Court of Fives

by Kate Elliott

  In this villa owned by a princely family, servants swarm like rats. The lacquered tray fends off unwanted questions. No one calls you over to give you a task when you are already about an urgent matter. The guards stationed at the bottom of the tower stairs wave me through. Evidently Father’s nightly tea is already an established fact in his new household, although it is now a servant who brings it, not a loving partner.

  My pulse surges in my ears far beyond the effort of climbing the steps. The air seems to swim past my vision as lamplight flickers. I have to pause to catch my breath on the landing of the second story. An open door looks onto a chamber bare except for a large bed where an orderly is laying out two night-robes. I flinch away from the sight and scurry up two more flights of stairs.

  On the top floor soldiers wearing the Garon badge guard the open door. They wave me to a halt and I am oddly thankful they are so cautious of my father’s safety.

  “Have the rest of the wedding furniture boxed up,” my father is saying to a man whose gray-streaked hair and fleshy back I recognize as belonging to Steward Haredas. “I am sure Lady Menoë has a warehouse in Garon Palace for all the finery.”

  He glances up, alert to the movement at the door. I stand framed by lamplight, the tray in my hand and my face masked. For a moment he does nothing but look.

  Then his nostrils flare as he takes in a sharp breath. His lips silently form my name: Jessamy.

  He has recognized me even in my mask.

  “General, is all well?” Haredas asks. “You look as if you have seen a rat.”

  The steward notices me. He flaps a hand as his brow wrinkles with lines of anger, for unlike my father he sees only what he expects to see. “The general drinks his tea before he goes to his bed, not now. Be away! Must I speak to your supervisor and have you whipped?”

  “No, Haredas, I asked for tea to settle my stomach.” Father wears a mask too: a mask of indifference. But he clenches his left hand. “I will take a few moments to drink it in peace before I descend to greet the guests and my wife.”

  Does his tone bite on the words my wife? Is he embarrassed, or ashamed, or angry that his unwanted daughter has shown up where her presence can harm him?

  Haredas gives a disapproving grunt. “This must be one of the local girls hired in for the feast. Lady Menoë does not allow Efean women among her servants.”

  “Go see that the wagons are being loaded properly,” says Father.

  I step aside to let Haredas leave. He does not give me a second glance.

  “Bring the tea,” says Father in his command voice. As I step into the room, he adds to the soldiers, “Close the doors. I need a few moments without interruption to collect my thoughts before the evening’s ordeal.”

  The guards tap hands to chests. “Yes, General.”

  The doors close.

  I stand in the tower chamber with the father who threw us away. He wears clothes of remarkable richness, a long red silk keldi that falls to his ankles and a red silk jacket trimmed with gold braid and embroidered with shimmering gold thread on the shoulders.

  “Set down the tray and pour,” he says in the firm but not harsh tone of a man used to having raw recruits feel intimidated by his stare. In all the years of my childhood I did not see him lose his temper. No one would call him a gentle man, but he is never rash nor cruel. He is a soldier who has suffered wounds and dealt death, but once after I had accompanied him to his regiment’s encampment and he and I were returning home, he told me that the most painful wound of being an officer was sending men to die.

  I fear what I must tell him. I fear what his answer may be. When I set down the tray and pour, my hand trembles and the stream of tea splashes messily.

  “So, Jessamy, here you are, come where you are forbidden to be.”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “Do you think I do not know my own daughters? Except when they are running on a Fives court, so it seems. I suppose I should not be surprised after discovering you had all this time plotted out a secret campaign and waged it behind my back in direct insubordination of my orders.”

  I set down the pot and rake the mask back from my face. “Do you know what provision Lord Gargaron made for Mother and your other daughters after you abandoned us? Do you?”

