by E. J. Beaton
For the briefest of moments, she felt a fervent desire to tell him about Charice—how her friend had always kept a drawing of a chimera on her wall. How Lysande had guessed what it symbolized. How she had learned later, from Charice’s own lips, that what seemed an omen of death to some was in fact a source of pride to others. She looked at Derset, again, and faltered.
As they left the royal suite, she could still smell the faintest hint of rose-oil. The scent lingered in her nostrils long after she had returned to her work. It accompanied her still when she lay down to sleep, her mind swirling, and she chased scraps of paper and half-finished notes in her dreams, watched by a figure whose dented armor glittered in the half-light.
* * *
• • •
The mare whinnied into the breeze, stamping its hooves. “Come, now,” she said, stroking its muzzle. “If I am to endure this, so are you.”
The tall animal, splotched black and white, stood out among the sleek chestnut horses of the royal team. It nuzzled her hand, and she passed it a handful of nuts, guiding it to the front of the palace.
She spotted Cassia through the mass of riders and tried to brush her hair into a more tameable state as she approached the Irriqi, changing the angle of her hand a little too late to make the gesture into a natural wave. Cassia hailed her over the heads of the Pyrrhan guards, standing up in the saddle. “I suppose you’ve traveled the Scarlet Road before, my friend?”
“Not at all.” Lysande’s only acquaintance with the winding path from Axium to Rhime had been in reading of the famous stabbings that had taken place upon it. “I wish I had ventured beyond Axium’s territory.”
“They are all olive-pickers and wine merchants down there. Not a patch of jungle in the east,” said Cassia, sniffing. “You could not stalk a tiger if you tried.”
“That is certainly a great disadvantage.”
“Olives . . .” Cassia muttered. “You are welcome to share my cook’s offerings when we make camp, Lysande. A friend must eat real food.”
If only you could excavate a word with your hands, burrowing with fingernails to break through layer after layer, to find the real meaning buried beneath the surface. Friend was an opportunity, in the world of royalty. Lysande did not trust that she would find something she liked, but she yearned to dig into the word’s core all the same, to feel her way to the chambers and spaces within Cassia’s lexicon and understand what resided there.
Guards swarmed around the nobles in front of the palace; range-riders, bodyguards for the Council, ordinary scouts, captains, officers, and special fighters mustered to ride in front and behind, and to flank the party. The captain of Lysande’s traveling guards wove between the Axiumites, checking saddles, handing out a few spare swords, and somehow maneuvering her muscular form between two horses that had developed a mutual dislike.
Lysande had seen Captain Chidney reporting to Sarelin before, and when the woman bowed at last to give her the all-clear, she was ready for the sight of six feet of armored soldier bending before her. Yet she was ill prepared for the realization that she was the one who needed protection. This time, it was not Sarelin that the guards would be circling.
“You really need to go all the way to Rhime, just to make a decision about the armies?” Raden said, coming up beside her.
“You know I have no choice. We must meet the Bastillonian ambassador sometime next week. So, we go to the closest city to the border for this meeting. A halfway mark, the Irriqi calls it.”
“Some say the White Queen will hunt the Council down.”
“Well, some of the silverbloods said that the White Queen had an army of demons during the war. You can’t always rely on their assessment,” Lysande said.
“She’s dangerous, Lysande. And not just because of her magic.”
It was impossible not to catch the note of anxiety in his voice. She was getting better, though, at painting on her façade, that layer of assurance all silverbloods seemed to wear. You could not wear the truth on your face, could you? She had considered the dangers of riding, even under heavy guard, with trepidation, but she had committed to making her choices for those who wore rags or evaded the executioner’s cart; or so she told herself. Was it better to ignore risk, or to ignore the reasons you were braving it?
“The people must be satisfied we are governing for the whole realm, and we can’t do that by sitting in Axium Palace,” she said.
“It sounds more like a traveling show than a Council.” He allowed her a smile.
“The more I learn about the business of rule, the more it does seem like a show. Only the players are not very heroic, the story changes without warning, and the audience prefers the spilling of entrails to a happy end.”
Raden’s smile waned as she climbed onto the piebald mare. Glancing down at her saddle, she was aware of the silver trimming, and the design with her initials that attendants had sewn; and she was sure that he was aware of them too. They were both silent for a moment.
“I can work where I won’t be seen. Fix things quietly,” he said. “Make sure none of them rips up the law. Axium will run like a well-shod horse until you return.”
“I know it will. I’ve seen you shoe a stallion.” She saw the sharp edge of his expression. “What is it, Raden?”
“It’s only a simple captain’s thought.”
“I don’t see a simple captain anywhere.”
He inclined his head, without cheer. “I was thinking that power sits like an ill-tied cloak on some people. They take years just to learn how to wear it. Others tie it on like a mantle, and it fits over their shoulders without a crease . . . and you wonder, is that newly added, or was it always there? Am I only noticing it now?”
She looked him in the eye. A forest cuckoo trilled, somewhere above them. She placed a hand on his shoulder, for a second, before turning her horse around.
