Children are some of my favorite audiences. When they ask questions, they ask good ones in good ways. They never, ever ask, “But why should I care about this?” They know what some adults have forgotten: a hunger for the world, to understand, to absorb every piece of it.
“That wasn’t exactly what I imagined I’d get when I asked,” Helena said to me afterwards.
The geography lesson had put me in a glowing mood, and interestingly, it even survived after I ran into Consanza in the corridor. She was reading a messy sheaf of papers and nearly walked right past without looking at me, saying only, “Helena was looking for you earlier, Chant.”
“She found me,” I said.
“Oh, good,” she said absently, still drifting down the corridor.
“She wanted me to teach geography to your children.”
Consanza stopped dead in her tracks and turned around. She was intensely puzzled. “Geography? You? Oh. Actually, I suppose that makes sense. If Helena wants you to do something, you’d better do it.”
“I already did.”
Consanza nodded. “How was it?”
“Helena said it wasn’t what she was expecting.”
She rolled her eyes. “Why am I not surprised? You can’t cooperate with anyone, can you?”
“I’ll have you know,” I said, drawing myself up as tall as I could, which was nowhere close to as tall as Consanza, “that she and the children all enjoyed what I had to say, and I got the impression she was expecting it to be much drier and more boring than what I gave her.”
Consanza raised her eyebrow at me and my tone but shrugged. “All right, then. As long as Helena is happy with it.”
“She is.”
She turned to walk away, then paused and turned back again. “What exactly did you tell them?” She didn’t sound quite suspicious, just . . . cautious.
“Just interesting things about all the places I’ve been. Geography things. Things to give them an awareness of the world beyond the horizon.”
“Places like what?”
“Everywhere,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“You hadn’t been to Nuryevet before this,” she replied sharply. “So maybe you haven’t been everywhere.”
“Everywhere that matters,” I couldn’t help but reply. But she was too intent on me to take offense. “All around the Sea of Serpents and the Gulf of Dagua, up and down the coast of the Amethyst Sea, from the Sea of Sun to the Ganmu River. And more.”
She hesitated again, and then she said, “Arjuneh?”
Silence, while we both considered how much of her hand she’d just revealed in this card game I hadn’t realized we were playing. “Yes,” I said at length. “In fact.”
“Did you tell them about it?” She was using her advocate voice now, and her advocate posture. Guarded, arm’s length, perfectly neutral.
“A little,” I said, using my own approximation of the advocate voice.
We were at an impasse.
“Did you like speaking to the children?”
“I always like speaking to children.”
Another long silence.
“Inga,” she said. “Inga is mine.”
“I know.” Inga stood out from the other children—Consanza’s only daughter of her own body, about seven years old, beautiful and brown. She had Consanza’s black eyes and dark hair, though the texture of it was a little softer, and it curled on her shoulders.
“You could tell her more about Arjuneh, if you wanted.”
That wasn’t at all where I thought the conversation had been going. I blinked. “Oh. All right.”
“If she’s interested,” Consanza said.
“I’ll ask her. Have you told her anything?”
“No,” Consanza said quickly. “That is, not much.” There was another long silence, but I could tell she was trying to find words, or perhaps trying to weigh the scales to determine whether she should say anything else. “I told her a story once. A story from Arjuneh.”
“Which one?”
“You mentioned it once. Priya, Majnun, and the Wondrous Blue Panther.”
“Oh. Yes. I know it.” I paused, thought back as far as I could. I’d heard her matronymic exactly once, as far as I could recall. “Your mother was named Priya, wasn’t she?”
Another pause to weigh the scales. “Yes.”
“Was that on purpose?”
“Yes.”
“Your grandmother must have been a romantic.”
“Yes,” and then, unexpectedly: “Both of them were.”
“Mm,” I said. I was dying to ask another question, but I was in too much of a good mood to ruin it by picking a fight. “I think that’s lovely,” I said. “The way your grandparents carried Arjuneh with them in the name they gave their daughter.”
She had no idea what to do with that. I’m not sure I knew what to do with that. I can’t recall if I’d ever given her any kind of compliment up to this point. “Yes,” she said, for lack of anything else to say.
I decided to risk the fight and ask the question. “You just said that both of your grandmothers were romantics.”
“Yes.”
“Was your father’s name Majnun?”
A very, very long silence. She was bowstring-taut. “Yes.”
And suddenly I felt like I could fill in a lot of blanks—maybe not with perfect accuracy. They were just guesses, after all. . . . But you only need two points of information to draw a line, and a line is a story: two women and their husbands leaving Arjuneh for the far, bleak north. Two women, probably close friends, bearing children around the same time: a son and a daughter, named for a love story and a land left behind. “It’s none of my business, but I’ve wondered. . . . Why did they leave Arjuneh?”
“You’re right, it really isn’t any of your business.”
I held up my hands and took a step back. “No offense meant, advocate. Curiosity is a hard habit to break. It was only an idle fancy.”
“Fine.”
“Are you glad they did?”
“What?”
“That they came to Nuryevet.”
