Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  Contents

  Copyright Information

  Also by Sylvia Kelso

  dedication

  Acknowledgements

  MAPS

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © 2017 by Sylvia Kelso

  Cover art copyright © 2017 by Chris Howard

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidepress.com

  Also by Sylvia Kelso

  Amberlight

  Riversend

  Source

  dedication

  In memory of my parents

  Acknowledgements

  Many more thanks to the ever-patient Carla Coupe, a model among editors, and to Chris Howard for matching patience over the cover art.

  MAPS

  Chapter I

  His nickname is woven through my life’s oldest memories. Yet when the crown prince of Dhasdein first crossed our path in the flesh, by human time I was already twelve years old.

  I say human time, though Two grows impatient with such words as “years” and “human,” especially where we are concerned. Small wonder, since my mother estimates Two’s memory runs for seven centuries and more, back to the founding of the oldest House of Amberlight. But I need human terms to measure space and interval, to divide Two’s memories from those of my own flesh and blood. And even before we could speak aloud, the recollections of this flesh involve that name.

  It comes first in a rare snippet from within my cradle: my mother’s quick, slightly burred Uphill Amberlight accent, its vibrations familiar from the womb. “. . . more to a prince than that?” My father Alkhes’ plosive consonants, clinching home the broad Quetzistani “a”:

  “Prince? The man’s a blighted dragonfly!”

  When I was old enough to place the word, Two gave me an image to match: insects like jewelled daggerettes darting, hovering above water, glittering scarlet, glistening lapis lazuli, and the gauze shimmer of their wings. So for our first five years in human time, Dhasdein to me remained some fabulous insect empire, ruled by the most glorious flying creatures of them all.

  I tried to explain that to my father Sarth, when in human time I was just three. Learning to speak, my word-hoard already a prodigy, though Two understood far more than I. So she had pushed us into the council room after that mirror-signal came: double urgent, passed up from the River at Marbleport, triggering a full council, Telluir House and Iskarda village both.

  The council-room latch was beyond my reach, but Zuri, Trouble-head and hence perpetually belated, was the last person in. I ducked between her shin and the swinging door and she grunted as she mis-stepped clear of me. Catching the back of my smock, she grunted again as Two sparked at her, however mildly. Then she scanned the table, scooped up and dropped me in my father Sarth’s lap, growling, “Take care of this.”

  Twisting in his arm, trampling for balance on his thigh’s familiar warm solidity, I got upright enough to see over the table edge.

  At its head my mother was just ready to speak: high-boned Amberlight nose leveled, brandy-brown eyes narrowed, rampant curls escaping a Crafter’s single plait. Opposite us sat my father Alkhes, that wing of silky black hair such an anomaly among the brown, crinkle-curly heads of native Amberlight, but his green and brown gear a match for the cloth under my feet. Like the enduring, so-slight tension that spoke from them both, warning, troublecrew: alert, war, danger. Off-duty or not.

  Troublecrew extraordinary, Zuri slid in beside Sarth. Under the table, their knees brushed. I knew they were both part of my mother’s consort, if I could not yet understand more. He must have passed some eye-message, though, because my father Alkhes rolled his own eyes half-up. Let be. And turned his attention, as my mother drew open the signalers’ scroll and began to read.

  Two can reclaim her words intact. I scanned reactions, which I was just learning to decode. Next down-table were the Craft-heads and specialists: I read uncertainty there, impatience over postponed work. Beyond them sat the village folk: Zdana, the Mother’s Ear. The village Head, Darthis.

  Zdana was mute. Darthis, monumental as a boulder, sat stiff enough to emulate one. My father Sarth’s knee was rigid under my foot, my father Alkhes’ stillness had tightened till my belly squirmed. Through them all ran a deeper thread of what I recognise now as fear. Familiar fear.

  My mother let the scroll run shut. I looked to the twin bastions of Iatha and Hanni, posted at her elbows. House-steward and Head’s aide. I still classified them by look and smell: Iatha’s salt-grizzled plait and raw cheekbones, Hanni’s prim expression and scent of records and ink. But it was Hayras, the shapers’ Craft-head, who grumbled, “They never learn.”

  I could already interpret Zuri’s suppressed twitch as an irritable, What did you expect? Crisp with her own irritation, Iatha finished the familiar exchange.

  “It’s Dhasdein.”

  Hanni tightened her lips. My mother nudged the scroll with a fingertip.

  “The Empire’s respect for allies, affirmed. Patience, certainly required, the cause understood. But surely, for imperial convenience, we could fulfil our promise—could offer just one small prophecy? After three whole years?”

