2. Mammoth

  Ten days earlier

  Her breath boils against metal. Droplets of it cling to her grimy skin, drip down the inside of her helmet. She can barely see ahead of her, the visor's narrow slits cutting her peripheral vision down to nothing. Every sound echoes under the metal: the crunch and sptter of her feet in the snowy mud, the creak of the armor, the roar of her pulse. Blood trickles down her cheek from the spot where her helmet chafes the root of her left horn, the skin as broken and blood as the day her horns first showed, ten years ago. The wound burns. Even in this cold her body is abze, the sweat of her exertion soaking the leather she wears beneath her pte, trickling down into her broken, filthy boots as she reels, not fast enough, to sidestep a blow from sir Dirza's sword. The dull bde screams against her pauldron, pain fring up her arm. She forces herself not to stagger, filing with her sword as sir Dirza jumps out of reach.

  The whispers come too fast for her to stop them.

  Pathetic. Useless. Broken.

  Why are you holding back?

  "Come on then!" shouts sir Dirza. "Come on, you bck-eyed bitch, give it up!"

  The queen's army cleared a wide circle for the tournament, and the ugliness of their fight has made it wider still. She can hear the soldiers standing in the long shadows of the pine trees, smoking pipes and pcing bets and shouting encouragements to sir Dirza. She ignores them all. She stares past him at the queen—Queen Iyan Hali, whose regnal name means pride of heaven—sitting due south at the top of the circle. She has a circle of her own—Twice-born guards and burning cresets surrounding her at a distance of ten paces. Within that circle, she is armored too, in a foxfur robe and a heavy bearskin cloak and a veil of raw silk. Unmoving.

  Sir Dirza steps between her and the queen, sneering at her through his hideous red beard. He points his sword at her, staring down the edge of the bde. He wears more mail than pte, but even so he's wearing out; his beard is soaked in sweat. He clenches and unclenches the pummel, circling inwards. Not stupid enough to run at her head on, the way the three men before him were, now lying bloody and senseless at the circle's edge. He's smaller than her, after all.

  Most men are.

  More jeers from the crowd: "Rip those horns off her head, Dirza!"

  Sir Dirza smiles. He falls towards her, his sword rising high above his temple to strike her throat, and she lunges forward to block him, guarding her head. She's got him now. She'll knock the little twig from his hands—

  But it isn't there. He feints, as sudden and graceful as she has ever seen, arms plummeting to his left and swinging from her unprotected side, and the tip of his bde crashes against the base of her right horn where it protrudes from the crude hole beside her visor. The visor crumples. Her vision blurs as the metal slit folds in on itself and the keratin of her horn splinters into her skin, blood spilling across her right eye. Her head bzes with pain. She lurches back, barely dodging the thrust sir Dirza aims at her neck, warding him away with a heavy, clumsy sweep of her bde. She forces herself to keep upright, even though her legs have turned to sponges underneath her. Snowmelt pools in her broken boots. Blood dribbles from her ruined visor.

  "So much for the mighty demon!" sir Dirza ughs. "Had enough yet?"

  "Call this off, your grace!" one of the queen's generals suddenly shouts. Probably lord Dasa—that pious twit—but she can't tell. "Call the fight for Sir Dirza! This savagery has gone on too long."

  She gulps air, tries to drown the whispers in each ragged breath. She wishes it was the demon's voice. Nine years it has lived inside her, its horns splitting from her skull, but never once has it spoken to her. It's only ever her own voice, hissing to her in the dark.

  End him. End him or end yourself.

  As if the demon would let her stop with killing him.

  Her eyes flicker from sir Dirza—mouth sck, panting cold fog—to the queen, who hand-signs to a tattooed boy at the edge of her circle.

  "First to yield," says the tattooed boy. "As before."

  Sir Dirza tightens his grip again. He advances slowly, but now in exhaustion, not in care, and she lets her body match his own, lets the great mass of her broad frame and thick limbs and all fifty pounds of her uncle's suit of armor weigh so heavy on her body that she droops like a dying tree, backing slowly into the shadows of the pines as the fire-haired knight steps forward to attack her.

  Now.

  He lunges, striking as he was afraid to before, a sudden two-handed blow from above his head, the blunted bde shrieking through the air to smash her skull, and she drops all the weight of her towering body onto the heel of her left foot and twists out of his path, the demon's strength burning like acid under her skin as sir Dirza's sword fshes an inch from her broken visor. Her body moves so fast that sir Dirza blurs alongside her, staggering into the empty space where her body stood less than a second before. She barely feels herself raise her own arm to strike until she sees he's too far past her, until she feels her arm stretching to reach him, and a scream of pain splits her mouth.

