by Sylvia Kelso
“My lady.”
He stopped, and began again.
“My ladies.” I could understand the falter. Two and I would strain even a crown prince’s store of protocol. “I think I also am ashamed. Shall we,” it was formal but not icy, “shall we call that a mistake? And—begin again?”
“Begin?” Two yanked my head up and he put both hands before him with genuine haste however convincing the laugh.
“In the River-lord’s name, not like that!”
“I only meant,” he amended, as I stared at him, “perhaps we might, uh, begin to talk again?”
While we can, expanded his look, quiet, composed now, too aware of the time ticking inexorably with every click of a hellien leaf.
“Yes.” I could feel my own face light, I was almost silly with relief. “Yes, we could do that, oh, I’m sorry, that was something, I can’t tell you, but I never meant—”
Forgotten, answered that gesture, elegant as everything else. Now he even managed a faint, wry half-smile. “Though I must say, my lady, I never expected to be so, so taken in my own net.”
Not the deer, turning and turning in those distant, silken chains. But though I caught his sense, the irony of the investigator investigated, what took precedence was my own shame.
“It was my—our fault,” I said to the rock. “Two, I, we worry so much. They’re all going to rely on us. They’ll ask what to do—and we have to know everything, how can we even forecast a flood height, if we don’t have all the possible facts? And men and women, the, the sex thing, it’s so important. If I miss one small thing, I’m so afraid I won’t—we won’t—we’ll say something, and it—it will be wrong . . .”
The words dwindled. I kept my eyes down, wanting now to creep entirely away. The helliens tick-tacked suddenly, in the wakening breeze. Inside the rocks it felt like the egg of the world. Absolute, unbreathing hush.
Then Therkon hitched himself back onto the boulder, moving over to make room, and said, more than gently, “My lady. Will you sit down?”
* * * *
Gauche as ten-year-old boy, I sat. I feared to move any further, and he kept silent until all my awareness narrowed on his faint scent, his breathing, the sense of his presence, so tormentingly close.
He murmured, “I think I know what you mean.”
I was too ashamed to look up. But I felt the way he, too, braced himself.
“I.” His hands moved, locking one over the other wrist. “I carry a burden as well.”
I did not have to ask. I had seen the philosopher, the desires he could not fulfil.
“Dhasdein. I have seen Dhasdein come from a great empire to,” the gesture finished, to a shadow of itself. “I am not sure that was not my fault. But it has set me . . . in debt, to what is left.”
I looked up then. He nodded a fraction, as if I had spoken aloud.
“I was trained and raised . . . as you were. Though I was to be,” a wry expression, “a prince. An,” the inflection was past irony, “heir-breeder. A figurehead. A fledgling ‘emperor’.” He flicked a hand. “Once, I could avoid that path. For safety, I had to play the fool, the spendthrift.” Another, very conscious pause. “The lover. Only to survive.”
“Antastes,” Two said.
His arm tensed, but he did not flinch. In a moment he said, “My father. Yes.”
Then he looked round to me and raised his chin. “Now, I have another part. My mother—the Empress—depends on me.” He read my face and his mouth corners turned down. “What do they say? The imperial hatchet man?”
“You aren’t like that!”
It was out before I could help myself. He eyed me sidelong, and the ruefulness deepened, hardening into something else.
“Oh, yes,” he said quite quietly. “Be sure, my lady. If I must be, I can.” Now his whole face was cold and inhumanly beautiful, merciless as the veritable axe.
“There is,” he finished softly, “more than enough blood on my hands.”
I looked down and tried to quell Two’s memories of Dhasdein’s descent on Iskarda. Tried not to think what future this warning might predict. But irresistibly, invincibly, both Two and I drew back the other memories. The deer. The eager, inquiring philosopher.
Greatly daring, I reached out for his hand. And after one tiny hesitation he gave it to me.
