She had many memories of her dark-haired mother, strong and sour as vinegar, and of her second mother Valada Roskva singing wordlessly as she concocted her cures and simples, her thick, deft fingers sifting the herbs into loosecloth bags, but Tzoja could remember surprisingly little of her father, except how wonderful it felt when he came back from one of his trips to Nabban or Perdruin, how the house had seemed to glow, how easily words had become laughter—even the food had tasted better! Until that time he didn’t come back.
And that is another weapon with a sharp edge on both sides, she thought. A father’s love, or a daughter’s love for him.
• • •
It took her two bells to make her way across the broad city tier and down into the lower levels because she was doing her best to look like the kind of unimportant, shuffling creature that the Hikeda’ya nobles would not concern themselves with. The second bell from Martyrs Temple was so distant she could barely hear it the second time because, instead of following the well-traveled route to the Memory Gardens down into the ultimate depths, she had chosen that rarity in Nakkiga, a comparatively new road, the clean-edged tunnel that led outward from the city and down to Dark Garden Lake, an underground body of water that her master and husband Lord Viyeki had discovered when she herself was still an infant. Viyeki had only taken her there once, but she had no fear of getting lost because it was a well-known route. During Serpent’s Moon, hundreds of families would crowd this passage on their way to the lake to celebrate the end of the Days of Mourning. But more than half a year stretched between now and then: other than a few Bound and their fishing boats, Tzoja felt sure that the end of the lake where the houses of the nobility stood would be all but deserted.
The last part of her journey led her along a winding outer tunnel barely wide enough for a single noble family’s litter and baggage train. Plenty of those would be jostling down the passage when Serpent’s Moon returned, but just now she heard no sound but her own footfalls and what the Hikeda’ya called “the mountain’s breath,” the perpetual soft winds that moaned through these deep passages. She wondered how long she would have to stay hidden. A dark, anxious part of her imagined what it would be like to live here in a darkness even thicker than the city’s, chasing lizards for food when her supplies were gone; she shuddered, but reminded herself how fortunate she was to have this refuge.
While carving out a deep shelter during the siege of Nakkiga, a building crew under Viyeki’s command had broken through into a previously unknown cavern and found a lake there full of blind, white fish and crustaceans, more than enough of them to help save the starving population. As a reward for this accidental but invaluable service, Viyeki had been given one of the lake’s first festival houses when they were built, but for some reason that Tzoja did not understand, her master had never been entirely happy about that or comfortable with the place. In fact, he had decided only a few years later to give it to his own master, High Magister Yaarike, but the house on the lake had never actually changed hands because Magister Yaarike died in a rockfall shortly after Viyeki told him of the gift. The old magister’s family had not known about it, and Viyeki himself had been too busy to give it much thought after he was named Yaarike’s successor as leader of the Order of Builders. Best of all, Lady Khimabu, Viyeki’s wife, had been told that the festival house by the underground lake now belonged to Yaarike’s heirs in the Kinjada clan, and had never learned otherwise. Of all Viyeki’s intimates, only Tzoja knew the truth, because he had told her of it and brought her for a visit in the early years of their bond. Before his work had overwhelmed him, Viyeki had hoped it would be their place, far from gossiping servants, so Tzoja alone, of all his family and intimates, had the heavy key-bar that would open the house. As she made her way now through a forest of black dripstones toward the small estate, able to see only because of all the shining grubs on long, sticky threads that dangled above the edges of the lake, she found herself immeasurably grateful that things had worked out this way.
She thought of her mother, left behind so very many years ago. “A fox’s den never has only one entrance,” had been one of Vorzheva’s favorite sayings. “Always have an escape ready.” At least in this one way, Tzoja had proved herself her mother’s true child.
Her mother had shared that bit of wisdom long before their father disappeared, when the four of them had still been living peacefully at the inn called Pelippa’s Bowl in Kwanitupul and there had seemed no need even to think about such things. Now, all these years later, father and mother and brother lost to her for decades and her own original name little but a memory, Tzoja saw that her mother might have been an unhappy woman, bitter as wormwood, but she had been right about always being ready to run.
• • •
She was a long time hiking around the lake to the festival house in a darkness, illuminated only by the sparkling strands hanging above the water. The glowing grubs swayed so gently on their filaments that they appeared to flicker, which reminded her of her names both old and new.
“Derra? It means ‘star,’ my child,” her mother had told her when she was small. And so did “Tzoja,” the Hikeda’yasao name Viyeki had given to her when she had shared that little remnant of her past in the first days of their unexpected love. Once a star, always a star, he had told her.
Tzoja was so deep into thoughts of the past that she gasped in surprise and stumbled when she stepped out of a thicket of smooth stone columns and found the great, glittering expanse of the night-dark lake stretched before her. For a moment it seemed as though she had walked directly into the starry sky—black stone overhead, black water below, and between those two horizons, thousands upon thousands of tiny, glowing points.
She turned, and there above her, shimmering gently on one of the stony hills that seemed to prop the ceiling of Dark Garden Lake, stood the volcanic stone house that had been awarded to her master by the palace, in thanks for the discovery of this strange, beautiful place. The path to its portico led upward between pale, dimly glowing lawns of candlesnuff fungus and whitecrown to a massive front door carved with the circular wreath of leaves and grass that the Hikeda’ya used as a symbol for the Lost Garden. Tzoja knew there would be blankets and robes inside for her to sleep on, as well as water and preserved food to pad out the supplies she had brought with her. She would be able to live here in secrecy and safety for at least a while—perhaps even until Viyeki came back.
But perhaps I won’t stay lucky that long, she reminded herself. She needed to start thinking about what she would do if this den were discovered, too.
Tzoja settled her bag on her shoulder for the last steep hike to safety, and began to clamber up the slope of loose stones toward the front path.
The light rain felt oddly soothing against Viyeki’s skin, like the touch of a thousand small, cold fingers.
What would it be like, he wondered, to live always beneath the sky like this? Our great mountain protects us but it also isolates us. We take our children from their mothers young to protect them from sentiment and the weakness it causes, and we avoid Mother Sun for the same reason. But is it truly weak to enjoy what the sky brings?
It was a strange and interesting thought, the kind that he often had when he left the confines of Nakkiga, but Viyeki could not afford to follow it just now. He had too many questions he needed to ask the upstart cleric Sogeyu and the Sacrifice military commanders—something that irritated him in and of itself: Why should a high magister have to seek for information? But he could find neither the main officers nor leading Singers anywhere around the camp, although he had walked from one end to the other. And not one of the Hikeda’ya soldiers or the bestial Tinukeda’ya carry-men who remained could tell him where they had gone.