‘You are well, lady?’ His gentle face studied her with concern.
‘I’m unable to sleep,’ she told him stiffly.
He nodded. ‘It is hard, away from home, away from friends. It will be easier.’
She wondered suddenly if he was talking as much about himself as her. Thilak’s men must come from somewhere, of course, must have homes that weren’t Winter’s Hammer. She hadn’t thought that In Su might feel as lonely as she.
‘You’re probably right,’ she told him. ‘And I have one friend here, don’t I?’
He blushed, lowered his eyes and nodded and she felt only a little shame at her manipulation. If he wasn’t her friend, he was the nearest she had in this place.
‘Why are you here, lady?’ he asked.
‘I want to talk to the prisoners.’ She only realised it was true as she said it.
She thought he would deny her – he was still Thilak’s man, after all – but he nodded as if her request made perfect sense. ‘Jinn said you would come.’
‘He did?’
‘He wants to speak to you, lady. You should listen.’
‘Has he been speaking with you?’ she asked.
He hesitated, and she realised that he feared she’d drawn him into self-incrimination. She smiled to reassure him as he remained silent, shuffling from foot to foot in the filthy straw. Then he looked up and said, ‘You should hear his words,’ before stepping aside to let her pass.
‘Is it safe?’ She’d meant to question whether the prisoners might attack her, but perhaps she was also asking about the mere act of listening.
‘I will be watching,’ In Su said.
The cell door creaked as she opened it. It had been pitch dark inside and the two prisoners blinked at the light of her lantern when she hung it on its hook. They’d been given no seats and no beds. The boy was sitting against the wall while the mother had laid herself out on the floor, face staring blankly at the ceiling as she shivered. They looked thinner than when she’d last seen them, and she wondered if they’d been fed. The woman’s eyes were dull and uninterested as they swept over her. Hopeless, she supposed.
But Jinn smiled and pushed himself to his feet. There was a clatter of metal and she realised that both he and his mother had been chained to the wall. The wide manacles looked obscene against his narrow young wrists. His cheeks were sunken and the dark shadows under his green eyes suggested he hadn’t slept much, but there wasn’t a hint of fear or uncertainty in his face.
‘I knew you’d visit me, Lady Nethmi. You saw me preach at Smiler’s Fair. You know I spoke the truth.’
Her stomach quivered with alarm. ‘How could you possibly know I was there? There were – I mean there must have been – thousands who came to see you.’
‘He has powers,’ the woman, Vordanna, said. ‘Yron gives him visions.’ She rolled to a sitting position, arms clasped round her knees. Her eyes were more alert but her face was pouring with sweat despite the chill and Nethmi wondered just how sick she was.
‘I guessed,’ Jinn said. ‘You seemed like a curious woman.’
His mother shot him a dismayed look, but Nethmi laughed with relief. ‘I see. It’s all just a trick then, a way to charm coin out of the gullible.’
‘I didn’t say that. Yron’s heir gave me the gift of understanding. I read your face when your husband brought you here, and I knew it wasn’t the first time you’d seen me. Are you gonna deny it?’
She thought it safest not to answer at all. ‘You call him Yron’s heir,’ she said instead, ‘but you claimed he was King Nayan’s child. You do know that King Nayan has no son, don’t you? He has no children at all. His wife died years ago and he never took another. Prince Gayan, his sister’s son, is to inherit the Oak Wheel, if the shiplords let him. There’s already talk of a succession battle if the boy’s too young when Nayan dies.’ She snapped her mouth shut, suddenly aware of how much she was saying. Her words would sound like treason in the wrong ears, but there was something about Jinn that invited confidence.
‘Nayan does have a son,’ he said. ‘He was told the boy would grow into the man who’d kill him. So he ordered his own child murdered the moment he was born.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard that kind of story before: the self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s just a cautionary tale told to children. Don’t try to wriggle your way out of your destiny, you’ll only wedge yourself tighter into the hole you’re trying to escape.’
Jinn cocked his head, studying her. ‘Why have you come to see me?’
