(We are transferring our RP over till it catches up so we can continue it. So there will be faster than normal post times.)
The tavern kept a twilight of brass and smoke. Lamps of pierced copper breathed slow halos along the carved cedar. The room smelled of cardamom, anise, and the salt of old sweat baked into rugs that remembered better nights. In the corner a man worried an oud until the strings sounded like thirst. Dice clicked. Tongues bargained. The hour did not hurry. Sukegei took a table that let his back kiss stone. He set the hookah stem between his fingers and watched the coal crust over with white. A soft draw. Ember woke. Sweet smoke climbed and folded upon itself like prayer. He let it reach his eyes and sting. He preferred it that way. The world is truer through a veil you choose.
The kilij rested across his knees, wrapped in a dull cloth that did not fool anyone who knew steel. The gauntlet slept on the bench by his hip. Its plates looked blind in this light, but script lived on them. Verse cut finer than hair. He did not touch it. He listened instead. Footfalls. Cloth. The weight a hard man puts on a heel. The small pride of a petty thief who thinks the world does not hear him. Sukegei heard all of it and decided none of it required heat. Zubaida had sent him to welcome an emissary of Hextor. He let the thought sit in his mouth like grit. A greeting duty. A cup and a seat for a foreign strumpet with winter in her pockets. He pinched the stem, drew again, and tasted honeyed smoke and a hint of citrus. The flavor tried to soften him. It failed.
What could the Shaitan gain from the dead. Their gods were bone and debt. Their cities kissed swamps that swallowed their own reflections. Their language walked like a procession of grieving priests. He knew the tales. He knew the smell. Cold meat and incense and the medicine of rot. The Lord of Light made glass and law. The dead made memory heavy as wet wool. He sipped tea that had gone to copper and kept still. A boy from the kitchens brought dates and almonds on a hammered tray. He placed them like offerings and waited for coin. Sukegei slid a piece across the brass. The boy bowed twice. Sukegei watched him go and wondered what kind of man he would become if the dunes remained hard. The Light likes a spine with proof.
On the far side, immigrants clustered in a pocket of their own noise. Sailors with wet eyes. River traders with court coin hidden in hems. Pale scholars who kept their hands clean and their servants dirty. Men who sold the news of other nations. Women who sold the faces that listened to it. They fed on the city and then wrote letters about its taste. He studied them as a mason studies a cracked wall. Not hatred for the stone. Hatred for the day the crack decides to widen.
He drew the Shaitan stillness around his mind and let his breath slow. The hookah whispered. The room uncoiled. He watched without looking. The old brawler near the door had a shoulder that would fail if pressed upward. The two caravan guards at the window would bolt at the first cry of fire. The scribe by the pillar drank water like a man pretending to be sober. None of them understood what a righteous blade can do to a room built on lies.
Why would Zubaida send him. Why him, and not a priest to make the smile sweet. Not an envoy with silk in the throat. She had said only this: meet them, listen once, and use the night if the night asks for you. He had bowed because obedience is the only freedom that matters. Yet the sand in him argued. He remembered famine. He remembered wives buying salt with their hair. He remembered governors who painted walls and left gates unbarred. Then he remembered Zubaida breaking a golden idol with a stone and handing the gold to widows before the priests could weep. She did not waste fire. She did not waste men. If she sent him to greet the dead’s mouthpiece, there was heat to be made.
The door lifted on its leather hinges. Desert air rolled through, carrying tar, camel, and the sour breath of the canal. No frost followed it. No corpse perfume. Not yet. A new pair came in and sat where the light kissed them just so. Not the ones. Sukegei watched their hands. Clean. Jewelry that was discreet. He dismissed them and poured more tea. He let his eyes rest on the tavern’s little shrine. A sun of hammered brass against the wall, greened by thumbprints that had rubbed the blessing thin. Men touched it before they lied to their wives. Women touched it before they returned to their husbands. The light neither loved nor hated them for it. The light refined. He set his palm over his sternum where the Second Flame had branded him and kept it there until pulse matched the distant drum of the oud.
He thought of Hextor again. Not the stories. The work. He had seen their glyphs carved into bone with a surgeon’s hand. He had watched a frost-lamped procession move like a river of glass through a city that did not breathe. He had met one of their monster-hunters in a salted pass and found her courage honest. The dead had their laws. He could respect law. He could respect a people who made use of death rather than dress it in lies. He could not respect the rot that calls itself mercy.
He ate an almond and let it crack loud enough to measure who turned their heads. Three men. One woman. The scribe did not flinch. A careful man. He filed the fact. “Water,” he said, and the boy ran it to him. He washed his fingers in the bowl and breathed the steam. His jaw at rest. His eyes on the door. The kilij a patient weight. When he found his impatience rising, he fed it a line of creed and watched it dissolve. Let sin rise as smoke. Let truth fall as rain. Make my edge Your will.
The oud player changed tunes. The room dipped into a minor key that made old shame wake in old men. A wind crawled under the door and tugged the lamp flames toward it. The coal on his bowl brightened, then crusted again. Smoke curled up, then down, then up. He tasted winter in the mouth of the next draft. Sukegei sat a little taller. Not much. Enough to let the cloth slide from a finger’s width of blade. The steel looked like night under starlight. He covered it again and settled.
If the emissary carried the scent he expected, the air would turn thin. If she carried the law he could respect, the room would steady. Either way, welcome is a word that changes its shape when spoken by the Wrath. He would give the cup. He would give the seat. He would listen once. The door opened. Cold came with it, dressed in perfume that was not flower. Somewhere in the room a drunk laughed and then forgot why. The lamps steadied. The oud string snapped and sang like a wire. Sukegei drew, not steel, but smoke. He held it. He let it go. He watched. He waited to learn which work the night would require.
The tavern kept a twilight of brass and smoke. Lamps of pierced copper breathed slow halos along the carved cedar. The room smelled of cardamom, anise, and the salt of old sweat baked into rugs that remembered better nights. In the corner a man worried an oud until the strings sounded like thirst. Dice clicked. Tongues bargained. The hour did not hurry. Sukegei took a table that let his back kiss stone. He set the hookah stem between his fingers and watched the coal crust over with white. A soft draw. Ember woke. Sweet smoke climbed and folded upon itself like prayer. He let it reach his eyes and sting. He preferred it that way. The world is truer through a veil you choose.
The kilij rested across his knees, wrapped in a dull cloth that did not fool anyone who knew steel. The gauntlet slept on the bench by his hip. Its plates looked blind in this light, but script lived on them. Verse cut finer than hair. He did not touch it. He listened instead. Footfalls. Cloth. The weight a hard man puts on a heel. The small pride of a petty thief who thinks the world does not hear him. Sukegei heard all of it and decided none of it required heat. Zubaida had sent him to welcome an emissary of Hextor. He let the thought sit in his mouth like grit. A greeting duty. A cup and a seat for a foreign strumpet with winter in her pockets. He pinched the stem, drew again, and tasted honeyed smoke and a hint of citrus. The flavor tried to soften him. It failed.
What could the Shaitan gain from the dead. Their gods were bone and debt. Their cities kissed swamps that swallowed their own reflections. Their language walked like a procession of grieving priests. He knew the tales. He knew the smell. Cold meat and incense and the medicine of rot. The Lord of Light made glass and law. The dead made memory heavy as wet wool. He sipped tea that had gone to copper and kept still. A boy from the kitchens brought dates and almonds on a hammered tray. He placed them like offerings and waited for coin. Sukegei slid a piece across the brass. The boy bowed twice. Sukegei watched him go and wondered what kind of man he would become if the dunes remained hard. The Light likes a spine with proof.
On the far side, immigrants clustered in a pocket of their own noise. Sailors with wet eyes. River traders with court coin hidden in hems. Pale scholars who kept their hands clean and their servants dirty. Men who sold the news of other nations. Women who sold the faces that listened to it. They fed on the city and then wrote letters about its taste. He studied them as a mason studies a cracked wall. Not hatred for the stone. Hatred for the day the crack decides to widen.
He drew the Shaitan stillness around his mind and let his breath slow. The hookah whispered. The room uncoiled. He watched without looking. The old brawler near the door had a shoulder that would fail if pressed upward. The two caravan guards at the window would bolt at the first cry of fire. The scribe by the pillar drank water like a man pretending to be sober. None of them understood what a righteous blade can do to a room built on lies.
Why would Zubaida send him. Why him, and not a priest to make the smile sweet. Not an envoy with silk in the throat. She had said only this: meet them, listen once, and use the night if the night asks for you. He had bowed because obedience is the only freedom that matters. Yet the sand in him argued. He remembered famine. He remembered wives buying salt with their hair. He remembered governors who painted walls and left gates unbarred. Then he remembered Zubaida breaking a golden idol with a stone and handing the gold to widows before the priests could weep. She did not waste fire. She did not waste men. If she sent him to greet the dead’s mouthpiece, there was heat to be made.
The door lifted on its leather hinges. Desert air rolled through, carrying tar, camel, and the sour breath of the canal. No frost followed it. No corpse perfume. Not yet. A new pair came in and sat where the light kissed them just so. Not the ones. Sukegei watched their hands. Clean. Jewelry that was discreet. He dismissed them and poured more tea. He let his eyes rest on the tavern’s little shrine. A sun of hammered brass against the wall, greened by thumbprints that had rubbed the blessing thin. Men touched it before they lied to their wives. Women touched it before they returned to their husbands. The light neither loved nor hated them for it. The light refined. He set his palm over his sternum where the Second Flame had branded him and kept it there until pulse matched the distant drum of the oud.
He thought of Hextor again. Not the stories. The work. He had seen their glyphs carved into bone with a surgeon’s hand. He had watched a frost-lamped procession move like a river of glass through a city that did not breathe. He had met one of their monster-hunters in a salted pass and found her courage honest. The dead had their laws. He could respect law. He could respect a people who made use of death rather than dress it in lies. He could not respect the rot that calls itself mercy.
He ate an almond and let it crack loud enough to measure who turned their heads. Three men. One woman. The scribe did not flinch. A careful man. He filed the fact. “Water,” he said, and the boy ran it to him. He washed his fingers in the bowl and breathed the steam. His jaw at rest. His eyes on the door. The kilij a patient weight. When he found his impatience rising, he fed it a line of creed and watched it dissolve. Let sin rise as smoke. Let truth fall as rain. Make my edge Your will.
The oud player changed tunes. The room dipped into a minor key that made old shame wake in old men. A wind crawled under the door and tugged the lamp flames toward it. The coal on his bowl brightened, then crusted again. Smoke curled up, then down, then up. He tasted winter in the mouth of the next draft. Sukegei sat a little taller. Not much. Enough to let the cloth slide from a finger’s width of blade. The steel looked like night under starlight. He covered it again and settled.
If the emissary carried the scent he expected, the air would turn thin. If she carried the law he could respect, the room would steady. Either way, welcome is a word that changes its shape when spoken by the Wrath. He would give the cup. He would give the seat. He would listen once. The door opened. Cold came with it, dressed in perfume that was not flower. Somewhere in the room a drunk laughed and then forgot why. The lamps steadied. The oud string snapped and sang like a wire. Sukegei drew, not steel, but smoke. He held it. He let it go. He watched. He waited to learn which work the night would require.
White Sands called itself an empire. In her mind, it read as a mirage with a treasury. Heat frantic. Order cosmetic. Dunes moving beneath a paint of law that never set. Hextor was not heat. Hextor was custody. Winter that kept the loaf from mold. Bone made into ledger. Death given work and dignity. Their sun bragged. Her moon accounted. Their priests praised blaze. Her queens tithed silence. The contrast pleased her like a clean incision. Sand forgets. Ice remembers.
Winter walked in with her. Lamps cowered to neat halos. Smoke folded into obedient ribbons. Tiles took a glassy breath. A thin rim of rime bloomed and melted under each heel as she crossed the threshold like a moon trespassing a small sky.
The tavern tried to look old. Cedar lattice bit the windows, but the carving was gossip, not craft. Brass lamps wore pierced stars copied from copies until the pattern forgot its prayer. Ceiling ribs cracked and sagged in tired scallops where a mason had attempted heaven and stopped at height. Zellij along the bar looked solved by a drunk. Blues bled into greens. Lines jittered. Calligraphy circled the doorway and demoted sacred words to garnish. Rugs curated a museum of spills. Cardamom. Anise. Goat fat. A sweetness that had lost its courage. She cataloged every flaw with a scholar’s appetite and a killer’s humor. A house of heat that did not know how to hold it.
Ixqueya moved like verdict and invitation. Bronze skin with the gloss of river stone. Shoulders proud. Hips a slow tide that taught posture to sinners. Hair poured to the waist, black deepened with cobalt. Streaks caught the lampfire and then killed it, a petty cruelty she enjoyed. The face was cut for governance. Noble brow. Cheekbones like clean obsidian. A hunter’s nose taught by famine where fear keeps its wrists. A mouth that could bless, ruin, and preferred the latter. Frost-white sigils crossed the bridge of her nose, curved the cheekbones, and nested at the temples. Ash tempered the paint to a quiet radiance. Guard the marrow. Quiet the heat. Let winter do honest work. The creed walked her skin without needing a tongue.
Her dress recited country. Kingfisher blue shouldered the mantle. Obsidian and jade ringed the throat with restrained severity. Red geometry gripped the ribs and hips. A sash of shell teeth whispered over the narrow of her waist. Anklets chimed once, then learned silence. The Gravechill Bulwark towered along her spine, necro ice latticed in bone. It swallowed light and returned it as threat. The Frostfang Mace slept in her hand. Clear head. Hoarfrost veining like winter roses embalmed in crystal. The haft held leather darkened by vows that did not expire.\
The room stared. Barbarous elves forgot their cups and gaped with the wet adoration they saved for weather. She did not fault them. They had been raised on smaller myths and appalling women. She passed like a knife through cooling wax. Perfume carried snow and iron. Men straightened late. Women hid the eyes they used for bargaining. She let them look. Awe was an inexpensive tax to collect.
Architecture kept offering itself to her judgment and she kept taking it. Earnest arches proud of plaster that shed like old skin. Lattice hung like jewelry on a starving throat. A poverty of spirit dressed in brass and geometry. White Sands in miniature. Paint on dunes. A farce resisting its punchline. They called upon a Lord of Light with a child’s grip. Lamp-god. Hearth-god. Bright toy wrapped in psalm. Not law. Not burden. Not worthy.
He sat where the smoke made a crown. The kilij lay across his knees like a storm that had learned table manners. Stillness with purpose. Iron smelled itself in his eyes. She granted a measured respect and then colder things.
She stopped at his table. Frost crisped the cloth over his blade. The coal flared in fright and then obeyed. The mace kissed wood and left a pale ring that ate the grain. The Bulwark breathed against the wall. She took the chair without permission and crossed one leg with ceremonial contempt.
Her voice was water under ice. “Your people have walked far from the ditch,” she said. “Stones were your alphabet. Sparks your grammar. Now you kiln clay and mistake pots for prophecy. Charming.”
The tavern tasted the bruise of the word. The oud stumbled and accepted a lesser tune.
“The Shaitan fly like the old pterodactyl,” she continued. “Thin bone dreaming itself iron. Lofty talk. Hunger for height. Fire let you think the sun wore a leash. The teacher you require is not the sun. It is the necromancer’s moon. Patient law. White wheel. It rises when pride sleeps and burns without flame. It will make glass of boasts. It will turn marching songs to frost. It will weigh you, not warm you.”
Her gaze returned to the arches and ornamental cracks. Painted doors. Hollow domes. A chorus trained to shout righteousness over the sound of thirst. She allowed herself a private smile. Civilization as theater. Intermission overdue.
“You call yourselves old,” she said, eyes back on the Wrath. “We call you early. Just outside the Stone Age. Brick upon brick. A tidy pile. You name it future. I have seen futures. In Hextor the dead do not rot. They labor. They stand the door while the living learn. They pay back the hour that stole them. Winter is mercy when it keeps bread from mold. Your mercy is heat that eats its own house.”
Her smile turned the knife flat. “Your champions speak with throats and listen with scars. I am generous with lessons. Bravos kneel when cold teaches the joints. It pleases me to see pride choose usefulness.”
The insult sat between them and poured itself a drink. “You smell of work, not perfume,” she allowed. “There may be marrow under your polish. Do not steal my evening to prove otherwise.”
She took a date, weighed its sticky gravity, and set it down like a failed idol returned to the stall. The ceiling confessed another hairline crack. Another star cut wrong. The city told on itself without knowing.
The tavern deserved more of her contempt, so she gave it. Jars of nuts lined the bar like votives to hunger. Copper trays dented by impatient faith. A prayer niche greened by thumbprints that asked forgiveness for petty theft and then rehearsed the next theft. A door curtain that pretended to be a veil and succeeded only at catching dust. She imagined the ledger under all this ornament. Water bought dear. Women bought dearer. Law bought in installments. The empire already a corpse with warm hands.
She let the thought ripen. White Sands was dead. It had not learned the courtesy of lying down. The Lord of Light felt like a street performer telling coins to believe in flame. A travesty of divinity. A festival of shine.
Her eyes stayed their native ice. Gold dreamed behind them and waited for sanction. Not yet. Winter was patient when pride was near. “Pour tea,” she said, and there was verdict in the vowels. “Show me a single step above cousins flinging stones. Then speak welcome or warning. Either suits.”
She leaned a fraction. Frost nipped the hookah smoke and made it fall like contrition. “I bring moon doctrine,” she said. “I bring winter that loves what it disciplines. If your fire has marrow, we trade. If it shines and hollows, I teach it to kneel and to serve or I write its obituary and move on.”
The lamps trembled as if fearing a draft that had learned to read. Tiles held their breath. A spoon thought better of clinking. Ixqueya waited with the calm of old ice. Pride sat straight in her spine. Ego rested like a coronet on her brow. The room felt the weight and called it beauty because it did not know the word for judgment.
Outside, the night sharpened. The moon climbed its simple ladder and did not ask the sun for permission. Inside, she watched the Wrath over the rim of an empty cup and began, with a scholar’s joy, to compose the long, cold sermon this desert would need to be anything but a rumor. She wanted to make her stance clear, as she knew his kind were as dimwitted and slow as they were barbarous.
