Warrior of the World Read online

  Efe had spotted me though. She’d been waiting for me to appear, and came galloping through the rain, waving her trunk in the air in elephantine celebration. She slowed as she reached me, wrapping her trunk gently around my head in her version of an embrace. Efe and I had started a friendship before the battle where I killed my late husband, but since then we seemed to have developed a special bond.

  Ochieng had told me that Efe had insisted on coming with them when the D’tiembo fighters mounted up to rescue me, though she wasn’t trained for battle. Rescued only a year before, and a difficult case, Efe resisted training. Even Ochieng, the master trainer, hadn’t been able to cling to her back for more than a few moments. When they’d rallied and equipped the fighting elephants, they’d tried to make her stay back, but short of restraining her—which they’d never do, particularly to Efe—they couldn’t persuade her. She came with the others and she’d found me, then curled around my back while I thought I lay dying, dreaming of elephants thundering around me.

  I knew in my head that Ochieng, the D’tiembos, and the battle elephants had saved me, but in my heart, it had been Efe.

  She started dragging at me, pulling me toward the elephant shelter and out of the rain. Efe didn’t much like the constant downpour, hunching in it miserably as if it attacked her. I went along, largely because when an elephant decides she’d like you to go somewhere, you went, but also because I liked it in the elephant shelter, out of the rain and pressed in with the big beasts. Ochieng naturally came along, greeted with enthusiasm by Violet and the others.

  Efe snaked her trunk over me, whuffling and sniffing until she found the fruit I’d stuck in my pockets. I rescued a melon for Violet, who plucked it from my hand with all the grave dignity befitting the matriarch, then let Efe root out the rest. With a happy sigh, I felt myself relax. Ochieng glanced at me, raising his brows, inviting me to speak.

  “I feel good here,” I told him. “That’s part of why I want to come visit the elephants, even though it’s difficult for me.”

  He nodded. “And the dancing?”

  The thought of even trying to dance—or picking up a blade—had my stomach clenching. So I lifted a shoulder and let it fall in a Dasnarian shrug of dismissal.

  “You know.” Ochieng had picked up a brush, circling it over Violet’s broad forehead, and she closed her eyes in ecstasy. “I used to think that if you could only speak, I’d understand you better.”

  “And now?” I made myself ask.

  He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Now I wonder if I’ll ever understand you at all.”

  ~ 2 ~

  I turned back to Efe, who expected nothing from me. “I never asked you to understand me.”

  He didn’t answer immediately. Then he came over and stood behind me, arms braced on Efe’s big flank on either side of me where I leaned into her comforting bulk. He didn’t touch me, but his warmth crossed the small space between us, his breath whispering against my temple.

  “Fair enough,” he said quietly. Oh so quietly, as if we might be overheard and he wanted the words to be only for me. “Understanding you is something I want. You fascinate me, Ivariel. From the first moment I saw you aboard the Robin, I was drawn to you—not just for your extraordinary beauty, but by something deeper. You were unlike any woman I’d seen before, and I wanted to know you. Perhaps I imagined more into your silence than there was, but I thought we’d become friends.”

  I leaned into Efe, listening, almost holding my breath, uncertain if delight or dread had me agonizing over what the next moments would bring. Ochieng had never declared himself to me, not in so many words, though he had kissed me. Twice. Here I had no fathers or brothers for him to approach and negotiate with, to seal my wedding vows with. In truth, I had no idea how the Nyamburans handled such things at all.

  “That morning you woke up,” he continued, after I said nothing, “you gave me the disk with your vow of chastity. Do you want it back?”

  Of course he would’ve saved it, probably keeping it with the other disk for my forsaken vow of silence. I didn’t have Kaja—or anyone of Danu—to ask, but I felt sure those vows given to Danu, once broken, couldn’t be easily taken up again. Certainly I had no temple to visit, no altar to swear upon. My vows had never been meant to last forever, regardless. Silence had kept my accent and poor fluency disguised. Chastity had been a protection of another kind.

  “You must prepare to be courted,” Kaja had said. And then, “I think that you do not wish to engage in such activities. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

  Maybe not ever.

  The memory of those words dug into my heart now as much as they had then.

  “Ivariel?” Ochieng made a question of my name. “Do you want it back?”

  I shook my head.

  “Can you use words to talk to me about this then?” He asked, his voice a little rough. “I know silence is a safe place for you, but I need to know what you’re thinking, what you need from me.”

  I’d been cowardly, avoiding him, taking refuge in not speaking and staying alone in my room. He’d respected that—and likely would forever—but it wasn’t fair. He was wrong about that. Screwing up my courage, I turned, tucking my hands behind my back and carefully not touching him, Efe solid against my back, but facing him. I couldn’t quite make myself look into his eyes—old habits die hard and that one seemed to be one that fought to remain—so I focused on his mouth, his full lips.

  But that made me think of when he’d kissed me, and I couldn’t be thinking of that, and all the crazy ways it had made me feel, for this conversation.

  So I looked at his throat, the strong column of it dark against his open white shirt, and the tender dip where the skin paled a little above the wings of his collarbones and between the fork of his neck tendons. The impulse to press my lips there, to taste his skin, to burrow into the warmth and comfort he offered unsettled me. I both wanted and didn’t want.

