![]() I’d tell myself the stories Sendo used to regale me with or pretend I was writing a letter to Baba and Keton. I whispered to myself sometimes, when Ammi was asleep, to try and drown out the noise. If Ammi noticed, she never asked what was happening to me, never asked why my eyes would suddenly glow red, or why, in spite of the cold, I never needed a cloak, or why sometimes, when she called me Maia or Master Tamarin, it took me an extra beat to respond.Īt night, the voices grew stronger. The burns from my dress left only the memory of pain, not pain itself. Ammi had to remind me to eat, or I’d forget. Even when the winds were biting, I never felt cold. Once it grew colder, we’d have to find shelter in a village and pray His Majesty’s soldiers did not recognize us.Įver since I’d woken, something had changed. We subsisted on what she had taken from the palace kitchens, and our tent was the carpet pitched up with a flimsy rod of bamboo. For Ammi’s sake, I wished I had found Edan’s feast blanket in his chambers, the one we’d used in the Halakmarat Desert to conjure a twenty-course meal out of thin air. ![]() We made our way south, making camp far from the Road, usually in the woods. ![]() ![]() ![]() I couldn’t tell her I was bound to the demon guardian of Lapzur, that his call tugged at me more violently than Edan’s to the Tura Mountains. “Someplace the emperor and the shansen won’t be able to find us.” “But it’ll take us far enough,” I murmured. ![]()
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