Rana was already up, as usual. Through the open door flap, Arram could see her tending a fire outside, mixing together ingredients in her small iron pot. She seemed to sense he was watching her and turned around not long after.
"Morning," she smiled, leaving the fireside and ducking back into the tent.
"Good morning," he replied.
"Come outside. You've been healing well."
Arram nodded, eager to leave the confines of the tiny tent, this time without being carried. Though his head and neck seemed to be in working order, it was a different situation for the rest of his body. When he tried to sit up, his abdominals trembled violently and were incapable of levering him up. He groaned, frustrated with his own weakness. The past few days, he had been doing nothing but drinking coconut soup and sleeping, and during his latest piggy back to the latrine, he thought his legs had felt stronger.
"Try rolling onto your stomach and pushing onto your hands and knees," Rana suggested, seeing his frustration.
He tried her suggestion and succeeded, though shakily. Pushing his weight onto his heels, he managed to heave himself into a seated position. The simple act of sitting up left his muscles drained.
She tilted her head to the left and studied him for a moment before saying. "I'll wait for you outside." She returned to the small pot on the fire.
He was determined to get himself to the fireside without help, and she seemed to have read his mind. He was reminded of Ozorne who had frequently been able to accurately guess people's thoughts or intentions. The prince had attributed his ability to his being a 'people person'. Arram had thought to himself that he must be a 'book person' then, since he would much rather spend a day with cracked leather and dusty pages than extravagantly dressed nobles who tittered about nothing while secretly hating each other. Numair hauled himself outside and plopped down across from her, exhausted. He saw that the pot contained more coconut soup and pulled a face. "I don't mind coconut, but one does tire of the repetition after a while."
Rana shrugged. "I don't have much else that makes a good soup, and I haven't gone into the city since I brought you here."
"How long ago was that?" Arram had completely lost his sense of time.
"Nine days." She stirred the soup once more and, satisfied with its consistency, took it off the fire. She threw some dirt on the fire to put it out and rose to fetch something from the tent.
Arram eyed her ease of movement with envy. He had never noticed how much energy it took to move one's limbs until now. Did being graceful like Rana take more energy than simply moving? He'd probably never find out. He had been clumsy since childhood.
She returned with an aish in her hand. Seeing his hopeful expression, she nodded and tore off a piece of the flatbread. "Here you go. Not coconut soup."
"Come on, that is hardly anything!" he protested. The portion she had given him fit neatly in his palm, the amount he would expect a toddler to receive with dinner.
She shook her head firmly. "Eat too much, too soon, and you'll get sick."
He sighed. He knew she was right. Many convents had taken in starving women and children, only to have half of them fall ill and die after their first plentiful meal in weeks. Healers could sometimes save the ill, but they still didn't fully understand the cause of the feeding sickness. Arram resigned himself to his small piece of aish, tearing it into smaller chunks so he could savour the feeling of chewing his food.
Unlike him, Rana was done her breakfast in a flash. "If you think you'll be alright for a few hours, I'll make a trip into Thak City."
"I will be fine on my own."
She fetched a small pack from the tent and set off for the city in the distance. "Stay inside the tent, and no eating until I get back, Numair!" she called over her shoulder.
It took him a few moments to remember that he was 'Numair'.
Arram's morning passed quickly. As instructed, he stayed inside, poring over one of the three books he had taken with him. It was a collection of intermediate and advanced combat magic. He couldn't put any of it into practice, for fear that Ozorne would detect his Gift and drag him back to the dungeons, but if he studied the book cover to cover, then he would stand a better chance against the battle mages the emperor had at his disposal. At the university, he had never focused on combat magic. Everything else was so much more interesting than blasting holes or throwing fire. Some of his friends had vastly outranked him in combat ability, but Arram had always been able to keep pace by drawing on raw power. Rana returned as he was visualizing one of the spells, saying the words but keeping his hands still and his weakened Gift tightly locked up.
"What are you doing?" she demanded, setting down her pack.
Arram opened his eyes. "Visualizing a combat spell."
"Visi-huh?"
"Visualizing. It is a mental exercise. You imagine yourself doing something so when you have to do it, you are more likely to do it correctly. I have been visualizing every spell in this book."
She shook her head. "Seems to me, the best way to get better at something is to do it, not pretend to do it."
