Jeweled Fire

by Sharon Shinn

  Filomara had wanted to bring both of her grandsons back to Malinqua, but Rafe had had plenty of reasons to stay behind in Welce. But Steff had been eager to leave the farm life behind him, eager to explore the heritage he never could have guessed was his. Corene strongly suspected that he had no idea how grueling, tedious, dangerous, and demanding life as a royal heir could be. When people weren’t trying to get close to you so they could use you to their advantage, they were trying to kill you—or undermine you—or marry you off. And when none of those exciting events were under way, you were attending hideously boring state dinners or trying to learn the history of the world or having yet another discussion about the royal succession.

  Really, could a farmer’s son learn how to balance the desperate days with the dull ones?

  She had posed that question to Steff, almost that bluntly, and he’d laughed. “I guess you’ve never lived on a farm,” he said.

  She’d eyed him with disfavor. “Do I look like I have?”

  “Days and days and days of nothing but plowing fields, watering crops, and tending livestock. Seeing only the people who live right there on your land, because you don’t have time to visit a neighbor or a friend. Then the brook floods or the barn catches fire or there’s an early freeze, and you have to work like crazy to save the animals or cover the crops or build a dam between your house and the water. That’s exactly what it is—dull as dirt until it’s desperate as death. If that’s what it’s like to be heir to a throne, I already understand it.”

  But it’s a much more sophisticated kind of boredom, she’d wanted to say. A more elegant form of urgency. You have to speak Coziquela while you’re enduring an endless dinner or fending off assassins.

  But she didn’t. She wanted Steff to like her.

  He had, at first. When they’d met, before he’d discovered his astonishing origins, he’d been awestruck and bashful—almost worshipful—having never so much as glimpsed a princess in the flesh before. It had been pleasant to have someone pay such close attention to her, listen to her with such reverence, almost stumble over his own feet in his willingness to serve her.

  And it wasn’t his sudden elevation to high status that had changed him, because he was still kind of a goofy, bashful, wide-eyed, unspoiled teenaged boy. No, he’d just started to find Corene troublesome and difficult.

  “Why do you have to make Sattisi so mad all the time?” he’d demanded after one particularly contentious language lesson.

  “She’s rude to me! She treats me like some kind of uneducated slum girl.”

  “Only because you won’t listen to her.”

  “I’d listen to her if she didn’t yell at me for being stupid.”

  “She might not think you were stupid if you ever did the lessons before you came to class.”

  “I hate learning Malinquese!”

  “Then why are you going to Malinqua?”

  He had asked the question in a reasonable tone, but she could see the exasperation in his face. The real answer was too complicated to boil down to under an hour, so she’d made a flippant reply.

  “Because nobody thought I would. That’s why I do everything.”

  “Well, nobody thinks you’ll learn Malinquese,” he’d said. “Does that mean you will?”

  He’d made her so mad that, for the next three days, she really had tried to master her lessons, just to prove all of them wrong. But Sattisi kept scolding and Bartolo kept frowning and pretty soon there weren’t enough incentives to make her keep trying.

  She had learned how to conjugate all the irregular verbs during those three days, though. So maybe the little burst of temper had had some benefit after all.

  Though it hadn’t made Steff like her any better.

  Actually, he’d told her recently that she reminded him of his little sister, a half sibling born to his father’s second wife. It shouldn’t have bothered her because, even before they left Welce, she’d fallen into the habit of treating him like an annoying younger brother; but she’d wanted him to have a higher opinion of her. But she had a dreary suspicion that from now on he would view her as a twelve-year-old farm brat with ratty hair and bare feet, throwing a tantrum because she had to go milk a cow.

  So maybe Steff didn’t actually hate her (since he seemed to be fond of all his siblings), but he certainly didn’t worship her anymore.

  Well, who cared? She didn’t need people fawning over her—she’d had plenty of that in her life. She needed someone to size her up and decide she would be the perfect royal bride and forge an alliance with her that would see them both on the throne.

  The longer she was on the ship, the easier it became to silence the small, wistful voice at the back of her mind. But you don’t want to be the empress of Malinqua, the voice whispered, in direct opposition to everything Corene had ever said or thought or dreamed. You might not know what you want, but it’s not that.

  It was. And she wouldn’t let anyone, even herself, try to convince her otherwise.

  • • •

  She stood at the railing so long that she could feel her face turning scarlet from the sun and the abrasive ocean air. The wind was so strong that the ship’s flag streamed out from the mast at an almost true horizontal; it was easy to make out the crossed swords, the symmetrical white flowers, sewn onto the bright field of red. Corene thought it was gaudy; she greatly preferred Welce’s simple rosette of five interlocked colors.

  The wind was also playing havoc with Corene’s hair, and she didn’t even want to think about how bad it looked. Even when she was inland on Welce, far from the ocean or the river, her dark red hair had a natural curl. Here on the water, it was a mass of frizz and knots, impossible to tame, and she’d started wearing it pulled into a tight knot at the back of her head. It was not a good style for her; it left her looking stark and startled, her brown eyes too big, her fair skin too white, her sharp chin too pointed.