Winter walked in with her. Lamps cowered to neat halos. Smoke folded into obedient ribbons. Tiles took a glassy breath. A thin rim of rime bloomed and melted under each heel as she crossed the threshold like a moon trespassing a small sky.
The tavern tried to look old. Cedar lattice bit the windows, but the carving was gossip, not craft. Brass lamps wore pierced stars copied from copies until the pattern forgot its prayer. Ceiling ribs cracked and sagged in tired scallops where a mason had attempted heaven and stopped at height. Zellij along the bar looked solved by a drunk. Blues bled into greens. Lines jittered. Calligraphy circled the doorway and demoted sacred words to garnish. Rugs curated a museum of spills. Cardamom. Anise. Goat fat. A sweetness that had lost its courage. She cataloged every flaw with a scholar’s appetite and a killer’s humor. A house of heat that did not know how to hold it.
Ixqueya moved like verdict and invitation. Bronze skin with the gloss of river stone. Shoulders proud. Hips a slow tide that taught posture to sinners. Hair poured to the waist, black deepened with cobalt. Streaks caught the lampfire and then killed it, a petty cruelty she enjoyed. The face was cut for governance. Noble brow. Cheekbones like clean obsidian. A hunter’s nose taught by famine where fear keeps its wrists. A mouth that could bless, ruin, and preferred the latter. Frost-white sigils crossed the bridge of her nose, curved the cheekbones, and nested at the temples. Ash tempered the paint to a quiet radiance. Guard the marrow. Quiet the heat. Let winter do honest work. The creed walked her skin without needing a tongue.
Her dress recited country. Kingfisher blue shouldered the mantle. Obsidian and jade ringed the throat with restrained severity. Red geometry gripped the ribs and hips. A sash of shell teeth whispered over the narrow of her waist. Anklets chimed once, then learned silence. The Gravechill Bulwark towered along her spine, necro ice latticed in bone. It swallowed light and returned it as threat. The Frostfang Mace slept in her hand. Clear head. Hoarfrost veining like winter roses embalmed in crystal. The haft held leather darkened by vows that did not expire.\
The room stared. Barbarous elves forgot their cups and gaped with the wet adoration they saved for weather. She did not fault them. They had been raised on smaller myths and appalling women. She passed like a knife through cooling wax. Perfume carried snow and iron. Men straightened late. Women hid the eyes they used for bargaining. She let them look. Awe was an inexpensive tax to collect.
Architecture kept offering itself to her judgment and she kept taking it. Earnest arches proud of plaster that shed like old skin. Lattice hung like jewelry on a starving throat. A poverty of spirit dressed in brass and geometry. White Sands in miniature. Paint on dunes. A farce resisting its punchline. They called upon a Lord of Light with a child’s grip. Lamp-god. Hearth-god. Bright toy wrapped in psalm. Not law. Not burden. Not worthy.
He sat where the smoke made a crown. The kilij lay across his knees like a storm that had learned table manners. Stillness with purpose. Iron smelled itself in his eyes. She granted a measured respect and then colder things.
She stopped at his table. Frost crisped the cloth over his blade. The coal flared in fright and then obeyed. The mace kissed wood and left a pale ring that ate the grain. The Bulwark breathed against the wall. She took the chair without permission and crossed one leg with ceremonial contempt.
Her voice was water under ice. “Your people have walked far from the ditch,” she said. “Stones were your alphabet. Sparks your grammar. Now you kiln clay and mistake pots for prophecy. Charming.”
The tavern tasted the bruise of the word. The oud stumbled and accepted a lesser tune.
“The Shaitan fly like the old pterodactyl,” she continued. “Thin bone dreaming itself iron. Lofty talk. Hunger for height. Fire let you think the sun wore a leash. The teacher you require is not the sun. It is the necromancer’s moon. Patient law. White wheel. It rises when pride sleeps and burns without flame. It will make glass of boasts. It will turn marching songs to frost. It will weigh you, not warm you.”
Her gaze returned to the arches and ornamental cracks. Painted doors. Hollow domes. A chorus trained to shout righteousness over the sound of thirst. She allowed herself a private smile. Civilization as theater. Intermission overdue.
“You call yourselves old,” she said, eyes back on the Wrath. “We call you early. Just outside the Stone Age. Brick upon brick. A tidy pile. You name it future. I have seen futures. In Hextor the dead do not rot. They labor. They stand the door while the living learn. They pay back the hour that stole them. Winter is mercy when it keeps bread from mold. Your mercy is heat that eats its own house.”
Her smile turned the knife flat. “Your champions speak with throats and listen with scars. I am generous with lessons. Bravos kneel when cold teaches the joints. It pleases me to see pride choose usefulness.”
The insult sat between them and poured itself a drink. “You smell of work, not perfume,” she allowed. “There may be marrow under your polish. Do not steal my evening to prove otherwise.”
She took a date, weighed its sticky gravity, and set it down like a failed idol returned to the stall. The ceiling confessed another hairline crack. Another star cut wrong. The city told on itself without knowing.
The tavern deserved more of her contempt, so she gave it. Jars of nuts lined the bar like votives to hunger. Copper trays dented by impatient faith. A prayer niche greened by thumbprints that asked forgiveness for petty theft and then rehearsed the next theft. A door curtain that pretended to be a veil and succeeded only at catching dust. She imagined the ledger under all this ornament. Water bought dear. Women bought dearer. Law bought in installments. The empire already a corpse with warm hands.
She let the thought ripen. White Sands was dead. It had not learned the courtesy of lying down. The Lord of Light felt like a street performer telling coins to believe in flame. A travesty of divinity. A festival of shine.
Her eyes stayed their native ice. Gold dreamed behind them and waited for sanction. Not yet. Winter was patient when pride was near. “Pour tea,” she said, and there was verdict in the vowels. “Show me a single step above cousins flinging stones. Then speak welcome or warning. Either suits.”
She leaned a fraction. Frost nipped the hookah smoke and made it fall like contrition. “I bring moon doctrine,” she said. “I bring winter that loves what it disciplines. If your fire has marrow, we trade. If it shines and hollows, I teach it to kneel and to serve or I write its obituary and move on.”
The lamps trembled as if fearing a draft that had learned to read. Tiles held their breath. A spoon thought better of clinking. Ixqueya waited with the calm of old ice. Pride sat straight in her spine. Ego rested like a coronet on her brow. The room felt the weight and called it beauty because it did not know the word for judgment.
Outside, the night sharpened. The moon climbed its simple ladder and did not ask the sun for permission. Inside, she watched the Wrath over the rim of an empty cup and began, with a scholar’s joy, to compose the long, cold sermon this desert would need to be anything but a rumor. She wanted to make her stance clear, as she knew his kind were as dimwitted and slow as they were barbarous.
The door creaked, and with it a gelid breeze swept through the bar. Sukegei's eyes wandered to the entrance, curious to see who might have been fashionably late. It wasn't long before he'd discover his answer. A giantess, one whose curves failed to compare to her ego. What sort of strumpet would flaunt her body so freely? It didn't take the shaitan long to figure out her lineage. After all, he knew one family line so endowed yet so brazen.
The spider queen got around, or so it seemed. Valerna's genes were indeed potent. He wondered what sort of offspring she'd bear if her blessed foreign womb were blessed with his seed. Fortunately for the cobalt and obsidian-haired beauty, he wouldn't pollute his genes with her inferior ones. Sukegei enjoyed another hit from his hookeh, blowing out rings as the loosely clad maiden approached. His eyes studied her bouncing bits, admiring how that top somehow resisted snapping. Truly, it must have been enchanted and was doing the Lord of Light's work. It wasn't long before Ixqueya babbled off. His eyes did not care to hide his delight in her bosom. Periodically drifting up to those bimbo lips slapping together.
Sukegei had a few skill sets. One of them is his ability to pick up the rantings of women by their pitch alone. His exes always complained he never paid attention; they were correct, and this time was no different. However, the giantess warranted this focus as she began attacking the illustrious shaitan people. "You must have balls larger than Florentina to come to this bar with such barb. Curious, are you arrogant? or can you back up such spunk." he'd lean forward, waving the barmaid over as he told the barmaid to bring this savage some tea in the shaitan language. He'd then return his attention to Ixqueya before resuming his speech in their shared tongue.
"I like them feisty. We could mix some pleasure with work. Whatever the case, Zubaida thinks Hextor is worthy of respect. I am not so convinced. How about we stop measuring egos? How about I buy you some drinks and food?" Sukegei spoke with a shrug. He found this creature to be amusing. Part of the reason he tolerated her was that she was attractive. "You're not bad looking for an unburnt one. And from what I've heard, your kind are skilled when it comes to the sensual arts. Curious, what does your kind think of mine? Surely there are a few prostitutes who remember the workout the Shaitans provided them when we stood unified against the defiled. I know, simpler times. But hey, nothing like a good brush with death to get the blood flowing, am I right?"
He quipped as the tea was brought. Lazily, Sukegei tossed a menu her way, taking another hit from his hookah. "You must be hungry. Order something, Unwind. We are eating on the church's dime. Business expenses and all. Let's live it up a little, don't you agree? Surely a woman like yourself knows how to unwind and party? Right? The Lord of Light is nothing if not charitable..." He ended with a jest. Hoping this would break the ice, pun intended. He might not be a scholar, but it was clear this woman was a cyromancer of some sort. The barmaid arrived with a hammered copper tray, steam curling from tulip glasses that caught the lamp glow like captive suns. Mint bruised under the spoon, sugar lumps stacked like white bricks along a small dish. He snapped one between thumb and forefinger, let the grit melt on his tongue, then slid a glass toward her with the back of his knuckles as if passing sentence. The hookah bowl crackled. Double apple and molasses sweetened the air, a poor incense for a holy hour, good enough for this den of soft pride.
He did not bother to hide the way his eyes returned to her chest as he spoke to the barmaid. He did not bother to soften the smirk when the room tried to listen without staring. The oud in the corner trailed a sulk of notes. Dice slowed in their cups. A shutter coughed against its hinge and fell quiet, as if even wood had learned manners. “Kitchen,” he called in Shaitan, not bothering to turn. “Beetle skewers. Saffron rice. Pistachios. Bread with the black seeds. Bring the good olives or bring your manager.” Coins clinked like a tiny hail. He never looked to see who picked them up. He let his palm rest on the wrapped kilij across his knees. The cloth hid the shine, not the fact. A light hum spoke through the scabbard when the hookah coal flared, the metal answering heat with a private promise. The gauntlet on the bench beside him caught the lamplight in its salt-glass veins, scripture tiny as ant tracks engraved on brass. He did not touch it. He liked the way she kept glancing at it when she pretended not to. “Zubaida says respect,” he went on, casual as a cat near a birdcage. “Maybe she sees something worth polishing. Maybe she wants me to find the crack and pry it open. Either way, I do not say no to food. Or to sport.”
He leaned back and blew another perfect ring that drifted toward her cheek paint and broke like a small surrender. He watched the rime that haloed the table’s edge when the mace kissed wood. He watched the way the shield swallowed light and made a black lamb out of it. He filed those details under the list called ways to ruin a pretty evening. The menu lay where it fell. He tapped it with two fingers and let it spin once, slow, like a coin that had already decided which face to show. “Eat,” he said, lazy as a lizard on stone. “Then talk. Or talk with your mouth full. I have manners, but I am not married to them.”
Murmur rose and fell like a tide that feared a shoreline. Sailors at the window found something fascinating in their empty cups. Two caravan guards turned their heads with the same stiffness as dogs who had remembered a beating. The scribe by the pillar pretended to read a prayer carved on cedar that had never seen a real prayer in its life. Sukegei’s eyes returned to her lips. He watched the gloss catch a lamp and thought of the women who swore they would never come back, then came back for a second helping of penance and praise. He thought of Valerna’s line breeding arrogance like horses and selling it like silk. He thought of Florentina and the way a room adjusted itself when she entered, as if furniture had learned fear. He weighed those thoughts and set them aside the way he set aside a bell he did not plan to ring.
“Here is my welcome,” he said, soft enough that she had to lean in to catch it. “You say winter. I say kiln. You say moon. I say sun. You say work of the dead. I say the living earn their bread. So I buy you dinner and we discover which sermon feeds better.” The food arrived. Skewers slick with fat. Rice golden as a tiny field. Bread blistered from the oven, glossy with oil and scattered with nigella. He tore a piece with his teeth and spoke around the steam, unbothered and unblessed, a man at home in heat and hunger. He put the bread down and gave her the hookah hose with a lift of his chin, a wordless dare. “You can hold your smoke,” he added. “Or you cannot. No shame in either.”
A dancer tried to pull the room’s attention from the table. Silk jingled. Anklets flashed. Sukegei did not turn his head. He was not finished taking the measure of the giantess who had brought winter into a house that did not know how to keep heat. He drummed two fingers on the kilij’s spine and let the old prayer run through him the way a whetstone runs along an edge.
Let sin rise as smoke. Let truth fall as rain. Make my edge Your will. He lifted his glass toward her, a toast that could be welcome or warning. “Eat,” he said again, a little smile like a knife shown flat. “Drink. Spend the church’s coin. Tell me where you want to draw your line tonight. The table. The floor. The bed. The border. I am generous with choices. I am cruel with outcomes.” He laughed then, low and real, the sound of a man who could enjoy a fight or a feast and would not apologize for either. The lamps steadied. The hookah hissed. The tea cooled to the exact temperature where mint speaks and sugar stops bragging. He waited, patient as a brazier in a quiet room, for winter to answer him with something other than posture.
The spider queen got around, or so it seemed. Valerna's genes were indeed potent. He wondered what sort of offspring she'd bear if her blessed foreign womb were blessed with his seed. Fortunately for the cobalt and obsidian-haired beauty, he wouldn't pollute his genes with her inferior ones. Sukegei enjoyed another hit from his hookeh, blowing out rings as the loosely clad maiden approached. His eyes studied her bouncing bits, admiring how that top somehow resisted snapping. Truly, it must have been enchanted and was doing the Lord of Light's work. It wasn't long before Ixqueya babbled off. His eyes did not care to hide his delight in her bosom. Periodically drifting up to those bimbo lips slapping together.
Sukegei had a few skill sets. One of them is his ability to pick up the rantings of women by their pitch alone. His exes always complained he never paid attention; they were correct, and this time was no different. However, the giantess warranted this focus as she began attacking the illustrious shaitan people. "You must have balls larger than Florentina to come to this bar with such barb. Curious, are you arrogant? or can you back up such spunk." he'd lean forward, waving the barmaid over as he told the barmaid to bring this savage some tea in the shaitan language. He'd then return his attention to Ixqueya before resuming his speech in their shared tongue.
"I like them feisty. We could mix some pleasure with work. Whatever the case, Zubaida thinks Hextor is worthy of respect. I am not so convinced. How about we stop measuring egos? How about I buy you some drinks and food?" Sukegei spoke with a shrug. He found this creature to be amusing. Part of the reason he tolerated her was that she was attractive. "You're not bad looking for an unburnt one. And from what I've heard, your kind are skilled when it comes to the sensual arts. Curious, what does your kind think of mine? Surely there are a few prostitutes who remember the workout the Shaitans provided them when we stood unified against the defiled. I know, simpler times. But hey, nothing like a good brush with death to get the blood flowing, am I right?"
He quipped as the tea was brought. Lazily, Sukegei tossed a menu her way, taking another hit from his hookah. "You must be hungry. Order something, Unwind. We are eating on the church's dime. Business expenses and all. Let's live it up a little, don't you agree? Surely a woman like yourself knows how to unwind and party? Right? The Lord of Light is nothing if not charitable..." He ended with a jest. Hoping this would break the ice, pun intended. He might not be a scholar, but it was clear this woman was a cyromancer of some sort. The barmaid arrived with a hammered copper tray, steam curling from tulip glasses that caught the lamp glow like captive suns. Mint bruised under the spoon, sugar lumps stacked like white bricks along a small dish. He snapped one between thumb and forefinger, let the grit melt on his tongue, then slid a glass toward her with the back of his knuckles as if passing sentence. The hookah bowl crackled. Double apple and molasses sweetened the air, a poor incense for a holy hour, good enough for this den of soft pride.
He did not bother to hide the way his eyes returned to her chest as he spoke to the barmaid. He did not bother to soften the smirk when the room tried to listen without staring. The oud in the corner trailed a sulk of notes. Dice slowed in their cups. A shutter coughed against its hinge and fell quiet, as if even wood had learned manners. “Kitchen,” he called in Shaitan, not bothering to turn. “Beetle skewers. Saffron rice. Pistachios. Bread with the black seeds. Bring the good olives or bring your manager.” Coins clinked like a tiny hail. He never looked to see who picked them up. He let his palm rest on the wrapped kilij across his knees. The cloth hid the shine, not the fact. A light hum spoke through the scabbard when the hookah coal flared, the metal answering heat with a private promise. The gauntlet on the bench beside him caught the lamplight in its salt-glass veins, scripture tiny as ant tracks engraved on brass. He did not touch it. He liked the way she kept glancing at it when she pretended not to. “Zubaida says respect,” he went on, casual as a cat near a birdcage. “Maybe she sees something worth polishing. Maybe she wants me to find the crack and pry it open. Either way, I do not say no to food. Or to sport.”
He leaned back and blew another perfect ring that drifted toward her cheek paint and broke like a small surrender. He watched the rime that haloed the table’s edge when the mace kissed wood. He watched the way the shield swallowed light and made a black lamb out of it. He filed those details under the list called ways to ruin a pretty evening. The menu lay where it fell. He tapped it with two fingers and let it spin once, slow, like a coin that had already decided which face to show. “Eat,” he said, lazy as a lizard on stone. “Then talk. Or talk with your mouth full. I have manners, but I am not married to them.”
Murmur rose and fell like a tide that feared a shoreline. Sailors at the window found something fascinating in their empty cups. Two caravan guards turned their heads with the same stiffness as dogs who had remembered a beating. The scribe by the pillar pretended to read a prayer carved on cedar that had never seen a real prayer in its life. Sukegei’s eyes returned to her lips. He watched the gloss catch a lamp and thought of the women who swore they would never come back, then came back for a second helping of penance and praise. He thought of Valerna’s line breeding arrogance like horses and selling it like silk. He thought of Florentina and the way a room adjusted itself when she entered, as if furniture had learned fear. He weighed those thoughts and set them aside the way he set aside a bell he did not plan to ring.
