Down south there would be music and glory, heartbreak and heart’s ease, claws or fang drawn sometimes in the lower chamberways and alleys. And come morning, power and passion and celebration all over again, jostling each other in the Pharaoh’s halls— narrowed for furtive love or quick bloodshed. So it goes also into bedchambers and planted courtyards, where flowering hedges droop over springs and deep-dredged artificial pools.

Horselord retreats.

He remembers plains like these. Remembers with whom he’d been there last, in tiger-iris time, before their fathers had died.

The waif aspired to be one of the khagan’s civil servants then, with access to the court. To Jochi and Tselmuun, Oyun and Rasha.

The steppe shimmers. Batu lopes his way northward.

He had been downwind then, wild and frozen by time and sunset’s dominion over them. 

Sayana rode from Tselmuun and into the arms of—

Batu.

“Saya,” more fleeting breath than voice is her name, as chest barrels for center, arms out and stabling before they both can fall. Cold as torment reframed horselord into khaan, there is a spellbound part of him that clutches Sayana, and a second concern that she may view Noyakin as Tselmuun does— veiled in so much death.

That ambivalence is alive in the turn of ears, while nose consumes the good scent of horse and earth from her travels. He’d lodged so many into the past, his friend, his brother’s bride, tucked away as a ghost into evenings, no longer certain in whose village she lived; if she lived at all. Grief had rehearsed him to measure for loss, but to find her alive is a painful relief, in the same way nostalgia hurts.

Last do eyes find the clear pool of her own, “I have you.”