Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  “You know,” he said very softly, past me. “You cannot have failed to predict it. And it will not just be the Assembly and the rulers that come.”

  Tez’s shoulders moved. Therkon nodded, and said what she would not.

  “You lack the resources to shield the lady Chaeris, in Iskarda.”

  “We have them,” Tez ripped back, “in Amberlight.”

  Therkon’s jaw clamped. Then he said, “What will you tell their Assembly, when some crisis arrives and they vote for an oracle?”

  Tez more than glared. I knew the Amberlight assembly, the people’s rule, was hers and my mother’s pride and delight. And Two’s memories showed me too often how it could be flawed.

  “And how will Chaeris fare, if your slumfolk riot in Riversend?”

  “If you think we would risk her beyond the palace—”

  “Since when have palace guards been incorruptible?”

  “Dhasdein is not Verrain—!”

  “And Dhasdein is half the River nearer the Archipelago.”

  For a second more Therkon held her stare, while the fire in those eyes spoke all the crown prince’s offense, exasperation, wrath. Then he sat back, turned both hands out, and slightly bowed his head.

  “Very well.” For the first time, he sounded openly tired. “We are an embassy, not a bandit raid. We will accept your judgement. Take what precautions you choose.”

  For the time, he did not add, when the peril approaching Dhasdein comes upRiver to you. But the menace was there, in the way he extricated himself, slowly as an old man, from the chair.

  Tez watched him with a face of solid flint. I tried to emulate her, but I was seeing the deer with hounds on its trail, flagging, denied sanctuary. Turning mutely away. And Two was watching a cornucopia of knowledge drawn from between our very hands.

  “I want to go!” It burst out of me like a broken water-pipe. Two cried for me, “We must go to Dhasdein!”

  “Chaeris—!”

  “Tez, he’s right! We don’t have the facts and we can’t get them here. I can’t even project accurately for today because for half the River, we don’t know! And as for this thing in the Archipelago—” I overshouted her—“It’s coming this way! There’s no reason it won’t reach Dhasdein like the refugees did! Are we going to sit here and let other people get destroyed for us, when we could have helped, when we might have saved us all!”

  The last sentence made her jerk as if I had hit her on a burn. Her mouth opened and I yelled again. “And if we ever are to know the future, it will have to be for the River as well as us!”

  Beyond the table Therkon had paused, but he had the wit not to attempt anything more. He simply waited, almost as completely effacing himself as was possible for a dragonfly, while Tez glared up at me, and I glared back.

  Until she said flatly, “This is a matter for the House.”

  * * * *

  When the door closed behind Therkon I covered my own anxiety with affront. “You were very hard on him, weren’t you? He was only trying to do his best. For Dhasdein. Maybe for the River as well.”

  She had got up, but she paused and gave me a look where exasperation and pity mixed. “And Therkon has been playing imperial councils like a lyre since he tied up his hair. Do you think he found it hard to play a twelve-year-old girl? Even one like you?”

  “He didn’t play—!”

  She gave one horse-like snort. “He played that last scene like a Delta tragedy queen. Sooo meek. Sooo quiet. Sooo lost and wistful—soooo—”

  “He couldn’t have played Two!”

  “Blight and blast it, Chaeris, of course he could! Ten minutes with you would tell him Two’s weak spot and where else did he aim? Information! Facts!”

  It wasn’t like that, I wanted to yell. It isn’t like that! Up the hill he had been the philosopher, he just wanted to know. And he saw how it upset us not to have the information. He knows why we want it. He wasn’t just using us!

  Infuriatingly, stupidly, my eyes blurred. The best riposte I could manage was, “He wouldn’t do that!”

  She stopped stock still and stared at me, eyes narrowing as if back behind a gun. Then she rubbed a palm over her face and said almost gently, “Chaeris, he’ll do whatever helps his people, however he feels about the tools. I know he will. Because I’m a Head, like he is. It’s what I do myself.”

  * * * *

  The council argued the matter, if argument is the apposite word, for the next two days. At times I thought it would come to weapon-holes in the walls. The first day I waited with fuming impatience, sure of the way within myself. But as I came down the passage almost at daybreak the second day, I heard the voices in my mother’s room.