She was trapped between confusion and anger. I wonder if such a question had ever occurred to her. “How should I know?” she snapped. “I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve never known anything else.”
I nodded. That made sense. “If they hadn’t, you wouldn’t have met Helena,” I offered.
She took an unsteady breath. “Then yes, I guess I’m glad they did.”
“Did Inga know her grandparents?”
“No.”
I nodded again.
“I just thought she might want to know, someday. About Arjuneh. I thought she might be interested. Since they . . . didn’t live long enough to tell her.”
“I could tell you,” I said. “And then you’d have something to tell her if that someday comes.”
“No,” Consanza said quickly. “That’s all right. I’m fine as I am. But what she wants might be different.”
“It’s very wise of you to say so. Most parents assume their children are going to want the same things they do.”
“Thank you,” she said, in a way that meant, Let’s stop talking about this, back off.
I nodded and . . . backed off. Walked away, my guard following a few yards behind as usual, and left her there in the hallway.
Sometimes as a Chant you can sense the shape of the things that people are carrying around in their hearts. A Chant spends so much of their life learning about how groups of people are in one place or another that they naturally come into a familiarity with the way individual people are. And the way that Consanza was? There was something big and tangled and complicated under her surface, something to do with Arjuneh, and her grandparents, and her daughter.
There are many stories that aren’t mine to tell. And, more important, there are some that aren’t even mine to hear. Consanza carried a story in her heart that I would never have a hope of reaching, or even understanding if I did reach it, not in the wa
y it deserved to be understood. But it was there and I could see the outlines of it, like the shadow of whale below a boat. If she wanted me to talk to Inga, then I would. And I did. But I can’t tell you about what we said. That’s not a story for you to hear.
Regardless of the glowing mood I’d been in earlier, the downswing happened as it inevitably does, and by evening I was miserable again, even worse than before. Flat-Nose would not be shaken from my heels, and I longed for a moment to myself.
I went up to the top floor to punish him, because I knew he’d have to follow me up all those fucking stairs, and I got the map out of its hiding spot and spread it out on a table, because it didn’t goddamn matter anymore. I didn’t know why I’d even bothered to try.
“Did you make that?” Flat-Nose asked.
“No, of course not,” I snapped at him. “I’m no cartographer.”
“Neither was the person who made that,” he said, snickering to himself like the uncivilized fool that he was.
I harrumphed at him and concerned myself with staring glumly at the map, imagining all the different paths you could have gone, hoping that Semynsk hadn’t been a coincidence, hoping that Ylfing had found you and was returning to me.
A thought itched at me. I brushed it away.
It itched more insistently.
I huffed and sat back from the map. “What do you mean?” I demanded, irritated more at the thought tugging so intently on my sleeve than I was at Flat-Nose.
“I mean it’s a shitty damn map,” he said, which was not at all helpful.
“It looks like a perfectly fine map to me,” I said, gesturing across it. It was in good condition—old parchment, but the edges weren’t torn or frayed, and all the lines were neat and clear.
“Looks, sure. Is, no.”
I counted to ten and managed to ask calmly, “Would you care to elaborate?”
He jabbed a finger at the Osered River. “Look, it’s wrong. That big bend there, it doesn’t exist.”
“Rivers change course all the time,” I said primly. “This map was likely made before that.”
“The Osered hasn’t changed course in four hundred years.” I squinted at the parchment. It certainly wasn’t four hundred years old. Flat-Nose slid his finger to the key in the upper right-hand corner. “Drawn in 1132 for the King of Coin Evitsen Perholat. Fifty years old.”
“So he got a little imaginative with the river’s course.”
“And Vsila is too far inland. Nearly eighty miles too far. We’re to the east of that little river draining into the bay. And—look, look at that!” he said, scornful, indicating a hamlet in the middle of the country. “They’ve put Kovazska in the Ninth Ward, and it’s in the Third.”
“Where’s the Third Ward?”
I watched his finger track from the center of the country to the far northeastern corner of Nuryevet, several inches above Vsila, where a stubby peninsula jutted into the ocean. He circled the area with his finger. “Third Ward.” I glanced up at him and watched his eyes move across the paper. He leaned on the table. “And here. Zlavoi: drawn in the Fifth Ward, belongs in the Seventh. And Promuk—it’s in the right ward, at least, but everyone knows it’s a day’s ride away from Lake Mira, not right on the banks.” He stood up and snorted. “Shittiest map I’ve ever seen, if I’m being honest with you.”
Hope glimmered within me like the first rays of dawn over the mountains. If the map was wrong, perhaps all was not lost. Perhaps I hadn’t set you an impossible task.
I rummaged through the shelves—there were a few other maps in here, older ones, more worn. Worn from use, by my guess, and perhaps the near-pristine condition of the other one I’d been using should have been a clue. I brought a few of them over to Flat-Nose and shoved the long, rolled-up sheaves of parchment into his arms. “Show me. Show me one that’s right.”
He shoved them back. “Fuck off.”
“Please. I’ll put in a good word for you with Her Majesty. And I’ll behave. I promise.”
He grumbled and grunted, but at last he picked through them, unrolling them one by one and giving each fair scrutiny. On the third or fourth, he said, “This one’s not bad.”
