by Tia Reed
“Will you consider another?”
“I will not. So, I suppose the question is unfair.” He took her hand. “Niece. You must believe I am a foolish old man with nothing to show for my age.”
“Just the opposite, you old fool,” she said, then gambled on his good humour, on the serenity of the perfect, blue sky, and the trill of one joyful warbler. “But how far do you trust your djinn?”
He pulled away from her. “I will not stand for innuendo, most especially not from you.”
“It behoves you not to deny it any longer. And I am the only one from whom you could stand it, Uncle.”
“You and Rochelle. Talk to her if you must.”
“You have done a very selfless thing. But the djinn serve their own purpose. Are you so very sure the pact will endure? Is there anything which might nullify it?”
Ordosteen swallowed, so she had her answer before he said, “You always were the perceptive one.”
She was not so naïve as to believe he would confide in her. He was too proud for that, had borne this secret alone too long. If he only thought through the consequences, Myklaan might weather whatever calamity the still winds dumped upon it.
“You have been, you are, an astounding Shah. Just look at how Myklaan has flourished.” The eastern vases on the pedestals flanking the desk, the jade dragon and primitive ceremonial mask on the shelves were testament to that no less than the gorgeous gold-framed paintings and marble statue of Vae’oenka commissioned from the best artist and craftsman in the realm. “There are years of experience for you to draw on.”
Ordosteen picked up her goblet and took a gulp of wine. “Ah, Jordayne, were you born a man.”
It was enough. She had accomplished what she set out to do. An eyebrow twitched up as she smiled and brought them back to safer ground. “I would not be quite so accomplished, nor so happy without my feminine wiles. Dear Uncle, this is Myklaan. I do not need to be a man to rule.”
“There is no precedent for a woman on the throne.”
“Ah, but I shall find a way.”
He raised his glass. The glint in his eye made it as much a toast as a caution. “Careful, Niece. If I did not understand the depth of your love for Matisse, I would be obliged to find you guilty of treason.”
“Nonsense Uncle. I’m far too valuable. More valuable, in fact, than that brother of mine.” A lesser woman might have thought it ominous the warbler stopped his song.
Ordosteen threw back his head and laughed. “That you are, Jordayne, that you are. I will remain forever indebted to Trove for teaching you more than how to use that body of yours to get what you want. His ingenuity will remain unsurpassed.” When she felt her face blanch, he added, “You are not the only one with a measure of perception, my dear.” He came and embraced her, his eyes brimming with sympathy. “I am truly, truly sorry for your loss.”
It seemed he of all people had the capacity to understand. Jordayne leaned into his hug. She had never felt closer to her uncle than just then.
Chapter Eighteen
Sian halted at the gusty ridge above Meeting Field and sobbed. The other children skipped along the goat track, laughing and calling to each other beneath wispy cloud. She was not supposed to follow. She knew she was not. Looking down, she took a step onto the narrow ledge anyway. The alternatives were a lonely afternoon wandering the wooded hills of the Olono Range, or returning to the longhouse to help her grandmother shell a mountain of peas. At thirteen she was no longer a child, Grandmam Vila reminded two or three times a day. She had to make herself useful. Sian blew at the strands of her fair hair which had fallen across her brown eyes and slight chin. She had been making herself useful since she was old enough to clutch a vegetable. Just once, she wanted to play, to splash in the pond as she tried to catch a few wide-mouthed, gelatinous puffers to keep the gnats buzzing around the stilted longhouses at bay.
“Wait,” she called.
Giggles drifted back on the afternoon breeze. Taking a deep breath, she placed a steadying hand on the wall of rock and shuffled one bare foot forward. Craggy and exposed, this hill sprouted tufts of scraggly grass and the occasional hardy thorn bush. The drop was dizzying, and her long legs, thin from lack of exercise, weakened. The trembly doubt inside her swelled into panic. She called out. As agile as the longhaired goats grazing the slope, the other children scampered on. Today, Sian decided, was going to be different. If she could just reach the pond and splash with the others, they might talk to her. They might even help her walk the ledge on the way back. Another deep breath helped her worm her right foot in front of her left. When she shifted her weight, her foot broke off a section of the ledge, sending a shower of pebbles clattering down the hill. She pressed against the rock, breathing hard.