‘You tell me. You’re the one with mystical powers. Or so you say.’
‘The power’s not mine, Lady Nethmi. I’m just a servant. But there’s one coming who’s greater than all of us. I reckon that’s why you’re here, because you want to believe he’s out there. You want to believe there’s someone who can help you. I can see you ain’t happy. That’s as plain as the day. And people who ain’t happy, they often hope there’ll be help along for them. But that’s nonsense. It’s foolish nonsense, because you’ll just keep on believing it and keep on letting your life pass, one miserable hour at a time.’
‘If you’re trying to sell this lost prince to me, you need to work on your patter.’ She chuckled, but it was forced.
His face remained solemn, his green eyes intense. ‘You need to help yourself. Yron’s heir ain’t gonna come riding across that snow out there, swerving round them black rocks to your rescue. We’ve gotta serve him. And before we can do that, we’ve gotta get our own wagons in order.’
He slumped back, resting against the wall as if the speech had exhausted him. It was ridiculous, of course. He hadn’t said anything she didn’t already know. She needed to help herself? Of course she did. No one else would do it. And yet, maybe she had been waiting for something to happen, rather than being the one to make it happen.
She leaned forward, suddenly full of questions, only to see Jinn’s eyes flick over her shoulder and belatedly remind her that In Su might not be the only guard outside. ‘That’s all I needed to hear,’ she said instead, keeping her tone neutral, almost cold.
He nodded wearily, as if in response to the thanks she hadn’t given him.
The next evening she returned to the library. She was displeased to find Sang Ki there, still sitting in the same chair, his rolls of fat spilling over its edges. She wondered if he ever moved.
‘A fellow intellectual!’ he said with apparent delight when he saw her. ‘I hoped as much when I first saw you here. How marvellous. What nugget of knowledge are you seeking today?’
‘Nothing in particular,’ she told him.
His clever eyes watched her as she scanned the shelves. She looked at the scrolls from the Fourteen Tribes first, unrolling some to read. But the text was incomprehensible and the few pictures she found pedestrian and dull: an illustration of the workings of a crossbow, pictures of the leaves of a selection of flowers, a diagram showing how iron ore was smelted.
She put the scroll back and heard Sang Ki clearing his throat behind her. ‘A scholar too, I see. I had no idea you could read the tongue of my mother’s people.’
‘I can’t.’ She didn’t bother to turn and see his smirk. The next shelf along contained books in teetering piles. When she opened them she saw that they were marked with a series of lines, horizontal and vertical, broader at the tip, like no letters she knew. She assumed it must be writing but it wasn’t a language she’d ever seen before. She put them back and moved on.
The next shelf held more familiar books, their names written on their spines.
‘My father’s collection is impressive, is it not?’ Sang Ki said. ‘It was the work of a lifetime. Several of them, in fact. He inherited it from his father, who had it from his. I imagine your own father’s library was not as extensive, being a second son as he was.’
Nethmi turned to face him. ‘Indeed, my father inherited nothing. Everything he had he won for himself.’
She hoped her words would sting, but Sang Ki just smiled a
nd touched his finger to his forehead as if acknowledging a point in a duel. She frowned and turned back to the books.
It was an impressive collection. She pulled out a volume called The Histories and found that it described the rise of Ashane the Founder from a petty warlord to ruler of his own realm in the thirty-ninth year of the new calendar. The ink was faded and the pages smelled faintly of mould, but the few illustrations were jewel-bright. She smiled to see one of them showing the legend she’d been told as a child: that Ashane had made his armsmen sit on the carrion eggs he’d stolen from the Great Nothing to keep them warm on the long journey south.
‘If you’re looking for information on our current monarch, you’ll find the biography by Calil at the far right of the second shelf very useful.’
‘Why would I be looking for that?’ Nethmi asked stiffly.
