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Once, when Aigul was a child, there had been a wildfire on the plains. It would have been devastating to the Jandiq if they hadn’t had their allies’ grazing land to fall back on. As it was she’d seen the landscape of her childhood go from verdant grass to ash and char. It had looked as if it could never heal.
After her first husband, after the divorce, she had bitterly remembered that blackened earth, dreamed that it crept across her cheek, that her flesh would flake away from her bones in the same way that she’d seen soil crack without roots to hold it, seen dust fly way on the wind. She had thought of herself as a wasteland.
Now, after her second wedding, she found herself remembering the years after: the new growth that they hadn’t let the horses or sheep near, the flurry of green afterwards. By the time Aigul married a second time, the Jandiq had been grazing their horses on that land again for years. It did not look exactly like the rest of their pastures—this plant too common, that other one too rare—but the earth was no longer maimed.
She had gone there to pick herbs to sweeten the scent of her dowry cloth, which had lain dusty for years now. She could have gone anywhere, but she’d chosen to bring that memory with her.
Baimat found himself thinking, after his wedding, of his dead cousins, the two last brides to leave the Hergal clan.
When Kalahiga died, they had wondered, but there had been no proof. She had been healthy enough before, but the young and strong died all the time. Particularly young wives—pregnancy and childbirth were as dangerous as riding to war. Everyone had a relative who had died that way, sister or daughter or aunt, just as everyone had a kinsman who had died in battle or later of a festering wound. Neither the women’s husbands nor the men’s battle companions had necessarily done anything wrong.
But Hergals had seen Atelui’s bruises and heard of her broken bones. They had known, and they had let the Numaji kill her, and they had been ready to send Amir to the same fate. Not willingly, of course—not all of them. It had been Belqat’s decision, and the rest of them could not argue with him while he lived.
They had been Belqat’s daughters, and he’d spent their lives as carelessly as he had charged into his last battle. For the alliance, he’d said; for the clan.
But the alliance with the Numaji had not been the only way for the Hergal clan to survive. Both Belqat and Azel had found other ways—some better than others. No, that alliance had meant more to Belqat than the lives of his children simply because it was the way he had chosen. He’d bound his pride to it.
And yet in much the same situation Jahan of the Jandiq had taken one look at Aigul’s face and taken her home, wrapped in his own coat.
There had been, Baimat understood, less riding on that alliance. But it had been Jahan and his wife who chose that man for Aigul, and he had taken the blame for the mistake before all his allies and all his kin.
That was a better sort of chief, and a better alliance to make. He could be glad of that, as he was of his bride.
There was no righting what had probably happened to Kalahiga, nor what had certainly been done to her sister Atelui. No one could erase their deaths any more than Baimat could erase the scar from his wife’s face. Kindness did not unmake cruelty, and he had brought a live stranger into his home, not those two familiar ghosts.
He would have reached out to her even if Kalahiga and Atelui had been waiting at home to greet her. But still, he thought of them as he offered Aigul what both she and they should have had all along.
Aigul’s days found a pattern in her new home. At dawn she and her husband rose together. She made the tea and the first meal—he did not go near the fire when she was there, and she found herself grateful.
In the mornings she heard her sister Riyazat’s bright laughter and quick steps—no slower even as her belly grew round with a first child, even after the time she’d stumbled and nearly fallen. (Riyazat’s husband had caught her—Aigul had flinched instinctively, and only then noticed that Riyazat was still laughing, that no one else was alarmed, that the only other person who’d been worried at all was Riyazat’s husband. But her own husband noticed her unease from where he’d stood in the distance, and come to make sure she was all right.)
She and Riyazat and Bique were the only new brides—it had been years now since a Hergal man had married. Aigul was grateful to have her sisters with her—Riyazat with her cheer, Bique always ready to defend her from any danger or insult. She would have been bitterly lonely without them, the only newcomer, hiding her scars from everyone.
Everyone but her husband.
When they were alone, she pulled the scarf from her face. It was a blessing to breathe freely, speak unmuffled, in the company of a man who neither avoided looking at her nor winced away from her scar, but reached out to kiss it as if she was still beautiful.
Perhaps she was. It no longer seemed impossible, with the way he looked at her.
On the days when the weather was bad, she and her husband stayed inside together most of the day. Aigul would sew, and Baimat would work in wood or leather. From time to time they would talk. It had taken her weeks to turn his quiet words into conversations, and longer to start any—but she treasured the memory of the warmth in his voice as he replied to her those first times.
