by Anna Banks
He hates when she brings that up. She has been the one to keep up communication with the Parani, she and Master Saen, and while he doesn’t like the idea of her entering the River Nefari and its potential dangers—she still carries the venomous scars all over her body from her first encounter with them—he can’t risk losing his newfound partnership with the Parani, either. And Sepora happens to be the only person to whom they will speak. “That’s different and you know it.”
She sighs. “I suppose I’ll have that Majai—what was his name, Sodi?—back in for another session next week. If I have to choose from among rocks, I suppose a polished one will have to do.”
Tarik laughs. “You are spoiled beyond belief.”
She appears put out. “May I be excused? I must call Anku and Cara back to prepare me for the suddenly lavish evening I’ll apparently be enjoying.”
“Of course, mistress.” He cannot help himself from watching her saunter to the door.
And he wonders just what a Serubelan menu will entail.
37
SEPORA
I step closer to the mirror, unable to recognize myself in the reflection staring back at me. Anku and Cara have really outdone themselves, having been caught up in the idea of a Serubelan dinner—only they’ve done it in the ornate style of Theoria. Were I actually in Serubel attending a royal dinner, my gown would completely cover me, mostly likely be made of red and gold velvet to symbolize the colors of our kingdom, and my hair would be braided modestly. I wonder if Cara even knows the traditional dress of Serubel, and I highly doubt it. As it stands, my hair swirls atop my head, constructed and laboriously shaped to appear as one of the mountains of my homeland. Small, beautiful flowers and vines are scattered over it, a touch Cara added, to represent the flora of our homeland. But by far the most amazing component of this creation is the miniature silver Serpen with sapphire-encrusted eyes encircling my mountain of hair, its wings made of fine silver tulle that spring to motion at the turn of my head, giving the effect of the Serpen fluttering its wings.
Silver paint lines my eyes and spreads out over my cheeks in an elaborate design of tiny vines entwined elegantly down the length of my neck. To finish the effect, my lips are also painted silver, and Anku assures me the paint will last throughout dinner by adding a horrible-smelling glossy balm to it with the tip of her finger.
My reflection shakes her head at me. I look like a silver figurine, a doll, ready to brighten some wealthy child’s mantel or lie upon the child’s silken bedding as she plays with other toys not so delicate as me.
“Don’t you feel that it is a bit … elaborate for a simple dinner with the Prince Sethos and the Falcon King?”
Anku seems taken aback. “I was given to believe you were a guest at the royal table.” Her hand covers her mouth in horror. “You’re not just attending to them, are you?”
I feel the heat in my cheeks almost instantly. “I am Prince Sethos’s guest.” There is shame and pride in the words. Shame because I know Sethos’s intentions are less than honorable toward me, but pride because I am a petty thing who has never been a guest at a royal dinner before and would love to know what it is like in a foreign land. At home, it is quite boring.
Anku nods once, tightly. “Well then, you must dress as any other guest at the royal table shall dress. It is an honor most attendants never enjoy, mind you. You’ve certainly seemed to impress the right pair of brothers in Theoria.”
Another blush. I will never survive dinner in this state of mind.
* * *
Several times I catch the Falcon King gazing at me, but apparently speaking to me is not on his agenda this night. It is true, then, that I am only the guest of Sethos, for his brother has barely spoken at all to anyone, while Sethos engages me endlessly. Tarik merely pushes the simple beef and cabbage—a staple Serubelan dish—around his plate in what appears to be disgust, while Sethos asks me how my communications with the Parani fare. “Well,” I say, not a little surprised the younger brother is capable of serious conversation.
“It was a brave thing you did,” he says, scooping up a bit more of the overcooked vegetable into his mouth. “You’ve no idea of the significance of this treaty with the Parani. Even if we were not on the verge of war, I’m sure there are many more uses for nefarite that remain undiscovered as of yet. Our engineers will be delighted to have their day with it, when it comes.”
