their campsite, and watched the guards building her small tent nearby. A slender book lay closed on the ground next to her. One of her mother’s. It was a gift from Chien: the latest volume of Muraki tu Koli’s ongoing series of fictions about a dashing romantic named Nida-jan and his adventures in the courts. Muraki’s creation had made her moderately famous among the high families, and her stories had spread by word of mouth to the servant classes and peasantry as well. Handmaidens would beg their masters and mistresses to read them the tales of Nida-jan, which were printed in High Saramyrrhic, a written language taught to high-borns, priests and scholars but incomprehensible to the lower classes. They would then eagerly pass the stories on to their friends, embellishing here and there, and their friends would do the same for their friends.
Nida-jan was everything Mishani’s mother was not: daring, adventurous, sexually uninhibited and confident enough to talk his way out of any situation, or able to fight his way out if words failed. Mishani’s mother was quiet, shy, and fiercely intelligent, with a strong moral compass; she lived her life in her books, for there she could shape the world any way she saw fit instead of having to deal with the one that was presented to her, a place that was often too cruel and hurtful for a woman so sensitive.
Mishani took after her mother in appearance, but her father in temperament. Muraki was a lonely woman, too introverted to connect with those around her, and though she was pleasant company, it was easy to forget that she was there at all. When her father Avun began grooming Mishani in the ways of the court, Muraki dropped out of the picture almost entirely. While Mishani spent all her time in Axekami with her father, Muraki stayed at their Mataxa Bay estates and wrote. When Mishani had fled to exile in the Xarana Fault, she had not considered her mother’s feelings at all. Muraki showed them so rarely that it simply did not occur to Mishani that they might be affected.
Now Mishani had finished the book, and a deep sorrow had taken her. The stories were not the usual Nida-jan fare; instead, they were melancholy and tragic, an unusual turn for the irrepressible hero. They concerned Nida-jan’s discovery that one of his courtly liasons had produced a son, who had been hidden from him, and whom he only learned of when the mother confessed it to him on her death-bed. But the boy had gone to the east, and had disappeared there some months before. Nida-jan was tortured by love for this unknown son, and set out to find him, becoming obsessed with his quest, spurning his friends when they told him it was hopeless. He set out on foolhardy adventures to seek clues to the boy’s whereabouts. Finally he faced a great demon with a hundred eyes, and he blinded his enemy with mirrors and slew it; but as it died, the demon cursed him to wander the world without rest until he found his son, and until his son called him ‘Father’ and meant it.
So the book ended with Nida-jan condemned, his soul racked and his quest still incomplete. Loss bled from every line. Each story had, directly or indirectly, been about a parent’s yearning for their child. Mishani’s mother may have been introverted, but she had not been cold. She poured out her pain on to the pages, and Mishani grieved to read it. Suddenly, she missed her mother like a physical ache in her stomach. She missed her father too, the way he had been, before she made herself an enemy to him. She wanted desperately to wipe away the years that separated them, to return to the time when she was her father’s pride, to embrace her mother and tell her how sorry she was that they had never been closer, that she had not realised how Muraki felt.
All the years of hiding bore down on her, living in fear of being recognised, terrified of her own family. She would have cried, had she been alone.
She was looking up at the moonless sky when Chien sat down next to her. The air, though warm, seemed unnaturally clear and brittle tonight, and the light of the stars was sharp and hard.
‘You’re thinking of your mother, aren’t you?’ Chien said, after a time.
Mishani supposed that was a guess based on the book lying by her side.