“You have children?”
“Not here,” he said. “For which I am currently more grateful than I would have expected. Where is your son?”
She sighed. “An enemy has adopted him.”
“Oh,” he said. “I understand.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“You want him back.”
“Of course!”
He nodded. “Go on. Tell me about the tiger.”
Sayeh drank a sip of tea to fortify herself. She ate another cake, this time the orange blossom. The tea had helped to clear her palate, but there was still a little of the funk of marigold left behind.
Oh, well.
“According to Drupada”—she cleared her throat—“the tiger is a bandit lord, and very wicked. But the elephant is the prince of the animals, and so it is his job to tell the tiger when the tiger is bad, and make him stop eating the other animals.”
“I see,” Hnarisha said. A little curve bent his lips. “Is the tiger prone to listening?”
“Well,” Sayeh said. “According to Drupada, sometimes because the elephant is the biggest he has to sit on the tiger.”
“He sits on the tiger.”
“That’s what I said.”
“And your son, Drupada? What did he say in reply?”
She laughed. “He said, ‘He does. But the elephant prince tries not to hurt the tiger too much so the tiger has a chance to behave better.’ He also said that sometimes the elephant has to appeal to a higher power.”
Hnarisha ate a small cake himself. Sayeh noticed that he started with the orange blossom. Live and learn.
When he had finished it, he said, “A higher power?”
“His mother.” She closed her eyes briefly, trying to savor the memory, the childish belief that a parent could fix the most terrible circumstances. “He said that the elephant’s mother could make the tiger listen no matter what.”
“I bet she can,” Hnarisha agreed. “You listen to your child.”
“Good mothers do.”
“My people have a different version of the story.”
She thought about asking Who are your people, exactly? But it seemed like the sort of question that broke a fragile, budding camaraderie. “Is it more flattering to the tiger?”
“Well, he’s not a bandit lord. But he does want to eat the elephant.”
“Wait,” Sayeh said. “You’re telling me this is a real story. This story my son made up and told me.”
“He probably didn’t make it up,” Hnarisha said. “And even if he did make it up, it’s still a real story.”
Sayeh felt her face blush. “Of course,” she said. “That was thoughtless of me. But I mean—it’s a story that exists outside of my son’s imagination? I did not realize that.”
“Who could have told it to him?”
Sayeh sighed. She wrapped her hands around the warm teacup and sat back in the chair, pressing her doubled fists over her heart. “A nurse. A guard. An entertainer. Someone brought in by his tutors, or perhaps even a tutor themselves. There are a lot of options.”
Despite herself, she thought of Nazia saying that someone like Ravani came to her and suggested she undermine the ritual and the omen that confirmed that the land and sea welcomed Sayeh’s rule. If that had not happened, Sayeh wondered, would her people have been more willing to listen to her when she begged them to evacuate?
Could someone like that have told a story to Drupada, too?
You are being paranoid.
“Interesting,” Hnarisha said. “Do you know who my people say the elephant’s mother is, Sayeh Rajni?”
Rajni of what? Sayeh thought. But instead of speaking, she just shook her head.
Hnarisha sipped his tea. “The river.”
* * *
Mrithuri unwound her husband’s veil and kissed his mouth. She leaned her forehead against his shoulder. She put her arms around his neck and embraced him.
“What you’re about to do,” he said. “It’s something terrible.”
“Likely,” she agreed.
“And no one can do it for you.”
She pushed her head into the hollow under his chin, ducking a little to fit herself there. The contact eased the pain in her head and her veins a little. Nothing seemed to ease her chills. “That is what it means to rule.”
“Not so different from being a soldier.” He set his hands on her shoulders and moved her back a step, looking into her face. His mouth curved in a smile she wasn’t used to seeing. It caught in her throat.
She would see it again. “I will come back,” she said.
“I will be here,” he answered, speaking as she had: as if she were going away a long way. He squeezed her once, hard fingers flexing painfully. Then let his hands fall and stepped away.
With a gesture so practiced it seemed unconscious, he drew the indigo cloth across his face and fastened it. She smiled. He smiled too; she could tell from his eyes.
She turned away while he was still watching. Still smiling at her. She reached up and touched the smooth outline of the silver snake that coiled around her throat.
She turned its head, and slid the flexible, silver-edged dagger concealed within it free.
“I never knew that was there,” the Dead Man said.
“It will remain there,” Mrithuri answered. “And if I have to marry and bed Anuraja, I will wear it to his chamber. But this is the thing I need now.”
She pushed a secret catch within the sheath of the dagger, and a key popped from a slot into her hand. She set it in a lock in the filigree wall before her and without turning back over her shoulder said, “From here I go alone.”
With shuffling footsteps, he withdrew.
She turned the key, which turned the lock. The filigree had no knob or visible hinges. She used the key as if it were a handle, and pushed the door away from her into the shadowy, secret, scented places beyond.
Then she retrieved it, locked the concealed door behind her, reassembled her serpent torc, and faced the dark beyond.
“Sisters?”
Out of the shadows, draped in white, veiled in white, like the legendary phantasms of the great northern steppe, they came to her.
