The stellar was a women’s space by design, a social center where one could write or read or sew by the bright light of the Heavenly River, without squinting under lamps as one must in the more defensible chambers of the palace. Mrithuri found Lady Golbahar there already, ensconced with her embroidery. Golbahar jumped up, needle poised, but waited to speak until the rajni indicated her wishes.
Mrithuri would have been quite pleased to see her, if she had not already sent for and been expecting Chaeri. Chaeri, and the Eremite serpents, in whose intoxicating venom perhaps a solution lay.
There was a rustle behind the pierced sandalwood partitions as nuns, too, set down their needlework and stood in courtesy to the rajni. Mrithuri could have ordered them all out. But this was the space in the palace that gave light for such delicate work.
And there was comfort to be found in the presence of Lady Golbahar, who was quick-witted and pleasant, and whose station in life constrained her in many of the same ways Mrithuri was constrained.
Still, Mrithuri turned away for a moment to collect herself. Sayeh’s phoenix was in a corner of the room, looking less bedraggled but very much older. Its broken feathers had been imped to replacements. But phoenix feathers were not the sort of thing that even most royal mews had lying around, so in among Guang Bao’s own iridescent red-gold-violet-green were speckled the dirty-white and black primaries of Mrithuri’s bearded vultures. The long lyred tail’s losses had been made up from the molted plumage of royal peacocks.
The least annoying use for which those mid-sleep screamers might have been put, Mrithuri thought, touching the outline of one inked under the skin of her arm. There was a bear-dog too, and as she touched that, she looked over at Syama, lounging by the door with her tongue lolling in the heat.
She turned back toward Golbahar and cocked her head at the foreign lady. “Sit,” she said. “You’re putting too much tension on your thread, standing like that.”
Golbahar smiled and settled again among the cushions. Mrithuri joined her. “Working on your trousseau?”
“Thank the Scholar-God, no!” Golbahar replied, her laugh a practiced bell.
Golbahar had been traveling from her home to an arranged marriage somewhere in Song when the inconvenient fact of Mrithuri’s familial squabbles had intersected her journey.
“You sound remarkably cheerful, for somebody caught in a siege not her own.”
Golbahar squinted at her needle. “My whole life has been a siege.”
“Meaning?”
The lady sighed. “Anything that keeps me a maiden for a few months longer is not an unrelieved trial.”
“If they breach the walls—” Mrithuri bit her lip. Even if they did not breach the walls, how would the willowy girl manage when starvation stalked the streets? And Mrithuri’s own men might become as much a threat as the enemy, if their discipline did not hold.
Well, she had Pranaj and the Dead Man to keep her own troops from murder and rape of their own city. And none of them had any choice about where they were now. So, Golbahar might as well be cheerful, she supposed.
And if it was a facade … well, it was a facade of strength. One that might comfort others, Mrithuri included. And that behooved Mrithuri to appreciate it.
She watched Golbahar’s needle move, thinking that sometimes it is easier to talk to strangers. Strangers have not judged you. They do not assume they know who you are, how you think, what you have experienced. How you feel.
Friendships come with so much weight of history that sometimes one’s friends cannot see one in truth for all the things they think they know about you.
So it was that Mrithuri found herself talking frankly to Golbahar without ever being quite sure that she knew how the conversation had developed.
“I think,” Mrithuri said, “that I have gone through my whole life without faith.”
“But aren’t you a priestess?” Golbahar asked interestedly.
“The Mother—and the Good Daughter—they are easy. Besides, They don’t reward faith. The Mother looks on us as chickens in the henhouse. What’s one individual, more or less, now and then? So long as the flock survives? And the Good Daughter will slaughter what she needs, when she needs them. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, after all.
“But people. People will purport to care about you. You. But just let the going get tough … or let them want something you prove inconvenient to. And see where your faith in them gets you.”
Golbahar’s needle stitched the pale linen like a blind dolphin stitching the river. “It sounds like you might be thinking about this a lot.”
