by S L Farrell
She laughed up at him. “I’m pregnant, my love, not made of glass. I won’t break.” She took his hand, and Nico allowed her to lead him over to the bed.
There, for a time, he lost himself in earthly passion and heat.
Brie ca’Ostheim
Brie raised her eyebrow toward Rance ci’Lawli, her husband’s aide and thus the person responsible for the smooth running of Brezno Palais. “She’s the one, then?” she asked, pointing with her chin to the other room-a drawing rooms in the lower, public levels of Brezno Palais. Several of the court ladies were there, but one was seated on the floor with Elissa, Brie’s oldest child, the two of them working on an embroidery piece.
Rance nodded. He towered over Brie as he towered over most people: Rance was long and thin, as if Cenzi had taken a normal person and stretched him out. He was also extraordinarily ugly, with pocked skin, sunken eyes, and the pallor of boiled rags. His teeth seemed too big for his mouth. Yet he possessed a keen mind, seemed to remember everything and everybody, and Brie would have trusted him with her life as she trusted him now. “That’s Mavel cu’Kella,” he whispered. It sounded like the grumbling of a distant storm.
“I suspected as much; I noticed Jan paying a lot of attention to her at the ball last month. And you’re certain of her… condition?”
A nod. “Yes, Hirzgin. I have my sources, and I trust them. There’s already some whispers among the staff, and when she starts obviously showing… Well, we can’t have that.”
“Does Jan know?”
Rance shook his elongated head. “No, Hirzgin. I came to you first. After all…”
“Yes,” Brie sighed. “It’s not the first time.” She stared at Mavel through the sheer fabric of the curtain between the rooms. The woman was younger than Brie by a good ten years, dark-haired as most of Jan’s mistresses tended to be, and Brie envied the trim shape of her, though she imagined that she could see the slight swell of her belly under the sash of her tashta. After four children, Brie struggled to keep her own figure. Her breasts sagged from years of feeding hungry infants, her hips were wide and her stomach was crisscrossed with stretch marks. She was still holding much of the weight she’d gained with Eria, her youngest from almost three years ago. Mavel had the litheness that Brie had once possessed herself.
She wouldn’t keep that long. Not now.
“The cu’Kella family has some land holdings in Miscoli. She could stay with her relatives there during her confinement,” Rance said. “I’ve had dealings with her vatarh; he was supposed to be on the list to be named chevaritt, but now…” He shook his head. “That will have to wait. We’ll see if one of the minor Miscoli families might have a younger son they need to marry off, who would be willing to call the child his own. I’ll make the usual offer for the girl’s silence, and draw up the contracts for her vatarh to sign.”
Brie nodded. “Thank you, Rance. As always.”
He gave her an awkward half-bow. “It’s my pleasure to serve you, Hirzgin. Send Vajica cu’Kella to my office, and I’ll talk with her. She’ll be gone by this evening. I’ll give the staff some convenient reason for her absence to counter the gossip.” He bowed again and left her. Brie took a breath before the curtain then entered the drawing room. The women there rose as one, curtsying to her as she approached, while Elissa grinned widely and ran to her. Mavel rose slowly, and Brie thought she saw a hesitation in her curtsy, and a cautious jealousy in her eyes. The young woman’s hand stayed on her stomach.
Brie crouched down to hug Elissa and gather her up in her arms, kissing her. “Are you enjoying yourself, my darling?” she asked Elissa, brushing back the stray strands of gold-brown hair that had escaped her braids.
“Oh, yes, Matarh,” Ellisa said. “Mavel and I have been embroidering a scene from Stag Fall. Would you like to see?”
“Certainly.” Brie kissed Elissa’s forehead and put her down on the floor. She glanced at Mavel, who dropped her gaze to the rug, with its black-and-silver patterns. “But I was just talking to Rance, and he has asked that Vajica cu’Kella come to his office. Some family news.” That brought the girl’s head up again, and now her eyes were large and apprehensive. “I’m sure you’ll excuse her,” Brie said to Elissa.
There was a moment of silence. Brie could see the other ladies of the court glancing at each other. Then Mavel curtsied again, hurriedly. “Thank you, Hirzgin,” she said. “I’ll go immediately.” She gathered up her sewing, and left the room, brushing past Brie with the scent of almonds and flowers.
