by Kate Elliott
The plea sounds so odd coming from his lips that it chases past all my defenses. So I tell him the story of how Amaya and I concocted a plan to search for our sister among the workers on the far-flung Garon estates, and how our journey brought us to Akheres Oasis.
“Bettany couldn’t forgive you or Mother. When she was taken to the mines with the other household servants it was a foreign doctor named Agalar who protected them. He took her on as an assistant and promised to train her as a healer. But it turned out he was a mercenary working with the East Saroese. She did try to warn us at first, without giving away the ambush at Crags Fort, but in the end she betrayed us in favor of him. I don’t know where she is now. I don’t expect to ever see her again. I’m not sure I want to.”
He sits in silence for so long that I wonder if I should comfort him, but I don’t know how.
Finally he shifts, a twist of pain parting his lips. “It should have been me who protected her.”
He looks so weary I feel shame using his regret against him, but I do it anyway. “Father, I left two fellow adversaries at the rear of the army, digging a trench to slow down the East Saroese. I need to go back and see if they’re all right. You wouldn’t want me to abandon my comrades.”
He winces. “Your desire to look for your friends is commendable. Steward Haredas will escort you with a squad of twelve.”
“I—”
“We are not discussing this, Jessamy. Besides being my daughter, you now have a relationship with the king that must and will change how people treat you.”
“Yes, Father. I was about to say I understand your concern.”
His rare smile flashes, and it warms me.
When Steward Haredas appears, I am handed over.
The rising sun bathes the royal banners with its brilliant light. A wind off the sea unfurls them like triumph. Around us, men sing a hymn to the Sun of Justice, and the roll of their voices thunders through me and makes tears come to my eyes. Isn’t this what justice looks like? The murderer Nikonos forced to flee and the Royal Army under its proper leader, a prince who will be a just and wise king as soon as he has driven the invaders from the land?
And yet Kal will have to fight his way into a city still ruled by his cousin Serenissima, knowing a huge East Saroese army dogs our heels and Nikonos is still alive.
“Doma Jessamy, please stay with me this time.” Steward Haredas has the look of a man who wants to be anywhere but at the duty he’s just been assigned.
“Yes, Domon.”
“Now that your father is the general in command of the Royal Army, you must call me ‘steward,’ Doma. To call me ‘domon’ is to suggest I outrank you, which I do not.”
My surprise must register on my face.
He adds, “Despite your irregular birth, you are the general’s daughter. His position must never be called into question, so therefore you must never be seen to be a lesser person than those who serve him.”
“Even though I am a mule.”
“The general has always made it clear he will not tolerate any use of that word among his household.”
The weary soldiers stride with renewed determination as the news filters back along their seemingly endless column that Lord Prince Captain Kalliarkos has won a victory and now leads the Royal Army. The sun is halfway up the sky before Haredas and I reach the last wagons and the rearmost unit. I shade my eyes into the glare. The road stretches eastward through flat countryside. Smoke twists in columns behind us, marking the destructive path of our enemy through the once-peaceful Efean countryside as they burn villages close to the road. Only the brutal speed of chasing us prevents them from doing far worse.
Two bodies lie at the base of the embankment. One twitches, and I’m aghast that a wounded man has been tossed away to die, but then a fox emerges from beneath the fabric of his tabard with a glistening moist organ in its mouth.
Hastily I swing my horse around to pace the captain overseeing the rear guard.
“Captain, where are the Efean laborers?”
He stares at me as if I am a crocodile abruptly capable of speech, then looks at Steward Haredas for help.
“Doma Jessamy is looking for two Commoners who were back here with the trenching crew,” says Haredas.
“Cursed Commoners.” The captain spits on the ground. “We distributed weapons to them, as we were ordered to do, even though I knew nothing good would come of it. They abandoned us just as if we hadn’t rescued them from the enemy. And stole the weapons we lent them. Lazy thieves! That’s gratitude for you.”
