I had put an end to his dream.
I had armed my sweet boy Aleksei with the courage of his convictions that he might continue the fight against his uncle’s vile legacy, raising a voice in favor of love, compassion, and understanding, altering the course of his world.
And yet it wasn’t enough.
No, now I must be shaken and rattled and tossed once more, hurled back into the fray, pitted against this legendary Falconer and his bedamned Spider Queen with her unknown charms that held grown men in thrall. And it was not enough that I find the missing half of my soul, no. A boy-monk with kind, gentle, ancient eyes was depending on me to rescue the reincarnation of one of the Enlightened Ones.
And that, he had informed me, was only the beginning of my journey.
I had further oceans to cross.
It was a considerable weight to carry, a considerable weight to place on the shoulders of a young woman who had grown up in a cave in the Alban wilderness. And I felt very, very alone beneath my burden.
It wasn’t that I failed to recognize the aid I’d found along the way. I did. And I was grateful to all of them: to kindhearted Batu and Checheg, to poor Valentina and my sweet Aleksei, to steady Vachir and his wife, Arigh, to stormy Erdene, to my young friend Dash, to gentle Dorje and Nyima.
And yet…..
Again and again, the dice were cast. Swept up on the tide of my fate, I left them behind and carried on alone.
“Moirin?”
I realized that Manil Datar had spoken my name several times over, and blinked at him. “Aye?”
“You were far away,” he said in Tufani, and then repeated it in Bhodistani, slowly and carefully. “You were far away.”
I echoed it back to him, memorizing the words. “Yes. I was far away.”
“Where?” Leaning over in the saddle, he stroked my braided locks, setting the coral and turquoise beads to rattling.
Lacking words, I shrugged. “Far.”
His fingertips brushed my cheek. “Do not go so far.”
I felt a tickle of alarm at the base of my spine. I made myself smile at him. “Not so far, no. I am sorry.”
Manil Datar smiled back at me, a smile that did not reach his eyes. “Good.”
FIFTY-FOUR
I did not like Manil Datar.
It was not that he wasn’t a good caravan-master. He was. He was as solicitous of me as he had promised. When we made camp, he ensured that my tent was erected securely, that I had ample food to eat and my mounts were provisioned and watered. He listened to his porters, who knew the terrain better than he did. He insisted that they escort me on foot through the worst passes, through the narrowest defiles, where all of us stretched our ears, listening for the fearful sound of ice cracking, portending an avalanche of snow and rock.
It happened more than once.
The scarred fellow who had disturbed Dorje seemed to have the keenest senses. Twice, he called for a halt moments before an unholy cascade broke loose from the mountains, barring our path.
While the porters dug us out, Manil Datar further instructed me in the Bhodistani tongue.
Snow, ice, avalanche.
Coat, hat, mittens.
Even though I did not like him, I listened and learned, repeating words back to him. In Vralia, the Patriarch had kept me ignorant and unable to communicate. I never wanted to be that helpless again.
Slowly, slowly, we crept our way across the Abode of the Gods. Beneath the ever-present shadow of mountain peaks, we scaled heights where little grew save tough juniper shrubs. I learned to string simple sentences together in Bhodistani. We descended into forested valleys where cedar, blue pine, and larch grew with hardy exuberance, and Manil Datar began teaching me more abstract terms. We traversed narrow paths clinging to the side of a mountain gorge above fierce, rushing rivers. We crossed unexpected meadows, where we sometimes encountered nomads pasturing their yaks.
It was in one of the meadows that Manil Datar revealed his true colors.
Between Dorje’s distrust and my own unease, I’d never fully trusted the man—all the more so when I realized that it was largely due to the scarred porter, whose name I had learned was Sanjiv, that the caravan’s animals were so content and well tended. But I had passed many days in Manil Datar’s company, and although he took the liberty of touching my hand or my cheek from time to time, he offered no further impropriety.
That changed in the meadow.
I was asleep in my tent, swaddled in woolen blankets with the heavy sheepskin atop them. I was awakened by an additional weight pressing on me, a hand clamped hard over my mouth, and a sharp edge against my throat.
