To begin with it was actually worse than this. She wasn’t the only Oshaaru or the only girl, but she was the youngest and smallest, and it was irresistible to the Blue Boars to treat her as a kind of mascot. But they soon learned that she was also the fastest and least merciful, and that she had been training for longer than most. Once she tripped the enormous Corporal Valmine on his face during training, they started to take her more seriously.
The Blue Boars all wore their hair long on one side, and shaven on the other. After a few months they took Csorwe to the company barber to get hers done to match.
She got home that evening to find Sethennai absorbed in one of his ciphered letters. Only when she brought him a glass of wine did he look up at her and notice the change.
“Joining up with the Boars permanently?” he said, after a second. There was an odd expression on his face, veiled as usual by ironic amusement. Csorwe stared back at him, and realised with horror that he might be upset with her—that it might be possible for something she did to wound him.
“No!” she said. “No—they were all getting theirs done—didn’t think you’d mind—”
“Why on earth should I mind?” he said, shifting effortlessly into cheerful bemusement. Csorwe couldn’t tell whether she was imagining a bitter undercurrent. Surely he didn’t think she might leave him to become a mercenary?
Occasionally, yes, she thought it was a shame they couldn’t just stay forever in Grey Hook. It was a shame she couldn’t spend the rest of her life exploring the rooftops and making new omelettes and memorising verb forms with Parza.
Still, she knew they were leaving sooner or later, and she was used to living with a deadline on the horizon. She liked Valmine and the others, but it was only thanks to Sethennai that she had these years at all.
“The Boars are a very respectable company,” he added. “And I suppose if you prefer to run with them—”
“I don’t,” she said, with vehemence, almost angry that he could think her so ungrateful. “I’m not joining up with them. They treat me like a baby anyway.”
This was true, Csorwe reminded herself, recalling now with shame that she had let Valmine carry her around on his shoulders after they’d got their haircuts.
“Well, if the soldiering life calls to you, far be it from me to stop you, although I must warn you it’s quite likely you’ll lose a limb,” he said. “But you do know we aren’t going to be here forever.”
“I know,” she said. There was no future for them in Grey Hook, and it was no good getting settled here. “Tlaanthothe.”
He smiled at last. It was an immediate relief. The tension went out of Csorwe’s body like tea leaves uncurling in water.
Beyond the Gate of Grey Hook, far away across the Maze, Sethennai’s city still waited for him—and for her. This was the purpose for which she had been chosen and trained. One day, maybe soon, they were going home to defeat Olthaaros Charossa.
3
The Curse-Ward
A LETTER ARRIVED ONE day when Sethennai was travelling with the Boars, and Csorwe was suffering once again from the pluperfect subjunctive.
“Must you be so slow?” snapped Parza. “You cannot travel to Qarsazh and talk like this, unless you want them to think you are a barbarian and laugh in your face. Again. We covered this last week. If-only-I-had-travelled-to-the-town,” he chanted, tapping the cover of his lexicon in time with the words. The point of his beard bobbed up and down like a bird pecking at a worm.
“If only you had stayed at home,” she muttered, baring her tusks at him behind his back. Her adult tusks had come in over the last year. Nearly full grown, they still ached at the roots sometimes, and Parza’s lessons seemed to make them worse. She ignored Parza’s hiss of displeasure as one of the maids from the wineshop knocked at the door with the post.
The letter was bulkier than usual, a heavy packet of waxed paper, tied with several loops of string and sealed with a lump of unstamped beeswax. The name Belthandros Sethennai was neatly inscribed on the front.
Csorwe spent as long as she could tipping and thanking the maid. Parza was supposed to leave in a quarter of an hour and she was prepared to scrape every minute of freedom that she could.
“Stop wasting time,” said Parza, from the sitting room. “I will not leave until you can recite it perfectly. I have all day.”
“Wonder why they kicked you out of Qarsazh,” said Csorwe under her breath, and stalked back into the room with the letter in her hands. “I have to deal with this,” she said. “Might be important.”
This wasn’t exactly a lie. She often helped Sethennai with his correspondence. It was good practice in languages for her. If this one was ciphered then she couldn’t actually read it, but opening the packet and filing the contents in Sethennai’s cabinet might save her from Parza’s example sentences for another thirty seconds.
Parza huffed and shuffled his papers, but he wasn’t about to interfere in Sethennai’s business. Csorwe sat down at the desk with the packet and began snipping through the strings.
As she cut the final strand, she realised what she had missed. Sethennai’s letters were always addressed to Pelthari. Nobody here ought to know his real name.
“Oh, shit,” she said.
“Such language,” said Parza, clicking his tongue. “But I suppose if Dr. Pelthari will encourage you to associate with street persons—”
Csorwe barely heard him. Her pulse began to race, beating out a rhythm of dread against her breastbone. She shoved the packet hastily away as the beeswax seal began to peel of its own accord, flaking off in shards and turning to dust.
Behind the wax seal, there was a sigil worked on the paper in some red-brown pigment, a spiral of interlocking curves that squirmed on the page. Looking at it was like biting into a peach and finding several worms wriggling inside.
“What are you—” said Parza, coming up behind her. “Sorcery,” he said, in a low harsh voice she had never heard from him before. “Mother of Cities, this is a house of corruption—”
“It came in the post, Parza,” she said. She shoved back the chair and stood up, not taking her eyes off the packet. She controlled her breathing as she had been taught, making a physical effort to damp down the panic that rose in her. Was the packet going to explode? She knew so little about magic—what should she do?
Parza was praying in Qarsazhi, stumbling over the couch toward the door. She ignored him.
The letter was unwrapping itself. The leaves of paper unfolded with a dry, leathery sound, like scales on sand. There was a strong smell: hot metal, scorched hair, and—something else, something Csorwe hadn’t encountered for years. A whisper of incense, a shadow of lotus.
“By the gods—” said Parza, now flat against the front door of the apartment and wrestling with the handle. “Run, you blind fool, don’t just stare at it—”
Csorwe did not want to see what was inside the packet. But how could she explain herself to Sethennai if she let the apartment burn or explode or whatever was about to happen?
With a calm that startled her, she returned to the table where they’d been studying, and sized up Parza’s lexicon: a slab of leather and parchment as thick and heavy as a paving stone.