by Jill Braden
Back in Thampur, the last long voyages of the season were beginning ahead of the monsoon season and the typhoons that made crossing the Te’Am Ocean to the southern continent so dangerous. If they remembered the minor festival at all, people celebrated by slipping an extra coin to the priests or placing a sweet bun sacrifice on the gold platters at the temples. In Levapur, Thampurians celebrated with fancy dress balls and great feasts of Thampurian dishes, as if it were the King’s birthday rather than a footnote on the maritime calendar.
He swerved around a lower caste Thampurian woman and her twin boys. Under the awning of a yellow and beige striped tent, a basket of fruit appeared inches from his nose.
“Ambrosia fruit! All the way from Thampur! Ours come on the fastest ships, only nine days from port!”
He used to climb the tree in Grandfather’s garden and gorge on the honey-perfumed pink fruits. The best part was the thick nectar that gushed out with each bite.
The seller’s grin widened as he saw Kyam’s expression. He pushed the basket closer to Kyam’s face. “How many, Governor? For you, a special price.”
The ambrosia fruit in the basket looked sun-wilted, but he hadn’t eaten one in years.
Ahead of him, QuiTai moved through the crowd with measured steps, as if she were keeping count of each one. He told himself he could keep sight of her long enough to buy one.
“One, please.”
“Discount if you buy more.”
“One,” he said firmly, as he plucked the least bruised one from the basket and handed over a coin.
As he rushed after QuiTai, he cupped his hand under his lips to catch the juices and bit into the flesh. But there was no juice, and it wasn’t the taste of home he expected. He spit the dry, woody mouthful into his hand and dropped it into the dust.
They were almost past the stalls when a Ponongese woman bumped into Kyam hard enough to spin him. She yelled at him, even though he was sure it had been her fault. He knew he recognized her, but couldn’t immediately put a name to her face. Since he’d moved from his old apartment to the family compound, his relationships with the Ponongese had grown formal and distant. Kyam the painter, they knew. Kyam the governor was just another Thampurian.
Kyam caught up to QuiTai. He almost grabbed her elbow but thought better of it. He didn’t want anyone to think he was dragging her somewhere against her will. The last thing he needed now was a riot.
This was all too easy. That was the most unsettling part. She’d agreed too quickly, as if she’d already known what deal she was prepared to offer. He didn’t trust it. Fate was going to cheat him out of this somehow, and if Fate’s name was pronounced QuiTai, he’d never forgive her.
~ ~ ~
RhiHanya bumped into Governor Zul in a narrow aisle in the marketplace and then scolded him loudly, so everyone would look. That was all she’d been told to do, so she sailed away on a cloud of theatrical indignation as he tried to apologize.
She hurried back to the banyan tree at the edge of the town square. Clusters of Ponongese squatted in the shade of the enormous tree. She stopped short as a little girl ran in front of her.
LiHoun raised his hand to get her attention. RhiHanya picked her way over the women weaving baskets. She made sure her bright orange sarong was secure before she squatted. The gap in her front teeth showed as she grinned at him.
“Have you eaten, brother?”
“Yes, sister. And you?”
She switched to LiHoun’s native language. “We both eat well, thanks to Little Sister. May she have a plump chicken for her rice bowl, and praise the gods, maybe we’ll continue to share.”
He coughed until he gasped in shoulder-wrenching whoops. He turned his head and spat bloody phlegm into the dirt. “It went smoothly?”
“You don’t hear him yelling, do you? She has quick hands. Even I didn’t see what she did, and I was looking.”
LiHoun fished a small spiked huwewe fruit from his pocket and held it out to a gray monkey. It paced at a skittish distance, sat for a moment, and paced again. Then it darted forward and grabbed the huwewe from him. As it scampered up the banyan tree, a gang of bigger monkeys tried to take it from him. LiHoun laughed as a bold monkey ran up his back and stuck a hand into his pocket. Finding it empty, the monkey dashed up the tree and scolded him from a safe branch high overhead.