Mrithuri looked down at her hands, strangely bare for the moment of all the ornaments that rendered her so dependent on others. Her hands were taking advantage of their nakedness to strangle one another.
“I might be having an attack of … of faith,” she admitted.
“Faith in a person?”
Mrithuri nodded.
“It’s a terrible poison,” Golbahar said, amused. “It will only make you ill.”
“It does not feel like a poison.”
“Then it is a prison.” Stitch, stitch. A pattern of poppies emerged, blood spreading beneath the surface of milky water. “It will have you in chains.”
“I want to trust somebody,” Mrithuri said. “I want to just … relax. Feel safe. A novel desire.”
“Fight it,” counseled Golbahar.
“What if it were you?”
“Doubly don’t,” the lady rebuked softly. She glanced aside, eyes abashed above her veil. “I can promise no loyalty to anyone.”
A swishing sound, as the door was whisked aside. The Dead Man walked into the room, hard-stained with battle. Both women fell silent and drew gently apart. Golbahar touched her veil.
“Everyone is here but the person I have sent for,” Mrithuri said with a laugh she thought sounded natural. She hooked the Dead Man toward her with a crook of bare fingertips. “How goes the war?”
He followed her gestures to settle on the cushions near her feet. “Not well,” he admitted. “We need to break their bridge.”
Mrithuri saw his eyes flick down. He had followed the motion of her hand, she realized, as she unconsciously stroked the outline of a blind river dolphin inked upon her skin.
His eyebrows lifted inquiringly beneath the edge of his indigo head scarf.
Apprehension stopped her breath. “Not unless I have no choice.”
“The enemy are across the river,” the Dead Man said. “Not quite to our gates, because they still respect our cannon. But that will last as long as our gunpowder does. There are more where these came from, and they’re going to keep coming.”
“There are bats in the caverns under the palace,” Mrithuri said, hearing her own bland satisfaction. “And we have two Wizards here. I’m not too concerned about running out of gunpowder.”
Somewhere within the walls, an anchorite stroked her harp in a gentle glissando.
“You’ve no bats among your ornaments,” the Dead Man said.
“They’re not especially sacred to the Mother. But they do keep the bugs down.”
“Food will also be an issue.”
“It will,” Mrithuri agreed. “We have fish, and water—”
“Until Anuraja poisons the river—”
Mrithuri’s hand fell to her lap in shock. The Dead Man paused mid-thought.
“Rajni?” said Golbahar, when the silence had stretched.
“He would not.” Even speaking it, Mrithuri knew her protest was ridiculous. But she spoke it anyway. “He … never.”
“We must anticipate the unthinkable.” The gentleness in the Dead Man’s voice made her feel she must appear very small and very young.
“But to poison the Mother? To poison the Mother?”
Golbahar remarked, “People do poison their parents from time to time.”
The Dead Man sat very still, as one will when imparting bad news. “Especially when they are impatient to inherit.”
Mrithuri knew her own naiveté rang in her voice when it burst outraged from her lips but could not hold it back, for all it shamed her. “That would be blasphemy! That is anathema!”
His voice grew gentler still. “Will religious feeling stop your enemies any more than familial duty shall?”
She laid her hands flat on her thighs, and with a supreme act of will, kept them soft there. “The dolphins would not survive that, either.”
“Neither would anything else in the river.” The Dead Man had a terrible manner of agreeing with her when she most wished he would argue. “But take heart, Rajni. I spoke with the Wizards. They are of the opinion that poisoning an entire river of that size would be an extreme technical challenge.”
“Comforting to think that difficulty might stay a hand when ethics will not.”
Golbahar clicked her needle on her porcelain thimble. “Apologies, Rajni,” she said, when Mrithuri looked at her. “But they do have a sorcerer.”
Mrithuri swore. “Yes.”
Restlessness infused her limbs. She wanted to jump up and pace. She craved the sweet focus and strength of her venom.
She was a rajni. She would comport herself. She willed herself still, folded her hands, and composed her dignity. “We need to keep the cisterns filled, then. Especially”—she nodded to the windows—“if the rains keep failing. We … oh, send for Hnarisha and Yavashuri.”
