by Evie Manieri
Aline looked back over her shoulder as they crossed the wide stretch of paving up to the doors.
Kira said, with some small twinge of remorse.
They passed the thick iron-and-wood doors and into the entrance hall; Aline took Kira’s cloak, hood and gloves and went off to join the other servants in the kitchens for their dinner. Wide stairways on either side led up to the second story, while directly in front of her were the carved doors featuring the Eotan clan’s snarling wolf’s-head sigil. Beyond those doors lay the venerable Great Hall, around which the rest of the castle had been built in ever-increasing layers, like an onion.
Kira adjusted the orange necklace as the doors swung open to admit her.
At first the clattering of dishes and the scraping of benches across the floor swallowed up her footsteps, but as she walked out under the arcade formed by the yellow and brown ribs of the great leviathan, Kira saw first one head turn, then another, and soon everyone was watching her walk toward the dais through the shimmering heat of the braziers. She affected a careless stroll, setting herself up as too oblivious to the awkwardness of her situation to feel embarrassed. She and the other nobles wearing white could have occupied a linen cupboard without crowding. The stone floor and walls, the heavy oak benches and tables, the iron braziers and chandeliers were old and solid, but the stuff of empire covered them like a gaudy mummer’s mask. Gilded plates heaped with exotic fruits and sweetmeats dotted the tables. Paned glass lanterns swung overhead and cast colored shadows onto the floor. Bright tapestries looted from the castles of Enderland held back the drafts. Arms and armor, statuary, musical instruments, shelves bowing under the weight of polished brass vessels in the shape of beasts with flattened faces, more shelves holding glistening glass ewers and pottery so fine as to be nearly transparent: all of it crowded the walls. The hall even boasted, on a special plinth of its own, the bearded head of King Castan of West Angor, preserved in a jar.
A space had been marked out in the center of the hall for the skits, but the mummers had not yet been admitted.
Emperor Gannon Eotan sat his place in the middle of the table, halfway through talking over the particulars of one of his military triumphs with yet another Eotan, the old Lord Denar. Gannon continued his conversation as she approached the dais, but she felt him tracking her like a bear raising its snout to sniff the air. His two old war-dogs did the same before lying back down in front of the high table in a rug of unwashed fur and ashes.
She stopped at the bottom of the steps, ignoring the yellow-eyed stares of the dogs.
Gannon’s eyes met hers and she felt him probing, as he often did. She let him in as if she had nothing to hide; the trapdoor in her mind was locked, the key long gone, the cracks filled up with dust.
Kira had been seated next to Lord Denar and the pompous Lord Betran Eotan, the latter spearing the food on his plate with resentful little jabs. He had been knocked out of the morning’s tournament in only the third round: a disappointing performance by anyone of significant rank, but especially for the man who, by virtue of being the highest-ranking Eotan in Ravindal at the moment, was technically heir to Gannon’s throne, thanks to the law that was in place to ensure the throne remained occupied at all times. Betran was of the opinion that Norland had been steadily going downhill in the century since the Stonewood Treaty had ended the Second Clan Wars; he firmly believed that the only high clan belonging in Ravindal was the Eotan. At least she could count on the sullen lord maintaining a frosty silence with a mere Arregador—and only by marriage, at that.
Betran should have been happy that most of the guests at the emperor’s table were Eotans, with the exception of a few warriors from other clans who had distinguished themselves under Gannon’s command during his three decades of campaigning, and Kira herself. Gannon had not learned much from his recently departed father about politics if he thought this slight to the other eleven high clans would go unnoticed.
Kira looked around in consternation.
Discomfort rippled down the length of the table. Most of the courtiers had put off mourning for the old emperor and worn their gaudiest clothes in a transparent attempt to curry favor with Gannon; a few had even exchanged traditional Norlander attire for expensive foreign clothes in thin, garish fabrics. Small wonder the mid-clan physics now did a booming business i
n cold potions and ague powders and had more money than many of their high-clan patients.
Kira wondered what the physics would see if they looked inside her these days: if they would see a gaping chasm at the core of her, veins dangling over the edge, organs sliding toward the blackness. It amused her to think of their discomfort as they dithered over their potions and poultices, afraid to tell her they had no cure—or maybe even that she was dead already.
She picked one of the yellow fruits from a dish on the table and pressed her thumbs into the indentation at the top, ripping it open and spilling its black arils. A wine-bearer came forward to fill her gold-plated goblet and another bearer leaned in to offer a tray of meat congealing beneath some lurid pink sauce before she waved him away. These elaborate meals had lost their appeal for her. She longed for the dull food of her humble childhood by the Aelbar cliffs: goat meat cured with orange-root; crumbly pannis-seed cakes steaming inside a cloth; sour pineberry jam. All these feasts were beginning to blur together, with the same people eating the same food, wearing the same clothes, having the same conversations, all stuck in place like a colony of jewel-beetles in a dollop of sap.