“I hope that is the case.” I know my answer is sweeping, but I’m not sure what else to say. I had not expected Sethos to offer any sort of substance in the way of conversation this evening; I’d merely expected to deflect his advances. It’s obvious he’s genuinely interested in what I have to say.
“How are your scars healing? Oh, don’t worry, they’re not as noticeable as you think. It’s just that the subject of the Parani reminded me what a great risk you took in securing that treaty for us and the personal injury you endured. I don’t believe I’ve ever formally thanked you for that,” Sethos says, and I’m sure my eyebrows are somewhere near the top of my forehead by now.
Even Tarik is surprised, if not a little grumpy. “You are very talkative this evening, brother. To what do we owe this honor?”
“Why, Highness, we’ve a special guest among us. The last time anyone harvested nefarite from the river, our father threw him a great banquet and declared him our bravest warrior. And what have we done to honor the Mistress Sepora?” He shrugs. “And before I left the Lyceum for dinner tonight, I happened to have brushed up on my etiquette.” Sethos turns to me. “Dinner at the Lyceum consists of lining up at the table while they slop something resembling food onto your tray and you have less than five breaths to eat it or you go hungry.”
“I’m sure you can hold your own,” Tarik drawls.
Sethos grins. “Of course I can. You see, Sepora, a soldier may not have a proper meal for days, especially while traveling, so it’s important not to get used to fine dining and the like. That’s why I never eat at the palace.”
“You seem quite at your ease to dine finely tonight, brother,” Tarik says.
“Well, I did say that I brushed up on the delicate matters of a royal dinner, did I not? You may be surprised to know, Highness, that conversation is an important part of the meal.” Sethos winks at me then, and I hide my giggle into my linen napkin.
Tarik rolls his eyes and takes a sip from his chalice. “It’s just that when I try to engage you into speaking with me of our economy and the impending war, you seem horribly bored with it all.”
“Perhaps it is you I’m bored with. How can I be bored with such a lovely dinner companion as the Mistress Sepora?”
Ah, there is the Sethos I know. But somehow, it is difficult to despise him at this moment. “Why did you choose the life of a Majai, Sethos?” I ask, surprising not only myself but everyone at the table.
Sethos is glad for the question. “You could say the life of a Majai chose me. Growing up, it was very obvious that life in the palace did not suit me. I was always endeavoring to escape to the Bazaar and always picking fights with the other children there when I did. One day, a Master Majai became privy to a fight where I had taken on several boys much bigger than I. He escorted me to the palace to speak with my father, to persuade him to send me to the Lyceum for training. It did not take Father long to realize that I needed an outlet for my … energy. So, he agreed I would become Majai.”
“Your father was a great warrior. Did you inherit his skill?”
Sethos nods. “I would like to hope so. My father could have been Majai, you know. If being the king did not take up so much of his time.”
“He trained his own personal guard,” Tarik says, a tinge of pride coming through his voice. “He was the only king to ever do such a thing.” He turns to me, a gleam in his eye. “Up until that point, only Master Majai were in charge of training the king’s personal guard.”
Sethos laughs. “I heard the only time the guard would not protect him was from Mother herself.”
&nb
sp; Tarik grins. “That is true.”
“It’s as it should be,” I say. It’s the first time either of them have mentioned their mother, who passed away years ago when the brothers were very young. According to Anku, she contracted a fever, went to sleep, and never woke up. I wonder how it affected the two. As of now, they seem to have grown to accept it. I would wonder if they remember much of her, but there is a certain fondness in their voice when they speak now.
“Indeed.” Sethos chuckles, raising his chalice in salute. “Indeed.”
The last course is brought to us then and while Sethos devours a rather large piece of maple cake, Tarik turns away dessert altogether. I find myself disappointed in the realization that he must not have a taste for Serubelan food. I’m not sure why I wanted him to enjoy it, perhaps because it’s a part of who I am—and he seems to enjoy me well enough.
