No one else really dared to yell back at him, which was a pity. Although Mrithuri was not sure that her nerves and head could have stood the rise in volume. She could not even hear the plainchant of the cloistered nuns who lived within her palace but separate from it, which under normal circumstances would have echoed through the filigree panels piercing the walls between the two separate and interlocking realms. She had very little idea what any of them were saying. There was too much competition. Perhaps she would wait until they exhausted themselves, and then make them take turns.
She reached out and fondled Syama’s ears, trying to soothe both of them. The bear-dog grumbled too low in her throat for anyone to hear, though Mrithuri felt it vibrating through her guardian’s deep barrel. Mrithuri smoothed her palms over Syama’s ears, knowing how sensitive she was to noise. Syama sighed and leaned her head on Mrithuri’s knee.
It will be fine, Mrithuri told herself, hoping she was not lying. It had to be fine: she had so many responsibilities.
Still, she sighed—and Syama’s head came up sharply—when the door to the room slid aside and everyone momentarily stopped shouting at each other to turn and face whoever might be coming in. Mrithuri breathed relief to see Chaeri, and Ata Akhimah with a bundle in her arms, and behind them the Dead Man, and two—
She startled to her feet. Syama surged up also, hackles raised, growling to be heard now. “What are they doing here? Why have you brought them into my presence?”
She knew these men. They—or rather their shadows—had entered her court before, in the company of the illusion-draped assassin who had worn the shade of a famous poetess, and who had tried to murder Mrithuri. Syama had dealt with the agent—sadly in such a manner as to leave him unavailable for questioning—but not before he had killed her former general and wounded her … friend, the Dead Man, while those two were rushing to defend Mrithuri.
“Hold your wrath, my rajni,” said Ata Akhimah. “These are the true men, come from your cousin Sayeh with a message, and not shades such as the illusionist used to disguise the attempt upon your life. They come with a surety.”
With a flourish, she unwrapped one coil of the bundle she held in her arms, revealing the draggled, miserable head of—
“Is that a phoenix?”
Despite herself, Mrithuri took a step forward. Syama escorted her uncertainly.
“Guang Bao, Your Abundance,” said the narrow-waisted, mustached man in the unkempt military uniform. From their previous, albeit fraudulent, introduction, Mrithuri recognized him as her cousin’s captain of the guard, one Vidhya. He confirmed that name, and introduced the little round Wizardy fellow beside him as Tsering-la. “My rajni sent Guang Bao with us to prove our authenticity as messengers, just before she was captured—”
Mrithuri raised a hand, and both Captain Vidhya and the rising murmurs of her courtiers fell silent. She should have thought of that an hour ago. “Captured.”
Hnarisha stepped forward. He wasn’t much bigger than Tsering-la, though lighter of bone. Mrithuri knew better than to underestimate either one of them.
“By your cousin Anuraja,” the captain said. “He is holding her hostage, with two of her ladies. We sent men back to scout, and so learned who had taken her. His ally Himadra has kidnapped the prince Drupada, her son.”
Mrithuri’s world whirled. She put a hand out and touched Syama for steadiness, a warm and solid object in a world she abruptly did not understand. “That is … quite an insult,” she said.
“Yes, Your Abundance.”
Theological, as well as personal.
She was overwrought. She knew she was overwrought. And she knew that if she showed it, she would be destroying her people’s confidence and morale. She kept her voice flat, perhaps a little venomous, and said, “That is an insult not just to our cousin’s royal person, but to the royal persons of everyone else in our family. Sayeh and Drupada’s inviolacy is sacred. Anuraja and Himadra dare to kidnap a ruling rajni and her son?”
The captain looked at the Wizard. “Yes, Your Abundance,” the Wizard said.
Mrithuri pressed her lips together. She swallowed until her throat lost the tightness that presaged a rising scream.
If one could kidnap a queen or a prince, could one not also execute one?
