Tainted (Lisen of Solsta Book 2)

by D. Hart St. Martin

  “She’s a hermit, Lorain. There’s little she can do beyond talk.”

  “And that’s the other point. She was at Solsta—a sooth at Solsta, I might add—a sooth, at Solsta, when Empir Flandari was assassinated, but she’ll tell us nothing about the Empir’s death.”

  “Did it occur to you that she might not know anything about the Empir’s death?” Bala asked.

  “Ah, but she does.”

  At the sound of the male voice, Bala looked up to see that Ariel had stepped into the room through the door from the clerk’s office. How long had he been standing there? She quickly rose, Lorain right behind her.

  “My Liege,” she said with a nod, and he came to her holding his hands out.

  “Bala,” he said as he reached her, his tone soft. He took one of her hands in both of his. “I am so sorry for your loss. I’m one with you in that.”

  “Yes, my Liege. And my condolences to you as well.”

  Ariel led her by the hand to one of the chairs in front of his desk and waited until she sat down before retreating to his own chair behind the desk. He nodded, and she turned to see Lorain, still at the couch, nod in reply and then leave via the door to the hall.

  “Bala?”

  She turned back to him. “Yes?”

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “I want to see my aunt.”

  “I can assure you that she’s being treated well.”

  “My father is ill, my Liege. If he had one less thing to worry about….”

  “Much as I would like to help you, I just can’t do it.”

  “On my honor, if you release her to my custody, I will not allow her to leave Avaret, and you can question her whenever you want.”

  “No. She knows things. She knows what happened to my mother, and I will know what she knows, too, before I’m done with her.”

  “You’re sentencing my father to death, you know. Without my aunt’s aid, with her locked up in prison, he’s just going to get sicker and sicker.”

  Ariel sighed, got up and started pacing back and forth. “I’ll think on it.” He seemed nervous for some reason, but Bala doubted it was her.

  “Please, my Liege. Don’t take too long. My father needs more than I can do alone.”

  “I will do what I think best.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of, she thought, but rose, recognizing in his tone the end of patience. Then she backed away from him at the dismissive fluttering of his fingers, disgusted at his very presence, but paused before completing her retreat.

  “Oh, and by the way,” she said, “happy belated outcoming day.”

  She gave him no chance to respond. She’d reached the door and now opened it, and she moved as swiftly out of the Keep as she could.

  When she reached her father’s quarters, she barged in and found him just waking up. He blinked at her with blurry eyes, then sat up slowly from the bed. “You look upset. Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been to the Keep.”

  “What?” He straightened, now fully awake.

  “I managed to actually speak with our elusive Empir.” She hid behind a dresser where he couldn’t see her as she slipped out of the seductive tunic. She felt used and dirty.

  “What happened?” her father asked from where he’d moved into the antechamber.

  “He promised to think about letting us see Aunt Eloise.” Now attired in a tunic meant for daily wear, a dark blue which she knew complemented her golden hair, she returned to the antechamber which also served as her father’s office and sat down beside him on the couch.

  “It doesn’t sound much like progress to me.”

  Bala patted her father on the knee. “He’s going to give in. I know it.”

  They sat quietly then, and Bala wondered how Lisen was faring at Rossla. Had she and Nalin arrived safely? What had happened since? This visit with Ariel had only reinforced her desire to see him brought down. And it wasn’t just that he was spiteful. It wasn’t even that he was a tyrant. It was just that he was so undeniably bad at cloaking the cruelty that ruled his soul and inspired every act that he committed and every word he said. Such cruelty must not be allowed to rule, she vowed.

  I am Ariel Ilazer. I will not be bullied by a child. Ariel realized he was still pacing, that the second Bala Tuane had exited his office, the fluttering of his stomach and the energy impelling his heart to race had flung him back and forth behind his desk without his even noticing. He stopped and took one deep breath, and then another.

  I am Ariel Ilazer, he thought.

