Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [187]
“The problem is that they will always have the higher ground,” he said. “See, here, here, and here. We will always be coming around blind corners, where they can pick us off one by one.”
I thought of an offer I had made Snow Tiger once when we faced an ambush—and a warning my mother had given me. “Unless they can’t see us,” I murmured.
Bao gave me a sharp look. “Your twilight.”
I nodded.
“No.” He shook his head. “No, Moirin. I will not risk you again.”
“No, I do not like it either,” Amrita said unhappily.
“What is she talking about?” Hasan Dar asked, bewildered.
It was easier to show him than explain. I had them close their eyes and summoned the twilight, wrapping it around Bao and me, then letting it fade before their open eyes. Ravindra and Hasan Dar stared in awe; the Rani Amrita, who had seen me call the twilight before, just looked worried.
“And you could kill a man thus concealed?” her commander asked. “Or Bao could?”
My mother’s words echoed in my thoughts. It is a grave gift and one never to be used lightly. Only to sustain life. Do you ever use it for sport or any idle cause, it will be stripped from you.
Snow Tiger’s, too, her voice gentle and firm as she refused my offer. What you suggest is dishonorable.
But when I glanced at Amrita’s beautiful, worried face and her son’s thin, clever one, I knew I was willing to take the risk. “I could. I cannot speak for Bao.”
Bao frowned, fidgeting with the bands of steel that reinforced his bamboo fighting-staff. “I would have no trouble killing those men who serve them willingly,” he said. “They are assassins who kill by stealth, and it is fitting that they should die thus. But I would not like to kill those who were trapped as I was.”
In the end, it remained a moot point, for we could devise no plan for dealing with Kamadeva’s diamond.
“I could accompany you,” Amrita said quietly. “I am not affected by it, at least not with Jagrati wielding it.”
“No!” Four voices spoke in emphatic unison.
Bao reckoned we had a few more days’ grace before the Falconer and the Spider Queen decided that Divyesh Patel had failed and sent a new assassin in his place. After our initial attempts at group strategy failed, Bao suggested in private that he and I go alone. Since my diadh-anam had been twinned, I could hold him in the twilight as easily as myself. If I could hold it long enough, the two of us alone could approach Kurugiri without ever being seen, without alerting the Falconer’s assassins.
“We could steal Kamadeva’s diamond rather than take it by force,” he mused, stroking my hair.
Lying in his arms, I shook my head. “I don’t trust myself around it. Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Bao admitted. “Here, with you… yes. I walked away from it once. But…”
“What if Jagrati got me to betray myself utterly, Bao?” I shuddered. “What if she sent me against my lady Amrita and her son? I can summon the twilight. I know where the hidden room is located.”
“And you are rather deadly with a bow,” he added. “No, you’re right. It’s too dangerous.” He toyed with my hair, which had grown out well below my shoulders, but was still much shorter than it had been. “Why did you cut it, Moirin?”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
His brows furrowed. “Whose was it?”
For the first time, I told Bao the whole of what had befallen me after the Great Khan’s betrayal—the journey and the whole long, awful ordeal in Vralia, the chafing chains that bound my spirit as surely as my flesh, the Patriarch and his incessant demands that I confess the litany of my sins, Luba and her shears, cold water, and lye, the endless scrubbing of the temple floor, my knees aching, the ever-present threat of being stoned to death.
I wept.
Bao held me. “I could kill them ten times over for that!” he said fiercely, his breath warm against my temple. “Do you want me to?”
“No.” I sniffled and laughed. “No, I don’t ever want to go back there.”
“How did you escape?”
I told him about Valentina