The Silences of Home

by The Silences of Home (v5. 0) (epub)

  “Very well. You, step forward.” This one was carrying a basket of fruit that glistened, red and blue, yellow, all beaded with water, and Leish’s mouth filled with saliva. His body again, saying, So thirsty, and, Imagine licking the water off before biting—but his mind did not hear, or understand. The night servants brought him fruit, though not much—mostly bread and dried fish and meats, which he ate and did not taste. One of the servants liked to throw the food so that it scattered around Leish, mostly out of his reach. One of the others always gathered it up and placed it closer, neatly, even though his companions jeered at him.

  Just as the basket of fruit was being set down at the Queen’s feet, there was a shout from the door beyond the central fountain. Leish looked away from the fruit, toward the woman who was approaching, running over the bridges and across the sparkling stones.

  Galha rose from her throne. Leish had not seen her stand up so quickly in weeks. She swayed a bit, and the neat semicircle of Queensfolk broke apart with some gasps and mutterings. He had not heard her speak loudly or clearly recently, either, but she did so now, though she was crying as well.

  “Nara! Nara, dearest child, I knew you’d come—” And Lanara was before her, reaching and gathering, talking low and breathlessly.

  “Guards!” Malhan cried, and three appeared, to lead the Queensfolk out of the chamber. By the time they had gone, Galha was seated again, with Lanara on her knees in front of her, holding her hands.

  “You see?” Galha said, and Leish saw that Lanara too was weeping. “This is your only home. You had to return—it called to you.” She bowed her head over their clasped hands.

  “Yes,” Lanara said, and looked up, past the Queen, past Leish, at Malhan. “Of course I did”—her eyes wide with fear or questions.

  They left soon after that, the Queen walking between Malhan and Lanara. The door behind the thrones closed with sound Leish also recalled from the time before the ship and the river and the sea. He lay down and gazed at the basket of fruit until all the colours blurred, as if they had turned to water. He stirred only when the servants came, with their laughter and their quick words, which were harder to understand than those of other Queensfolk. They took away the basket, though the kind servant set two mang on the stone beside Leish. His chain clanked a bit, as he reached for the fruit. After he had eaten, he lay down again, looking up at the tower whose glass was invisible at night. The sky seemed open and close. He tried to imagine wind on his face, or the scent of night blossoms, but could not.

  He heard footsteps. Quiet footsteps, not like the servants’ careless ones. Leish’s chain clanked again as he rolled onto his side to peer into the gloom beyond the fountain. The kind servant, perhaps, with another piece of fruit, or the one who laughed at Leish, returning to paddle in the pool and drink in long, noisy gulps—but no, Leish saw, it was neither of these.

  Ladhra’s bed was wide and firm, its blue and green coverlet smooth except for where Lanara was sitting. She had run up to this tower chamber countless times since she was a girl, and lain in this bed, whispering and giggling until dawn, and sleep. She had never been alone here. She looked at the tapestry, the window, the sunlight on the familiar flagstones—and she felt absence there with her, so large that there was hardly space for anything else.

  “You must stay in Ladhra’s room,” Galha had said as they left the Throne Chamber. “It is clean and ready for you. Go there now, and rest, and we will have food brought up to you. When my own rest is over I shall send for you.” But when the food came—trays of it, piled precariously high—one of the Queensmen who had helped to bring it told Lanara that the Queen would be receiving no more visitors that day. Tomorrow, most certainly—for both the Queen and her consort-scribe were eager to see Lanara after such a long time apart.

  She stared at the trays, spread out on the floor and the desk and even on the broad windowsill. She could not remember eating much on the journey here. She had ridden—no ships going upriver from Fane, or none soon enough—and had hardly paused, it seemed, except sometimes for water. She had felt no hunger. Emptiness, yes, spreading into her body from somewhere else—her mind or her heart, she was not sure. She had tried to ride hard and long, so that she would not sleep, but sleep had found her anyway, sent her tumbling from her horse or spinning into darkness when she had just intended to lie down for a moment.