  So today she’d left her hair loose, and now it floated around her head like a bed of algae, though redder and even more tangled. She’d never get a comb through it. Maybe she’d just cut it all off. Filomara wore her gray hair straight and short; she’d probably approve of the practicality.

  Corene had just decided it might be time to go below and seek her cabin when she heard footsteps behind her on the deck. Turning, she found she’d been joined by the one person on the ship who didn’t hate her—didn’t even seem to find her irksome. Foley. A member of the royal guard of Welce, and formerly assigned exclusively to her sister Josetta. Corene was pretty sure that if he hadn’t agreed to accompany her to Malinqua, she wouldn’t have had the nerve to come. He was the one person who always made her feel safe, no matter how strange and precarious her circumstances were.

  If she’d been a shopkeeper’s daughter instead of a princess, she would have been mad for him, attracted to his size, his steadiness, his preternatural calm. But of course, she was a princess, sailing the world in search of a throne. She certainly allowed herself to think of her guard as a friend, but she’d never entertain other thoughts about him.

  Well, not very often.

  “Has somebody been looking for me?” she asked him.

  “The empress’s cousin said you were expected for a lesson.”

  She grimaced. “I’m sure he’s just as delighted at the prospect as I am.”

  Foley merely grinned. Although he was an alert listener, he tended not to talk a great deal. Sometimes Corene made a game out of drawing him into a conversation, trying to see what she could get him to say. Usually it wasn’t much.

  She sighed and turned back to the ocean, resting her arms along the railing. “I suppose I need to learn something this afternoon. It would be good if I understood some of the conversations going on around me while we’re in Malinqua.”

  He didn’t answer, and she glanced up at him. “Have you picked up any of the language since we’v
e been on the ship?”

  He answered in Malinquese, which surprised her so much she almost pitched overboard. “I can ask for food and water and beer,” he said. “Count to a hundred and name the quintiles and ninedays.”

  “That’s excellent!” she exclaimed. “But what do you mean—‘name the quintiles’?”

  He switched back to Welchin. “The Malinquese have quintiles and ninedays, like we do, but they have different words for them,” he explained.

  “I never thought of that,” she said. “I guess I should have. The Malinquese don’t care about elemental affiliations. I don’t understand it.”

  In Welce, everyone was presumed to fall under the influence of one of the five elements—fire, water, air, earth, or wood—and exhibit the corresponding character traits. Corene was a sweela creature, a child of fire, and her quick temper certainly attested to that. Foley was all torz, all earth, as steady and dependable as the land itself. Steff was coru through and through, as fluid and adaptable as water.

  The influence of the elements also spilled over into the seasons. They were just now coming to the end of Quinnahunti as summer reached its high point. In Welce, they would soon be observing the Quinnatorz changeday as they moved into the next quintile. In fact—

  “It’s Quinnatorz changeday, isn’t it?” she demanded. “And nobody noticed! Not even a special dish at breakfast this morning! Do they even have changedays in Malinqua?”

  “They acknowledge changedays, but they don’t celebrate them as holidays,” Foley answered.

  She nodded glumly. “They don’t seem like particularly lighthearted people.” Almost without her volition, her hand came up to touch the necklace she wore under her tunic. A slim silver chain holding three simple charms. “And I suppose they don’t have blessings, either?” she asked. She could tell that her voice sounded small and childlike, which annoyed her, but somehow she couldn’t make herself sound scornful and derisive, as she would prefer.

  Foley’s only answer was to shake his head.

  No blessings. Really, it was hard to imagine how the Malinquese made it through their days. In Welce, all infants received three blessings a few hours after they were born, and these blessings would sustain and guide them for the rest of their lives. People also could drop by a temple at any time and draw fresh blessings for daily guidance if they were dealing with some vexing problem. There were eight blessings associated with each of the five elements, and three extraordinary blessings on top of those.

  Most of Corene’s life she’d carried the sweela blessings of imagination and intelligence, and one hunti blessing of courage, no doubt a reflection of her father’s unbreakable heritage of wood. But her life had been so turbulent this year, and she’d been so unhappy—she’d wanted to be someone new, someone different, someone who could leave old burdens behind. So she’d insisted that Josetta draw new blessings for her as a sign of her planned metamorphosis. The first one to come up had been clarity—a sweela gift—and something Corene would be deeply grateful to possess. The coru trait of change followed right on its heels, and Corene had been glad of that; she’d been more than ready for change to shape her life. She’d been surprised at how happy she was that her third blessing was courage, for she’d hated to give that one up. And she thought she’d need it if she really did develop the clarity to make wholesale changes to her life.

  She’d thought all her blessings had coalesced when she’d decided to leave Welce. It had seemed so clear to her, two ninedays ago, that traveling to Malinqua would be just the thing to set her life on a new path. She was seventeen now, almost eighteen—it was time to take up an adult’s responsibilities. It was time to stop trying to impress her father and please her mother. It was time to plunge into the future.

  But now she wasn’t so sure.

  “It’ll be so different there, won’t it? In Malinqua,” she said softly. “Nothing at all will be familiar.”

  Foley glanced down at her, sober as always, and for a moment she thought he might not reply. Then he said, “But isn’t that why you wanted to go?”