I took it palm down, but he turned it upward in my grasp. I opened out the fingers, long and slender and dark against my milk-coffee Iskardan skin. The nails were beautifully shaped and perfectly manicured.
I said, “Your hands are beautiful.”
He took the meaning. His fingers twitched once and relaxed. “Useless,” he answered ruefully. “Not like your fathers’.” A quick pain crossed his face. “Or Tanekhet’s.”
I had noticed my foster-father’s hands when I was four in human time. They had the same shape, graceful and elegant, but the skin was rough, the palms calloused, and on one hand nails had been torn away, leaving gnarled scars. I had asked, What did that? And for the first time we were denied knowledge. His consorts, my own fathers, even my mother’s face had closed. Then, abruptly, they had spoken of something else.
So I asked again now, uncertain of the response. “What happened to his?”
His mouth clipped tight and thin and he averted his face. “He was tortured,” he said to his sleeve. And then, muffled, “I tortured him.”
“You—!”
“I gave the orders. He—he planned it.” That long, too-feeling mouth twisted. “In our own ways, we betrayed each other.” The note changed. “As well as Dhasdein.”
Both of us understood that inflection. Don’t, if you care for me, ask any more.
After a moment I smoothed my fingertips across the elegantly shaped, polished shields of nail. Then I said, “For a crown prince, for an emperor, I think these will do.”
“You think?” It was almost a laugh. The fingers curled involuntarily over mine, and I felt the rings.
The thunderbolt and serpent had been carved on the big bloodstone over his first knuckle. An imperial signet. We knew that instantly. The other, on his wedding finger, was a simple hoop of gold. Set with three seed-sized, matched, magnificent blue-white thillians.
“What’s this?” I asked.
He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “It belongs to the crown prince. A betrothal ring.”
My heart seemed to fall mysteriously under the arc of my breastbone. “To whom?”
He looked up sharply and it was mostly surprise. “To Dhasdein.”
“Oh.”
That time earth itself fell under me, as if air had opened in the solid ground. Of course, he had said it already. The deer turned and turned before me, in the net it could not, would not let itself try to break. Dhasdein. The rule of empire, the weight of empire. The crown prince’s responsibility.
I shut my hand on the suddenly illusive warmth of his fingers, as if a ghost would slip between us and all in a moment drift him away.
“My lady?”
I looked up, and it was the philosopher, or just the man, who looked back. Quiet, gentle, concerned for me. As if we were of the same common, companion flesh and blood.
Then the concern became a slight, conscious constraint. I read the signs of an unwelcome but pressing decision and waited for him to release his hands. However courteously, to move back.
He said, “My lady Chaeris, if you understand all that . . . then you know why I am here.”
Two did not have to tell me. I said, and it sounded hollow too, “For Dhasdein.”
“Yes.” He bent his head a little, but he did not look away. “And I know you are young. And you need knowledge still. And I would not wish—now—to press you.” He hesitated. When he went on, it was open stress. “If I might just—”
Then he jerked his head up like a genuine deer and I heard the frantic,
panting voices, the thump of multiple feet among the rocks.
Chapter III
“It wasn’t my fault!”
I had never felt so near the threat of an actual whipping before. I fully expected confinement on bread and water until the whole embassy was back in Riversend. No-one had resolved the confusion turning my world and my stomach upside down, but eventually the uproar bouncing off the council-room walls drove me to bawl like a true twelve-year old.
With Iatha’s jaw still half-down I exploited the equally shocking hush.
“I didn’t intend it. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t want it! If you have to blame someone, blame his troublecrew. I didn’t let him get up there! It isn’t my fault and it isn’t Azo’s either. She only did what I asked!”
Azo’s shoulder hunch contradicted that. I would have pressed on anyway. Had not Iatha, after one glance at Tanekhet, suddenly gathered herself up and let out a foundered-pack-mule sigh.
“Yes. We’re counting chip-falls here. We should plotting the next cut.”
To lead the shift of a debate was always Iatha’s prerogative. I knew better than to answer. Tez had words assembling, but it was Eria who spoke.
