Cinnabar Shadows (12 page)

They'd made a mistake, she and Telhami; Escrissar's deadly ambitions had taken them by surprise.
They'd paid dearly for that mistake. Quraite had paid dearly. Telhami had died to keep Escrissar from
conquering zarneeka's source, villagers and other druids had died too, and they'd be years repairing the
damage to the groves and field.

But they would have won—had won—before the sorcerer-king's intervention—Akashia believed that
with all her heart. What she couldn't believe was Urik's ruler on his knees beside Grandmother's deathbed,
caressing Grandmother's cheek with a wicked claw that was surely the inspiration for the talons Escrissar
had used on her.

The sense of betrayal souring Akashia's gut was as potent now as it had been that night. Clenching a
fist, relaxing it, then clenching it again, she waited for the spasms to subside. When they had, she calmly
dragged a foot through the touchstone patterns—defying Telhami to restore them again.

"Mahtra went to House Escrissar frequently and willingly, she said so herself. She was there,
Grandmother. She was there when Escrissar interrogated me, when he laid me to waste—just like the boy
was! They witnessed... everything!"

She was, to her disgust, shaking again, and Telhami stood there, head drawn back and tilted slightly,
glowing eyes narrowed, taking everything in, coldly judgmental—as Grandmother had never been.

"And what is it that you expected to accomplish?"
"Justice! I want justice. I want judgment for what was done to me. They should all die. They should
endure what I endured, and then they should die of shame."

"Them!"

The unnatural eyes blinked and were dimmer when they reappeared. "You didn't," Grandmother
whispered. "That's the root, isn't it. You wanted to die of your shame, but you survived instead, and now
you're angry. You can't forgive yourself for being alive."

"No," Akashia insisted. "I need no forgiving. They need judgment."

"Destroying Mahtra won't change your past or the future. Destroying Zvain won't, either. Born or
made, life wants to go on living, Kashi. The stronger you are, the harder it is to choose death."

Not everyone is as determined as you, Kashi. Some of us have to stay alive, and while we live,
we do what we have to do to keep on living. Pavek's sneering face surfaced in Akashia's memory,
echoing Telhami.

"You were assailed by corruption, you were reduced to nothing, you wanted to die, but you survived
instead. Now you want to punish Mahtra for your own failure and call it justice. What judgment for you,
then, if Mahtra's only crime were the same as yours: She survived the unsurvivable?"

It was a bitter mirror that Pavek and Telhami raised. Akashia raked her hair and, for the first time,
averted her eyes.

"Where is my justice? Awake or asleep, I'm trapped in that room with him. I can't forget. I won't
forgive. It's not right that I have all the scars, all the shame."

"Right has little to do with it, Kashi—"

"Right is all that remains!" Akashia shouted with loud anguish that surprised her and surely awoke the
entire village. Embarrassment jangled every nerve, tightened every muscle. For a moment, she was frozen,
then: "Everything's dark now. I see the sun, but not the light. I sleep, but I don't rest. I swallowed his evil
and spat it back at him," she whispered bitterly. "I turned myself inside out, but he got nothing from me.
Nothing! Every day I have to look at that boy and remember. And, she's come to put salt on my wounds.
They know. They must know what he did to me. And yet they sleep sound and safe."

"Do they?"

She set her jaw, refusing to answer.

"Do they?" Telhami repeated, her voice a wind that ripped through Akashia's memory.

According to Ruari, Zvain at least did not sleep any better than she. And for that insight, she'd turned
against her oldest friend, her little brother.

Something long-stressed within Akashia finally collapsed. "I'm weary, Grandmother," she said quietly.
"I devote myself to Quraite. I live for them, but they don't seem to care. They do what I tell them to do, but
they complain all the while. They complain about using their tools in weapons-practice. I have to remind
them that they weren't ready when Escrissar came. They complain about the wall I've told them to build.
They say it's too much work and that it's ugly—"

"It is."

"It's for their protection! I won't let anything harm them. I've put a stop to our trade with Urik. No one
goes to the city; no one goes at all, not while I live. I'd put an end to the Moonracer trade, too... if I could
convince them that we have everything that we need right here."