The sun spread fingers of pale gold over the rooftops, and once the riders were out of the capital, the chill of the northern breeze receded; they could have been a hundred miles from the capital, trotting through the lanes of Axium’s outlying towns. Elsington’s thatched rooves hid shops full of silverware, riding leathers, and bodices of heavy velvet, and farmers sold their grain and vegetables in the street. Lysande wished they could dismount long enough to greet the people who waved at them. She noted the brightening smiles and the eyes that seemed to light up when they saw the entourage, and tried to tell herself that it was not about her; that Sarelin would have received a welcome like this, too.
A girl with braided hair ran toward her, shouting something, two syllables, repeating it twice. It took her a moment to realize that the word was Prior.
She sat, quite still, listening to the sound. It thickened and hardened.
Perfault called this the mirror of one’s majesty. Was that not an apt term? It sounded foreign, hearing her name from the girl’s lips. She felt that she was hearing some other, well-known leader’s name, yet she wanted to hear it again and again.
A woman in a blacksmith’s apron and thick boots ran to the girl and gathered her up, red-cheeked, looking as if she were about to call her twenty names; a man ran to join them, taking the girl and holding her gently. Neither parent spoke. Watching them, Lysande realized that she had inspired this distance; that her presence had spread a blanket of stillness.
“Prior!” the girl shouted again.
They stared at each other. The world shivered, rearranging its pieces.
Hoofbeats: a guard joined her, at last, wearing an inquisitive look, and Lysande remembered to wave to the crowd. She heard the blacksmith call out a blessing, which she returned with a brief nod; she heard well-wishes from the other townspeople, and did not hear them, for in that moment, something had changed within her, something fragmenting and reforming. Prior.
At Wiltingford she was aware of a glimmer of movement as she entered the town—a b
lur somewhere to her right that she could not catch. She shook her head. The extra half-spoonful of scale she had heated and mixed might have been too much. You could never be certain of the amount when your measurements were always a little heaped.
They passed through an autumn festival where orange and brown strips of cloth fluttered on poles along the main street, and young boys threw handfuls of dry leaves at girls who led them onward. Lysande stopped the wagons at Wiltingford Bridge, and a movement drew her body to the left—not just her gaze but all of her responding—ready for something, she knew not what. Her muscles clenched and tightened. Be the blade. There was nothing to strike, however; no animal lurking.
She gave orders and while the horses were rested and watered, she gazed at the schools of circling trout. A pensive figure looked back at her from the water, more a woman than a girl. Thanks to her height, she took up a swathe of the river’s surface, blotting out the lily pads.
“This is the furthest I have been from Axium.”
“Were your parents from the capital?” Derset asked, bringing his gray stallion up.
“No one can be certain. A group of guards found me in a carpenter’s shop that was burning in the outskirts of Axium during the war. If the shop hadn’t been so near the orphanage, I might have been as charred as the wood.” She remembered sitting on a bench, in the palace grounds, the day Sarelin had asked her what she knew about her finding. Sarelin’s face had been taut with focus. There had been little Lysande could tell her, the headmistress’ words doled out to her in clumps over the years; she had recounted the same story about the knock on the orphanage door, the hurried words of soldiers, and the bundle of stubborn life, swaddled in rags and blinking.
“Like many children of the White War, I expect.” Derset looked ahead at a swathe of green fields. “I am sorry, my lady. At least you will have a chance to see more of Elira now. I still remember my first ride to Rhime, on an errand for my mother. I stared at that tapestry of wide fields, narrow streams, and groves of olive trees that might have been stitched on . . . and I kept staring. I thought: it is magnificent, but not like Axium. It has its own magnificence. A glory of ripening things, like a garden of plums which refuse to wither. Once we get through the hills and onto the Scarlet Road, the land will be more fertile than the capital. The traders say that if you could bottle up the Rhimese sun, you would make your fortune in gold.”
“No doubt Luca Fontaine would oversee the selling.” She smiled. “And make the deals in Old Rhimese.” The thought of Luca in his black armor distracted her and she pictured the lines of his body, his shoulders tightening as he fired. It was too easy to imagine the fluidity of his movement. She shook her head to dispel the images.
They saw no vineyards for the first few miles, only trees whose leaves formed a queer, vertical shape, spreading slightly out at the bottom like very thin pears. Oxen ruminated in clusters, small farmhouses sat surrounded by bales of hay, and cottages with flower gardens studded the fields between the last of Axium’s towns and the first of Rhime’s. No manors appeared, but Lysande noticed a smattering of commoners’ houses among the gentle hills and dales, merging with the fields as seamlessly as if they had grown there.
At the next fork in the road, Derset pointed out the dark green lumps on the horizon. “I thought you would like to savor your first glimpse of the Emeralds.”
The bunch of little semicircles on her map of Rhimese territory had looked a lot less imposing than the real hills. From their sheen and deep color, she had no difficulty guessing why the Rhimese had chosen their name. The Axiumites broke off to take the scenic route. This was no time to fall prey to baseless fears, she told herself, still glancing to either side as she rode. Halfway up the first hill, the grass proved so smooth that the horses struggled, and only Chidney’s shouts of encouragement and swift leaps in front of the pack kept them going. Lysande was forced to cling to the saddle as her piebald mare scrambled up, and when the horse stumbled over a loose stone, she thought she might be about to make a very quick fall. The sight at the top was worth the ascent, for a mile of rolling green hills unfolded so softly that the edges seemed to form a single blanket over the land.