The shadows had grown by a fingernail before she worked up the courage to slip her left foot through to the front. At a snail pace, clutching the ragged rock, she could get across. When she caught up, she would tell the others her too-tight trousers, a hand-me-down from her older brother, made running impossible. It didn’t matter her feet and ankles bruised on jutting shards, but the path had too many loose rocks. Her ankle twisted on one. It tumbled, unbalancing her. She slid down the incline, the rock grazing her from arm to knee. Her cry stopped the laughter, but the others were out of sight. She kept falling. Her fingers blistered scraping at the grass, and she knocked the painful point of her elbow. She knew she was going to break her leg and need to be put out of her misery, like the goat they had eaten last month. Her legs crashed onto an outcrop, sending a jolt of pain up her spine and halting her decent. She sobbed through a clenched jaw, and clung on for her dear, miserable life. It was a long, steep way down. The track was a few bodylengths above her, and the safety of the wooded hill ten paces to her left, but she didn’t have the strength to climb. Her breathing became as ragged as the rock. In her head, she heard Grandmam’s voice tell her to stay calm, because she knew what would happen if she did not. Then her mam joined in with her biting rebukes, and Sian had to gasp for air. The slope fell into shadow before she heard footsteps close. Not the children but someone bigger, crunching through the forest. Between the poplars, she glimpsed a leather vest.
“Help!” she called.
A goat bleated. The crackle of leaves stopped. Footfalls came her way. Then chubby-faced, fair-haired Erok appeared at the edge of the trees, three dead rabbits slung over his broad shoulder. He scanned the ridge before his eyes dropped and alighted on her. She dipped her head, embarrassed. Why did it have to be him who found her? Now the whole tribe would find out how clumsy she was. She felt her whole body tense, and the hill begin to spin around her. No, she thought. Not now.
When she looked up again, Erok was striding down the hill, surefooted even with his bulk, and not at all bothered by the incline. He reached her before she had drawn three more breaths, grabbed her wrist and pulled her onto the slope. As she looked up at him, her straight hair falling back, the land spun with greater speed.
“You’re not supposed to be out this far,” Erok said. He tugged her back up to the ridge. In his strong grip, she needed her legs for little more than balance. He bent to retrieve his rabbits as she stood there, too ashamed to speak to him, or look anywhere but her bleeding toe. Then her muscles tensed and the hill span faster. Blackness blotted the shadowed trees, and she collapsed.
When Sian woke, it was dusk, and apricot streaked the sky. Erok was sitting on a ledge of rock above her, chewing one end of a blade of grass. He had cleared the rocks from around her, and cushioned her head on his vest. Turning her face away, she brought a hand up and wiped at the spittle around her mouth. The children were clambering up and down the slope as though it was no more than an anthill. Spying her open eyes, squish-nosed Loyt stopped ordering the others about and stared. Then his friends noticed and did the same. Her whole head burning with shame, Sian rolled so she did not have to face them.
“Time to go,” Erok called. The fit hunter hoisted her gangly body into his arms and set off down t
he leaf-strewn path. The children capered to his side without effort, chattering about their day and asking about his hunt. Sian wanted him to put her down, but then she would have to sit here, in the howling dark and all alone, until her legs found the strength for her to crawl over mossy roots and jutting stone. An ogre might find her before she reached home, and tear her limbs apart. She closed her eyes. It would have been better if she had tumbled to her death.
She hated her stupid self more when they reached the wooden longhouses. The stilted dwellings nestled in a cleared area, partially screened from each other by rustling beeches it had not been necessary to fell once upon a time when the Ho’akerin Tribe settled on this hill. She made Erok put her down before they were in full view of the door, but it was late and she was dirty and there was only one reason she would be hanging her head. She couldn’t help it. Erok and the other children would tell anyway. She crept past the bright-skirted women seated on tree stump stools before the rock-ringed fires, trying not to sniff the herbs they were mixing into their sizzling pots because the heavy aroma was turning her stomach. The stairs creaked as she climbed up. That should have warned her she was in the wrong house, but Erok was coming up behind her and it was too late to do anything other than steal along the squeaky floorboards, past the men sitting on their woven mats, smoking their tookaweed pipes. When they moved their legs, the patterns their wives had embroidered on their trouser cuffs collided with the patterns on the mats. The combination made her so, so dizzy, and she stumbled into a foot.