“Here is my welcome,” he said, soft enough that she had to lean in to catch it. “You say winter. I say kiln. You say moon. I say sun. You say work of the dead. I say the living earn their bread. So I buy you dinner and we discover which sermon feeds better.” The food arrived. Skewers slick with fat. Rice golden as a tiny field. Bread blistered from the oven, glossy with oil and scattered with nigella. He tore a piece with his teeth and spoke around the steam, unbothered and unblessed, a man at home in heat and hunger. He put the bread down and gave her the hookah hose with a lift of his chin, a wordless dare. “You can hold your smoke,” he added. “Or you cannot. No shame in either.”
A dancer tried to pull the room’s attention from the table. Silk jingled. Anklets flashed. Sukegei did not turn his head. He was not finished taking the measure of the giantess who had brought winter into a house that did not know how to keep heat. He drummed two fingers on the kilij’s spine and let the old prayer run through him the way a whetstone runs along an edge.
Let sin rise as smoke. Let truth fall as rain. Make my edge Your will. He lifted his glass toward her, a toast that could be welcome or warning. “Eat,” he said again, a little smile like a knife shown flat. “Drink. Spend the church’s coin. Tell me where you want to draw your line tonight. The table. The floor. The bed. The border. I am generous with choices. I am cruel with outcomes.” He laughed then, low and real, the sound of a man who could enjoy a fight or a feast and would not apologize for either. The lamps steadied. The hookah hissed. The tea cooled to the exact temperature where mint speaks and sugar stops bragging. He waited, patient as a brazier in a quiet room, for winter to answer him with something other than posture.
Winter answered.
It did not rush. It never did. It crept in through seams and under teeth. It rode her breath.
Ixqueya watched him through half-lidded eyes, a tribunal of one. Nine feet of giantess folded into mortal furniture, all wrong for the chair and very aware of it. Feathers fanned from her shoulders in a storm of turquoise and jade. Her hair fell in black and cobalt sheets around a face cut for verdicts, not for mercy. Her breasts rose, heavy and gleaming, like twin moons lifted above a feathered harness that was more statement than cover.
He wanted that to matter.
She let him.
Frost thickened along the rim of her glass until the tea within looked like something trapped under lake ice. A ring of rime spread from her fingers across the wood. The table began to remember her.
“Fire spends,” she said at last. Her voice was soft and cold, the kind of soft that bruises bone. “Ice keeps. That is the first lesson of the Marrow Doctrine. You people of the kiln still have not learned it.”
A few nearby drinkers went still. The dancer’s anklets faltered for a beat.
She turned the glass between her fingers, watching steam die in thin, desperate threads.
“You speak of the Lord of Light as if He were a merchant,” she went on. “As if His favor could be tallied as business expense. As if burning the dead and forgetting their names were marks of culture instead of crimes.” Her lip curled. “In Hextor, we call that what it is. Barbarism with better dishes.”
Her eyes came back to him. Pale blue. Cutting.
“Your creed burns its history and calls the ash holy. You light pyres. You salt bones. You pretend forgetting is mercy. In my country, that is heresy. Waste of grief. Theft of names. Your saints are smoke. Your relics are soot. Your god is a bonfire that eats ledgers.”
She lifted the glass, never drinking. Frost crawled higher along the tulip shape, veiling the tea like a closed eye.
“Beneath our swamp sleeps the God Beneath,” she said. “Yohuallotlquixochitl. Your mouth would break on the name. You may use Her lesser face. Yohualtzin. The moon that never forgives a ledger out of balance. In Her light Necro Ice blooms. Death hardens into crystal. Names stop bleeding. Our dead do not vanish into your pretty flames. They rise. They work. They are kept.”
She leaned forward, and the chair sighed. Her chest eclipsed the table for a breath. She let his eyes follow the motion. Let the room pretend that this was performance.
Then she smiled.
It did not reach her eyes.
“You look at my flesh and think it is invitation,” she murmured. “In Hextor, it is instrument. The Church teaches after-use, not afterlife. This body is ledger and tool. Seed and sanctum in one vessel. You talk about my womb as if it were an empty amphora waiting for some desert fool to pour his heat into it and call that a miracle.” Her gaze dropped, briefly, to his lap, then rose with slow disdain. “I do not take barbarian tithes. I do not let sun cultists smear their ash in a temple carved for ice.”
The frost on the table cracked in a fine ring, a tiny pane waking.
“I am impressed, though,” she added, tone turning light, almost conversational. “That your kind has come so far. Once, your desert sprites flung excrement at our tents and shrieked nonsense to the stars. Now you can sit on chairs. Use cups. Approximate language. Truly, Yohualtzin is generous. She lets even the loudest animals evolve a little before She files them.”
Someone snorted behind a hand. The sound died quickly.
“You boast of whores who remember Shaitan vigor,” Ixqueya continued. “You flatter yourself that a few bought moans during a war against the defiled mean your creed understands the body. You confuse rutting with sacrament. In Kilk-Mire, even our dead stand to better purpose than that. Your faith sells forgetting as comfort. Ours stitches memory into frost and makes it work.”
She pushed the hookah hose back across the table with one finger. The mouthpiece steamed where she had touched it, then froze.
“Keep your smoke,” she said. “It suits a cult that worships fire and calls the sparks wisdom. In Hextor, we thin the breath, tithe it, send it along the Whispering Vein to do something useful. Here you turn lungs into toys and name it piety.”
Her attention flicked to the food he had ordered. Beetle skewers. Rice like small suns. Bread blistered and oiled.
“You spend your god’s coin on feasts and flirting,” she said. “You couch lust as hospitality. You dress appetite in scripture and think that makes you civilized. In my doctrine, tithes are breath and bone and kcal held back from casting. Work before worship. Memory before mercy. Your heat is a loan you have not begun to repay.”
She tore a piece of bread at last. Frost plated the crust under her touch. She set it back on the plate, untouched, a small frozen hill.
“You asked where I draw the line,” she said. “Listen closely, kiln-boy. I will share a table with a Shaitan when there is work to discuss. I will share a battlefield when the ledger requires it. I will not share a pane, a bed, or a bloodline with a creed that burns its dead like garbage and calls that grace.”
Her eyes sharpened, ice brightening toward gold at the center.
“You sit here with your hookah and your coin and your little sun-prayers and think yourself large,” she finished. “To me you are a small man casting a smaller shadow. One entry on a page you have never read. When winter reaches you, it will not be as a lover. It will be as a clerk. It will take your name. It will file you. That is more kindness than your Lord of Light ever gave his own burned faithful.”
She lifted her glass in a slight toast, a thin crescent of frost catching the lamplight.
“Eat,” she said, almost kindly. “Spend your barbarian god’s money. Enjoy your heat while you have it. Somewhere under this swamp the God Beneath listens. Yohualtzin watches. When the Emerald Thorn rises, the ledger will remember every jest you made in His name.”
She smiled again. This time there was nothing warm in it at all.
“Winter keeps its promises,” Ixqueya said. “Your fire only promises to forget.”
It did not rush. It never did. It crept in through seams and under teeth. It rode her breath.
Ixqueya watched him through half-lidded eyes, a tribunal of one. Nine feet of giantess folded into mortal furniture, all wrong for the chair and very aware of it. Feathers fanned from her shoulders in a storm of turquoise and jade. Her hair fell in black and cobalt sheets around a face cut for verdicts, not for mercy. Her breasts rose, heavy and gleaming, like twin moons lifted above a feathered harness that was more statement than cover.
He wanted that to matter.
She let him.
Frost thickened along the rim of her glass until the tea within looked like something trapped under lake ice. A ring of rime spread from her fingers across the wood. The table began to remember her.
“Fire spends,” she said at last. Her voice was soft and cold, the kind of soft that bruises bone. “Ice keeps. That is the first lesson of the Marrow Doctrine. You people of the kiln still have not learned it.”
A few nearby drinkers went still. The dancer’s anklets faltered for a beat.
She turned the glass between her fingers, watching steam die in thin, desperate threads.
“You speak of the Lord of Light as if He were a merchant,” she went on. “As if His favor could be tallied as business expense. As if burning the dead and forgetting their names were marks of culture instead of crimes.” Her lip curled. “In Hextor, we call that what it is. Barbarism with better dishes.”
Her eyes came back to him. Pale blue. Cutting.
“Your creed burns its history and calls the ash holy. You light pyres. You salt bones. You pretend forgetting is mercy. In my country, that is heresy. Waste of grief. Theft of names. Your saints are smoke. Your relics are soot. Your god is a bonfire that eats ledgers.”
She lifted the glass, never drinking. Frost crawled higher along the tulip shape, veiling the tea like a closed eye.
“Beneath our swamp sleeps the God Beneath,” she said. “Yohuallotlquixochitl. Your mouth would break on the name. You may use Her lesser face. Yohualtzin. The moon that never forgives a ledger out of balance. In Her light Necro Ice blooms. Death hardens into crystal. Names stop bleeding. Our dead do not vanish into your pretty flames. They rise. They work. They are kept.”
She leaned forward, and the chair sighed. Her chest eclipsed the table for a breath. She let his eyes follow the motion. Let the room pretend that this was performance.
Then she smiled.
It did not reach her eyes.
“You look at my flesh and think it is invitation,” she murmured. “In Hextor, it is instrument. The Church teaches after-use, not afterlife. This body is ledger and tool. Seed and sanctum in one vessel. You talk about my womb as if it were an empty amphora waiting for some desert fool to pour his heat into it and call that a miracle.” Her gaze dropped, briefly, to his lap, then rose with slow disdain. “I do not take barbarian tithes. I do not let sun cultists smear their ash in a temple carved for ice.”
The frost on the table cracked in a fine ring, a tiny pane waking.
“I am impressed, though,” she added, tone turning light, almost conversational. “That your kind has come so far. Once, your desert sprites flung excrement at our tents and shrieked nonsense to the stars. Now you can sit on chairs. Use cups. Approximate language. Truly, Yohualtzin is generous. She lets even the loudest animals evolve a little before She files them.”
Someone snorted behind a hand. The sound died quickly.
“You boast of whores who remember Shaitan vigor,” Ixqueya continued. “You flatter yourself that a few bought moans during a war against the defiled mean your creed understands the body. You confuse rutting with sacrament. In Kilk-Mire, even our dead stand to better purpose than that. Your faith sells forgetting as comfort. Ours stitches memory into frost and makes it work.”
She pushed the hookah hose back across the table with one finger. The mouthpiece steamed where she had touched it, then froze.
“Keep your smoke,” she said. “It suits a cult that worships fire and calls the sparks wisdom. In Hextor, we thin the breath, tithe it, send it along the Whispering Vein to do something useful. Here you turn lungs into toys and name it piety.”
Her attention flicked to the food he had ordered. Beetle skewers. Rice like small suns. Bread blistered and oiled.
“You spend your god’s coin on feasts and flirting,” she said. “You couch lust as hospitality. You dress appetite in scripture and think that makes you civilized. In my doctrine, tithes are breath and bone and kcal held back from casting. Work before worship. Memory before mercy. Your heat is a loan you have not begun to repay.”
She tore a piece of bread at last. Frost plated the crust under her touch. She set it back on the plate, untouched, a small frozen hill.
“You asked where I draw the line,” she said. “Listen closely, kiln-boy. I will share a table with a Shaitan when there is work to discuss. I will share a battlefield when the ledger requires it. I will not share a pane, a bed, or a bloodline with a creed that burns its dead like garbage and calls that grace.”
Her eyes sharpened, ice brightening toward gold at the center.
“You sit here with your hookah and your coin and your little sun-prayers and think yourself large,” she finished. “To me you are a small man casting a smaller shadow. One entry on a page you have never read. When winter reaches you, it will not be as a lover. It will be as a clerk. It will take your name. It will file you. That is more kindness than your Lord of Light ever gave his own burned faithful.”
She lifted her glass in a slight toast, a thin crescent of frost catching the lamplight.
“Eat,” she said, almost kindly. “Spend your barbarian god’s money. Enjoy your heat while you have it. Somewhere under this swamp the God Beneath listens. Yohualtzin watches. When the Emerald Thorn rises, the ledger will remember every jest you made in His name.”
She smiled again. This time there was nothing warm in it at all.
“Winter keeps its promises,” Ixqueya said. “Your fire only promises to forget.”
Sukegei listened. Or rather, he watched and let the words run along the edge of his mind like a whetstone. Those moons did most of the talking for him. Every time she drew breath, the feathered harness shifted and the lamps wrote soft highlights across her skin. He kept his gaze there longer than was polite, shorter than was suicidal, pretending he was measuring the rise and fall of her temper instead of the rise and fall of everything else.
When she finished, the table was a pale wreath of frost. His spine had picked up a quiet, involuntary chill. He smirked anyway. A chuckle slid out of him, warm and easy as poured tea, buying him a heartbeat to tuck away the sting of her words. Outclassed. He knew that shape. He wore it with the same care he wore his rings. “Marrow Doctrine,” he said, rolling the phrase on his tongue as if tasting a new wine. “You know, for a barbarian desert cult, we seem to have done very well for ourselves if the high priestesses of frost feel the need to lecture us in public.”
His eyes flicked to the ice creeping around her glass, then unapologetically back to her chest. “I will say this much,” he added. “If your god beneath gives all Her missionaries lungs like yours, I finally understand how She wins converts. One sermon and half the room is already worshiping.” The line drew a nervous ripple of laughter from nearby tables. He rode it, let it carry him forward. “Relax, Winter bitch,” he said, palm opening in a small gesture of truce. “You can keep your womb sanctified and your ledgers spotless. I am only a humble sand barbarian trying to enjoy a meal in peace while a very tall, very cold woman explains why my god is illiterate.”
His eyes climbed at last from her chest to her face, lingered on the ice-bright stare, then drifted lower to her mouth. Those lips were full, painted in gloss that caught the lamplight each time she shaped another insult. He felt a small, traitorous heat coil in his gut as his imagination tried to assign them other duties. He shut the door on that thought with a swallow of tea that scalded his tongue. “Regardless,” he went on, voice smoothing, “banter or not, Lady Zubaida has welcomed you. That matters here.” He tapped the wrapped kilij with two fingers. The metal hummed, a reminder of oaths that did not care about his ego. “If she says the frost giant is to be treated as guest instead of invader, then the House listens. Even the barbarian parts.”
He leaned back, hookah hose resting in one hand, glass in the other. The confidence sat on him like a cloak. A little frayed at the hem, perhaps, but still bright. “So tell me,” he said, tone dropping into something more curious. “What do you know of me, beyond that I burn my dead and offend your ledgers? What stories did Hextor whisper into your ear before dispatching one of its favored knives into my motherland?”
He tilted his head, studying her. “What does your Dominion seek to gain by sending you here?” he asked. “A foothold in the glass palaces? A new market for your cold miracles? Or did Xandera simply tire of you freezing her furniture and decide the White Sand Empire had more heat to waste?” His gaze slid back to her lips again, unhurried. He watched the way they rested when she was not speaking, plush and dangerous. He wondered, privately, if they were half as skilled at gentler work as they were at carving him into pieces with theology. The thought put a crooked line to his mouth.
“You are sharp, as sharp as you are endowed ” he admitted, letting a hint of sincerity bleed through. “Sharper than half the blades hung in this city. I can respect that. I am not asking you to bless my god or my bed. Only to answer a simple question. Although, my bed is always open.” He lifted his glass in a small salute, eyes locked on hers over the rim. “Why is winter sitting in my bar tonight,” Sukegei asked, “wearing feathers, drinking my tea, and looking at me as if she is already measuring where to write my name on her pretty sheet of ice? And why did you spoil my meal. Uncivilized." He jested.
When she finished, the table was a pale wreath of frost. His spine had picked up a quiet, involuntary chill. He smirked anyway. A chuckle slid out of him, warm and easy as poured tea, buying him a heartbeat to tuck away the sting of her words. Outclassed. He knew that shape. He wore it with the same care he wore his rings. “Marrow Doctrine,” he said, rolling the phrase on his tongue as if tasting a new wine. “You know, for a barbarian desert cult, we seem to have done very well for ourselves if the high priestesses of frost feel the need to lecture us in public.”
His eyes flicked to the ice creeping around her glass, then unapologetically back to her chest. “I will say this much,” he added. “If your god beneath gives all Her missionaries lungs like yours, I finally understand how She wins converts. One sermon and half the room is already worshiping.” The line drew a nervous ripple of laughter from nearby tables. He rode it, let it carry him forward. “Relax, Winter bitch,” he said, palm opening in a small gesture of truce. “You can keep your womb sanctified and your ledgers spotless. I am only a humble sand barbarian trying to enjoy a meal in peace while a very tall, very cold woman explains why my god is illiterate.”
His eyes climbed at last from her chest to her face, lingered on the ice-bright stare, then drifted lower to her mouth. Those lips were full, painted in gloss that caught the lamplight each time she shaped another insult. He felt a small, traitorous heat coil in his gut as his imagination tried to assign them other duties. He shut the door on that thought with a swallow of tea that scalded his tongue. “Regardless,” he went on, voice smoothing, “banter or not, Lady Zubaida has welcomed you. That matters here.” He tapped the wrapped kilij with two fingers. The metal hummed, a reminder of oaths that did not care about his ego. “If she says the frost giant is to be treated as guest instead of invader, then the House listens. Even the barbarian parts.”
He leaned back, hookah hose resting in one hand, glass in the other. The confidence sat on him like a cloak. A little frayed at the hem, perhaps, but still bright. “So tell me,” he said, tone dropping into something more curious. “What do you know of me, beyond that I burn my dead and offend your ledgers? What stories did Hextor whisper into your ear before dispatching one of its favored knives into my motherland?”
He tilted his head, studying her. “What does your Dominion seek to gain by sending you here?” he asked. “A foothold in the glass palaces? A new market for your cold miracles? Or did Xandera simply tire of you freezing her furniture and decide the White Sand Empire had more heat to waste?” His gaze slid back to her lips again, unhurried. He watched the way they rested when she was not speaking, plush and dangerous. He wondered, privately, if they were half as skilled at gentler work as they were at carving him into pieces with theology. The thought put a crooked line to his mouth.
