The Poet King

by Ilana C. Myer

  * * *

  LATER that night he said to her, “I heard other things on the road. This Queen is on her way east, though none know why.”

  She lay curved into him. “If you go after her, I’m coming with you.”

  “You want to put the fear of the gods into me again,” he said. “Is that it?”

  “I’ll do other things to you first,” she promised, and changed position on the bed. When she cupped Ned’s head in her hands he said, “I’ve learned something from all this.”

  “What?”

  “To shave more often.”

  Later still, they held each other and drifted into sleep. Rianna dreamed of a road, of horses and a long ride. As if her mind traveled where soon the rest of her would, through the roads that led to the mountains, by whatever route was unhindered by the snows, and farther yet. She had looked at maps, had an idea of the course they would take. Through desert, then through fields, across the River Gadlan to Majdara.

  * * *

  RIANNA insisted on meeting with Queen Myrine the day they arrived. Ned looked green at the suggestion but that only strengthened her resolve. She knew she was a sight, haggard after days of hard riding. They’d changed horses several times, drawing upon her father’s connections at various inns. Nights they collapsed, so tired they hurt. By the time they reached Majdara, Rianna felt as if her bones had been taken apart and reassembled by a mad toymaker.

  She did not intend to let that get in the way of confronting the woman who had lured away her husband.

  She ended up having to wait. Suave servants led her to rooms where she might bathe and dress in a velvet robe of crimson. Not a color she would choose, but the velvet felt ravishing on her skin. Her wet hair she braided and wound around her head. She kept her knife under the robe, though she knew it was next to useless here.

  The familiar resentment had flared in her when they first arrived at the gate to the palace and Ned had said something hurriedly in Kahishian to the guards. Sounding at ease with them, and they well-acquainted with him.

  She thought she understood what his reasons had been for staying. Before he’d become a hero of Majdara there’d been a price on his head. In tricking him into helping her escape to the city, Myrine had laid the trap to keep him there. He’d had little choice but to do what he’d done—organize and command her force of thieves in the city’s defense. A clever trap. Rianna mulled it—that particular stratagem of the queen’s—as she strapped the knife beneath her skirts. Clever, clever.

  When at last Rianna was ushered into the queen’s presence, she was pleased that her request had been granted: They were alone.

  Myrine sat in a throne. She wore a purple gown embroidered with gold peacocks. But what Rianna saw right away were the flawless features, the sleek coil of black hair.

  Rianna came to stand before the queen. Her lip curled. “I don’t know what I expected,” she said. “Perhaps that you’d be taller.”

  The queen sat looking at her with impassive dark blue eyes. Then said, “Now why would I need to be tall to achieve what I have? You know the world, Rianna Alterra. We have other weapons at our disposal, you and I.”

  “We?”

  The queen didn’t answer. She was staring at Rianna. Looking her over in a way that, from Rianna’s point of view, could be considered rude. And then the blankness of her expression fell away, like a curtain drawn from a light: she was smiling. “I see now why Ned was immune to my advances.”

  Rianna swallowed. Then raised her chin. “I didn’t know whether to believe him.”

  The queen’s gaze was steady. “You know he doesn’t lie.”

  Rianna sank into a chair. She wouldn’t cry, but felt the same release she felt, sometimes, with tears. “So that’s settled.”

  Myrine inclined her head. “I am glad,” she said. “You and your husband are most welcome, though I’m afraid we’ll soon be preoccupied with a siege. I don’t suppose … once you’ve eaten and rested … that I could interest you in a game of chess?”

  * * *

  AFTERNOON turned to evening as the three of them talked. A loaf of bread with poppy seeds and date paste had been reduced to sticky crumbs on the plate. At some point Eldakar had left the room. He had taken Syme with him, promising him pastries of candied almonds and burnt sugar, confections of violet cream and rosewater set in neat little puffs. The Fool was lured away. Eldakar indicated he would soon return. But as the shadows lengthened, light altering from white to gold to dusk rose, it remained the three of them.

