The Poet King

by Ilana C. Myer

  Naked again, but clean, Nameir crawled onto her pallet. Only then did she realize that she was trembling. Which was strange. She’d thought she was feeling calm enough.

  It took her a long time to fall asleep.

  * * *

  IN the morning she headed straight to the king’s tent. She found him sitting at his desk in nearly the same position she had left him the night before. He was writing. She looked to the cups beside him. The wine goblet was barely touched. Only the herb infusion in its blue porcelain cup had been drained.

  “My king,” she said. “Did you sleep at all?”

  He looked up from his papers. She read the answer in his face, drawn and shadow-eyed. He said, “I had to think.”

  There was a mood in the tent this morning she could not identify. “Think about what? We won.”

  Eldakar grimaced, then tried to turn it into a smile. “Yes,” he said. “Are you here to escort me? Let’s go.” Before they left, he donned a cloak. He took up his sword from its resting place against the wall. It had lain there ever since the wound to his shoulder. Keeping company beside his lute, which was also untouched. He glanced at the instrument as he fastened the sword to his waist. He said, “I wonder, Nameir. Who could sing?”

  And she was worried all over again, without knowing why.

  They met Mansur in an open field. Their men-at-arms had gathered, but left a cleared space for their prince. Beside Mansur stood the three sons of Muiwiyah, chained at the wrists and ankles.

  The atmosphere was boisterous; the men were aware at this time that the battalions on the east border had won the day. Their relief was palpable. Nameir wasn’t sure if the men knew how close they had been to losing. She thought not.

  When Eldakar and Nameir broke through the crowd to where the three prisoners stood, the men looked up. They were handsome, all; broad, tall, with the rugged features of their father. It was as if Muiwiyah Akaber stood there in the flesh, three times repeated. With a difference: the father was hardened by age and a life of tyranny. His sons had hardly begun.

  “Eldakar!” The one who called out thus looked to be the youngest. “You know me. You remember.”

  Eldakar stood at the edge of the clearing. He said, “I remember well. Your family’s visits to the Zahra. Clambering in the gardens while our fathers were in council. I recall now, too, how you always wanted to play at war.” He winced, hastily added, “I don’t judge you for that, Miralfin. I know your father let you think of nothing else.”

  The other man replied, quick and urgent, “I made a mistake. I should never have joined against you. Tell me how to repent.”

  One of the other sons spoke up. “Of course you seek to curry favor with Eldakar. Always a coward, as Father said.”

  “And he said you were a fool,” said Miralfin.

  At last the third son spoke. “You are both fools,” he said. “Only one of us has a chance of surviving this. Don’t you see? One to rule in the East Province.” He fixed his gaze, attractive and sullen, on Eldakar. “Our father was wrong to rebel against you. I was wrong not to break away from him and join with you. I beg your forgiveness, Eldakar Evrayad. If you grant my life, all East Province shall serve you and what’s more, shall send tribute. Our father’s wealth was vast.”

  For a moment was a silence. There were stirrings among the men who watched, but these were muted by the sigh of a wind that flowed steadily across the hill.

  Eldakar said, “I have no grudge against any of you. But I won’t prolong this. It would be cruel. And I don’t see another way.”

  The prisoners understood him before Nameir did, from the way their eyes widened.

  So did Mansur. “Brother,” he said uneasily, “perhaps—”

  “I am your king,” Eldakar reminded him. “You had time to offer me your thoughts last night. I have thought this through.”

  “I see no headsman,” said Miralfin, panicking. He knelt down in the dirt in his chains. “You don’t mean this. You wouldn’t be so cruel.”

  Eldakar’s sorrow reached Nameir where she stood. “I am the headsman,” he said.

  * * *

  THE bodies of the three sons of Muiwiyah were to be sent home. Along with them went a message from Eldakar Evrayad—a command to the East Province to pay homage to their king.

