Naamahs Curse Read online

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  In Terre d’Ange, folk had found it just as startling that a full-blooded D’Angeline man—a Priest of Naamah, no less—had chosen to couple with one of the infamous bear-witches of the Maghuin Dhonn, fathering a child on her.

  And in Ch’in…. .

  Vast as it was, the mighty empire of Ch’in was insular, circumscribed by its Great Wall and its outer shores. No one in that inn knew or cared aught about my heritage. I was the foreign witch who had helped free the dragon. It was enough.

  “Sit. ” Auntie Li showed me to a low table, pressed on my shoulder.

  I sat.

  She clapped her hands together. Food came—hot, steamed dumplings with spiced pork and a dipping sauce. Noodle soup with green onions floating atop the broth and chicken feet stewed until they were gelatinous and tender. Auntie Li hovered over me, pouring hot water into my teacup whenever it grew low, nodding approvingly as I shoveled noodles into my mouth and sucked chicken flesh from the bone, tilting the bowl to slurp the dregs of the broth.

  “You eat like a proper Ch’in woman,” she observed.

  I lowered the bowl. “I’ve had practice. ”

  “Huh. ” Her shrewd gaze measured me. “Is it true you seek the twice-born one?”

  I paused. “Twice-born?”

  Auntie Li beckoned to one of her servers. He bowed and brought a small porcelain jar with two cups. She made an impatient gesture. “Drink your tea, drink it down. Indulge me, child. I will read the leaves for you while we enjoy this wine. ”

  I downed my tea, leaving the leaves strewn and stranded on the bottom and the sides of the thin porcelain cup. Auntie Li studied them, tilting the cup this way and that. She set it aside and poured a measure of rice-wine for both of us, motioning for me to drink.

  “So?” I obeyed. “What did you mean by the twice-born one, Auntie?”

  “Born once into life, twice out of death, or so they are saying. ” Her brow furrowed. She drank her own rice-wine, then picked up the teacup again and bent her head over it, a straight white line delineating the part in her hair. “Hints of your fate are written here. Do you see? Here and here?”

  I peered at the tea leaves. Despite Snow Tiger’s best efforts, I was fairly illiterate when it came to reading Ch’in characters. During that last week I had lingered in Shuntian, she had teased me about it, wielding her long, braided hair like a ticklish brush and drawing characters on my bare skin.

  Surely you recognize that one, Moirin.

  The memory made me smile. I saw the shape of that character echoed in the pattern of the tea leaves. “Desire?”

  “Desire, yes. ” Auntie Li nodded. Her forefinger moved, pointing. “But you see here, it lies in conflict with judgment. Does that mean anything to you?”

  I thought about it before shaking my head. “No. I don’t know. Whose judgment, Auntie? Mine?”

  She shrugged. “I can only tell you what the leaves say. I cannot tell you what it means. Desire in conflict with judgment lies ahead of you. ”

  “To be sure, it lies behind me. ” Raphael de Mereliot’s face surfaced in my thoughts, his grey eyes stormy with anger. Even though there were untold oceans between us, it made me shiver. I had been very young and very foolish. I’d let Raphael use me to summon fallen spirits. If it hadn’t been for Bao and Master Lo, a terrible force would have been loosed into the world. “But that is not a mistake I will make again. ”

  Auntie Li smiled wryly, refilling our cups with rice-wine. “There are no end of mistakes to be made, dear. ”

  “Am I making one now?” I asked her.

  Her face softened. “Ah, child! I cannot tell you that, either. Do you love the boy? Is that why you seek him?”

  A hundred memories of Bao cascaded through my mind: Bao staring insolently at me as I sought to master the Five Styles of Breathing, Bao shouting at me as he drove the demon spirit back, Bao helping Master Lo tenderly to his feet, Bao sporting his battle-grin as he sparred with Snow Tiger.

  It should have been simple, only it wasn’t.

  I did love him. I remembered the moment I had realized it. When I had first fled Shuntian with the dragon-possessed princess and a handful of loyal ruffians, Bao and Master Lo had gone ahead to lay a false trail. They had been late in returning, and I’d begun to fear they weren’t coming.

  I would not let that happen, Moirin.

