“Not with lies.” Alea’s voice, at least, was stronger.
“How can you say that? How can you be sure you wouldn’t conceal or change what you knew, if it meant that your people would be spared confusion and misery?”
Alea shook her head but said nothing. Wrung, defeated: a change more shameful than Aldron’s, for he had done something to provoke it.
“Where did he go?” Lanara’s face was much thinner than it had been; Alea only noticed this now. Her eyes looked fevered.
“I don’t know.” Alea had not wanted to say anything more in this place, to this woman who had laughed with her once. They had baked bread, rolling their eyes at Aldron’s loudness and Nellyn’s silence. “He told me he had something to do. I asked him if it involved your Queen—I hoped it would—but he said no. He wouldn’t say anything else, just that he’d have to be alone to do it. And that he wouldn’t come back to me or anyone, after.” She sucked in her breath. It was strange to hear the truth of this after so many months of simply knowing it. “And Nellyn?” she went on, needing to wound, needing to know. “Where is he?”
Lanara made a sound that was like a laugh except for its raggedness. “He said he had to be alone—though he did tell me where. His village. He said he didn’t know if he’d come back to me after.”
Alnissa snatched two handfuls of Alea’s hair and pulled herself up until she was standing. Alea gasped, and Alnissa chortled, and Lanara smiled at them. The quiet that fell then was broken only by the sound of waves—the water stirred by a great back or a fin. Alea felt the quiet as if there had been some change in her and it was her own self rippling outward, in circles.
“Stay here,” Lanara said. “If you won’t stay in Luhr, at least let me find you and your daughter a home somewhere in the realm.”
There was no anger or scorn in Alea’s almost-laugh. “Oh, Lanara, how could I stay in the land where I have known only grief? I lost Aldron here”—and a baby girl, she thought, but this was hers to know, and Nellyn’s—“and I could never live among your Queensfolk without hating the lie of this loss.”
She was rising. Everything felt light: her own body, and Alnissa’s. She wondered whether the shock of her Telling was affecting her belatedly, cloaking her in this calm. Maybe it would dissipate—but it would not matter, for soon she would be far away. She could see the path she would take as clearly as if it were before her now, and lined with beacon fires.
“And you?” she said. “Will you stay in a place that drives you to lie, though you do it out of love?”
Lanara did not stand, and she did not look up at Alea. Alea turned to Leish, who was lying exactly as he had been. I’m sorry—weak words even if they were true, so she did not say them. “Come, little foal,” she did say, to Alnissa. Then she walked—over bridges and stones, past the guards who were waiting for her at the door. “Lanara!” one of them called. “What should we . . . ?” Lanara answered, clear and steadily, “Let her pass, Padhrel. Let her go.”
The sun was low in the sky. The air was cool and fresh, and would be cold before too long. It would be easy travelling, on such an evening. Alea readied their belongings and put Alnissa to her breast. The baby was already asleep when Alea laid her in the red cloth and tied it over shoulder and waist.
She passed the rocks where she had met the horned man, days ago. She had looked for him yesterday as well, and not seen him. Now, as then, there was a woman atop the pile. “Your return will have no ending.” Alea had wanted to ask him why he had told her this, and what it meant. Now she thought she knew. She was sure of it, with a joy that carried her through the city and through the gates and on into the desert.
FORTY-TWO
Lanara was speaking before the guard had closed the door behind her. She was breathless from running, and from the revulsion that had been in her gut and in her throat for weeks—but she spoke anyway. “I know the truth,” she said, and stood gasping, looking down at the Queen.
Galha was lying on her back beneath a blue and green sheet. It was drawn up to her chin; her shoulders, hips, knees, toes jutted beneath the silk. Her eyes were mostly closed, and Lanara thought for a moment that she was asleep or unconscious. All for nothing, then, the sudden entrance—and she did not think she would be able to speak the same words again.
“Lanara,” Malhan said quietly.