‘Because you’ve been speaking to our guests down in the prison, of course.’ She couldn’t control her guilty start and Sang Ki laughed. ‘My father’s soldiers are very loyal, Lady Nethmi. But even if they hadn’t told me, I could have guessed. Our prisoners are just too wonderfully fascinating. And now you want to know if anything that remarkable boy told you is true.’
She turned away from the bookshelf and took the armchair opposite him. It was too large for her, leaving her feet dangling above the floor and her body sunk into its cushions. They looked an absurd pair, she felt sure: she so small she was swallowed by her chair and he appearing to be in the process of absorbing his. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Is what Jinn told me true?’
‘That King Nayan has a lost son?’
She nodded.
‘As a matter of fact, it is.’ He grinned at her surprised expression, his brown eyes bright with pleasure. ‘It’s a rather lurid tale. Would you like to hear it?’
In that moment she almost liked him. It occurred to her that if they’d met in other circumstances, they might have been friends. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘The more lurid the better.’
‘Very well, then. A long time ago, in the year 323, when I was barely walking and you were but a young girl, a mage came to see our King, as mages are wont to do in such tales. She’d travelled all the way from Mirror Town, through the Silent Sands, across the Rune Waste and over the mountains to reach us. And do you know why she came?’
‘If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked you to tell me the story.’
He laughed. ‘She had a prophesy for our King, you see. She told him his wife would soon be with child, and that the child would grow into a great man.’
‘He was a king’s heir. Of course he’d be a great man. He’d be a king.’
‘You have uncovered the very kernel of the matter. King Nayan thought little of the prophecy, but it was only the first. One by one, all the truthtellers of the realm came to him. They’d been sent dreams, they told him, god-dreams that left them pale and shaking. The dreams foretold that King Nayan’s unborn son would grow into the man who’d kill him.’
‘And Nayan believed them?’
Sang Ki shrugged. ‘King Tanvir didn’t believe the truthtellers who warned him he must wear black to conquer the Black Heights, and he died in the mountains your father eventually won for the Oak Wheel. Is it any wonder his son gave a prophecy of his own death the benefit of the doubt? And he did travel to the Feathered Lake to check the omens for himself.’
‘They agreed, I suppose?’
‘It was hard to tell. Every single bird on the lake had died. They say you could smell the stench of rotting flesh for miles around. The mage was the only opposing voice. She insisted the King’s son would be a god made flesh, and that he’d do wonderful things. But naturally Nayan didn’t care how wonderful his son’s deeds might be, if one of them included killing him. So he locked his wife up and gave his most loyal carrion riders orders to kill the child the instant it popped out. The queen, of course, was less than keen on this plan. She cut the child out of her own body a month before it was due to be born, and sent it away from Ashfall clasped in the trunk of a flying mammoth.’
‘A flying mammoth? And this is a tale I’m supposed to believe?’
‘Well, it may have grown in the telling. But it’s certainly true that Nayan put it about that his son was dead. He must have suspected the infant had survived, though. He sent out troops and spies to look for the baby, in his own lands and elsewhere, but the child was never found. And that, it seemed, was that. Except that certain people, our prisoners among them, built up a little legend around the boy. The lost prince, Yron’s heir: a very convenient object for veneration, as he was never likely to be found or to tell his followers what he wanted them to do. The best kind of deity, I imagine – a god who leaves one entirely alone.’
It seemed extraordinary to Nethmi that King Nayan could have fathered a child she’d never heard of, and not only fathered him but condemned him to die. Why hadn’t her own father told her? He must have known. But she supposed by the time she was old enough to be told, the boy must have been presumed dead. Except … there was something about the smug expression on Sang Ki’s face. ‘He’s been found, hasn’t he?’
‘He has indeed. Less than a month past in a tiny village in the White Heights, not terribly far from here.’
‘But Jinn didn’t mention that,’ Nethmi said slowly. ‘He doesn’t know.’
‘Interesting, isn’t it, that our little preacher should be ignorant of perhaps the most important fact about his god?’
So Jinn was a charlatan. Of course he was a charlatan. But Nethmi still felt a tug of doubt. She remembered the boy’s bright green eyes, and the compassionate way he’d looked at her. She wanted to believe him. Because if he was right, there was some hope for her.
