“Good.” She steeled herself with a deep breath and was about to take that first step through the door when Jazel’s voice stopped her.
“My Liege, you have a letter from Solsta.”
Lisen stood, frozen by “Solsta.” A letter. From Solsta. Eloise making contact. She wanted to wish the letter away but couldn’t—not when her own clerk knew about it. She turned, forcing a smile, and took the letter from Jazel’s hand.
“Thank you,” she said and headed without further hesitation into her office. She stepped around the straw on the floor and over to the conference table. There, she sat and lay the neatly folded letter down in front of her. It bore no seal, not from a hermit. She didn’t recognize the writing, but she wouldn’t as Eloise had never written to her before. Yet, she knew the letter had come from the sooth; she knew no one else at Solsta, save for Hermit Titus, but he had not written this letter.
She touched it, straightened it on the table, then straightened it again. Her breath came in shallow bursts. Why would Eloise write to her? What could the woman possibly have to say to the Empir of Garla? She straightened the letter once more. How did it keep losing its alignment with the edge of the table? She stared at it a moment more. Then a thought occurred. If you open it and read it…
She patted the letter, picked it up and swiftly unfolded it. With a last deep breath, she read.
My Liege,
The person in need of watching is a danger to you and yours no longer.
No signature. None required. And despite the vague wording, Lisen knew precisely what Eloise had intended to convey. Her heart beat fast as she wondered a great many things. Had Eloise notified the family as well? Did the spouse and children even care anymore? Had they managed to continue their lives without dwelling too often on the woman’s empty mind? Had it ever occurred to them that their Empir had played a significant role in stealing the woman from them?
Lisen began to breathe again. Opseth was dead. The watcher who had pushed a servant to assassinate Empir Flandari, who had then followed Lisen mentally throughout her journey from Solsta to Halorin, from Halorin to Seffa, from Seffa to Rossla Haven, and from there into the desert and back again—that woman was finally gone.
Lisen had done what she had to do that first night as Empir—neutralizing the woman’s toxic mind with Eloise’s assistance. She hadn’t known at the time if the silencing would last a day, a week or a lifetime. She only knew that the woman could not continue serving the rich and titled of Garla in the capacity of their primary manipulator.
Lisen assumed the end had come of natural causes despite the unnaturalness of the malady which Lisen had inflicted on the woman. And although Lisen hadn’t thought about her more than a couple of times in the last sixteen years, she felt a lightness of soul settle upon her. The watcher who had forced Lisen into using gifts she might never have recognized otherwise was dead.
Lisen picked up the letter and stood. She stepped to the fireplace whose embers still glowed from earlier in the day and poked them to increase the heat. Then, with delicate accuracy, she set the letter on top of the hot coals. It flared up and began to burn.
“Good-bye, Opseth…” She paused. She wanted to remember the woman’s full name but couldn’t. The letter continued to burn, and Lisen watched until all that remained were ashes. One life extinguished, she thought. One life of many, then and now.
CHAPTER TEN
WHAT THE PROPHECY SAYS
His reddish-brown locks braided back, Nasera pulled on a sunshine-yellow tunic, with no pouch slit per parental instructions, surveyed his obsessively organized bedchamber, then headed for the door. The powers in the Keep had relegated poor Elor to some form of limbo, and all because someone had almost succeeded in assassinating Nasera’s mother. Well, it certainly couldn’t have been Elor, Nasera reasoned. Elor didn’t possess that particular brand of ambition, or so he always claimed. Besides, anyone Elor hired would not have failed at the job.
He opened the door and found a different guard from the one he’d found there first thing this morning.
“My lord,” the man said.
“I’m going to visit my cousin.” And Nasera stepped past the guard, daring him to follow with a flip of his braid, and took the brief journey to the room two doors down from his own. The guard there challenged him.
“My lord, the heir of Bedel is unavailable.”
