"So I've been told time and again."
"If you like," Sire Dagon said, "you could see for yourself, with your own eyes. We have permission from the League Council to offer you transport across to meet with them. Nothing would impress upon the Lothan Aklun the strength of our partnership like seeing you stand beside us."
Corinn looked between both men, trying to read them while not betraying how shocked she was by the proposal. In all the years of the quota trade, no Akaran had met with the Lothan Aklun. The league had guarded their exclusivity jealously. If this offer was genuine, they must really be worried. "I cannot leave Acacia right now," she eventually said, "but I will send my brother, Prince Dariel, with a message from me to the Lothan Aklun. He should be returning to Acacia in a few days. He will appease them and then get on with business."
She could not read whether or not they were happy with this pronouncement, but for them being hard to read was as essential to life as breathing. Rising, she dismissed them formally, promising to sort out the details with them in the coming days.
Alone once more a few minutes later, the queen again stood over her desk, trying to recall each word spoken and the gestures that accompanied them. Of course, the leaguemen had not told her everything. They would never do so anyway, but they likely hid some aspects of the affair that she would do better to know about. She would have Rialus send out his ears, his rats, to see what more they could learn. As for her brother, perhaps he really should accompany them. There were surely things to be gained. It was an opportunity best grasped before the league found a way to squirm out of it.
She heard somebody enter the room. She felt a flare of annoyance, but it vanished just as quickly. She knew-from the rapidity of his steps and the lack of a whistle to announce him-exactly who it was before he had begun speaking.
"Mother, watch this," a child's voice said. "See what I've learned."
Corinn straightened, looked up, and watched her son, Aaden, dash into the room. He carried a wooden training sword, a small, light version designed for children. Appropriate, for a child of eight was what he was.
"Watch," he ordered. "I'll do the first part of the First Form."
Without waiting for affirmation, he set his legs and brought the sword to ready position. He focused on the imagined foe standing before him. Corinn grinned. Her little Edifus at Carni, already imagining carnage. He had never known a day of hardship in his life, and yet he already hungered for conflict.
The boy moved with the awkward, intense concentration of the young. He stepped and swung, parried and turned on the balls of his feet. He wobbled a few times and corrected missteps on occasion, seeming so focused that he barely breathed through his tight lips. Watching him, his mother paid little attention to the Form itself or to his performance of it. She simply stared at him, amazed at the act of creation that had brought him to life. She had made this child! This complete, exquisite human being. How was it possible that she possessed the power to draw that small mouth and fill it with those perfect, tiny teeth? And his eyes… well, they were gray flecked with brown, almost too large for his face. But he would grow into them, and when he did, they would melt all whom he set them upon.
Had she done all this?
The boy spun in a sudden flourish, his long wavy hair sweeping around him. Corinn always felt she should have it cut short, keep it trim and close to his scalp, neat. But she never had the heart to order it done. In his infancy, she had held this boy and stroked the hairless crown of his head and run her fingers around the soft indentations in his skull and pressed her palm over the spots. He had seemed so vulnerable then. He had remained so for nearly a year before his hair began to thicken and lengthen. Part of her had feared the prospect of his having straw-blond Meinish hair, but as it grew in she loved the look and touch of it. How could she help but adore it? It was her son's hair.
True, he was Hanish Mein's son as well. The proof was there in the gold highlights of his brown hair, in the already-sharp line of his jaw, and in the shape of his mouth. His features often had something of Hanish's dreamy quality, a mirthful expression that had often disguised his true thoughts and intentions. Yes, he was Hanish's son. Corinn lived with awareness of that fact every day. But he would not bear that traitor's name. He was officially all Akaran; Corinn was all the parent he needed. If one sought to name his father-she had once snapped at an ambassador impertinent enough to question her on the child's parentage-look no further than the line of Akaran itself. That's what Aaden was! The child of Edifus and Tinhadin and every other Akaran who had ever walked across the Known World. He was named after Tinhadin's firstborn son. Corinn thought that appropriate and, hopefully, prophetic.
Corinn found it disturbing that there were no words to adequately describe the love a parent feels for a child. Before she'd become a mother she'd known so little. All those years she had understood nothing of what her mother and her father must have gone through raising four children. It rankled her to think how foolish she had once been. It was a strange, unpleasant emotion to follow so quickly on her adoration. It concerned her that she might, at some point in the future, look back from a place of greater wisdom and again find that the self she now was-at thirty-three, the mother of a single child, the widow to a lover who had planned her murder, a sister to two living siblings and one dead, an orphan who could no longer look to her parents-had been ignorant on some matter of import.
She kept such thoughts exclusively to herself, of course. To the outside world she was a display of statuesque certainty. And why shouldn't she be? She was the queen of a vast empire and the keeper of the most powerful knowledge the world had ever known. She owed it to her people to be certain in all her actions. Hesitation, deliberation, second thoughts: these were signs of weakness, the kind of flaws that kept her father from being a truly great king. The failings that temporarily lost the empire.