  Ned lounged on the couch, legs stretched in front of him. Rianna sprawled on the carpet with her head against Lin’s skirts. Lin stroked her hair, the endless soft gold of it. Seeing them together, after everything, lifted Lin’s heart like nothing else in many months. Last time she’d seen Rianna, she’d felt she couldn’t reach her. Now she felt as if a sister had been returned to her from that long journey; that the frozen Rianna of Tamryllin had entered through an enchanted portal, and emerged from it the woman she knew.

  And Ned. She had forgiven him long ago.

  “How did you know I’d come here?” Lin asked.

  Rianna looked up at her. She had been drinking khave flavored with cinnamon; it made her eyes bright. “We couldn’t be sure,” she said. “It stood to reason you’d put yourself where the danger was. It’s what you’ve always done.”

  “You can’t help me.”

  “Nonsense. A good sword arm or two will be of help.”

  Lin’s throat tightened. “It’s dangerous. You saw what this Queen could do, and her opponent is likely much the same.”

  “We’re all in danger if this goes the wrong way,” said Ned. “Let us do something about it.”

  A dream and a nightmare, both, to have them back like this. She had seen battle not long ago. She didn’t want either of them in the hellscape she recalled. Especially not when the enemy could kill the way Elissan Diar had been killed.

  Lin searched for something to say. It was not her place to make decisions for them. Either of them. She was no longer in a position to give commands, to render prohibitions. Being Court Poet didn’t mean much in these times. It meant nothing. The palace back in Tamryllin lay empty. Lin’s service there was done.

  Whatever she decided to do now, she did for herself. She couldn’t attribute it to the weight of the Crown, not this time.

  The outlines of the two of them, her beloveds, were blurred in the dark of evening. And then light, from the open door—Eldakar stood there. “You are all invited to dinner,” he said, smiling

  On their way to the dining hall, Ned Alterra pulled Lin into an alcove. “We haven’t talked,” he said. “I told you I was sorry by letter. That is not enough. I don’t know how to make amends for what I did.”

  “There is no need,” she said. “For apologies, amends. If you are going to battle to fall on your sword for me, please don’t. Your happiness is what I want more than anything.”

  “I don’t deserve that,” he said. “But no, I won’t put myself needlessly in harm’s way. It would be irresponsible.”

  She laughed. “You are the same, after everything,” she said. “Irresponsible. Oh, Ned.”

  He looked sheepish. “It’s just … I was such a fool.”

  “I don’t know how many would have done differently,” she said. “Her power is lost on me, but I think I understand it.”

  “She is teaching Rianna to play chess,” he said with a wince, and now Lin could not help giggling helplessly like a girl as they made their way down the hall towards dinner.

  * * *

  THE evening passed in a whirl of food, drink, and laughter. Just the five of them, banqueting in a fire-warmed chamber.

  Rianna and the queen had, against all reason, taken to one another; they leaned together talking. Lin kept company with the men; the three shared tales of the campaign. These were mostly jokes. There was little to say about the battles; none of them gloried in acts of war. Ned went into a story of brokering peace bet
ween two factions of the Brotherhood of Thieves that had emerged despite Myrine’s best efforts. It was clear she would have simply hanged the perpetrators if Ned had not intervened.

  “You’ll never guess what did it, in the end,” said Ned. His long, awkward body loosened, made graceful by wine. His hesitant manner turned urbane. “We discovered that one of the leaders, a fellow calling himself the Brotherhood Fiend—no, really—was worried about marriage prospects for his daughter. You should have seen him—forearms the size of another man’s waist, tattooed skulls all over him. Very like the men I encountered at sea. But when talk of his daughter came up, he was like any concerned father. She is shy, apparently. And so we cut a deal. A husband for the daughter from the other side, if both sides worked together.”

  “I suppose even the most skilled thief can’t steal a husband,” said Lin.

  A shouted laugh from across the table. The women had overheard. “This one did her best,” said Rianna, inclining her head towards Myrine. The queen looked amused, dignified, while Ned turned bright red.