Mi Ren stepped forward—around Lady Golbahar, who glared after him but really couldn’t do much more, given the difference in ranks. He bowed before Mrithuri with a flourish of glittering rings. “Your Abundance,” he said, as if he were saying my love. “I have sent doves to Song with messages for my father. I have informed him that you have agreed to be my bride—”
Not exactly.
“—and that his men must come to your relief if I am to rule by your side.”
Definitely not what I said. Mrithuri smiled, and laid the back of her hand against his sleeve. “It is a long way to Song, my lord Mi Ren.”
His face fell, but with true self-absorption he rallied and simpered. “They will come. I am my father’s favorite son.”
Mother, how bad are the rest of them?
“Then we will look for them at the enemy’s back.” She stepped back, swallowing both fury and laughter. “Go now,” she told them, when she could make her voice low and throaty and confident again. “All of you. Except for Chaeri. There will be court in the Great Hall in an hour. You must prepare for it. Find our friends some fresh clothes, and get that poor bird to the austringers.”
“Rajni,” the Dead Man said, his eyes pleading above his veil. He leaned forward, silently begging for her word to stay.
She dismissed him with a gesture.
If he stayed, she would collapse against him. And she could not bear that he see her so. He must think her strong, powerful. He must think her a worthy rajni, or he would not want her—he who had seen caliphs and Wizard-Princes, and so much of the world.
When the door had closed behind everyone except Chaeri, Syama, and Mrithuri, Mrithuri turned to Chaeri as Chaeri held out her arms. Mrithuri went into the embrace and rested her forehead on Chaeri’s shoulder. Tears burned the edges of her eyes as Chaeri comforted and coaxed her.
“I am here for you now, my rajni. You do not have to be strong anymore. Rest a moment. You know I can make it right.”
Mrithuri let loose a trembling sigh and felt some of the grief and panic leave her. “Did I shame myself?”
“No one noticed anything,” Chaeri assured her.
“You are the only one who knows me, Chaeri.”
“There is nothing so bad you cannot tell me,” Chaeri said, stroking Mrithuri’s hair. Chaeri was only a few years older than Mrithuri, but for the moment the rajni felt very young, and very much like she needed the mother she had lost so long ago. “There is nothing you can tell me that is so bad I will not love you still.”
“I have nothing bad to tell you,” Mrithuri said. “Except that I did not realize until just now that I am afraid.”
Chaeri stroked her hair again. “Let me fetch your pets, my rajni.”
“It’s not wise,” Mrithuri said. “It is too soon.”
Chaeri bent to kiss her brow. “My rajni. This is war.”
* * *
Sayeh Rajni looked up at the towering, seamless walls of Sarathai-tia and felt … a little faint, quite honestly. She had raged, in her heart. But she raged quite coldly, quite inwardly, keeping her pretty face smooth as years of artifice could make it.
Now the rage was frozen in a wash of even colder fear, for she did not know how she had been brought so quickly by her enemy from her own lands to those of her cousin Mrithuri. And she had not known what a citadel she would be forced to face when she got here.
But here she was, helpless in her enemy’s keeping. And not even the enemy she had meant to surrender herself to.
Her broken leg was splinted and stretched out before her in the horse litter on which she reclined. It jolted with every rough step the pair of grays she was suspended between took, and the view of the rump of the horse before her
never changed. The pain was not precisely bearable, but since she had no choice but to bear it, she gritted her teeth and managed.
Ümmühan rode beside her on a docile old mare; Nazia, who was still not very much of a rider, chose to walk beside the litter mostly. They had ridden through the bright night, and with the darkening of day—there was the golden city of Sarathai-tia rising across the river, that should have been weeks of travel from Ansh-Sahal.
Sayeh did not wish to speak. There were enemy soldiers on the horses behind and before her, tasked with controlling the animals who carried their raja’s most honored hostage. Those would be trusted and seasoned men, Sayeh knew, and not rough recruits who would not understand the seriousness of the work assigned to them. Whatever she said, they would notice and report, and she did not care to give away the advantage of allowing her enemy to know she felt fear, or anxiety, or confusion.
