Dissa folds her hands over Dara’s, unpeeling the Indiri’s fingers from her weapon. “I cannot expect one born into violence to understand the heart of one raised on promises of love. He may turn to me yet, and you would do well to remember that harming him would mean your death.”
“Ah, Stille,” Dara mocks. “How can it flourish when the best of its blood is relegated to the bedroom?”
“I have my ways,” Dissa says, replacing the dagger on the dresser. “Not as impressive or memorable as your own, but I make my mark.”
“The Indiri women lead as often as men. And they bed whom they please, when they please,” Dara says.
“Oh, to be Indiri.” Dissa’s wry smile brings out Dara’s laugh, but it is soon quieted.
“And what of when Varrick becomes king? Will your ways keep him in check even then?”
“I can only hope,” Dissa says, her fingers prying into the tines of the comb to tear free Dara’s hair. She holds the ball in her hand, untwisting it for the weavers to use in a tapestry.
“Stilleans would not like Indiri hair entwined in a tapestry meant only for that of the royal family,” Dara says.
“Then Stilleans interpret the word family too strictly,” Dissa says. “And with my hair growing silver, Varrick’s thinning, and Vincent’s pale as the moon, the weavers could use some color.”
Dissa is quiet then, her fingers smoothing out the lump between her fingers. There was another color running through the tapestry once, the dark brown of her older son, gone to death too soon. Dara’s hair is darker than Purcell’s was, but close enough that the weavers accept the locks when Dissa brings them, claiming to have kept Purcell’s trimmings.
“Would that I’d known him better,” Dara says, her thoughts following Dissa’s. “But I don’t believe he felt the same. Babes speaking with the mouths of adults did not sit well with him, and once we were children, his sickroom was closed to us.”
“That you should call it a sickroom,” Dissa says, shaking her head. “I still think of it only as his room, though the door be barred and closed forever.”
“It is for the best. I know you wish to look upon his things again, touch the bed he lay on. But the Stoning moves quickly, freezing limbs in the span of a day. Your father is right to leave Purcell’s room untouched, for it may linger still in the air.”
Dissa closes her eyes. “Can I trouble you?”
“Of course,” Dara says, accustomed to Dissa’s request. She closes her eyes and relaxes her hands at her sides, letting her mind wander back in time through her own memories and ones inherited from ancestors.
“He was tall and dark, would have made a handsome man, given a bit more time,” Dara recounts, her memory sharp as her knives. “More lashes around the eyes than the average boy, with a tiny white scar across his top lip.”
Dissa smiles, eyes still unopened. “That was from the kitchen cat.”
“Never trust a cat,” Dara says. “More?”
Dissa shakes her head. “No, I’ll not be selfish tonight. I know how looking drains you.”
“Only if I delve deeply. My own memories are near and close; those inherited from my mother and hers from her own are the ones that tire.”
“He was a good boy,” Dissa says. “His brother is as well. Would that there were more children to follow, but . . .”
“An emptiness your husband could easily fill,” Dara reminds her.
“So I filled it myself, and brought the last of the Indiri into my family,” Dissa counters.
“Yes,” Dara allows. “You drew us in, while in turn drawing no love from your people for sheltering Indiri with your skirts.”
“And here you are, my daughter in all but blood, grown to a woman and dragging dead animals to my feasts. Any suitors warmed to you by my well-chosen words may find their effect cooling.”
“I’ll not hear of suitors, and well you know it. The last of the Indiri must wed another Indiri, not dilute her blood with that of a Stillean.”
“Even a noble Stillean?”
“Especially a noble Stillean,” Dara huffs. “I could break any one of them over my knee like a twig. I do not find that a desirable quality in a mate.”
“Not Vincent,” Dissa counters, her voice making it a question, her eyes searching Dara’s face.
“No,” Dara says slowly, all boldness lost. “Though I don’t believe he’s an option.”
