An Accident of Stars Read online

  “They’re, uh…” She was still searching for words when Pixeva thrust a large billow of red-and-yellow-striped cloth into her hands, muttering something incomprehensible as she did so.

  “You wrap yourself in it,” Gwen said, pantomiming with her hands. “It’s called a taal.”

  Saffron hefted the cloth – the taal – as though it were a bedsheet in need of folding. Setting down her schoolbag, she tried to tie it on like a sarong, but without much luck: the material was too thick to knot in the ways she was used to, and her hands were shaking so badly that she kept dropping it. Seeing this, Pixeva rolled her eyes and began to wind Saffron into the thing as though she were a mummy. Gwen watched the process with evident amusement, the wrinkles at her eyes and mouth deepening. When the guide finally stepped back, Saffron’s uniform had disappeared from view completely. Somehow, the taal conspired to cover not only her legs, but her arms and head too, as though she were wearing a wraparound, hooded poncho.

  Gwen surveyed her critically, then turned to the guide, speaking again in the other language while motioning at her hair. In response, the guide scrunched a fist at the back of her head, a questioning expression on her face. After a moment, Gwen nodded assent.

  “Do you have a hair tie?” she asked, switching back to English. The question caught Saffron off guard.

  “You want me to tie it back?”

  “Please.”

  “Oh. I think so. Hang on.”

  Careful not to unseat the taal – it sat awkwardly over her uniform, and the weight of the extra cloth was already making her sweat – she crouched down and fished around in her bag, eventually pulling out a rubber band. It would sting when the time came to take it out, but it was all she had; in the morning rush, she’d forgotten to pick one up. Gingerly pushing back the hood, she pulled her hair into a ponytail and covered it again. Both women nodded their approval, and for the first time since her arrival, the guide smiled as she spoke.

  Gwen snorted and relayed the comment. “Pix says you look like a merchant’s daughter, but she apologises if you get too hot – she only bought that taal because it was cheap.”

  Saffron had no idea what to make of this. “Um… thanks, I guess?”

  Gwen laughed. For the first time, it occurred to Saffron to wonder just how old she really was. Though Gwen’s hair was uniformly grey and her face lined, her arms were ropey with muscle, her hands long-fingered and strong, and her posture straight as a soldier’s. “Christ, I’d kill for a cigarette. I don’t suppose you’re one of those delinquent teens I’ve heard so much about?”

  Saffron shook her head, not trusting herself to answer. Almost, she giggled.

  Gwen sighed. “Pity. The smoke-herbs here taste like desiccated toejam. I’ll take that,” she added, grabbing Saffron’s bag and tying it alongside one of the panniers. “We need to mount up.”

  For all she’d been willing to think of them as cuddly a moment ago, Saffron suddenly found herself eyeing the roa with trepidation.

  “Are they safe?” she blurted.

  Gwen stared at her levelly. “Well,” she said, pulling Saffron forwards, “that all depends on whether you’re planning to fall off. Are you planning to fall off?”

  “No!” Saffron squeaked, and in a rash effort to prove her competence, tried and failed to put her foot in the stirrup without completely entangling her taal. Gwen watched her flounder for a moment, then unceremoniously boosted her onto the roa’s back.

  Saffron reached for the reins, but found none: they were still tied to the tree. Instead, she rested her hands between the roa’s shoulder blades – what she guessed would be called the withers on a horse – and tried to get her balance. Though she’d been thinking in terms of a regular riding saddle (or at least, regular by Earth standards), this one was flatter than she was used to, canted forwards so that she had to grip with her knees. There wasn’t much support at the back, either.

  Swallowing, she nudged her heels to the roa’s flanks and rode forward.

  Three

  Learn the World

  In the three weeks since Gwen had left Karavos – which is to say, twenty-seven days; Kenan weeks were nine days long, a day for every major god – everything had changed, and yet nothing had. Or so Pix said, and Gwen was inclined to trust her (in this, at least). The two of them rode side by side, Gwen leading Saffron’s roa on a lead rope. For obvious reasons, Pix spoke no English, but though it rubbed Gwen against the grain to exclude Saffron so thoroughly from the conversation, the girl was far more preoccupied with keeping her seat. Remembering her own first time aboard a roa, Gwen could sympathise: assuming they made it safely to the compound, her legs and back would be aching by nightfall.

  Beside her, Pix swished her braids, oblivious to this inner monologue – which, given the circumstances, was hardly unreasonable. “Leoden might be Vex,” she was saying, “but he’s not a god. Or if he is, he’s only from the third tier.” She snorted at her own joke.

  Gwen, however, didn’t think it funny. “He’s a man,” she snapped. “An oathbreaker and an empire-builder, and in case you’d forgotten, Pixeva ore Pixeva, it was our profound lack of judgement that put him on the throne. Find me the godly purpose in all of that, and I just might manage conversion to your wretched pantheon.”

  Pix ignored the rebuke, as calm as any cat, and carried on as though Gwen had never spoken. “The temples are furious at how he’s recruiting their castoffs to the arakoi. He’s not just after kemeta, either – he wants students the temples have rejected, mages willing to break their oaths for whatever reason, whether out of cruelty or curiosity.”