  The whole table growled. Exasperation, protectiveness, wrath. My father Alkhes fairly spat the verbal version. “She’s too young!”

  The rest exploded then. Outrage, details, suggestions cracked together like burning sticks while with her council craft my mother let them burn the upset out. Until my father Sarth spoke, that pure Tower accent and effortless projection overriding everyone.

  “Signed by the Empress?”

  Everybody stopped. The eyes all turned. Surprise, spinning sharply to respect.

  I had seen my mother’s tiny, almost wry smile before, as I would see it over and over again after. The salute of a duellist, to a master in the art.

  She said, “Signed by the crown prince.”

  The uproar burst again. Sentence shards slapped over me, bearing atop them Ahio the shaper’s outraged bawl. “—make him her hatchet-man!”

  A couple of people laughed. My father Alkhes did not. And before my father Sarth spoke, his belly muscles had clenched in a way I already recognised.

  “The Crown Prince Therkon was famed as a wastrel and a libertine. In his father’s day, shrewd camouflage. His mother weighs him better. Nor does she fear to give that worth its use.”

  The pause this time was sharp as fear. Ahio, scarred and inured to risk from a lifetime of working qherrique, finally spelt the menace out.

  “So the Empress passes him her message. Both messages. This time, word from the hatchet-swinger. Next time, phalanx troops?”

  Even my father Sarth twitched. My mother held Ahio’s stare, and answered distinctly as chisel strokes on a block.

  “Unless we find a way to hold them off.”

  Zuri stiffened. Iatha glared. In her outrage Ahio actually spat as far as the brazier.

  “What, run like a pack of Craftless hill-rats? Bow and scrape to that primping dragonfly!”

  The uproar burst again and this
time I did not heed. My three year old human brain fought Two for domination, clawed back the memory of my father Alkhes’ words above my cradle, Two’s image—I tugged my father Sarth’s arm to bring his ear down and spluttered into it, “Wings?”

  “What, dearling?” He did lean closer, his arm curving tight in a way Two would suffer from no-one else. “Wings? What wings?”

  “He. Him.”—“Crown prince” was too much for my tongue, but the image had reached Two now and it excited us both. Projections shot through my head, humans walking on two ordinary feet, then humans with wings spread behind them, the brilliant gauze of the air-borne insect, vibrating, expanding, huge—“He have wings?”

  “He—Therkon?” He was too surprised to use the title, even though he caught my drift. “No, he—Chaeris, why do you ask?”

  My father Sarth had been the Mother’s Ear: a man, yet the Mother’s chosen hearer, speaker for the reborn qherrique, core of all our lives. No-one else would draw so swiftly to the matter’s heart. But before I could wrestle the rest into words my mother’s voice clove its own way through the noise.

  “S’hurre . . .” Craft-folk. An honorary title, since half the council had no Craft at all. “In whosever name, Dhasdein has sent their usual question. And we have nothing but the usual reply. Prophecies were promised the River, yes. But we have planted the seed that once spoke to us. If it grows, it no longer replies. And,” she glanced once at me, swiftly, but the love in that look was edged and deadly as a sword, “the other voice, that may give answers, will do so in its proper time.”

  Then her eyes flicked sidelong. “Sarth,” she said, “I’ll need some—polite—threat.”

  * * * *

  It chagrins Two excessively that, without unearthing that letter from the archives, we cannot tell what they actually wrote. Two can retrieve anything in that seven-hundred year span before my birth, but once I began to live—Two claims it was in the womb, somewhere during my ninth month—we can recall only what has happened, or been recounted, before my own eyes and ears.

  We did see the next message arrive, first of anyone in Iskarda. At five years old in human time, I could read mirror-signal flashes, and after that Two could no longer suffer second or third-hand information. In my sixth winter, we asked to join the signal watch.

  “I have a fur jacket, like they do.” I spread both arms to display the thickness of sheephide, the wolf-fur hood trim. Our current pride and joy. My father Sarth had made it that autumn. “We’ll be as warm as the others. And I can read the signals, Ma, you know I can, we can! We need to have the news first. We need to know!”

  My mother’s eyes turned to Iatha, silent behind me in the House-head’s bedroom door. Over my head I read the half-laugh, half-dismay, the exchange of meaning fleet with years of shared experience. “Oh, burn it!” she said.

  Iatha stepped over the threshold. She rarely entered this room, where I had cornered my mother with her boots not yet laced, amid the tangle of bed quilts, the dense mix of her and my fathers’ body-scents that spelt most deeply, Home. But before she spoke my father Alkhes appeared from the jungle of coat and clothes-stands at the bed-end, and said abruptly, “Call a meet with Derinno.” The signal-roster Head. He glanced at me, sharper than a blade. “If Chaeris can read the signals—so.”

