The Past The Choice #2
“That’s probably a good idea.” The others had all withdrawn to opposite corners. Ziede and Tahren sat on another bench talking together.
“Our people are very stubborn,” Bashasa added, low-voiced, his gaze moving over the room.
“They are,” Kai agreed. Bashasa could out-stubborn a stone wall himself but he was also lightning quick to adjust his thinking to take account of new facts. That others were unwilling or unable to do this was somewhat baffling to him.
Bashasa glanced down. “Ah! Did someone give you that?”
At some point Kai had taken out a luck token and was absently rolling it between his palms. “Lots of someones.” He dug in his coat pocket and pulled out a small handful.
While he and Dahin had been doing the washing this morning, several more tokens had appeared on his folded coat, left there by others going in and out of the bathhouse to fetch water or wash something.
Some had been handed to him earlier by soldiers in Bashasa’s cadre, or the outguard, as he walked around camp.
“They’re giving them to Ziede and Tahren, and the Witches, too. They’re for luck?”
Bashasa leaned forward, lightly touching Kai’s hand.
“Not luck, exactly, though that’s a simple way to say it in Imperial.
They’re more like cynosures.” He indicated one, the same design as the first Kai had been given while visiting Amabel near the supply train.
Most of the tokens in Kai’s collection were that shape, though there were a few different ones mixed in.
“That is for Benais-arik. Each city has a different one. They were signs of affiliation, of a sense of belonging, given to visitors from other city-states, other places, as a sign of welcome, a remembrance.” He was smiling at the figures, a genuine expression of pleasure.
This explanation was even more puzzling. “Why are they giving them to me? So many, all of a sudden?”
Bashasa lifted his brows, as if it was obvious.
“Because they saw you create a pillar of fire to defend our camp. Because they saw you and Ziede plunge into the dark in pursuit of our attackers, to bring back our captured people.” He looked at Kai for a long moment.
“Would you speak on my behalf, Fourth Prince?”
Kai snorted. “To who? Nobody in this room who isn’t listening to you is going to listen to me.”
“To the dustwitches,” Bashasa clarified.
“That’s not any better,” Kai said. “They think I’m an expositor’s familiar.” And he didn’t know any more about them than Ziede and Amabel did. Less, even.
Bashasa nodded to the Prince-heirs and the others, conferring in different clumps. “The only thing we have managed to agree on here is that if the dustwitches consent to a meeting, I should not be the one to go to it.”
They had got further along than Kai realized.
He wondered if anyone understood that Bashasa must have subtly shifted the conversation in that direction, so that now they were talking about what to do when the meeting took place, instead of arguing about whether it should take place at all. “You didn’t think that through.”
“I was rushed,” Bashasa admitted ruefully, with that devastating candor.
“I didn’t realize their objections to me going would be so well-considered.
But Sister Ziede and Tahren Stargard have offered to go in my stead.
It gave me pause, because I wasn’t certain how the rest of the army would accept their leadership in this.
I know they are respected, but I thought they were still seen as outsiders. ”
“Like me,” Kai pointed out. He was the most outside outsider in the army. Possibly in the whole Arik.
“True. But this…” Bashasa stirred the tokens in Kai’s hand. “This is a sign that that is changing. That they may accept them, and you, not just as officers in my cadre but as leaders.” Bashasa met his gaze, serious. “You could be a leader. A leader of Witches.”
Kai felt his brow furrow in consternation. “You want me to kill the Doyen and take their place?”
“No, Kai, as we discussed before, may I remind you, I don’t want that.
” Bashasa let out a breath. “The Doyen seems to have great control over their people. If you can convince them that they will benefit by an alliance with us, if you can find out what they want, and make with them an agreement we can trust, they could become part of your cadre, give their allegiance to you.” He nodded to himself, forming new plans even as Kai watched.
“You and Ziede will know best what to ask, how to evaluate the truth of their answers.”
“Give their allegiance to me?” Kai repeated, as skeptically as possible.
“Yes, to you.” Bashasa made an openhanded gesture. “Who else? They will not consider giving it to a mortal, will they? Not with the attitude Hawkmoth spoke of.”
Kai would rather just kill the Doyen. He was pretty certain that when he met them he wasn’t going to like them. Still groping for objections, he said, “Why me and not Ziede?”
