Page 32 of Queen Demon
“It is.” Hiraga reached over and closed their hand around Kai’s arm. Their grip was strong and urgent. “There is danger here, a turning point.”
The danger was obvious and everywhere, but Kai hated turning points most. “Like the one you saw at the river.”
“Not like that one. That one only had one trail to follow. This one has many, and none lead to safety. No, all fall into the dark.” They patted Kai’s arm. “I’ll go now.”
Kai and Isa helped Hiraga to stand, and the pair made their way out of the circle of tents. Kai sat down again. Trenal, who was on clean-up duty this morning, came to collect the empty cupsand asked, “Was that helpful, Fourth Prince? Telare swears that old person knows everything.”
“It was helpful,” Kai admitted. Not in the way he had hoped. But it was nice to know that his already low expectations were valid.
Trenal gauged his expression. “Ah,” she said sadly, and sighed. “Like that, then.”
Kai sat for a while. The camp was quiet in the growing light, the sky back to its more usual cloud-streaked blue. Everyone was either patrolling, on sentry duty, or resting. Even Bashasa had been persuaded to sleep through the morning unless something important happened. Kai was still too awake, with too many things to worry about. He slipped into his tent quietly, so as not to wake Ziede, and collected the pile of their washing and carried it off to the caravanserai’s bathhouse.
It was built against the far side of the lowest level and was mostly a ruin, with a wooden roof that had partly collapsed. But the pumps and pipes leading from the spring still worked and the first people to take advantage of it had scraped all the dirt and dead bugs out of the basins. There were no coverings over the broad windows, but someone had hung up some canvas tarps around the section with the bigger tubs to use for bathing. No one else was here now, and Kai took off his coat, left it folded on one of the stone benches, rolled up his sleeves, filled a basin, and started scrubbing dust and blood out of his and Ziede’s clothes. He needed to take a bath, too, but he would get the clothes washed and hung up first.
There was a view to the open prairie from here, down the slope past the horse lines, where the sentries on this side were stationed. The grass flowers grew all around the walls and the air was sweet with their scents. The combination was entirely different from the western grasslands, but there was still something familiar and homey about it. That and the soldiers and civilians passingby hurriedly or sleepily, the low hum of voices from inside the caravanserai.
Dahin wandered up, eating a handful of seeds. He wore Arike men’s clothes too now in soft unobtrusive grays and browns, but he was too pale, the kind of pale that meant the north, that meant the Blessed. Kai had seen tawny-skinned Immortal Marshalls—briefly, because they had been trying to kill him—but when easterners thought of the Blessed they thought of people like Tahren and Dahin. People with very pale skin were common toward the south and in some of the archipelagoes, and showed up all throughout the east, more so after the Hierarchs’ invasion. But at least they tanned like old ivory in the sun or turned blotchy pink; Dahin didn’t. Even his freckles were too pale, and his shorter straw-colored hair stood out too. He watched Kai for a moment and said, “Since you’re doing laundry I’m assuming nothing has happened yet.”
Kai wrung out a skirt and hung it over a line someone had strung up. “Not yet. We’re waiting to see what happens when they get the message. Or attack us again.” He remembered he hadn’t seen Dahin in camp until now. “Were you out with Tahren last night? I know she was patrolling.”
Dahin sat down on a stone windowsill. “Oh, ha ha. My sister wouldn’t let me go out on patrol with her. I was tucked up in the caravanserai with the children from the supply train like a good little piece of baggage.” He sounded offhand, but the bitterness in the word choice told a different story.
Kai paused, elbow deep in water. “Are you mad at your sister?”
Tellingly, Dahin didn’t looked affronted or surprised. He squinted at the morning sun on the rippling grass of the prairie and smiled. “Of course not.”
Kai reminded himself he didn’t know Dahin very well, that he had never imagined a situation where he would want to know a Lesser Blessed. And it would be easier to say nothing and change the subject. But Dahin was young and, under his flip exterior,upset. As an observation, not an accusation, Kai said, “You’re lying to me.”
Dahin’s brow quirked as if Kai had made an odd joke, but he didn’t protest. He dusted the remains of the seed shells off his shirt. “Can you tell I’m lying because you’re a demon?”
“I can tell you’re lying because I can see your face with my eyes and hear your voice with my ears.” Kai hesitated, considering. Tahren clearly felt Dahin was in danger here with the rest of them, which was perfectly true. The only reason there were any children with the army now at all was that they had been swept up during the last village evacuation, and there hadn’t been an opportunity yet to send them safely to one of the refugee hiding places. But Dahin wasn’t a child; there were apprentice vanguarders and soldiers here not much older. There had to be a reason Tahren had Dahin with her, instead of hiding him somewhere up north in or near the Blessed Lands. Surely she wouldn’t have brought him to the Summer Halls with her if she had any other choice. Kai guessed, “You aren’t safe with your family.”
