Carolinne screamed at the top of her lungs, the sound rumbling through the soles of her feet and deep into the caverns below. The Falmer scattered before the fury of her voice, shrieking as they tumbled from dwarven-made ramps into the darkness below.
Rayya caught her as she fell, her scream turning into a wail. An eyeless straggler aimed another arrow at them and she blasted the creature with a bolt of electricity from her staff before it could cause them harm. It fell from its perch in the wall, its voice high, terrified and eerily human.
Rayya thrust her hands under her armpits and dragged her to safety. The walls chittered at her as she went and every now and again, an arrow bounced off the stone beside her. When a pale face stepped into their ring of light, Carolinne blasted it without mercy and screamed insults until it fled.
She grew quieter as they went. Her body relaxed and her limbs dangled limply at her sides. The staff slid from her fingers and Rayya made a mental note of where it was so that she might pick it up later when she had more free hands.
At last, the chittering ceased and the sneak attacks halted. She dragged Carolinne into the relative safety of an abandoned Falmer hut with a good view of the walkway below. Her hands shaking, she struggled to unhook the lantern from her belt to get a better view of the wound. A lump formed in her throat at the sight and the tears she'd been holding back prickled at the corners of her eyes.
There were two wicked black arrows, embedded deep in the meat of her thigh, side by side. Smudging the entry wounds was a viscous fluid, darker than blood. She touched it and took a sniff. Before the scent could register, her eyes caught upon the stark blueness of Carolinne's lips.
"Carolinne!" she hissed under her breath, seizing her wrist to take a pulse.
It was faint and weakening under her fingertips.
With a cry, she struggled out of the pack on her back and dug through it willy-nilly until she at last wrenched the alchemy kit free. There were so many little vials clacking around inside, the labels all written in Carolinne's impossibly crabbed handwriting. She found one with a dark black fluid inside, squinted so hard at the label that her eyebrows hurt and then wrenched the cork off with her teeth.
Carolinne gagged on the antidote, making a pained face as it was poured down her throat. Rayya held a hand over her mouth until she felt her swallow.
And then, waiting.
*.*.*
Carolinne groaned, her fingers curling in the dirt as she awoke.
"Rayya?" she breathed. Her voice was tiny and pained.
"I'm here."
Her head was in Rayya's lap. Rayya squeezed her shoulders reassuringly in the darkness. The lantern had burned out long ago. Only the faint light of the glowing fungi illuminated the space outside the door of the hut.
"That…"
She paused to cough, a horrible gagging cough that Rayya had to pull her up into sitting position to get through before it finally subsided.
"…wasn't…the plan."
Rayya smiled, unseen.
"No. We'll try again. But for now…"
She gently edged out from under her.
"We need to get you to a healer. Can you hang onto my shoulders?"
"I…think so, yes."
There was some barely lit shuffling as they got into position and a whimpering cry of pain as Rayya inadvertently brushed the shaft of an arrow while picking her up.
"I'm sorry." she whispered, her voice cracking as she tried not to cry again for inadvertantly inflicting more pain on her.
Carolinne nuzzled into the crook between her neck and her shoulder, uncomfortable as it must have been with her cold armor in the way. But she said nothing more.
Rayya began walking, softly, but with determination, her burden a dead, heavy weight on her shoulders. She tried to remember the way out without seeing it by lantern light, to trust that her feet would not fail her and send them both plummeting to their doom. To reassure herself, more than anyone else, she rambled in the dark, the words flowing almost nonsensically out of her, under her breath.
"We'll hike to Dawnstar…find a healer…maybe that priest'll do? And then we'll order the biggest meal that inn's ever made...ale and horker and sweetrolls...and then...I'll tell you a story…"
"Hmm..." Carolinne moaned, hugging her tighter and burying her face in her shoulder.
*.*.*
The refugee camp was situated a little ways out of Sentinel and as the southern coast of the country burned, it grew. The houses were ramshackle, clapboard affairs, most of them thrown up overnight. The one assigned to Rayya's family was exactly the same as the ones that surrounded it - two rooms, one window, a bit of an awning that made some semblance of a porch. One of the first things that Baba had done was make a little shelf out of some scrap wood, nail it in place beside the door and reverently set down the Book of Circles in its proper place. It was home, for now.
The water pump was on the opposite end of the camp and there was always a line to use it. But every time Rayya reached the front, she'd pause to take a long, deep, cool swig before filling the jug the rest of the way and taking it home. It was endlessly satisfying, after subsiding on tiny sips of water for so long. Part of her felt a lingering guilt for doing it, as though by drinking her fill, she might rob her family of their needed sustenance. But she was learning to let those feelings go, at least when it came to water.
Food was delivered once daily, on the back of a horse-drawn cart from the city and distributed according to the amount of people in a household. It was a pittance and only got smaller as the war wore on. In response to the shortage, a group of hunters got together to scour the desert and would trade their catches for things that they needed - rice, medicine, arrows.