A patter of slippers sounded from behind the partition. The nuns would pass the message, and Yavashuri and Hnarisha would soon be with her.
She looked at the Dead Man. “We must speak with Nizhvashiti. It is possible the Godmade can work a miracle or two. Isn’t multiplying bread supposed to be the sort of thing that Godmade are good for?”
“If I knew where it was, I would speak to it,” the Dead Man said. “May I rise, Rajni?”
She nodded.
He had no compunctions about pacing. He strode back and forth, his hands folded behind his back. He again wore the torn red coat. She watched as he slid his hands into the pockets, how he smoothed his thumbs across the seams.
The bullet hole at the breast had been darned, and the worst patches of wear at hems and elbows. Laundry women had their own arts that bordered on magic, and while the borders of the bloodstain were still faintly brown against the faded fabric, the worst of it had been scrubbed and soaked and alchemized away.
“Well,” he said. “That was … not decisive. At least we’ve kept them back from the walls.”
“Cannon,” she said. “Good for something.”
He nodded in a manner that looked like shaking his head.
She put a hand on his sleeve, forgetting herself for a moment. Surprised, he looked at her.
Soothingly, she said, “Don’t worry. When the Mother rises, they will learn that they have been camping underwater.”
A rustle behind the pierced screens. A slip of paper. Golbahar rose to fetch it. A silent anchorite extended a folded spill through the filigree and smiled when Golbahar’s fingers brushed hers.
The foreign lady bent over the spindled paper. She smoothed it between her hands. “Yavashuri and Hnarisha request that you do them the great honor of meeting them. They say they are in the rooms of Mahadijia, and they have something they need to show to you.”
Mahadijia had left some Wizardry in place around his chambers that made them hard to locate; hard even to remember the existence of. Mrithuri pressed her fingertips to her eyes. “If we can manage to find our way there.”
The Dead Man looked down at her, unspeaking.
“Well,” she said, pressing herself to her feet, “we’d better go. It’s not as if we can leave the war to cool its heels in our parlor until we get around to greeting it.”
Her bhaluukutta rose and followed them.
* * *
The Dead Man followed Mrithuri and Golbahar down the passages of the palace, and Mrithuri and Golbahar in turn followed one of the anchorite nuns. She sang softly to herself and walked with a little shuffling step on the other side of the piecework partition, almost as if she were dancing in a straight line. She moved with direct sureness through the winding corridors. Apparently, the nuns were not confused by geomancy.
They turned a corner. The queen said, “Oh, no.”
The Dead Man unsheathed his sword.
“Who is it?” Golbahar had the better view, until the Dead Man stepped in front of her.
Mrithuri touched her cheek as if wishing for one of her snarling filigree masks of estate. Behind her palm, she whispered, “That asshole, Mi Ren.”
Golbahar giggled.
“What?” asked the Dead Man, as that asshole approached, preceded by a wave of perfume.
“Oh,” Golbahar murmured. “I call him that, too. And so do the nuns.”
The Dead Man, who had never heard the nuns speak, might have asked another question, if the person under discussion had not just then burst in among them like a small artillery shell.
He rushed up to Mrithuri so precipitously that the Dead Man interposed himself and his sword. Mi Ren, though, just hurled himself to his knees in the hall.
It looked painful, as if the Song Prince were not much practiced at self-abasement. Mrithuri drew back with a jingle of anklets.
“Your Abundance!” Mi Ren cried. “Why do you scorn me?”
Golbahar stepped against the wall quite sensibly. A nun giggled in embarrassment, her movement revealed by the pale flutters of her raiment.
The Dead Man lowered his sword. Not to remove the threat, but so the blade remained at Mi Ren’s eye level as the prince groveled. Apparently he could not bring himself to prostrate himself entirely. So he simply knelt, and extended his hands beseechingly.
Though not too close to the Dead Man’s naked blade. Or the glowering teeth of Syama.
