by Mima
She dried her hands, skin stinging from the cleanser she’d been helping wipe the tables down with. “Seventh City has rioted again?”
“No, Lady. Here.” Avis’ chest was even slighter than Moriko’s own small endowments, but her ribs flexed deeply in her distress.
Moriko shook her head, as if to dislodge a fly. “Here?” She struggled to understand what Avis was saying.
“At the old king’s fountain, members of the Smith and Weaver Guilds met to discuss if Beasts were making us more or less safe. They heard the Beasts had brought in a caravan not through the Guild Gate, but their own, and it grew ugly. They began to march and the guards there quickly ordered the truxet staying in several nearby inns away. They r-r-refused.” Avis’ neat brown braids were frazzled, but they often were by this time of day. “The Beasts formed a line in the street to halt the march and the people began to throw things. The crowd grew and now people from all over the City are headed there. Injuries are coming in from the City and Royal guards are dispatched.” She stared at Moriko, blue eyes pleading.
Moriko turned and walked blindly toward the inner bailey, mind racing with supplies the healers would need, and what message of shelter could be offered to the Temple, who would surely be inundated with frightened people trying to flee the riot.
She’d planned for this. In the last two months it was just one of the horrible litany of things she’d planned for. But now her palms were wet and her throat was dry and she coughed, deep and harsh.
People were milling around in the cobbled area outside of the Main Hall. The higher tone to the rumble told her the news was spreading.
“Attention!” She used her deepest voice, standing on a bench. “Yes, there has been strife by a large crowd in the streets! No one is to leave the compound, not even to check on family.” People drifted toward her and she assured her pounding heart she sounded confident. “The Guilds are in lockdown and the streets will be swept of passersby from here down to the outer Walls. If you’re off duty, move to assist at the barracks, otherwise, continue with your ordinary tasks.”
Several people came up to talk to her, but she did not give out details of the riot. They pressed in around her, which made her spine pour with sweat. She looked each in the eyes, trying to determine if any could be darkmages. Shaking their hands made her ill. Signy had made her distrust her own people.
When the crowd thinned, Avis and several runners took her orders to make sure assistance was in place. She confirmed the truxet on Royal guard duty had remained on the compound and that the Queen’s Own were watching them.
As the last stragglers were drifting away and there were only a few other small clusters of people standing around in nervous clutches, she caught a snatch of angrily hissed words.
“-dare she continue to issue orders, as if she’s not one of them. Living with a darkmage in her own apartment for over a year, giving the woman access to every bit of knowledge, and still she walks freely, unpunished!”
Moriko froze, literally in midstep. The magelights were a steady gold in the falling twilight, the sky not yet full dark. Her heart pounding, she remembered again the scent of the fresh garden, her terror of not being able to move, of knowing her whole world was a lie. She remembered learning Signy, her assistant, was a darkmage, and she herself an unknowing aide. The one who thought herself a leader had been a victim.
“Moriko?” Avis pattered up, holding a message slip.
It was impossible to move. The venom and disrespect in the voices was stronger than any horrific spell the Mage Guild could devise. Tears welled up.
“Moriko?” Avis stood too close. “What has happened?” She looked around nervously.
The people, Moriko knew not who they were, had drifted farther away, but their vicious hissing outrage still carried to her.
“It will probably be her letting them in during the dead of night. Jiselle says Signy was probably her acolyte. We’ll be killed by our own infected Royals.”
Avis gasped, spinning to stare. The sound of shushing, then hurrying feet pattering on cobbles. Avis didn’t follow, but put one hand on Moriko’s arm. She was warm and her hand was calloused. The touch was enough to break the panic.
Moriko stumbled, shivering, as her joints struggled to support her. Avis was talking but she couldn’t hear her. She staggered into the south hall and braced herself on the wall, out of sight in a quiet nook.
She looked up and noticed this one just happened to have her grandmother’s tapestry on the wall. It was two bodylengths square and enchanted to glow pastel at night and jewel tones in the day. That had always struck Moriko as backwards from what would have made sense. A fierce need erupted in her core, a need for pleasure, life, and escape.
