“It’s not what you think,” Rusk said.
“I know all about what that chain means, brother.” Her face softened as she said, “Do you know about Lira?”
Rusk glanced at Amandera. “She told me that Lira died.”
His eyes clouded with emotion, and she patted him gently on the arm.
“I’m glad you are safe,” she said. “I’m glad you are alive, and I will speak to the High Tazmin about granting you your freedom, brother. Perhaps he will have a place for you in his military. As for ‘saving the world,’ the High Tazmin has that in hand.”
“He has a plan to heal the cataclysm?” I asked, tilting my head to the side questioningly. What was wrong with this girl? She talked like the death of her sister was no more important than the changing seasons and like she was the High Tazmin’s ... pet.
She ignored me.
“I’ll take you to him, brother,” Evanessa said, smiling sweetly. “My heart is full of joy that you are here.”
“You’re so close to the High Tazmin that he will grant you an audience?” Rusk said. Couldn’t he see that Amandera had been right about her? I shifted from foot to foot. Why did I have such a bad feeling about her? Why did she make me want to draw a blade to defend myself?
“We need to leave. Now.” Maybe if I pushed them to leave we could sort all of this out in the air. We needed to get back to the Tooth. Hopefully, it hadn’t been discovered.
“I think she should tell us what the High Tazmin is planning, first,” Amandera said, stepping forward.
“I won’t be telling you anything, rival.”
“Rival?” Rusk asked. He looked like the breath had been knocked out of him. “I thought she was lying.”
“The fact that we are working at cross purposes does not make me a liar,” Amandera said coolly, her arms crossed over her chest. Did her ribs still pain her? If they did, she was masking it well.
But Rusk wasn’t looking at her, he was staring at his sister, shock all over his face … and on hers… satisfaction? She wasn’t like Rusk. He’d rail and rage at a marriage to an enemy. He’d fight it every step. Except he was married to me, wasn’t he? Was it any different?
I studied her and then glanced at Amandera. They were both beautiful, willful, sophisticated and powerful with weaving the Common – if Amandera was to be believed. I supposed it made sense that my father would choose the same types of women as consorts, but I didn’t have time to think about it right now.
“Rusk,” I said gently, taking his hand in mine. His attention as still fully fixed on his sister. “We need to go. Now. While we still can.”
He nodded. “Gather your things, Evanessa. We must go immediately.”
She laughed, a tinkling cultured laugh, nothing real about it. “And leave my home? Ridiculous. These women have bewitched you, brother. Did they tell you the world is crumbling and they need your help? Did they promise you that they would restore your kingdom?” I’d done both those things. “Did they tell you about her unique gift?” She pointed at me. “She’s the reason the world is crumbling. She’s the reason that the High Tazmin has been scouring the countryside with every man he can spare. He needs her to fix it.”
“Well, we’re here now,” Rusk said, his voice tender.
What was he promising her? The plan had always been to leave. Amandera glanced out the window as if she was waiting for something. Her expression was tight. Did she see something out that window? Palace guards? The army of Axum? Did she and Catane plan his arrival here?
“Yes, that’s perfect brother.” Evanessa stood up on her tiptoes and kissed Rusk on the cheek. “We’ll bring her to the High Tazmin. She will be all he needs to right this world.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Amandera said.
“I won’t be going to the High Tazmin. We all need to leave, before we lose our chance.” I bit my lip. Why could no one else see the risk we were running here?
“Choose, brother,” Evanessa said. “Choose your blood, your debt, your world’s future or a woman who made you her slave.”
“Whoa!” I said, “I did no such thing-!”
“Choose!”
A scream came from out the window, solitary and startling, and then the crash of steel and a barrage of shouts joined it. I dropped Rusk’s hand, stunned. Evanessa and Rusk ran to the window. Amandera, alone, was calm.
“Finally,” she said, with a small smile.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!” EVANESSA SHOUTED. She turned to Amandera, “You, traitor! This stinks of your doing. Do you hate the High Tazmin so much that you would turn on him?”
