Beneath Ceaseless Skies #153

by Michael Haynes

  “I will be along to join you in three years,” I say. It’s a lie: Lydie will return before her fourth year begins, and after that I will be prince and will have no time for traveling. “That means at worst you only have three years to wait for a proper game.”

  “A proper game,” Lydie says, amused, and takes the bishop I had just moved. “I suppose if you spend the intervening years studying hard enough, you may be able to challenge me. At least, if I find no one else to practice against while I’m there.”

  “I doubt you will miss me at all, then,” I say, and though I mean to sound light my voice comes out strained and hard. I move a piece at random to cover my reaction, and I only realize afterward that I have left my king wide open.

  “Mate in three moves,” she says, not unkindly. “And don’t be stupid, Deva, I shall miss you terribly.” I frown, and she says, “I promise faithfully to miss you every day, little sister, until my return. Is that enough, or must I swear to you by the moon and stars?”

  “Make no promises,” I say, as always. I force myself to smile, though, when she looks concerned. “Come, let’s return. I grow weary of losing to you. Besides, Samil will be done with his rounds soon. You would not like to miss passing him by accident in the stable yard.”

  “Mandeva!” she protests. “Often it is an accident, you know, lessons do get out late some days. Oh, don’t give me that look,” she adds, as I watch her with the knowing smile of a younger sister who has found a weak point. “We may as well head back, though, I suppose.”

  My smile feels more natural now, and I help her pack away the chess pieces with a lighter heart. I let my shoulder bump hers on the way down several times, as if it is my right eye that cannot see, and instead of growing exasperated she throws an arm over my shoulders and pulls me in, and though it is too warm to walk so close, we stay tucked together the rest of the way home, arms around each other with easy affection.

  * * *

  Her parting with Samil is easy and amicable, and Lydie is already moving on in the weeks before her ship leaves for university.

  “I am going away to school,” she tells me. “Nothing can hold me back.”

  “Samil is already working a trade, and just took on a second apprenticeship to learn another,” I point out, and she grimaces.

  “Yes,” she says. “As would I, if mother thought any work were suitable for the prince’s daughter. She thinks she can keep us living as children forever, but I will not stay home and marry the local stableboy.”

  “He’s going to become a healer,” I tell her, a little defensive of him, for though he is her lover he has also been my friend, one of the few people remotely my age who work at the fortress where we live, one of the few willing to trust me once I promised that no one in my mother’s household would ever find out. She laughs at me.

  “One of your fancies, Deva?” she asks. “Perhaps he will tend to wounded horses, but nothing more. He is as trapped by his birth as we are by ours.”

  “I do not feel trapped,” I say uncertainly. While Lydie is home, I am always content to be the younger sister. I do not look forward to the day I become the prince.

  She waves this off. “You are still a child,” she says easily. “Still taking ordinary tutoring. Not even your first lover, yet.” She speaks as if reading down an imagined list. “You will understand when you are older.”

  Make no promises, I think, but do not say. If growing older is what makes my sister betray us, it is something I do not want to understand.

  * * *

  A year later, I sit on the rocks jutting out of the shoreline as my sister rows out to the ship that will take her away to school. The weather is cooler here, a full day’s ride from our city, and I shiver in the damp breeze.

  Lydie does not look back until she reaches the ship, and as I wave to her she only lifts a hand in farewell. Then she climbs the ladder they’ve lowered over the side and does not look back. I wave anyway, until the ship begins to recede into the distance and no sign of Lydie is left on deck. Then I let my hand fall wearily back to my side.

  Behind me, my mother stands tall, her horse’s reins held with easy authority in one dark hand.

  “I know you’ll miss her, Mandeva,” she says. “But after all, she will only be gone four years, and you will join in her in only three.” My mother cannot see the future—I have always known this. She has always been kind to both of us, distant but always loving, but I have seen her righteous anger, and if she knew of my sister’s coming rebellion I doubt my sister would have survived her first year. It was why I never wanted to tell her, as a child, and now I suspect it is too late—I have mentioned the future in passing, and even when my predictions come true, she waves it off as luck. I cannot imagine her believing me now.