“My Lady, you so fearlessly defend the Queen from every scrap of gossip you find. Yet when these cruel whispers about your prior assistant reach you, you freeze. I don’t understand your fear. Fly at them with the same fire! It is so unjust!”
Moriko focused on the small crab in the corner of the tapestry. She’d asked her grandmother to add it. It was pink now and purple in the day. She missed her grandmother. She hadn’t spoken to her in a week. The last time she’d seen the woman, she’d asked Moriko to hold a statue of the Earthmother and pray with her for Moriko’s tainted soul. Her own grandmother…
“Are you interested in being my lover, Avis?”
Avis stared rather comically, jaw hanging so loose Moriko could almost fit a tart inside. Avis shook her head. “Me? But I’m a woman?”
Well, that answered that. Her newest assistant was entirely too naïve. So, no sex and on to the confrontation. “Please go find Jiselle. Tell her to meet me here with the code word ‘candles.’ Then, make sure you stay posted by the governance lobby for news of the riot. I won’t be longer than a half hour.”
It wasn’t the right time for this. Moriko had been putting this off for two months now. She was needed to help manage the repercussions of the riot. But if she couldn’t indulge in sex at this exact minute, then she’d take care of the shadows lingering from an enemy.
Avis nodded and skittered away. Moriko flicked her skirts and made a flurry of emergency rounds on her own, seconding Fergmar the Captain of Security’s thought to separate angry citizens from the arriving fearful ones. In ten minutes she was back at her grandmother’s tapestry.
Jiselle stood there, hands clasped, contemplating the pastels. “Moriko, you know I’m with Akisa now. I will not dally with you any longer.”
A dozen burning jabs tumbled on Moriko’s lips. That her sister had only taken Jiselle to spite Moriko. That Akisa had a dozen lovers, no matter what she’d told Jiselle. That the riot could be the end of the City, a wash of empowering destruction lifting the darkmages to power, and that Jiselle’s newest hairstyle was extremely unbecoming.
“I want to know what passed between you and Signy that morning in the bath.”
Jiselle’s head snapped away in open shock. “Do not speak her name!”
“Tell me.”
Her arms crossed. “I’ll tell you nothing. I told the truxet investigating more than enough and the Temple the rest.”
Moriko heaved bricks from the patterned hall floor into a wall. Wrenching her earthcraft through the stones, she clattered them up behind her in a puff of grit, sealing the alcove. Jiselle cried out and rushed forward, slamming her hands against the newly made divider that enclosed the two women. The single magelight here was small, set low in the wall, and her grandmother’s tapestry sparkled, a fantasy of flowers and green pathways fit for a seven year old.
“You bitch!” Jiselle screamed, turning on her. She was a skymage, but a poor one. Her job was to help dust the Royal public rooms every day. Her power didn’t stand a chance against Moriko’s.
Moriko considered the woman who finally faced her. Jiselle was so very beautiful, with lusciously long curling black hair she now wore in a tightly pulled back knot. She’d been with Moriko sporadically for over two years, until Signy. Joini
ng with Akisa was just an excuse for both women to announce their disapproval of Moriko’s pardon.
Jiselle had been one of several of Moriko’s lovers who had declined her bed in the last two months. But unlike any of the others, Moriko suspected Jiselle’s absence wasn’t due to fear of Moriko’s contact with the darkmage. The pretty bitch was scared Moriko would tell of her tryst with the darkmage, and was desperately trying to discredit her before Moriko had the chance.
Moriko took a breath, waving the grit from in front of her face. “I remember the night Signy walked in on us. We laughed about it.” Signy had watched Moriko fuck entirely too many partners. It hadn’t been something Moriko had sought to keep from her assistant. She wasn’t ashamed of her high need for sex and she wasn’t shy.
But when three of Moriko’s lovers went missing in the days after Signy’s exposure as a darkmage, Moriko had re-evaluated every private moment Signy had ever been part of. She’d noted that Signy had watched Moriko with all of those lovers. It had haunted Moriko’s memory for the last few weeks.
