by Kate Elliott
Between the West and East Harbors lies the peninsula where the Saroese bury their dead and entomb the oracles through whom the gods speak to the living. I can’t identify which is Clan Tonor’s tomb, from which I freed my mother and sisters, but I gloat anyway.
The road turns inland, overlooking the reed-choked shoreline of Mist Lake. Boats crowd the lake harbor where I saw Bettany. Efea’s fields and orchards and mines are so rich that our ports never sleep, transferring grain, oil, flax, cotton, natron, salt, and metals from the interior to the ocean fleets for export. No wonder our enemies wish to conquer us so they can bathe in the spoils.
Below the King’s Hill we pass the wall that fences off the Grain Market. Long lines of people wait to buy grain, Patrons on the shade side and Commoners in the sun. As people look up to watch us pass it is remarkable how many recognize me.
“You were robbed, Spider!” a Patron man shouts.
“That was the best trick I’ve seen this year!”
“Don’t let them kill your spirit with their stifling rules!”
When I look at the silent line of Commoners, many stare with hostility but some of the women press left hand to left breast in a gesture I have only ever seen Efean women make as a mark of respect, while some of the men hold up an open palm, five fingers spread. I don’t know what it means.
Suddenly my carriage lurches to a stop. Shouts break out.
“The king is hoarding the grain!”
“We need bread!”
I lean out. Ahead, at the entrance to the Grain Market, the crowd has begun shoving, trying to get inside. On the wall the king’s soldiers turn their crossbows on the crowd. If a riot breaks out, we are trapped here on the street.
To my surprise one of the Garon guards holds the curtain of the first carriage aside to reveal Lady Menoë. Her black hair is piled atop her head in a fantastical architecture of metallic ribbons and bows so bright they catch sunlight in their folds. The appearance of a highborn woman hushes the agitated crowd. For such an elegant person she has an astonishing voice that carries in the air without seeming shrill, the bold call of a commander in battle.
“I have heard the cries of folk who fear the grain supplies are running low. You fear the king sells grain to our enemies in order to finance his war. I can assure you as the granddaughter of the revered Princess Berenise that her ships will never transport grain to foreign ports as long as any household in Saryenia goes hungry. This very day I go to see the queen to beg that she make the same pledge on behalf of you, who are her children. Be patient, good citizens. I act as your champion!”
Ragged cheers applaud her stirring speech but an undercurrent of skeptical murmuring from the crowd makes me glance around to find an escape route if they swarm us. The fearsome glimmer of spider scouts appears, big metal creatures clanking up to the gate from inside the Grain Market. The arrival of the intimidating spiders causes the crowd to shrink back and quiet down.
We roll on and without further incident reach the city walls and the Royal Gate that leads to the King’s Garden, carved with the sea-phoenix that is the emblem of the royal house. Not even Gargaron could have predicted that victory in the Fives would grant me entrance into a garden where only the king and queen, their household, and their invited guests may walk. It’s an extraordinarily fortunate chance, especially if I’m able to discover proof that Prince Nikonos and Menoë are colluding.
Palm trees and shade trees fill the wide expanse. Sprawling bushes span the ground like clouds torn across the sky, their white blooms as bright as stars. We arrive at the famous Silk Pavilion. The ladies and their servants enter up a flight of steps to a portico hung with embroidered curtains depicting the ships on which Kliatemnos the First, Serenissima the First, and their sisters, soldiers, servants, and followers arrived in Efea.
Of course I’m not allowed to enter with them. My carriage travels on around the pavilion to a building in back where the kitchens are housed. Here I wait for an interminable time, hearing the clamor of people busy preparing a feast. The smell of cooking lamb and the heady aroma of cinnamon baked in pears makes my mouth water.
A Garon steward hurries up. “Lady Menoë wishes you to be presented to the queen. Come along, Spider.”
