by Glenda Larke
‘Several things,’ I said. ‘You can be as arbitrary as you like with me, but Brand deserves better. A fair hearing. After all, anything else smacks too much of Tyrans, does it not?’
‘In matters of treason, it is the will of the Mirager that prevails,’ he said stiffly.
‘Brand can hardly be said to have committed treason. He is not Kardi,’ I snapped. ‘You know Brand cannot lie to you. See to it the Mirager is fair. It is your duty as one of the Magoroth, surely.’
‘What else?’
‘I would like to know my fate.’
‘Most of the Magor are pressing for your execution. But we Magoroth have voted to allow the Mirager to take the ultimate decision by himself. You are his sister, after all. Besides, you are—unfortunately—his heir, which means it is difficult to subject you to the ordinary processes of Magor law anyway. Although there are many who feel we shouldn’t bother with niceties like that.’
‘I would like to see him.’
‘He does not want to see you.’
‘Do I get no opportunity to defend myself?’
‘That is also the Mirager’s decision.’
‘Rough justice, eh?’
His lips tightened, but he said nothing.
I breathed in, deeply. I had made up my mind. It was time to make irrevocable my decision on whether I was Tyranian or Kardi. Time to bring an end to lies, to deceit, to keeping my options open. And yet, it was so hard to say the next words, to discard publicly the values of a lifetime and replace them with other principles. Ligea Gayed was difficult to kill.
‘Korden,’ I began, ‘when I was still in Tyrans I heard of a plan to attack the Mirage from the west. The legion known as the Stalwarts was to be sent across the Alps—’
He laughed and his scorn swirled around him. ‘What is this, some kind of joke? Next, you’ll be telling me they intend to bring their gorclaks across the peaks. The mountains are impassable.’
‘The plan is a serious one. Taking into account the difficulties of the terrain, the amount of preparation involved, and considering the seasons, I estimate the forces will arrive in less than three months’ time. A whole legion; three thousand on foot perhaps, and another seven hundred mounted Stalwarts, on gorclak.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. No such force could ever cross the Alps!’
‘Your parents’ generation underestimated Tyrans. Don’t make the same mistake. Especially not of the Stalwarts.’ I frowned, baffled by the intensity of his disbelief. ‘You know the truth when you hear it. Why, then, should you doubt me?’
He remained contemptuous and angry. ‘Believe me, we have talked about little else lately. We have come to the conclusion that you must be able to do what we cannot: hide a lie. How else could you have walked among us concealing your identity so cleverly? Temellin even slept with you without sensing your duplicity! You are an enormous danger to us. You represent something we always felt was impossible: a liar in our midst.’
I stared at him, suddenly aware of another emotion, inadequately concealed, lingering around him. Korden was in a state of shock.
I tried to explain. ‘I didn’t lie to any of you. I just didn’t tell all the story. There’s a difference. You can see that, can’t you?’
But he couldn’t. The Magor not only didn’t lie, they didn’t try to deceive. And the ordinary Kardi, awed by the reputation of the Magor, would never have tried, either. What I had done was unthinkable, and it had left them reeling. Their only explanation was that I was able to conceal lies; therefore nothing I said could be automatically believed.
He said finally, ‘I can’t possibly imagine what you hope to gain by telling this tale about the Stalwarts.’
‘Tell Temellin. And tell him I must see him.’
‘I’ll tell him. But don’t wait up.’
He turned on his heel and left.
Temellin did not come to see me until the next day. He was not alone; Brand was with him.
Brand entered first, his expression as unreadable as ever. He didn’t speak, but he came up to me and raised the back of his hand to my cheek in an intimate gesture of caring far more moving than any kiss would have been. I looked away from him to Temellin. I sensed a tinge of shame and uncertainty about the Mirager as he watched the two of us.
He did not greet me. He said flatly, ‘You wanted to see me?’ and then walked across the room, avoiding eight or nine fish swimming around in an expanse of apparently unconfined water at head-height, to stand with his back to the hole in the wall.
