Above all else, he was brief. In only a few weeks, he would return to Kithamar and be gone from her life. Nothing permanent was possible with him. Any dalliance between them would turn with the season and be gone. The stakes had seemed low.
His brother-by-law, Drau Chaalat, joined them some nights. He was, Saffa learned, the priest of the Daris Brotherhood. She recognized that it was a position of status. She didn’t know its mysteries, and he didn’t offer to tell her. He performed a few little cantrips after their dinner, no more than a fortune-teller on the street might offer, and she’d pretended to be impressed. And then he would leave them alone together.
Those nights had been sweet and left her with a sense of the expansiveness of life and of her own body. It made all that came after a deeper betrayal.
Ausai left, as she’d known he would, with fondness and respect and no empty promises. Drau Chaalat, on the other hand, had stayed on some unspecified work of the brotherhood. She hadn’t suspected that his errand was her.
He arrived at her home unexpected, but not unannounced. He had his servants with him. His white hair and beard weren’t the signs of age. He was simply pale as bones. She poured him wine and water and he made a gift of meat tarts bought that morning in the day market. They’d talked about… something. She didn’t remember what. And then, calmly, he’d explained that so long as the brotherhood had no need of it, the child was hers to love and raise as she wished. But that if the time came when Ausai had need, it was her duty to surrender it. The sacrifice might not be required. Probably wouldn’t. But if, then without fail.
She hadn’t understood at first, and then when she did, she still didn’t believe. It was another month before she was certain that she was pregnant. Chaalat gave her gold and silver, treated her with the respect due to a prince’s chosen lover, and then climbed on a ship headed for the delta. She had told herself that it was only the politics of succession and bloodlines that woke her in the dark hours before dawn. She felt Timu kick for the first time when she was lying in her bed listening to the thunder of a distant storm, and it felt like an omen. She couldn’t say later what made her decide to study the Daris Brotherhood except that it was Ausai’s chosen mystery and her memories of Drau Chaalat disturbed her.
Timu was born healthy. Everyone knew who his father was, and no one cast blame on Saffa for bearing a child to a foreign prince. The world was woven of such things. This was only one curiosity among many. Her work continued at the spirit house, though she found it was harder now to release the world. Her son was in it. She might meditate for hours on her own eventual dissolution and death and even find some peace in the idea. Picture the same thing for her boy, and she was made from animal panic, and the best she could do was observe that terror and try to accept the fact that she was a woman who feared for her son.
As Timu grew, Saffa learned of the Daris Brotherhood and of Kithamar. The deep mysteries of the house were kept close, but there were those who whispered of a darkness there. Ancestor worship was a common enough thing. The Richian mysteries, the creed of Amnen Toh, even the respect afforded to the council of elders had an aspect of owing homage to those who came before.
The Daris Brotherhood was something else.
She found old tales with uncertain sources, some little more than ancient gossip. They told of child sacrifices and lineages of more than blood. Tales of a knife that was also a needle, capable of stitching an unclean spirit to a child’s flesh. The eerie promise of the death of Death. She came to believe that the diplomatic mission Ausai had led to the Bronze Coast had been an excuse. That what he’d been seeking was a secret place for his blood to live away from the intrigues of his cold, dark home. If the brotherhood needed Timu, who played in the surf with the other children of Dulai, it would be for a rite. And not one from which he would return.
Saffa, who had dedicated herself to a philosophy of release, found herself unwilling to consider letting her son go. Instead, she hoped that the issue would never arise. The source of her comfort was Drau Chaalat saying Probably wouldn’t. And so she comforted herself until the day that probably wouldn’t became would.
The message had come from Ausai himself, not long after the word of his illness had reached them. All it had said was I have need of our child. Send him. She put the paper into her fire. She’d told herself that the Bronze Coast was her home and her place of power. The cold fingers of Kithamar wouldn’t reach here, and if they did, they wouldn’t be strong enough to pull Timu back.
In her heart, she knew she was trying to shout down a storm.
Timu vanished without another letter coming or any further warning. One day, he was present with his friends, running down the paths between the trees, and then no one knew where he was. Everyone thought he’d gone the other way. Tragedy struck many people, and by many means. He might have swum into the sea and been caught by a riptide, or gone walking and fallen into some secret and terrible cave, or eaten some spoiled fruit that drove him mad. There were a thousand ways to lose a son. Saffa didn’t doubt for a heartbeat what had happened to hers.
She went to her family and to her friends. She begged the high priest at the spirit house and the general priest of the six. She sold everything she had and borrowed against what she might gain later. Divesting herself of everything was easy. She’d trained for it her whole life. She bought a traveller’s cloak, a knife that she carried in her sleeve, a leather hat that she’d lost the same day she got it, passage on a trading ship, and all the coins of Kithamar she could find. It was a fortune, if a small one. It was her life, translated into a handful of gold. It was her hope of seeing her son’s living face again.
Fuck, Sammish said. That’s where Darro’s coins came from. That’s what he stole.
Thieves steal, the wild man said. Start being angry at that, you’ll end up angry at the wind for blowing.
She went to the delta and took working passage with a flatboat, taking a turn with the team of oxen that hauled them against the current. She talked to anyone who would talk, and she listened to the rest. She learned that Drau Chaalat was years dead, and his daughter presiding over the brotherhood’s house in Kithamar. She learned that Ausai was dying, and heard rumors that the prince had been searching for a missing knife. She also heard that Bronze Coast slavers had been seen on the river, heading north.
She used the petty magics she’d learned in the spirit house to hurry her travel, to find signs of where her son was or had been, to ask the powers behind the world for guidance and hope. Or if not hope, then freedom from it. She slept little.
Kithamar had been everything she’d been told, and less. Cold and close. Beautiful in its way, and forbidding. As a foreigner, she’d met distrust and avarice. For weeks, she’d hunted the chill streets, buying information about the knife or her boy or the fate of her once-lover Prince Ausai, dying in his palace that overlooked the city. She’d found the too-clever young man, and told herself that because he was Inlisc and hated by the powers of the city, he might be a true ally to her.
And then Prince Ausai died, and the night between princes came, and she’d suffered a terrible dream. Black wings and the scent of fire. It had been a premonition of death, and indeed, days later, the Inlisc man had come in the costume of the guard and tried to kill her. Betrayed and injured, she’d gone to an herbalist in the Smoke. The woman had taken her pulse, touched a wand of woven sage to her brow, and told her to get the fuck out. That the help she needed was on the Silt or it was nowhere.