The Silences of Home

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

  The thud of the gangplank meeting the stone beneath the bridgetower made Lanara flinch. She saw the Queen take Malhan’s raised hand and step down onto the deck, saw them turn together to the side of the ship. “Aldron!” Lanara hissed. “Help me down—I must get to her.”

  He tugged at her hand when she was beside him again, already pushing her way into the crowd. “You’ll never make it there,” he said, but she felt him follow her anyway, through knots of bodies and growled curses.

  She was nearly at the river’s edge: one more row of people. She jabbed her elbow into someone’s back. She heard an oath, saw an opening, and thrust her face between two sets of shoulders. The Queen and Malhan were at the end of the slender bridge that joined their ship to the shore. So close: Lanara could see the whorls of stitching on Galha’s cloak and boots, and the darkened tips of Malhan’s fingers, stained by decades of clutched writing sticks and words smudging on parchment.

  “My Queen!” Lanara cried into the silence, and voices rose around her, scolding, quelling.

  Galha turned. “Step aside!” she called. Lanara heard her, though she did not see her; the men in front of her had forced her back against Aldron’s chest.

  “You heard the Queen,” Aldron said in a rough, low voice. The men shifted, glanced at each other.

  “Step aside,” Galha said again, “and let her come to me.”

  There was a path before Lanara now. No people, nothing in her vision except for the Queen. Lanara walked faster, faster, and was nearly running when she reached her.

  Galha’s skin was yellow, older. Her eyes were wide and burning-dry and webbed with crimson veins. Her voice at least was almost the same. “Nara,” she said, and held out her arms, and rocked them both in the sunlight by the Eastern Sea.

  “Malhan chides me for not sleeping.” The Queen turned from the window, but only a bit; she still stood with the harbour and the sea before her. The same room where Lanara had read of Ladhra’s murder, the same benches and table and wall hangings. This time, though, there were no Queensguards present; Galha had dismissed them. “I must speak with Queenswoman Lanara alone,” she had told them, and Lanara had felt a flush sweep up from her neck to her cheeks. A moment of pride among all those others that brought her only helplessness.

  “I do not chide you,” Malhan said quietly from his customary place by the door. Again Lanara’s heart sped and lightened, for she was here, alone with the Queen and her consort-scribe, permitted to see and hear them as no one else was. No one, now that Ladhra was gone. “I simply urge you to rest. You are too busy—”

  Galha’s laugh was hollow and grating. “Too busy! How not, when there has been so much to do? Ever since the morning after the attack. Our own forces to contact, and the prisoner to interrogate. And Ladhra’s tomb fountain to choose.” She did turn now. She leaned against the window and gazed into the room, though not at anyone or anything. “I could not choose one in the end, from those set aside for my family. I ordered one to be made specially, according to my own design. My daughter died a heroic and remarkable death. None of the fountains already in existence could possibly have done her justice.”

  The Queen’s voice was high, nearly strident, but her silence was worse. Lanara cleared her throat, said, “And who . . . who saw her fall? Do I know them?”

  Galha’s eyes sharpened on Lanara. “Two of my personal guard. I’m sure you have seen them near my tower chambers. They have accompanied me here, though one of them is unwell—some sort of intestinal complaint. . . . But we are hoping he will be able to join us on the journey. As you will, Nara. You will come with me on my own ship. How proud your mother would be! And your father.”

  Lanara glanced away from Galha, at the fireplace. The flames were tall and did not shudder or bend. “Yes,” she said, trying not to sound uncertain, “I’m sure they would be. And I will sail with you just as proudly—more than proudly, for I long to fight beside you, to cut down the beasts who have so wounded us both. . . .” She bit her lip as if this would steady her pulse, or her voice. “How,” she said after a time, slowly, raising her eyes again to Galha’s, “have you kept yourself from killing him?”