  It was Tez who spoke, with irony and wryness atop hardly submerged stress. “Last time, I wanted to save the River, and it was you saying, Put us first.”

  The door’s hinge-crack gave me her back view, cross-legged on the great old bed. In a moment Tanekhet came round the bed end, a view of his chin, a half-buttoned shirt.

  Tez said, “And now, what do you say?”

  His fingers stopped. Then he answered, too neutral, “This is a matter for Telluir House.”

  “You think you aren’t Telluir? After all this time?” Her voice firmed. “I say you are of the House. And I am Ruand. I also say, give me your opinion now.”

  He tucked his chin down to give her that under-the-brows look. “It will not please the House.”

  Tez sat up with a jerk. A pillow flew on the floor. “You want to let her go?”

  His expression said it all: she was Ruand. She had the final say. To dispute was a waste of time.

  “She’s too young!”

  “Chaeris is twelve.” Tanekhet’s voice was neutral again. “But Chaeris is not alone.”

  “No, Two’s with her. In her. Who knows how? Mother aid us, a twelve year old girl and a seven hundred year old—something. What will Dhasdein make of that? What if they try to ‘study’ her? If they call her a freak? A monstrosity?” Suddenly her voice quivered. “I couldn’t bear her to be—”

  He moved then, coming to her side. She laid her head against him and he slid an arm around her, one hand touching her hair. “She would hardly go outside the palace—”

  “The palace! I’ve been there, too. How will she fare, in that serpents’ paradise? Intrigue, factions . . . And the Empress. Not to mention Therkon himself!”

  When Tanekhet did not reply she buried her face deeper, the words muffled in his chest.

  “He’ll twist her round his finger. He did it here, just the other day. She’s never met a man who—she’s twelve. She’s never been out of Iskarda!”

  “Two will be there . . .”

  “What does Two know? She only remembers decisions. She’s never made them herself.”

  In profile, his own brows had set. He said evenly, “She will have escorts. Troublecrew. I thought, perhaps Azo and Verrith?”

  “Azo and—?” Tez’s head came up. I could read the dismay. The two stalwarts Zuri would have relied on to uphold her new inexperienced Trouble-head.

  Tanekhet too paused before he spoke.

  “She must have someone. And would either, this time, go alone?”

  “No. No.” The qherrique had enrolled Azo to seek the Source, without her partner, a pairing made in Amberlight. “No. They’d never do that again.”

  Tanekhet let the silence ask for him, Is there any other choice?

  “No,” Tez said flatly. “It must be both. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “O Mother’s aid, they’re good, but they’ve never been to Dhasdein. And there’s only two of them.”

  “Surely, two like that? And Chaeris is practically trouble crew now?”

  One hand jerked. “If Therkon lured her somewhere—forbade them to come. Some secret cursed place
. He only has to mention information, Two will follow him anywhere!”

  Like me, I felt Two wince.

  Tez’s face was still buried. There was more than an ache in her voice. “If I wasn’t Head. If I could just go with her. Myself.”

  Perhaps unconsciously his face smoothed. He ran a finger over her plait. “You were troublecrew once, yes, for Tellurith. Between the pair of you, you plagued me for weeks.”

  She produced a watery half-laugh, half-sniff. Then her shoulders clenched. “But it’s Dhasdein this time. What are we to do if they keep her there? If they held her there? If she couldn’t even get a message out! Oh, Mother aid me.” Her hands came up over her own ears. “If anything happened to her . . . what would I say to Tellurith?”

  My own heart was bumping unevenly in my throat. Not least at the look on Tanekhet’s face.

  At last he put a finger under her chin and lifted her head. “My heart,” he said, softly, somberly, “if I read this aright, Chaeris will go, whatever we do.”

  Tez started back. He let her move, but held her gaze.

  “They have already met. Despite all we did. If that was intended, then, we must expect, so is this. And if we refuse to let her go this time—what lever will come next?”

  Even in profile, Tez was going pale. “You mean, next time they will use force?”

