by Sharon Shinn
“Very well, maybe I didn’t try very hard. I didn’t hire spies and try to track you down. But I did look for you. I was worried. Eventually I had to ask for my father’s help—and you do not want to hear the things he said to me when he learned I had failed to provide for a woman who was carrying my child. Or for the child itself.”
“Oh, I think I do want to hear.”
“Well, I’m not going to repeat them. But within a single day he had uncovered the rest of the story, down to the fact that you had delivered a baby girl on Taro Frothen’s estate—and left the baby behind. But beyond that no one, not even my father, could discover what had happened to you next.”
“Say what you will about Darien Serlast,” Leah said with a tight smile. “He knows how to keep a secret.”
“Taro does, too, though apparently he didn’t know as much as I believed at the time,” said Rhan. “Merely that you had left and that Darien had funded your way. If he knew you were in Malinqua, he never said.” Rhan sipped at his wine more slowly, watching her over the glass. “I was certain I would hear from you eventually. I was sure you wouldn’t have a child—my child—and never tell me where the baby could be found. If nothing else, I was sure you would have so much anger left inside you that you’d have to spill it out in a letter. And then I would find you, and we would talk, and we might not have fixed things between us, but we would have made things better. But you never wrote. You were well and truly gone.”
“It seemed easier.” Yori’s voice in her head: I don’t want easier. I want to feel.
“Easier for you maybe,” Rhan snapped.
She spread her hands. “So now I’m the one who says I’m sorry. But you had made it clear that you were not interested in the upheaval a child would bring to your life. It didn’t occur to me you would change your mind. Therefore, it seemed pointless to tell you she had arrived.”
“And what about you?” he demanded. “You despise me for shirking my responsibility, but you didn’t want a baby, either, from what I can tell. At any rate, you didn’t keep her.”
Leah nodded calmly, but her stomach was churning with self-hatred. “Oh, I never said I was any better than you. I was terrified at the idea of having a child—having another human being given over to my care. I was heartbroken and wild with grief, afraid I would harm the baby or myself. I left her because I was a coward, yes, but also because I wanted her to have someone better than me to look after her.” She hunched her shoulders. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. Or maybe I was. I thought she would be better off with Taro and Virrie than with me. But I’ll never forgive myself for leaving her.”
“My father wanted her, too, once he found out the truth,” Rhan said. “And my mother—you can imagine. Kurtis offered to take her in and raise her along with his own children. But before we had a chance to make this offer, the course of her life had already been set.”
Leah nodded. “She’d been discovered to be Odelia’s lookalike.”
“She was suddenly the decoy princess. So not only could we not claim her, we had to pretend we did not know who she was. It was very hard.” He looked away. “I admit, I didn’t make a special effort to get to know her even so. I could have found a way. I could have visited Taro’s estates when both girls were in residence. I could have fashioned myself some kind of uncle. But I didn’t do it.”
“I think Taro would have discouraged you from developing a relationship with her while she was masquerading as Odelia.”
Rhan snorted. “I’m not afraid of Taro. Have you ever seen my father in a rage? Hardly to compare.”
That made Leah laugh. “Taro’s the torz prime. He could cause boulders to shake loose from the earth and smash you to the ground. You don’t want to make him angry.”
“Well. So I didn’t. And now Odelia is no longer the heir and Mally can be herself, and I can be her father if I want to, if I can figure out how.”
“And I can be her mother if I can figure out how.”
“I know you hate me,” he began.
“I don’t hate you. I just find it painful to be around you.”
“But perhaps we can find some way to be friends, at least where Mally is concerned. Unless you think it would be better—unless you think I don’t deserve . . .” His words trailed off and he watched her, his face a study in dejection.
Leah took a hard breath. “I don’t envision the three of us going on pleasant excursions or setting up a household together and pretending to be a family,” she said bluntly. “But I had such a troubled relationship with my own father that I would never keep Mally away from hers. I would be glad if you made her a part of your life. Just a part of your life that doesn’t include me.”
Rhan gazed at her, his eyes narrowed in speculation, and for a moment she thought she could tell what he was thinking: Are you sure? Couldn’t we try to make our lives intersect, overlap, combine? But he didn’t say the words. Maybe he wasn’t even thinking them.
“Then that’s all I want,” he said simply. “I will let you get to know her first. As long as you swear you will let her get to know me next. I won’t interfere, I won’t cause trouble, I’ll hold off. But I think it’s time I stepped forward.”
“Time we both did.”
“You can choose,” he said, “when to tell people. What to tell people. Everyone in our circle.”
Your circle, she wanted to say, but didn’t. “Who already knows the truth? Do you have any idea? Besides your parents and Taro and Darien, I mean. And Zoe, of course.”
“Zoe knows?” he said with a groan. “I suppose she does. I suppose Kayle Dochenza and Mirti Serlast know, too, then—all the primes can tell when someone is related to someone else.” He straightened his shoulders. “Well, it hardly matters, since everyone will soon learn the truth. I suppose it will be quite a topic for conversation at the next formal dinner.”
