by Amy Raby
“Which one of those pronouns would you use for me?” asked Rhianne.
“None of them,” said Janto. “You’d be jhe. Uncertain friend.”
She wished she could be more. “Do I want to know what the sixth and seventh forms are?”
“The sixth is dre—enemy. And the seventh form is reserved for the gods. Otte.”
“You have a special pronoun for the gods?”
“Of course we do,” said Janto. “Think about it. Our pronouns communicate the relationship between two beings, and none of the relationships I just described—stranger, friend, enemy—describe the relationship between a mere mortal and a god. Thus we give that relationship its own pronoun. Otte from man to god, otu from god to man.”
“What about between the gods themselves? Say, between the Soldier and the Vagabond?”
Janto shrugged. “Depends on the context. Probably sei because in most of our stories about the gods, they treat one another as brothers.”
“I have a different sort of question for you.” Rhianne marked her place and closed the book. “How long have you been a slave?”
Janto hesitated before answering. “Why do you ask?”
“I want to know if you were captured before or during the war. Don’t worry, I won’t ask for details.”
“During,” he said.
“You fought, then, on Mosar?”
He eyed her warily. “Yes.”
“Then you have some familiarity with Augustan Ceres.”
“The commander in charge of the invasion?” said Janto. “I have the sort of familiarity that comes from fighting against him. I’ve never sat down to dinner with him.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s a monster,” said Janto.
Rhianne shivered. Surely he was exaggerating. “I understand he’s in charge of the forces that invaded your country, and you would naturally harbor ill feelings toward him—”
“I don’t personally despise every enemy commander who targets my country, Princess. I understand they’re under orders and they’re doing their jobs. But Augustan Ceres really is a monster.”
“How do you mean?”
“Early in the attack, when my people saw how outnumbered we were, the royal house sent your Commander Augustan a party of envoys under Sage flag to offer terms of surrender. They were generous. Preferential trade agreements, annual tribute.”
“You can’t blame him for not accepting,” said Rhianne. “Our military men are instructed not to accept conditional surrender.”
“It’s not that. He refused to return our envoys, even though they’d come under Sage flag. He led them out on the beach and staked them, in the full view of those watching from the cliffs. In war, he is ruthless and cruel. When we took Kjallan soldiers as prisoners of war, they were more frightened of him than they were of us. They desperately did not want to be traded back. I never learned why.”
A cold knot of fear gathered in her belly. This was the man she was supposed to marry, a man who would murder a group of envoys who’d come to negotiate under Sage flag? But then, Janto would naturally be biased, and maybe she was naïve about the realities of war. “You don’t know his reasons for doing what he did. He commands the entire Kjallan invading force, and you cannot know his mind. It’s not Augustan who’s ruthless and cruel. War is ruthless and cruel.”
Janto gave her a pitying look. “I cannot agree, Princess. War is harsh, but there is no call for Augustan to be cruel to his own men. For him to murder men under a Sage flag is not only dishonorable; it offends the gods. I would rather be a slave, with my honor intact, than to be wearing that man’s sandals.”
Rhianne bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. He had to be wrong. He had to. Of course he was. He was Mosari, and the Mosari hated all Kjallans, especially the ones involved in the invasion. One could hardly blame him—his country and his people were at stake. She clutched the book of fairy tales to her chest and stood. “I think I’ve had enough language work for today.”
5
Janto waited for Iolo beside the well, rubbing his arms and shivering beneath the oaks. Since his arrival on Kjall, he had yet to feel truly warm. Over his head, the full Vagabond moon, ghostly blue, shone through a tangle of bare branches. The Sage was also up, just a sliver, but the Soldier was not, which made for a dark night.
Leaves crunched along the path, and Janto turned. It was Iolo. He gestured and brought the man into his invisibility shroud.
Iolo stopped short. “That always takes me by surprise.”
