Chapter 1
Courtiers and palace servants turned as Tesha and Hattu entered the stone-paved courtyard outside the Great King’s throne room. The gilded door to that room, guarded by carved lions, glimmered from under the roof of the portico. Tesha lifted her chin. What went through these onlookers’ minds? Did they believe the whispered accusations that Tesha was a sorcerer?
Or were they admiring Hattu, her husband, the most successful and popular general in the empire? He was beloved, even though he was only a vassal king with nothing more than a small fractious corner of the Great King’s empire to rule. It wasn’t Hattu’s fault if some courtiers saw him as a more capable ruler than the callow Great King Urhi.
Hattu had made a vow at his older brother’s deathbed to support his nephew Urhi, despite the boy’s concubine mother and inexperience. Even now, Hattu insisted the uneasy peace between him and Urhi was better for his family and the empire than a rupture that would lead to civil war. But Tesha saw her family balancing on the honed blade of a dagger. A small incident could tip them into bloodshed that would encompass the whole empire.
Without looking, Tesha reached for her daughter, Arinnel, to pull her close amid this untrustworthy crowd. By kidnapping and threatening to murder Arinnel three years earlier, the Great King had already proved that he’d use any means to exert his power over his uncle and supposed mentor, King Hattu. Tesha stretched out her arm, but her fingers grasped empty air. She turned. Her little girl had vanished. Tesha whipped back and forth, her red veil and dark hair flying around her as she searched.
“Where’s Arinnel?” She clutched her husband’s arm and saw panic bubble up in his eyes to mirror her own. “Where is she?” Her four-year-old daughter had been right beside her.
Tesha’s gaze darted around the wide courtyard in the heart of Great King Urhi’s palace. Clusters of nobles wrapped in embroidered cloaks whispered among themselves. On a wicker altar to one side, a long-robed priest offered grain and wine to the Stormgod, patron god of the Great King. Incense rose in a perfumed wisp, scenting the air. In another corner, a slaughter priest led a bleating ewe toward a stone slab darkened by generations of blood. But no tiny girl stood beside the priests or noblemen or hurried along with the royal messengers in saffron livery under the limestone portico that shielded the courtyard on four sides.
How could a child disappear so quickly? The bustle of their arrival had consumed Tesha’s attention. She looked behind for her son and saw the baby was safe in his nursemaid’s arms.
Bringing her children to Urhi’s capital always felt dangerous, even if this visit from their vassal kingdom to advise the Great King was supposed to be routine, one of many unpleasant but necessary consultations over the last three years. Tesha’s grip on her husband tightened. “Has someone taken Arinnel?”
Hattu shook his head, but his face was taut. The scar that cut through his left eyebrow stood out starkly white against his olive skin. “She was holding my hand all the way through the palace complex until . . . She must have run ahead to the guest lodgings.” He turned toward the low mud-brick building where they stayed on these visits, separate from the grand living quarters of Great King Urhi and the rest of the royal family. Never mind that, as Urhi’s uncle, Hattu had grown up in those regal rooms. Hattu called to the guard by the lodgings’ door, “Did you see Princess Arinnel? Did you let her in?”
“No, King Hattu. She hasn’t been this way.” The burly guard looked alarmed by the question.
Tesha peered into the courtyard’s corners, where the portico roof blocked the autumn sunlight. Arinnel could easily have been snatched through one of the various doorways. Great King Urhi feared Tesha’s magically powerful daughter. Had some event convinced Urhi he needed to force their subservience by once again taking their daughter hostage? Urhi had lost more than he’d gained by that crime the first time, but had he ordered his men to repeat it? No! Please, my goddess, not that.
Tesha’s blind sister, Daniti, stood nearby, her unruly fair curls escaping from her brown veil. She slowly turned in a circle, stopping to listen, and then shifting again to listen from a different angle. She sent out soft clicks and thrumming that returned to her to locate people and objects the way others used their eyes.
Tesha clasped Daniti’s shoulder. “What does Arinnel say to you? Where is she?” Daniti had been able to communicate by sending thoughts silently with Tesha’s daughter even when Arinnel was in the womb. Aunt and niece shared this magical way of conversing, at first in images and emotions, later with words as well.