“I don’t hate your husband,” Amandera protested.
A scream and the sound of stones falling pushed me into action. I pulled on Rusk, grabbing Amandera with the other hand.
“We don’t have time to waste!”
Amandera followed me for a few steps, but Rusk was still, his face pained and one hand reached out to Evanessa.
“You can’t go with Amandera, brother. She’s in love with Catane Al’Javeen Nyota the bastard son of the High Tazmin. He’s a dangerous man. He’d steal the throne and kill the High Tazmin.”
Her lovely face took on a look of sadness.
“I don’t care about the High Tazmin, Evanessa. I care about you and I want to see you safe and away from here. Please, come with me!” Rusk said.
“In love?” I raised my eyebrows at Amandera. She had some explaining to do. If Evanessa knew about her obsession with Catane, then it must have started before she came to Axum.
“They’ve secretly been lovers for years,” Evanessa spat. “Before she married the High Tazmin. Before Catane was acknowledged as an heir. It’s disgusting. She’s not worthy of the High Tazmin’s love.”
“You’re a fool,” Amandera said, but it sounded resigned.
So, it was true. She’d had a secret lover for all of her marriage. I might have felt judgmental, but then I’d married Kjexx when I’d needed to, and I had enjoyed it. And I’d still been in love with Rusk the entire time.
“I don’t care if she has three cats and a clay jug as lovers. We need to leave before Catane’s army ransacks this place.” I had to put aside confusion and think of Rusk. What would he want? “We would like you to come with us, Evanessa. You’ll be safe with us, and you can return here when the danger is past.”
“We need to warn the High Tazmin,” Evanessa said, her hands clasped as if she were pleading.
“I’m pretty sure he knows his city is under attack.” Rusk looked torn, like he wanted to keep her safe and give her what she wanted at the same time.
”Please, brother. I love him.”
Rusk shook his head, running his hand through his hair. “He has guards and an army here. It’s you I’m worried about, Evanessa. He will be fine, but you must come with me. I’ll protect you. We can talk about all of this when we are safely away.”
Her torn look, and tiny glimpse at him through her feathery eyelashes were so perfect that if I hadn’t already been looking at it I would never have seen the sly look in her eye.
“I’ll come with you, but only if we warn him first.”
Rusk’s mouth opened and closed twice before he spoke. “It’s too risky. He’d take us as prisoners and then we’d never escape before Catane broke through the defenses here.”
“He won’t deny his favorite consort,” Evanessa said.
Exactly what kind of man was my father to inspire so much devotion from his consorts? I remembered Amandera speaking this way. I glanced at her. Had that been an act? Evanessa claimed she’d been in love with Catane that entire time – and the evidence seemed to support that.
Evanessa’s lower lip jutted out and trembled slightly before she said, “If you say no, then you will have to leave without me.”
“You need to come with us, Evanessa,” I said. She was going to get Rusk killed if she didn’t listen to sense. “Your life depends on it, and so does your brother’s. Come with us willingly, or w
e’ll just have to take you for your own good.”
Evanessa crossed her arms over her chest. My threat fell flat on her stubborn unwillingness.
Rusk’s jaw clenched before he spoke to me, “I can’t do that to my sister. And I can’t leave her here. We’ll do as she asks. We’ll warn her … husband,” he stumbled over that word, “and then we’ll flee together.”
Evanessa smiled, and I started to frown, but Rusk’s expression had taken on a mulish look. He’d chosen her request over mine, that was clear. It tasted bitter in my mouth to be considered second place, but what could I do? We were tethered together. There was no way for us to part, and no way to convince him beyond what I’d already said.
“Lead us there,” he said and Evanessa smiled angelically.
She crossed the room to a small door and led us into a narrow hall beyond.
“I have close access to his throne room,” she said proudly.
She held Rusk’s hand, but the hall was only wide enough for two people to pass through shoulder- to- shoulder and I was forced to follow behind them with Amandera.
