“Why did you follow me?”
“I arrived before you did,” she laughed. “I’ve been attending this gathering for a while, trying to find some flicker of the truth about Auralia.”
“Why?” Cal-raven glanced anxiously back to the sanctuary. “This has almost nothing to do with Auralia.”
“I was beginning to suspect as much. I have seen the influence of her work. It heals. But that…that was sickness.” She shuddered. “Sometimes distortions can speak the truth. They confirm for me what is real by troubling me with something false.”
She was still holding his hand. He withdrew his—too quickly, he realized, for she stepped away as if offended. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My people might misunderstand.”
“Of course,” she said.
As she led him away, she folded her hands behind her back as if she were still offering them to him. They ascended the stair quickly, and Cal-raven gulped the cleaner air, feeling as if he were rising from a deep, polluted well.
“Sisterly Emeriene brought supper to your room tonight. She was hoping to meet with you.”
Cal-raven bit his lip.
They emerged into the deserted marketplace, where the tents were swaying in a slow and eerie dance.
“You have avoided her since your arrival. You are never where she seeks you. Is it insulting to take orders from one of my helpers?”
“My lady, I have many people to attend to. Holding Abascar together is like trying to catch falling leaves and put them back on the tree. We’ll take your leave soon.” Even he was surprised at the force of his voice.
“Patience, Cal-raven ker Cal-marcus. I told you that I would send for you when I was ready to rescue your two friends from the infirmary. Surely you won’t depart before we’ve restored them. Has your trust run out?” She seemed angry.
“Trust? I trusted you when I arrived here. Did you trust me? No. You hid behind a wall and questioned me.”
She touched his lips to silence him. They stood among the wavering curtains and fluttering awnings in the empty marketplace. He realized that any of those ghostly canvases might conceal a spy.
Then she stepped very close to him and leaned in toward his shoulder. He could smell her perfume sweetening the salty breeze and see the details of the gems swinging gently from her ears.
“Let’s not argue. I understand you, Cal-raven. Deeply, I do. The poisons and seductions spreading through our house make it difficult to live here day after day. Every morning when I walk along the water’s edge, I long to keep walking or to sail away on a ship or to return to the deep forest and listen to birds instead of the constant bargaining and bickering. To stay is wearying and dangerous. But I must stay. I said I would complete what Deuneroi began. He risked his life trying to break the Cent Regus curse. And he died trying to save survivors from Abascar’s ruins.”
Cal-raven found himself holding Cyndere’s shoulders, whether to support her or to hold himself up, he was unsure. “Deuneroi died in Abascar?” Then he found his arms around her. “I am sorry.”
Cyndere did not resist his embrace. “To honor Deuneroi,” she said, “I’ve set plans in motion that will bring strength to New Abascar. I cannot say more yet.” She turned, and in the darkness her eyes were two pools flecked with stars. “You trusted me before. Trust me a little more.”
He heard something more in her voice than a friend’s confidence. It startled him. Even more startling was the surge of emotion that trapped his voice—a powerful pang of loneliness.
“Go back to your room, Cal-raven,” she said. “The people have begun preparing for my mother’s celebration. They’ll be hanging banners on the towers tonight. Draw the curtains across your window so you can sleep. Tomorrow will be eventful.”
He felt the urge to take her hand again.
But a clattering sound behind one of the nearby tables drew their attention. Then faint laughter.
“Who’s there?” Cyndere demanded sharply. “Come out.”
Two figures rose to their feet. Struggling to disentangle his arms from the seashell necklaces of his seductress, Krawg tried to apologize, but it sounded more like a man dying from some severe infection of the lungs. Gelina’s enormous lips parted in the smug smile of a conqueror, and then she strutted off through the marketplace, a riot of clattering beads and swishing veils.
Wide-eyed, Cyndere laughed. “With that,” she said, “I bid you good night.” Wrapping her dark disguise more closely around her, she walked away determinedly, as if it required a great force of will.
