The Silences of Home

by The Silences of Home (v5. 0) (epub)

  The moon was nearly full tonight. She waited until it rose to the level of her tower window before she opened her door. She stepped carefully down the stairs, holding an unlit torch in her left hand, trailing her right along the wall for balance. She pressed her ear to the thick door at the bottom of the stairs and waited until she heard the guard’s footsteps advance and retreat twice, regular and measured. The third time they retreated, she pushed the door open, pulled it smoothly closed and turned to her right. She did not glance left; the guard’s back would still be to her, but only for a few more paces. She ran to the corridor’s turning, her bare feet as silent on the stone as they had been when she was a child.

  She had never been afraid before, on these nights: nervous, yes, that she would round a corner and bump into a Queensguard—but never afraid. Tonight the fear seemed to creep like cold, up from the floor and into her flesh, from toes to belly. She shivered with it, and with the excitement to which it was joined. My mother does not know. No one does, except me—and him, soon. . . .

  She had planned to visit him once—to give him water and relish the absence of guards and Queen. And she had done this. She had watched the fishperson tipping water against his chapped lips, had enjoyed his relief because she alone had given it to him. His convulsive swallowing had sounded very loud in the chamber and the empty corridor outside. She had offered silent thanks for her mother’s decision to leave the prisoner’s door locked but unguarded. After he had eaten the piece of scarlet mang, he had looked at her. She had held his gaze until his eyes closed. Then she had ordered the fishperson to remove all traces of water and fruit from his skin, and she had left the chamber.

  She had returned the next day, and the next. Day after day, thinking each time, Just once more; each day staying longer, to stretch her dizzy exhilaration further.

  She tried to remember, as she ran through the darkness, when she had begun truly to see him. Perhaps the first time Galha had requested her company for “another attempt on the prisoner,” when Ladhra had stood beside her mother and met his eyes. Their round whiteness had been so unexpectedly familiar that she had had to look away. He knows me now, she had thought. I know him. Even though this could not be; how could it, when he was a stranger who did not understand her language? A stranger like the one Galha had killed, rightly, in the Throne Chamber, the one for whom Ladhra had felt no pity. Yet she had seen Leish’s eyes so clearly that day, and she had flinched when her mother ordered a Queensguard to beat him until he lay like a bloodied animal on the floor.

  Ladhra had shuddered in her bed that night. I will not go to him again. I swear by the First that I will not.

  But she had, of course, again and again, and she had seen his seeping skin and his filthy clothes and his strange, hollow eyes as if she had been looking on them for the first time. She realized that the straightening of his mouth when she entered was a smile. She noticed that he sat up now, and smoothed his long, lank hair behind his ears. But he only did this when she came alone. When the Queensguards thrust open his door for Galha and her daughter, he stayed curled on the floor, his eyes half closed and his limbs heavy.

  He did not stir now, though the door swung open with a slow, climbing screech. She knelt beside him and touched his shoulder. When his eyes blinked open, she spoke some of the fishfolk words she had learned—and she spoke his name. She watched him listen to her voice. He looked at the door and back at her, and she crouched so that she would be able to support him.

  He was heavy, and much taller than she was. She slipped an arm around his waist and willed him to stand on his own. He did, after their first shambling steps, and by the time they were halfway up the tunnel, she was holding on to him only lightly. The torchlight showed her new black patches on his already stained clothing. She felt the blood as well, a slow, wet warmth against her fingertips and palm and wrist.

  It took them a very long time to reach the door behind the thrones. Both of Ladhra’s arms were numb, one from carrying the torch and the other from half-carrying him after his initial strength had ebbed. They leaned together against the door. When their gasping had subsided, she took a key from her belt.

  The Throne Chamber was layered with white and silver and shadow. The moon was hanging directly above the glass tower. Ladhra noted its position, calculated how much time they had and drew him quickly on. She urged him across the winking flagstones to the edge of the vast central fountain. Only when they were standing with their feet at the edge of the pool did she notice his trembling and look up into his face.

  He’s listening to something, she thought. His eyes were open but unfocused; his head was bent, but he did not seem to be looking at the water. The webs joining his fingers and toes were stretched taut and thin. After a time he turned to her, and she knew that he saw her, that he hoped and questioned and feared because she had brought him to this place.

  “Swim,” she said, relieved that she remembered the word, and “Please,” because she wanted him to know that this was something wished, not commanded.

  Leish was shaking so violently that she expected him to fall into the water. He stood for a moment longer, his toes now curled over the rim of the pool. Then he leapt up and in, his long body a gentle, silent arrow. She saw rings expanding and receding where he had entered the water, saw fish pebbling the surface in surprised flight. And then, for almost an hour, there was nothing. She sat with her legs in the pool and waited for his head to appear, but it did not. Perhaps he was too weak for this, she thought, and imagined plunging in herself to grapple his body into the air. Perhaps he can’t breathe. But she knew that the selkesh were fishfolk kin, that he would be able to breathe as easily underwater as above it, and so she waited as the moon’s path shifted on the water and the gems and the backs of drifting lake creatures.