Mrithuri stood looking down at him with that practiced, waxed complacence that the Dead Man was coming to recognize as fury. Mi Ren folded one hand inside the other and begged theatrically. “I have sent you gifts, my rajni, and tokens of esteem. I have sewn my heart in petals on my robe for you. And yet you are cold to me.”
The Dead Man didn’t think Mi Ren saw Lady Golbahar roll her eyes at him and the nun. Or hear that she muttered, “Perhaps because there is a war in our garden?”
But the Dead Man certainly did.
What was one little war to such as Mi Ren? Surely nothing that should inconvenience him.
Mrithuri seemed to have recovered herself, though she had never lost her self-possession. She rubbed her arms with her palms, a gesture the Dead Man loathed because it meant she was coveting the Eremite snake venom. It made her sleepless and gave her thoughts the speed of racing falcons. But her voice was steady and imperious as she said to Mi Ren, “Stand up, before my bodyguard and my bhaluukutta eat you.”
Syama growled as if she knew the words.
Mi Ren tried to leap to his feet, as dashing young princes were no doubt meant to in his mythology. He caught a slipper on the edge of his robe sleeve and did not quite go sprawling. Which was all for the best, the Dead Man supposed, given the danger of imminent impalement. Still, as he staggered and struggled and hopped, the Dead Man could not help but mourn a plausible accident.
As soon as Mi Ren was stably on his feet again, Mrithuri softened. The Dead Man could see it for the act it was, but he doubted that Mi Ren had the self-awareness to imagine Mrithuri finding him anything but irresistible. Therefore, any distance she imposed must be mere simpering meant to inflame.
“Now, Prince,” she murmured. “You know that I have duties. There is a war at my very gates.” A flash of cunning inspiration lit her features, smoothing seamlessly into coyness. “You know that nothing lesser would keep me from the pleasures of your company.”
She turned her face and angled her eyes at him, as she might have if she were wielding a fan. It was a pretty, calculated trick, and the Dead Man’s heart warmed that she never used it on him.
“But have I not offered the assistance of m
y family and our armies and wealth?” Mi Ren reached out and touched her hand. She allowed him to take it, so the Dead Man resisted his immediate urge to inflict mutilation. “Have I not told you we will march to your relief?”
“You have,” she purred. “Has there been a dove from your people, then?”
“I doubt they have doves trained to come to Sarathai-tia.” He pouted. “The silly birds will only fly home to their own cote. I still have a few of the ones I brought with me, however. I can send another message.”
Mrithuri gazed up at Mi Ren through her eyelashes. “I would be ever so grateful,” she said. “You know there’s no chance of a state wedding … until”—she sighed as if it grieved her—“until the siege is lifted.”
Mi Ren’s eyes ran over her possessively. The Dead Man’s fingers tightened on the hilt of the sword she had given him. “I will go right now, Your Abundance.” He bowed once more, with another of his elaborate flourishes, and withdrew along the hall.
“I’ve heard there’s a language to those flourishes, in Song,” the Dead Man remarked conversationally, when Mi Ren was gone.
“I bet he speaks it with a whine,” Mrithuri snarled. “I need a bath.”
“Pity,” said Golbahar. “The water in the cisterns is for drinking.”
* * *
The nuns brought them to Anuraja’s dead ambassador’s chambers without a falter, leaving the Dead Man to wonder why Mahadijia’s Wizardry did not seem to maze them. Perhaps they had Wizardry of their own. Perhaps Mahadijia had not thought to extend his illusion or whatever it was to their half-hidden warrens. Perhaps he had simply forgotten that they were people he needed to account for. Or perhaps there was some quality of the warrens themselves that pierced the confusion he had laid, or had had laid, over his spaces.
That he had hidden his suite in Mrithuri’s palace from Mrithuri herself, and magically arranged things so that nobody noticed or even remembered to go looking, seemed a subtle and powerful magic. Not the sort of thing one might wish for on a battlefield. But profoundly useful nonetheless.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 17