They led her into the shadows, where they were paler shadows still. The dimness was kind to her throbbing head. The chill was not so kind to her aching bones and shivering skin. The floor under her bare feet was wood, not stone, and polished smooth as silk from the passage of so many bare feet, and quite a few slippered ones. They led her down a spiral, and by strange ways that pierced walls and skirted corridors and slipped along the edges of rooms she had not known had secret passages within them.
She caught glimpses of her own familiar palace beyond the screens, in some places. There were fragments of life carried on: cooks in the kitchens, maids spreading linens, courtiers laughing over a lute. But her own familiar palace seemed strangely disconnected from the way she knew it to be. The rooms in the wrong order; corridors connected that she knew were not; chambers she knew to be on different levels now seeming to be the same.
Perhaps it was the lack of her venom, the sickness it engendered in her that made the connection to her own world seem so tenuous. Perhaps the world swam because her head was swimming.
Everything familiar was made strange.
That is how it will be if Anuraja rules here. She steeled herself. She would carry this through.
As they walked, one voice hummed a prayer. It was joined by another, singing words of praise in harmony. A third rose, contralto, weaving a counterpoint under the other two. Soon all the voices rose around her, echoing through the corridors so that she could not even be sure how many there were. They sang in time to their footsteps, so that without meaning to she fell into rhythm with them. They sang and walked, and walked and sang, and Mrithuri became certain that they had walked and sung, and sung and walked, for far longer than the mere confines of her palace could have supported. They seemed to wind up and down at random, and she became utterl
y confused as to where they were in relation to anything of the palace she had lived in her whole life.
At last, they came out into what must be a high and empty space, though she could not see that distance. Some of the nuns carried little oil lamps, but the lamps only gave a dim light—though a strong scent—and both vanished into the blackness that stretched around. It could not be an infinite blackness, however, because the nuns’ song echoed all the more here. It was as though Mrithuri stood in the heart of the sounding chamber of a vast and convoluted instrument, some lute or zither of such enormousness that an entire mountain might be needed to contain it.
One by one, the nuns ceased to sing. The echoes and reverberations made up their voices, strange and haunted and attenuated, until the last woman let her voice fall away.
When the silence had stretched a little, Mrithuri cleared her throat.
That, too, lingered on dying echoes.
“How is this possible?” she said, meaning the long walk. Meaning the space they stood within. Her voice had a resonance, here, like God’s.
One by one, the nuns turned toward her, stepping out until they stood in a white-robed, white-veiled, white-gloved, barefoot ring. One remained where she was. It was the woman who had been in the lead, Mrithuri thought. Now she was the woman who stood closest.
“The Building Science,” the nun said. “These two places touch, you see. But they do not inhabit the same continuity. At least, not exactly.”
“The Alchemical Emperor built this.”
“He did,” the nun answered. “Our cloister touches your palace in the same way that the Lotus Kingdoms touch Rasa, yet exist under a different sky.”
“I do not understand.”
“Your Ata Akhimah might, a little,” the nun said. “But your ancestor went to great lengths to ensure that his knowledge would be scattered after his death. Even we do not know much of what he understood. Merely enough to glimpse the outlines of what is hidden from us.”
Mrithuri did not shake her head, because shaking made it feel as if her brain were slapping against the inside of her skull. Maybe what the nun was saying would have made sense if she weren’t so befogged. “Sister,” she said instead, in capitulation. “I have come to beg your assistance.”
“There is a price.”
Mrithuri swallowed, but her mouth grew no less dry. “I expected there would be.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“I expected you would tell me.”
The nun cocked her hip and crossed her arms low in front of her, as if standing more comfortably. The flickering lamplights behind her were doing nothing for Mrithuri’s migraine.
The nun asked, “Your life?”
“If it were mine to give? In an instant.” Mrithuri would regret it. She had things to live for, if she could keep them. For the first time in her life she had real things; things that were her own and not inherited or borrowed.
She hoped the nuns would not ask for that. But then, if they did, she would mind dying less, if she had to.
“It is true,” the nun said. “Your life is already given to your people. Well, then. Your right hand.”
She shuddered. Was it the venom-need, or was it fear? “If I must. Dismembered, can I be your rajni?”
The nun chuckled in echoes like lapping water. “Something could be arranged. How about your virginity?”
Somehow, here in this dark and vibrant space, Mrithuri was beginning to feel at home. Even, mildly, bold and humorous. She said, “I need that, unfortunately. At least, the token of it. I may be forced to marry a raja, and they expect that sort of thing. Besides,” she said, self-deprecatingly. “It lets me come here.”
“You are the Mother in your own person. You do not need chastity to come here.”
“I’m not sure what virginity I have left counts as much of a sacrifice anymore, to be completely honest,” Mrithuri admitted.
The nun laughed knowingly. The nuns knew so many things. Chaeri must have used illusions to hide her nefarious activities from them. Damn that sorcerer to at least thirteen of the numberless hells of Namhansanseong.
“Your hair?”
“It would serve Anuraja right to have an ugly bride.”