The Queen turned her head on the pillow, very slightly, and smiled at her. Lanara took a step back from the bed.
“Alea told the truth about the battle. The truth, when for months you whispered lies about mindpowers and made me imagine I knew your most precious secret.” She paused and breathed, though she was not afraid now that she had begun. “And Leish told me, weeks ago, about the other battle that was really a surprise attack, mounted by Queensfolk as well as Raiders. So you tell me now. Tell me about all your lies—beginning with Ladhra’s death.”
Galha’s lips were dry and cracked, and she moistened them with her tongue. Malhan lifted a goblet from the table beside the bed, but she did not look at him. “I failed her.”
Lanara clenched her hands as she strained to hear the words. When the Queen had first spoken to Alea in the Throne Chamber, Lanara had thought, Her weakness has passed—her voice is the same as it was before. But it was not. It was an old woman’s voice, trembling with air.
“I failed my daughter. I could not fail my people.”
“And how would the truth have failed them?” Lanara said, her own voice softer. “It was an attack led by traitors who knew the palace and the city. It was one of these traitors who killed Ladhra—and yet his name will never be known, and you have made an innocent man responsible for her death. Surely your people deserve to know that it was Baldhron who committed this crime.”
“No. No one will know about his life. When I am recovered and find him, no one will know about his death. No one will know he led a band of Queensfolk traitors. Queensfolk traitors! Imagine what confusion it would have caused if other Queensfolk had known of it. And rebellion”—she drew a shallow, whistling breath—“always breeds rebellion, in time. No: the Sea Raiders had to be our only enemy. And my daughter had to die before the gates of her city.”
Malhan was lighting candles. Eight, ten, fifteen: the round chamber was like a lightroom, though the flames shone only on stone walls and wooden shutters, not glass and sky.
“Many have had to die,” Lanara said. “Aldron, say. He had to, but did not: you were too sloppy, and I was too determined. Did you plunge the spear into him yourself or did you watch someone else do it?”
The Queen’s hair clung to her cheeks when she shook her head. “Dear girl. I’ve killed many people less beloved to me.” Malhan straightened. Lanara felt him looking at her, but she did not turn to him. Galha was smiling again. One of her hands moved; the silk rippled and fluttered smooth. “No one who has not been given the gift of power should ever presume to know how to wield it. Such presumption is naïve and dangerous—I warned Ladhra of this several times. And now you . . . though your words to the Alilan woman made me remember why you must be queen someday.”
“Because I lied so well?” Lanara said, petulant, heartsick, imagining what she and Ladhra could have borne together if they had known the truth.
“Because you spoke wisely. You spoke to save all of us from disaster.”
“Yes,” Lanara said quickly, “and I spoke only because you were so overcome by Alea’s Telling that you could not. Your body’s sickness tells me what you do not, my Queen. It is guilt that weakens you so. The weight of it must be unbearable. Cast it off—I will help you. Your people love you. They will still love you if you—”
“Lanara,” Galha snapped, “why do you mar the memory of your other words with these ones?”
Lanara answered the question as swiftly as the Queen had asked it. “Because there must be honesty between us, at least, if I am really to be your daughter.”
Galha’s right arm emerge
d from beneath the sheet. She extended it so that her fingers wavered in the space between them. “Nara. My sweet girl.” Words and warmth that Lanara had heard before, and could not endure or permit now—so she wrenched the door open and ran from them, over the slippery stone.
Lanara left the palace. She walked through the marketplace and through the city streets beyond it, which were quieter and slanting with shade. She sat on fountain rims and listened to the lazy, droning talk of adults and children’s high-pitched chatter. She remembered when she had come to these streets and fountains with Nellyn. He had beamed at everything, and held her hand, and kissed her ears until she giggled. She looked out of the guardtowers’ windows, at the sand and the distant blot of jungle. People smiled at her, and one old woman bowed a bit. Perhaps she had been present for Lanara’s speech to the “Alilan madwoman,” as Alea was doubtless being called. Lanara bowed back.
