Traitors' Gate

by Kate Elliott

  “I don’t know, verea. They sent an emissary. They sent the captain’s mother. It’s she who knows what they mean to offer him.”

  “The captain’s mother?” said Tuvi under his breath, words she would not have heard if he had not been standing close enough that his shoulder brushed hers. “The var’s sister? Is here in the Hundred? In Astafero? Hu!”

  Sheyshi was staring at Kesh as if his words had hammered her, yet her gaze seemed fixed not on him but past him, as if she were seeing something else. Then her eyes flickered and she glanced at Mai and began to snivel. “I’m scared, Mistress. What if the red hounds come?”

  “Hush, Sheyshi. Tuvi, if Anji’s mother has come, I must greet her. Show her honor and respect. Can she not come here to Olossi?”

  The Qin were not outwardly affectionate; they did not push and prod, except when soldiers wrestled and sparred in training exercises. In Kartu Town, folk kept a physical distance appropriate to their station and degree of relationship, and even within the Mei clan Mai had witnessed few displays of physical warmth and intimacy. One of the most startling aspects of the Hundred was the degree to which people casually touched other people, of either sex, in public spaces.

  So when Tuvi now touched her hand, she was shocked enough that Atani startled, his little head tilting back to look first at her and then at the chief.

  “Best she stay there and you stay here until the captain returns, Mistress,” Tuvi said, but his sober expression cleared immediately and a smile softened his face as the baby squirmed and reached for him. Mai handed him over.

  “She asked me if I would take you!” Keshad blurted.

  “If you would take me where?”

  “Take you as my wife. She has plans, verea, for her son, and they don’t include you.”

  Tuvi’s gaze was distant as he continued smiling absently at the cooing boy. These words did not surprise him, however much they confounded her. “Like I said, it’s best if you do nothing until the captain returns, Mistress.”

  Mai stared at Keshad. “As your wife?”

  Sheyshi sobbed and collapsed on the floor like a rag doll cast away by its indifferent owner. Merciful One! Could poor Sheyshi have been harboring an infatuation for Keshad all this time? And no one the wiser?

  “Of course that’s not what I want, not that I don’t admire you, verea. But you must know—” His emotions galloped away and dragged him after. “You must know, verea, that I intend to marry Miravia. If she’ll have me.”

  Sheyshi bawled.

  “But you can’t!” cried Mai. “I mean Miravia to marry Chief Tuvi! He’s the only one who’s worthy of her. And then she’ll always stay with me. You can’t have her, Keshad!”

  “Who are you to order her life? Eliar repudiated her. In the market. In front of everyone. Will you do that, also, if she turns down Chief Tuvi in favor of me? No disrespect, Chief.”

  The chief studied the baby with brows furrowed.

  “What makes you think she’ll have you?” demanded Mai. “You, who traded in slaves for years!”

  “I only did it to earn coin to buy my sister free.”

  “Miravia despises and rejects slavery.”

  “You keep slaves! She doesn’t despise and reject you!”

  Anji’s mother! Blown in like a storm to overset everything. How could a woman who had never met her be speaking of handing Mai over to another man as if she were a slave purchased at the market? And yet hadn’t Anji bought her from her father? That he treated her as a wife, not as a slave concubine, was only because he had chosen to do so. He could have used and then discarded her at any slave market during their long journey here. Why should Anji’s mother—a woman of exalted birth, sister to the var who ruled over the Qin Empire and wife to the Sirniakan emperor himself—consider Mai to be any different from a slave? Any more than she was herself, a woman of far superior rank and blood, who had been discarded by the emperor when it was no longer politically useful for him to favor her?

  “I will not be handed off to some other man!” cried Mai. “Meaning no disrespect to you, Master Keshad!” But the words were bitter, their bile a sour taste on her tongue.

  Miravia was going to marry Tuvi. Mai had it all arranged and was just allowing time for Miravia’s situation to settle. It was not acceptable for Miravia to marry this unpleasant young man with his handsome eyes and beautiful hair, exactly the kind of passionate features worn by the heroes in songs who snared so many luckless maidens. What if Miravia, so innocent, so unworldly, fell in love with his intense looks and rejected a steady, solid, intelligent, calm, and wise man like Tuvi just because he was old enough to be her father!