“No,” Dissa echoes. “He is not. My influence extends only so far. An Indiri on the Stillean throne would surely bring about an uproar. As it is, it pains me to hear a single voice raised against you.”
“Which doesn’t stop them from muttering behind your back.”
“Perhaps if you gave them less cause?” Dissa raises an eyebrow, and Dara drops her gaze. “The Stillean people would not accept you as their queen, and neither would you care for it. Your blood is too wild, and it searches for a heat to match its own.”
“Too true,” Dara says. “I can fill your wish for a daughter only so far. My ways are not yours.”
“No, but you are. Not by blood and never by marriage, but you are a daughter in my heart, and I love you as one.”
Dissa clasps her hands with Dara’s, speckled fingers entwining with unmarked ones as the tide comes in.
CHAPTER 12
Vincent
MILDA’S BED OFFERS SOLACE. THE KIND HER BODY OFFERS, of course, but others that she doesn’t know I indulge in as she sleeps by my side, her mouth partway open. Her mattress is lumpy; the scuttle of mice comes from the corner, bold now that she and I are quiet. Here I can pretend for a time that I am a regular boy, waking up next to his girl, the smell of baking bread in the air. Her eyelids flutter, and she rolls against me, body seeking body beneath the ratty quilt.
Her father’s bakery sits on the outskirts of the city, storefront hanging over the main road, one I rode past without noticing until the flash of her red hair caught my eye. Father saw, on one of the rare days we went together to meet with the weavers’ guild, and made an arrangement that part of me finds reprehensible but not so much that I don’t take advantage of it. I visit whenever I wish. The baker’s door is always open to me, and he pays no tax to the city.
I curl a strand of Milda’s red hair around my finger, and she reaches for me, wrist brushing against my hip.
“My prince is awake.”
“Your prince wishes you would call him by his name,” I remind her, but she only smiles at me. Neither of us harbors any daydreams about what we are to each other; she is my chance to pretend to not be royal, and I am her opportunity to bed one.
She smiles and her hands slide lower, more practiced than they were when we took up with each other. I wonder for a brief moment if she takes other lovers in my absence, and realize that I don’t care if she does. I have no wish for my shadow to loom long in her life, making demands even when I’m not present. I know well enough what it is to lead a life not fully your own.
“Your mind is not in my bed,” she chides, pushing playfully against my chest.
“Is it required?” I ask, and she giggles, burrowing into the covers and running her bare feet up my leg.
“No,” she admits. “But I know when it’s far from me. What’s troubling you?”
“The Given has come,” I tell her, rolling onto my back to stare at the ceiling.
“I heard as much,” she says. “What is she like?”
So I tell her about Khosa, who seems to me a small, frightened thing, despite all her well-executed pleasantries. Milda asks what she wears, the color of her hair and eyes, and I tell her as best I can recall, although my strongest impression of the Given had nothing to do with her appearance, but with her overwhelming resignation to a fate decided at her conception. Still, I give Milda what she wants, well aware that these snippets of court gossip raise her in high esteem with the other merchants’ daug
hters.
“She is not bred?” Milda asks.
“No. I think Donil caught her eye, though I don’t know if she was fascinated or frightened by him.”
“Donil catches all the girls’ eyes,” Milda says.
“Does he?” I ask, playfully pulling her back against me now that we’re both fully awake.
“Not all,” she says. “There’s a certain baker’s daughter who prefers her prince.”
“Tell me more about her,” I say, and she smiles as the sun rises and I decide that the castle can get on without me a little bit longer.
Madda is not happy with me, and makes no attempt to hide it.
“A Stillean prince who doesn’t come to his Seer,” she mumbles, a lifetime spent in the darkness of her own chambers reducing most of her conversation to fragments of speech directed mostly at herself. She putters through her small room, disturbing clouds of incense that waft around her gray hair.
