Auralia's Colors

by Jeffrey Overstreet

  One guard escaped without reply, but Maugam’s words stopped the other. “Auralia refused to respect the Rites of the Privilege,” he haltingly explained. “She is guilty of conspiring with an exiled advisor, an enemy of House Abascar. She is guilty not only of speaking deception but of inciting a treasonous riot. She has provoked the grudgers. And since she’s arrived in the prison, she has made things worse. She has sought to deceive Prince Cal-raven and taunted the king by transforming the prisons through her strange powers.” He glared at the shadows where the girl was almost visible. “It is…unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunate?” the jailer shrieked. “What do you mean, she transformed the prisons? Maugam rules the prisons.”

  “Her magic lit up the prison, Jailer, and enchanted the prisoners. She set the stones to shining. The place is full of color.”

  “But…” Maugam peered at Auralia out of one eye, then the other. “What Maugam will do to her she cannot endure. What is that she’s holding?” Maugam reached for the girl, touched her trembling hand, and then recoiled as though stung. “Great bones of Tammos Raak! She wears the prince’s Ring of Royal Trust! If Maugam were to proceed, he would be…he would be arrested and sent…to Maugam!” The jailer began to quake, confused and distraught.

  “Command of the king, Jailer. It overrules the Ring of Trust.”

  “Why didn’t the king take the ring off her finger?”

  “He also…” The guard clearly found his own testimony implausible. “He also condemned the ring, Jailer. Childhood fancies, you see. It’s crafted in the shape of the Keeper. He wants it to vanish. Into the Hole. With the girl.”

  “This…this little thing,” Maugam murmured, unable to look at Auralia directly. “It might make Maugam remember. Things will not go well if he remembers.” In this dark place, he had never seen a girl of such gentle, fragile beauty. His memory stirred against his will, the image of his precious little sister surfacing suddenly. The sweetness of the pear upon his tongue soured.

  “Don’t give her to Maugam,” he shuddered. His hands fumbled about in the air as if searching for some response that would correct the situation. “Don’t let him have her. For he cannot bear to see what will happen.”

  The guard fled, taking the orange torchlight with him.

  In the feeble glow of the lamp, Maugam fixed his eyes on the hole in the floor, on the yawning darkness. Beside it lay the spear, the whip, and other spiked and blunt-ended instruments. He closed his eyes, clutched at his protruding belly.

  “Maugam,” he said to himself, “you must think this through. Why would you hurt her?”

  It had become one of his favorite rants against prisoners, to torment them with memories of their childhood, to force them to search for the moment when their hearts went bad. Maugam enjoyed it when they found regret at last, when they wept for what they had become.

  Now, hating himself instead of the criminal, he turned those questions inward.

  He remembered the day his mother told him to drive away the serpents basking in the sun beneath a bush outside his sister’s window. The snakes, she had said, would eventually be hungry, and they would try to steal eggs from a nest in the tree nearby. Or worse, they might bite his sister while she played in the grass.

  The very thought of their predatory nature troubled young Maugam. He determined he would teach the snakes to fear him. He would punish them for even thinking of harming his sister.

  So he tortured them. With sharp objects and with flame. He had felt a rush of virtue and a strange delight in seeing them feel the pain they might have caused others. Further, there was the thrill of secrecy, for nobody watched him. Nobody stopped him. How far could he go? What would it take to change the nature of a snake?

  The next day tears had soaked his pillow. But when a troop of soldiers passed down the avenue, his dreams of riding among them flared, and he sprang to his feet. He felt ashamed of himself for crying, for if he was to be a soldier someday he would have to kill without tears. So, with his mind fixed upon strength and courage, he returned to the snake bush with a shovel, determined to dig them up. Determined to practice, and practice, and practice the art of hindering those who might work evil, who might threaten his precious and beautiful sister.

  As these memories seized and shook him, he slumped to the ground and stared at Auralia’s feet. They were so small, toes as perfect as peapods. She lay blinking, like his sister in her bed when he had run in to wake her.

