The Stars Are Legion(27)

Finally, after the food has been cleared and the little serving women come in carrying great jugs of red liquor, I see Jayd and Rasida enter the temple from the great stairway by which we came.

I stand with the crowd—hundreds of us here—as Jayd and Rasida advance, and my heart aches as I watch Jayd walk arm in arm with Rasida, up and up to the dais where the fat local woman embraces them both. The woman gives another speech while holding hands with both Rasida and Jayd. The woman begins to cry.

“What’s she saying?” I ask Aiju, but Aiju shushes me. The whole room is still on its feet, all gazes fixed on the dais.

The fat woman gets down on her knees. She has a very kind face, and though I cannot understand what she says, she says it with passion.

Rasida and Jayd lean over the woman. Each pulls out a long knife sheathed at the woman’s hips.

I’m still not sure what I’m seeing. I start to ask Aiju, but she preemptively shushes me.

Rasida and Jayd both repeat the same phrase, something in what must still be High Tiltre. Then, acting in unison, Jayd and Rasida each plunge their blades into either side of the woman’s neck.

I make a choking sound and jerk out of my seat, but Aiju grabs my sleeve, shushing me again like a child. The woman on the dais sways and falls. Jayd takes a bowl from the podium and catches some of the woman’s blood in it. She offers the bowl to Rasida.

Rasida drinks from it and passes it to Jayd. Jayd meets Rasida’s gaze and she, too, drinks the warm blood.

When they hold up the bowl together, there is a roar from the room. Not of fear or horror, but of approval.

Aiju claps her hands and shouts with the others. Then she says to me, “They are part of this world now.”

“Both of them?” I say. “I thought this would be Anat’s world.”

“It’s a complicated treaty,” Aiju says.

I see Jayd holding Rasida’s hand. They raise their bloody arms aloft. Jayd’s mouth is bloody. The former—what, First? Head? Leader?—woman’s body lies there between them. Jayd struck her down like so much chattel. And Jayd did not flinch or hesitate in any way. No gasp, no shaking. When Jayd finally catches my eye, she grins, and her teeth are crimson.

I look away.

When Jayd and Rasida are ushered from the dais, I sit heavily in my seat. “Will they go back to Bhavaja now?” I ask Aiju.

“Most likely,” she says. She peers at me. “You really shouldn’t be sad. Jayd has never had your interests at heart. She has what she wants now.”

“You think she always wanted to marry Rasida?”

“Of course,” Aiju says. She lowers her voice, looking meaningfully at Anat, who thankfully is engaged in conversation with someone at a neighboring table. “Jayd was never going to be Lord of Katazyrna. Anat would never permit that. She will have far more power bound to Rasida.”

“You think she meant to do this all along?” I ask.

Aiju pats my shoulder. “You wouldn’t be the first person she used to get ahead. She’s the best of us at getting Anat to do something she wants while getting Anat to think it was her idea all along. Have some drinks. You’ll feel better.”

I stare into my cup and see a bleary shadow stare back at me from it. It’s too dark for me to see my reflection properly, but I feel old, in this moment, and foolish. Sabita warned me about Jayd, and suffered for it. Now whatever Jayd wanted from me . . . is this it? Is it over? Was this Jayd’s intent all along, to get far from me and Anat so she could be co-consul of some other world?

There is more singing, more wine, and a great group of women begins to dance in three lines at the center of the room. I don’t remember this place or these people. None of these things is triggering any sort of memory at all, and I am deeply angered at that. Jayd has left me alone and broken with her mad mother and sisters. I have nothing.

Anat comes up behind me and puts her arm on my shoulder. I flinch, and she leers at me.

“We’re not here for Bhavaja,” Anat says. “Keep your eye on the Mokshi. None of this shit matters.”

But it does matter. My vision isn’t clouded like Anat’s with some single-minded purpose. I’m trying to see this not from Anat’s perspective, or even Jayd’s, but from Rasida’s. What is all this? Why have a ceremony here, set between the contested Katazyrna and Bhavaja spaces? I watch the women sway together at the center of the room, their hair all done up in elaborate hanks that have been twisted and plaited into large cross sections. I see the rime of whatever it is they’ve put into their hair, and it looks like rusty dried blood to me. If I was Rasida, all of this would be a show, a distraction, from my real purpose. I see Anat swigging from the cup in her other hand. I see her daughters all doing the same, and even if Jayd got herself into this mess through her own devices, I fear for her anew.

If it was me suing for a true peace, I would have invited both families to my own world and offered not just some planet but an exchange of organic matter. An exchange of sisters. But Rasida offered no such thing. She did not give Anat any of her own organic matter. Nothing of her own world. Only the cast-off leavings of this one. What did that mean? It meant Rasida gave nothing of herself in this joining, only the blood of some other people.

Rasida risked nothing.

Anat gave them a daughter. And in this place, among worlds where organic matter was the literal lifeblood of the world, and the Legion, a daughter was everything.