  The demon wields her sword for her. It strikes so fast her tendons pop and tear, her sword crashing into the back of sir Dirza's knee.

  Sir Dirza tumbles into the snow, arms spyed. He rolls as he falls, trying to swing his sword with one hand, but it comes as slow as honey now. Steel barks against steel as she knocks it from his hand. She crushes him into the snow, her filthy boot pressed to his ribs, her left arm suturing itself back to her shoulder as she raises her sword to his throat. The pain narrows her eyes to slits.

  "Yield," she rasps, a thick scar tugging at her throat.

  Around them she can hear people screaming. "Bck magic!" someone shouts, and the cry goes up among sir Dirza's bannermen: Bck magic! Bck magic! She pays them no mind. The queen isn't speaking. Nothing else matters. Underneath her, sir Dirza sputters and groans. She presses harder with her boot and her sword, the blunted tip drawing an ugly, shallow cut in the base of his neck. A thin line of blood runs over his pale, dirty skin.

  "Yield or I will split your skull."

  He hesitates a moment longer, tears shining in his eyes, then reaches up and sps her boot three times. She steps off him, and as his men rush forward to drag him away, she turns to face the queen, to watch her stand. Her generals and attendants shrink back as she approaches, their faces flickering from disgust to curiosity to awe. She hands her sword to the captain of the Twice-borns and lets her knees give out, sucking cold air through the ruined visor of her helmet.

  She hears the crunch of footsteps in the snow, sees the soft reindeer leather of the queen's boots.

  "Xanh Ixa," says the queen. "Your helmet."

  The tch of her visor is broken. Xanh Ixa fumbles, trying to lift it from her face, before giving up and ripping her helmet off her head, and even with years of practice she can hear the soft intake of breath around her, feel the queen's courtiers staring and recoiling from the ruin of her face: from the jagged scar sshed through her left cheek from lip to temple, from her broken nose and heavy brow, from her whiteless eyes and the pale cow's horns curving from her temples, the base of each horn soaked in blood. The queen doesn't react. Xanh Ixa finally turns her eyes from the ground as the queen lifts the veil from her face, and after half a year among her soldiers Xanh Ixa finally sees her—a tiny woman much younger than herself, face gaunt and eyes set close together, her pockmarks barely hidden by her makeup. From her girdle the queen unsheathes a tiny knife and pricks the thumb of her ungloved hand. A bead of blood shines brilliant red against her skin. She reaches out and presses the blood to Xanh Ixa's brow, between her eyes.

  "Xanh Ixa," the queen says. "With this we make you Xanh Ko, Protector of the Crown."

  The entire camp is silent now, even the cursing and shouting of sir Dirza's men has died down. The generals are kneeling, too. No sound but the wind in the branches of the pines and the crackle of the cresets. The queen lifts her hand from Xanh Ixa's brow, and, careful not to take her eyes off her master, Xanh Ixa opens her mouth and lets the queen press a drop of blood onto her tongue.

  *

  Today they march for Stsovak. Tzoake, in Aretii. For years the only Aretii Xanh Ixa ever used was her own name. Even after she joined the queen's army she spoke the nguages of the mountains: Sakhnen, Tfea, Sutka. It's true, what they say in the balmy north: the queen is raising an army of barbarians in this cold country, so close to the sky and so far from heaven.

  She'll have to get used to speaking Aretii again.

  She walks beside the queen in the dim light, her give in hand. The air is freezing, colder than it was the day before, but Xanh Ixa has new clothes now; when she awoke she had new leather boots, a fur-trimmed coat, fresh linen to bind with, all warming by the fire.

  Don't get used to it. You can lose this, too.

  A small crowd fnks them: women mostly, schors and servants, but Xanh Ixa recognizes a few fellow soldiers: general Dasa Orsolya, who always prays for the Great Mother to protect him from devils when he thinks she can't hear him; general Lhadomirskarets, whose heavy beard and deep ugh remind her so painfully of her uncle, captain Setama Ri, so lissome and clear-spoken she still can't believe he wasn't gelded till his fifteenth year, the only man to ever join the Twice-borns so te. He and the tattooed boy stand close together behind the queen, the eunuch holding a spear, the boy holding a rosewood footstool.