We stride into the pavilion, which is made up of many ornately carved pillars from which awnings and curtains are hung to create tiny private sanctuaries or large gathering spots. A ripple of sweet-falling sound announces a gathering ahead. Servants bearing platters of food process into a courtyard shaded by gauzy awnings and surrounded by billowing fabric. Highborn women, Lady Menoë among them, sit on couches listening to a woman play a harp. The harpist wears a diadem of gold molded to look like sheaves of grain, and I realize this unremarkable-looking woman not much younger than my mother must be Queen Serenissima. To my surprise she plays with genuine skill.
The steward pauses at the edge of the courtyard as Menoë sees us and shakes her head to indicate it isn’t time to bring me in yet. With a grimace the steward glances around for someplace to keep me out of view, and parts a curtain, waving me through. I find myself in a dim space made gloomy and stuffy by wool curtains tied down on all sides and a heavy canvas awning overhead. This area seems to be an empty buffer space, nothing stored here, no servants waiting.
The bark of a labored cough touches my ears. I tiptoe to the far curtains and peer out between a slit onto a second courtyard, this one shaded by an arbor whose vines sag with clusters of grapes. Under a purple silk canopy a man sits at a table stacked with books propped open with rods of gold. He’s an ordinary-looking man, not handsome and not ugly, but very intent on what he’s doing. He has a large book open in front of him and pauses to brush words into it before going back to reading a different book. A tray of honey cakes sits at his elbow, warm enough from the oven that their scent luxuriantly kisses my mouth. My heart staggers through erratic beats as I realize how close I am standing to the most powerful person in Efea.
A bell rings from behind a thick swag of curtains.
With the impatient frown of a man who is rarely interrupted, King Kliatemnos looks up and says, “Enter.”
A resplendently dressed captain steps into view. “Your Gracious and Most Powerful and Enduring Lordship, a pigeon has arrived bearing a message from Prince Nikonos, with news of the army on the Eastern Reach.”
“Bring it in at once, Captain.”
A pair of soldiers carry in a birdcage in which rests a hooded pigeon banded with a gold collar. Whistling to calm the bird, the king slips a folded paper from the tiny pouch on its back and unfolds it. I chafe, wishing I could dart out and snatch it from his hand.
To my relief the king reads the message out loud. “‘Gracious Brother, the gods have favored me with a victory at Pellucidar Lake.’ ‘Favored me,’ Nikonos writes,” Kliatemnos remarks in a tone of dour amusement. “Of course our brother gives himself credit for the victory but we are sure the credit belongs entirely to General Esladas. We are fortunate that in our time of peril such a competent commander is available.” The king hands over the message. “Have a decree written up and announce the victory throughout Efea.”
A victory! My whole body sags in relief, for I am sure if Father or Kalliarkos had been wounded or killed the message would have mentioned it. Yet I hadn’t realized the enemy had already entered Efean territory, that they are fighting at Pellucidar Lake, where stands the easternmost fortress under Efean rule. Is the situation already so dire?
What makes it worse is that they still don’t know Nikonos and Menoë are conspiring behind their backs, that they are in danger on both sides. Maybe Inarsis’s courier has reached them with this news, but what if he hasn’t and what if they don’t believe it?
Another cough draws my attention to a frail-looking boy reclining on a couch off to one side in the shadow of a heavy canvas awning. He’s ten or twelve years old and wearing a simple white keldi and linen vest. A handsome youth fans him with the bored expression of a person who knows he will be
at this tedious chore for the rest of the day.
They aren’t the only ones in this spacious courtyard. Under a second arbor a stone’s toss away, two men sit across from each other at a table, playing a Saroese game called Castle and Tower. The black tassels on their tall hats identify them as priests of Lord Judge Inkos who presides over the judgment of the dead and the afterlife.
As the captain, soldiers, and birdcage withdraw, an old man wearing a scholar’s robe bustles into the courtyard. A tower of books teeters in his arms.
“What did you bring us, Thanises?” asks the king.
“The official texts of all the history plays produced in Saryenia in the last ten years, as you requested, Your Gracious Lordship. Although what you hope to find here I do not know.”
