by Foz Meadows
“Yes, and my thanks,” said Viya. She was only too glad to exit the room, but as she left, she could swear she felt Yasha’s gaze burning her neck, like coal-sparks kicked up from a fire.
The compound was quiet at night, and Gwen savoured it.
She sat alone on the front verandah, rolling a cup of warm mege between her palms. A faint breeze stirred the courtyard dust. She clutched the shawl wrapped around her shoulders, the action more reflex than necessity. She didn’t yet know what to make of the fugitive Cuivexa; she was young and prickly and powerful, and watching her snub Yasha had filled Gwen in equal parts with schadenfreude and secondhand embarrassment, but as to what she was planning…
Lifting her chin, Gwen contemplated the Kenan stars and wondered, for neither the first nor last time since Leoden’s betrayal, exactly what Kadeja had done to be cast from Ashasa’s priestesshood; how Leoden had met her; what the two of them saw in each other. She knew now, with the bitter certainty of hindsight, that Kadeja had been working with Leoden long before Gwen and Pix ever knew she existed; and worse, that Leoden had always planned to make her his Vex’Mara. His lengthy “negotiations” about the conditions of his marriage to Tevet and Amenet had been a stall tactic in the first instance, and a means of getting close enough for murder in the second. Nothing more.
Kenans didn’t play poker, Gwen thought sourly, but if they did, Leoden would make bank on it. He’d fooled her – fooled them – so comprehensively that, even now, even knowing what he was, a part of her still couldn’t separate out the lies from the truth. Was Leoden Kadeja’s pawn, or vice versa? It was, of course, entirely possible that they were equal partners in crime, but on the basis of having met them both – albeit briefly, in Kadeja’s case – Gwen somehow doubted it. Or maybe she only wanted to doubt it, hungry to believe that the man who’d betrayed her was himself in danger of betrayal. If Leoden and Kadeja were quietly working against each other, then they were vulnerable, which was a comforting thought. But if they were truly pulling in harness, then what did that mean for Kena?
Gwen sipped at her mege, and remembered.
Kadeja had been there, the day they’d finally persuaded Leoden to sign the marriage contracts. Her head was shaved then, and together with her piercing eyes and fine-boned face, it had given her the look of a bird of prey, for all that she sat demurely in a plain white gown, her bare arms banded with heavy gold bracelets.
“And who is this?” Pix had asked, her eyebrows shooting up. In all the times they’d come to Leoden’s residence, he’d never had company beyond his servants. Which, in retrospect, made sense: he’d taken care to keep them from seeing who else he’d been talking to. “An ally?”
“A friend,” replied Leoden, smiling in that brisk, warm way of his, like winter sunlight flashing through glass. He was more magnetic than handsome, and when he spoke, his hands could be as eloquent as his words. “Pixeva ore Pixeva, Gwen Vere, this is Kadeja Etmahsi.”
Etmahsi. It was a word, not a name, but for all the time she had spent with Vekshi women, it still took Gwen a moment to place the meaning. When she did, her gaze sharpened. Etmahsi meant motherless, and in a culture of matriarchs, it wasn’t a title you earned through anything good. Still, Gwen didn’t like to judge – the Many knew, she found Vekshi customs strange enough at the best of times – and so she said nothing, moving aside as Pix laid out the contracts on Leoden’s writing desk.
As the two nobles went through the documents, Kadeja rose and padded over to Gwen.
“You’re the worldwalker,” she said – a statement, not a question. Gwen nodded, silent beneath Kadeja’s appraising stare, and waited for the other woman to speak again. After a moment, she did. “Kenan aristocrats are peculiar creatures, aren’t they?”
Gwen hadn’t contradicted her, not least because Pix had spent an hour that morning deciding how best to wear her marriage-braids. “They certainly have their moments.”
“I was worried, when I first came here, that I wouldn’t understand them.”
“Oh?” said Gwen, gaze flicking to track the movement of Leoden’s fingers over the vellum. “What made you change your mind?”
“Power is power,” Kadeja said simply, and Gwen wished then – as she’d wished many times since – that she’d seen her face as she said it. Instead, she turned too late, and any further insight into the remark was lost forever.