Now she laughed. “It might be, but I won’t be there to hear the gossip. I don’t plan on reentering court life any time soon.”
“You don’t? Then what do you plan to do with your time?”
She took another big gulp of her wine and smiled a bit maliciously. Finally, she was starting to enjoy herself. “I’m going to become a shopgirl.”
SIX
Annova looked around the shop and said, “You’re ordering more goods? How do you think you’ll sell all of this?”
Leah and Yori had left yesterday’s acquisitions on the ground floor of the building, and Leah had to admit that the disorganized bundles and boxes looked like one big mess. But she saw potential. “If I manage a steady rate of sales, I’ll have constant turnover and need to be replenishing on a regular basis,” she said. “And if the first things I put out don’t sell, I’ll need to try new things and—trust me. This isn’t too much.”
“I know we’re supposed to be helping,” Virrie confessed. “But I keep getting distracted. I love these little wooden bowls.”
Mally looked up from the window embrasure, where she was carefully arranging the multicolored stones Leah had bought from Barlow and Jaker. “I like these rocks,” she said.
“I thought you would,” Leah said. “You can sit there in the window and play with them as long as you like.”
“And when you’re done playing with them, we can store them on one of the shelves to get them out of the way,” Annova said practically.
While Leah had been bargaining with ship’s captains, Annova and Zoe had been furnishing the shop, setting up open shelving units on the two long sides of the store and interspersing them with closed cabinets, wooden chests, and tall tables. Now the trick was deciding which pieces of merchandise should initially be on display, which should be within easy reach downstairs, and which should be stored upstairs until replacements were needed. For the rest of the morning, Leah and Annova and Virrie spent their time determining what went where and then hauling boxes up the steps. Afterward, A
nnova and Virrie stayed upstairs, organizing the replacement goods by elemental affiliations, while Leah returned downstairs to begin arranging merchandise in the showroom.
Mally spent all of that time sitting quietly in the window alcove, sorting through fifty or sixty rocks of varying sizes. As the morning wore on, Leah couldn’t resist perching on the edge of the elevated floor and spending a few moments watching her.
She didn’t think it was accidental that Virrie had found a way to leave her alone with Mally. Leah had to swallow against her tight throat and put some effort into speaking in a casual voice.
“Show me what you’ve been doing,” she invited.
Mally looked up and gave her a grave smile. The window embrasure was perhaps five feet deep and raised about two feet off the floor. Three tall windows made a half-hexagonal shape around it and admitted satisfying amounts of unfiltered light. The sunshine through the glass also warmed up the space to a degree that was right on the edge of uncomfortable. Leah could see a few strands of dark hair sticking to Mally’s damp forehead. Otherwise, the girl didn’t seem to be aware of the temperature.
“First I put them in piles,” she explained. “The flat ones here and the tall ones here and the round ones over there. And then I started making a pattern.”
Leah looked more closely. What she had first taken as a random assortment of stones on the wooden floor was really an elaborate mosaic. Mally had carefully chosen slabs of stone and fitted them together—a jagged edge against a broken corner, a concave curve against a convex bow—so that they formed one more or less continuous surface. She hadn’t completed the pattern yet, but it looked like she was making a giant rectangle, flat edges to the outside to define the border.
“That’s—really stunning,” Leah said faintly. “Who taught you to do that?”
“I never did it before. I just thought it would be fun.”
“You’re almost done with your shape. It would have taken me a year to fit all the pieces together like this.”
Mally lifted her flecked eyes to Leah’s face. “Don’t you like rocks?”
“I do! I just never—I guess I just never sat down and played with them much.”
“Natalie says rocks are silly.”
“Natalie?” Leah repeated reflexively. In a moment, she remembered the name. Queen Romelle’s daughter, a year or two older than Odelia and Mally. Naturally, she had been living on Taro’s estates while Mally was growing up there.
“My sister,” Mally said. She picked up a flat stone, nearly square except for one missing corner, and considered where to place it. “Or—maybe not my sister.” She flicked Leah a look as if wondering how to explain.
“I don’t know much about your life,” Leah said softly. “Would you like to tell me about it? I know you live with Taro and Virrie.”
Mally nodded and found a place for the stone she’d been holding. She picked up another one and ran her fingers over its smooth edges.
“Taro and Virrie and Natalie and Mama, except I’m not supposed to call her Mama anymore,” Mally said. “And Odelia lives there, too, but sometimes I’m Odelia. But sometimes I’m not. Mama says—Romelle says—I’m not ever going to be Odelia anymore.”
“Did you like being Odelia?”
Mally shrugged and discarded her current stone in favor of another one. “Odelia had to be good and sit quietly and let people stare at her and never say it was rude,” Mally said.
“Did you ever get mixed up? Think you were Mally when you were supposed to be Odelia?”
Mally shook her head. “Not even when people tried to trick me.”
“Tried to— How would they do that?”
“They would ask me. ‘What’s your name? What’s your mama’s name?’”
“And you knew when to tell the truth and when to lie?”
Again, Mally gave her a brief look from those wary eyes. “I just always said I was Odelia. Even if Taro asked me. Even though he knew.”