It was the wrong question. Bashasa just got more confident. “Ziede is a Witch. As she said, it is not her way to rule other Witches.”
Kai protested, “It’s not my way either.”
“Is it not?” Bashasa tilted his head to the side, and Kai knew he had lost the argument.
“From what you have told me, the Saredi ruled themselves justly and with consent, but the captains they chose for themselves had the authority to make decisions for all. And your mother in the underearth ruled your house. And your Saredi grandmother ruled far more than that, though it seems she never took a title for herself.”
Kai tried one more time. “I was just a scout.”
Bashasa nodded patiently. “Who was charged with leading and teaching other scouts.”
Kai thumped back against the wall in exasperation. “Do you remember every word I say?”
Bashasa actually looked hurt. “Of course I do, Kai.”
Kai sighed, rubbed his face, and gave in. “I was supposed to be your bodyguard.”
Bashasa smiled at him. “Were you? That would be such a waste, when you could be so much more.”
The answer to the message came just as early twilight touched the sky with purple, when the sentries spotted a lone figure walking out of the plain toward the field where the attack had taken place.
They moved at an even, unhurried pace, and stopped just at the rippled line where the grass was still recovering from Ziede’s wind-devils.
They had come from the direction of the creek bed where Kai and Ziede had found the injured vanguarders.
The wind-devils had seen no one else in that area, or any of the other approaches to the encampment.
Ziede had pointed out that there were ways to use chimeras to conceal movement, and that the long twilight was an ideal time to attempt it, but the whole camp was already on high alert for that.
As agreed, reluctantly on some of the Prince-heirs’ parts, Kai, Ziede, and Tahren walked out to meet the dustwitch.
“Bashasa probably planned this from the beginning,” Ziede said as they walked through the paddock gate.
“What beginning?” Tahren asked, her tone only a little ironic. “The middle of last night?”
As Ziede glared at her, Kai said, “No, I saw him get the idea. He really wanted to come out here himself.”
“I know,” Ziede said. “That’s worse.”
The breeze was gentle and filled with the call and flutter of evening birds and insects.
They were past the packed earth in the paddock now, and the long grasses, even after being knocked back by the air blast, dragged at Ziede’s and Tahren’s pants and Kai’s skirt, and grasshoppers fled their approach.
Kai had put on the blue embroidered Arike-style coat Bashasa had given him, hoping it made him look a little less like an expositor.
It was also better for holding intentions.
Ziede could have flown them out here, which would have been very dramatic, but might have been taken as an attack. Kai didn’t want to ruin the whole thing at this point, since Bashasa would probably just make them start over with another message.
Ziede continued, “Bashasa is a master at talking people into things they probably shouldn’t do. If he wasn’t, we’d all be stuck in the Summer Halls, dead or wishing we were dead.”
“Are you arguing for or against what we’re doing right now?” Tahren asked, sounding honestly curious.
Ziede’s mouth twisted in a rueful grimace.
“I don’t know anymore.” She had said she was conflicted about the idea of trying to ally with the dustwitches.
Kai thought Hawkmoth’s disdain for everything that the Khalin Islands had stood for, let alone the Saredi treaty with the underearth, had shaken and hurt her more than she wanted to show anyone, or maybe even admit to herself.
Which made it odd when she had refused to participate in Kai’s attempt to mock the whole idea of getting the dustwitches to join his cadre. Ziede had said, “Why do you think the borderlander Witches answered the Saredi’s call to unite against the Hierarchs? They followed the demon blood.”
Kai had never thought of it that way, and wanted to argue. But he remembered the war captain that Kentdessa had chosen, and the signs of her demon ancestry in her eyes.
They were about forty paces away from the dustwitch when a voice called out in Imperial, “I will only speak to the demon.”
Kai recognized that voice. It was the dustwitch who had spoken to him after he had trapped Hawkmoth. Maybe that wasn’t a surprise, that she was the one to come to the meeting. She had tried to bargain with him even then.
Kai let his breath out in resignation. “Wait here.”
“Kai…” Ziede hesitated, either having too much to say, or not enough. “If one of these idiots hurts you, I will remove their liver with my bare hand and shove it down their throat.”
“We’re doing this after I cut their head off?” Tahren asked, her voice dry.
“How would that make any sense?” Ziede said witheringly.
Tahren countered, “I didn’t say I didn’t want you to do it.”