"Well I cannot do the spell or there would be a huge crater in the ground and His Imperial Majesty would be out here in less than an hour," he shot back. "Alright, maybe just a moderate crater. My Gift is still rather drained presently."
"When do you think it'll be back?" she asked, pulling bags of food out of her pack and tossing them into the designated food corner, replenishing her stores.
"Whenever my body heals, I would say. It has been returning with my strength. I estimate a month or two would be sufficient."
"Well then." Rana turned towards him, a dagger in her hand that she had drawn from seemingly nowhere.
Arram tried to scramble backward, but his haste and weakness combined only caused him to lose his balance and land flat on his back. The combat magic book went flying and he winced internally when it hit the ground. He hated damaging books. His mind snapped back to the more imminent problem before him. He called his Gift and a small tendril of it rose within him. He was running the risk of some spell of Ozorne's picking up on his location, but that wouldn't be a concern if Rana slit his throat.
"Oh, stop that," Rana said calmly, a gentle smile coming to her lips.
Arram's gaze was glued to her face. Her smile was so soft. Rana's emerald eyes seemed to glow with disarming kindness. The very air around her looked like it had taken on the colour of her eyes. The deep green of meadows of lush grass, the colour of thriving trees, of life. He would be safe with her. The fire surrounding his large hand winked out.
"I only have to cut your hair," she explained, gesturing with the point of the blade, indicating that he should go outside. "You can't look like Arram Draper if we're going to hang around Carthak for a month or two."
The young man righted himself but didn't leave the tent. "You are Gifted," he realized.
"Yes," she said brusquely. "Now, come on, outside. I don't want your hair all over my floor." Rana stepped into the sunshine, leaving him to follow.
He did, laboriously, asking, "Can you do that again?"
"What, use my Gift?"
"Yes. Please."
She shrugged.
This time, his eyes were drawn to her right hand. His gaze never left the worn wooden hilt and the sharp grey blade. He felt a shiver run down his spine as the simple dagger commanded his focus. It was starting to emanate the same emerald green glow, but this time it reminded him of toxic brews in cauldrons instead of fields of grass. The green faded. "Does your Gift affect feelings?" he asked, puzzled. He was surprised by how differently he had reacted the second time.
"I'll explain after you sit," she said, tapping her foot.
Arram sat in front of her. "Can you try to keep-"
She gathered his matted hair into a horsetail and sliced it off. "No, I'm not keeping it long. Your height is odd enough. The less you look like yourself, the better. Now hold still."
He did, feeling the blade working very close to his scalp.
"As for my Gift," she continued, "it attracts attention. I can draw people's gazes, either to me or a part of me."
"Myself," he murmured.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"It's useful when I perform in crowded places, but I try not to use it too much. Especially in the richer neighbourhoods. Too many mages that could pick up on what I'm doing." When Rana finished with his hair, she went inside the tent and returned with a shard of a mirror. A strip of fabric covered the sharp edges, but she still handed it over carefully.
Arram hardly recognized himself. His long hair was all gone, cropped so close to his head he was sure someone would mistake him for a slave. His haircut wasn't perfectly even, but it was very good for having been done with a dagger. It was strange to feel the breeze on his scalp; he had grown his hair long from the moment he left Tyra. He shifted the shard of the mirror. Some scraggly facial hair had grown on his cheeks and chin. While on the run, he had been unable to take the time to shave. More than his short hair or beard, he was shocked by how skeletal his face looked. His eyes were sunken, staring out from shadowed sockets. His cheeks looked hollow. Looking down at himself, he saw how very thin his arms and legs had become, barely more than twigs with a few cords of muscle lashed on. Peeking underneath his dirty shirt, he was repulsed by the fact that he could count every rib. No wonder his Gift was so depleted.
She grabbed a bar of soap from her bathing items and worked up a lather with some water. Carefully, she shaved off his facial hair. It did not escape him that her hands moved with the ease of long practice.
"You did not mention you are also a barber," Arram commented, checking for cuts in the mirror. There were none.
She waved it off. "I've had this dagger long time." Rana gathered the rest of her bathing items and headed for the river. "I'm going to bathe," she said, changing the subject.
Arram made his slow way back to his book, careful to avoid looking in the direction of the river. His limbs trembled, protesting the labour. It seemed that he had reached the limit for moving today.
The woman interrupted another one of his visualizations when she returned, picking up the book off his lap and setting it aside. He had barely opened his eyes when she picked him up and returned to the river. "Your turn," she declared, blonde hair still dripping. She set him down on the bank and pulled his shirt off.
