by Judith Tarr
Vanyi levered herself up. The circle of power was quiet, the lamps that marked its wards burning steady. She could sleep, she thought, if no one interfered. Sleep would be a pleasure.
Her mind reached to the limits of its wards and found no danger. It touched Daruya—in a snit as usual, but not in trouble that Vanyi could discern—and Kimeri playing contentedly with a companion or two. Nothing to fear there, either. The other children meant her no harm beyond a small, shivery, delightful conviction that they had made friends with a demon-child. Only Kadin was cause for anxiety: he had gone back to the house of the Gate, to sit in the dimness and the empty silence that matched the condition of his heart.
He was not thinking of death, not at the moment. He was not thinking of anything at all.
Better nothing than death. Vanyi could not help him; he was not ready for that yet, if he would ever be. She left him alone, drew in the boundaries of her power, became simply herself again, and a bone-tired self at that.
oOo
Vanyi.
She started out of a drowse. A moment longer and she would have been asleep.
The voice spoke again, soft round the edges of her shields. Vanyi, let me in.
Temper would have refused, but habit opened a gate in the wall of her mind. He entered as he had so often before, fresh and morning-bright—it was that on the other side of the world, and for an instant her yearning to be there was as sharp as pain.
“Estarion,” she said without voice. “You woke me up.”
He did not look remarkably contrite. “Oh, it’s night there again, isn’t it? Everything’s backwards. Do people have their faces in their bellies or on the backs of their heads?”
“Don’t be silly,” she snapped, but he had lightened her mood. Eased her headache, too, without her even being aware of it: a touch like a cool hand, a fading of pain. He never asked permission, never thought he needed to.
He looked about this room that was her mind’s conception of itself, noted what had changed and what had not, and said, “I dislike this Minister of Protocol. What a fishfaced fool!”
“So he would like us to think,” said Vanyi.
“He reckons himself clever and subtle and wise, and I suppose he is, by his lights. He’s still a fool.” Estarion leaned against a wall, insouciant as any young bravo in a tavern. His mind-self was much as his bodily self was; he did not affect the image of youth, or feign more beauty than he had. That was rare, but it was also Estarion.
Vanyi resigned herself to his presence. She was not entirely displeased by it, though she would have welcomed the sleep that he had put to flight.
He was a fairly restful guest. With her headache he had taken some of the dragging tiredness, smoothing it away as easily as he breathed.
“Do you know,” he said, “you’ve done a great deal for so short a time in this place. I doubt a stranger would get so close to me in a hand of days.”
“A stranger from the other side of the world would find you in her sitting room before she was well settled in it, pouring out wine and besetting her with questions.”
“Well,” he said, shrugging. “I suppose so. I’ve never been particularly careful of my station. Perhaps I should get myself a Minister of Protocol?”
“You already have one,” said Vanyi. “He’s sweet, elderly, and erudite, and you drive him to distraction.”
“What? Who? Rezad? Is that what a Minister of Protocol is—a chancellor of the palace? Well then. Rezad definitely won’t keep the filthy commons from my presence, and I’d have his liver for breakfast if he tried. He knows it, too. He’s very wise, is Rezad.”
“And very long-suffering.”
“Rezad is Asanian. He expects to suffer for his emperor. If he didn’t, he’d think there was something wrong.”
Vanyi sighed. “This Minister of Protocol is no Rezad. He’s going to give me what I ask—but I’ll have to fight for it.”
“Which is precisely why I call him a fool. It may be his duty to protect his queen and her king from importunate strangers, but an ambassador deserves greater consideration.”
“An ambassador from you in particular?”
He flashed his white smile. “Oh, but I’m nothing on this side of the world! It’s courtesy, that’s all. Not to mention common sense. If I’m as terrible a monster of a mage as he must think, I could be mounting armies of dragons and preparing to descend on his kingdom.”
