by Kate Elliott
The Runt whined. She clamped a hand over his muzzle as movement along the wall caught her eye. A boy slithered along the shadows behind the colonnade, trying to approach without alerting the arguing nobles. The long formal robe he wore looked strange on a lad that age who, as Mum would say, ought to be running about freely in a kilt like an ordinary child. The extraordinary shimmering shine of the silk impressed her, as did the spray of freckles on his pale cheeks.
Old Captain Kellas of Plum Blossom Clan stood in the shadows, obscured by a pillar. When he had arrived in Toskala she did not know. He caught the boy’s sleeve, pried the child’s hand open to look at the object the boy was clutching, then released him. The boy wriggled along the wall and pressed this object into Lifka’s hand: It was flat and round.
Beside her, Tarnit stiffened. Lifka looked over to see the king had placed a hand on his jeweled dagger, about to draw a blade on his own son. The hells! She had a dog muzzled with one hand and a mysterious object clutched in the other when what she really needed was to unsling her staff to protect herself and, perhaps, the king.
But the king did not unsheathe the knife even though Prince Tavahosh spouted mocking words, a strutting cock crowing in all its finery of self-regard. When the king abruptly dismissed the prince, the young man stalked off in such a temper that Lifka could practically smell the fumes of his anger—but not before he stared directly at Lifka to remind her he’d not forgotten her defiance.
Captain Kellas whispered in the mysterious boy’s ear and the child ghosted after the prince like a tiny spy. Evidently the boy was a servant to be ordered around despite being dressed in silk her clan could not afford even if it saved every string of vey earned for ten years.
That’s what it meant to be rich.
The Runt wiggled impatiently in the harness she had rigged for him at her chest. Her hand was starting to ache from gripping his muzzle, so she let go. Immediately he barked in protest, as if to say Why do you treat me so discourteously?
Startled by the sound, the king turned.
“What are these two reeves doing here?” he demanded in the Hundred language.
He noted Tarnit with a brief nod, as if he recognized her, but he took his time examining Lifka. Indeed, his gaze jumped from her face down to her tightly laced vest. The Runt growled.
“Does the dog bite?” he asked with a smile so charming that her mouth twitched, and then she gave in and smiled back as she again clamped a hand around the Runt’s muzzle.
“Nerves make anyone bite, as it says in the tale.”
The king laughed. “I won’t bite. I’m just curious. Where are you from, Reeve?”
“Near River’s Bend, Your Highness. Across the river from the Weldur Forest.”
“I would have thought you a girl from Nessumara where all sorts of sailors and travelers come to harbor. Your parents must be outlanders.”
Captain Kellas stepped forward to interrupt. “What did the boy give you, Lifka?”
“What boy?” asked Marshal Dannarah.
All looked at Lifka expectantly. The Runt heaved a great sigh of displeasure and resignation, a sure sign that he would be obedient for a little while. She released his muzzle and opened the other hand. In it lay a round ivory token, engraved with a loom on one side and a tree leafed with stars on the other.
“Dia!” The king snatched the token rudely right out of Lifka’s fingers. “This is for me!”
“Best we ask Queen Dia, since the messenger evidently gave it to my reeve, not to you, Jehosh,” said the marshal crisply.
A blush curdled the king’s cheek like that of a lovelorn youth. He pulled a face and, uncurling his fingers from their desperate clutch of the token, gave it back to Lifka. “Had it been meant for me, it would have been given to me,” he agreed.
“What do you mean, my lord?” asked Captain Kellas.
“Dia has no reason to trust anyone at court and especially not people who might be in league with Chorannah. Therefore she only admits people to her presence if they are carrying one of these tokens. That way only people she has personally summoned can see her, thus thwarting spies and murderers.”
“Anyone can carve ivory,” objected Dannarah.
“The tokens are imbued with magic. It burns the hand of anyone who wishes her harm. The magic smells like pepper.”
“Pepper!” The marshal plucked the token out of Lifka’s fingers and sniffed at it. “The hells! It does smell of pepper!”
