by Sam Hawke
Tain actually laughed. He sidestepped the attack and hit the man one final time; with that last blow he folded in half like a deflating waterskin and sat on his backside by the canal with a sickening groan. “Get back,” Tain warned me, and we skittered out of range just in time to avoid the sudden torrent as the man’s overfull body gave up its contents.
And finally—finally—an Order Guard appeared at a run, errant hair springing out of her Warrior-Guild braid and a sheen of sweat on her brow. She pulled up to a stop and her terse expression melted into shock as she took in the participants. “Honored Heir! Credo! I—my apologies, there was an altercation with a herd of oku and some lutra at the south end of the pier, and … Honored Heir, are you all right?” She looked around us, presumably searching for the servants who should have been there preventing this sort of thing, but who were in fact days away down the river.
“We’re fine,” Tain assured her with a broad smile. “This fellow couldn’t handle his kori cups and was disturbing the poor gentleman by the shrine, there.”
“He had a knife,” I said, and gestured to the area where I’d kicked it.
“No weapons in our city,” the Order Guard barked at the man by the canal, but he was still slumped over and heaving, so I doubted he heard. She looked anxiously at Tain again. “Again, my apologies for the delay, Honored Heir. We’ve limited staff at the moment.”
“Not your fault.” Tain, still all smiles, knelt and straightened the bent leg of the stall they’d crashed into, while I helped the merchant pick up her paper cones and sweep up the ruined beetles. Her earlier agitation forgotten now that she realized who we were, she tried to shoo us away.
“We’ll pay for the food,” I told her as I scooped up the last of the mess.
“No, Credo, that isn’t necessary, not necessary at all,” she said, but I pressed my family chit into the wax tablet on her now-wobbling tabletop with a weary glance at Tain.
“It was entirely our fault getting involved,” I said firmly.
Tain helped the Order Guard haul the big drunk to his feet. As if his stomach contents had been the source of his aggression, he slumped meekly on the spot and let the Guard fix his wrists behind his back with the wire-centered cord hanging from her tunic. “I’ll take him to the Guildhall with you,” Tain offered.
“Of course that’s not necessary, Honored Heir,” the Guard said, her tone anxious. “This’s been quite enough bother as it is.”
“Nonsense!” Tain beamed at her. “I wouldn’t mind a word with the Warrior-Guilder in any case.”
Like a room doused in sudden sunlight I finally recognized his idiotic behavior for what it was. It was very bad manners to roll one’s eyes at the second most powerful man in the country, so I settled for a sigh. A month or so downriver and I’d quite put out of my head my friend’s recent obsession with the Warrior Guild and, more importantly, its coarse, disreputable leader, Credola Aven.
He’d spent the better part of summer training with the Guild, much to the bafflement of his peers and the irritation of his uncle the Chancellor. Unlike them, I knew why. Aven was twenty years his senior and the leader of the least honored and respected of the Guilds, disinterested in art, music, or cultured discourse. Tain’s fascination was unfathomable, considering Silasta was full of interesting, talented women and men, beautiful and clever and contributing far more to civilization than someone whose main skill was the effective use of violence.
But the Guard deflated his hopes in any case. “The Warrior-Guilder’s not in the city, Honored Heir. She’s with the army out near Moncasta, fighting Doranites over the mines again. That’s why we’re low on bodies here.” She ducked her head, her discomfort obvious. “Please, allow me to deal with this. My apologies for your involvement.”
After she left, we rinsed our scraped hands and shins in the canal and Tain took my berating with good humor but no apology. “No one else was helping him,” he pointed out.
I frowned. “No, but that doesn’t mean—”
“Would you prefer the old man got stabbed?” He stood, distracted. “We should check on him. I think I offended him somehow.”
But several yellow-sashed Guild officials now moved about the area, directing the cleanup, and the preacher had long since disappeared either voluntarily or at their direction. It wasn’t illegal to preach the old religion, of course, but it was common to see earthers moved along for disturbing trade or obstructing traffic.
I checked the position of the sun. “We’d better head up. The Chancellor will probably hear about this soon enough.”
