The Queen of Sorrow

by Sarah Beth Durst

  “Always,” Mother said.

  “Not always. You haven’t told Ven that you missed him yet.”

  Ven reached across the table and covered his sister’s hand with his. That’s Sira, he thought, always seeing good, even where there wasn’t any. He shouldn’t have stayed away for so long. As long as she was here, he could weather whatever Mother said. Sira beamed back at him with the same wide, guileless eyes she’d always had. Changing the subject, he asked Mother, “How’s the border?”

  “Tense.”

  “Any hint what’s going on beyond it?”

  “Been tense over there for years. Worse now. There was some hope when the new queen took over, but then after the invasion failed . . . Yeah, they don’t like us much. Your Majesty, speaking from my professional opinion, if you’re planning a visit, you should bring a squadron with you. Or at least more than just my son.” Mother fixed her eyes on Ven, and he felt like squirming as if he were thirteen and caught borrowing her longbow without permission. “Why didn’t you bring your candidate?”

  “I don’t have one at present,” Ven said. “Queen Daleina has released me from my duties as champion in order to escort Queen Naelin on her mission.”

  “I see.”

  He braced himself as she stared him, an inscrutable look on her face—he couldn’t decide if it was better or worse than her usual look of profound disappointment.

  “After dinner, spar with me, Ven.”

  Her words surprised him . . . and yet didn’t.

  “Of course, Mother.”

  Ven stripped off his armor, leaving him in just a shirt and pants. He laid his knives in a pile, joined by his bow and arrows—when Mother said “spar,” she meant swords and only swords. He then climbed down onto one of the platforms, where she was waiting, just below Mother’s house. “Live steel or wood?” he asked.

  “Live,” Mother said.

  “Wood,” Naelin said, coming out onto the platform behind him. He turned to face her, but he couldn’t read her expression. Her eyes looked hollow, as if she hadn’t slept in days, though he knew she had. Or thought she had.

  “Your Majesty, with all due respect . . .” Mother began.

  “I need him whole,” Naelin said.

  Ouch. “I can handle myself,” Ven said. He’d sparred with the best champions in Aratay, trained for years, kept himself at peak readiness. His mother was seventy years old. Surely she must have slowed by now.

  Surely . . .

  “Of course you can,” Naelin said. “Use wood anyway.”

  He saw Mother smirk, but she picked up two practice swords. He knew they didn’t have bladed edges, but they were vicious things: hardened oak with weights shot through them. Looking at them made his arms and legs ache—he knew the kind of bruises they could leave. Mother tossed him one as if it weighed nothing. Catching it, he rocked back a step, and she smirked again. She was going to enjoy this.

  I shouldn’t have said yes. What am I trying to prove?

  At the same time, though, how could I say no?

  No was never an option here.

  Sira approached him with a jar of ointment. He smelled mint and the acrid stench of redberries—a bruise-soothing mixture. Wiggling the jar, she smiled at him. “I’m ready. Would you like me to sing while you fight?”

  “Oh, Sira.” Mother sighed.

  “Yes,” Ven said firmly. “I’d love that.”

  Sira asked Naelin, “Can you provide a rhythm? Beat that hide with the stick, an even rhythm. Bah, bah-bah, bah, bah-bah . . .” A tanned squirrel skin was stretched across a frame in one corner. Ven stretched out his arms, getting used to the weight of the wooden sword as Naelin began the beat.

  Sira began to sing, deep and low, an old battle hymn, and Mother leapt off the platform and landed in a crouch on a lower branch. “Come on, boy!” she called.

  Seventy years old.

  She hasn’t slowed a bit.

  He jumped down, and she was charging at him before he’d even landed. He sprang up to block her blade. The force shook through his muscles, but he held steady. She pulled back and was swinging again, a swift strike toward his side. He dodged and danced backward, noticing as he did that the limb she’d chosen was narrow, with the thickest part behind her. It bent beneath him, bouncing him up a quarter of an inch. He added that into his calculations as he dodged and struck.