Krawg hung his head like a dog who expects to be scolded. But Cal-raven only shook his head. “Come along.”
Behind him the sea roared. He felt so fragile that the thought of going anywhere alone frightened him.
It may have been the incense or the reflections from a thousand murky mirrors. It may have been the endless parade—the haggard and haunted, the wide-eyed and the intoxicated. It may have been the shrouds of perfume they wore or the wave upon wave of music spilling from revelhouses, shacks, and gated gardens.
Whatever it was, Cal-raven forgot himself on the long ascent. Somewhere on the climb, Krawg left him. Stair after stair, avenue after avenue. The guards who laughed at him as he tripped crossing the wrong courtyard were unfamiliar. Was this the right tower? Was this the lift, and was this the right cord to pull to take him to his chamber?
He rose, passing window after window, catching glimpses of platforms, walls, walkways slung from the rock. Trains rolled along the rails, slithering in and out of passages like nocturnal serpents. He thought he saw children climbing ladders to string cords of tiny, sparkling glowstones.
When he stumbled back into his chamber, he patted a happy Hagah and snatched up the cold bottle of ale that waited on the table. The bottle was empty before he drew the towel off the food tray and found a loaf of fresh nectarbread, a small pitcher of cream, sliced ocean-vine apples, olives, crumbling wedges of fragrant blue-flecked cheese, and thick slices of spicy chump sausage. He devoured the sausage with the cheese, folded pieces of bread and dipped them in the cream, and then ate the apples, which proved to be a bit sour.
He was thirsty again but almost too tired to move. He lay back on the bed, wondering how soon the sun would rise. When he closed his eyes, there it was, the red moon’s burn, flickering fiercely in his left eye.
He swung his feet back to the floor, stood up, and then stumbled to regain his balance.
The star he had seen in the chamber before, a diamond of light darting about his room, was back.
Cal-raven walked to the window. There again he saw the flash of the tiny glass in a curtained window of the Heir’s Tower high above.
He knew what it was. Only a few years had passed since he had learned what it meant.
“You win,” he said. “I give up.”
Leaning out the window, he scanned the courtyard below. People were busy there with decorations. Already banners rippled beside his window, swaths of cloth bearing bright emblems of soaring eagles, fish curling in their talons. One of the tall ladders was propped against the wall just beyond his reach.
He climbed out the window.
Clinging to the tightly fitted blocks of the stone, his fingers burning with stonemastery, he spider-walked sideways until he reached the ladder. It extended a fair distance above his window, and he climbed up to the third rung from the top.
The ocean seemed nearer. Its voice was clearer, the waters roiling in the inlet and crashing on the shores. A bat hovered beside his head, squeaking after some frantic moth, and then was gone.
He waited for someone to shout at him, to tell him to get off the ladder. But the people far below were talking wearily amongst themselves.
The other window was right across the avenue from him now. The reflective glass was gone from the window. The curtains had been pulled shut.
This is going to be another mistake, he thought.
He climbed around the side of the ladder, and then he pushed off from the
wall with a hand and a foot. The ladder swayed out from the wall, then brought him back to it. He waited. No one had noticed. He pushed off again.
The ladder moved easily upright, then tipped and fell fast toward the Heir’s Tower. But the distance was far enough that it landed at a lesser incline, and he caught himself against the wall beside a window three levels below his target.
Sweat dripped down his forehead from the effort. He felt strangely exhilarated. Pushing his fingers into the stones, he climbed quickly without looking down. The voices below grew louder as he clambered onto the sill and leapt through the curtains.
He landed in a room surrounded by elegant white candles.
A woman in a white robe stood with her back to him, gazing into a mirror.
He brushed off his hands and said nothing.
“I was beginning to think you’d forgotten,” said Emeriene in a quivering whisper. And then she took slow, uneven steps toward him. “That you’d never come back through my window.”
