A Conspiracy of Truths

by Alexandra Rowland

  It was soon afterwards that I decided that it was time, again, to attempt my escape. I knew that events were, by this point, well under your control, and so all that was left for me to do was to find a way to get myself and Ylfing out of the city alive.

  I had to make an appointment to see the Queen, she was so busy these days. As it turns out, being the sole ruler of a warring nation recovering from the near implosion of its economy takes up a lot of time in one’s schedule. So I went to her personal secretary.

  I found Ivo standing in the corridor outside Taishineya’s chamber, right at the base of the godforsaken spiral staircase that formed the central spine of the Tower. He was speaking to Ylfing in a low voice and stroking Ylfing’s arm in that way people have when they’re trying to comfort and dismiss someone at the same time.

  “We can talk later, all right?” Ivo said.

  “Sure.” Ylfing was smiling, but with only about eight-tenths of his usual cheer. “Yes, that would be nice. I’d like that. But—”

  “I’m just busy for the day.”

  “I could keep you company.” Ivo couldn’t quite suppress his wince, and—gods, even Ylfing couldn’t miss that. “What was that for?”

  “Nothing,” Ivo said, shaking his head. “Honestly, nothing. Her Majesty needs my full attention today, that’s all. I can’t waste my time on—that came out wrong. I just meant that I’ll be very boring today.”

  “You’re never boring,” Ylfing said, all sparkling smiles once again.

  Ivo forced a fairly convincing smile and kissed Ylfing’s forehead. “We can spend time together later, I promise.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I said loudly. “I need to talk to Her Majesty today. I’d like an appointment with her, if she has any time available.”

  Ivo opened the messenger bag hanging at his hip, took out a booklet, and flicked through it; Ylfing slunk away up the stairs while he was occupied. His shoulders were hunched in a way I didn’t like. “She’s only available during lunch. She’s having the rest of her household moved here to the Tower later today.” He snapped the book closed. “Will that do?”

  I snorted. Of course it would. “Lunch would be fine,” I said.

  “And I’d like a word now, if you don’t mind.”

  I sighed heavily. “What else do you want from me? I’m doing all I can. Just be patient.”

  “We could be doing more,” he hissed. He glanced around and leaned in close, his voice low. “We could just get rid of her now. Why wait?”

  I glared hard at him—my guard was about twenty feet back down the corridor, and even if she was occupied with cleaning her fingernails, Ivo had no call to be acting so obviously suspicious. “Well,” I said, pasting on my sunniest smile, “that sounds like a fine notion. I’ll leave all that to you, eh? Since it was your idea.” He stilled and got pale. I snorted and went after Ylfing, steeling my soul and my knees as I always did when I had to go up those damn stairs.

  I caught up with him after a floor or two, and I took him by the arm and turned him—“Oh, Chant,” he said, wiping his face and pretending like he hadn’t. “Hi.”

  “Hi. So what was all that about?”

  “What?”

  “Just now, between the two of you. What’s Ivo’s problem?”

  “Problem? Nothing.”

  “Tell a better story, if you’re going to lie.”

  He cringed. “He’s busy.”

  “Uh-huh. I heard. What is it really?”

  Ylfing couldn’t meet my eyes. He reached out and picked at the edge of a stone in the wall. “I’m not used to people who won’t tell me what they really think of me.”

  “That’s because everyone likes you,” I said, which is obnoxiously true. “Everyone has always liked you.”

  “Yeah,” he said in a small voice. “Do you think being liked is a skill?” The Hrefni and their attention to skills, I tell you.

  My first instinct was to say well, yes, obviously. I thought about it then, thought about it hard. Ylfing deserved a careful answer in this moment. “No,” I said slowly. “I don’t think it is. Because being liked is more about other people than it is about you. Liking people is a skill, though, one that you’re . . . very good at. But being liked, no. Why? Are you worried Ivo doesn’t like you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ylfing whispered. “He liked me before. He liked me a lot before. Now, I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s his business,” I said brusquely. Comforting people—now there’s a skill. I’m terrible at it. “You can’t control him or what he thinks or what choices he makes, so tell him to go fuck himself.”