“Let us first find the root of this.”
Tanekhet’s head swung quickly. Until now he had been noticeably quiet. Eria ignored him, looking only at me.
“Chaeris, will you tell us: why?”
I could not help a thoroughly unmannerly, “Why, what?”
“We know why you were there. And why you were alone. And how he came there. But why did you stay?”
It was the one thing even I had not thought to ask. I stammered, “I don’t—the rocks. I couldn’t have got past . . .”
Eria’s stare was inscrutable as Darthis’ had been, and as unwavering. “But he would have let you by: if you had asked.”
It was true. My heart admitted it. He had never been anything but mannerly. He would have let me by. If I had asked.
Tanekhet sat up slightly but so suddenly and after such long immobility that the whole council looked. He caught my eyes and pinioned me with that intense green stare.
“Chaeris, favour me. Think carefully. And however,” a rueful little smile, “however odd, however trivial—however embarrassing it seems—tell us. The truth.”
I stared in earnest. Two was flinging questions and extrapolations broadside and finding nothing pertinent. “The truth about?”
“The reason you stayed,” he answered softly. “In your own heart.”
Only Tanekhet could bring out something like that in full council without sounding either fulsome or over-dramatic. But his face told me the question’s weight.
I looked at Eria. Her stillness said she had not only followed, but agreed.
“When I said, I didn’t need troublecrew.” They had had it all out of me, word and almost look. Except for the kiss. The mere thought of that still heated my ears. “When I said that, he looked at the qherrique again. And he said, ‘I see.’”
It did seem trivial. It was embarrassing. Meeting Tanekhet’s eyes, I tried neither to falter nor to blush. “And—I was sorry for him.”
Nobody had to bellow, you felt sorry for the crown prince? Dhasdein’s hatchet-man? The one man on the River who could, with a word, crack Iskarda like a nut?
It was Tez who dropped the next words like a fall of silk. “Chaeris, did you feel, at any moment, that the choice was not wholly yours?”
“What?”
Their faces told me she had taken Eria and Tanekhet’s thought right into the gold. Tez just watched me, unblinking. Then she said, “Ask Two how the old Heads felt, when the qherrique spoke.”
Eria twitched. Hayras sat up. But Two was already running the memories, the moments when, over and over, House-heads of Amberlight had turned to the oracle only they could use.
Two left me to answer. I looked back into Tez’s waiting gaze and silently shook my head.
Iatha’s hands relaxed. Tanekhet said decisively, “That does not prove anything.”
At the stares a hint of steel slid into his voice, “S’hurre, if this meeting was intended, the paths could have been laid long since.”
Iatha’s expression made him turn a hand out and close it into a fist. “Come, you remember for yourselves. When Tellurith chose to save Alkhes, it was after a message, yes. But how many chances had already matched to bring the two of them together, at that time, at that place? To allow that choice?
“And what,” he went on, “brought these two together, now?”
“Dhasdein troublecrew,” Tez looked wickedly ironic at Iatha’s expression, “losing their crown prince? Too much oil in a salad-dressing? Chaeris getting hungry up the hill?”
“Two people led,” Tanekhet answered softly, “by a chain of pebble-falls. Despite everything we expected. Despite everything we could do.”
There was a fathomless hush. I heard myself say stupidly, “It was meant to happen? But then—who arranged it? And why?”
Tanekhet swung but it was Tez whose sharp gesture forestalled Iatha, and preceded a dagger-point stare at me.
“I think, Chaeris, this time, you could try to answer that. You know where to ask.”
Ask Two. And it was not about the future. It was an extrapolation, pure and simple, from what had already happened. What we already knew.
But it was the first time anyone had asked us to do the thing in earnest. To play the oracle.
My hand was suddenly trembling as the air seemed to tremble, shaking-tense. I turned myself inward, and for the first time, formally, consciously, I asked.