“I can’t make her answer me. The last few days she has closed me out. Shh.” Daniti lifted her finger to her lips and turned from one side to another, listening. “I hear a child’s footsteps. Come. Arinnel is on the battlements above us.”
Tesha’s glance jumped to the fortifications surrounding the palace. Steep undulations shaped like a serpent topped the parapet, providing depressions where guards could look down. Even those low spots were high enough to block the sight of a child, but she trusted her sister was right.
Hattu tipped up his face. “On the battlements?” His hand shot to his sword hilt.
Tesha followed his gaze as it passed over the guards quietly standing on duty, their heads visible above the serpentine parapet. He relaxed his hold on his sword and nodded to her. “Go. I’ll stay with the baby.”
Daniti stepped forward, guiding herself as usual by clicking her tongue to feel the echo off the walls and obstacles ahead. Tesha took hold of her anyway and headed them toward the narrow, enclosed stairwell that led to the walls.
Before Tesha ducked into the dark cavity, she glanced up. The walls were so high. A fall from such a height would be fatal. What had possessed her little girl to go there? And it was so unlike her to shut out Daniti. She started up the stairs. “Arinnel! Where are you?” Her voice echoed hollowly back to her. The two sisters ran up the turns of the musty stairwell in a clatter of footsteps.
Climbing out onto the brightness of the palace ramparts, Tesha scoured the battlement walkway. Farther along, she found Arinnel up on tiptoes, poking her head through a slit in the parapet, her weight shifting toward a plummet. Tesha’s throat locked, and she raced forward to grab her.
“What are you doing up here alone? You could have fallen.”
Arinnel shook herself free from her mother’s panicked embrace. “No!” Extending her skinny arm, she pointed an outraged finger at the slit as if to say even she could not fit through it, and she was right.
“You cannot run off on your own like that.” Tesha drew in a shaky breath. She called down to her husband that their daughter was safe.
Daniti came up behind her. “At least we found you, Arinnel, but don’t frighten us again. I would have taken you up here if you’d asked.”
Tesha held on to her daughter’s shoulder. “It’s always something with you.” She turned toward Daniti and stopped, transfixed by the sweeping view. Flooding back into her mind came the unsettling vision her goddess Ishana had sent five nights earlier. In it, she’d floated without any support above this city and felt the same frantic fear that now overpowered her senses. She gasped, her fingers slipping from Arinnel’s shoulder. Would she finally unravel the vision’s meaning?
Humming to herself, Arinnel skipped away from her mother and aunt. Interspersed along the narrow stone path atop the palace fortifications were squat towers of the same height as the walkway. They supported wide platforms from which to deploy large groups of soldiers. Arinnel headed toward the nearest of the platforms. Tesha called out, “You stay where I can see you. No more troublemaking.”
“Yes, Mother.” Arinnel turned her head to deliver a smile, as if to say she was trying to be good. “I wanted to see from high up.”
Tesha returned her attention to the view and the divine message she hoped she’d find. It wasn’t easy to be a devotee of the goddess of love and war. Beyond the parapet, the empire’s capital sprawled over a series of deep gullies and rocky outcrops, interspersed with more approachable areas of rolling hills and valleys. On the far horizon, encircling mountains jutted up like lion’s teeth through a haze.
“It’s the vision I described to you,” Tesha told Daniti, “of the city around us and the empire.” In it, she’d looked down on the capital as she did now, but all the while floating with nothing solid under her feet. She’d been certain if she took a step in any direction, she would plunge to her death.
Daniti slid her arm around her sister and struck her foot against the stone pavers. “You won’t fall.”
The night before they had set out on their journey to the empire’s capital, the goddess Ishana had sent her this vision. Tesha had tried to interpret its meaning before they left their own small capital. That was the point of the divination dreams she’d received since girlhood, the guidance the goddess sent to her priestess.
The overwhelming fear the dream caused her must be a warning from Ishana, but of what? Something here in this place she disliked so much? This city where Urhi had dragged her baby daughter after he’d stolen her. She and Hattu had used a threat of humiliation in front of the empire’s allies to force the Great King to release Arinnel, and they’d held off a self-destructive civil war, but only with a brittle agreement that would not take much to shatter.