LiHoun coughed until his face turned ashen. He turned to RhiHanya. “She was a magician’s assistant when she lived on the continent.” He liked knowing more about QuiTai than anyone else. He hoped she wouldn’t decide he knew too much.
“No one gets hands that fast by folding herself into a compartment at the bottom of a cabinet.”
“She only talks about the tricks she doesn’t mind you knowing about.”
RhiHanya watched Kyam and QuiTai emerge from the market. “I hope our Wolf Slayer knows a trick where she can survive being hanged, uncle.”
“She will find a way.” He folded his arms across his knees and rested his chin on them.
“So you think she has something up her sleeves?”
“I know better than to try to figure her out. You’ll drive yourself as mad as nesting gregru if you spend time worrying about her.”
“Of course I’m worried. She’s going to the fortress, isn’t she? That means the sea dragon wouldn’t investigate the murders of SungHi and ChiHui.”
“I told her he wouldn’t.”
“Why doesn’t she tell him we already–” Her mouth snapped shut as he jutted a thumb toward the circle of mothers several feet away. Her sigh was long on suffering.
LiHoun chuckled. “Mad as a gregru.” He formed his hands into beaks and mimicked a pecking fight between the strutting male birds. “Worry about what happens to us if she fails. She is the Wolf Slayer. We are lowly jungle fowl – snacks for those who hunger for power.”
~ ~ ~
Peels of lavender paint clung to the weeds at the base of the funicular station’s ticket shack. Dust coated the single window. A double line of yellow ants flowed across the exposed wood and disappeared into a wide joint.
The back door squeaked open. A Thampurian in a creased uniform stepped out of the ticket shack and kicked a crate toward the door to stop it from swinging closed. He listed as he carried a tin of juam nut oil to a disintegrating shade hut on the other side of the track terminus.
Grabbing a grimy cloth from a nail on a post, he gingerly unscrewed the funicular engine’s fuel tank. He pulled back his fingers between twists to blow on them. The oil tin’s sides collapsed inward until the flow slowed. Air rushed in, popping the sides out again. Amber oil gushed out, then trickled, and finally fell in drops. The operator screwed down the tank cap and wiped his hands on the cloth. He started the engine again, and it belched black smoke. After watching it for a bit, he nodded and returned to the shack.
QuiTai went to the end of the ticket line. As Kyam waited behind her, he noticed her sarong was bulkier than usual. How many times a day did she change clothes, anyway? She was usually so meticulous about her clothes, but her choice this time he found unflattering.
“Seeing as the colonial government is so poor right now, I’ll buy my own funicular ticket. Shall I also buy one for you?” she asked.
He wished she wouldn’t say that where anyone could hear. “Thank you, but I can–”
She turned to the window. “One, please. I’m feeling hopeful. Make it a round trip.”
The quip was vintage QuiTai, but her heart didn’t seem to be in it. Maybe she was thinking ahead to the fortress. He was tempted to give her shoulder a friendly squeeze of support, but then reminded himself that she was his article of transport out of this place. This was business. She always made that clear in the past, so he wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking it was something more this time. It was her choice to face her biggest fear. It was her fault he had to be beside her when she did it.
Kyam told himself he could admire her and still lock her away. But damn it, why? Why was she doing this? And how
was he going to rescue her? She trusted him to do it, maybe because she knew what he’d lose if he didn’t.
Chapter 4: Nashruu Begins
After Kyam brought Nashruu and her servants to the family compound, he muttered an excuse and left her to deal with the household, furniture, luggage, and a million other matters that she of course could manage but wished hadn’t been so abruptly dumped into her manicured hands. Two years living in exile had roughened his edges, she decided. The alternative was that he was simply that rude, or that he hated her. She preferred her first explanation.
She was cross, a mood she had no patience for. Kyam had been out of sorts too, although neither of them would admit to it. If they had, they would have blamed the searing heat of the day, or perhaps – she slapped a gnat that seemed determined to share the shade of her parasol – the abundant insect life with a taste for flesh. Because they were Thampurians, they would never confess that their bad moods had begun when they’d turned to look back at the wharf from the lower funicular station and had seen QuiTai and Voorus huddled together behind a stack of crates at a warehouse door.