“This looks to be in order,” Leoden said. His words were for the room at large, but Kadeja smiled as though at a private joke. “Let me get my quill.”
“Here,” said Kadeja, passing it to him, and if any part of Gwen thought it odd that a Vekshi woman, newly-disgraced – she knew what her missing fingers meant, even without the inauspicious name – would rush to act so submissively around a Kenan nobleman, she must have ignored it. Or maybe, she thought, you were so used to feeling odd yourself that you privately welcomed a little oddness from others. Regardless of whether strangers truly believed her to be a worldwalker, she was still a foreigner here, and even after so many years, the sting of being thought alien was undiminished.
Then Leoden signed the marriage contracts – the ink was purple, Teket’s sacred colour, and ferociously expensive – and that was that.
“I look forward to meeting Amenet in particular,” he said, unfailingly polite as they made their parting courtesies, and all the while Kadeja stood back and watched, a slight smile on her face.
Two weeks later, he’d poisoned Amenet, married Kadeja and crowned himself Vex of Kena.
Now, Gwen drained the last of her mege, rubbing her head as she set the cup aside. She wanted to trust in Iviyat, but past experience made her wary. She’s a child, Gwen. Younger than Saffron is, even. Would you force her to prove her innocence before offering aid?
Yes, said a different inner voice, the one that sounded disconcertingly like Yasha. A hundred times over, if it saves us the same mistakes.
But what if mistrust is a different error? the first voice persisted. What then?
Gwen sighed and straightened, heading back inside. Pray that we learn from it quickly enough to matter.
* * *
Saffron lay awake in bed, turning the day’s events over in her mind. Even once Pix had presented Iviyat to them properly – they were to call her Viya, with no more to be said about it – an air of unreality clung to the situation. The Cuivexa herself had mostly remained in a haughty silence, occasionally initiating conversation with Pix, Matu and Jeiden, but otherwise dealing curtly with everyone else. Though Zech assured her this was all to do with rank – Pix’s family were aristocrats, and had been highly placed at court before Leoden came to power – it still felt brattish and rude to Saffron.
The problem, she reflected, was that it was almost impossible for her to comprehend that plump, imperious Iviyat was a queen. Partly, this was due to the fact that she reminded her of Ruby; partly because she’d already taken to thinking of Kadeja that way; and partly, too, because the very idea of meeting a Cuivexa, or a queen, or a princess – or whatever she was in whatever language – was not one that came naturally to a girl from New South Wales whose entire family thought it was long past time that Australia became a republic. Mostly, though, it was because they were all pretending she wasn’t royalty, and without any communal sense of awe or deference to tip the scales, it was hard for Saffron not to think of the whole thing as a sort of abstract joke.
Pix and Matu belonging to the nobility was one thing; she could get away with thinking of them as the Kenan equivalent of private school alums with property in Rose Bay, or, at worst, as politicians. But a queen – the Queen – was a smiling old white lady who gave the Christmas speech and had her face minted on coins. It would have required more mental agility than Saffron currently possessed to instantly confer identical status on a fourteen-year-old brown girl shorter than she was. Not, she thought hastily, that race has anything to do with it. The idea that it might, even a little, left her feeling deeply uncomfortable.But with sleep the only esca
pe from her thoughts and it proving hard to come by, she was forced to confront the possibility that maybe it did. After all, she’d had no trouble believing in Kadeja’s queenliness, and that was after the woman had cut off two of her fingers. (She touched her stumps again in the dark. The new skin felt waxy, like candles burned down to their nubs.)Disquieted, she rolled over on her mattress and stared at the moonlight sifting in through the shutters. “Not seeing Viya as a queen because she’s not white is racist,” she whispered into the pillow. “I’m being racist. Stop it.” She felt bad because it was true, but slightly better for having admitted it. After all, if she didn’t admit she was doing something wrong in the first place, how could she possibly fix it?
Saffron closed her eyes and, some minutes later, finally fell asleep.
And dreamed.
