by Sonia Lyris
“No,” her sister said. “Another time, maybe.” She walked by Amarta, petting her head in passing. She moved around the room, readying herself.
“Where do you go?”
Her sister stopped and looked at Amarta. Amarta sat down again, her gaze dropping to a seashell she had been holding.
The village tavern, Amarta guessed as she turned the shell over in her hands. Whatever it was Dirina did there, she somehow managed to bring back food and fuel for them. Not much, but enough to keep them going.
A treasure, the shell was. When had her mother given her this? It seemed to Amarta the least she could do, to recall the last thing her mother had given her.
“I’ll only be a little while,” Dirina said softly.
Spring festival of her fifth year, Amarta was pretty sure. A festival gift. It made her want to cry, thinking of her mother.
No, she would wait until Dirina was gone to cry.
Dirina belted her dress with a cord, cinching it tight around her waist, then began to brush out her dark hair, gathering it in a length of blue cloth that matched the hem on Amarta’s cloak. Dirina’s bangs escaped the tie, falling across her face in slight curls. With the ends of the blue fabric she tied a bow behind her head.
Blue. Like the blue lines of the shell. Like the dress her mother used to wear, blue as a hot summer’s sky. They had cut that dress up, over and over across the years, reused every piece of it, sewn strips of it onto the bottom of Amarta’s cloak, taken more lengths yet to tie their hair with. They still had a few of those ties left. A bit of beauty against the undyed brown of everything else they wore.
The shell. The scraps of blue dress. But for memory, it was all they had left of her.
There had been a song, too, but it was gone. Sometimes, as Amarta was falling asleep, she almost remembered it. Her mother would sing about the ocean. Like a lake, her mother had said between verses. So big you couldn’t see the other side. One day, she had promised, they would go and see it together.
But they never had. Because of Amarta.
With a thoughtful pout, Pas reached out a hand to try to take the shell from Amarta’s hand. She gave him her other thumb instead, and he clutched it tightly.
“What do you do there?” Amarta asked.
“Not much. We talk.” Her sister fastened her fraying cloak around her shoulders, tying it snug.
Amarta looked up eagerly. “Do you mean like telling stories? Like what I do, but for fun instead of—?” Instead of causing trouble with tales of futures that might be.
“Yes, like that.” Dirina walked to the door.
“At winter festival,” Amarta said, not wanting her to leave. “Will we join in?”
“Yes. Probably. You watch Pas. I’ll be back soon.”
“I’ll wait up for you.”
“No, you should sleep. You should—” Dirina exhaled, fell silent, then nodded once and opened the door. White flurries swirled in the night breeze. Then she left, yanking the door shut behind her.
In the silence that followed, Amarta found that her tears for her dead mother would not come after all. Pas had fallen asleep again, and she gently pulled her finger out of his slacking grip.
The pile of peat by the stove was small, too small. Amarta decided to wait until Dirina returned to burn any more. She was not so cold as all that, not yet.
Again she turned her attention to the shell. As she rubbed the blue and white ridges she wondered if some part of her mother’s spirit lived on, in the shell. If she believed it to be true, might it become so?
She would believe it, then. She would keep the shell close to her, always. Perhaps if she slept with it in hand, she would dream of the song her mother used to sing to her. And then, when the weather warmed, she could tie the shell to hang in the window, letting it dangle in the sweet breezes, so that if her mother’s spirit was in it, she would see the warm blue sky, hear the birds, smell the earth. Each solstice and equinox, Amarta resolved, she would take her mother’s shell in hand, and think of her, remembering everything she could about her. Surely, she could do that much.
The flash of vision came and went so fast that she barely realized it had happened.
Thick fingers held her shell, turning it over and over. A man’s voice. A thoughtful sound.
Her shell. Someone had taken it from her. A sick feeling came over her. She enveloped the shell in her hand, wrapping it tightly, as if to protect it.
For a moment she had a sense, almost a taste, of the man whose fingers she had barely seen, then it was gone. Someone she had once met? A long-ago memory of some possible future vision?
Or maybe it wasn’t memory or vision at all, but only a snatch of dream.
It wasn’t fair, she thought, pressing the shell to her cheek as if it were her mother’s touch. The shell was all that she had left of her.
No, she decided, whatever it was that she had just seen, vision or memory—and whoever the man was—she would not let him take it.
Her throat tightened, and she gripped the shell tightly until the stove ran hungry and the room went dark.
Chapter Four
Pelting icy rain continued, slushy and cold. When it warmed even a little, the pouring rains washed the streets clean, flooding sewers and inland farms and lakes.
At least, Innel reflected, the palace’s roof cisterns were full.
Midwinter festival arrived. Cern sat sullenly by her father, drinking herself into unconsciousness and needing to be carried to her rooms, to the scowling of her father. Sachare shook her head sharply at Innel’s offer of help.
A tenday later, Cern’s glares at him had softened, ever so slightly. Was that the smallest hesitation before she turned her back on him?
His patience was souring. Letting the king’s assigned work languish, he watched for the right opportunity.