From where I stood he was a silhouette, rigid and forbidding. He continued, ‘You have an unlikely tale about a Stalwart invasion of the Mirage. I asked Aemid what she knew about it. She said, not unexpectedly, that she had never heard of it. So now I’m going to ask Brand, because if there is such a thing planned, I’m sure you would have told him. Tell me what you know about it, Brand—and remember I can detect lies.’
Brand looked at me helplessly, his anger at Temellin growing.
I intervened. ‘He knows nothing.’
‘She didn’t tell me everything. Only those things where she thought my advice would be useful,’ Brand said.
Temellin looked unconvinced. ‘That’s not what Aemid says. She says Ligea always asked your advice.’ He sighed. ‘You’re loyal, I’ll say that for you, Brand. What I can’t understand is why. She’d put a slave collar around your neck again the moment she had the chance.’
‘Ligea freed me before we ever came to the Mirage. She has paid me for every year of my service to her or to her father. I give my loyalty to her because she is worthy of it, not because I am ordered to do so. In fact, she has been asking me to leave her, to seek a life of my own.’
Temellin looked at him, astonished. ‘Then why didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t want to leave, that’s why. And I’m glad I didn’t. Ligea’s damned lucky she didn’t die in the dining hall with your sodding sword in her heart—how could you do that to a woman who gave you all the love she had to give? She would have died for you half a dozen times over, but you couldn’t trust her, could you?’ His voice was so thick with contempt he could scarcely speak. ‘When I think of the way she felt about you—’
‘It seems she has fooled you just as she fooled us.’
‘Ligea and I were brought up together. There’s nothing I don’t know about the way she thinks. She was raised by men who tried to twist her into a cold-blooded instrument of their revenge. They tried, but they didn’t succeed, because she could never quite reconcile what they tried to make of her with what she knew herself to be. They tried to sharpen her into a ruthless killer; instead, she made torture obsolete in the Cages of Tyr. How could you have loved her, and not sensed her capacity for loving?’
‘You’re the one who is mole-blind—’
Brand shook his head, his stare in Temellin’s direction unforgiving. ‘I remember the day I arrived at General Gayed’s house in Tyr. He’d just bought me, cheap, at a slave auction. I was twelve years old, a dirty, skinny, ill-fed boy who had spent two whole years on auction blocks, being passed from one foul slave dealer to another across the Exaltarchy. I’d been beaten, starved and abused in ways you probably haven’t even heard of. My parents were dead, my home and my inheritance stolen from me, my body used.’
He turned away from Temellin, apparently to look at the fish. I doubt he really saw them, though. ‘I remember seeing Ligea for the first time. I think Gayed had bought me as a sort of joke, to see what she’d do with me. I was hardly a quality slave. He’d got me from the docks in Tyr where they sell the dross of the slave trade. Most girls brought up the way Ligea was would have scorned me, sent me to be the middenboy in the stables. She looked me over and I could see her anger growing. But she wasn’t angry at me, or even at her father.
‘“Who beat you like that?” she asked. It was a hard question to answer—I’d been beaten so many times—but I gave her the name of the slaver who’d inflicted the last and most vicious beating. I never spoke
of it again, and neither did she, but ten years later, when she had the means to do so, she had that man banned from the slave trade and his assets impounded by the State for tax evasion.
‘She was ten years old when she saw me for the first time. She could have seen the dirt, the sullen face, the ugliness of an undernourished body—but she didn’t. She saw only the abuse. And hated it.
‘I was her slave for eighteen years before she freed me. I never felt less than her friend, for all that she maintained the conventions of a slave-owner relationship. I know that as a compeer she’s killed people, condemned others to a lifetime in the Cages of Tyr, but I’ve never known her to be less than fair, or to harm anyone who wasn’t a criminal. Her special abilities saved as many people from torture or wrongful imprisonment or execution as condemned them to such.’