No matter, she thought. Acacia now had a great queen. The nation would thrive because of it; she promised it would. A queen to stand strong, a mother to raise the nation's next king. That was what Aaden was to be, even if the world was not yet as sure of it as she was. Born outside of an official marriage, Aaden was not guaranteed the throne. He could succeed her, but not without challenges and protests from other Agnate families, those who would rather she marry among them and bear a legitimate child. Also, any child of a marriage of her siblings-like Mena and Melio's-would step before Aaden in the line of succession. But there was no such child yet, and before long Corinn would surprise them all.
As focused as the young swordsman had been, when he reached the end of his memorized routine he dropped his role completely. His sword arm went limp at his side and he strolled toward his mother's desk, a look of sudden boredom on his face. "That's about all I've learned. I wanted to learn the end bit, but Thotan said I had to begin at the beginning."
"Aaden," the queen said, "that's wonderful. You'll be a fine swordsman someday. Better than Dariel, I'd wager. Better even than Mena!"
The child accepted the praise with a curt nod. He assured her that he already was a fine swordsman. No someday needed to qualify it. Still, something about the compliment rekindled his focus. He turned his attention back to the Form, determination etched in the lines of his forehead, the tip of his tongue pinched between his front teeth.
"I enjoyed watching that," Corinn said, "but you should go. I have matters to consider."
"All right," the boy said, and then he lowered his voice, went conspiratorial. "But show me something first. An animal. Make something I've never seen before. No! Make something that nobody has ever seen before."
Glancing around, Corinn said, "Aaden, you know I don't like to do such things here with so many eyes around."
"But there's nobody here," Aaden said, incongruously leaning in and whispering.
"Wait until we're back at Calfa Ven."
"Mother! Just one thing and then I'll go. It's been ages since you've shown me something. We're alone. Look."
Corinn took a momen
t to verify that the room was empty, that no eyes watched, and no one was within hearing. She rarely indulged any living person anything not completely to her liking, but Aaden was difficult to refuse. Or, in truth, with him she did not want to refuse. Seeing pleasure on his face was a joy like none she'd known before.
She said, "Go make sure the door is pulled tight, then."
Stepping from around her desk, she withdrew into the small alcove in the corner of the room, out of sight lest somebody barge in unannounced. Such an act was strictly forbidden, of course, but she still chose caution. Certain that they would not be disturbed-and with a portion of her senses able to detect the movement of persons in the hallways nearby-Corinn began to sing. She did so softly, as if she wished to push the words out and into a shallow bowl on the floor before her, directing them carefully and so as not to spill over some imagined rim. She sang words that were not words, sounds that carried in them the ingredients of existence, the threads that wove together life. She felt Aaden return and knew him to be standing wide-eyed just beside her. She did not shift her gaze from the area above the floor that she sang to.
If she had been asked to explain just how the Giver's tongue worked she could not truly have done so. It was not a practice that led logically from one point to another. It was a language that never held still, that changed before her eyes and in her ears. There was an order to it, yes, a manner in which one moved toward greater and greater mastery. Yes, there was learning involved. She had labored for years over The Song of Elenet, especially when sheltered away with Aaden and a small staff at the hunting lodge of Calfa Ven. Countless times the text on those ancient pages had risen to speak to her, like spirits trapped on the parchment and unleashed by the touch of her eyes. They spoke to her of the Giver's true language. They put her through exercises, twisted her tongue around words made of sounds she had never heard uttered.
Despite all this, the act of singing remained something of an improvisation that leaped from all those hours of study and took on a life of its own. Though this frightened her-sometimes waking her from dreams in which her song had suddenly turned to nightmare-the act itself was a thing of such enraptured beauty that she could no longer be away from it long. Aaden wanted her to sing; truth be known, she hungered for it even more than he.
And sing she did. Her words-unintelligible, beautiful, and infused with an almost physical power-filled the alcove. Sound danced in the air as if the small chamber were laced with invisible ribbons, like snakes airborne and slithering, circling. As Corinn continued, the circle grew ever smaller. She pulled the spell in, drew it tighter, filled that invisible bowl with sounds that shrank into greater substance. Soon the words of her song swam like hundreds of sparkling minnows, a seething globe of them getting denser and denser. Within this, a form began to take shape.
Something that nobody has ever seen before: that's what Aaden asked for. And that was what she was singing into being. She would let it live there before them for a few moments, and then she would sing its unmaking.
CHAPTER THREE
The guards at the lower steps of the palace grounds made the mistake of barring the young man's passage. One of them asked him what he was about; the other hit the stranger's chest with the flat of his palm, his knife hand ready to pull his dagger from his waist sheath; a third sounded a whistle of alarm. They all expressed indignation that a laborer, a peasant-whatever the new arrival was in his tattered clothing, with unkempt hair, calloused hands, and bare feet-would dare try to gain entry to the royal residence. He could be executed on the spot for it. They held this fate off, the first guard said, only because they wished to know the nature of his insanity before doing the deed.
In answer, the intruder took a step back. He set his hands on his hips and stood smiling. He knew his garments were worn thin, grimed by what looked like years of wearing, patched in places and shredded in others. His toenails were black crescents; and the creases of his elbows, neck, and forehead were drawn with thin lines of dirt. He stood with easy confidence, however. His white-toothed smile asked them to see the person behind these outward trappings. See the mirth in his eyes and wonder at it. See the etched musculature beneath the rags. See his face for what it was, not what it appeared to be. It was a tense moment, although everyone but the young man seemed aware of this.