But I must stop thinking along those lines. It has been weeks since the king tried to kiss me that night on the pyramid, and every day since then I have wanted him to try again. Yet, I’ve squandered all the chances I’ve had to give him some sort of sign that he should make another attempt. That he should take it further than telling me how lovely I look or how clever I am at court or the simple act of brushing my hair to one side when it fell into my face. But each time, he stops. Just short of where I want him to stop.
Perhaps by now his interest in me has waned altogether. Perhaps that is why he’s so quiet this evening. He didn’t seem particularly pleased when Sethos invited me as a guest. And could I blame him? I’ve been as cool as a winter morning in Serubel toward him.
Oh what a fool I am to be thinking of this instead of paying attention at the royal dinner table. That I should be pining away for a king who has lost interest in me, and ignoring a prince who is very interested in me.
“You’ve hardly eaten a thing, brother. Are you falling ill?” Sethos says around a mouthful of maple cake—one of my favorite dishes from Serubel. “You know, I rather enjoy this Serubelan fare. We should have it more often.”
“Do you intend to dine at the palace more than once every two fortnights, then?” Tarik says dryly.
“If Sepora will join us, and we can experiment with more of these Serubelan delicacies, then why not?”
Tarik sits straighter in his chair and folds his hands in his lap, ignoring his brother’s enthusiasm. He gives me a somber look. “I hope it wasn’t a mindless thing to order a Serubelan dinner this evening. It was meant to honor you, not to make you homesick. You’ve barely touched your food. And you’re not drinking enough water.”
So. The Falcon King is still paying close attention to me. “My stomach is not quite fully recovered yet, Highness, but it’s very kind of you to think of me for the menu this evening. I’m honored.”
But the last of my sentence goes unheard, as a tray of food is tossed upon the table, and the face of a servant lands in my lap. Blood seeps from his nose, and it trickles from his ears. His mouth is open, and his eyes stare at me but do not see me. Quickly I cradle his head in my hands before it can slip away to the floor, where the rest of his body wants to slink at an odd angle.
Instantly Tarik and Sethos are on their feet and at either side of me. Tarik takes the adolescent boy from me and eases him gently to the chair next to me, setting his head to rest on the back of it. The boy’s eyes roll back inside his head.
He has the Quiet Plague.
“Guards!” Tarik says. “Take him to his quarters and fetch the Healer Cy immediately.” To me, he says, “Sepora, you must move away from him.”
But I cannot. I cannot move at all. For this boy has the Quiet Plague and is dying in front of my eyes. My thoughts punish me as I ponder what would happen if Cy did not have the spectorium he needed to help him. If he were completely out, as I know one day Theoria will be, this boy would not live. He looks only to be a bit younger than Tarik.
And what if Tarik himself were to contract the illness? And why should I care so much about this king? I should stop this nonsense and quickly, before it upsets my reasoning abilities altogether.
I contemplate this as the guards usher the servant boy away, and still more when I feel the king’s eyes on me. I cannot think that one day it will be him. Because perhaps it will be, and I will still have to keep my secret a secret.
My Forging has never been so much of a burden as it is now.
Tarik’s lips press together in a line. “I apologize, Mistress Sepora. I did not know he was even ill. You’re looking pale. Perhaps we should cut the evening short so you can get some proper rest.” And he adds, though not unkindly, “And so you can think of the matter at hand more thoroughly.”
He wants me to reflect upon the boy and what could happen if Theoria were out of spectorium. Did he plant the boy here to further his own purposes?
Could Tarik be so cruel? Up until now, I thought not. But the boy was serving me, was he not? Could that be so coincidental?
My temper begins to get the better of me then, filling my cheeks with a different kind of heat than Tarik usually incites.
“Nonsense,” Sethos says, slapping the table. “What she needs is physical exertion to get her mind off of what happened. Why would you want her to dwell on such unlucky events, brother?” Sethos pats my hand in an almost childlike way. “You’ll see, Mistress Sepora. Physical exertion works for me every time.”