  Eldakar had insisted on performing the executions himself. The men had grovelled in the dirt, screaming for mercy. Nameir had had to hold each still when his time came. The worst had been the execution of the last brother, the oldest; Eldakar had begun with the youngest who had been his friend. At that point, with the two bodies swimming in blood around his knees, the scene had taken on a quality of the worst moments Nameir Hazan had experienced in battle. His horror came through in every scream. And through it all was Eldakar, expressionless, sword dripping blood.

  When it was done, the crowd had gone completely silent. There was a play of small, fleet shadows in the grass. Carrion birds circling beneath the sun.

  “The ravens shall not have them,” said Eldakar calmly. He spoke from a face that was stained with blood down one side, where the artery of his former friend had sprayed. “They shall be buried with honor among their people.” He looked to Mansur. “See it done.”

  He began to make his way out. The crowd parted, still silent, to let him pass.

  Nameir followed. Her shirt was spattered red. They’d been butchers today, not warriors. A thought she saw mirrored in Mansur’s eyes before she turned away.

  Eldakar walked with what she thought was unnatural uprightness as they made their way to his tent. The activity of the day had almost certainly taxed his wound. But he walked without signs of distress until they were in his tent. Then he allowed his shoulders to slump and reached for her arm. “If you wouldn’t mind, dear,” he said. “I am not sure I can stand on my own much longer. Will you help me?”

  “Always,” she said. She helped him undress. There was water at the washstand already. Though she thought it might take several washings, certainly several changes of water, for him to be completely cleansed of blood.

  “You understand it, Nameir?” he said. She held on to him as he slowly dipped the rag in water and applied it. He wasn’t looking at her. “I won’t ask if I was right,” he said. “No one else should have this stain on them. And the idea of rightness … that seems impossible.” He looked at his hands, gloved in fast-congealing red.

  “I can’t presume to know,” she said.

  He spoke in the same hollow tone, turned away from her, as he scrubbed his hands. “The tale of the weak king Eldakar … it has harmed more than myself. It can’t go on. Not if the land is to unite and survive. This victory will be temporary if the narrative of a weak king is kept aloft, like a banner summoning the provinces to war among themselves. So it seems to me. I thought about it all through the night. I wanted to be wrong. Yet I couldn’t see another way.”

  His hands were clean now, or near enough. He let her help him into a robe. Then she helped him to lie on his pallet, and set more herbs to steep for his infusion. “You should sleep,” she said. Then felt it was not enough, and took his hand. “Eldakar,” she said. “I am honored to call you my king.”

  He squeezed her hand. “You have always been kind to me.”

  * * *

  WHEN she left his tent she allowed her legs to carry her where they would. It was hard to think clearly. Until she came to a tent—not her own—and pushed her way in.

  The tent of Aleira Suzehn was unchanged. There was a scent of spices from the brazier. There was the flickering light. The Magician sat in a chair, oddly still. She said, “I was expecting you, Nameir. Or perhaps it would be correct to say—Melila. That was your name. I found it in the stars. Melila Hazan, torn from home, her language gone. Remade into a weapon so she might live.” In that moment Aleira looked all of her age, and sad. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s a tale I know.”

  Nameir found herself unable to speak.

  “I wish I could have sav
ed you,” said Aleira. “For so long, I thought only of saving myself. I’m sorry.”

  Nameir knelt beside Aleira’s chair. Up close, the Magician smelled of hearthfires and another, familiar scent. Not alluring, or exotic. Something that drew her to another time. A kitchen, a bright home, a place that was safe. Something that made it all right to rest her head in this woman’s lap, just now, and stay like that awhile.

  CHAPTER

  18

  THE dreams were gone. It had only been two nights but Julien knew. Two nights submerged in ordinary dreaming. The usual pitiful swamp of yearnings and fears.

  Loathing was a metallic taste in her mouth when she awoke. Little comfort in the place she woke to: a frigid room, a hard bed, not a hint of daylight peering through the shutter slats.

