***

Janurana let out a comforted sigh as they passed the first building with a second floor. Dhanur led her off the main road, worming through the haphazard alleys up the city’s incline. Janurana enjoyed the increasingly ostentatious houses. Some had dyed cotton curtains or plush pillows on their rooftops just for lounging rather than sleeping. Others painted the walls with family histories or extravagant flourishes of color for its own sake. The communal gardens of the lower sections transitioned to personal oases of flowers and fruiting bushes. She tried to focus on the sights as she heard the northerners being taken up the main way. Dhanur either didn’t hear or didn’t care.

To Janurana’s surprise, they slipped by quite a few two-story homes, a couple with covered porches, before reaching Dhanur’s. It was two floors as well, the second smaller than the first, bone white cotton curtains fluttering through the windows, and a door embossed with bronze and a clay red painting of a bow to indicate whose home it was.

Dhanur fumbled with the peg that kept it closed. But once she succeeded she stumbled forward, forgetting that the door would no longer support her weight when opened.

Janurana tried to reach for her but balked as Dhanur recovered.

“I’m fine. C’mon in,” Dhanur bade her entry.

Her home wasn’t the typical sty one would expect of a staggering drunk. Dhanur’s dwelling was well organized and practical with few things out of place on the table near the hearth or around the support pillars for the second floor. Beyond the utilitarian were shelves of dusted clay tablets, flowering shrubs in painted ceramic pots bearing bright red fruit, and trinkets, both exotic and ornate, which showcased the eclectic interests of an apparently well–traveled woman. Uttaran spear heads inlaid with gem-like swirls of color, withered branches from far off forests, a mountain goat horn, a ring embossed with five rubies, a statuette with a lion’s head, a simple broken cup and brick, all had a place of display.

Janurana followed close behind but called Dhanur to a halt by placing her hand on her back.

“Ah, do you need to extinguish those embers?” she muttered.

The embers of a once proud fire were twinkling away in Dhanur’s hearth. She flickered her weary gaze to Janurana, then back at the fire. All she could do was groan, finally realizing what it was she had forgotten when she left the house. Something new stood between her and her bed. She put down her bow, stomped forward, preparing herself, then turned her stomps to the ashes. Janurana watched her frustration as the ashes spread. With concern stifling any humor, she doused them with a splash from the jug of water next to the hearth.

“The house is, ya know, brick. It wasn’t gonna… fire.” Dhanur took off her spackled boot.

“You still should have—”

“So, here’re the stairs.”

Dhanur nearly crawled to the second floor, encouraged to show Janurana the guest room before falling asleep right there.

It was smaller and homier than the first. A skylight illuminated the sitting area that made up almost the entire second floor in the moon’s purple light. A cedar wood table practically melted into the cotton tarp below it with a small potted plant in the center and a pillow on the side, slightly askew showing use. The few goblets set on the trunk made it clear the rest were inside. Along the walls were tarps of paintings of Light miracles, an embroidered pattern of countless geometric shapes blending together to create a soaring eagle, multiple road signs to prove where she had been, and a single large window, leading out to the roof with a ladder up to the second floor’s roof.

“Alrigh’, so guest.” Dhanur motioned to the left, then advanced to the other doorway. “Me.”

“Understood. Thank you so much for letting me rest here,” Janurana said, bowing deeply with her hands together.

Dhanur remembered her manners and bowed with two fists pressed together instead and walked backwards through the tarp leading to her bedroom without rising.

Allowed to drop her rigid decorum, Janurana giggled before taking a single long breath. She tilted her head up and her eyes fluttered closed. Even under her boots she could feel the plush tarp of brushed cotton covering the floor. She opened her eyes slowly, taking in the violet rays from the sky light bouncing off the walls, removed her boots, and let out a ragged sigh when her toes met the rug. Such a treasure was as wonderful as she remembered.