I say nothing, familiar with her moods. Madda has held the hands of Stillean kings before me, the world passing by outside her windowless corner of the castle while her eyes followed only the creases in hands. She is an old woman who has never seen the sky, ensconced in the stone room she was born in, her mother’s talent passed to her, both their lives choked by smoke and lit only by fire, for fear that the brightness of the sun might tear away the shadows that allow sight of the future. Madda’s irritation is a constant stream of muttering that smells of the dried nilflower she burns, her lungs so lined with the smoke of years that her very breath carries the tint.
“Hands out, then, young prince,” she says as she unceremoniously plops into the chair across from me.
I sigh, my usual amusement at her constant dissatisfaction eaten away by my thoughts. I try to focus on the task at hand, aware that my palms and the palms of my father are her only purpose in life, and that this duty was not her choosing but what she was born into.
Much like me.
“Oh, yes, a heavy sigh. What trying times when the young prince has to sit with an old woman who knows much and could share more. Just breathing in this room could teach you something, but I hear that you prefer the air in Milda’s bedroom.”
I glance up, all boredom evaporating. “What would you know of how I spend my time outside this room?”
“What would you know of how I spend my time when you’re not in it?” she counters, and I sit back in my chair.
Madda knows well enough that she is a faded relic, her gift reduced to mere tradition. Generations of Stillean kings have asked their Seers for pointed answers, and grown bored with vague replies. Even Madda’s childless womb drew little concern from the Elders or Gammal’s advisors, for who needs to know the future written in their skin when the past has taught us that we will live long lives, uninterrupted by trial or terror as long as a Given dances when her time comes?
Madda’s face is as familiar as my mother’s, the lines there deeper than in my childhood, furrowing into skin sallow with lack of sunlight and gray with the film of burnt incense. Yet as I look at her now, familiarity falls away, her face not fitting the mold I’ve set for her in my mind, that of the cantankerous old woman who speaks whether anyone listens or not. Instead I see a craftiness I’ve not noticed before, a thread of amusement in her voice that could be easily dismissed as bitterness to those who do not know her well.
“An old woman who knows much and could share more.” I repeat her words, drawing my hands away.
“Oh, you were listening,” she says, an eyebrow cocked, its long gray tendrils almost snagging her unruly hairline.
“I still am,” I say.
She leans back as well, each of us watching the other for a few moments. “The old women may know much, but it’s the young girls who do most of the talking. Go back to your baker’s girl. See what she’s heard.”
“It’s the elderly who have my attention at the moment,” I counter, which earns me a lascivious cackle.
“Mmmm . . .” She settles into her chair, her body seeming to sink deeper into the pile of rags she wears. “There’s talk in the halls. The Given has come with the ash of a burnt village on her heels and nothing growing in her womb. She’s not hard to look upon, I’ve heard, and would have had no trouble finding a willing Hyllenian boy to plant the seed.”
“She is indeed fair,” I agree, remembering the face that studied mine in the few moments when our public masks had slipped at the banquet.
“Yet there is no little Given swimming inside her, which must happen before the mother takes her own dip,” Madda says.
“Madda, please,” I say. “That’s crass, even for you.”
“And what do you care?” she snipes back. “The Given swims—or sinks, rather—with or without a few bawdy jibes before she goes. And you’d do best to remember that, young prince.”
“Ah, I see. The talk in the halls doesn’t concern only the Given, does it?” I lean forward, the legs of my chair thumping to the stone floor. “There were many eyes on us at the banquet.”
“And little space between you,” Madda says, wiggling her eyebrows.
“I thought she was choking,” I defend myself. “I have no interest in the Given, pretty as she may be.” Though my words are true, they don’t ring that way, maybe because her beauty isn’t what drew me to her but our shared moments over dinner. I smile at the thought that I feel bonded to someone because we wore false faces with each other.
“Nothing amusing in it, my prince,” Madda chides me, misinterpreting the smile. “That’s the other side of the talk. Someone must breed the Given, and this one seems . . . reluctant.”
I remember Khosa frozen under my father’s grip, how she burrowed against her chair when I leaned close to speak in confidence. “I don’t think she cares to be touched.”