  THREE

  The harbor at Palminera, when they reached it two days later, looked much like the harbor in Welce, except three times its size. The piers stretched on and on; Corene thought they might accommodate a thousand boats, whereas she’d never seen more than a couple hundred at one time in Welce.

  And the city that was laid out behind it was magnificent, much bigger than Chialto back home. The harbor, at sea level, was slightly lower than the surrounding countryside, so the city seemed to rise slowly from the edges of the water and spill out in a lush and varied display. And it was densely packed with buildings—tall, short, wood, stone—crammed together like children at a carnival display. From shipboard, Corene couldn’t tell which were the wealthy districts, which were the slums, but it was clear there were demarcation lines created by walls, canals, and roadways, each laid in with its own distinctive colors.

  She was back on the deck, staring her eyes out, as the ship made its final, excruciatingly slow approach to land. Steff had joined her as soon as they’d gotten close enough to see anything, and he was staring just as hard as she was. Inexplicably, Sattisi and Bartolo had also chosen to stand at the railing with them—although maybe, Corene thought, they were just keeping Steff company. The empress had remained below.

  “Magnificent, isn’t it?” Bartolo said in his self-satisfied way.

  Corene couldn’t take issue with him. “It really is,” she admitted. “I’ve never seen such a big city.”

  “This is small by the standards of Cozique—but few other countries in the southern seas boast a town much bigger,” Bartolo said.

  Steff pointed. “What are those two big towers? There and there?”

  “They represent day and night,” Sattisi piped up. “Fire and ice. South and north. Flame and shadow. Flesh and spirit. Life and death. The duality of existence.”

  This duality idea had wound through some of the most recent lessons, but Corene hadn’t thought it would manifest in such a physical way. The towers were impressive, though. If she’d correctly identified her compass directions, the one to the north stood for ice and death and spirit and shadow. It appeared to be constructed of white marble, from this distance utterly smooth; it was crowned with a half-moon of some clear material that seemed to emit an opal light.

  No surprise that she preferred the southern structure, which looked as if it had been built of warm, rough, reddish granite. On its roof, open to the sky, were huge flower petals of stained glass—red and yellow and orange—and at the center of the great blossom writhed an enormous fire. It was an eye-catching sight even in the middle of the day, against a summer sky practically drained of color by the afternoon sun. She’d bet it was really impressive by night.

  Steff’s attention had already moved on. “Look at all the crowds,” he exclaimed. That was when Corene realized that the streets were packed with people, all gathered to witness the ship’s arrival; more gawkers stood on the roofs or hung out of upper-story windows, watching and waving. “Are they here to see the empress?”

  Bartolo seemed smug. “Yes. Anytime she departs, there are throngs to welcome her when she returns. She is much beloved.”

  Steff and Corene exchanged quick smiles. It was the one point they’d agreed on during the journey—Filomara was easy to admire, but difficult to like, at least for those who knew her intimately. But her subjects might not care that she was cold and calculating in her personal relationships. If she kept her people safe, treated them fairly, and never lost faith with them, they would love her anyway.

  Corene couldn’t resist poking at the others. “Maybe they’re not here to see Filomara,” she suggested. “Maybe they want to catch a glimpse of Steff.”

  Steff looked briefly horrified and Sattisi displeased. Bartolo just shook his head. “They know nothing about him,” Bartolo said.

&n
bsp; “Really? She didn’t send the news ahead?” Corene asked.

  Bartolo pursed his lips, thinking over his answer. “The empress wished to introduce her grandson to everyone at court at the same time, to personally explain the circumstances surrounding his birth.”

  “She didn’t want to give anyone time to start scheming against him,” Corene translated. “So she wanted him to be a surprise.”

  Sattisi’s frown grew darker, but Bartolo, unexpectedly, nodded. “It’s possible that not everyone at court will be entirely pleased by my cousin’s great good fortune,” he said carefully.

  “Anyway, she wants proof, doesn’t she, before she starts introducing me around?” Steff interjected. “She said that the doctors here would be able to trace my blood. Or something.”

  Bartolo nodded again. “Yes. She wants to be absolutely sure you are who you claim to be before making great fanfare about your existence.”

  It sounded vaguely insulting, as so many of Bartolo’s comments did, but Steff just nodded. Malinqua might have advanced scientific and medical abilities, but Welce had the primes—the heads of the Five Families, the people most in tune with the elemental affiliations. Darien’s wife, Zoe, was the coru prime, a woman with strong ties to both water and blood; she could lay her hand on anyone and instantly identify his or her family bloodline. That was how she’d figured out Rafe’s heritage, and then Steff’s. If Zoe said Steff was Filomara’s grandson, it was true. But Corene supposed she couldn’t blame Filomara for wanting her own kind of proof.

  “Honestly, I’d just as soon arrive quietly,” Steff said. “Not have people staring at me the minute I step off the boat.” He glanced down at Corene and grinned as he said, “Nobody knows about you, either, since you came along at the last minute. The servants at the palace won’t be expecting a Welchin princess. They won’t have your rooms ready for hours. Maybe you’ll have to sit in the courtyard with all your baggage.”