Paratheen wasn’t fascinating just because it was a large and crowded city; traveling with Master, Mistress, and Tasmyn, Joslyn was already well-traveled for a child of only seven summers and she had seen plenty of bustling cities. Paratheen fascinated Joslyn because it was unlike any of the other cities in the Empire, like one of the magical djinn cities from the tales Mistress sometimes told at night, a city conjured from nothing in the middle of the desert.
The thought of Paratheen as a city of the djinn — those shadowy servants of the Gods whose mood and actions could flip from benevolent to malevolent at the slightest provocation — made Joslyn shiver, and she gripped Tasmyn’s hand with more force.
“Ow, Joz,” Tasmyn complained. “Not so hard.”
“Sorry,” Joslyn mumbled.
Both girls moved sideways to avoid a collision with a tall, severe looking man with a black beard and high red turban. He held a rope that connected him to a small herd of at least a half-dozen bleating apa-apa calves. They followed him dutifully, as a child follows a parent… or as slave girls followed their master’s cart. But the fate of the young apa-apas, Joslyn feared, was far darker than hers and Tasmyn’s. The meat of young apa-apa was considered far more desirable than old apa-apa.
Joslyn tore her eyes away from the unfortunate creatures, deciding it was preferable to study the city’s strange buildings than its stranger inhabitants, even though looking up at the tall buildings lining either side of the narrow streets made her feel somewhat dizzy and claustrophobic.
Not all the buildings were topped with a dome, she noticed. Some of them were rectangles reaching up in perilous, asymmetric fingers towards the sky, which only made Joslyn feel nervous that they might topple down into the street at any moment. To Joslyn, it looked as if a giant had made a game of stacking boxes, trying to see how high he could make his uneven stacks before they toppled.
Scarcely a single foot of the winding dirt streets went unoccupied. Merchants barked out facts about their wares at passerbys; men in turbans of various colors argued loudly on street corners; tired apa-apa herdsmen in dusty sandals swatted their beasts forward with switches; women in long, brightly colored sarongs floated by gracefully with baskets of fruits and vegetables balanced on their heads; and ragged, grimy children even younger than Joslyn scampered past all the others, weaving in and out of the crowd, between legs, beneath wagons, behind fruit stands, laughing maniacally even as adults shouted at them.
Joslyn watched one of the children disappear into the crowd, a pilfered handful of grapes in one of his hands. For a moment, she imagined what it must be like to be a child here, to feel as much at home running barefoot through the dusty streets between the honeycombed, giant-stacked buildings as Joslyn felt at home amongst the wide open dunes of the high desert, traveling the Emperor’s Road.
She shook her head to herself, as if answering a question posed. No, she would never belong in a place like Paratheen. At least Father had sold her and Tasmyn to a tinker family. With their donkeys and their jangling, awkward, overstuffed covered carts, the tinkers certainly didn’t belong in the desert the way the tribesmen did, but at least they didn’t belong to places like Paratheen, either. Joslyn knew by the look on Master’s face that he didn’t want to stay in this loud, smelly, crowded, surreal place any longer than he had to. At sundown, once his goods had been sold and his trading for the day was finished, the donkeys would pull the cart outside the city gates and the tinkers would set up their bliva in an open space beneath the stars, as they always did.
Still innocent at the age of seven, Joslyn had no way of knowing that one day she would be the good to be traded by the tinker, and she would end up spending two and a half brutal years in Paratheen, years during which the crowded streets would become her refuge and the street children her only companions.
~ NOW ~
Joslyn stood at the crest of a hill. Paratheen’s harbor spread out below and behind her, sun glinting off the placid azure waters of the Adessian Sea. The city of Paratheen itself spread out in a semicircle around the harbor, perching on a series of hills and cliffs overlooking the sea.
Despite the blazing sun, the lack of shade, and the way her leather armor trapped the heat and sweat close to her skin, Joslyn shivered in the same way she had as a child on her first visit here, when she was half-convinced that the city had been crafted by the djinn.
She hadn’t been back to Paratheen since she ran away from her second master somewhere between the ages of thirteen or fourteen. She’d never thought she would be here again, standing on the hill above the harbor.
He’s not here anymore, she reminded herself. He can’t hurt you again.
She sighed, irritated at herself for her hesitancy. She was a grown woman, an accomplished warrior. How could he hold so much power over her even now, in death?
Her second master had been the first man Joslyn had ever killed.
At the time, she’d assumed he would be the last. But Father Mezzu, the god of the blue sky who gazed down on all the world’s creatures and wrote their fates at birth, had a different destiny in mind for her.
Joslyn adjusted the sword strapped to her back and began to walk.
Her possessions still consisted only of the shabby leather armor on her back (she’d traded her conspicuous palace blacks long ago in Reit), her sword, daggers, and boots, but at least she had a coin purse again. The weight of the eight Imperial silver pennies the Captain had given to her was a comforting presence beneath her tunic. He hadn’t intended to pay her at all, but she had saved his crew (most of them, anyway), ship, and cargo, and gained two prisoners for him. He would earn back those silver pennies and then some when he handed the prisoners over to the magistrates. In reality, he probably should have given her a full gold regal for the services she’d rendered. But Joslyn couldn’t quibble. Eight silver pennies were more than she had hoped for, anyway.
Unlike the villages she’d traveled through in the East on her way to the port city of Reit, where the combination of her Terintan features and her soldier’s dress made wary visitors stop and stare, she attracted almost no attention walking through the streets of Paratheen. Long a crossroads for goods flowing east and west through the Empire, not to mention a favorite watering hole for the Adessian traders, smugglers, and pirates from the south, along with the only place within traveling distance where the high desert nomads could reliably find buyers for their apa-apa wool, milk, and meat, Paratheen was filled with far too many different kinds of people for anyone to take much notice of Joslyn, which was how she liked it.
It would be freeing, almost, if not for the fact that the task ahead of her was so daunting.
The wick of a candle clock burned continuously inside her head. Seven weeks had passed already since she woke in a burned-out hut at the foot of the Sunrise Mountains. Seven weeks in which she had heard no news of Tasia. Seven weeks that brought her closer to the end of the single year she had borrowed from the undatai.
Joslyn had traveled as far west as fast as she could because she knew that they would have taken the Princess that way once they captured her. She’d hoped to find a ship to Port Lorsin, but Paratheen had been the closest she could come.
Part of her wanted to rush to Port Lorsin as swiftly as possible, to find another ship or a caravan traveling that way and attach herself to them, but a more rational part of her mind, the part, perhaps, that represented the wisdom of her ku-sai, reminded her that she didn’t yet know if the Princess even lived.