"I can bathe myself!" he cried indignantly.
"No, you can't. You barely made it back to your precious book just now." She pulled off the rest of his clothes and moved him slightly deeper into the water. "Nothing I haven't seen before, Master Numair," she laughed, catching sight of his beet red face.
"That's a different one than yesterday," she commented, eyeing his book from across the fire. "Is it also about combat spells?"
"No." He tilted the tome up so she could see the cover. Lushagui and Her Children: The Banjiku.
Rana looked over the title, then back at him, one eyebrow arched expectantly, waiting for him to explain why he was reading it.
"Some of my Masters at the university believed in a different kind of magic. It is not the Gift and it has to do with animals, so it was termed wild magic. I had a couple hypotheses that I had proposed to Master Lindhall and he sent me off to confirm them before I rambled at him again."
She rolled her eyes. "You need to stop talking like a scholar. A what-teses?"
"Hypotheses," he repeated, emphasizing the 'h' she had missed. "That's the plural. The singular is a hypothesis. A theory. A guess, really, about what wild magic can do."
"So? What can it do?"
"Wild magic manifests itself as a knack with animals. The Banjiku people are the most well-known example. Their mutual understanding with their animals is so deep, it gives the illusion that the animals speak Common. It appears to only be effective with one species per person, though. Another point I wanted to research was the intelligence of the animals themselves. Exposure and interactions with individuals harbouring wild magic may increase the intelligence of the creature, leading to eerily two-legger-like behaviour including attempting to keep records or grooming for vanity instead of cleanliness. I also wanted to explore the possibility of the gradual modification of two-leggers' features to resemble the species their wild magic connects them to. This last my be entirely due to the Banjiku's ideals of beautly, but the performers I have seen bear an uncanny resemblance–"
"Numair!" Rana shouted, stopping the stream of words tumbling from his mouth.
"What?" he asked, hurt that she had cut him off in the midst of such an intriguing topic. "You are not the slightest bit interested, are you?"
She shook her head. "No. I am. But you have to start over. Slow down, and use words that I can understand, alright?"
Arram sighed. He doubted he would ever be able to banish the scholar inside him. Haltingly, he began anew, watching Rana for glares or eye rolls that indicated he had once again chosen a word outside her vocabulary.
When he finished explaining his hypotheses to her satisfaction, she asked, "And you're going to find the answers to your questions in that book?"
"It is possible. I have been through it once, but not thoroughly. I have to read it again and pay particular attention to the legends and lore. Too often, a generation or two of ancestors gets skipped, or someone is called by three different names." He was expecting a laugh, or at least a smile from her at this last comment, but instead, Rana was frowning.
"You've already read the book?"
"That is what I said."
"And you didn't sell it?" she cried, "You know, for food?"
Arram pulled the book closer to him on his lap. "Books are invaluable. Priceless! Without written records, we would still be relying on legends and campfire stories to keep track of history. We would be suffering from all the inaccuracies and exaggerations that come with oral records. There is a wealth of information stored between the pages of every book, if only we took the time to read them."
She plopped her chin in her hand and narrowed her eyes at him. "You didn't read that combat magic book for the first time yesterday either, did you?"
"Yesterday, you were not reading the combat magic book for the first time either, were you?' he corrected.
"What? Is that another one of your rheti-questions?"
He sighed. "No. I was rephrasing your sentence. It could have been better constructed." This earned him yet another eye roll. "I was reading the combat magic book for the fifth time. If Ozorne does find me, I would like to be overprepared."
"What about your third book?"
He shook his head. "I am only a few pages into that one. It is a translation from Ancient Thak that I was working on before my arrest."
Rana's face dropped into her hands. "If it weren't for me, you would've been a dead man with two books he'd already read and a third that you didn't understand," she muttered into her palms. "And they say the university folk are smart."
"Sorry? I did not hear that. Your hands muffled your words."
"Never mind." The woman stood and dusted off her skirt.
"Are you going into Thak City again? I would like some ink and parchment. It would enable me to continue my translation," he said hopefully.
"I'll go tomorrow," she replied. "And you're getting charcoal. Ink is expensive. I have a dance to work on today." She walked a distance away from the fire and began to move to a song that only she could hear. Every once in a while, she would pause, repeat some movements, and change something until it was to her liking.
