When Vars came in I was lying on the floor. “Get up, teldarin,” he said, alarmed. I obeyed, though I could not see why it was important. What does it matter where I am? Bed, chair, floor. I could lie on a table. I could curl up in the big washbasin.
It is the thirtieth day of the month of Fir. Today the Telkan. Today the Teldaire.
No. Today the old rituals do nothing for me. I opened the balcony doors while Vars was building up the fire. I made sure no one was below, then dropped the almanac over the railing.
“What are you doing?” Vars cried.
The book unfolded in the air as if trying to fly, then crashed in the branches of a plane tree in the courtyard. I came back in and closed the balcony doors, but not before I caught sight of my father’s painted face streaked by the rain.
Vars had brought nothing but olives and water. He told me to conserve whatever oil I have. For light. His fingers trembled.
“Sit down,” I told him. There are two chairs at the table, but he’s never sat with me. He seemed nervous, awkward, pulling everything close to the fire, arranging, fussing. At last we both sat down. My slippers and stockings began to grow hot. He rubbed his face and hair with both hands, as if he were washing.
“What is happening?” I asked him.
He looked up, tired, rumpled, reddened. “The duke is coming.”
“Which one?”
He laughed briefly at my ignorance. “Veda of Bain.”
I thought of how the palace has seemed quieter lately—less singing, fewer revels. At intervals, shouts ring out in the distance.
“I thought it was me,” I said.
“Hm?”
“I thought it was me. The way everything’s getting quieter.”
He did not understand, but was too distracted to ask questions. He told me the fires in Bain had died down, the city was under the duke’s control once more, and warships were filling the northern harbor.
“They can reach the Isle in a day,” he said.
“What will you do?”
“Fight them, of course.”
His voice was frayed; it did not match the confidence of the words “of course.” After a moment he added: “I hope you’ll tell them we’ve treated you fairly. That we’ve done only what’s necessary to hold the Isle.”
Perhaps because I have been eating so little, it took a moment for what he was saying to reach me, but finally I said: “You expect to lose.”
He crossed his arms on the table and held his elbows tight. “No. We’ll win, with Avalei’s aid. But the prince—the prince is ill.”
The prince is ill. He is lying on a rooftop under furs. He does not speak. His eyes are fixed on the wintry sky. If they try to move him, to take him indoors, he stiffens his limbs and groans through clenched teeth—a high-pitched sound, terrible, almost a shriek.
For a week he has eaten only black foods: raush and hard black bread. He takes almost nothing now. Sometimes he lets them spoon a little olive paste into his mouth.
“Nobody knows what’s wrong with him.”
And the Duke of Bain has reclaimed his city. The rebels are falling in the Valley, in Nain.
“I tell you this,” said Vars, “because the prince said you were his friend.”
I should have screamed with laughter. I should have flung the olive dish at his head. I should have snapped my fingers in his face and gloated: The duke will unstring you like a harp. I should have wept. My father. My father.
Instead, I ate. Rava, sister of the twentieth Telkan, said that the Isle possesses two things in abundance: music and clarity. I too will look at the world with clear eyes. I will see my own part in this. When Vars had gone I stepped onto the balcony and looked at the painting again. In the left-hand corner of the picture—the corner of passion—a table in an arbor. There the prince drinks wine with the High Priestess of Avalei. Dappled sun on his claret coat. His black hair like a wing. His mouth a bloom. His eyes obscured by a ray of light.
4. A curse on these orphans darkening my path!
939–942
“It is time,” said Ivrom, “for the young prince to come to me.”
“Ah, yes,” said the Telkan, rubbing his knees. He glanced uneasily at the priest’s daughter, who sat in the corner turning the pages of an enormous dictionary. In the opposite corner of the room gleamed the Stone.
“Yes, well,” the Telkan stammered. “It is difficult to find time. There are his riding and music lessons, and the calligraphy. He is practicing advanced swordplay now. And then, in the autumn, he goes to stay with his aunt and uncle in Kestenya . . .”
The priest sat with his arms crossed, wearing a sardonic smile. He knew very well why Prince Andasya traveled to Kestenya. Redis, one of the Teldaire’s ladies-in-waiting and a recent convert to the Stone, copied out the queen’s letters for him. Sometimes Redis wrung her hands and yanked at her layered skirts: she ought to be wearing black, she said, not this gaudy stuff. And the priest replied unctuously: “Calm yourself, my child. The gods understand the requirements of your service. Remember—this is the work of the Stone.”
So, dear sister, he had read the previous night, I intend to send Dasya to you again before the Feast of Plenty, for though it tears my heart to be parted from him, I cannot bear the thought of his falling into the clutches of Ahadrom’s wretched priest.
