The Tears of Kas̆dael

By the time they made it back to camp, the night was far spent. If they had raced back to their tents, perhaps they could have snatched an hour or two of sleep before the sun rose to spoil their rest, but Jasper saw little point in trying. Instead, he headed for Gūla’s tents with the prisoners in tow.

This time, she wasn’t waiting to greet him. Gūla was asleep, and it took a few shouts before she finally stirred. The Djinn peaked out of her tent groggily, with her hair sticking up in a half-dozen directions. “Would you be quiet-" she started to scold, and then it clicked who she was talking to. “Yas̆peh!?”

Her head disappeared between the tent flaps, emerging a moment later with the hair partially smoothed down. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night? And with him!” Her eyes shot daggers at Nas̆ru, whose abnormal height made him loom over the others like a giant.

“We picked up a few prisoners on our mission,” Jasper replied. “And I think you'll be interested in what they have to say.”

“Prisoners? Weren't you just going to observe Selēmuq for a while, and see if you could get him alone to ask a few questions.” Standing on her tiptoes, she tried to peek over his shoulders. "Is he one of these prisoners?”

“Weelll,” Jasper winced. “Selēmuq is kind of…dead,” he finished the sentence reluctantly. “But we caught one of the Lords of Wēdīnīnu,” he rushed past the bad news hastily, beckoning for Erin to bring the captured mage into view.

“He’s dead?” Gūla’s jaw dropped in disbelief. "You killed him? And who is this?" She glared at their Moon-kissed prisoner for a moment before heaving a weary sigh and shoving the tent flaps open. “Fine, you can come in, but you’ll have to be quiet.”

As Jasper squeezed past her, he quickly saw why she’d warned them to be quiet. The small cot in the corner of her tent was still occupied. The blankets were carefully tucked around a small form, whose tousled hair peeked above the covers. “Is that your daughter,” he asked softly.

Fondness lit her eyes as she glanced back at the cot. “Yes, that’s my little Kiribta. She has her own bed,” she nodded to the right side of the tent, where another flap led into the adjacent tent that had been set aside for her daughter, “but she’s always sneaking into my bed at night.”

“We can come back in the morning,” Jasper offered, suddenly feeling bad for imposing on her. He’d known Gūla was a mother, of course, but it hadn’t really sunk in. I guess this is just a job for her.

But the firebird captain shook her head. “No, it's fine. We can slip her back into her bed, and use the glyphs to quiet the noise. Can you move her for me,” she asked.

"Sure." Approaching the cot, Jasper gently scooped the little girl up in his arms. She stirred faintly as he extracted her from her blanket fort, and he feared she’d awoken, but her eyes remained shut as she squirmed closer to his chest. The blankets dragged behind them as he carried her into the adjoining tent. There were two cots in this room; one was child-sized, while the other was filled with the slumbering form of a slightly older woman. Her nanny? Lowering the child onto the bed, he gathered the blankets around her in a cozy cocoon before returning to the primary tent.

Gūla placed the charms as he passed her, and she waited to speak until the bubble of silence had expanded to fill the room.

“S̆ams̆a’s light, Yas̆peh,” she exploded, “you killed Selēmuq?!”

“I was kind of hoping you'd moved past that now,” he replied with a rueful grin.

"By now? It's been five minutes."

He shrugged. "It wasn't ideal, but we weren't given much of a choice.”

“It was my fault,” Ihra piped up. “I was the one who cut his throat.”

“Cut his throat?” Gūla pivoted her anger to a new target. “You mean you tried to kill him? He was one of our only leads - he might have been the key to this whole operation. You were there to observe, not kill him!”

“Like I said,” Jasper cut back in, “We didn't have a choice. Both Selēmuq and your supposed ally, Captain S̆ams̆ātnu, attacked us in an ambush. We did our best to escape without fighting them, but they caught up and we had no other choice. Ihra just did what she had to.”

“S̆ams̆ātnu attacked you?” The anger on Gūla’s face subsided into disappointment. “Him too?” She muttered to herself, a moment later the anger resurged. “S̆ams̆a’s light,” she cursed and slammed her hands against the table. “That thieving bastard took my money and went straight to them for a raise, didn’t he?”

“It seems like it,” Jasper agreed. “Either that, or he was always on their side.”

“S̆ams̆a’s light,” she cursed again, though with less heat. “I checked him out before paying him. The captain was a commoner from the north with no known connections to the southern tribes and a spotless 50-year record with the city guard, and he still betrayed us.”

Jasper leaned forward, clasping his hands together, as a thought occurred to him. “S̆ams̆ātnu didn’t happen to belong to a mercantile family, did he?”

Pausing in her rant, Gūla crossed her arms as she turned to face him. “That’s a rather specific question to ask but…yes, he did. He’s the third son of one of the trading houses in Nūr-S̆ams̆a. They sell…horses, I think. How did you know?”

Jasper and Ihra exchanged a glance, and he gestured for her to explain her theory.

“Although we failed to capture Selēmuq, we did learn a few things about their plans,” Ihra began.

Gūla’s eyes drifted to Nas̆ru and the bound mage. “And they have something to do with merchants?”

“Maybe,” she hedged. “The group is more diverse than we realized. As you can tell, our prisoner is Moon-kissed, Selēmuq was a Djinn, and another of their mages was casting stone spells so-”

“-he was probably a S̆addu’â,” Gūla finished the sentence for her. Her mind worked quickly to fill in the details. “Which means this likely isn’t a coalition of southern nobles and my theory was wrong. But what ties them to merchants?”