  “I mean, next time, it may not be Dhasdein.”

  Tez froze where she sat. Then she moistened her lips. “This—intent. This—purpose. Whatever it is?”

  Tanekhet produced the tiniest of shrugs. And said the next words with a surgeon’s lethal delicacy.

  “Or whatever it is, in the Archipelago.”

  I tried to make my wits work. To remember to breathe. All my self seemed to be beyond that door-slit, where they were still face to face in the silent, listening room.

  Then Tez turned her head away. Gathered a crumple of linen and let it drop. When she spoke, there was an echo of Therkon in her almost lifeless voice.

  “Then this time, too, you’re right. We,” a bitter little laugh, “have no choice. We have to let her go.”

  Chapter IV

  I heard it all again as the House laboured its way to Tez’s conclusion, while their spelling out of perils and mischances sharpened the pangs of dread already goring me. To leave Iskarda. To abandon everyone who cared for me, all that had been my life, with no certainty of ever seeing it again. Without even my mother’s knowledge, with only Azo and Verrith as shield, to thrust myself headlong upon the charity of strangers. And those strangers Dhasdein.

  Two added worse threats, a storm on the River, a sortie from Mel’eth or Shirran to ambush Therkon’s galley. A sudden breach with Verrain, and the entire scheme stillborn? The thought of betrayal in Dhasdein brought me near enough panic, but that spectre nearly finished me.

  Under it all boiled our own peculiar stress: that we had to go, whatever the dangers, whatever the loss. That the urgency, whatever its source, was imperative. We could not afford to wait a single day.

  With heroic effort I managed not to shout all that at everyone who rehearsed the general laments in council, or poured them out on me. I even managed not to let Two spark more than a time or two. But at the last, only one choice could be made.

  Therkon agreed to a full formal meeting without the slightest demur. He even accepted the banishment of all other Dhasdeinis. Though he must have been fretting worse than I, he came into the council room more devastatingly elegant than ever, in a flame-gold brocaded over-tunic and driven-snow white shirt, no ornament but his two rings, settling just a little too quietly into a seat.

  In equally courteous silence he waited out almost the entire Iskardan jeremiad of threat and lament. But when Iatha reached bluster about harm to me, and very unsubtle reminders of Dhasdein’s past behavior, he thrust out a hand with a jerk that drew every eye to the charred patch on the tabletop.

  “Do you think, my ladies, that we have not learnt our lesson?” The Dhasdeini clip on his final consonants was very clear. “Or if we did forget the past, after that reminder, that anyone in all Dhasdein would dare lay hands on the bearer of qherrique?”

  Iatha snorted at him with her worst belligerence.

  “What guarantee is that, against the chances of the River and war? An arrow out of Shirran, a Mel’ethi bandit. Or just another storm—”

  Therkon stood up with a jerk that overthrew his chair. “Madam,” the courtesy came like a slingshot, “I will be the lady Chaeris’ surety.” He tossed his head back. His eyes burned. “If harm comes to her, I will answer for it with my life.”

  The air seemed to ring behind his voice, adding everything he had not said: I, no mere man but Dhasdein’s crown prince, the Empire’s shield and hope. Sealing this pledge with the promise of his own flesh and blood. Speaking, beyond question, from the truth of his own heart.

  I had to drop my eyes like the merest bashful boy. My throat was swelling with something that was not grief, even though my eyes had misted almost to tears.

  Iatha had sat back, though her silence was not abashed. Her eyes narrowed. It was Tez who answered, coolly as a flung bucket of water, “Telluir accepts your pledge.”

  Yet again their eyes locked. After another aeon, Therkon let his chin down, and made Tez a bow of most imperial courtesy. “Dhasdein thanks Iskarda, my lady. For its trust. Above all, for its gift.” He did not bother with vows and protestations of how Dhasdein would treasure it. “Have I your leave to prepare, now? Whenever you set our departure, we have no time to waste.”