  “It’s not his fault he’s busy.”

  “It is his fault if he thinks you’re a waste of time,” I said, and Ylfing flinched again. “That’s what he was about to say.”

  “I just . . . He has things to do, and I don’t. Not really. I’ve been talking to all the Thieves and Consanza’s family, trying to get them to tell me stories.” It’s Chant practice, essentially. Whenever we stop somewhere, he goes and makes friends, and looks, and listens, and gathers all the raw material he can find, and then we talk about it—sometimes every day, sometimes once or twice a week, depending on how fruitful his scavenging has been. He tells me all the stories and rumors and gossip he’s heard, and together we separate the wheat from the chaff, and I ask him questions until I feel like he’s been made to think about things sufficiently. “But I think they’re tired of me too. They keep saying they’re not in the mood, or that they don’t have anything else to tell. So I’m bored, a little bit, and I want to spend time with Ivo, and he . . .” Ylfing shrugged, still picking at the wall. “I’m always around when he wants to be with me, but . . .”

  “But the reverse is not always true.”

  He nodded and swallowed hard.

  “So does that say something about him or about you?”

  Ylfing chanced an uncertain look at me out of the corner of his eye. “Him?”

  I shrugged. “Figure it out yourself. Now, unfortunately for Ivo, I have assignments for you for the rest of the day and probably most of the evening. So you won’t be available at all.” I waited and watched to see if he’d protest. If he did, I would have dropped the issue immediately. It’s not like I was about to keep him from Ivo against his will.

  He sniffled, and wiped his face, and nodded. “All right,” he said, and managed a wan whisper of a smile.

  I took him to my meeting with Taishineya. He stood quietly at the door and said nothing, and while Taishineya prodded unenthusiastically at a dish of baked fish with lemon, I offered my life in exchange for my freedom.

  “I have had a dream,” I told her. “And the gods have offered me a choice. And so I offer you a choice. Will you hear me?”

  “When are you going to tell me another prophecy?” she demanded, as if she hadn’t heard. “The raiders are laying waste to the western marches. I need information. They’re coming east.”

  “My dream concerned my prophecies, Your Majesty.”

  “Dream? What about a dream?”

  “In the dream, I stood on the edge of a great cliff, looking down into an abyss. At the bottom, a storm was raging. Behind me, a desert. Above me, the sky was black, and the sun burned cold. I heard a voice from out of the abyss, and it said that there were only two paths in my life. I could accept the gift of the gods one last time, and do some good in the world, or I could turn back into the barren wasteland, from which I could never return.”

  Taishineya Tarmos furrowed her brows at me. “You just get to pick?”

  “Yes, but it comes with a price. If I choose to take the gift, it will destroy me. It will leave me shattered. This is what the dream told me.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You don’t want to do it, then.”

  “I want to offer you a choice, so that I can make my own—I want my freedom, my liberty. I am a very old man, and I want to live out what little of my life is left to me somewhere safe and quiet. I want to return to my
homeland. If you allow me to leave, I will give myself to the gods for you, one last time. They said my sacrifice would change the world, but I believe that the price is that it will burn everything out of me—my mind, my wits. . . . I will be nothing but a doddering, drooling husk. I might not even be aware of myself or my surroundings after that, but I want to know that I’ll be taken care of, that I’ll be living where no one will trouble me.” I nodded towards Ylfing. “My apprentice knows, and he is a good lad; he will stay with me until the end. I don’t imagine that I will last very long in that state, afterwards. I may not even make it home.”

  “So all you want from me is your freedom?”

  “And passage to the border. Perhaps a few coins for Ylfing, to help him get us the rest of the way, if Your Majesty feels inclined to generosity.”

  “And in exchange, I get . . . ?”

  “As I said—a great prophecy, one that will change the world, one that will shake the foundations of destiny. One that will empower you to carve whatever you wish into the tablets of fate with the chisel you’ve picked up.”

