Naamah's Curse - Jacqueline Carey [36]
I felt as though Bao had done much the same to me.
As soon as I’d passed the sheep-slaughterers, I summoned the twilight, breathing it in deeply and flinging it around my horse and myself. The world softened and dimmed in the silvery-violet dusk, easing my troubled spirits. A few seconds later, I heard a soft gasp behind me, and the murmur of voices. My passage and my subsequent, abrupt disappearance had been noted.
Well and so, let them take heed. Batu had a point; it was better to be feared and respected than despised. I smiled grimly to myself and nudged Ember with my heels, setting out at a trot.
The campsite was situated alongside a wide, meandering river. I followed its course aimlessly toward the north, riding over the twilit grasslands until the tents and gers behind me looked as small as toys. I rode until I found a flat, windswept place where I could sit and watch the river.
There, I dismounted and turned Ember loose to graze.
I sat cross-legged and tried to meditate, but my thoughts were a jumble. I could not let one thought rise from another. So instead, I concentrated on breathing, cycling through the Five Styles, willing my mind to be empty.
In perhaps an hour’s time, I sensed Bao’s presence growing closer. In the twilight, I could see the silver spark of his diadh-anam coming toward me over the plains even before I could make out his form.
He couldn’t see me, of course; but he didn’t need to. Bao knew where I was as surely as I did him.
He turned his shaggy pony loose to graze with Ember and sat cross-legged opposite me without speaking, laying his staff across his lap and settling into a breathing rhythm that matched mine. We might have been Master Lo’s magpie and his least likely pupil once more. Except that in the twilight, Bao looked different than he had before.
It wasn’t just that the spark of the divine spirit of the Maghuin Dhonn Herself shone within him. The faint shimmer of darkness that surrounded him since his rebirth was deeper here, impossible to ignore, impossible to dismiss as a trick of the light. It flickered all around him—darkness made bright, a penumbra like an eclipsed moon. Gazing at it, I remembered that there was more at issue here than the fact that Bao had left me and ridden away to find his blood-father and wed some Tatar princess in the bargain.
He had died, and been restored to life. He was twice-born, and he was learning how to live with it. And although I was angry, mayhap I owed him the chance to explain.
With a sigh, I released the twilight, letting the daylight world return.
Bao’s lips parted at my sudden appearance, but having known I was there all along, he showed no other sign of surprise. I tilted my head to indicate I was listening. He nodded in acknowledgment and cleared his throat. “First of all, it would have been a grave discourtesy to refuse such an honor from the Great Khan. Second, I did not seek it out, Moirin.”
I stayed silent.
“You remember Master Lo’s snowdrop bulbs?” he asked me. “Well, I took them. I made a tonic like Master Lo prepared.”
“I know.” I wasn’t very good at holding my tongue. “I heard. That’s how you bribed your way into General Arslan’s favor.”
“My father’s favor, yes.” Bao fidgeted with his staff, frowning a little. “It’s true, you know. Although the truth isn’t exactly what I expected it to be. I thought… I thought that mayhap that once I gained his trust, I would avenge my family’s honor.”
“But it’s complicated,” I said in a neutral tone.
“Yes.” He straightened his back. “For now, it is enough to say that my father claimed me with pride, and I allowed it. When the Great Khan Naram visited