  After the dessert courses had been savored, along with pots of tea, Lin excused herself. As she was leaving, glanced behind her. The couples had found each other: the king and queen leaning together, Ned and Rianna. The four involved in animated talk. She heard their voices as if through water, sounds that echoed. Amid the lamps and candles that surrounded the table, the four of them glowed. They were drenched in light. She watched for what seemed a long time, but was likely only a moment.

  Then turned, and when she saw Syme, felt a sense of being pulled along in a current. It was that feeling of having dreamed all this once, of knowing before she began what was to happen. It was all arranged.

  “You’re ready,” she said. It was not a question.

  The Fool’s eyes in the candlelight were like pools of ink. In his lime green jacket, was absurd and dapper as he bowed. “My lady,” he said. “Time to go.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  THE dark outside the city walls was a live thing. It was tangled with hedges of stinging nettles, with thistles that snagged in her sleeves. Other invisible growing things, roots and tendrils, reached out to trip her. With one hand she held a lantern; with the other, reached to feel her way. Syme a silent shape, a half-shadow, at her side.

  What had been a manicured path up the mountainside was overgrown. She imagined there were already vines breaking up the stairway paving stones, though she couldn’t see them in the dark. She only knew she had to watch her footing, had once or twice nearly pitched from the steep incline. An unceremonious and pathetic end that would be. So she made her way with care, keeping an eye on the circle of light cast by the lantern. The moon and stars were obscured tonight.

  As they strove through the reaching growth of the path she thought of where they were headed. His words to her at New Year’s Eve.

  The myth of Asterian takes many shapes.

  How he knew that was anyone’s guess. The Syme Oleir who attended the Academy—a stolid, rotund boy, well-liked by other students—was unlikely to have known the sinuous transmutations of a myth. He’d have known, like everyone, the one recorded in writing. In popular songs.

  Now he claimed to know versions in which the poet Asterian did not fail. In which he reclaimed his love, Stylleia, from the dead.

  To begin the tale: The lovers were on a riverbank, and Asterian sang to her. And then, catastrophe: she stepped on a viper in the grass. Her limbs would have seized, skin turned blue. Dead in an instant as the heartwrung poet held her by the waist and screamed his lament.

  Stylleia would have seen the world slip away like the shore from view of a boat going out to sea. Finding herself in eddies of nothing. Until she reached the farther shore and disembarked. The start to her journey, the one each soul by one turn or another must take.

  There would be more to the journey on the farther shore, Lin thought as she tramped the black and broken path on the mountainside. Still no moon to be seen. The dark of hedges that loomed each side of the path was ragged and rife with thorns to block her way. She recalled when these were flowers that had drifted in a breeze to fill the air with scent. Roses, lilacs, falls of wisteria.

  That shore had vanished utterly.

  At the first landing she began to see traces of the ruin. The sphere of lanternlight fell on leaning piles and scatterings of rubble. Cornerstones exposed like a giant’s broken teeth.

  Lin raised her lantern. She felt a tug of helplessness. How to search through all this? Each level of the palace was huge, and there were three in all.

  “You know this,” said Syme. “Remember why we’re here.”

  Zahir.

  She recalled a boy with Zahir’s eyes, rooting in the wreckage of a city. Grief turning to desperation as he realized this was no ordinary wreckage. That while death was bad enough, there were things worse. In his eyes she’d seen the beginning to the plot that would shape all he did thereafter. Not knowing then, as a boy, the doors he’d walk through on the way. Doors that once opened could not be closed again.

  “So, the Tower,” she murmured.

  Her light caught a flash in the corner of her eye: Syme’s teeth. He had smiled.

  She went on climbing.

  The destruction of the Zahra was the first piece. The first paving stone on the path Zahir Alcavar had sought all his life. As long as the palace stood, the souls of Vesperia were trapped. So he’d turned all his ingenuity to creating this, the rubble she picked through now.