  The Sea Raider was still bound to the mast, nearly naked, his skin cracking in the sunlight and the fierce cold. Lanara had attempted not to look back at him as she followed the Queen to the house—but she had, and each time had felt the sickness crawl again in her stomach.

  “My dear,” Queen Galha said, so gently that Lanara felt for a moment like a child, cherished and comforted, “of course you do not know—how could you? There are worse things than dying, more effective ways to punish than the quickest one. This Sea Raider is mine now. He will not leave me. He will starve a bit, and his flesh will cry out for the water his kind needs for life—but I will keep him well enough to witness the destruction of his land and people.” She smiled. Lanara saw deep lines in her yellow-shadowed skin, branching from her lips and eyes. “And in any case,” the Queen continued in a quicker, brighter voice, “the information I have forced him to provide me with has proven invaluable. So much so that I’ve grown tired of translation and have employed a fishperson of his acquaintance to teach him the Queenstongue. He is sullen and quiet in my presence until I urge the words out of him. The fishperson, though, tells me he is learning quickly.”

  Galha’s breath caught on her last word and she groped for a chair back. Malhan crossed to her, lowered her down as she waved her hand at him. “It is nothing—a brief weak spell, to be expected . . . and now you will chide me and try to bundle me off to a darkened room. As if I would be able to rest. When I close my eyes, I see only ugly things. . . .”

  Lanara was staring once more at the fire. It filled her vision, especially when she kept her eyes unfocused. Alnila, she thought, remembering the name Aldron’s people gave to their goddess of fire. Aldron . . . She turned quickly to Galha. Malhan was standing beside her chair, very close but not touching her. Galha’s fingertips and thumbs were together: the sign of the arrow, her reign, her strength.

  “I—” Lanara began, then stopped. Perhaps it would sound foolish, this idea that had come to her so swiftly. Better to think a little more, as her father would have commanded her to do. But Malhan looked at her, and Galha lifted her head from her joined hands and said, “Yes, Nara?”—and the words came out almost as quickly as she had thought them.

  “I know an Alilan man—you may remember them from Queensfolk reports—and anyway, I wrote to you about him. About his Telling power. He can speak and make you see and hear and feel what he speaks of. It’s the most wonderful thing. He Told a fountain for me once, in an inn, when he could see that I needed to be cheered, and since we came here, he’s been Telling for almost anyone who asks him and has need of comfort. He’s generous and careful, and his words can soothe and distract, though they don’t make real things—that’s not part of the gift. . . .”

  “So this is what I require?” the Queen said when Lanara’s words had faded. “Soothing? Distraction?”

  Lanara’s fingers felt numb; she wove them together under the table. She had no answer to Galha’s question, which had not been a question at all, and she could not look at her, now that she had been a fool, and presumed to offer counsel.

  “Dearest,” Malhan said. Lanara stared at the table, which was almost as glossy as the one in the Queensstudy in the palace. “She loves you. She thinks only to help you in your grief. And her idea is a good one. Even the illusion of peace may calm you, allow you to marshal strength for what is to come.”

  Lanara heard the icemounts in the harbour humming and snapping. She heard voices: Fane’s people were shouting, now that the Queen was not among them—probably at the ship and the green-brown man who stood limp beneath the windless sails. Lanara looked up when she realized how long she had been listening to the noises outside and the silence within. The Queen was sitting still and straight, her head turned slightly toward Malhan. She stayed this w
ay for a moment more, then stirred and nodded once.

  “You are right,” she said to him. “If listening to this man helps me feel stronger, do more, then it can only be a good thing. And if it does not, there will have been no harm done.” She stretched out her right hand. Lanara leaned forward and took it, felt her trembling fingers wrapped in Galha’s firm ones. “Thank you, Nara,” the Queen said. “Now, where is this friend of yours?”