  Something shakes the trees ahead of them. Xanh Ixa catches her breath. Her hand sckens on the give as the mammoth lumbers towards them out of the pine forest, snowy branches tugging against her thick brown fur. Steam billows from her mouth as she shambles towards them, the rider perched on her head directing her with only a slight tap of her goad. As she kneels, Xanh Ixa can feel the earth shaking below them. She stares at the creature's face, at the vast yellow eye that rolls down to meet her own. At the four tusks, steel-tipped, that curve between them, as if they might embrace her.

  The queen lifts her veil and smiles. "Tzantzi! It's been too long."

  "She's still a little frail, your grace," says the driver. "We shouldn't overtax her."

  "We'll break early then," says the queen. She turns to Xanh Ixa and ughs. "You gawp like a child. Have you never seen a mammoth before?"

  "Never this close, your grace," Xanh Ixa says.

  "You should get to know her. Tzantzi! Look here!"

  From the sleeve of her coat the queen takes a quince, the same deep gold as the mammoth's eyes, and holds it up, shying back as Tzantzi raises her trunk. "Ah ha, I want you to meet someone new, my dearest."

  The queen presses the quince into Xanh Ixa's hand. "Put down your give and give this to her."

  Xanh Ixa barely hears the words. She doesn't move. Lhadomirskarets nudges her forward. "Go on!" he says, smiling. "Anyone her grace likes, Tzantzi likes."

  Xanh Ixa's hands feel light without the give in them. She steps forward, as fearful and as awestruck as the child she can't remember being, the quince held up in her hands. The morning light glints horribly on the steel tips of Tzantzi's tusks, only a hands' breadth from her body. A single twitch of her great skull is all it would take to drive one up through Xanh Ixa's chest. She imagines her body flying into the air, her blood and entrails spilling through her ruptured breastpte. A shadow falls across her as Tzantzi raises her trunk, sniffing the air around her. She pushes it into Xanh Ixa's face and Xanh Ixa squawks and steps back, falling into the snow as Tzantzi smears a wide streak of mucus across her cheek and eye. The queen and her courtiers are ughing openly; even general Dasa smiles. "You see?" says the queen. "I knew she'd like you!"

  Xanh Ixa holds the mammoth's gaze. She wonders, as the wet, snuffling tip of her trunk curves along one of Xanh Ixa's bandaged horns, if the mammoth sees any likeness between them. If Tzantzi will remember her face, as mammoths are said to do. Xanh Ixa realizes that she lied—she did see one once, when she was small. House Xanh was still alive then, and Xanh Ixa's eyes were not bck but a noblewoman's gray, and no horns grew from her head.

  You probably remember your youth better than I can, Tzantzi.

  Tzantzi plucks the quince from her hand, curls her trunk back and pushes it into her mouth.

  The tattooed hands Xanh Ixa's give back to her as she steps away from the mammoth. She recognizes the pattern on him now, the blue-green fiddleheads on his pale cheeks: a Tfea ndsign. He might have been born only a few miles from where Xanh Ixa was. He moves to set the footstool beside Tzantzi, so the queen and Xanh Ixa can climb aboard the panquin atop her back. An unimpressive structure, a little box of leather and iron with slitted windows. A bigger mammoth, she remembers, will carry the royal panquin, a gold and cquer box with a body double inside, and their standard—the five stars of the southern spear—flying from its roof.

  "Thank you, Akhti," the queen says to the tattooed boy. She pronounces his name correctly.

  One of the courtiers giggles as Xanh Ixa follows the queen: "Are you sure you want to be alone with her, your grace? She might not have a man's weapon, but they say she has one's appetite—"

  The queen sps her so hard the sound echoes around the clearing. The offending courtier reels.

  "Never speak of her that way again," the queen says. She turns. "Xanh Ko, follow me."

  Akhti is trembling. The queen can see it, and she strokes his hair as she climbs into the panquin, whispers to him as he helps her lift her gown through the door.

  The inside, at least, is comfortable; suited to a queen. They've burned a brazier inside to get it warm, and perfumed it with sandalwood. Cushioned seats of red brocade line either end, and carefully positioned mirrors let the riders watch the ground below, and fill the interior with light. As soon as the door is shut the queen rips off her veil and wig and leaves them in a heap at her feet. Her head is as ugly as the rest of her face, covered with the same red stubble as sir Dirza's, and scarred here and there from ringworm. But her eyes, at least, are gray. Skin that pale and hair like rust mold are sure signs of a foreign bastard, but gray eyes alone are enough to cim nobility.

