I watched my father for as long as I could before the lady-in-waiting nudged me forward. He spoke elegantly and generously to everyone, and only someone who had grown up in his household would ever sense that he wanted to move things forward rather than linger in the glamour of the accession forever.
Suddenly I found myself in front of the Empress’s throne, the Seat of Ananya itself. The throne sat on a raised platform with a semicircle of chairs around it, facing outward, where the Empress’s consort and favorite ministers and attendants sat. An empty seat next to the throne would become my father’s after the ceremony concluded.
I’m sure the room was still filled with people talking, but suddenly I felt as if I stood in a cone of silence, just me and the Empress. My parents had drilled the correct greeting and signs of respect on meeting the Empress into me from the moment I could talk, long before my mother was sick. Both of them knew I would meet the Empress someday, even if she seemed like a faraway fairy tale figure to me. At that moment, I was so glad that I didn’t have to think. I started saying the ritual words of greeting, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Aren’t you precious,” the Empress said, leaning forward. Rich blonde hair framed her face. “You’re so much quieter than your father.” That just made me more self-conscious. Everyone was staring at me and it was supposed to be my father’s party.
The Empress knew just what to say, though. “Come, sit with me for a minute.” She gestured to the empty seat that would become my father’s. “You can watch the ceremony from here. You must be very proud of your father.” I nodded in agreement and walked to the seat. I couldn’t make any words come out.
And then the room really did fall silent, as if there had been some sort of signal that I missed. Someone, a female voice I didn’t recognize, called out my father’s name and the sound resonated through the room. He stepped out of the glittering crowd, into the space before the throne that I had vacated. I heard him repeating the same phrases of greeting and respect that I had said, but they sounded so much more polished coming from him, more right. I was so glad the attention was on him, not on me anymore.
Then the Empress spoke: “Are you ready?”
“I am,” he said.
“And you give this up willingly?”
“I do.”
“Then speak your name, for the last time until you leave my service. Your name shall be a token to the gods that you serve your Empress. From this moment forward, when you speak, you shall speak with my voice, in accordance with the laws that govern us and the Talisman of Truce that binds us and allows us to live with gods in peace, where once there was only fighting.”
I expected my father to speak his name then, but he didn’t. He quoted from the Talisman treaty on the importance of names, and why the Empress and chancellor had to give theirs up as part of the bargain through which the magic flowed from the gods. He spoke of the goddess Senne, from whom Ananya’s magic flowed, and of how she had offered to give up her magic and her life with her lover Kedessan in order to make sure that the treaty succeeded, and that the lives expended and the land laid waste by the war could finally begin to heal. He spoke of the ways that humans had healed the land and rebuilt also, and the great empire in Ananya that grew from Senne’s sacrificed magic. I felt so proud to be Ananyan by the end of his speech. But I felt even prouder that people like my father and the Empress had sacrificed their own names to the gods so that the Ananyan Empire might continue to enjoy prosperity.
No one stirred when he stopped speaking. The whole glittering crowd stood silent.
And then he spoke his name.
The word echoed and filled the room. And it filled my mind, but I couldn’t grab hold of it. I heard the sounds but the word eluded me. And then the sounds faded and the word was gone. And though I searched my mind, my father’s name had vanished from my memory as if it had never been.
For a moment I wondered if the same thing had happened with my own name, the day he had come home and told me it was gone. But I don’t think anyone noticed it going, not even me.
With the accession complete, the celebration began. The room filled with noise again, and performer after performer took the open space in front of the throne: dancers, musicians, puppeteers, mimes, a water spirit in a great glass vase wheeled in by liveried servants. More servants in livery brought in trays of food, and I saw more food heaped on the sideboards. I didn’t stir from the chair, just tried to watch all I could. I don’t think I could have moved if I tried. Someone brought me a plate of food—I’m not sure who. I guess I must have looked like I was going to pass out. My father had disappeared somewhere, probably working on the problems of the empire already. He wasn’t one to stay at a party when there was no more business to be done there.
My head swam with it all. In all the dancing and glitter and music and intermingled conversations, I started to think I saw the blue streaks on the walls again, but once more they disappeared when I tried to focus.
I don’t remember the end of the party. Like the feast at the lakeside chateau, at some point the dancers and performers merged with dreams. I woke up in my new room in my new bed to find myself surrounded by familiar objects. Someone had unpacked my trunks and hung up my clothes while I slept.