  “Aldron’s Telling power. . . .” She heard Nellyn’s voice so clearly in her sleep, though she could not bring it back to her when she was awake. And Alea’s: “You’re a fool, Lanara, you and all your people.” Their words tangled with images, bright and scattered, except for one that always came clearly whether she slept or woke: Aldron dying behind the tall white stone with a bloodied spear beside him.

  “Your friend.” Galha had clutched Lanara’s wrist as she said this at the door to Ladhra’s tower. “The Alilan man.”

  “Aldron,” Lanara had said, motionless, her ears humming.

  “Yes—Aldron. Have you seen him? Do you know where he is?”

  “No.” She had wanted to twist away from the Queen’s grip—and this frightened her as much as everything else did. “No—he’s gone, just as he said he would be.” She watched Malhan place his fingers over Galha’s and pry them gently open. He had looked at Lanara, as if something were clear and acknowledged between them. She had shaken her head slightly: No, I don’t understand. I have more questions now than I had before I came. . . .

  When she had seen the first glint of Luhr against the sky, Lanara had thought that her questions had vanished. She had reined in her horse and gazed at the towers and arches, the banners, the long, gleaming road across the sand. And then the Queensguards at the front gate had called out to her, saluting as if she were a returning hero, and she had known the ones in the marketplace too, who had hugged her and welcomed her home. She had sunk into the scents and colours and noises. Yes, I am home—except that Ladhra was dead and the Queen changed almost beyond recognition. All Lanara’s questions had returned and multiplied as she knelt covering Galha’s hands to stop their shaking. And now it was worse, for she was alone in Ladhra’s tower, with silence and absence and piles of food she could not eat.

  “If there were lies about the Raiders’ Land battle,” she said, so that the words would seem reasonable and real, no longer wraiths she could slip away from, “then there may have been other lies.” She remembered the prisoner in Galha’s cabin on the ship, hissing, “Ladhra friend Lanara—Ladhra friend Leish.” His bound arms and chest had oozed as he strained toward her. He was mad then, she thought. He will be worse now. And why would I ever trust his word above my Queen’s? I will wait. Surely things will be better tomorrow, with food and sleep. . . . She lowered her head into her hands.

  The chamber was firelit when she opened her eyes. She was on her side in Ladhra’s bed. She did not remember lying down or sleeping, but her mind and all her limbs felt light and rested. Someone had lit a fire in the hearth and all the trays but one had been removed. She ate a globe of bread and some berries and drank a flagon of water. Then she lit the lantern that stood by the bed and left the tower.

  She could not ask Malhan for the truth—she was certain of this as she walked through the quiet corridors. He was never apart from Galha. She nodded at the Queensguards she passed, and attempted to look confident, unhurried: just a palace-dweller who could not sleep, on her way to the kitchens or a terrace garden. Only when she reached the last corridor did she stop and draw a trembling breath.

  Gellior was on guard tonight. She felt dizzy with relief, then shame, as he cried out her name and reached for her hands. “I heard you’d come back. Thought I’d have to wait for my next day duty to see you—but here you are, and at such an hour. . . .”

  “Yes,” she said, squeezing his hands and slipping hers free. “I know it’s strange—but I can’t sleep. You know I haven’t been back here since . . . well, since before the attack and Ladhra’s death. Now th
at I’m here, I find I can’t stop thinking about her.” True enough, so far—but she looked at his chest, not his face, as she continued more slowly. “I think my mind would be easier if I could see him. The . . . thing that killed her. I saw him on the voyage to the Raiders’ Land, of course, but I was so occupied with other things. Now that I’m not, I must speak to him.”

  “I understand,” Gellior said, and she heard his frown. “But now, child? Could you not wait for morning? I’ll let you in when—”

  “No,” she said, and now she looked up into his eyes. “Please, Gellior. I feel like I’ll never rest again if I don’t do this tonight.”

