She grubbed around in the bloodied sheets again. ‘I felt him come out, I felt him leave me!’ she cried. ‘But I cannot see him!’ She picked up something tiny that looked like a dense clot of blood, holding it up to the light. Threads of sticky liquid ran through the gaps in her fingers. ‘Is that him? Is that him?’
With a sickening wrench, Reki realised where all the blood had come from, and what she was looking for. He felt suddenly dislocated from reality, one beat out of time with the world. He could barely breathe for the horror of seeing his sister this way.
‘That is not him,’ Reki said. The words seemed to come from elsewhere. ‘He is gone. Omecha has him now.’
‘No, no, no,’ Laranya began to whine, rocking back and forth on her knees. She had discarded the clot. ‘It is not him.’ She looked up at Reki, her eyes imploring. ‘If I find him, I can put him back.’
Reki began to cry, and the sight brought Laranya to new grief. She reached out for him with bloodied hands, and he slumped onto the bed and embraced her. She flinched as they hugged and he let her go reflexively, knowing that he had hurt her.
‘What did he do to you?’ Reki said, and Laranya wailed, clutching herself to him. He dared not hold her, but he let his hands rest lightly on her back, and tears of fury and grief angled down his thin cheeks.
After a time during which they did not speak, Reki said: ‘He needs a name.’
Laranya nodded. Even the unborn needed names for Noctu to record them. It did not matter that they had no idea of the sex of the child. Laranya had wanted it to be a son, for Mos.
‘Pehiku,’ she muttered.
‘Pehiku,’ Reki repeated, and silently commended the nephew he would never see to the Fields of Omecha.
That was how Asara found them when she arrived. She had taken a little time to dress, though she wore no make-up and her black hair hung loose over one shoulder. She slipped inside the curtain without asking permission to enter, and stood in the green moonlight silently until Reki noticed her.
‘I will kill him,’ Reki promised, through gritted teeth. His eyes were red and his nose streaming, forcing him to sniff loudly every so often. Ordinarily he would have been mortified to be seen like this by a woman he found so attractive, but his grief was too clean, too justifiable.
‘No, Reki,’ Laranya said, and by the steadiness in her voice he knew that sense had returned to her. ‘No, you will not.’ She raised her head, and Reki saw a little of the old fire in her gaze. ‘Father will.’
Reki did not understand for a moment, but Laranya did not wait for him to catch up. She looked to Asara.
‘Look in that chest,’ she said, motioning to a small, ornate box laced in gold, that lay against one wall. ‘Bring me the knife.’
Asara obeyed. She found amid the folded silks a jewelled dagger, and brought it to the Empress.
Reki was faintly alarmed, unsure what his sister intended to do with the blade.
‘You have a task, brother,’ she said, her swollen lips making repulsive smacking noises as she spoke. ‘It will be hard, and the road will be long; but for the honour of your family, you must not shirk it. No matter what may come. Do you hear?’
Reki was taken aback by the gravity in her voice. It seemed appallingly incongruous with the disfigured woman who knelt on the bed with him. He nodded, his eyes wide.
‘Then do this for me,’ she said, and with that she twisted her long hair into a bunch at the back of her head and put the knife to it.
‘Don’t!’ Reki cried, but he was too slow; in three short jerks it was complete, and Laranya’s hair fell forward again, cut roughly to the length of her jaw. The rest had come free in her hand.
He moaned as she held the severed hair up in front of him. She tied it into a knot and offered it.
‘Take this to Father. Tell him what has happened.’
Reki dared not touch it. To take the hair would be to accept his sister’s charge, to be bound by an oath to deliver it which was as sacred as the oath she had made by cutting it off. To the folk of Tchom Rin, the shearing of a