Helva picked it up with a sly grin. “We heard tell of your request. I approved it when Baerr Lars inquired. You have them all terribly confused.”
The information network moved blazingly fast. Something to keep in mind. Hopefully if I told them what they’d come to find out, they’d share some information with me. “Would you like some?”
They exchanged conspiratorial smiles and Helva poured for three. “The men think we don’t drink it,” she confided. “The heat is considered to be unhealthy for a woman’s watery, yielding nature.”
“Ah.” I decided against giving away that Sunniva and Runa had explained the very same. “But you are not concerned?”
They both snorted, a sound very like their brothers’. At least Harlan and Kral. Hestar might shatter into a pile of crystalline spiders if he laughed. “We all snuck mjed together in our youth. Why the men think we change when we are confined to the world of women, I have no idea.”
“Men can be obtuse about women,” I suggested, thinking of how Dafne, Zynda, and I had gotten to be friends commiserating over men. And Kral had his blockheaded ways. Certainly his ideas of proper female behavior didn’t reflect the reality of his sisters’ lives. When we are confined to the world of women. How much did he even know of their lives?
“True are your words,” Inga said, raising her cup. “You are most welcome to Dasnaria, Jepp. We have long awaited your arrival without knowing we did.”
“True are your words,” Helva echoed, clinking her mug to Inga’s and mine. “Now, tell us—did Harlan truly seduce a king’s daughter and stage a coup?”
I managed not to choke on my drink—the stuff did burn going the wrong way—and began to set the story straight by telling it as I knew it, beginning with the return from Windroven with Ursula, to find Uorsin had hired the Vervaldr as mercenary guards. Relating such a tale wasn’t easy. I couldn’t forget my listeners were more than concerned sisters. For all I knew, Hestar had prompted this visit to dig information out of me. How much of Uorsin’s insane paranoia should I relate as the reason for bringing in the Vervaldr? Should I mention Illyria’s presence? No, I thought not, but then I reached the point of explaining how Ursula fled Ordnung to save her life, at Harlan’s urging—and found myself tripping over my own story feet.
They caught my slips, too, both Helva and Inga listening intently, interrupting occasionally for more specifics on Harlan’s words and actions. Despite the intervening years, they knew him well and their questions tended to pinpoint the areas I attempted to blur. Fortunately, I could plead ignorance on plenty, as I wasn’t intimate to much. Sure, I overheard a great deal and observed more, but I could dodge mentioning my own speculations. I told them of Ursula’s return, fudged a bit on Uorsin’s demise at her hands—though emphasizing that Harlan did not do it—and described the glorious coronation in great and, I hoped, impressive detail, winding up with Kral’s arrival at Ordnung.
They sat silent for a bit when I finished, turning the story over in their heads.
“So,” Inga said thoughtfully, “our brother did meet with Harlan. I wonder what he’ll tell us about it?”
“Do you suppose he swallowed his pride enough to ask Harlan about Jenna?” Helva retorted.
I doubted it, as Kral hadn’t mentioned this mysterious Jenna to me, the cagey bastard.
Inga snorted. “You know Harlan would no more betray his vow now by discussing her than he did back then.”
I listened to this with great interest, though I attempted to appear casual, in case I alerted them that their conversation revealed secrets of their own.
They turned on me, however, with all the intensity of mountain cats spotting a crippled deer. Those females hunted in groups, too. “So,” Helva said, pouring me more mjed, “tell us of this High Queen of yours. How did she seduce our baby brother?”
“She didn’t, thank you,” I replied, a bit too annoyed to be diplomatic. “Her Majesty is not the seducing sort.”
Inga waved that off. “Every woman is the seducing sort when she spots a man she wants. And why wouldn’t she want Harlan? He’s the best of men. Always has been.”
“Luta.” Helva wiped away a tear. “I miss him so.”
“What kind of woman is she?” Inga demanded. “Do you find her admirable—as a person and as a ruler? She truly does rule?”