  She sat back and tapped her fingers against the arm of her chair. She had done away with many of the jewels that she had been wearing during our stay in the bank. She now wore only a diamond pendant around her neck and a few simple rings. Her clothes were still finely cut and finely woven, with secret subtle glimmering in the extravagant folds and masses of cloth. My eyes had become accustomed to beautiful things as one’s eyes do to bright light when one first wakes in the morning, and it was no longer searingly painful to look upon her.

  I thought she might be getting a few tiny traces of wrinkles across her forehead and around her mouth. But perhaps that was simply wishful thinking. “Do you need time to think about it?” I asked her.

  “No, of course not, why would I? You will accept the gift. That is not a question. You will give me everything I need to know.”

  “And after that?”

  “If you are correct about what will happen to you, you’ll be used up. Useless. As you say, a doddering husk. Why would I care where you and your apprentice go after that?”

  I nodded. “I would rather live as an imbecile in freedom, than live another day in possession of my wits, yet in bondage.”

  She shrugged. “When will you tell me this great prophecy?”

  “It will likely come to me during the night, while I sleep. The gods prefer to speak in dreams; they are easier to move than creatures or signs in the real world. Will you stand vigil to witness it, or will you trust my apprentice to transcribe it accurately for you?”

  “Of course I’ll stand witness,” she snapped. There was a light in her eyes—the dreams of power were reawakening in her, and it was dawning on her that this was what she had been waiting for, truly.

  “That was scary,” Ylfing whispered to me in the hallway afterwards. “It sounded real.”

  I stopped. I looked at him. And then I said, “Lad, it was real.”

  He frowned. “But you said you didn’t have any magic. You said—you said none of the Kaskeen have it, that it’s not in your blood.”

  “Some people say that it’s not about your blood, lad. There’s stories here and there—people move somewhere else, and live there for a long time, and sometimes they get the magic of that place. Look at Consanza—can you imagine her ever having Arjuni magic?”

  “No,” he said slowly.

  “No,” I agreed. “The land sinks into your bones, and she’s lived in this land all her life. If she had any magic, it’d be the Nuryeven kind.”

  “And you?” He was confused, poor lad. Bewildered more than brokenhearted, but I knew that’d come too. I’d resigned myself to it.

  “Who knows? I’ve been so many places. Who knows where my dream came from?”

  “It really happened?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He was confused, deeply so. “You’re going to die?” he whispered.

  “Something like it.” He began to cry; I steeled my heart and held firm. He’s not a good liar yet. I couldn’t tell him the truth. “You’ll stay with me, won’t you?” I said. “You won’t leave me to rot?”

  He cried harder, big hitching sobs, and shook his head. “Of course I won’t, of course not.”

  I patted his arm. “Do me one favor, lad. I don’t imagine I’ll care much where we go afterwards. I leave it up to you. You’ll know what’s best. But do me one favor and take me out of this city. Anywhere but Vsila, all right? Maybe you can convince Ivo to leave too, and the two of you could set up and make-home together, eh? Just not in Vsila.” All I needed was for him to take me out of the city. I could handle the rest if he just got me out.

  Taishineya wouldn’t allow anyone but Ylfing in with us—she set me up in her very own rooms that night, in fact, up high in the Tower of Pattern—gave me a pile of cushions and blankets on the floor of her sitting room, which was fine with me. More comfortable than the cot I’d been sleeping on, relegated to my former cell once again, though this time I was allowed to wander. It was an unsettling place to be, even so. It made my skin crawl, and I kept seeing ghosts around every corner, or Weavers, or blackwitches.

  As far as Ylfing knew, I was really giving up everything for our freedom. He spent most of that day begging me not to do it, swearing that we could find another way, but I was resolute. He cried for a few hours, and when we went down into Taishineya’s chambers that evening, his eyes were still red and swollen. He kept saying that he just didn’t understand how it could happen, and I kept shrugging and saying, “No one understands magic, lad, not really.” Again and again, ever more desperate, he asked if I was sure about this. Again and again, I told him what I’d told Taishineya: I’d rather be witless and free.