Little businesses and services were springing up in every other house, it seemed. Here, a woman was offering music lessons. Here, a miniature smithy with a homemade smelter out back. Here, a small library scavenged from the ruins of a burnt-out city and carried across the desert on a cart.
Mama had begun to grow herbs again, in rough-hewn window boxes that sat on the ground. Some of them were for cooking, but the greater majority of them were medicinal. Iya was well-occupied in crafting tinctures and cures from those herbs. She sat under the awning all day, grinding them to paste, accepting any and all who came to her for help. Few had the means to pay her, but always, perhaps the next day or a week later, there'd be a bag of beans or a sack of flour sitting on the doorstep. So it was that the family survived.
This arrangement left Rayya and Baba fairly free to focus on her training.
He pushed her like never before. And she poured herself into it, as though doing so would rid her of the darkness that tugged at the edges of her dreams.
She ran laps around the camp, her heels kicking up dust as she sped past all of her staring neighbors. She stood outside until dusk, doing push-ups, squats, lunges, practicing her sword-strokes until she no longer knew the ways to do them wrong. In the heat of the day, when the air was heavy and still, she meditated, the sword blooming in her hand, each day more beautiful than the last.
By her thirteenth birthday, she had mastered the Third, Fourth and Fifth Cuts.
By her fourteenth birthday, she had attained the Sixth and Seventh. The Eighth was nearly perfect, but not quite there yet.
On that day, Mama revealed that she had secured honey enough to make shortcakes and they ate the results joyously, licking up every last crumb. Iya had begun painting again. Her gift was of the courtyard at home, with its blue agave and its untamed flowers twining through one another in their bursts of vibrant color. Her heart ached to remember, but she hung it up where she might see it upon waking, right beside the other one she had carried so far, all of these years.
Baba carved another notch on her stick. His gift was the beginning of her education in sparring.
She was terrible at it.
*.*.*
She had fought so many battles in her head. On the battlefield of her mind, her enemies were slaughtered by the hundreds and armies routed by her hand. Her strikes were perfected in theory and her form was unwavering in practice.
And yet - none of it seemed to mean a thing in the hard plane of reality.
With every idea she had, Baba had a better one. With every feint, he had a counter-feint. She could not get past his defense. She could not win against his offense. Every day was a test to see how many more bruises she could accumulate.
But still, she gritted her teeth and tried.
*.*.*
She crashed to the ground, her hand throbbing from the force of the blow, the stick vibrating in her hand. She tasted iron and realized that her lip was bleeding. Had she bitten it?
Some child watching from the sidelines was booing her, until its mother hushed it up. Her face flushed with the shame of being seen like this. She would have much rather sparred in private, but privacy these days was the most precious of commodities.
"Prepare to pay for victory in blood," Baba quoted sternly, his coat billowing in the wind, his cane held like a sword in his hand. "But do not waste a drop."
Not for the first time, she wondered why he had taken such care in bringing the Book of Circles along, if the entirety of it already resided in his head.
*.*.*
"The victor's tempo grasps his opponent's and devours it!" he bellowed, sweeping her off her feet with a surprise downward swoop of his cane.
She stumbled, her feet tangling with one another, before sitting on the dirt ungracefully. Baba smiled and extended a hand.
The child giggled quietly. Its mother was nowhere to be seen.
She got up on her own power, narrowed her eyes and planted her feet firmly on the ground.
*.*.*
He was backed into a corner now. Her heart swelled. Her sword stilled in anticipation. She could hardly believe she had done it and then -
She was on the ground again, her rear sore from falling on an old bruise.
"Do not lose the melody in the rapture of one note." Baba said gently, dusting himself off and planting his cane back on the ground.
Something clicked in her head. And this time, it wasn't her jaw.
*.*.*
Tempo, melody, note…
It was a dance. She couldn't understand how she hadn't seen it before.
Or…maybe it wasn't that much of a mystery. For all the years she had been away from home, she had assumed that following one path meant abandoning the other. But here was that path, resurfacing in a faraway place and rejoining the new one. It was not lost, but interlinked.
She hadn't danced in years. The music of the marketplace seemed so far away, a thing that had existed in another life, that had happened to another person. She tried to remember how it had gone, how the dancers had moved. She moved her feet to the beat of her heart and swayed alone beneath the moonlight.
She closed her eyes. In her hand, she imagined her sword as she saw it, blooming in her hand, its greenery spreading up her arm. She mimed the grip of its hilt as her fingers curled around its non-existent heft.
A fight was a dance with two performers interlocked in a contest of life and death. The tune they danced to was similar, but it was not the same.
The object was to cause a skip in the tempo, to seize that moment, to trip up one's partner. The stronger melody overpowered the weaker and became the victory song.