  The patch of moss was yellow and shaped like a handprint. Nellyn was so familiar with it now that it could have been the shape of his own hand splayed against the rock. He had found this part of the tower balcony nearly a month ago, and he came to sit here every day, when the air inside the tower pressed too closely against him. He reached the back of the balcony through a door in the writing floor. It faced the cliff wall, so he did not have to walk out into the spinning space above the waves. The wind always blew, always tugged at cloak and hair, but it was not so wild, facing the cliff as it was over the sea. He sat on a stool he had carried out with him the second time he had come, and huddled deep into his layers of clothing and studied the moss. His thoughts, so loud within the tower stones, quieted. His breaths grew long and slow, and there was silence between them. This moss and rock are my river now, he thought once. My lynanyn trees. The still, calm place that holds me but does not touch me.

  Nellyn was sitting looking at the moss the first time Queen Galha came to the signal tower. He had been there for many minutes—long enough that he should have felt the beginnings of peace. It was stormy; the wind was viciously cold and grasping even here, and the boom of the waves was so loud that he was sure they would rear up behind him and sweep him away. Icy snow stung his cheeks above the scarf he had wrapped over his mouth. The snow clung to his eyelashes and to the moss, and he caught only quick, broken glimpses that confused him.

  Go inside, he told himself—but he remembered how Alea and Lanara’s laughter had grated in his ears, how he had left them in the kitchen baking bread because their amusement had been as stifling as the silence of the upper floors. Lanara always seemed to be laughing these days, and reaching for his hand, kissing the back of his neck when she passed him. He woke to her every morning sliding her skin over his, taking him into her when he was still half-asleep. All things he had missed and yearned for, since their arrival in Fane, and yet he ached with wrongness, with fear and pain that would not dissipate. She is happy because she will leave soon, on the ship with the Queen. She will leave and I will not, and she is happy. He clutched his sodden cloak around him and shuddered, and sank into the cold as if it would numb the other ache in him.

  The voices were difficult to hear at first, above the waves and the wind and the bell that was swinging, clanging its warning to whatever ships were sailing in the storm. Nellyn glanced toward the tower door. Perhaps Lanara and Alea were there, or Aldron, returned from laying stones on the path. One of the voices was certainly Aldron’s, though it was not coming from inside.

  Nellyn rose from his stool and took several unsteady steps over to the part of balcony that overlooked the ledge. He peered through the slanting snow—thick enough to his right to obscure any view of ocean swells—and saw Aldron. He was standing where the path ended, shouting and waving his arms. The person who was with him was swathed in a cloak. Even from his height, and with blowing snow between them, Nellyn could see the cloak’s colours and the dark hair that curled out from beneath the hood. The Queen was about five paces away from Aldron. She turned her head briefly to look at the door and then called out to Aldron. He fell silent. Nellyn could not hear her words, but he saw Aldron’s face as he walked toward her. He was smiling—but Nellyn did not recognize this smile; it was new and strange, and intended only for Galha, who spoke two last words and glanced up over her shoulder and saw Nellyn. He did not move, not even when she lifted her hand to him, stepped over to the door and in; not even when Aldron followed her without an upward glance, or when Galha’s consort-scribe walked after them both. Only when Nellyn heard the front balcony door bang shut did he turn.

  The Queen was alone. Nellyn looked past her and saw Malhan’s face in the round window that was set in the top of the door. He was inside, watching. He stayed there as Galha walked to stand beside Nellyn.

  “The last time we met on a balcony,” she said, leaning close to his ear so that the wind would not scatter her voice, “the sun was shining. We were warm and comfortable. And now look at us.” His eyes were fixed on her hands, which were hidden by woolen gloves: green and blue, of course, speckled with gold. He remembered the wind that had torn at him above the endless sand and the heat-gauzed city. He remembered vines and water and music, and wine that had spilled.

  “I do not like high places,” he said.

  She nodded and gazed at the sea, which he imagined would be foaming and heaving. “Well, Nellyn,” she said at last, “you are the only one I have met in the last three months who has not mentioned the murder of my daughter.”