  Gwen winced; she’d said as much to Saffron, but it was still ill-omened. “Is there any word on what he’s training them for?”

  “Only whispers, but those are terrible enough. Three nights ago, a man suspected of treason was found wandering the streets, completely out of his mind, speaking only in shrieks and growls. He didn’t know his name; he couldn’t even speak Kenan, Yasha’s informants said. Now I’ve heard of beatings bad enough to steal memories, but language itself? It’s like someone used the ahunemet to make him forget he was human.”

  “Or the zuymet, perhaps,” said Gwen, not liking either prospect. She’d had decades in which to acclimatise to the idea of magic as mundane, yet hearing of its misuse still chilled her. Zuymet was word-magic, the ability to learn and bestow language with supernatural ease – it was how she’d first learned Kenan, and if they made it to the compound in one piece, she had plans for Saffron to do likewise. A supremely useful gift, and tricky to abuse in any practical sense. The ahunemet, though, was a different story: whether you termed it thought-theft or telepathy, it was all too easy to imagine how it might be turned to unsavory purposes. Gwen shook her head, troubled. “Has that been all?”

  “It’s not enough?” Pix countered, then waved a hand, as though she’d thought better of it. “My apologies. The prospect of such dark experimentation disturbs me. Vexa Yavin went down this path before, in the Years of Shadow; it’s why the temples instituted their oaths, why kemeta are subject to so much scrutiny even now. That Leoden would turn to it so flagrantly so soon into his reign–” She broke off, clearly disgusted. “We truly were fools to believe in him.”

  “Truly,” Gwen echoed.

  As the woodland began to thin, the broad dust of Cevet’s Road became visible, running parallel to the tree line. A subtle reminder of their destination, perhaps, yet one Gwen felt minded to heed.

  Sighing, she let her roa drop back from Pix’s, reining in alongside Saffron. She studied the girl, who was gawking shamelessly at everything, and felt a pang at how little she could explain about their situation – yet – without spooking her. If Saffron had considered going home at all, she doubtless assumed it would be an easy transition: just open another portal and pop back after an afternoon’s adventure. But Gwen, who was more aware of Trishka’s strengths and limitations than anyone save Trishka herself, knew it wasn’t that simple. She didn’t im
agine Saffron would respond positively to being told she was stuck in a foreign world, however temporarily: if she panicked and ran off, there was no telling what might happen. And yet her ignorance was a danger, too: Gwen couldn’t simply leave her in the dark.

  “It’s beautiful,” Saffron said. Her flicked gaze indicated the sky, the hills, the oversized sun, before finally lighting on Gwen. “Are you… I mean, you’re from Earth, right? Not here?”

  Gwen let out a breath. It was a good opening, all things considered. Personal – she didn’t often talk about her history – but perhaps, in this instance, necessarily so.

  “I’m from Earth,” she said. “From England, originally. Born and raised in London, though my parents retired near Sydney a few years back. I first wound up here in my twenties.” She saw the (politely) unasked question flit across Saffron’s face and added, “I’m fifty-four.”

  “So you’ve been, ah–”

  “Worldwalking,” Gwen supplied.

  “–worldwalking, right, for, um… thirty years?”

  “Thirty-three, if we’re being particular. But yes.” She sighed – a little wry, a little wistful. “More than half my life. My whole life, really.”

  Saffron opened her mouth, then seemed to think better of whatever she’d been about to say. She bit her lip. “Did you choose it?”

  “No,” said Gwen. “And yes. Well. It depends what you mean by choice.” She tucked a stray grey lock behind her ear. “The first time it was an accident. The magic that makes portals – they call it the jahudemet, in Kenan – is, well… demanding, let’s say. It’s a born gift, one with varying strengths and applications. Most who have it can only glimpse other times and places, but can’t necessarily open a door; for those who can, it’s rarer still to be able to rip between worlds. Either way, the stronger the gift, the harder it is to ignore. The magic builds up like a static charge – don’t ask why, because I don’t rightly understand it myself – and sooner or later, it has to be used. And Trishka, who makes our portals, her magic is very strong, but her body isn’t, and once upon a time, she had the idea that suppressing the jahudemet, refusing to use it, might let her be healthier. So she held it back, and back, and back – and when it finally broke loose, it tore a portal to Earth.” She raised a meaningful eyebrow.

  Saffron’s eyes widened. “And you came through?”

  “Fell through, really. I was on my way home from college, and it opened up so close to me, I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to. I went straight from a dingy backstreet to the middle of Karavos – no idea what was happening, no guide, nothing. It was two days before Trishka found me, and after that–” She broke off, shying away from harder truths that cut too close to Saffron’s own situation, and chose her next words carefully. “Well. Let’s just say I was gone long enough that going home raised questions. Oh, I tried to go back to the way things were – I finished my degree, qualified as a teacher, all that stuff – but I’d made friends here, and I wanted…” She trailed off, uncertain if an honest explanation would be met with understanding, disbelief or derision. “Wanted what?” Saffron prompted, after a moment’s silence.