“You are sharp, as sharp as you are endowed ” he admitted, letting a hint of sincerity bleed through. “Sharper than half the blades hung in this city. I can respect that. I am not asking you to bless my god or my bed. Only to answer a simple question. Although, my bed is always open.” He lifted his glass in a small salute, eyes locked on hers over the rim. “Why is winter sitting in my bar tonight,” Sukegei asked, “wearing feathers, drinking my tea, and looking at me as if she is already measuring where to write my name on her pretty sheet of ice? And why did you spoil my meal. Uncivilized." He jested.
Winter answered his leer with discipline.
Ixqueya did not flinch from the rot-gloss of the room or the crude hymn of his throat. She let the cold tighten the air until the lamps behaved. She let the tiles breathe a thin ring of rime and then repent of it. She set the Frostfang Mace on the wood. The pale halo it etched into the grain felt like ceremony. The Gravechill Bulwark leaned beside her and turned lamplight into a tame, black thing.
Her gaze did not lift to meet his. It weighed him the way a steward weighs coin. Count. Test the edge. Snap a false piece and hear the lie. He was all jingle and no silver. Appetite in a borrowed chair.
“You confuse hunger with rank,” she went on, voice level as still ice. “You confuse staring with strength. You call vulgarity wit and mistake the noise of men for the work of a nation. A kennel cur that finds a match in his teeth does not become a furnace. He becomes a fire hazard.”
Her eyes flicked to the wrapped kilij and back. Calm. Exact. “Any man who must praise his virility has none. Any zealot who must say he has law carries only permission. Your morality is rented light. It flickers when a coin coughs. Your brain rattles like a thimble in a helmet. Your manhood boasts like a drum with a split hide. Loud. Hollow. Useless once the cold enters.”
She took the tea he offered and did not drink. “You invite me to a trough and think you have set a table. You speak of pleasure as if the moon were a tavern lamp and not a wheel of law. You slobber fealty to one woman while you angle for another. Groveling grub. A man who kneels for a mistress and calls it piety. I would sooner remove my own bosom and gift it to the jackals than share a bed with a brazier that wheezes.”
The tavern tried to shift. She denied it. “You dress heat as virtue and call the costume an empire. White Sands is a corpse that has not learned to lie down. Your Lord of Light is a street performer with a jar of tinder. If you must light a candle, light it to Queen Xandera. Her decree is the only reason your head keeps its high perch and your blood keeps its small ambition. Thank her when you find a corner brave enough to hold your whisper.”
She let her eyes travel the room. Cedar gossip. Pierced brass that forgot its prayer. Rugs that remembered every spill and no sermon. She returned to him with the slow patience of a ledger. “You think this is sport. It is audit. Hextor does not barter with panting. Hextor disciplines. Hextor keeps bread from mold and kings from lying to themselves. I do not negotiate with a man who cannot master his eyes. Put them here.” She tapped the space between her painted brows with one black nail. “Not there. Count sentences, not skin. If you look again without learning, look as a penitent reads a debt.”
He breathed, a little faster now. She smelled fennel, sugar, and the small panic of a man realizing his chair has grown cold.
“You offered to buy my time,” she said. “My winter is not for sale. My winter is for service. It keeps widows breathing and orphans fed. It keeps cities from pretending they are alive when they are only warm. Your men are submissive stock. Unbreedable. Fit for hauling and hymns. Not for legacy. I prefer tools that do not tremble when the moon comes up.”
The hookah hissed. She let the smoke touch her paint and fall like a chastened veil. “You spoke of death making the blood sing. Hextor sings when the work is done. We do not need knives at our throats to remember our duty. Our dead stand the door. Our dead count the grain. Our dead repay the hour that stole them. Your living spend heat to feel important, then pass the plate to a godling who cannot hear.”
She rested two fingers on the mace. Frost climbed her knuckles like a rosary. “Now I will speak to you as a queen speaks to a stubborn vassal. You will keep both hands where I can see them. You will close your mouth when it reaches for a joke and open it only when it reaches for truth. You will thank Xandera in your heart for the lesson you are about to survive.”
Her smile was a small, hard thing. “You wanted a night of sport. You will receive a catechism. You wanted to measure egos. You will learn to measure borders. You wanted a bed. You will earn a bench. And if your pride reaches for me again, I will take it at the wrist and place it neatly on your plate. Cold makes clean work.”
She leaned the smallest degree. Her voice softened the way a blade softens when it finds flesh. “Say your welcome. Say your warning. It will not change the price. The moon is patient. The audit is long. The tally is mine. And the next breath you enjoy was purchased by my Mother’s decree, not your lamp’s charity. Remember that when you thank someone in the dark.”
She sat back. She let the silence fix itself to the beams. She allowed the room to discover the shape of fear that arrives well dressed. “Pour,” she said, and it was both command and verdict. “Pour, little Wrath. Learn to hold something without shaking. Winter is watching. And winter, unlike you, does not fail when tested.”
Ixqueya did not flinch from the rot-gloss of the room or the crude hymn of his throat. She let the cold tighten the air until the lamps behaved. She let the tiles breathe a thin ring of rime and then repent of it. She set the Frostfang Mace on the wood. The pale halo it etched into the grain felt like ceremony. The Gravechill Bulwark leaned beside her and turned lamplight into a tame, black thing.
Her gaze did not lift to meet his. It weighed him the way a steward weighs coin. Count. Test the edge. Snap a false piece and hear the lie. He was all jingle and no silver. Appetite in a borrowed chair.
“You confuse hunger with rank,” she went on, voice level as still ice. “You confuse staring with strength. You call vulgarity wit and mistake the noise of men for the work of a nation. A kennel cur that finds a match in his teeth does not become a furnace. He becomes a fire hazard.”
Her eyes flicked to the wrapped kilij and back. Calm. Exact. “Any man who must praise his virility has none. Any zealot who must say he has law carries only permission. Your morality is rented light. It flickers when a coin coughs. Your brain rattles like a thimble in a helmet. Your manhood boasts like a drum with a split hide. Loud. Hollow. Useless once the cold enters.”
She took the tea he offered and did not drink. “You invite me to a trough and think you have set a table. You speak of pleasure as if the moon were a tavern lamp and not a wheel of law. You slobber fealty to one woman while you angle for another. Groveling grub. A man who kneels for a mistress and calls it piety. I would sooner remove my own bosom and gift it to the jackals than share a bed with a brazier that wheezes.”
The tavern tried to shift. She denied it. “You dress heat as virtue and call the costume an empire. White Sands is a corpse that has not learned to lie down. Your Lord of Light is a street performer with a jar of tinder. If you must light a candle, light it to Queen Xandera. Her decree is the only reason your head keeps its high perch and your blood keeps its small ambition. Thank her when you find a corner brave enough to hold your whisper.”
She let her eyes travel the room. Cedar gossip. Pierced brass that forgot its prayer. Rugs that remembered every spill and no sermon. She returned to him with the slow patience of a ledger. “You think this is sport. It is audit. Hextor does not barter with panting. Hextor disciplines. Hextor keeps bread from mold and kings from lying to themselves. I do not negotiate with a man who cannot master his eyes. Put them here.” She tapped the space between her painted brows with one black nail. “Not there. Count sentences, not skin. If you look again without learning, look as a penitent reads a debt.”
He breathed, a little faster now. She smelled fennel, sugar, and the small panic of a man realizing his chair has grown cold.
“You offered to buy my time,” she said. “My winter is not for sale. My winter is for service. It keeps widows breathing and orphans fed. It keeps cities from pretending they are alive when they are only warm. Your men are submissive stock. Unbreedable. Fit for hauling and hymns. Not for legacy. I prefer tools that do not tremble when the moon comes up.”
The hookah hissed. She let the smoke touch her paint and fall like a chastened veil. “You spoke of death making the blood sing. Hextor sings when the work is done. We do not need knives at our throats to remember our duty. Our dead stand the door. Our dead count the grain. Our dead repay the hour that stole them. Your living spend heat to feel important, then pass the plate to a godling who cannot hear.”
She rested two fingers on the mace. Frost climbed her knuckles like a rosary. “Now I will speak to you as a queen speaks to a stubborn vassal. You will keep both hands where I can see them. You will close your mouth when it reaches for a joke and open it only when it reaches for truth. You will thank Xandera in your heart for the lesson you are about to survive.”
Her smile was a small, hard thing. “You wanted a night of sport. You will receive a catechism. You wanted to measure egos. You will learn to measure borders. You wanted a bed. You will earn a bench. And if your pride reaches for me again, I will take it at the wrist and place it neatly on your plate. Cold makes clean work.”
She leaned the smallest degree. Her voice softened the way a blade softens when it finds flesh. “Say your welcome. Say your warning. It will not change the price. The moon is patient. The audit is long. The tally is mine. And the next breath you enjoy was purchased by my Mother’s decree, not your lamp’s charity. Remember that when you thank someone in the dark.”
She sat back. She let the silence fix itself to the beams. She allowed the room to discover the shape of fear that arrives well dressed. “Pour,” she said, and it was both command and verdict. “Pour, little Wrath. Learn to hold something without shaking. Winter is watching. And winter, unlike you, does not fail when tested.”
For a heartbeat he could have sworn he saw Samara. Not in the shape of her. Samara had been all light and laughter weaponized, golden eyes and starfire temper. But in the way this towering frost-witch flayed him with sentences, in the way the room shrank to a schoolhouse and he to the slow child at the back… yes. The Radiant Djinn would have approved of this scolding.
He felt the old instinct rise in his throat – a barb, a lewd joke, something to snap the tension and win the room back. Years of surviving Samara’s lectures, however, had taught him a hard lesson. Sometimes the cleverest thing a man can do with his tongue is chain it. He exhaled slowly, let his shoulders loosen, palms turning outward on either side of the cup in a small show of surrender. The smugness bled into something closer to rueful amusement. “She has claws,” he said at last, mostly to himself, then a little louder so she could hear. “Point taken, Winter.”
No flirting. No fire. Just that. He sat a touch straighter, forcing his gaze to the point she’d tapped between her brows and keeping it there, even as the rest of her tried its best to disrupt his focus. “You are not wrong,” he admitted, voice trimmed down to the clean bone of diplomacy. “About many things. The Sands sin loud. The Church sins quieter. The ledger between our gods is… untidy.” A small, dry smile. “I am not here to balance it with jokes.” He lifted the glass, finally drinking, letting the burn in his throat stand in for all the retorts he did not voice. “For now,” his thoughts added, a private flicker of pride. She has all the plays. For now.
Aloud, he went on, quick and to the point. “Whatever you think of my Lord, my heat, or my manners, one thing is simple. Lady Zubaida asked that you be received. I am her creature before I am any brazier in a corner tavern.” He set the cup down with care, not letting his fingers shake against the frost-webbed wood. “So,” he said, tilting his head, curiosity cutting through the singed edges of his ego, “what do you make of her, Inquisitor of Ice? You do not leave a theology like yours for a land you call barbarian without cause.” A brief, softer huff of laughter. “You do not meet with Zubaida Ahmadzai if you truly despise the Sands.”
His eyes flicked to her lips once, quickly, then back to the place she had commanded. Discipline, this time, if only to prove he could learn. “There must be something down here worth you coming off your icy throne,” Sukegei said. “Is it the woman? The war? The ledger you spoke of? What does Hextor seek to gain from sending one of its winter knives into my motherland?”
He felt the old instinct rise in his throat – a barb, a lewd joke, something to snap the tension and win the room back. Years of surviving Samara’s lectures, however, had taught him a hard lesson. Sometimes the cleverest thing a man can do with his tongue is chain it. He exhaled slowly, let his shoulders loosen, palms turning outward on either side of the cup in a small show of surrender. The smugness bled into something closer to rueful amusement. “She has claws,” he said at last, mostly to himself, then a little louder so she could hear. “Point taken, Winter.”
No flirting. No fire. Just that. He sat a touch straighter, forcing his gaze to the point she’d tapped between her brows and keeping it there, even as the rest of her tried its best to disrupt his focus. “You are not wrong,” he admitted, voice trimmed down to the clean bone of diplomacy. “About many things. The Sands sin loud. The Church sins quieter. The ledger between our gods is… untidy.” A small, dry smile. “I am not here to balance it with jokes.” He lifted the glass, finally drinking, letting the burn in his throat stand in for all the retorts he did not voice. “For now,” his thoughts added, a private flicker of pride. She has all the plays. For now.
Aloud, he went on, quick and to the point. “Whatever you think of my Lord, my heat, or my manners, one thing is simple. Lady Zubaida asked that you be received. I am her creature before I am any brazier in a corner tavern.” He set the cup down with care, not letting his fingers shake against the frost-webbed wood. “So,” he said, tilting his head, curiosity cutting through the singed edges of his ego, “what do you make of her, Inquisitor of Ice? You do not leave a theology like yours for a land you call barbarian without cause.” A brief, softer huff of laughter. “You do not meet with Zubaida Ahmadzai if you truly despise the Sands.”
His eyes flicked to her lips once, quickly, then back to the place she had commanded. Discipline, this time, if only to prove he could learn. “There must be something down here worth you coming off your icy throne,” Sukegei said. “Is it the woman? The war? The ledger you spoke of? What does Hextor seek to gain from sending one of its winter knives into my motherland?”
Ixqueya let his question hang between them like breath in cold air.
She reclined in the chair as if it were an ice throne, one knee lifting, the other leg planted. The motion was unhurried, deliberate. It made clear who was interviewing whom. Moonlight from the high windows silvered the strong line of her thighs and caught in the turquoise feathers at her hips. Her smile was all small teeth and verdict.
He kept his eyes where she had told him. Between her brows. She noticed. A faint approval softened the hard edge of her gaze without melting it.
“Better,” she said. “You have discovered vertical sight. Keep it.”
She let her fingers trail along the curve of the Gravechill Bulwark. The shield gave back a dull, obedient gleam. Her eyes never left his.
“You ask about Zubaida,” Ixqueya went on. “I do not dislike her. I dislike the god that wastes her.”
A slight tilt of her head, as if considering a puzzle she had not yet solved.
“She is flint in a field of straw. Focused. Exact. She hunts the defiled while other priests pose for tapestries. She knows how to keep her own eyes on a ledger instead of a mirror. That earns regard, even when her prayers run to the wrong sky.”
The rhetoric had cooled, but there was no warmth in it. Only a steady appraisal.
“I came because she asked for winter,” Ixqueya said. “Not with her mouth. With her work. She digs where your empire prefers to sweep. She finds things that do not burn clean. Things that drift. Things that might follow river and trade road until they touch my swamps.”
Her fingers tapped the table once. Frost thickened in a neat circle under her nail.
“Hextor does not wait for neighbors to rot and then complain about the smell. The Marrow Doctrine sends auditors. We read the wound. We decide if it can be stitched, or if it must be cut out. Your motherland is a fracture that touches our map. That is reason enough.”
She let that settle, then gave him a smaller, almost playful look.
“You want poetry,” she said. “Here is the shorter version. Xandera wants numbers. How many defiled. How honest your war. How deep the Sun Creed’s corruption runs. How often your priests choose spectacle over duty. I count. I test. I come home with a ledger instead of stories.”
A pause. The admission that followed was very small, but it was there.
“And I was curious,” she added. “I have walked peat and bone all my life. I wished to see what sort of people build palaces on powder and call that faith. To see if any of them know how to stand in heat without losing their shape.”
Her gaze sharpened again, reminding him this was not a confession, only context.
“Do not mistake that for affection for your sands,” she said. “Zubaida has value. Your empire has uses. That is all. If the ledger finds you solvent, winter will stay in the high courts and the bone-chapels. If it finds you wanting, it will come down from its throne in earnest.”
She inclined her head a fraction, a queen granting a brief truce.
“For now, little Wrath, you have done the clever thing,” Ixqueya finished. “You asked the right question. You kept your eyes where they belonged. Eat. Watch. When Lady Zubaida calls for me in the field instead of the bar, you will see clearly enough what Hextor came here to gain.”
Her smile returned, slow and controlled. “And you will remember, I think, who was in control from the first cup of tea.”
She reclined in the chair as if it were an ice throne, one knee lifting, the other leg planted. The motion was unhurried, deliberate. It made clear who was interviewing whom. Moonlight from the high windows silvered the strong line of her thighs and caught in the turquoise feathers at her hips. Her smile was all small teeth and verdict.
He kept his eyes where she had told him. Between her brows. She noticed. A faint approval softened the hard edge of her gaze without melting it.
“Better,” she said. “You have discovered vertical sight. Keep it.”
She let her fingers trail along the curve of the Gravechill Bulwark. The shield gave back a dull, obedient gleam. Her eyes never left his.
“You ask about Zubaida,” Ixqueya went on. “I do not dislike her. I dislike the god that wastes her.”
A slight tilt of her head, as if considering a puzzle she had not yet solved.
“She is flint in a field of straw. Focused. Exact. She hunts the defiled while other priests pose for tapestries. She knows how to keep her own eyes on a ledger instead of a mirror. That earns regard, even when her prayers run to the wrong sky.”
The rhetoric had cooled, but there was no warmth in it. Only a steady appraisal.
“I came because she asked for winter,” Ixqueya said. “Not with her mouth. With her work. She digs where your empire prefers to sweep. She finds things that do not burn clean. Things that drift. Things that might follow river and trade road until they touch my swamps.”
Her fingers tapped the table once. Frost thickened in a neat circle under her nail.
“Hextor does not wait for neighbors to rot and then complain about the smell. The Marrow Doctrine sends auditors. We read the wound. We decide if it can be stitched, or if it must be cut out. Your motherland is a fracture that touches our map. That is reason enough.”
She let that settle, then gave him a smaller, almost playful look.
“You want poetry,” she said. “Here is the shorter version. Xandera wants numbers. How many defiled. How honest your war. How deep the Sun Creed’s corruption runs. How often your priests choose spectacle over duty. I count. I test. I come home with a ledger instead of stories.”
A pause. The admission that followed was very small, but it was there.
“And I was curious,” she added. “I have walked peat and bone all my life. I wished to see what sort of people build palaces on powder and call that faith. To see if any of them know how to stand in heat without losing their shape.”
Her gaze sharpened again, reminding him this was not a confession, only context.
“Do not mistake that for affection for your sands,” she said. “Zubaida has value. Your empire has uses. That is all. If the ledger finds you solvent, winter will stay in the high courts and the bone-chapels. If it finds you wanting, it will come down from its throne in earnest.”