Responding to a blown whistle, several other Marah approached, menacing, sword hands ready. Among them was a face the man knew well but did not much care for. Rialus Neptos hung at the back of the new arrivals-no fighter he, but as usual eager to observe anything he could report to the queen. He was not her chancellor, as he was rumored to think himself, but everyone knew that he shared a closeness with Corinn Akaran that none could fathom. He was a councillor she seemed to grant as much access to as she offered her siblings.
Rialus was quicker than the rest to recognize the young man. For a moment he looked just as perplexed as the guards. "Draw no swords!" he shouted, pushing forward. "Draw no swords, you fools! Do you not see this is Prince Dariel?"
The second guard-the one who had touched him but not yet spoken-sputtered, "Prince-Prince Dariel?" He glanced at the others, his face twisted in puzzlement. He moved his hand away from his dagger as if shocked that he had ever gripped it. "Your Highness, I don't understand."
"Ah, you've pegged me," the young man said, holding his mirthful expression a moment longer before breaking into laughter. "And your lack of comprehension is clear, friend! Your partners here are the more confused. Have I really been away for so long? I thought it just a few months!" He paused, but nobody had a ready response. "None of you has ever seen a prince in pauper's clothing, I take it. It's the man who makes the clothes, you know, not the other way around." He danced in, suddenly light on his feet as if fencing. Nodding toward the councillor, he added, "Rialus Neptos, it seems, understands this better than most."
The second guard continued to sputter, while his two companions begged forgiveness. Several of the newly arrived Marah bowed low to the ground. Rialus tried to form a question about his garb; seemed to sense the question was fraught with insult; and instead posed a series of queries, after none of which he kept quiet long enough to hear the answers to. Dariel mentioned casually that he was here to see the queen on matters of state. He should probably be on his way, but should Rialus prefer to interrogate him first… He sketched his indifference in the air with his hand. For that matter, he did not mind being delayed by each Marah who wished to question him. Of course, the queen might not like to be kept waiting…
A moment later Dariel was striding along. Rialus shuffled a half step behind him, signaling furiously with his hands and arms and face at any soldier or guard that might possibly think to intercept them. By the confused looks the men and women sent him, it was clear few understood his antics. Not, at least, until they recognized Dariel's face and bearing. Despite his garb the prince walked with assurance and obvious military fitness. All who might have questioned him instead stepped to the side.
"Is it true what I hear said about you, Rialus?" Dariel asked.
"What's that, sir?"
Dariel did not slacken his pace, but looked at the councillor askance, one corner of his mouth lifted. "That you've found love, Rialus. That you found marital harmony in the arms of a woman who was once your servant. I'd no idea you were so liberally minded, though I had heard you were on something of a diligent search for a… well, for a wife to complete you."
This had been a running joke for the last few years. Rialus, once he had his quarters set up in what had been a Meinish compound during Hanish's rule, had set about staffing it almost entirely with attractive young women. It was rumored that not all of them knew much about keeping an official's house in order, but most of them made up for it with a propensity toward buxomness. A few, it was said, came directly from houses of prostitution and served entirely to satisfy Rialus's considerable carnal appetite. Who could blame him-pent up as he had been in Cathgergen for so many of his prime years? Dariel real
ly felt no superiority to him in this regard. He did not even condemn Rialus for marrying a servant girl. Truth be known, he envied him the freedom to marry whomever he chose. This was not a freedom he himself had, as Corinn had made abundantly clear.
"No need to explain yourself to me," Dariel said, cutting him off before he got fully up to speed in his sputtering explanation. He slapped a hand down on the man's thin shoulder, feeling him wince beneath it. "Be a happy man, Rialus. Plant a child in her. Become immortal…"
The prince's voice trailed off. He had just mounted one of the upper stairs and turned on the patio to take in the view. As ever, the terraced descent of Acacia to the sea was a wonder to behold. Beneath him, the land cascaded down, level on level, merging together like a maze cut by stairways and fortifying walls, with great houses in the higher reaches and smaller structures lower. Corinn had ordered new paint colors mixed to announce the return of Akaran rule and to represent the new age she believed they were entering. So the rooftops and spires and globes below him flashed in brilliant hues of sky blue and crimson and orange, of brown and silver that shimmered like sun on water.
Dariel found it somewhat garish, really. He almost remarked once that the colors suited the flamboyant tastes of a Sea Isle brigand outpost, but he had held his tongue, sure that Corinn would not care for the comparison. Still, garishly clothed or not, Acacia had weathered the changes of human fortune with quiet resilience. He wondered if the island itself would outlive all empires and go on in its beauty long after humans ceased clamoring over it. The sea would surround it then just as now. The sun would rise from one horizon and set in the other, just as now. In a way this notion of a lonely Acacia was a pleasing thought, though Dariel was not sure why that should be so. He should want his people to rule here without end. He did, of course. But a person, he had come to believe, can want two conflicting things at the same time.
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