10

“It will do you good to eat,” Likh reminded me, carefully placing perfectly grilled fish before me. Likh, I soon discovered, had packed with the intention of turning every veldt we wandered into a home, to domesticate every plain and mountain we camped on. The food he made was simple but with the same caliber of an Arhen-Kosho chef’s.

In the first hours after our unexpected flight, I also learned that Likh had done my packing for me, that I had no scarcity of zivars and hua. He, Kalen, and Khalad had been planning our escape from the instant they learned of my impending execution. I knew I should be grateful, but part of me wanted to laugh at the insanity of it all. I had killed my own sister—clothes and trinkets were the last things on my mind.

I accepted the stew but continued to stare numbly at the horizon, fighting the urge to cry or throw up. I had never seen Mithra’s Wall this close before. I had never been to the Yadosha city-states. From my perspective, the mountain ranges were an imposing fortress, shaped like a nanghait’s profile. They stared back at me, almost literally—each peak a more repulsive face than the next. Nature had once been an inexperienced sculptor, and Mithra’s Wall was one of its first attempts. It was not like the elegant snow cliffs of the Bayevik Mountains that skimmed Istera’s Ice Knife. It was not the slim, majestic cliffs of the Hollow Mountains that guarded Odalia’s south, nor was it even the bullish, armor-like mountains of Daanoris’s Haitsa range. It was not a popular destination for tourists who preferred their scenery genteel and refined, but its ugliness was what most Yadoshans loved about it.

Monstrosities had monstrous legends to explain their monstrous natures, and theirs was of the Great Hero Mithra lifting the earth to impede the newly resurrected nanghait’s approach into Yadosha. Its burial mound was located on the other side of the range, which seemed to support the story, but I don’t have much reason to believe in old tales nowadays.

At Kalen’s urging, we had ridden for the rest of the night, not stopping until the darkness rewarded us with the glimmer of dawn. He wanted distance between us and the city before he would allow me to summon the azi, knowing the sight of it would alert others to our escape, if they hadn’t discovered it already.

All talk of my killing the azi had faded; the daeva was our only chance of outrunning any pursuers. Kalen sold our horses at a nearby village, keeping only Chief, as no other steed, save Kismet, had ever willingly mounted the daeva.