“Are you telling me you aren’t?” He grinned at her. She resisted the urge to slap him—too common an urge, and too easy to gratify. “Estarion, I need to sleep. Are you going to get to the point or will you go away and let me rest?”
He looked briefly guilty. Too briefly. “I wanted to see that you were well.”
“And your heirs? Both of them?”
It was difficult to catch him off guard. He regarded her calmly, arms folded. “I see that they’re well. Have you tanned their hides yet?”
“No,” said Vanyi. “And I won’t, unless they try something like that again. Daruya got us through the Gate. We’d have died without her. Did you know she was that strong?”
“She’s Sun-bred and priestess-trained. All appearances to the contrary, she has remarkable discipline—when it suits her to remember it.”
There, thought Vanyi. He was colder than he needed to be. Irked, and afraid, too. His heirs had abandoned him; that pricked his pride, at the very least, and roused him to the fact that if he lost them both, he was an emperor without an heir.
She did not soften her voice for that, or treat him more gently. “I know what Daruya is. I helped to train her. I’ll tell you what worries me more. Ki-Merian. She hid herself from us all, and survived a Gatestorm that should have killed a child so young and so untrained.”
“The god protected her,” Estarion said. “And her own power, too.” He drew a long shaking breath. “God and goddess. What I wouldn’t give for an ordinary, common, simple, mischievous child without a drop of magery in its blood.”
“You’d be bored silly before the hour was out,” said Vanyi. “Live with it, Estarion. You’re a mage and the father of mages. They do what it suits them to do, and they make fools of us all when they’re minded, and if they outlive us, why, it’s a miracle, and the god’s own mercy. We have nothing to do with it.”
“That’s a lesson I’ve never been able to learn.” He straightened, unfolding his arms. “I’ll let you sleep. I only wanted to know—”
“I know,” said Vanyi. She said it more softly than she might have, after all. “Go on. I’ll do what I can to keep your descendants alive and sane. If it will console you, I think they do that very well for themselves, all things considered.”
He was consoled, perhaps. His farewell was like a brush of a hand, a flicker of a smile. She took them both down with her into sleep.
15
Kimeri in Shurakan missed the demon of the mountains very much at first. But it was out there beyond the wards that were so little really to a mage with any power at all; and she was here, where it could never come. Someday she would find it again. She did not think that would be very soon.
She dreamed about it now and then. She saw it teaching words to the other demons of the mountains. None of them was as quick of wit as it was, and most of them still ate travelers for dinner, but it seemed content after its fashion.
It never did try to pass the wards into Shurakan. That, it was sure and Kimeri supposed, would shake its poor airy self to pieces.
She, who was fire and earth and water too, was happy in Shurakan. That was a little surprising. She still had her other dreams, the ones about Gates, and the Guardian was still caught in the broken Gate. She tried more than once to go where the Gate was, but an Olenyas always caught her.
Once it was even Vanyi who was standing on the other side of the door Kimeri was going out of. Vanyi was coming in: she had her clothes on that she wore when she went to the palace and tried to talk to the queen. Kimeri should have been more careful, but she was
looking for Olenyai and not finding any; she forgot to look for a mage.
Vanyi herded her straight back in, saying something about mothers who let children run wild in enemy territory. Kimeri had heard that before. When she could stop, which was all the way in and most of the way to Vanyi’s rooms, she said in complete exasperation, “You have got to let me go out.”
Vanyi’s brows went up. “Have I, your highness?” she asked. “And why is that?”
She was being nasty and sweet at the same time. Kimeri was aggravated enough to tell her the truth. “Because the Gate isn’t dead, and neither is the Guardian. He’s trapped inside it. I’ve got to get him out.”
“You’ve been having dreams, haven’t you?” said Vanyi. But before Kimeri could say yes, she had them every night, and they were horrible, Vanyi went on, “There now. When people die, especially if they’ve been killed, we always want them to be alive again. We dream about it, we wish for it. But it doesn’t bring them back.”