  He was nervous, too nervous. And truthfully, Bala Tuane never could have brought this on. Lorain had returned too soon from pouching. He knew that now, now that it was too late to send her away again. Because within hours or a day, her physical evolution into the pouched carrier of his child would be complete, and her presence would cease to have this effect on him. At this precise moment, however, he needed badly to resurrect the grieving Ariel, indisposed to everyone—and that included Lorain—so he could hide out until her condition no longer affected him.

  He went to the conference table across the room from his desk, and he gathered up the paperwork relative to his throning. He would move upstairs to work on his speech and then try to resolve some of the seating conflicts. Not actually his responsibility, but just the sort of busy work that would separate his mind from his insatiable nerves.

  “Psst…my Liege?”

  Struck with fear, his nerves already in tatters, Ariel dropped the papers on the table and turned. He’d heard no one enter. But there, poking her head out of the closet that led to one of the Keep’s secret passages, stood his watcher, and he charged over to her.

  “Opseth,” he whispered when he reached her. “What are you doing here?”

  “Forgive me, my Liege,” she whispered back. She tried to step out of the closet, but Ariel blocked her way. “I know I wasn’t supposed to return until summoned, but I must see the sooth.”

  “No,” Ariel barked. “Not now. In a few days, maybe.”

  “But it’s…urgent.” She paused, looking confounded.

  “Don’t worry,” Ariel said, pushing her back into the closet. “I will send for you shortly.”

  She stared at him for the length of a breath, then she spoke. “Yes, my Liege. Thank you, my Liege.” With a nod, she turned and disappeared from sight into the passageway.

  Ariel closed the door and backed up against it, holding it shut, struggling for air. He forced himself to calm down, restoring his breathing to a more normal rhythm. What was he to do with the woman? He needed her, but too often she forgot who she was, that she was the servant, not the served, and that he was the Empir, her master. She trampled boundaries without a second’s thought. He must rein her in, but gently. Gently. She was too valuable an asset to relinquish simply because she refused to play the game by his rules. He would teach her the rules, give her better reasons to follow them than to break them. Hang on to your assets, he counseled himself.

  And on the subject of assets, what was he to do about Bala Tuane and her father? The sooth didn’t deserve a visit from her family. He sought to deprive her of comforts in the hope it would force her to speak and reveal the information he knew she had. And yet…. The Tuanes had lost Jozan, and unlike the loss of his mother which had given him only pleasure, their grief dripped like some awful ooze from the both of them, rooted in that thing that eluded him—love.

  He pushed away from the closet door and stepped firmly back to the conference table. He picked up his papers and headed towards the door to his head clerk’s office. As he passed through, he tossed off an “I’ll be upstairs if I’m needed” to Jazel, and then he stomped out down the hall and up the great staircase. He’d order lunch in his antechamber, invite Lorain to join him, but only for lunch. After all, her assets deserved treasuring as well. He smiled, pleased he could find a reason to smile, even on a day such as this. Perhaps life could improve after all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN


  LETTING GO, HOLDING ON

  “Hurry,” Korin snapped at Lisen. “The Elders are waiting.”

  “I’m dealing with this…this…robe. What did you call it?” Lisen wished Korin had given her a bit more warning than “The Elders want to see us” just as they were finishing the night’s training session. When she’d asked when, he’d responded, “Now,” as though it were a given. But first he’d brought her back to his chamber and tossed this robe thingy at her.

  “It’s a kashir,” he told her. Again. He looked all native and foreign to her in the red and orange kashir he’d slipped on without difficulty—hot colors, hot like the desert itself. Hers was green and yellow.

  “And how does it go on? I give up.” She held it out to him. She had changed into a clean tunic in the wet room where she had once again thanked the Creators and Mantar and whoever else might be in charge that her damn period had finally stopped, after seven days, over now at last.

  Korin took the kashir from her and proceeded to disentangle the mess she’d made of it. He held it out unfurled in front of her.