Arram watched, entranced by her seamless steps, each motion flowing smoothly into the next. She could have been gliding on clouds, he wouldn't have noticed a difference.
Another few days passed before Arram found that he had the mental capacity to work on his translation. He could devour books in Common no matter how tired he was. But Ancient Thak, the obsolete cousin of Old Thak, wasn't nearly as easy for him to read. His lessons in Old Thak were long ago and the half-remembered words did little to help him understand the ancient form. More often than not, he had to focus and sound out a word. "Wo-go-rah," he muttered, "Wogora. Look." He wrote the word down on the rough parchment Rana had bought him. In all his years at the university, he had never given his dark inks and smooth parchments a second thought. How he missed them now, trying hard to avoid smudging the charcoal already on the page.
"Hm mm hm me wogora..." Rana's humming drifted in softly from the outside. "Pah stargo... No, pah starga key me wogora. That's it."
He stuck his head out of the tent, thinking she was mocking his mutterings. But she was too far away to have heard him. She began to sing soulfully, pairing the slow song with the steps she had choreographed over the past few days.
"په سترګو کې مې وګوره
ته به و وينې ته څه مانا لرې وما ته
زړه دې و لټه
اروه دې و لټه
او ما چې پکې و موندې هلته,بيا به و نه لټوې نور
مه را ته وايه دا هڅه ورته کولو وړ ندی
ته نسي را ته ويل,دا ورته مړېدو وړ ندی
اتره يې رښتيا دي,هر څه کوم ستا لپاره يې کوم"
Arram watched, entranced. Her voice sang a beautiful melody, her body moved as if it was just as possessed by the music as he. She held her final pose for a few moments, then relaxed, sweeping a bow to an invisible audience. He closed his jaw and cleared his throat before he spoke. "You sing in Ancient Thak?" he called to her.
Rana turned and walked back to the tent. "Only that song. I had another Player teach it to me. People like to hear something they don't understand. Feels exotic."
"كيف هي لغتك العربية؟" How is your Thak?
".تعلمت العربية قبل أن أتعلم الإنجليزية" I learned Thak before I learned Common. ".والداي هما أردو لكنني ولدت مصريًا" My parents were Sirajit but I was born Carthaki.
"درباره فارسی شما چطور است؟" What about your Old Thak?
She snorted. ".بهتر از شما، با یک لهجه مثل آن" Better than yours, with an accent like that.
"Ancient Thak is not too far from Old Thak," he said, switching back to Common. "Yours is good. Try reading this, you might have an easier time than I am."
The woman looked at the page for a moment, then sighed. "I can't read."
Arram fought his disappointment. "Really, there are similarities. Take 'wogora' here." He indicated the word he had just translated. "The 'wo' syllable is similar to Old Thak, but with an extra tail. See?"
She shook her head. "No, you're not listening. I didn't say I can't read Ancient Thak."
He blinked, making sense of what she had said. "You can't read at all? Not Old Thak? Thak? Common?!"
Rana shook her head for each language he named.
"Sirajit?" he tried.
She threw her hands in the air. "Is it so hard to believe that I can't read? It might not be something you've come across before, Master Scholar, but almost half of the poor can't read."
"But- but then..." he stammered. He couldn't fathom being unable to read. To never read a single book, to never escape into the depths of a story or to never learn what scholars of the past had to say. But even more astounding, the inability to read a street sign or a vendor's prices. "How do you... get by?" he asked, unable to come up with another phrasing.
Rana glared at him. "It's not that hard. Other people who can't read don't write things down. People who can read will read things to you if you ask nicely. You just need to learn a few numbers and make sure you're not getting cheated. Reading isn't something I need to be able to do."
He closed the book and set it aside. Pulling a fresh sheet of parchment from his stack, he wrote a large 'A'. "Sit here," he said, indicating a spot on his left. "We will start with Common."
She turned on her heel and walked back to where she had been dancing. "I don't need to learn to read!"
Rana sat on the bank of the river and dipped her toes in the cool water. The nighttime sounds of the desert filled her ears as she looked up at the sky. Clouds blocked the light of the stars. "Your kind of night, huh?" she murmured. "I never liked clouds the way you did." Reaching next to her, she uncorked the small bottle of date wine she had purchased earlier that day. "To you," she toasted, in the direction of the river.
As she took her first sip, Arram ducked his head back inside the tent. His trip to the latrine could wait for her private moment to pass.