“He is alive,” Kimeri insisted. “I know he is. I hear him. He’s trapped in the Gate. He doesn’t know how to get out. If I went there, I could—”
“Maybe you could,” said Vanyi, “someday, when you’re older. If there’s anyone to rescue from a Gate that’s broken. But not now. It’s not safe.”
“He’s trapped,” said Kimeri. “He hates it. He wants to get out.”
She was almost in tears. That was never a wise thing with grownfolk. It just convinced them that she was a baby, and too young to know anything.
Vanyi said things that she meant to be soothing, and handed Kimeri over to the servants and told them to feed her a posset and put her to bed. And never mind that the sun was only halfway down from noon. Nothing Kimeri said made any difference to her at all. She simply was not listening.
Kimeri thought about a shrieking fit, but that was the sort of thing babies did. She set her teeth and did what she was told. “Grownfolk never listen,” she said to the walls when she was finally alone.
oOo
But it was not all like that. Vanyi was out most of the time, and so was Kimeri’s mother. Kimeri could not go out in the city, and all she could do to help the Guardian was tell him in her dream that she was trying, and she would keep on trying. And yet, in everything else, she had more freedom here than she had ever had at home.
It started with being able to spend as much time as she liked in the stable with Kadin, which no one had ever allowed before. It got better when she found out that there were children round about, and what was better yet, none of them had nurses to make their lives miserable.
They did have nurses, that was true, but those were indulgent when they were not outright lazy. Children here could do much as they pleased, provided they were sensible about it and kept out of grownfolk’s way. When they grew very big—seven whole summers’ worth—they had to go to the temples to school, and many never came out of the temples again. But before then they were as free as birds.
Kimeri, who had always had armies of nurses hovering and fretting, found it wildly exciting to slip away from the stable, where Kadin never took much notice of her anyway, and find the places where the children liked to gather. Those were usually places where grownfolk never came, odd corners or dusty passages or rooms full of things that no one knew the names of, the makings of games that could range from one end of the palace to the other.
The first time Kimeri went to a gathering place, she had a friend to speak for her. His name was Hani; he was older, almost old enough for a temple, but he was not as tall as she was.
She found him straddling the wall of the stable the day after she came to the city, staring at the seneldi. He was much too curious to be afraid, and he was not shy at all. As soon as Kimeri saw him he grinned, showing a mouthful of more gaps than teeth, and said, “You were our protect-us-against at prayers this morning. What are you really?”
“Kimeri,” she answered, not knowing what else to say. Then because he was thinking that she did not know his language: “That’s my name. I’m a person. What are you?”
“What kind of person are you?” he asked her.
“A Kimeri person,” she said. “Me. Myself. I’m not a demon. That’s stupid.”
“All right,” said Hani, sliding down from the wall and landing neatly on his feet. He had straight black hair cut straight across his forehead and straight around his head just below his ears, and he was wearing a coat and a pair of trousers much like the ones she was wearing, and altogether he looked like a perfectly ordinary person from the Hundred Realms. But so did everybody here. There was nobody who looked like an Asanian, as Kimeri did, or like a northerner, which was what Kadin was.
Hani stood in front of her, and he looked and sounded older but he was definitely smaller. He looked her up and down. After a moment’s thought, he stretched out a hand and tugged at one of her curls. She let him. He was curious. He had never seen curly hair before, or hair the color of yellow amber. “You’re very funny-looking,” he said. “What did they do to you to make you look like this?”
“I was born this way,” she said. “You don’t look funny to me. Lots of people where I come from look like you.”
“Of course they do,” said Hani. “People look like that.”
Out in the courtyard, where Daruya’s mare was loose with two of the Olenyai geldings, the mare decided that the geldings had been taking too many liberties, and went after them with teeth and horns. Hani watched them with his narrow eyes gone wide. “They’re going to kill each other!”
