Jacqueline Carey - Naamah's Curse

He say, you be my peach-bottom boy, I teach you .

Thinking on it, I shuddered.

In some ways, I think it troubled me more than it did Bao. I hadn’t been raised to think of myself as a D’Angeline-indeed, I was ten years old before it occurred to me to wonder who my father was-but I had always felt Naamah’s presence in my life. The bright lady, I had called her. When the Maghuin Dhonn Herself at once accepted me as Her child and sent me forth to seek my destiny, I had no idea where to begin. So I set out to solve the only mystery I knew, and crossed the Straits to seek my father in Terre d’Ange.

I had found him, too; and as it transpired, he was one of the loveliest, gentlest souls I had ever encountered. When I was in a mood to resent my infernal destiny, one of the things I resented the most was that it had taken me away from my father so soon, when I’d scarce had a chance to know him.

The other, of course, was leaving Jehanne.

Well and so, it was done, and even on my darkest days, I could not deny there was a purpose in it. And I could not help but think that Bao travelled a similar path. He had died . His soul had travelled to the Ch’in spirit world. Because he had died a hero’s death, the merciful Maiden of Gentle Aspect had intervened to spare him the judgment of the Yama Kings. And then he found himself reborn into his body, with his soul inextricably yoked to mine and his mentor Master Lo Feng dead.

None of that was reason to seek out his marauding rapist of a father, of course. Not at all. On the surface of things, it made no sense. But I thought he would do the same thing I had done when confronted with an unwanted destiny, and set out to solve the only mystery he knew. With Master Lo dead, Bao had nowhere else to go.

Besides, I could sense him somewhere beyond me, moving farther and farther away.

If I could have followed him as the crow flies, I could have closed the distance between us more swiftly, but I was constrained by the terrain to follow the roads. Still, Bao would have faced the same constraints. In village after village I asked after him as best I could, usually with mixed results.

I didn’t have the luxury of keeping a low profile in face-to-face encounters. Bao did. A young Ch’in man travelling on his own, carrying little more than a satchel and a battered bamboo staff across his back, was not a remarkable sight. And I didn’t even know for a surety under what name he went. I knew him as Bao, but I had learned that that wasn’t a proper name, but the baby-name his mother had called him. Treasure, it meant; at least when spoken with the right intonation.

It was a name Bao had reclaimed when he cast his lot in with Master Lo Feng, abandoning the stick-fighters and thugs in Shuntian he had once led, leaving everything behind to become Master Lo’s magpie, a journey that had taken him all the way to Terre d’Ange. For a long time, I’d wondered why he’d made such a choice.

It wasn’t a pretty tale.

Bao had told me on the greatship. A young boy had come to him and begged him to teach him to fight. Bao had agreed… for the same price that the man who taught him had charged.

I don’t know how I would have responded to Bao’s tale had he gone through with the bargain. I might not have been raised with Blessed Elua’s precept and the sacred tenet of consensuality, but I was Naamah’s child as surely as the Maghuin Dhonn Herself’s, and I had taken those beliefs deep to heart.

But he hadn’t gone through with it. Confronted with the naked, shivering, stripling boy, Bao had walked away from his bargain, walked away from his life. He had taken Master Lo’s offer, an offer he had jeered at only days before, and reinvented himself.

Everything I have done in my life, good and bad, I have chosen. But this, I did not choose .

That was what Bao said the day he left me.

“Stupid boy,” I muttered to myself as I rode, not really meaning it. I tried not to dwell on it, tried not to wonder if he would be angry at me for following him. He had to know I was on his trail. He could feel my presence as surely as I could sense his.

And I tried not to worry about the distance that yet lay between us, the shortening days, the trees growing increasingly barren of leaves, the chill in the air.

Here and there, I found folk who remembered Bao’s passage. He might not have stood out as unmistakably as I did, but he was memorable in his own way. Even from the beginning, there had been an air of coiled intensity to him, a feral glitter to his dark eyes that put me in mind of my own people. It was not unthinkable; although the Maghuin Dhonn have dwelled in Alba for time out of mind, there are tales among us of an older time, when the world was covered in ice and we followed the Great Bear Herself out of a frozen wasteland to warmer climes.

That was when there were still great magicians among us, shape-changers capable of taking the form of the Maghuin Dhonn Herself. We lost that gift generations ago when the magician Berlik broke an oath he swore by stone and sea and all that they encompass, on his very diadh-anam . Now, only small gifts remain to us; or so I had thought. My mother taught me to summon the twilight when I was but a child, a gift meant for hiding and concealment.

But as I’d grown to adulthood, I’d found it has other uses. To summon the twilight is to take half a step into the spirit world. It could also serve to make a gateway that allows the energy of the spirit world to spill into ours.

I discovered first that I had a knack for coaxing plants to grow. It seemed a simple and benign gift, mayhap a legacy of my father. Although he is a child of Naamah through and through, the lineage of Anael, the Good Steward, also runs in his veins.

It was Raphael de Mereliot who discovered that my gift could be used for other purposes. In a twisted way, I supposed I owed him a debt of gratitude. Had he not done so, had he not used my magic to work miracles of healing, my lovely father would have died of an infection of the lungs. Had Raphael not persuaded me to help him summon fallen spirits, I would not possess the gift one of them gave me on a whim, a charm to reveal hidden things. Were it not for that charm, Snow Tiger would have drowned in the lake below White Jade Mountain with the pearl that lodged the dragon’s soul hidden in her mortal flesh.

Gods, the links that bind one person’s ambition and desire to another’s fate are complicated things! One could go mad thinking on it. But I knew for a surety that if Raphael had not used my gift thusly, Bao would still be dead. Master Lo Feng would never have known to use my gift to exchange his life for Bao’s.

Being touched by death had changed Bao. Its touch clung to him, lent him a faint aura of shimmering darkness. Bao had died, and yet lived. He alone in the world was twice-born. So it did not surprise me to find folk who remembered him along the way.

And having guessed at his purpose, it should not have surprised me to come across the village of his birth as I followed in his tracks.

Yet somehow, it did.

The village was called Tonghe. There was nothing to distinguish it from the dozens of others through which I had passed along the way, and I would not have chosen to stay there if my inquiries in the market had not proved fruitful. When I described Bao using a combination of dialect and gestures, an elderly woman selling squashes nodded vigorously and pointed across the square toward a handful of men huddled over a set of dominoes.

Even though my diadh-anam assured me that Bao was many, many leagues away, my heart soared, and I had to look twice to assure myself he wasn’t among them. The squash seller tugged my arm and spoke volubly.