He gave me a mournful look. “Let’s walk, at least. Enjoy the last of the peace while we can.” I raised an eyebrow, unsure our morning could be described as peaceful anymore, but then he grinned. “We can have that cup of tea at least.”
We walked south and crossed the pedestrian bridge to the east side of the lake. A calm contrast to its commerce-driven sister, the east shore was all long silvery grass and white sand, dotted with groups of Silasta’s wealthier classes enjoying the morning sun. Bathers splashed in the shallows and daring gulls snatched at unattended food. As we came off the bridge we dodged a stack of squealing children playing “old wooden” on the grass; tottering on one another’s backs and shoulders as they sang the rhyme, they almost collided with us as they shouted the last line: “The great old wooden saved us all!” and came tumbling down in a heap of giggles and cheerfully squashed limbs. Behind them, a knot of men and women lounged about, casually betting on informal footraces on the grass.
This side of the lake was more homogeneous and we blended in easily among crowds of dark heads and bare brown limbs under white tunics or palumas. But our anonymity didn’t last; first we were waylaid by earnest young Credo Edric, eager to share with us his latest song for my sister (called, imaginatively, “Kalina Kalina”) then by a wily couple of jewelers who were working the crowd of young Credolen in the hopes of securing a commission. I was grateful when we finally made it to my apartments.
The tinkle of the tiny hanging bells in the doorway rang out into emptiness. No movement stirred the green necklace of plants framing the curved walls (some decorative, some medicinal, some lethal). A suggestion of Etan’s earlier baking or experimentation hung in the air by way of a faint smoky scent. No sign of him or Kalina.
I changed, grateful for clean clothes—Tain waved off my offer of the same, unfazed by his rumpled state—and had begun to prepare the tea when my sister arrived home.
She froze as she saw us, furtive. Or perhaps it was just an involuntary flinch, as she followed it with several successive sneezes. Tain laughed and sprang to his feet. “There’s a sound I’ve missed!”
“Are you all right?” I blurted out.
“Hello to you, too, Brother.” She smiled to blunt the rebuke and squeezed my hands in greeting, then Tain’s. “Welcome home, both of you.”
“It’s a relief to be back,” I said by way of apology. Up close, her hair was damp and springy, and her skin prickled faintly with cold. “Where were you? Are you well?”
“Just walking. And I’m the same as usual.” Soft voice hoarse, she didn’t meet my eyes as she slipped past us to settle on a cushion by the table.
I checked the color transition of the brew and found it a satisfying rich gold. I settled the pot among the three of us and listened to my sister’s breath over the comforting warm gur-gur-gur sound of the tea pouring into each of our cups. No telltale squeak or rasp. Nothing to be anxious about.
A few sips in, the blanket of routine wrapped around me, it was as though we had never left. Tain entertained Kalina with tales of our trip, somehow turning weeks of monotony and stress into amusing escapades. I mostly sat in peaceful silence. The tea was a new one our mother had sent in my absence; delicate in aroma, but surprisingly pungent and earthy. Mother had never been a proofer, or much of a mother, but the genius of her palate for tea was undeniable.
“Enough about these two idiots,” Tain said at last. He left th
e table and began rifling through our bags. “Gifts! And you tell us your news. You haven’t been working too hard, I hope?”
“Oh, much of the same,” Kalina murmured vaguely. He’d bought her a set of polished wooden beads. I’d found a Talafan book of children’s stories with gorgeous painted illustrations. “Now you didn’t choose this just so you could scrape samples of the paint colors, did you?” she asked me severely, and Tain laughed at my attempts at bluster, having heard me enthusing in the market about the shade of blue.
“Well, your heart was half in it,” she teased, but her cheeks dimpled with pleasure just the same. Tain wound the beads through her dark cloud of hair—the wood was same warm brown as her skin, and gleamed like dewdrops in her curls—while she pored over the book. Talafan looked nothing like our written language and not much like Trade; indecipherable to me, but no obstacle to my sister. Her fingers stroked the pages and she read hungrily.
