When will he let go of me?
That wondering was bigger than my head.
"Enough!" Tegus shouted. He turned to me. "Is it true, what she says she read?"
"My name's Dashti," I said, as simply as I could. I knew it was all about to end and I didn't want to lie anymore. "I'm not Lady Saren. I'm a mucker maid, no more." I wouldn't point out the real Saren now, not with Lady Vachir there hoping for someone to chop up.
He asked Lady Vachir for my book. She gripped it. "Lady Vachir," he said quietly, "stealing is also a crime."
She placed it in his hands, her expression carefully casual. He pressed it back into mine. "Keep this close to you," he whispered.
Then, at last, came the moment when his arm fell away from my waist. I shivered as he took a step back, suddenly as frozen inside as out. Perhaps it's irony that I'd met Khasar naked on the battlefield, but I felt colder now.
After he let me go, warriors carried me here, locked me in. I stared at my one candle for hours. I couldn't bear to look away.
This evening Shria brought some supper, and with it my horsehair blanket, some ink, and a brush. She didn't speak to me, but she touched my cheek before she left. I tore a blank page out of this book and thought to write Tegus an explanation. I crossed out the words again and again before I gave up. Every word I write to him sounds false. I can't speak the whole truth--That I wasn't only acting out of duty for my lady, how it was my own shirt I gave him.
How parts of me wanted to be his lady, just for a moment even.
Stop it, Dashti. None of that matters now. My whole, heavy world hangs by a thin rope. I remember a time when I comprehended Saren's plea to die, but not now. Now I want to live. Ancestors, please, I want to keep on living.
It's cold down here.
Day 170
Khan Tegus came this morning. He asked me again if it was all true.
"Yes," I said.
He groaned and paced. I didn't explain. I guess I always knew it would come to this, and trying to change it now seemed like trying to stop the wind from blowing across the steppes. Besides, the excuse "my lady ordered me to"
sounded so feeble in my head. She ordered me, but I chose to obey.
"Lady Vachir is claiming blood rights," he said. "Protection of binding betrothals is as old as cities, since the days men would get brides by kidnapping. The law is severe on that point, and my chiefs say she's within the law, and... Dashti, I don't know what to do."
"Have you spoken with Lady Saren?"
He looked sharply at me. "Is she Lady Saren? She's been claiming such, and I told her to be quiet about it and stay hidden in the kitchens. No need to give Vachir another target."
"If it comes to dying"--I sat on my hands so he couldn't see them shake --"if it comes to that, don't be anxious for me. I have a mama in the Ancestors' Realm. She'll sing me in. I'll be all right."
I didn't want to say that. I wanted to throw myself on my knees and beg to keep breathing, but I can't have him breaking his heart for worrying about me. Even so, my words didn't seem to relieve him any. He put his face in his hands and breathed slowly for a long while. I think he might've cried, if he'd let himself. He might've cried for me.
What a powerful thought.
"You're our champion." He let his hands drop. "You went out alone, you took down Khasar. But now Lady Vachir has made certain there's not a soul in this city who doesn't also know that you lied, you claimed to be gentry, you..." He sat beside me and was quiet for a while. I kept my eyes on his hands until he spoke again.
"Lady Saren's father visited Song for Evela when I was eight. I remember at a banquet, my father pulling me in close and saying, in almost a teasing way, 'He has a daughter named Saren. You might marry her one day, you know.
What do you think about that?' When I was fourteen and received her first letter, it didn't seem strange because I'd had her in my mind all those years."
"You were meant to marry her," I said.
He shrugged. "The letters were a game. I was young, I felt as though I were playing at being in love. I read poetry to try to learn how one courts with words, and I failed at it miserably. But it was fun, anticipating a new letter, hiding it from my father and hers, and we kept it up for a few years. When my father died before declaring who he wanted me to marry, I realized I might actually wed Lady Saren. I looked over her letters again, and I saw them anew-
-they were simple, little humor or life. To tell the truth, I was apprehensive at best. And then came news of the tower.
"I felt responsible, but I was dreading the meeting, too. It was you, wasn't it, Dashti? You were the one who spoke to me."
I nodded. I was wrapped up in the weave of his story and didn't want to speak.
"Of course it was you. I never should've left you in there. I should've risked war with Titor's Garden and Thoughts of Under. We met war anyway. When I spoke with Lady Saren in the tower, with you, it was a wonder. It felt right." He smiled. "Then I met you as Dashti, but when you told me you were Lady Saren, that felt right, too. And all has seemed right until... Ancestors, it's all wrong. You weren't Lady Saren in the tower, you weren't when you faced Khasar, you're not now and you won't ever be, and for that the chief of order says you must hang."
I thought I'd prepared myself for that end, but hearing him say it made my heart sting.
He rubbed his face again. "Dashti, I don't know what to do. I don't know. Can you, will you sing for me?"
So I sang him the song for clear thoughts, and after a time he leaned back against the wall with me and rested his head against mine, humming along. It was strange, as I think back on it now, that I'm the one scheduled to die but I was comforting him. At the time, it felt just right. It was a moment of peace, and it gave me space to think. We were betrothed once. I always knew it was ill-fated, but he truly believed I would be his bride. I guess I'd never realized that before. He had taken my mucker hand and looked at my mottled face and believed we would wed. And he hadn't seemed sorry. In fact, he'd swooped me up in the corridor and kissed me.
That set me to crying. He sat up and took my hand, the one mottled, holding it to his lips.
"Dashti, oh Dashti, I'm sorry." He smoothed my hair against the back of my head, he held my forehead to his.
"Please, I'm so sorry. Listen, nothing's settled yet. The chiefs may vote to preserve your life.
A lesser sentence might be banishment from Song for Evela."
Ancestors know that I never would've said aloud what I thought then--that living didn't matter to me if it meant I'd be alone, that I'd have to leave Tegus behind. Is that silly? And yet I really feel it. Here's what I wished I could say--
Tegus, I'll not find a better man than you, not on the steppes, not in any city or in all the wilds of the Eight Realms. You're better than seven years of food. You're better than windows. You're even better than the sky.
But I couldn't tell him that, and since I had to hold back words, I wanted to give him something. "Take my book of thought keeping," I said. "It's all I have that I care about."
"Haven't you destroyed it yet? I gave it back to you so you could. It's the best evidence against you." He put it back in my hands and stood at once. Before he passed through my door, he turned and said, "I'm sorry, Dashti."
And I guess that's the last time I'll ever see him.
After he left, I sat on the ground and stared at the door for a long time. A very long time. I didn't want to move ever again. Eventually I got myself up so I could write what Tegus said. To keep telling my story seems like the last bit of living I can still do. I feel like a dragonfly clinging to a grass blade in a windstorm, but I can't just let go. I can't.
I stare at the candle, how the flame shivers and bends when the wick is too long. The light is small and unsteady, but unless it's snuffed out, it'll keep burning for as long as the wick runs.