Wind and wildfire mages.., p.29
Wind & Wildfire (Mages of the Wheel), page 29
“Go away,” he said, irritation the only lingering emotion. Mazhar would not dare give Dilay away. Not with all the illicit trysts Omar had to hold over his head.
“I could go, but I would only be replaced by an onslaught of physicians and servants. I want to know what magic you worked to sneak her in here.”
When Dilay heard Mazhar’s voice she made a little groan against Omar’s chest and peeked over his shoulder. Omar hugged her tighter. Mazhar released his grip on his mouth to wave his fingers at her. His abrupt arrival had shocked the lust right out of Omar, leaving a haze of irrational temper smoldering in its place.
“The same magic you are going to use to sneak her out,” Omar said.
“I don’t need his help. I can get myself out,” Dilay protested, looking up at him. How was he ever going to think of anything but kissing her? There was still a flush to her skin and her lips from their play. She lowered her gaze from his. “Beste told me to go through the garden.”
“Father is in the garden with Semih Kadir and his family. Consider yourselves lucky he didn’t walk by your window and see this…conversation.” Mazhar crossed the room as he spoke to pull the curtains closed. “What were you thinking, leaving these open?” He tsked. Omar hadn’t been thinking much of anything. Except about her.
Dilay sat back on her heels, breaking Omar’s grip on her. She stared at the curtains, panicked, and she appeared as if she might be sick. “They’re out there?” she asked. “Behram?”
“For a time, at least,” Mazhar said.
“What if he saw us?” She looked frantically at Omar. Before he could respond, or even understand the ugly knot of feelings that bloomed in his chest, she scrambled off the bed. “I have to go. Forgive me.”
“Dilay.” Omar clambered after her, but she bent to pull her shoes on and moved away from him.
“I have to. You don’t understand. What I did at the tribunal…if he saw us, what it would do to him. This was…” She turned a quick, concerned look at the windows.
A terrible idea. He didn’t need her to say it. And when she motioned to Mazhar, who looked to him for assurance, he could only nod. The door closed behind them, softly, but it might as well have slammed shut.
Omar turned his anger on the windows, and threw open the curtains. The garden was dark, too dark to see from inside a lit room. He pushed the doors open and stepped outside. He wanted to shout for Behram, but that was just his temper, and anyone who witnessed would think he had lost his mind.
So he listened. But it was quiet. No voices, no men talking. If they had been there, as Mazhar said, they were gone now.
He had been angry, at Behram, for reasons he could not quite put name to. Or perhaps he was angry at him for wanting the same thing from Dilay that Omar did. To take—to take from her, fill up the holes in himself with all that she was.
Omar walked the gravel path, his anger turned inward, realizing a few steps in that he was still half naked. He stopped, and stared up at the night sky, soothed by the spring chill in the air around him. But not as soothed as he had been with Dilay. In her absence, it all came back to him.
He was dying. They were killing him. And he was letting them. Choosing to let them. That was what Dilay had said to him, those turns ago. Choose to be a good person. Choose to fill himself up with the decisions he felt were right. Choices he made for himself. His own triumphs and joys. Not to steal them from someone else.
Twenty-Six
“LIKE THIS,” DILAY SAID, HOLDING the young boy’s hand to show him the order of sigil strokes. The feather he was trying to control bobbed off the ground as a puff of air stirred it. “Good!”
He screwed his mouth up in concentration and tried again, and Dilay did her best to give him the courtesy of concentrating on him instead of all her other concerns. Behind her, Seda guided three young fire mages through breath control, a beginner method of managing the size of the fire they controlled in their palms.
Having to teach all day had been a somewhat effective distraction from the maelstrom in her mind. Omar, and Behram, the guilds—emotions she could not untangle or separate. Men she cared about for the same reasons, and for disparate ones. And she was hurting both of them, knowingly. Behram, by betraying his trust, and Omar, by keeping his fate from him while simultaneously ushering him toward it.
