I walked to my own hanging with a lighter heart than I now carry with me. It feels like the organ has been transmogrified to the same old, dark stone that peaks out at me from the Goddess-House. Maybe it's simply turned to metal to match the dress, a sheet of silver I could heat over a forge and hammer into a sword. Or at least a shield. Something to deflect the gaze of ten thousand eyes, the cries and cheers of five thousand voices. The only weapon I now wield is my face, and I do everything in my power to keep it from betraying my rising panic. My pained desperation. My hate, hot and thick, as they call out well wishes.

I liked the hanging better, to be honest. Many of the spectators called me a traitor and a whore, many cheered at my supposed betrayal of my family, but there were still those among the assembled Arzsans that looked on with sympathy. Pity. Their eyes told me they still, as Kaza said, 'flew my flag in their hearts.' Now, there's an almost rabid merriment, a determination to be joyful as the world around us burns and smolders. There's a desperation peeking through the celebration, a need to abandon the past they have so thoroughly betrayed. To forget whose blood stains the streets they walk and dance on.

If I could tell them one thing, besides the truth of my loyalty to my family, it would be this: there is no way to cut yourself off from your beginnings, from your past, and still be whole. There's a reason plants in the desert grow from thick, deep roots. Those that just scratch the surface of the sand lose their footing in dust storms and droughts. They die. People are no different.

Forgetting is unfathomable.

Even now, the ghosts of the past walk beside me. The ululating notes of the Asenah played for my processional take me instantly back to a green and gold eyed boy who played it like he carved the first one from river reeds himself. My cousin Riva rarely talked, but his voice still carried. Music flowed through his fingers like silk through a half-open fist. His brother, older by three years yet shorter by a foot, talked a great deal. Dama will always be to me the little boy who snuck his way inside the private rooms reserved for greeting foreign dignitaries to steal the besmo'ín chocolates and imported Mirrenovese dates kept there. The handsome idiot who cut one of Alya Morevni's braids from her head as she slept and mounted it atop the flagpole the next morning.

We would sit beneath the stars on summer nights and, if we were lucky, Rivashi would pick up the Asenah and play a few notes, and Damaros would stop his flirting long enough to join his brother in any number of old songs. I remember my uncle Nather saying that even the old songs sounded new when Iddra's sons sang them. Haim was their father; that's where Dama got his drinking and whoring from, I think.

And now they're just.... gone.

And I'm not.

And I still can't decide which is worse.

I steel myself, imagining that my dress is armor wrapped tightly around me. The thousands of diamonds flashing silver in the sunlight are tiny daggers. My eyes burn, but I do not blink. Everything is so fragile, so dependent on everything else. A million memories flow back to me from the deepest rivers of my mind. A twig snapping in a dam upstream might undo everyone living along the banks. Another blink, another breath, the wrong scent on the wind, and I could crack like the old Harrowin stone beneath the Goddess-House facade.

I do my best to keep my head up, my eyes ahead, as I am washed by the tides of the life I lost. It seems fitting, almost, that if my family cannot be with me on my wedding day in body, they are here in spirit, haunting my mind like unquiet ghosts.

Maybe I'm the ghost, I think. What a strange turn that would be, to wake up one morning and realize that they all still lived, somewhere far away, and it was I who had slipped down dead into some indeterminate hell. I know it's not true, but if I closed my eyes I could half convince myself of it. Reality feels as thin as reeds along the riverbank.

In my mind, another girl walks beside me. She's a mirage, I know, nothing more than a whisper of blue silk and gold hair, but she feels more solid than even the diamonds studding my dress. My mother, who was always meant to walk with me on my wedding day. Only twenty four and closing the distance between her present and an unfathomable future.

Time collapses on itself for an instant, a gyre inside a gyre. Condensed, pulled, pushed through our corner of eternity. Kyoro is walking the mosaic path at my right. She's thinking about dark stone, ancient and indefinite, and about the man who waits for her at the ara inside. Vyzsan Torath Koritzu is twenty-eight years her senior and far from her choice. In her chest burns a righteous rage at her older brother Arjuuna for forcing the match. He'll be dead three years later, and her own husband only seven, but both seem near-immortal to the girl asked too soon to take up the mantle of womanhood.

