A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  “How can you stand doing it?” Piras asked. “Over and over again? It’s so dull.”

  (Much like Ylfing’s interminable dialogue! Of course I wasn’t going to interrupt and shame him in front of Ivo, but I was grinding my teeth by this point and wishing he’d get on with it.)

  “I don’t mind it,” Hariq answered. “I can’t get to sleep at night anyway, most nights, and I like being by myself and thinking. And the city looks so much different in the dark. And I like feeling close to the Stately One.”

  They sat there talking all night long, and Amina found herself quite struck by how cordial and mannerly Hariq was, and how intelligently he spoke, and the line of his jaw, and the color of his eyes. . . .

  Well before dawn, Piras gave Amina back her cloak, and she and Hariq gathered up their things and scampered back across the court to their respective temples, settling themselves in wait to be collected by their families. There would be more festivities in the morning, but Amina’s eyes were growing heavy and tired, and she fancied the idea of going to bed. Before she sat down, she looked into the temple at the White One’s disc. As expected, it hadn’t moved anywhere.

  Months passed, and Midsummer came about, and Amina was again dressed in the richly embroidered robes of white and silver, but this time they felt heavy and burdensome. She was uncomfortably warm, but she remembered that Hariq had said he liked to volunteer to sit vigil for Midsummer. She rather looked forward to seeing him again. It would have been utterly forbidden to exchange even a glance with him at any other time—it would have sent both their families into an uproar.

  So there was another feast and another parade to take her out to the temple, and pretty much as soon as the sun had set and the last of the revelers had left the court, she and Hariq were both running down the steps to the fountain, chattering almost as soon as they’d gotten within earshot of each other.

  (Here Ivo said, “Aww,” and couldn’t hold back a smile. He’d already forgotten we’d told him it was a tragedy, already forgotten Ylfing had spoiled the end and how badly he’d wanted to leave a few moments ago. I could see a bit then why Ylfing liked him—for all my apprentice is a genuine idiot, I’ll allow he can spot a soft heart from a mile off. Or perhaps it’s just that hearts soften after he spots them.)

  And then they went up to the temple of the Bright One, but Piras wasn’t there. It was some older member of the house, and he just sat there and glared at the two of them. So they sat on the base of the fountain for a while and talked, and they walked back and forth across the square so they could be sure to keep an eye on the relics. Amina had seen the heaven stone from a distance before, because even if the Stately One was Hariq’s house’s temple, the Stately One was everyone’s god, just as the Bright One and the White One were. Hariq brought her inside the temple and showed her around—the heaven stone was the color of blackened iron, and it was the size of a wheelbarrow, all lumpy and odd-looking.

  They talked all night, and it being just the two of them, with a fountain and the stars and the moonlight—things got a little romantic. By the end of the night, they had agreed that they had to find a way to keep talking, no matter what. Hariq showed Amina a loose stone on the side of the Stately One’s temple, and they devised a plan to leave notes hidden there for each other. At Midsummer’s dawn, Amina kissed him and ran across the square to the White One’s temple, just before the processions arrived.

  Need I describe the months of delicious subterfuge?

  (I thought to myself, “Oh gods, please don’t.” But he didn’t.)

  The cunning excuses they found to pass by the loose stone in the temple wall? The close calls that each of them risked, Amina trembling like a leaf when she was almost caught with a letter, or Hariq with his heart in his throat?

  By the next Midwinter, they were in love and out of hope. Hariq was to be wed. He had persuaded his family to let him sit vigil once more, and he begged Amina to find a way to do the same. She made honey-cakes, sweet and sticky, and she mixed in a measure of a certain herb she knew that would make a person very ill. Not dangerously ill, but ill enough they wouldn’t want to move too far from the chamber pot. She made platters and platters of the sweets, and when her whole family gathered together to dress her cousin up in the robes and send him off to the temple, she made sure that her cousin ate several of the cakes, and that all her other cousins who hadn’t sat vigil ate them too. By the end of the party, more than half the family was lying about in agony, and the other half was panicking for the doctors.