The king’s wry smile imperfectly concealed the anger and frustration that had boiled over in the ugly confrontation with his son. “Dia knows how to protect herself. Although what she wants with this young reeve I cannot imagine. As for you, Aunt Dannarah, my apologies. I meant to offer you a better welcome back to the palace.”
“Had you left me as chief marshal none of this would be happening.”
“I earned that barb,” he said, and Lifka was amazed to watch him calmly absorb such blunt criticism. He turned to the old man. “Captain, what do you advise? I’m inclined to leave Aunt Dannarah as Tavahosh’s second, if she’ll agree.”
Captain Kellas glanced at the marshal with a wry smile that he then transferred to the king. Although the servant, he spoke with a dignity that made him seem in charge. “Your Highness, I advise you to make an immediate inventory of your officials, your army, your clerks, and the various tasks they administer. You must discover which you control and which have been undermined from within. You are right to focus on the army first. I suggest you begin by assessing your support within the city militia. If they will not back you, then prudence dictates you flee the city.”
The king muttered words Lifka could not understand but it sounded like a string of angry curses. Then he nodded, his hot, hostile gaze fixed not on anyone here but on the situation that had just collapsed around him.
“Come along, Captain. We’d best start planning our campaign.”
He and Kellas walked out into the sun-drenched garden, leaving the women in the shadowed corridor.
“That was illuminating,” said the marshal with a curt and unamused laugh. “Let us go discover what in the hells Queen Dia wants from you, Lifka.”
She handed the token back to Lifka and set off with a brisk stride. Lifka tucked it under her vest down along the side of her breast where, she hoped, no one would feel they had the right to simply insert their fingers without permission. She didn’t care about Queen Dia’s favor; she was just not used to such grabby manners. At home everyone shared everything but you asked before you took what someone else was handling.
“I thought Queen Dia lived in the lower palace,” said Tarnit as they crossed a shaded colonnade that ringed the garden.
“She does,” said the marshal. “But if I am judging matters rightly, Dia will have shown her support for Jehosh by attending the reeve convocation, sequestered on the women’s balcony of course. As well, she cannot possibly trust Chorannah. Therefore she will surely remain in the upper palace until Prince Kasad is safely under her wing. Jehosh has private chambers here, and I only recently discovered it has a hidden room that is linked by a secret passageway to the Thousand Steps. A clever way for a king to bring people in and out whom he doesn’t want others to know about.”
Her somber tone and bitter frown caused Tarnit to look alarmed.
The marshal glanced at Tarnit and said, “No, I don’t want to talk about my father.”
They walked on in an awkward silence. Besides the fountain and a decorative shelter, the space bloomed with flowers and hedges.
“What a lovely garden this is,” said Tarnit with a nod at Lifka as if tossing her a dropped ring in a game of hooks-and-ropes.
Lifka said the first thing that came into her head. “How do they water all this?”
“Spoken like a country girl,” said the marshal with a laugh as Tarnit cast Lifka a grateful look.
“I’ve hauled enough water from the local well to know how much work gardening takes.”
“By no means am I criticizing you, Li
fka,” said the marshal, with a meaningful glance at Tarnit. “I like my reeves to be smart and observant. Do you realize that the upper palace, situated as it is atop Law Rock, is a bad place to get stuck in a siege unless you control the eagles? By placing me in charge of the reeves here Tavahosh and the shrine haven’t the least idea of how much power they’ve just put in my hands. I’ll be party to all palace and shrine messages.”
“Trust you to find a way to work the situation to your advantage, Marshal,” said Tarnit.
A steward wearing the king’s badge of crossed spears spotted them heading for the king’s private chambers and raced in pursuit, but they reached a portico before he caught them. The guards recognized Marshal Dannarah and slid a door aside. The women took off their sandals and stepped up onto a matted floor in a chamber furnished only with seating cushions. Two outlanders stood guard by a closed door, one armed with a staff and the other with two swords crossed in a harness at her back. Like the boy they were a pale brown, cheeks dusted with freckles. One bore the slave mark prominently inked onto a cheek although she carried her weapon with the same easy confidence as the other, unmarked woman. Lifka tried not to stare at the mark she had escaped. Like a bell ringing softly in her head a buried resonance filled her with a certainty that long ago she had walked among people with their coloring and looks.