The softness of it transported her to childhood when she would lay on a not so different rug, while her mother carved message after important message into clay slabs. The night wind would blow through the gem–colored curtains and Janurana would play with her small jade figurines while her mother worked. The fire would crackle, making the only sound in the room with her toys softly padding across the cotton. It was joined with the periodical rustling of her mother’s skirt as she moved to and from the fireplace to set the tablets to harden. Mother would pat her head before she sat back down and Janurana would wait and wait, watching the tablets dry, playing on a rug just like the one in Dhanur’s home.

Suddenly, Janurana’s back seized. A flash of pale blue took over her vision. She spun, prepared to spring out the window and sprint off into the night, but Janurana saw the staircase. There was no pale blue sliver flickering in the distance.

She shoved the memory aside, she would not allow it to become tainted like the others.

Janurana remembered there was a whole guest room open for her. The plain cotton curtains were so different from the colorful ones in her childhood home and the bed was half the size she had been accustomed to, but that was a far memory. Any bed was a luxury.

She surveyed the guest room, with a more objective eye, noting the placement of furniture. Dhanur’s eye for decorations showed even more with trinkets on the shelves and walls. One was a woodblock carving of a sleeping woman and another a sign that read in the pointed Daksinian script “cotton fields”. The bed rested in the embrace of moonlight against the wall. Without missing a beat Janurana strode over and fell face first into it, shuttering at the scent of cleanliness. Janurana hadn’t sunk into anything so soft since the mud she slept in last rainy season. She frowned at how the blanket wasn’t as quality as the rug. Janurana wondered if Dhanur was keeping a nice one for herself, then chastised herself for such a rude thought towards her host.

She noticed flakes of dirt coming off her sari, hopped off the bed, dusting it clean, and searched for sleepwear. She looked through the trunk at its base gently, so as not to seem like she was rummaging even though no one was around to judge.

Janurana began her routine, half amazed she remembered it after all the nights in the Outside. She undressed, folded her clothes, slipped on a nightgown, and closed the curtains as tightly as she could. She nearly walked out of the room before pausing, thinking she should probably ask permission to use her host’s tub.

There was a small saucer of water in the room's corner. It wasn’t much, but Janurana took to it like a starving wolf. She spent what felt to her like an eternity rinsing off her face, relishing in the feeling as well, running her fingers down her unblemished cheeks, trying to remember what pimples felt like. Once she finished, she sat on the bed, then collapsed back onto it. Her massive plume of hair acted like a second cushion. It wasn’t washed and that fact kept her from instantly passing out. She hoped there would be time to wash it later.

Taking all excess pillows, Janurana made a wall on the bed facing the window and wrapped herself tightly in the blanket before laying her head on the last pillow. Her night should have been restless with Dhanur arguing with her armor in the other room. She hadn’t taken it off before flopping into her bed and would jerk awake, loudly complaining before passing out again.

But Janurana found sound rest hard to come by for another reason entirely. She could still catch Ilanlan’s scent wafting through the city. She moved to the window, focusing on him. It was almost as easy to hear him yelling as it was to smell him despite being beyond the web of houses and Ilanlan off in the main way. She could parcel out the smell of fruits and sugar, typical to every northerner as was the concoction of scents she could never place, having never made it past the Borderlands between Daksin and Uttara. His combative voice polluted the sweet, sleepy sounds of the city. Ilanlan was easier to hear as Janurana honed in on his scent. He railed in Uttaran about Dhanur and his wound. Janurana heard him shout “traitor” in Daksinian over and over. The clanless northerner meekly said “rest” a few times to the guards dragging them but Ilanlan pushed them aside. He demanded his friends go free, since he was the one who started the fight. It was hard enough to drag the mountain of a northern man, let alone two hangers on, so the guards relented. Ilanlan meekly said “sorry” to his friends before he was taken away.

Janurana drummed her nails on the window. She wasn’t hungry, but her appetite was growing. And it was doubtful the smaller northerners would survive long in the Daksinian Capital with their wounds, let alone stagger across the borderlands home.

She sighed deeply and slipped back into her sari.