“Pretend you’re describing her to us for a marriage match,” Helva urged. “Tell us why she suits our brother.”
“Yes—what do you like about her as a person? We’ll never meet this wife of his, so what you tell us is all we’ll ever know.”
“Kral met her,” I said without thinking. Too much mjed perhaps. Or too much of these wily lionesses stalking information. How much would Her Majesty want me to reveal? “You may yet get him talking.”
“You call him by his name,” Helva mused.
“And you traveled here with him on the Hákyrling,” Inga fit her words to Helva’s.
Dangerous territory. I needed to get them off my relationship with Kral, lest I find myself in even deeper imprisonment as his rekjabrel.
“Yes, High Queen Ursula truly rules. You would like her.” Funny to see it, how these women from such different cultures would understand each other. “She grew up as her father’s heir, eldest of three daughters. He had no sons.”
They exchanged a look at that. Oh, yeah, they got it.
“She’s a warrior. Blazingly fast. No one can beat her—not even Harlan. They spar a great deal, always seeking to one-up the other.”
Inga’s pretty aqua blue eyes sparkled with excited wonder. “Truly? A woman who can hold her own with a man the size of Harlan, with all his skill? Yes. Yes, I can see he would be fatally attracted to that.”
“You are a warrior, too.” Helva gave a knowing nod to the armband sheaths I’d strapped back on. “Everyone is saying those daggers are only exotic jewelry, but they’re not. You can use them.”
I shrugged that off, but Inga fixed me with a glittering gaze gone imperious. One I well recognized. “Show us.”
“What do you want to see?” I hedged. More important, what skills did I want to keep secret?
“Something. Anything you like.”
“A parlor trick, perhaps,” Helva chimed in. “Something impress—”
She broke with a gasp when the dagger I’d drawn thunked into the wall behind her, pinning a painting of a dancing girl in the eye.
Inga regarded me thoughtfully while her sister gaped, looking between me and the dagger sunk into the wall.
“I barely saw you move,” Helva finally said.
“Her Majesty is faster,” I replied, in all honesty—and maybe just a bit of pumping up my own ruler’s semi-divinity. Ursula’s shape-shifter blood made her faster than any mossback like me could hope to achieve. But I held my own.
“No wonder he picked her for a wife,” Inga murmured.
This I felt I could clarify. They’d made it clear in formal court. “They are not husband and wife,” I told them.
“They . . . have no permanent attachment?” Helva asked in a faint tone, a bit of rising outrage behind it. “He is her male concubine? Surely not a rekjabrel!”
Inga pinned me with an accusing stare. Oh, wonderful, my first diplomatic incident. At least, the first official one.
“Her Majesty is the High Queen of the Thirteen Kingdoms,” I explained, feeling my way. “She cannot marry the prince of another empire. And no, Harlan is not her concubine or rekjabrel. We don’t have slaves. He’s a free man who’s pledged himself to her of his own will. She never asked it of him.”
“Pledged himself?” Helva fastened on that. Inga had gone still, as if moving might interfere with her understanding of important information.
“Is there any sort of . . . salute or gesture he makes to her?” she asked, attempting to sound casual, but I knew that sort of body tension. While my Dasnarian might be barely serviceable, I was fluent in the language of the body.
Kral knew it, so why not te
ll Harlan’s sisters? “The Elskastholrr, yes.”
“Luta,” Inga breathed. “This is extraordinary, indeed. Little rabbit, what in Sól are you thinking?”
“He always did go for the dramatic gesture,” Helva remarked, lips curving in a nostalgic grimace. “That’s why Jenna—”
Inga cut her off with a lifted hand. “Do your people understand the significance of the Elskastholrr?”
“It’s not common knowledge,” I hedged.
“But Kral knows.”
“He explained it to me, in fact.”
“Not entirely, I imagine,” Helva inserted.
“No wonder our brother Kral seeks to protect you,” Inga said, watching me for a reaction.
“Does he?” I kept my tone light. “His Imperial Highness agreed to escort me here as ambassador, as part of the treaty he signed with Her Majesty the High Queen, and made a personal promise to Harlan to assist me, as a way of making amends for past wrongs.”