  That's all her cim rests on, really. On the red hair of a savage and the gray eyes of an Aretii dame, this pockmarked girl cims to rule the whole of their distant, rainy isnd.

  "I'll have that bitch flogged for what she said about you," she says.

  "If I may, your grace, there's no need. I've been insulted many times; it doesn't offend me anymore."

  "No one will ever insult you again. Now, hold on."

  From outside the driver calls out—"Tzantzi, up up!"—and with a great lurch the panquin rises into the air, spilling Xanh Ixa onto the floor as the mammoth's earth-shaking steps carry them through the camp. Outside, around them, she can hear captain Setama shouting to the soldiers, inside, above her, she can hear the queen ughing.

  *

  They come out of the forest at noon, trudging up a zigzag path in moraine slopes of mount Aga. A thin arete stretches across the sky above them, cutting across the sun. Less than league from here to Tzoake, but it will take them until sunset to get there. The path narrows their march to three abreast, the column stretching out of sight ahead and behind them. Xanh Ixa watches it zigzag up the road below: five hundred spearmen and a thousand archers, three hundred riders from the northern floodpins, ten mammoths mounted with ballista and firethrower. The biggest army ever seen in the southern provinces. Xanh Ixa wishes it were big enough.

  She'd know. She's fought northerners before.

  The queen gags. Xanh Ixa jerks her head from the window in time to see the queen grab the upper half of the door and throw her head out, puking a slurry of blue yams and saltcod onto the snow and scree below them. She sps Xanh Ixa's hands as she tries to pull her back inside. "I don't care if I'm shot!" she snaps. "I won't be sick in here!"

  With a st wave of her hand she colpses back into her seat, nursing her stomach like a wounded dog. From under her cushions she pulls a fsk of lifewater and drinks, amber liquid swirling down the bottleneck.

  "Your grace," says Xanh Ixa. "If I may—that won't help your stomach—"

  "Go back to hell!" the queen snaps. "Oh, I don't mean that. Don't look so gloomy."

  She stows her fsk.

  "How did you get those scars?" she says. "The demon?"

  "No, your grace."

  "Who, then?"

  "The man who was to be my husband."

  The queen stares at her. Xanh Ixa continues, suddenly embarrassed: "He saw that I was possessed and tried to kill me."

  "And how did you come to be possessed?"

  "I don't remember. I don't remember anything."

  "You remember nothing before your demon possessed you?"

  "I remember some small things. I remember that I dreamed of knives. I remember my uncle, Xanh Yuta, teaching me to fight. I remember something that might have been in another world— a tower rising into the clouds far away, like the Tower of Gss in Makara—but I don't remember being a child."

  "No memories? It's true, then, what some of my soldiers say—that you aren't Xanh Ixa at all, but a demon wearing Xanh Ixa's body, like I wear this dress. Where did you come from, demon? Did you come from deep beneath the earth, or did the Celestial Court cast you down from Heaven?"

  "Your grace, before House Xanh was destroyed, I remember only glimpses of things. So far as I know my own life, I know it secondhand. I was raised as a boy, but I don't remember it, anymore than I remember being a demon. I can only remember being this body. Being both, if you will."

  The queen smiles. "My soldiers think the demon changed your sex," she says.

  "If I may, your grace—as far as I can tell, I'm still a woman."

  "But you live all your life like a man, does it really matter?"

  "I don't understand, your grace."

  "I mean that I envy you."

  A whistle from outside interrupts them. "Messenger!" the driver shouts.

  Xanh Ixa peers out the slitted window. A young man is galloping towards them down the column, his horse snarling for breath. She slides open the panquin door as he approaches, swinging herself into the frame to catch the scrollcase from his staff. The sight of the muddy ground surging below them almost makes her vomit.

  Inside the panquin, the queen cracks the seal of the scroll on her knee. Her knuckles turn white against the parchment as she unrolls it.

  "Fuck my dead mother," she breathes.

  "Your grace?"

  "Read it."

  "I can't, your grace."

  The queen stares, suddenly incredulous: "They didn't teach you how to read? They wanted you to be a boy that badly?"

  "I was a poor student."

