by Sam Hawke
She nodded, but carried the tension in her shoulders all throughout the remainder of the meal. By the time we were ready to leave for the market, later, Jov was already buried in papers again, a frown of concentration on his face. I squeezed his shoulder. “Have you considered just poisoning all of them so they’re too sick to come?”
“Haven’t ruled it out,” he said with a scowl.
* * *
Bright canopied stalls lined the edges of the market, not selling their normal array of everyday goods this afternoon but instead offering various karodee crafts. Dee and I wore ribbon crowns and strolled together through the crowd, trailed at a discreet distance by our houseguard Lara, and I feigned smiles and casual conversation with other festivalgoers, exchanging ribbons and pretending the peaceful enjoyment that should have characterized the last day of karodee. Dee bounced along beside me, eyes wide and watchful and a faint smile at the corners of her mouth. She seemed to have recovered well from her ordeal, or at least she played the part well enough. A day in bed had done me good, too; we had still come down to the lower city by litter, but so far neither my legs nor my lungs had protested the gentle activity.
We made paper boats that were supposed to carry the year’s bad luck away, and sailed them together in the canal, dodged giggling children holding hands and solving clues to the great citywide treasure hunt, and fed the last of our seed cones to persistent gulls hopping hopefully among the thicket of legs. All the while I watched the gently moving crowds, looking for telltale pale skin, or broad-brimmed hats among the ribbon crowns. There were plenty of northerners in the crowd, along with tall Doranites and various westerners, some bedecked in local fashion and exchanging ribbons, some merely watching our rituals, but I recognized no one from the official Talafan delegation.
Perhaps Zhafi had not received my note, or not found it hidden in the book I had sent her. Perhaps the low rumblings of scandal around my family had reached her after all, or perhaps she blamed me for Tuhash’s fate. Or perhaps she simply had no desire to go out in public so soon after receiving terrible news. But I had to try, at least, to see her. Perhaps the other women knew her secret and were comforting her. Certainly at least some of them must have known she had slipped out at masquerade, but did they know the extent of it? The possibility that she was alone in her grief, unable to disclose to anyone what she was feeling, had haunted me for days. I already pitied her lonely lifestyle and her lack of self-determination; I couldn’t bear the thought that she might have to hide herself when she most needed support.
I had not sought a reply; it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, for her to send a messenger with a private message in ordinary circumstances, let alone if sentiment in the Prince’s household had turned against us. There was no doubt the rumors about Jovan had now spread widely, judging by the speculative, sidelong looks and whispers that followed my passage. Some people gave me overly warm greetings, their gazes intense and searching, their grips too earnest. Others avoided me altogether.
“Is your brother here today?” one of the Reed cousins asked me, only moments after handing over a bright red ribbon in exchange for one of my greens. She threaded it into her crown with an innocent smile. “I’ve heard he’s a bit more sociable than he used to be.”
I didn’t like her sly giggle and took my time fastening her ribbon to my crown. “No, I’m afraid he’s been injured. He was attacked a few nights ago. Attempted robbery. Didn’t you hear?”
She gave a theatrical gasp, clapping her hands to her mouth. I touched her arm and gave a sympathetic smile. “You know, people say the Reeds are always the last to know anything, but I don’t think it matters. It’s just gossip, isn’t it? Anyway, a bounteous and fortunate season to you.” I finished with the ribbon and turned down to Dija. “Let’s get something to eat, Dee, what do you think?”
We diverted to a long table nearby where people were making pastries, leaving the Reed woman behind, her mouth working in silent fury.
“That was a bit mean,” Dija said, looking up at me solemnly as we took our place at the bench.
“It was,” I agreed. I wouldn’t apologize for it. “There’s nothing the Reeds fear more than being left behind the news.” It was Lazar’s great paranoia to be always trailing a trend or a word of gossip, and he’d infected his whole family with it.
A line of half a dozen cooks with powerful arms and sweating, cheerful faces pounded the flour behind the bench, and someone passed us a section of the sticky finished product. Dija surprised me by turning an extremely cheeky grin on me. “I’ve never seen you be mean. Properly mean. Not just teasing.”