“Well, then,” Brie said to Elissa. “Let’s see that embroidery.. .” She smiled as she let Elissa take her hand, and the other women of the court smiled in return. Brie wondered, behind the smiles and idle talk, what they were really thinking.
But that, of course, she would never know.
Allesandra ca’Vorl
Allesandra attended the Third Call Service at the Old Temple, as was her usual pattern while in the city. The Admonition, delivered by A’Teni ca’Paim herself, was pleasingly stern, though Allesandra noticed that several of the teni attendants seemed to frown at her rhetoric against “those who would follow the teachings not of the Archigos of the Faith, but of self-styled disciples of Cenzi,” an obvious reference to Nico Morel and his followers.
She also found herself pleased to see Erik ca’Vikej at the service, seated several rows behind the royal pew reserved for the Kralji. Despite knowing that Sergei would be upset, and that A’Teni ca’Paim would undoubtedly include the incident in her weekly report to Archigos Karrol in Brezno, she had one of her attendants go back and invite ca’Vikej forward to sit in the pew with her. He bowed to her as he took his seat near her. His smile dazzled, his eyes sparkled. Allesandra felt again the pull of the man-the people she’d set to checking his background had already told her that he was one of those individuals that people would easily follow-a natural leader.
They had also told her that he was a widower, whose wife had died birthing the last of his three children, who were currently living with relatives in exile in Namarro.
He would be a fine Gyula, should the Moitidi who governed fate ordain that for him. And if that happened… well, Allesandra, like Marguerite before her, believed that marriage was a fine weapon to wield. And if one’s spouse was at least pleasant to be with, that was a bonus.
After the service, she allowed ca’Vikej to take her arm as they proceeded first from the temple, Allesandra nodding to those she knew as she passed them. “A stern warning from the A’Teni,” he commented. His voice was warm and low, his breath smelled pleasantly of some eastern spice. “Thank you, Kraljica, for allowing me the privilege of sitting with you.”
“I was surprised to see you there, Vajiki,” she said.
“I once thought of becoming a teni myself,” he told her. “My vatarh talked me out of it, but ever since…” She felt him shrug. “I still find great comfort in the Faith. And besides, I knew there was a good chance you would be attending.”
“Ah? And why would that be important, Vajiki?” she asked.
He laughed at that, deep and throaty and genuine. She liked that laugh, liked the way it deepened the lines around the man’s eyes. “I never had the chance to properly thank you for the dance at the Gschnas, Kraljica.”
“That’s all? Are all Magyarians so aggressively courteous, Vajiki?”
Again, the laugh. They were approaching the doors, and the teni there opened them wide. The western sky above the buildings that fringed the plaza was touched with red and orange, as if the clouds were afire. They entered out into a cool evening. A crowd of citizens had gathered-some who had come out of the side doors of the temple to see the Kraljica, as well as the usual curious tourists. Allesandra’s carriage was waiting several steps away, the driver already holding open the door for her. They cheered as she emerged from the temple, and Allesandra lifted her hand to them. “No, I’m afraid not,” ca’Vikej answered as the crowd roared. “But they don’t have the incentive of your beauty. As you can
see, even your subjects are overcome.”
Now it was Allesandra who laughed, stopping momentarily. “You’ve inherited your vatarh’s golden tongue, I see, but I don’t flatter that easily, Vajiki. Forgive me if I say that I suspect your motives are more political than personal.”
“In that, you’d be-” he began to reply. But a shout from the front of the crowd interrupted him.
“Don’t be a traitor to your own faith, Kraljica!” a male voice shouted. His voice was strangely loud, as if enhanced by the Ilmodo, and all heads turned toward it. The gardai holding back the crowd were suddenly shoved aside as if some invisible, gigantic hand had pushed them sprawling to the flags of the pavement, and a green-clad teni, the slash of his rank on the robes telling Allesandra that he was an o’teni, stepped through the gap. She recognized him, though she didn’t know his name; his was a face she’d glimpsed among A’Teni ca’Paim’s staff. “You defile Cenzi if you bring the body of a Numetodo heretic into this sacred place. Cenzi will not allow it!” The o’teni stalked closer. Allesandra felt ca’Vikej’s arm leave hers. “Those who are truly faithful will stop this travesty if we must!” The man’s face was twisted as he shouted, and now he began to chant, his hands moving in the pattern of a spell. But Allesandra heard the whisper of steel being drawn from a scabbard, and ca’Vikej had rushed from her side. One muscular arm was around the teni’s head and a dagger in his hand was pressed against the man’s throat.
