by Kate Elliott
With dawn, the stream of soldiers outward from the camp ceased, and a few casualties came in, but otherwise a hush fell with the sun’s rising. Jaelle shivered, pulled her cloak more tightly around herself, and shut her eyes. She could not sleep.
“Jaelle! You will attend me.”
Rusudani stood under the awning of a neighboring tent. Jaelle rose hastily and hurried over to her.
“Tell these guards that they are to escort me into the castle. I have spoken to them, but they cannot understand me. I do not speak Taor as well as you do. Yet.” A sharp glance from the princess served to remind Jaelle that Rusudani had not yet forgotten her former dependence on Jaelle’s translations, and how Jaelle had defied her.
“Yes, my lady.” But the jaran soldiers could not understand her, either. Evidently none of them spoke Taor. She attempted a few words in khush, but these also failed to produce any effect.
“I will go to the castle!” Rusudani proclaimed.
“Do you think it is safe, my lady? There may still be fighting.”
Rusudani gave her a scornful look, hoisted up the trailing edge of her gown, and began to walk. Her jaran guards had phlegmatic temperaments. They simply found horses, mounted everyone up, and in this way they went into the town, which lay deathly quiet in the morning sun. The gates were held by jaran soldiers. After a brief exchange, Rusudani’s guards escorted her straight up the embankment that led to White Tower. Rusudani dismounted in the outer ward and Jaelle followed her in to the great hall. There was gathered the remnants of the castle’s population. Lady Jadranka sat with austere dignity in her chair. She looked washed clean with grief, and her hair uncovered, had gone to white at its roots. Janos’s seat was empty.
Rusudani swept up the hall and mounted the two steps that led to the dais. She approached Janos’s chair and surveyed it. Jaelle, behind her, saw Lady Jadranka’s mouth tighten.
“You have no right to sit there,” said Lady Jadranka, her voice rimmed with frost.
Rusudani turned and examined her coolly. “I may do as I please. This castle is mine, now.”
Jadranka stood up slowly. Yesterday, she had moved like a much younger woman. Now she looked as frail of body as a crone. But her voice lacked no power. “It is not yours. It reverts to me. You gained none of his inheritance by marrying him.”
An odd expression colored Rusudani’s face. “Where is your son?”
“He is dead. I had supposed you had heard already, since it was by your hand that he was betrayed.”
The word hung in the air, proclaimed loudly enough that Jaelle cowered, expecting Rusudani to reply fiercely. Instead, voices swelled in the anteroom and a delegation clattered in: The jaran had returned from securing the town. At once, the Mircassian envoy rushed forward and knelt before Rusudani, watching her warily, head slightly bowed. She gestured to him to move aside.
“Jaelle, you will translate what I cannot understand. Mind that you do it faithfully, or I will have you killed.”
“Yes, my lady.”
Jaelle watched them come forward. They did not look like supplicants, although Rusudani pretended to receive them as such. To Jaelle’s surprise, Bakhtiian was not with them. Instead, the Prince of Jeds stopped before the dais, escorted by two jaran soldiers.
“I see you have taken possession of the castle, Princess Rusudani,” said the Prince of Jeds. She still wore armor, strips of leather and plate decorated with red ribbons, and had her helmet tucked under her right elbow. Without giving Rusudani time to reply, she turned deliberately to Lady Jadranka. “You are Lady Jadranka? My niece, Princess Katerina, has asked to be remembered to you, my lady. She begs for your forgiveness, and asked me to tell you that the insult to her honor dictated the outcome.”
Lady Jadranka inclined her head slightly. She swallowed, but it was a moment before she could speak. “It is too early to speak of forgiveness. I do not hold Princess Katherine responsible for the fall of White Tower.”
The words blew a chill through the hall.
“Where is Bakhtiian?” asked Rusudani, cutting into the conversation.
As if her question summoned him, he appeared, limping. He looked grim and rather wild. He, too, wore armor, more elaborate than that he had worn when Janos and his men had ambushed him at the monastery. It made him look like a prince. Prince Vassily attended him, hovering by his side like an overprotective father. Lady Jadranka’s eyes widened as she realized who he must be. But she said nothing.