  He looked into her eyes then, and saw how sleepless and sunken they were. She was hardly blinking, despite the driving snow. He said, “I have no words to give you, so I am quiet.”

  Her brows rose up toward the edge of her hood. “What—no wise shonyn expressions to soothe me? No descriptions of your people’s death rituals to distract and educate me?” Her voice was hard and tremulous at the same time, as Lanara’s sometimes was—but this woman was not Lanara. Galha’s words were more than words, or perhaps less.

  He shook his head and took a steadying breath. “No,” he said, and waited, not looking away from her face.

  Her lips moved: a kind of smile, stiff because of the cold, or something else. “Thank you,” she said, and turned away from him as the door behind them slammed shut.

  “My Queen!” Lanara cried. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you—I was in the larder. Do not linger outside; please come in—we have spiced herb water and fresh bread. . . .”

  Alea glared down at the sitting cushion by her feet. Lanara had already sat, as had Nellyn. Alea put her hands beneath her belly and wondered how rude it would be if she stood in the Queen’s presence.

  “Here—let me help you.” Alea looked up. Galha was beside her, offering her hand. Alea took it immediately, reflexively. Galha’s grip was firm but gentle. “I remember how ungainly I felt when I was carrying Ladhra,” she said as Alea sank down onto the cushion. “Lying, standing, sitting—nothing was comfortable. Will the babe come in the spring?”

  “No,” Alea said. Her voice sounded very faint. “Not until early summer.” She saw Galha’s expression of surprise and looked away. She had had no intention of speaking to the Queen; she had willed herself to silence before stepping onto Nellyn and Lanara’s living floor. But now she had spoken, and about the baby—and Galha had mentioned her daughter, who had died. Alea flushed at her weakness, her pettiness, the clumsiness of her body.

  She had never met the Queen before this moment. She had seen her at the prow of the enormous ship, and from time to time standing on the wharf watching the boats come down the river—but she had been a speck until now, a small, featureless blot of blue and green cloth and red-brown skin. Aldron, though, had seen much of her, ever since that first day, a month ago, when he had Told for her.

  “What did you Tell?” Alea had demanded, and he had waved his hand at her and shrugged.

  “Nothing much. A summer scene and some water—easy things, but they seemed to comfort her. She’s nearly as simple to please as the townsfolk.” But he had not met Alea’s gaze—not then, and not on the many occasions after, when he went down to the town to see Galha. He usually went with Lanara, but sometimes he slipped out alone. He would be gone for hours, most of a day. At first Alea told herself that he was merely laying stones for the path he had begun, but then he would return, pale and quiet and sick as he only ever was after a difficult Telling.

  She said she worried about him. She begged him to stay at the tower
. She hurled the yellow vase across the room and it shattered against the stairs. She demanded to know whether Galha was beautiful—and this question alone, among all the others that were equally ridiculous, made her cringe and long to swallow back the words until they were unsaid. He had not answered her, had walked back out of the tower, back down the half-finished path, back to the bright stone harbour house.

  She looks sick. And old. Alea thought this when she saw the Queen at last. A tall, slender, strong body, its lines visible once her cloak and outer tunic had been removed—but her face was sallow and drawn. She is sick with grief, you heartless woman, Alea told herself, though she could not quell her relief and her shame. And then Galha had smiled and held out her hand, and Alea had shrunk from her.

  “As Lanara and Aldron already know,” the Queen said after she had helped Alea to sit, “my war fleet is nearly assembled.”

  Alea looked at Aldron, who was sitting next to her. He did not meet her eyes. His attention was on Galha, of course, who was still standing while the rest of them sat like eager students at her feet—the rest of them except for the strange, silent man who had accompanied her and now stood beside the stairs. If only we were in the writing room, Alea thought, she would look striking with the storm stretched out behind her. Or the lightroom, even: she would stand among the flames and the blinking glass pieces and we would prostrate ourselves before her brilliance. . . .