“Oh, sweetie,” I murmured, rolling my ball of pastry with a little more vigor than was strictly called for. “If they come after our family, they’ll be seeing more of that.”
We rolled the little rice pastries and stuffed each one full of sharp orange and creamy barbanut paste, Dee with an oddly satisfied look on her face.
“Credola.” A soft voice to my left as someone joined the group.
“Your Highness.” I started to turn toward her but Zhafi made a small sound of protest or warning. Under the guise of adjusting my crown I looked around. Zhafi’s blond servant, Esma, stood on her other side, but I saw no other Talafan ladies about. However, a clot of hard-faced Imperial soldiers were behind her and, at their core, Brother Lu in a wheeled chair borrowed from our hospital. He swatted insects and glared around as if looking for an excuse to end the excursion. Fortunately, market day was the most innocent and harmless part of karodee. I glanced at Zhafi without being too obvious about it. She wore a broad-brimmed hat that hung down, shading her cheeks, a ribbon crown fashioned around its band. “A bounteous and fortunate season to you,” I said in Sjon.
“A bounteous and fortunate season to you,” Dee piped up politely from my other side. We both untied a ribbon from our crowns and Zhafi, fumbling slightly, did the same. I chanced a quick look back at her grim entourage. Several of them looked bored, the others wary, but no one seemed to object to the Princess exchanging spring greetings or ribbons. It was not clear whether any of them had recognized me.
“A … bounteous and fortunate season to you, too,” Zhafi replied softly, and I had to mask my surprise. Either she had practiced the greeting extensively by rote, or she actually spoke some of our language, because her Sjon was easily understandable. “What are you making?” she asked in Talafan, and there was something brittle in her tone.
“Sweet buns.” I handed her a piece of fresh dough, and passed my completed cakes over to the cook steaming buns over a big pot at the end of the table. “Here, you roll it like this.”
She pushed it tentatively against the table. “Like this?”
“You’ll need to put a bit more wrist into it,” I said. I glanced around the table casually. No one I recognized. I dropped my tone further all the same. “Are you all right?”
Her hands paused, bright-painted nails digging into the white dough. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she whispered, and my chest ached with the childlike helplessness in her words.
“I am so sorry.”
She seemed to have gotten the knack of rolling the ball, and accepted the bowl of paste from me, silently copying the thumb action to make a hole for the filling. When she spoke it sounded like she was fighting back tears. “We thought about running away, you know. On this trip. My brother is selling me off just when I had dared hope I might be free.”
I had to strain and concentrate to understand her. She spoke so fast and so low, the words draining from her like I’d lanced a boil. “I was foolish. I thought myself so worldly because my father let me fund orphanages and workhouses and travel the Empire. But I was never really independent, I just thought I was. As soon as a better use was found for me than generating goodwill in the capital, it can all be taken away.” A hand darted up, quick as a kitsa catching an insect, to wipe her cheek. “But Tuhash loved me. He was not like any of the other men of the court, who treated me like blown g
lass. He knew me and he wanted me, for me.”
That struck such a chord in my heart that I dared reach out and briefly touch her hand. Fortunes, I knew what it was like to covet the sensation of being properly seen. The touch seemed to puncture her; the hat slumped and her spine loosened, and she let out a tiny hurt sound like a small animal in pain, quickly suppressed.
I knew grief. Even though it had been more than two years, Jov and I still liked to sit late in the night sometimes and talk about Etan; remembering and sharing stories about the kind of man he had been, or relaying those stories to Dee. It helped. “What was he like?” I asked.
“He was … exciting.” Her voice strengthened. “A little wicked, perhaps. He had such wild dreams, and when he spoke of us together taking on the world, it felt real. He was so handsome, and charming, and he had a way of making me feel like I was the only woman in the world, like he would not be able to breathe if I was not kissing him. He could have told me to throw myself in the ocean and I’d have done it.” Her head was tilted firmly down, apparently concentrating on her task, but there was the hint of pride and pleasure in her words now. I felt sure she had not said this aloud before.