  “Now, put your arm through here,” he ordered. He quickly had it draped around her properly, and once she’d watched his deft handling of the thing, she understood how it wrapped over and under her arms until it hung like a simple robe. Did it have to be so complicated?

  “Ready?” It sounded like a question, but she knew it was another jab at what he perceived as dawdling. She wasn’t dawdling; she was scared. The Elders were allegedly quite wise. What if they saw through her? What if they figured out she wasn’t who she claimed? What if, at the very least, they recognized that she and Korin weren’t a couple, weren’t even colleagues, but a superior and inferior in cahoots?

  “Yes. Of course,” she lied. She wasn’t ready, not mentally for sure. With a bit of spit on her fingers, she smoothed the loose hairs back to her braid, the braid she’d taken to wearing with the solid black ribbon of one-without-family. She’d felt uncomfortable wearing the color of Korin’s house, and not because of the uninteresting combination of orange with her copper hair, as she’d told him. She didn’t deserve Korin’s color, and she didn’t want to live a lie. The black was fine, and she was content without a family claiming her. At least that was the truth.

  Korin led her out into the hall which was beginning to fill up with those returning from their night’s work. They’d all be eating dinner while she and Korin were lying to the Elders.

  “Are you all right?” he asked as he guided her up and up and upward through the tunnel, making turns without hesitation. She couldn’t keep track of where they were, and if she should get separated from him, she’d never find her way back on her own. She’d be lost forever then. Her survival depended entirely on him, just as it had since her return from Earth.

  They stepped through an opening off the tunnel, and Lisen looked around what appeared to be a tiny antechamber with another doorway set in the opposite wall. To her left as she faced this curtained passage, she noted an alcove with a small seat carved out of the stone rock face with room for no more than two.

  “We sit there,” Korin said as he gestured to the alcove. She stepped over to it with him, and they both sat down.

  “I thought you said they were waiting for us,” Lisen grumbled, making no attempt to hide her displeasure at the way he’d ordered her around.

  “I said they were waiting,” Korin corrected. “They see each couple alone. Some interviews take longer than others. It shouldn’t be long.”

  Lisen nodded, then scratched her neck. The kashir chafed her there, although it didn’t seem to bother her anyplace else. She fidgeted, and Korin turned to look at her, undoubtedly judging her for the nervousness she couldn’t hide.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m not used to all this formality.”

  “I would think at the very least a lifetime in the haven would have taught you how to wait.”

  A laugh broke from her before she realized. She sobered quickly and said, “You have no idea.” Do I tell him? she asked herself. Do I tell him it was no lifetime? Do I tell him where I went for seven years? When do I tell him? That is, if I tell him. One thing she did know—she wasn’t going to tell him now.

  The curtain shifted and slipped back, and the couple who had preceded them stepped out. One of them was Ondra, the woman Korin had introduced her to at breakfast a week ago. She seemed calm beyond comfort in her kashir and, it appeared, with the moment as well.

  “Korin,” the blond woman said.

  “Ondra, Rika,” Korin replied with a quick nod.

  “Rika,” Ondra said to her companion and then continued on in Garlan, which Lisen appreciated but also found odd, as though the woman wanted to be sure Lisen understood every word. “This is Korin’s Lisen. Did I speak that right?” The last she addressed to Lisen, and Lisen nodded stiffly. “They will do the Farii.”

  “Ondra told me you were back,” the young man with light brown hair said to Korin, also in Garlan, though he spoke it more comfortably than Ondra, or so it seemed to Lisen. “Couldn’t stand the Guard, I hear.”

  “Couldn’t stand our new Empir,” Korin corrected him.

  “I couldn’t stand the old one,” Rika added with a laugh. Lisen watched as Korin simply shrugged. What else could he do? After all, he’d been the one to push Flandari’s stallion almost past endurance up the twisted road to Solsta Haven while the Empir rode in front of him, dying in his arms.