Akashia thought of the arguments she'd had trying to convince the Quraiters, farmers and druids alike.
They didn't understand—couldn't understand without living through the horror of those days and nights
inside House Escrissar.

"Alone," she said, more to herself than to Telhami. "I'm all alone."

"Alone!" Telhami snorted, and the sound cut Akashia's spirit like a honed knife. "Of course you're
alone, silly bug. You've turned your back to everyone. Life didn't end in House Escrissar, not yours nor
anyone else's. Walls won't keep out the past or the future. You're alive, so live. You've been pleading for
my advice—yes, I've heard you; everything hears you—well, that's it. That, and let them go, Kashi. Let
Pavek go, let Ruari go. Let them go with your blessing, or go with them yourself—"

"No," Akashia interrupted, chafing her arms against a sudden chill. "I can't. They can't. Pavek's the
Hero of Quraite. The village believes in him. They'll lose heart if he goes—especially if he goes to stinking
Urik—and doesn't come back. I had to judge that woman. If I could make her reveal what she truly was,
he wouldn't follow her. He'd stay here, where he belongs. They'd all stay here."

The sleeping platform creaked as Telhami sat down beside Akashia. She had neither pulse nor breath,
but her hands were warm enough to drive away the chill.

"At last we get down to the root: Pavek. Pavek and Ruari. They do know what happened. You can
scarcely bear the sight of either of them—or the thought that they might leave you. It would be so much
easier, wouldn't it, if all the heroes of Quraite were dead: Yohan, Pavek, Ruari, and Telhami— all of us
buried deep in the ground where we could be remembered, but not seen."

She swiped tears with back of her hand, but more followed.

"Pity?" The bloodless hands were warm, but the voice was still cold and ruthlessly honest. "What pity?
None was asked for, none was given. Outside this hut, I've seen life go on. I've seen compassion. I've seen
love and friendship grow where nothing grew before. But I see no pity, no clinging to a past that's best
forgotten."

"I don't want to forget. I want my life back. I wish life to be as it was before."

It was a foolish wish—life didn't go backward—but an honest one, and Akashia hoped Telhami would
say something. She hoped Grandmother would reveal the words that would prevent Pavek and Ruari from
leaving Quraite.

"Let them go, Kashi," Grandmother said instead. "Tear down the wall."

"It won't ever be the same as it was."

"It won't ever be different, either, unless you let go of what happened."

"I can't."

"Have you tried?"

She shook her head and released a stream of tears, not because she'd tried and failed but because it
was so easy to forget, to live and laugh as if nothing had changed—until a word or gesture or a
half-glimpsed shadow jarred her memory and she was staring at Escrissar's mask again.

"Laugh at him," Grandmother advised after the old spirit unwound her thoughts. "Run through your
fields and flowers and if he appears—laugh at him. Show him that he has no more power over you. He'll go
away, too."

More tears. Kashi took a deep breath and asked the most painful question of all: "Why,
Grandmother—why did you give your grove to him?"

"It was not mine to give," Telhami's spirit confessed. "Quraite chose its hero. And a wise choice it was,
in the end. I'd made a mess of it, Kashi. Can you imagine the two of us grappling with all those toppled
trees? We'd be at it forever—but Pavek! The man was born to move wood and rock through mud. You
should see him!"

And for a moment, Kashi did, hip-deep in muck, cursing, swearing and earnestly setting the grove to
rights again. She had to laugh, and the tears stopped.

"You're not alone," Grandmother said suddenly, which Akashia mistook for philosophy, then she heard
footsteps outside the hut.

Telhami disappeared before Akashia could tell her midnight visitor to go away. Feeling betrayed and
abandoned once again, Akashia plodded to her door where two of Quraite's farmers greeted her. One held
a pottery lamp, the other, Mahtra's hand.

"She had a dream," the lampbearer said. "A nightmare. It scared us, too. Pavek said he'd be in the
bachelor hut, but we thought..."

Some folk needed neither spellcraft nor mind-bending to convey their notions silently. The farmer's
hollow-eyed, slack-jawed expression said everything that needed to be said.