  (He got dangerously close to calling attention to a key flaw in the story, which is: How did she make sure all the cousins ate the tainted sweets, and how did she escape suspicion? But we must not inquire too closely into the internal logic of stories like this. It needs to happen so that Amina can sit vigil again, and so it does.)

  Amina helped her cousin take the heavy robes off, since he was already sweating buckets and clutching his stomach. “What shall we do?” her aunt cried. “Have we angered the White One?”

  “You must stay here and take care of everyone. I’m feeling fine, so I’ll go to the temple. I’ll pray all night!” Amina said. Her aunt nodded. Amina was the only unmarried one who wasn’t ill; she was the obvious choice.

  Amina didn’t even look across the square to see who was sitting vigil at the Bright One’s temple when she arrived. She flew up the steps of the Stately One’s temple and into Hariq’s arms by the heaven stone. They wept together for a time, and Amina declared she couldn’t live to see Hariq marry anyone else.

  And here Ylfing broke off and frowned.

  We all stared at him for a time, waiting. “Go on,” says I at last. I’d bitten my tongue so much during that story that I’d almost gnawed it right off. “Finish it. You’re doing fine.”

  “Um,” says he. “I’ve forgotten the last bit.”

  “Forgotten the last bit!” says I. “Forgotten! How could a person forget?” How could a person forget? I ask you now. But, “Forgotten!” I says.

  “Not the whole of it,” he protested. He could see I was spluttering. “I know they die in the end, and—”

  “Oh, well done,” says I. “Now you’ve gone and ruined it for Ivo twice over.”

  But Ylfing had gone and forgotten the bit that linked their declarations and their death. I couldn’t roll my eyes hard enough. What a time to sputter out! Right at the climactic moment. So I had to take over, but it wasn’t the same. You can’t start a story from the end; it just don’t work. Didn’t have any time to get rolling, you know, to work myself into it. They’re like hot baths, stories. Gotta ease into ’em slow. I made a muss of it, I’m not too proud to admit, but it’s Ylfing’s fault anyway. It was a mere summary at best, like this:

  They run away. Piras, once again on vigil at the Bright One’s temple, sees them and raises the alarm (that was the bit Ylfing forgot). Their families come after them. Amina’s family thinks Hariq seduced or bewitched her. Hariq’s family thinks Amina seduced or bewitched him. They flee on horseback from the two mobs, and, cornered where the plateau drops steeply down into desert, and overcome with despair and desperation, they fling themselves off the cliff to their deaths. When their families climb down, they find the bodies too broken and bloodied to identify, but still clutching each other. The end.

  You see? How can you forget all that?

  “I’m sorry for making a mess of the ending,” Ylfing said to Ivo.

  “It’s all right,” Ivo replied immediately. Ylfing had been making puppy eyes at him again, and I defy any boy to hold out in the face of that. Ylfing will be an excellent Chant one day if he can learn how to make that face on purpose. “But we’d really better go.”

  “Oh, right!” Ylfing fussed with his scarf and cloak and pushed the basket of leftover food closer to my cell. “Ivo’s taking me to meet his friends, since I missed it before.” He reached through the bars and patted my knee with his hand, thickly mittened. “Don’t mope about today, all right? Consanza will
think of something.”

  Ylfing came again early the next morning, with another paper parcel of monk’s-puffs. He poked them at me through the bars and spread his cloak—or Ivo’s cloak, it probably was—on the ground. Had a bag with him too, with a wad of paper and a thin sheet of slate that he balanced across his knees.

  “How was your night out?” I asked, once he’d gotten settled in. I spoke in Hrefni; it was cozier than Nuryeven.

  “What?”

  “Meeting Ivo’s friends.”

  “Oh. Yes. It was fine, I think.” He seemed distracted.

  I frowned. “You think it was fine?”

  “Mhm.” He didn’t meet my eyes. “Do you want to get started on today’s work? You can tell me about . . . something.”

