The Bride of the Blue Wind: The Sisters Avramapul, #1

The Bride of the Blue Wind

What the gods desire , they take.

When the gods take a person, there is not much one can do about it, even if there seems something strange and terrible about the god. Through the gates of the eastern mountains pass only the gods, the dead, and the heroes of legend. Mere mortals do not go farther than the tombs lining the roads of the Middle Desert.

Except for the daughters of the Bandit Queen of the Oclaresh, that is. The lord of the Blue Wind took their youngest sister. When Pali and Arzu discover that there is something gravely wrong, they decide that the gods work through the hands of men, that justice binds everyone—god, man, djinn, or demon—and that they are not afraid of the road east.

One

ALDIZAR AQ NAARUN AQ Lo of the city of Rin had three daughters, which would ordinarily have earned him much good-natured chaffing from his compatriots and clansmen, but because the mother of his children was Lonar Avramapul the Bandit Queen of the Oclaresh, he was instead much congratulated.

Their first daughter was beautiful and strong as a lioness, and they named her Arzu-aldizarin, and she sat at her mother’s knee and learned the ways of war.

The second daughter was beautiful and sharp-taloned as a falcon on the wind, and they named her Paliammë-ivanar. She was the delight in her father’s eye; he was an artist who had come to the desert to sculpt the Bandit Queen, and had never left, and he hoped she might follow his trade.

The third daughter was as beautiful and even-tempered as the moon over the desert, and they called her Sardeet-savarel. She was beloved all of all her clan, for she laughed and sang and broke hearts that mended quickly.

Each of them beautiful, each of them wise, each of them beloved. Arzu the lioness, Pali the falcon, Sardeet the moon; as they grew in stature, in the songs of the hinterlands of Oclaresh people began to murmur of the bride-prices they would expect, and that no ordinary man could ever hope to pay.

So say the stories.

AT FOURTEEN ARZU LEFT, as was the way of her mother’s people, to spend a week in the desert and seek what messages the Wind Lords would send her. She went dressed in bridal scarlet with gold coins braided into her black hair, for it was said that the Wind Lords sometimes chose one for bride or husband; it was considered an honour beyond merit or questioning, for the one so chosen would become as a god in the Halls of the Sky, the palace in the heart of the Desert of Kaph where the gods ruled the world with wills fickle as the wind. One did not return from the Halls of the Sky a living man or woman, although sometimes those left behind would be granted a vision and the new name given to the one once their own, and a new deity would be inscribed in the stele of the clan gods. 

When Arzu returned she went to her father and her mother and her two sisters and kissed them, and asked for their blessings, for she had had a vision of magic in knots and thread, and would go to those who made the carpets in the mountains to the south of the Desert of Kaph, and return to the clan a shaman of power.

She was given as her dowry for the carpet weavers a set of chess pieces carved out of jade by a master in a far-off land. Her father gave her small figurines of each of her sisters, and letters for the master weavers, who would recognize in his name