“So,” said the nun, whose voice too was becoming more humorous, “not a thing that would count as a sacrifice. Your serpents.”
“Already stolen,” she admitted. “Not a thing I can offer in good faith to sacrifice.”
“Indeed,” said the shape in white. “Your hands tremble with desire for them. But think you: your enemy is also our enemy. He is a heretic and a blasphemer.”
“You’ve heard that in your cloisters, then.”
The figure’s head tilted beneath her shrouds, as if she smiled. “We live in your walls, my rajni.”
Mrithuri had to shake her head, eyes closing, at her own obtuseness. “I am thinking on what you mentioned. Does that mean you will aid me for your own sake?”
“It means that if our enemy has your serpents, he could use them to control you. You think you need them. Their venom certainly has a hold on you—”
“I do need them,” Mrithuri said. “I am not myself enough.”
“Oh,” said the nun. “But what if you must be?”
Mrithuri had no answer for that. She felt weak, old. Exhausted. She wished for a chair. She wanted to lean forward and put her hands on her knees. She stood, but she could not quite make herself stand straight. She pressed her elbow against the wrapped ache in her side. Some honesty—perhaps just the sense that the woman in white would know if she was lying—compelled her to say, “Then I will fail.”
“Will you? Have you yet?”
Had she? She didn’t know. She had … been too certain that Sarathai-tia could hold against a siege. She had been too dependent on Chaeri, even when others she should have trusted more had called on her to make better decisions.
“Yes,” she said.
“Did the world end?”
That made her laugh. It sounded flat, even here. “Too soon to tell.”
“Did the venom prevent your failure?”
That drew her up short. She couldn’t get a breath, suddenly. As if she had been punched in those cracked ribs, or in the solar plexus. It was a question, not even a truth. Not an accusation.
And yet it unraveled the entirety of everything she had been relying on since she was … nine years of age. “I don’t know if my body can manage without it at this point.”
“You have no choice,” the nun said. “You will change, or you will die.”
Mrithuri closed her eyes. “I feel like I am living someone else’s life,” she said. “Someone who should have been carefree. At least for a little while. Someone whose mother and father should have lived, and ruled, and raised her. But she died and I lived and I stole her life. She would be better at it. She would be a fine rajni. But I stole her life and I cannot give it back to her and all I can do is make a mockery of who she would have been while trying to be worthy of her legacy.”
She took a breath. It shuddered. “I broke. She would be whole. I survived and she—the Other Me—she deserved to. She deserved so much more than I do.”
“She doesn’t exist,” the sister said.
“She gave her life for me. This broken thing,” Mrithuri said, with a dismissive wipe across herself.
“Well, then,” the sister said. “You owe her something.”
It might have been the most terrible thing anyone had ever said to Mrithuri. But it did, in fact, pierce her despair.
“I swear,” she said, thickly, with a tongue that resented her. “I will give up this thing.”
“Which thing?”
“I will give up the venom.”
“And what else?”
“I will give up … I will sacrifice…” She couldn’t quite find the words.
“You will give up this idea that you must be perfect.”
She opened her eyes again, forced her arm away from her aching side, and reached
out a supplicating hand to the sister. “Will you help me?”
“What help do you have in mind?”
“I must stop Anuraja from reigning over my people. I must protect them. Unpoison our water? Lift the siege?”
“We cannot do that.” Mrithuri’s heart sank, but the nun stepped forward and placed a gloved hand on her arm. “We will do what we can.”
* * *
The nuns brought her back to the Dead Man. They locked the concealed door behind her. She felt as if her soul had been scoured.
Perhaps it had. Perhaps she was finally clean.
“Take me to Sayeh,” she told him, leaning hard upon his arm.
“My rajni, you are not well.”
“I am well enough,” she said. “There is no time to be other than well.”
* * *
She had offered herself into another gilded captivity, Sayeh realized. Although it was a far more comfortable one. And it was good, so good, to have Guang Bao and her people around her again. Though Guang Bao really did look ridiculous with all those black-and-white feathers patched in among his own brilliant ones. She had spent some time talking with Mrithuri’s austringers, assuring herself of their skills, and ascertaining that the repaired feathers would drop out naturally with Guang Bao’s next molt without any intervention on her part.
Then, with a quiet pragmatism, she sent Ümmühan and Nazia and Vidhya and even Tsering-la away, and rested. Her son was in the north. He was as far out of harm’s way as anyone could be in this world. Farther than she was, for certain. Vidhya had left men behind to watch over the refugees from Ansh-Sahal, and to seek out Drupada, if such was possible, and protect him if they could. Sayeh had the opportunity to really rest—and to rest in a room alone—for the first time since the fall of Ansh-Sahal. She too was safe here, she judged, at least for the time being.
So the scratching upon her door sometime later roused her from a very deep sleep indeed. She pushed herself up on her elbows quite groggily, blinking sleep from crusted eyes. She had no idea how long she had been asleep, or even what time it was. It took her a moment to realize that she was in Sarathai-tia, and that the palace had apparently not fallen to Anuraja while she was asleep. No one would be scratching so politely at her door if it had.
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 37