  For many months Maugam’s mind had sought to tear itself free from his person. As if clinging to the ceiling and looking down with contempt, it had declared itself a separate thing, rejecting any relationship with what the body exercised upon its property. But now, here, it lost its grip and fell back.

  “Enough. It’s all gone on too long, too far. I want you to get out of here,” Maugam said to the girl. “It is dangerous here. I want you to go.”

  The darkness of the Hole below the hanging chains…

  On hands and knees, Maugam crawled toward his tools. He lifted a heavy, blood-caked spade. It was not so different from the shovel he had used to capture the snakes long, long ago.

  He looked down into the Hole.

  Auralia thought she had fallen asleep. There were no dreams, just darkness interrupted by the faint outline of a monstrous, pale, crawling shape.

  But then she heard faint, feeble cries. She lifted her head and turned.

  The eyes that caught the lamplight were colorless, blind. But she recognized him anyway.

  Auralia pushed herself to her knees and crawled across the murky soil to the broken body of Radegan the thief. As she did, she felt her own tears flow for the first time since her imprisonment.

  She leaned down and kissed his bloody cheek, and heard the faint rasping of his throat.

  “I’m sorry, Auralia,” he was saying. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” she said. “They should be sorry. Nobody, nobody deserves this.”

  “I’m sorry. I took all your gifts from the Gatherers.”

  She wept now, clutching her hands together, for she dared not touch his broken fingers.

  “I’ve told no one. They are strung up in a basket, high in a tree. The tree with the hollow arm. Beside the old gorrel warren.”

  “I know the tree, Radegan.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Auralia glanced over her shoulder. The strange white giant had disappeared into the pit. She did not know who he was or what he was doing.

  Auralia began to push through piles of bones, tugging at loose shreds of cloth, fitfully tying and bundling them together. Whispering to Radegan, she described the beauty of the lake, of the ghostly shapes she saw on the shore. She feared to look about, for she could sense something listening, hearts beating close. She braided the strands and the shape in her hands began to grow. When Radegan’s weeping softened to a faint and steady breath, she lifted his bloodied head and rested it upon the pillow she had made. Her tears fell like white jewels in the cold lamplight.

  23

  CAL-MARCUS TURNS

  A goblet of rare black crystal splintered the afternoon sunlight on the windowsill of the king’s bedchamber, radiating bright and jagged lines throughout the room. Patches of light wavered on the walls as if exploring the tapestries. One of those woven murals illustrated King Gere-baron fighting Bel Amicans before the Truce of the Trade Routes. Another depicted Har-baron leading a charge against Cent Regus beastmen.

  There was no tapestry bearing Cal-marcus’s image, his story. Not yet.

  Cal-marcus sat by the window and touched the goblet. The weight of all that had transpired held him fast to this chair. He had looked out upon Abascar for hours, watching the shadows turn about the towers like the dial of a compass. As those dark lines moved, the beauty of the change seemed to right what had been jarred askew. He could not explain it, nor could he even recognize it, but his thoughts had realigned, the dark haze of wrath and fear clearing as the perfumed wind washed over the windowsill. His wor
ld had come back into focus. No one counseled him. Nothing persuaded him. He just knew this was the moment—the time to decide what his own story would be. How would he be remembered? As the king who cleansed the woods of marauders? Or the man who drained the color from Abascar? Tomorrow the dye would have settled in the fabric, and no one would ever be able to wash it clean.

  He watched the clear hajka swirling in its dark bowl. He traced the circle of the brim, surveying the view before him, west and north across the Expanse with all the attention of a watchtower guard. Cal-raven was out there somewhere, fighting beastmen, saving the laborers, risking his life for the glory of Abascar. No, not for the glory of Abascar. Cal-raven did things for those he loved. Today he fought to save his father from disgrace. He fought to save the lives of people he knew and cherished.

  How would Cal-raven be rewarded upon his return?

  To the west, the sun slid down into woods. To the north, its rays painted the fanged peaks of the Forbidding Wall.

  The king looked away from the window, winced, and pushed the cup off the sill.