It was late afternoon when he followed Cern and her entourage to the glassed-in gardens of the southern court, warmed in the winter months with a ring of heated stones brought from the basement furnace. Inside the glassed-in room, fruit trees were in bud. Beds of green sprouts lined the windows.
Cern’s guards stood arrayed inside and out, a double perimeter of protection. There had not been a successful attempt on the life of a royal since Nials esse Arunkel, the king’s beloved grandmother, was a young queen, and her younger sister’s attempted kidnapping turned particularly nasty, but some attempts had been sufficiently bloody—and politically messy—to inspire both diligence and a solidly capable royal guard.
Innel had trained with many of these guards and knew them well. He exchanged nods with the commander in the doorway, a stout woman with an instinctive and powerful close-in fighting style. She considered Innel for a long moment, then stepped aside to allow him entrance. She turned her back on the room, implying a privacy that was not, in fact, present.
Cern did not look up from the long-tailed red and blue Perripin bird. It stood on her leather-wrapped arm, clutching tightly with long talons. She was feeding it with tongs from a bowl of wiggling white slugs that sat atop a round red marble tabletop.
The bird turned its head sideways to give Innel a suspicious one-eyed look, then snapped up the offered slug, held it high, gulped it down. Innel watched a lump make its way down the bird’s long neck.
Cern held out her arm, and the bird stepped onto the marble tabletop and then over to the bowl of slugs, helping himself as the princess turned an unwelcoming, loathing look on Innel.
“You are trash and a liar,” she said.
He suppressed elation. After months of effort, she was speaking to him.
“Yes, my lady,” he said, bowing his head, aiming for a contrite tone and expression.
“What kind of man kills his own brother? And a man as fine as Pohut was? You are a monstrosity.”
Much warmer. This was the opening he’d been hoping for. And now to step into it.
The story he had given the king after his audience on return from Botaros had started with the trut
h: that he and his brother had gone to Botaros independently. From there it was invention: a woman, he told the king, claiming to be an unknown granddaughter of Nials esse Arunkel, now dead for decades, was said to look enough like the old queen to be her twin. The granddaughter was telling anyone who would listen that she should be on the throne instead of Restarn.
Treasonous talk, of course. Both he and his brother, Innel said, had gone to Botaros to find out the truth of the matter, intending to bring the granddaughter back to the king for justice.
But Pohut had changed his mind, barring Innel’s way, claiming the granddaughter to be his discovery. Intending to use her against the king, Innel suspected. They had fought, and Pohut pulled a knife, forcing Innel to defend himself.
It was a relatively safe story. Even had the granddaughter existed, a short talk and a quiet relocation to the south border would have taken care of the matter. Not a threat that would much trouble the king.
Restarn listened impatiently, waving his hands for Innel to hurry it along. Clearly he didn’t want details.
Or he knew it wasn’t true.
In any case, he seemed to accept the explanation.
Innel had debated an alternate tale for the king, that it was the brothers’ devotion to and lifelong competition for Cern that brought them to blows, but finally discarded that; if Cern found out—if she thought that Pohut had died for her—she would never forget him.
And that would not do; however long it took, he needed Cern to forget his brother and forgive Innel.
So for the princess he needed a more compelling tale.
He kept his tone soft and sorrowful. “There’s more to the story than what I told your father.”
A dangerous double game here, he knew, because with the guard listening, every word would likely get back to the king. Anything he said now had to both be convincing to Cern and transparently benign to Restarn.
A flicker of uncertainty in her eyes, a wary interest.
“You see, my lady, we wanted to find out if the rumors were true.”
“The granddaughter,” she said tightly.
“No.”
“No? What, then?”
Innel shook his head ruefully. “I’m embarrassed to admit to it.”
At that she gave him a look, still plenty hostile, but tinged with curiosity.
This was the reason the Cohort education had included the finest bards and minstrels of the empire.
“We were seduced by a story that could have been a children’s tale. A cave outside a small village . . . a treasure trove: a cache of gold.”
“Gold?”
By law, every flake of gold belonged to the crown. Every last bit, no matter its form nor how it had come into being. And no matter who now held it.
Innel looked around at the seedlings, the fruit trees optimistically preparing for spring in this last part of winter, and let the moment lengthen. He acted as if he were struggling with what to say next.
“We could not afford to be wrong. You know what they’d say. The mutts. The fools. We had to find the absolute truth. And we did. But my brother . . .” He paused. “He wanted it for himself.”
“What, the gold?” She seemed incredulous at this.
“To sell it south, to wash it through Perripin traders.”
“But that would be treason.”
Sometimes it surprised him, how naive she could be.
“Yes, and I told him so. No, I said. He grew angry. Our loyalty to the crown, I said; nothing is more precious. He yelled at me, called me a fool, and when I would not budge, disowned me. And then . . .” A glance down, a ragged exhale. “You know the rest.”
She considered his words skeptically. She was almost there.