“Watch out, you stupid girl,” her pah snarled from somewhere down the row of the men.
All the way to the far corner of the smoky longhouse, Sian felt his eyes bore loathing into her. The bare meeting room offered nowhere to hide, and she couldn’t shrink enough to escape his stare. Just to avoid giving an account of herself, she found a basket of pistachios to shell.
“It happened again,” she heard Erok say to her pah, Vorn.
Her hands trembled as she glanced his way. A nut rolled out of the shell and along the floor. Pah’s reaction was predictable. He stood and spat at her, then huffed out of the longhouse. She blinked back tears as she fumbled to split another shell, because years of suffering his loathing did not lessen the stab of pain right through her middle. It hurt all the more to see little Tara clamber all over her pah as Loyt recounted the day’s adventures with grand gestures. Sian could not even look up when her wrinkled, sun-baked grandmam came in with a platter of steamed leafgreens.
“Your hands are dirty. Go wash before you touch the food,” Vila said.
Without a word, Sian padded back the length of the house, sidling past the women carrying in bowls filled with steaming chunks of goat and baked tubers for the men. She wished Erok wasn’t watching her, wasn’t twirling a dried stalk of grass in the corner of his mouth. She averted her eyes because the circles he drew were making them hurt, and scuttled sideways as Loyt and Tara tore past, trying to beat each other out the door to the cooking fires. They nearly knocked a young woman down the steps in the process. Laughter lightened her scolding, as she ruffled Tara’s hair with her free hand. Sian made sure she flattened herself against the wall to allow the woman plenty of room. Head still down, she didn’t even see who it was.
Outside, insects were buzzing a welcome to the breezy night. A smear of Daesoa’s yellow face was just visible through the lattice of leaves. Pah was standing in the patch of the smaller moon’s light, dwarfing Mam, who squatted as she ladled his dinner into a bowl. Sian went dead still.
“No man will want to get children on a girl with half a brain,” Pah said.
She took in a sharp breath.
“She can still work. Her hands are good,” Mam said, passing him the bowl. “Draykan will let her stay if she does her share.”
Far away, a wolf howled.
“Bah,” Pah said. “The Leadsman’s got a Tribe to feed and clothe. He’s as sick of her as I am.”
She tried to sneak a wide circle to the hollow-log trough they used for washing. They heard her feet crack twigs though, and watched as she broke into a scurry. She scrubbed her face and hands too quick in the dirty puddle at the bottom of the ant-ridden trough, but she wanted to find her bed.
“Bah,” Pah said when she shook the drops from her hands. The word echoed so loud she jumped. She tried not to notice he spat into the dirt. “A snail’s got more spine. And more use. At least we can eat them. She’s a burden. You deal with her woman. I don’t want to hear of her again. If you hadn’t birthed Toko fit and healthy, I’d…”
The rest of Pah’s oft-repeated sentence was lost as she sensed her muscles tense. “No,” she pleaded as the trees spun into a dizzying blur of brown and green. But the world turned black at the hoot of an owl, and she had no time to form another thought.
Wakefulness was a struggle. The air itself pressed down on her, trapping Sian in a groggy haze. Rattles mingled with sweet smoke to drag her back to misery. A face, painted and feathered, swam over hers, pleading with the spirits to intercede on her behalf. Sian squinted and blinked until white-eyed Ishoa lost her blurry double. The soothsayer, clad in a ceremonial fox-fur stole, swayed her lithe body to the beat of maracas, rattled high and low. The dry rustle of her grass skirt reminded Sian of how thirsty she was. She rubbed the irritating smoke from her eyes, and swallowed. Her limp body lay on her own straw bedding, too weak to respond to her needs.