“She’ll have to bear it, and soon,” Madda says. “Before the less scrupulous take matters into their own hands—”
“The Given cannot be forced,” I remind her, my voice louder than necessary at the thought of violence brought upon the frail bones I’d felt folding under the very touch of my palms.
“Ooh, you’re a bit piquey at that, aren’t you, now?” Madda says, actually squirming in her chair with delight at my discomfort. “You’d best abandon those scruples, young prince. To be a good king you’ll need to aid and abet in some unsightly things for the sake of Stille.”
I nod, but my eyes are on the smoke swirling in the air, my thoughts no longer on Khosa. “A good person does not necessarily make a good king,” I say.
“And that’s as true backward as forward.” Madda nods, all teasing gone. We’re quiet for a moment together, the wax of the candle pooling on the table.
“I do not want the throne,” I tell her, the words that have long been in my heart finally finding my tongue.
“Ah well.” She reaches for my hand and unfolds my fingers, gaze sweeping over the lines of my palms. “Best get used to the idea.”
CHAPTER 13
Dara
DARA KNOWS HER BROTHER HAS TRACKED TRUE WHEN they find the Tangata cats. Their once-lithe bodies are twisted, dead paws set in a perpetual swipe that forces sheaths open. Claws rake the air in search of an enemy who has already won. Dara and Donil slip through the group cautiously, sidestepping the claws that could slice them open even in death.
“Tides,” says Vincent, pulling his shirt over his nose even from his vantage point astride a horse. “They’ve been in the heat a bit, haven’t they?”
Donil nods as he bends over the bodies, their muscles hard under softening skins. “Five days, at least. I’ve never seen so many taken down at once. Looks as if they thought they had safety in numbers, but the prey was new to them. This one’s got a bite taken right out of his belly.”
“They attacked the sea beast, you think?” Vincent asks.
“Surely,” Dara says, plucking a scale from a cat�
��s hide. She holds it to the light, but its iridescence was lost as it dried and curled. “Tell me again the worth of following an animal I’ve already killed?”
“To see if there are others,” Vincent says, echoing his grandfather’s words. “The sight of the sea on land threw fear into a great many people, something perhaps you intended by dragging half a rotting corpse into a banquet.”
Dara flicks the scale into the breeze. “Your mother says Stillean banquets need flavor.”
“The reek of death wasn’t what she had in mind,” Vincent says. “Gammal was sequestered with his advisors until the dawn trying to decide what to do about it. The Scribes tore through their shelves, searching for references of Lusca coming onto land in the past, and in Stillean territory, at that.”
“Did they find any?”
“No, and that did little to alleviate their fears.”
Donil rises from a Tangata body, his brow furrowed against the sun. “They’d be better served to fear the Pietra, after the attack on Hyllen.”
“The Scribes say Pietra attacked Hyllen in retribution for Stille pushing them onto the cliffs years ago, time out of memory,” Vincent says. “They found references in the histories.”
“Nonsense,” Donil argues. “Armies don’t march for revenge only.”
“Remind me of that if there’s ever a Pietran neck under my blade,” Dara says. “I’ll gladly kill to settle a score.”
“You with the memory of our mother’s death fresh in mind, not buried in old books that no one reads anymore,” her brother counters. “Pietra has the strength to attack Stille, certainly, but why would they?”
“The Pietra need no reason, brother,” Dara reminds him. “Surely you of all people know that.”
Vincent shifted in his saddle, sensing an argument brewing. “Nonetheless, Gammal is rousing the army,” he says, voice muffled by the shirt still covering his nose.
“Rousing is the right word, indeed,” Dara says, happy to shift her ire from her brother onto the Stillean soldiers. “Your army has been napping since your father’s-father’s-father got a good look at his wife.” She reaches up, tugging the shirt from his nose. “Breathe deep, Vin. This is what all of Stille will reek of soon enough, should the Pietra march.”
Given to the Sea Page 5