“Another word,” she heard him say in the teni’s ear, “and you’ll have no throat with which to talk.”
The teni’s hands dropped and he stopped his chant. The gardai, regaining their feet, were now around him as well, several of them stepping between Allesandra and the teni. She heard shouts and cries. Hands hurried her to her carriage. Past uniformed shoulders, she saw the teni being dragged away, still screaming. “… betraying the Faith… no better than a Numetodo herself…”
She stepped up onto the carriage, and saw ca’Vikej, the dagger taken from him, also being hurried away. “No!” she shouted. “Bring Vajiki ca’Vikej here.”
They brought him to her, a garda holding each arm. “You may release him,” she told them; they reluctantly let go of ca’Vikej. “Give me his dagger,” she said, and one of them handed it to her. “Vajiki, in my carriage, please.”
As the door of the carriage closed and the driver urged the horses forward, Allesandra glanced at ca’Vikej. He was disheveled, his clothing torn, and there was a long scratch on his shaved head with beads of darkening blood along it. She lifted his dagger from her lap-a long, curved weapon, crafted from dark, satiny Firenzcian steel with a carved ivory handle. She turned it in her hand, admiring it. “Very few people are permitted to bear a weapon in the presence of the Kraljica,” she said to him, keeping her face stern and unsmiling. “Especially one made in the Coalition.”
He inclined his head to her. “Then I beg your forgiveness, Kraljica. I will remember that. Please, keep it as my gift to you; the blade was forged by my great-vatarh-my vatarh Stor gave it to me before…” She saw a brief flash of teeth in the dimness of the carriage. The springs of the seats groaned once as they jounced over the curb of the temple plaza onto the street.
She allowed herself to smile, then. “I thank you for your gift,” she said. “But in this case, I think it’s better to return it. Let that be my gift to you.” She handed the dagger to him.
He hefted it in his hand, touched the hilt to his lips. “Thank you, Kraljica,” he said. “The blade is now more valuable to me than ever.” She watched him sheathe it again in the well-worn leather hidden under the blouse of his bashta.
“Are you hungry, Vajiki?” she asked him. “We could take supper at the palais, and then…” She smiled again. “We could talk, you and I.”
He inclined his head in the deep Magyarian fashion. “I would like that very much,” he said. His voice was like the purr of a great kitten, and Allesandra found herself stirring at the sound of it.
“Excellent,” she said.
Rochelle Botelli
She hadn’t expected to find herself in Brezno. Her matarh had told her to avoid that city. “Your vatarh is there,” she’d said. “But he won’t know you, he won’t acknowledge you, and he has other children now from another woman. No, be quiet, I tell you! She doesn’t need to know that.” Those last two sentences hadn’t been directed to Rochelle but to the voices who plagued her matarh, the voices that would eventually send her screaming and mad to her death. She’d flailed at the air in front of her as if the voices were a cloud of threatening wasps, her eyes-as strangely light as Rochelle’s own-wide and angry.
“I won’t, Matarh,” Rochelle had told her. She’d learned early on that it was always best to tell Matarh whatever it was she wanted to hear, even if Rochelle never intended to obey. She’d learned that from Nico, her half brother who was eleven years older than her. He’d been touched with Cenzi’s Gift and Matarh had arranged for him to be educated in the Faith. Rochelle was never certain how Matarh had managed that, since rarely did the teni take in someone who was not ca’-and-cu’ to be an acolyte, and then only if many gold solas were involved. But she had, and when Rochelle was five, Nico had left the household forever, had left her alone with a woman who was growing increasingly more unstable, and who would school her daughter in the one best skill she had.
How to kill.
