“Nuriya.” Lussadh doesn’t move from her spot; it doubles as cover. “You know that to depart now, of all times, is unusually treasonous.”
“I abjure my name.”
“I can grant you a chance.”
“How kind of you. No.”
The whiplash noise of a gun being cocked. Lussadh and Nuriya used to be close; she knows what round ey prefers, smoke and spitfire. It melts stone.
She also knows, with exactness, how Nuriya fights. They were frequent sparring partners, and Lussadh sometimes let em win. One learns more about people that way, she finds, in their moments of victory.
For good or ill, Lussadh is the one selected, the one made prince. Each day she breathes she must justify her title, or else.
Lussadh does not wait for the first shot to fire; she has the advantage. She throws her knife, hilt first, the blunt weight of it cracking across Nuriya’s wrist. Disarm, subdue. She is across the room, bearing down on her cousin. A fist to the gut, hard enough to wind, not so hard it would fracture ribs. “You can still come back.”
Nuriya gags on eir saliva. Footfalls from the outside. “Don’t come in!” ey gasps out, breathy, but still heard. The footfalls pause. “You don’t have to do this. Winter will fell Kemiraj, this is the enemy that’ll end us. You can leave, find another life, find even one where you can become a lord in your own right. Unbeholden to any higher authority or destiny. Imagine that, imagine a life other than this. What does the king care for you except as a device to rest her crown upon, someone to take her place when she passes. I remember the girl––”
Lussadh looks down at em; she imagines her expression a canvas as perfect as a dune on a windless day. “I do not remember,” she says mildly. “Kemiraj will not fall so easily.” She picks up her knife, slices across with precision. No point to prolong the suffering. It is not even anger that animates her, just expediency. The moment has outstayed its welcome; time to hurry it along.
Regardless of the source, blood is a phenomenon. Beast or human, common or royal. The geyser of it, and most of all from the jugular, so much arterial pressure. The painter has not entered: she wonders if he is listening at the door. Through her calling-glass she says to Zumarr, “See to it that the painter receives a widow’s recompense.” The same as the spouse of any fallen soldier. “And bring me a sack, the absorbent kind.”
She unsheathes her sword. Decapitation necessitates more than a knife. There is a saying that no two affections are alike, and that is true, but after killing the first loved one the second is much easier. By her third, Lussadh expects, she will feel nothing at all. She glances up, at the window, to make sure she has total privacy: Nuriya deserves that much. On the pane that she pried open to get in, there is a furring of frost, and for a moment it seems as if it might resolve into something––a silhouette, tall, like the outline of a mannequin. But the ice melts fast, and when she touches the glass again there isn’t even a drop. She merely leaves a fingerprint, sticky and red as congealed claret.
King Ihsayn: Sun-Bearer, Ghazal of Conquest, the lord who has added twelve provinces to al-Kattan territory. Even in the privacy of her library, without crown or armour, she is an avatar of might. Broad, though softer than she used to be, imposing despite her lack of height––many tower over her, including Lussadh. Her chair is simple wood and lightly upholstered, but with her in it, by definition it has transmuted into a throne. She sits with a hummingbird in her palm, the crest animal, a bird that can sip from cacti without being pierced by their thorns. “What news, Lussadh?”
“I have brought Nuriya to heel.” Lussadh sets the box down. Ulamat has dressed and cleaned the head, lined the casket. Most of the fluids have been drained out, the glistening attachment to spine removed, but best to be safe.
“I grieve eir loss.” Said as though the matter was inexorable and immutable, the way dawn and dusk proceed. “Ey had promise and was such a capable commander.”
In the dialect of Ihsayn, this means Nuriya was a good spare, had Lussadh met with misfortune or proven unworthy. “Where shall I put eir remains, Majesty?” It is her first execution of another al-Kattan, the one area of protocols she is not familiar with.
Ihsayn returns the bird to its cage, shuts the little door with a gilded tinkle. She retrieves the casket, takes a look, nods. “Have the head frozen for now. You’ve done perfectly, as always. Among our illustrious family––” Her mouth twitches. “Among that, the multitudes of children my siblings and my nieces have so helpfully produced, you’re the gold among the brass.”