24
AN OPEN WINDOW
You should be scared of me right now.” Emeriene set the small mirror behind one of the candles. It shot another golden ray to cross the others cast all around the chamber so that she moved in a web of light.
“Terrified,” said Cal-raven, and he meant it. “You’ve been so generous to my people. But you should close the door against anyone who treats you with as much disrespect as I have.”
“My door,” she said, “is always closed these days. And barred.”
“But your window was open.”
“There is something worse than rejection,” she snapped. “There’s a long, slow starvation while I wait for someone to fulfill a vow.”
“You deserve better than Cesylle.” Cal-raven wondered if it was too late to turn back. “And you deserve so much better than me.”
“Perhaps.” She walked to him and without any hesitation reached up to cup her hand behind his head and drew him down to kiss her. Stepping back from him almost as quickly as she had approached, as if burned, she pressed her forearm to her lips and looked away. “But you see? I’m as weak now as you were cowardly then.”
“I should never have run.” He stepped forward, reaching out. “Does he hurt you?”
“Not in the way you mean.” She walked around to the other side of the table. “I was once a beacon for Cesylle. But when he earned the Seers’ favor, anything he could want became available to him. Now brighter things hold his attention. He’s committed our sons to apprenticeships on the islands. He took them away from me, Cal-raven.”
She went to the long, low wooden shelf and unwound her head scarf. Her dark hair spilled down past her shoulders, surprising him. Last he had touched her, that hair had been cut short and neat, just behind her ears.
“He’s a blind man and an idiot,” Cal-raven whispered. “I’ve been gone for six years. But you do not look a day older.”
She paused, then finished unpinning the clusters of gems that hung at her temples. “I expect you to go on lying. If you don’t, I’ll throw you out.” Then she held up a mirror with an oval the size of her small face, and he saw her eyes narrow. “You’ll leave me again, won’t you?”
“House Abascar’s future is to the north.”
He thought she might lash out at him or collapse into tears. Instead she bravely met his gaze. “Then stay for a while, King of Abascar. You never know what might happen. The queen might offer you an island.”
“It would be a mistake.”
“An island?”
“To stay.”
“Trust me,” she said. “In the Expanse every choice is some kind of mistake.”
“I’m getting that feeling.” He walked toward her then, and she sat down on the edge of her bed. He knelt and quietly reached beneath her robe, behind the calf of her right leg, and softly unbound the straps of the cast that protected it. “The Seers have not healed you yet?”
“They’ll never lay a hand on me.”
The cast parted like a shell, and he set it on the floor. Then he took her small foot in his hands. Her hand closed over his shoulder and tightened as if she were in pain.
“I’ve tried to forget you, Em,” he said.
“I understand,” she sighed. “I tried to forget Partayn when we thought he was dead. Then I met you. I asked you to tell me about your home. And you opened a door to places I’d never imagined. With you, I could forget what Partayn must have suffered when beastmen took his caravan. I could forget the dreams I had designed since childhood about what he and I might become. You…you were a whole new world. And then…”
“Then I abandoned you without a good-bye.”
“It was worse with you. You were still alive out there somewhere, choosing other paths, choosing other company. You could have thrown yourself out this window and made it easier for me.”
“I did not love anyone’s company more than yours, Emeriene. But my father expected so much of me. I had to return to him. And now I’ve inherited his burdens, the calamity he prepared.”
“You’re still so principled,” she said bitterly. “You and Partayn—both so much like Cyndere’s Deuneroi. Always with an eye on some higher path than your own pleasure. Always giving up what you want for something more important. How could loving any of you be a mistake? I know that I am selfish. But the stars have gone out. I can’t muster the courage for dreaming or hoping anymore. My boys are gone. Do I give up and drift aimlessly here? Or do I wait, and wait, and hope that the beacon that once shone for me comes around again?”