  * * * *

  Dhasdeini troublecrew swamped him a step beyond the door. Duitho slid out after them, while with belated laments the council began to disperse. Azo and Verrith closed on Tez: a firsthand briefing, no doubt, on Dhasdein. Iatha and Hanni went last, together, as they had been so long. But between me and Tez, Tanekhet had remained.

  He was watching the door, and something in his eyes spoke amusement, and memory, but an affectionate, almost admiring memory, as of a man recalling a child who is now, in both senses, well grown. I saw Keshaq read it too, for he did not wait as usual. As he moved off with his version of the sinuous troublecrew tread, I slid to Tanekhet’s elbow myself.

  He smiled at me, despite the tiredness he was showing like the rest. “Well, my dear, you will certainly have the best possible shield.”

  “Yes.” Pride, and something else, kept shutting my throat on anything more. “Tanekhet? I wanted to ask: that ring he wears?”

  “The signet?” He looked faintly surprised. “Reputed to be his father’s own? Left in the palace, when Antastes went?”

  Two knew “went” did not mean the usual sense of “died,” even for an emperor. I brushed that aside. “Not the signet. The other one. The triple thillians.”

  “The betrothal ring?” The remnants of smile vanished. “Wedding him to Dhasdein?”

  “He said that.” Do not, I threatened Two, do not you dare let me blush. “But is that what it really means? He’s plighted to the Empire? He can’t marry anyone else?”

  The hint of constraint vanished too. “No, my dear, certainly not. Therkon,” he gave his fingers a more than eloquent twirl, “has not been niggardly with his, er, favours. But he will as certainly marry. The Empire will, in time, need another heir.”

  An heir-breeder, said that soft, momentarily bitter voice in my memory.

  “Oh. Of course.” Let Two’s insatiable curiosity, I prayed the Mother, also be credited with this. “But—who?”

  “I mean, who’s he likely to marry?” I expanded in a hurry to Tanekhet’s incipient astonishment. “A, a, is there anyone in mind?”

  “I should think, several.” He had made the ordinary assumption. He was his calm, incisive self again. “I doubt, at the moment, I could give you actual names. But some great family’s daughter, out of Riversrun, certainly. Not, I should think, Quetzis
tan. Not this time.”

  “Oh.” Two wanted to ask, why not Quetzistan? I had more pressing parameters. “But still, someone from Dhasdein?”

  Tanekhet’s brows went up. “Do you see Therkon consenting to marry a Verraini merchant’s get? With not even a Family to boast?” The great Families of Verrain had vanished, Two had told me, massacred in revolution twelve and more years ago. “Or an Amberlight Assembly delegate?” His mouth curled. “Let alone some tribal scion out of Cataract?”

  My own mouth went on speaking, it seemed, without my consent.

  “And not—not—”

  Tanekhet’s brows went to his hairline. Then he leant over and took both my hands without even a hesitation and Two let him hold them as his eyes held mine.

  “Chaeris. My dear. My very dear.” It was love, as well as pity in his voice. “Therkon would need to thank the River-lord on his knees, daily, did he ever have the chance. But no. Not a princess. Not an outland princess. Even one like you.”

  My throat had entirely shut. My lips could only shape a pathetic, ineffectual, No?

  Tanekhet tightened his fingers a little. “Dearling, I know.” He had never called me that before. “He is extremely beautiful. And gallant. And no-one would blame you, after that—avowal—if you thought he perhaps feels more than kindness. But, my little one . . . you are twelve years old.”

  I kept my eyes on the table rim and locked, He said I looked seventeen! In my throat.

  “And he,” Tanekhet was saying softly, almost reluctantly, “he has had his choice of the Empire’s great ladies, these twenty years.” He put a hand suddenly under my chin and made me look at him as he had with Tez. “Dearling, listen. Remember that, in Dhasdein. The crown prince is a great lover: not least because, when he loves, he does it with his heart. His whole heart. But they do not call him Dragonfly only for his clothes.”

  I tried to keep my lips shut, hearing that voice here in this very room. I will answer for her with my life.

  “Ward yourself,” Tanekhet was saying even more softly, but with a note of urgency. “Should the inclination ever take him, do not let him sunder yours.”