A jolt of terror ran through me as I lurched from deep sleep to full wakefulness. Dim lantern light and the musky scent of perfume filled the tent. Manil Datar’s face hovered inches above mine.
“Moirin,” he whispered. “It is time.” I struggled ineffectually, but he had me pinned beneath my blankets. He leaned harder on the knife against my throat. “Be still. I will not hurt you if you are good. Do you understand?”
I blinked in agreement, too terrified to move.
“Good.” The knife’s pressure eased a fraction. Datar smiled at me as pleasantly as though we were discussing the day’s journey. “I wanted to wait until you understood. Some things are worth waiting for. I have heard stories of the bed-arts of D’Angeline women. I want you to show them to me. Do you understand?”
I blinked again.
Manil Datar nodded in approval. “If you are good, you will be mine, and mine only. If you are bad…..” He withdrew the knife from my throat, tracing a line along my cheek with the sharp tip. “I will cut your face worse than Sanjiv’s, and give you to the men to share. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I whispered, my heart thudding in my chest like a trapped thing.
His unsmiling eyes bored into mine. “You will be good?”
“Yes.”
He shifted his weight off me, tugged away the sheepskin, untangled the woolen blankets, pulling me to my knees. With one hand, he opened his long coat and unlaced his thick, lined breeches. Taking my hand, he guided it to his erect phallus. With another smile that did not reach his eyes, he gestured with the dagger and uttered one of the first words he had taught me. “Mouth.”
I felt sick.
The point of the dagger prodded a spot beneath my ear. “Mouth, Moirin!”
“Slow,” I murmured, stroking the length of his shaft, feeling it throb in my hand. “Slow is best, yes?”
Datar’s breath quickened, his lids growing heavy. “All right, yes. Slow.”
Sick and horrified, I stroked him, watching his face beneath my lashes. When I cupped his heavy ballocks and began to lower my head, his eyes fluttered shut for an instant.
It was all I needed—a second without his gaze on me. Quicker than thought, faster than I’d ever done in my life, I summoned the twilight and spun it around me, taking a half-step into the spirit world.
Manil Datar uttered an involuntary cry, dropping the dagger.
Exactly what he was feeling, I couldn’t say, only that it was unpleasant and unnerving. Bao had said it was like being touched by a ghost. Fury ran hot in my veins, and I tightened my grip on Datar’s ballocks with grim satisfaction, feeling them shrivel and attempt to retreat into his body, his erection flagging. With my other hand, I picked up the dagger he had dropped, setting the point beneath his chin.
Datar stared frantically into the empty air before him, his eyes wide and terrified.
“You will not do this to me, Manil Datar,” I said to him in a hard voice, willing him to hear. “Not tonight, not ever. Do you understand?”
He blinked in assent.
“Good.” I shoved the knife a little. I didn’t know if it would cut him while I was in the twilight and he wasn’t, but whatever he felt, it made him raise his chin higher. I gave his shrinking ballocks a hard squeeze. “Never touch me again, or these…..” I didn’t know the word, so I squeezed them again. “No more. I make a curse. You will not be a man. Do you understand?”
His throat worked as he tried to swallow. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “Yes.”
“Good.” I lowered the dagger and released my death-grip on his ballocks. Manil Datar drew a ragged breath. “Now go, and do not trouble me again.”
He couldn’t scramble out of my tent fast enough, clutching his coat closed with one hand, holding up his unlaced breeches with the other.
Once Datar had gone, I began shaking, and couldn’t stop. I clung to my grip on the twilight and wrapped my blankets around myself, wrapped my arms around my knees, and rocked.
My tent stank of his musky, cloying perfume.
I could still feel his phallus throbbing and twitching against my palm, still hear his voice saying, Mouth, Moirin.
Ah, gods.
Being a heroine was a very lonely affair.
In the end, I released the twilight and dozed fitfully that night, waking from time to time in a start of terror. Manil Datar did not return, but in the morning I found that the mood in the camp had changed considerably.
No one would meet my eyes.