  The curtain parted again, and an older woman in a long off-white kashir emerged. “Korin?” Korin rose, and Lisen jumped up, anxious and excited, her heart pumping a bit too hard, her mind racing after answers. Korin said something in Thristan to the woman, and then he encouraged Lisen to follow this woman with him into the Elder’s chamber. They left Ondra and her spouse behind without a word.

  Two torches, one on each side of the room, broke the darkness. The chamber was round, capped by a domed ceiling. Nature never could have constructed this room; The People, the Garlan equivalent of what Thristans called themselves, had carved it out by hand. No power-driven drills and such, just hard labor over a lifetime or lifetimes. Amazing. Around the room, a stone bench flowed out of the rock face, unbroken save for the doorway. On that bench, five people sat, three women and two men, all wearing the same off-white kashir as the woman who had escorted them in.

  “Please sit,” the woman said, and Lisen and Korin took their places on the bench in an empty space to the right of the door. Next to them sat one of the two male Elders, and their escort took her place to the other side of him. “I speak your language, Lisen of Garla,” she continued. “I will translate what the others say. Korin will translate your words for you.”

  “Thank you,” Lisen replied.

  “I am Elder Hozia.”

  Lisen nodded, saying nothing.

  “This is Elder Barok,” Hozia said, pointing to the Elder between Korin and herself. “Elder Larus.” The woman to Hozia’s right and almost directly across from the entry. “Elder Tronin,” Hozia continued counterclockwise around the circle, “Elder Paken and finally Elder Askrol.”

  Lisen nodded stupidly. How on Earth am I going to remember all these names? She decided remembering all their names was not important. She’d soon determine which names she would need to know, and those names she would endeavor to recall.

  Despite Elder Hozia’s promise, translating for the sole Garlan in the room quickly flew out the proverbial window, but with no windows anywhere in the mesa, there was no place for their good intentions to go. Maybe they just dropped them on the floor, Lisen thought. Their thoughtlessness got her fiddling with her fingers. The heated conversation all in gibberish lacking explanation began to irritate her, so she took to making up stories about these Elders to pass the time.

  In Lisen’s mind, the section of the bench opposite the door felt like the head of a table. And at that head sat Elder Larus, probably in his mid-sixties, his grey hair slicked back into the traditional Thristan braid filled with
more adornment than anyone else’s in the room. Larus sounded angry and kept glaring at Lisen as though she were the devil herself. Neither Korin nor the much kinder Elder Hozia seemed willing to fill Lisen in on the details of the disagreement. This pissed her off; someone should have translated what they were saying as the argument was clearly about her.

  “What are they saying?” she asked Korin in a whisper.

  “Shh,” was Korin’s only answer.

  “Don’t shush me,” Lisen whispered.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Excuse me,” Lisen spoke up, boldly interrupting the six Elders in the middle of their little talk. They all stared at her, and Lisen turned to Hozia and shrugged. “I’m sorry,” she continued, “but I know you speak Garlan. I would really appreciate not being left to imagine what you’re all saying about me. Where I come from, it’s considered rude to argue about someone right in front of them when they can’t understand you.” No need to point out that where I come from is light years away from here.

  “And that is what Elder Larus is concerned about—where you come from,” Hozia replied in Garlan, “while your friend insists that the fact you’re here is what should be important to us.”

  “Thank you, Elder,” Lisen said and turned to Korin. “See, that wasn’t so complicated that it needed to be saved for later.”

  “Delicate matters demand delicate treatment,” he cautioned back. “These are the Elders of the Tribe.”

  “And you and they are all talking about my life as though I’m not in the room.”

  “Lisen.” She heard the effort in his Guard-trained voice to call her by her name and hated that it had to be that way.

  “I wonder…,” Elder Hozia interrupted with a hint of hesitation.

  Lisen turned from Korin and looked to Elder Hozia. “Yes?”

  “We all wonder,” Hozia continued, “if you understand the importance of the Farii.”

  “Probably not,” Lisen replied, “but I can learn.”