  Gwen sighed. “How much do you know about Margaret Thatcher?”

  “Not much,” the girl admitted. “I mean, my parents talk about her sometimes, and I’ve seen movies and stuff, you know, about when she was Prime Minister – I know there were strikes and protests – but we haven’t exactly covered it in school.”

  “What about the Brixton Riots?” Or Section 28, she almost added, suppressing a shudder.

  “Oh! I know a little about them, I think. It came up in some articles I read about the England Riots back in 2011. I didn’t understand it all, but we did a class project on it.”

  I was at Brixton, Gwen thought, with a sudden, distant ache. She’d been nineteen at the time, only a little older than Saffron was now, though still two years away from her first trip to Kena, angry and sad and terrified all at once. She almost said so, until she remembered to do the maths on Saffron’s age. Five years ago, she would’ve been eleven. Whatever she’d learned about it then would likely be too garbled and simplistic to help now, and Gwen had no desire to unburden such an old, sharp part of herself to someone who wouldn’t understand what it meant. She thought for a moment, then said, “All right. So if I told you that I wanted to feel safe, and that I felt safer here, in an alien world, than in Thatcher’s Britain, what would you think I meant?”

  Saffron opened her mouth. Closed it. She looked from Gwen to Pix, who still rode silently ahead, and back again. “I’d think,” she said, very carefully, “that you were talking about racism. And sexism, and violence. Police violence. Things like that.”

  “You’d be right,” said Gwen, relieved. Perhaps she did learn something, after all. “I’m not saying Kena doesn’t have its problems too, but they’re different problems, you understand? I was still an outsider here, but not in the same way.” She didn’t say, the police wouldn’t look for me when I vanished, because they didn’t think a missing black woman mattered. She didn’t say, my parents convinced themselves I’d run off with a boy I was too ashamed to bring home, and when I came back, the second thing they asked me was if I’d had an abortion. She didn’t say, I grew in Kena, and when I wouldn’t shrink again, people thought there was something wrong with me. She didn’t say, You’re already changed forever, too. You just don’t know it yet. Instead, Gwen said, “So now I go back and forth. I visit Earth, but I mostly live here.” I married here, too, she almost added, the silent thoughts rearing up again. I married an Uyun woman and a Kenan man in a tiny town by a warm, southern sea, and raised our son a world away from everything I’d grown to fear might kill him. Pix didn’t know about that, of course, which was why Gwen kept quiet, even though they were speaking in English: the greater marvel was that she’d considered telling Saffron at all. Trishka knew about Naku and Jhesa and Louis, of course, but she was one of a trusted few. Gwen wasn’t ashamed of her husband and wife, who’d always understood her restless need for movement; she just preferred to have some part of her life that wasn’t subject to external scrutiny, but which existed, beautiful and inviolate, beyond the reach of worldwalking and politics. She loved Naku and Jhesa deeply, platonically, a counterbalance to their mutual romanticism. Gwen had never felt romantic love, and once upon a time, before Trishka assured her otherwise, she’d wondered if that meant there was something wrong with her. Such worries had died out years ago; nonetheless, the fact that her marriage-mates extended their romance to Gwen while accepting her feelings never ceased to be warming.

  I should go home again soon, she thought, a little wistfully. Once things have settled down. It was good to have seen her parents, but if not for the very real risk of being tailed by Leoden’s agents, she would have gone to her partners instead in a heartbeat. Oblivious to this internal monologue, Saffron said, “I can’t imagine what that’s like. I keep wanting to take pictures, but my phone’s on a different planet.” She blinked. “Assuming it would even work over here, I mean.”

  “It would,” said Gwen. “Or the camera would, anyway.”

  Saffron grinned, and it struck Gwen that she looked less tired than she had on Earth. A cynical part of her wondered how long it would last. Gwen’s roa snorted, forcing her to consider more practical matters. “Once we reach Karavos,” she said, “you’re going to stand out. White skin is uncommon here. Not unknown, mind you, but as far as this world and this city are concerned, you look Vekshi.”

  “Vekshi,” said Saffron, trying out the word. And then, with more perspicacity than Gwen had expected of her, “Is that a nationality or an ethnic group, or both?”

  “A nationality,” said Gwen. “Veksh is just north of Kena, but it’s very different.” An understatement of somewhat epic proportions, though she wasn’t about to start listing all the reasons why. “They speak a different language there though, so it won’t be so odd that you don’t speak Kenan.” Saffron nodded. “And the Vekshi wear,
uh, taals like this?”

  Not if they’ve got any choice in the matter, Gwen wanted to say, but even though Pix wouldn’t comprehend the slight to her taste, she kept the remark to herself. There was no point making Saffron any more self-conscious than she must already be. “Some do, if they’re naturalised. Taals are Kenan, but even then, not everybody wears them.” She gestured to Pix as a case in point. “Most Vekshi women wear loose trousers with wraparound tunics. They also shave their heads. Don’t worry, though. A Vekshi girl in a taal is unusual in Karavos, but not odd. Keep your head down, leave the talking to us, and we’ll be fine. Just try to be unobtrusive.”