She didn’t know what to do. All day she had waited to see Seda, to unburden herself to the only person she could think to. Seda would understand, while Dilay’s parents would not. Her friend knew what it was to be unable to push someone from her mind, even if she knew she should. But there had been three new children waiting for her when she arrived at the warehouse school to set up, and now she would have to wait until their class finished.
“Dilay!” Turgay burst through the front door. “The Watch, they’re here.”
Just as he finished the sentence, someone yanked him backwards out of the doorway. Seda put her arms around the three children she had in front of her and hurried them toward the back door as Dilay bolted to her feet. But it was too late. Eight men, who in the moment looked like frightening monsters in their dark uniforms, moved through the door and surrounded the room, yataghans drawn.
“You are all under arrest, by order of the Sultan, for subversion,” the largest of the men said, mechanically.
“Subversion?” Dilay said in disbelief. “These are children.”
“They will be held until their parents turn themselves in.” The speaker came toward her, hand outstretched.
“Please don’t take them,” she pleaded.
“Those are our orders. Come quietly or be dragged.” His companions were already rounding up the children, all frozen in shock and fear. The youngest of them were crying, and a handful of the older ones did their best to comfort them. Dilay stared, mute, as they were herded out of the building.
“Dilay!” Seda cried out when one of the guards grabbed her roughly by the arms, wrenching them behind her and shoving her forward.
“Let her go,” Dilay demanded, lunging forward. The guard in charge, nearest her, grabbed her by the elbow, wrenching her around so hard she thought he’d dislocated her shoulder. “We haven’t hurt anyone,” she said as he steered her forward, not bothering to lead her on a clear path, so she tripped and stumbled on pillows and discarded supplies. His companions not involved with the children went to work smashing everything in sight. Dilay tried to turn to look, to protest, anything, but the one who held her only twisted her arm until she cried out in pain, shoving her through the door and into the small open space in the alley in front of the school.
Zeki and Turgay were on their knees, hands bound with rope at their backs. Zeki wove in place, and she could see blood from one nostril and a swiftly darkening patch over his left eye. The children had huddled close to the two men, and when Seda’s captor released her she quickly dropped to her knees to put her arms around the three youngest, two girls and a boy. Toulin, the void who had spoken with Omar, was one of them, and she was the only one of the three not crying. She stared, resolute, into the darkness. More accustomed, perhaps, to being treated like so much refuse.
“This is madness,” Dilay tried again, unable to think past the moment or the simplest of protests, but the man holding her gave her a rough shove and she stumbled forward. Turgay turned to try and break her fall, but could do little with his hands tied. She caught his shoulders as she fell but abraded her knees on the stones of the alley.
“All right?” he asked as she sat back on her heels and he pressed his shoulder to hers to give her balance. Dilay nodded. What had she done? How had they found the school? She must have been too careless. Someone had seen her.
“All of them?” The man in charge directed his question into the shadows of the alley and someone stepped into the light of a mage orb one of the guards commanded.
Behram, dressed in red and gold that looked threatening in the mage light. Dilay tried to say his name, but her voice failed as her heart broke, a hard, aching pain in her chest. He looked at her, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing on his face or his eyes. He had never looked at her so coldly.
“You rotten, burning son of a bitch,” Zeki spat at him. Behram smiled, and Dilay’s blood froze. He strode to her and held his hand out. Dilay offered hers, unsure, and he pulled her to her feet. When she was up he grabbed her shoulder and yanked her against him.
“If you cannot make good choices, I will make them for you. Do you understand?” he said low, for only her to hear.
“How dare you. Let me go,” she said, icy from head to toe, afraid and furious.
“I am not the one breaking the law, Dilay.” Fire hissed in his words, even if she could not see it. “You think because you’re playing whore to a prince you can do whatever you wish in this city without consequences?”