No one brought me food to break my fast; no one saw to watering my mounts. No one aided me in striking my tent and loading my gear, all the little niceties to which I had grown accustomed, all the things that had made the caravan function with swift efficiency.
I heard one word murmured, over and over: dakini.
I did not need Manil Datar to translate it for me.
Witch.
Well, and so. Better that they should fear me than not. The memory of Datar’s knife tracing a line along my cheek was vivid in my mind. And at least it did not seem that the caravan meant to abandon me altogether. A trader’s bond was only as good as his word, and Manil Datar was not yet willing to break his.
So I dined on the tsampa that Nyima had packed for me, kneading roasted barley and butter together in the Tufani manner and popping balls of it into my mouth. I trudged across the meadow with the iron cooking-pot Aleksei had bought in Vralia to fill it from the waterskins the porters’ yaks carried that I might water my horses, since I did not have a bucket of my own.
My saddle-horse, Lady, guzzled down a potful at one go, gazing mournfully at me with a dripping muzzle when it was empty.
Her mate Flick, my pack-horse, looked on eagerly.
I sighed. “More, eh?”
“Here,” a voice said behind me. I turned to see the scarred porter, Sanjiv, a brimming leather bucket full of water in either hand. He ducked his head, embarrassed. “For your horses, Lady Dakini.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Sanjiv nodded without looking at me. “They should not suffer.”
“No,” I agreed. “They should not.”
In silent accord, we watched my horses drink their fill. “Horses are good,” Sanjiv offered after a time. “Yaks, too.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“They like you,” he said shyly.
“I like them, too.” Curious, I looked at his face full on in the daylight, studying the raking scars that lacerated it, dragging his nose sideways and skewing his upper lip. Despite the disfigurement, his eyes were dark and soft, with long lashes. “Who hurt you, Sanjiv? Who did this to you?”
“No one,” he said simply. “It was a snow leopard. He was hungry. I was trying to protect my yaks. It is not his fault he made me ugly.”
I smiled. “I do not think you are ugly.”
“No?” He met my eyes for the first time, tentative and fearful.
I shook my head. “No.”
FIFTY-FIVE
Without Sanjiv’s kindness, I would not have survived the journey.
For the first couple of days after Manil Datar’s assault, I thought mayhap I could manage. Grueling though it was, I was accustomed to hard work and surviving on my own. Datar didn’t appear inclined to deny me the share of provisions to which I was entitled; he simply ceased to ensure that any aid was given to me.
No one offered me food, but after I ran out of tsampa, no one attempted to stop me when I filled a plate of rice and lentils from the cooking-pot—only glanced at me sidelong and muttered under their breath. And Sanjiv took it upon himself to help care for my horses, which was a tremendous help.
And then I got sick.
I’d always been blessed with a healthy constitution, but it failed me in the mountains. I was already worn down by prolonged travel, worn down by my never-ending destiny. After Datar’s assault, I had trouble sleeping, constantly waking in a start of terror. And, too, the atmosphere of suspicion and hostility in the caravan took its toll on me.
It began with a headache and a scratchiness in the back of my throat. By the second day, it hurt to swallow. My joints ached, and I suspected I was feverish.
By the third day, I was sure of it.
Manil Datar knew it, too. He came upon me struggling to hoist Lady’s saddle in place on the morning of the fourth day. Giving me a tight smile, he addressed me for the first time since he’d fled my tent. “You are sick, Moirin.”
I didn’t answer. My limbs felt weak, and it took all my concentration to lift the saddle.
“The caravan cannot wait,” he said. “If you cannot continue, I will give back part of your money.”
“No,” I said shortly. If I could not continue, winter would come and I would die in the mountains. Both of us knew it.
Narrowing his eyes, Datar assessed the extent of my weakness. “Maybe I can help….. for a price.”
I met his gaze. I could not conceal myself in the twilight with him looking at me, but I could still call it. With an effort, I did. Seeing the air around me begin to sparkle with unexpected brightness, he paled and took a step backward. “No,” I said again. “No trouble, or I make a curse.”