Akeha tilted his head. “Are you questioning a prophet’s vision?”
He swallowed. The scene—blood, death, grief—had clearly shaken him. “Then you will die,” he said to Rider.
“Indeed. It is a fate I have accepted.”
Raja Choonghey moved away from the table and paced impatiently. The pop of his knuckles as he cracked them was the only sound in the room. His frown burrowed more deeply into his face. “But the vision did not show my daughter’s fate.”
“No,” Rider said. “And that is good. She should not be there. In my plan we would take her to safety before I deal with the naga.” They pointed. “Mokoya will do it. She has learned skills that allow her to travel instantaneously.”
Mokoya’s cheeks burned at this tiny betrayal, at Rider roping her into their suicide mission without her consent, but she said nothing.
Raja Choonghey rubbed his face. “This is madness,” he said. “I can’t risk my daughter’s life on these illusions.”
“These illusions are proven,” Rider said.
“Do you have a better plan?” Akeha added.
The raja struck him with a glare, jawbone milling through his anger. Finally he said to Rider, “Very well. If that is your choice, then that is what we shall do.”
*
As they were leaving the chamber, Thennjay caught Mokoya by the arm to draw her aside. “Nao . . .” he said. His expression did the rest of the talking for him.
“Don’t worry about me,” she replied, flat and practiced, like she was reading off the lines of the First Sutra.
He rubbed the skin of her lizard arm, where the colors had faded to a muddy blue-gray. “I can’t help it.”
Mokoya wanted to say, It’s all right, I’m all right, everything is going to be all right. But faking a smile required energy; steadying her voice required strength. And she felt emptied of both.
So she said, “I’m tired,” and leaned into his bulk. Thennjay wrapped his warm, solid arms around her. Mokoya imagined herself dissolving in his embrace, her molecules scattering unconscious and pain-free to the ends of the known world.
All her life she had been stalked by a particular shadow of fear. In its teeth this specter held visions in which her loved ones were hurt and killed. She would lie awake at night, feeling the prickle of a prophecy creeping toward her, and be terrified of falling asleep, just in case she woke to a vision of Thennjay succumbing to poison, or Akeha lying in a back alley with a blade through his heart.
When the accident killed her daughter, she had been furious at the shadow for betraying her, for not showing her an actual tragedy when it was about to happen. She had wanted to know, or thought she had wanted to know. Sometimes she thought this anger was what had driven her prophetic ability away.
Now it had returned after many years, and it had brought her this gift as though mocking her. She had been wrong. She did not want to know. It was not making the pain any easier.
Thennjay held her until she somehow found the will to separate from him. “Go to them,” he said softly. “You still have time.”
*
Rider had fled to the tent city, as though they could not stand to be in Bataanar a moment longer than necessary. When Mokoya found them, they were crouched by Bramble, stroking the naga’s snout as they whispered in a language Mokoya did not know. She stood watching them, afraid of shattering this moment of languid tenderness.
Rider looked up. “Mokoya.”
She approached them slowly, her limbs heavy as though she dragged a promise of violence in her wake. Rider looked at her, patient, waiting for her to speak.
“She was the one who hit you,” Mokoya finally said. “Tan Khimyan.”
“It’s past,” Rider said. “It does not matter.”
“The past always matters,” Mokoya said. Especially when there was no future to hold on to.
Rider nodded slowly. “She often got into bad moods. And it would be my fault, for behaving so badly, for provoking her temper. She would say those things to me.”
“You weren’t to blame. Violence is the fault of the one enacting it. Always.”
“I know that, Mokoya. I know now.”
She touched their face gently, trailed fingers down their chin and the tendons of their neck, ending at the border of words spelling Rider’s life story. “Why didn’t you just leave, then?” Not an accusation, but curiosity. She wanted to understand Rider.
“Because I loved her, Mokoya. Because I was a fool back then, terrified by a city and a world I did not understand.” They hesitated. “And because of my daughter.”
Mokoya froze. “Your daughter?”
Rider broke away to search through one of Bramble’s saddlebags. They returned with a picture scroll, which they unrolled and tensed to life. The thin brown sheet lit up with a looping, repeating sliver of life: an olive-skinned young woman, generously dimpled, laughing in the sunlight.
“This is Echo,” Rider said. “She was an orphan I met on streets of Chengbee years ago. All the time we lived in the capital, Khimyan never suspected I was helping raise a girl in a workshop in the Lower Quarter.”
The girl had such a lightness to her smile, a radiant glow of hope. “Where is she now?”
“She lives in Chengbee still. She is grown now, a dragonboat jouster and an apprentice to a medicine seller.” They pressed the scroll into Mokoya’s hands. “When this is over, will you look for her? For my sake?”
She cradled the scroll between her fingers. “What should I tell her?”
“Tell her I died protecting those I care for. She will understand.”
Who was Rider protecting, and from what? Mokoya nodded anyway. “What else will you have me do?”
“I would ask you to watch Bramble.” Behind them, the naga rumbled at mention of her name. “She will stay behind when we execute the plan. Since she did not feature in your prophecy, her fate is not yet locked. I would like her to survive.”
Mokoya frowned at their phrasing, her fate is not yet locked. It struck her as strange, for reasons she could not identify. Rider continued, “Bramble has never lived without human companionship. She would not survive in the wild.”
“Phoenix won’t object to a playmate,” she allowed. “Anything else?”
“My bones.” As Mokoya sucked in a breath, they said, “They will be a record of who I am . . . who I was. I would like you to keep them. Your husband could perform the death rituals, could he not?”
She wanted to say, You were supposed to teach me how to read the words, but what would be the point of saying that, except to cause them more grief?
“We could preserve the bones, yes,” she said. “Is that all?”
“There is one more thing.”
“Tell me, then.”
“I want you to live.”
Air thickened in Mokoya’s lungs. “What?”
Rider’s hands wrapped gently around her arms as though she were an eggshell carving, fragile and precious. “I want you to embrace what fortune has bestowed upon you. I want you to look ahead with no regrets. I want you to carry the memory of what happened here into the future.”
Mokoya could not tamp down her reaction. “I can’t do that. I can’t pretend that it’s all okay—”