At her feet, the people have scattered flowers so thickly that she can't make out the designs she's walking over, just hints of the colors used to render them: shards of red, sky blue, and brilliant gold flash up at her. She knows without seeing that it's an elaborate rendering of the eye of the goddess, repeated over and over again. Every fifty paces or so her foot lands on the emerald of a pupil. She wonders what the view is like from so low, how distorted this all looks to those eyes eternally embedded in the concrete walk. Maybe the goddess is just seeing up her skirts. Zsavina, she thinks with more than a little irony, are you enjoying the view?

No, that can't be it. I may play at being a lady, but my mother Kyoro was one. She wouldn't think something so sacrilegious.

Well, I have never been my mother's daughter. With my next step, I dig my heel into the bunches of ethevesti and albiona covering Zsavina's pupil and twist. Hard. If I am a grain of sand in your eye, Oh Great Mother, I think bitterly, at least you won't blink me away painlessly. Before I leave you, before you cast me down to the dust at your holy feet, you will feel me. You will see me. And so I dig my heel in deeper, adding a shadow of deep blue to my already stained slippers as the petals weep their brilliant sap beneath my feet.

What arrogance! I can feel the facets of her emerald eyes cutting into me, looking past the façade of silk and silver, past the opulence of the carriage and my mottled shoes. Digging into me like fish hooks and dragging me up by my gills to swing, swing, swing before the specter of the carving knife. That is what I am, whatever my clothes might suggest. A fish on a hook, gasping for air in the fucking desert. Maybe all of Shikkah is, and I know to my marrow that all the water in the river Imer couldn't make it swim again.

But the banks of the river still lie low. Despite the promises of the coyote prophet, the rains did not come and restore the fields to the bloom of a ripe harvest. Fucking idiots, I think, gritting my teeth. Stupid fucking sheep herded by food and fear, smiling at this travesty and wishing me well.

They cry out to me. Ji, mem'ai chezsed aroshi. May your union be blessed with many children. Nuuin talasha telu yasvineh. May you never know sickness or death. Kor Dizsa, katyan tefit astal tirasat. Dizsa, may the goddess keep you forever in her eye.

Bless us, is what they're really saying. Save us, their half frantic eyes beg even as they shake their mavva and sugar sweetened wrists at me like dancer's bells. Tell us something beautiful. Promise us we are safe. Paint over the bloodstains that mar the face of this city. Fill our bellies and furnish our houses; we are tired of the war we weren't even brave enough to fight.

Sholu's miracle isn't his words. It's his ability to speak and have them each hear their own voice. Their own prejudices justified. Their own desires gratified. Their own fears assuaged. His light comes from being little more than a mirror. Reflect, deflect, amplify. Mollify.

Maybe Manit was right. Maybe I never loved them. I certainly don't now, and I don't care to. I don't want to forgive them. I don't want to forgive anyone. Not Sholu. Not his drug peddlers and bawds. Not his brutal mercenaries. Not my guard, not even Undercaptain Kaza Utim O'utena. Not Arzsa. Not Shikkah. Not Zsavina. Not even my own mother.

I already know I will never forgive myself.

As I reach the door of the Goddess-House, I tell myself the truth for the first time since the night when fireworks became bullets. I am furious at the world, I hate these people around me, but I hate myself more. I became obsessed with saving Halima Royen's life because I knew I couldn't save my own, and maybe I didn't want to. Maybe I throw barbs at Kaza every time he's kind to me because I know he told the truth when he said we were the same. Hypocrites. In some shadowed corner of my heart, I believe I deserve this.

The guards fall back as I step over the threshold, leaving the riotous crowd behind and entering the candle-lit stillness of the Goddess-House antechamber. Before they do, Kaza lays one hand softly on my back. I barely notice. I see only the flaps of a red tent rearing and twisting in the air like wild horses. My mother's bronze rings glinting in the brilliant light of high noon as she walks inside and sits down at a table across from Sholu Verlaina's coaxing, mocking smile. The nervous way I curled and uncurled my fingers as I followed her in. The smell of drying ink and a faint incense. The brown backs of the Vasayaste guards standing outside. His calloused hand as he offered us both a glass of red wine, the other hand resting unconsciously on the hilt of the dagger at his side.

