Her voice was taut, suppressing disgust. The fact that Kaiku could tell at all meant that Mishani wanted her to know how she felt about it. In the background, Kaiku could hear the sounds of the servants racing to put out the fire she had started; the creaking of bucket handles, the slosh of water, shouts of alarm. They seemed impossibly distant.
'I have seen a girl in a village on my family's land,' she continued, her back to her visitor. 'She was hideous to look at, a freak of melted skin and hair, blind and lame. Where her hands touched, flowers grew. Even on skin, Kaiku. Even on metal. We found her being kept in a pen. She had killed her mother as an infant, after the poor woman allowed her daughter to feel her face. The mother's eyes were bored through by flower roots, and she choked on blossoms that grew in her mouth.' She paused, reluctant to go on; but she did so anyway. 'I have never seen a person possessed by a spirit, but I have seen and heard of many Aberrants, and I have heard of several who brought flame simply by being in a room. Most burned themselves to death; the rest were executed by the Weavers. They had two things in common, though, the fire-bringers. All were female. All of them had your eyes when the flames came. Your red eyes.' She faced Kaiku at last, and her gaze was hard and grave. 'Aberrants are dangerous, Kaiku. You are dangerous. What if I had been in that room with you?'
That had been yesterday. Since then, she had been left alone, given the bare minimum of attention by her host, given time to think on her condition. She had done a lot of thinking.
She could hear the weeping of the servants as they neared the house. Yokada, the servant girl who had been the only witness to Kaiku's condition as she escaped the fiery room, had died. It had been said she left a brazier burning in Kaiku's room, sparking the blaze. She had drunk poison last night, a suicide to atone for her crime. Kaiku doubted that the suicide was voluntary. She wondered if Yokada had even known she was drinking poison at all. Mishani had grown ruthless in her time at court. Kaiku had no illusions. Being at her lowest ebb afforded her a wonderfully clear perspective on things. Mishani had not been protecting her; she had been protecting herself. Blood Koli's standing would suffer terribly if it was found that they were harbouring an Aberrant. Worse, that the heir to the family had been fast friends with that unclean creature all through childhood and adolescence. The taint would be on Mishani's family then; they would be shunned. Their goods would fall in price, and stories about the strange fish in Mataxa Bay might start circulating.
Kaiku's presence in their home was enough to ruin Blood Koli. Mishani could not risk the loose tongue of a servant girl undoing generations of empire-building.
Mishani came into the room without ringing the chime. She found Kaiku still sitting before the mirror. Kaiku turned her gaze to Mishani's reflection.
'My servants tell me you did not eat this morning,' she said.
'I feared to find something deadly in my food,' Kaiku replied, her manner chilly and excessively formal, her mode of address altered so that she spoke as if to an adversary.
Mishani betrayed no reaction. She met Kaiku's eyes in the mirror levelly, her small, thin face in amid the mass of black hair.
'I am not so monstrous that I would order your death, Kaiku, no matter what you have become.'
'Perhaps,' Kaiku replied. 'Or perhaps you have changed much these past years. Perhaps I never really knew you.'
Mishani was perturbed by this shift in character. Kaiku was not properly and rightfully ashamed of what she was; instead, her tone condemned Mishani for her lack of friendship, her lack of faith. Kaiku had always been stubborn and wilful, but to be an Aberrant was surely indefensible?
Kaiku stood and faced Mishani. She was a few inches taller than the other, and looked down on her now.
'I will go,' she said. 'That is what you came to ask, is it not?'
'I was not intending to ask, Kaiku,' Mishani replied. 'I have told you what I know about the Mask. It is better if you go to Fo and seek answers for yourself. You understand, I am sure.'
'I understand many things,' said Kaiku. 'Some less palatable than others.'
There was a long silence between them.
'It is a measure of our friendship that I have not had you killed, Kaiku. You know how dangerous to my family you are. You know that, by revealing yourself as an Aberrant, you could hurt us badly.'
'And be executed by the Weavers,' Kaiku retorted. 'I would not throw my life away like that. It is precious. You thought so too, once.'
'Once,' Mishani agreed. 'But things have changed.'
'I have not changed, Mishani,' came the reply. 'If I was ill with bone fever, you would have sat by me and nursed me even though you might have caught it yourself. If I was hunted by assassins, you would have protected me and used all your family's powers to keep me safe, though you yourself would have been endangered. But this… this you cannot condone. I am afflicted, Mishani. I did not choose to be Aberrant; how, then, can I be blamed for it by you?' 'Because I see what you are now,' she replied. 'And you disgust me.'
Kaiku felt the blow of her words as an almost physical pain.
There was nothing else that needed to be said.
'There are clothes in that chest,' Mishani said. 'Food in the kitchens. Take what you will. In return, I ask this courtesy. Leave after sunset, that you may not be seen.'
Kaiku tilted her chin proudly. 'I ask no favours of you, nor will I grant any. I want only what is mine: my father's Mask, and the clothes and pack I came with. I will leave as soon as I have them.'
'As you wish,' Mishani replied. She paused then, as if she wanted to say something else; but the moment passed, and she left.
Kaiku walked boldly out of the front gate once the servants had brought her belongings. Barak Avun – Mishani's father – was away, so she was spared the dilemma of whether to thank him for his hospitality and bid him goodbye. She could feel the servants watching her leave. The sight of their noble lady's friend departing in trousers and boots – travelling clothes – was odd enough. Perhaps some of them also blamed Yokada's suicide on her. She cared little. They knew nothing of her affairs. They were only servants.
I have a purpose, she thought. A destination. I will go to the Isle of Fo.
There I will learn of the ones who killed my family.
The afternoon was sweltering and muggy now that the sun had climbed clear of the obscuring red dust of the Surananyi, and so bright that her eyes narrowed unconsciously. The Imperial District's streets were as clean and wide and beautiful as ever. She had money in her pack. Her first destination would be the docks. She would not think about Mishani, nor about what had been done to her, until she was far away from this place. She would not look back.
She left the compound of Blood Koli, turned a corner into a narrow side-street sheltered by overhanging trees, and almost walked into Tane, coming the other way with a woman at his side.
Surprise paralysed them both for a moment, before Kaiku found her voice. 'Tane,' she said at last. 'Daygreet. Shintu's Luck, no?' The latter was a phrase expressing amazement at an unlikely coincidence – in this case, their meeting here.
'Not luck,' he replied. 'We have been searching for you. This is Jin, an Imperial Messenger.'
Kaiku turned to the woman who walked with him, and the colour drained out of her. The sound of the city birds chirruping in the trees lining the lane seemed to fade. She became aware that, in this narrow passageway, she was all but invisible to anyone on the main thoroughfare.