On the days they spent apart, he would bid farewell courteously and greet her the same way when they met again. She surprised herself the first time she returned his polite words with an embrace.
And at night, Aigul slept in her husband’s arms, her scar pressed to his skin, safe in his warmth.
Of course Aigul wished this had been her first marriage—that she had come to this kind man and his family unscarred, not starting at each raised voice, her face open to the wind.
But her parents had scarcely heard of the Hergal clan when they arranged her first wedding. Certainly they had not heard of Baimat Hergal, one among the rest, not even the chief’s son.
And even if they had—or if she had been as daring as Bique, if she’d turned back home as soon as her first wedding was over, or as soon as he first struck her—would Baimat even have noticed her, one unscarred girl among the rest?
Baimat knew that Aigul had not expected to be chosen. She had made it clear that she had not expected to marry again at all, let alone to the chief of another clan—and to begin with, they had all expected either one wedding or none. But she had still joined the race, knowing her covered face would draw attention. That had taken courage.
And she had ridden well. She might not have had a horse as fine as Bique’s Kalkashka, but she had not fallen to the back of the group, and neither she nor her mare had been winded by the end of the race.
They had had little time to judge one another, that day. But all the same, it was a better chance than many men and women had to know their future wives and husbands. And none of those who had made a choice that day regretted it.
Baimat was glad that of all the women there, he had chosen Aigul to ask to be his bride. And gladder still that she had said yes.
Aigul’s husband didn’t tell her about the dead Hergal brides. Afterwards, she thought he had been trying to spare her feelings. It grieved him that she had thought she had to thank him for marrying her; perhaps he didn’t want her to feel a debt to them as well. Perhaps he wanted to put the question of pity behind them both.
Perhaps he was ashamed that his clan had not protected them. She understood shame well enough.
So it was Riyazat’s husband who finally told her—her Baimat’s cousin, Joruk with his ever-tangled hair and his careless tongue. He’d insisted on hauling water in his wife’s place now that she was so far along, and some of the children ran by them, almost tripping one of the slower aunts.
“Amir used to play that way with Atelui and Kalahiga,” he said, and once he’d said their names the rest followed, bit by bit, day by day. The dead brides, and the living one Belqat had tried to take back from the town; the alliance with the Numaji, and the one with the Badan; the ruinous attack on that town, and the chieftain’s death.
“It’s a good thing we don’t know who killed him,” Joruk said as they both waited their turn at the well. Aigul blinked, though Joruk’s own aunts didn’t even seem startled. “You can’t exactly thank someone for killing your chief, but…” He shrugged.
She was glad for the scarf across her face. But she could not bring herself to disagree, when that chief’s death had brought her such a good life.
“Anyway, I’m glad we don’t have anything to do with the Numaji anymore, and I think so’s everyone else.” With that Riyazat’s husband shrugged, and bent to get the water for his wife. Aigul stayed where she was.
Like the sun coming out from behind the clouds, she realized: so must Jahan and his brothers, all the young girls and all their mothers, be glad that the Jandiq had no family ties to Aigul’s first husband anymore.
They had all said it was not her fault—even Bique, who in her place might well have slain him before his hand landed on her, only wished that she had met violence with greater violence. Aigul could not argue with her parents, and she did not wish to argue with her sisters or their cousins.
It did not matter to the Jandiq if he was even alive or dead now. Nor to the Hergal.
Nor to her. That thought had an edge as sharp as Bique’s sword, and Aigul held it as confidently.
But another one followed.
Atelui and Kalahiga, she thought. It mattered that they were dead, and that she was alive.
Their first child was born half a year after Riyazat’s son, in the cold of winter. Baimat knelt by his wife’s side in their warm yurt and held their daughter for the first time, tiny in the crook of his arm.
“What do you want to name her?”
“I had thought we could call her Atelui,” Aigul said.
Her husband nodded once and kissed her scarred cheek again, one hand on the other, their daughter safe between them. He was smiling, a gentle expression on his stoic face.
Aigul had thought once that she would be afraid for her daughters, if she had any. The world was no less harsh now than then. But she knew this daughter would have a happy childhood. And if sorrow came for her later—well, they would be there for her, as they were for each other, and joy would follow sorrow.
As it had for her.