  “Of course, mother, it is only four years,” I say, and look back at her when she huffs impatiently. “No, truly, I will focus on my studies and try not to pine.”

  She touches my braids, lightly, like she isn’t sure she is allowed, and I let myself lean into the touch and take comfort from it. She laughs, a little, soft and self-conscious, and pulls away. “We should return home,” she says. “The ship is almost out of sight already.”

  I look out to sea. It’s true, the ship looks small and far away, silhouetted against the pale sky. I can feel the future riding with it, my sister’s life unfolding outward, flowing toward that horizon and past it, until it too fades from sight.

  * * *

  My mother and I speak little on the ride back to the fortress, and I picture our supper in my mind, the four courses we will eat in my sister’s honor. The particulars are blurry—I do not usually bother with such small details—but I can make out roasted oryx and some kind of fish and a goblet of watered honey, crashing to the floor.

  Surely this is a small enough thing to prevent. As we eat, I keep careful watch over my own cup and prepare to catch my mother’s if it should fall. It is strange to eat with her one on one—always my sister has been there, more willing to laugh with me, more willing to challenge my mother’s ideas, more willing to argue. Alone with each other, my mother and I are awkward, stilted.

  I drink my dessert quickly, the sweetness almost choking as I swallow it down. As soon as I finish, I excuse myself, almost lightheaded with relief, both goblets still unspilled. As I rise, a servant enters the room a little clumsily, and the door shuts with a crash just as my mother reaches for her drink. Honey spills like blood. The ringing of the goblet striking the floor sets off echoes of clashing swords that only I can hear.

  * * *

  It is not the first time I have failed to change the future. Often, in the coming days, I watch our people closely out my window, watch the echoes of their lives unfolding outward.

  Sometimes I watch for a very long time, just to see if one of them might prove me wrong.

  I told a thief, once, that he would be caught; left a note in neat lettering by his bedside. He could have waited a day—I could see that his family had enough to survive another three days. But he only tried to be more clever; burned the note and set off with determination on his face. I will never know what his plan was going to be, only that it all unfolded exactly as I had foreseen, down to the house he chose and the hide wall he slit as his point of entry.

  I visited him in prison and raised his wife’s wages with a few words to her employer of their misfortune, making what recompense I could for my failure. My warning changed nothing that I could see. Perhaps I had always been going to interfere.

  * * *

  My sister has been away almost two and a half years, and my mother demands that I study ever harder, to prepare myself for university. I do the work, more obedient as her death draws slowly closer. It is always hard to tell, but I think she cannot have more than a year left to live—more likely only a few months.

  I go to bed each night weary even of mathematics, sick of geography and literature. My focus is on the chessboard these days, on military history and books of strategy, on
defending and retaking a fortress. I study fencing, desperate to become faster, sharper, more deadly with a blade. When my lessons are over, I explore every inch of our fortress, learning the hallways until I can find my way through them blind. My sister will attack at night—I must be able to pursue her even where there is no torchlight.

  Today is a sword day, so I spar with my instructor for a full hour, and my arms and legs ache from effort and bruises. I pass my mother as I return from training and see her mouth tighten in disapproval.

  “Fencing lessons again?” she asks me. “They will be of little use at school.”

  “I’m going to need them,” I say, and she loses interest as she always does when I speak of the future.

  “Keep training, if you enjoy it so much,” she says. “But you are in no danger here. Our soldiers are strong, and I have centuries yet to stand between you and any harm.”

  “Make no promises,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to hear me.