  He fussed over me as we settled down—I to sleep, and he and Taishineya Tarmos to sit vigil. Tried to tuck me in as if I was a child, until I snapped at him and batted his hands away, but I saw his eyes fill up with tears again. I knew this was all a scam, and that no one was saying good-bye to anyone tonight, but Ylfing, poor lad, thought this was the last time that we were ever going to speak to each other before my soul was burned out of me.

  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to stay awake for hours while pretending to be asleep, but it is tricky. I couldn’t sneak coffee beforehand, because then I would have been jittery and twitchy the whole time. It would have spoiled the, you know, dramatic tension. I made do with flexing my hands and feet under the blankets when I thought Ylfing and Taishineya Tarmos weren’t looking, and I pinched my arms hard when I really started to drift off.

  “This is taking too long,” Taishineya Tarmos grumbled after a while.

  “He’s giving up everything for you,” Ylfing replied, more bitterly than I thought wise. “The least you can do is show some patience.” Some fucking patience, that’s what it sounded like he’d wanted to say. “A man is making a sacrifice tonight—a great man, and a great sacrifice. Be respectful.”

  I half expected Taishineya Tarmos to throw him out of the room, or call off our deal entirely, but I think she must have been too surprised to realize she could. She wasn’t a woman who had to face down adolescent impertinence in her everyday life.

  My foot cramped. I gritted my teeth through it and supposed that this, at least, would keep me awake.

  I waited, and I waited, and I waited. Ylfing and Taishineya Tarmos said nothing more to each other.

  So then I started screaming. They jumped about a mile in the air, both of them, and Ylfing was at my side immediately. I flailed and struggled in the covers, tore at my hair, screaming all the while. Pissed myself too, because why the hell not? No one would do that if he were faking it. At least, no one would accuse someone of faking it if he did. You’ve either got to be dead fucking serious about your ruse to do something disgusting like that, or it’s got to be real.

  I babbled in a language neither Ylfing nor Taishineya knew—some obscure tribal dialect of Perland. Sounds hellish the first time you come across it, a
ll guttural throat-scraping consonants. In fact, it’s a really beautiful language in its content, with some very elegant and subtle ways of expressing emotional nuance. But when you don’t know what it means? Gods, you’d think that the speaker had just sucked off an entire pack of demons not an hour previously.

  So I recited delicate springtime love poetry at them in this Errachkhak Valley dialect of Perlish for a few minutes, until Ylfing was near crying, and Taishineya Tarmos was frozen by the wall next to the door. Don’t know what she thought I would do, but I could see that she regretted not letting any of the guards in to stand by.

  I wheezed in a huge gasp of air and arched my back, and I let my eyes roll up in my head. “Five battles. Five battles until glory. Tova and Vsino, you will lose. Do not try to win them. Send your men and women and let them die. Kasardat and Tishero you will win, as if you wield a sword from the hand of a mighty god. But let Tova and Vsino be lost, and take your troops to the Athakosa Plain near Byerdor and have them wait in the ravine there. The enemy will break upon your shields like water upon the rocks. Glory. Glory. Glory. Long live the Queen.”

  And then I fell silent.

  Ylfing’s sobs were the only sound in the room. He gathered my head to his chest and cradled me. “There,” he sobbed. His tears were falling hot on my face, but I was feigning unconsciousness and couldn’t wipe them away. “There. Are you happy? It’s done. You know how to win now. Are we free?”

  “You’re free,” Taishineya Tarmos said. “Your debts are all paid.”

  I almost swore then. Debts. Debts. I had all but forgotten that I had promised Consanza, months ago, that I would owe her a favor.

  Now, you well know that I never got along with her, and probably never would have, even given a hundred years to try . . . but damn it, a Chant has got to have some honor. I had promised her a favor in return for the ink and paper she’d brought me once, and that had to be repaid before I stepped foot out of this godforsaken country.