“Why shout in words nobody remembers?” the transgressor girl asked in Empire vernacular—once a minor trading language and these days filling everyone’s mouth.
“I remember,” he replied in Empire talk, glad to focus on her. “We’re not all dead to this world.” The transgressor girl twisted around to face him. Haints ventured closer. He almost made out a round familiar face. The crack in his heart throbbed. “So much I cannot say or see unless I speak Anawanama.”
“Ancestor tongues conjure other worlds.” The girl followed his gaze. “What?”
His eldest daughter, Tessa, wavered in front of him, a shaft of evening mist with blue-violet eyes like Samina. Tessa was wide-hipped and forthright like her mother and arrogant like Djola. She chastised him for leaving the way open to scoundrels and fools. Quint, a smoldering ball of ash, echoed his sister.
“No time to close the wise-woman passageway,” Djola told the haints in Anawanama. Opening corridors was easy, no danger of getting caught in a collapsing fold; closing one could take a month. “The enemy snapped at our heels.” Tessa and Quint hissed at his excuses. Djola had never seen his dead children so clearly. As he marched from the coast to Holy City, they’d come as blurs, torment, as wishful thinking. He’d dispelled them easily. In the shadows of Mount Eidhou, on ground they’d walked and near rivers they’d tasted in life, his children claimed the power of ancestors to challenge him. Where was Bal? They should all be together, unless Bal was ashamed of her father, unless Bal refused to haunt a monster. “I’m not a common murderer raining down terror on the Arkhysian Empire.” Speaking this lie in Anawanama burned his mouth. What was he then? “Tell your sister.”
Tessa’s and Quint’s hissing replies got snatched by the wind. Djola only heard last breath. Cathedral saplings wove these words into their red-leaf song. The transgressor girl added a soothing harmony. She patted his thigh and startled him.
“Not yet the hour for my last breath,” he said. “Basawili.” One word in Anawanama yet so much to do. “In Arkhys City, I must lay disaster at Azizi’s feet and force Council to give up the Dream Gate illusion, before it’s too late to save anything. Years they’ve wasted.” Haints whistled from behind rocks and bushes. “Stop! I promised your mother. She still loves the world. I do what she asks.” Time enough for his death after that. “Where is your sister, where is Bal? She must honor her father.”
His haint-children went silent and dissolved into cold shadows, leaving a reproach rustling through the leaves. The warhorse pricked up her ears and swiveled them.
The transgressor girl narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“Azizi banished me. Masters killed my half-brother, and…” Djola licked dry lips. “Since my wife and children were … Since they died, I’m not always in my right mind.”
“I knew a Sprite named Bal.” Love and longing colored these words. The transgressor girl leaned back against him. She smelled of horse dung, cinnamony tree oil, and rot. He should tend her wounds when they made camp.
“Where my people are from,” he said evenly, “Bal is the name for a second child, born under a mango moon, a gift of fire and wind.”
“Bal went off to soldier, when lapsed Elders and northlanders raided our enclave.”
“Northern tribes raided Green Elders?”
“To kill vesons or convert them, and Bal was fearless, resisting—”
“No glory or love for soldiers these days, only destruction and death.”
“How do you know?” The girl let anger flare. “Bal is a shadow warrior, determined to survive. She loves life. No matter her fate, that is glorious.”
“I suppose.”
“What happened to your Bal?” the girl demanded.
“I don’t wish to speak of her.” Hope was a pointless distraction. He squinted down the road. Abandoned cathedral stumps rotted in the gravel. The lush young grove was farther up than he thought.
The girl stroked the horse. “How many more leagues?”
The road looked endless. “This steep incline and whispering shades saved those trees above from elephant brigades.”
“Just say you don’t know.” Her boldness was strange comfort. “Sorry…”
“Keep speaking your mind. It’s refreshing, like cathedral tree song.”
The warhorse sidestepped pink fungus glowing in twilight and got tangled in strangle vines creeping around rocks. The barbs were sharp enough to tear up her legs. The warhorse halted, snorting steam. Sweat foamed on twitching flanks. She was too hot even in icy drizzle.
Djola stroked silky ears. “Standing still on the road, I feel like a target too, but nobody ambushes us now. Just ornery weeds seizing an opportunity.” He drew the thin blade with a diamond tip from his boot and hacked at thorny stalks and creepers. “We need to reach the highest ground no matter how far. The other horses followed our scent through the wise-woman corridor. They track us still.”
“Kurakao!” The transgressor girl perked up.
“You give praises for an ambush?”
“Reunion. My friends galloped off on Fannie’s friends. Those horses would follow her into fire—”
“Fannie?” A cloud burst overhead and fist-sized hail battered them. Freed from barbed vines, the warhorse charged up the almost vertical road as if she hadn’t already carried them too many leagues. “Good girl,” he said as the road wound through a thicket of bushes and boulders and levelled off. “The weather is wrong in the valley, but here—”
Supple young trees swayed in the storm. Seedpods waved a welcome. The warhorse slowed to a walk under whispering branches. An umbrella canopy of elephant leaves, nut vines, and weaver-ant nests kept the rain and hail out. The air was oily and warm. The warhorse snorted relief but wouldn’t go much farther. Crows circled above them and cackled joy. He cackled back.
“Your friends?” the girl asked as the crows disappeared behind leaves. “Not my favorite birds.”
He chuckled, his chin grazing her head. “They always know something we don’t.”
“Crows make me think of death.”
“We all live by death,” he sang, “yet we hold hope for the lives to come.”
“You’re not making fun, are you? Of The Songs, I mean.”
“What you say you become.” Without thinking, he stroked her head.
“You sound like a Green Elder.”
“I was never much more than a Garden Sprite like you.” He scanned for a campsite.
“Do you believe we all cast a spell with our words?” She was earnest, like Tessa.
“I did once. I believed all The Songs, all the old ways.” He closed his eyes. “Today forgotten Elder words return to me.” He shivered at visions of his youth with Yari then opened his eyes. “Conjure is a long game. Maybe if I chant the verses, I’ll believe again.”
“What twisted you into a monster?” The girl bit her bottom lip.
“Sometimes monster is the only choice,” he whispered.
She whispered also. “Many times in the huts, I came to a life-and-death crossroads and chose monster too.”