  Yet how was Mai different from the rest if she managed Miravia’s life, or Priya’s life, or anyone’s life but her own and her child’s, merely to satisfy her own selfish desires? If she did not want to be so treated, then she must begin by refusing to inflict on those she had authority over what others had previously inflicted on them. What her father had dealt to her.

  She turned to the big man. “O’eki, write up a manumission for all three of you. You, and Priya. And Sheyshi.”

  “Do you mean to turn me out?” Sheyshi sobbed. “Where will I go?”

  “Of course I won’t turn you out. If you want to stay, you can stay. It’s just you won’t be a slave. You’ll be a hireling. You’ll be paid coin, and if you want to work elsewhere, you can go elsewhere.”

  “I don’t want to go elsewhere!” Sheyshi wailed, swaying back and forth like a tree whipped in a strong wind.

  “You don’t have to go anywhere,” said Mai, expending her last store of even temper, she who had prided herself on her fathomless calm. Not for her Ti’s storms or her twin Mei’s sulks; she had held herself above Uncle Girish’s tantrums and thoroughgoing nastiness, her father’s controlling angers, her mother’s jealousy and competitiveness, her aunt’s scheming, and her grandmother’s favoritism. And yet here they all surfaced in a swell of furious emotion that made her hands quiver and her shoulders shake.

  Keshad will not get the better of me!

  “Go on, O’eki!” she said harshly. “Do as I told you!”

  With a shaking hand, O’eki moved paper on the desk and weighted its corners with stones. His brushstrokes were uneven, the calligraphy uncharacteristically sloppy, but he wrote the same text three times, a formulation familiar to him from his years as a slave in Kartu Town.

  Tuvi dandled the baby with a thoughtful look on his face that might have meant anything. Surely he had guessed she meant him for Miravia, someone special only, but what he thought of her blurted confidence, the revelation of her most lovingly hoarded plans, she could not tell. Sheyshi’s tears squeezed out through eyes pressed shut.

  Priya said nothing, moved not. Keshad fumed. She’d stolen a march on him, hadn’t she? Eiya! And now she was crying, but she let the tears flow. Tears were no reason to feel shame. Only dishonor shamed you.

  O’eki lifted his brush as if to add another word but set it down on the brush stand instead.

  “Mistress,” he said in a trembling voice. “I am finished.”

  Sheyshi turned her face toward the wall, hiding herself.

  Mai sank down beside O’eki. She plucked the brush from the stand, forefingers on the outside and small fingers on the back with the thumb to steady them. She touched the hairs to the inkstone and, ruthlessly, hearing only their breathing as her accompaniment, signed them with her formal name, Mai’ili daughter of Clan Mei, as Priya had taught her.

  She signed Sheyshi’s manumission. She signed O’eki’s manumission. She signed Priya’s manumission and pressed the seal over each one, to make them legal and binding before witnesses, work that the clerks of Sapanasu usually did but which those who could write could manage themselves without requiring the intervention of the temple.

  The var’s sister and the emperor’s former favored queen, so grand and noble a woman, might consider Mai of Clan Mei so insignificant as to warrant no more consideration than a di
sposable slave, but Mai was no longer such an insignificant creature even if she had been so at one time. She had no need to ask anyone’s permission to seal such an act. Hers to act and hers to seal because this was her household as much as Anji’s and no woman like Grandmother Mei was going to totter in and think she could sell off Mai as though she were a helpless, propertyless daughter worth only as much coin as her beauty could be sold for. And she certainly wasn’t going to let some handsome untested young man steal Miravia just because of his pretty eyes and reckless heart! She had a right to appeal to Miravia’s affections, too.

  “It’s done.”

  Perhaps her tone had an angry edge. Perhaps she was shaking more than she realized, even if only one drop of ink stained the paper above her imperfectly brushed name. She wanted its lines to reflect the grace of proper calligraphy, to mirror the gravity of the occasion, but she was still learning, so it would have to do.

  She set the brush on its stand. O’eki put a hand to his forehead.