“None of them stayed behind?”
I’m going to find a way to fight for Efea, Mis told me. For Efeans. Not for them.
Here I am, riding with them. Allied with them.
A wild desire bursts in my heart: to take my horse and ride inland, to find Mis and Dusty, to vanish into the heart of Efea alongside people who will accept me as I am. But I can’t leave Father now, and I won’t abandon Kal. I have to see this through to its end because there’s no other way to make sure Nikonos and Serenissima and their foreign allies do not destroy Efea.
Yet an unquiet voice tugs at my loyalties. What if I’m wrong?
Two days later, not long after dawn, we march into view of the sycamores marking the turnout to Falcon Villa, where Father married Lady Menoë. The command company with its carriages pulls out for fresh horses. I can’t help but think of Kal driving me here in a race to get Father’s help to free Mother and the others from the oracle’s tomb.
“We will reach Saryenia by midday.” Father sips at a flask, looking out the open window of the carriage at the army marching past, still in disciplined ranks.
“Are we going to set a siege? Won’t that just trap us between the queen inside the city and the East Saroese army marching up behind us?”
“We are going to bluff.” He has ruthlessly kept me beside him, acting as my constant chaperone. I have seen Kal twice, and always with Father in attendance so we have been allowed only to greet each other from a polite distance. “We are taking a dangerous chance. Once we enter the city, if fighting breaks out you must melt away into the population of Commoners.”
“No.”
He blinks. “What did you say?”
“I want to stay with you, Father.”
He takes a much longer draft of the wine in his flask. His face is flushed, and maybe that is a tear in his eye. “Very well. But you will stay in this carriage.”
“Yes, Father.”
We roll on past grain fields, lush orchards, and prosperous villages. Efeans pushing carts and driving wagons are streaming away from their homes, some hurrying for the walls of Saryenia while most head north into the interior.
We pass the regimental encampments, now empty. The Royal Road’s night-lanterns hang at intervals, unlit because it is day, and beside each lantern hangs a cage. No new prisoners have been hung out to die in recent months; the old prisoners are dead, rotting away under the sun, skin turning to leather and viscera decaying until there is nothing left but bone.
I think of the horses left behind, the stragglers, the skirmishers, the captain sent to light an oily fire; he knew his task was to create havoc and cause damage, not to survive.
I brace myself for what I fear is coming as the walls of Saryenia rise out of the west. Always in my youth those walls meant security. Now I see only the promise of death. How can Kal possibly win his way through a city occupied by foreign soldiers and a queen who wants to kill him?
We pass companies of soldiers who have halted at the side of the road to allow the command company to move forward to the vanguard. They cheer as the royal carriage and the general’s carriage pass. For people watching from the city walls, it will appear that the conquering hero, Nikonos, has returned, flying his banner and the king’s flag of Efea, bringing General Esladas with him as prisoner or as an ally.
That is our bluff. Let them see what they expect to see.
Even so, Father’s ability to march calmly into a
potential disaster amazes me. The walls loom so high I have to tilt back my head to see the battlements.
Horns blare from the tops of the walls. Will they close the gates? Do they guess the ruse? Has Nikonos arrived here before us?
The horns blare again, singing out the fanfare that rouses the city when its king or queen returns in triumph.
Unmolested, we cross the plank causeway across the canal that rings the city and pass under the triple gates. I brace myself, waiting for boiling oil or hot sand to be poured down on us, but no attack mars our entry. Nikonos’s banner carries us past the gate and the guards. Kal cannot be seen behind the royal carriage’s closed shutters.
“Shut the window on your side, Jessamy.” Father does not close the shutter on his side but draws a gauzy curtain across, making it hard to see him. When I don’t immediately obey, he reaches across me and latches the shutter.
Our procession rumbles down the Avenue of the Soldier. Squads of enemy soldiers on patrol line up at intervals to salute in the East Saroese manner, a bow with hands braced together. They are paler than the local Saroese, and many are burned red from too much sun.