  She was as nimble as he’d remembered. More so.

  From above them on the platform, Sira’s voice soared. His body absorbed the rhythm of the drumbeats, which he knew was one of Mother’s tricks: her enemy would move subconsciously with the beat, while she would remain unpredictable. He concentrated on making his strikes staccato, out of sync with the song, but she adjusted quickly, blocking and striking back with all the ferocity of . . . of a mother whose son has wronged her.

  “I am sorry for not sending word,” Ven said.

  “You should be.” She wasn’t winded. But then, neither was Ven.

  “You raised me to face what battles came my way, and so I did.”

  Strike, block, spin.

  Balance.

  Adjust for the bounce in the branch.

  Position the feet, and lunge. Strike, punch, kick. And duck.

  Thwack. He felt the flat of the wooden blade hit his side. Breath hissed through his teeth. Mother didn’t let him recover. She was on him again, strikes and jabs that he parried back. He shot one look at Naelin, to be certain she was still safe while his attention was diverted—he wouldn’t put it past his mother to use her against him. Sure enough, Mother saw the glance and used it, racing up the branch to swing hard at the support that held the platform level.

  She wouldn’t . . .

  She did.

  With the wood sword, she hit the support so hard that it was knocked out of position. The platform jerked down, and Sira’s song cut off in a shriek. The drum stopped, and Ven immediately raced toward them—to where Mother waited.

  He saw her but didn’t slow. He let the blow hit him, bending so that it impacted his back instead of his neck, and he bashed into the support until it wedged into position. The platform jerked again, steady. He saw Naelin help pull Sira back—both of them safe.

  Grabbing a branch, he swung to land in the crook of another tree’s branches.

  Mother did not pursue. “Still thinking with your heart instead of your mind. You will never be a truly great champion until you conquer that.”

  He’d heard all of this before. “I am not choosing love over duty, Mother. I am choosing both.” Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a spirit: a large air spirit, with translucent wings and a body that blended into the leaves, and he made the calculation. Then he leaped the one direction Mother wouldn’t suspect: backward against the same weakened support, knocking it out completely. The wood slammed into Mother, sending her flying onto her back.

  As the platform fell, the air spirit swooped in with a cry, catching Naelin and Sira on its back with its translucent wings spread wide. Below them, the platform tumbled down, hitting against the branches below.

  He watched Sira and Naelin be delivered safely back to the house, and then he laid down his practice sword and offered his hand to his mother, hoping she wasn’t bruised too badly. “Do you concede?”

  She didn’t take his hand. “No.”

  Ven scooped up his sword again just in time.

  Chapter 16

  From a platform with drying laundry, Naelin watched Ven and his mother continue whacking at each other as if nothing would give them greater joy than to decapitate the other. Keeping a safe distance, Naelin sipped at a mug of willowbark tea. Beside her, Sira hummed and swayed side to side.

  “It’s nice to have Ven home,” Sira said serenely. “Mother’s happy.”

  Zenda landed a vicious strike on his thigh. Yelping, he flinched, but then lunged only an instant later to hit her shoulder. The impact sounded like a branch cracking. His mother didn’t slow. “She is?” Naelin asked.

&nb
sp; Sira waved her hand at the two fighters. “This is how she and Ven talk.”

  Taking another sip of tea, Naelin watched them for another moment. “They should try nouns and verbs.”

  Sira giggled.

  Naelin put down her tea. Maybe they’d stayed long enough. Especially if Ven’s mother was this angry. “We should keep traveling.” If she summoned a few nocturnal flying spirits, they could fly through the night and be at the capital of Semo well before dawn.

  “You shouldn’t cross the border in the dark—the Semoian spirits won’t like it. Stay here tonight, and cross at dawn. Please, Your Majesty.” She was smiling at Naelin with a hopeful, childlike expression. “Let them have their reunion.”

