by Sharon Shinn
Zoe remained for a long time in the torz section, trying to muster the resolve to move on to sweela.
Where her father would linger, if his spirit were ever to make its way to a temple.
The other congregants shifted and re-formed around her; some left, new ones came in, and yet Zoe stayed where she was, staring at the red pew just a few feet away. She was not startled to feel a touch on her arm—there were, after all, six people currently crowded beside her—but she was a little surprised to find that the woman next to her was smiling in a knowing, encouraging fashion.
“I’ll walk over and sit with you, shall I?” the woman whispered. She might have been in her eighties, a frail, tiny thing bundled in so many scarves and overrobes that her clothing probably outweighed her body. “It will be easier then.”
“It’s not that I’m afraid of fire,” Zoe whispered back. “It’s that someone—my father—”
“My father was sweela as well,” the old woman replied. “And I always prefer to take a friend when I go to sit on the red bench.”
The kindness was irresistible. Zoe found herself smiling. She held out her hand, and the tiny old woman took it in a comforting grasp. Zoe felt the thin, shredded journey of blood in her veins, a complex mix of heritage and experience. “Then let us go together to confront our fathers,” she said.
They had the sweela seat to themselves; it tended to be a place where only certain people paused for long. Despite her new friend’s reassuring presence, Zoe felt some of her tension return as she sat before the slashing sign for fire. Sweela was not a restful element at the best of times. It exhorted you to feel, to care, to think, to love, even to remember. Zoe closed her eyes and unlocked her heart and let her mind flood with images of her father. Laughing. Arguing. Dancing with her mother. Flirting with a strange woman. Reading by candlelight. Listening to music. Meditating. Sleeping.
Coughing. Suffering.
Dying.
It was impossible, but that great fiery soul had been extinguished, and now all that was left of him were Zoe’s memories—and Navarr’s two very different daughters.
But she was alive, filled with her own flickering light, her own restless desires. She was not all coru, as she had pretended these last few ninedays. Her own heart could be reckless, her own mind could be clouded by emotions. That did not just mean she was her father’s daughter; that meant she was alive.
Beside her, the tiny woman sighed and released Zoe’s hand. “Not so bad after all, is it?” she whispered. “I always feel a little more energetic once I’ve faced down the mind and the fire.”
Zoe laughed softly. “That’s why we visit the temple,” she replied. “To put ourselves back in balance.”
“Have you pulled your blessings yet?” the woman asked, coming to her feet.
“No, have you?” Zoe said, standing alongside her.
“Let us do that together as well.”
They waited until a heavyset young man finished tossing through the coins, obviously seeking specific ones, and then they approached the barrel. The woman was so diminutive she looked as if she could comfortably fit inside it.
“Would you choose my blessings for me?” she asked Zoe. “I find my life is much more interesting when someone else makes the selections.”
“Gladly,” Zoe said, and quickly pulled out three pieces.
Her new friend looked inordinately pleased. “Joy, charm, and time,” she said. “I do not believe I have ever been more felicitously blessed. What happy traits to take out with me into the world!”
“Forgive me if I do not ask your intercession in return,” Zoe said. “My life has been so complicated lately that I am not eager to give over to a stranger even the smallest detail.”
“I felt much the same way when I was your age,” the woman replied. “Shall I leave now or do you want me to stay and support you?”
Zoe laughed softly. “I don’t think I need support any longer, but you may certainly stay and watch.”
Zoe dipped into the cool pile of metal and let the disks slide through her fingers until her hand, almost of its own volition, closed over a coin. She pulled it up and showed it to her companion.
“Surprise,” the old woman said.
“Accurate as always,” Zoe replied in a dry voice. She dug through the heap of coins again, and pulled a second coru trait. Resilience. “Well,” she said on an exhaled breath, “I hope that is true.”
The third blessing was change. “Am I right in guessing you are coru?” the old woman asked.
“Yes,” Zoe answered, “though usually my blessings are a little more evenly distributed.”
“Try again. Three more.”
But the next three were coru traits again—and the next three—and the next. Zoe felt herself shivering a little even in the warm, aromatic air of the temple.
“I thought I had brought myself back into balance,” she said in a low voice. “Perhaps I need to meditate again before each element.”
“Perhaps you have, after all, achieved balance,” the old woman suggested. “But your destiny still lies with water.”
Zoe glanced down at the twelve coins in her hand. “Or with blood.”
Her new friend waved off Zoe’s offer to see her safely home—in fact, there was a carriage awaiting her outside the temple and a concerned coachman to help her inside it. Just as Zoe had suspected; a woman of some wealth, possibly even from one of the Five Families, though Zoe had not recognized the composition of her blood. She grinned to herself as she waved goodbye. It would have been entertaining to realize she had struck up a friendship with, say, Seterre’s mother or Mirti Serlast’s aunt. She thought it was better for their acquaintanceship to end in anonymity.
The temperature had dropped at the urging of a northern wind, and Zoe made the return trip to the hotel at a walk so brisk it barely avoided being a run. Night was not far off. She began considering what she might do for an evening meal, since the lemon candies had been tasty rather than filling. The hotel might have a place to recommend; otherwise, she would have to find warmer clothes and go out exploring.