  But that destruction was only a start—the first step. Zahir had imagined them—himself and her—harrowing the Underworld together. The two of them, harnessing the powers of the Ifreet to enter that realm. He had not planned on being dead. Unless she was right that in some corner of his soul he had not meant to live. Aware there was too much death on his hands.

  One might have desires that are opposed, blades crossed in the heart.

  Hope for the souls of Vesperia had not died with Zahir Alcavar. Not when Lin Amaristoth had in her possession the Ifreet, and what Syme had called the keys to death.

  There were many versions of the myth of Asterian. What was one more?

  “We’re close,” said Syme. “There.” He pointed. Before them was an arch that stood, unsupported, in the midst of rubble. In the lantern light the stones shone. Marble, she thought. An arch of marble that had been in the Tower of Glass. Around them the stillness of the night, punctuated with cricket calls and the occasional cry of the jackal.

  Lin stood there, thinking. She had an idea. “Hold this.” She handed the lantern to Syme.

  He took it. Then aimed it a blow to her face.

  “What…” Lin ducked. The lantern fell to the ground. Its light winked out.

  But even in the dark she could see him. She knew his outline better than she did her own.

  It wasn’t Syme standing there anymore, but Rayen, loose-limbed and smiling. “Hail, my dear.” The voice was his as well.

  She drew a breath. She knew what this was. Even as she watched, saw the green glow that outlined him as he advanced to her. He looked the same as he had the day he’d tied her to the ground.

  “Come no closer,” she said, drawing blade.

  “You’ll kill me?” His hair flung back. “Oh, I hope so.”

  “I know.” She felt cold all over. Syme’s voice, New Year’s Eve: He’d rather die than help you. That is how much he hates.

  When Rayen came at her with his blade, she parried and dodged and tried not to attack. Until his blade whistled past her ear and she met the blow with a vicious slash of her own. It missed him narrowly.

  He was laughing. “Your hatred is useful,” he said. “But I think there is someone—one person in the world—you hate even more.”

  He changed again before her eyes. Shrank, narrowed. Became a slight woman. Large, dark eyes. A plaintive voice. “Won’t you kill me?”

  Lin gritted her teeth, backed away. She’d never heard that voice, high-pitched and grating i
n her ears. Yet knew it for her own.

  “You can’t think this will work,” she said. “I know you want me to kill you. These are child’s games.”

  The other Lin, green-wreathed, drew her sword. Lunged forward. Lin, the true one, dodged the blow.

  The other Lin said, in that grating, destestable voice, “Darien died for you. So did Valanir Ocune. So did Zahir Alcavar.” They stood inches apart. The other Lin hissed, “Look at me. For this did such men give their lives?”

  Lin sprang back. “I agree.” Her lungs were bursting from the long climb up the stairs. “And if I were to die now, it would be even worse. After what they gave.”

  The other Lin looked genuinely outraged, her plain face twisting. “That great men gave their lives for this.” She gestured downward. “An obscenity.”

  “I know you mean it,” said Lin. “I know even though you are mirroring my thoughts, you mean them. But you will have to work harder than that to make me throw away this chance to do right. One thing, at the end.”

  There was no use speaking to the creature, she knew. She did it to stall. She couldn’t kill it, nor did she know what else to do.

  The other Lin flashed a smug, ugly grin. “I have many tricks.” Then looked astonished, eyes widening. “No.” Its cry was not in Lin’s voice. It was a multitude, emerging from the perfect circle her mouth had become. A cataclysm of voices, a murder, a swarm. Its eyes were orbs of green.

  When the light died the shrunken figure slumped to the ground. It lay curled there.

  “Syme,” she said, running to him.

  He sat up with a groan. “I turned it back,” he said. “For now. That is all I could do. And it fights me.”

  “You’d do this to help me,” she said. “Syme.” She found she could not speak. Then met his ingenuous gaze, and knew she could not be silent. “When I use the Ifreet for … for this next thing … I don’t know what will become of you. If you’ll survive.”

  At last, she’d said it. She could not bring herself to lie to him. Not even by omission.