Ihra glanced over her shoulder at Nas̆ru and Gūla followed, her eyes darkening in anger as she stared at her former fiancé. “And why isn’t he in chains,” she snapped.

“You were right that Nas̆ru was working with them,” Jasper replied, “but he wasn’t doing so willingly. They were blackmailing him the entire time - even killed his kid brother to get him to comply.”

“Please,” Gūla scoffed, “don’t tell me you fell for his lies.”

“I verified it with Scales of Justice; he was telling the truth.”

From the spark in her eyes, Jasper could tell how much the firebird captain wanted to reject his claim, but for as much as the Djinn hated her former fiancé for his treatment of her, she was still a professional. Her sarcastic response died on the tip of her tongue unspoken and, taking a deep breath, she turned to face Nas̆ru. “I assume, then, that you’re the one who suggested the merchant connection. Why?”

The handsome Djinn shook his head. “For the last few years, the Lords of Wēdīnīnu have made me do all sorts of odd tasks for them. I couldn’t figure out what their motive was, but-“ he hesitated for a moment, clearly unable to remember Ihra’s name, “the elf,” he continued awkwardly, “was the one who put the connections together. She suggested they’re a group of merchants conspiring to manipulate prices.”

“Several years? But then that means this group wasn’t formed as a protest against the war,” she made the connection immediately.

“We think they might be delaying the army simply to make a profit; the longer the troops are stuck outside Nūr-S̆ams̆a, the more the price of food and clothing skyrockets. They've got to be making a killing,” Jasper butted in.

“Maybe,” Gūla nodded her head hesitantly. “But they aren’t all merchants.” She pointed at the bound mage who up till then had escaped attention. “It took me a while to put a face to a name, but I have seen her before. She’s Lady Selbārah. She’s a noble.”

“She’s also a member of the House of the Fifth Daughter,” Nas̆ru replied. “Their forges are the largest provider of armor for the royal guard. Other than the elf and I, everyone in this room is wearing at least one piece of armor they made.”

“And all of this is based on your word,” her eyes hardened. “Perhaps you're telling the truth, but we both know that the truth can be used to deceive. You certainly tricked me into thinking you were a decent person,” she added caustically.

The noble grimaced. "I'm sor..." he paused for a moment, struggling to force the words out of his mouth. "I'm sorry for how things went down. I didn’t want to treat you that way, but that was another one of their strange commands. They were the ones who demanded I break the engagement - I had no choice.”

“I know that my father’s ill-fated attempts to fill our family’s coffers by funding caravans to Appāra angered many of the merchants in Tabīnat, so I can almost believe you on the first part," she said, clucking her tongue. " But I don't believe that they forced you to treat me so poorly.”

“They told me to denounce you as a whore-” he insisted, but she spoke over him.

“Did they? Or did they tell you to use that as an excuse to end the engagement? I saw the look in your eyes when you found out I was pregnant, the way you stopped touching me, stopped looking at me. Did these merchant lords really command you to continue to persecute me for years after our break-up, or did they just give you a convenient excuse to indulge your own feelings?”

She nodded grimly as Nas̆ru looked away, unwilling to meet her eyes. “That’s what I thought.”

“I really am sorry,” he repeated softly.

The firebird captain ignored him and focused her gaze on the Moon-kissed prisoner. “So Lady Selbārah, are you ready to tell us about the Lords of Wēdīnīnu?”

Gūla drew close as the woman refused to respond, and gently pulled back her long, black hair, to unveil a pair of slightly pointy ears beneath. “Your elven heritage shines through clearly. What are you, first or second generation? With your looks, I imagine you have many marriage prospects. For now.”

Fear flickered through the woman’s eyes at the technically unvocalized threat, but it was not enough to loosen her tongue. Crossing her arms, Gūla tapped her foot impatiently on the ground. “Let me guess, you think your friends are going to rescue you when I take you to central command?”

The Djinn smirked. “Well, that’s not going to happen. You weren’t the only ones who discovered something interesting today,” she added to the rest of the group. “While I was examining the flight logs of the tsussîm, I noticed some very odd patterns amongst certain members of Turzu’s command. I don’t know if you were right, Yas̆peh, and he is in on it, or if it is simply his staff that is compromised, but there’s no way, Lady Selbārah,” she flicked her attention back to the mage, “that I’m taking you to them.”

“As it happens, I already have a little arrangement worked out with my former crew. One word from me, and they’ll fly you back to the capital on their tsussîm. Good luck escaping from there. You know,” she paused and stroked her chin like was she struggling to remember an odd piece of trivia, “I’ve heard the royal guards have concocted some new ways to make people talk. Like,” bending down, she placed her lips against the woman’s ear and whispered the rest of the sentence.

The mage struggled to keep her composure, but the widening of her eyes betrayed her. “What do you want to know?” When she finally spoke, it was with an imperious tone in a last-ditch attempt to maintain her dignity, but it wasn't deceiving anyone. “I can’t tell you everything, but-”

A triumphant gleam glinted in Gūla’s eyes as she leaned forward. “You don’t have to tell me everything. Just give me the names of your leaders. Do that, and as long as he confirms you’re telling the truth,” she pointed at Jasper, “I’ll let you slip out of this tent and slink back home.”