“I don’t need pretty hands,” Raia said.
“What do you need?” Tamra asked.
“Teach me how to do that.” Raia nodded at the cage, where the kehok lurked, glaring at them with his golden eyes, waiting for them to show weakness. “You controlled him. How did you do it?”
“Tell me the truth about why you’re running, and I’ll give you your first lesson.”
Raia was silent, and for a moment, Tamra thought she wasn’t going to answer. But then the girl spoke in a voice so soft it was nearly swallowed up by the waves of the river. “I was told I was to be an augur, that I’d been identified by my aura as one who was worthy enough to be blessed with the power of inner sight. I didn’t choose it. They chose me. That’s how it always is, I guess. They said I was going to do wonderful things, that it was my destiny, because of the purity of my soul from my prior life. My parents were so proud.”
“I’m sure they were.” Tamra kept her voice neutral, but inside she began to calculate how quickly she could pay Raia’s ferry fare to send her as far from Shalla as possible. If Raia had run from the augurs . . . I can’t harbor a fugitive from the augurs while my daughter is in training!
At best, Tamra could give her a head start. There was a little leftover gold from Lady Evara—not much, but a few tokens could buy Raia a bit of distance.
She’d never heard of an augur trainee running from their duty before. It wasn’t supposed to be part of their makeup. But Raia was right that trainees had no choice, and it wasn’t an easy life. If Shalla had ever wanted to run, Tamra would have helped her, never mind the cost to her soul. She’d do the same for Raia. Just . . . she can’t stay here.
“As it turns out, I wasn’t special enough. After four years, I was still failing to master the basic skills. So they cut me loose. Returned me to my parents as unteachable. Said they’d expected me to fulfill the potential they’d read in me, but unfortunately, I’d failed to become the kind of student I was supposed to be.”
Tamra breathed again.
The augurs weren’t the ones after her.
“So why run away?”
“Because my parents want their money back. All the gold they spent for my tuition since I was chosen. They want me to repay them. Since I have no money of my own—I was a student, so how could I have any?—they want to recoup their loss by marrying me to a man who’ll pay for the privilege.” She spat out the words as if they tasted rank.
Tamra had heard of such things happening—children treated as commodities, essentially sold into marriage, trading their future for their family’s comfort—but she hadn’t met anyone who’d experienced it. Hearing Raia’s story made her wish that Raia’s parents were here so she could unleash her kehok on them. Not to hurt them, of course, since that was strictly illegal, as well as immoral. But, oh, I could scare them!
“I take it this isn’t a man you want to marry.” She tried to keep the rage out of her voice—Raia seemed to be having a hard enough time telling her story as it was. She hadn’t once made eye contact with Tamra. All her attention was on the shimmering river. An egret skimmed low over the ripples, its white feathers bright against the blue.
“He’s not a man anyone should marry,” Raia said. “Rumors say he beat his last wife to death. Of course my parents say not to believe rumors. He wasn’t read by any augur after her death—her family had no money to pay for one, and there wasn’t enough evidence to force one. So he’s innocent, in their eyes. And wealthy.”
“For the record, your parents are selfish and evil and have placed themselves on the path to be reborn as kehoks. Or at least dung beetles.”
So much for not showing her rage.
Raia flashed her a bit of a smile. It faded quickly. “I told them I’d rather die than marry him. But the truth is that I’d rather live and not marry him. So that’s why I’m with you. If I can earn enough money through the races, then I can repay my parents every cent they paid the augurs. They’ll cancel the engagement. And I’ll be free.”
“Good,” Tamra said fiercely.
At last Raia met her eyes. “What part of that is ‘good’?”
“It means you have enough fire to face the sands,” Tamra said. “It means I can teach you to win. You asked me how I controlled the black lion. It’s as simple as this: I wanted it more than he wanted it.” She watched Raia’s face to see if she understood that. Everyone acted as if they got it, but only a few understood it in a bone-deep way—only the ones who truly wanted to seize control of their lives. “Any idiot can command a kehok, if they can learn to focus their thoughts. The trick is that you need to be fully in the moment. You can’t think about the past, the future, what you ate for breakfast this morning, whether you’ll eat breakfast tomorrow. . . . Most people can’t do that, especially not for any extended length of time. Minds are unruly things, and most can’t control theirs—and if you can’t control yourself, you can’t control a kehok. That’s why you don’t see kehoks used for labor. Or war.”
Many had tried. It rarely went well.
You needed a fire inside you, the kind that kept you passionately invested in the here and now, the kind that made you want to shape what was happening rather than letting it shape you. Tamra had seen a glimpse of that fire inside Raia back at Gea Market. The key would be if Raia could call on that determination even when she wasn’t in desperate need. “You’ll help me unload the kehok,” Tamra decided.
“But I can’t lift—”
“There’s a winch to lift the cage from the boat to the dock. Then we’ll walk him from the dock to the stables. Or more accurately, you will.”
Raia stared at her.
Looking at her expression, Tamra laughed.
“Good, you’re joking.” Raia sagged in relief. “I thought you meant you were going to unlock the cage and let him out.”
“Oh, that is exactly what I meant. It’s just your expression was hilarious.”
Just before sunset, the ferry docked at the training grounds. Tamra helped the ferryman use the winch to swing the cage with the black lion from the boat to the dock, and then she watched as he booked it back into the middle of the river as fast as he could pole.
From the dock, she waved cheerfully at the remaining passengers. None of them were getting off until Tamra, Raia, and the kehok were as far away as possible.
They didn’t wave back.
“Exactly how do we do this?” Raia asked.
“Carefully.”
Tamra was confident she could train this kehok to be a racer and equally confident that she could transform a determined girl like Raia into a competent rider. But she didn’t expect to accomplish either before nightfall. “Also, we’ll use chains.”
Crossing to a box, she opened it and hauled out one of the special kehok nets, made out of iron chains, that all racers wore. Tamra felt a throbbing in her leg and an ache in her back—the net weighed more than she did—as she hooked it up to a set of pulleys and raised it above the entrance to the cage.
It was a maneuver she’d done dozens of times. Each time got a little harder. Someday she wouldn’t be able to do it at all. She refused to think about that day.