The Crown's Game
Page 32

“I would not advise it.” Aizhana raised a fingernail in the air. It was as long and sharp as a blade.
The women remained obediently in place—or more accurately, they were too terrified to move. Aizhana limped to the edge of their fire. “I am going to tell you a story,” she said as she settled herself on the ground. Damira, who was the closest, had enough sense not to wince at Aizhana’s stench.
Aizhana took in a long breath. The smell of roasting meat filled her with a distant memory, and she fell swiftly into her tale.
Once, many years ago, there was a girl with golden eyes who lived happily among her people. She was renowned not only for her fleet-footed dancing and fine embroidery, but also for her extraordinary touch. She was a faith healer, and she could redirect energy from one part of an ill or wounded person to another part. From a strong stomach to a weak spleen, or from powerful lungs to an arrow wound. Because of that, she was one of the most valuable girls in the tribe, and as befit her position, she was betrothed to their leader’s son.
But then, when she was sixteen, a regiment of Russian soldiers arrived near her village. Curious, she and the other girls snuck out to spy on them. They intended only to have a peek.
She did not expect one of the soldiers to spot her in the grasses. She did not expect to fall swiftly in love with his confidence and easy grace. She did not expect she would abandon her tribe to spend her nights in his bed, living hungrily on his love and his kisses.
She certainly did not expect to wake one morning to find him and his entire regiment gone.
The tribe took the girl back in, but she was disgraced, condemned to scrubbing laundry and hauling the manure of yaks. Eight lonely months crawled by. And on the nine-month anniversary of her first night in the soldier’s bed, she gave birth to a baby boy. The umbilical cord wrapped like a noose around his neck.
“No!” The girl uncoiled it and touched the bruise already formed on his fragile skin.
Death stole into her yurt, reached out with its bony hands, and attempted to lift the boy away.
But the girl snatched the baby back. “You cannot have him.” She hugged the child, the only thing she had, and heard his pulse fluttering like a dragonfly, trying to escape. “Shh . . . ,” she said. “Shh. I am a healer. I will save you.”
And then she thought of all the times she’d healed a wound or nursed an ache. It was simply a matter of moving energy, of shifting the patient’s strength from one place in a body to another. She looked at the gasping baby in her arms. What is stopping me from channeling my energy to him? Nothing. It would either work, or it wouldn’t.
She focused on the place where the baby’s skin touched hers. Then she felt her own energy flowing hot with the fear of losing him. She directed her remaining strength into his veins.
The boy cried, so loudly it shook the walls of her yurt.
Death cocked its head and moved to take the girl, who lay weak on the dirt floor. “But I’m not dead,” she whispered.
Death paused. And then, instead of picking her up, it knelt and passed its skeletal fingers over her eyes to shut them. Because she was brave enough not only to face and defy Death, and also to outsmart it, she was rewarded with sleep in ante-death, the space between the living realm and the dead.
But she would not stay in ante-death forever. She swore with her last breath that when she was strong enough, she would rise again.
The women around the fire pit quivered.
“Do you remember me now?” Aizhana smiled in a way that once would have been sweet, but now was nothing but rotting gums and disdain.
“You rose from the dead,” Damira said, scrambling away. She did not go far, though, before she bumped into the other women.
“No. Were you not listening? I was never dead. I was merely not living. But I have returned, and I want my boy. Where is he? Is he out shepherding or hunting with the men?”
“He . . .”
“Is he out shepherding or hunting with the men?” Aizhana asked again, the screech of her voice rising.
Damira’s eyes widened. “I . . . We haven’t seen him in eleven years. He left the village.”
Aizhana scraped her fingernails against her papery temple. They rasped like claws against molted snakeskin. “He could not have left on his own at age seven. What did you do?”
Damira sniveled. The other women held one another, as if something so simple would protect them.
“Where is he? What did you do?” Aizhana snarled.
“A Russian aristocrat came. She wanted him. You have to understand, he was too much for us. We didn’t know what to do with his power—”
“You lived with me among you all those years. How could a boy be any different?”
“He was. He was different!” Damira said. “You were a healer. You made people better. You were a force of good. He was . . .”
“Like a demon,” another woman, Tazagul, said. Her face glowed in the light of the fire. “He had too much power. It came from somewhere other than the people who needed to be healed. He wasn’t like you.”
“My son is not a demon!” Aizhana howled, and her shriek nearly drew blood from the women’s ears.
But if he wasn’t a healer, then what was he? Could he be an enchanter? It would make sense, the way Damira and Tazagul described him. Healers utilized small magic, and the energy came from their patients. But enchanters could use greater magic.
“Whatever he was, we did not know what to do with him,” Damira said. “And the Russian woman offered two horses and two sheep to take him away to train—”
“You sold my son? For four animals?”
“No, we—”
But that was all Damira got out before Aizhana pounced on her and slashed her throat with her wicked nails. Thick, hot red spurted everywhere. Aizhana grinned. Then she siphoned off the energy as Damira’s life left her body.
“What have you done?” Tazagul said, trembling. She and the other women still kneeled on the ground, too paralyzed to flee. They gaped at their dead kinswoman.
“Even if I was disgraced, my son was innocent, and you were supposed to mother him in my stead,” Aizhana said, her voice now a low growl. “That is how a village works. But you left him without a mother, and now I will leave all your children without theirs.”
She lunged at the women. She shredded them with her nails, ten merciless blades compelled by vengeance. And as she killed them, she absorbed their energy, just as she’d done to the worms and the maggots in the ground.