so close she could feel his breath blowing against the hairs on her temple. “I am proud of you.” He placed a gentle, ink-stained hand on her shoulder and pushed her away. “We won’t speak of it again,” he said in the formal tone.
We carry on.
Mesema slid across the bench to the other window. The west, beyond the desert, was a place of mystery: cruel fighting men who rode boats like horses, buildings bigger than her whole village, and an ocean so large that all of the Cerani and Felting lands could hide inside it. This was all true, if the traders-who-walked could be believed.
Wind rippled the sand, and Mesema tried to count the grains on her arm. How many questions would she like to ask Banreh? They couldn’t be numbered, and she knew it. There was no way he could answer them all before he returned to her father and his war.
It hit her, as hard as the desert sun: Banreh would be gone, and she would be alone. There would be no intermediary, no protector, no adviser. An image of the dead-eyed bandit arose in her mind.
“Banreh,” she said, still looking out towards the west, steadying one trembling hand on the window frame, “let’s continue our lessons. I want to speak excellent Cerantic.”
Sarmin moved through a darkened hallway. He passed a door to the right, two more to the left. He longed to turn and open one, but his body would not obey him. His feet moved forwards unbidden. Some force held his eyes fixed ahead to where, beneath shadowed tapestries, a man stood in a dim entryway. Above the man’s head, tiles depicted a battle in shades of brown—perhaps the famous Battle of the Well, where the Cerani had defeated the Parigols once and for all. Sarmin tried to judge for certain, but he was too close now to study the tiles. He couldn’t lift his head. Something forced him to look upon the man instead.
Tuvaini. Sarmin would have smiled, but his face paid him no heed. A dream. He left his room so often in dreams, and yet it always took a second miracle to make him realise he was travelling through nothing more substantial than imagination.
The vizier’s lips curled back, revealing small white teeth.
He looked up rather than down at Sarmin, his eyes full of disgust, and held back, as if he thought Sarmin would make him dirty.
Even Sarmin’s fever dreams had never seemed so strange. He’d never dreamed his body to be a traitor to his will—or taller, come to that.
Tuvaini’s manner fascinated Sarmin. If everyone were to treat him with such disdain, he could move through the palace practically unseen. He tried to ask Tuvaini what had caused the sudden change, but his lips held still.
“I did my part; you can hardly blame me that you failed.” Tuvaini held out a clean palm.
To Sarmin’s surprise, he felt himself hand Tuvaini a rolled parchment.
“You’ve put me in an awkward position, to say the least,’
said Tuvaini, tucking the scroll into his robe.
“You have what you wanted,” Sarmin said. His voice felt odd, gravelly.
“So I do. And next I will cleanse your stench from the palace.”
Sarmin involuntarily glanced behind, to where he had started his walk. All lay dark. He turned back to Tuvaini. “I will leave, if it is in the design.”
“In the design.” Tuvaini’s voice mocked Sarmin’s.
For an instant a pattern flashed across Sarmin’s eyes, overlaid on the scene, familiar, compelling and fearsome all at once.
Sarmin tried to reprove the vizier for his tone, but he could not. Instead he turned away, into the darkness, where he felt something shift.
The corridors melted away into night.
“Dada?” A young girl looked up at him with wide eyes, her hair wild with sleep.
Sarmin could see the pattern woven around his arm, spiralling to the hand that held the cleaver. A meat cleaver? Was Sarmin now a butcher in the Maze, chopping goat and mutton to sell in pieces?
“Dada?” the girl asked again. “Are you still sick, Dada?” Sarmin thought the girl very pretty. She was dark, like his sister Shala. He felt the blood from the cleaver running warm and powerful across his fingers. Shouldn’t the man be practising his trade in his shop? But instead he stood in a dim mud-walled bedchamber, crammed with sleeping pallets pushed together. He had been sick. Patterned. Hidden away. Sarmin understood.
The man—Sarmin—both of them—they caught the little girl by the hair and raised the cleaver.
No!
With every fibre of his being