There was one dawn she’d left to go deal with one of Silva’s tantrums in the laundry, and returned to find Jiselle and Signy touching in the plunge baths. It had surprised Moriko, because she herself had found Signy singularly untouchable, with a formal distance and a private manner. But Jiselle had been stretched out against the tub’s edge in satisfaction and her breasts had born deep bite marks.
Clutching her fingers into fists, Moriko stared at Jiselle, sick. This woman had traded whispers and sex with a darkmage.
“Let me out!” Jiselle beat on the wall, her thin craft stirring the air enough to flap the heavy tapestry and make Moriko cough with the dust.
“No. I want to know why you’re still walking around, why she didn’t take you, too.”
“I don’t remember! Skyfather save me! You’re one of them aren’t you!”
Her fear felt real, and that Jiselle thought Moriko guilty of being a darkmage hurt. Moriko wanted to cry, to scream, to beg. “Jiselle. What did you tell Signy? What did you know of who she really was?”
Jiselle slid down the new wall, her pretty red dress crusted, her dark hair encased with powdery dust. She panted, breaths small and quick, staring at Moriko in horror.
She thought about commanding the woman based on her oath to the Royals. She thought about asking in the name of their past pleasure. But in the end she merely used her daily matter-of-fact expectation of obedience. “Tell me.”
“I told her you liked a little pain. I said you acted strong, but really lived in loneliness and that you were devoted to the Queen and were not jealous of your sister, although you hate her. She wanted to know your heart, she said, but I never suspected her a darkmage.”
Moriko’s stomach churned hard and sharp. All of that was true and all of it was private. “Liking pain in one’s pleasure does not make a darkmage.”
Jiselle wrapped her arms around her knees. “You’re such a bitch.” She laughed, bitter. “I’m glad she used you! Who will have a woman who slept in the same room with evil and didn’t know it? Who will have a woman too stupid to know her right hand was a darkmage? Who would risk their soul on the chance you were merely a dupe?”
Moriko leaned down into Jiselle’s pretty, filthy face. “At least I didn’t kiss her, fellow bitch. Did she make you come? Did your pain add to her power?”
Jiselle looked up at Moriko and burst into tears, burying her face in her knees.
Moriko hissed in her ear. “The next time I hear your name attached to night whispers about me being a darkmage, you will be assigned to barn duty.” Storming over to her grandmother’s tapestry, she slapped at the central rose bush, her mother’s favorite flower, over and over until her hand stung and she choked on the gritty air.
She turned and stared at the miserable young woman she’d spent so many sweet hours stroking and sucking. She stared at her a long time, struggling not to vomit, and finally took down the wall, replacing the bricks into their pattern in the hallway.
Walking out past Jiselle, she headed to the baths. The need to be touched in a sexual way was a fire inside her, but she had to get back to the situation with the riot. And her own touch had ceased to interest her when she was sixteen.
With the news, it wasn’t surprising the bathing chamber was empty. She waded into the still waters gratefully. Oh, Donte-Bear. When you are here, you will rip the darkmage secrets apart. Not one minute after she’d rinsed her plain, thick, straight brown hair, her sister swished in, nude but for a skirt of transparent scarves floating around her thighs.
“I don’t know what you did to make sweet Jiselle leave me, ugly crab, but I want you to know I don’t care. It was worth it just to be able to listen to her shred you so eagerly to whoever wanted to talk about you these last few weeks. She hated you before, but now you really have an enemy.” Akisa tossed her own garnet locks over her shoulder and began to oil her body. “You keep collecting them at this rate and the compound will riot to throw your proud self to the Wildlings.” She grinned, clearly relishing the thought.
Moriko stood from the baths and paused before the rack of mageheat to dry off instantly. Usually, she tried not to respond to her older sister, ever. But tonight she moved into her sister’s space, forcing her to pause in her use of the brass oiling bowl. Akisa had too much composure to look alarmed or surprised, but her face lost its cruel glee and assumed its default shuttered blankness.