She stood in a place she didn’t know, beneath a huge, white sun. The earth underfoot was brown and hard – a crossroads, placing her at the nexus of four different paths. Each one was narrow, not even as broad across as her outstretched arms, and all were surrounded by tall, lush grass, a blue-green sea that waved as high as her calves.
“Weird,” she murmured, feeling the dream-words sting her lips. “Either I’m in Wonderland, or due to meet the devil.”
“Why not both?”
The voice came from behind her. Turning, she found herself face to face with a handsome, dark-skinned man who looked to be about Pix’s age. His hair was braided in leftwards-curving cornrows, and there was a quizzical tilt to his head. Like Matu, he wore a tunic and trousers – both deep blue – though his sleeves were short and his feet bare. His brawny arms were folded over his chest, and as he studied Saffron, a crooked smile tugged his lips.
“That’s odd,” he said. “You really are here.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” said Saffron. “It’s my dream.”
His smile broadened. “Are you sure about that?”
“It’s a dream. I don’t have to be sure.”
He laughed at that. “Good point.”
Movement flickered in the corner of her eye, but when she turned to follow it, the whole world somersaulted around her, spinning like a merry-go-round. She fell and kept on falling, rolling over endlessly as though down the world’s longest slope. Then something caught in her throat, and suddenly she was on her hands and knees, gagging groggily as she vomited a spool of cloth onto the grass. With one hand, she pulled the last of it free and stared at the pattern: a golden dragon rearing on a scarlet field studded with flowers. The dragon twitched against its stitches, hissing like a punctured hose; the flowers opened, withered, regrew; and all around the crimson fabric rippled like blood–
Hands grasped Saffron’s shoulders, pulling her up and away. She lurched to her feet, blinking spots from her vision.
“Well,” said the man in blue. “That was interesting, wasn’t it?”
“Was it?” Saffron asked. Her tongue felt muzzy and slow, as though she were talking underwater – but then, dreams were often like that.
The man raised his eyes as if in prayer. “Come on. Walk with me.”
He held out a hand, and Saffron took it. His palm was calloused and warm. As he led her forwards, the world around them changed again, the long grass turning ruby-red, punctuated here and there with golden flowers. The white sun dipped low and the sky grew darker, a deep, friendly indigo streaked with lilac.
“You’re not from Kena, are you?”
“No,” admitted Saffron. “I don’t really know what I’m doing here.”
“That’s true of most people, never mind where they’ve ended up or how it happened. But like I said before, it’s odd that you’re here, specifically.” He gestured at the never-ending fields.“You said it wasn’t a dream,” said Saffron. She frowned, her thoughts flowing thick as treacle. “So what is it?”
“A crossroads, of sorts. A way for me to try to find the patterns in the world. Or in this world, anyway,” he amended, grinning. “It’s not like there’s only one.”
Abruptly, Saffron stopped walking. She pulled her hand away, vaguely resentful of being told she was trespassing in her own subconscious. “Why am I here, then? What’s happening?”
The man cocked his head and looked at her. “I’m not quite sure. Well, that’s not true – you must be part of events, or else I couldn’t have found you. But that’s true of lots of people, and they don’t all show up on my patch of the dreamscape. No. It’s something else.”
Movement flashed in her peripheral vision. Wary of what had happened last time, Saffron tried to refrain from looking, but the motion was insistent. Slowly, she turned her head. Away to her right, the grass was catching fire – no, turning into flames, a spreading carpet of red tongues crackling and dancing.
“Do you see that?” she whispered.
“I do.”
“Can it hurt us?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Good.” But still, she felt uneasy. “The ground keeps changing.”
He gave her arm a gentle pinch. “Do you still think this is a dream?”
“All dreams change,” said Saffron. “That’s how you know they’re dreams.”
“So does reality,” he replied. “That’s how you know it’s real.”
The fire was closer now, licking towards them like an incoming tide.
“Tell me your name,” he asked, suddenly. “Who are you?”
“I’m Saffron. Saffron Isla Coulter.”
“I don’t know you in waking then. That’s not it.” He went silent for a moment, then his eyes lit up with delighted suspicion. “You didn’t come alone to Kena. Who brought you here?”
