God's War Read Online Free PDF

back on the bench
and eyed Rhys like he was a beetle turned over on its back, not sure if it was
harmless or just playing at docility until she got close.
    Rhys asked for her right hand.
    She hesitated, and he thought that
was odd from a woman who was about to go toe to toe with a seasoned fighter in
a magicians’ gym. He realized then how young she was, maybe seventeen. It was
hard to tell with Nasheenian women. They grew up fast, bore the marks of their
short, brutal childhoods on their bodies and faces. Most of them were broken
old crones at thirty.
    He taped the wrap in place and began
to loop it around her wrist and between her fingers. She had her palm flat and
her fingers wide.
    When he had first come to Nasheen,
he’d thought he would hate all of its women for their ugliness, their vanity,
but as he put the wraps on this little dog-faced girl, he found himself
admiring her hands. She had strong, beautiful fingers, calloused knuckles and
palms, and he saw her scars, and the dirt under her bitten nails. There was
something splendid and tragic about her all at once.
    He tied off her right hand and moved
to the left. When he took her left hand in his, something about the way she
held it, the way it felt beneath his fingers, made him hesitate. He pulled at
her fingers.
    She winced.
    “You’ve done an injury to this
hand?” he asked.
    “Nothing,” she said.
    “An old injury,” he amended as he
pressed his thumb against the back of her hand, rubbed her knuckles, pushed in
slow circles up to her wrist. She had hairline fractures in the small bones of
her left hand. Some had healed, but badly. It was a brittle hand.
    “You shouldn’t be fighting with
this,” he said.
    She pulled her hand from him, and
her mouth got harder. Her shoulders stiffened. “I can wrap myself. They told me
magicians used tricks.”
    “I didn’t say I wouldn’t finish.” He
took her hand in his again. His ability to diagnose illness and injury had been
the first sign that he’d inherited his father’s skill as a magician. A more
talented magician might have been able to heal her hands, if the injuries
weren’t so old, but Rhys’s skill was limited, his knowledge incomplete. The
longer he stayed among the Nasheenian magicians, the more he worried things
would stay that way.
    “Does your family approve of you
boxing?” he asked to fill the cool silence. Three locusts climbed up his pant
leg. He moved his hand over them, and they dropped to the floor.
    “Don’t have much family,” she said.
“Where you learn to wrap hands? They teach you that in magic school?”
    “My uncle took me to fights in
Chenja,” he said, “when I was too young to know better. I wrapped his hands.”
    “You got soft hands. You aren’t a
fighter. You never fought?”
    “I don’t believe in violence.”
    “You ain’t answered the question.”
    He finished taping her bad hand. He
squeezed her fist in his palm. “There, that good?”
    She made fists with both hands. “I
been taped worse.”
    “I’m sure,” Rhys said. He hesitated.
If she had had a proper husband, or a brother, or a son, that man would have
told her not to fight. He would have taken care of her. “You shouldn’t fight
with that hand,” he repeated.
    “I been doing it a long time. It’s
fight or die where I’m from. Sometimes you have to run away just to live. I
suppose you know something about that.”
    Rhys did not answer.
    “I don’t mind you’re black,” she
said, magnanimously.
    “It doesn’t matter what we mind,”
Rhys said. “God sorts all that out.”
    “Our God says your god is false.”
    “They’re the same God.” He had not
always believed that, even when he pressed his head to the ground six times a
day in prayer and intoned the same litany in a dead language, the language of
Umayma, brought down from the moons with the Firsts at the beginning of the
world: In the name of God, the infinitely Compassionate and
Merciful…
    For years he had believed what