I very carefully resisted the urge to snatch it from his hands and let him lay it out on the table. I looked back and forth between the two—indeed, the Osered River was a dramatically different shape in this other map. “Not too bad, you say?”
He shrugged. “It’s a hundred years old. The borders of the wards have changed a little, but the landmarks are there.”
“Is Vsila placed correctly?” I said, tapping the miniature of Vsila’s distinctively bland city walls and squat, squarish buildings.
“Aye.”
My finger traced west, up the Bay of Vsila and along the Osered. “And Uzlovaya?”
“Aye,” he said.
“And, ah, Tova?” I said, picking a minor-looking town at random from the Athakosa Plain, north of Vsila.
He leaned in. “As far as I know. Never been there myself.”
“Thank you,” I said with the greatest sincerity. “This has been extremely enlightening. I owe you one.”
He grunted at me. I returned my attention to the map, found what I was looking for, and breathed a silent sigh of relief. The towns I’d named for you were perfectly placed; I couldn’t have chosen better if I’d tried. With a little luck, we’d probably be all right.
And then came the day that we heard about the raid on Czersdo, and then I knew for sure that Ylfing and my message had reached you safely and that my plans were in motion. I burned that damn fucking map in celebration—and kept the other one as safe as a King’s treasure, of course.
That night, I had a very public, very noisy attack of the prophetic vapors in the main hall not far from Taishineya Tarmos’s chambers. I writhed around, screaming and carrying on until everyone in earshot was crowded around me, arguing about what to do, and Taishineya Tarmos stood at my head, shouting at all of them to shut up in case I said anything important.
“In Derisovet! Three days after the new year!” I gasped, and pretended to faint.
Silence, and then an uproar—what did that mean? Where was Derisovet? There was an argument—Consanza’s husband Velizar kept trying to say that it was a little ways in from the western marches and the Tegey Mountains, but no one was listening to him then, of course.
Before I “recovered,” they’d sent for a map, and Flat-Nose, remembering our conversation from a few days before, had fetched down the nice, correct one from where I’d stashed it in the storage room. They located the little town, as I had known they would. It was a little farther in from the western marches, but . . . well, everyone knows prophecies are uncertain creatures: The previous one had clearly been about the Umakh; was this the same or was it some new and unrelated catastrophe? If it was the raiders, would they continue on their path eastward? This possibility was met with great concern, arguing, shouting. Of the Thieves, only Flat-Nose was Nuryeven, but I found out then that Taishineya Tarmos had promised them various estates and holdings in the western parts of the country (which, she had claimed, were very valuable—draw your own conclusions, since you laid waste to the vast majority of those little hovel towns). They were primarily concerned with whether they would be able to sell their holdings profitably if everything on them had been razed to the ground.
Taishineya Tarmos eventually shouted them all down—she’d gotten rougher in the months with these ruffians, less polished, less calculated. She was still a cunning bitch, and I didn’t like her any better, but she wasn’t the sickly-sweet piece of fruit candy that she’d been when she visited me in the prison. There was steel in her. I mean, I suppose there had been steel in her before—there would have to be at least some, to be elected to office in Nuryevet, but it had been harder to see before, behind the tinkling laugh and the coy smiles. She still hadn’t given those up entirely, but I’d heard her laugh like a real person at least once. No, I didn’t like her any more than I did before, but i
t was easier to respect her when she was authentically ferocious instead of disingenuously girlish.
So, as you well know, because you were there, Derisovet fell, and the messengers that Taishineya Tarmos had sent out brought the news back to the city that it had happened exactly as her oracle had said it would. Dozens of soldiers dead, we heard, but no one ever seemed to ask how many civilians. Two or three, I’d expect, right?
Taishineya came to me all in a snit about it, saying that they would surely believe her now and so forth, and she fairly shook me until my teeth rattled in my skull, trying to get me to give her another prophecy about the next village that would come under attack. I begged and pleaded and professed myself to be just a feeble old man, already weakened by the toll that the prophecy had taken. These things could not be rushed, I reminded her, so rarely could things be told on command. “But you did it before,” she said, as petulant as a child. “The first time I asked, you just did it! And you were in a repulsive little cell then.” And in turn, I reminded her that I’d had supplies, incantations, my apprentice. . . .
So she sent out to find the supplies I asked for—I requested a lot of useless extra things, just because I was terrifically put out about having been shaken to bits, and because I thought it would make some starving alchemist in the city happy and perhaps keep him or her alive for another day or two.
I held off on actually doing the damn show for her, pretending to come down suddenly ill with a winter cold.
Taishineya Tarmos had no army; she had fifty-odd people who were pretty enthusiastic about doing what she said, since she’d brought them to a nice warm building and filled their pockets with literally more gold than they could carry. Even though they couldn’t eat it, even though it was as useless to gamble with amongst themselves as pebbles would have been. Even though there was nothing to spend it on except when one or two of them snuck out to see the city at night, and even then they couldn’t spend more than pennies and the occasional liriya.
A Conspiracy of Truths Page 36