Bakhtiian made a comment, curt, to the Prince of Jeds in the language of the jaran, and she flushed, so slightly that Jaelle would not have noticed it if she had not happened to be looking at her directly at that moment. Princess Rusudani had eyes only for Bakhtiian. She fairly drank him in.
“Who does this castle belong to now?” demanded Bakhtiian.
Lady Jadranka rose slowly. “It is mine, sir, inherited from my father, since I was his only child.”
Rusudani looked furious, but she held her peace. Prince Vassily glanced at her, away, and back at her again.
Bakhtiian inclined his head respectfully toward Lady Jadranka. “I have prisoners to give into your hands, my lady. If you will give me your oath and sign your name to a treaty letting there be no feud between your house and mine.”
“How can I promise that? Janos was my only son.”
“By what means will you make war on me, Lady Jadranka? You cannot. Out of respect for you and your grief, I will leave this castle standing. Otherwise I would burn it to the ground.”
“The prisoners knew, all of them, did they not?” she asked. “All but my son knew that you were Bakhtiian. He would have killed you otherwise.”
“But he did not.”
“But he held you prisoner.” The barest smile creased her face, and Jaelle saw Bakhtiian whiten, as if at a blow. “With that memory, I will have to be content. I cannot forgive, Bakhtiian. But I will sign your treaty. Certain of my ladies have whispered to me that it is likely that Princess Rusudani is pregnant with my son’s child. For that child’s sake, I will swear an oath to hold you no further to blame, as long as I receive in my turn your oath to leave these lands alone and to give me the child, whether boy or girl, to raise in my son’s place.”
“I give you the child willingly,” blurted out Rusudani. “I want nothing from your son, least of all his child.”
Lady Jadranka’s expression did not alter. “Then let it be so.”
Prince Vassily touched Bakhtiian’s elbow and whispered in his ear. Bakhtiian shook off the hand impatiently. He looked, to Jaelle’s eye, quite transfigured from the man whom she had first seen at Sarai: There, he had reminded her of a steel sword, dangerous, sharp, but clean of line, and strong. Now, he seemed brittle and on edge. Before he had overawed her, but his power had seemed tempered by a glint of humor and a deep sense of control. Now, he scared her, because she could not predict what he might do next.
“What about me?” demanded Rusudani. “You owe me your life.”
“Are you sure you want me to—” Jaelle whispered.
“You will speak exactly the words I speak, Jaelle!”
But, like a man well used to deciphering many languages, he had already understood her.
“What do you want from me, Princess Rusudani?”
The Prince of Jeds stood stiffly. A gulf seemed to separate her from Bakhtiian and Rusudani, though there were scarcely three arm’s lengths between them.
“I am King Barsauma’s heir. Any alliance with me is worth a great deal.”
“That is true.”
“I can give you an army and passage into Filis, as well as control of caravan routes that lead into the lands south of Mircassia, past the great waste.”
“Of course it is in my interest to want these things. But surely you must want something in return.”
The silence drew out in the hall until even the soldiers shifting, nervous or bored, in the back stilled and waited.
Jaelle felt a chill envelop her. She had a sudden forebo
ding that Rusudani was going to say something foolhardy and perilous.
Rusudani had the wisdom to lower her voice, so that only the six of them closest to her could hear.
“I will be queen of a country greater than all of the Yos principalities together, greater than all the western merchant cities, greater than Filis, greater than Jeds. Why should I not have, as husband, the only prince as powerful as I am?” Deliberately, she did not look at the Prince of Jeds.
Nor did Bakhtiian. His gaze remained fixed on a point just behind Rusudani’s head, crowned with a gold-threaded shawl that almost covered her thick black hair. His eyes blazed, as if seeing some vision of a great alliance sealed by a royal marriage, the beginning of a powerful dynasty that would rule a vast empire.
Prince Vassily looked like he had been struck.
The Prince of Jeds looked gray, but she said nothing. Rusudani clenched her left hand triumphantly. Still, no one spoke. Like a storm rising, the tension rose until it engulfed the rest of the room.
