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  The landing was gentle enough not to break anyone’s bones or split the wagon in half. The miserable ex-slaves all scrambled out of the wagon. I saw Meruert, with her baby. “The Alashi are that way,” I said, pointing. “The first group should have found them by now. They’re not going to be overjoyed to see you, but stand your ground.”

  “Are you coming, Jaran?” Meruert asked.

  “Not right now,” Jaran said. “Maybe I’ll be back in a month or two.”

  Meruert nodded. “Good luck,” she whispered, gave us each a kiss on the cheek, and followed the rest.

  Back in the air, I clung to the idea that we would be home soon. “Not as fast as last time,” I said. “But almost as fast as you can. Get us back to Boradai.”

  The last of the mist was vanishing when we landed. The waiting group was much diminished now. The former slaves who wanted freedom, but not with the Alashi, had struck out on their own some hours ago. Tamar still waited, of course, and as predicted, she was delighted to see Jaran. Boradai had waited for our return, Alisher at her side. The former slaves who wanted to be resold—seven of them, now—waited in the shade, a forlorn-looking lot. Aislan waited in the shade, too, a contemptuous smile on her face.

  “Jaran came back to help us,” I said by way of explanation. Tamar didn’t question his return, just helped untie us from the wagon and gave him a hug. Boradai watched with a faint smile.

  She approached a few moments later. “I have an idea that would be to our mutual benefit. Those seven—” she gestured. “They asked to stay in slavery. They will need to be sold. Let me take them; I’ll sell them. The money will assist me in making my way in the future.”

  I glanced at Tamar. She didn’t like the idea, but neither of us had wanted to deal with trying to sell the slaves. “A kind master,” I said. “I had an idea of a man just west of Daphnia . . .” I told her about the farm and where to find Solon.

  Boradai nodded. “I’ll take care of things. But you have no objections; you’re not going to try to claim them.”

  “I’d really just as soon stay out of the business of selling slaves.”

  “Understandable.” She turned toward the slaves. “Right, then. Into the wagon, all of you.” There was grumbling and dismay—they had hoped to avoid another experience with the djinn—but they obeyed. There are some who really are happier this way. I thought of Burkut, of his miserable death.

  Boradai and Alisher climbed up into the wagon and bound themselves to the seat. I watched as Boradai fingered the spell-chain. They rose up like a basket being lifted by its handle, and then flew away from us toward the rising sun. From the ground, it looked like such a pleasant way to travel . . .

  I turned back to our horses with immense relief. “Jaran, you can ride Kara,” I said. “I’ll take Krina again.”

  I dumped the bucket of vomit and washed it, then picked up the bag that had held Sophos’s head. I started to throw it away, then remembered an old soldier’s saying, death breeds death. Rotten meat might make the mine guards sick; would it make them even sicker if the rot came from human blood? I looked in the bag; there was blood and fragments of skin and bone inside, and it already had a smell that made my stomach queasy. Rotten animal meat smelled bad enough. Rotting human flesh . . . I swallowed hard, then rolled up the bag, wrapped it in another bag, and packed it.

  Jaran was still wearing the light, impractical clothes of one of Sophos’s concubines. I dug through my bag. I would need to share my clothes with him, as he was much too big to fit in anything of Tamar’s. The end result was that we both looked like ragged vagabonds, but neither of us looked like an escaped harem slave. “Is it safe to set out?” Tamar asked. “Surely the soldiers in Helladia know by now what’s happened . . .”

  “It’s not all that close . . .”

  “But they would recognize Jaran.” He nodded agreement. “I think we should stay here, at least until night.”

  I thought I would fly to pieces from impatience, as I waited through the rest of the day. We sat in the cave, along with our horses. Tamar and Jaran chatted quietly with each other; I paced. Aislan sat near the back of the cave, because Tamar didn’t trust her near the front.

  I wondered what the soldiers would make of the situation: Sophos dead, the slaves vanished. If they’d caught a glimpse of the makeshift palanquin, they might think a rogue sorceress was involved. With any luck, the Sisterhood would blame the Younger Sisters and our enemies would distract themselves fighting with each other.