  Priya’s fingers brushed her chest as if pain stabbed in her heart. “Free,” she murmured as she leaned to the right as if trying to read the freshly inked letters. Without warning, she collapsed.

  In her haste, Mai knocked the writing table askew, and before O’eki had even gotten to his feet she knelt beside Priya’s limp form. “Priya? Priya!”

  As faintly as the whisper of mice in the desert Priya spoke again one word. “Free.”

  Mai held her shoulders, keeping her head up. How slender she was! Not much weight to hold, and yet how generous in heart Priya had been all those years. She had served Mai faithfully, affectionately, warmly, loyally. Mai had never given her service a thought.

  How blind she had been!

  “Yes, you’re free now, Priya. You and O’eki both. If I had understood . . .”

  But she had not understood. Only now was the veil ripped from her eyes.

  Priya rose to crouch at the table and touch the paper; paperweights shifted as she turned it so she could read. There is a flower in the desert that blooms only once in its life; it was as if Priya’s expression took on that opening as her gaze scanned the words.

  “Seren,” said Tuvi in a voice startling for its eerie calm. “Take the baby.”

  The young soldier accepted the baby, although Atani’s fabled equilibrium was, under this storm of emotion, beginning to dissolve into a fuss.

  “As for you, Master Keshad,” Tuvi continued, words all the more commanding for their even tenor and unimpeded flow, “having returned to this compound, you are back under my authority. You will tell me everything that transpired, in the south and on your return journey. Afterward you will bide here, confined and quiet and under my supervision, until the captain returns to interview you.”

  Keshad glared at Tuvi as at a rival in love. “What choice do I have?” he said with a dark frown that made his handsome eyes all the more intense.

  Hadn’t Miravia seen him that one time, in this very compound? Was it possible she had fallen in love with a face glimpsed across a courtyard, as lovers did in songs and tales?

  Tuvi made no reply to Keshad’s inane question. In his silence he exerted his authority.

  Mai rose, tentatively brushing Priya’s shoulder as if to test whether her beloved nursemaid recognized that she existed. Priya glanced up, eyes watery with tears, and touched the back of a hand to her own lips as if to say that she had, as yet, no words.

  It was done. Mai could not regret it, no matter what happened next.

  “I too must hear Keshad’s tale,” she said to Tuvi in her firmest voice, however weak it sounded to her ears.

  He nodded. “As soon as the captain returns, you’ll hear it all. Meanwhile, the young master wants feeding.”

  Atani strained toward her from Seren’s solid arms. When she took him, he began to root against the silk of her taloos, trying to reach a nipple, while Keshad flushed and looked away. O’eki nodded at Mai with a faint smile, and gestured as if to say, “We’ll come when we can.” Priya was staring at the words that freed her. Sheyshi still stood with her back to them, so it was impossible to imagine what she was thinking. For how many years had the young woman lived as a slave in the Mariha princedoms? How had she come into Commander Beje’s household? Was it possible that Sheyshi, simpleminded as she was, did not truly remember? That this household was the only one that meant anything to her? Or was Mai foolish to think anyone did not dream of what they had lost?

  “Sheyshi, of course you can stay in this household if you wish it,” Mai said again, although Sheyshi did not answer.

  “Mistress, isn’t that baby hungry?” said the chief.

  She took comfort in the baby’s fussing. Thanks be to the Merciful One for hungry babies, who soothe troubled minds through their uncomplicated need. When all else roils, refuge can be found in simple tasks. For she had to be honest with herself. It wasn’t losing Miravia she feared most. What if the empire’s troubles reached up out of the south to devour Anji?

  • • •

  KIRIT WAS ARGUING with him again, annoying girl. For days Jothinin had dragged her from one makeshift campsite to the next along the western shore of the Olo’o Sea, whose isolation protected them. She stayed with him because the girl she had been had always moved with the tribe. She obeyed because she was accustomed to accepting the command of her elders. Today, she was rebelling.

  “If we have allies,” she said, flinging stones into the water, “then we should fight at their side!”

  “Guardians do not fight,” he said for the hundredth time. “Anyhow, Kirit, we have placed a weapon in their hands that can be turned against us.”