They both stared at me, far more arrested than if I’d confirmed that I’d spent a great deal of the Hákyrling’s voyage doing their brother every way anatomically possible. I reviewed what I’d said, feeling my calm fray at the edges. I should have stuck to throwing knives.
“A treaty?” Helva squeaked, brown eyes going to Inga, who shook her head minutely.
“No doubt he discusses such with His Imperial Majesty even now,” Inga said in a quelling tone. “This explains why dinner was canceled.”
Aha. Which explained why the Imperial Princesses had the leisure to visit me. No, let’s be honest, to interrogate me with all of Kral’s determined obstinacy and none of his finesse.
“Amends for what, exactly?” Inga inquired conversationally, pouring us all more mjed.
I could drink most people under the table, but I suspected these women had been weaned on the heady stuff straight from mother’s milk. I wouldn’t go into a knife fight drunk, so I didn’t pick up my cup. “I wouldn’t know. I’m not Harlan’s intimate, by any stretch. Our association is primarily through his relationship to Her Majesty.” And the comingling of the Vervaldr and the Hawks, but that seemed a reasonable line to draw.
One that didn’t fool Inga for a moment. “Jepp.” She leaned forward and laid a hand on my knee. “You have no reason to trust us. I understand that. But let me lay out a few ideas for you. Kral may have agreed to help you, for whatever reasons”—and here her tone made it clear she thought I hadn’t told her all of them—“however, I can vouch that the Emperor will be greatly displeased that Kral signed any kind of treaty. The more you can tell us, the more we can assist you and him both. Regardless, you have already annoyed His Imperial Majesty, whether by design or not, and Kral will be in at least some level of disgrace for that. Not to mention for returning without the Nahanaun treasure. That means we are your help here.”
Helva nodded, a bit ruefully, but in total agreement.
“We want to help you,” Inga continued, “for several reasons that I can explain. I am asking you to take a leap of faith and exchange stories with us. Conversely, we can also use our influence with our eldest brother, along with the confirmation that you are as female as any of us, to have you confined to the seraglio.”
“Threats?” My fingers twitched to draw a blade, though my head knew it wasn’t that kind of fight.
Inga tilted her head in acknowledgment. “You have your weapons. I have mine. I’d far rather agree to be allies.”
“And in return?” I asked, feeling as if I’d been treed by the felines who circled beneath.
She lifted a shoulder and let it fall, in that fatalistic Dasnarian way. “I believe hlyti guided you here and now for a reason. We need you. In return, we can tell you things you and your High Queen need to know. We can use our influence to ensure you the freedom to do whatever your real purpose is here.”
My real purpose? I couldn’t think of a response that didn’t sound either disingenuous or a confirmation.
“Come now, Jepp,” Inga said briskly. “We are all women here. If Harlan has given the Elskastholrr to your queen, he places his loyalty to her above all things, which means he told her to send you. Our brothers may be thickheaded, but they are not stupid.”
“Ban is not so smart,” Helva murmured, and Inga flashed her an amused look.
“Harlan and Kral are not stupid,” she clarified. “Harlan could have sent you himself, knowing us well and that we would have this conversation. He asked Kral to aid you in return for amends, both of them knowing the import of that request. So.” She rubbed her hands briskly together. “It follows that you’re a spy. What are you here to discover?”
17
I really should stick to knives. This entire conversation had me drowning. What would Dafne have said at this point? Danu, I should be guarding the door while she talked to these she-lions. Everything had gone upside down.
“Let me tell you a story,” Inga said more gently. “Have some mjed and listen. Then decide if we are friends or enemies.”
Because I really wanted a drink to take the edge off, I did.
“There are ten of us, children of the former Emperor, seven boys and three girls, born to His Imperial Majesty’s three wives. Helva and I are half sisters.”
“But Harlan, Hestar, and I are all full siblings,” Helva put in.