“Unavailable, my pouch,” Nasera retorted. “He’s locked in, but I’m the Heir of Garla, and I am definitely not locked out.” He pushed past the woman who would bar him from his cousin and gained entry to Elor’s bedchamber, and before the guard who’d tried to stop him made any further attempts to keep Nasera from the soon-to-be holder of Bedel, he’d slammed the door behind him. He found Elor sitting at the small desk making notes. It was apparently an approach to managing one’s environment which Elor’s mother had used to great advantage.
“Ah, cousin,” Elor said, looking up from his work. “Come to gloat over the prisoner?”
“They can’t possibly have reason to suspect you,” Nasera replied as he settled, cross-legged, into a cozy cushion on the floor.
Elor leaned back in his chair behind the desk and smiled. “The Empir forced my father to kill himself. That’s called motive.”
Nasera shrugged. “I suppose. I wonder why I’m not a suspect.”
“Maybe you are but they haven’t told you,” Elor whispered.
“I mean,” Nasera continued, “with dear Mummy dead, I could have been Empir today rather than waiting until forever.”
“And there’s another motive for me.”
“What?”
“I’d rather have you as Empir than your mother any day.”
“So did you?” Nasera couldn’t believe he was asking this question. He’d already decided Elor couldn’t have done it. And yet, when put to a test, the motives were there.
“Even if they accuse, try and punish someone else, you’ll never know, will you.” Elor smiled like the Destroyer Itself, and Nasera faked a little shiver of fear. Because, in reality, he wasn’t afraid of his cousin. Elor was the only one in the Keep who gave a damn about him. “Isn’t it lovely how freely we can talk when that nosy sister of yours isn’t around?”
Nasera shrugged. “I suppose.” Insenlo often played the nuisance, but Nasera suspected she was actually spying on her brother and cousin for her own purposes. Everyone else thought Sen was this contemplative, mystical child, but Nasera didn’t see her that way. She listened, carefully, all the time. She always looked like she was reading whatever book or scroll she held in her hands, but he could feel her carefully cataloging everything everyone said in her presence for use later.
Elor rose from his chair and stepped over to sit down on the floor in front of his cousin. “Now, here’s what I need for you to do for me.”
“What?” He would do anything for Elor, and Elor knew it.
“I want you to—”
They both turned at heavy pounding on the door.
“What is it?” Elor yelled, his patience beyond repair, an unusual state in Nasera’s carefully controlled cousin.
The door flew open, and a guard stood on the other side, but not the guard Nasera had stepped past just a few moments earlier.
“My lord,” this sentry said. “Forgive the intrusion, but I’ve been sent to inform you that you are no longer restricted in your movements. You will, however, be required to have a guard with you at all times.”
“Of course,” Elor muttered, then looked directly to the guard. “Thank you. You may go.”
The guard backed out the door and closed it behind him.
“Well, still under guard but allowed to move around. I suppose that is an improvement.”
“None of us is allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied. You’re not alone.”
“Yes, well.” Elor stood up. “Excuse me, cousin, but I need to get out of here.”
“Going to the old palace?” Nasera asked, too eagerly he realized.
<
br /> “Yes.”
“I’ll come with you.” Nasera popped up from the cushion.
“No,” Elor replied, shaking his head. “I need time to think.”
And without another word, without so much as a nod or good-bye, Elor swept out the door, and motioning for the guard there to follow him, he disappeared from view.
Nasera inhaled deeply, burying his hurt below the flow of air into his lungs. He’d grown quite adept at this shutdown of emotion when Elor rejected him. He’d come to accept it as the price he paid for his cousin’s friendship. After all, nobody could be friends all the time.
One more breath to seal his heart’s heavy door, and he headed back to his own room where he, too, could read like his sister read and escape the frightening world he lived in.