“And you thought I was the one to worry about,” Amandera said. “Your san’lelion is leading us to our deaths at the hands of the High Tazmin.”
“You don’t really believe that,” I countered, “or you would be protesting.”
She shrugged.
“Were you really in love with Catane all that time?”
“She wasn’t lying.”
“Then all those things you said to me about your loyalty to the High Tazmin were lies.”
“Not everything is that black and white.”
Ahead of us Evanessa and Rusk murmured together. Had I lost him forever, now? His love for his sister overshadowed his loyalty to me. He hadn’t even listened to me.
I felt lost.
“And her? Can she really love the High Tazmin?”
“I’ve seen it before in some of the prisoners he takes as consorts. It’s a terrifying thing,” Amandera said. She swallowed so hard I could hear it. “But then again, the High Tazmin is a terrifying man.”
I shivered. What was wrong with these women? Evanessa was in love with a man Amandera described as ‘terrifying’ and Amandera was in love with a man who slaughtered without a second thought – someone I would certainly label the same way.
“So all that time when you were hunting me down and thrashing me to get my magic out for the honor of the High Tazmin … ?”
“It wasn’t a lie. With Catane thrust into Axum we had no other choice but to tap into your potential to unweave. Someone is going to have to unweave the cataclysm while the others repair it. We thought that someone would be you. We just didn’t know exactly how to do it – I still don’t.”
“But you knew you needed me,” I said, breathily. I had never suspected a thing. “You took some terrible chances.”
Amandera shrugged. “All of life is rolling the dice. We’re rolling them now. Who knows which of us will still be alive an hour from now? I doubt it will be all of us.”
I shivered. Something about her words rang with truth.
“Here’s the door,” Evanessa said, stopping before a plain entrance at the end of the corridor. “It will open to the side of the throne, and the High Tazmin is not expecting visitors, so you should bow immediately and try not to look threatening. Put your sword away, brother.”
Rusk did as she asked.
“Follow any instructions I give you and I’m sure the High Tazmin will be very pleased with what I’ve brought him.”
My palms were sweating. What if the thing he was pleased to be brought was me? How would I get out of this alive? I swallowed, entering Ra’shara just enough to be ready. If someone was going to die in that room it wasn’t going to be me or Rusk.
CHAPTER TWELVE
EVANESSA FLUNG THE DOOR OPEN and stepped through, kneeling immediately and bowing low. I peered curiously over her head. I’d always wondered what the court of the High Tazmin looked like, and at first glance, it was glorious.
The floors and walls were patterned with mosaics of tiny white, gray, and blue tiles in whorling patterns and stars, like the ceremonial tattoos on my arms. Delicate arches curved over our heads, woven so intricately and skillfully that the eye struggled to follow the path of a single strand of carved stone.
The room was so large that I couldn’t see the other end of it from my vantage point. There were halls and alcoves that dipped out of sight behind painted screens. Candelabras the size of palm trees hung at regularly spaced intervals across the vaulted, muraled ceiling. I thought I caught a glimpse of the painted visage of High Tazminera Aeleria with her bridal gift of a thousand fig trees and another depiction of the dancing war elephants of the Fifth High Tazmin.
Light breezes fluttered filmy curtains in each window and people dotted the room in knots and clusters, their activity impossible to discern at a simple glance. At the head of the room, a raised dais with gilded carvings of elephants and lions sprawled. In its center was an ebony, crimson-padded seat with a low back and elephants on either side, their trunks raised high in an eternal trumpet.
Before the throne, a ring of soldiers, their color flags flying the High Tazmin’s own standard, stood at attention. In front of them, row upon row of perhaps two hundred courtiers had been seated. Chaos ruled among them, some fleeing towards the far end of the room, and all of them with their voices raised, pointing or gesturing madly out the windows at the screams from the courtyard below.
Evanessa was right, we’d come out from the little door almost right beside the dais within the ring of soldiers. We were so close, in fact, that I could see my father, the High Tazmin for the first time in my life.