But it was clear as soon as she stepped into the kierten that she would not be foraging for dinner on her own. Darien Serlast stood in the empty high-ceilinged room, his arms crossed, his expression forbidding. It looked like her main course for dinner would be an argument.
TWENTY-THREE
Zoe did not attempt to speak first. She just came to a halt in front of Darien and waited for him to berate her.
“I thought I made it clear,” he said, his voice clipped and his arms still pressed to his chest, “that I would appreciate it if you would not relocate from the palace without first apprising me of your intention. I thought I made it clear that the king himself desires your ongoing presence in his life. I know you consider your restrictions chafing but your duties have not been onerous, so I am mystified as to why you suddenly find yourself anxious to slip away, in secrecy, without a word to anyone.”
She was pleased that her own voice sounded calm—that, in fact, she remained composed, unmoved by his anger. “And I thought I made it perfectly clear,” she replied, “that I am not particularly interested in being governed by your wishes. Or the king’s. As long as it suits me to stay at the palace, I will. When it does not, I will leave.”
“As you have left?” he demanded pointedly.
“I have not moved here permanently. Most of my belongings remain in my suite at the palace. Surely your spies verified that before they sent you chasing after me.”
“Your servants are still in place, it is true,” he said stiffly. “But they seemed singularly ill-informed about your future plans.”
Zoe found herself wondering if Darien had interviewed Calvin and Annova himself. She hoped so. Calvin would have enjoyed the experience hugely, while Annova would have been fascinated to observe Darien’s strangely possessive attitude toward Zoe. There was a conversation Annova would certainly want to have someday soon.
“
My future plans depend to a large extent on you,” she said. “Or, more precisely, the answers you give me to a few key questions.”
He jerked his head back; she saw wariness cover his face like a mask. “What questions?” he asked.
She glanced around the kierten. There were maybe a dozen people inside, hovering near one of the tall glass doors or crossing the polished marble floor, hurrying in or dashing out. “Are you certain that this is the venue to discuss sensitive matters?” she inquired in a provocative voice. “I have no secrets, of course, but you might.”
Alarm briefly changed his expression, though it quickly settled back to guarded neutrality. “We shall go to my lodgings,” he said. “We may speak there in perfect privacy.”
“Gladly,” she said. “I admit to some curiosity about the sort of place you would consider home.”
He offered her his arm and she took it, shallowly pleased that, despite his anger, he was still willing to extend the courtesy. In a few moments, they were settled into his elaymotive, which he drove himself. She was grateful to discover that the vehicle had an internal heating system that negated the power of the rising wind—and surprised to see how far they had to travel. Darien Serlast did not keep lodgings in the elite section of town where Zoe’s hotel was located and where the Five Families had their homes. Instead, it turned out he owned a tall, narrow house, on a street of tall, narrow houses, in a far western section of town that crowded between the boundaries of the Cinque and the canal. The buildings were similar in size and structure, yet appealingly idiosyncratic—some built of wide, sleek slabs of patterned stone, some constructed of brick and roofed with clay, some graced with whimsical statuary at the eaves, some covered with vines, some stark, some ornate.
Darien Serlast’s house was made of wood painted in rich red earth tones. The scrap of yard between the street and the front steps was not large enough to sustain a tree, but he had planted the whole expanse with hardy shrubs whose thin, tough limbs had woven into an impassable tangle. Zoe suspected it took a gardener the better part of an hour every day to keep a passage cleared from the street to the door.
“The house of a hunti man,” she said as he helped her out of the smoker car. He did not bother to answer.
The small kierten featured wood parquet flooring and walls covered with stained oak paneling. Darien did not offer to give her a tour of the house, just escorted her through one of the three doors that led off the kierten. It opened into a comfortable room filled with bookcases and worn furniture.
“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll build a fire.”
She sank into a deep leather chair near the hearth. It was chilly enough in the room that she could see the exhalation of her breath.
“You don’t keep servants here?”
“Someone comes by every day to make sure all is in order, but no, most of the time the house stands empty,” he said. He was kneeling on the floor, not seeming to care that he was getting dirt on his silken trousers, and building a fire with as much speed as any sweela man. “Normally I give my housekeeper some notice if I am planning to spend any time here, so the place has a more welcoming air.”
“How much time do you spend here?”
The fire caught quickly and began arcing with its usual joy over the carefully laid fuel. Even so, Zoe couldn’t imagine the room would warm up soon. She edged her chair closer to the blaze.
Darien sat back on his heels. “Not as much as I’d like,” he admitted. “Someday, when my responsibilities at the palace take less of my time . . .” His voice trailed off and he shrugged. “But for now, I like to remain within easy reach of the king whenever I can.”
“So there’s no food in the house,” Zoe guessed.
He laughed, his gray eyes snapping with amusement. “Are you hungry? You should have told me to stop for a meal.”
“Maybe our conversation will go so quickly that you will return me to my hotel before the dinner hour.”
“I doubt that somehow.” He stood up. “There’s likely to be bread and fruit in the kitchen. Shall I go hunting?”