She inclined her head a fraction, a queen granting a brief truce.
“For now, little Wrath, you have done the clever thing,” Ixqueya finished. “You asked the right question. You kept your eyes where they belonged. Eat. Watch. When Lady Zubaida calls for me in the field instead of the bar, you will see clearly enough what Hextor came here to gain.”
Her smile returned, slow and controlled. “And you will remember, I think, who was in control from the first cup of tea.”
For the first time all night, Sukegei felt himself sitting straighter without deciding to. It bothered him.
Her authority had weight, real authority. Not the kind you bought with coin or stole with clever lines. The kind that made a room behave without raising its voice. He had felt it around Samara. Around a few warlords in his youth. Around Zubaida on her worst days. It was in this woman too, in the way she lounged as if every chair she touched became a throne that owed her rent.
A foreigner. A woman of the dead. And some traitorous part of him wanted to fall into step behind her.
He hated that. Worse was the pull beneath the respect. Attraction sat in his chest like hot sand. Every time she shifted, the feathers at her hips and the impossible swell of her body turned the air into something he had to swim through. He had spent years railing against the softness of men who let curves lead them. Now here he was, measuring his words because a frost giantess with a theology he despised had told him where to put his eyes.
Could it be that the sermons he had swallowed about foreign women and cold gods were wrong, or at least incomplete? He took a breath, slow and steady, as if he could smoke the thought out of his lungs.
“Humbling,” he said at last, picking up her last admission and turning it between his fingers like a coin. “For both of us, it seems.” The smile he offered her now was small and honest.
“You concede that some outsiders have value,” he went on. “That the Sands are good for more than kindling and bad stories. I concede that a woman of the dead court can walk into my bar, dress me down in front of my own people, and I still find myself thinking she is someone worth listening to.”
He shrugged once, a sharp little motion. “I do not enjoy that feeling,” he added. “But I know better than to ignore it.”
He reached for his tea, more to occupy his hands than for thirst, and drank without flinching at the lukewarm sweetness. “You are right about Lady Zubaida,” Sukegei said. “She is flint in a field of straw. The rest of us pretend at righteousness. She lives it until it hurts. If she has called for winter, then winter was needed. I will not argue that.”
His gaze stayed where she had ordered it, between her brows, though it cost him a thread of pride each time his eyes wanted to dip.
“You say Xandera wants numbers,” he continued. “Defiled. Corruption. How honest our war really is when the hymns stop. That is the surface. A queen of your weight does not move a piece like you for numbers alone.” He set the glass down carefully.
“So tell me plain, Icewing,” he said. “What does Queen Xandera want from the White Sand Empire. Tribute. Alliance. A buffer. A warning for the Sun Creed. A chance to test her doctrine against ours instead of against the weak little faiths that already crumble in your swamps.” He let a hint of his old humor return, just enough to soften the edge.
“Because if I am to be audited,” Sukegei added, “I would at least like to know which column my motherland is being written into. Asset. Liability. Or curiosity.”
He inclined his head, a small, reluctant show of respect that did not feel like surrender, only accuracy. “And if a woman like you is here to decide it,” he finished quietly, “then I suppose the least I can do is listen while you sharpen the quill.”
Her authority had weight, real authority. Not the kind you bought with coin or stole with clever lines. The kind that made a room behave without raising its voice. He had felt it around Samara. Around a few warlords in his youth. Around Zubaida on her worst days. It was in this woman too, in the way she lounged as if every chair she touched became a throne that owed her rent.
A foreigner. A woman of the dead. And some traitorous part of him wanted to fall into step behind her.
He hated that. Worse was the pull beneath the respect. Attraction sat in his chest like hot sand. Every time she shifted, the feathers at her hips and the impossible swell of her body turned the air into something he had to swim through. He had spent years railing against the softness of men who let curves lead them. Now here he was, measuring his words because a frost giantess with a theology he despised had told him where to put his eyes.
Could it be that the sermons he had swallowed about foreign women and cold gods were wrong, or at least incomplete? He took a breath, slow and steady, as if he could smoke the thought out of his lungs.
“Humbling,” he said at last, picking up her last admission and turning it between his fingers like a coin. “For both of us, it seems.” The smile he offered her now was small and honest.
“You concede that some outsiders have value,” he went on. “That the Sands are good for more than kindling and bad stories. I concede that a woman of the dead court can walk into my bar, dress me down in front of my own people, and I still find myself thinking she is someone worth listening to.”
He shrugged once, a sharp little motion. “I do not enjoy that feeling,” he added. “But I know better than to ignore it.”
He reached for his tea, more to occupy his hands than for thirst, and drank without flinching at the lukewarm sweetness. “You are right about Lady Zubaida,” Sukegei said. “She is flint in a field of straw. The rest of us pretend at righteousness. She lives it until it hurts. If she has called for winter, then winter was needed. I will not argue that.”
His gaze stayed where she had ordered it, between her brows, though it cost him a thread of pride each time his eyes wanted to dip.
“You say Xandera wants numbers,” he continued. “Defiled. Corruption. How honest our war really is when the hymns stop. That is the surface. A queen of your weight does not move a piece like you for numbers alone.” He set the glass down carefully.
“So tell me plain, Icewing,” he said. “What does Queen Xandera want from the White Sand Empire. Tribute. Alliance. A buffer. A warning for the Sun Creed. A chance to test her doctrine against ours instead of against the weak little faiths that already crumble in your swamps.” He let a hint of his old humor return, just enough to soften the edge.
“Because if I am to be audited,” Sukegei added, “I would at least like to know which column my motherland is being written into. Asset. Liability. Or curiosity.”
He inclined his head, a small, reluctant show of respect that did not feel like surrender, only accuracy. “And if a woman like you is here to decide it,” he finished quietly, “then I suppose the least I can do is listen while you sharpen the quill.”
Ixqueya watched the word humbling leave his mouth as if he had tried to dress himself in one of her coats.
Her eyes narrowed. The blue in them thinned to hard, pale rings.
“Do not overreach,” she said, voice low and even. “When I say outsiders have value, I am not inviting you to stand beside me in the ledger. Even a dead dog in a field has value. It feeds crows. It fattens worms. It keeps children from sleeping in ditches. Use is not honor. It is merely the reason carrion is not shoveled into a pit and forgotten.”
She shifted, slow and unhurried, crossing one long leg over the other. The movement was a study in control, not invitation. Feathers rustled. Gold and bone chimed softly. The way she sat made the chair look like furniture that had been promoted, not a woman lowering herself.
“You, Sukegei, are such a dog,” she went on. “Less offensive alive than rotting in the street. You pour tea. You listen where others talk. You are, on occasion, capable of keeping your eyes where you are told. That gives you value. It does not make you peer to queens or keeper of designs.”
His agreement about Zubaida drew the faintest incline of her head.
“On Lady Zubaida we concur,” Ixqueya allowed. “She is one of the few in this oven who remembers that faith is work and not costume. A hard woman. A necessary one. The Marrow Doctrine is not so vain that it refuses a sharp tool because it was forged under the wrong sky.”
The small concession ended there. Authority settled back over her like a cloak.
“As for what Queen Xandera wants,” she continued, tone turning colder, “that is not tavern talk. The intentions of the Court of Blessed Bone are not recited between hookah pulls to a sand-licker who lives on tips, rumors, and whatever affection he can buy by the hour. Which I expect is buggery.”
Her lip curled, just enough to show what she thought of his rank.
“You are an ignoble vagabond with expensive boots and cheap discipline,” she said. “A man who measures himself by how many beds he has warmed and how many times he has made the Lord of Light look the other way. You are precisely useful at this table. You are not qualified to be briefed on the affairs of Hextor’s crown.”
She let that hang, then added, in the clipped, matter-of-fact tone of a magistrate closing a case:
“If the Queen wished the strategy explained to you, you would not have to ask. You would find it written in your orders, or carved into your sentence. Until that day, you will know what you need to know. Lady Zubaida gives you enough to keep your courage lit. I give you enough to keep your mouth from wandering.”
Ixqueya leaned back, shoulders settling against the chair as if she had placed a seal on the moment.
“Drink your tea, little Wrath with a little shadow,” she finished. “Watch. Listen. When winter chooses to move a piece, the piece moves. It does not sit in a bar and demand to see the board.”
Her eyes narrowed. The blue in them thinned to hard, pale rings.
“Do not overreach,” she said, voice low and even. “When I say outsiders have value, I am not inviting you to stand beside me in the ledger. Even a dead dog in a field has value. It feeds crows. It fattens worms. It keeps children from sleeping in ditches. Use is not honor. It is merely the reason carrion is not shoveled into a pit and forgotten.”
She shifted, slow and unhurried, crossing one long leg over the other. The movement was a study in control, not invitation. Feathers rustled. Gold and bone chimed softly. The way she sat made the chair look like furniture that had been promoted, not a woman lowering herself.
“You, Sukegei, are such a dog,” she went on. “Less offensive alive than rotting in the street. You pour tea. You listen where others talk. You are, on occasion, capable of keeping your eyes where you are told. That gives you value. It does not make you peer to queens or keeper of designs.”
His agreement about Zubaida drew the faintest incline of her head.
“On Lady Zubaida we concur,” Ixqueya allowed. “She is one of the few in this oven who remembers that faith is work and not costume. A hard woman. A necessary one. The Marrow Doctrine is not so vain that it refuses a sharp tool because it was forged under the wrong sky.”
The small concession ended there. Authority settled back over her like a cloak.
“As for what Queen Xandera wants,” she continued, tone turning colder, “that is not tavern talk. The intentions of the Court of Blessed Bone are not recited between hookah pulls to a sand-licker who lives on tips, rumors, and whatever affection he can buy by the hour. Which I expect is buggery.”
Her lip curled, just enough to show what she thought of his rank.
“You are an ignoble vagabond with expensive boots and cheap discipline,” she said. “A man who measures himself by how many beds he has warmed and how many times he has made the Lord of Light look the other way. You are precisely useful at this table. You are not qualified to be briefed on the affairs of Hextor’s crown.”
She let that hang, then added, in the clipped, matter-of-fact tone of a magistrate closing a case:
“If the Queen wished the strategy explained to you, you would not have to ask. You would find it written in your orders, or carved into your sentence. Until that day, you will know what you need to know. Lady Zubaida gives you enough to keep your courage lit. I give you enough to keep your mouth from wandering.”
Ixqueya leaned back, shoulders settling against the chair as if she had placed a seal on the moment.
“Drink your tea, little Wrath with a little shadow,” she finished. “Watch. Listen. When winter chooses to move a piece, the piece moves. It does not sit in a bar and demand to see the board.”
Sukegei snorted, a short, sharp sound that cut through the hush she’d nailed to the beams. “First correction,” he said, lifting his hands as if to ward off an invisible mace. “I am many things. Ignoble. Vagabond. Professional disappointment. But I am not in the habit of offering my back door to anyone, least of all a woman who looks like she could rearrange my spine for sport.”
His mouth tilted, wicked and resigned all at once. “You,” he added, giving her the most fleeting up-and-down he dared, “look very much like the type who prefers breaking gates to knocking on them. I’ll keep mine barred, if it’s all the same to you.” He let that hang just long enough for the nearby tables to decide whether they were allowed to laugh, then shrugged and took another pull from the hookah, using the smoke to hide the tightness in his jaw.
“Anyway,” he went on, tone flicking back to lazy, “the Queen of Corpses can keep her secrets. I’m not fool enough to think a creature like me gets a map to whatever game she’s playing. If she wanted me briefed, you’d have arrived with a scroll and a list of tasks instead of a lecture and a mace.”
His eyes skimmed her again, lingering for a heartbeat on her impossible silhouette, the regal ease with which she occupied the chair. The thought he bit back was that only a royal or a weapon forged by one carried themselves like that. “Still,” he added, “I take it as a good sign that, if she means us harm, she sent a daughter to do the scouting. Queens don’t usually risk bloodlines on places they plan to turn entirely into ash. Flesh like yours does not walk on expendable errands.” He gave her a small, crooked grin, leaning his elbows on the table.
“As for the rest,” Sukegei said, “I heard you. Dog in the field. Carrion with uses. Ignoble vagabond with expensive boots and bad habits. Fine. I’ve been called worse by people I respect less. I pour well, I listen when I have to, I know which end of the sword to point at the problem, and I am, if nothing else, pleasant scenery while the serious folk count ledgers.” He tipped his glass toward her in a half-bow.
“You want me to fetch, I’ll fetch for Lady Zubaida. You want me to stand in the corner and look pretty while you freeze liars in their tracks, I can manage that too. Just don’t expect me to stop being cocky because winter decided I’m only fit for crows and errands.” A spark of mischief returned to his eyes. “Besides,” he finished, voice dropping, “if I’m such a useless little sand-licker, you can safely ignore anything I say. And if I’m not… well. Then the Queen of Corpses is already getting more out of me than my own god ever did. That should count for some value on your precious ledger, no?”
His mouth tilted, wicked and resigned all at once. “You,” he added, giving her the most fleeting up-and-down he dared, “look very much like the type who prefers breaking gates to knocking on them. I’ll keep mine barred, if it’s all the same to you.” He let that hang just long enough for the nearby tables to decide whether they were allowed to laugh, then shrugged and took another pull from the hookah, using the smoke to hide the tightness in his jaw.
“Anyway,” he went on, tone flicking back to lazy, “the Queen of Corpses can keep her secrets. I’m not fool enough to think a creature like me gets a map to whatever game she’s playing. If she wanted me briefed, you’d have arrived with a scroll and a list of tasks instead of a lecture and a mace.”
His eyes skimmed her again, lingering for a heartbeat on her impossible silhouette, the regal ease with which she occupied the chair. The thought he bit back was that only a royal or a weapon forged by one carried themselves like that. “Still,” he added, “I take it as a good sign that, if she means us harm, she sent a daughter to do the scouting. Queens don’t usually risk bloodlines on places they plan to turn entirely into ash. Flesh like yours does not walk on expendable errands.” He gave her a small, crooked grin, leaning his elbows on the table.
“As for the rest,” Sukegei said, “I heard you. Dog in the field. Carrion with uses. Ignoble vagabond with expensive boots and bad habits. Fine. I’ve been called worse by people I respect less. I pour well, I listen when I have to, I know which end of the sword to point at the problem, and I am, if nothing else, pleasant scenery while the serious folk count ledgers.” He tipped his glass toward her in a half-bow.
“You want me to fetch, I’ll fetch for Lady Zubaida. You want me to stand in the corner and look pretty while you freeze liars in their tracks, I can manage that too. Just don’t expect me to stop being cocky because winter decided I’m only fit for crows and errands.” A spark of mischief returned to his eyes. “Besides,” he finished, voice dropping, “if I’m such a useless little sand-licker, you can safely ignore anything I say. And if I’m not… well. Then the Queen of Corpses is already getting more out of me than my own god ever did. That should count for some value on your precious ledger, no?”
Ixqueya listened without shifting so much as a feather.
The joke about doors washed over her with all the impact of a twig on pack ice. If she was offended, it did not reach the surface.
“Your thresholds are your concern,” she said, tone flat. “Winter has no interest in entering rooms that open onto nothing.”
Her gaze steadied on him, cool and exact. Every word thereafter felt weighed before it left her tongue.
“You persist in confusing notice with favor,” she went on. “When I speak of your value, you hear compliment. When I deny you secrets, you hear flirt dressed as insult. This is the kiln brain. It believes anything that does not burn it on contact must wish to warm it.”
She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them the other way, not to tease but to settle more comfortably on her invisible throne. Authority sat on her shoulders like fur. The room reacted to the movement before she finished it; voices dipped, eyes flicked away.
“You guess that I am the Queen’s daughter,” Ixqueya said. “It is a child’s guess. You see a woman with stature and think there is only one path for such a creature. Bed, womb, crown. You cannot imagine that a realm might shape a weapon for its own sake.”
A faint curl of her mouth, closer to contempt than amusement.
“I am not Xandera’s daughter,” she said. “I am something far less comforting. I am her ice in the march. Her signature written in cold where she cannot stand in person. Blood is a private matter. Doctrine is not. You should worry more about the second.” A half lie.
She let her fingers brush the head of the Frostfang Mace. Frost whispered along the iron like a chorus cut to a single note.
“As for your education,” she continued, “believe me when I tell you this. The Queen of Corpses has no need to explain herself to a man who measures his worth in how loudly he can announce that he will keep his back to the wall.”
Her eyes narrowed a fraction.
“You mistake yourself for a reader of boards,” she said. “You are a piece. A useful one. A mobile one. A loud one. Zubaida moves you because you respond to heat and danger in the correct direction. That is your place. It is not shameful. It is simply accurate.”
He had called himself scenery. She let that hang in the air for a heartbeat.
“You speak as if your god has wasted you,” Ixqueya said. “As if my Queen is already getting more from you than He ever did. That is not a revelation, Sukegei. That is what competent rule looks like. A good steward can find use for a cracked cup. A poor one lets it leak, then tells stories about divine mystery when the water runs out.”
Her fingers tapped the table once, light as a gavel.
“You want that counted on the ledger,” she added. “Very well. The audit so far. You have appetites, yet you can leash them when ordered. You have a tongue, yet you can bite it when duty requires. You are vain, yet not so stupid that you cannot feel the weight of a room that does not belong to you. That is more than I expected when you opened your mouth the first time.”
Her gaze sharpened, pinning him.
“But understand this. Cockiness is not a virtue. It is a lid. It keeps small men from seeing how small they are. You are clever. You are not as clever as you think. You are useful. You are not as indispensable as you hope. Winter has seen better men than you ground into slush in streets that no longer exist. The city still stands. The ledgers still close. The moon still rises.”
She eased back, letting the words sink in, then allowed herself a thin sliver of almost kindness.
“If Zubaida and I both find uses for you, that should be enough for your pride,” she said. “You are right about one thing. A queen does not spend daughters, or instruments like me, on lands she plans to destroy outright. You are not yet written in the column for ruin. That does not make you heir to her confidence.”
Ixqueya lifted her cup, the glass now a shell of clear ice around the cooled tea.
“You will not see the board,” she finished. “You will see your line on it. You will be told where to stand, where to march, whom to cut. If you do it well, your name will sit in the ledger with a firm hand. If you do it poorly, the line grows thin and the entry ends. Either way, the work continues.”
