Her new friends came and gossiped in her presence, which was also useful. This was how she learned that the Tian Wizards had done something to seal the gates and that the Tians were rumored to have a revenant among their defenders.
She chalked that up to a bit of legendry.
When the sun rose fully, hot behind its cauls and darkening the sky, the music ended. Ümmühan waved to her admirers and handed her zither to Nazia, who had crouched beside her and was watching what she did with her hands. Get the girl zither lessons, Sayeh told herself.
Well, here was Ümmühan, and it wasn’t like they lacked for time.
The ladies came inside, and slowly the guards lowered the tent flaps. Sayeh heard voices and footsteps as the crowd outside slowly broke up and wandered away.
It was close inside the pavilion without the walls raised, but Sayeh could not show pain in public, and she liked to dine in what little privacy they were permitted.
Sayeh’s leg was not healed, but it was better. Well, better. The bone was knitting. The muscle had withered away to nearly nothing, though that was to be expected. At last she had the slender thigh of a girl—
She laughed, contemplating it. Well, one of them, anyway.
Moving about the camp on crutches had made her arms and back stronger. Her arms were sleek with muscle as they had not been since she was a girl. She and her ladies dined, and then they busied themselves with small tasks. Sayeh looked to some mending. She had grown up doing fancywork and this was a light plying of a needle by comparison, but the soldiers were happy to have their socks darned by a rajni and—again—it made her friends.
So she happened to be sitting upright in a chair, with her broken leg propped against a footstool, when the guards came back in.
Nazia jumped to her feet. Ümmühan rose more slowly, setting aside a pen.
“The raja wants you, Rajni,” Pren said. “Just you,” he clarified, when she waved Nazia over.
Sayeh saw the tautness on the man’s face and wondered whether Anuraja had found out about her slow and careful attempts to cultivate his people. But she had not done anything. She had not taken any actions. She had not asked for any favors. All she had been doing was entertaining others. And perhaps … collecting friends.
Could that be enough for Anuraja to grow angry with her? Or was there something else? Something she did not know, and so could not prepare for?
“My ladies must help me into my chair,” she said reasonably.
“He said you could come on your crutches, Your Abundance,” said Najal. “You should hurry. I have seen him this impatient before.”
Of course they had. And wasn’t that the tactic of a tyrant? To throw one off-balance, keep one on the back foot. Stage an outlandish fury over nothing at all …
If it was nothing at all.
“Then my ladies,” Sayeh said, with all the regal calmness she could muster, “must help me to stand.”
She set her sewing aside and extended her hands. In a moment, Ümmühan was on one side of her, Nazia on the other. They swung her between them to her feet.
Nazia steadied her and Ümmühan fetched the crutches. Then the guard was holding the flap aside for her, and they were out of convincing delays.
Sayeh’s walk across the dark, dusty camp had the quality of a bad dream. Eyes skated off her. She hitched gamely along—she was getting pretty good at it—and did not ask questions. She felt that if Pren and Najal knew, they would have told her already.
Assuming they were allowed to.
They led her to Anuraja’s familiar pavilion and—unsmiling—held the flap aside.
She went in.
It was dim inside, and cooler than she could have expected. The space was lit by witchlights, leading Sayeh to wonder if it was cooled, as well, by a spell. She wished Tsering-la were here, so she could ask him.
She should not think of Tsering-la. It made her sad.
The past was beyond her. She had to live through the day, and the next. And continue building power.
And get back to her son.
Something tripped her in the darkness. She staggered hard, struggling with her crutches. She could not save herself, and fell.
The little scream that came out of her was cut short in a grunt as she struck the carpet and fur-covered floor. At least it was a soft surface to tumble onto. She struck her face, but did not think she had bloodied it. Her fingers ached sharply from being banged by the crutches. Her leg …
Praise the river, she did not think that she had rebroken it. But the pain that pulsed from her injured thigh was as bad as if she had been struck by a hammer. She could do nothing, for a moment, but whine through clenched teeth, prone and utterly motionless on the floor.