  He’ll be an excellent Chant one day if he can learn how to lie. “Actually, why don’t you tell me about something.”

  “Hmm?” He fidgeted with his cloak a little, fussed with the brazier. “I don’t have anything.” He brightened. “This morning I heard some sailors from Tash singing a sea shanty I’d never heard before—”

  “Why don’t you tell me about how the rest of your night went?”

  He twitched. “Oh, you don’t want to hear about all that.”

  I made a mental note to teach him better evasion and redirection techniques. There are times Chants have to keep things to themselves. “Actually, young apprentice, with every moment my interest grows.”

  “It was boring.”

  “You said it was fine. And I’ve never once seen you bored with a new acquaintance.”

  “I—I meant the people were fine, but the things we did were boring, that’s all.”

  I pinned him to his chair with my eyes. “So you did some things.”

  “No,” he said quickly. “That’s why it was boring. The lack of things! Really dull.”

  “So you and Ivo’s friends sat in stillness and silence.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Lying.” And if I hadn’t been sure of it before, the blush that lit his cheeks would have done it. I leaned forward, narrowing my eyes, peering hard at him. “You’ve got shadows under your eyes, so you were up late, but you don’t have any new hickeys, so I seriously doubt that you were alone with Ivo very much. What were you up to, staying up so late if the company was so boring?”

  “Just—just talking.”

  “About what?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Sure doesn’t seem like nothing.”

  “Chant,” he said weakly. “Please don’t ask me. I can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t tell me? Well! That certainly puts me right at ease!” I’d been curious before, but . . . something about his face . . .

  “I’m fine, I promise. It was just talk. You don’t have to worry.”

  “Talk that you can’t talk about.”

  He bit his lip. “I said I wouldn’t.”

  I squinted at him again. “Did they make you promise not to tell anyone about this so-called talk?”

  He said a phrase in Hrefni, hwæn weo, which I can only translate as, “Well, you know,” but it has more layers to it than that.

  “Ylfing,” I said. “My lad. I want to make something clear—if you truly, truly cannot speak about the conversation you had with Ivo’s friends last night, if you are confident in the necessity of your vow of silence, then tell me now and we’ll forget all this.” I paused for a heartbeat or two, just long enough for him to squirm. “But if, as I suspect, you’re not certain, if you have an instinct about it, then trust your gut. You’re my apprentice; you’re allowed to ask for guidance if you need it, and I can keep a secret as well as anybody. You know that.”

  He looked wretched. “I want to tell you.”

  “Then do so. I’m your master-Chant. My job is to guide you.”

  “But they said I shouldn’t tell you. Specifically.”

  “Why?”

  He swallowed hard. “Ivo said—and his friends said—that the Queens might try to drag information out of you, if they thought you knew something.” His voice lowered to a whisper, though I doubt there was another Hrefni speaker within a thousand miles. “He said they might hurt you for it.”

  “Torture? They haven’t tried it yet.”

  Ylfing tilted his head back and forth, which is the gestural equivalent of hwæn weo.

  “Don’t you think I could come up with a more enticing story to tell them, if they did try that? Stories always make more sense than reality.”

  “Ivo cares so much,” Ylfing said, quiet and sudden. “About so many things. The minute I saw him, I knew he was a person who really, really cared about something. I could see it in his eyes.” He looked into the fire. “I’m . . . confused.”

  “About Ivo?”

  “No. No, gods, no. I’m more confused about . . . myself, I guess.” He took a deep breath. “Have you ever—do you notice—” Another breath. “What do you do when someone tells you something, and another person tells you something else, and they both sound like they’re certain of the truth, but it’d be impossible for both things to be true at the same time?”