“The token,” said the marshal.
Lifka handed it to the woman with the staff, who held it to her cheek, nodded, and went over to tap a rhythm of knocks on the door at the back of the room. They were let through. In the room beyond, the walls were painted with golden figures floating amid vines and flowers so cunningly rendered they seemed alive. The fourth wall was a balcony looking over fields far below.
Even unversed in the ways of a palace, Lifka recognized the queen at once because she was beautiful despite her pallor. Her skin had the color of the milled rice that wealthy people ate for dessert. She sat amid a flock of women, not separated from them by decorated chairs or elaborate screens but all crowded familiarly onto low couches arranged for conversation. Some had a similar coloring to the queen while the rest had such diverse features they might have been at home in any port, and about half bore the slave mark although the ones so branded did not act in any way different from the others. Every woman had handwork under way: embroidery, knitting, mending, netting. They all looked up expectantly as the reeves halted inside the chamber and the door was shut.
The queen set down her needles and yarn and, to Lifka’s horror, looked at her with an expression of the greatest curiosity. She spoke words in a foreign language whose sounds meant nothing but whose timbre and rhythm burrowed into her flesh until it almost seemed they could fall off her tongue. Snatches pecked at her: Mothers? Ship?
The figures painted on the wall dizzily faded and brightened like her thoughts blinking in and out, but that was only the light and shadow in the room.
The Runt sneezed.
All the women laughed.
“What an adorable little dog,” said the queen in pleasantly accented Hundred-speech. “May I pet it?”
Lifka still felt dizzied, and to her relief the marshal answered for her. “I think it is safer not, Your Highness. He snaps. I fear you have startled my reeve by speaking in a language none of us know. I am Marshal Dannarah, as you may recall. I believe you and I only met when you first came to the Hundred. I have not been much in the favor of the palace these last twenty years.”
Queen Dia’s smile had an enigmatic curl. “Nor have I been in favor of the palace, truth be told, Lady Dannarah. Since the unusual circumstances that brought me to the Hundred, I have preferred to remain on my country estate with my trusted people around me.”
“Yet the king built the lower palace so you might bide more often at court.”
Queen Dia set her handwork to one side. “So he did, as he intends to spend most of his time here in Toskala administering the Hundred from now on.”
“So we may hope. What words did you say to my reeve just now?”
Shapes rose in Lifka’s mind. She spoke aloud as if bidden by a spell. “By what names are your mothers known? In what ship does your soul know its home?” She wiped a tear from her eye, for her heart had wakened the memory of a five-year-old’s fear and grief. “I thought I had forgotten all that.”
The queen rose and with measured dignity and a slight limp crossed the mats.
“May I?” She indicated Lifka’s neck.
Lifka wanted to step out of reach but she was pretty sure it would be insulting to do so. Suddenly she knew what the queen wanted. So she tucked the Runt’s nose in the crook of an elbow and sucked in a breath, bracing herself.
The queen felt along the back of Lifka’s neck and examined the scar although Dia could only see the part of it on her neck, not the part on her back hidden beneath her reeve’s vest.
“Do you remember getting this scar, child?”
“No,” Lifka lied.
The queen nodded as if she knew perfectly well that Lifka was lying. “It must be difficult to speak of something that would have happened so long ago and surely in tragic and frightening circumstances. But its distinctive pattern suggests it was deliberately carved there by a person who wanted to mark you as with an inking but had no needles or ink, only a knife.”
She spoke an order in a language Lifka did not know. An attendant opened a hidden door in the wall and vanished down a flight of steps.
“Do you truly not know who you are?” The queen examined Lifka with an expression of astonishment.