I try to discern if I should be insulted by just what type of physical exertion he has in mind, but Tarik shakes his head at me. He does not believe his brother to have stepped out of line. Relieved, I turn to Sethos. The threat of the Quiet Plague amid our dinner does not seem to bother Sethos. Of course, he does reside in the Lyceum. He’s probably well acquainted with it, sharing the same space as the Healers do. I clear my throat and try to focus on the conversation at hand. “Physical exertion? How do you mean?”
“I shall teach you to fight with a sword,” he says with finality.
With his fingertips, Tarik massages his temples. “That, of course, is out of the question.”
“Why?”
Only, the question did not come from Sethos—it came from me.
He turns to me, incredulous. “You want to spend time with … er, that is, learn to fight?”
I cross my arms at him. This boy king would control my every step if he had the chance. And so, he will not. “And why shouldn’t I learn to at least protect myself the Theorian way, if I’m to reside in their midst?” I wonder if the king even realizes that I can fend for myself with a sword as it is—as long as I’m fighting in Serubelan form.
“You live within the palace walls, Sepora. You are well protected.”
Sethos shakes his head. “That’s unreasonable, to assume a mistress as beautiful as Sepora would not need to learn defensive tactics, at least enough to help her make an escape to safety.”
“Any man who tried to attack Sepora would be thrown from the Half Bridge,” Tarik says through gritted teeth.
“But that would be after the fact, now wouldn’t it, brother? The damage could still have been done.”
“Of course you may train me to fight,” I tell Sethos hurriedly, before Tarik can reject the matter again. “The sooner the better.”
His expression lights up in delight. “How about now? Are you finished with your dinner? You’ll excuse us, won’t you, Tarik?”
Before the king can put a halt to it, Sethos is already dragging me from the dining room and imparting the best possible way to angle a kick to a man’s groin.
38
TARIK
Sepora arrives for duty almost an hour late. She wears the same attire she wore the evening before for her Serubelan feast. Only now she looks quite a bit more disheveled. And irritatingly happy. Her hair has been let loose from its exquisite styling and now cascades around her shoulders in waves of white. Her dress is spotted with dirt in places and torn a bit at the hem. The silver Serpen she wore in her hair was carefully bent to wrap around her arm. Tarik cannot stand the thought of w
ho helped her accomplish that feat.
Withholding his scowl, he instead pours Cy a goblet of water and offers him some fruit, astonishing the two attendants standing beside the refreshment table, who probably had been waiting for Tarik to issue those very instructions. “You may go,” he clips at them. After all, it is better for a king to employ his hands for the good of his guest than to throw the entire tray of food at the wall—which is exactly what he feels like doing. But such a display simply won’t do, since Cy is here to instruct him on how his ill servant fared through the evening, and besides that, Tarik had personally invited him to join him this morning.
Blast it all, but he wants to shake Sepora and demand to know whether she spent the entire evening in the company of Sethos.
But he already knows that she, of course, did. Because even if he hadn’t been kept informed of her whereabouts, he still couldn’t ignore the correspondence waiting for him on his table when he arrived at his day chambers this morning. Sethos had sent him quite the persuasive and humble request asking to visit Sepora more often and spend time training with her—for her own sake, of course. “We’ve taken quite a liking to each other, brother, and you cannot deny her beauty warrants undue attention. She must be able to defend herself when the situation calls for it,” he’d written.
We’ve taken quite a liking to each other. Since when did Sepora develop a liking for Sethos? Surely not in the span of mere hours.
“I’ll prepare that,” Sepora says quickly, rushing toward the table of refreshments against the back wall of the day chamber. She snatches the goblet from Tarik, brushing her fingers along his accidently, and glances back at Cy, smiling. “I’ve found that the figs are quite delicious. Would you like one, Master Cy?” she says.
Figs. Delicious. Surely she jests. But in the merry mood she is in, she’d find a pile of Patra’s—
“It must be the time of year,” she says more to herself than to anyone in the room. “It’s cooling off now, especially during the evening. Why, last night it was…”