“Do you really think this is the night to be joking about a riot, ugly stork? Will it impress the Queen to know you think watching one would be amusing, and inciting one for your own goals is tolerable?”
Narrowing her identical honey-brown, slanted eyes, Akisa smirked at Moriko. “There are two princesses in this room, but only one of us enjoys audiences with the Queen.”
Avis burst into the room. She noticed Akisa and bumbled a hasty curtsy in the Heiress’ direction, but flew right to Moriko. “Princess! The Queen has asked you to come directly to her private chamber!” Her blue eyes were enormous round disks.
Without missing a beat, Moriko smiled into Akisa’s stunned gaze. “Your facts are ever wrong, Kiki. And Revay is still earning my vote. Keep showing how petty and cruel you are, and Jiselle’s rumors will still be rumors, but your actions will be Truth.”
Snagging a towel from the pile, she flicked it around her shoulders and left the steamy bathing room. Dropping the lazy strut she’d used in Akisa’s sight, she scurried behind Avis down the hall and into a changing room. Avis’ hands were shaking as she helped Moriko into an undershift. Her best red gown shimmered on the bench. Avis had good taste.
“When did the message come?” Moriko asked breathlessly, trying to comb her hair while Avis pulled on her knee-stockings.
“Perhaps a half hour ago, but I was helping with the influx of people.”
Moriko steadied, relatively sure the summons to meet privately with her father’s sister, only the second of her life, had nothing to do with the argument between her and Jiselle. “News on the riot?”
“I heard it was really over by the time we even knew about it. The streets are still being cleared of all citizens, and a few are still arriving here in a panic, but mostly the guards are now investigating.”
“Deaths?”
“None confirmed. Several shops and homes were damaged.”
“Oh.” Moriko put both hands on her cheeks. “Praise the Sacred Couple.”
Avis paused too, her gaze sharing deep relief that this was merely a horrible moment and not the beginning of the end. Moriko nodded and they both continued their flurry of activity. She was off to meet her Queen. There was nothing she would not do for the woman who had given her the position of Chatelaine at the age of seventeen, and again showed her support by issuing an edict of Moriko’s innocence after the investigation into Signy’s disappearance.
Her Queen needed her and so she’d go. It was as if the Earthmother had delivered the opportunity to ask for Donte directly to her.
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Chapter Eight
Night Three
The day had been warm enough that she wanted the terrace doors open to the sea. Curled in her smooth sheets, she hugged the pillow to herself and stared at the beautiful potted palm that replaced the divan her assistant had always slept on. Yarielle had been like family, a friend impossible to replace. When she’d retired, she’d helped Moriko choose her replacement.
They’d chosen Signy, an older woman, on purpose. Moriko wanted someone with greater experience than energy, in an attempt to retain the wisdom Yarielle had shared. So Signy had slept for a year on a very similar divan across the large room.
No assistant would ever sleep there again. Not in the short time Moriko remained Chatelaine. Earlier the Queen had made it clear she expected Moriko to advise on a short list of possible successors soon. While Moriko had been considering such a list ever since her pardon, it had been agonizing to hear the inevitable stated aloud.
The ocean lulled. The waves pushed into the pain and pulled back on the tatters of her pride. Hisssss-shhhhh. An image of the waves tumbling the broken bits of her, rolling them up the sand and sucking them back out, came into her mind. She closed her eyes on the welling tears. Fucking her old friend Nels had relaxed her enough to send her into this room alone, but it hadn’t been enough to hold the pain at bay.
She saw the Kingdom crumbling and with all her inherent drive to stabilize, to strengthen, to shore up, she couldn’t do a damn thing. The whispers against the Mage Guild and truxet were growing stronger, and now there were even whispers about Idivay herself.
Moriko truly believed in the Queen. She was a bold and forward thinker, and she had every faith that within days the Queen would make a bold move against the darkmages flitting through the Cities… Living in this compound… Sometimes, living in the Royal apartments. Rolling her face against the slick, cool pillow, she remembered with intricate, cutting clarity, as if the images were carved upon her eyes with needles. Staring at the billowing white curtains in her open doorway, Moriko slid into the memory.
