The guards closed the doors behind Sarmin as he entered the women’s wing. Soot coated the walls that had once been painted with images of Mirra and Pomegra. The carpet consisted of ashes mixed with long, bright threads. Doors twisted from their frames, scorched and broken. The stink of fire reminded him of the smell of his room, after Govnan raised the elemental and burned the stairs. Bitter and heavy. Women and guards had been found along this floor, red with the death that smoke bestows and black with the kind offered by fire. Traitor guards had barred the doors, trapping them all inside.
He had declared the empty wing, the wing where Beyon had once hidden with Mesema and his Knife, the new house for the women. Nessaket was there now, side by side with her slave-girl, Rushes, both of them unconscious, struck down by blows to the head. Neither had woken since the night of the slave revolt. The same man had hit each of them: Mylo. Sarmin had never heard of him before, a delivery boy, purchased a year ago from a satrap’s estate. Murmurs and confessions allowed the story to be pieced together. The boy had been a follower of Mogyrk, and had colluded with Austere Adam through a network of priests and worshippers. Neither of them had been found, nor had Sarmin’s brother Daveed. He had been spirited away as had Helmar so many years ago, taken by followers of Mogyrk. Daveed. Flesh called to flesh and he ached for his brother, his round face, his curls. I will find you.
Azeem told him Mesema had gone to the ladies’ garden to find relief from the flames and then had never left it. Sarmin had forgotten the garden, where he had once played as a boy, Kashim’s mother Siri watering the blooms as the children pushed around her. How bright those days had been. He passed through Old Wife Farra’s room, charred and stinking, and climbed the stairs to the roof.
The garden had changed. Once, a riot of colour burst from roses, honeysuckle and clematis and green things grew in every bed. He remembered Mother Siri, holding her jug of water-but today it was Mesema he saw, and only a few weak seedlings pushed forth from the soil. His wife knelt beneath the statue of Mirra, Pelar’s silks laid out on the ground before her. As he approached she moved to pick up the boy, to protect the child from him, her sky-coloured eyes angry and cold. He stopped a man’s length from where she sat and held out a hand, his eyes drawn to Pelar, pink and squirming in his makeshift bed. Cured. Tears stung his eyes. “Azeem says you will not come downstairs.”
“There is nothing but death and lies downstairs,” she said, “give me a tent and let me live outside in the air.”
“You are Cerani now. Remember? You took my hand. You said, “We are Cerani. We carry on.” Did you not mean it?”
“How could I mean it when I didn’t know what it meant? When my own husband keeps the truth from me…if you had told me that you Carried Beyon I would not have let Pelar go.”
He knew that more than Beyon stood between them. There was Jenni, too. Sarmin looked again at the boy. He longed to hold him, to smell his skin. Daveed and Pelar both had a stubborn curl at their temples, just like Beyon’s, inherited from some ancestor they no longer remembered. Daveed! His heart split into two like Helmar’s stone. “You are the empress,” he reminded her. “There are duties, especially with my mother fallen. Your clan-”
“My clan has betrayed you. Have you not heard of it? I heard it from the concubines as we huddled up here, waiting out the fire. Concubines, Sarmin, told me that Banreh slit our soldiers’ throats in the night. What could drive Banreh to such treachery other than Cerani madness, the same madness that drove you to infect Pelar?”
“It is gone,” he said, risking a step closer. “And even so, you have duties.” A flash of blue caught his eye. Behind her, a butterfly searched for a blossom.
“You instruct me like a servant,” she said, pushing yellow curls from her eyes, “because you do not need me. Leave me to the garden and to my mothering. Once, we defeated the Pattern Master together, but now, you pursue your own fascinations, make your own assaults against the dark without me. This victory was yours, and I was there only to witness the destruction that came with it. I could have been at your side…”
“You could not have helped. I needed… protect…” The words left him. He remembered when Mesema had smashed the urn, just as he had smashed the stone. That, and the day he first saw Pelar, when she smiled at him across the room, were the last happy days that he could remember. Before Jenni, before the envoy. He had wanted to need her, to feel that closeness he felt with Grada, bone to bone, the intimacy he had pushed away when he handed Grada the Knife. But Mesema offered something else.
“Please,” he said, kneeling, looking into her eyes, “we are friends, are we not? From the first moment when you came to me in my room, you were my friend. My only friend, now.”
She met his gaze, lips trembling, with tears or a smile he could not tell. “I would like a friend too.”
It was a start.