  * * *

  That night, I am so weary from training that even reading by candlelight is exhausting. I put the book aside. The candle is beginning to gutter in the melting wax. Absently I check on the futures of the villagers—marriages and thefts and funerals spill out into the future, some soon and some years away, disorienting in their multitude. It gets harder and harder to see the when of things, now, as if the approaching loss of my eye makes my sight weaker, the depth of my perception worsening. The future echoes around me until I can barely see the candle, and when the visions fade I have missed the candle going out.

  * * *

  I wake to the tromping of feet outside my door and the low ringing of voices and steel. My chamber is in total darkness, and I start awake disoriented, not sure when I am, whether I somehow miscounted the months so severely that my sister can be already outside, my mother dead before I can even try to warn her.

  As I scramble out of bed, my legs tangle in the sheets and I fall, hitting the stone hard. I cannot see, I cannot drag my legs free, and I panic, gasping for air and thrashing, hitting a flailing arm painfully on the bedpost. I get one hand on my sword where it lies beside my bed and finally pull a leg free. I stagger upright, bruised and aching, then move to the door.

  In the hallway, the dim light of torches in the corridor seems painfully bright. There is a flash as the light catches on chain mail, a soldier in the hallway turning to face me. I see his eyes widen as he recognizes me. He signals some alarm around the corner, then comes at me. I drag my sword clumsily free and move to face him. Two of his fellows come to join him, but the hall is narrow enough that they must approach me one by one. I kill the first two, then crouch and thrust my blade upward as the third makes to leap over their bodies.

  I leave him there gut-wounded, a slow and bitter death. I have my family to find, and I cannot be bothered with my sister’s pet traitors. If the fight ends soon enough, a healer might even reach him in time.

  I do not look ahead to see if one will.

  By the time I reach my mother’s bedroom, the rush of panic has faded to leave the ache of fighting on sore muscles, and my body feels distant, clumsy with exhaustion. I move carefully, quietly, entering my mother’s chambers with my sword extended, until I hear a voice whisper my name.

  There is a muddled shape on the floor at the center of the room, and as I stare it moves slightly and calls my name.

  As I hurry closer, I can see the pool of blood spreading darkly under her. “Mother?” I say, and cannot help how my voice rises, thin and helpless.

  She draws a wet, ragged breath, and gasps, “Lydie never did learn patience.”

  For a moment I think she means the way Lydie left her, not waiting to see her die, and I think she might yet survive. I feel a surge of relief and reach for her wound to see what I can do, but she shakes her head. “We are long-lived, but...”

  Of course, she means Lydie’s attack, although Lydie was heir and would surely have been prince eventually. My mother, centuries old already, can’t imagine what three hundred years of waiting feels like to those of us who have been alive barely a fifth of a century.

  I say none of that; only grip her shoulder firmly, lean down to kiss her damp forehead. “I won’t let her rule,” I say. “I will take our city back.”

  I speak of facts, but she answers as if it were only a promise. “You must try,” she orders, her voice rasping. “When a kingdom is torn from its rightful prince, the land withers and the people sicken with it.”

  I have read about that danger in the books of family legends, but my sister was never fond of history.

  “She will fall,” I say. “And I will imprison her in the lowest dungeons.”

  My mother lifts her hand to my face; touches my bruised cheek with surprisingly gentle bloodied fingers. “You will destroy her,” she says, low and rough, like she has just begun to believe it.

  Then she dies, without fanfare, her hand falling back to her chest. Her face goes limp, a little blood spilling from her mouth. I shut her eyes and arrange her against the wall as neatly as I can, laying her out like she is only sleeping.

  I’m having trouble breathing, my chest constricted with fear and grief and anger. I rise stiffly to my feet, my knees cold and aching from the flagstones. I wipe blood off my shaking hands and steel myself to seek my sister out. If I am to stop her taking the fortress, as I have seen her do; if I am to save myself and the country from the six hard months of her rule as I prepare to recapture my own fortress, I must fight her now. If my foreknowledge is any use at all, if there is any chance the future can be changed, this is the moment.