“Not too hurt to genuflect now, I see,” Anuraja’s voice said, out of the darkness.
The witchlamps flared. They were an odd coral color, and as they brightened and Sayeh managed to lift her chin, she saw that the glow glittered through the facets in cut gemstones. Was it Anuraja who had tripped her? She could not imagine him risking his own gouty feet on such an escapade.…
No, it was Ravani. The sorcerer leaned against one of the pavilion posts, a spear balanced in her hand. The point was raised and the butt extended toward Sayeh. As Sayeh watched, Ravani drew the butt slowly, insolently across the rugs toward herself.
“You needn’t have bothered,” Sayeh said around the pain of her clenching diaphragm. “In the dark, I would have fallen over one of these furs or cushions momentarily.”
Ravani smirked. “We could have been friends,” she said. “You’re clever.”
Too clever by half, Sayeh thought. But I’m glad I never made any promises to you.
She pushed herself up on her elbows. Got her good knee under her. Swung the bad leg to the side and then forward, very indelicately. Groped for her crutches, found only one of them, and gently knelt back.
Now she could see Anuraja. She clutched her prop, but remained kneeling. She could probably get up. She wasn’t certain she wanted to give away that ability. And her leg did hurt abominably.
“Your Competence,” she said. “I did not mean to displease you.”
Anuraja rested on a rug-covered form that must be one of those boxy, uncomfortable coastal chairs. She would pad it too, if she was forced to sit in it for long. He had his own bad foot propped up, and the bandages were off his ankle.
The unhealing wound on his leg had a festering smell.
He snarled, “Did you know he had plans for the brat, and did you not tell me?”
* * *
“Excuse me?” Sayeh said incredulously.
She thought Anuraja might lunge to his feet, unbandaged abscess and all, and come at her. But she honestly did not know what he was talking about. Perhaps he read that in her pain-muzzed expression, or perhaps he was just enjoying the tears that broke over her lashes and streaked down her unpainted face. She was in the next best thing to pajamas, and she suspected that did not look prepossessing at all.
She didn’t bother to straighten herself or wipe her face.
She’d skinned her knee. She could feel it bleeding into the carpets.
Serve him right if the wool rotted.
Anuraja stroked his beard between forefinger and thumb. “You heard me.”
“My raja,” she said. The words felt slick and greasy in her mouth. “What brat? Who is this ‘he’ you speak of?”
Even as she said it, she had a sickening sensation that she knew. In part, at least. There was only one child she could think of. One child who was the only thing she could think of. And she knew who had had him last.
And it was true, she had not told Anuraja everything.
She drew a breath as Anuraja continued to watch her curiously. “Prince Drupada?” she asked. “Oh, tell me, my lord, that you have found my son!”
She thought he eased a little, though she was not certain. He said, “Himadra. I am speaking of Himadra. And your son. Who was not stolen by Himadra, but given to Hi
madra, I have to suppose?”
He is angry because Drupada is alive, and Himadra has him. He is angry because my heir is not dead. But I told him that Himadra— “Why would you suppose that, my lord?”
“Because,” he said coldly, “Himadra has declared himself Lord Protector of Ansh-Sahal.”
* * *
Sayeh gaped. There could be no other word for it. Her mouth unhinged; her eyes bulged. She clapped the hand that was not clutching her crutch across her face.
“Lord Protector,” she finally said, her words a voiceless squeak. “Of Ansh-Sahal.”
“And Prince Drupada,” Ravani agreed, a little greasily. The sorcerer’s gaze seemed to linger on her distress even more avidly than did Anuraja’s. Sayeh heard Ümmühan’s voice in her head: There are beasts that feed on war.
“But I am Drupada’s protector. I am his regent.” A simple statement of fact, and it fell so flatly from her own lips that she could tell it meant nothing anymore.