The castle warden swept into the playground rattling his chain of keys and called in the mummers. Kira settled back in her chair with her goblet in her hand, anticipating the customary skits that had ceased to amuse her when she was eight years old. The opening playlet always commemorated the first battle with the Scathrings: a pretend Eowara in a ludicrously tall fur hat fought off an ambush by Scathrings wearing dark scraps to represent their scaly skin and masks painted with staring yellow eyes. The crowd immediately began heckling the mummers and their wooden swords, calling out tips and correcting their fighting techniques, or mockingly cheering the Scathrings on to victory. Clack, clack, clack went the mummers’ swords and the Norlanders fell around Eowara one by one, unfurling blue silk scarves to represent the blood flowing from their wounds. Some of the Scathrings made a show of lapping up the blood, at which point missiles of fruit and bread came out of the crowd to chase the monsters away from the dead.
That skit ended, and others followed, until eventually the caped figure of Lord Valrig appeared to taunt a man with a line of charcoal across his face to represent a scar, kicking at him and darting forward to squeeze his muscles like a stock-warden inspecting an animal for purchase. Apparently satisfied, he came to a halt in front of the man and threw back his hood. Splotches of black and purple paint covered his face and neck in an unconvincing representation of Valrig’s terrible sores. The crowd roared in feigned outrage.
Kira’s jaw tightened and acid gouted up from her stomach: a ridiculous reaction to a low-clan mummer dressed in an old robe who’d collect his gold piece after the feast and then go back to mucking out the stables or chasing rats out of the storerooms. The crowd soon tired of him and drove him out with another volley of scraps. The traitor god earned a cheer when he caught a large chunk of bread and took a bite as he dragged his new subject away with him. Kira drained the rest of the wine from her cup and held it out to the wine-bearer, who instantly appeared beside her chair.
The mummers played out a few more old favorites. After a well-received jape where a greedy Vartan choked to death on a fish bone, the stage was cleared for the climactic arrival of the Scathring king. First the mummer playing Eowara came out again, this time with Onfar and Onraka tottering on stilts beside her, and the gods made her the first Norland monarch by handing her a painted circlet and a wooden representation of Valor’s Storm.
Then out doddered an old man, or the comical likeness of one, stooped with age, blinking, with a slack mouth and trembling hands. His Scathring King costume had strips of blue among the green and black—Eotan blue—and he wore a painted wooden crown. His sword was a flaccid affair made of rope and twigs. When Eowara challenged him, he looked around as if confused, and then scratched his arse with his useless weapon. Eowara danced around him, jabbing the clueless creature over and over again until he fell to his knees with ribbons of blood leaking from half a dozen pockets in his costume.
Not a single person there could have failed to notice the similarity between the scene being played out and the ritual combat in which Gannon had killed his father three months earlier. Poking fun at recent events was a tradition, but it stunned Kira that anyone could be either so bold or so ignorant as to stage such a reckless jest. She could only imagine what would happen when Vrinna found out about it.
Kira felt the low rumble of Gannon’s anger. She knew this change of mood: the shadow passing in front of the candle, the gust of wind through the broken windowpane. Now he laid his hands flat on the table as if he was about to spring up and his sword trembled in its scabbard over the chair behind him. Everyone else at the table fixed their eyes on their plates and tried to disappear. The rustle and clinking in the room fell away and the roar and snap of the fires leaped up to fill the silence.
Gannon’s dignity won out over his anger in the end and he sat back down in his chair. The movement signaled the real end of the skits, and the more serious drinking began. The atmosphere grew more raucous as smoke and the intoxicated emotions of six hundred people thickened the air. She wasn’t surprised when the emperor bolted up a short time later and bade the rest of them an off-handed farewell. His dogs lurched up on their thin legs and trotted after him, their nails clicking over the stone floor.
People began leaving in small numbers after he’d gone, but the feast would go on all night. Eventually the tables would be pushed back as boasting gave way to challenges, and challenges to blows. Kira tossed back another cup of wine and cast a longing look at the side doors, which were now gently rocking along with the rest of the hall. She could slip out now and go back to Arregador House, to her bath, her bed. Sleep might come if she laid her head down now and let the black roll over her.
said Aline, as they left the dais.
Chapter 5
They came up through the servants’ corridors to a low door fitted with a heavy iron ring. It opened noiselessly on well-oiled hinges when Aline pulled. Kira didn’t need to give her any further instructions; after so many months, the girl had sorted a place to sleep until morning.
Kira stepped into the room and the door closed behind her.
The fire had only just been lit and the room was still freezing cold, but Gannon wore no shirt under his fur robe: another volley in his personal war of outrage against the cold; she felt like he was daring her to find any flaw in his masculine beauty. She unbuckled her sword and laid it on the table. Her body responded as his heavy arm came around the small of her back and pressed her to him. His mouth tasted of good wine.
Thornwood was a whole morning’s ride away, and the run of fine days they’d had lately meant the weather was likely to turn foul. Kira pictured the dripping black trees and the barbed bushes that gave the forest its name, and the blue algae growing along the reedbeds that made the streams look as if they ran with blood.
she said, fishing gently for more information.
ing at the knot holding her shirt ties together.
He ran a few links of the chain through his fingers before sliding his hand down to her breast.
she said, pulling the pins from her hair and tossing them down onto the side table. The little pile of books there had not changed position since her first visit to his chambers.