“Of course they’re not,” said Kimeri, feeling superior. “The striped one is a mare. She’s telling the other two to stop thinking they’re as good as she is. Mares,” she explained, “are the center of the world.”
“Why?”
“Because they are,” said Kimeri. “There, see? They’re all quiet again, and the geldings are behaving themselves. They know how they’re supposed to be.”
“They look like mountain deer,” Hani said, “except that they’re so much bigger, and they have manes, and long tails with tassels on the end. And their horns are straight instead of branched, and much shorter than the stags’.”
“That’s because they’re geldings, and mares don’t usually have horns at all. You should see the stallions. They have horns two ells long, and sharp as spears.”
“Do they kill people with the horns?” Hani wanted to know.
He was not particularly bloody-minded, she noticed. Just curious. “Sometimes,” she said. “When people get in their way, or are cruel to them. You don’t whip a senel, my mother says. Seneldi are our hooved brothers. We treat them like people, and they carry us because they love us.”
“Would one carry me?”
“Why, of course,” said Kimeri.
One of the geldings did, because Kimeri asked; and Kadin came to see what they were doing, but said nothing, which was much better than Kimeri would have got from a nurse. Kadin was a mage, and a northerner besides. He saw nothing alarming in riding seneldi around a perfectly safe and completely closed-in yard, even if they did leave off the bridles and saddles.
Hani found Kadin terrifying, but he put on a brave face for Kimeri. She let him think he convinced her. Northerners were so very tall and so very dark. Even Asanians were a little afraid of them, and Asanians were used to them.
oOo
After that, Hani was her friend. He took her to the palace, and got in trouble for it too, what with the other children being sure he had taken up with a demon. But he was one of the oldest, and while he was far from the biggest, he could knock down and hammer on anyone who argued with him. He did that to a boy or two, and she did it to another boy and one of the girls, and when the two of them were finished, they all decided to forget what Kimeri looked like and treat her like a person.
The others never quite came close enough to be friends. Hani was different. He found her much more interesting than anyone else he knew, and even if he did not believe most of her stories of what th
e world was like outside of Shurakan, he liked to listen to them. He had his own stories to tell, too, and he knew all the fascinating places to play.
One of his favorites was one of the hardest to get to. First of all it was in the part of the palace where the most people were, though they only gathered in that particular place once in a Brightmoon-cycle. The rest of the time there were people muddling about, cleaning the floors, feeding the incense burners, braiding flowers into garlands to hang from everything a garland could hang from.
Once one got past those and slipped through a heavy curtain like chainmail, one was in the best place. A lamp was always lit in it, to honor the god whose house it was. The god himself stood on a plinth, carved of wood and set with glittery stones and painted and gilded and dazzling in his gaudiness. His robe came off at every cycle, and priests put a new one on.
oOo
The day Hani took Kimeri to see the god, he was wearing cloth of gold. “That’s a good omen,” Hani whispered, being very careful not to wake any echoes. “His robe is the same color as your hair, see?”
Kimeri stood in a shadow in that shadowy place and smelled the incense, and felt rather strange. She felt that way in temples in Starios, too. “There are gods here,” she murmured.
Hani blanched, but he kept his chin up. “Why, of course there are. This is their place. Are you going to come and see the best part, or are you afraid?”
Kimeri, who was not afraid at all, gave him a disgusted look and walked across the patterned floor. She walked the way she had been taught to hunt, very, very quietly, putting each foot down from the toes backward.
Hani, tiptoeing behind her, made a great racket. He was scared, but he was excited, too, and a little irked with her for being so much braver than anybody else. She could have told him that gods’ children would hardly be frightened of gods, but he had already refused to believe that she was the sun-god’s child.
It was quiet in the room, which was actually a tall, wide alcove in a much larger space. The lamp flickered in a draft, making the shadows leap and dance. Hani’s heart was thudding—Kimeri could hear it. Her own beat as it always did, maybe a little faster because she was excited, that was all.