“I suppose it must, my appearing out of nowhere.” Crouching, he lowered his hand to the ground and called through the telepathic link. Sashi came running from where he’d been hunting nearby in the forest and ran up onto his shoulder with a chirp of greeting. “Where’s this woman we’re supposed to meet? Sirali, right?”
“She’s jumpy,” said Iolo. “She wouldn’t meet near the slave house, so we’ve got a walk ahead of us.”
“Dark night for it.”
“Vagabond moon, though.” Iolo smiled up at the sky. “An omen for mischief.” He headed into the woods, and Janto followed.
The forest was not a natural one. The trees, evenly spaced, were all the same variety of white oak. Some smaller plants and trees had sprung up in the gaps—weeds, Janto supposed—but the cultivated forest was remarkably open, allowing easy travel.
“How does it work, your shroud?” asked Iolo.
“You’re familiar with the spirit world?”
“Yes . . . well.” Iolo looked confused. “It’s the source of all magic?”
“It’s an entirely separate world. No one understands it fully, but it exists parallel to our own. Your physical body resides in our world, and your soul resides in the spirit world.”
Iolo blinked. “Even if I’m not magical?”
“We’re all magical because we all have souls,” said Janto. “You can call magelight—anyone can—because magelight is your soul’s reflection in the spirit world. But other forms of magic are more complicated. Magic is simply a transference from the spirit world into the real world through a Rift, but opening a Rift is extraordinarily difficult. To simplify the task of magic, one creates a sort of permanent Rift that can be used at will, and one does that by soulcasting. By entrapping a part of one’s soul in another creature, or sometimes an inanimate object, one creates a fracture in the barrier between worlds.”
“Your ferret,” said Iolo. “You cast part of your soul into him. But how do you use him to create a shroud?”
“I find the fracture between worlds,” said Janto, “the one I created by soulcasting. I open it and pull it over myself like a veil, placing myself in the between-space, neither in the real world nor the spirit world. The only hint that I’m in a shroud is my vision’s a little fuzzy, and sometimes I get that rainbow effect around the edges of the veil—see there?” He pointed.
“I see it,” said Iolo. They walked in silence. Then Iolo slowed, looking about. He seemed to find what he sought—a particular tree, which he examined. He altered course. Janto squinted at the tree as he passed it. There was a score mark on it in the shape of a circle.
“Did you hear my conversation with the princess today?” Janto asked.
“Gods, no, I stayed well away. That bodyguard of hers.” Iolo shuddered.
“She asked me something strange. She asked what I thought of Augustan Ceres.”
“Who’s he?”
“The commander of the invasion—I guess you wouldn’t know if you were enslaved before the war.”
“Why would she ask what you thought of the enemy commander?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. She got mad when I told her he was a nasty piece of work. I’m beginning to think he’s her lover or something.” And Augustan didn’t deserve her, the bastard. But maybe he was misinterpreting Rhianne’s interest. She’d been asking as if she’d never met the man. Maybe he was a relative—a distant one. They were nothing alike, after all.
<
br /> “You said she had seaweed for brains.”
“I take that back,” said Janto. “I never have to repeat a thing when I’m teaching her, and Mosari is not an easy language for foreigners. So she’s not stupid. Perhaps a little naïve.”
“I don’t know why you talk to her at all. Isn’t it dangerous?”
Janto shrugged. “Everything I do here is dangerous. Talking to Rhianne may be the least dangerous thing I do, because while I’m not a trained spy, I am a trained diplomat. I know how to talk to people like her, so at least I’m playing to my strengths.”
“But what do you hope to accomplish? She’s not going to leak war intelligence to you. She probably doesn’t know any.”
“I’m not sure yet what I hope to accomplish with the princess,” said Janto. “I just know that having a link to the imperial family is better than not having one.” Also he just plain liked being around her. He knew Iolo would neither approve nor understand, and that it couldn’t go anywhere. But some things couldn’t be denied, and his desire to be near Rhianne was one of them.
They continued through the forest. The ground rose beneath Janto’s feet, and the soft dirt became solid stone. Surf roared as a breaker rolled in somewhere below him. They’d reached the sea. There were no more trees ahead of them, and the empty sky glittered with stars and the crescent Sage.