Lussadh goes to one knee. “That is high praise, Your Majesty.”
“Only just praise has meaning. Flattery is chaff.” Ihsayn passes a hand over the marble map on her table; ink vectors stir into motion, like unquiet poetry. They usually signify troop positions, enemy resupply sites and lines of transport, the accountancy of battle. At the moment only one vector moves, at the border between the outermost provinces and a garrison town. “Winter doesn’t parlay, so it is said. The queen demands surrender, takes the answer––yes, no––and proceeds accordingly. What do you wager goes on in her mind?”
Death by starvation, death by cold. The Winter Queen conquers lands that have never known snow. Lussadh does not expect most can survive the change, the young children, the ailing old. A country yields in life or in death, but it submits all the same to this alien creature’s advance. “For someone of her nature the desert proves more of a challenge than most. She isn’t much of a tactician.” Not that she has to be. “It depends on what she will claim to want from us.”
During her reign, the king has had the map altered a dozen times. Ihsayn touches the area around the queen’s marker. “Ambition such as hers is reckless; her expansion is hardly tenable. Nations are not founded on simple hunger and bloodthirst. One acquires territory because it holds something one covets. I take it that her emissary is thus far not forthcoming.”
“A difficult person to read. The bearing of a soldier, the manners of a courtier. The queen’s compatriot, I’d guess.”
“And there is an oddity. By all accounts this Crow has never been seen. Not at her side, not anywhere. They weren’t present among her infantry or commanders. I watched them rendezvous with the queen; they are who they claim to be. Yet.” The king circles her map the way a hunting beast might circle trapped prey. Lussadh understands this: for the moment cartography is adversarial. The next time this map is redrawn it may not be to Ihsayn’s favour, Kemiraj’s glory. “Her emissary is a secret, I’m certain of it, a tool deployed in exceptional circumstances.”
It is conjecture, but Lussadh lacks the information to counter. She therefore elects to say nothing. It would be chaff, as the king would say.
“Have you thought of defeat?”
Once, three years past. Bedsheets sopping with haemorrhage. There was the option of sand or courtyard, but she wanted that moment to belong to her solely. Between the two of them. How impractical, in hindsight. “No. I’ve contemplated the conditions that might lead to it, but that is not the same.”
“And your courage cannot be faulted.” Ihsayn sweeps her hand across lines of demarcation, the reduction of cities and population to paint.
Her grandaunt wishes something of Lussadh, a task, a test. She waits as the moving vectors disperse, the map once more ornamental, seemingly an item that exists in service to the king’s ego and nothing more.
Ihsayn is not someone who paces, who fills the silence with nervous motion. Such habit belongs to the lesser, she has said. But she does gaze into the distance now, eyes falling on the shelves where she keeps her favourite books. Not volumes on military history, the rise and fall of dynasties or republics. Her favourites are nature historians, those who study birds, write long treatises on the poesis inherent in the span of coverts and alulas: the beauty of beaks, the monstrous insides of an avian mouth. Lussadh knows because she’s checked that shelf. Often she wonders what Ihsayn’s childhood and youth were like. Whether the king was muc
h like Lussadh, pitted against other al-Kattan children, vying to be heir. Whether Ihsayn had executed her own share of treacherous lovers. But Ihsayn is at peace, if such deeds are part of her history. The king’s portion of the palace is open splendour, tall insulated windows and broad chambers, smooth mosaic floors and soft walls where beautiful aristocrats hunt. A pristine conscience.
“Crow is an opportunity. I want you to do anything necessary to draw them out. The seers have shown me what they look like.” And judging by Ihsayn’s absent gaze she is observing Crow in the guest quarters as they speak. “It ought to be no ordeal.”
Lussadh glances at the hummingbird in its cage, but not for long. “Your Majesty, I very much doubt a monarch’s prized agent can be suborned through means so unsophisticated.”