  "You'll have to learn soon. Auntie Lam has sent the Sons of Heaven after us. Two thousand of them under Kiran the shrike, with the northern dukes joining them as they go. Ersu Oe says he'll reach Iyan-Aisa in ten days, if not sooner. Her uncle's fled. She'll meet us in his pce at Tzoake."

  Xanh Ixa frowns. She's never been north of her family's home—a ruin now, the castle's roof caved in—but she knows those names, the pretender Unenune Lam and her pdog Kiran the shrike, and the well of cruelty that stands behind them, guarded by ten thousand soldiers in bck armor trimmed with gold.

  "We have plenty of grain from Iyan-Aisa and the border duchies already."

  "Not enough to st the winter," says the queen. "But we have one bit of good news from Makara, at least. Auntie is going to make me a winter solstice gift—a tombstone in the pace grounds!"

  *

  Lady Ersu Oe is waiting for them when they reach the abandoned keep of Tzoake. She sits beside the hearth in the roofless ruin of the castle's sor, snow falling on her cloak through the splintered rafters. At first Xanh Ixa thinks she has covered herself in yered bnkets, but then she turns to face them, her body rippling gently beneath the fine wool of her gown. Fat enough to make Xanh Ixa look thin, her stomach spreading from atop her girdle like a curtain, her fingers as plump as a babe's on the stem of her pipe. After years of eating once a day, of winters spent in mountain towns where women kill and cook their sons to stay alive, Xanh Ixa can barely believe her body is real. But as she watches Lady Ersu smile at them, gray eyes fshing in her dark, delicate face, she feels something break inside her, something built up over long years of training herself never to look too long at the polished bde of her give. Lady Ersu stands to serve them tea from a samovar, and even though Xanh Ixa is taller than her, she feels suddenly small at her side, as if she were a little boy again, falling asleep while Xanh Yuta carried her to bed.

  For almost one second she wishes she could fall on her knees as Lady Ersu's feet, press her face to the front of her gown, beg to feel the Lady's tiny hands around her throat.

  "My dear cousin," says the queen. "How is your hunt fairing?"

  "Poorly, your grace," says Lady Ersu. She eyes Xanh Ixa greedily. "A pity the first demon I meet is one of yours. Your horns would make a fine trophy down north, if we lived to show them."

  Xanh Ixa can barely breathe. Yes, she thinks. Cut them off. Make me worse. Make me so ugly no one would even rape me. Let me beg for you and tell me: No.

  "Do you speak Tfea, demon?" Lady Ersu asks, in Tfea.

  "Yes," says Xanh Ixa. "Do they still burn demons on Makara Prospekt?"

  "Not a spy, then!" says Lady Ersu. She turns to the queen. "And none of your friends at the door speak it, either?"

  "Only one," says the queen. Her Tfea is slow, precise. "But I trust him. Do you know where your uncle is, cousin?"

  "He's right where my men left him: in the oubliette, waiting for you. I suppose you've been thinking about what to do with him?"

  "I'm going to have my mammoth drag him down the road to Iyan-Aisa. Assuming you don't want to do the honors when we march down north?"

  Lady Ersu's eyes flicker from the queen to Xanh Ixa, and back again. "I want neither," she says. "You don't have enough men to face the Sons of Heaven. Or am I wrong, Xanh Ko?"

  The queen's eyes are horribly wide, glowing with rage. Xanh Ko swallows. "When they reach Iyan-Aisa, they'll have enough men to meet us. We might win, but badly."

  "You're being reckless," Lady Ersu says, emboldened. "If you march north now, just to get away from winter, they'll rout you. Better to stay up here, in the moutains. Let them think they're starving you out while you raise more men to fight for you."

  The queen spits into the fire. "And I suppose you mean to go back to Iyan-Aisa, and spend the winter doting on the Sons of Heaven while we starve in this frozen fucking aerie?"

  "I could be useful to you. The shrike's been ordered to marry me—as his wife, I could keep an eye on his generals. My men know this country much better than the Sons of Heaven ever will—there will be plenty of opportunities for me to pass along letters. I could even tell him that my men are spying on you, feed him lies—your soldiers are deserting you, your horses are starving, you haven't got enough weaponry. Perhaps we could even smuggle you some of that grain you won't stop talking about. Much more useful than adding two hundred spearmen to an army of the famished, I think."

  "Maybe we should embellish your tale a little," the queen sneers. "Just to make it convincing for the shrike. Perhaps you should say you barely made it out of here alive. Perhaps when Sir Kiran lifts the veil from his wife's head he should discover that she has no ears!"