  He smiled, though he was still frowning too. “Very well. The night servants have already been in to do their work—you won’t be disturbed. You won’t. . . .” He bit the inside of his cheek, glanced over her shoulder. “You’ll be sure not to harm him? For if I do this for you and—”

  She kissed him on his grizzled left cheek. “No, I won’t harm him.” He nodded and turned the key. She held her lantern high as she walked into the darkness, where there would be sleeping birds, and fish bound by glass, and Leish, chained beside Sarhenna’s pool.

  Leish sat up so slowly that the links of his chain made no noise, either against each other or against the stone. The light in Lanara’s hand trembled, and she set it down. Her face was mostly in shadow when she straightened again. She was many paces away from him, and she did not move at all for a long time after she had put the lantern down—but Leish felt his muscles clench in a way that reminded him of fear or expectation.

  “Speak,” she said at last, and the word rang, though it was only a whisper. “Tell me everything,” she went on more loudly, just as he prepared to say, “Why should I speak, when all you want is to hurt me?”

  “Tell you. . . .” he said instead. He saw her flinch at his voice, but she took two steps toward him and the shadows fled her skin.

  “I’ve read the account of what took place here, when your people attacked. A battle before the gates—I read about this. About how you pulled Ladhra from her horse and killed her as your people were fleeing the city.” She ran her tongue over her lips. “But you said her name to me, on the ship. You said you’d been her . . . friend.”

  He was sure now that he felt fear. It was warm where for so long there had been only numbness. It was not fear of her; he knew this after he had named the feeling and felt it grow. He feared no man or woman, no pain, not even thirst or death. But when she fell to her knees before him and said, “Tell me what happened in the city on the night of the attack,” he felt himself grow small and crumpled, and he wanted to moan with the ache of it.

  “No one asks about this before,” he said when he could speak. The Queensfolk words were sharp in his mouth, but they emerged quite smoothly, after all his listening, all the learning he had not realized he was doing. “No Queensperson will believe my truth, if I tell it.”

  “Tell me,” she said, and he did.

  The well shaft was slippery and stank of mildew. There had been no rain in a long time; it was possible to paddle from the bottom of the shaft into the tunnel beyond with head and lantern held above the water. The tunnel stank too, but not as much. There was more air here, more space.

  “There were lanterns shining all along the tunnels leading to the biggest pool. . . .” They were not lit now, of course, but they still hung from old torch brackets. Careless, that they had been left here—but who would ever come to see them and wonder who had brought them? She walked slowly so that she would not fall on the moist ledge, and so that she would see where the lanterns led. She did not even glance at the glittering stones in the walls. Her eyes were steady on the lanterns, which she followed without a false turning to the chamber with the pool and the bridge.

  “Bags hung from the walls. The scribes tended them, always opening them to add parchment or take out stone and brush it, maybe to clean. . . .” No bags now, either, though she had not expected to find any. She held her lantern as close to the pool as she could without losing her balance, as if its feeble light would cut through the murk and show her tablets and scraps of cloth, writing sticks and letters that had not bled away. “There were many scribes—maybe a hundred, maybe more. Men and women, who listened to Baldhron. He said there were people like them in other places. He said there were people like them many years ago, who wrote the truth while queens did not.” She rose and walked along the right-hand wall, which was broken only by the gem patterns. A hundred or more here, she thought as she went carefully across the bridge. I would have known some of them. Ladhra would have. This cannot be true. The wall on the other side of the bridge was rough, studded with metal hooks. She ran her fingers over them one by one, sometimes bending, sometimes reaching high. Thirty-seven hooks, and a bridge, and a pool whose southern tunnel burrowed under the city wall into the open desert and its string of wells.

  So the Sea Raider was right about the chamber beneath the city, she thought as she wove back through the tunnels, but perhaps he lied about who used it, or what they did. Perhaps only his own people used it, and he now wishes to implicate others who will never be found. . . . The Sea Raider’s eyes had not wavered from hers as he spoke to her by the pool. His limbs had been shaking, then rigid—yet his eyes had been still. What he told me about Ladhra—this, at least, I must confirm to be falsehood, she thought as she climbed back up the shaft to which the unlit lanterns had brought her. She felt limp with dread and weariness.