  She dressed, made her way down the sagging staircase—boards weak from seawater as well as age—passed the brooding hiss of embers in the fireplace of the common room, and left the inn. The day was grey and the wind hit her in a smooth blast. She huddled in her cloak and kept on. Black rock lined the coastline, and beside it a strip of amber sand. A path like an invitation, wherever it happened to lead. Especially if it led nowhere.

  She didn’t think that loathing—of herself, more than anything—could be shed through walking; but perhaps forgotten for a time.

  They had arrived the day before. It would be too much to call it a hamlet—it was a cluster of fishing cottages, no more. But there was a small inn, or what passed for one, perched windswept on the brink of the coast.

  Their destination had been more or less decided for them. The morning they’d summoned the ferryman to retrieve them from Labyrinth Isle.

  “Are there other islands we might visit?” she had asked the ferryman. Though in her heart, already knew what he would say.

  “They are barred to you.” He did not even look her way.

  He didn’t need to tell her that it was the mark of the Seer that had allowed her to go as near the boundary as she had. And that was gone.

  Dorn tried to make light of it. “Might be just as well,” he said. “We’re running out of things to give away.”

  “Take us to the mainland,” she had told the ferryman, steadily as she could. “Someplace where we might get our bearings.”

  So he had brought them here, to this place with its creaky inn and cottages. In the boat she and Dorn Arrin had made a plan: they would say they were brother and sister on the road. They had not yet discussed where they would go from there. To his home? Hers? Neither seemed safe just now. Not if this White Queen was looking for Dorn.

  I won’t let anything happen to you, she’d said the day she saved him and Owayn from the wolves. And just a handful of days since she’d become, at best, a hindrance. She had one thing of value, that might or might not be useful. A name that could only be uttered once.

  A bad bargain, her thoughts sneered, and she didn’t know. She didn’t at all. Perhaps someone with more wit than she would have made another choice. She had blundered into becoming a Seer, for no reason that did her credit; she had, perhaps, deserved to lose it after all.

  She was striding along the path by the coastline. Sunless, the water was the color of iron. It flung against the rocks, cast streamers of foam all along the cracks and crannies in their sides. A rush of sound—water and winds combined. Along the shoreline as she passed, a bird unfurled its wide black wings to dance. A cormorant.

  She kept on. The sand was tight-packed and wet. Bleached carapaces of sea creatures protruded, polished by tides. Hidden treasures. She thought of kneeling to dig one up. A token—some tangible thing to take from this part of her life.

  She remembered being very young—four? five?—gathering seashells on a warmer shore down south. Such simple joy. No ambition, no awareness of her smallness in the wider world. No awareness of herself at all, in truth. Just happiness, simple and all-encompassing, in the act of unearthing the shore’s gifts with her hands.

  The sun had begun to rise. Here in the west what showed was a band of brighter grey above the water.

  As the light grew, she saw that ahead, among the rocks, there was movement. A figure grey as the day. She kept advancing. Saw that the figure was a man. He was coming towards her.

  She didn’t have time to feel afraid. He let down his cowl, no doubt so she’d know him. So she would see that it was Archmaster Hendin.

  He lifted his voice to be heard above the surf. “There you are.” Before she knew what was happening he’d engulfed her in a hug, damp with sea spray and scratchy with his beard. Then, “Dorn. Is he—”

  “He’s with me,” she said, coming out of her shock.

  He uttered a fervent prayer skyward, to Kiara and the gods.

  “How did you find us?” Julien asked. She had a moment of doubt. How could this be him? But it was; she knew that kind face. The only Archmaster who’d been kind.

  He pointed to his eye. “The Court Poet sent me a message. She had a sense that you’d left the Isle and it worried her. I was able to trace you, mark to mark, until the coast. Then it went dark.” His face creased. “I feared the worst.”

  “We’re alive,” she said. “But there is much to tell.”

  He studied her. “You were a child when last I saw you,” he said. “I’d have had you remain one still.”