  Night fell; the moon was full tonight, so we could ride, slowly. We packed up and mounted; Aislan stayed in the back of the cave, as if she thought we’d simply forget about her. “Aislan,” Tamar called, just before we set off, and she reluctantly came out. “You can do whatever you want now. Go back to your lover in town, run away to the Alashi, whatever.” Her voice was kind, kinder than I would have expected; Aislan had never been very nice to Tamar back in the harem. “I hope you find what you want. Whatever it is.”

  We pushed the horses, traveling through the night and into the morning, trying to put distance between ourselves and Helladia. Then we gave the horses an afternoon to graze and rest, and made camp.

  I sought the borderland that night, and tried one last time to find Prax. The djinni had taken me to find him once; surely I could find him again. He had tried to kill me, and had drawn blood—had that created a thread between us that I could use to find him? I found the borderland easily enough, and touched the spot on the back of my arm where he’d managed to cut me. Prax, I thought.

  I stood for a long moment on the dark plain; then the world tilted, and rippled around me, and suddenly I was watching a woman on a horse, from above, like a bird. Or a djinn. It was day, and I recognized the horse—it was Zhade, my old horse, from when I worked for Kyros. That was when I realized that the woman was me: I was seeing myself, two years ago. I was looking for Prax.

  I drew breath to shout at her—at myself—but no sound came.

  She dismounted. I saw movement, I remembered. She approached cautiously, her hand on her sword’s hilt. For a moment, even though I knew what had happened, I thought that she wouldn’t see Prax, and would continue on her way. But no. There was a faint sigh of triumph, and she reached for him.

  Prax uncoiled from where he’d crouched, a broken shard of ceramic jar in his hand. “You’re going to regret finding me,” he snarled, and lunged. He moved fast, and with utter ruthlessness—he knew he couldn’t afford to hesitate. The Lauria I saw below flung her arm up to shield her body, and yelled out a curse as the shard scored across her arm, cutting deep enough to draw blood. She drew her sword.

  “I’ll die before I go back there,” Prax spat.

  “No,” Lauria said, her voice perfectly assured. “Kyros wants you back alive, so I’ll bring you back alive.”

  Prax lunged again—a mad tactic, his stub of a makeshift knife against a sword, but Lauria stepped to the side, grabbed his outstretched arm, and knocked the shard from his hand with her own sword’s hilt. Then she brought the heel of her boot down on it, crushing it into the dirt.

  Prax crumpled. He didn’t cry, but I could see the defeat in his bowed shoulders—I’d seen it that day, too. I’d known that he’d give me no further trouble. I swallowed hard, and the world tilted around me, giving me a look, just for an instant, into the old Lauria’s triumphant eyes. Shaken with a blind surge of anger, I wanted to hurt her—kill her, even, or at least terrify her. In the strange landscape of the borderland, I felt my anger go out like an arrow . . . and then, a moment later, as I hovered on the edge of waking, felt it return, and strike me, like an arrow in the gut.

  Oh gods. I don’t know what I just did, but it wasn’t good.

  To my relief, someone was shaking me awake. It was Jaran. “Now would be a good time, if you’re ready. If we’re close enough.”

  I’ll need something that reminds me of Tamar. Shaking off my dream as well as I could, I took my knife and sawed off the very edge of her coa
t, then knotted it tightly around my wrist, like the scraps of sister cloth that had been given as bracelets, back among the Alashi. The sister cloth had hair in it. I didn’t dare pluck a hair from her head, for fear of waking her, but I found a stray hair on her bedding and knotted that around my wrist as well. As for my own possessions—I would have to leave my sword here. Perhaps Tamar would find a use for it. I left it, sheathed, by her blankets, the hilt near her hand.

  We slipped away on foot, leading Kara. Dawn came when we were a mile out from the entrance to the mine; Jaran looked me over. “Take off your boots,” he said. “Those are way too nice for a slave who’s being sold.”

  “Give me your sandals, then.”

