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“The Dredge?” Soapy suds twinkled in the fine hair framing her face. “Oh, you mean the old Ghosting Quarter.”
“If you like.” Sylah started to roll up the map.
“What are you going to do with it?”
Sylah shrugged. “Trade it, probably.”
Anoor crossed her arms over her bosom. Without her undergarments lifting them up, the swell of her chest swayed. “You can’t trade it, it’s important.”
Sylah lifted her eyes to Anoor’s. “Why? What do you know?”
Anoor opened her mouth to speak. Closed it. Opened it again. Closed it.
“Are you going to speak or should I start the applause for this highly entertaining mime show? You should be a griot.”
Anoor’s eyelashes fluttered, her eyes creased at the corners. “The thing is, I don’t know anything.”
“Well, that settles that. I need to go to the privy.” Sylah stood.
“But that’s the important bit.” Anoor’s hand gesticulated before her, as if somehow, by moving the air in earnest, she could convey what she meant.
“What do you mean?”
“I went to the library and there was nothing there about it.”
A pause. Anoor’s hands splayed wide, her feet arched forward, so close to the cliff of understanding.
“Did you go to the right place?”
Anoor’s hands dropped to her side in frustration. “Yes, Sylah, I went to the right place—”
“And there were no books?”
“There were books, of course,” She explained as if talking to a child. “But nothing in them. Nothing but a few sentences on the Ending Fire, and a bit about the founding wardens. No other details, nothing at all.”
That was interesting…
“Maybe they didn’t write books back then.”
“But the story is taught in every school. How do the masters of knowledge know the facts? It must have been recorded somewhere.”
Sylah dismissed Anoor’s conjecture with a wave of the hand. “You’re getting carried away. Besides, I’ve got to use the privy.”
Sylah shut the bathroom door and leaned against it. Her fingers worried the grooves in the wood, the cool marble chilling her feet. Her full bladder was a thing of the past as her mind whirled through the implications of what Anoor had told her.
“Keep focused,” she whispered to herself. “All you need to do is learn to bloodwerk and get out, leave the girl to her tales.”
But the truth had a way of shifting the sand dunes of her life, and Sylah wasn’t ready for a new landscape.
—
The morrow brought a bitter wind and a fresh film of thick blue dust. The tidewind must have lasted longer than its usual two strikes as the sand had piled up into miniature dunes in the courtyard and the servants had yet to clear it away. The Ghostings began to stir after Anoor’s second lap of the courtyard.
“You’re already improving,” Sylah noted, the compliment quirking Anoor’s lips.
“I still think I’m going to throw up.” She did promptly after.
Despite brushing her teeth, Anoor could still taste the acrid remains of her breakfast at the back of her throat as she sat in the schoolroom. The run hadn’t felt any better than the day before, but Sylah insisted she’d improved. Anoor was pretty sure she was lying.