Two’s extrapolation, that ran always on the margin of my awareness, accelerated past coherent images. The inner and outer worlds became one unbroken blur, then disintegrated into frenziedly roiling white.
The council room came back as if I had opened a door. Two said, and it seemed to echo inside my skull, “There is reason to say, intent. If not arrangement. But not ours.”
We had answered. We had not panicked. We had not failed. I sat panting, my hands clenching and opening, my heart slowing in more than pure relief.
Tanekhet smiled at me and leant over to touch the back of my hand that was damp with sweat. Softly, he said, “Good girl.”
* * * *
I had no time to savour the achievement. As always in Iskarda, in Amberlight, the council was already two paces beyond the crisis point. Iatha was saying sharply, “If that’s so, then it has to be—” the jerk of her head indicated the hill behind us. She meant the seed, I realised. “Blight and blast it, we’re back in Amberlight!”
Discussion burst. They had dismissed us, that newly shocking chance of Two’s complicity dwarfed by the greater alarm: that we were back with the old ways of qherrique, unheralded, incalculable influence, and now with not one but two unhuman players in the game.
“The Mother aid us,” groaned Eria, clutching her head. “How do we deal with this?”
“We shoot the narrows as they come.” Tez spoke decisively enough to hush them all. “S’hurre, Two did not say there was intent. We still don’t know if things were ‘arranged,’ before. The seed couldn’t tell us. Even Sarth’s stopped trying to work it out. And another thought. It took a certain mass to fire a Navy light-gun. If it took all the thirteen motherlodes in Amberlight to—perhaps—arrange things, earlier: then can our qherrique do it now?”
The startled expressions said how few of them had considered such practicalities, but Hayras and Charras had already turned to me. “Chaeris,” Charras burst out, “if it was intended, can you figure, Why?”
Tez stopped in mid-breath. The whole group had focused. And my pulse was already leaping, my stomach turning, Two at the cusp of explosion or fright.
“There is no basis—we need more facts!”
Tez slammed the table and snapped, “Charras, enough!”
“Why is currently as unanswerable as, If. We would be wasting time to ask. As for what we do now,” the smile was bleakly ironic. “Has the initiative not already passed?”
Almost as fast as Two, she had made the projections and drawn the conclusions from that meeting up the hill. Iskarda’s moves had all been preventive, defensive. It was the other player who had led events, by whatever means, whosever intent.
“S’hurre, use your wits.” She snapped it when the fresh uproar reached shouting point. “We tried to shield Chaeris and we failed. We cannot expel a perfectly legal embassy for a mischance neither they nor we could prevent. We cannot break off negotiations. We do not know enough to take any other path.” She curled her lip and tossed it among them like a Dhasdeini fire-bomb.
“At this point, we can only wait upon Dhasdein.”
* * * *
Even in my own little room behind my mother’s quarters, I did not sleep well that night. The dark swarmed with speculations too wide-reaching and nebulous to finalise, too disquieting to ignore. What if chances had been manipulated, what if it really was by our qherrique, and above all, to what end? And repeatedly, ousting every other concern: now, what would Therkon do?
It did not help that, with both my workout and mirror-signal watch cancelled, I came bleary-eyed into the kitchen just as his Note arrived.
“Mother blast the man!” Iatha clutched her morning coffee, eyes blearier than mine. “He could give us time to eat!”
“He knows better.” Tez was already dressed, neat as a Navy officer. “He has the initiative. Why would he let it go?” She broke the seal and spread the parchment summarily on the kitchen table, among the night-watch’s dirty plates.
Tanekhet came wandering in, hair on end, in an elegant but untidily fastened robe. “Tez, must we all rise before the forsaken cockerels . . .?” The rest snapped off. He took three strides to her shoulder and picked up the scroll.
After what seemed an aeon he raised his brows, once more the courtier, and let it run shut. “No doubt,” the tone made it faintly condescending, “he had the chamberlain scribbling drafts all night.”