“Do you?” The king smiles. “Desire is a potent currency, as you’re well aware. At our roots we are base impulses. There may be an opening to exploit. If not, you’ll have tried your best.”
As much chastisement––a reminder that Lussadh fell to her own base impulse––and dismissal: you’ll have tried your best. “I will see what can be done, Majesty.”
She calls Ihsayn that, never aunt or grandaunt.
The reception is as folded in ceremony as any other, and like most public ambassadorial affairs, next to nothing of meaning passes. Crow gives obeisance, sharply correct, and does not miss a single title of Ihsayn’s. They extend the courtesy to Lussadh. “Prince of al-Kattan, the Dastgah that Strikes, the sword to the crown. To you the Winter Queen sends her greetings.”
“Which I accept as host to her envoy.” Lussadh occupies her customary place, a seat below the king’s. The subsequent one, a chair lesser than hers, is empty. Ihsayn has not had a spouse or favoured concubine for many years. “Kemiraj gives you welcome, and Her Majesty grants you audience.” The signal that says Crow may rise.
They do so, small in the deific-scale hall, alone on the mosaic floor and limned in morning sun. For the occasion they have donned an elaborate ensemble: layered silk robes defined by straight lines, secured by a black sash. Their hair is held by a long hairpin from which silver hyacinths depend. Their resemblance to the queen is striking, illuminated. Offspring, nephew, cousins get. That close in kinship. Younger than Lussadh first took them for, not that far from her age. “Winter does not seek conflict with the dynasty of the sun,” they say. “The queen wishes for a relation and sees no gain in us bringing each other to ruin, or at least to squander. She regrets the losses on both our parts.”
Ihsayn regards the emissary from her elevated vantage, outwardly impassive, disinterested. “What does she propose?”
“An exchange of knowledge. We shall send our finest scholars and inventors to your university, and they will learn from your scientists and alchemists. In such a way we may engage in the most honourable of commerce and come to peace. Winter most wishes to have you as ally.”
In other words, spies. No doubt some would be legitimate scholars, but not all. Lussadh glances at her king.
“An ennobling idea that will enrich us both.” The king spreads one hand, munificent, as though months ago she was not slaughtering winter soldiers and they weren’t doing their level best to terminate the al-Kattan lineage. “I am amenable to this. Indeed the prince shall show you the university herself, and we shall see from there the fine details of our agreement.”
Crow bows deeply. “The wisdom of the Sun-Bearer is renowned, as is her magnanimity. I thank you for this chance, Your Majesty.”
It seems underwhelming after all the artillery those months past, but then both sides are acting on pretence. Further pleasantries are traded, monarchic praises. Too humble by far, Lussadh thinks, for the agent of winter who may be the queen’s relation. Nor has Crow admitted to any title. Hard to read, harder to place in hierarchy. She scrutinizes the robes and attempts to divine their meaning: does the sash indicate rank, does the colour or texture of the silk. But they are foreign, she has never seen their like.
She escorts Crow out of the audience hall, curious to see them move in the heavy attire. They are no less fluid, and they make their wood sandals look elegant. The robes add rather than impede. They are observing her in turn, and she wonders what they make of her, the gun and blade at her hip, the circlet atop her skull. “I wasn’t able to have them prepare food you might find familiar, but perhaps you’d be in the mood to try our cuisine.”
“I have an adventurous palate.” Crow smooths down their wide sleeves. The folds seem voluminous, infinite; anything can be hidden within their shadow. “It may be impolitic to mention this, but I was there to bear witness and I thought you magnificent on the battlefield. Like the red-gold god, who in my homeland governs the science of combat.”
“Were you on the field?”
“After a fashion. While I can fight, I was there as a… standard-bearer, if you will, a symbol.” Their hairpin tinkles; their head twitches side to side. A fragrance of apple and cinnamon emanates from them, some strange edible perfume. “You fuelled our officers’ nightmares. So many sleepless nights given to imagining how you would dismember or torture or behead them. In a way it kept them disciplined.”
Despite herself Lussadh almost laughs. Obvious flattery, but Crow is so matter-of-fact about it. She does not press as to what exact capacity they filled in the queen’s army. That would be for later.
