by Sonia Lyris
And what was she in this tapestry?
Unique and beyond reckoning.
She was a short length of dyed thread, and that was all she would ever be, until and unless she was as willing to be the wolf as the man in front of her.
“Amarta, your oath. Do you break it now?”
“No, ser. I do not. But you ask the wrong question. Until you ask the right one, my answers will not serve you.”
“What is the right question?”
She looked at the Teva across the room. “What do I want, Lord Commander.”
“You?” he asked incredulously, hands again clenching into fists. “You?”
He waited for her to speak, but vision told her that any word she spoke now would only infuriate him further, so she stayed silent. He looked around the pavilion, at the tapestries, the bed, and finally back at her. “Very well; what do you want, Seer?”
“Untie the Teva,” she answered. “I already know you won’t release them, but you can treat them better than this.” She met his gaze. “An attack is coming, Lord Commander. I see no future in which it does not occur, but there are things you can do to make it better. If you do them soon. And I know what they are.”
His eyes narrowed at her, his expression darkening. Then he went to the guards. “Untie them. Send for cots, food, wine. And you—” He rounded on her, close and breathing hard. She struggled not to flinch, not to step back.
After a moment, with an exhale, he stepped back. “Tell me.”
“The stream from which the camp gets water,” she said. “Get more.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Always a delicate balance, thought Cern, looking out her window to the tranquility below, a garden of flowers and herbs and sparkling gems, while on the other side of the palace someone was dying in Execution Square. Behind her Sachare checked the bedclothes, the mattress, and the pillows.
A delicate balance, a bit like the creation of rods and tubes, hooks and chains in the next room. Her most recent creation attached to the ceiling and two walls, pressing and pulling upon itself. A wooden rod in a large ruby’s concave hollow, the rock pulled in two directions by delicate jeweled chains. The whole of the work would collapse if each piece did not depend on at least two others, and better yet three. Otherwise it was a weak arrangement, fragile and ready to fall to the floor. Forces from multiple directions were necessary to complete the puzzle, to draw it together into a single entity.
Now Sachare was grumbling. Someone had made the mistake of changing Cern’s bedding without Sachare’s oversight. Chambermaid and bodyguard both, Sachare was attentive and cautious.
As Cern must be. In action. In appearance.
Such a delicate balance.
The courtyard below was said to be the finest of the palace’s many gardens, looked upon, as it was, by the reigning monarch. At the center red and black chrysanthemums formed her family’s sigil, walkways radiating out in eight directions past walls of gemstone, iron trellises, and wooden sculptures, each of which had its own cascade of fragrant herbs, thick with flowers. Benches of stone, wood, metal, and coral were set about the circumference, kept exactingly clean in anticipation of the possibility that she might actually use them.
That was one of the many delicate balances, right there. No matter how carefully her guards were chosen, no matter how restricted the view onto this garden, when Cern sat on a bench, the House who had gifted it to the crown would soon be notified and then everyone would speculate on what the action implied.
The Great Houses who did not deal in substances that might reasonably be fashioned into benches must be satisfied in other ways, so tapestries and wall-hangings hung in a nearby room carefully adjudged a similar status to the garden below. That room, then, she also must be sure to visit on a regular basis while somehow making it seem as natural as a visit to the garden. One of her aides’ primary task was to keep track of what Cern had done to honor or neglect which House and to arrange ways to even the score.
Cern could never simply sit.
“What are you thinking about?” Sachare asked her softly.
“That time I sat on House Etallan’s bench, watching an ant try to drag a worm back to the nest.”
“I remember that. He wasn’t very happy.”
“No.”
Her father had called her to him and explained her error at fair length. She was to sit with good posture, at the center of the bench. Not slumped over, staring at the ground. It was insulting to the House. Did she understand?
She did.
The Houses. Ever-attentive, easily offended, and mercilessly unavoidable. Yet again she wondered if she could possibly move her suite to the other side of the palace, where she would instead have a good view of Execution Square. Let the Houses figure out what that meant.
But of course she could not; it would send all the wrong signals, among them that she mistrusted Innel’s oversight of executions.
No such message could be allowed. The aristos loved their executions. The more cunning and elaborate the better, and they relied on the Anandynar royals to make a good show of them.
That her family had a reputation for exacting brutal retribution against those who opposed them, she knew. That she had to live up to that if she were to keep the crown she also knew.
But while she might condemn a criminal to be bound and pierced, crushed and broken—all the various ways to achieve a meticulous and agonizing death that were the trademarks of her family—Innel handled the truly messy part. Trained for it. Raised in the Cohort.
Particularly well-suited. This was part of why Innel had been her first choice. Pohut, for all that he was handsome and charming and full of wit, simply did not have Innel’s keen edge of single-minded ruthlessness. Innel could do what needed doing.
But that wasn’t quite all of it. It had also become clear to her those last few years that despite how close the brothers were, whichever of them she did not marry would need to swallow a sort of humiliation. Pohut, she had reluctantly concluded, would take this with somewhat more grace than Innel. This had factored into her choice.