“Not”—Ravani glanced at her master—“anymore.”
“Well, if you really didn’t give the boy to Himadra, then Himadra must think you dead,” Anuraja said, with jollity. “Do you suppose he’s told your son to mourn? Oh, here, Ravani. Help the lady up. She must be in much discomfort squatting on the floor in such a manner. Fetch her her crutches, there’s a good girl.…”
Sayeh found herself stood up, dusted off, and sat back down again on a tuffet before she could really orient herself. They brought her a smaller tuffet for her bad leg to rest on. Her crutches were laid at her side, just a little too far away to reach conveniently. Another game; another small humiliation. Another reminder that she was dependent on him.
She had been gently raised, and lucky in her marriage. She knew, however, women who had not been. The motives behind his actions were no mystery to her.
She pushed her unbound hair from her face. “My lord,” she said in all sincerity, “I did not know that Himadra had declared himself my son’s guardian.”
She had, it was true, known a few other things. But this statement was not a lie, and she made it boldly. There was room in the cracks of the truth.
The ache in her leg told her that Anuraja was someone she needed to get away from. She pressed her lips together to keep from trying to lick the dryness from them with an equally dry tongue. Anuraja’s reversals were intended to disorient. It was a tactic of war. A tactic for breaking animals if you did not much care about the nature of the partnership that resulted, but only wanted cringing, fear, and obedience. First violence, unprovoked and incomprehensibly sudden. Then kindness salted with cruelty. There would be violence again, soon, she was sure. And after that some small gift, a present intended to soften her feelings, some lavish show of admiration and solidarity. A pretense of allegiance. Something to combine with the fear of being hurt again to erode her will, make her slavish.
Make her his thing.
All the poisoned pretend kindness of before had only been an act leading up to this. This was his move. He wanted to make her his thing.
She knew it could work. She even knew it could work on her, though she wanted to deny that weakness in herself. But she was a rajni of four decades’ experience. She was a woman who had seen how men could treat the people they claimed to cherish. And not just men: there were women who bound their children to them in just such ways.
She knew the truth: under the right kind of torture, everyone breaks.
She wondered if any of his wives had loved him before he had them killed, with the sick love of something owned. She was certain, watching his face, watching him—already—regard her as if she were a possession, that he took joy in his petty cruelties, in the exercise of power.
And she was equally certain, watching Ravani’s face as Ravani looked at her supposed lord and master, that the sorcerer thrived on the pain that Anuraja caused. That Ravani feasted on it, as surely as a sin-eater feasted on the guilt of unrestored crimes.
“My lord,” she said, as if impulsively. “Send me to our cousin Mrithuri. I will plead for you.”
He had been about to speak, but he stopped with his mouth open, one finger lordly in the air. Sayeh noticed that he had tea and cakes beside him, though she had been offered none this time. He covered his hesitation by reaching for the tray, lifting a morsel, and popping it into his mouth.
“Is that all it takes to change a rajni’s mind?” Ravani said, while Anuraja was—meditatively—chewing.
Sayeh turned to the lounging sorcerer slowly, using the drama of moving her hair across her shoulder as an excuse to take her time. Having formulated her words, she simpered, “His Competence had not shown himself to be so … masterful … before.”
Anuraja, having dispensed with the sweet, reached for a date. He toyed with it. It was a little withered, the flesh beginning to spot, and Sayeh in her heart was rudely glad that he was afflicted by what must seem to him a great hardship.
“And women crave masters, is that so?”
She wished real hardship on him, and fervently. “Women do like strength,” she allowed. She glanced at him under her sadly unglossed lashes. “And this Mrithuri is but a girl, is it not so? Surely she must be frightened in her youth and inexperience. Surely she can be swayed to consider”—she exhaled—“such a protector.”