  “I did not abandon you! Do you have any idea what would have become of the household if we had fallen with Lord Ottonor? All the years of careful stewardship to maintain our finances in good order were wiped away to nothing by his undisciplined luxuries and endless bad decisions. In one way he was a good man. He gave a humbly born man like me a true chance to flourish by my own efforts. But in the end he did not take care of the people he was responsible for.”

  “Do you think Lord Gargaron has taken care of us?”

  He picks up the cup, takes a long swallow, and sets it down, looking grim. “Why are you here, Jessamy? Have you been mistreated?”

  “Lord Gargaron has had Mother and your other daughters bricked up in Lord Ottonor’s tomb. That’s how he made provision for them!”

  He blinks.

  At first I think he is about to deny it, to protest, to slap down the ugly accusation.

  But I recognize the flashes of expression: the tic of an eye, the quiver of his upper lip, the way his brows draw down and afterward lift; he is running the Rings in his head, assessing the information at hand. My face must look similar when I crouch on the last platform and let the height and spin and speed of the obstacle settle into my brain until the pattern emerges.

  He staggers, barely catching himself on the table.

  “Kiya,” he whispers so softly I cannot truly hear him, but I have seen her name on his lips for all my life, and it looks like nothing else he says because it always shakes him to the heart.

  The agony that twists his face gives me a stab of joy because I want him to suffer the way they must be suffering, knowing he condemned them to a living death.

  He sinks onto a chair, hands braced on his knees. His lips move in a prayer, but he has not the breath to voice it out loud. The spicy fragrance of the steeping tea hits my nose, drawing me hard into the memory of the quiet evenings when we would sit in our courtyard as night embraced our content little family.

  I hate him.

  He gave up Mother’s devotion and our laughter for this sour victory.

  After a while he looks up, and he says, “Jessamy.”

  He sounds so wounded that I cannot help but creep over to him. I kneel as I used to do when I was younger and lean my forehead against the chair with its armrests carved in the manner of firebirds in repose. Mother bought him this chair.

  He rests a hand on my hair and strokes a thumb over its coils.

  “Jessamy,” he says again, as if the shock has torn all other words out of his mouth.

  His raw grief is little enough recompense for the pain but I can’t revel in it. I can’t bear it.

  “You have to get them out,” I whisper. “If anyone can, you can, Father.”

  His voice is hoarse with choked-back tears. Its vulnerability makes me press a hand to my chest lest my heart pound right out of my skin. “It was the very day I got off the ship. I was only twenty years old, wandering around dazed because Efea was a dazzling vision like nothing I had ever imagined. I remember the very moment I saw her in the market. At home we had no garden but for a strip of dirt that my father’s brother cultivated for dill and peppers to flavor the bread. Only at a festival could we afford to trade bread for a few precious, shriveled persimmons, the last of the crop. Then in Efea there was an old woman selling persimmons so bold and orange that they caught my eye. That’s when I saw her. She was laughing.”

  Mother has told the tale of their meeting before but made a jest of it. She tripped and a young foreigner caught her before she fell facedown into a vat of urine. Confusion resulted because neither spoke the language of the other.

  The yearning in his face burns out my hatred. My anger turns to ashes.

  “Did y
ou fall in love with her at first sight?”

  “No one can fall in love at first sight. Love is built over years, not snapped into existence like a flame that can be as easily extinguished. But I was so struck with her beauty and the pure joy of her laugh that something deep within me changed. Where I grew up I never saw beautiful young women laughing boldly in the market, like they belonged there. The poets sing that a man come to foreign soil leaves his heart behind in the familiar and beloved earth of the village where he grew up. But in that one instant my heart leaped all the mountain vastness and the wild and windy sea to come to rest here on Efean earth. I would never go back to the old country. Maybe I was Saroese once. But I am an Efean man now, and I will fight for Efea.”

  “Fight for Lord Gargaron, and his palace, and his ugly schemes.”

  He cuts a hand through the air to silence me. “I suppose it seems to you I did not fight to keep you. That I let ambition sway me. In what gauzy theatrical tale do you think I could have said no to Lord Gargaron? The instant he stepped into the house, our fates were sealed.”

