Death was the right answer, she thought as she drifted off. Of course. What is the art of the sword master? The art of death.
No wonder the sword master had not taken on a pupil before. None of them had been willing to stay until the brink of starvation, when the word “death” was the only correct answer to any question asked.
1
~ NOW ~
In faint grey light tinted pink by the rising sun, two women in two different places worked through a series of movements. Filled with leaps and crouches, the sweeping of arms and legs in great arcs and tight thrusts, sidesteps, dodges, and spins, an outside observer might have taken each woman to be engaged in a kind of unusual, exotic dance.
“What is she doing?” the observer watching from the shadows may have asked himself. “Is she imitating the mountain men, dancing to bring the rain?”
But no one watched either woman. Each had made sure of that, because their dance was a secret one.
One woman danced on floorboards so worn that years of footsteps had etched visible pathways into them. These floorboards rolled and shifted beneath her feet, for she was belowdecks in a merchant carrack sailing from Reit in the East to Paratheen in Terinto. Trade goods surrounded her, primarily in the form of sheep and cattle, and, although the men who hired her on as a cook thought she did not know, she also knew that a hidden compartment contained two barrels filled with meravin mushrooms — heavily taxed delicacies that were easily worth twice or even three times the cost of all the livestock.
Despite the unstable surface upon which she danced, her movements were fluid and graceful. The ship bucked and rocked, but she did not. Any warrior of the Seven Cities, who might have recognized her dance for what it was, would have also called her deadly.
The woman on the ship was known as Joslyn of Terinto. Only a few weeks earlier, she had been dead. But she made a bargain to a dark creature in a dark world to gain one more year of life in order to protect the woman she loved.
The second woman danced on an opulent rooftop courtyard. She had pushed the furniture to the edges of the patio to make room for her dance, and as she moved, she silently recited the names of each part, lips forming the words as she went:
Mountain. She planted her feet; she changed her breathing.
River. She dodged left, then right, then forward, then back, never letting her feet leave the ground.
Rising sun. She crossed imaginary daggers before her — because the movements were meant to be done without one’s weapons — and parried against an invisible foe, moving his weapon above and then behind her.
The woman on the rooftop was an amateur — but a well-trained amateur, if only she would stop mouthing the names of the movements like a child learning to read.
Her name was Natasia of House Dorsa — the Traitor Princess to some, the heir to Emperor Andreth and rightful Empress to others. Only a few weeks earlier, Tasia had watched the woman she loved die before her eyes. Tasia, by all rights, should be dead, too, but somehow here she was, a royal in exile, taking refuge with a strange lord in a strange land.
But this strange land was the land where her love had been born. Being here in Paratheen, Terinto’s largest city, made her feel closer to Joslyn, even as it underscored her absence.
Wind through wheat, Tasia mouthed, leaning backwards with as much flexibility as she could muster, though she knew her version of the movement was hardly even a decent imitation of her dead lover’s version.
Tiger’s fury, Joslyn thought (without thinking) on the ship sailing for Paratheen many hundreds of miles away. The ship lurched, but Joslyn completed her short charge and tigress-like swipe with her dominant hand effortlessly, even as the Adessian Sea boiled like a cauldron.
Diving falcon, Tasia mouthed on her rooftop, remembering the way Joslyn had made her watch hawks and falcons diving for their prey for nearly an hour before she had consented to teach this move. Once Tasia had finished the sharp duck, she hesitated, one knee on the ground.
“Gods be damned,” she muttered to herself, because she had forgotten the next move of the dance. The next several moves, actually.
But Joslyn had not forgotten. Several hundred miles away, in the belly of the ship, diving falcon morphed into scorpion sting, scorpion sting became light on water, and light on water transformed into heron’s wing.
On the rooftop in Paratheen, Tasia used a shirtsleeve to mop the sweat from her brow, thinking she might as well stop for the morning and break her fast. A flicker of movement caught her attention. Tasia spun. Defensively, she placed her back against the waist-high wall that marked the edge of the roof. One hand went to a dagger sheathed at her hip.
A hanging plant, its long arms and spiky fat leaves cascading nearly to the ground, swayed gently upon the line. It swayed, despite the fact that the wind was still this morning — there was no sandy breeze tripping southwards off the dunes, and no cooling salt breeze traveling north from the sea.
Tasia leaned forward, squinting. Then she smiled, taking her hand from the hilt of the dagger.
“It’s alright,” she said, aiming her comment in the direction of the swaying plant. “You can come see if you want.”
But the plant stopped swaying on its own without anyone appearing, and Tasia sighed. She slipped Halia’s leather sandals onto her feet once more and pushed the furniture back into place.
Maybe tomorrow, Tasia thought. Maybe tomorrow morning, the girl would come again, and this time she would be brave enough to show herself.
Tasia hoped she would. She’d like to have someone to talk to besides Evrart, Halia, and Lord M’Tongliss.
But after nearly being caught in her voyeurism, Tasia doubted the girl would even come to the rooftop tomorrow morning, let alone reveal herself. The differences between “slave” and “Empress” were too great, ingrained into the girl’s head since birth. They had been ingrained into Tasia’s head, too, but Joslyn had changed that.
Joslyn. Even thinking the name produced a hollow ache in her chest.
Tasia sighed and headed for the stairs. She might as well break her fast.
#
In the ship’s hold, Joslyn also wiped sweat from her brow. She put her shabby leather armor on, strapped her sword to her back, checked that her daggers were all hidden where they ought to be, and headed up the stairs towards the faint morning sun.
The deck wasn’t as empty as she’d expected. The sailors’ work was never done, that was true, but at this early hour, she’d expected to see no more than a skeleton crew on the deck — the remnants of the night crew as they traded places with their morning replacements.
Instead, crewmen ran in every direction, the Captain’s voice echoed across the main deck, and the first mate was handing something out. Three of the sailors stood on the starboard side near the place where Joslyn had emerged from belowdecks. They each stood with a hand shading their eyes, staring transfixed at the open sea. Joslyn followed their gaze and spotted a black smudge on the horizon.
“What’s happening?” she asked the closest sailor.
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Pirates is what’s happening,” he grumbled. “Cap’n should’ve known this would happen. Hardly any Imperial ships in these waters anymore, what with the war.”
The sailor beside him, who didn’t look as if he could be any older than fifteen summers, let out a plaintive moan. “Mother Moon spare us all,” he said. “We’re goin’ t’die.”