  "Isn't making me carry the little fiend's child punishment enough, you grace? I'd say another winter up here is better than being raped and burned alive by the Sons of Heaven. Think of poor Xanh Ko here, how they'll make her watch while they share you like a wineskin—

  The queen grabs her cup and throws her tea in Lady Ersu's face. Milky liquid sptters across the floor, pops and hisses on the hearth and on the brass bowl of Ersu's fallen pipe. She ughs as she wipes her face. "You do have a man's temper, after all!" she cries.

  The queen turns on Xanh Ixa. "Do you have anything to say to this?"

  "No, your grace," says Xanh Ixa. "I don't. I know we don't have the grain to spend the winter in the south, but then, we don't have the men to survive the march north. We have no good choices, your grace. I think the generals would agree."

  The queen stares at her for a few moments, and for a minute, Xanh Ixa wonders if she will hurl her empty tea cup at her, if it will shatter against her heavy brow and bandaged horns.

  Instead, she storms out of the room.

  "Don't worry," says Lady Ersu, mopping the st of the tea from her face. "She's young. She'll see I'm right. Besides, why march north when you could hunt the hart with me tomorrow?"

  *

  Pgue and winter have left Tzoake an empty ruin, but the baths are warm, at least. In the caves underneath the castle a hot spring wells up from the rock, filling the basins with sulfurous water. Xanh Ixa can't remember the st time she's had a hot bath. But as she pumices the grim from her arms she begins to enjoy the bzing heat of the water, to forget the body hidden beneath its milky surface: the thick muscle of her arms, the heavy pad of fat on her stomach, the hideous bloat of her breasts. She'd forget her scars too, if she could, but her fingers find them all the same—the puckered seams where frostbite took three of her toes and half of two right fingers, the neat lines she can't remember engraving on her thighs, the long keloids torn into her legs and arms, some by arrow and sword, others by her own give, the demon wielding her limbs so fast the skin splits and tears like sodden paper, only to suture them together as soon as she can sleep, make her ready for another battle. There is nothing it will not force her to survive.

  She tries to touch herself—she can still remember Lady Ersu's face, her dimpled cheeks and doubled chin—but, of course, that's where the worst scar is, the long, fine line that runs from her navel to her cunt. The memory breaks her breathing: Xanh Yuta, eyes still red from crying, his full beard soaked with blood from the cut across his throat. Her mother beside him, her tattered arms thrown ten paces from her punctured chest and jawless head, and further off, Yuta's lover, Estri, bowels spilling into his dead hands beneath the elm.

  I killed them. They were hunting me and I tore their bodies into fucking pieces—

  "Xanh Ko."

  She pulls her hand from her face, forces herself not to sob. Akhti is standing in the doorway with a taper in his hands, his face lit from below. He's wearing a dress now, a pin peasant girl's gown, much subtler than the frilly suit he wears among the courtiers, but in the dress, with his long hair let down and his tattooed cheeks painted with a little rouge, he is suddenly beautiful to her, as he wasn't before. She sees him, finally, for what he is: a mere child, with no great name, born in the cold of the southern nowhere, without the slightest power over his own life.

  He could have been her body double, if not for those tattoos.

  "The queen—she needs to see you—"

  A sobbing ugh echoes down the hall behind him, and Xanh Ixa leaps out of the water, grabbing her give. She sees Captain Setama bnch, then face the wall, as she rushes past, Akhti following with her robe. "She's been drinking," Akhti says, his voice hushed, as if any amount of discretion would diminish the spectacle of Xanh Ixa, more than a head taller than him, running naked through the cavern with a give in her hands.

  The queen is drunk. Xanh Ixa has never seen someone so drunk, even at the summer dances where grown men drink entire pots of wine. She reels across the floor of her chamber, ughing and crying, a cup of lifewater sloshing from her hand onto her wet, half-open robe, her feet slipping in her own vomit. The smell of liquor and bile almost makes Xanh Ixa gag. She lets her give ctter to the floor and accepts the robe Akhti gives her, fumbling with the fasteners. She shouts through the door behind her, at the mob of courtiers and servants and Twice-borns thronging the hallway beyond: "Send for a healer, the queen has taken ill—"

  "No!" the queen screams, suddenly attentive. She throws herself past Xanh Ixa, beating on the door with her fist. "Out! Everyone, get out! Get out or I'll hang you all!"