“I wish you could have come,” I said quietly, and her hands quivered a moment on the page before she shrugged with artificial nonchalance. I cursed myself for saying it and hastened to change the subject. “Etan’s notes were very short. Has he been busy?”
“I’ve barely seen him,” she said. “First there was the mess with the raids on the mines, then I think there was some kind of problem getting the summer harvest deliveries. Oh, and there was an earthquake that damaged a quarry, and the rains still haven’t come to the rice fields so everyone has been worried about yields.”
“What happened with the mines?” Tain’s voice was a touch too casual. We had longstanding disputes with various Doranite mountain tribes about ownership of some of the mines near the southern border; it wasn’t unusual to see raids in summer, but these had been larger and better organized than in previous years. Tain’s interest, though, had nothing to do with the military implications.
“Some of the attacks started getting close to Moncasta,” Kalina said, and twisted ever so slightly so that Tain’s hands fell away from the beads in her hair. “One of the outskirt villages got attacked. The Council sent the whole army to force the Doranites to either retreat or move to a full confrontation.”
“That’s why Aven’s gone with them,” he said, disappointment rich in his tone.
My sister’s lips tightened around the fine porcelain of her cup, midsip. “Yes, the Warrior-Guilder led the army.”
Tain sighed, and now that we were in the privacy of my own home, I rolled my eyes freely. “Come on, Jov,” he said, catching my expression and giving us an innocent grin. “I’m the Heir, aren’t I? My uncle’s always saying I need to have relationships with all the Councilors.”
“I’ll look forward to you spending the next few months in the Craft Guild practicing your leatherwork, then.” It was unclear whether taking up sparring and weapons lessons at the Warrior Guild, much to the consternation of many of his peers, was the cause or a consequence of his infatuation. I glanced at my sister, who stared down at her cup, the Talafan book pushed aside. “Did the Doranites retreat?”
“I haven’t heard anything.” Her tone had cooled.
Feeling the peace of our reunion breaking away from me, I tried again to reel it in, topping up our teacups with a forced smile. “What did Mother call this blend? It’s very good. In Telasa they said the Talafan Emperor himself is drinking our tea now.”
“It’s called pale needle.” She cleared her throat. “Actually, Mother asked me to come to the estate for a while.”
“What for?” Like all the six Credol Families, our estates in the country were the lifeblood of our family business and the source of food to support the capital, but they were hardly interesting to visit. Nor was there any great compulsion to visit our mother, whose fascination with and ambition for our family’s tea production outweighed any desire she’d had to help her brother raise us. She’d left the city when I was barely walking and we saw her perhaps once a year, if that.
Kalina shrugged, swirling her tea and avoiding eye contact. “I suppose she thought I might be useful there.”
I might have imagined the slightest emphasis on there.
Kalina was the eldest and should have been Etan’s apprentice. She was bright, quiet, unobtrusive, and desperate to please. But when she had not been able to fulfill that role I had replaced her, and neither of us could ever forget that sore spot between us.
I remembered lying awake in bed as a young child while she sat in the corner of our room with a candle, face screwed up in concentration. She studied so hard, memorizing quantities and names and drawing elaborate labeled pictures of plant leaves, trying to impress our Tashi with her devotion to her duty, hoping it would make up for her body’s weakness. I didn’t understand, back then. I’d had my own problems—as a child my compulsions had been overwhelming, and I had lacked tools to fight them. The thoughts I couldn’t stop dwelling on, the seemingly meaningless things that bothered me … My sister had been my anchor, calming me when the anxiety drove me to fits, and helping me develop the patterns and order that would eventually help me manage the problem.
Kalina taught me our family’s secret code of lines and dots almost before I learned to read ordinary language. We left secret messages for each other not just in print but on any tactile surface that could be marked—wax tablets, a beaded necklace, even baked on bread—practicing reading it by feel as well as sight. Sometimes we also left messages in geraslin ink, which would disappear if you sprinkled a certain powder over the text, then reappear under heat and light. Through her I inadvertently learned early the many varied fauna of our country as I held up pictures of plant parts she’d drawn and she named them in turn. I’d loved that game, its methodical calming repetition. I didn’t realize until years later that for her it was no game. She was constantly pushing and testing herself.