Ravani rolled her eyes amusedly. But Anuraja was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, obviously enchanted. Sayeh blinked: was that really all it took to charm the man? A few honeyed words, a little overblown and overspoken flattery? And that little tense twitch of Ravani’s mouth. Was the sorcerer afraid that Sayeh had uncovered the key to her power over the raja?
He was weak, Sayeh thought. When she had met the last emperor, he had called her daughter, though the true relationship was far more distant than that. His empire had already crumbled. He had been dying. And she had been a very little girl, but he had laid his hand upon the not-yet-crimsoned part of her hair and praised her courage, and told her then that she would need all her will and all her wiles to live as she would. But that she should not let that stop her, as he had not let it stop him.
Anuraja was older than Sayeh. He claimed he had been introduced to their illustrious relative as well. She had a thought, then. A thought that at first cruelly pleased her.
She wondered if the last emperor had not been … too impressed with this particular nephew.
Sayeh leaned forward, forcing her expression to remain serene. She was not bad at men, it so happened. And the category of men to which she judged Anuraja to belong did not like to think of women as human people, with physical and emotional needs. They liked to think of women as conveniences, pieces of temporary art, nuisances. To betray emotion, to rage or spit, was irrational and incomprehensible; to be bland and smooth-faced was deceptive, shallow, cold.
There really was no winning such a person over, except in using their prejudices against them.
And such men, being shallow themselves, did like to be flattered.
She felt a veritable click within herself as of gears engaging, as of some telescoping mechanism locking itself into place, erect as a spine. She felt … as if she fell into herself, after a long time of not knowing who she was or who she had been.
“I believe Mrithuri can be induced to give you what you want,” Sayeh said. “But you must offer her an honorable excuse to do so. A rajni has her pride. She likes to feel she is making her own decisions, and if they are hard decisions, she wishes to feel she is making them for reasons of duty and honor. For the best future for her people. After all, a rajni is the Mother in her person, and her people are her children.”
“Women can be broken of pride,” Anuraja said, with such self-satisfied pomp that Sayeh would have broken his nose with her crutch if she could have reached it or him. Fortunately—fortunately?—she was constrained by her infirmity for long enough that her legendary self-control reasserted itself. Her hands shook as she carefully folded them and laid them demurely in her lap again. “Do you think you can m
anage that? Or should I rid myself of the burden of you once and for all?”
I will strangle you with these little hands someday, she promised. Just let me stay alive long enough and gain power enough to do so.
“Do not anger yourself too much, my lord,” Ravani soothed. “Soon, very soon, you will mount the golden stair to the Peacock Throne. And this woman is a path to that.”
“Hmph,” he said, and settled back in his chair.
Ravani turned her face away from Anuraja and smirked at Sayeh. Sayeh wondered if the sorcerer could read thoughts after all, or if murder was just what any woman would be thinking at this time.
“I think we can offer you some advantages,” Anuraja mused.
“Advantages?”
“If we decide to accept your kind offer, you will see.”
Anyone could be broken. Anyone could be crushed and abused into a shell of their former self. Sayeh herself could be, she knew. But in that moment, she also knew that she had gained another goal: not just to survive, to be reunited with and protect her son. To protect such of her people as she could find and reclaim.
She wanted to beat Anuraja. She wanted to see the moment when he realized she had beaten him. She wanted to relish that moment of defeat.
So maybe she and he were not so different after all.
“It is as you say,” Sayeh said. “Women will do what they must. Let me go to her, my lord. I am pleading with you.”
* * *
Ravani came in while Sayeh was packing, and brought the chaturanga board.
Sayeh remained surprised, quite frankly, by how much she had to pack. Hadn’t she arrived here with nothing but ragged clothes on her back? And now she had a trunk full. Where had it even all come from?
Dresses bartered or given, of course. And not all of them were hers; there were also clothes belonging to Nazia and Ümmühan, who had their own admirers and friends. It was an inadequate trousseau with which to embark on a diplomatic mission. But then, this was war.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 34