Rochelle had been ten when Matarh placed a long, sharp knife in her hand. “I’m going to show you how to use this,” she’d said. And it had begun. At twelve, she’d put the skills to their intended use for the first time-a man in the neighborhood who had bothered some of the young girls. The matarh of one of his victims hired the famous assassin White Stone to kill him for what he’d done to her daughter.
“Cover his eyes with the stones,” Matarh had whispered alongside Rochelle after she’d stabbed the man, after she’d driven the dagger’s point through his ribs and into his heart. The voices never bothered Matarh when she was doing her job; she sounded sane and rational and focused. It was only afterward… “That will absorb the image of you that is captured in his pupils, so no one else can look into his dead eyes and see who killed him. Good. Now, take the one from his right eye and keep it-that one you should use every time you kill, to hold the souls you’ve taken and their sight of you killing them. The one on his left eye, the one the client gave us, you leave that one so everyone will know that the White Stone has fulfilled her contract.. .”
Now, in Brezno where she had promised never to go, Rochelle slipped a hand into the pocket of her out-of-fashion tashta. There were two small flat stones there, each the size of a silver siqil. One of them was the same stone she’d used back then, her matarh’s stone, the stone she had used several times since. The other… It would be the sign that she’d completed the contract. It had been given to her by Henri ce’Mott, a disgruntled customer of Sinclair ci’Braun, a goltschlager- a maker of gold leaf. “The man sent me defective material,” ce’Mott had declared, whispering harshly into the darkness that hid her from him. “His foil tore and shredded when I tried to use it. The bastard used impure gold to make the sheets, and the thickness was uneven. It took twice as many sheets as it should have and even then the gilding was visibly flawed. I was gilding a frame for the chief decorator for Brezno Palais, for a portrait of the young A’Hirzg. I’d been told that I might receive a contract for all t he palais gilding, and then this happened… Ci’Braun cost me a contract with the Hirzg himself. Even more insulting, the man had the gall to refuse to reimburse me for what I’d paid him, claiming that it was my fault, not his. Now he’s telling everyone that I’m a poor gilder who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and many of my customers have gone elsewhere…”
Rochelle had listened to the long diatribe without emotion. She didn’t care who was right or who was wrong in this. If anything, she suspected that the goltschlager was probably right; ce’Mott certainly didn’t impress her. All that mattered to her was who paid. Frankly, she
suspected that ce’Mott was so obviously and publicly an enemy of ci’Braun that the Garde Hirzg would end up arresting him after she killed the man. In the Brezno Bastida, he’d undoubtedly confess to having hired the White Stone.
That didn’t matter either. Ce’Mott had never seen her, never glimpsed either her face or her form, and she had disguised her voice. He could tell them nothing. Nothing.
She’d been watching ci’Braun for the last three days, searching-as her matarh had taught her-for patterns that she could use, for vulnerabilities she could exploit. The vulnerabilities were plentiful: he often sent his apprentices home and worked alone in his shop in the evening with the shutters closed. The back door to his shop opened onto an often-deserted alleyway, and the lock was ancient and easily picked. She waited. She watched, following him through his day. She ate supper at a tavern where she could watch the door of his shop. When he closed the shutters and locked the door, when the sun had vanished behind the houses and the light-teni were beginning to stroll the main avenues lighting the lamps of the city, she paid her bill and slipped into the alleyway. She made certain that there was no one within sight, no one watching from the windows of the buildings looming over her. She picked the lock in a few breaths, opened the door, and slid inside, locking the door again behind her.
She found herself in a storeroom with thin ingots of gold-“zains,” she had learned they were called-in small boxes ready to be pressed into gold foil, which could then be beaten into sheets so thin that light could shine through-glittering, precious metal foil that gilders like ce’Mott used to coat objects. In the main room of the shop, Rochelle saw the glow of candles and heard a rhythmic, dull pounding. She followed the sound and the light, halting behind a massive roller press. A long strip of gold foil protruded from between the rollers. Ci’Braun-a man perhaps in his late fifties, with a paunch and leathered, wrinkled skin, was hunched over a heavy wooden table, a bronze hammer in each of his hands, pounding on packets of vellum with squares of gold foil on them, the packets covered with a strip of leather. He was sweating, and she could see the muscles in his arms bulging as he hammered at the vellum. He paused for a moment, breathing heavily, and she moved in the shadows, deliberately.