"Yes, I understand." She made space in the doorway for Mahtra to pass. With her strange coloring and
wide-set eyes—not to mention whatever the mask concealed—the white-skinned woman's face was
almost unreadable. When Mahtra squeezed herself against the door jamb rather than brush against her,
Akashia had the sense that they were equally uncomfortable with the situation. "She can stay here with me
for the rest of the night. Pavek shouldn't have troubled you in the first place."

" 'Tweren't no trouble," the farmer insisted, though he was already retreating with his wife and his face
belied every word.

Akashia stood in the doorway, watching them walk back to their hut, and all the while conscious of the
stranger at her back. As soon as was polite, she shut the door and braced it with her body. She didn't know
what to say. Mahtra solved her problem by speaking first.

"It was only a dream. I didn't know my dreams could frighten someone else. That has never happened
before. You said I should go to the grove. What is a grove? Would my dreams frighten anyone there?"

"No." Akashia pushed herself away from the door with a sigh. "Not tonight. It's too late."

It was too late for the grove under any circumstance. Mahtra's voice wasn't natural. Her jaw scarcely
moved as she formed the words and the tone was too deep and deliberate to come from her slender throat;
yet listening to her now, Akashia believed Mahtra had lived in the world for only seven years. As much as
she craved justice, Akashia couldn't send a seven-year-old to the grove.

"No, nothing, thank you."

Of course not, Akashia realized, feeling like a fool. Eating or drinking would have meant removing the
mask. While ransacking Mahtra's memory, Akashia had found the white-skinned woman's
self-image—what she thought she looked like. If it was halfway accurate, there was good reason for that
mask, though appearances alone would not have bothered Akashia.

One thing that did bother her was the way that Mahtra chose to stand a step away from the touchstone
patterns on the dirt floor. Grandmother had known what they were: mind-benders' mnemonics, makeshift
symbols Akashia had used to push and poke her way through Mahtra's dreams. Akashia was the only one
who could have deciphered their meaning, yet Mahtra stared at them as if they were a public text on a Urik
wall.

Akashia strode across her hut. She stood in the center of the pattern, scuffing it thoroughly—she
hoped—with her bare feet before she took Mahtra by a white wrist. "Please sit down." Akashia tugged her
guest toward a wicker stool. "Tell me about your dream," she urged, as if she didn't already know.

Mahtra's narrow shoulders rose and fell, but she went where Akashia led her and sat down on the
stool. "It was a dream I would not want to have again. I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn't wake up."

"Were you frightened?" Akashia sat cross-legged on her sleeping platform. It was wrong to ask these
questions, but the damage was already done, and she was curious. Mind-benders rarely got a chance to
study the results of their efforts.

The pale blue-green bird's-egg eyes blinked slowly. "Yes, frightened, but I don't know why. It was not
the worst dream."

"You've had other dreams that frightened you more?"

"Worse memories make worse dreams, but they're still dreams. Father told me that dreams can't hurt
me, so I shouldn't be frightened by them. Sometimes memories get worse while I'm dreaming about them.
That happened tonight, but that wasn't what frightened me."

"What did frighten you?" Akashia found herself speaking in a small voice, as if she were talking to a
child.

Mahtra stared at her with guileless but unreadable eyes.

"Near the end, when I couldn't stop dreaming, I remembered memories that weren't mine. They
frightened me."

Akashia's blood ran cold. She thought of the touchstone pattern and the possibility that she was not as
skilled with the Unseen Way as she believed, at least not with the mind of a child-woman who'd been made,
not born. "What kind of memories?" she asked, curiosity getting the better of her again. "How do you know

they weren't your own?"
For a long moment Mahtra stared at the ground, as she'd stared at the patterns. Perhaps she was
simply searching for words.

"Father was killed in the cavern below Urik, but Father didn't die until after I found him and after he'd
given me the memories that held his killer's face—Kakzim's face—so I could recognize it. Father was very
wise and he was right to save his memories, but now I remember Kakzim and I remember being killed. In
my dreams the memories are all confused. I want to save Father and the others, but I never can. It's only a
dream, but it makes me sad, and frightened."

"And your dream earlier tonight—it was like that?"

Mantra's head bobbed once, but her eyes never left the dirt. "I remember what never happened, not to
me, but to someone like Father. Someone who's been killed and holding on to memories, waiting to die. I
don't think I'll go to sleep again while I'm here."