Dahin’s shoulders dropped, releasing the antic tension in the muscles. He tucked his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, his gaze on the basin instead of Kai. “Were you?”
A few months ago, Kai would have been certain of the answer. “I thought I was,” he said. “But they’re all dead, and a Saredi demon I rescued from the Cageling Courts tried to kill me because I took this body.” Not just any demon; Arn-Nefa had been a friend, a mentor he had looked up to when the war had started and he had first been given his duty as a scout. There had been worse hurts, but that rejection had settled deep in his heart. Ziede was the only one who had any idea what had happened or what it meant, and he hadn’t even really spoken to her about it. He had tried not to think about it and the shock of it was still a knot of pain in his chest. “So I’ll never know, maybe they would have tried to kill me too.”
Dahin turned his head, watching Kai. It was a little hard tomeet his gaze, suddenly. Maybe because his eyes held so much understanding. He said, “Because it was—it might have been—the young woman that they wanted, Enna. And not you.”
Kai wrung out a pair of leggings and hung it up. “Exactly.” He would never know now, and it had been Arn-Nefa who had taken that certainty and sense of belonging away.
Dahin was quiet for a time. “They were going to hand me over to the Hierarchs. My family. I know Tahren explained that, back in the Summer Halls, that it was why she joined Bashasa. But… They were really going to do it.”
Before being dragged into the east as a prisoner, Kai had known very little about the Blessed. Before the Hierarchs came, they were just a rumor among the Saredi, stories from the borderlander traders who crossed the mountains for eastern goods. It wasn’t until the war started that the Saredi had known them as enemies. It wasn’t until Kai had met Tahren and Dahin that he had known them as people. He frowned, absently rubbing blood out of a hem. The skin on his fingers was getting wrinkly from the water, and that this was somehow normal was one of the odder things about being in a mortal body. “They were that afraid?”
Dahin nodded, not lifting his head. “We don’t fight for the Hierarchs because we want to. Well,” he added more matter-of-factly, “maybe some of us do. But the rest of us don’t have a choice. We’d always been the most powerful people in the world. Nothing could touch us.” He said this without any pride but as though it was immutable, like the sky being blue or the rain wet. “Then the Hierarchs came and they swept across all the mortal cities, and no one could stop them. Then they came toward the Blessed Lands. The Well of Thosaren keeps out invaders, they shouldn’t have been able to cross our border, the Patriarchs said they wouldn’t be able to. But they did, their Well was more powerful. We couldn’t stop them…” He swallowed and took a sharp breath. “No one knew what to do.”
Kai had seen a Raneldi Saredi Captain pick an ImmortalMarshall off the deck of an ascension raft with a longbow at easily two hundred paces. The Blessed metal armor was strong but the gap where the breastplate met the area under the arm was just as vulnerable. He wasn’t going to say that to Dahin; not now, anyway. It didn’t change Dahin’s point, that the Blessed had thought themselves invulnerable and had made no plans for what to do if they weren’t. “Did they ask for many of you?”
Dahin’s eyes were bright, and he wiped at them and looked down at the tears on his fingers as if they had personally affronted him. “One for every hundred. The families with Immortal Marshalls volunteered, because at first we thought they were to be hostages. Then the Hierarchs’ Hand said they had to be young, because they would join the priesthood. Then the Patriarchs who took them to the Hierarchs found out… It’s not like the Well of Thosaren, it’s not… Once the Hierarchs’ Well takes you, it’s not you anymore.” He rubbed his hands on his skirt. “Then the Hierarchs’ Hand came back, and said this time it would be one in fifty.”
“And the Patriarchs had given in the first time, so they gave in again.” Kai wondered if the Saredi had ever been offered any bargains. He had never heard any hint of it. Maybe they hadn’t been considered useful enough. Or too dangerous. The eastern territories seemed to think the Saredi were strange wild people who ran around the grasslands encouraging demons to eat their children. The Hierarchs had seemed to think them little better than talking animals.
“Do you want to know a secret?” Dahin said.
Kai wrung out another set of leggings. “Only if you want to tell it.”
Dahin’s smile was painful. “I wasn’t surprised. That the Patriarch of our family was willing to give me up. I’m different. I ask too many questions.”