Beyond them, I glimpse local people staring with wary interest, although they keep a wide berth from the foreign soldiers and do not cheer the arrival of Nikonos and his banner. It seems the populace does not trust their new king and his foreign allies, but they are caught by the majesty of the procession, our tattered remnants marching with dogged pride. It is only after the royal carriage has moved on that I hear people shout out greetings as they see familiar faces in the Royal Army.
We reach the Square of the Moon and the Sun and make a wide turn onto the Avenue of Triumphs, which leads to the king’s palace. How strange that I am part of a royal victory procession like the one Amaya and Mother and I watched the day Father sat in glory as a newly promoted general, the last day we were a happy family all together.
The words come out as if I have no rein on them. Hoarsely I say, “Mother was so proud of you that day. She wept to see you given pride of place in your own general’s carriage. How could you have abandoned her, Father?”
He doesn’t look toward me but I hear his words, murmured for himself and not for me. “I will make it up to her. She’ll understand.”
“How can she understand you just leaving her when you didn’t even know she was safe? How could you bear to do it, if you truly loved her?”
His fingers tighten on the hilt of his sword, not aggressively but with suppressed tension. He won’t answer, and he refuses to look at me.
I don’t have the courage to ask again.
I ride with the victorious army he commands. That is answer enough.
The gates of the king’s palace open before the combined force of the royal carriage, the royal sea-phoenix banner, and Prince Nikonos’s personal banner of gold and purple, all of which taken together fool the guards into thinking that Nikonos sits inside. This has to work. If they realize it’s Kal, they’ll cut him down without mercy.
I still have the knife Inarsis gave me. Heart racing, I set it across my lap, ready to fight if we’re discovered. Putting Kal on the throne is the only way to defeat the invaders. I’m sure of it. I’m sure.
The outer courtyard fills up with our infantry units. Officers come to the curtain where, hidden behind the gauze, Father gives a stream of orders in a low voice.
“Make sure all approaches to the palace are under our control. Secure the grounds. Search every chamber and storehouse. Imprison all East Saroese soldiers who surrender, and kill those who resist. Restrict the palace guards to their barracks until we can determine their loyalty. We remain on high alert.”
Our soldiers race up stairs to the guard walks, spreading out to take over the palace.
The royal carriage passes through a second gate into an inner courtyard. Here courtiers sit on benches beneath the shade of trees, waiting for permission to enter the king’s audience chamber. As the royal carriage halts, these courtiers leap to their feet and press fists to hearts, each wishing to be seen as first to greet the returning king. Officials wearing the gray silk of the royal stewards push open a third gate. Accompanied by a complement of Father’s veteran troops and Kalliarkos’s personal guards, the royal carriage passes through.
The gate shuts before we can follow.
“Father, what if the palace officials attack him?”
“Quiet.”
No screams and no clash of arms reach my ears although I am certain the palace officials, confronted with Kalliarkos, will react with immediate and drastic measures. He’s armed. He’ll defend himself, but we have to reach him before he’s overwhelmed. From farther away, in the other precincts of the palace compound, a flare of sound from a confrontation bursts like a flock of birds taking wing, then calms.
Father gets out of his carriage and limps to the gate. I’m right at his heels. Courtiers murmur, staring at Father and at me. Always at me. One of the stewards steps out of line to block my path. The purple stripes on his sleeves indicate that somewhere in his past he can boast of a palace forebear.
His haughty gaze flicks over Father’s stained tabard and dusty boots. “Without a letter of entry marked with the royal seal, you may not enter. And this… creature may not pass under the gate that admits the elect to the king’s audience hall. It should not be walking within these walls at all.”
Father still carries the captain’s whip he earned years ago. He presses its tip against the man’s chest and shoves him hard enough that the steward stumbles back.
“Open the gate.”