She leaned against Daniti. “I don’t like walking into Urhi’s traps.”
“You think Urhi’s up to something? My spies haven’t reported trouble, but perhaps the goddess knows more than my spies.”
Tesha noted her sister’s uncharacteristic concession to Ishana, but it was more likely ironic than sincere. “The vision didn’t feel like most of my divination dreams. On a bigger scale or—”
“You did say you were hanging above the empire.”
“I’m not sure what the goddess meant. The warning seemed directed against me, not for me. I used to feel the goddess’s support through my dreams. Now I don’t know what I feel. She’s guiding me, but to what?”
“Perhaps you should consider if she’s luring you rather than guiding.” Daniti spoke in the barest whisper. “Perhaps the trap is another of hers.”
Tesha grimaced. Still, she couldn’t dismiss her sister’s suggestion. She laid a hand over her ribs where she harbored her connection to the goddess Ishana. She sensed that spot as warmth and a golden light visible only to her inner sight. There lay the source of her magical power, but she had learned to receive Ishana’s divine guidance with caution as well as proper devotion. Not all her goddess’s wishes had proved wise.
Tesha shook off the tightness in her shoulders. Even the hint of opposition to Ishana was too dangerous to consider. Besides, her goddess had always wanted what was best for Tesha. The difficulty was that what she viewed as best did not always sit well in Tesha’s heart.
Looking down the walkway at her daughter, Tesha forced a teasing tone into her voice. “Or maybe it’s Arinnel who’s lured us into a snare.” She studied her daughter. Was Arinnel up to something? She could never be certain with her magical daughter. Farther down, Arinnel slowly circled the largest of the broad tower platforms. Tesha felt a pang at how tiny she looked on that wide expanse. Her daughter showed no sign of catching up to the size of other four-year-olds. Arinnel stretched out her arms, swooped in a spiral around the platform, and then carefully paced from one side of it to the other. What game was that?
Tesha rested her head against Daniti’s shoulder. “How can I keep us safe if I don’t know what the danger is?”
She eyed the surrounding city again. Her husband did his best strategizing when he had a wide view in front of him, as she did now. “Maybe Arinnel’s bolting was the goddess’s way of bringing me here. To help me understand my dream. It is dramatic the way the city spreads out below us.”
“I know. I can feel it.” Daniti tipped up her face, apparently savoring the air coming to her from the open spaces. Tesha shook her head in puzzled awe at her sister’s awareness of distance and ability to navigate.
She sighed in frustration and scanned the landscape. “What am I supposed to notice up here?”
The city’s chaotic layout disturbed Tesha with its ragged heights and depths. Many key buildings perched on rocky outcrops, as did the palace situated on a high bluff. Winding around those promontories, the city’s rolling hills and narrow valleys held neighborhoods of temples, homes, workshops, storage or water reservoir complexes, and royal offices that could not be accommodated within the palace complex. Some areas of land lay uninhabited, either because buildings had been abandoned in these trying times or the land was too inaccessible for any structure. Walls as broad as four men across with arms extended encompassed the vast city, echoing those around the outer edge of the palace bluff where she now stood. Looking out under a gloomy sky, Tesha saw no divine guidance, only too many places for trouble to hide.
Daniti pulled Tesha from the parapet. “Let’s fetch Arinnel. Your arrival will have been announced to Great King Urhi. If you make him wait, he’ll take offense.”
“I loathe these royal consultations.”
“Of course, but if there’s something unexpected going on, then it’s best not to provoke Urhi’s bloated sense of himself.”
“Too bad we can’t prick a hole in him and watch him deflate like a faulty bellows.”
Daniti laughed, but she drew them both toward Arinnel, whose footsteps rang out as she ran from one side of the platform to the other, singing some unintelligible song to herself. Tesha shook off the vision’s hold. These detested visits to Urhi’s court were essential, both to remind Urhi how much he depended on his uncle’s far greater experience and, gradually, to mentor Urhi so that he would become a competent ruler. That had been Hattu’s promise to his brother. Little had he known how hard it would be.