Post by Seek on Jun 20, 2016 1:28:36 GMT 10
Title: A Life In Exile
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1159 words
Summary (and any Warnings): At first, Buri stays for Thayet. The longing for Sarain never really goes away.
Notes: None.
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At first, Buri stays for Thayet.
It is a difficult thing, being an exile (for that is what it is, even if not in name.) She takes comfort in the little things: tying K’miri knots for fortune, peace, and prosperity and concealing them in the tassels of Thayet’s shawl. The food is all different: Tortallan food is greasy and heavy and the textures and spices are all wrong. She misses the mixed-grain tea soup they make on festive occasions, and the west wind in her face, like a caress. She erects a small shrine to the Horse Lords in her room, because she will not be denied this much, in her home away from home.
Thayet adapts, with an ease that both gladdens and frightens Buri, slipping like a fish into the waters of their new life. She can’t decide which. She eats their heavy stews, their boar and their battered fish with equinamity, and proceeds to set about making a place for herself in Tortall.
Buri occupies herself with training, with keeping a watchful eye on Thayet. Her family has served Thayet’s for generations, and even now, with the dust of a strange land on her feet, she will not falter or fail in that duty. She acquires K’miri throwing stars and knives and keeps drilling at the archery range until she hits the targets ten times out of ten. Surely neither jin Willima or zhir Anduo will send assassins to strike at Thayet here, as an honoured guest in the heart of Tortall, but even so.
“Are you sure you can trust them?” she asks Thayet bluntly, lying side by side in bed (a holdover from the days they were on the run together.) “Your father could send them a messenger, demanding your return. They’d listen to him.”
“They won’t,” Thayet says, with a confidence Buri doesn’t trust. “Jon’s not that sort of person. He promised us his hospitality. And so did Alanna.” As if Buri hasn’t seen the way the Tortallan king looks at Thayet, the way he scribbles furtively about her, or looks at her as though she’d hung the moon and stars. Thayet knows it, of course. Is used to it, the way suitors glance at her as if she’s a prize horse being sold at a fair.
“I hope you’re right,” Buri replies, “Because if we both get sold over to your father in a sack, I’m going to tell you I told you so.” There’s nothing more to be said, then. Her duty is to protect Thayet, not to tell her what to do, and if Thayet’s decision frustrates her, she’s also bound to respect it.
King Jonathan, Horse Lords bless him, does in fact keep to his word. The diplomats from Adigun jin Willima are left to cool their heels for hours in opulent waiting rooms and then politely informed that Thayet jian Willima has not elected to leave the protection of the Tortallan crown. When one of zhir Anduo’s diplomats try to knife Thayet in a secluded corridor, Buri snatches up her own knife and drags it across his throat in a flash, a few seconds before men from the palace guard storm the area.
Among them is a tall man, ruddy-cheeked, with dark curls, in blue and silver livery. It takes him a moment to sheathe his drawn sword: he glances sharply about him and something in Buri prickles with wariness—he carries himself like a man looking for a reason to fight something, and she doesn’t trust that. Still, she reads concern in those coal-black eyes as his gaze darts from Thayet to Buri. “You’re fine?” he asks. “Neither of you are hurt?”
“Just shaken,” Thayet murmurs. “Buri saved me. She saw him.”
Buri wipes clean the knife and sheathes it. “She was supposed to be under your protection,” she informs the man, with a scowl. Too damned close, Buri thinks, frustrated, listening to the man’s apologies, ignoring the fact he towers over her.
“I know,” the man says—groans, really, which doesn’t mollify Buri. “Jon’s going to have our heads when he finds out.”
And he does. It’s how Buri learns that the guardsmen on duty were from the King’s Own, and the man is Raoul of Goldenlake, drunk on the night zhir Anduo tried to have Thayet assassinated. After that, a whole platoon of guards follow Thayet around, and Buri eyes them suspiciously. Their presence isn’t lost on Thayet, and finally, Buri snaps and shoos them out the door so that Thayet can at least bathe and sleep in peace.
“I didn’t think it was going to be like that,” Thayet murmurs, at last. “I’d hoped I’d come far enough for them to forget about me.” Buri doesn’t say anything to that. She has her own low opinion of the lowlanders, and as far as she’s concerned, they’re lucky this was only the first attempt.
Even after the assassins stop coming, Buri listens for the news from Sarain, a compulsion born of longing and curiosity. She’s the first to hear of the new warlord (a jin Turaiha, apparently) and his marriage to a full-blooded K’mir and then the peace with the clans. She weeps alone, that night, because of what might have been, if Kalasin had married a more understanding man than Adigun jin Willima, because Sarain is still her country, still deep in her blood and bones and she misses rice dumplings and paper-thin noodles and horse broth and sometimes the home-longing is a sharp, physical pain of separation and the knowledge that she will never see the steppes of her birth, not again.
Tortall is never home. The longing never fades, only swells and ebbs, like the gentle waves of grass on the plains, unspoken always. She leaves, foraying out in Tortall with the Queen’s Riders, fighting bandits and pirates and later, Immortals.
But she always comes back, and Thayet says nothing, except a gentle, “You don’t have to worry about me, Buri. I’m happy. I’ve settled in.”
And she has. And Buri hasn’t—if Thayet doesn’t need a bodyguard now, does it mean Buri is any less obligated to protect her? But Thayet has a way of finding the chinks in her armour, with words carefully-chosen. “Buri,” she continues. “What I need, right now, is a friend.”
“You could go home, you know,” Thayet says, quietly, one night, now a queen, a hand on the gentle swell of her stomach.
Buri shakes her head, dares Thayet to argue with her. Thayet doesn’t, and Buri is grateful when her friend never brings up the matter again.
When the child is born, Thayet says, “I’m naming her Kalasin,” and Buri has to turn away to choke back the tears.