But a palace official with palace antecedents is not easily cowed, not even by my father. “No. There is protocol to follow, something a lowborn man like you cannot understand.”
I’ve already eyed the wall and the trees. “It’s all right,” I say. “I don’t need to pass under the gate.”
I launch myself into the friendly canopy of a persimmon, a tree favored by the royal family. The branches sway alarmingly as I climb. One cracks under my weight as I leap but I’m able to grab the top of the wall and roll onto a walkway. A surprised guardsman runs up, sword drawn. I vault past him and scramble down the stairs. There’s yet another courtyard inside, paved in marble and lined by pillars, where the royal carriage has come to rest. It’s abandoned; the area has emptied, not a soldier or official in sight except the man on the wallwalk who is now being yelled at by my father from the other side.
Where is Kal?
I drag the gate open and Father enters. In his wake a flood of firebird soldiers move in so fast that I’m pressed back against the wall, caught there as they fill the courtyard. Father hammers on the magnificent dark wood of the two-story-high double doors to the audience hall. There’s no answer.
He corrals the haughty steward and demands, “Is there another entrance?”
A hollow knocking sound from inside the hall makes us all jump.
The doors swing open to reveal palace stewards in gray silk. Father beckons to me to follow but he doesn’t wait. With his loyal soldiers at his back, he strides into the massive audience hall, larger by itself than the entire compound I grew up in. The murals painted onto its walls depict the perilous sea voyage of the first Kliatemnos, the fleet’s miraculous survival in a fierce storm, when the shadow of a sea-phoenix kept his ships afloat, and the glorious shores of Efea where he made landfall and gained a crown. The sea-phoenix diadem is painted on his noble brow in gold leaf. Real jewels are embedded as his eyes, and his sister and queen, Serenissima the First, glitters, for her figure is constructed of tiny tiles rather than painted. The effect makes her seem to leap out from the mural like she is doubly alive, a woman with two sparks.
Our footfalls thunder on the marble floor because we are so many. Father walks in front, his limp quite noticeable, providing an easy target for the palace guards stationed on either side of the hall, swords and spears held ready at their sides. More palace officials cluster at the far end of the hall, whispering as they tak
e their ordained places. It all happens so fast.
The king’s throne sits on a dais, framed by a vast carved lintel that captures the throne as if within a picture’s frame. The seat has a simple base with a back that flares outward in the shape of sea-phoenix wings, enfolding and embracing the ornately cushioned chair like white foam rising off the water.
A man already sits on the throne.
At first I think it is Nikonos, that he has arrived on a swift war galley before us and we have walked into his trap.
But it is Kal who surveys the men sinking to one knee to surrender their loyalty and lives to him. I’m so surprised that I forget to kneel. Across the distance he sees me standing. His expression isn’t triumphant. Instead he wears a mask of grim resignation.
King of Efea. The destiny he never wanted.
I helped him win this trial. He climbed the victory tower, and now he can never let go of the victor’s ribbon until he is dead.
10
Kal makes a stirring and fortunately brief speech to the Royal Army.
“Your courage… hard fought… sacrifices not in vain… We have prevailed here but more battles await us.… Our enemy must be vanquished and Efea set free of foreign boots.…”
He might as well be speaking gibberish.
Servants fan the warm air to keep it moving. Watching their seemingly tireless arms, I cannot help but think of the boy I saw murdered to keep Prince Temnos alive. The son of a lord named Perikos, he’d been brought into the palace to be a loyal companion to the prince. When I think of that nameless youth, I’m not sorry King Kliatemnos was murdered for his part in the child’s death. And yet when I think of Temnos, I know we did the right thing in driving Nikonos away. Kalliarkos and Father can make something better. They can.
They have to.
After Kal finishes and the obligatory cheers die down, palace officials form a phalanx of silk and escort him out a bright red door set into the back wall. I want to follow, but the palace is a Fives court with new rules, ones no one has bothered to explain to me, and for once I’m too intimidated to move.