“Let’s talk first,” she said.
He dropped into another chair set before the fire, turned at a friendly angle toward hers. “Why did you run away?”
She leaned back, pretending to be at ease, but every nerve was taut as if braced for some trauma she couldn’t quite identify. “Why did you make me do something so drastic merely to catch your attention?”
He looked briefly thunderstruck before quickly wiping his face clear. “If you wanted to talk to me, you merely had to send a message.”
“Everyone else in the entire palace, in the entire city, came to my door yesterday,” she said, exaggerating only slightly. “To express astonishment at my powers and offer thanks for my actions. But there was no word from you.”
“You can hardly think that means I place no value on what you did,” he answered sharply.
“Or that you feel no worry about how well I recovered from such an immense outlay of energy.”
His eyes were narrowed, intense, as he weighed the meaning behind her words. “What is it that you want from me?” he said bluntly. “Praise? Adulation? Concern? Only let me know, and I will try to produce the proper emotion.”
She leaned forward, unable to feign serenity much longer. “You watch me night and day. You probably knew within the hour that I had moved from the palace to the city. You have made yourself my guide and, to some extent, my friend. And yet, when we both participate in a dramatic and potentially catastrophic event, you do not turn to me to share your reactions, to admit your own relief and terror, to inquire after mine. You vanish. You stay away.”
“I am surprised to learn you consider me a friend,” Darien said, but she ignored him, since it was obvious he was trying to divert her from her central point. Her fingers tightened on the worn leather armrests of the chair.
“What question do you not want me to ask you about Josetta’s terrible ordeal on the river?” she demanded.
He answered with silence and another glare.
“‘Who tried to kill the princess?’” she asked. “Because both of us know that it was most definitely an attempt at murder.”
“That’s it, of course,” he said. “The question I do not want you to ask.”
“You don’t deny someone wants her dead.”
He shook his head. “It’s possible that it is not the first time someone has tried to kill Josetta.”
Zoe felt her stomach clench. “What? No one else has mentioned—”
He waved a hand. “There was an accident. A year ago. She was riding in a smoker car, and its gas canister exploded. The driver was badly burned, and Josetta badly frightened, but she was not injured. At the time I was suspicious and I made pointed inquiries. But I could discover nothing particularly damning, and I did not voice my suspicions to anyone.”
“Have Corene and Natalie ever been in danger?”
“Not that I am aware of.”
“Then why Josetta? And who would want to harm her?”
Darien shook his head again. “I have a dozen men scouring the docks at the southern port where her crew members were hired. So far, I have turned up nothing. Of the two men who abandoned Josetta in her boat, one has a sister. Though she claims she has not seen her brother in a couple of quintiles. The other appears to have no family in the area, and his three closest friends shipped out a nineday ago on a trading vessel. I will keep searching.”
“Who would want Josetta dead?” Zoe repeated.
He gazed back at her. “Someone who does not want her to inherit her father’s throne.”
“Alys,” Zoe said flatly.
She had thought he would protest or at least manufacture some outrage, so his answer surprised her. “She would be the obvious choice, but public assassination is not her style. Poison, maybe. Suffocation. I would not put it past her to harry Josetta into killing herself, but to murder her before an audience of hundreds? Alys is too clever to take such chanc
es.”
Zoe laughed softly. “I did not realize you disliked her as much as I do.”
“Even more,” he said with a certain grimness. “And I say that without even knowing how deep your animosity runs.”
“Then if not Alys, who?”
“If I knew that, I would have brought the scoundrel to justice and you would not have had to flee the palace to ask me uncomfortable questions.”
She smiled a little and dropped back into the chair. “I am glad you realize I have more than one question.”
“I was sure you would. I am nerving myself for the possibility that each one is worse than the last.”
“That may very well be,” she said. “My second question is: How many people know who Josetta’s father is?”
Staring at her, Darien was so completely silent for so long that she could hear the occasional bright pop of the fire over the continuous low ruffle of flame. Finally, to prod him into speaking, she added, “I presume you know?”
“Why would you have any reason to suspect it is not Vernon?”
“The man has four wives and three children,” she said. “It takes no great leap of imagination to deduce that he either has no desire for women—or little ability with them.”
“Even so—I’m not sure why you think—”
She extended her right hand, fingers spread, and turned it this way and that as if examining it for blemishes. She was still cold; her rings were loose around her icy fingers. “Something I learned once I became prime of Lalindar,” she said in a conversational voice. “Something perhaps Christara would have told me if she had had a chance to prepare me for my role.” She leaned forward suddenly and placed her hand across his arm where it lay, tense and immobile, on the armrest of his chair. Through his silk and wool she could feel his hunti bones and his coru pulse. He did not move so much as an inch. “I can touch every man and woman in the city—every man and woman—and tell you something about their blood. I can identify them. I can sort them into families.”
She tightened her fingers around his wrist. Even if she hadn’t been able to tell it by the expression on his face, his clamoring heartbeat would have told her he was horrified. “Josetta came to my room last night and took my hand,” Zoe said, her voice almost a whisper. “And I knew instantly that she was Navarr Ardelay’s daughter.”