  I turn toward the door only to see it shoved wide, hitting the wall with a crash. My sister stands in the doorway, sure and dangerous, hair cropped short for battle and skin lighter from the loss of the desert sun. The torches behind her cast her face into shadow.

  I reach for my sword, but I am too slow, and hers is already drawn. She makes one swift, certain thrust with a trained fencer’s elegance. For a choked second I can appreciate the grace of her movement, her smooth step back, sword lowering before I can even feel what she has just done, and then the pain hits and I forget everything else.

  It’s like my world has cracked open, jagged, until only fleeting impressions reach me through the agony and shock. A voice shouting from the hallway; my sister turning away to listen. Her shoes ringing against the floor as she leaves. I am sprawled on the ground, though I do not remember falling, and I feel her footsteps echo through my bones. My hands clench spasmodically, and my eye is gone, and the pain is shattering, everything coming apart with the burning, blood running thick and warm down my face to puddle choking in my mouth, and with one eye I can see myself return, see myself take back the fortress, see the patch over my eye and remember when I will be well again but it seems impossible, and I gag on my own blood and sob into the floor.

  I think I hear my name and then one of our soldiers is there. Her face is outside of my half-blinded sight, but I can see the bright buckles on her boots, fortress-issue, one of ours.

  She carries me from the room, but I do not see how we get out of the fortress, fixated on the slow dark trickle of my blood that runs down the back of her uniform, streaking it in long dark lines. I see the future spin and sway dizzily between me and the floor, so that instead of flagstones I see the stable boy my sister once danced with waiting for us in the home he shares with his wife. I see him turning to face the door as we enter—as we will enter. We will come in the door and he will welcome her, the farmgirl-turned-soldier who has saved my life, and I wonder if she recognized me after all, if she knew the gold in her basket came from me or if she had only found in soldiering a sense of purpose.

  His face will turn from panic to relief when he sees her face, and then twist to horror again. I cannot hear the words she will say—the world is slipping at angles, and all I can concentrate on is their small house and the bloody patch on her tunic and the dark red pain in my eye.

  * * *

  The loc
al soldiers are trained in field medicine, though they have had little cause in the past to use it, and my rescuer sets me down on a low bed as her husband fetches bandages and medicines. I suppose they do not want to risk the fortress’s attention by calling in a real doctor; it is possible my sister will have noticed I am gone, though she may only think me lost among the dead.

  She hisses when she sees my eye; touches my bruised face with cool fingers. Her touch is gentle, but it drags me back from the future where I have been hiding, darting between memories of the days of my rule and the days that come after, when I will let the fortress rest and the town rule itself; when I will leave to wander the world. My travels are long and weary, and though each town gathers eagerly to hear my stories, I will never be asked to stay; will never find company for the roads. My eye will be only a scar by then, and the pain will be gone, and I wish I did not have to suffer the road in between.

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” she murmurs, already brushing the skin around the wound with the thin cold salve that will freeze the pain away. I shiver with relief as the burning starts to fade, the present finally reasserting itself. I slip away from my sister’s funeral into the small house here, crowds and coffins fading to reveal tall wooden poles and rough skin walls and the soldier who saved my life. “Very lucky—you came very close to death.”

  “We are all lucky,” her husband says, kneeling beside her.

  Their names are a fragment of my past, and I do not have the clarity necessary to find them. She must see that I am lost, because she touches my arm carefully, almost reverently; a subject to her prince. “My lady,” she says. “I am Riven, one of your family’s soldiers. My husband, Samil, once served you in the fortress stables. You are safe here.”

  My agony has faded to a dull, nauseating ache, and I am able to find my voice, though it comes out hoarse and painful, as if I have been screaming. I probably have. “I am honored by your service, Riven,” I say faintly, and I see her stand straighter; see both their faces ease a little. “And Samil,” I say roughly, tilting my head so I can see him from my one remaining eye. “Of course, your kindness has ever been known to me.”