A Thousand Nights (18 page)

“Even the spoiled bits have their uses, lady-bless,” the cook said to me, smiling. “And the lads appreciate the treat whether they’ve two legs or four, eh?”

I watched as he passed a sweet-roll to the boy who turned the goat spit, and then went back to his work at the kneading tables.

Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered thought that the demon was too strong, but perhaps I had found a weakness when I saw the dark spot in the first place. Lo-Melkhiin’s mother was certain that her
son, her good son, still lived. The dark spot had felt kindly when I saw it. Perhaps it was the lightning that gave the demon control.

“Fix him,” Lo-Melkhiin’s mother had said to me, and fix him I had. But I had only fixed his body. The dark spot in his brain was still there. If it were bigger, perhaps
Lo-Melkhiin would return to the way he had been before he met the demon in the sand dunes. I could not cut with a knife, the way the head cook had, to separate the two pieces from one another, but
I did not need to. I had reached my sister across the desert, and I had called a great bird from the sky. The lightning inside Lo-Melkhiin had scared me before I knew what it was, but I knew my
soul was strong and could grapple with his if need be.

The men needed a king. Most were content with the one they had. The Skeptics wished for another to put in his place—treason, should anyone hear of it. I would not settle for the king we
had, but neither would I give them an heir. Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered had bid me to be the ball, and he the sun, but I would do that no longer. I would be the sun, now, and I would test the limits
of what this strange power could do. I would call upon the prayers my sister offered at my shrine, and I would change what I saw fit to change.

I
had kept Lo-Melkhiin in a corner of his own mind, for my own amusement at first. I grew accustomed to his screaming and pleading, and then
his sullen silence when he became inured to each horror in its turn. When the bird attacked us, I found a new use for that corner.

I had felt pain before—not as myself, but only once I had entered Lo-Melkhiin’s body. He might have stiff legs from a day’s ride, or cut himself with his eating knife. It
was interesting, this pain. It made me feel alive inside his body, and I rather liked it. The day the great bird took us, though, I felt something entirely new. It seared me, inside and out, as
though I were cooking and could not find the fire to put it out before it engulfed me. I had thought we might die.

I pulled myself out of his hands and his feet and his chest. His own awareness, so long caged, rushed in to take my place, and only found too late the trap I had set. Now the pain was his
alone, save for the small amount that boiled in his head, and I had to bear very little of it.

I did not think I would ever tire of his screaming, but he screamed so much that day that I made him go to sleep. I expected that we would heal, and then I would wake him again, but though I
had poured as much of my power into the healer as I dared, the healing did not come. There was something in the blood, something put there by the foul carrion—carried from the mountains in
its wretched claws—that would not be healed. I was loath to leave Lo-Melkhiin if he could be saved, but he was no good to me dead, so I prepared myself for the long trip back to the hottest
part of the desert. I would have power enough for a while there at least, though of course I craved more.

Then there was the lightest of touches on Lo-Melkhiin’s skin. A cool compress, where the healer’s craft had only sealed the burning in. I waited, and did not leave Lo-Melkhiin
yet, as that coolness spread through the blood and the brain, and then retreated as it had come.

It was
her
.

When she left us, the compresses were removed, and then came a new pain, sharp and sure. We bled, but I felt the poison leaving us, and decided that I could endure a little longer if it
meant not leaving Lo-Melkhiin’s body on the table where it lay. I let him have that pain, too. I had had enough to suit me forever more.

I woke three days later, weak but whole. The healers filled me
with soups and fruit juice until I thought I would burst, but each swallow restored me. On the fourth day, I could
walk again. On the fifth, I overheard two of the serving girls whispering as they cleaned the room where they thought I slept.

“She stitched it, before she could have known,” one said to the other.

“She couldn’t have,” said the second.

“She burned it, so no one would see,” said the first. “Only, the spinners all saw, and weavers too.”

“Did she see it, then?” said the second. “Or did she cause it?”

They hushed each other as I shifted, hardly able to keep still, and then fled. I was sure the creature I had married was human, common and sun-hammered like the rest of them, but if the
girls were right, then she did have some power to her use, whether she knew it or not.

I thought of the cool touch that had come before the knives. That had been her hand. She had come into my blood and seen the damage there, and then told the healers how to fix it. She had
let me live. I would not have done the same for her.

Power twists men’s minds so easily. They bend toward it like a tree reaches for light and water. That was why I had chosen Lo-Melkhiin’s body and Lo-Melkhiin’s hands; his
were the most powerful. The merchant-lords of his court, the Skeptics and the Priests, the artisans and laborers and their sons, had all turned to him—to us—the way sand follows the
direction of the wind.

I had spent all the years I had been in Lo-Melkhiin’s body giving power to men who I thought would use it in ways that might serve me. I had given them great art and great thoughts,
and they never guessed that they fed a terrible hunger in me that would require feeding until they died trying to sate it. They had done great things and made great tales, but I had been
blind.