  We traded shoes. My boots were too small for him, and his sandals were too big for me, but they were close enough to serve.

  “Could you ask the Fair One whether Prax is still alive?” I asked. “Could she carry a message to him?”

  Jaran pursed his lips as he worked my boots onto his feet. “She is not my servant; I am hers. She likes the idea of you going into the mine. I don’t think she’d want to send you in if Prax were already dead, but I don’t think she’ll carry messages, because she wants you to do this.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged wordlessly. “The djinni have their own plans.”

  I stood up. “Do I look all right?”

  “You passed as a slave in the harem . . . mostly. Here you’ll be a slave in trouble, so any misbehavior will be written off as something that needs to be beaten out of you.”

  “I think I’ll try not to get in trouble.”

  “Good plan.” Without warning, Jaran backhanded me across the face, knocking me down.

  “You son of a . . .” I scrambled back from him, rubbing my cheek.

  He shrugged. “Look, do you want to pass, or not? If you’re a slave in trouble, you’ll have at least one bruise.”

  “You could have warned me!”

  “Sorry. I thought this way would be easier for you.” He took a rope out of the saddlebag and tied my hands together, then tied the other end of the rope to the saddle. “I’m a merchant from a caravan. You went missing briefly last night—when we found you, you said you were lost, but I don’t believe you. I’m making an example out of you.” He jerked his head. “Last chance to back out.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. My head was spinning. “Where are you going to go after you sell me?”

  “Up to the Alashi,” Jaran said. “If I go back to Tamar after this, she’ll kill me.”

  I’d been flying high for days now, and it had served me well. As we approached the mine, though, I felt my good spirits beginning to fall to earth, like a spider descending from its web. This will work, I told myself, trying to reassure my own doubts as we walked. Will work will work will work. If not, well. I’ll feel really stupid. I touched the packet of rotting flesh. Arachne, let this work. Prometheus, let this work.

  “Stop!”

  There was a wall around the mine, well maintained and carefully guarded. Jaran reined in Kara and she backed up a step; I had to skip to the side to avoid being stepped on. “What do you want?” the guard called down.

  “I’m selling a slave,” Jaran said. “Are you buying?”

  “We’re always buying. This has certainly been a good week!” There was a pause, and then the door swung open and an officious-looking little man came out to look me over.

  “Why are you selling?” he asked.

  “I need the money,” Jaran said. I waited for him to tell the rest of the story, but apparently he was angling for a better price. The guard didn’t notice.

  “What do you want for her?” he asked.

  “I’ll trade her to you for 150 pounds of grain for my horse,” Jaran said.

  “A hundred,” the guard countered, though this was an absurdly low price.

  “A hundred forty-five,” Jaran said.

  “Done,” the guard said with a shrug, and sent for sacks of grain to hand over on the spot. Jaran untied my rope from the horse and tossed it to the guard. The Fair One thought this was a good idea, I reminded myself, and followed the guard through the gate. He kicked the door shut behind me.

  This will work, I told myself again, but I could hear the vulture of darkness settling around me. The arrow of anger I had fired at myself had struck my heart. This time, I would be facing both the real darkness and the darkness inside.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  This was a gemstone mine. I could see two slaves turning a crank to draw something up out of a narrow hole in the earth. My first horrified thought was that this tiny passage led to the mine, but then they grabbed a bucket of water and dumped it into a brick-lined shallow pool in the ground. Other slaves knelt beside the pool, scrubbing the loose rocks. The washed rocks were tossed onto broad sheets of linen, then sorted through under the sun by more slaves. The larger chunks were broken into smaller chunks by slaves working with hammers on big rock slabs, then washed again. If they were finding anything valuable, I didn’t see it. A few glanced up to see the newcomer, but I didn’t see Prax.

  A hill rose up to our west, and a tunnel had been dug into the hill. I could see two slaves coming out with a wheelbarrow full of rock chips, which they dumped into the pile of stones to be washed. The soldier led me into the side of the hill. “Down,” he said.