  As if the gesture called on a curse, his hand began to shake. It would never stop shaking. It would shake until he died.

  Frightened by the seizure, he stood and grasped the window ledge, looking down for the cup as if he might snatch it from the air.

  He spied it lying in a tangle of long-dead rosebushes along the edge of the small, private garden.

  “Dig up the garden.” Even though he had not seen the meddling mage for years, the old man’s counsel lingered. “Dig it up. Let it go. Do not dwell upon her ghost.” It had been good advice. The garden was a graveyard now.

  His cup lay among the dry, brittle thorns, the drink seeping through cracks in the crystal.

  He wanted to feel relief. But he felt nothing. Nothing at all. He had cast away the danger, but the work had barely begun.

  He collapsed into the chair and lifted a bell. It took no will to ring it. His hand was already shaking. The attendant came at once, ready for instruction.

  One morning early in Jaralaine’s reign, Scharr ben Fray had stood at this very window, sharing the view of the roses. “Your queen has quite a gift,” the mage had said. “Her love for beauty gives the garden a magic. She could coax color from ash. A shame that she clutches such wonders to herself.”

  Cal-marcus understood the queen’s compulsion to keep the garden private.

  As she narrated her childhood memories to him while they lay awake, he was taken by how many of her stories found her wandering off into wildflowers. Her father had always dragged her back, tearing bouquets from her grasp. Here in this courtyard she could cultivate the scents, sights, and sounds she loved. Here Cal-marcus had given her what she needed. He had ensured her safety and given her peace.

  Or so he had tried.

  But what he had first thought of as scars were, he now realized, wounds that had never closed.

  “People judge merchants,” Jaralaine had told him when they met. “We made a trade, and they called us devious. We crafted our clothes from things in the wild, and they called us primitive. Even merchants judge merchants. We were totally alone.”

  When Jaralaine was born, the youngest of four, her arrival strained the family’s meager resources, making things even worse. Her father despised her for increasing his burdens, and her mother could not meet her gaze. She never grew close to her brother, Jermin, for he mirrored his father’s expression and disdain.

  She had been left in the company of her older sisters, Jeriden and Jesimay, who were often humiliated at marketplaces and sometimes sought in trade. They hated their lives and hated that they were forced to work so hard along the road. Labor in the morning, danger in the day, bitter disputes over bargaining tables, shadows in the evening. Hunger. Injury. Snakes. Jeriden and Jesimay came to despise the judgmental people who lived within houses. And yet they tempted boys from the Abascar Housefolk in hopes of being seized and stolen away, escaping the road. Rejected at every turn, they were prone to fits of temper. Jaralaine was easy prey.

  So she found her own paths, roads that led away from roads. She made friends among other living things—things that would not condemn her, things that wanted, even needed, her attention. She named herself the forest’s gardener, and flourishing gardens sprang up in the woods.

  Cal-marcus had been drawn to her enthrallment with the wilderness. He had lured her to follow him, just so he would not lose her, so he could escape his own responsibilities and play with her far from the harsh gaze of his father.

  His life became dependent on her whims, a truth he carefully ignored. He convinced her to come and live among the Gatherers, just to keep her within his reach. He would steal away to visit her, his favor provoking further contempt from her new and jealous neighbors. “An exile among exiles,” Jaralaine called herself in sighs.

  But it was not merely to rescue her from the Gatherers that Cal-marcus chose to marry her. She was beautiful, and in the gown of a princess more beautiful still.

  He took a sort of wicked pleasure in sitting beside her at the court banquets, for she would speak to no one but him, remaining a mystery to his father and the council. His mystery.

  When he was king and she was queen, his was the only heart in her favor.

  At one elaborate dinner, they sat at opposite ends of the feast. A wide red ribbon ran the length of the abundant table, decorated with glittering candles. As the somber counselors debated across their plates and glasses of wine, Jaralaine playfully pulled at the ribbon, drawing it down inch by inch into her lap. It slowly carried the candles, the vases of flowers, the bowls of seasoning and olives toward her until the magistrates were struck silent to find all the table’s decorations clustered around her plate.