‘Your fate is bound up with his,’ Sang Ki said mockingly. He’d made his voice high and melodic, an almost perfect imitation of Jinn’s. ‘Yron’s heir is your destiny. Don’t look so surprised, he told me exactly the same thing. No doubt he tells everyone. But our lost prince is currently being pursued by half King Nayan’s army and will shortly be hanging from a gallows for the crows to eat. If I were you, I’d make very certain that your fate isn’t bound up with his.’
Later that night, she woke to a light tapping on her bedroom door. At first she thought it must be Thilak claiming his conjugal privileges. But of course her husband would never be so tentative. The knock came again and before she could answer it, the door swung open and a small shadow slipped inside. Some instinct stopped her calling out and instead she fumbled for a flint and struck a light in the wick of her bedside lamp.
It was Jinn. It troubled her that she’d known it would be. As he shut the door carefully behind him she sat up, clutching the bedclothes round her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t normally enter a lady’s bedchamber without permission.’
It was so absurd she couldn’t help laughing, but the laughter quickly withered in her throat as she rose from the bed. ‘What are you doing here? How did you get out?’
‘In Su freed me. I told him that’s what you would have wanted.’
His brazenness almost surprised another laugh from her, but she kept her face stern as she said, ‘You were wrong. Now I suggest you leave before anyone realises you’re gone or before I come to my senses and raise the alarm. And you’d best take your mother with you. Where is she?’
‘Waiting with In Su by the door.’
‘Then use it and get out.’
‘I wish we could, Lady Nethmi. We’ve found the entrance to your husband’s private dock, but it’s locked and I don’t have the key. Nor does In Su.’
‘Neither do I –’ she started. Then a memory of her wedding returned to her. I give you the keys to my home as I give you the keys to my heart. Jinn knew that, of course he did – that’s why he’d come to her. That was probably why he’d said all those things he said to her.
She distrusted the helpless look he gave her. ‘Please, we need your help. You were meant to help us. I’ve seen it.’
‘Really?
And how clear are your visions? How clear can they be, if you didn’t even see that this lost prince of yours has finally been found?’
She enjoyed the expression of unfeigned shock on his face. There was a long pause before he asked, ‘Who found him, Lady Nethmi?’
‘I don’t know, but Sang Ki assures me the King’s men are on his trail. Shouldn’t you know? I would have thought you’d be the first person Yron’s heir would contact, as you’re such an admirer of his.’
‘I don’t know why I didn’t know. Maybe you were meant to be the one to give me the news. I told you: your fate is bound with his.’
‘Really? The way that Sang Ki’s is?’
She expected at least a flicker of guilt, but he was calm again, certainty restored. ‘Both of you. When they locked me and Mamma up, I knew there had to be a reason for it. Please. If he’s been found I have to go to him. He needs me and I need you.’
‘No, I can’t risk it. And I don’t trust you. How can I? You’re sentenced to death. You’d say whatever it took to escape.’
‘You’re wrong.’ He reached out to clasp her hands, his own fingers warm and a little damp against hers. They froze that way for a moment, then jumped apart as a loud knock rattled the door on its hinges. There was no hesitation this time; this was someone who knew he had the right to enter.
‘Under the bed!’ Nethmi hissed. ‘Don’t argue – it’s my husband.’
Jinn obeyed her, but his legs were still visible as Thilak entered.
‘My lord,’ she said loudly, and caught his eyes before he could look downward while Jinn wriggled out of sight.
Thilak was wearing a fur-trimmed gown and, as he strode towards her, the fabric parted and she saw his naked legs beneath. To her disgust, his member already stood proud, tenting the material. She knew why he’d come. If she listened very closely, she could hear Jinn’s soft breathing from beneath the bed. The thought of having congress with Thilak while he lay below them horrified her. Worse, it humiliated her. She couldn’t bear the boy to know how her husband used her.
Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods Page 19