  “But they can’t be our allies if they would turn against us! Why are you afraid?”

  It was getting cursed hot as the season of Furnace Sky took hold, and here on the western shore of the Barrens there was no shade. The ground beneath his feet had baked as hard as brick; a skin of salt left where wet season pools had evaporated crackled as he walked closer to the girl.

  “It is better for us to stand back and let events follow the course they will. Afterward we can come forward and restore the assizes.”

  “ ‘Foolish Jothinin, light-minded Jothinin’?” she sang. She didn’t have the cadence right, and her voice cracked on the melody, as though she were not accustomed to singing. “Marit said you stood up and spoke out, even though you got killed for it. So what would have happened if you had hid then?”

  “I’d be resting peacefully beyond the Spirit Gate, where I wouldn’t be getting lectured by a girl who knows a hells lot less than she thinks she does!”

  She glared at him with her demon-blue eyes, quite disconcerting in their cold fury. She opened a hand to let stones fall. “I am angry at you, uncle. I am going north to find Marit. She will listen to me.”

  When had he ever been able to stop a stubborn-minded girl from acting foolishly? That was the problem with tales; they didn’t tell the truth but rather what people wanted to be true. Listeners did want the lustful farmer to get to sleep with the man she desired; they wanted the lad and lass forced to marry by warring clans to discover they could live in a peaceable house. They wanted a death that made you weep, and a joke that made you laugh. They wanted the carter’s barking dog to be smarter than the greedy merchants who were trying to cheat the carter of his hire.

  Everyone loved the tale of the Silk Slippers, in which he had played so striking a role. He had stood up in protest when the bandits had come to take her away, but the gods knew what an arrogant pain that girl had been, not the sweet innocent portrayed in the tale but rather a self-absorbed, demanding, vain spoiled brat who spent most of her time talking about whether people were paying enough attention to her. Her unpleasant personality hadn’t made her cause any less just. But it was why no one else had made the effort to protect her. No one had liked her. He had only spoken because it was the right thing to do.

  The wind blew hot and dry off the mountains.

  “Kirit, what if the
y kill you?”

  “I’m already dead, uncle. I want to fight.”

  “Let’s say I agree,” he said hastily. “We’ll seek Marit together and decide what to do next.”

  She considered with that funny little frown creasing her pale lips and pallid face. “We saw many troops gathering on the Olo Plain. Now we see also ships hauling soldiers east across the sea to Olossi. We could ride with them!”

  “As Sun Cloak rides with his army? Don’t you see, Kirit? That would make people fearful. They must not believe Olo’osson’s army is the same as Radas’s army. Led by shadow-corrupted cloaks.”

  Tongues of water lapped the shore, the water faintly slicked with oil of naya. They were north of the new settlement, north of the most plentiful naya sinks, but cracks bubbled here and there beneath the waters. Its flavor coated his lips.

  “I fear what we have unleashed,” he said.

  “You fear everything, uncle,” she said with a flash of emotion he could not interpret: anger, maybe, or scorn. Or maybe she was just worried about him. Was that too much to ask? “I want to hunt down the other Guardians. Even if I can’t kill them, maybe I can lead them to those who can kill them.”

  Her words alarmed him badly, but he smiled in the inane way he had perfected. “Perhaps you’re right. Let’s go search out some sunfruit, and then we’ll fly to the high salt sea to meet Marit.”

  “It’s not the end of the year yet, is it? Will Marit be there?”

  “It’s soon to become Wolf Month. Then there is only Rat Month, and after that the Ghost Festival welcoming a new year. Then it will be the Year of the Blue Horse, when we can hope for a secure, orderly, and tranquil year.”

  She agreed to go with him to the high valley she had discovered after her final awakening, the hidden valley where sunfruit grew in abundance. Yet when they flew in between the high mountain cliffs, they found that since the last time they had been here, others had claimed it. In a clearing hacked out of the trees, two neat structures had been built, simple but pleasant shelters raised on posts and walled and roofed with sturdy canvas. No one bided there, but closed chests and sealed pots and tidy cupboards told a tale of people who might come back at any time.