His smile as he says "I'm so glad you came, Kyoro. At least one amongst the Amarin Dimaraste has common sense."

My own voice as I muttered through clenched teeth, "mother, this is wrong."

The peculiar expression on his face as he studied me, seeming to notice me for the first time. My skin crawled as his gaze seemed to peel off my clothes, my very skin, and cut to my marrow. I wanted to hurt him even then. He had a way about him that made me crazy. Like he already owned us. Like we were working for him and not the other way around.

His reply: "my dear Izsaiki, this is business. Wrong? What's wrong is burying your head in the desert sands so you don't have to see or hear that times are changing. Hell, already have changed. Wrong is clinging to outmoded traditions and hierarchies that are set to plunge us right back into a recession and disenfranchise the very merchants whose commerce saved our economy during the Great Famines."

"Hush, O'otani," my mother whispered. "We talked about this. Many times."

"Talking and seeing are very different things, mother."

"And what do you see?" He asked me, studying my face with an intensity that was profoundly unnerving. I stepped back and immediately regretted showing any weakness.

So I made up for it in my next breath. "I see a vulture who grew rich during the starving-times, who dressed in borrowed silks until he convinced himself he was something more than a Noraya criminal in drag. I see you, and I see the space between who you are and who you think you are. Truthfully, I see very little."

"Tani," my mother hissed. "By the goddess-"

He held up a hand to stop her chastising. His eyes lit up with some strange mirth and he actually laughed, making my hackles raise. He was supposed to be cut off at the knees, not amused.

"Well, since you've been so candid, let me tell you what I see. I see a girl torn between doing her duty in world and in deed. I see familiar prejudice weaponized to deflect discomfort over conflicting loyalties." His gaze unsettled me. Made me feel pinned to the wall even then. He paused. Half-smiled. "What? Nothing to say?"

"Nothing suitable for polite company. And I mean mother, not you."

His eyes slipped from me and suddenly I could breathe again. The roiling ocean of anger lapping at my ears quieted and I listened to their discussion. They seemed to both forget I was there, silent and stoic as a statue. Promises, bribes, bargains. Numbers scrawled on pieces of parchment and passed back and forth with the such gravity. Hissing from pursed lips, the figures edited by a second pen, then crossed out and redrawn entirely. Pleasantries spilling between them, at odds with their hard eyes and gesticulating hands. Names exchanged, too, and gold my mother had tucked into her bodice and warmed as she walked like a bird brooding an egg.

The buzzing in my ears returned, louder this time, as each word they spoke created another one that must go unsaid. I've heard you called the man that can spin air itself into gold. We desperately need it; our coffers are drained to their last bitter lees. Who are your creditors? If I am to partner with you, I need to know what foreign power may try to pull your strings. Who among your family can be trusted to see the logic of a continued partnership between the dimaraste and the vasayaste merchants? Who has the balls to go against the explicit will of the dizsa and the great aunts and uncles? Are you sure you weren't followed? This is high treason, after all. Will your daughter keep her mouth shut? She's bloodbound to the son of the very woman you're undermining. If she breathes a word of this, we're all good and fucked.

My heart and head were never so torn. I longed to run to the holy river and cast myself in just to wash off the grime of his grasping hands, his magnanimous smile. I wanted to run to Shira and beg him to forgive me, to forgive us. I wanted to plead with him until he understood that I had to lie. Not for my mother, not for any power or influence I might gain, but for him. Always for him. What I wouldn't give to have him understand that sometimes, being Izsaiki meant protecting him from himself. That his mother was on the verge of starting a war with these upstart merchants we might not win.

Most of all, I wanted to take his hand in mine and hold it like we did when we were very young, and let that soft touch convince him of my sincerity. I loved him more than all of the world combined. I would do anything for him, but his mother's regressive economic policies would bankrupt the family and leave us both stranded, Izsai and Izsaiki of nothing. That this whole affair made me sick, but it was the only way I could do my duty to him.

That's what my goddess saw. That's what Sholu sees. That's the truth.

I am a traitor, too. 

_____

THE DRAMA INTENSIFIES