She sipped at last, unfazed by the chill.
“Count that as mercy, little Wrath,” Ixqueya said, eyes gleaming like frozen gold. “You are spared the burden of understanding. You need only do your part while the serious people decide what to do with the world.”
The joke about doors washed over her with all the impact of a twig on pack ice. If she was offended, it did not reach the surface.
“Your thresholds are your concern,” she said, tone flat. “Winter has no interest in entering rooms that open onto nothing.”
Her gaze steadied on him, cool and exact. Every word thereafter felt weighed before it left her tongue.
“You persist in confusing notice with favor,” she went on. “When I speak of your value, you hear compliment. When I deny you secrets, you hear flirt dressed as insult. This is the kiln brain. It believes anything that does not burn it on contact must wish to warm it.”
She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them the other way, not to tease but to settle more comfortably on her invisible throne. Authority sat on her shoulders like fur. The room reacted to the movement before she finished it; voices dipped, eyes flicked away.
“You guess that I am the Queen’s daughter,” Ixqueya said. “It is a child’s guess. You see a woman with stature and think there is only one path for such a creature. Bed, womb, crown. You cannot imagine that a realm might shape a weapon for its own sake.”
A faint curl of her mouth, closer to contempt than amusement.
“I am not Xandera’s daughter,” she said. “I am something far less comforting. I am her ice in the march. Her signature written in cold where she cannot stand in person. Blood is a private matter. Doctrine is not. You should worry more about the second.” A half lie.
She let her fingers brush the head of the Frostfang Mace. Frost whispered along the iron like a chorus cut to a single note.
“As for your education,” she continued, “believe me when I tell you this. The Queen of Corpses has no need to explain herself to a man who measures his worth in how loudly he can announce that he will keep his back to the wall.”
Her eyes narrowed a fraction.
“You mistake yourself for a reader of boards,” she said. “You are a piece. A useful one. A mobile one. A loud one. Zubaida moves you because you respond to heat and danger in the correct direction. That is your place. It is not shameful. It is simply accurate.”
He had called himself scenery. She let that hang in the air for a heartbeat.
“You speak as if your god has wasted you,” Ixqueya said. “As if my Queen is already getting more from you than He ever did. That is not a revelation, Sukegei. That is what competent rule looks like. A good steward can find use for a cracked cup. A poor one lets it leak, then tells stories about divine mystery when the water runs out.”
Her fingers tapped the table once, light as a gavel.
“You want that counted on the ledger,” she added. “Very well. The audit so far. You have appetites, yet you can leash them when ordered. You have a tongue, yet you can bite it when duty requires. You are vain, yet not so stupid that you cannot feel the weight of a room that does not belong to you. That is more than I expected when you opened your mouth the first time.”
Her gaze sharpened, pinning him.
“But understand this. Cockiness is not a virtue. It is a lid. It keeps small men from seeing how small they are. You are clever. You are not as clever as you think. You are useful. You are not as indispensable as you hope. Winter has seen better men than you ground into slush in streets that no longer exist. The city still stands. The ledgers still close. The moon still rises.”
She eased back, letting the words sink in, then allowed herself a thin sliver of almost kindness.
“If Zubaida and I both find uses for you, that should be enough for your pride,” she said. “You are right about one thing. A queen does not spend daughters, or instruments like me, on lands she plans to destroy outright. You are not yet written in the column for ruin. That does not make you heir to her confidence.”
Ixqueya lifted her cup, the glass now a shell of clear ice around the cooled tea.
“You will not see the board,” she finished. “You will see your line on it. You will be told where to stand, where to march, whom to cut. If you do it well, your name will sit in the ledger with a firm hand. If you do it poorly, the line grows thin and the entry ends. Either way, the work continues.”
She sipped at last, unfazed by the chill.
“Count that as mercy, little Wrath,” Ixqueya said, eyes gleaming like frozen gold. “You are spared the burden of understanding. You need only do your part while the serious people decide what to do with the world.”
Sukegei listened to the last of her sermon and let out a slow breath through his nose. “Serious people deciding what to do with the world,” he said, lips quirking. “Good. I’ve seen what happens when men like me are put in charge of it. Too much drink. Not enough ink.” He tipped his head in a shallow, crooked bow.
“Fine. You keep the ledgers. I’ll keep the blade pointed the right way and try not to drool on your precious audit. Seems a fair division of labor to me.” He pushed himself up from the bench with an easy grace, adjusting his cloak, kilij strap, and pride in roughly that order. The room’s attention drifted with him; some out of habit, some to see whether the giantess would move when summoned to motion. Sukegei gave her a half-smile, equal parts irreverent and acknowledging. “Come on then, Lady Ixgueya,” he said. “The serious people are waiting. Woman of the hour doesn’t like to be kept from her own storm.” He gestured toward the back of the tavern, where the private rooms lay in shadow and incense. “Time to go see what happens when flint meets frost.” he added over his shoulder as he started walking.
“Fine. You keep the ledgers. I’ll keep the blade pointed the right way and try not to drool on your precious audit. Seems a fair division of labor to me.” He pushed himself up from the bench with an easy grace, adjusting his cloak, kilij strap, and pride in roughly that order. The room’s attention drifted with him; some out of habit, some to see whether the giantess would move when summoned to motion. Sukegei gave her a half-smile, equal parts irreverent and acknowledging. “Come on then, Lady Ixgueya,” he said. “The serious people are waiting. Woman of the hour doesn’t like to be kept from her own storm.” He gestured toward the back of the tavern, where the private rooms lay in shadow and incense. “Time to go see what happens when flint meets frost.” he added over his shoulder as he started walking.
Chairs whispered and cups stilled when Sukegei rose. The tavern’s light clung to him hopefully, like sparks that did not yet know they would die on stone.
When Ixqueya stood, the room understood the difference.
The chair yielded with a soft wooden groan, as if relieved to be dismissed from holy duty. Nine feet of frost-born height unfolded, each vertebrae a quiet verdict. Feathers cascaded down her shoulders in a slow, controlled spill of turquoise and shadow, like frozen riverwater captured mid-fall. The Gravechill Bulwark settled against her arm, a black crescent that turned every lamp it caught into a dim, obedient coin.
It was as if a glacier had decided to imitate a woman for a season.
Smoke from the hookahs curled toward her and faltered. The nearer coals hissed and thinned, their heat bitten down to a sulk. Frost traced fine veins along the floorboards beneath her bare heel, delicate as script, ruthless as a tally.
She watched Sukegei’s back for a moment. The set of his shoulders. The tilt of his head. A man who masked unease with swagger. A fox that had just realized it was sharing a den with something that did not run.
“We have compared ourselves enough,” she said at last.
Her voice did not need to rise. It moved like cold through cloth. The words slid between cups and throats and nailed themselves to the beams. For a heartbeat even the oud in the corner forgot its song.
“I have a judgment. That is all that matters.”
There was no triumph in it. Only finality. A page closed.
She lifted the Frostfang Mace from the table. The ring of hoarfrost it had etched into the grain remained behind, a pale halo, proof that even in rest her tools tried to rewrite their surroundings. The weapon came to rest at her hip with the quiet gravity of a star falling into its proper orbit.
Sukegei started toward the back, toward Zubaida and incense and deeper politics. Ixqueya took one step after him, then another, each measured. The tavern seemed to tilt around her path. Men leaned away without thinking. Lamps hummed a little lower as her shadow passed over them.
“You spend much time worrying what I think of you,” she said, her voice following his back like an old hymn. “I do not return the favor.”
Her eyes were winter sky. Clear. Distant. Absolute.
“A predator does not concern itself with the feelings of its prey. My grandmother taught me that before I could spell my own name.”
Florentina’s lessons flickered through her mind. A giantess with blood on her hands and frost in her smile. The constant refrain. You are not a girl. You are Jorgenskull. You are not comfort. You are consequence.
Ixqueya’s mouth softened at the memory for a heartbeat, then reset into its usual sculpted calm.
“I am Jorgenskull,” she went on. “I am not here to be liked. I am a weapon. A tool. A shield on the wall. An idea realized so that others may keep the luxury of being people.”
She moved to his shoulder then, a looming shape of feather and bone and cold. The air around him cooled another degree. His breath showed once, a small ghost that vanished against her.
“Your approval does not enter the accounting.”
Outside, some unseen shutter rattled in the desert wind and fell still. Inside, lantern light broke itself on her armor like worship on a closed altar.
“You keep your blade pointed, little Wrath,” Ixqueya said. “I will keep the ledger true. That is a fair division of labor.”
The mace-head touched the floor once as she shifted her grip. The tap sounded like a distant bell in a burial city.
She turned her face toward the corridor where Zubaida waited. Incense, old sandstone, the sharp, clean note of the Shaitan’s discipline reached her. Flint in a field of straw, as she had named the woman. A meeting worth the walk.
“Lead on,” she said, granting Sukegei a single, impersonal nod. A commander acknowledging a scout who had not failed. Yet.
“To your Lady Zubaida. Let us see how much flint your sands still possess before winter is asked to do more than watch.”
Then she followed, tall and unhurried, like a judgment that had chosen to walk beside a sentence on its way to be read.
When Ixqueya stood, the room understood the difference.
The chair yielded with a soft wooden groan, as if relieved to be dismissed from holy duty. Nine feet of frost-born height unfolded, each vertebrae a quiet verdict. Feathers cascaded down her shoulders in a slow, controlled spill of turquoise and shadow, like frozen riverwater captured mid-fall. The Gravechill Bulwark settled against her arm, a black crescent that turned every lamp it caught into a dim, obedient coin.
It was as if a glacier had decided to imitate a woman for a season.
Smoke from the hookahs curled toward her and faltered. The nearer coals hissed and thinned, their heat bitten down to a sulk. Frost traced fine veins along the floorboards beneath her bare heel, delicate as script, ruthless as a tally.
She watched Sukegei’s back for a moment. The set of his shoulders. The tilt of his head. A man who masked unease with swagger. A fox that had just realized it was sharing a den with something that did not run.
“We have compared ourselves enough,” she said at last.
Her voice did not need to rise. It moved like cold through cloth. The words slid between cups and throats and nailed themselves to the beams. For a heartbeat even the oud in the corner forgot its song.
“I have a judgment. That is all that matters.”
There was no triumph in it. Only finality. A page closed.
She lifted the Frostfang Mace from the table. The ring of hoarfrost it had etched into the grain remained behind, a pale halo, proof that even in rest her tools tried to rewrite their surroundings. The weapon came to rest at her hip with the quiet gravity of a star falling into its proper orbit.
Sukegei started toward the back, toward Zubaida and incense and deeper politics. Ixqueya took one step after him, then another, each measured. The tavern seemed to tilt around her path. Men leaned away without thinking. Lamps hummed a little lower as her shadow passed over them.
“You spend much time worrying what I think of you,” she said, her voice following his back like an old hymn. “I do not return the favor.”
Her eyes were winter sky. Clear. Distant. Absolute.
“A predator does not concern itself with the feelings of its prey. My grandmother taught me that before I could spell my own name.”
Florentina’s lessons flickered through her mind. A giantess with blood on her hands and frost in her smile. The constant refrain. You are not a girl. You are Jorgenskull. You are not comfort. You are consequence.
Ixqueya’s mouth softened at the memory for a heartbeat, then reset into its usual sculpted calm.
“I am Jorgenskull,” she went on. “I am not here to be liked. I am a weapon. A tool. A shield on the wall. An idea realized so that others may keep the luxury of being people.”
She moved to his shoulder then, a looming shape of feather and bone and cold. The air around him cooled another degree. His breath showed once, a small ghost that vanished against her.
“Your approval does not enter the accounting.”
Outside, some unseen shutter rattled in the desert wind and fell still. Inside, lantern light broke itself on her armor like worship on a closed altar.
“You keep your blade pointed, little Wrath,” Ixqueya said. “I will keep the ledger true. That is a fair division of labor.”
The mace-head touched the floor once as she shifted her grip. The tap sounded like a distant bell in a burial city.
She turned her face toward the corridor where Zubaida waited. Incense, old sandstone, the sharp, clean note of the Shaitan’s discipline reached her. Flint in a field of straw, as she had named the woman. A meeting worth the walk.
“Lead on,” she said, granting Sukegei a single, impersonal nod. A commander acknowledging a scout who had not failed. Yet.
“To your Lady Zubaida. Let us see how much flint your sands still possess before winter is asked to do more than watch.”
Then she followed, tall and unhurried, like a judgment that had chosen to walk beside a sentence on its way to be read.
Sukegei snorted under his breath as she said the word Jorgenskull like a verdict stamped on stone. Of course. “That figures,” he said over his shoulder, walking but not hurrying, letting his voice carry back to her through the thinning smoke. “Your little speech about predators and prey? I heard it first from Florentina. Usually right before she tried to suplex me during training." He glanced back at Ixqueya just long enough to line her silhouette up with the memory of the bronze giantess in the training yard. Different ice. Same pressure. “She was fond of that line,” he added. “You take after your grandmother. Just colder and without the three-foot meat club swinging between her legs.”
A couple of nearby patrons choked on their tea. Sukegei only smiled, the lazy, crooked one he wore when he knew he was pressing his luck and doing it on purpose. They reached the edge of the tavern proper. The barmaid hovered there, eyes sliding between the frost giantess and the Shaitan like she was waiting to see which one would end the building first. Sukegei fished in his cloak, fingers closing on a smooth cut of stone. He flipped the gem once over his knuckles, where it caught the lamplight and hummed faintly, veins of inner gold pulsing like a slow heartbeat. A minor miracle, expensive enough to sting, not enough to cripple. Worth the show.
“Here,” he said, tossing it to the barmaid in an easy arc. “For the food, the coal, and the damage to everyone’s world view.” She fumbled it, clutched it to her chest, eyes going round when the magic sparked against her skin. Half the room sat up straighter. Even in a sand city, you did not see that kind of coin every day. Sukegei turned away before gratitude could find him. He tipped his chin toward the shadowed corridor that led to the private rooms, to Zubaida and real trouble. “Come on, mountain,” he called back to Ixqueya, that long drawl slipping into place like a familiar glove. “The woman of the hour is waiting, and I am not explaining to her that her new winter hammer got lost between the tables.”
He let a beat pass, then added with an unapologetic smirk: “Try to keep up, you tall lumbering brute of a woman. Some of us have shorter legs and more sins to outrun.” With that, Sukegei pushed through the beaded curtain into the dim corridor, laughter, incense and the faint ring of his spurs marking his exit as he led winter toward the storm that had called it.
A couple of nearby patrons choked on their tea. Sukegei only smiled, the lazy, crooked one he wore when he knew he was pressing his luck and doing it on purpose. They reached the edge of the tavern proper. The barmaid hovered there, eyes sliding between the frost giantess and the Shaitan like she was waiting to see which one would end the building first. Sukegei fished in his cloak, fingers closing on a smooth cut of stone. He flipped the gem once over his knuckles, where it caught the lamplight and hummed faintly, veins of inner gold pulsing like a slow heartbeat. A minor miracle, expensive enough to sting, not enough to cripple. Worth the show.
“Here,” he said, tossing it to the barmaid in an easy arc. “For the food, the coal, and the damage to everyone’s world view.” She fumbled it, clutched it to her chest, eyes going round when the magic sparked against her skin. Half the room sat up straighter. Even in a sand city, you did not see that kind of coin every day. Sukegei turned away before gratitude could find him. He tipped his chin toward the shadowed corridor that led to the private rooms, to Zubaida and real trouble. “Come on, mountain,” he called back to Ixqueya, that long drawl slipping into place like a familiar glove. “The woman of the hour is waiting, and I am not explaining to her that her new winter hammer got lost between the tables.”
He let a beat pass, then added with an unapologetic smirk: “Try to keep up, you tall lumbering brute of a woman. Some of us have shorter legs and more sins to outrun.” With that, Sukegei pushed through the beaded curtain into the dim corridor, laughter, incense and the faint ring of his spurs marking his exit as he led winter toward the storm that had called it.
The beads of the curtain rattled against her cuirass, a string of small, nervous teeth tapping at bone. None dared to bite. They parted around her bulk and swung back in her wake, still quivering after she had already left their little world behind.
Heat clung to the corridor in layers. Old incense. Hookah smoke. Lamp oil. Human breath. It felt like walking through the lungs of a sick animal. Each step she took cooled a ring on the floorboards, thin bands of rime that blinked into being, then softened at the edges, unable to hold their shape in this furnace.
Ahead, Sukegei walked as if the world were still centered on his stride. Spurs whispering. Cloak swinging. The little side-to-side tilt of the shoulders that said he was used to being the one people looked at, not past.
She watched the line of his back and let her mind toy with the earlier image. Cocky spine arched over her knee. Breath snapped out of him in a sharp, surprised sound. All that easy irreverence crushed into something smaller and more honest. One motion. A clean break. A simple sentence written in cartilage.
Then the thought met the simple fact.
He does not have a spine worth breaking.
Not in the way that mattered. His backbone was a habit of surviving loud rooms. A network of reflexes, jokes, and practiced shrugs. Flexible in all the wrong places. Stiff in none. There were no straight lines there to snap. Nothing true enough to make the act satisfying.
A pity. Winter wanted firm material. Straight grain. Something that rang when it cracked.
She let the fantasy go as she would let a snowflake melt between gloved fingers. Pretty. Pointless. The real work was ahead.
The tavern behind them exhaled. Once her shadow passed on, voices slowly regained color. Dice found courage. Someone tried a song and stumbled on the first note. Heat rushed back to reclaim the space she had carved out. Fire was always eager that way. It mistook haste for power.
Her grandmother would have snorted at the sight. Florentina, bronze and colossal, standing in a training yard rimed white, watching recruits bump into each other like blind calves. You are not a girl, Florentina had said. You are Jorgenskull. You are not comfort. You are consequence. The prey can whine about the claw. The claw does not care.
Ixqueya felt that lesson settle in her bones again as easy as breath.
What Sukegei thought of her did not matter. Whether his pride bristled or bent. Whether his attraction soured into resentment. Whether he spoke of her as frost queen or frigid witch in whatever den of smoke he frequented next. To the ledger, he was a moving asset. To the Doctrine, a vector. To her, a tool in the hand of someone she respected more than him.