He looked across at Temellin. ‘But what’s the use in talking to you—you’ve made up your mind, haven’t you? Condemned her on the word of your bitch-wife and a prematurely old nurse who hadn’t the spine to tell her charge the truth about herself when she was a child. You aren’t fit to lead a nation, Temellin. Even with all your powers you still don’t recognise the truth when the smell of it is in your nostrils. Vortexdamn you, you had everything I would have given the world for, and you tried to kill her. If I were free, I’d run a sword through your innards sooner than I’d look on your face again.’ He turned his back and went to stand by the door, his dismissal of his jailer as rudely abrupt as he knew how to make it.
And Temellin accepted the dismissal. He called someone to come and escort the Altani back to his room.
I hoped Brand understood the look I gave him as he left. It was the only way I had to say thank you. He’d been my slave, and he could still defend me. I had never been so humbled.
It was hard to be alone with Temellin.
I opted to keep the conversation away from the personal and said, ‘The Stalwarts are coming. And that’s the truth. You are supposed to be able to distinguish a lie when you hear it.’
‘Can I, though, with you? If Brand had known about them, I would have believed you. But he didn’t. And why, if you had changed your loyalties, did you not tell me of this invasion before? You would take an oath to serve Kardiastan, and yet you wouldn’t mention an intended attack on the country; worse still, on this part of it—the Mirage? Everything that you’ve done, Shirin, begs to make me wonder about your honesty. It begs me to wonder if you can do what others can’t, and disguise your lies in the same way we can all hide our emotions.’ He sounded rational and unemotional, but I could feel his contempt. And his pain. ‘There was one other person who deceived us with his lies. We don’t know who it was, but we do know it was one of us. A Magoroth. We trusted, because we didn’t believe we could be deceived. And he brought Tyranian legionnaires into the Shimmer Feast, and killed our parents, yours and mine, and all our cousins, all the babies in the nursery and our whole way of life. I can never risk that happening again. Never.’
His resolution, as hard as the iron in his voice, was thick in the air about him, but so was his underlying horror. He believed he had come close to another such abomination occurring because of me. And he was right. I had come to the Mirage with the intention to betray them all. And what then? Would I have stood by and watched while the legionnaires killed babies, and thought it a job well done? Dear Goddess, what had I been?
I ripped away all the covers from my inner mind, let him sense whatever he wanted, bared myself to him as I had never done to anyone before. Even so, the words did not come easily. ‘Temel, I was too ashamed to tell you the truth. Ashamed of what I had been. Ashamed of the role I played in strengthening the Exaltarchy. And I was afraid you would despise me, reject me. I was going to tell you eventually—I just wanted you all to know me better first. It was what I wanted to tell you about, the day you arrived back from Sandmurram. I knew I could not delay any longer.’ Everything I said sounded weak to my ears. Ridiculous. I had been a Brotherhood Compeer, and here I was describing the doubts and frailties more appropriate to an adolescent girl. Yet it was the truth. It was just that loving him had rendered me an idiot.
He snorted. ‘You knew you couldn’t delay because you were afraid Pinar might find out about you in Madrinya. Perhaps you even guessed she had gone there expressly to investigate you.’
‘Perhaps. I was a coward, Temellin. I didn’t really want you to know, so I kept on postponing the telling.’
He put his head to one side and looked at me. ‘Do you know,’ he said finally, ‘I have a great deal of trouble believing that. If there was ever anything that impressed me, it was—is—your courage.’
‘There are different kinds of fear, Temellin. I was afraid of losing your respect. Perhaps I was even afraid of having made the wrong choice. As long as I didn’t tell you about the Stalwarts, I could always change my mind…and betray you to Tyrans. I knew I loved you—loved you as a lover. But it was hard for me to believe in this love of mine for you. I was brought up to believe love was a weakness I must never allow. I was taught that to feel too much was a failing, not a virtue. It was even harder for me to acknowledge this respect I was learning for much that was Kardi; it went against everything I had ever been. You want the absolute truth? I had made my choice. I made it before I took the oath, and when I swore to uphold the Covenant, I meant it, but it wasn’t until I stood there in the dining room and knew you were going to kill me that I was certain I had made the right choice. In that moment, I knew it didn’t matter if I died—what mattered was you, and what you believed in. For the first time in my life, I cared more about someone else than I cared about myself.’