They have lunch in the river room, the one part of Lussadh’s wing that has not been overtaken by thorns and serpents. She has kept it clear. The artificial stream that bisects the room runs and gleams, small fish with scales like precious metals and eyes like rubies, framed by banks sculpted from sandstone. Pots of trimmed hedge and imported anthuriums, in every colour that she can get her hands on. Albumen white, pollen yellow, jade green.
“You must like this flower,” Crow says as they sit.
“I’m impressed by their endurance. They aren’t a desert plant, but with a little help they’ve got exceptional longevity. One of my tutors was fond of violets. To please her I tried to grow some. As you might imagine, however much water I squandered, they couldn’t be kept alive for long.”
“The prince is most practical in what she finds beautiful.”
“I am of Kemiraj,” Lussadh says. It is an explanation, in its own manner. “What about you?”
“Strength. Not necessarily strength at arms, strength of the body, or even strength of the intellect; I mean strength to resist inertia, to break free from a prescribed path. Strength to carve one’s own course, that is what I find the most superb.”
Lussadh finds her smile a little tight. Too close to home, too like Nuriya’s taunt. Coincidence; naturally Crow would profess to lofty ideals.
Servants bring their meal, covered platters of garlic flatbread, bowls of curry and milk curds, dethorned cacti stuffed with spices and ground lizard meat. Lussadh makes a point of sampling from every dish first, to show her guest that the food is safe to eat, that Kemiraj would not stoop so low as to poison an ambassador. On short notice she can learn much about someone through these simple means––in combat, or at a meal. The manner of eating tells the upbringing or at least the training: whether someone converses over food, how quickly or deliberately they consume, whether they pick at their plate. Crow is, as they promised, adventurous and does not balk at eating cactus. They ask if it was fried in olive oil, how sumptuous. There is efficiency to how they dine and she can believe they have been in the field, in circumstances where meals are rationed and irregular, and must be finished in good time.
“If you will forgive me, Prince Lussadh,” Crow says as they spread milk curds on a flatbread, “I expected you would be more extravagant in person. Louder, more raucous. But you’re as dignified as any poet.”
She refills both their cups. Chilled milk, sweetened with honey. From the rim of her cup she meets Crow’s gaze with one eyebrow raised. “Is it so bad a thing, to be quiet?”
“It’s a trait that intrigues. But it is not that you’re merely quiet.
You observe. Ah––may I? I’ve to redo my hair.” Crow cranes their neck sideways, unnecessarily. It draws attention to the line of their throat, to the hollow at the base, those exquisite places that invite the lover’s fingers and mouth. They smooth down their hair, repin it. They smile. “I am not used to being the subject of study. Like you I prefer to be on the other end.”
“I would have thought someone of your station would be used to attention.” Lussadh leans forward a little, allowing that show of interest. Her grandaunt’s order or not, she will concede that Ihsayn is correct in that the task would be no ordeal, if she chooses to carry it out. She has overseen torture. This is more pleasant, as far as the arithmetic of it goes.
Crow laughs, a velvet sound. “What is my station? I am my queen’s instrument. In her lands many would have my life so they may displace me in her favour. But this is gorgeous food, in even better company. Rank has fallen away; I feel capable of anything.”
Over the next weeks Lussadh guides Crow through the city, its shops and gardens, its temples and academies. She does not show them the city garrison or palace defences, and does not mention the seers or the assassins, and Crow does not ask. Zumarr relays that the queen’s march has paused, far out at the borders where she has raised a little palace for herself made of her element. Though Crow must be in communication with the Winter Queen, they rarely mention her.
At the temple to the sun, in a prayer room of rutilite tiles and murmuring fountains, Crow asks whether Lussadh believes herself a containment for divinity. “It seems odd to come to a temple when you’re the object of veneration.”
“We don’t literally think we are gods incarnated in mortal coil,” Lussadh says. “What we are is a deific contract. We pay tribute to what is above us, and carry out what they require of the earth. This may seem oblique, but it follows a certain logic.”
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