  Tears choke my throat. “We can’t leave them there.”

  His stern voice comforts me. “We won’t leave them there. For her to have a life away from me I can live with. But if I walk away now, knowing what I know, I cannot call myself a man. And if I am not a man, then I might as well be dead. Besides that, it is the worst kind of blasphemy to entomb a pregnant woman. It is spitting into the faces of the gods.”

  “Can you tell the priests?”

  “Don’t be naïve, Jessamy. To get them entombed means at least some priests already know about it. Lord Gargaron has offered them something they want in exchange. Or they fear him. A man like that has many ropes with which to bind people to his will. Now let me think. The City of the Dead is guarded day and night. The tombs are sealed with bricks, impossible to enter or leave unless you break them open.…” He trails off, wiping a hand wearily over his brow.

  “I can get into the tomb through the air shaft,” I say, my voice tentative because I am unsure if he’ll approve of the plan. “If I have rope, a climbing harness, and an ally outside, then the people trapped inside can be lifted out. A diversion, like a fire, will keep the priests’ attention elsewhere. Mother and the girls can’t wear mourning shrouds on the street, so I’ll bring each a change of clothes. Also, it would have to be done at night.”

  His gaze fixes on a point beyond my head as he works through the possibilities. This must be the face he wears in battle: unflappable and deadly serious. “It’s risky, but it could work. You’ll need a Patron ally, someone who can move in and out of the City of the Dead without suspicion. Polodos can help you.”

  “I saw him at Lord Ottonor’s tomb. I tried to tell him, but he wouldn’t believe me. Do you think he has enough courage to aid me?”

  “Do not underestimate Polodos.” He grasps my hands. “Even if he does not, he will obey you because you have the mind and the heart and the courage of a soldier, Jessamy. You should have been my son.”

  My lips curl as I yank my hands out of his. “I don’t want to be your son! I want to be your daughter who matters to you as much as a son would.”

  Another man would protest that I do matter to him, or would push me aside in disgust. He catches my chin in a hand and tips back my head. In his eyes I see myself: not as a reflection but in their brown color, their shape, the thick lashes, the intensity. In the face of his scrutiny I begin to cry silent tears because I want him to care, and I have never truly been sure that he does.

  His mouth tightens. “Never think my daughters do not matter to me. Never believe it. I am proud of all four of you even if I have not known how to show it.” He releases my chin. A smile peeps out as he shakes his head. “Down the air shaft. I suppose that is an idea you picked up from the Fives. I expect you are good, are you not?”

  I have to bite my lower lip to stop from bawling. All I can do is nod.

  “Of course you would be.”

  I put a hand on his knee like a supplicant. “Father, come with me.”

  He sets me back, stands, and takes an agitated turn around the room. “Garon stewards watch me. Garon guards stand at every gate. My movements are under constant scrutiny. My usual military stewards and orderlies have already been sent east to prepare for my travel. Except for Haredas, I am alone among people loyal to Lord Gargaron. After tonight’s feast they mean to parade me at the victory games and then send me east to the war.”

  “That’s when we can do it! The day of the victory games!”

  “They would find me out in a moment. I cannot walk out that door without a guard on either side. Besides that, my involvement would endanger your mother even more. A man who would commit blasphemy to separate her from me will murder her if he knows she is free.”

  He halts at the window to gaze down over the courtyard in its blaze of lamps. The tense set of his shoulders eases as he wills himself into calm.

  “I must go to war, just as I always do. I will fight to keep Efea free from invasion because soldiering is my duty. The king needs me to command his army.” He turns, and I rise, standing at attention as I have been taught. “Freeing your mother and sisters is your task, Jessamy. You must devise an attack and carry it out. I can never see her again, do you understand?”