“Careful,” said Iolo, gripping his arm firmly. “There’s a drop-off in front of us.”
Janto could see it, or at least imagine it, the total blackness of the empty air below them and then the ocean, which stretched toward the western horizon, dotted with glow beacons. The glow beacons would be navigational aids, identifying hazardous places for ships, or perhaps marking a channel.
“Are we in the right place?” asked Janto. “Where’s Sirali?”
They turned simultaneously, looking for her, and Janto spotted her, pressed against a tree and scanning the forest.
Janto dropped his shroud and approached with Iolo at his heels. “Sirali?” he called.
Her head whipped toward them.
“This is the shroud mage I told you about,” said Iolo gently. “The one who’s looking for Ral-Vaddis.”
“Right, and what do you know of Ral-Vaddis?” she asked.
“I’m the man who sent him here,” said Janto. “And since he hasn’t reported in for a while, I’ve come to look for him.”
“Prove it,” said the woman. “Show me you’re a shroud mage.”
Janto approached her slowly. At first he thought her an older woman, but the more he scrutinized her, the less certain he was of her age. It was more that she looked worldly, that any naïveté or innocence she might have possessed had somehow been scrubbed away. Her accent suggested she’d grown up in a Mosari fishing village. He plucked Sashi off his shoulder and cradled him in the crook of his elbow. “Do you see me? Do you see my familiar?”
Sirali nodded.
“Watch closely.” He went invisible and watched with satisfaction as Sirali’s eyes went wide. He became visible again. “Proof enough?”
“Right, and Ral-Vaddis is gone. I don’t know what happened to him.”
Sashi leapt out of Janto’s arms. I’m hungry, he said. Mouse scent here.
Good hunting, said Janto as the creature scampered into the trees. Then to Sirali, “Start at the beginning. How did you know Ral-Vaddis?”
“I work in the palace kitchens,” said Sirali. “Sometimes I serve people in their rooms, or at meetings or parties. Not the big parties, and not the imperials—slaves don’t have access to them people. But I hear things sometimes.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Janto.
“Right, and Ral-Vaddis approached me one day. He said Mosar wanted to know the things the jack-scalders said. He wanted to meet with me once a sagespan—”
“Jack-scalders?” That was a term he hadn’t heard in a while. Near-universal warding spells had rendered pox lesions virtually extinct.
“Kjallans.” She wrinkled her nose. “This is the place we met, right here. I told whatever I heard. And then he stopped coming.”
“Do you have any idea why?” asked Janto.
Sirali shrugged. “Got caught, maybe.”
“And yet he didn’t give you away. Did he?”
“Right, and he didn’t.”
“Don’t you think if they’d caught him, they’d have interrogated him? And if they’d interrogated him, they’d have gotten your name out of him?”
Sirali was silent.
“They would have,” said Janto. “If there’s anything the Kjallans are good at, it’s torture and interrogation.”
“Ral-Vaddis was an important spy,” said Sirali. “I’m a kitchen slave who heard things.”
Janto gave a bitter laugh. “You think you weren’t important enough for them to come after you? If he’d given you up, they would have. Something else happened. Either he didn’t get caught, or he died before he could be interrogated. Did you know anybody else who knew Ral-Vaddis? Perhaps someone who worked for him the way you did, hearing things in the palace and passing them along to him?”
Sirali shook her head. “I met with him alone. I figured he met with other people too, but he didn’t want us to know about each other.”
Janto nodded. That made sense, though it was aggravating now. There could be a dozen or more slaves like Sirali scattered throughout the palace, people who’d worked with Ral-Vaddis, and one or two of them might know something about what had happened to him. But how was he ever to track them all down? “Tell me about the wards in the palace. What types do they lay, where do they lay them, and how often?”
“Across doorways,” said Sirali. “Don’t know what kinds or how often.”
“You’re sure they’re always across doorways? You’ve never seen one laid across a hallway?”