After more than a month of these rides in the park with her mother—and two weeks after the attempt on her mother’s life—Rinli had actually begun to enjoy the hours spent on a horse in her mother’s company. Sometimes. To a point. And that point always came when her mother would signal a halt at some distance out and nod to the guards for them to back off. Rinli knew they hated moving away. The assassination attempt had set everyone on the sharp edge of a shindah—the traditional Thristan blade—but nothing had come of it. Yet. And they remained as ignorant of the assailant’s employer as they had been in the beginning.
So, once again, her mother pulled Pharaoh up and raised her hand. Rinli stopped beside her and waited as the guards maneuvered themselves into a protective distance. Rinli sat, a point of stillness amongst several similar points, her horse’s tail slapping back and forth at the early summer flies which alighted on the mare’s flanks, and she wished she could kick Lipta into oblivion. Her enjoyment had died, and her heart filled up with the dread which replaced it.
As she sat there, waiting, she dreamed of the freedom she would gain once her investiture as Protector of Thristas was done, and her mother would have to leave her behind in Thristas. Not that Rinli would never see her again. She was required by the treaty to attend Council sessions for the next two years—four of them in total. Then, on her eighteenth outcoming day, all that would come to end with the creation of Thristas as an independent state with Rinli as its ruler—in whatever capacity she and the Elders determined would suit the new nation best. In the interim, however, while in Thristas, she’d be required to answer only to her father.
“It’s a delicate balance, you know,” her mother began and patted Pharaoh’s neck. Rinli nodded in a breeze of confusion. Her mother had begun this lecture differently than the others. She usually started straight off into the need for Rinli to accept her gifts, but this time Rinli had to dismiss her expectations. “I sat down on Garla’s throne for the first time ignorant of what it meant to be Empir. I’d only spent a couple of days in Avaret, and all I had in my favor was your Uncle Nalin.”
Rinli didn’t know why everyone insisted that the children of Korin Rosarel and Ariannas Ilazer call a man “uncle” to whom they were not related. It was one of those things that confused her. She didn’t mind thinking of her mother’s Will as a close relative; she liked him quite a bit, actually. She simply thought it was a stupid affectation, amongst a great many stupid affectations that the noble rich dallied in. Her horse turned, restless, and Rinli had to rein it around so the conversation remained face to face.
“You will have your father, of course,” her mother continued. “But I stepped into a role already well-defined by convention and law. I adapted that role to work better with my definitely un-noble experience, but with so much from before as an example, I didn’t have to begin from the first moment of intention. You, on the other hand, must grope your way, inch by inch, in a darkness that will never be nearly as dark to anyone who follows you as it will be for you.”
“That sounds bleak,” Rinli mumbled.
“It all depends on how you approach it.” Pharaoh tossed his head and stomped one hoof, but he didn’t move from where he stood. “You are strong and very bright. You are willful as well. It’s been a challenge for those around you. Sometimes I’ve just wanted to… But then I remember I was willful, too. I still am.” She shrugged.
“Fa says I take after you.”
Her mother let out a quick chuckle, then grew serious again. “Truth is, that willfulness may prove to be a valuable ally as you step into your place as Thristas’ first independent leader.”
“Why did you do it to me?”
The Empir of Garla sighed like any normal person would sigh when confronted with a dilemma. “Because I needed a solution. Because I could see you without sight and believed there was a reason I could see you then but not before.” She paused, sighed more deeply, then continued. “Because I saw you doing it. I saw you able to do it. I’m no sooth, but at that moment, I knew—knew—you were Mantar’s Child. I didn’t know anything really about the prophecy except that Mantar’s Child was supposed to be conceived by two lands in the Farii. And certainly that much was true about you.”
“Do you know that Mantar’s Child is supposed to die and be reborn?”
Her mother took a deep breath. “Yes, but I believe your father told me the traditional story describes it as ‘the child will lie as though dead and’—what is it?—oh, ‘and return to The People to fulfill the mission,’ or something like that.”
“Most interpretations I’ve heard—and believe me, I’ve sought them out—say Mantar’s Child will die and will somehow find a way to come back.”
“Does that frighten you?”