What would have been her choice, if Innel had not taken it from her.
Single-minded ruthlessness, she reminded herself. She needed a man like him at her side if she were going to hold the throne through these first and most difficult years.
“And now what are you thinking about, my lady?” Cern could hear the smile in Sachare’s voice.
A short sigh. “The Consort.”
“Ah.” Sachare returned a pillow to its casing, fluffing and setting it on the bed.
Cern’s training had been a little different. When Cohort lessons became too full of blood and parts, she had been pulled away. She was to rule and judge, she was told, not slice and stab.
Rule and judge she now did. Finally free of her father, she would sink or swim entirely on her own. Innel was right that she must somehow make her own mark, become distinct, if she were to avoid being thought of as Restarn’s own mother—her grandmother—a monarch in name only, a stumble between the formidable Grandmother Queen and Restarn One, who had taken in hand the last holdouts between Perripur and the ocean, uniting the empire.
But to take it was not the same as to hold it. If she could not hold the areas her father had taken, no one would care what benches she sat on or for how long or what murmured appreciations she made while staring at some amardide tapestry.
The mining towns. The border cities. Smuggled gold. Counterfeit coins.
If this continued she was well on her way to being another interim ruler, a stepping stone for someone else in the family, enthroned only until someone with more fortitude could be found.
The way the other royals looked at her was disturbing. Bemusedly, as if wondering why she had been on her father’s list at all. From a handful of cousins her own age to Lismar and her Cohort, there was no shortage of those eager to try their hand at her position.
She knew she must make a succession list. The problem w
as that her father’s list already contained the obvious successors, and all of them knew it. To make a list the same as his felt like the worst kind of defeat, and stiffened her resolve not to die anytime soon.
Innel was entirely out of the question. Naming him, should anyone find out—or worse yet, the list be needed—would incite a war among the royals, something they’d managed to avoid for some time. Or even a coup from the Houses, by whose collective patronage and loyalty the Anandynars kept their throne.
“Do you worry, Your Grace?”
Always. But Sachare meant Innel. A safer subject than her thoughts, certainly.
“Not with the numbers of troops he’s taken,” Cern said.
He had also insisted on taking the seer, leaving the mage with Cern. She would have preferred it the other way around, finding the black-robed man a disturbing presence in her palace, but she had accepted Innel’s reasoning.
“No one ever lost a battle by taking too much force,” Sachare said.
“Well, he’d better not lose this one.”
Sachare made a thoughtful, noncommittal sound, something she did well.
If Innel lost this, she was going to need to seriously consider the not-very-subtle advice of her ministers about replacing him as Lord Commander.
He would not take such a step backwards gracefully.
Now Sachare was sorting through Cern’s just-delivered clothes. She took a red-as-blood silk jacket, creases pressed to knife-sharp edges, shook it, turned it inside out, and did it again.
“You really think the laundry a threat?”
“Not everyone is as delighted to have you enthroned as I am, Your Grace,” she said, tracing the hems and collar by running the seams through her fingertips.
So many ways to be afraid for your life. As she was growing up, her father had told her that ruling was never as splendid or amusing as those watching seemed to think, but he himself had managed to make it seem otherwise with his feasts and hunts and campaigns. She had not believed anything he said anyway, because it was clear he did not care much about the inconveniences of the truth, and that he would give himself every advantage no matter who might pay the price.
Like her mother. She pushed the thought away.
Now that Cern held the throne—for however long that lasted—she discovered her father had been telling the truth about how unpleasant it was, at least. Ruling was far from glorious.
Really, it wasn’t even much fun.
She was beginning to understand his various indulgences. Why not suck the marrow from every moment you could? Otherwise life reduced itself to a constant calculation of risk and reward and struggle and little else.
Could she take a stroll outside? Not if fog clung to stone walkways where shadowy corners could hide threats, or if the sun shone too brightly and her guards might be momentarily blinded. Should the Ulawesan envoy be allowed to petition her in person, accomplishing a more favorable agreement with that wealthy Perripin state by flattering the envoy? Not if he had never been in the royal presence before, and certainly not with that many retainers by his side.
Sachare gave a small cry.
“What?” Cern asked.
“A pin,” Sachare said, sucking at her index finger. “An accident. Most likely.” She examined the offending bit of metal. “But this”—and here Sachare jabbed the air in Cern’s direction with the pin—“could as easily have been a spring-snap coated in a tincture designed to take your mind and rot it from the inside like a bad fruit.”
“Thank you for giving me more nightmares, Sacha.”
“My pleasure, Your Grace.”
“You seem healthy enough.”
“These things take time,” Sachare said dryly and resumed her inspection. She glanced up a moment, as if checking to see that Cern was still there.
Because she might escape? Climb out the window? Somehow wander off alone?
Stop that, she told herself sternly. If she could not trust Sachare, then she was truly lost, and her best hope was for a quick and painless death.