Now the “wretched priest” gazed at the Telkan. His hips ached, his spine twinged, but as usual he ignored the pain. He was only five years away from the wheeled chair in which his daughter would maneuver him through the halls of Velvalinhu to the end of his days. The Telkan had no such fortitude: tears of sweat gleamed in his brows. He was not made to rule—but then, Ivrom reflected, neither were his brothers: sunburnt Veda, Duke of Bain, who always smelled so strongly of saddle oil, and the fiercely handsome Irilas of Tevlas, a nervous recluse and bolma addict. Olondria’s Royal House was like a gambling den, Ivrom thought, whose members would gladly forfeit both wealth and honor, if only they could have (for Irilas) a cup of wine, (for Veda) a horse, and (for the Telkan) an hour of peace. No doubt the young prince was equally feckless; the sooner he was taken in hand, the better, for the cult of the Stone was still small and required the next king’s support.
“There is the month of Lunre,” the Telkan admitted at last, “but during that time he is always fitted for new clothes . . .”
The priest’s smile, like a sword cut, remained in place. His daughter drew in her breath audibly at the sound of the word Lunre—an irritating habit, for it was, after all, a common word, a month of the year, and one must expect to hear it. The Telkan wiped his brow with his wrist. In his mind, Ivrom basted the younger man and turned him on the spit. Then he increased the heat. “And are these things,” he asked quietly, “more important than the well-being of his soul?”
“Believe me,” the Telkan cried, “if I could, I would bring him to you at once—you would be his tutor—you must know that nothing on earth would please me better! But the Teldaire is very firm, very attached to him, very excitable—truly excitable—she has not been well.”
“Has she not?” the priest asked dryly.
“I think not,” said the king. “She is always on her couch when I arrive.”
“And harshness is no crime!” snapped the priest, quoting the Stone. “Leave her be, or yank her up by the roots of her hair, but bring me the boy.”
And harshness toward the self is no crime, Lunre thought it was. A question of the translation of an ancient word.
Years later, Ivrom’s daughter would say: “You care more for the prince than you ever did for me.” One of her rare arguments with her father. And her father would stare, taken aback that this slip of a girl, this shadow who owed him everything, could attack him. His first impulse was to shout, but he thought better of it, and raised his chin prou
dly. “In the War of the Tongues,” he declared, “King Thul sacrificed his daughter. He threw her into the sea as a gift to the goddess Ithnesse. A painful act, yes, but honorable. And he won the war.”
The Telkan, however, was selfish; he would not make sacrifices; he shrank and whined; he sat up all night, according to Ivrom’s spies, not studying or praying, but watering, sniffing, and crooning over the plants he grew in pots in the Tower of Lapis Lazuli. Plants! The priest longed to run up the stairs and hurl every one of them over the balustrade (but he would not—that would happen many years later—and it was the young prince who would send those pots crashing into the courtyard one by one, to the cheers of his rebel army). And then, one rainy winter, when the fog lay so heavy on the Isle that lanterns were carried about even in the middle of the day, and the servants’ children rang bells on the landings to drive away melancholy, the Nameless Gods smiled on their priest at last.
“Oh, very good,” he whispered. “Very good.”
What have I raised, Firvaud? he read. How did I manage to fail so completely with both you and your sister? What was the purpose, I ask you, of all my care with your education, if it is to result in nothing but dishonor? Those sessions in the white parlor when you were a child—wasted, wasted! I might have been working! I might have been devising some alternate plan for success. Instead I placed all my faith in you children, all of it! And this is how you reward me—the trap sprung too early, and the pheasant flown!
A letter from the queen’s aunt, Mardith of Faluidhen. Ivrom had a moment of fellow feeling for the rigid, power-hungry old lady. He could picture the white parlor where she had taught her nephew and nieces herself, forcing them to add up long columns of figures. He knew that she kept no steward; she alone managed all the business of the estate. She was formidable, formidable! But now something had happened—he could not quite tell what—something had gone awry, and the time had come to grind her people to chalk.
To make matters worse, Firheia has allowed Dasya to start home, so he is on his way to you, though he ought to have come directly to me. I would have cured him; I would have made him sensible of his duty, if I had to wear out Fenya’s riding crop on his back! That, I know, is the sort of image that usually makes you laugh—your old aunt whipping a boy of seventeen. I hope you laugh, Firvaud, I hope you have your fill of laughter before your son comes home, trailing our name behind him through the mire! Perhaps, then, you will look at him without smiling. Perhaps you will begin to take your duty seriously. But no, I know you—wine, milim, lovers, I know it all, your escapades are notorious even here in Nain.
“How did the queen look when she read this?” asked Ivrom.
“Sallow,” answered Redis. “And when she had finished, she struck her head on the wall.”
“Did she indeed?”
“She did. It will leave a bruise, that’s certain; tomorrow she’ll have her curls arranged on her forehead.”