He closed his hands around her calf, bowed to press his forehead to her knee. “Are you really so alone?”
“I lean against Cyndere,” she said, “my one true friend. And when she leaves me behind to attend to her own secrets, I feel as lost as a sailor clinging to wreckage on the sea.”
“You’re stronger than you think.” He looked up into her face and almost lost his line of thought, for she was still, in all her sadness, so beautiful. Those dark brush strokes like storm clouds over her piercing gaze, that small red twitch of her lips. “You have not abandoned your husband though you have every right to throw him out a window. You do not condemn your children though they follow him.”
“But how could I give them up? It’s too costly.” She combed her fingers through the braided lines of his hair. “Look what I’ve done. Here—a second chance for us. But I gave up too quickly. I made other promises, didn’t I? It’s too late. I cannot walk away with you.”
He stood and, with one arm around the small of her back and another under her bending knees, he lifted her. “Let me carry you then.” He smiled.
He took her through the balcony curtains and out into the air. They lay down on the cushioned bench. He cradled her head on his shoulder. She ran her fingers through the matted braids of his hair.
“Moonlight still loves you.”
“And you,” she said, smiling for the first time, “you look like you’ve been dragged across the floor of the Cragavar, facedown.” She kissed her thumb, pressed it against the right side of his nose, and drew it across the scars. “Such wounds.”
“Barnashum’s been…challenging. It’s made me careless when I shave.” Now she was laughing, closing his mouth with her palm. “I thought you’d died when Abascar fell. And then when the rumors about survivors came, I…” She pressed her hand against his chest. “You don’t know how beautiful—”
He put his fingertips on her lips. “Look up.”
The stars were so stark and cold against the night sky that it almost hurt to look at them.
He sighed and put a hand over his face. “You know why I climbed to your window. You know what I wanted. But I cannot make you any promise, Em. I would drag back the suns of so many days to return to that crossroads where we first met. If I ever find a way…”
“You’re not the only one with a life and a calling, Raven. I made my promise. Empty as it now seems.” She paused. “May I still call you Raven?”
&nbs
p; “Of course,” he said. “But only here, unless you want the world to know our secrets. Promise me, Em. Promise me you’ll be safe.”
“Cesylle spends most of his time beyond these walls, running errands for the Seers. He’s jealous of Ryllion because he wants to be the Seers’ favorite. I think he’s forgotten all about me.”
“And Partayn? Surely it is difficult seeing him all the time, knowing he’ll be king.”
“The heir came back with two thoughts in his head—he wants to sing, and he wants to save those suffering in the Cent Regus Core. And he’s changed. He’s become crass and impulsive. Braver, too. He devotes himself to planning the prisoners’ rescue. He and Cyndere rarely sleep. They’re two hands holding one sword, fighting their own house to save it.”
Cal-raven stared out at the sea, and it seemed that she had spoken some word of incantation that turned loose troubling spirits. “What do you mean ‘planning the prisoners’ rescue’?”
Emeriene was silent for a while, then bowed her head. “Perhaps I’m not so good with promises after all. I said I wouldn’t tell.”
“I need to know this,” he said.
“You’ll find out soon,” she said. “Cyndere has a scheme and a part for you to play in it. She knows you’re a stonemaster, a strategist, a king with powers at his command.”
“That’s what she was hinting at. The plan!” He sat up straight. “Cyndere plans to rescue the Cent Regus captives. That beastman she sent to me. He’s helping her, isn’t he? He’s going to help her save the prisoners!”
“Who do you think rescued Partayn?”
“Give me a moment.” Cal-raven rose and paced back and forth on the balcony. “Oh, this world is too big. Too many slaves. Too many monsters. I am king of Abascar. That should mean something. I should be able to fix what is broken. But I cannot go to the Core to help the slaves. I have a clear vision, a path I must not stray from. Yet if I refuse to help Cyndere, what kind of man am I?”
Raven's Ladder Page 27