She slapped him. The sharp lance and shock of impact emptied her of all feeling except the hard sting of her palm. She staggered a step back, and he did nothing as one of the guards grabbed both of her arms and drove her to her bruised knees on the stones. Tears streaked her cheeks, but she had not felt them arrive or fall until they were hot on her skin. She made harsh, high sounds as she tried to calm herself, but those gasps did nothing to make her feel quenched for air.
Behram touched his cheek, staring at her, then dropped his hand to his side. “The Cliffs. All of them.”
“Yes, Master Kadir.”
THEY WERE MARCHED THROUGH the alley and out onto a main street. Though Zeki and Turgay’s hands were tied, Seda and Dilay were left free. When they began their trek up the main road, Dilay removed her entari and gathered as many of the children together as she could, commanding them to hold hands, and threw the entari over their heads to hide their faces. If they were freed, she did not want their faces to be known, to be discriminated against. Seda did the same, for as many as she could.
At the outskirts of the Earth District, they loaded into a wagon and rode a candlemark or more, up the palace road and west, to the Cliffs. The prison was carved into the sandstone below the palace, over the sea, and could only be reached by a treacherous staircase cut from the rock. Dilay had always imagined it was populated by violent criminals and angry-faced guards. Not by children and their teachers. But she should have known better, after all the stories her father had told her.
They were escorted through an entrance cave, where the two men who were on duty in what appeared to be a cavern repurposed into an office took the details of their arrest and crime. It was dark but for the lamps that held orbs. No sun reached them in the tunnels where the cells were. Water dripped somewhere, echoing through the dank cells cut out of rock.
Zeki and Turgay were placed in a cell together, the boys in another, and the girls with Seda and Dilay. As if the boys would not also need the comfort of an adult when they had been torn from their parents.
Dilay had never known anger like the thing that burned in her belly. It felt like the worst hunger she had ever known. It was fire, burning down her limbs, making her mouth taste like lightning and her thoughts spin endlessly in visions of fury and revenge.
Once the tears of the children had subsided, and some of them slept, her anger cooled to a simmer, though she could feel it twisting and changing. Into hatred. It was the closest she had ever come to understanding Behram’s obsession with retribution. That it was Behram who had brought the feelings about in her was how she wrestled them more fully under control. She would not become him.
“Will your father come?” Seda whispered when everything was too quiet. Dilay didn’t know if he could. She had committed a crime. They all had. Those same guards were supposed to return to the city to hunt down the families of the children. Thinking about it made her feel like vomiting.
Seda leaned in, trying not to disturb the two girls using her lap as a pillow. “What about the Vali Ahad?” she whispered. “Since you’re helping him?”
Helping him. Lying to him. Abandoning him without any explanation. What must he have thought when she ran away at the mention of Behram’s name? What could he do? He had kept her school a secret because he couldn’t do anything if it was found out. She was tired, and hungry. Angry. She could hardly think straight, let alone muster enough control to cast a whisper through stone and distance to the sprawling palace. Even if she managed it, she could not, in good conscience, ask him to show favor to her, to a criminal.
“That is complicated,” Dilay murmured. Who knew how much the guards listened to prisoners?
“No. You think everything is complicated. He came to the school. If you think he did that purely from the goodness of his heart, you are not as smart as I thought you were. At least try. You have his ear.” Seda glanced at her and away. “At the very least.” She brushed a bit of hair away from the face of one of the girls as she stirred.
Dilay wanted to tell Seda everything, but this was not the place, with too many possible ears. And too much emotion. “I am sorry you’re here, Seda. This is all my fault.”
“I made my own choices. If it is anyone’s fault, it is Behram’s. I warned you, didn’t I? All the care in the world cannot help someone who does not believe they need help.”
It was a bitter medicine to swallow, the idea that Seda had seen Behram more clearly than Dilay ever had. But the evidence was too strong. Dilay tried to smile but failed, and laid her head on Seda’s shoulder instead.