He looked down at the floor. ‘I wish I could believe you. But I can’t; on your own admission you were lying to us when we first met, and I had no inkling of it. Not even when I lay with you. You were very clever. No one I know could hide so much when cabochon to cabochon. Your lies are impossible to detect. How can I ever believe what you say now?’
‘But, Temel, I didn’t lie to you! I never lied to you. I just—just didn’t tell you the whole truth. I let you jump to conclusions. There’s a difference. Temellin, please—look into me now. You must be able to sense my truth.’
‘How can I be sure? I doubt everything now! I doubt every relationship I’ve ever had because of what you have done. I even look at my friends with suspicion, and wonder if they deceive me as you did. I look at Korden, and wonder if one day he’ll stab me in the back because he wants to be the Mirager. I look at my wife and wonder if I dare tell her my secrets. You’ve made me doubt myself. Doubt my fitness to lead this land and these people.’
We stared at each other. I choked on the lump in my throat, aware of the damage I had done. Useless to say I hadn’t meant it.
He continued, ‘And as for this supposed invasion over the Alps, Aemid says you have a lover among the Stalwarts. Someone you have been bedding for years. She says anything you knew about the Stalwarts would have come from him, so if there was an invasion, he would probably be part of it. But she also says you would never betray this man; you are too close. She says you would never deliberately endanger his life.’
‘Do you think that comes easily to me?’ I asked and allowed him to feel my bitterness. ‘I had to make a choice between Kardiastan and Tyrans, and I made it. Either way a man…a man I care about is endangered. I chose you and Kardiastan rather than Favonius and Tyrans. I stand by that choice, although if Favonius dies, his death will haunt me. He is a brave man, and he has been a good friend.’
‘Betrayal comes easy to you, it seems.’
I drew a sharp breath at the hurt in that. ‘You can’t have it both ways, Temellin. Either I am betraying you or I am betraying Favonius. It can’t be both. To one of you I am true. To you—my brother.’ I stood up and went to go to him, but he held up his hands as if to fend off my approach and I stopped. ‘You still don’t believe me, do you? Not a word of it—’
‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘I don’t believe you.
You’re my sister, and just the thought of what was done to you rasps my soul. The bastards took a child and corrupted her. That was the little Shirin I remember. They bent her and used her and probably laughed at her behind her back while they did it. But all that doesn’t make me trust you now. I can’t see anything of her in you. She was sweet and trusting and kind.’ He folded his arms, his whole stance one of rejection. ‘And now I am left with a puzzling question. Just why do you want us to believe in this Stalwart invasion?’
I didn’t answer. What could I have said?
‘There must be a good reason. It’s a diversion of some sort, isn’t it? You want us to worry about the wrong place, or the wrong kind of danger. What is it the Brotherhood really has planned for us, Legata? I’ve heard enough about them to know they are masters of deviousness, of deception, of plots and counterplots. And this, I know, must be one such. You’re General Gayed’s daughter and Rathrox Ligatan’s apprentice, and Aemid says she believes you were sent here at the express order of Exaltarch Bator Korbus. All three men were once humiliated at the hands of Kardiastan. You came as the lance blade of their revenge, Shirin. Did they know when they took you that you were my sister? They did, didn’t they! Were you to gain the trust of us all, then kill me and take over as Mirager? Is that what you are trying to hide from us with this fanciful tale of the Stalwarts crossing the Alps, a tale you conveniently tell only when your main deception is uncovered?’
I still didn’t speak; I couldn’t think of any words to convince him of the truth.
A fleeting look of anguish crossed his face. ‘Ah, Shirin, Shirin—it hurts so much to look at you, to see what they made of you. It could so easily have been…different. When Solad sent the Ten to the Mirage, I cried because they didn’t include you. “Can’t you make it eleven?” I asked. Shirin, we shouldn’t be standing here like this, as enemies. We should be husband and wife with children playing at our feet. You’ve lived among us, you’ve seen what sort of people we are—can’t you be one of us now?’ He must have known the question was ridiculous. It was exactly what I did want, and exactly what his disbelief wouldn’t allow him to grant.