The Emeralds basked in the sun, studded here and there with little dark bushes. Lysande had the sudden desire to ride at full speed into them, as she had once done with Sarelin on a slope in Axium Forest, the two of them cackling at the queen’s joke about beautiful men and their jousting-lances, meeting the full breeze with aching cheeks. There was no jocosity now, of course; no bellowing mirth from a woman better known for facing down an army. Since Derset was too dignified for racing, Lysande set off with Litany at a gallop. Her attendant cantered beside her, and when she looked across, she saw that the girl was watching her from her saddle, only half-attending to the slope ahead.
“I find this very disappointing, Litany.”
“Councillor?”
“This canter. If you keep it up, how will I ever know if you can beat me to the top?”
A smile brightened Litany’s face; it dimmed for a moment, but as the girl checked Lysande’s expression, it spread. “When do we begin the race?”
Lysande gave her mare a quick tap on the neck and gripped the animal harder as it began to gallop. “Catch up when you have the fortitude,” she said.
Soon they were laughing into the wind, Lysande’s fingers curled into her mare’s mane, the two of them shouting Axium proverbs at each other as they raced, twisting and mangling the old phrases. Litany proved singularly adept with her horse, and they raced higher, until they reached the top of the last hill together and gazed out on a quilt of color.
Dark squares of vineyards and fields of little red flowers checkered the ground, bordered by lines of the conical trees and interspersed with houses, yet it was the landscape beyond the town that caught Lysande’s eye, a canvas of green and yellow fields painted in shades brighter than any she had seen, the ground shimmering, iridescent in the sun. The territory had none of Axium’s northern quietude; this land seemed to pulse with a warm rhythm, birds, rabbits, and deer moving here and there among the trees.
“I think we have stumbled upon some paradise.” Her imagination leaped to Cicera’s ancient poem about a hidden realm, untouched by frost, where the sun always shone. It had always sounded too sublime, too full of mythic qualities to have ever existed. She had imagined it, all the same, lying in bed with the Silver Songs propped on her chest.
“This is no arcadia. Only Spelato, my lady.” Derset brought his horse up beside hers, casting a slightly reproachful look at Litany.
“We can spare a half-hour to eat.” She heard the command in her voice, unfamiliar.
They could easily meet the others past Ferizia, where the Scarlet Road began, she told herself a little guiltily. She was just about to nudge her horse over the edge of the hilltop when she saw a flash of movement at the very edge of Spelato’s vineyards. A figure atop a horse sped between two trees.
From behind the trunk where the horse had disappeared, a head poked out, the face obscured by the top of a hooded cloak.
“Did you see that?”
Derset looked across at her. “See what, my lady?”
The trees offered nothing but leaves and branches. Lysande found no trace of either horse or rider. She scrutinized the trunks for a half-minute more, her mind turning over images of silent swords and poison. “It may have been a fancy,” she said.
Derset stared across the vineyards for a long time, leading his horse forward a few steps and peering at the treeline, checking every visible part of it before turning back to Lysande with a somewhat apologetic look on his face. “There are many traders and messengers coming back and forth from the cities.”
“Do traders in the east wear hooded cloaks?”
“I should think not. Prince Fontaine forbids any rider to hide their face in his territory, they say, since the Petrioglio sisters sent
four hired swords after him last year.”
Unease stirred in Lysande’s stomach, but she gave Derset a relaxed smile. If her advisor had known that she had taken one and a half spoonfuls of scale, and that those spoonfuls had worked with a new violence inside her, he might have dismissed her concern. The scouts rode off toward the trees and returned with nothing to report. Yet her unease stayed with her as they cantered down the hill and made their way slowly along the vineyards, stopping in one of the powder-blue fields near Spelato to spread out their blankets, and she checked the road every few minutes.
Litany unpacked the palace cook’s basket of cheese pies, sun-fruit quiches, hazelnut tarts, and hard ginger sweets, along with several bottles of wine. With Lysande’s permission, all the attendants ate and drank to satiety, stuffing their pockets with handfuls of sweets. The guards sat in a cluster, talking of famous Rhimese ambushes with an interest that bordered on relish; Chidney kept them in order, but she looked across every so often, too, and Lysande had the distinct impression that her captain was gazing at Litany.
Lysande engaged Litany on the subject of attendants’ etiquette, fishing for clues about how the girl had come to work as a page and why she had trained in the skills of wardrobe. Midway through a discussion of the hierarchy of stable-hands, she reached to fill Litany’s goblet. They seized the bottle by chance at the same time. She felt the strength of those hands, which seemed to exceed the promise of the girl’s wiry frame.
“I believe Captain Chidney is looking at you.” It was hard to resist the opportunity to show off her observation.
Litany shot a glance at Chidney, then immediately stared at her own knees. “I beg your pardon, Councillor, but the captain is a noblewoman. I am the daughter of a stable-hand . . . and possibly a baker. Captain Chidney has no reason to look in my direction.”