  The opening was larger than the well, but not by enough. A ladder led down into the darkness. You can’t be serious, I thought, but he clearly was. I began to climb down. The daylight disappeared, replaced by the dim flicker of lamps. “Fresh muscle,” the guard shouted down the hole. “On her way down.”

  My legs trembled as I went down into the darkness; my palms were slippery with sweat. I don’t need a dark bird this time; I’m meeting the darkness on my own feet. I told myself that I was meeting the darkness on my own ground as well, but I knew that was a lie. For a minute or two of climbing, I could see nothing at all, and hear nothing but my ragged breath and my borrowed sandals hitting each rung of the ladder, but then I saw a grayish flicker, and I could hear the clink, clink, clink of hammers working against rock.

  When I’d joined Sophos’s harem, I’d been given a disdainful welcome from Boradai, and then instructions from her and Tamar. Here, as soon as I set foot on rock at the bottom of the mine, the guard gave me a hammer, and put me to work.

  Is Prax here? I tried to look around, only to get a rough shove in the back hard enough to knock me to my knees. “Quit stalling,” the guard said.

  There were only two guards down here at the bottom of the mine. They had twitchy hands that seldom left the whips they carried, and short swords. I can look for Prax later, I thought, swallowing hard, and climbed back to my feet to get to work.

  We chipped rock away from the walls of the tunnel, piece by piece, carrying the chunks in baskets to empty them into a barrel that was pulled up on chains. In the lamplit shadows of the mine, all the rocks looked gray. I hoped they didn’t expect me to actually spot gems.

  In the dust and the dimness, and my own interior bleakness, the other slaves all looked alike to me, too. Until the person next to me hissed, “What are you doing here?” I looked over. I didn’t recognize him at all, but he was cleaner than I’d have expected, wilted like a spent flower but not yet hardened. Fresh muscle, like me. Why did he know me? Then I realized—he was one of the seven, one of the ones who’d chosen to return to slavery. Oh, gods. Boradai sold them here? But . . . but . . .

  “It is you,” he hissed. “This is not what we asked for, you lying, foul . . .”

  “I know,” I said. “Shhh, the guard is looking at us.”

  He lapsed into frightened silence. After a little while he said, “Sophos was a fine master. A good man. He treated me well.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “You should be. I never asked for your help.”

  “He had two faces. You saw the nicer one.”

  “It wasn’t that hard to stay on his good side. You were with Tamar
, weren’t you? She was uppity. Thought she was too good for anyone.”

  Our eyes met in the dim light and I knew he saw my disgust, as I saw his anger.

  “I’m going to free you again,” I said.

  “Sure you are. Did you bring a djinn?”

  “No, but I’ll free you without one.”

  “Sure you will.” We heard a guard approaching and fell silent. The guard stood directly behind me for a long moment; I redoubled my efforts with the hammer, breaking chips loose from the wall. I thought I could hear the guard’s breath, feel the heat of it against the back of my neck. I didn’t dare look; he would take that as an invitation to draw out the whip, and with eight fresh slaves this would be a convenient time to make an example of someone. Anyone. I was one of the weaker new slaves, a good choice should they decide to beat someone senseless—or worse.

  Finally the guard moved on.

  “I never wanted freedom,” the man said. “Never.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered again. thinking, shut up, already.

  “Sophos fed me, he gave me a roof over my head. I was warm in the winter and had water to drink in the summer. You took my home away from me. And now, now, thanks to you, here I am.” He swung the hammer up and against the wall with a particularly vicious clink. The force of the blow shook a basket’s worth of rock chips loose, and he knelt to gather them up and dump his rocks into the barrel. When he was back, he gave me another venomous look and said, “This is all your fault.”

  “You’re here because you chose slavery,” I hissed. “You were gifted an opportunity that many people die trying to get, and you chose slavery. So don’t whine to me because it didn’t work out the way you’d hoped.”

  “You promised a kind master.”

  “Did I? Well, I gave Boradai the name of a man who would have bought you and treated you kindly. She sold you here instead. Blame her.”

  “Boradai—”

  “—is a free woman now.”

  “But—”