Beside me, Dee was a little too still, clearly unable to stop listening even if she did not understand the language we were speaking. Gently, under the bench, I touched her foot with mine, and she gave a tiny start and began stuffing her rice buns again. The first batch was cooked now, and the smiling cook slid the board back to our end of the bench, laden with the fragrant sticky steamed cakes. “Here, try this,” I said in Sjon, and offered Zhafi one of the fresh cakes. “It’s a karodee special.”
I took a bite of a bun myself, enjoying the contrast of flavors and textures; smooth, silky outside, creamy and crunchy inside. “Zhafi,” I said slowly, because I could not bear to leave unacknowledged the part I’d played in this mess. “I’m sorry if what I did—”
“No.” She set down her bun, shook her head, glanced hurriedly over her shoulder at her minders. “No, it was our own recklessness. With Brother Lu in your hospital, we thought we were so clever, tricking everyone. We did not want to be denied the excitement of the masquerade, not when we thought our freedom was so close.” She gave a hard little laugh. “It was all foolishness. Perhaps some part of us knew we would never get away, and we wanted…” There was a pause, then for the first time Zhafi lifted her head and looked at me directly. Tear tracks marked the cosmetics on her face. “I loved Tuhash, but he did not always make wise decisions. How he behaved after we parted was his decision, not yours and not mine. It was not your fault, Kalina. You protected us. You protected me, when you barely knew me, more than once. Why did you do that?”
The sudden question, and its intensity, surprised me. It was my turn to search for words. “I liked you,” I said honestly. “I know what it’s like to be more than what people think you are, and I understood how frustrated you must have been. I don’t think anyone should be punished for that.”
This time she touched my hand. “You are a kind person, Kalina Oromani. I won’t forget. I will tell my father so, if I have any influence left to spend.”
And then all of a sudden she was gone in a whirl of Talafan silks and high emotion.
I took another bite of my cake and chewed, both touched and relieved the conversation had gone as it had. Zhafi was an intelligent and passionate woman trapped by circumstance in a position not of her making, and I had contributed to the death of not just her lover but her dream. The anger and bitterness of thwarted hope could very easily have been redirected at me and my family, or even my country. We had been fortunate indeed to escape it.
“Do you want to make a lantern?” I asked Dee with forced cheer. My niece was studying me interestedly, her gaze assessing behind her glasses and her expression suggesting she had understood far more of that conversation than she should have been able to, for someone who did not speak the language. “Or shall we go home?”
But before she could answer, the empty space left by Zhafi was filled with another, and once again as if on cue I heard a soft foreign voice saying, “A bounteous and fortunate season to you, Credola Kalina.”
Unlike Zhafi, the Perest-Avani diplomat had made no attempt at subtle integration or disguise. She wore a high-necked dress and jewelry in her country’s fashion, in riotous reds and golds and beads glinting in the sun. I returned the greeting warily, watching her closely as we exchanged ribbons. This woman, with her warm, inviting smile, seemed to be everywhere I was, and it would be foolish to put that down to a coincidence. On my far side, I felt Dee’s tension.
The translator bowed her head low with her fingertips touching together lightly in the western style. It exposed the back of her head and the intricate patterns shaved into her close-cropped hair, visible below her ribbon crown. “We have not been formally introduced. I am known as Abaezalla Runkojo, and I am here in Silasta by grace of General Iheanako, benevolent high ruler of Perest-Avana.” Her Sjon was smooth and barely accented.
“A pleasure to meet you,” I said, watching her closely as she straightened. She was much taller than I, and up close her glorious burnished brown skin seemed almost luminous, her eyes black and liquid as ink in candlelight, the bones of her face like a carving from the sculpture garden. A dangerously beautiful woman. “We have passed each other a few times, have we not? I thought you were on the staff of the High Priestess?”