  Looking at her, Naelin couldn’t say no. She couldn’t crush the light in those eyes. Now I see why Ven has his hero complex. His sister was exactly the kind of person he’d be drawn to defend. She may have been his older sister, but there was an innocence to her that made you want to protect her. Naelin thought that Ven’s decision to become a champion might have had as much to do with wanting to protect Sira and make the world safe for her as it did with his mother’s training and expectations.

  “The first stars are about to appear, and it’s time for me to welcome the night. Would you like to come with me to sing them into shining?” Sira asked shyly, as if she’d asked and been denied a hundred times. Naelin would rather have kicked a kitten than say no. She glanced once back at Ven and his mother, who were dodging between shadows as they leapt from branch to branch.

  “I’d love to come with you,” Naelin said.

  With a happy chirp, Sira scrambled up the side of the tree, swinging from rope to rope as she climbed even higher up. Naelin hesitated for only a second, then climbed after her.

  Sira was as nimble as a squirrel with apparently zero fear of plummeting to her death. Reaching out with her mind, Naelin reassured herself that there were ample air spirits to catch them both if they fell again, and then she sharply withdrew her mind. I’m doing it again. Depending on them, as if they were trustworthy. She climbed higher, not as nimbly as Sira but equally without fear. If I fall, I fall, and that will be my fate.

  They rose higher into the canopy than Naelin thought possible, or wise. The branches that held them bent and swayed, and Naelin clung to them, trying to convince herself they weren’t going to snap, that Sira wouldn’t lead her too high for humans to climb.

  “You’re afraid of the forest floor, but not of this?” Naelin asked.

  From above her, she heard Sira’s tinkling laugh. “Ven told you that story, did he? I’ll happily walk on the ground, but only when it holds an interesting story to sing. Right now, the best stories are up in the trees.”

  Naelin climbed higher until she was above the canopy. Her hands and feet splayed wide on four different branches to keep her balance.

  She felt the sun on her back before she saw it.

  “Look, it’s nearly set.” Sira’s voice was filled with reverence, and then she lifted her face toward the soft rose light and began to sing. From across the canopy, other distant voices melded with hers—her melody wrapped around another’s, at first discordant then blending together, the notes dancing around one another, touching and breaking apart.

  Naelin heard a touch of sadness inside the sweet melody, and at first she thought she’d imagined it, but then the minor notes began to pile on top of one another, sung in Sira’s sweet voice and echoed by the countless other canopy singers across the roof of Aratay. The dying sun hit the yellows and reds of the autumn leaves, and fire spirits danced in the light, and then the sun sank and spread into the west.

  A single note, low and vibrating, sang out as the final drop of gold disappeared. Naelin felt the note deep in her bones. And then the note soared up and up, higher, and Sira pointed to the east, where a single star shone, bright against the deep blue. “I call the first star Hope,” Sira said. She then pointed to a faint dot in the northeast, a hand’s spread away from the first star. “And the second star Courage.”

  “That’s lovely,” Naelin said.

  “It’s from the Song of the First, about the first queen of Renthia, who looked to the sky for hope and courage in the days when the land was only wildness.” She looked shyly at Naelin. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.” Naelin wondered if it was going to be about her and Ven.

  “All the rumors said that when your children were attacked, the wolf Bayn was driven into the untamed lands. How could that be? I know the creatures of the forest, and no animal would willingly cross into the untamed lands.”

  “He ran into the untamed lands to escape.” Naelin sighed, thinking of the wolf who had been a guardian and friend to her children—and to me. “He probably died soon after he crossed. At least, I’ve never heard of anyone surviving the untamed lands.” Still . . . she wanted to hope. After all, he wasn’t like other ordinary animals. Crossing into the untamed lands wasn’t the first unusual thing he’d done. He always seemed to know exactly what they were saying and what they needed. “Have you ever heard of any animals coming out of the untamed lands?”

  “No.” And then she brightened. “But I do know songs about the untamed lands.”

  “Could you sing one for me?”

  “They’re mostly sad. You might prefer a happier song. I know lots about the night sky, and travelers who found their way home. Or I could sing you one about Ven, if you’d like. It embarrasses him, but I like it. I wrote it.”

