Many heard, and heads shook.

Izzi watched Fariha more closely, saw a glitter in her eyes as she swayed, her arms moving like snakes. Beneath the movements there was tightness. Her hands trembled when outstretched, before she forced grace back into them with obvious effort. 

The music slowed to a quiet climb and fall of separate plucked notes. Izzi watched the concentration of the musicians, saw them looking into each other’s eyes, keeping a connection that became the music. Finally, only a faint beat on a tambour remained. 

The other dancers fanned out, leaving Fariha to dance out her sorrow. 

An older caravaner woman rose among the musicians and raised her hands, then opened them as if she read a book. She howled once like a jackal, and began a mournful croon, her voice deep and care-worn.

The names on the wind,

Mother, your name it sings.

Fariha swayed, her arms moving as if she was thrown about by the wind. The music climbed in complexity and tempo. The singer continued the lament.

The mountains my kingdom,

The wind my road,

The flames my feathers.

The qanun built to an impossible number of notes in an angry crescendo, swirling like a windstorm, while Fariha extended her arms to the stars, and began to spin, till she flew like a child’s spinning top.

You who burn,

Sting of arrows,

Break our homes,

Shame on swords—

Our lives are sand. 

Her angry spinning slowed. The music seemed to falter, pick itself up, and falter again. Her feet took her back and forth as if to stop her from falling as she wobbled. The rich, reverberating voice sounded out a sour hope.

I spread my wings,

Write your name on the wind—

It will find you.

Birds take our names,

Ashes take our bones,

Wind, take our foes.

Fariha collapsed, a marionette with its strings cut. The other dancers swooped in and caught her at the last moment, their arms forming a cradle around her limp frame, and the singer breathed the final part, her voice catching in despair and loss:

Mother, feed me,

No ashes for dinner.

I swallow your name

On the wind.

A wound seemed to open in Izzi’s chest, a physical pain, and she pressed her hand into it. Myzina’s name was on the wind, carried by the vultures, dark giants of cleansing. She flew with them, wheeling and soaring. 

The tears dripping from her cheeks were soggy on her sleeve. 

This song was for Fariha, it was not about her. The mother in the song was not her mother, who had died of illness, not in a battle fought over her home. But Izzi’s emotions, haunted by wordless questions, would not be ordered around or thought away. That had not worked before, and would not this night.

She backed away further into the shadows, till her shoulders pressed against the rough sandstone of the building. She wanted to race back to the darkness of her room, to the smells of her mother’s incense, the safety of her memories. But the khan’s magesty held her, tightened at her ribs, rooted her to the earth. She forced her breathing to slow. There was no need to flee. There was nowhere to run.

Izzi wanted just to disappear. She curled her fingers into the shapes of the sigils, and whispered the spell from her mother’s journal. The air around her rippled. Her fingers frayed at the edges like ripped cloth, and dissolved like dust in lamplight. Even her own eyes slid off them. Other things were far more important to see.

The spell had worked!

No one would notice her now. 

No one ever really saw her anyway.