Nashruu and Kyam had turned sharply away from the scene when the couple went to greet Mityam Muul. Thankfully, Mityam shuffled so slowly that the funicular left that station before they came up from the wharf, and Nashruu was spared the indignity of sharing a car with them.
On the funicular ride up to the town square, conversation between Kyam and her had gone from strained to unbearable. They seethed in their private hells of jealousy and humiliation. No wonder Kyam took the first opportunity to go pout in privacy. Unfortunately, that left her to handle greeting his servants and moving her staff into the house alone.
The interior of the compound consisted of only two buildings. Back home, wealthy families often had four or more, as each generation added to the clustered houses inside the walls. Squatting women stared at her from inside the smaller of the two buildings. The bright yellow band around their oval pupils glowed in the deep shadows. They held woven fans that they passed over a ring of stones on the ground, probably fanning the coals of a cooking pit. In Thampur, the kitchens were in the main house, but she’d heard it was so hot in Ponong that only the poor cooked in the same building where they slept. She wondered if that was true during winter, too.
The main house looked almost like a typical Thampurian mansion, except for the odd ways in which it didn’t. Every room on the ground floor opened onto the courtyard through glass doors, which she could see through. If there were curtains, they were pulled aside. At least upstairs, the glass in the typhoon shutters was frosted at the bottom, so anyone looking up from the courtyard wouldn’t see much below the ceiling murals, but they still opened onto a shared veranda. Having servants meant never having true privacy, but this was so exposed. She felt as if she would be living in a shop window along the Lirhumet Canal in Surrayya.
Although the wide canopy of a single tree shaded most of the main courtyard, the sun was too brutal to endure for long. Since Kyam hadn’t bothered to introduce his staff, and they didn’t seem inclined to come out to greet her, she’d have to invite herself in and take over.
It struck her that during the years she’d been married to Kyam, they’d spoken, to the best of her memory, six hundred and thirty-nine words to each other. Well over a hundred of those had been exchanged this morning. She wondered when he’d become so chatty. He’d used only four to propose marriage; she’d used one to answer, and those had been a mere formality for both of them. On their fifth anniversary, he’d accidently walked into her parlor and sputtered as he’d grasped frantically behind his back for the doorknob, “Oh, wrong room. You’re looking well. Splendid. Is that a new frock? Color suits you. Is that the boy? Wonderful. Must run. Love to auntie.”
When he returned later today, she would definitely have a few more words to say to him. For the first time in their marriage they would live together, and that meant someone had to change his ways.
~ ~ ~
Stepping into the foyer of the compound’s main house was a bit like crossing the Sea of Erykoli back into Grandfather’s mansion. The dark wood floor and paneled walls cast a welcome hush. It wasn’t that Levapur was loud; it was the bright turquoise and yellow buildings, the squawking birds, and the intense scent of jungle that made it seem as if the island were constantly shouting for her attention. This dark, monochromatic place was like a cool rag on her forehead and cucumber slices for her eyes.
Then the servants shuffled in behind her, and although they apologized, they banged the luggage about and brushed against her, destroying her moment of peace. While the foyer was quite large, twenty people, a small boy, and their collected possessions filled it quickly. She quashed the desire to rush outside and fill her lungs with air. Nerves, Grandfather often said, were an indulgence for women with little else to occupy their time, and she had plenty to do.
First order of business: settle the household.
Before her was a broad staircase behind which she glimpsed a door. If this were grandfather’s mansion, that would be his office. From what she’d seen through the glass doors, there was a formal dining room to her left and a parlor to the right. She hadn’t looked into the outermost rooms of each wing but assumed they were the sorts of spaces one often found in palatial homes, such as a music room, a library, and one of those long, wide rooms that wasn’t big enough or small enough to be of any real use so you hung artworks you didn’t much care for on the walls and only opened the doors for those horrible parties where you couldn’t hear what anyone said and people kept stepping on the hem of your dress.