She had wept when first captured, wept and screamed, it was true. She had engaged in what was surely the finest display of hysterics the lands under the Mother River had seen in her lifetime. That had been occasioned by the discovery that she had given herself into the wrong hands, the hands of her cousin Anuraja, and not those of Himadra—also a cousin, it was true, but the cousin who held her young son as hostage. If she had to be captive, she would rather be captive where she might be able to use her wiles, her political sense, even her (admittedly aging) beauty to influence and protect Drupada, who was her only child, her heir, and all she had left of her husband now that he was gone.
Ümmühan would not lie, it seemed. Sayeh had come to learn that lying, in her sect, was not just a sin but a kind of blasphemy. But she needn’t correct misapprehensions in others, and so the guards had been allowed to think Sayeh’s raving was a fever from her broken leg. It was not a hard notion to sell; she was as weak as a nestling, and the pain whitened her face and dewed it, even now.
So she did not wish to speak, and she did not speak. But she caught Ümmühan’s eye.
And Ümmühan raised an eyebrow over the veil she had abruptly resumed wearing, as if to suggest that she would explain eventually. Or possibly as if to suggest that she, too, had no idea how they had come this far. Speaking glances were all very well, but they were still not exactly language.
A clatter of hooves approaching made Sayeh glance over her shoulder, but she could see nothing but the chest and mane of the trailing gray. From the sudden tension in the back of the soldier riding before her, however, she expected that she would soon have her long-delayed conference with her enemy.
Perhaps she was correct, she thought later. But if so, once again, it had not been the enemy she expected.
A woman rode up beside her litter, beyond Ümmühan. Her tall, arch-nosed red bay mare struggled through the verdant rainy-season growth along the road’s shoulder, but the rider did not seem concerned for its footing. The horse’s trappings were rich and well-cared-for. Perhaps more well-cared-for than the mare. Her saddle was gilded over ornaments carved into the leather, and her saddle blanket was a tiger skin with the snarling face intact and taxidermied. The edges of the skin were finished with tassels and flashing jewels.
The rider was built on the same model as the mare: tall and muscular, with mahogany skin and black hair piled in intricate braids and glittering with ornaments. Her jerkin was red leather with peaked shoulders, and carved and gilded and jeweled as extravagantly as the mare’s harness. She wore it over silks in a peacock color that dazzled the eye with a mauve countersheen, and the cloak thrown over her shoulders was trimmed with the fur and tanned paws of a wolf.
She was rough with the reins, making the red mare struggle with the bit and her balance, and did not seem to care at all. Sayeh did not like the way she treated the mare. But the woman met her eyes, and despite the woman’s cruel hands, Sayeh felt drawn to her, bathed in a charismatic warmth.
Nazia, at the shoulder Sayeh was turned away from, made a sharp sound under her breath. Ümmühan suddenly had her hands full as her mare tried to sidle away from the bloody-mouthed bay with its rolling eye and pinned ears. She didn’t have room to turn the mare in a circle, because the heedless rider in the wolf-trimmed cloak was crowding them, and Sayeh, helpless in the horse litter, was in the way on the other side.
Ümmühan managed to balance her mount, though, and Sayeh had only a few bad moments. The woman let her bay fight its way forward, kicked it hard across the path of the first litter-bearer, and dropped back to push between Nazia and Sayeh.
Sayeh had a few bad moments more as the woman turned her clear brown eyes on Sayeh and said, “So you’re the Sahali rajni.”
There was a shimmer of color at the back of her eyes, Sayeh thought, like the shimmer behind a cat’s eyes in the dark. She had a catlike face, also, with a snub nose and a slightly undershot jaw. The woman had a cold expression that was no expression at all, as if she had forgotten how to wear a human face.
“This is Her Abundance Sayeh Rajni,” Nazia said, when Sayeh couldn’t quite organize her thoughts between the ache of her broken leg and the woman’s stare. She felt like it went right into her, through her, peeled back the layers of her soul like the petals of a rose and rummaged around in there. It was horrid, and intoxicating, and she wanted to relax and fall into that stare and let all her troubles be forever over.