She walked all day, three days in a row. At night she returned to the palace, each time expecting the Queen to be waiting for her in Ladhra’s tower chamber—or a Queensguard, anyway, who would summon her to Galha’s side. But the chamber was always empty, its fire lit and welcoming, wine and fresh water in jugs placed on the desk. No one sought her out, and Lanara did not know whether to feel relief or dread.
On the third night she stood at the window, listening to the wind. Her shutters were rattling, and sand was hissing against them like rain. Even during the day the air had been full of sand; the desert had been lost behind curtains of it. Lanara almost threw open her shutters, to feel her breath snatched away and her skin stung, to feel a pain that would wake her. She laid her forehead and fingers against the wood, which was humming. Then she lay down on the bed.
The fire was low when she started awake. The wind was a muted whine. She thought at first that it was the quiet that had woken her, but there was another sound. She lay and tried to hear it above the pounding of her heart. A scraping sound, quite close. She sat up, scrabbled through a pile of clothing and parchment. She whimpered when she felt the cool leather of her dagger’s sheath against her palm. The scraping was louder. Her door was closed; she could see the key still in it. She had been locking the door at night since she returned to Luhr. Its handle was not moving now; nor was the key.
“There was another door.” She turned to the tapestry across from the bed. Of course—Leish had said this, but she had known about the door since she was a child, listening to Ladhra’s indignant protests. The scraping had stopped now, and been replaced by a grating of metal and stone. The tapestry shuddered and angled outward. Lanara leaned forward, thought, Baldhron, even though it could not possibly be Baldhron.
“Do not be afraid,” Queen Galha said.
Lanara nodded slowly. The wind’s whine was between her ears and behind her eyes. Galha’s eyes shone: Lanara saw them clearly in the light of the lantern the Queen held. Her cheeks were shining. She glowed with tears.
“I’m so very sorry. My dearest daughter—my girl. . . .” She took two small steps toward the bed.
“I’m Lanara,” Lanara whispered. She slid back until she felt the wall behind her. She could not draw her dagger from its sheath, though she held it beneath her left hand.
“So sorry, so sorry,” Galha said, moving forward, raising her arm.
“No!” Malhan cried as he ran and reached for her. “Love,” he said more softly, drawing her arm down again, drawing her in against him. “You should not be here. Come away.” He was breathing hard, Lanara saw through the blurring of her own relief. He must have run all along the walkway from the Queenstower to the door, which had still been open.
“No,” Galha murmured, “too much to do—must be sure. . . .”—but she was letting him lead her back to the tapestry, and her eyes were closed.
He looked at Lanara, before he ducked out of sight. He was holding the lantern on the other side of the tapestry; she could hardly see his face. But he paused and his eyes were on her—and then he was gone and the key was scraping the door locked.
Lanara sprang toward the other door, which would take her into the palace. She grasped the key with numb fingers and counted as she tried to turn it: “One, two, three, four, five, six”—the last number wobbly with frustration and panic. When at last it did turn, it made no sound, though the door thudded against the wall. She took the stairs three at a time, her thick leather sandals slipping, her hand clutching the rough stone wall. She had brought no light. Only the familiarity of the twisting staircase allowed her to descend it so quickly and in darkness. She did fall once, near the bottom—but by then she could see the other door, rimmed with the torchlight that flickered in the hallway beyond it.
She did not answer the Queensguard who called out after her, or the one who cried her name at the palace’s western doors. She did not pause until the ground changed from stone to earth—broken earth, rough with fallen branches and sharp dry moss. She stopped and stood panting in the ruin of the Queenswood.
She had not come here since her return. The Queen had told her of the fire: set by the Sea Raiders, of course, who had wanted nothing more than to destroy this living symbol of the Queens’ power. Lanara looked up at the trees that still stood, their branches bare against the sky. She looked at the ones that lay toppled on the ground. Baldhron had come to Ladhra here when there had been leaves and moist earth. She had spurned him here, as she had within the palace; she and Lanara had laughed about it time after time. Lanara could almost see him standing where she was, gloating as the leaves above him vanished into flame. Baldhron, not a Sea Raider—but she would never know it for sure. This one thing uncertain when too much else was clear.