The idea of an antagonistic performance was at first a strange concept to wrap her head around. Never had she seen such a thing at home. She tried to think of how it would work - how it would go over in front of a crowd. And then she thought of that little gladiatorial action figure from the Imperial City in Baba's shop.
Performances like that happened all the time. She need only recognize them for what they were.
She hummed the tune in her head as she went through the range of cuts she had mastered, opening her eyes as she executed one single, perfect Eighth Cut.
The sword was gone. The music had quieted. But she knew how to find both of them again.
*.*.*
It was months before Baba even came close to yielding to her. There were times when she thought that she would never best him, when the comments of the onlookers got the better of her, when all of her moonlit dance sessions seemed for naught.
But improvement is a slow thing and so subtle that its presence can very well go unnoticed. Day by day, she was holding her own for a little longer. Far more often, her melody rose up over her father's.
The first time she bested him, she made use of a distraction. Mama was calling them both inside and in that instant, she had made her move. She did not quite consider it a fair win and was a bit disheartened that she should use such a low-down tactic to achieve her first victory.
But Baba was more than proud of her. He laughed as he struggled to his feet and clapped her on the back once he'd regained them. They broke open a bottle of wine that Iya had been given in payment for saving a woman's life with dinner to celebrate. Her head swam with the drink and in the midst of the dinnerside conversation, she made her peace with what she'd achieved.
In time, she scored more than enough fair victories too.
*.*.*
Sentinel's refugee camp was considered to be something of an easy target by the local marauders. It had no walls, no trained Watch, no oversight. In fatter years, the pickings would have been considered slim. A great many of the refugees had carried valuables with them, but as the war wore on, most of those things had been exchanged for more substantial goods - food, clothing, medicine, housing materials. It was no bandit king's prize, these goods of the chased and downtrodden.
But as trade from the south had dried up and caravans of wealthy merchants ceased hauling their wares across the desert, the marauders too, grew desperate.
Efforts had been made to combat the problem. Anyone and everyone within the camp with the slightest lick of military training were written into a rotating schedule for the Neighborhood Watch.
It was not a terribly inspiring militia. Most of it was old soldiers who were too infirm to fight in the war. The other third were striplings who had just barely entered into adulthood and figured out how to swing a spear last week. Rayya was too young to be inducted into the latter group, though she had shadowed Baba on his rounds more than once, her skin prickling with anticipation for the confrontation that never happened.
Weak as it was, the force did prevent its fair share of violence. Far more often than not, all it took was one desperate person yelling at another to halt the exchange of blows.
Mostly, that is.
*.*.*
Mama was ill.
She tried to hide how bad she felt and how much it effected her. She threw herself into her chores as hard as ever, though the effort left her twice as exhausted. Iya did her best to treat her and the sores that were ravaging her skin, but there is only so much that poultices can do for malnutrition. It was the lean season of the year and everyone was feeling it, though Mama was struck particularly hard.
Together, against Baba's inflexible pride, they had gone into the city and spent the day begging. Rayya had smiled sweetly at passers-by and done silly little dances to attract attention, though her heart was breaking all the while. Mama did her best to look pathetic. It was not at all hard.
By the end of the day, they had gathered gold for rice and beans enough for at least two more days. They carried their precious load home at dusk, their shadows long on the sand, Mama leaning on Rayya when she needed to.
Rayya was exhausted and her face still burned with shame, though she chose to believe that it was the lingering heat of the day. She kept her eyes on the ground as she walked, focusing only on her mother and the act of putting one foot in front of the other.
It was already too late when the man's shadow fell across their path. She looked up with a jerk and there he was - dressed in jackal hide, a crooked knife in his hand. Mama instinctively clutched the bag of rice to her chest and bared her teeth.
"Hand it over." he said evenly, almost gently, were it not for the knife in his hand.
He flashed them a smile worthy of a prince.
"No."
Her voice was a hoarse whisper, a croak against the inevitable.
"Hand it over." he repeated, his eyes narrowing.
He took two steps forward and the tip of the blade was under her chin.
Rayya felt as though she were falling backwards through dark water. Falling, falling and never reaching the bottom. Tears sprang to her eyes. She saw her mother's blood swirling in the water around her. She was helpless. A child, unarmed. She closed her eyes and reached for the only solid thing there was…
Her sword.
It sprang to her hand as easily as it had in years past, its weight solid and reassuring, its edge as sharp as the training of her mind.
She opened her eyes. The bandit was gawking at her, dumbfounded, the knife shaking in his hand.
The sword glowed under the darkening sky, its edge trembling, ghostlike, but real. Dead silent, her eyes widening until her irises were surrounded by a ring of white, she pressed the tip under his chin.
He bolted, his breathing ragged, his heels throwing up dust behind him, his limbs clawing desperately at the sand to get as far away from her as possible.
Rayya let loose a ragged breath and fell to her knees.