She realized she wasn’t going to miss Surrayya much. It was too bad that as the governor’s wife she’d be expected to play hostess to the exiles of Levapur. On the voyage over, Cousin Hadre had quipped that for a group of people with dark secrets, the Thampurian citizens living in exile in Levapur were inexplicably dull. It was too bad they didn’t have the nerve to celebrate their wicked reputations. What was the worst that could happen? Someone back in Thampur would get angry? Who cared? This place was freedom from all that.
Khyram escaped from his tutor and threw open the dining room door. “Food!” He rushed inside before anyone thought to grab him. Nashruu knew she should scold her son, but she was hungry and her servants probably were too, so she followed him into the dining hall as if it had been her plan all along.
It was bad enough that Kyam’s servants hadn’t bothered to greet her; did they have to be bad at their jobs, too? It was a nice thought to set out a meal for her, but someone had simply dumped the fruits into silver bowls rather than arrange them with any eye for art. There were no cloths under the bowls to protect the long, polished table. She lifted the heavy lid of an elaborate chaffing dish. The scent of the curry rose in a puff of fragrant steam.
Her maid, Simran, darted forward to take the lid from her. “Please sit, Ma’am.”
Nashruu sank into the seat at the head of the table. The master had bolted for safety rather than grace them with his presence, so she felt entitled to the most comfortable seat.
Simran couldn’t figure out where to put the lid. She devoted her life to making sure everything stayed in its correct place, and this was a small nightmare in the making for her.
“Set it down in a corner for now,” Nashruu told her.
“Where?” Simran wailed.
“On the floor.”
Simran shuddered, but set it down.
“We’ll have to see about training the household staff, won’t we? Assuming they even exist,” Nashruu said.
Her servants laughed. She always wondered if they ever meant it, or if humoring her was like cleaning mud off boots – simply another duty.
“Sit, sit. Someone hand around those plates.” Nashruu extended a graceful hand.
Her servants seemed scandalized, but her son and his tutor plopped into chairs and ladled hefty servings of curry onto their plates. With some urging, the rest of the staff shuffled forward, but they sti
ll waited for someone else to make the bold move.
“Either sit down or I will revoke your articles of transport allowing you to return home.”
The senior staff reluctantly took the seats past her son and tutor. The rest followed the intricate rules of hierarchy to decide if her maid or a footman should sit in a particular place. They perched on the edge of their chairs as if they would run away the moment they were allowed to. Most seemed perplexed by the array of spoons and forks before them.
She suspected they would have eaten much more heartily if she hadn’t been there. Their discomfort was her fault. She’d expected them to have more of a sense of adventure, but perhaps that sort of thing was something only the rich, and socially secure, could risk.
After she had her fill of curry and rice, she rose, but gestured for them to remain sitting. “I’m going upstairs to find my rooms – and hopefully the household staff.”
Definitely fake laughter, she decided, as the staff once again tittered on cue.
“Please feel free to continue your meal. We’ve all had a long trip, and this heat is not to be believed. Take the rest of the afternoon to settle. Tomorrow morning we begin our regular schedule. That means lessons.”
She gave Khyram a meaningful glance. He groaned and slid down in his chair until she could only see the top of his head. He’d been allowed to skip formal lessons on board the Golden Barracuda and spend time on deck, as every Zul male should. Now it was time to return to his books.
“Master Zul! Sit up at once.” The tutor, it seemed, was ready to reclaim control over his pupil. That was one worry off her list.
On her way out of the dining room, Nashruu took the farwriter case from her protesting footman. The doors shut, and she took a deep breath. It was exhausting to be in charge of that many people. She’d managed much of the staff in Grandfather’s house, but they had little need of her direction. On board the ship, few of her servants had been able to perform their regular duties, which made them far more dependent on her for guidance than she’d anticipated. This was the first moment she’d had to herself in over two weeks. What a shame she had no time to enjoy it.