For a time she wandered, trying to find a trunk or stump she might recognize. When she did not, she went out through the gate. The Queensguard outside it raised her eyebrows but said nothing except, “It’s a lovely night, now that the gale’s died down.”
Lanara nodded. “Yes,” she said, mostly to see if she could make her voice bland and careless. “The wind kept me awake for hours, but now that it’s gone, I can’t sleep.”
The guard laughed. “I’d be asleep in a moment, wind or no wind!” As Lanara walked away, the woman said, “Wait, please, Queenswoman Lanara, if you would. I hear . . . they say the Queen’s keeping to her room all the time now. That she’s too ill to walk. The cooks say her food comes back nearly untouched, and it’s only broth to begin with. Is. . . .” She hesitated. Her thumbnail was digging into the wood of her bow. “Is she well?” she went on quickly. “We won’t lose her too, will we?”
Lanara heard love and fear, solid, whole. She tried to smile. “I don’t know.” She touched the Queensguard’s hand, and its white-knuckled grip on the bow loosened just a bit.
Lanara walked past the Queensfolk houses that rose against the palace wall. If she looked at them, her feet might carry her up the well-worn steps to a door she knew, and she might open it and stand waiting for a man who would not come. “You were right,” she might whisper, though it would be no use, speaking to him as if he were in front of her. He was not here, just as he had not been in his tomb chamber with its jewels and its delicate crystal fountain. These places did not hold him.
Luhr’s streets were filled with drifts of blown sand. People would sweep them away in the morning, but for now they stood tall and silent, a desert within the city. In some of the larger squares the sand still swirled. Lanara watched it eddy over her feet and thought of ash. She tried to look at every courtyard and cobblestone and house, at every lazily swinging lantern and fountain basin. My city, she thought, as if thinking this now would help her to remember later.
She searched for Alea in the marketplace, after the sun had risen. When she did not find her, she asked about her. Most people claimed they had never seen her. Some said that they had seen her leave but had not spoken to her at all, ever. “She was mad,” one man said, then glanced away and cleared his throat. “I heard it from someone who saw her. Her baby�
��s the one to pity, I’d say.”
Lanara went to the base of the iben stones, but there was no one at its top. She had refused one, long before, when it had offered her a glimpse of future. She might refuse again, but she wanted the choice at least. “Don’t waste your coins, my lady,” a fruit seller called from his cart. “They’re a ragged bunch that tells only lies—better leave while there’s no one there.” He might remember her if she turned to face him. He might have lynanyn on his cart. She walked away, not seeking any more, just moving.
She would have to go back to Ladhra’s chamber. All her belongings were there, and she would need her knife, and her heavier cloak, and some food. She should have thought before she fled. “Too hasty,” chided Creont in her head. While the sun climbed, she walked aimlessly, mostly in the city, for she would be easier to find in the marketplace. When the sun fell behind the great outer wall, she returned to the palace. She had wasted the day and would not be able to bear another night. She smiled at the Queensguards at the front doors, and went inside.
The sunlight had left the corridors. Lanara walked swiftly beneath the torches, slowing only when she drew close to other people. There were very few of them about now; most would be eating supper. Her own belly grumbled, but she ignored it; when she was well away, she would eat, but not until then. The guard at Ladhra’s tower door straightened when he saw her, and opened his mouth to speak. “I’ve been in the city all day,” she said gaily as he opened the door. “Imagine: all day and part of the night too, and all I want now is some food and a clean tunic.”
She was already running when the door closed behind her. Up the stairs three by three, once trying for four and falling forward onto her hands. She seized the door handle, pushed with all her weight. The chamber was dark: no fire in the hearth, no window open on the last of the daylight.
The Silences of Home Page 41