White smoke rose up from the fire-grass, blooming in clouds like mushrooms.
“Gwen Vere,” said Saffron, coughing. “A worldwalker. She didn’t bring me though. I just sort of… followed her in.”
But the man was grinning in triumph. “Hah! Of course you did!” His gaze turned serious. “And don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that things you didn’t intend or plan don’t matter. It’s a big, disorganised multiverse out there – an accident of stars. Almost nothing ever works out like we want it to, and when it does, there’s guaranteed to be unexpected consequences. Randomness is what separates life from entropy, but it’s also what makes it fun.”
“Who are you?” Saffron asked. The smoke was boiling everywhere now, wreathing them so thickly that she could no longer see the fire, the grass, or anything but the strange man’s face and torso.
He smiled at her sadly. “You’ll probably forget this meeting, Saffron Isla Coulter, or else brush it off as just another dream. But if any of this breaks through as real–” and here he kissed the tips of two fingers, touching them to her forehead, “–you tell Gwen Vere that Luy ore Jhesa’yu of the Shavaktiin is helping as best he can. You tell her–”
But then there was only smoke, and white, and silence.
Eleven
Firefight
“Wake up, Gwen. Please. There isn’t much time.”
Gwen struggled into wakefulness, shrugging off sleep like a borrowed shawl. Her dreams had been flat and unmemorable, and yet her brain was reluctant to let them fade. “Trishka?” she said, blinking up at her friend. “What is it?”
“Leoden,” Trishka said. “He’s coming for us. We have to get out now, as quick and quiet as possible.”
That brought her up cold. “Devils and gods in an orgy!” she swore. “Damn him!”
Muscles protesting the sudden movement, she swung herself out of bed, grabbing for her boots and belt while Trishka spoke, her voice unnervingly calm.
“Some of the Uyun ambassador’s men are with his honoured swords. I don’t know why, but he’s told them where we are. There’s about fifty of them. I think…” She hesitated, voice trailing off as her vision went far away. “They have torches,” she said at last. “I think they want to burn us out.”
Gwen went cold all over. The compound’s roof, flooring and outbuildings were wooden
, as were the stables and gates. Fire wouldn’t destroy the building, but it could certainly drive everyone into the open, trapping them between flame and stone. Though Yasha’s Vekshi were proficient staff-fighters, their hardwood weapons strong enough to match all but the sharpest swords, they drilled to fight either in ordered ranks or alone. But in darkness, disordered, with children and animals underfoot and no space to either form up or retreat? It was a recipe for a massacre.
Gwen’s thoughts raced ahead of her pulse. “We need two groups,” she said. “One to travel north, and the rest to head to safety.” Her gaze darted to Trishka, who was perched on the end of her bed, and weighed her next words carefully. “Do you trust Sashi as a leader?”
So briefly that anyone else would have missed it, a shadow of fear passed over Trishka’s face. But when she stood, her back was straight and her voice firm. “She’s a good choice. Yes.”
“And Yena?”
“Should come north.” Her response was instantaneous. “It’s time they travelled apart from each other.”
The braided path, Gwen thought, but even so, the weight of the choice wasn’t lost on her. She reached out and squeezed Trishka’s shoulder. Their eyes met in silent accord. “Go wake your daughters. Tell Sashi to round up everyone who doesn’t know about Viya – they’ll be the eastern group – and get Yena to grab as many supplies as she can. I’ll have Zech and Jeiden go to the stables: roas and horses both, as many and as quiet as they can manage. Then I’ll wake the others and meet you out front.”
Trishka grinned savagely. “Yasha last?”
“Yasha last,” Gwen echoed, and as though they were still young and miscreant enough for that ancient pact to apply, they pressed their foreheads together in brief affirmation. “How long do we have?”
“Twenty minutes at most, I’d guess.”
Gwen swore, borrowing a favourite Vekshi curse of Yasha’s. Literally translated, it meant arsegullet. We’ll never get clear of the compound in that time, let alone free of the city. But there was nothing to do but try.