worry,” Qara said. “If you love him, then you can trust yourself to protect him.”
Rin hoped that was true.
“Hey,” Kitay said. “What’s so interesting over there?”
“Nothing,” Rin said. “Just gossip. Have you cracked the nature of the cosmos?”
“Not yet.” Kitay tossed his stick onto the dirt. “But give me a year or two. I’m getting close.”
Qara stood up. “Come. We should get some sleep.”
Sometime during the day the Ketreyids had built several more yurts, clustered together in a circle. The yurt designated for Rin and her companions was at the very center. The message was clear. They were still under Ketreyid watch until the Sorqan Sira chose to release them.
The yurt felt far too cramped for four people. Rin curled up on her side, knees drawn up to her chest, although all she wanted to do was sprawl out, let all of her limbs loose. She felt suffocated. She wanted open air—open sands, wide water. She took a deep breath, trying to stave off the same panic that had crept up on her during the sweat.
“What’s the matter?” Qara asked.
“I think I’d rather sleep outside.”
“You’ll freeze outside. Don’t be stupid.”
Rin propped herself up on her side. “You look comfortable.”
Qara smiled. “Yurts remind me of home.”
“How long has it been since you’ve been back?” Rin asked.
Qara thought for a moment. “They sent us down south when we turned eleven. So it has been a decade, now.”
“Do you ever wish you could go home?”
“Sometimes,” Qara said. “But there’s not much at home. Not for us, anyway. It’s better to be a foreigner in the Empire than a Naimad on the steppe.”
Rin supposed that was to be expected when one’s tribe was responsible for training a handful of traitorous murderers.
“So—what, no one talks to you back home?” she asked.
“Back home we are slaves,” Chaghan said flatly. “The Ketreyids still blame our mother for the Trifecta. They will never accept us back into the fold. We’ll pay penance for that forever.”
An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them. Rin had more questions, she just didn’t know how to ask them.
If she were in a different mood, she would have yelled at the twins for their deception. They’d been spies for all of these years, watching the Cike to determine whether or not they would hold stable. Whether they did a good enough job culling their own, immuring the maddest among them in the Chuluu Korikh.
What if the twins had decided that the Cike had grown too dangerous? Would they have simply killed them off? Certainly the Ketreyids felt as if they had the right. They looked down on Nikara shamans with the same supercilious arrogance as the Hesperians, and Rin hated that.
But she held her tongue. Chaghan and Qara had suffered enough.
And she, if anyone, knew what it was like to be an outcast in her own country.
“These yurts.” Kitay put his palms on the walls; his outspread arms reached across a third of the diameter of the hut. “They’re all this small?”
“We build them even smaller on the steppe,” Qara said. “You’re from the south; you’ve never seen real winds.”
“I’m from Sinegard,” Kitay said.
“That’s not the true north. Everything below the sand dunes counts as the south to us. On the steppe, the night gusts can rip the flesh off your face if they don’t freeze you to death first. We stay in yurts because the steppe will kill you otherwise.”
No one had a response to that. A peaceful quiet fell over the yurt. Kitay and the twins were asleep in moments; Rin could tell by the sound of their steady, even breathing.
She lay awake with her trident clutched close to her chest, staring at the open roof above her, that perfect circle that revealed the night sky. She felt like a little rodent burrowing down in its hole, trying to pretend that if it lay low enough, then the world outside wouldn’t bother it.
Maybe the Ketreyids stayed in their yurts to hide from the winds. Or maybe, she thought, with stars this bright, if you believed that above you lay the cosmos, then you had to construct a yurt to provide some temporary feeling of materiality. Otherwise, under the weight of swirling divinity, you might feel you had no significance at all.
Chapter 24
A fresh blanket of snow had fallen while they slept. It made the sun shine brighter, the air bite colder. Rin limped outside and stretched her aching muscles, squinting against the harsh light.