  He had laughed with her, failing to see this as a portent of things to come.

  Those had been different days before the death of Cal-marcus’s own father and mother in a wasting winter plague. Too immature for the responsibility of the throne and frightened by a brush with the suffocating outbreak himself, he worked days and the nights, commanding his people to stay in their houses until the spread of disease had been halted.

  Meanwhile, Jaralaine helped him master the kingship and prepare his house for an uncertain future. Flourishing where she had been planted, she would emerge from her garden with inspired ideas.

  “The house, the forest, the river—they’re ours,” she said amongst pillows, drawing him toward her. “No one can take them.”

  “Careful, my love,” he whispered, repeating words he remembered from a lesson with Scharr ben Fray. “Desire’s a dangerous guide. He has no respect for borders. There are deeper laws we must respect.”

  “But who’s to say any law is better than our will?” Her soft hands spidered up his back, her sharp nails dug into his shoulders. “We’ve seen the world, and more, we’ve learned what it can be. I was just a merchant’s daughter, and now a king is in my arms. Do you see? Where your heart leads you…follow.”

  Indeed, where Jaralaine’s heart led, the house soon followed. The magistrates were malleable, the captain and defender easily conquered. Cal-marcus had reinforced the walls, ordered Housefolk to stay inside. Convinced that Gatherers were conspiring, he had heightened restrictions and doubled the guard.

  While Jaralaine delighted in establishing new restrictions, she refused to respect any authority these laws might have over her. She continued to pass beyond the walls for long strolls along the winding River Throanscall, taking only one or two guards with her.

  Once she returned to tell Cal-marcus she had seen a thief running away from the house. “He could have killed you,” he grumbled. She ignored him; she defied him, in fact, wearing brilliant red and yellow dresses through the woods.

  Among the king’s disgruntled advisors, only Scharr ben Fray had been compassionate. But he had also spoken warnings that kept Cal-marcus awake. “You may not yet know what kind of flower you have plucked from the wilderness,” the mage had murmured.
“She is generous, in your experience. But think about why she chose you—a prince, one who could offer all she lacked.”

  Cal-marcus forbade the mage to advise him regarding Jaralaine again, but those words had already taken root. When he cautioned her again about wandering, she flew into a rage. “To keep me from danger, you would build me a jail?”

  And that night she stole away without guards for the first time. She stayed out in the woods as the moon rose and had not yet returned when the king searched for her at daybreak.

  That same day a few vagabonds made a vengeful strike, butchering a company of Gatherers harvesting seeds. When Jaralaine appeared the next evening, burrs and blood streaking her ragged gown, she clutched at her belly and fell to her knees, crying, “I won’t go away again. Forgive me.”

  “I will give you whatever you need,” he said again, now, engrossed in the memory. He stared out at the familiar darkness, but in his mind he still knelt before her.

  “Cal-marcus,” Jaralaine had said, surprising him with a smile, “I have brought you a gift. I have brought you an heir.”

  Reports of marauders increased. Even though the queen was now bedridden, caring for their son Cal-raven, Cal-marcus faithfully related to her all information he received on these strange attackers. Jaralaine’s close call with danger should have convinced her to stay home. But Cal-marcus’s attempts to frighten her brought his heart no assurance that she would not run away again.

  He doubled the combat exercises for his army’s swiftest riders and equipped them with the best weapons his forge could produce. He gave Tar-brona a charge and sent him out to canvass the woods. Tar-brona found marauders and fed them to the wolves.

  Certain this triumph had earned them House Abascar’s respect after years of unrest, Cal-marcus and Jaralaine had taken their place before the people. But the cheers praised only Captain Tar-brona and his king.

  Then Jaralaine spoke the words that ruined him, confirming Scharr ben Fray’s many warnings. “House Abascar treats me with reproach,” she declared, leaving no room for argument. “I can never escape the dark cloud that followed me along the merchant roads. I will go to House Bel Amica, where the people call their queen beloved. And I will learn what it is that makes them love her. I will learn how to break this curse.”