The king breaks off a piece of honey cake and eats it absently as thunder brews in his eyes. “We want to find the reason why a Commoner poet stands in front of a crowd and proclaims our revered ancestress Serenissima the Third, the Benevolent, a murderer!”
I barely refrain from gasping out loud. The king knows about Ro-emnu!
“Of course the incident troubles you, Your Gracious Lordship. But it took place a month ago.”
“And since then we have heard reports of graffiti scrawled on walls and insulting songs sung in taverns.”
“Yes, yes, Your Lordship, but people will have their discontents. Let them bleed off their energy in harmless small acts.”
“The poet will attack again, and more people will hear what he has to say. Why have our soldiers not tracked him down? Double their numbers. Triple them!”
The scholar scratches his forehead with a look of exasperation. “Your Gracious and Exalted Lordship, can you not tear your attention away from your hunt for this trifling poet to consider the pressing question of how to pay the troops with the gold reserves so low? Do you never wonder if there is a reason the gold supplies have begun to drop off in recent years, not just the vague assurances from Princess Berenise that the veins are giving out? Please let me counsel you, Your Lordship, that paying the troops is a far more serious issue than a poet’s scurrilous accusations. It isn’t as if his outrageous assertions are true.”
The king pops a honey cake into his mouth and chews slowly. The hard look in his eyes is anything but reassuring.
“In our first year as king we personally supervised the destruction of all the Archival records from the year in which Kliatemnos the Third and Serenissima the Third, the Benevolent, ascended to the throne of Efea. The events cast such an unpleasant light on the royal family that we thought it better to eradicate all trace of what she did.”
“The deified Serenissima the Benevolent murdered her own kinsmen?” Thanises tugs nervously on a sleeve.
“The flask she used for the wine with which she poisoned her father, her brother, and her brother’s infant son sits at our bedside. She did what she did to save Efea, but people always misunderstand necessity. The poet must be arrested. Before he is executed we must discover how he found out, when we went to such trouble to conceal the entire history of her actions!”
Thanises presses fingers to his eyes and struggles for composure, then with a placating smile addresses the king. “I am pleased to inform you that this morning my investigators brought word that a poet answering to his description was spotted at a place called the Heart Tavern.”
I find my hand on my throat before I realize I raised it. How can I possibly get out of here fast enough to warn Ro? What if, in tracking him down, the authorities discover Mother?
The boy on the couch suddenly begins gulping in wheezy gasps, rolling from side to side with spasms like a fish throttled by air.
The king leaps to his feet. “Thanises, you said it would be another year before his illness progressed this far again! I’ll throttle you with my own hands if he dies!”
Thanises hurries to the child as the youth holding the fan backs out of the way. Alerted by the commotion, the priests leap up and rush over as well. At the scholar’s touch the boy’s movement ceases. I am so sure he has stopped breathing that I reflexively hold my breath as my fingers tighten on my own throat.
The king strides over, tapping a long knife against one thigh.
“Has he stopped breathing?”
With a strike as swift as a cobra’s and all the more stunning for its precision, the king stabs the youth who is holding the fan.
The priests catch the lad and bind his mouth with a band of cloth before he screams. As he fights against their grasping hands, his squirming and choked attempts to cry out make my skin crawl as with a thousand spiders.
If I run out there they will kill me. A flash of heat like lightning courses through me. My vision hazes over as if filling up with blood.
The world is filling up with blood.
11
The priests trap the boy on the ground as blood pumps from the wound to soak his tunic. The younger priest waves a lit stick of incense beneath the youth’s nose, making his eyes roll up while his struggle slows. The scent tickles my nose, causing my eyelids to droop and my legs to feel as heavy as logs.
The king watches without expression as the young priest presses a knee into the lad’s chest and with a scalpel cuts into his throat, although not to slice through the blood vessel and let him bleed out: instead he cuts into the ridged tissue of the voice box to render him mute.
My heart has turned to stone. My hands no longer feel like my hands; my eyes belong to someone else. I have to pretend I am standing in the back row of a theater watching actors about their work because otherwise I will scream and scream and scream.
