I put a sash around my waist and went down to the court once again. I asked if they knew someone else. A better physicker, someone who knew wasting illnesses and would not shy away from uneasy visions of illness.
A special physicker. The one who comes from the palace.
“I have coin,” I said, and bribed them even more lavishly this time, weaving my deepnames into the silver to sweeten the offering.
Back in the room, I paced among stifling, thickwoven carpets. Uiziya was not dead. She wasn’t withered dry, or gone into some rod. She had woken briefly before, and would wake again. She had to.
The second physicker came. A shorter one, bald and more lavishly dressed, his eyelids painted in green. He brought potions and ointments, and an odd, swinging speculum on a long chain, and he took his time examining Uiziya’s leg. But I saw his eye wander and rest upon the carpet of sand, rolled and tucked into a corner.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
The physicker spoke evasively. “There’s many a treasure in the Collector’s Rainbow-Tiered Court. Treasures smelted and strung, treasures hammered and burnished, treasures wrought and treasures woven. But among the treasures at the palace, none are greater than the treasures hidden.”
“It’s just an old rug. My sister used to be a weaver in her youth.” I shrugged, pretending indifference I almost but didn’t quite feel. “But if you heal her, if she wakes up and speaks, then I have coin and will pay you lavishly.”
The physicker nodded, his gaze sliding off mine. “I can give her this for easy sleep.” He showed me a deep green vial. “In the morning I’ll come again. I’ll prepare special potions to help her regain both con- sciousness and vitality. Does this seem amenable to you?”
“Will she walk again, physicker?”
“Your sister has sustained a grave wound,” the physicker said. “How did she come by it?”
“Her aunt.”
He frowned. “She might relearn to walk. And the goddess Bird might come to her with new flesh in her beak, as a gift. But you should not hope for it.”
“You are harsh,” I said. “Unnecessarily. This isn’t a jesting matter”
“I do not deal in false promises.”
It made me trust him, somehow, that he told me to hope for her life, not her wholeness. “You will come at dawn?”
“Yes,” he said. “After the last move of the dawnsong is sung from the roofs of the Khana quarter.”
“Then I’ll wait for you.”
“Yes,” said the physicker. “Do.”
Night had fallen in the springflower city of Iyar. I paced in the room, denying my body its pain. Uiziya slept quieter now, her breath more even and eased after taking the physicker’s potion. I should sleep, too, but I couldn’t. I had to go somewhere. Do something.
Do a particular thing, and the need for it gripped me like my hands had once gripped Bashri-nai-Leylit’s moving chair, after she could no longer steer it with her deepnames. The knuckles of my hands flexed and tightened in memory. I had made the moving chair for her. And now I wanted to make another.
Bashri-nai-Leylit. My lover. My leader. My best friend. My captor. She held such power over me. I let her because I loved her. Why didn’t you leave? my Surun’ friends asked me. You could have just left. You and all these women who tired of your way of life Yes, I could, and they could. Some women left for trading journeys and never returned, leaving their children behind to be brought up by grandmothers. But most did return. Our people’s women were held together by strong webs of love and kinship. Of oreg-mates, lovers. Of sisters and friends. Of grandmothers and their lovers. Of children and their lovers. Those who loved you held you in shape, even if this shape was all wrong.
My lover, my Bashri-nai-Leylit, she did not want me to be a man. If I became a man, then she could not love me, she said. And I loved her. Benesret had woven a cloth of winds for me, a promise that I could come back and transform my body at any time, but Bashri had begged me to stay by her side. I gave her the cloth of winds in the end. For safekeeping. Give it to me when you’re ready, I said, but she never did.
Still, I had made the moving chair for her when she ailed, and steered it for her after she no longer could move. She was dead now, but my hands still remembered the feeling of the cool white metal I gripped as I walked behind her.
Uiziya was not Bashri. She wasn’t my lover. But I was responsible for this wound. If I hadn’t asked Uiziya to come with me, she wouldn’t have been injured. And I thought—I thought she betrayed me, when she never did.
I got up at least, and called on my three powerful deepnames. Uiziya slept soundly. I warded the door with my magic, then took what I needed and stepped out. There was time yet, before the dawn.
The streets of Iyar were even more fragrant at night, adorned with primrose blooming on balconies and in the tiny gardens; I saw the small purple flowers they called gugrai opening on the parasite vines that cloaked the walls. I wanted to put on a veil, but couldn’t find it.
I edged closer and closer to the Khana quarter, my hands gripping at air.
It felt strange to be back. The great double doors of the quarter were open as always at this time of night. It was shameful for Iyari to trade with the Khana people in daylight, so they sneaked in under the piercing regard of the stars. I walked under the outer gray walls, my hands surreptitiously touching the boulders of the quarter, shaped and chiseled before my great-great-great-grandmothers’ time. If I squinted hard, I could sense old magic buried in the stone, deepnames planted here centuries ago.
Two Raw Guards flanked the open gate. These were automata created by Khana men for the protection of our quarter from the aggression of outsiders. The Raw Guards were gigantic, fashioned of white enameled metal, unmoving except for their emerald and lacquer eyes, which followed each guest as they entered the gates. Occasionally a Raw Guard’s white surface would ripple with the dark wriggles of holy Birdseed writ, and then the automaton would bend and push a person away, gently unless they resisted.
I leaned on a nearby wall and watched the Raw Guards from the shadows for a while. The Khana men made these Guards, made them beyond the white walls of the inner quarter. The Khana scholars. When I was young, I dreamed of making such automata, pinnacles of craftsmanship and faith, but all I had was a secret workshop underground where women labored, making small objects too mundane and unimportant for the labor of men. My greatest work there had been a moving chair for Bashri-nai-Leylit, a work of nothing much in comparison to the Raw Guards.
It was nothing much, but for decades, this work defined me. The underground artifice, and wearing men’s clothes, and the companionship of my mentor and my friends who were into such ways, and the scandalous gossip of others.
I missed the work.
I did not miss the others judging me. How they’d say, It’s just the old . . . I could not even bear to pronounce my old name in my head. Just the old—Just Bashri-nai-Leylit’s old lover running around the quarter in men’s clothing! I was not ready for that regard, not then, not again, now that my truth has been made manifest in my body. I wished I had grown out my beard like the men of my people, not shaved it in Surun’ style, but it was too late to undo that.
Finally, I pushed myself off the wall, trying not to dwell too much on my fear. I wore Surun’ clothes—would that be enough to conceal me? They knew me. At least, they thought they did. My searching hands grasped a thin piece of fabric in the folds of my garment. The veil had been with me all along.