Bakhtiian stirred. He glanced, curiously enough, at Vassily.
“I regret that I cannot give you myself, my lady,” he said politely, quietly, and, continuing, spoke abruptly louder so that his voice filled the hall. “But you are right. It would be fitting if you married my son.”
Rusudani shut herself away in the solar and would not be moved. Jaelle escaped her by simply staying behind in the hall, unnoticed and unasked for in the furor that arose after Bakhtiian’s pronouncement.
“Tess?” Bakhtiian was casting about, searching for his wife, but she had vanished. “Tess! Where is she?” He sounded querulous and remarkably irritable. An instant later, he dismissed two of his guards and fell into an argument with his son.
Jaelle stood behind Janos’s chair and tried to melt into the floor.
Bakhtiian looked up suddenly, right at her. “There is Jaelle,” he said. She could not reply, she was so astonished that he remembered her name. “Vasha, take her back to camp.”
Thus he ended the argument.
Vassily said one more thing to him, still angry, but Bakhtiian simply turned away and began conferring with someone else. Lady Jadranka had retired to her chamber, and the Mircassian envoy had gone upstairs with Princess Rusudani, her one loyal servant.
“I’m sorry,” said Prince Vassily. “That was all very sudden.”
Jaelle did not dare venture an opinion. He shrugged, led her out of the hall, and commandeered horses. Preoccupied, he did not speak. Ten jaran soldiers escorted them back to camp. There, dismounting, she found to her surprise that someone was waiting for her.
“Jaelle!” Katerina ran to her and hugged her for a long time. No one seemed to think her affection strange. “Come with me. Do come.” She tugged on Jaelle’s arm. “Stefan has paced a new ditch in the ground, he’s been so worried, wondering where you are. Of course you can come, too, Vasha. What a stupid question.” She asked her cousin something in khush, but he shook his head stubbornly and refused to answer.
Stefan was waiting. Somewhere in the tangle of tents that made up the camp they found him, working under an awning that sheltered injured soldiers. He wore clean clothes, the red and black of a jaran rider, and despite his youth he stitched up a wound with the confidence of a master healer, examined an unconscious man and shook his head with a frown, discussed a third case with an older man who seemed to defer to his judgment.
“You see,” said Katerina, “Stefan will make you a fine husband. I don’t expect he’ll ever do much fighting. He’s far too valuable for that. He will be as great a healer as his grandfather Niko Sibirin is. Or no, Aunt Tess said that Niko died, didn’t she? As his grandfather was. Not every man is so gifted by the gods.”
Jaelle suddenly wondered if her face was clean, her hair in place. She became aware that her skirts were muddy, and her hands needed washing.
Stefan looked up and saw her. Before, his expression had been fittingly sober. Now, his face creased with a smile, with more than a smile, and Jaelle felt a rush of something—she did not know what it was, a melting, a sudden fire washing over her, a giddy numbness that fell away into sharp joy. And was in an instant erased by agony.
“Marry me?” she stammered.
“He has been talking of nothing else since we were freed,” said Vassily, looking sour as he said it.
Stefan wiped his hands off in a bucket, dried them, and hurried toward them. He practically bled happiness into the air.
“I can’t marry,” Jaelle gasped. She began to cry. “I can never marry. I have sinned, and God will never forgive me. Please. Take me away.”
Stefan halted, looking hurt and perplexed, and that only made Jaelle cry the more. Finally, having mercy on her, Katerina led her away and soon enough she was enveloped in the dark tomb of a tent.
“But why?” Katerina demanded. “Why can’t you marry him? He’ll just mark you anyway. How can you object?”
“He must not. You must not let him be stained with my sin.”
“But how—?”
Jaelle wiped her eyes dry. It did no good to cry. “I will tell you. Then you will understand. You will yourself shun me, but I beg you not to hate me. I will go back to the caravan trade. That is the price I pay for my sin.”
“What is a sin?” Katerina demanded. “You khaja make no sense to me.” She said it fiercely, grown out of fresh pain.
