• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2164 0

’d left Ahya with friends, how she’d returned to find her burning body among the wreckage of the home she’d left only hours before, but as she spoke it was not those images that played through her mind but the sights and sounds of the mountain where she had taken breath. The day had been cool, pleasant. The sky had held few clouds, but those that were present scudded across the sky, sending shadows to play over the landscape like trumpeting heralds. The wind had been brisk. It had brought a scent of Lion’s Foot—the pale, late-blooming flowers that grew along the highest ranges of the southern islands. She had felt, during those hours of meditation, as though she had come to know Nazakhov deeply, as though, like the bond between mother and daughter, she was a part of it and it was a part of her. It had been exhilarating, for this had never happened to her before. It had been something that every Aramahn hoped to find but few managed in their lifetimes.

But here Rehada had discovered the weight of an island upon her shoulders. She wondered when she came down from that mountain whether any such thing could really happen. It seemed that it had all been a figment, a self-fulfilling delusion, a trick of the mind perpetrated consciously by the breath-stealing air of the tallest mountain in Bolgravya. It must be so, for what else could explain her apparent oneness with her environment and her complete inability to sense that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong with her child, her blood, her one and truest love?

As she had come to rest before that house—the one that had been burned to the ground—she had stared at the burned skeleton that had been her daughter. Her precious child had been ripped from her world by the acts of the Maharraht who had been hiding there, the prevailing attitude of the Landed for the ruthless acts committed by them, but mostly—she had no doubt in her mind—by the overriding greed of the Landed aristocracy. It was a greed that had pushed them to claw for every scrap of land in the sea, and it had done so for so long that they could no longer see that their acts would one day instill and reinforce the resistance that they hoped so fervently to root out.

Perhaps Rehada’s voice contained more venom than she had realized. She had expected Atiana to soften even further, to paste a look upon her face that would force Rehada to claw at her, if only to remove the expression from that white skin for a moment or two. But instead Atiana was nearly emotionless, and then, in increments, her face hardened, as if she condoned the actions of the streltsi that day, as if she would have ordered the very same thing had she held the gavel of fate in her hand. Strangely, this did not upset Rehada in the least. It felt as though things had returned to balance—Atiana the oppressor, she the oppressed—and it allowed Rehada to complete her story to Fahroz’s satisfaction.

“What did you do after you discovered your daughter dead?”Atiana asked. Fahroz had prepared Atiana to ask certain questions at certain times, but still, Rehada was startled by her words.

“I left that very night and traveled Erahm another full circuit before landing on Uyadensk.”

“You didn’t see your daughter buried?” Atiana asked.

Rehada smiled the way she would for a child. “She had gone. Her funeral pyre had already burned whether I liked it or not.”

Atiana’s face pursed. “I do not question your judgment—I know the ways of the Aramahn are not my own—I only wondered why you would not grieve over your child.”

“I grieve as I grieve!”

Fahroz stopped near Rehada’s side, her arms across her chest. “A question was posed.”

Rehada shook her head. “I cannot do this.”

“You cannot even speak of your child?”

“Not to her. Nyet.”

Fahroz stared at her for a long time, hoping Rehada would change her mind. But she would not. “You leave me no choice.”

Fahroz strode toward the doors to Rehada’s left. As her soft footsteps faded, a vision of Ahya leaping over the edge of a skiff came to Rehada. It had happened when they’d reached Nazakhov. Both of them had been