  “It didn’t protect me,” she said. Not knowing where the words came from. “Being a child. It’s better this way.”

  * * *

  THEY huddled together in a corner of the common room, as near the fire as they could. The room was empty. Their morning meal had been gruel, thick and tasteless, the bowls long since pushed aside.

  Julien thought that despite everything, Archmaster Hendin looked happy. He had seemed to catch alight when he saw Dorn, though did not embrace him as he had Julien. Instead he’d hung back, awkward, as if ashamed. It was only when the younger man reached out that the elder stepped forward to an embrace, and then, Julien saw, with effort held back his tears.

  “I will never stop blaming myself,” said Hendin at last, when they faced each other again.

  Dorn shook his head. Was even smiling. “I’ve seen things that I’d only thought to hear about in songs,” he said. “Things I would never have once believed. I wouldn’t trade that away. And I wasn’t harmed, thanks to Julien.”

  “Yes,” said Hendin, turning his glistening eyes to her then. “I am in your debt, young woman, though I can’t think how to repay it.”

  “Let’s not speak of debts,” said Julien. “There’s too much else to discuss.”

  Dorn Arrin cast her a look of concern at this. She knew she ought to be grateful that someone cared enough to have concern. Instead she felt more bitter yet, that he would never see her the way she wanted. It was a morning for feeling raw, it seemed.

  As they ate they exchanged their tales. The innkeeper ignored them, with a disinterest that seemed genuine rather than studied; he truly didn’t care. A sallow, reedy man who smelled of tabak, he made himself scarce. Archmaster Hendin had been staying in this inn for some days, watching for them, trying to figure out what to do next if they did not come.

  More had passed since they’d left Academy Isle than just two days, if the Court Poet had sent word of it a week before. It seemed that time moved differently on the western sea. Just as it had folded in on itself, collapsed, in their first journey home.

  Still it came as a shock to the Archmaster, she saw, to hear that Elissan Diar was dead. The death of the king, what that could mean. Nor what had happened since. The Court Poet, who had communicated to Archmaster Hendin when she feared for the two of them, had not done so again.

  It took hours to tell the Archmaster everything. At last, Julien Imara told of the bargain she’d made within the maze.

  “Tell me this,” she said, looking up to meet his eyes. “What is the meaning of the pearl ring?”

  He appeared to hesitate. Only a moment. “The moon that comes out from a cloud, a shine that never fades,” he sa
id, quoting from the lore of gemstones that every poet learned by heart. “The pearl represents the emergence of art, usefulness, kindness from pain. It is meant to say something about the Seer you were. And the one you may be again, years from now. Don’t forget that possibility.”

  “Someday,” she said. “Maybe.” In many years, if she studied enough, and was invited. And even then, the harp fashioned for her in the Otherworld was gone.

  The part of the tale that affected him most, though, was that Dorn was in danger. It was Dorn’s turn when it came time to narrate this: he told of the dreams he had of being swallowed in some darkness—dreams that evoked his experience of Manaia.

  “He belongs to her,” said Julien. “That’s what I was told. But who is she?”

  “I think you know,” said Archmaster Hendin. “After all you’ve heard and seen.”

  “The White Queen.”

  “Elissan Diar let her through the portal to this world,” he said. “And now you have her name.”

  “But it will only weaken her for a time,” said Julien. “I don’t see how that’s much use.”

  “It means we need a strategy. But I will think on this more. Meantime, based on your tale, Dorn is being hunted. And so we three will be, until we find a way to safety.”

  “But where is that?” she asked.

  He fell silent.

  “Let the White Queen have me,” said Dorn. “I won’t see anyone harmed for my sake.” He was making an effort to sound brave.

  “There is to be no talk of that sort,” Archmaster Hendin said sternly, for the first time sounding like the one in authority. “Don’t forget, you two—I am a Seer, and the enchantments are back. That has for the most part brought nothing but trouble, but there are some uses. I’ve discovered ways to keep us hidden on our journey.”