  “When I was a girl,” I told him, “I always knew I would marry when I turned eighteen, that my father would pick a husband for me. I never questioned that—or that I would give my body to my husband without reserve to use as he pleased.”

  Ochieng made a sound, and his throat worked as he swallowed, but he didn’t say anything because I plunged on.

  “And from that union, I would have babies. I wanted children.” My eyes flicked up to his dark ones, and away again. “I think… not only because it was my duty and destiny to carry on the imperial line. Somewhere in me, I still want that. I know that I’m unwilling—” Unaccountably my voice shook and broke there, the rage welling up in a sharp sweep. “I refuse to let my late husband ruin the rest of my life. He took enough from me and I won’t let him take still more.”

  “He’s dead and gone, Ivariel,” Ochieng murmured, as if in comfort. “He can’t ever hurt you again.”

  I laughed, a dry bitter sound. “But don’t you see? He can and does. Every time I think about…” I had to swallow, my throat tight and resisting. “About…giving myself that way again…I—”

  “Don’t weep.” He leaned his face toward mine, still not touching me, but it was clear he wanted to. “I’m sorry I forced you to talk about this. You don’t have to say any more.”

  I scrubbed the tears away impatiently, with fury at the way they just fell like that, without my knowledge or control. “I do have to say it. I think you’re probably better giving up on me. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to submit to that again. I’m not sure I can… make myself. Do you understand?”

  I looked into his eyes, seeing that he thought he did, but he didn’t. Not really.

  “It doesn’t have to be like that,” he told me. “It can be joyful, a mutual sharing of pleasure. Not submitting or giving yourself, but partaking. Like eating or drinking—it’s a way of feeding ourselves.”

  I understood that. Or, rather, somewhat understood. The rekj
abrel and concubines, some of them, had relished bed sport and spoke of it with enthusiasm. My father’s wives had loved to be called to his bed, though I mistrusted that, as they mostly wanted the opportunity to influence him. My teachers in the sensual arts, however, had made it clear that the giving of pleasure mirrored the receiving of pleasure. I was far from ignorant in that arena. It made me smile to think that Ochieng saw me as some innocent when I’d learned my sensual skills in the seraglio of the Imperial Palace. Should I choose to—or could find a way to make myself—I could shatter those illusions and likely pleasure him as no other woman in all of Chiyajua could.

  “You laugh at me?” he asked, though not offended.

  “No. Never that,” I answered. “But you still don’t understand.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “It’s not you I don’t trust. It’s me.”

  His dark gaze searched my face. “How so?”

  “Ochieng, I had no plan to kill Rodolf. I planned to die. No, don’t say anything.” I’d raised my hand and laid my fingers over his lush mouth before I realized it, surprising us both.

  He turned his head ever so slightly, back and forth, brushing the lightest of kisses against my fingertips. I pulled them back, cupping them in the palm of my other hand, as if to save the caress.

  “Ever since my wedding night—or, perhaps later, after I emerged from the shock of it all—I began to hate.”

  “You deserved to,” Ochieng replied, hushed. “Anyone would have felt the same.”

  “Maybe? But I mean that this…I think of it as a kind of dark seed of hatred that found fertile soil in my heart. By the time I realized how I’d nourished it, how deeply it had wound itself through all my soul, I had no idea how to root it out. All I could do was try not to give it more than I already had, because I was afraid it would destroy me. When I went to meet Rodolf, I stopped worrying about it destroying me. I fed it with everything in me.”

  “So it would destroy him.” Ochieng kept his face calm, but a deep anger showed in his eyes.

  “I don’t know if I thought that clearly. I just stopped caring what happened to me. I only knew I’d never let them take me back to Dasnaria. I wanted to die here, on the soil of Chiyajua.”

  “Oh, Ivariel.” His face creased into a kind of grief. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “It’s a good thing. You offered me this place, said it was my home, and I wanted—still want—that. And if I had to die, it would be here. I gave myself over to that. It wasn’t until he…” I took a ragged breath. Behind me Efe shifted, leaning her shoulder into me. “When he asserted his marital rights, that’s when I lost control of the serpent.”

  “I’m glad,” he breathed. “He deserved to die.”

  “I think so, too,” I agreed. “And I don’t regret killing him, or any of those men who died that night, and that’s maybe a problem. I don’t feel anything for their deaths, except perhaps a kind of satisfaction.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?” My turn to search his face. He certainly wanted to understand, but I didn’t think wanting would be enough. “I’m glad I killed him.” Interesting how it felt to say as much aloud. “I’m glad he’s dead instead of me. But that’s not my point. Ochieng, I don’t remember killing him. I don’t have much memory of that night at all. Not really. It’s like a dream I remember having long ago.”

  “Some things we don’t remember in order to protect ourselves, because it hurts us too much. As you heal and grow stronger, you’ll recall more and be able to make sense of what happened.”