  I wipe away tears because he has allowed me a glimpse into his five souls, his deepest heart: it isn’t just Gargaron’s ruthlessness he fears, it is his own love for her. If she dies, he will blame himself. He already blames himself. “Yes, I understand.”

  He taps his chest twice, and I respond with the same signal.

  I have been given my orders.

  A bell rings in the courtyard. Servants rush to the feast like the sweep of wind. Women’s laughter spills on the night air, unmarred by grief or care.

  “You can find Polodos at the Least-Hill Inn by the West Harbor,” he adds. He cocks his head as we both hear a noise at the closed doors.

  “Open up at once. General Esladas must see me immediately.”

  I would know Lord Gargaron’s voice anywhere.

  25

  I pull my mask down over my face. The tray is in my hands before the door opens. Father remains at the window.

  With bowed head I step out of the way as Lord Gargaron strides in. He cannot be bothered to glance at a masked servant. All his attention is reserved for the man he has elevated. His disapproval clouds the room.

  “General Esladas, I thought you would be downstairs already. The procession is gathering.”

  Father flips his sleeves, then smooths them. “My apologies, my lord. I am not yet accustomed to the formal manners of a palace and the stately customs by which every nightly meal is embarked upon.” No agitation mars his tone or manner.

  Lord Gargaron’s frown lifts as he joins Father at the window. “It is just as well you’ve lingered here because there is a small matter I wish to speak of while we still have privacy.”

  “My lord.” Father inclines his head obediently.

  Lord Gargaron leans out to examine the courtyard, then steps back as if fearing arrows will pierce him from out of the night. “On the road, it is likely you will be joined by your wife’s brother.”

  “Likely? Is there some doubt of it?”

  “His grandmother insists he be given one final chance to prove he can make something of himself running the Fives, even though I am altogether opposed. Still, I have given my word to allow him a last trial. If he can win at your victory games, he may devote himself to the Fives. If he loses I will finally be allowed to send him into the army as has been my intention all along.”

  He rubs a cheek with a finger, as if rubbing a gloating smile off his lips.

  “My lord.” The acknowledgment offers nothing and betrays nothing.

  “I expect you to keep him close. Let him see how a campaign is run. Give him a chance to prove himself in protected circumstances, with you making the important decisions. Above all else, keep him safe.”

&n
bsp; “What manner of temperament may I expect to be dealing with, my lord?” Father asks with the patience of a man who has overseen any number of hapless lordly whelps sent out to endure their first and possibly only campaigns.

  “He’s a smart boy but naïve. He needs seasoning and experience. The one thing you must cure him of is that he wants people to like him. He is inappropriately friendly toward those who are not of his station. He believes he can rescue forlorn wretches. He has a bad habit of doing favors for people to win their approval.”

  Father is far too disciplined to glance my way but the twitch of his shoulders and the cant of his body betrays that he is abruptly wondering how I got here and who might have helped me.

  “Cleanse him of that desire for camaraderie, if you can. But above all, I need him back sound in mind and whole in body. A few brave injuries would not go amiss to mark him as a good soldier. Your fortune will rise with his, I promise you.”

  I rock back a step to catch myself.

  “My gracious lady wife speaks little of her brother,” Father remarks. “I am not sure she has mentioned him even once within my hearing.”

  “Though close in age, they are not much alike.” Lord Gargaron looks around to see me standing like a statue by the door. He flutters a hand. “Out! These creatures! Too stupid to take initiative.”

  Father’s gaze flicks toward me, then back to his lord. “Good soldiers undertake their duty and accomplish all that they have been ordered to do,” he says as I depart.

  The words are meant for me.

  My head is buzzing. The stone steps slip away, like they are falling farther and farther from my feet, and by the time I reach the bottom I am halfway to flying. Only my trained reflexes keep me from slamming into one of the guards.

  “Slow down!” he barks.

  Panting, I duck my head and slide away at a more measured pace although my heart stumbles.