He was younger than I would have expected – perhaps about fifty – and his garments, fine and well embroidered, were sleeveless. On his arms, his brand was identical to my own – the brand of an heir. He was looking out one of the great windows, leaning over the ledge as if studying something. He spun around as if he felt us enter, and our gazes locked. A stab of fear shot down my spine. His black eyes were the eyes of a predator, and the emotion in them was powerful, although indiscernible to me.
I couldn’t look away, and I didn’t want to. It was as if in that gaze, I might find answers to the culture I’d been raised in, my mother’s death, Catane’s origin, and every other trial of my short life.
It occurred to me, for the first time ever, that he was only a man with the fallibility and vulnerability of any other human. To think of the High Tazmin that way felt almost sacrilegious. I should bow. I should show respect. Somehow, my knees refused to bend.
“Tylira Nyota,” he said, his face expressionless. “I meet you at last.”
Was he not at all concerned about the chaos in his city? Perhaps he felt secure here in the Hall of Doves. Perhaps his power was so great that he felt he could fend of Catane on his own.
“She is my gift to you, greatest High Tazmin,” Evanessa said, rising from her bow. “Spill her blood as you wish.”
I heard Rusk’s sudden inhale and I glanced at him just long enough to see his dumbstruck expression. He hadn’t seen the signs that I had, and her betrayal must sting. I’d comfort him later, if I could. Right now I had to figure out a way to get us out of here alive, and Evanessa with us.
“I hear you’ve been looking for me,” I said. “If you are planning to ask me to be your assassin, as you asked my mother, you can think again.”
I held his gaze in my own, which is how I saw the flick of the corner of his mouth. My mother’s fate amused him. Fury bubbled up within me.
“You’re like a brush fire on the open plain, Tylira. I wouldn’t be such a fool as to send you on an important errand.” He crossed the dais to his throne and sat, one hand lingering on an elephant’s head.
“And yet you had them mark me as your heir,” I said.
Again, there was a flicker of amusement in the corner of his lips, and all at once I realized everything, as if a key had been t
urned in a lock and the chains around my mind had fallen free.
“You marked Catane as your heir, too. You always knew that would make him see me as a target, and that I would defend myself.” I paused, letting my words have their effect on him … and on me. My voice was husky when I continued. “You orchestrated a war between us. Why?”
“Your gift is unique, Tylira.” He pointed to the glowing white heartstone on his forehead. “Your stone doesn’t glow like mine, or Evanessa’s. Yours crackles with the anger of ancient gods. Surely you must realize by now, that a gift like that destroys everything and everyone around it. My ancestor was very clear. Any child born with that gift must die, or we risk the destruction of our very world.”
“But you didn’t know about Catane until his gift was already shaking the foundations of this world,” Amandera said, her tone laced with acid.
The High Tazmin sneered at her. “I see she’s brought you trailing in her wake, mongrel. I thought I told you to keep your disgraced hide from my doorstep.”
I had thought him frightening before. The look he turned on Amandera almost made me melt in terror. She shook slightly, but her posture remained firm. Around us, the court had grown silent. Their finery and orange waterlilies forgotten in the fury of their ruler.
“You failed me when you let her go off on her own. She was meant to be my dog in this fight,” my father said.
“You thought you’d set me out to fight for you, like a dog for his master?” I shook with the rage I struggled to keep pushed down.
“And why not? Born and bred ours. Robbed of a doting mother. You should have been clay in my hands. If only you hadn’t been so headstrong.”
“So clever,” I amended.
“You think so?” He took a step forward. In the hush of the room, his shoe leather squeaked on the mosaic tile floor. Far away I heard running footsteps and shouts, but I could no more turn my attention from the riveting gaze of the High Tazmin than I could move the sun in the sky. “If you are so clever, then tell me, daughter, how you plan to heal this world. I’ll strike a deal with you. Stop the cataclysm, and repair all that it broke and I will make you truly my heir.”
Thunder Rattles High (Unweaving Chronicles Book 3) Page 5