“I see, I see,” the priest murmured. Firelight shone through the paper and he lowered it to his lap to read it better. I expect you will go on spoiling the prince, while your sister spoils her daughters in the highlands, and Faluidhen shatters like a glass on the stove. I expect no one will listen to me. But if you did, this would be my advice: the children must be kept apart. They must be kept apart, far apart, until even the servants have forgotten that there was ever a hint of impropriety between them. (The servants at Ashenlo must be bribed, of course, to encourage the process; I am sending Irilas some money for the purpose, so that he cannot plead destitution. I have never seen a person less able to keep his wealth in hand, though he sells more land every year, and not cheaply.) Tavis must go to Bain, as she is old enough to go into society now. She must be kept free, if possible, from the taint of the whole business, for if we should lose Siski, Tavis will be our only weapon. And Siski—if only Firheia listens!—Siski must come to me.
Impropriety. A taint. The priest folded up the paper and absently pressed a corner of it against his teeth. He gazed into the fire. The trap is sprung, the pheasant flown—what could it mean? The queen struck her head against the wall.
Redis had taken out a little ivory filigree fan and was cooling her face with it. The firelight gleamed on her hard young skin.
“What do you think has happened?” he asked her at last.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she smirked. “They want the prince to marry his cousin.”
Of course. Of course.
Faluidhen spread before him. The linden trees. The white parlor where Lady Mardith turned the pages of her prayer book. She had raised her nieces and nephew to know the common prayers and a good third of the Vallafarsi, but not to be particularly devout. Don’t over-salt the soup! It was not genteel to pray too much, to talk constantly about the state of one’s soul. Look at Uskar of Tevlas, who now called himself Ahadrom I—he was a laughingstock, a bumbling, earnest clown in woolen robes. His son was going the same way. “Make sure you ask them about this Stone!” she advised her niece Firvaud, smoothing the girl’s lace collar. That collar was not more intricate, more cunningly conceived, or more elegantly executed than her plan. Slowly she drew the threads into marvelous flowers. Firvaud married Ahadrom II, Firheia his brother Irilas. Firvaud bore a son, her sister a daughter. The marriage of first cousins was frowned upon, but there were precedents in the royal line. If those children married, the throne would belong to Faluidhen.
“Brilliant,” he said.
“Do you think so?” Redis sniffed.
But something had gone wrong. A hint of impropriety between them. Every year, the queen sent her son east to Ashenlo, to keep him from Ivrom, but also, he saw now, to encourage the boy’s attachment to his cousin. Siski, that was her name—barbaric—surely chosen by her father—the name of an ancient princess of the highlands. Had the young people become too attached? Had they consummated their love too early, unlawfully? The trap sprung, the pheasant flown.
Yes, that was it. The priest chuckled. Ah, youth! He remembered the faint stink of the canal in Bain, the streetlamps reflected in the oily water, and himself, on one of his rare visits home, flinging a handful of gravel. The object was to hit the windows on the other side of the water; perhaps one of the harlots would look out. “Open up!” he shouted, and the boys with him (urchins he only played with when home—they introduced themselves by bloodying his nose) clutched themselves laughing. And one night a window opened and a coarse word was hurled out, along with a glimpse of a fleshy, radiant, naked arm. And afterward, back at the temple school, such remorse! He shook his head, smiling. “Redis,” he said, “we must prepare to receive our prince.”
He came. He wore a black suit and black skullcap like his father. Pearl earrings gleamed against his skin. It was the eighteenth day of the month of Mur; the prince had bathed in the Tower of Aloes that day, and his hair had been fumigated with apple-wood smoke. In the Temple of Sarma, he had walked three times around the ancient, blackened mirror representing the Waters of Destiny, and his face had been painted with silver flowers. He had washed, but a scrap of metallic paint still clung to his cheek as he sat in the room of the Stone. The prince’s eyes had a strange, lifeless glitter; his spine curved. In the afternoon he would put on indigo and flame-colored garments. It was the day the Teldaire tasted the new wine. The prince would escort her and open the ceremonies by blowing a swan-shaped horn.
He sat hunched at the table, and the priest’s daughter saw at once that he was like her father: a person of absolute loneliness. The air around him seemed red, as if he dwelt in a different atmosphere. He awaited instruction with apparent indifference.
“Well,” said the priest in his stinging, sarcastic voice. “You have come at last, eh? You have left off digging for truffles in Avalei’s mud patch.”
The priest’s daughter flushed, but the prince said nothing.
Ivrom laughed rustily, then coughed. “Sul
king, my prince? Perhaps you are missing a riding lesson? How sad for you. Or perhaps my tone offends you? You are accustomed to flattery, no doubt, and to hearing the words ‘Your Highness’ from noon to midnight. But you are in a different place now. In this room your blood and accomplishments mean nothing. Please follow me with the lamp.”
He turned his back on the prince and approached the Stone. The prince took the lamp from the table and followed, his movements oddly smooth and subdued, as if he were floating. Obediently he held up the lamp and listened as the priest explained the work and showed him where the dictionaries were kept. Then Ivrom gave the boy a stack of transcriptions in the Ancient Tongue. “I hope you read it?”
The Winged Histories Page 15