  I smiled and felt terribly old. I loved Ochieng’s optimism, his brightness of spirit. He couldn’t understand the dark paths I’d gone down. “I don’t think that’s it. It seems that this serpent lives its own life now, borrowing my body. I may be Ivariel on the skin, but I think Jenna became a monster. She’s in me and she’s stronger than I am. She has all the strength of her hatred.”

  “So, you learn. You will heal and let the hatred go.”

  “Or I won’t, and I’ll be as scarred and as untrainable as Efe. She and I, neither of us able to earn our keep, to be a real part of things.” As if she understood, Efe blew out a long breath, her trunk questing along my feet, then wrapping around one ankle.

  “This is an excellent analogy,” Ochieng said. “Don’t laugh—it is! Efe suffered, yes, but she’s come a long way since her rescue. She’s learned a great deal and continues to learn. You never saw her back then, so you can’t recognize how far she’s come.”

  I made a sound of dismissal for his idealism and he frowned. “I have no intention of giving up on either one of you, so you can forget that. And you don’t have to earn a place here. This is your place. Apparently I haven’t made it clear enough to you, but I am in love with you, Ivariel, and I want you to be my wife.”

  My breath stuck somewhere behind my stomach, making it turn over. I’d forgotten sometime in the winding of this confessional that I’d suspected him to be on the verge of such a declaration. And now I would have to put an end to his hopes.

  “That can’t ever be,” I told him, making it sound as final and as irrevocable as possible.

  “I’d believe that if you hadn’t given up the vow of chastity—and if you’d asked for the disk back when I offered it.”

  He had a point there. As difficult as I found it to explain, I figured I owed him that. “The reason I don’t think I can take up the vow again is that I already broke it with Rodolf.”

  “That was rape. Danu could hardly hold you accountable for that.”

  I shook my head. “He was legally my husband. I complied with his orders.”

  “So would anyone with a knife to her throat.”

  “He held no knife to my throat.” He hadn’t had to.

  “Because he didn’t have to. You were already in his power, he could’ve killed you or had you killed at any moment, yes?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “I don’t wish to interrupt your words, but there are no ‘buts’ to that. That’s a metaphorical knife to the throat. Add to that the fact that you were diligently taught all your life to submit to your husband—to anything any man asked of you, in fact. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “Yes.” I kind of wished I hadn’t told him as much as I had. In that first waking, so grateful to be alive and to see the rains, to be held by him—and in the grip of the pain-lulling tea Zalaika had given me—I’d revealed so much of my life, myself to him. My teeth ached from clenching my jaw. “None of this is the point.”

  “Then what is the point?” He asked it gently, encouragingly, but with a certain bewilderment.

  “The point is that I didn’t submit! Don’t you see? I killed him. And I don’t remember doing it.” Just the blood, so much blood. Painting my bare breasts with it and wishing that he hadn’t died so quickly. “I can’t trust myself,” I told him, in a ragged whisper. “I don’t know when it will happen again, what will set me off… who I might kill next. It could be anyone—even you.”

  ~ 3 ~

  Ochieng studied me, his confusion clearing. “This is why you won’t carry your blades, why you won’t take up your dances and martial practices.”

  “All you need is for me to lose my mind again like that with a blade in my hand.”

  “It’s different. You’re not in peril from me.”

  “Remember when you kissed me that first time?”

  He smiled with nostalgic delight. “For the rest of my life I’ll remember that moment.”

  “Clearly you don’t remember the part where I panicked and hit you!”

  “Barely.”

  “I drew blood.”

  “It didn’t even hurt. I understood then and understand now. Besides, you didn’t hit me when I kissed you the second time. Progress.”

  I looked away from him. The feeling of being trap
ped rose to a worrying level, the seeds of another panic in it. “Let me go.”

  Though he hadn’t been restraining me, he immediately stepped back, giving me room to move. There wasn’t much space to go anywhere, with the elephants crowded under the shelter, the hay-strewn ground prickly under my bare feet. They were caked in mud, which suddenly bothered me greatly. I scraped one foot against the other, accomplishing nothing.

  “Feet of clay,” Ochieng said. He’d picked up a cloth and sponged the dirt from around Efe’s eyes. She liked to bury herself in mud and it accumulated around her eyes, making it hard for her to see. If I’d been a good caretaker, I would’ve done that for her. Exhaustion slammed through me, so I sat on a stone bench, waiting for him to say more.

  He didn’t.

  “What does that mean?” I finally asked.

  Glancing at me, he frowned a little to see me sitting, but didn’t comment. “It’s a way of saying we’re all human and we have flaws. You don’t like the mud on your feet, but you couldn’t walk out here without getting muddy. You’re not an angelic being who can float through the air, untouched by the muck of the world.”

  “I never claimed to be,” I retorted.

  Ochieng laughed, surprising me, and came to sit beside me, though a careful distance away. “You know,” he said confidingly, “I always thought that poise of yours came from being a Warrior and Priestess of Danu. Now that I understand you’re the daughter of an emperor, I wonder how I missed your air of regal command.”

  I gave him a long look, which only made him laugh again. “Ivariel, my love, I’m only saying that I don’t mind the mud. See?” He lifted his own foot, also bare, also caked with mud. “We are all human. And the dirt washes away again.”