It got tiring to be treated like a curiosity. “Of course I know who I am, Your Highness. I realize it must be obvious to everyone here that my parents did not themselves seed me and birth me. I am one of the children brought south from Ithik Eldim thirteen years ago. Even though I was born somewhere else, Five Roads Clan are my father and mother, my uncle and aunt, my brothers and cousins. I wear the Fire Mother’s tattoos, just like any other Hundred girl. That’s all.”
“Oh, no,” said the queen with a portentous shake of the head, “that is not all.”
Footsteps thumped on the stairs and two women about the same age as the queen entered the room. Armed with long knives, both carried themselves as soldiers and were dressed in loose trousers and sleeveless vests. One had a northern complexion, a patch covering her left eye, and a slave’s mark. The other bore no ink; she was as black as Lifka, a tall woman with a gruesome knotted scar on her left shoulder and a nick in her chin as if a blade had scored a wedge out of it. This woman stopped dead, staring.
The Runt barked five or six times, caught up in the tension now permeating the room.
“She bears the mark of the Phoenix, Odoriga,” said the queen, still in the Hundred-speech.
“It cannot be,” said the scarred soldier without any of the bowing or courtesy common to servants. “The last heiresses of that lineage died in the attack on Gyre Port thirteen years ago.”
“The one led by Jehosh,” said the marshal with a glance at the queen.
“That’s right,” said Dia in an unfathomable tone. “The one led by Jehosh.”
The soldier spoke in a singsong lilt like the refrain to a tale: “So many sisters and brothers, mothers and uncles, died that day. All the Phoenix ships burned, their children lost to fire and sea.”
“This child survived,” said the queen.
“What are you talking about?” Lifka demanded, forgetting that she was talking to a queen.
The queen’s look felt more like threat than comfort. “It means you are heiress to a fortune.”
Odoriga sheathed her knife and crossed her muscular arms. “Anyone with coin can claim a fortune. Money is the least of her value, if this is true. If this is true, she would be the last surviving born-daughter of the Phoenix Lineage.”
“What is the Phoenix Lineage?” Marshal Dannarah asked.
“Long ago, across the ocean, the Tandi people became famous seafarers and then merchants. They organized themselves into a co
nsortium, and within that into lineages, each named after a bird. Until the massacre at Gyre Port, the Phoenix Lineage commanded the largest fleet and most powerful reputation within the Tandi consortium, like to that of queens and their brother kings flying above their lesser subjects. If she is who she seems to be, every Tandi lineage will want to get their hands on her in order to sell her back to the remnants of the Phoenix Lineage or to marry her to one of their own women—as is their custom—in the hope she will give birth to daughters who can rebuild the lost ships.” Her hard gaze fixed on Lifka. The Runt quivered under Lifka’s muzzling hand. “You’ll need protection against the greed of your lineage’s rivals.”
Lifka was too stunned to form words. Fortunately the marshal was not.
“Are you yourself of Tandi lineage, verea? To make this claim?”
The soldier said, “I am not. My people come originally from the land of Kost. But my people have for many generations hired out as guards on Tandi ships. That’s why I know their language and some of their lore. This knowledge I have shared with Dia.”
“Which is why we are willing to offer you protection, child,” said the queen. “You would be wise to accept our offer. You will be well rewarded if you do.”
This was really too much! Lifka released the Runt’s muzzle, and his growl made everyone go still. Still not knowing what to say, she cast a desperate glance at the marshal.
Sure enough, the old woman slipped her baton from its loop and tapped it twice against a thigh. No queen intimidated her!
“If Lifka wishes to speak to you later on her own account, I will not get in her way. If she does not, then you will leave her alone. Do you understand me?”
Queen Dia exchanged a glance with Odoriga, yet her acquiescent shrug did not reassure Lifka. Nor did her words. “The girl may believe it is better to hide from her past, but it will engulf her regardless of what she thinks she wants. Others will come for the girl once the news gets out. They will not be as accommodating as I am willing to be.”
33
Kellas admired the masterful way Jehosh held the rapt attention of the young militiamen in the Flag Quarter barracks as he told them a story from the first Eldim war.