  I couldn’t help but beam at him. “My boy!” I cried, so full of pride I could have wriggled with it. “You’re asking very Chantly questions these days.” But I saw how helpless and lost he looked, and I got myself under control. Goodness, though. I’m pleased to bits even remembering it. Think how proud you were every time one of your oath-nieces came home from her first successful hunt, with a fat bustard or an egret hanging from her pommel. That’s how proud a master-Chant is when their apprentice starts asking such questions. “You’ve stumbled upon something very fiddly and very important, lad. You want to know what to do? When you start noticing discrepancies, then you close your mouth, and you watch. Carefully. You sharpen your eyes and you examine every word they say to you.”

  “But . . . Ivo wouldn’t lie to me. Would he?” He was nearly wringing his hands, and his brow was knotted up all fretful.

  “Not on purpose, lad,” I said, as soothingly as I could. “Ivo is telling you a truth. He can’t tell you the truth, because he doesn’t know what it is, and that’s not his fault. You look at Ivo’s truth, and then you look at the truth you’re hearing from other people, and you pick it apart, and at the end, perhaps you find a truth somewhere in the middle.”

  “And that’s the real one?”

  I sighed. He’s still got a ways to go yet, even if he is starting to trip into Chantly questions by himself. “No, that’s just Ylfing’s truth, separate from Ivo’s.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s messy, lad, it’s all messy.” I waved my hand airily. “You just question everything that anyone tells you and assume they don’t really know what they’re talking about, even when they sound like they do, and you remember that everybody has a reason for telling you something in the way that they do and that most reasons are selfish. It will be second nature to you by the time you’re a master-Chant, not to worry. But what’s the thing Ivo is telling you that’s different from what you’ve heard elsewhere?”

  His voice was faint and a little dazed: “He says Nuryevet is a bad place.”

  That didn’t bring me up short like it should have, didn’t give me pause at all. “That’s because it is a bad place,” I said.

  “Consanza doesn’t think so.”

  I bit my tongue hard on my response to that, let me tell you. “Never mind her,” I said. “Focus on Ivo.” Looking back on it, I can’t believe I actually had to encourage him to tell me about Ivo. May wonders never cease.

  Ylfing took another, final deep breath. “Ivo and his friends meet every so often to talk about how bad it is here. He told you what it was like growing up here.”

  I nodded. “The schools, yes.”

  “He says that it hurts people, living like this. He says people starve, or die, and that no one’s allowed to say anything about it. He says people get angry about the taxes, and they try to argue about it, and they get arrested. That
happened to some of their friends, so now they meet in different places, secretly, and—”

  I sat up very suddenly. “They’re revolutionaries!” Hrefni doesn’t have a word for that, so I had to cobble one together, but Ylfing seemed to get my point, because he looked hunted.

  “No,” he said firmly. “Not like that. They just talk. Like I said before, just talk.”

  “Except for the ones who got arrested. Go on, then, what do they talk about?”

  “How to make things better, that’s all.” He squirmed. “I did promise not to say anything. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  I eyed my apprentice and wondered which of the two of them, him or Ivo, had the other wrapped around his little finger. Ylfing was terribly, terribly taken with Ivo, obviously, but Ivo . . . Well. There was potential there. Not that I could trust Ylfing to manage things delicately. “I’d like to talk to Ivo sometime,” I said. “If he wants to.”

  Ylfing squirmed again. “I’d have to tell him that I told you. . . .”

  “Were you planning on keeping that a secret?”

  “Yes! I was!”

  “All right. Well, if you happen to change your mind, then.” Or, more likely, if he ended up being unable to manage the ticklish matter of finagling Ivo for information. He’s so bad at lying. “You might as well find out as much as you can from that boy, either way. You can tell me all about it if we manage to get away from this horrible place. Now. To work?”

  We had a bit of a squabble, again, about whether he was going to write down everything I had to tell him or not, and it ended up that he won simply by moving out of my reach and refusing to put aside the lap desk and his supplies. I was too distracted to argue with him anyway. The cold had set in during the night, and even though Ylfing heaped twigs on the brazier, I couldn’t shake the chill out of my joints. Terrible thing, getting old. Bits of you that used to work start breaking. You start noticing parts of your body you never had reason to notice before.