“Let me know you,” the woman said, her voice velvety.
Sayeh’s mouth opened to say yes. Ümmühan’s hand went out to touch the pole of the horse litter, a silent warning.
Sayeh snapped her jaw shut again. She gritted her teeth and closed her fingers on the bruised and swollen muscles of her splinted thigh, sending a spike of pure, white, unfiltered pain through her body. It blinded her and cleared her head at the same time, and the rush of sensations left her dizzy. She clutched at the poles of the litter and accidentally placed her hand over Ümmühan’s.
The poetess’s hand was warm and dry, despite the humidity and rising warmth of the morning. Her touch clarified Sayeh’s thoughts that much further.
Sayeh got a breath and said, “Who are you?”
The woman grinned wolfishly. Sayeh got the impression that she was … amused … by the resistance. “Ravani,” she said, as if that explained everything. “I am an advisor to the raja.”
Sayeh thought of Himadra, and of the black-haired man on a tiger-caparisoned horse who had ridden beside him. She thought of how that man’s eyes had glanced off her without acknowledgment but—she thought—not without seeing.
Ravana, he had been called.
Ravana.
A cold sensation rose up inside Sayeh like icy water in a spring. She shivered and managed to make herself look away. “What do you want with me, Ravani?”
She made herself say the name, even when her tongue and teeth and lips, her very flesh, seemed to peel away from it. Ravani. A simple word, but it hurt coming out of her.
“I don’t know.” Ravani directed her eyes ahead. “An alliance, perhaps? An acquaintanceship, for certain.”
“To use me.”
Ravani laughed. “You’re already a hostage. I imagine the raja will wish to speak to you by night’s end. Don’t you think that you could use a few people who have his ear, and might wish to speak for you? And … for your son?”
Sayeh was silent. Ravani’s words weren’t illogical. But the creeping sensation that filled her, that those words presented the only reasonable path for her to take, and that everything else led to destruction—that was not rational.
“You do not know what I sacrificed to bring that child into the world.”
Ravani reached across and laid a palm against Sayeh’s cheek. She stroked its smoothness and Sayeh shivered. “I can extrapolate.”
Ümmühan’s touch helped to anchor her. The pain helped to anchor her. This person is my enemy. She offers nothing that does not have a hook in it somewhere.
Still, she obviously wanted something from Sayeh. And Sayeh did need allies in Anuraja’s entourage, since apparently she w
as doomed to be a part of it whether she willed that or not.
“I am grateful for the consideration,” she said at last, schooling her voice into its softest and most gracious tones. “I am grateful that you sought me out, Ravani.”
Again, the name was bitter in her mouth. She swallowed saliva for having said it. Is there a curse on her name?
“What do you want of me?” Sayeh asked, when Ravani let the silence hang. She could feel Ümmühan and Nazia beside her, both breathing shallowly.
“I don’t know yet,” Ravani said, quite easily.
It was not the courtly fencing gesture Sayeh had expected next, and it disarmed her.
She was still remustering her forces when Ravani continued, “You are a true-born descendant of the Alchemical Emperor. His blood flows bright in your veins. His gifts to his daughters are your gifts. I am certain of this. You speak to animals; you have the hand of the Mother upon you.”
“I have a little talent,” Sayeh said. “Not what my cousin is said to have inherited. And what about you?”
“I have the raja’s ear,” Ravani said, low enough that perhaps the soldiers on the litter-bearing horses would not quite hear her. “I am loyal, of course.”
“Of course,” Sayeh said.
Ravani looked at her speculatively. “Do you happen to play chaturanga?”
“I was once accounted good at it,” Sayeh admitted.
“Hmm,” Ravani purred. “You will be bored while that leg heals. And I am always bored. Once you are settled, I will bring the board. I think that if we spend some time together, you can come to see how our purpose might benefit you. You might consider a true alliance with Anuraja. Surely that is more pleasant than hostageship. It would certainly offer you a position of more strength.”
The Red-Stained Wings--The Lotus Kingdoms, Book Two Page 2
