast. 'Are you sure she is Shirin?' he asked.
'Oh, she couldn't be Sarana,' Zerise said. She dispensed a comforting calm in liberal waves that said even more than her words. 'The Mirager-solad himself brought Magoria-sarana's body back for burial. We all went to the burial griefs.'
'There can't be any doubt? A misidentification?' It was Temellin who asked, and his voice was unfamiliar to my ears; it was harsh and almost cruel.
'Oh no. Utterly impossible. The Mirager-solad himself identified her. And he was her father, after all. She was unmutilated, killed by an arrow through the heart. He was the one who found her shortly after the ambush. He'd ridden out to persuade her mother to come back, you see… He shroud-wrapped her, and her mother Wendia, and rode back to Madrinya with them both in his howdah. I saw them arrive. He was shattered. He worshipped that child. And he loved Wendia too. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. Do you think if there had been the slightest doubt the bodies he carried were not those of Sarana
and Wendia, he'would not have seized on it? I have rarely seen a man as broken as he was by the death of his daughter. He fought like a whirlwind during the Shimmer Feast attack, though.' She looked at me and explained. 'I was there, you understand, one of the few to survive. I saw Solad kill more Tyranians than anyone else that day, even though he was stuck through with arrows like a roast on a spit. It was sheer burning rage that kept him alive long enough to kill so many.' She wiped away tears with the back of a hand and turned to Temellin. 'No, the Magoria here cannot possibly be Sarana.'
'Are you sure the only other possibility is Shirin?' J Once again the question came from Temellin. This time he was smiling, his eyes sparkling with a partially suppressed joy.
'Yes, if the Magoria is right about how old she is. And even if she's not -' Zerise thought for a while. 'No. Reneta was about a year younger and I saw her body myself. The other girls were little more than babies and they were all accounted for, murdered in their cradles. But Shirin's body was never found. And she was the only Magoria missing. The part of the palace she was in was devastated by fire; there was little left to find. We thought she'd burned. I suppose it is possible she was saved by a Tyranian soldier.' She touched her scar and added bitterly, 'There were enough of them about.'
But Temellin was already reaching for me, whirling me in his arms, holding me tightly, hurting me in his joy. 'Shirin… Shirin, my Shirin – don't you remember me? I gave you my wooden shleth when you cried after I broke your toy sword. Don't you remember?'