Zubaida.
The corridor air shifted as they neared the private rooms. Incense grew cleaner. Less perfumed, more purposeful. Beneath it, she could taste metal and grit. The scent of a woman who prayed with her sword arm as much as her tongue. Flint in a field of straw, as Ixqueya had named her. One of the few in this burning creed who did not treat the Lord of Light as an excuse for theater.
In that, they were kin of a sort. Different moons. Same contempt for empty spectacle.
Her fingers tightened on the Frostfang Mace. The weapon answered with a thin bloom of hoarfrost along the grip, a rosary of chill beads under her palm. She thought of {Yohualtzin}, high over Hextor, emerald and patient, watching this little errand in the Sands through a curtain of stars. The God Beneath’s wound in the sky did not care about this bar, this corridor, this man. It cared about infection. About defiled rot that might seep through trade routes and forgotten shrines until it brushed Kilk-Mire’s peat.
That was why she was here.
Not to educate one Shaitan with delusions of charm. Not to quarrel with a sun cult in their own oven. She was here as the cold antibody at the border of a fevered body. To read numbers. To measure lies. To decide if this empire was a sick organ that could be treated or a gangrenous limb that would have to be cut, whatever treaties said.
Queen Xandera’s intentions were too large to fit in a tavern.
They lived in tide lines mapped on bone. In census ledgers written in frost. In quiet decisions taken in oculus chambers when the Emerald Thorn climbed and green light cut through every lie in the Dominion.
Ixqueya was not those intentions. She was what they looked like when given legs.
Weapon. Tool. Shield on the wall. Idea realized.
She felt no lack in that. Others needed to be people. To be loved, agreed with, understood. She had been raised to be useful. That was enough. The Marrow Doctrine loved use the way other faiths loved music. A well placed blow of the mace was as holy as any psalm.
Behind her, the tavern vibrated faintly as the magical gem Sukegei had tossed settled into new ownership. That, too, was an allegory. Heat spending itself to buy a moment of quiet. A small miracle used to pay for food and the privilege of surviving a lecture. Fire bartering with ice to leave without losing more skin.
Ahead, a strip of lamplight cut across the floor from an open door. Zubaida’s voice murmured beyond it, low and controlled, speaking to someone unseen. There was the faint clink of armor. The sound of a woman who had already done her prayers with action and was now merely closing the day’s account.
Sukegei’s silhouette paused at the threshold. For all his talk, he did not rush in. Good. Something in him understood that he was ferrying winter to his mistress’s shore, not dragging a tavern toy behind him.
Ixqueya drew level with him, tall shadow blotting half the doorway. For a heartbeat, she let herself stand there and taste the moment. The heat of the corridor behind. The cool intention of what lay ahead. Desert and swamp. Fire and rot-kept memory. The Sun Creed and the Marrow Doctrine, about to touch in the persons of two women who knew too well how much both had already cost them.
No words were needed.
Predator and steward both knew silence sometimes carried more weight than speech.
She stepped forward into the private room, into incense and iron and Zubaida’s waiting gaze. The frost on her mace hardened. The ledgers in her mind opened to a fresh page.
Whatever the Shaitan thought of her stayed where it belonged. Outside. With the smoke.
Inside, there was only work.
Heat clung to the corridor in layers. Old incense. Hookah smoke. Lamp oil. Human breath. It felt like walking through the lungs of a sick animal. Each step she took cooled a ring on the floorboards, thin bands of rime that blinked into being, then softened at the edges, unable to hold their shape in this furnace.
Ahead, Sukegei walked as if the world were still centered on his stride. Spurs whispering. Cloak swinging. The little side-to-side tilt of the shoulders that said he was used to being the one people looked at, not past.
She watched the line of his back and let her mind toy with the earlier image. Cocky spine arched over her knee. Breath snapped out of him in a sharp, surprised sound. All that easy irreverence crushed into something smaller and more honest. One motion. A clean break. A simple sentence written in cartilage.
Then the thought met the simple fact.
He does not have a spine worth breaking.
Not in the way that mattered. His backbone was a habit of surviving loud rooms. A network of reflexes, jokes, and practiced shrugs. Flexible in all the wrong places. Stiff in none. There were no straight lines there to snap. Nothing true enough to make the act satisfying.
A pity. Winter wanted firm material. Straight grain. Something that rang when it cracked.
She let the fantasy go as she would let a snowflake melt between gloved fingers. Pretty. Pointless. The real work was ahead.
The tavern behind them exhaled. Once her shadow passed on, voices slowly regained color. Dice found courage. Someone tried a song and stumbled on the first note. Heat rushed back to reclaim the space she had carved out. Fire was always eager that way. It mistook haste for power.
Her grandmother would have snorted at the sight. Florentina, bronze and colossal, standing in a training yard rimed white, watching recruits bump into each other like blind calves. You are not a girl, Florentina had said. You are Jorgenskull. You are not comfort. You are consequence. The prey can whine about the claw. The claw does not care.
Ixqueya felt that lesson settle in her bones again as easy as breath.
What Sukegei thought of her did not matter. Whether his pride bristled or bent. Whether his attraction soured into resentment. Whether he spoke of her as frost queen or frigid witch in whatever den of smoke he frequented next. To the ledger, he was a moving asset. To the Doctrine, a vector. To her, a tool in the hand of someone she respected more than him.
Zubaida.
The corridor air shifted as they neared the private rooms. Incense grew cleaner. Less perfumed, more purposeful. Beneath it, she could taste metal and grit. The scent of a woman who prayed with her sword arm as much as her tongue. Flint in a field of straw, as Ixqueya had named her. One of the few in this burning creed who did not treat the Lord of Light as an excuse for theater.
In that, they were kin of a sort. Different moons. Same contempt for empty spectacle.
Her fingers tightened on the Frostfang Mace. The weapon answered with a thin bloom of hoarfrost along the grip, a rosary of chill beads under her palm. She thought of {Yohualtzin}, high over Hextor, emerald and patient, watching this little errand in the Sands through a curtain of stars. The God Beneath’s wound in the sky did not care about this bar, this corridor, this man. It cared about infection. About defiled rot that might seep through trade routes and forgotten shrines until it brushed Kilk-Mire’s peat.
That was why she was here.
Not to educate one Shaitan with delusions of charm. Not to quarrel with a sun cult in their own oven. She was here as the cold antibody at the border of a fevered body. To read numbers. To measure lies. To decide if this empire was a sick organ that could be treated or a gangrenous limb that would have to be cut, whatever treaties said.
Queen Xandera’s intentions were too large to fit in a tavern.
They lived in tide lines mapped on bone. In census ledgers written in frost. In quiet decisions taken in oculus chambers when the Emerald Thorn climbed and green light cut through every lie in the Dominion.
Ixqueya was not those intentions. She was what they looked like when given legs.
Weapon. Tool. Shield on the wall. Idea realized.
She felt no lack in that. Others needed to be people. To be loved, agreed with, understood. She had been raised to be useful. That was enough. The Marrow Doctrine loved use the way other faiths loved music. A well placed blow of the mace was as holy as any psalm.
Behind her, the tavern vibrated faintly as the magical gem Sukegei had tossed settled into new ownership. That, too, was an allegory. Heat spending itself to buy a moment of quiet. A small miracle used to pay for food and the privilege of surviving a lecture. Fire bartering with ice to leave without losing more skin.
Ahead, a strip of lamplight cut across the floor from an open door. Zubaida’s voice murmured beyond it, low and controlled, speaking to someone unseen. There was the faint clink of armor. The sound of a woman who had already done her prayers with action and was now merely closing the day’s account.
Sukegei’s silhouette paused at the threshold. For all his talk, he did not rush in. Good. Something in him understood that he was ferrying winter to his mistress’s shore, not dragging a tavern toy behind him.
Ixqueya drew level with him, tall shadow blotting half the doorway. For a heartbeat, she let herself stand there and taste the moment. The heat of the corridor behind. The cool intention of what lay ahead. Desert and swamp. Fire and rot-kept memory. The Sun Creed and the Marrow Doctrine, about to touch in the persons of two women who knew too well how much both had already cost them.
No words were needed.
Predator and steward both knew silence sometimes carried more weight than speech.
She stepped forward into the private room, into incense and iron and Zubaida’s waiting gaze. The frost on her mace hardened. The ledgers in her mind opened to a fresh page.
Whatever the Shaitan thought of her stayed where it belonged. Outside. With the smoke.
Inside, there was only work.
Sukegei did not turn toward the back rooms after all. Instead he hooked two fingers in the beaded curtain and swept it aside, letting the tavern spill back into view. Heat, smoke, lampglow, all crowding the air like petitioners around a low altar. For a heartbeat he glanced up at the ceiling, as if to apologize to whatever saint watched over fools and barmaids.
Then he jerked his chin toward the door. “Come on,” he said to Ixqueya. “If you are going to confess anything, best you do it in the proper place. Zubaida prefers her sinners under a roof with an actual god, not a leaky one with bad music.” His tone had that long drawl again, casual, unbothered, the sound a man makes when he has already decided he will regret this and has chosen to enjoy it anyway. He led the way through the tavern. Chairs scooted. Men made space without looking like they were making space. The barmaid clutched her new gem at her throat like a relic. Someone started to bow, thought better of it when they caught Ixqueya’s eye, and turned the motion into a clumsy stretch.
The door pushed open on the White Sands night. Heat rolled in, honest and dry. Stars hammered the sky. Lanterns strung along the street bled pale halos into the dust. The city hummed around them, all domes and minarets and white stone turned gold under torchlight. From somewhere distant came the ring of a call to prayer, the Lord of Light’s name pulled thin over rooftops. Sukegei fell into a comfortable pace, cloak swinging, spurs ticking a lazy rhythm. Beside him, Ixqueya loomed like a walking verdict, every step leaving a faint, temporary kiss of frost on the sand-powdered stone. The contrast pleased some wicked corner of his mind.
He glanced sideways up at her, smirk curling as he imagined the look on some of the old priests' faces when she stepped into the nave. “You know,” he said conversationally, “our church has a bath house. Holy pools, scented steam, quiet little alcoves where the faithful contemplate their unworthiness.” He let that hang for a beat.
“In another life,” he added, grin sharpening, “I would pay good coin to see what happens when the ice princess and the desert wolf finally decide to stop arguing and use their mouths for something other than theology.” His brain supplied a vivid picture before he could stop it. Zubaida and Ixqueya in the pale tiled baths, steam curling around shoulders and hair, water beading on dark and pale skin. Mouths meeting, breaking apart, meeting again. Fingers in hair, in feathers. The blessed pools slapping softly against carved stone while every statue in the place pretended not to stare.
He swallowed the image like a shot of bad liquor, let it burn on the way down, and locked it behind his teeth. That was the sort of thought that got a man killed twice, once by the Lord of Light and once by whatever cold thing slept under Hextor. Naturally, he would never tell a soul. He pointed ahead, grateful for the distraction of architecture. There, at the end of the street, the district’s main temple shouldered its way into the night. White stone, fluted columns, brass lanterns hanging from chains, all arranged to catch and throw the light in patterns the priests swore were holy. The great doors were open, spilling a rectangle of warm gold onto the steps. Within, shadows moved in prayer and duty.
“That is our oven,” Sukegei said. “Seat of local piety. Storage closet for guilt. And the best acoustics in the quarter if you feel the urge to shout at my god in person.” He took the steps two at a time, then remembered who followed him and slowed, not from courtesy, but because he did not wish to see a Jorgenskull slip on his own front stairs. The symbolism would be cruel.
At the threshold he paused, turned, and gave her a small, mocking half-bow that somehow did not quite manage to be disrespectful. “After you, Inquisitor,” he said. “Time to lay your terrible Hextoran sins at the feet of Lady Zubaida and the Lord of Light. I will even vouch that you have at least one virtue. You keep the tavern paid and the conversation interesting.” His eyes lit briefly with that private mischief again, the one that always suggested he was three thoughts ahead and none of them were appropriate.
“And if you decide the bath house is more to your taste than the altar,” he added lightly, “I promise to avert my eyes. Eventually.” He stepped aside, letting her shadow fall across the temple threshold, desert heat licking at her on one side, sanctified air waiting on the other. For once, he held his tongue as she moved, content to play usher while winter crossed into the house of fire. Whatever happened between frost, flint, and faith inside those walls would not be his story to tell. But he would enjoy imagining the version his god would never hear.
Then he jerked his chin toward the door. “Come on,” he said to Ixqueya. “If you are going to confess anything, best you do it in the proper place. Zubaida prefers her sinners under a roof with an actual god, not a leaky one with bad music.” His tone had that long drawl again, casual, unbothered, the sound a man makes when he has already decided he will regret this and has chosen to enjoy it anyway. He led the way through the tavern. Chairs scooted. Men made space without looking like they were making space. The barmaid clutched her new gem at her throat like a relic. Someone started to bow, thought better of it when they caught Ixqueya’s eye, and turned the motion into a clumsy stretch.
The door pushed open on the White Sands night. Heat rolled in, honest and dry. Stars hammered the sky. Lanterns strung along the street bled pale halos into the dust. The city hummed around them, all domes and minarets and white stone turned gold under torchlight. From somewhere distant came the ring of a call to prayer, the Lord of Light’s name pulled thin over rooftops. Sukegei fell into a comfortable pace, cloak swinging, spurs ticking a lazy rhythm. Beside him, Ixqueya loomed like a walking verdict, every step leaving a faint, temporary kiss of frost on the sand-powdered stone. The contrast pleased some wicked corner of his mind.
He glanced sideways up at her, smirk curling as he imagined the look on some of the old priests' faces when she stepped into the nave. “You know,” he said conversationally, “our church has a bath house. Holy pools, scented steam, quiet little alcoves where the faithful contemplate their unworthiness.” He let that hang for a beat.
“In another life,” he added, grin sharpening, “I would pay good coin to see what happens when the ice princess and the desert wolf finally decide to stop arguing and use their mouths for something other than theology.” His brain supplied a vivid picture before he could stop it. Zubaida and Ixqueya in the pale tiled baths, steam curling around shoulders and hair, water beading on dark and pale skin. Mouths meeting, breaking apart, meeting again. Fingers in hair, in feathers. The blessed pools slapping softly against carved stone while every statue in the place pretended not to stare.
He swallowed the image like a shot of bad liquor, let it burn on the way down, and locked it behind his teeth. That was the sort of thought that got a man killed twice, once by the Lord of Light and once by whatever cold thing slept under Hextor. Naturally, he would never tell a soul. He pointed ahead, grateful for the distraction of architecture. There, at the end of the street, the district’s main temple shouldered its way into the night. White stone, fluted columns, brass lanterns hanging from chains, all arranged to catch and throw the light in patterns the priests swore were holy. The great doors were open, spilling a rectangle of warm gold onto the steps. Within, shadows moved in prayer and duty.
“That is our oven,” Sukegei said. “Seat of local piety. Storage closet for guilt. And the best acoustics in the quarter if you feel the urge to shout at my god in person.” He took the steps two at a time, then remembered who followed him and slowed, not from courtesy, but because he did not wish to see a Jorgenskull slip on his own front stairs. The symbolism would be cruel.
At the threshold he paused, turned, and gave her a small, mocking half-bow that somehow did not quite manage to be disrespectful. “After you, Inquisitor,” he said. “Time to lay your terrible Hextoran sins at the feet of Lady Zubaida and the Lord of Light. I will even vouch that you have at least one virtue. You keep the tavern paid and the conversation interesting.” His eyes lit briefly with that private mischief again, the one that always suggested he was three thoughts ahead and none of them were appropriate.
“And if you decide the bath house is more to your taste than the altar,” he added lightly, “I promise to avert my eyes. Eventually.” He stepped aside, letting her shadow fall across the temple threshold, desert heat licking at her on one side, sanctified air waiting on the other. For once, he held his tongue as she moved, content to play usher while winter crossed into the house of fire. Whatever happened between frost, flint, and faith inside those walls would not be his story to tell. But he would enjoy imagining the version his god would never hear.
Sukegei lounged against the fluted pillar as if it were a throne he had graciously consented to borrow. Cool stone pressed through the thin linen of his sleeve, grounding him in the humid hush of the Lord of Light’s cathedral. Incense smoldered in braziers along the nave, gold-thread smoke unfurling toward the high vault like coiling prayers. Above, the mosaic windows burned. He let his eyes climb to them.
The glass told the old stories in fire and pigment. A sunburst, all jagged rays and molten amber. A desert caravan rendered in shards of ochre and lapis, tiny faceless pilgrims forever trudging through a river of light. A figure of radiant judgment lifting a sword too bright to look at directly. When the afternoon glare struck the panes just right, color spilled over the marble floor in fractured halos and set the dust motes drifting like embers in water.
Normally, it soothed him. Today, it only sharpened the weight in his chest. What in all the blessed dunes brings a Jorgenskull here. He flicked a glance toward the side chapel where Zubaida held court with their guest from the land of rot and frost. Voices bled through thick stone in indistinct murmurs. The occasional low thrum of Zubaida’s voice, that familiar iron wrapped in velvet. Another voice under it, deeper, colder, like water sliding beneath river ice.
Ixqueya Jorgenskull. The name felt wrong in this cathedral. Like a bone icon left on a sun altar. His gaze drifted back up to the glass. Saints and martyrs. Flames and halos. No giants. A daughter of the dead in our little speck of sand. A Jorgenskull in the Lord’s own house. No summons. No procession. No warning at all. She simply arrives with frost clinging to her shadow and walks in as if the dunes owe her audience.
Sukegei’s jaw flexed. Something in his gut tightened that had nothing to do with hunger. It did not feel right. He had felt fear in these halls. He had smelled lies. Pride. Lust. The sour reek of guilt clinging to penitents who knelt and hoped the Lord of Light did not look too closely. He knew the currents of people the way a sailor knew wind. The moment Ixqueya had stepped through the great doors, the air had changed.
Not like a sinner. Not like a zealot. Not like a supplicant. Like a storm that had simply decided the desert belonged to it for a while. And yet. She had looked at him once. Only once. Those eyes of glacial blue slid over him, measured, and moved on. No flinch. No shy downward flicker. No answering smile when he had given her one of his better ones. The kind that had reduced hardened warriors to stammering and made more than one noblewoman forget her vows.