With a snap Sachare shook out a magenta tunic trimmed in lace overstitch and a repeating brocade of the monarchy’s sigil.
“Yes, my lady?”
Cern had been staring. “I envy you your long hair, Sacha.” A small thing. A tiny freedom.
Sachare’s face showed mild confusion. “Surely now you can wear your hair any way you choose.”
Cern’s hair had been cut too short to gather since she was old enough to walk; a practical cut, bangs at an angle that became more pronounced as she got older, allowing one short, token lock at the right side that might be tied or braided in decoration.
“Think of the many images of the Grandmother Queen. I can no more change my haircut than I can change my family’s colors.”
Sachare held up the magenta tunic. “So—a little?”
“A little,” Cern allowed.
A small chuckle from her chamberlain. Her friend, in truth, and possibly her only one. Certainly her closest companion of the most years. The boys of the Cohort, grown to men and heirs, were not friends, but something else.
Innel was a necessity first and foremost, though he would be more than the Grandmother’s Queen’s consorts, and more than her own father’s string of women.
Which put her in mind of her mother again.
As a child she had once secretly hoped to find that Restarn was not her father after all, but as she aged the facial resemblance became undeniable. Good thing, really; he might otherwise have disowned her as easily as he had discarded the many women he had bedded who were no more to him than dams to breed his hoped-for litters.
And all he had to show for it was a litter of one. Herself.
A knock at the door of the inner chambers. Sachare went to consult with the guards in the antechamber, the also-guarded space between the already-guarded hallway and her inner chambers.
So many chambers. So many protections.
As always Cern noted the voices, the sounds, the patterns, listening for aberrations.
Srel followed Sachare inside. This was rare, for Sachare to let anyone in her chambers. Something had happened. She fervently hoped it wasn’t bad news about Innel.
“Your Majesty,” Srel said with a bow.
“Speak.”
He took a breath and paused. Cern was used to this, but not from Srel, who usually knew better than to waste her time. It did nothing to reassure her.
“The Royal Consort’s sister,” he said. “Cahlen.”
“I know her name,” Cern snapped, tension overcoming her. “What happened?”
“She has taken a horse from the stables and left Yarpin at speed.”
“What?”
“As you may know, Your Grace, she is subject to—instabilities of temperament and inconsistencies of mind, so—”
Cern waved a hand. “Yes, yes. Where has she gone, and why?”
“We don’t know that. Yet. Quite. Though there seems to have been a message, arrived by bird.”
“What message?”
“Again, your majesty, I am so very sorry, but we don’t know. That the message arrived was confirmed by her assistants, but only the Consort’s sister read it. Cahlen took the message and apparently some of the feathers of the bird that brought it.”
“That’s”—Cern glanced at Sachare—“strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” Sachare confirmed.
“Send someone after her. Find out what happened.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“What direction did she go?”
“East, Your Majesty.”
Cern felt her mind wander again, and drew it back. The eparch of House Brewen was still speaking—how long had it been now?—a new posture with each point, holding his arm up, or a hand to his forehead, then a deep, ragged breath before resuming. Then the eparch of Finch would stand, interrupting, her high voice shrill as she became increasingly agitated. House Flore’s eparch shook his head at all this, making impressively
loud clicking sounds to show his disapproval. With what, she wasn’t sure and didn’t really want to know.
She doubted she could bear another minute.
Much as she hated to admit it, her father was right: there was nothing grand about being queen. It seemed to be largely about reassuring everyone around her, most particularly the Houses by whose lands, holdings, and efforts Arunkel produced food and iron and ships. She was to make sure they were secure in the monarchy’s attention so that they might continue to do what they did best.
Her real job, she was coming to understand, was to seem certain. In the Houses. In the monarchy. To infuse all meetings and conclaves and negotiations and adjudications with an appropriate sense of gravity, history, and credibility.
How had her father always made that part seem so easy? He had about him a sort of size and weight that no one would even think to argue with. Restarn esse Arunkel. Who was Arunkel.
For a moment she found herself wishing she could ask his advice on how to be more like him.
She stood. The arguments and clicks trailed into silence.
“Eparchs and representatives,” she said as politely as she could manage, “you will have to excuse me.”
Guards preceded and followed, encircling her instantly, mixing with the seneschal, courtiers, aides, secretaries, and the ever-present Sachare.
So many people. Always so many people.
As she strode down the corridor, her seneschal walked backwards to face her as he spoke.
“Your Majesty,” he began.
She flicked her hands, a gesture both of rejection and acceptance of the carefully worded point he was about to make. “No one will be served if I lose my temper.”
Cern was beginning to understand why her father sometimes interrupted meetings to veer off into irrelevant stories about his travels and campaigns. Or fell into sudden, scowling silences. Beginning to understand it all too well.
“Without you there, Your Majesty—”
“I know,” she said with more force than she’d intended. He was retreating before her as smoothly if he had been walking backwards his entire life. Well, maybe he had; she could not remember another seneschal. “Send wine and whatever happens to be good from the kitchen. They will wait.”