  Those were the words Bao had spoken when they did arrive and I confessed my fear to him, the closest he’d ever come to a declaration of love. My heart had leapt.

  And yet…. .

  It wasn’t why I was following him. I was following him because he had half of my diadh-anam and I couldn’t do otherwise.

  “I don’t know, Auntie,” I said truthfully at last. “It’s a question I’m hoping to answer, and I cannot do it alone. ”

  “Poor child. ” Auntie Li patted my hand. The look of kindness in her shrewd eyes nearly undid me. “Don’t pay too much heed to an old lady’s rambling. If the boy’s got a lick of sense, he won’t run far. ”

  I smiled despite the sting of tears. “I’m not sure he does. ”

  She sipped her rice-wine. “That probably makes two of you. ”

  I laughed. “You’re probably right. ”

  THREE

  So began the pattern of my days.

  For the most part, it was a lonely time. I thought I was accustomed to solitude. I’d grown up in the Alban wilderness with only my mother’s companionship. But she had been a constant in my life; and later, there had been Cillian, my lost first love, killed in a foolish cattle-raid.

  Here, I had no one.

  Oh, there were folk I met along the way, though none who took so lively an interest in me as Auntie Li. But with each new day that dawned, I was forced to leave them behind and set out on my lonely road.

  I was grateful for the company of my horses. I named the chestnut saddle-horse Ember, and the grey pack-horse I called Coal. As a child of the Maghuin Dhonn, I was able to sense their thoughts and moods in a way most folk couldn’t. Betimes I would let my thoughts drift, touching theirs, enjoying the simplicity of their reactions to the world around them.

  Betimes I immersed my own thoughts in the world around me, breathing the Breath of Trees Growing and listening to nature.

  Winter was coming, sooner than I would have hoped. I heard it in the sleepy murmurings of the trees, the sap growing sluggish in their veins. I heard it in the anxious whispers of the winter wheat in the fields, straining to outrace the coming frost. I saw it in the worried faces of farmers along the way.

  The days began to grow shorter.

  I wasn’t worried, not yet. So long as I was in the empire of Ch’in, I was safe. I could always find a place to lodge, supplies to purchase. It grew harder to communicate as I rode, for the farther away from Shuntian I went, the fewer folk spoke the scholar’s tongue. Still, I managed with friendly gestures and a few words of dialect picked up along the way; and the Emperor’s seal spoke for itself.

  But I was fairly certain Bao was no longer in Ch’in.

  I couldn’t be sure beyond doubt. It was a vast country. Still, when Snow Tiger had bade me consult my diadh-anam in conjunction with a map, it had been clear that Bao was headed for Tatar territory.

  And I had a suspicion of the reason why.

  Master Lo’s tranquil voice echoed in my memory. Through no fault of his own, Bao is a child of violence.

  Violence.

  Rape, he meant—the crime D’Angelines called heresy. Folk who know no better reckon D’Angelines are a licentious lot. They are not entirely wrong—in Terre d’Ange, all manner of love and desire is freely celebrated—but it is far from the whole truth. Blessed Elua, the earth-begotten son of Yeshua ben Yosef and Mary the Magdalene, the deity who Naamah and the other Companions chose to follow, turning their backs on the One God’s Heaven, gave his people one simple precept: Love as thou wilt. />
  So they do, but it is within the bounds of the sacred tenet of consensuality. To violate it is to commit heresy.

  Bao’s mother had been raped during a Tatar raid, that much I knew. When it became evident that he was the result of that violence, and not the legitimate offspring of his parents’ marriage, they had sold him into servitude to a travelling circus. He had been trained and raised as an acrobat, but fighting was in his blood. At the age of thirteen, he had begged the troupe’s best stick-fighter to teach him. And Bao had been willing to pay any price to learn.

  He say, you be my peach-bottom boy, I teach you.

  Thinking on it, I shuddered.

  In some ways, I think it troubled me more than it did Bao. I hadn’t been raised to think of myself as a D’Angeline—indeed, I was ten years old before it occurred to me to wonder who my father was—but I had always felt Naamah’s presence in my life. The bright lady, I had called her. When the Maghuin Dhonn Herself at once accepted me as Her child and sent me forth to seek my destiny, I had no idea where to begin. So I set out to solve the only mystery I knew, and crossed the Straits to seek my father in Terre d’Ange.