“Creators and Maker, Mother, of course it does. What if they kill me just to prove it one way or the other?”
“That’s why you have to learn to protect yourself,” her mother pleaded. “Please. Let me help.”
“Damn it! Must it always come back to this?” Rinli gathered up her reins. “Mother, you conceived me, but you’ve never loved me. How could you and do what you did to me?” She kicked her horse, moving forward in the saddle, and reached her rein hand forward to release the sorrel’s head. Following its training, it took off at a run, leaving Pharaoh and the Empir of Garla in their dust. Good. Leave them dusty. “Dust cleanses the soul.” Well, sand, but dust is just as good.
In the middle of working with a young recruit in the training yard, Korin looked up towards the stable to see his daughter on Lipta galloping in from the park. A hand ran out to greet her, and Rinli tossed her reins without looking and threw herself off her horse. He watched her stomp off towards the portico of the Keep and disappear inside. Another ride with her mother, he determined.
Taking advantage of his distraction, his recruit smacked his left arm with the flat of her training sword, hard. He winced and grabbed his arm with his other hand, careful to keep the sword in that hand from inflicting damage on himself or the recruit.
“All right. I deserved that.” He let go of the arm that was likely to end up bruised by the next day and shook it out. “But let that be your lesson for today. Pay attention, even when you think the person you’re sparring with still has a great deal to learn.”
“Yes, Captain,” the young woman said.
“And don’t call me ‘captain.’”
“My lord?” she tried.
“‘Korin.’ ‘Korin’ is fine.” He looked over to one of his fellow trainers. “Mish? Will you take care of this one here?”
“Aye, Korin. My pleasure.” Mish, a captain in his mid-thirties, nodded and stepped over to Korin’s recruit, and after returning his practice sword to the rack, Korin sauntered over to the stable to await the return of his spouse. He wished he could find a way to connect these women in his life. More importantly, though, he wished he could convince Rinli to trust her mother enough to allow Lisen to train her. What a damn dilemma.
He stood at the far end of the stable, at the root of the path that led out into the park. Soon he saw the great black’s head tossing, his mane blowing in the wind, with Lisen atop him, posting—up and down, up and down—as he trotted. Korin swore s
he and that horse were a single entity.
Lisen didn’t notice him at first. He could tell by the tight expression on her face that she wrestled with some unpleasantness, and he didn’t require any so-called gift to recognize the source of her mood. He waited, utterly still, hands clasped behind his back in easy attention, until she finally noticed him, and her face softened into a worn smile. She pulled Pharaoh to a walk and finally to a halt in front of him.
“Welcome back,” he said as he took the stallion’s reins. She threw her leg over the horse’s back and dropped to the ground. “I’d ask how your ride went, but I saw Rinli storm into the Keep just a few minutes ago.”
“Did she see you?” Lisen asked as the two of them escorted Pharaoh to the stable, Lisen slapping her crop on her leg repeatedly.
“I don’t think so. I was down in the training yard.”
“I mucked it up. Again.” They led Pharaoh inside the stable and handed him off to Jal. Lisen turned without a word and started back out, Korin following in her wake. “Damn.” She slammed her hand up against the doorframe as she passed it.
“Dare I ask?” Korin said as he caught up with her.
“Oh, you can dare.” She stopped abruptly midway between the stable and the Keep and turned to him. “She asked me why I did it.”
“Why you did what?” He watched her deflate, her body transforming from rigid and prideful to the carriage of someone who had lost everything, the sense of loss leeching away her vitality, her very self.
“Ah, damn it, Korin. I didn’t mean to hurt her. She was hope. She was possibility. She was sunlight at the end of the storm. And she just seemed…right. The entire idea seemed right. Like it had all come together to make the war end just as it began. Was I wrong?”
“Not then, you weren’t.”
“And now?”
He put his arm around her waist and encouraged her to continue on to the Keep. “I don’t know.”
“That’s helpful.”
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