  He emerged at last with a roar. Not his own voice—that of something beneath, something large and powerful and invisible whose bellow tore the water into waves. Ladhra flung up a hand to shield her eyes from the spray. When she looked back at the pool Leish was there, bobbing close enough to touch. He drew himself over to her, and she clenched her limbs still. O First Queen, First Mother, what have I done, he is changed, he is strong and sure as a warrior. . . .

  She lifted her chin when he slid from pool to stone. His dark skin glowed; the water hung upon it like a net of beads. When he raised his hands, she flinched just a little. He gestured to her left hand with his fingertips and she turned it up. Her palm looked soft and fleshy; she tried to close her fingers over it, but he gestured again and she left it as it was. He extended his other hand—a fist, she noticed—and eased it slowly open above hers.

  At first she thought that the four hard smooth objects that fell into her palm were stones. When she held them out into the moonlight, though, she saw that they were shells, two round and two straight. They were translucent, thin as the webs between Leish’s fingers, because there were no living creatures within to darken them. She smiled at him, wondered whether he would know what this meant. He smiled at her.

  He did not need her help, on the way back to his prison. He walked in long strides and she followed, watching the torchlight on his skin that looked now like scales. When they reached his door, he turned to her. “Thank you,” he said slowly and clearly, “Ladhra.”

  She waited for him to speak again, or move toward her, but he did not. She stepped forward and touched her cheek to the damp cloth over his chest. She placed her hands lightly on his hips and closed her eyes. His heartbeat was rapid and very loud. After a long, motionless moment he eased himself away from her, back into the empty room.

  Baldhron hardly ever slept any more. Luckily, sleep had never been something he’d had much of, or needed. For the past many years there had been lessons to attend in the mornings; Ladhra to seek out in the afternoons (when the student scribes were expected to study independently in their library); the Scribesrealm to visit at night. He had not slept a full night in his bed
in the Scribestower since he was a child, though he had always been careful to begin and end the night there.

  He was less careful now. He knew that his absence from his bed would be noted, perhaps commented upon, and he made sure to mention to his chamber fellows that he had several women, both in the palace and in the town, who required his presence on a consistent and wearying basis. He explained his occasional absences from lessons the same way. “Tired,” he said to one of his teachers, “worn out—must tell those insatiable women that I need some rest. . . .” Because he had always been a gifted student and would soon be finished his long training, his teacher sighed and rolled his eyes and allowed Baldhron’s frequent truancy to continue.

  He now spent all his afternoons and nights with the selkesh and the scribes, and some of his mornings in class. This meant that he had lost the thread of Ladhra’s daily doings, which made him irritable with his men. This irritability in turn made him impatient with himself, for it proved that his shadowing of the Princess had become a necessity, a dependence, rather than the voyeuristic pleasure it had once been.

  He remembered how amusing it had been to compose those first letters to her, years ago. He had laughed aloud writing them, as he knew she had laughed reading them. He had planned to needle her, to work his way into her life and observe her reaction—this poised, proud girl who would be the next lying queen. But as he continued to write and she continued to laugh, something had changed. He saw her scorn as she read his letters or spoke to him, and his amusement turned slowly to anger. And then one day, standing before her among the shadows of the Queenswood, she had said, “I could never love someone like you—forgive me, but this is the truth.” Her pity had been new and unexpected, as had the desire that wracked him then, along with the rage—shocking, stabbing desire like a sudden illness or a wound. He had turned and left her. Later he had been proud of his restraint. I was my own master, he thought, despite my need. It must remain thus. For the exercise too had changed. He courted her scorn and pity because he knew that he would master her someday. When he and his scribes revealed the truth of the Queen’s corruption and the realm convulsed in chaos, then he would take Ladhra and watch her despair.

  The arrival of the selkesh army had made Baldhron’s nebulous plan an achievable one. He taught them and fed them and assuaged, with infinite patience, their growing restlessness. He told them that they would wait until Queenswrit Eve to attack. He explained that the palace and city were poorly guarded on this night, for Queensfolk were inevitably drunk and sleeping by midnight, after the earlier festivities. He declared to his own men that, by striking on this night, they would forever alter the meaning of the date, which was so sacred, so beloved of the Queen’s ignorant people. The new rulers would change its name and its memory; from then on it might be called Scribeseve, or something to do with Truth or Victory. This idea so thrilled him that he risked selkesh discontent. He knew this and regretted it, but also knew that the revolt could take place at no other time.

  “Wait!” he commanded the selkesh over and over, as their bodies hollowed and their eyes darkened. “Wait one more month. We can only triumph on this night, when the moon is dark and the city is weakened. Believe me: this will be the perfect moment.”

  He would shake her awake. Perhaps there would already be screaming; perhaps Ladhra would be sitting up, confused, rubbing her hands over her eyes. In that case he would push her back again and pin her with his body. He would not cover her mouth; he would let her scream until she realized that no one would come for her, until the other screams made her own more like the mewling of a kitten. She would be broken even before she knew what was happening in her palace, her city, her realm.

  He envisioned going to her in more and more detail, until this unspoken plan was as intricate and delicious as the other. Only his certainty of success and imminence enabled him to sacrifice the afternoon hours that he had often spent as Ladhra’s shadow. Soon she would be his whenever he wished; his army needed him now.

