She was home, but Aliver was not. Corinn never would be. Dariel and Melio had gone out of the Known World and nobody could say a word about their fate. She was alone. At least Aliver’s body worked its slow way home, escorted by the army that loved him. His body, encased in a simple casket, took one last meandering trip around the Mainland. Mena hoped Aliver would have welcomed that. She thought he would. She thought he would like it very much that his body was being carried the entire way on the shoulders of former slaves who had just weeks before stood in the army that opposed him. So many of them had chosen to stay and had begged for the honor of bearing Aliver home to Acacia. There was a rightness to that, a closing of very old wrongs.
Yes, she thought. He would have liked that very much.
Hearing someone enter, Mena stepped back into the room. Rhrenna, her sister’s former secretary, stood at attention, a collection of papers held to her chest. She bowed her blond head. “I have news,” she said, “from Alecia.”
Of course she did. Rhrenna had nothing if not news. Since Mena’s return to the island a few days before, the Meinish woman had acted as if she were Mena’s personal assistant. She had been a great help, really, leading the princess through her own palace as if she were a visitor new to it. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she had not come back the same and would never feel the same. Or perhaps, with Aliver and Corinn both gone, Acacia itself was not the same.
“I would rather you had news from the Other Lands,” Mena said. “One fair word about Dariel or Melio would be all the news I need for some time.”
“Still nothing from there, I’m afraid. This news, though… Your Majesty, perhaps you should sit down.”
Rhrenna had been nothing but courteous to her. She had not called her Majesty before, though.
“Why, do I look so ill as that?” Mena glanced down at the dress she wore, and nearly started. A dress! A garment of light cotton that flowed all the way to the stone floor, pressed and clean, embroidered with gold thread. This will take some getting used to, she thought. It had been a good thing for her to return directly to Acacia on Elya. She needed time to remember how not to be at war, how to wear a dress and wake in a mild clime and not think constantly about the lives that depended on each decision she made.
“You look very well,” Rhrenna said. “It’s just… the decrees were opened and read before the Senate. They… may surprise you.”
The secretary had her attention now. Not knowing how to read her face, Mena felt a tingling of fear, familiar trepidation. “What’s happened?”
“It’s not anything that you expected.” Rhrenna looked around the empty room. “I feel like somebody should be here with us when I say this.”
“Just speak it.”
“Aliver and Corinn… have made you queen.”
Mena stared at her.
“They both conceded that their children, being illegitimate, should not inherit the throne. That’s how they explained it, at least. You are the only direct, legitimate heir. Only you are married, with the potential to produce a legal heir.” Rhrenna paused, searching Mena to see if she acknowledged that logic. “The Senate agreed. They’ve reratified the decrees already. They had no choice. They had already accepted the decrees Aliver gave them in a locked box. Remember I told you about that? He did that before he flew to meet you. And now, considering the way the people love the Snow King, nobody disputes his and Corinn’s wishes. You are to be queen of Acacia. Nobody opposes it.”
And what if I oppose it? Mena thought.
“There’s more.”
Of course there is.
“You should read it yourself.”
The secretary offered it, but Mena made no move to accept it. After a moment, Rhrenna continued. “Aliver and Corinn have called for an alliance of nations, not an empire. They called it the Sacred Band.” She stopped again. “Do you really want me to-”
“Rhrenna, just tell me, please!”
“It’s a plan to be implemented over time,” Rhrenna said, skimming the pages. “Right now, you are to be queen of the empire. You are to oversee the five provinces as they each form governments. In ten years-or after ten of peace, calm, if all is going well-they gain self-governance. They’ll still be within the empire, I think. But after twenty years the nations are to become truly independent. There are details. More to it than that, but that’s the thrust of it. Eventually, Acacia will be one nation among others. Among equals.” She set the papers down on the desk. “Now that I think about it, I can see why the senators wouldn’t want to interfere with this. Self-rule. You know how many new kings that will make?”
What a grand confusion that will be, Mena thought. But even as she thought it she felt lifted on a tide of relief. It was right. A confusion, but confusion that would no longer rest on a single pair of shoulders. Hers. They trapped me and freed me at the same time. Aliver, you did say you were going to ask a lot of me. Now I understand. Or, I’m starting to.
L ater that afternoon, Mena gathered Aaden and Shen from their lesson with Barad. They took it up at the same open-air classroom in which she and her siblings had received lessons from Jason. Mena ushered them away quickly, thanking Barad but not wanting to stay too long with the memories of the place, or with him. Not that she could escape memories in the palace. Barad’s eyes, though, saw into one. Yet another thing she would have to get accustomed to. Another topic on which she would need to slowly come to trust her older siblings’ wisdom.
The children were unusually quiet as they walked. Only when they reached Elya’s terrace and heard the creature chirrup a greeting did they find voice to ask about what Barad must have told them.
“Is it true?” Aaden asked.
“Many things are true. Which one are you asking about?”
“You’re to be the queen,” Shen answered. She did that sometimes, and Aaden did the same for her, finishing each other’s thoughts as they shared them.