“Masheraki eraka maran,” Ishoa chanted, drawing the ritual to a close. Beyond her, a man coughed. Sian dared shift her gaze to her pah. He was leaning against the wall, the pale light of a candle hardening a look of blame on his long, weatherworn face. When their eyes met, he waggled his head, and strode from the long room in which the older girls slept. Not tonight, though. Tonight, no breaths and sighs surrounded her, straw didn’t crackle, and hands didn’t slap at the biting gnats darting through the cracks between the sweet-smelling logs in the walls. Sian guessed why and fought the lump in her throat. She did not want to deal with this. Ishoa had long ago declared she was not possessed, that the gods had merely seen fit to test her. To what end, nobody, not even the soothsayer, could say. Her pah believed they had seen fit to test him. And on bad days, when the fits took her again and again, Ishoa bent to the will of the Tribe and performed the Rite of Expulsion. It never did any good. The fits always returned. Sian gripped the sadness inside so it wouldn’t consume her. She did not feel possessed, whatever possessed felt like. But she did feel damaged beyond repair. Perhaps one day she would not wake from the fit, would find herself in the Spirit Forest, whole and hearty, and loved by the trees, rocks, and animals.
“You must drink this,” Ishoa said. Her hand brushed Sian’s neck before it found her shoulder and eased her up. Sian took the cup the soothsayer held out, but Ishoa did not let go, tilting it until she had to lean forward so she could sip the bitter brew or risk it spilling over her blouse.
“Is she cleansed?” Grandmother Vila asked, stepping out of a dark corner. She was steady on her wrinkled feet despite the late hour. The sleeping hall, dark save for the flames of a stunted candle, was otherwise deserted.
Ishoa straightened. Her sightless eyes remained fixed on a square of the sleeping mat beside Sian’s ear. “If you mean will there be more fits, there will. I’ll leave a little of the drug. You may give her a quarter measure on days like today.” Sip by sip, the soothsayer made her drain the porrin potion in the cup. Sian had grimaced it down enough times to recognise its peculiar tang.
“You’ve been fitting throughout the evening,” Ishoa said when, unable to stomach any more, Sian turned her head. At least her stick insect sat over her moss pillow. His big eyes looked happy to see her. He would listen to her sorrows. She tried to tell him but the soothsayer’s free hand tapped over her neck to her chin, and tilted it back. “You must drink enough to allow you to rest.”
Sian took a final gulp and gagged.
The soothsayer brushed a lock of fair hair from her forehead across her cheek, o
ne soft finger trailing across her eye. Sian settled back, clinging to the unfamiliar comfort of a kind touch. She could almost believe there was someone who cared.
Almost.
“See she is not upset. When the effects of the porrin wear off, send her to me.”
The soothsayer’s voice came faint through the haze of her light-headedness. The dizziness felt safer than the aura of her fits. Sian surrendered to the blissful indifference it brought. That was better than brooding on the thought that her mam did not care enough to see how she fared.
Chapter Nineteen
The flutes blew a fanfare to welcome the royal guest. The first notes drowned in the cheer of the crowd as Lord Ahkdul of Verdaan stepped onto the deck of the galley and waved to the Terlaani citizens who had crammed into every pocket of space behind the hastily erected barriers.
Arun stiffened. Whether coloured by innuendo or not, his dislike of the man was instantaneous. Over the past minor moon, he had found numerous occasions to converse with Baiyeed deq Ikher. Two eight-day, in which small Daesoa had returned to full, and not one of the ambassador’s words had thrown his lord into a positive light, despite the man’s fervent attempts to exalt Ahkdul’s virtues. His praise dripped over sweet and fermented, like the buckets of the lemon and geranium scent he wore. The thought of Princess Kordahla in the man’s grip appalled. Yes, Shah Wilshem had every right to wed her to political advantage, but to doom his spirited daughter to Ahkdul’s cruelty was unforgivable.
Beside him, Mariano clasped his hands behind his back. The Crown Prince had dressed in royal burgundy over black shalvar. The gold embroidery on his turban and calf-length kurta was a bold declaration of his rank. While the Verdaani saffron Ahkdul wore stood out against the harsh azure, its cut was simplistic in comparison. Their foreign visitor had to comprehend how obvious the difference in their fortunes showed, for he clenched his jaw as he walked the gangplank to the scrubbed wharf. The mahktashaan lining it gave a single stamp of a booted foot, though their eyes never left the restless crowd.