“Yes, but I do not work for the High Priestess,” she said, smiling. Her teeth were very white. “I was assigned by General Iheanako to assist the Exalted One with translation as part of the official delegation, but I am not of the Priestess’s order, myself.”
“I see.”
“I am a linguist. I study languages,” she explained eagerly. “It is a great privilege to work directly in another country so I may observe their language firsthand. Are you interested in language?”
“A little,” I admitted. It was hard not to be moved by her enthusiasm.
“I hear you speak excellent Talafan. Have you ever visited the Imperial City, Credola Kalina?” Her smile was so warm, her voice soft and sweet, and her tone sparkled with the same excitement as her eyes. “I have spent much time there. It is a most magnificent place.”
“I have not,” I said, slightly taken aback by her open friendliness. Was she trying to determine my relationship to the Talafan party? She must have seen me with Zhafi. What interest did Perest-Avana have in the Sjon-Talafar alliance? If she thought a pretty face would sway me, she’d be disappointed; I would not volunteer anything. Perhaps she could offer me some answers instead.
“Do you speak Talafan too?” I asked.
“Oh, yes! It is the most fascinating. It is such a vast country, you know, and there are distinct groups of dialects that—” She broke off suddenly. “I’m sorry, I am told I am boring when I go on about this. I knew you worked for your diplomatic office though, and thought—” But I winced because she had reached a hand, apparently to gesture to my Guild tattoo, and hit instead my bandaged arm, still sensitive from yesterday’s cuts.
Her smile dropped away as if I’d struck her. “I’m sorry!” she said immediately. “Oh my goodness. Please, forgive me. I did know you were hurt, I even saw what happened. It was terrifying! What a careless fool you must think me.”
“Not at all,” I said truthfully; I would not underestimate her, no matter how breathtaking her smile and charming her apparent naivety. “It was hardly the morning I was expecting, either.”
“You are so brave,” she said, shaking her head. “You are so calm. I would be a mess. I cried when that bird got up again, I was so scared.” And indeed, her eyes filled at the mere mention.
A little nonplussed by the compliments, I shrugged, awkward. “I was petrified. It was Hadrea who’s the fearless one.”
Abaezalla chuckled. “I have heard such stories, I do not believe that for a moment!” She looked away, smoothing down her dress with sudden fussiness. “I confess I very much wanted to meet yo
u, Credola Kalina. Tales of your bravery have made it as far as my country, do you know?”
I smiled. “Exaggerated tales, no doubt.”
“Well.” Her smile broadened, exposing some crooked teeth; somehow, the small imperfection only made her more dazzling. “Some claim you were gifted with magical gills to swim up the length of the mighty Bright River, but I will have to report back that I have seen no sign of any fish parts.”
Her gaze lingered on my neck, the warmth in her voice making her jest clear. “These things always sound more dramatic as stories than the reality,” I said, annoyed to feel my cheeks warm. “I ran, rather badly, and stole an animal and a cart, and blundered my way to the army. It was very far from glamorous. I could do without having to do anything like it again.”
Her smile vanished. “Of course. And here I have been a fool again, quizzing you about such things. I always talk too much.”
But not too thoughtlessly, despite appearances, I thought, because she would hardly be serving a person as important as the High Priestess if she could not be trusted to mind her tongue. I played along, reassuring her I had taken no offense. My mind raced. There could be valuable information to be learned here. “Have you made a lantern yet? Perhaps you’ll join me and my niece? It’s traditional to make one and then carry it to the closing ceremony tonight.”
Without any signal from me, Dija seemed to understand what to do. All wide eyes and enthusiastic manner, she took Abaezalla’s hand with open trust and launched into an explanation of the rules of the treasure hunt as we walked to the lantern making. I kept my eyes on the surrounding crowd, watching not just for assassins but also for any other Credolen. I’d had enough of fencing away their queries and parries today, even the friendly ones. “—and then you bring the completed sheet to the judges, and if you have all the symbols right, you get the treasure.” She was showing Abaezalla the list of clues and spaces for marking in the answers.