“And Kral is our half brother, his mother’s only son. She also bore a daughter. Jenna.”
I began to have a bad feeling about this.
“The birth order is important because right to rule depends on it,” Inga continued.
“For the males,” I clarified.
“Aha. Not exclusively. See, Hestar was born first. Then Jenna, only a month later, with Kral born a year after that. Then my mother bore me. Harlan is the youngest of us all. It gets trickier, however, because Jenna and Kral’s mother was first wife, Hestar’s was second wife. That affects their rank as well.”
“Okay. That’s a lot of kids born in quick succession.”
“Our father, the former Emperor, of course waited until he was crowned, then married his three wives and began getting heirs as quickly as possible,” Helva explained.
“Of course. And on his concubines, too?”
Both women nodded. “It’s good for a new Emperor to demonstrate virility,” Inga said. “His Imperial Majesty has five children by his three wives now. They don’t leave the seraglio, however, so you would have to meet them there.”
I was having a difficult time keeping it straight. Dafne would be making a chart.
Inga waved a hand in the air. “We have scholars who devote their entire lives to tracking these bloodlines. The salient information to this story is that, by being firstborn and also born to the first wife, Jenna posed a threat to Hestar becoming Emperor. Jenna and Kral’s mother was a high-born princess, from a family dynasty that predates the Konyngrrs. Had Kral been born first instead of Jenna, there could well have been a division of the house, possibly civil war. A month’s time in birth rank compounded by a family as powerful as theirs makes the heirs very nearly equivalent.
“Except for gender.”
“Yes, except for gender. But, as it was, Jenna and Kral’s mother, with the help of her family, conspired to have Jenna betrothed to the king of one of the more powerful kingdoms in the empire—and one of the most recently acquired.”
Restive, then. Not unlike in our realm.
“With that alliance, the subsidiary kingdoms could have applied enough pressure to raise Kral from second in line to heir to the Emperor, something his mother and his mother’s family wanted badly. Positioning a son of their family to be the next Emperor was the entire reason for her marriage. And she’d raised Kral to want it, too. She’s a . . . strong personality. Kral could never please her by giving less than all of himself to that purpose.”
Helva smiled. “We are a family bloodthirsty for power. It comes down in our father’s seed and our mothers’ milk. We crave power like the air we breathe.”
“Except
for Harlan,” I said, puzzle pieces shifting in my head. “He left Dasnaria and said he’d never go back.”
“Indeed.” Inga nodded. “But did he ever say why? I’m thinking not, if you’ve never heard Jenna’s name.”
“Jenna was eighteen.” Helva leaned forward, the expression on her face urgent. “She’d never even been outside the Imperial Palace. The king she was to marry was in his seventies—and his previous four wives had all perished. He only married girls who weren’t yet twenty, and still none of them lived past thirty. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The bad feeling only grew worse.
Inga put a restraining hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Harlan was a boy of fourteen, but already so steadfast in his character. An empathetic person, from the beginning.”
“That hasn’t changed.”
Inga nodded, unsurprised. “Jenna did not want to marry that man, but she had no ability to stop the wedding. No recourse to refuse the match.”
“What did she do?” But I could guess. Knowing Harlan, knowing what I would have done.
“She didn’t,” Helva said. “She couldn’t do anything.”
“Harlan did,” Inga confirmed. “He arranged to accompany her on the journey to her new home, and helped her to escape along the way.”
“Where did she go?” I asked, amazed that Harlan had never mentioned this. It would have made for a terrific campfire tale. Although the campfire smoke often shrouded more unspoken stories than the ones told aloud.
“Nobody knows.”
“Nobody? Surely Harlan does.”
Helva pursed her lips, frowning. “Somehow I don’t think he does.”
“He refused to tell any of us any details,” Inga said. “No matter how we swore to keep the secret or begged. He told us once that he’d given her the best chance he could to be free, then refused to say another word on the topic. No one could get it out of him—and believe me, they tried. Until he ensured they couldn’t.”
The Edge of the Blade Page 21