“I think it will be all right,” Seda said. “Even Sabri Sultan cannot possibly think keeping a dozen families in prison will be tolerated by the city?”
Dilay was not as certain. He thought allowing his son to kill himself with dangerous magic was all right. What did he care about common families?
They did not talk for long, silent marks. One of the men snored. Dilay could hear one of the boys sniffling, quietly, trying to hide it but thwarted by the way sound echoed on the rocks. Her heart ached. Her back hurt from sitting on cold, uneven stone, allowing the girls to take turns resting against her.
When light poured into the tunnel, accompanied by the scuff and strike of shoes and boots, she did not know how long it had been. All night? The burn of a few candles? Seda slept against her shoulder, and Toulin in her lap. Two guards, bubbled in the glow of another mage orb, strode down the stone hall and stopped in front of her cell.
“That one?” the man on the left said, pointing at Dilay.
“Which one of you is Dilay Akar?” the other asked.
“You do not even know who we are, but you’re willing to keep us jailed? Women and children?” Dilay spat, spewing some of the seething anger in her heart. It felt good for a moment, but the one on the right smiled mockingly.
“I keep the cells closed and the people inside unless they’re asked for. And you’ve been asked for. Get up.” He unlocked the door. Seda stirred.
“No,” Dilay said, as Toulin wrapped her arms around her neck with a whimper. “I will not go anywhere without the others.”
“Bring her,” the right-hand guard ordered as he swung the door wide. Seda gasped as the other advanced, and Dilay hurriedly passed Toulin to her and stood. The guard grabbed her and slung her out of the cell.
“That way.” He pointed down the dark tunnel toward the entrance. “Under your own power or with help.”
Her legs and feet ached with pins and needles, and she stumbled for the first few strides, until feeling returned. They led her back into the low-ceilinged cavern at the entrance to the Cliffs, where several more guards now loitered, sitting on cushions scattered about carpets. Three were rolling dice. Two sat at the table where the guard present at their arrival had noted their number on a logbook.
Behram stood near the exit, looking bored and disgusted. When she appeared, he glanced to her feet and back up. One eyebrow cocked. All the anger that had been fermenting as she sat in the prison coiled and burst inside her, unlocking her grip on her magic and her wits.
She lunged, but the guard behind her caught both her arms and she stumbled, nearly dropping to her knees yet again. He tugged her back. Dilay tried to rein in her anger, but she did not have enough control to speak, to do anything but stare at Behram, as if that were enough to make him manifest a conscience.
“Ah, ah. Behave,” the guard said.
“Release her. I’ll take responsibility for her.”
“No!” Dilay said. “I am not going anywhere with you, and not when all the others are still back there.”
Behram made a sound of impatience. “Don’t be foolish. You want to stay in prison to prove a point? No one cares that you’re down here, Dilay. Besides me. Now, come with me, I am certain your family would like to see you.”
The guard gave her a little push. Dilay set her feet. Behram rolled his eyes and advanced. It was the very last thing she could bear, seeing him come for her, to force her, again. Her magic exploded outward, a rush of air away from her that made Behram and the guards nearest her stagger back and knocked all the papers and pens from the table on the far side of the room.
“You will leash that, or I’ll put you back in a cell for assault,” the guard at her back said, his hand closing like a manacle on the back of her neck.
Dilay wrenched away from him. Behram tugged at his entari, frowning at her, and jerked his head to the guard. The man shoved her forward again.
“Go on, get her out of here.”
“Dilay,” Behram ordered. She looked behind her, gritting her teeth. She could not do anything for them from inside a cell, but was abandoning them any better?
She rounded on the guard. “Those children need food, and water. They’ve been here all night.”
He started to sneer at her. He wore a tiraz with two sigils of the Fourth House, and bore a scar over his jaw.
“What is your name?” she asked. He scoffed. She pointed at the thick scar. “That is a recognizable mark. Easy to describe. I will make certain everyone knows exactly which of you denied food and water to children.”
