Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [29]
“No one shoots as well as us,” Temur said to me, his cheeks ruddy with the cold and his habitual embarrassment. “Maybe you are part Tatar, Moirin.”
“Mayhap,” I agreed. “My people remember coming from very far away long ago when the world was covered with ice. But we followed the Great Bear Herself, and there are no bears here.”
The young men conferred.
“Not here, no,” Temur said. “But there are bears elsewhere in Tatar lands.” He nodded to himself. “It must be so. Otherwise, you would not be so skilled with a bow.”
I lost track of the days, each much like the next. When I had been some months among the Tatars, there was a ceremony to celebrate the New Year. With unwonted shyness, Checheg presented me with a vibrant blue silk scarf.
“I have seen these.” I remembered seeing similar scarves fluttering from the wooden cairn. “It is special?”
She nodded. “It is the symbol of the sky. Today, it means you are kin.”
“I am honored,” I said sincerely. “But I have no gift to give in turn.”
Checheg shook her head. “It is not required.”
“Wait.” Remembering the dwindling store of Imperial generosity I carried, I rummaged in my packs and found a beautiful sash of celadon silk embroidered with birds and vivid pink peonies. “Maybe it is not tradition, but I would like you to have it.”
She hesitated. “It is too nice.”
“No, no.” I pressed it into her hands. “Please, take it.”
For three days, we celebrated the New Year with feasting and well-wishes. On the night of the third day, a great bonfire was built outdoors and a table set forth with incense and ritual offering bowls of food and water.
Bundled in layers of felt and wool, I watched the fire burn, sending sparks into the night sky. Overhead, the stars shone brightly.
Somewhere in the not-too-distant west, the other half of my diadh-anam shone, too. I wondered if Bao stood beneath these same stars, watching a similar bonfire. I wondered, as I often did, what in the name of all that was sacred was going through his mind.
The festival marked the first new moon after the point of midwinter, and I felt my blood begin to quicken as the days grew longer.
I struggled for patience, which had never been my strong suit. Oh, in some ways I had the knack of it. I could be patient with animals and children. I could be patient in enduring the foibles of people for whom I cared. It had served me well with Jehanne’s temper and Snow Tiger’s proud reserve, and it had served me badly with Raphael’s ambition.
But in matters of desire, I had always been impulsive; and with the slow, inevitable coming of spring, desire was rising in me.
It made me more restless than usual, until Checheg began dismissing me from the ger more often than not.
“You are like a wild thing caged,” she scolded me. “Go, go!”
When there were no chores with which I could assist outdoors, I would saddle Ember or Coal and ride as far as I dared, always ranging westward, always feeling the incessant pull of my diadh-anam.
Alone, I would summon the twilight. It was one of the only things that soothed me. In the dusky, shimmering half-light, time’s slow passage did not seem so onerous, and distance did not seem to matter so much.
I thought of the dragon, content to regard his own silvery coils reflected endlessly in a mirror, in a river, in my own dark pupils.
The dragon had counseled patience.
You are very young, he had said to me. Live. Learn. Love.
I was trying.
To be sure, I was grateful for what I learned of love, kindness, and hospitality amidst Batu’s family. They were lessons I took to heart. Were I to start a family of my own one day, I would remember them. I regretted nothing of my own upbringing, but I did not have my mother’s taste for solitude. I yearned for connection.
Day by day, I endured.
At last, spring came. It came slowly and tentatively, but it came. The frozen ground began to thaw. Murmuring grass shook itself awake, sending out tender new shoots. Cattle, sheep, and horses grazed gratefully, nibbling it to