Nothing. Sukegei’s lips pressed together. He rolled one shoulder against the pillar, resettling his weight with practiced indolence, and lifted his chin. Impossible. Nobody was immune to him. Not truly. Perhaps resistant. Perhaps stubborn. Perhaps devout enough to pretend. But immune. No. She was playing hard to get. That was all. The ice-queen routine. The frosty hauteur. The way she carried herself as if men were an inconvenience that happened to exist in her line of sight. Some women liked the long game. Some needed time to thaw.
She just cannot handle your Shaitān aura, he told himself, and the thought soothed him at once. That was it. The only explanation that did not insult his understanding of reality. His presence rattled her. She simply masked it with that warlord composure and those eyes that looked at everyone as if gauging where to carve the first cut. If anything, it meant she was interested. His mind, treacherous and male, replayed the moment she had passed him near the entrance. The smell of her: cold air, foreign resins, the faint mineral tang of long-frozen rivers. The sound of armor plates whispering against one another. The way the cathedral’s stone had seemed smaller with her inside it. Shame about the scale, really. Ixqueya would make a terrifyingly good mother.
Even his sense of propriety could not stop the thought from unfurling. That towering frame, all sculpted strength and disciplined grace. A chest that could have made icons weep. An ass that had no business being that round on something that tall, moving with lethal unconcern as she walked. Hips wide as a promise, built to bear broods and battles both. All of that poured into a giantess fated for necro-swamps and bone palaces instead of a proper sunlit courtyard full of shrieking children. Wasted. He clicked his tongue softly, as if the Lord Himself might share his opinion on divine design flaws. Still, wasted or not, she was here. In his desert. In his cathedral. Under his god’s gaze. And something was off.
Maybe it was the way frost kept spider-webbing along the flagstones wherever she lingered, leaving hairline veins of white that took the attendants hours to scrub away. Maybe it was the way Zubaida had not sent word ahead, the way her messages had gone from regular to very pointedly not about this at all. Maybe it was the simple heresy of seeing a Jorgenskull’s sigil near the Lord’s flame. Or maybe it was that she had looked at him and given him nothing in return. No reaction. No spark. He pushed off the pillar just enough to adjust his stance, boots whispering against marble, then leaned back again, casual as a cat on a wall. From here he could see the chapel door clearly. Light bled around its edges. The muted cadence of their conversation rose and fell.
Let the Shaitān talk to the frost ghost, he mused. Let Zubaida pry the secrets from her teeth. When the giantess walked out, the real test would begin. Charm was a blade best used when the mark thought the battle already over. He folded his arms over his chest, eyes rising once more to the blazing mosaics. A Jorgenskull in the Lord of Light’s house. Immune to him. He almost smiled. We will see about that. Somewhere beyond the chapel door, stone hinges groaned. Voices shifted. A shadow, tall and sharp, flickered against the far wall. Sukegei straightened from the pillar, smoothing his expression into something politely neutral, every nerve suddenly awake. Show time.
The glass told the old stories in fire and pigment. A sunburst, all jagged rays and molten amber. A desert caravan rendered in shards of ochre and lapis, tiny faceless pilgrims forever trudging through a river of light. A figure of radiant judgment lifting a sword too bright to look at directly. When the afternoon glare struck the panes just right, color spilled over the marble floor in fractured halos and set the dust motes drifting like embers in water.
Normally, it soothed him. Today, it only sharpened the weight in his chest. What in all the blessed dunes brings a Jorgenskull here. He flicked a glance toward the side chapel where Zubaida held court with their guest from the land of rot and frost. Voices bled through thick stone in indistinct murmurs. The occasional low thrum of Zubaida’s voice, that familiar iron wrapped in velvet. Another voice under it, deeper, colder, like water sliding beneath river ice.
Ixqueya Jorgenskull. The name felt wrong in this cathedral. Like a bone icon left on a sun altar. His gaze drifted back up to the glass. Saints and martyrs. Flames and halos. No giants. A daughter of the dead in our little speck of sand. A Jorgenskull in the Lord’s own house. No summons. No procession. No warning at all. She simply arrives with frost clinging to her shadow and walks in as if the dunes owe her audience.
Sukegei’s jaw flexed. Something in his gut tightened that had nothing to do with hunger. It did not feel right. He had felt fear in these halls. He had smelled lies. Pride. Lust. The sour reek of guilt clinging to penitents who knelt and hoped the Lord of Light did not look too closely. He knew the currents of people the way a sailor knew wind. The moment Ixqueya had stepped through the great doors, the air had changed.
Not like a sinner. Not like a zealot. Not like a supplicant. Like a storm that had simply decided the desert belonged to it for a while. And yet. She had looked at him once. Only once. Those eyes of glacial blue slid over him, measured, and moved on. No flinch. No shy downward flicker. No answering smile when he had given her one of his better ones. The kind that had reduced hardened warriors to stammering and made more than one noblewoman forget her vows.
Nothing. Sukegei’s lips pressed together. He rolled one shoulder against the pillar, resettling his weight with practiced indolence, and lifted his chin. Impossible. Nobody was immune to him. Not truly. Perhaps resistant. Perhaps stubborn. Perhaps devout enough to pretend. But immune. No. She was playing hard to get. That was all. The ice-queen routine. The frosty hauteur. The way she carried herself as if men were an inconvenience that happened to exist in her line of sight. Some women liked the long game. Some needed time to thaw.
She just cannot handle your Shaitān aura, he told himself, and the thought soothed him at once. That was it. The only explanation that did not insult his understanding of reality. His presence rattled her. She simply masked it with that warlord composure and those eyes that looked at everyone as if gauging where to carve the first cut. If anything, it meant she was interested. His mind, treacherous and male, replayed the moment she had passed him near the entrance. The smell of her: cold air, foreign resins, the faint mineral tang of long-frozen rivers. The sound of armor plates whispering against one another. The way the cathedral’s stone had seemed smaller with her inside it. Shame about the scale, really. Ixqueya would make a terrifyingly good mother.
Even his sense of propriety could not stop the thought from unfurling. That towering frame, all sculpted strength and disciplined grace. A chest that could have made icons weep. An ass that had no business being that round on something that tall, moving with lethal unconcern as she walked. Hips wide as a promise, built to bear broods and battles both. All of that poured into a giantess fated for necro-swamps and bone palaces instead of a proper sunlit courtyard full of shrieking children. Wasted. He clicked his tongue softly, as if the Lord Himself might share his opinion on divine design flaws. Still, wasted or not, she was here. In his desert. In his cathedral. Under his god’s gaze. And something was off.
Maybe it was the way frost kept spider-webbing along the flagstones wherever she lingered, leaving hairline veins of white that took the attendants hours to scrub away. Maybe it was the way Zubaida had not sent word ahead, the way her messages had gone from regular to very pointedly not about this at all. Maybe it was the simple heresy of seeing a Jorgenskull’s sigil near the Lord’s flame. Or maybe it was that she had looked at him and given him nothing in return. No reaction. No spark. He pushed off the pillar just enough to adjust his stance, boots whispering against marble, then leaned back again, casual as a cat on a wall. From here he could see the chapel door clearly. Light bled around its edges. The muted cadence of their conversation rose and fell.
Let the Shaitān talk to the frost ghost, he mused. Let Zubaida pry the secrets from her teeth. When the giantess walked out, the real test would begin. Charm was a blade best used when the mark thought the battle already over. He folded his arms over his chest, eyes rising once more to the blazing mosaics. A Jorgenskull in the Lord of Light’s house. Immune to him. He almost smiled. We will see about that. Somewhere beyond the chapel door, stone hinges groaned. Voices shifted. A shadow, tall and sharp, flickered against the far wall. Sukegei straightened from the pillar, smoothing his expression into something politely neutral, every nerve suddenly awake. Show time.
The last words between them left a warmth on Zubaida’s tongue that did not belong to the desert.
Ixqueya’s shadow slipped through the side door first, long and cold across the flagstones. The giantess followed, stooping just enough that the arch did not scrape her brow, the lingering scent of hoarfrost and foreign resins clashing gently with the cathedral’s frankincense and myrrh. For a heartbeat, their gazes met in the threshold. A shared glimmer. A memory of breath stolen and pressed back in a single, sharp, stolen kiss behind the icon-screen. Fire and frost arguing in the dark.
The Lord of Light had not smitten them yet. Which, in Zubaida’s theology, meant He had been watching with very keen interest.
“Go,” she murmured under her breath, too soft for anyone but the giantess and God to hear. “Burn your road, Winter-daughter. I will tend the embers you leave.”
Ixqueya dipped her head in a warrior’s nod and moved away toward the sun-cut nave. Her footfalls sank into distance. Only then did Zubaida gather her robes, adjust the fall of jewels over her hips, and turn toward the door that opened onto the main aisle.
The corridor’s shadows peeled off her like cooling wax as she stepped through.
The cathedral greeted her in full blaze. Afternoon light knifed through the mosaic windows, shattering across her in rivers of gold, emerald, and amber. Every movement turned her into a living icon. Black silk clung to the lush architecture of her figure, cinched and framed in hammered gold that caught the light like captured flame. Chains and facets of crystal and diamond swung from waist and breast and collar, chiming softly with each slow, unhurried step.
She did not walk so much as sashay, a sinuous tide of fabric and flesh that moved to some inward hymn only she and the Lord could hear. Honey-brown eyes, warm and lambent as lamp-oil before the altar, swept the nave. They found him immediately.
Sukegei, leaning in his studied laziness against the pillar, gaze still half-lost in the stained glass heavens.
Of course.
Her lips curved.
“Ser Sukegei,” she called, voice low and mellow as a well-tuned oud, carrying despite its softness. “Tell me. Does your lechery know no bounds?”
The question floated across the incense-thick air like perfumed smoke. By the time she reached him, she was already smiling, the expression bright as sunrise and edged with mischief.
She came to a halt an arm’s length away, tilting her head so the white fall of hair at her brow framed her face like a streak of holy fire. From this distance the scent of her surrounded him. Spiced tea. Warm sand. A faint trace of smoke, as if she had stood too long by sacrificial flames.
“Truly,” she continued, eyes glittering, “my poor wrath seems more parched than the white dunes we call home. I could feel it thirsting through the door.”
One hip cocked, an effortless pose of matronly indulgence and quiet authority. The motion set her curves into a soft, living ripple. Gold and crystal chimed together at her waist and throat, a brief cascade of bright notes, like a prayer-chime struck by some invisible breeze.
She lifted a hand, palm up, half in benediction and half in mock-scolding. “Do not glower at me so. The Lord of Light sees the thoughts that march across your face like a caravan. I merely name the beetles.”
Her expression softened a degree, humor deepening into something almost fond. “And do not worry. I get the appeal.” A playful little shrug rolled through her shoulders, sending bracelets whispering against bronzed skin. “Some men like a strong, tall, maternal figure to make up for… the little bonfires of their past. Childhood wounds. Absent hearths.”
Her smile turned conspiratorial. “A woman who looks as though she could cradle them and break them in the same embrace does curious things to the male imagination.”
The glint in her eyes said she knew exactly how curious, and exactly how male.
She let the moment hang, then added sweetly, “Besides. You should be grateful I convinced our visitor to leave you with your dignity.” She leaned in by a fraction, voice dropping to a teasing murmur. “Had you seen how passionately we kissed, your soul might have fled your body and left me with nothing but a husk to drag to vespers.”
A beat. She laughed, light and rich, clearly jeering at his carnal inclinations even as she said it. “I jest. Mostly. The Lord knows the truth, and He is far more discreet than you.”
Straightening again, Zubaida studied him with the unhurried patience of a priestess examining a votive flame. Sukegei’s stance was relaxed, but the tension in his jaw, the far-away set of his eyes, told another story. She had seen that pensive stupor before, when his thoughts had wandered farther than his feet could follow.
“You are miles from this pillar,” she said gently. “Your body leans on stone, but your mind is somewhere between her shadow and your own doubts.” She angled her chin toward the great doors where Ixqueya had gone. “What do you think of her, truly? The woman from the land of the dead. The frost-tower in a house of fire.”
Her fingers brushed a strand of dark hair back from her shoulder, rings catching the light like coals roused with a poker. “You have that look again. The one you wore before your first campaign. Before your first confession. Lost in thought, Sukegei. Not in lust. At least, not entirely.”
The rebuke was soft, wrapped in warmth. Motherly.
She shifted her weight, the delicate sway of her hips sending another slow tremor through the veil of chains at her waist. The sound of her jewelry was almost like embers settling in a brazier, tiny bright sounds in the hush between them.
“Speak,” she invited, voice dropping into its gentler register, the one she reserved for frightened recruits and children with scraped knees. “The Lord of Light gave you a tongue for more than flattery. What troubles that clever head of yours? The Jorgenskull herself? The politics that will trail her like smoke? Or is it something smaller and more foolish. Like wondering how it feels when frost kisses back?”
Her smile turned wry, affectionate, the heat of a brazier that never quite burns but never goes out.
“Tell me, my flame. What is truly burning in you?” She ended with a query.
Ixqueya’s shadow slipped through the side door first, long and cold across the flagstones. The giantess followed, stooping just enough that the arch did not scrape her brow, the lingering scent of hoarfrost and foreign resins clashing gently with the cathedral’s frankincense and myrrh. For a heartbeat, their gazes met in the threshold. A shared glimmer. A memory of breath stolen and pressed back in a single, sharp, stolen kiss behind the icon-screen. Fire and frost arguing in the dark.
The Lord of Light had not smitten them yet. Which, in Zubaida’s theology, meant He had been watching with very keen interest.
“Go,” she murmured under her breath, too soft for anyone but the giantess and God to hear. “Burn your road, Winter-daughter. I will tend the embers you leave.”
Ixqueya dipped her head in a warrior’s nod and moved away toward the sun-cut nave. Her footfalls sank into distance. Only then did Zubaida gather her robes, adjust the fall of jewels over her hips, and turn toward the door that opened onto the main aisle.
The corridor’s shadows peeled off her like cooling wax as she stepped through.
The cathedral greeted her in full blaze. Afternoon light knifed through the mosaic windows, shattering across her in rivers of gold, emerald, and amber. Every movement turned her into a living icon. Black silk clung to the lush architecture of her figure, cinched and framed in hammered gold that caught the light like captured flame. Chains and facets of crystal and diamond swung from waist and breast and collar, chiming softly with each slow, unhurried step.
She did not walk so much as sashay, a sinuous tide of fabric and flesh that moved to some inward hymn only she and the Lord could hear. Honey-brown eyes, warm and lambent as lamp-oil before the altar, swept the nave. They found him immediately.
Sukegei, leaning in his studied laziness against the pillar, gaze still half-lost in the stained glass heavens.
Of course.
Her lips curved.
“Ser Sukegei,” she called, voice low and mellow as a well-tuned oud, carrying despite its softness. “Tell me. Does your lechery know no bounds?”
The question floated across the incense-thick air like perfumed smoke. By the time she reached him, she was already smiling, the expression bright as sunrise and edged with mischief.
She came to a halt an arm’s length away, tilting her head so the white fall of hair at her brow framed her face like a streak of holy fire. From this distance the scent of her surrounded him. Spiced tea. Warm sand. A faint trace of smoke, as if she had stood too long by sacrificial flames.
“Truly,” she continued, eyes glittering, “my poor wrath seems more parched than the white dunes we call home. I could feel it thirsting through the door.”
One hip cocked, an effortless pose of matronly indulgence and quiet authority. The motion set her curves into a soft, living ripple. Gold and crystal chimed together at her waist and throat, a brief cascade of bright notes, like a prayer-chime struck by some invisible breeze.
She lifted a hand, palm up, half in benediction and half in mock-scolding. “Do not glower at me so. The Lord of Light sees the thoughts that march across your face like a caravan. I merely name the beetles.”
Her expression softened a degree, humor deepening into something almost fond. “And do not worry. I get the appeal.” A playful little shrug rolled through her shoulders, sending bracelets whispering against bronzed skin. “Some men like a strong, tall, maternal figure to make up for… the little bonfires of their past. Childhood wounds. Absent hearths.”
Her smile turned conspiratorial. “A woman who looks as though she could cradle them and break them in the same embrace does curious things to the male imagination.”
The glint in her eyes said she knew exactly how curious, and exactly how male.
She let the moment hang, then added sweetly, “Besides. You should be grateful I convinced our visitor to leave you with your dignity.” She leaned in by a fraction, voice dropping to a teasing murmur. “Had you seen how passionately we kissed, your soul might have fled your body and left me with nothing but a husk to drag to vespers.”
A beat. She laughed, light and rich, clearly jeering at his carnal inclinations even as she said it. “I jest. Mostly. The Lord knows the truth, and He is far more discreet than you.”
Straightening again, Zubaida studied him with the unhurried patience of a priestess examining a votive flame. Sukegei’s stance was relaxed, but the tension in his jaw, the far-away set of his eyes, told another story. She had seen that pensive stupor before, when his thoughts had wandered farther than his feet could follow.
“You are miles from this pillar,” she said gently. “Your body leans on stone, but your mind is somewhere between her shadow and your own doubts.” She angled her chin toward the great doors where Ixqueya had gone. “What do you think of her, truly? The woman from the land of the dead. The frost-tower in a house of fire.”
Her fingers brushed a strand of dark hair back from her shoulder, rings catching the light like coals roused with a poker. “You have that look again. The one you wore before your first campaign. Before your first confession. Lost in thought, Sukegei. Not in lust. At least, not entirely.”
The rebuke was soft, wrapped in warmth. Motherly.
She shifted her weight, the delicate sway of her hips sending another slow tremor through the veil of chains at her waist. The sound of her jewelry was almost like embers settling in a brazier, tiny bright sounds in the hush between them.
“Speak,” she invited, voice dropping into its gentler register, the one she reserved for frightened recruits and children with scraped knees. “The Lord of Light gave you a tongue for more than flattery. What troubles that clever head of yours? The Jorgenskull herself? The politics that will trail her like smoke? Or is it something smaller and more foolish. Like wondering how it feels when frost kisses back?”
Her smile turned wry, affectionate, the heat of a brazier that never quite burns but never goes out.
“Tell me, my flame. What is truly burning in you?” She ended with a query.
You are on: Forums » Fantasy Roleplay » Winter and the Desert. (Sukegei X Ixqueya)