They pull the cloth away from the youth’s mouth. It stretches wide and desperate, but no sound comes out.
The younger priest pulls open the lad’s arms, like spreading wings, while the elder slips on a pair of gloves and pulls a net of silver thread from inside his robe. He spreads the net over the lad’s face and chest. Blood slides right over the fine gradient, not staining. The net glitters like a dew-moistened spider’s web when morning sunlight catches on its threads.
Using his size and weight, the younger priest cracks the lad’s chest. The sound assaults me, so resonant and so cruel that I can’t control a violent flinch that stirs the curtains, but no one is looking this way.
Floating on the air like a mocking accompaniment, a glissade of notes from the harp cascades as sunlight might gleam through a rent in storm clouds. From behind the curtain, unaware of the terrible contrast their words make, women sing in clear, bright voices:
Let the Sun of Justice vanquish that which seeks to harm us! Let the Blessed Lady heal our wounds and hurts. Let the Judge grant us safe passage into the Underworld.
The older priest holds up an obsidian knife that seems to eat light out of the air, then deftly slices through skin and flesh. Two fingers thrust between the gaps in the netting. He pries a pulsing organ—the lad’s heart—out of the chest cavity until the netting wraps it.
A final rising tower of notes spills from the harp as the queen finishes playing, followed by a rush of applause from the ladies. The lad’s heels drum against the earth in futile defiance. The king places a foot atop the youth’s ankle to hold it down.
The lad exhales and does not inhale. The veined mass of his heart ceases beating.
Light cascades through the silvery netting. Brightness winks as brilliantly as a spark-bug caught in a cage. The priests have just killed a boy no older than I am and captured his spark in a net.
The old priest peels the net off the dead lad and, with the calm and practiced demeanor of a man who has performed this magic many times before, he spreads the netting over the face and chest of the prince.
The gleam in the netting fades as the spark caught in its threads seeps into the flesh of the prince.
My palms grow clammy. I want to scrub my skin over and over again with a stiff brush to scrape off the blood even though none touched me. With a sick sense of certainty it all comes clear: The prince has been living
on borrowed sparks. People have died to keep him alive.
The prince gasps. His eyes flutter, and he sighs as if his sleep now curls through peaceful dreams. His color is already a healthy sheen instead of an ashy pallor. The spark of the dead youth is a strong one, filling the prince’s flesh with vitality.
If this is the magic of Efea, then I want nothing to do with it.
The older priest peels the net off the prince. They bow and vanish behind a curtain, leaving the body behind.
Kliatemnos gazes on his son with a clouded expression no different from that of any worried father. “It is fortunate we had someone so close at hand, isn’t it?”
In a low voice Thanises says, “My lord, the youth was the son of Lord Perikos, not a criminal.”
“Yes, the lad’s death does create a breach of courtesy.”
I’m shocked that the king dares kill the son of a lord, and speak of it so calmly.
“I recommend you pay Lord Perikos ten talents of gold,” the scholar says.
“As you reminded us before, we can’t even pay our own troops, Thanises.”
“Then transfer to Lord Perikos the deed to a good piece of property, my lord.”
“Yes, yes.” Seeing that the prince breathes with the vigor of any healthy child in a restful sleep, the king settles back at his desk and walks his fingers across the open pages of books as if looking for inspiration between the lines. “Ah! We shall transfer the deed to our vineyard on the slopes of Butterfly Pass over to the Ikos clan. Perikos visited us there and admired the view. In fact, it was on that visit when he pledged the youth to serve the prince at the palace. The boy is the son of a concubine, so he isn’t an heir. A death hymn and the vineyard should content Perikos as a decent recompense for his loss. It’s a shame. A good-looking and intelligent lad. Our son liked him.”
Thanises studies the corpse with its terrible wounds. “May I recommend that Your Lordship inform Lord Perikos that the lad was attacked while carousing in the Lantern District? No, no, say he went outside the city to the horse races and got in a fight over a bet.”