The return to her rooms took place in utter, sullen silence. She caught Qa Lung eyeing her, but Tsem had noticed her mussed clothes and angry expression, too. He placed himself at her side, rather than walking behind, a clear message to all that, for the night at least, courting was over.
"Is this how it's going to be?" Hezhi asked Qey, when she was safely back in her rooms.
"No, little one," Qey assured her, placing Hezhi's gown, neatly folded, before her. "You mustn't think that all men are like that."
"I see no reason to doubt it," Hezhi returned, her lips tight.
"Things will seem better, later on. One day you will laugh about this, tell your girlfriends at court."
Hezhi glowered back at Qey. "I doubt this will ever seem funny to me, even if my face is smeared with nende'ng. He attacked me, Qey."
"I'm sure he didn't see it that way," Qey responded carefully.
"That makes it worse," she snapped. "How can someone not know he is attacking you? Must I be courted by men who don't even know the difference between romance and fighting?"
"Ssh, little one. No one is to say you must marry Wezh. Soon you will have many suitors. Some are reluctant now because you haven't ascended yet. Wezh is merely the most eager, trying to gain an advantage by courting you before you are certain to join the court. When you go up the Hall of Moments, suitors will follow you like the train of your dress. Many of them will respect you, will understand your wishes."
"Many will be like Wezh, and I won't know it until after they attack me. How much of that must I endure? He frightened me, Qey, and I have seen things that should make him seem silly, unable to frighten a child…" She trailed off, suddenly realizing that Qey was looking at her worriedly. What did Qey suspect?
When she stopped, Qey regarded her for a moment, then took her hand.
"It isn't easy to believe this," she said at last, "but I was young once, too, and not even a princess. This seems very difficult now, I know. But it will get better, if you endure. One day, believe it or not, a man will put his hand on your leg and you won't want him to move it. You will want him to hold you and kiss you."
"He didn't hold me," Hezhi said softly. "He grabbed me. Isn't there a difference?"
"Usually." Qey sighed. "Usually."
Sleep came with some difficulty. She kept reliving the evening's experience over and over in her head, thinking of all the things she should have done. She had felt the thing in her—the River part of her. She could have struck at him, just as she had done before, and yet she felt instinctively that using that power was very dangerous right now. Even so, without her even asking, it had made her stronger, filled her arm with enough might to best Wezh; the muscles still tingled, even itched a bit. Actually, that arm had been itching for a few days, now that she thought of it. Over and over, she reviewed the scene, her anger staying alive and keeping her awake. Finally, deep in the night, an odd thought struck her. She imagined the situation again, but this time, in place of Wezh, she imagined that Yen was her suitor. A ridiculous thought—he was much too far beneath her station. And yet, when she imagined the scene with Yen, it came out differently, somehow. When he placed his hand on her leg, she stopped him, as well. But Yen just smiled kindly, his offending hand gripping hers briefly, and he leaned forward to kiss her forehead. Then the two of them rose and walked, hand in hand, back to her apartments where he bid her good night.
She ran it through her head like that a few times and finally drifted off to sleep.
She awoke to a gray dawn, just drizzling in from the courtyard. Something had awakened her, something annoying, but it took a moment for the sleep-fog to lift from her senses enough to localize it. It was her arm, itching furiously. Sleepy and annoyed, she reached to scratch it. That felt better, in the way that scratching does. In the same way, when she stopped, it itched more than before. Grunting, she scratched even harder.
Her nail caught on something, like the edge of a scab. Picking at it again, she wondered when she had injured her arm. Had Wezh wounded her? Curious, she stood up. The apartments were quite silent, and cloaked in that stillness she padded effortlessly out into the courtyard. The sky was slate, with a promise of coral just appearing eastward. A little mouse, surprised at her early entry into its night domain, scuttled into the patch of sage. A cool wind paused in its flight above the palace, just long enough to drop into the courtyard, swirl about her once, and set back on his way.
There, in early light, her life changed once again. No scab on her arm, no injury, no rash. Instead, just above the crook of her elbow, tiny but perfectly formed, grew a scale. Blue, with a hint of iridescence.
V
The Bit Slips
Days began to matter again. Perkar first noticed it a short time after he left Ngangata. Impatience was the root of it. It wasn't so much that he cared about days themselves, but that there seemed to be too many of them, too many between him and his destiny. He began marking them, each passing sun a score in the tough wood of the boat.
"What I cannot do," Harka explained to him, "is cut through days as if they were curtains. I cannot cut them open and let you walk on through to where you want to be, not even I. You must brush each drape aside, one at a time, just as anyone would."
Perkar snorted. "What good are you then?"
"Without me, you would be long dead, piles of shit in a cave."
He didn't reply; he still wished sometimes that he had died. He clung now to what the goddess told him long ago. Live with what may be, what is possible, and not what you childishly wish. He was not dead, that was a fact. The goddess was right; remorse and guilt were indulgences, candy to console a troubled child. A man who could not rise above self-pity was useless in any capacity.
He could tell himself that, anyway. But if he had learned that lesson long ago, then his king would still be alive. Apad and Eruka… he still saw their faces each morning. Apad's ruined features, Eruka's sightless eyes—the Kapaka as Perkar had last known him alive, ashen, his dreams dead and his own ghost yearning for oblivion. Or worse, the cold, faceless spirit in the moonlight. But he could tell himself that grief was pointless, get on with things. He had a purpose now, though it was vague. He had something more to do.
If only he could do it soon, before he lost this new resolve, before the memories and the dreams dragged him into madness. The wounds on his knuckles were already merely scars, and the tedium of the boat trip made it difficult to sustain his anger. Still, it was there, waiting, at least for the moment.
Five days after he began counting suns again, he passed by the city of Wun. He knew that it was Wun because Brother Horse had told him that Wun was the first city he would encounter. He knew that it was a city because he had never seen anything like it save in dreams. There was nothing astonishing about the first cluster of houses he went by. Though the dwellings were willow and reed rather than of stout planks with shake roofs, in size and number they were much like the village near any damakuta. The people, despite their dark skin and exotic features, were familiar, too, seemed to go about life the way villagers did. A woman filling a water jug, boys swimming in the River, waving at him as he passed, a man watering his sheep. But as he drifted along, the houses grew denser and denser, larger, and the people more numerous. Some young women, bathing in the River, giggled and pointed at him, and one even motioned him toward them, to the mock dismay of her companions. Perkar waved and drifted on, eventually passing houses made of stone, wooden docks thick with ships, some larger than any he had ever imagined, clustered at the planked walkways like fish feeding at the edge of a stream.