Well, Leah supposed that was one way to make sure a young child didn’t give away a desperate secret. Tell her exactly what to say, no matter what the circumstances. “So if I walked up to you and said, ‘Hello, young lady, what’s your name?’ what would you tell me?”
“I’m—” Mally hesitated. “I’m not supposed to be Odelia anymore.”
“So maybe you can be Mally if anybody asks.”
“Maybe nobody will ask me.”
Leah’s heart squeezed down. What a sad predicament for a small girl! So well-versed in deception that she didn’t even know how to claim her own name. “It’s hard to pretend to be somebody else,” Leah said. “I know.”
Mally glanced at her. “Did you ever?”
Leah nodded. “I did! For five years! I lived in another country and I pretended to be a different person.”
“What was your name?”
“Nobody knew who I was, so most of the time I just used my own name. Not always. But I told people that I had run away from Welce and I didn’t have any money, when really I was there because Darien Serlast sent me to Malinqua to work for him.”
“Was it fun?”
“Sometimes.”
“Was it dangerous?”
“Sometimes.”
“Did you ever forget who you were supposed to be?”
Leah thought about that. “Sometimes,” she said at last. “Or—more truthfully—sometimes I forgot who I really was. I forgot all the people back in Welce who loved me. And it was a while before I realized I needed to remember them.”
Mally moved one rock that was already in place and replaced it with another that was more suited to the spot. “Are you glad to be back?”
“I think so.”
“And did anybody forget you while you were gone?”
Leah was so surprised by the question that she let out a little huff of air that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. “Oddly, it doesn’t seem like it,” she said. “I thought that they would have.”
“Are you going to go away again?”
“Oh no. I’m never leaving Welce.”
“I don’t think I am, either,” Mally said.
Leah smiled. “You’re just a little girl. You could grow up and want to have all sorts of adventures! Look at Princess Corene. She seems determined to explore the whole world. Maybe you will, too.”
“Maybe,” Mally said. “But I don’t think so.”
There was a clatter at the back of the shop and Annova and Virrie reappeared. “We’re hungry,” Virrie announced. “Shouldn’t we take a break and get something to eat?”
• • •
The next nineday passed in a virtually identical manner. Leah and Yori returned to the harbor to shop for new merchandise; Jaker and Barlow swung by to introduce one of their trader friends. Rhan insisted on another dinner, and Leah went, but at the end of it she told him flatly she didn’t want to see him again. “Not like this, anyway. I can stand it if we see each other at big dinners when other people are around. But it’s too unsettling to sit here and talk to you like we’re old friends.”
“We are old friends.”
“We’re old lovers, and I’m not good at those transitions.”
She wasn’t sure, even so, that he would stay away. Rhan had never been very good about observing other people’s rules.
She wrote Chandran every night, but she didn’t mail any of the letters. She wanted to wait and see how he responded to the one she’d sent through Darien, the one that had included the list of items she’d like to buy and the heavy bags of money. It might turn out they only had a business relationship, which would certainly be sensible. But in that case she wouldn’t want to share all the thoughts she’d put down on paper over the last nine days.
I’ve met my daughter. I’ve talked with her father. I am facing my ghosts and demons, my abandoned dreams and my bitter ho
pes. So far I have survived each encounter, but each one has made me dizzy in its own way. I can’t tell if I’m starting to recover my balance or if I’m getting used to the constant spinning. At any rate, I’m not unhappy. Lonely sometimes, despite being surrounded by people on most days. But not unhappy.
They were not the sorts of letters you sent to a man who cared only about how many quint-golds you would pay him for his Coziquela gemstones. Leah folded each piece of paper and stuck it in a drawer. She would see how he responded to that earlier letter, and then she would decide how much to show him of her heart.
During the hours when she wasn’t compiling her inventory or communicating with the men in her life, she concentrated on putting her shop in order. And getting to know Mally.
Virrie brought the little girl to the store every day for a couple of hours and usually found some way to leave Leah alone with her at least briefly. Leah had invited Mally to help her set up the torz section of the shop, a task Mally took as seriously as she seemed to take everything else. Torz was the earth sign, often symbolized by blossoms and vines and crops, and Mally spent a solid hour arranging a tray of cut-glass roses.
“The first time somebody buys one of those, all your work will be wasted,” Leah told her with a smile. “And we want people to buy things.”
“I know. I’ll arrange them again.”
Leah had bought a small flowering fruit tree at the Plaza of Men and potted it in a dark green planter, but Mally wouldn’t let her put it near the torz items. “That’s hunti,” she said.
“But it’s so little!”
“It’s still a tree,” Mally said firmly. “Put it over there.”
“Relegated to the inferior corner of wood and bone!” exclaimed Zoe, who had dropped by to check on Leah’s progress. “Darien will be downhearted when he learns how low his status is.”
“Hunti isn’t bad,” Mally told her. “It’s just not torz.”
“Well, that will be a relief to Darien,” Virrie said.
“Does he like trees?” Mally asked.
“He does,” Zoe said. “And anything made of wood.”