Jaelle bowed her head. She could not bear to speak, but it must be spoken. It was time to confess. “I killed my baby child,” she said, because it was easiest to start with the bare truth. She heard Katerina gasp, but she went doggedly on, determined to have it all out. “I was taken by men at the mines, many times, even before my courses began. I ran away when I realized that I had become pregnant, but life was worse on the streets. That town was called Orontis. The birth was hard, but the baby lived, though it was a tiny thing, so weak it could barely suckle. Then one day Kamarnos—he was a merchant—saw me. He saw others first, other women, he was haggling for a woman to be his companion all the way north to Parkilnous. In those days I didn’t know how far that was, I only knew that it was away, that I would be fed every day and have a dry bed to lie in. But he wanted a woman who had no child to burden her. He saw me. He thought I was pretty, through the rags and the dirt. He asked me. Ah, Lady, what was I to do? The child was sickly. She might not even have survived the month. That is what I told myself. I had no milk for her anyway. I wanted to live. I pinched her nose and mouth closed with my fingers, until she stopped breathing. It took only a moment. She just slipped away. God will never forgive me.”
She fell silent. She was too tired to weep. She understood now that God was punishing her, by letting her glimpse safety but keeping it forever out of her reach.
“There was no one who would foster the baby?”
That surprised a harsh laugh from Jaelle. “No one wants a baby like that. At the mines, sickly babies were exposed on the hillside. No one wanted me. Why should they want a runaway slave’s child? Why would they want a sick baby that would never be strong enough to work for them? Who would raise it? Feed it? You jaran are very strange.” She said it bitterly. “My own mother stood by and watched while I was sold off to the mines. I had no mother, like you do, to watch over me. I had no tribe to care what happened to me, to send an army to rescue me. Only the Lady’s mercy kept me alive in the mines at all. If only I had prayed to her more earnestly, I would never have gotten pregnant there.”
“Katya?” That was Prince Vassily, from outside, sounding unsure.
“What is it?”
“Stefan is here with me. He wants to see Jaelle.”
“Come back later,” said Katerina. She put a hand on Jaelle’s shoulder. “Do you love Stefan? Do you wish to marry him?”
“He won’t wish to marry me, not after he knows what I did.”
“It is not a man’s right to judge. If you wish to marry him, then you must let my grandmother and his grandmother judge. How long ago did this happen?”
&nb
sp; “I don’t know. Five years ago? Seven?”
“How old were you?” Katerina sounded appalled, and Jaelle shrank away from her touch, aware that she must not allow her affection for Katerina, and Katerina’s for her, to come between them and God’s judgment.
“I don’t know. Ten years old. Twelve. Thirteen, perhaps. That is the usual age for a girl to begin her courses, isn’t it?”
“Gods. You khaja are savages. And there was no child after that? After that one?”
I found out there were herbs that stop a woman from conceiving. Once I thought I got with child, so I took the seeds of the torise plant and was sick for weeks. If there was a child, it never came out. Perhaps God made me barren. It would be just.”
“What about this Lady, this Pilgrim, you speak of? Does she intend to punish you, too?”
“You must not speak of God and Our Lady that way.” Jaelle made the sign of severing, clutching her talisman knife in one hand. “It was just. Surely you must think so, too, Katerina.”
“It is true that it is a terrible act to kill a baby. But Aunt Tess says that our army has killed children simply by existing, by conquering and laying lands waste, by leaving children no food to eat over the winter. So is what you did worse than that? I don’t know. I killed Prince Janos, and I could have granted him mercy. Who am I to judge you?”
“You killed Prince Janos? But Lady Jadranka said that Princess Rusudani killed him.”
“Rusudani betrayed him. It was my hand that killed him.”
“I did not know you hated him so much.”
“I did not hate him,” said Katerina, her voice trembling for the first time. “But I had sworn that he would die for what he did to me. And because I swore before the gods, I had no choice.”
“I had no choice,” whispered Jaelle. “I would have died, too, if Kamarnos had not hired me. That is the truth. I chose to let the baby die so that I could live.”