Like twins, Mena thought, looking at them. A pale-skinned boy with light eyes; a brown-skinned girl with dark ones. So different, and yet not. Not for the first time since joining them, she wondered what her child by Melio would have looked like. It was too difficult a thought, though. She pushed it away, knowing that she faced a lifetime of wishing she had had that child with him when she had the chance.
“That’s what I’ve been told,” Mena said. “I never planned that. I don’t… know what it means, really. I don’t know.” She looked at the two of them helplessly. “I’m sorry, but it’s too new. I just don’t know.”
“Melio will be king,” Aaden said, “when he comes back.”
Mena had not had time to consider that. Melio Sharratt, a king. Love him as she did, that was rather hard to imagine. “Let’s pray he comes back, then.”
“I always do,” Aaden said. “Every morning, I ask the Giver to let Dariel and Melio return.”
The boy turned his face away. He watched Elya preen, pretending to be fascinated. Mena knew better. She heard the emotion trying to crawl over his last words. She almost said that she said the same prayers herself. She wanted Melio back beside her so much she walked with a perpetual emptiness inside. It had been there throughout the war, but she noticed it much more acutely now that she was home. Finding Wren here on Acacia when she returned, with a wee babe whom she had named Corinn in her arms, made things both better and worse. Mena was so pleased to be an aunt a third time, so pleased to know that Dariel lived on in the child, and that Corinn would be honored by her as well. What a father Dariel would have been! She could not imagine anyone better suited to it. Instead, though, it was the likes of Rialus Neptos who would soon be arriving back to meet his daughter for the first time. Maybe he would make a good father, too. Mena could not say. Despite the animus she might always feel for him, he had played a part in saving the nation.
How very strange, the turning of fate.
Shen said, “My mother is happy. She said this means I won’t have to worry about being queen.”
“Would you have wo
rried about it?”
The girl caught the question on her lips and paused to consider it. “I’d rather you did it.”
“Me, too,” Aaden said, glancing back. “Don’t tell Mother I…” The words fell from his mouth and dropped out of the air, the sentence unfinished. He began to turn away again, but his aunt did not let him.
“Oh, dear, come,” Mena said. She pulled Aaden in, hugging him tight, and then looked up and motioned with her fingers that Shen should join the embrace. Arms around both of them, she whispered, “You two are good friends now, aren’t you? That would make your parents happy. It makes me happy. Listen, the world surprises us all. Me as much as you. It even surprised Corinn and Aliver. Again and again it finds ways to surprise. It makes things tough sometimes. That’s what it’s been lately. But it won’t always be so hard. We’ve come through so much. We really have.”
“Aunt, what will become of us?” Shen asked.
Mena drew back to see her niece’s face. “What a question to ask! I don’t know the future, child. I only know what’s been, and what I wish will be. And even then I know that I’ll never even really understand what’s been. It confounds me all the time. Nor will what I wish to be ever come to pass exactly as I imagine.”
Shen crossed her eyes. It was such an unexpected, bizarre gesture that at first it alarmed Mena. When the girl’s eyes popped back to normal, Mena saw it for the joke it was. Smiling, she agreed, “You’re right. Life is confusing enough to make you go cross-eyed.”
“But what do you imagine?” Aaden asked. “I know-it won’t happen just perfectly-but still. Tell us.”
“You would have me lay the future before you, made only of my hopes and fears?” Both children nodded. “All right. Here…” Mena took a seat on a couch and motioned for the children to do the same. She had one sit on either side of her, turned them so that they rested their heads on her lap. Elya stopped preening to watch them.
Mena looked up and away from them all. “What I imagine is that you will live magnificent lives,” she said, “and that you will live lives of quiet disappointment. You won’t be able to explain why, but there will always be some failures. You will strive for greatness and justice, and you will help to make our nation wondrous. I’m counting on that. Don’t let me down. You will both be great, but you will also fail at many of the things dearest to you, and people-even ones you love-will disappoint you. You will know great loves and you will have dear friends and you will be part of the great tree of Akaran. You will never be alone. And yet some of those you hold dearest will betray you, or envy you, or covet the things they perceive you to have that they do not. At times-even within a throng of people, despite the noise and clamor of attention-you will feel strangely lost. You will find gifts that are special to you, but you will never understand why such things were thrust upon you. You may curse the world for always, always spinning, never pausing, and yet this motion will be the music to which you dance. In the end, I hope, you will come to feel that none of the life you led could have been any different, any better or worse. You will find meaning in accepting many things you cannot understand or change. And if you live a long life, you’ll grow tired and that will be all right, because you will have done the best you could during your lives.”
Aaden shifted his head as if to look up at her, but Mena stilled him with her palm and pressed him gently back against her knee.
“You will take into the future all that ever has been for us. You will take your mothers and your fathers. You will take all that was Acacia, and all that was Talay, and all that was Mein, and you will take more than that-gifts and memories beyond measure. All of it lives inside you. Because of you, the days to come will be better than the days before this one.”