  I had found him, too; and as it transpired, he was one of the loveliest, gentlest souls I had ever encountered. When I was in a mood to resent my infernal destiny, one of the things I resented the most was that it had taken me away from my father so soon, when I’d scarce had a chance to know him.

  The other, of course, was leaving Jehanne.

  Well and so, it was done, and even on my darkest days, I could not deny there was a purpose in it. And I could not help but think that Bao travelled a similar path. He had died. His soul had travelled to the Ch’in spirit world. Because he had died a hero’s death, the merciful Maiden of Gentle Aspect had intervened to spare him the judgment of the Yama Kings. And then he found himself reborn into his body, with his soul inextricably yoked to mine and his mentor Master Lo Feng dead.

  None of that was reason to seek out his marauding rapist of a father, of course. Not at all. On the surface of things, it made no sense. But I thought he would do the same thing I had done when confronted with an unwanted destiny, and set out to solve the only mystery he knew. With Master Lo dead, Bao had nowhere else to go.

  Besides, I could sense him somewhere beyond me, moving farther and farther away.

  If I could have followed him as the crow flies, I could have closed the distance between us more swiftly, but I was constrained by the terrain to follow the roads. Still, Bao would have faced the same constraints. In village after village I asked after him as best I could, usually with mixed results.

  I didn’t have the luxury of keeping a low profile in face-to-face encounters. Bao did. A young Ch’in man travelling on his own, carrying little more than a satchel and a battered bamboo staff across his back, was not a remarkable sight. And I didn’t even know for a surety under what name he went. I knew him as Bao, but I had learned that that wasn’t a proper name, but the baby-name his mother had called him. Treasure, it meant; at least when spoken with the right intonation.

  It was a name Bao had reclaimed when he cast his lot in with Master Lo Feng, abandoning the stick-fighters and thugs in Shuntian he had once led, leaving everything behind to become Master Lo’s magpie, a journey that had taken him all the way to Terre d’Ange. For a long time, I’d wondered why he’d made such a choice.

  It wasn’t a pretty tale.

  Bao had told me on the greatship. A young boy had come to him and begged him to teach him to fight. Bao had agreed…. . for the same price that the man who taught him had charged.

  I don’t know how I would have responded to Bao’s tale had he gone through with the bargain. I might not have been raised with Blessed Elua’s precept and the sacred tenet of consensuality, but I was Naamah’s child as surely as the Maghuin Dhonn Herself’s, and I had taken those beliefs deep to heart.

  But he hadn’t gone through with it. Confronted with the naked, shivering, stripling boy, Bao had walked away from his bargain, walked away from his life. He had taken Master Lo’s offer, an offer he had jeered at only days before, and reinvented himself.

  Everything I have done in my life, good and bad, I have chosen. But this, I did not choose.

  That was what Bao said the day he left me.

  “Stupid boy,” I muttered to myself as I rode, not really meaning it. I tried not to dwell on it, tried not to wonder if he would be angry at me for following him. He had to know I was on his trail. He could feel my presence as surely as I could sense his.

  And I tried not to worry about the distance that yet lay between us, the shortening days, the trees growing increasingly barren of leaves, the chill in the air.

  Here and there, I found folk who remembered Bao’s passage. He might not have stood out as unmistakably as I did, but he was memorable in his own way. Even from the beginning, there had been an air of coiled intensity to him, a feral glitter to his dark eyes that put me in mind of my own people. It was not unthinkable; although the Maghuin Dhonn have dwelled in Alba for time out of mind, there are tales among us of an older time, when the world was covered in ice and we followed the Great Bear Herself out of a frozen wasteland to warmer climes.

  That was when there were still great magicians among us, shape-changers capable of taking the form of the Maghuin Dhonn Herself. We lost that gift generations ago when the magician Berlik broke an oath he swore by stone and sea and all that they encompass, on his very diadh-anam. Now, only small gifts remain to us; or so I had thought. My mother taught me to summon the twilight when I was but a child, a gift meant for hiding and concealment.

  But as I’d grown to adulthood, I’d found it has other uses. To summon the twilight is to take half a step into the spirit world. It could also serve to make a gateway that allows the energy of the spirit world to spill into ours.