But no matter how hard she worked, it wasn’t hard enough.
The first and only time Etan poisoned her, she almost died. Even after years of immunization, her frail body, ever susceptible to every cough and fever, couldn’t cope with the dose. I was so young, then, but I never forgot the loneliness of those dark weeks when I wasn’t allowed to see her, and there was no one to play games and keep my mind operating smoothly. She recovered weaker than ever, her skin tinged gray, her hair dull, her eyes fever bright. Though we still left each other coded messages for fun, never again did we play the card game. She told me years later, in a stiff voice, that she had burned the cards. She had failed, and I had taken the place that should have been hers.
My tea was cold and the conversation had fallen away. The comfort I’d found in the three of us back together had been spoiled, and I could think of nothing to bring it back.
A messenger arrived soon after, sparing us further awkwardness. Our return had been noticed and passed on; Chancellor Caslav respectfully requested his nephew’s presence at a formal luncheon at Credo Lazar’s apartments to welcome a visiting Talafan dignitary. Presumably the nobleman was the passenger on the ornately decorated Talafan boat we’d seen in harbor when we arrived. Tain immediately set to wheedling to convince me to come with him. Back to normal, indeed.
* * *
Looking back, I could have gotten there faster. Entered differently. Spoken to different people. Perhaps I would have seen something different. But all I had was what was done.
The apartments for the six Credol Families were built on the great sweeping drive at the top of the hill, so it was a short walk to the Reed family’s from our own Oromani apartments. The sound of the gathering leaked out into the streets and a retinue of stony-faced Talafan servants waited outside the grounds by an elaborately decorated litter. The visiting nobleman must have been an important man, but it was the height of poor manners—even for a foreigner—to take your own servants into another person’s home, so outside they remained.
Servants dressed more expensively than I ushered us into Lazar’s entertaining suite. The Performers’ Guild’s most celebrated musician played delicate strings in a corner.
Hanging silks in the unmistakable hand of the Artist-Guilder herself fluttered in the light breeze from the gardens, and tall spears of blue flowers imported from the Great Wetlands filled cunning alcoves in the walls. All new since I’d last seen this room, all worth a fortune.
“Honored Heir!” Lazar grasped Tain’s shoulders in welcome and beamed. “You’ve returned! Why, we weren’t expecting you for days! I was going to throw you a party.” Our host’s head was a shiny, wobbly teardrop glistening with expensive oils and ending in a weak chin. Extravagant fabric garbed his obese frame. He looked me over, soft face scrunched in polite confusion as he assessed the appropriate response; I wasn’t invited, but I was heir to Etan’s Council seat, and my family outranked his. “Credo Jovan. How pleasant to see you also. Welcome home, lad.”
“My apologies, Credo Lazar.” I shot a glare at Tain, who ignored it complacently. I shouldn’t have given in to his pleading. “I know this is a Council function. I wanted a quick word with my uncle. I’ll just be a moment.”
“Of course, of course, my boy.” Lazar ushered us in, his attention already fading. “You wouldn’t have heard this piece yet, would you? Exquisite. The Performers’ Guild is calling it the composition of the season, you know. I think—” He broke off at a crash across the room; the Stone-Guilder had collided with a servant. Vivid orange soup splashed onto the white tiles like a spray of blood. “Not again!” Lazar’s voice jumped an octave higher. “Please excuse me, Honored Heir.” His perfume didn’t mask the reek of panicked sweat as he darted away. Tain and I exchanged amused glances.
The heads of family and Guilders who comprised Silasta’s ruling Council milled about in small groups, servants weaving expertly between them. We passed the Theater-Guilder, Varina, conversing with a servant carrying cups of cloudy kori, and identified the thin, sunken-eyed Talafan nobleman, a gleaming pale ghost in a bright silk jacket as he stood listening to the musician with Credola Nara and Credo Javesto. At the other side of the room, Etan and Chancellor Caslav spoke with a few other Councilors by the food table.