Sperrin
Whitmount: Nine years before the Loss
For years I couldn’t remember my last day with my wife and daughter. Now, of course, I can remember it with painful clarity. It’s hard not to assign extra weight to that day, because of what came after, but really it was just like every other day of that long leave, spending as much time as possible with my daughter and as little as possible with my wife. Somehow, Nolene’s revelations had made the urge to kill Sefa subside somewhat, as if knowing what had triggered my initial reaction made it easier for my mind to cope with it. But if anything, the knowledge made a solution to the problem farther away. I knew I needed time away from fighting more than anything: Sefa’s actions hadn’t caused my reaction, and it could easily have been triggered by something else, regardless of anything she did or didn’t feel for me. But when I asked Khemme’s help in appealing to the Empress, I imagined that removing myself from the battlefield would allow Sefa and me to regain our feelings for each other and heal. Now I knew I would only be removing myself to another battlefield, a battle with the woman I couldn’t help loving. A battle I had no desire to fight. Sefa’s actions baffled and confused me, and I felt hurt that she didn’t share my feelings for her, but she hadn’t betrayed me. Her choice had been made before the Empress had arranged our marriage, and the soldier in me couldn’t fault her loyalty to her first love, for all that the idea of disobeying an order from the Empress felt utterly alien to me. My tactical abilities failed me: I had no idea of how to fix these problems. All I could do was spend time with my daughter and wait for the Empress’s solution.
I spent that morning playing with Lynniene, who was almost seven. My wife was working at the ministry offices. In the past sometimes she had taken time off when I was home on leave, but less so recently, for reasons Nolene had made me painfully aware of. I knew Sefa could sense how guarded I was around her, how I kept my distance, and she took it for something other than me trying to control my worst impulses. Wartime duties kept her busy as well. She and I had quarreled the night before, not over anything significant, since we both pretended not to sense the strain between us. It was easier to pretend that because we lived in different worlds, we didn’t have anything much to say to each other. We would try to talk and end up fighting, mostly as a way to avoid really talking. The only thing we didn’t fight about was Lynniene. Sefa was a good mother to Lynniene and, when I was home and not thinking about killing her mother, I think I was a good father to her.
I had no idea what, if anything, was being done about my request to the Empress. Enough time had passed that I suspected Nolene had managed to have it quashed by some friend at the palace before it reached the Empress’s ear.
I had a week of leave l
eft. Lynniene had a long list of places she wanted to visit and things she wanted to see that her mother was too busy to take her to. We were working our way down the list, methodically. With my status as a war hero on leave and my wife’s position as a channeler in the ministry, very few places on Lynniene’s list were closed to us: Life could be frustrating for a girl her age, so she looked forward to the rare times when I came home on leave, when all sorts of doors that were normally closed to her opened as if by magic.
When the messenger came saying that the Empress had responded to my request for a transfer, Lynniene and I were on our way back from a menagerie: a hothouse filled with a hundred kinds of flying lizards and poisonous reptiles collected by a retired captain-general whose son’s life I’d saved on two occasions. He’d led the tour effusively and in person, finishing the visit with flavored ices, and Lynniene was telling me all about her favorite parts as if I hadn’t been right there beside her the whole time.
Messengers from the Empress don’t wait. I left Lynniene at the house with her nurse, giving her a kiss that I wish had been longer. Then I pulled on a dress cloak and the baldric that held my blade, and followed the messenger to the ministry building and the channeler representing the Empress in this matter: my sister-in-law, Nolene, which made things a bit uncomfortable.
She gave no sign that there had been any investigation, and seemed very much in control of herself and her position. I nodded to her in greeting, perhaps a little too grimly.
My request had, Nolene told me, been approved, effective immediately. There was, she said, a catch. She and my wife were best friends as well as sisters. She had already explained to me the price she and Sefa would pay for my request to the Empress. So I didn’t understand why her smile looked so sincere.
“What is the catch,” I asked.
“This,” she said, and I found myself in a room full of strangers.
A coach awaited me outside, and the same messenger guided me to it, though I had no idea I’d ever seen her before. In twenty minutes I was at the carriage platform, waiting for the next cable-carriage out of the mountains. In a little more than a day I reported for duty in the Drowned City.
The Empress had left me with most of my memories: childhood, youth, battles, promotions, glory. Only marriage and fatherhood were gone, excised smoothly enough that until the night the Empress died I never knew they had existed.
Ketya
The Drowned City: Nine years before the Loss
When I first came to the palace, some of the kids would use the old theater as a sort of clubhouse. No one else ever came there, and something old and oppressive permeated the atmosphere. Despite the theater’s huge cathedral ceiling, somehow the air felt like it was pushing down on you. Unlike the other old parts of the palace, I never saw a hint of dust or decay anywhere in the theater, but old age and echoes of thousands of performers soaked the air.
We would play on the stage, singing popular songs and pirouetting like Fireday dancers and giving long monologues that Gertin, the palace rhetoric and public speaking tutor, had forced us to memorize. Somehow, delivering the speeches to the mass of empty seats in the theater made the old words seem relevant—as if we really spoke to rapt audiences, instead of standing at an ancient lectern waiting for Gertin’s sarcastic corrections.
The one thing in the theater we never touched were the costumes. Racks and racks of them lined the walls of the cavernous backstage. In front of each rack stood a pair of seamstress’s dummies garbed in elaborate festival pageant costumes: the Mouse King, or the dancing Spectral Princes, or the silver-armored Snake Slayer, or dozens of others. When I was younger I had loved to dress up in my mother’s fancy clothes, no matter how huge they hung on me. You’d think I would have buried myself in the racks of furs and wolfskins, but I barely touched them. Ancient as they were, the costumes remained immaculate, not a moth-hole or worn patch on any of them.