He inhaled slowly, audibly. “We grew up poor, My Lady Princess. Two years older, he remembered it far more clearly than I did. No House, no family—then the king’s generosity, to be sure, but nothing to call our own. Perhaps he sensed that his chances with you were waning and wanted something more substantial in hand.”
“What? We would never have turned him away. A company command, at least.”
Innel gave her a pained look. “You know how proud he was.”
“No, it is not possible.”
But it was not disbelief in her tone now. It was pain. Denial that someone she had known since childhood, someone she had cared for, could act this way.
And that meant she nearly believed him.
It was time for the final detail that weaves the parts of the story into a whole. He reached into his pocket, palmed a small, heavy item that Srel had bought for him from a south-end black market, a place it was barely safe to walk, let alone spend money. Srel, born to that side, had known what to do with the funds Innel had managed to scrape together. It had taken every quarter-nals Innel could lay hands on.
An investment, he told himself again. It would pay off. He only had to win her. This was the moment.
He walked slowly to the marble table.
“There was no cave, no cache. Just a hole under a rock, by the foot of a twisted hemlock pine, where we found this. Perhaps also the source of the granddaughter rumor. Now I give it to you, My Lady Princess, to put in the treasury. As is my duty to empire, king, and Your Royal Highness.”
He placed the item on the table. At the sound and feel underfoot of the heavy metallic click on the stone, the bird quickly sidestepped away from him to the edge. He stepped back.
Cern reached forward and brushed the small, dully gleaming statuette with her fingers.
Four-fingers high head to shoulders, it was a passable rendition of Nials esse Arunkel, the Grandmother Queen, judging by the portraits that hung in the Great Hall. Cern picked it up, held it wonderingly.
“Pohut died for this?”
No, his brother died because he had crossed the line between competition and betrayal.
And because Innel had gotten to the girl first.
But he could say none of that.
“I’m sorry, My Lady,” he said, knowing it was the only thing he could say, and resenting the part of him that meant it.
Innel found himself jolted awake from dreams of struggles in frozen mud, unable to get hold of his brother, grasping and slipping. Then suddenly, somehow, he had Pohut’s head tight between his locked arms and twisted hard to the sound of a crack.
He was fully awake now, considering the split-second decision that saved his life, and the advice that had made it possible.
If he knew of her, others would. Of those who had heard the rumor, who else might care enough to go to Botaros to find out if it were true?
Innel now keenly regretted not having done something about the girl that night.
But what? He could hardly have dragged both his brother’s body and a resisting child through the mountains and then into the palace, never mind the question of the sister and the baby.
It dawned on him then, the obvious, brutal solution: to slay her there and then, that very night. This problem would now be solved.
His thoughts flickered back to the candlelit shack. He considered the distance from the nearest neighbors and how far her screams might have carried in the gusting wind. The sister would likely have fought him, so he would have had to kill her, too. And then what? The baby as well?
He wondered if it was in him to do such a thing, to take sharp steel to the three of them, in order to keep the girl from whoever else might want her predictions.
Well, it didn’t matter if it was in him or not. He hadn’t. He would simply have to find a way to have her quietly brought to Yarpin, where he could control what she said and to whom.
Once she was here, he would have more options. For example, he could have her tongue cut out, solving the problem of her talking without any killing at all. He wondered if she knew how to write.
In any case, this could wait no longer.
Innel drummed his fingers on a table of dark wood into which was inlaid a scattering of paler woods showing the sigils of the oldest
of the Lesser Houses. Bolah, warming spiced wine in the corner, filling the air with anise and cardamom, was adept at services quieter and less showy than the Great Houses might inspire.
Which was why he was here.
He realized he was drumming on House Finch’s sigil. What was their motto again? Loyalty through winter. He considered that and paused in his drumming.
“Twunta, Captain?” The small white-haired woman offered him a long, silver pipe from a red mahogany stand.
With a head shake he declined. Wine only clung to his breath, while smoke clung to his clothes. He found it better not to have his indulgences so easily determined.
Getting away from the palace tonight had been no small feat. On this cold, overcast evening, Srel stood outside a soaking bath as if Innel were inside, where instead Nalas enjoyed hours of late-night soaking while a hooded Innel snuck out into the frigid city to meet with Bolah.
Now his eyes wandered the room, taking in the glinting, colorful, polished clutter. On one wall a thick tapestry hung on which people and animals feasted and fornicated, their bodies mingled and twisted together so that it was hard to tell where one limb began and another ended.
Bolah had a reputation for being able to offer the unusual.
On the table between them she set two tall circular porcelain tumblers, almost equidistant from him.
“Congratulations on your promotion, Captain.”
Innel made a sound between acceptance and amusement. She would surely know that he expected to have another title as soon as he married Cern.
She slowly sat across from him at the small table. “It has been a long time, has it not?”
“Alas, I’ve been quite busy.”
“I can easily imagine, ser.”
Through the translucent sides of the tumblers he could see the dark, aromatic wine fill as she poured.
“The hope your pending marriage brings brightens this dismal night. I trust I may be allowed to say that the empire is most fortunate to have your hands so near what I am certain will be her most grateful reins.”