  Naelin was sure it did embarrass him, but she was equally sure he’d never stop his sister from singing it. Not if it made her happy. “What was he like as a child?”

  “Always serious. Always trying so hard. I think he believes that if he’s strong enough and fights hard enough and runs fast enough and leaps high enough, death won’t catch him. Mother believes that too. She taught it to him.”

  “But not to you?”

  Sira lifted her arms up, letting go of the thin branch she’d held. “I know we’re all stardust, shining in the darkness for a while then winking out. I’m not afraid of dying.” She said it so matter-of-factly, and she looked so fey, a blue shadow against the even darker blue sky, that Naelin believed her.

  Naelin looked to the north. “I used to be afraid of so many things. But everything changed when Erian and Llor were taken.”

  “I felt the world change when they were lost,” Sira said.

  “Thank you.” It seemed the right thing to say. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Bayn. “You said the songs you knew about the untamed lands were ‘mostly’ sad. Are there any that aren’t?” It would be nice if she could think the wolf was all right. He had tried so hard to protect Erian and Llor.

  Opening her mouth, Sira began to sing again, this time with words that flowed out of her like a waterfall:

  Beginning—

  We are here in the darkness, unfolding.

  Opening—

  We are waking in the wildness, molding

  Ourselves into shapes with names.

  Speaking—

  Not alone, we answer, echo, echo,

  We tell the nothingness we came,

  And it embraces us, unfolds us, molds us, names us.

  And then her voice shifted, becoming a tone that did not sound human, and Naelin shivered at how closely she echoed the odd cadence of a spirit:

  You, who have come where you do not belong,

  You, who have come before your time,

  You, who were formed from the formless,

  You, who have called out your name,

  When you should have been nameless,

  We will rip you, rend you, tear you from our world,

  Heal what you have sickened—

  “I thought this one wasn’t a sad song,” Naelin murmured.

  Sira looked startled, as if Naelin had poured water on her head. She broke off her song. “Oh! I’m sorry! I didn’t think! It has hope at the end—the First, our first queen, wasn’t alone. When
all seemed lost and the few people who were left alive were surrounded by spirits bent on their deaths, the First went back into the untamed lands, where we were formed, to pray to the Great Mother, and when the First came out again, she was accompanied by a Protector.”

  “She went into the untamed lands and came out again?” Naelin repeated. She’d never heard a tale like that. “But that’s not possible. No one’s ever done that.”

  “It’s a very old song. It wouldn’t surprise me if only canopy singers know it.”

  “And who was the ‘Protector’?” I’ve heard that term before . . . Queen Merecot’s letter, she remembered, the ransom note. She’d called Bayn the “Protector of Queens.” No one had known what that meant, and Naelin hadn’t thought about it much at the time. She’d been too caught up absorbing the implications of Queen Merecot’s letter to think about the wolf. Odd that the word is associated both with Bayn and this tale of the untamed lands. “What do you know about the ‘Protector’? Who was he or she?”

  Sira thought, tapping her lips with her forefinger. “A few songs mention him—always a him—at the side of the First. Other singers have told me he was the first champion, and that the title simply changed over the years. Except there was only ever one Protector in the songs, and there are many champions. There are those who believe he was a kind of enlightened spirit—or an uncorrupted one, a spirit the way the spirits were supposed to be if the Great Mother had completed her work, devoted to humans instead of despising them, at one with Nature.”

  That didn’t make sense, Naelin thought, at least when it came to Bayn. She’d never heard of an “enlightened spirit.” And the wolf was obviously not a champion.

  “There are also songs that hint the Protector is some kind of immortal, or that he bears an immortal destiny, but those singers were known for being caught up in the beauty of their own poetry, so that could be exaggeration. Do you want to know what I think?” She leaned closer as if she wanted to impart a secret. Her eyes were sparkling and her lips were smiling.

  “Yes, I do. Tell me.”

  “I think the Protector was the First’s lover.”