Of Sand and Malice Made Read Online Free PDF Page A

then he was gone, leaving a knot inside her she couldn’t untie, a knot composed of anger and impotence and foolishness.
    He must be a warlock, she decided—it ran thick in some areas of Kundhun—and now for some reason he was toying with her. She vowed to find him, but for the life of her she had no idea how she would manage it. Every time she tried to lie in wait, she ended up spending hours with nothing to show for it.
    Instead she lost herself in preparations for her upcoming bout—running in the mornings, sparring in the afternoons, lifting Djaga’s stone weights beneath the pier in the western harbor in the evenings. Osman had told her she’d have no shading work until after her day in the pits, a thing that bothered her at first, but given that there was nothing she could do about it she threw herself into her training with an abandon she hadn’t felt in months.
    Djaga noticed, and even allowed a grudging nod once or twice for how focused Çeda’s technique had become. “Good, girl. Good. Now keep your rage bottled up.Release it in the pits, not before. It’s not so hard as you might think.”
    Ã‡eda thought she understood, but as the day of her bout approached, she found herself becoming more and more anxious, not from any fear over her opponent—a Mirean swordmaster who’d had some small amount of success in the pits—but from the relentless feeling that she was being watched. Whether by some trick of the mind or the unseen workings of the boy, she felt on display, a prized akhala being paraded before auction. All across the city, men, but more often women, were spying her out. She was sure of it. And yet whenever she looked, they were doing completely innocent things, apparently oblivious to her presence.
    The experience so unnerved her that, despite her distaste over it, she took Djaga’s advice and went to Bakhi’s temple and dropped three golden coins into the alms basket at the foot of Bakhi’s altar. She thought to speak with the priestess, but the old, bent woman had stared down at Çeda’s kneeling form with such a sour expression that Çeda had immediately stood and left the temple.
    Soon, all the confidence she’d built while training with Djaga began to erode. “Enough,” Djaga said two days before the match. “We’ve practiced enough. Too much, in fact. There are times when you can overtrain, and I think I’ve done it with you, girl. Take this timebefore your match. Stay away from the pits, think of anything but fighting, and you’ll return a new woman.”
    â€œAnd if I don’t?”
    â€œThen you’ll be no worse off than you are now. You’re in your mind too much. Go to your Emre. Fuck him like you should have done long ago. Or take another to your bed. But for the love of the gods, let your sword lay untouched.”
    Near dusk that evening, as Çeda wended her way through the tents of the bazaars, waving to those who had remained throughout the dinner hours hoping to catch a final few patrons, she felt someone new watching her: a woman who Çeda could tell was thin and lithe but little more, for her head was hidden in a deep cowl, her hands within the long, flowing sleeves. Çeda had no idea who the woman might be, but she wasn’t about to lead her toward the home she shared with Emre.
    She kept her pace, moving along a narrow street that ran down toward the slums of the Shallows. When she came to the next corner and turned, she ducked into an elaborate stone archway: the entrance to a boneyard that looked as though it had stood longer than Sharakhai itself.
    She glanced over the yard for the telltale glow of wights or wailers—one didn’t treat boneyards lightly in the desert—then peered out through the arch from behind a stone pillar marking one of the graves. She saw the form soon enough, a shadow in the deeper darkness. Thewoman slowed, perhaps