  One night the men beneath the city seemed more content, quieter than usual. Most of the selkesh were sleeping; Baldhron did not allow himself to think that this was due to the lethargy of confinement and slow starvation. His own men were mostly above, since he had ordered them to be more cautious in these last few weeks and to remain visible to any who might be questioning their recent absences. Baldhron murmured to one of his scribes that he would be back in a few hours, well before dawn. Then he swam to the marketplace’s well shaft.

  Why go up now? he thought as he drew on one of the dry tunics that hung at the base of the shaft. The sky was only a little lighter than the air beneath the ground—because of the moon, which was full. Deep night already, moon risen and bright. She’ll hardly be about at this hour. But it had been so many weeks since he had lingered at her tower door, and perhaps tonight he’d go further, tamper with the lock every time the guard turned his back, run up the twisting stairs to stand against the door to her chamber. Baldhron climbed the well shaft as swiftly as he had once scrambled up the cliff above his cave.

  When the moon waned to invisibility, the palace would be his. He attempted to imagine this as the Queensguards nodded to him and opened the doors, and as he slipped through the darkened corridors and took his customary place behind the statue of the Eighteenth Queen. He had spied and hidden for so many years that an end to such an existence was almost impossible to envision. But he did. He half closed his eyes and saw himself striding down the middle of the hallway, smiling at the guards, who would bow from the waist. . . .

  Ladhra’s door opened. Baldhron stiffened and watched the Princess pull her door quickly shut behind her, unnoticed by the guard who was fifteen paces away, with his back to her. Baldhron’s surprise held him motionless for a few long moments, and she was nearly at the corridor’s turning before he leapt after her. He knew the guard was about to begin his march back to the door. Baldhron ran, glad for his bare feet and the swimming that also gave him speed on land.

  She was difficult to follow, for she was moving even more rapidly than he was. He tried to keep an appropriate distance between them—and then she would round another corner and he would have to sprint to keep up. Once he hurtled around one such corner and nearly collided with her. She was standing with her arm extended, holding a torch—which he had not noticed until now—to another that stood, lit, in a wall bracket. He waved his arms violently in order to stop himself before he touched her. Somehow she did not hear him or see his ridiculous flailing. He followed more carefully after this, even when she opened a door he had never seen before, one hidden by flowering vines as thick and heavy as a wall hanging, as he discovered when he pushed his way through them. The door was low and unlocked, and opened onto a stairway that stank of sand rats and mildew. Baldhron eased the door open and shut so that there would be no wind to tug at the torch flame—but she was already at the foot of the stairs, disappearing into a tunnel. He thought, Sweet Drenhan, how have I overlooked this place? and felt a prickling that was both excitement and anger.

  He was calm and lucid until the moment she stopped at another door and raised her hand to it. As she did this, he remembered the words of a fishperson he had spoken to in the marketplace. “The selkesh man is alive—ill, but alive—and being held in a chamber that is not known to any palace folk except the Queen and her family.”

  “And how do you know this?” Baldhron had demanded.

  The fishperson had stared at him with its inscrutable underwater eyes and said, “Some questions cannot be answered and should never be asked. Would you, for example, answer me if I asked why you and your comrades throw vast quantities of food down the wells here every night? And why you slither down after it?” Baldhron had stared back at the fishperson, his voice vanished. “Well, then,” it had continued, “let us not concern ourselves with such questions. Now, if you please, my payment. . . .”

  When Ladhra entered this new door, Baldhron began to feel dizzy, so di
zzy in fact that he did not think to hide himself, in case she returned the way she had come. She did not; she turned the other way when she finally emerged again, her arm wound around the selkesh prisoner’s waist. Baldhron watched them lurch almost out of sight; then he stumbled forward. He followed, blind to the strange tunnels through which he was passing, seeing only her skin and the other’s, her shadow on the wall, rippling and bending and larger because it was not just hers. He halted when she opened a door at the top of another stairway. He watched her enter the chamber or corridor beyond, with the water-man beside her. When the door had closed, Baldhron stepped back into the tunnel and waited. He might have waited for minutes or hours; he had no idea afterward. He shivered and did not think to blame himself, as he normally would have, for this evidence of physical and mental weakness. He did not think at all.

  When he heard the door above him open again, he pressed himself against a wall within a side tunnel. This time the water-man walked ahead of Ladhra. He was no longer stooped and shambling, and his breathing, which before had rasped, was now silent. They returned to the prison room and stood together. The water-man said, “Thank you, Ladhra.” She reached out her hands, not to support or aid him, this time, not for any other reason than to touch him: his hips, wrapped in strips of cloth that looked wet-dark, and his chest, against which she laid her cheek and her long black hair.

  Baldhron’s dizziness evaporated. He leaned forward so that he would see clearly what the water-man would do, where he would touch her before Baldhron launched himself into the light. But the prisoner did not touch her. He stood very still, then moved her hands off his hips and turned into the room behind him. The door closed with a deep, shuddering sound, and Ladhra stared at it. Baldhron could not see her eyes, but he could see the rigid bones of her hands.