  An avanche of running footsteps, bare feet and thin slippers spping the wet stone. The queen recoils from the door. She turns to look at Akhti, sees his bloodless, trembling face, and bursts into tears again: "Akhti, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to scare you—"

  She pulls him into her arms.

  "Your grace—" he begins, stammering in embarrassment.

  "Shh, my girl," the queen moans. "Don't be scared of me, please."

  "Your grace, if I may," Xanh Ixa says. "You might stand still and let him fix your robe."

  The queen glowers at her. "Don't talk to me like that. One word from me and you'd be on the pyre … oh, it's all a fucking farce, isn't it? But I did it, didn't I? I told you it would work, Akhti, my darling girl, I told you it would work. I've done it! I've done what all those dried-up old cunts wanted me to do, the only thing I'm good for until they put my ashes in the fucking ground … it's a bad py, a bad fucking comedy … but I've done it! Pray to mother on high a million times a day to make me a man and she gives me what none of those pretty painted sluts my grandmother squeezed out could get …"

  Xanh Ixa stares at her. The cloth of her robe is soaked through: her body, normally concealed beneath so many yers of silk and fur, is tiny, fragile, as gaunt from hunger as the bodies of her soldiers. In the dim light of the tapers, through the thick mist rising off the water, she stares at the queen, at her scarless skin, her ft belly.

  Xanh Ixa feels as if her stomach is full of ice.

  "You're pregnant," she says.

  "Yes."

  "How long?"

  "Since I st bled? Forty days."

  Xanh Ixa gnces at Akhti, cowering beside the wall, his eyes on the floor. "And he is—"

  The queen stares, then screams with ughter: "Him?! He wouldn't even stick it in another boy—oh, Akhti, I don't mean it that way, no …"

  "It's not an accident, your dyship," Akhti says to Xanh Ixa. His voice is getting steadier as he speaks: "I knew, but I'm not the father."

  "Then who is?"

  "Who cares?" says the queen. "If I can squeeze the little whelp out living next year no one will give a cold fuck who emptied his balls into me. I'll have the dynasty those barren inbreds in Makara can't keep up … an heir, Xanh Ko. Do you have any idea what the women in my family will do, how much silver and gold they will throw away, how many men they will send off to die, for this?"

  "We won't march north, then." Xanh Ixa says.

  "Without an heir, no one will support us," says Akhti. "There's no point in leaving the mountains if we can't raise men from the northern duchies. So we'll follow Lady Ersu's pn. Let Unenune Lam think winter has starved us out, then march north in the spring, with the child."

  "You still have to cim a father. He can be dead, he can be made up, but—"

  "He's already here," says the queen. "He's here right now."

  "But you said Akhti wasn't—"

  "Not Akhti, blockhead. You. You will be the father."

  She steps forward and slips; Xanh Ixa catches her mid-fall, the top of her head barely reaching Xanh Ixa's chin. Her body is still wet from the bath, slick and cold. Her breath pulses against Xanh Ixa's unbound chest, reeking of liquor. Xanh Ixa opens her mouth to speak, but the queen has cmped a hand to her mouth, fingers worming into her scarred cheek.

  "You'll be the father, because I'm already a bastard. My father fucked a red-haired mountain bitch and out I came. If I didn't have his eyes I wouldn't even bother trying to cim the throne. I can't say I'll continue my family's incestuous shit-stain of a dynasty after fighting a war against it, even if I could cim inheritance through the motherline. That line's dead. I have to found my own dynasty … you'll do that for me. You don't need to fuck me, don't even need to touch me, the thought that you could is all anyone will care about … Xanh Ko Ixa. The st survivor of a great house, a demon whose eyes were gray before they were bck. Born a woman, but now—no one knows! You're both, and you're neither. You're perfect."

  The queen lifts her hand from Xanh Ixa's mouth.

  "If you're willing."

  Xanh Ixa remembers the clearing in the forest. Remembers the ragged wound in Xanh Yuta's throat, and before that, in the castle, the blood on her own legs, the blood that never seemed to end, staining her gown and her quilt and the horsehair mattress of her bed, soaking through to the ropes below. Her mother's cold words: You are a woman now.

  Her mother bled more than Xanh Ixa ever would, her arms and legs torn from her chest.

  "I am," says Xanh Ixa. "I'm willing."

  She almost feels as if she has a choice.