All of this time, I had had access to more power than I had imagined, and I had missed it because I saw with men’s eyes. I had forgotten the girls who scrubbed the floors and spun the
yarn. I had forgotten the women who dyed the cloth and worked with henna. I had married three hundred girls, and as much as eaten them all before they were done cooking.

She knew. She knew, and yet she saved me anyway, when I lay weak and dying in front of her. She had not struck me as malleable, but she must have been. Only a fool or a puppet would save a
man who might kill him, and I knew she was no fool.

Better, she had had a taste of it. Whether she had seen that bird or called it down on me, she would have felt the power of it, and power was something I could spin as easily as she spun
thread. I had taken the hearts of so many men in my time in Lo-Melkhiin’s body that it had become easy, too easy. Now I had a challenge ready-made. I did not know how to bend the heart of a
woman, but Lo-Melkhiin did.

WHEN HE RECOVERED, LO-MELKHIIN dined with me in my room. The serving girls brought in a second table—larger than the one where I ate, and where I kept my lamp and
ball—and covered it with a soft blue cloth edged in gold. One girl trimmed all the wicks, and brought in more lamps so that we could see each other clearly as we ate. I watched their
preparations with a sick heart. Even if we did not eat for an hour while they prepared, we would still have two hours between dinner and the time I went to sleep. I doubted he would leave me,
particularly not if his mother had told him I had woven the attack as it happened, but I had no desire to learn what Lo-Melkhiin did to pass his evenings.

The henna mistress came and took my hands in hers. She drew me out of the room and across the garden, to the bath. She did not have time, she said, for a full wash, but she could do my hands and
my hair.

I sat patiently while she worked henna into my hair, reddening it. Where her fingers brushed my neck, ears, and forehead, I knew she would leave henna prints on my skin. This she did on purpose,
so that smallgods who were not in my family would know I had put the color in my hair. If it were done too neatly, they might think I had been born an oddity, and mark me for their purpose. I did
not tell her that her efforts were in vain. I was purpose-marked already.

She left my hair, and took up her stylus to draw the symbols on my hands. I could only watch in silence for a few moments before my curiosity overwhelmed me.

“Henna mistress,” I said to her. “What are these symbols that you draw?”

“Some I will tell you,” she said to me. “But, lady-bless, some are my family’s own secrets. Blessings of our smallgods that we are permitted to draw on others as gifts.
Those, I will not give up.”

“I understand,” I said to her.

I had wondered what set a good henna artist apart from a lesser one. The mistress always worked on me, though I knew she had several apprentices and at least one daughter—a child of
herding-age, had she lived in our father’s tents. Those girls might draw upon one another, or upon the spinners, but they did not touch me, even for practice. Now I knew why. If the henna
mistress drew signs of power on my skin, she would want no others to interfere.

“This one is for luck,” she said to me, and pointed at a wide circle with wings on it. There were several of them on my forearms, hidden in the pattern. “And these are for
strength.”

A tree started at the base of each of my palms, growing leafy branches into each of my fingers. She traced a line I knew to be the desert, and our father’s tents: my history. Then she
turned my hands palm up, brought them together, and pulled them toward her own body. I looked down at the pale side of my forearms, pressed together by the way she held me. They were birds, half on
each arm, and recognizable only when my hands were held as she had them now.

“Lady-bless,” she said, and released me.

“Thank you,” I said to her.

If I dined with my husband, I would take all the aid I might receive.

She did not explain any other symbols to me, but I could feel each one as she drew it on. They burned, like skin put too near a candle, when she started them. When she finished each one, the
ache sank into my skin and ceased. Every one of them made me stronger, even if I did not know their meaning.

At last she finished, and clapped her hands sharply. The other girls appeared as she folded away her kit, and began to coil my hair in the elaborate styles I had, at last, become accustomed to.
Here again, there were patterns in plaits and pins, and I felt each bit woven and then sealed against me as the girls braided, looped, and secured.

They brought out my dress, a blue that was several shades darker than the cloth that covered the table, but not yet so dark as the starless sky, and wrapped it around me. It covered the henna
mistress’s birds, but I could feel them on my skin as though they flapped their wings against it. The dress was embroidered in dark purple thread as well, making the patterns difficult to
see. Again, I needed no eyes and no touch to tell their path. I could not tell if any besides the henna mistress had done this on purpose, but I was as armored as I could be to face dinner and
whatever followed with Lo-Melkhiin.

The girls left me when their tasks were done. They were still afraid of me—though perhaps they were more afraid of the henna mistress, who supervised their work with eagle’s
eyes—but they did not shirk. The last girl, who pinned my hem above my slippers after she put them on my feet, hesitated before she left. This was the girl who had brought me my tea on the
very first day; though I had seen her several times since, we had not spoken since that time. She passed me a package, wrapped in silk scraps she must have begged from the weavers. Its smell
betrayed it to me, and I bowed my head to her. I had not been able to find the tea myself, despite repeated trips to the kitchen and several conversations with the cook and the boys who ran his
errands. She had brought it to me.

“Thank you,” I said to her.

“You are welcome, lady-bless,” she said to me.