On stage we danced and shouted heroic monologues to imaginary audiences. But in that backstage dressing area, we spoke only in whispers.
I only went there when I was young, usually with my friend Mala. By the time I was eleven or so, Mala was gone and most of the other palace kids wouldn’t have much to do with me out of fear of my father. Then when I was twelve I met Tenia, who didn’t have much interest in play-acting. I know the younger kids in the palace still went, but for the next few years, while I spent time with Tenia and then we went off to the Academy together, it was as if I had forgotten the old playhouse existed.
* * * *
I wasn’t supposed to go in the kitchens when I was at the palace—my father thought it was beneath our station—but of course I did anyway. Mala worked in the kitchens, and both of her parents were cooks. And with all of my various lessons and my father’s schedule, he would forget about meals a lot, so I was a little hungry all the time.
I would sit at a big prep table with Mala and her parents, help them cut up or peel whatever they were cutting up or peeling, and they would bring me a bowl or a plate with something delicious on it. While I ate, Mala’s parents would explain how it was made, demonstrating cutting techniques or how to squeeze out dough at the table while they talked. Mala and I soaked it all in while we ate, dipping hunks of the brown kitchen-bread in the leftover sauce and gnawing on them while her parents performed.
Once, after a long discussion with the minister of agriculture about resource allocations, my father began demonstrating cooking techniques on the spot to prove his point. I was nine and always wanted to impress him, so I kept wanting to join in and show him what I knew. But then I would have had to admit how I learned it, and he would have been furious that I’d gone against his instructions to visit my friend in the kitchens. It was a little jarring watching a lesson from him in a subject performed by people it was beneath him to associate with. But my father was like that: He always had to understand everything, and couldn’t stand the idea that he didn’t know a subject better than the person he hired to do it for him.
Perhaps that was why he seemed to dislike soldiers. He couldn’t do most of the things they did, but he had to rely on them for protection.
* * * *
“And that ends your east defense!” Mala played the blue god card triumphantly, paralyzing my blue empress card for a turn and disabling the channeler card that protected my until-now impregnable east flank.
Mala was really good at talisman games. I scanned my remaining cards for countermeasures, but Mala had timed her attack perfectly.
We heard a loud footstep in the hall.
“Quick, hide the deck!” I was supposed to be studying, and Mala was supposed to be working. Mala had to work in addition to taking lessons; as a child of servants she was only allowed to study with us if her work in the palace was done. Whenever I could, I helped with her work so we could study together, as long as no one could see me helping so I didn’t get in trouble with my father. If my father caught me dusting! Right now we had finished both Mala’s work and our studying, but if we got caught doing something as frivolous as playing talisman games we’d both have more work piled on us.
I reached for my books frantically, while Mala scooped up the cards.
No time to case them! If we lost them it would be no more talisman games for a while. Gertin had already confiscated my talisman deck, and told me he wouldn’t return it until I memorized another seven hundred lines of Old Ananyan poetry, ten lines for each card in the deck.
The red-whiskered harbormaster, Burren, swept into the room a moment later. He didn’t usually go out of his way to cause trouble for us kids like some of the ministers, but I saw him a lot since he often had business with my father. Any senior bureaucrat in the palace was allowed to assign us more tasks if they caught us shirking. Burren glanced at me more-or-less at work with books strewn around the table, while Mala dusted the sideboards.
“At work, are you?” Burren looked doubtful. “I heard giggling. One might almost think the two of you had been playing.”
/> “No, Master Burren,” Mala said. She knew I had a hard time lying, so she jumped in to forestall me from having to.
I had no idea where her talisman deck had disappeared to.
“If I searched you, would I find anything I shouldn’t?” Burren asked.
“Of course not,” Mala said. Lifting her arms, she twirled around slowly, as if to demonstrate her innocence.
“I just have my books and memory stylus,” I chimed in. That much was true at least. The stylus had been one my mother had used for practice in her own school days, given to me by my father last New Year’s. Normally he didn’t care for family gift giving, but since he attended most palace ceremonies as part of his duties and the Empress loved gift ceremonies, the quality of my birthday and New Year’s presents had increased a lot. Of course I wouldn’t be able to use the stylus to record songs or memories until I was actually a channeler, but I could at least mark up books without causing any permanent changes.
Burren grunted skeptically but didn’t question us further. Either he was in a hurry or he didn’t really care how hard we were working.
“How did you make those cards disappear?” I asked Mala after he’d gone.
“Easy,” she said. “Watch.”
She reached back and plucked the deck from the small of her back, where I would have sworn she’d had nothing concealed.
With a practiced flick of her wrist, Mala opened the clamshell case and riffled the cards across the table. Then with her other hand she swept them back toward the case where the seemed to fall neatly all by themselves. Then another flick of her wrist and the case seemed to disappear under her open hand. The barest twist of Mala’s hip and it vanished again, her hands empty.
The Lost Daughters Page 7