  “There was much blood. On the tapestry was mine, on the floor beside the bed was hers.” Lanara laughed a high, giddy laugh when she looked at the tapestry. She put her lantern up next to it, but this hardly mattered, for it was dawn and the chamber was full of silver light. She saw each thread, each whorl of colour. Everything was clean, even the lightest spaces—and it was impossible to leach blood from weaving completely; there would always be smudges, imperfections that a seeking eye would find. There were no dagger tears in the cloth either, or places where it had been mended. Ladhra didn’t die here. There was a battle before the city gates. I should never have trusted any part of the Sea Raider’s account; he is a ruined man. And the Queen would not deceive me so. Lanara backed up and her legs buckled her to the bed. The prisoner’s face was as vivid to her as if he stood before her, Aldron’s face as well, pale and blood-spattered, and his body motionless on the hot stone of the Raiders’ Land.

  Lanara was still sitting on the bed when she heard footsteps on the stairs—slow, scuffing ones that paused often and were accompanied by a soft blur of words. When Galha and Malhan appeared in the open doorway, Lanara rose and went to them, took Galha’s hand to lead her to the bed. “Please, sit,” she said, thickly, as if her tongue were swollen with thirst. “You should have sent a guard so that I could have come to you and spared you this effort.”

  “No, my dear,” the Queen said, and smiled. A stronger smile than yesterday, perhaps, and her skin looked less sallow in the light, which was golden now instead of silver. “I had to see you here. I could not sleep, so intense was my desire to come to her room—to you.”

  Lanara felt herself smile as well. “I remember this room with such fondness. I’ve been looking at every detail. They’re all so fresh, as if I’d just been here with her yesterday. Why, this tapestry—” she turned, gestured, “—looks just as it always did. I used to stare at it in the dark, after Ladhra had fallen asleep—it always frightened me a bit, but in the morning I forgot my fear. Just a tapestry—and here it is, still.”

  “No.” Galha was frowning, shaking her head. Malhan lifted a hand and took a step forward, but the Queen was already speaking again. “This is not the same tapestry—this is a new one. We put it up after Ladhra—after. . . .”

  Lanara sank to her knees, dizzy, still holding Galha’s hand—but searching as well, brushing the coverlet away from the flagstones. The stains were dark and long, as if a brush, in trying to remove them, had smeared them outward
and ground them even more deeply into the floor.

  “Nara, I have something to tell you. Look at me, child—I must see your face when I speak these words.”

  Lanara did look up, though her fingertips lingered on the stains. She waited for the truth—all of it. For the truth, and then perhaps for understanding.

  “Lanara,” Queen Galha said, smiling still, “who was the daughter of Salanne: you are my daughter now and always, and you will be the next queen of this realm.”

  FORTY-ONE

  Nothing changed. Leish waited, after Lanara’s night visit, for the Queen to come to him and beat him again, for Lanara to ask him more questions, or at least confirm that she believed him or didn’t. But none of these things happened.

  He had trembled, as he told her of the attack. And when he had said, “Ladhra brought me here to swim,” and gestured at the fountain pool so close to him, he had had to close his eyes to keep himself from seeing Ladhra turning to him, smiling, giving him this gift. Lanara had said nothing to him, after her last “Tell me,” and he had not heard her go, or seen her (his eyes still closed against memory). And she had not spoken to him all these weeks since. She sat on a stool by the Queen’s throne and listened to the people who came to weep or stare. Sometimes she spoke to them after the Queen did. But she never glanced at Leish, never once acknowledged him with eyes or words. At first he had been tempted to cry out to her. “Tell the Queen what I told you the other night. Tell everyone gathered here, and see what they think of the truth.” But he had kept silent. He would be overcome otherwise. He would need to think again and feel again; everything would change. And why not? he had demanded of himself the day after Lanara came to him. Why not force change, welcome it, even—for you have no life to lose and nothing to fear. He had been afraid again when the answer came to him. Because I am such a coward that I need this life. He had shied away from the words, retreated from the emotions that had made him tremble. It was easy enough to do; he had been in an empty place for so long before, and he remembered how to return to it.