“Right, and I’ve not. Might make it hard for slaves to get around if they had wards over hallways.”
“Sirali, I’ve a task for you. Do you still hear things, in the kitchens and such?”
“Sometimes.”
“I’d like you to continue to report on what you hear, once per week, but to me instead of to Ral-Vaddis.”
“Right, and I’ll do that,” she said. “Whatever stops the jack-scalders from taking Mosar.”
* * *
Rhianne hurried to the Imperial Garden, anxious to get to the appointed meeting spot. She wasn’t late—in fact, she was early. But she wouldn’t risk missing even a moment of her time with Janto. She was beginning to strategize about what she might do after the wedding and the move to Mosar. Could she not convince her uncle to let her bring Janto along? Janto was Mosari, after all, and he was teaching her the language. He could continue in that role, and act as her cultural adviser or something. Janto wouldn’t mind, would he? Mosar was his home. And this was all perfectly innocent.
All right, in her mind and fantasy life, none of this was innocent. But in the real world, with Tamienne keeping a watchful eye over the two of them, they hadn’t so much as touched fingers.
Janto was waiting for her beneath the Poinciana tree. He was early too.
“Cona oleska, na-kali,” she called to him.
Janto’s face broke into his beautiful grin.
Rhianne sighed. “Please tell me I didn’t wish you a good mountain again.”
“No. You said, ‘Good morning, my alligator.’”
“Three gods. I thought I had it right this time!”
“When you add the na- modifier, it changes the vowel sound in kali. It’s confusing, I know. Say it like this. Na-kow-li.”
She repeated the altered pronunciation until she got it right. Then she glanced at him shyly. “It’s not as if you look like an alligator.”
“Perhaps if I were toothier.” He gestured to the bench.
She sat, clutching the book of Mosari mythological tales she’d brought. It would be harder going than the fairy tales, but she was ready for a challenge. In more ways than one. Gods above, she wanted to
touch this man. She eyed the necklace of glass beads he wore around his neck. That seemed a reasonable excuse. “Where did you get this? Can I see?” She reached for it.
He drew away, placing a protective hand over the necklace. “Mosar.”
She withdrew her hand. Rebuffed again. “Why wasn’t it taken from you when you were enslaved?”
“Because it’s worthless.”
“Yet you care about it.”
“If you had but a handful of possessions,” said Janto, “you would care about them too.”
“Fair enough.” If only she could figure him out. She was almost certain he liked her, but he wouldn’t touch her. Maybe it was just Tamienne. “Look, I won’t be here for the next few days.”
“Oh?”
“Augustan Ceres is coming. . . .”
Janto’s jaw dropped.
Rhianne blinked and considered how that must sound to him. “It has nothing to do with the war,” she amended. “That’s still ongoing. But Augustan has been recalled for a few days. For his betrothal.”
Janto’s eyes narrowed. “To whom?”
“Me,” Rhianne said in a small voice.
Janto was silent for several seconds. “Did you have any choice about this?”
“Of course not. Do you think a Kjallan imperial princess gets to choose her marriage partner?” It was the one enormous downside of being what she was. That she would have to marry one man for political reasons while secretly craving another, wholly unsuitable man.
“She might, perhaps, choose among several eligible suitors.”
“Well, that is not what happened,” said Rhianne. “And as for his being a monster, I would like to point out that you are Mosari and have an extraordinarily biased opinion.”
“You are quite correct,” said Janto.
Rhianne eyed him. His response was proper and polite, yet it chafed. For the past few days, he had not hesitated to push back when he’d disagreed with her, and she’d rather enjoyed arguing with him. He reminded her of Lucien, the sort of man she could enjoy an easy back-and-forth with and not worry that, like Florian, he was going to lose his temper, or, like so many of the lower-ranking men around the palace, he would be intimidated by her rank and refuse to challenge her. But now he was simply agreeing with her even when she knew perfectly well he didn’t, and she feared it was because he felt sorry for her.