Mena paused. She flexed her fingers where they touched the two children. “At least, that is how I imagine it. I may be wrong. I am not so old myself. Some say the greater portion of my life is before me. But, dear ones, that’s the future I imagine for you. I wish that it were more, and yet I also know it to be a vast thing, beyond what you can imagine now.” She paused again, unsure how they would respond, if they would be saddened unduly. She did not want that, but she could not lie to them.
She was surprised, then, by the calm with which they answered.
“Let that be so,” Shen said.
And a moment later, Aaden echoed, “Yes, let that be so.”
After a silence, Shen said, “Mena?”
“Yes, love?”
But it was Aaden who answered, “You’ve said many of the things that my mother wrote me in her letter. Shen read it, too. Did you read it, Mena?”
“No.”
“Funny,” Aaden said, “because she wrote the same thing. Almost.”
“Only ‘almost’? What did she say that was different?”
Shen responded. “She wrote all that, and then she said that it was our job to make it better than that. When we’re grown, she said, we should make it better in ways she could not imagine.”
“We will,” Aaden said.
Mena closed her eyes. She tilted her head up slightly, as if she needed to scent the air. When she opened her eyes she was glad the children couldn’t see the tears that escaped them. She was glad her hand-that was a gentle weight on their heads-could just as easily hold them in place. She said, “Of course you will. That’s what you were born for.” End of Book Four
Epilogue
Sire Dagon lingered on the dock after the others had departed the ceremony. He stepped out of the shadow of the Enrapture and stood gazing at the ship. There it was, the new home of His Eminence, the Enraptured Sire Grau. Stacked stories upon stories tall, the Enrapture was not the largest league brig, but it was the most revered, the most sacred. It never docked longer than a few days, never filed a plan of sail, and for most of each year it kept no contact whatsoever with the rest of league society. It floated the world’s seas, followed the currents. It rose and fell with the tides. All the time it did so, the enraptured leaguemen housed within it lived in a state of unending bliss. Sire Grau, having just joined them, had an eternity of floating, dreaming paradise stretching before him.
The bastard, Dagon thought. You lying, conniving bastard. I hope the vessel sinks!
He glanced around to make sure nobody heard his thoughts. He would never let such venom escape him in council, but he was not in council now. The leaguemen and Ishtat and workers draining away toward the town paid him no heed. He wished he did not have to hide his thoughts, as he just had throughout the ceremony. He had stood beside his brothers through the pomp of Grau’s Rapture, watching Grau climb into the casing that was to be his lasting paradise, watching as the casing was winched up into the vessel. Dagon had even intoned the sacred songs, honoring the sire for the life of service he had lived. Complete rubbish. Why would anyone think I’d have anything but hatred for him anyway? He’s ruined me.
Thanks to Grau and his plotting, Dagon was a failure. Having been forced to forfeit his Rapture tithe-part of which went to conclude Grau’s payments-Dagon would never live long enough to earn admittance. The lowliest young league novice in the outer circles of the council had a brighter future than he.
Dagon did not follow the others. He strolled out to the far end of the dock, looking to the west and also south across the open expanse of water. He set a hand on a pylon, a thick stump of wood that he knew was actually the very tip of a massive tree, one that extended far down into the depths of the deep-water dock. A brig caught his eye in the distance, coming in from the west. One of the large ones most often used for crossing the Gray Slopes. He did not recall a brig’s return being planned, but his mind had been on other matters recently.
He tried to take some comfort from being able to absorb the news of the world from the safety of Orlo. Tumultuous events were best studied from a safe distance. He much preferred mulling over the Known World’s turmoil while inhaling the sea breeze blowing in from the west, watching the sun slide toward the watery horizon, as he was doi
ng now. He even took some satisfaction in finding himself somewhat vindicated by recent events. “Who among you, brothers,” he had asked at the last council meeting, “would prefer being prisoner in the Inner Sea to being free leaguemen perched between the two continents?” The answering silence had been gratifying, regardless of the grumbling undertone hidden just beneath it
Watching the brig come in and waiting for the sun to dive into the horizon, he stood cataloging what he knew of recent events. For one, Queen Corinn was no more. Nobody knew what had happened to her, but she never returned from the confrontation with the Santoth. Dead, gone, and good riddance.
Her dragon, Po, circled high over the isle of Acacia one evening, but he never landed. He flew north and gathered his siblings. All four of them ripped off their harnesses and lofted into the air, roaring themselves into freedom. Wild, monstrous freedom. Elya, their mother, could do nothing to restrain them, though she stayed true to Mena.
Aliver had managed to arrange a truce with the Auldek. He even sent them home with his blessing, the Numrek orphans, and a box of children’s toys. Or so went the joke making the rounds among the leaguemen. The vintage had not proved to have the deadly apathetic withdrawals their trials had suggested. That, the people claimed, was Aliver’s doing, the same magical connection with the masses he had employed to help them off the mist during the war with Hanish Mein. The people went on. And then the king had promptly lain down and died! Dagon had tried to win some credit for that, but-injustice!-it all fell on Grau. None of the blame, all of the credit. Hail Grau!
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