  My mother’s brows flew up and down again. I could almost catch the smothered maternal protests, the stern acceptance of a future woman’s right. The knowledge, passed yet again between them, that the usual children’s rules did not, must not apply to me. And then the slight, wicked warning of a parry stroke.

  “And if she proves herself? Who wards her on watch? It’s no load to put on signallers.”

  He tossed his head back. Black silk flew in a way I had known since my eyes would focus. “I’ll do it,” he said.

  So we were out on the mountain-side in the wake of the last snowfall, my father Alkhes yet again stealing time from his own troublecrew round to shepherd us to the watch-station, its broad-based stone cairn and platform spatched with snow-melt, all four of us muffled to the eyebrows against the skinning-knife wind that swept round the quarry-gate. We were staring into the mist and snow-mud dappled lowland distance when the next mirror began to blink. Two must have decoded it even faster than Latsa, the actual signaller.

  “Courier on road. Sealed message scroll.” Then the coded sequence that meant: Dhasdein.

  I saw the courier ride up, too, equally muffled on her sweating mule. And disappear round the quarry corner, while we stormed and cried and pleaded, and my father Alkhes stood at the platform ladder-head, repeating evenly, “You are on watch. You cannot leave, for whatever matter. You chose this work. This is your duty, Chaeris.”

  Two was sparking white at my fingertips, we had to know the message, I may have screamed that before we leapt at him. We both see that moment yet: the grey scrim of snow and mud and mist and my father against it, immoveable as a quarry block. Black hair flying, black eyes unwavering. He knew what we were. He knew what might happen. And whatever befell, he would not move.

  So I heard the message only hours later, third-hand, fourth-hand, after the watch finally drew to a close. And I would need records to tell what excuse or threat they found to ward off Dhasdein that time, too. Because that was my week on roster, and again, we were on watch when the council met.

  * * * *

  In my seventh year the message again came up from Marbleport, this time bringing its own imperial courier. I saw him pass, jewels and parade armour flashing, on his tall bay horse. At the plough-handles Ahio’s daughter Fira snorted, “Freighted the poxy beast upRiver with him, just to make a show!” Before she caught me with one foot across the furrow. “Get back and stir that team, Chaeris!”

  Like me, she was doing her duty in the spring fields, but I knew better than to argue. Like her mother, she was by Craft a shaper. Forget tantrums. She would not have been impressed by sparks from naked qherrique.

  I saw the horse in the House stable, though all Two’s pleas and imprecations could not bring me within the rider’s range. “No,” my mother answered flatly, when we besought her outside the council-room. “You don’t go near him.” And called Ahio and Verrith, veteran troublecrew, to see her veto fulfilled.

  We did glimpse the message satchel, gaudy with diplomatic seals of passage: from the closest downRiver border post with Verrain, from the further border post with Shirran, and even, Hanni eventually told me, from southernmost Mel’eth. And we garnered a snatch of conversation, my mother and Iatha striding into the communal kitchen. Shia, Head’s cook even in Amberlight, had exercised her magic to keep yet another over-due dinner palatable.

  “Tez thinks not,” Iatha had grunted. My mother, staring straight ahead as she did in crisis-thought, grunted too.

  “Tanekhet’s uncertain. So’s Asaskian.”

  Tez was my half-sister. House-heir, in charge down at Marbleport, our bridgehead for the marble on whose sale Iskarda lived. Tanekhet and Asaskian were part of her consort, as I had known since I was three. But for all my coaxing, neither my mother nor my fathers, nor Iatha, would let slip the uncertainty’s source.

  * * * *

  In my tenth year I saw neither message nor messenger. Like all House and village girls, by then I had worked with the plough-teams and the slingshots to protect sown seeds and ripening grain, had harvested plums and helped brew beer, and gathered roses for Midsummer festival. I had been taken hunting to learn the hills, and practiced painting tally-marks on a quarry block, and as a House child I would be tested, one day, for Craft. But though I still stood signal-watch, my new prenticeship was a gulf away from them all.

  “Not a place for children, no.” A very small meeting, that one, just my mother, my fathers, Zuri, and me. “But Alkhes and I,” my father Sarth, using his blankest council-voice, “think it would be for the best.”

  My mother’s eyes flew from one to the o
ther and back. “Chaeris?” The end of the word rose. “In the troublecrew?”

  “Only to learn,” my father Alkhes said. “Yet.”

  My mother stared. And bit her lip.

  “The other children . . .”

  “Chaeris is already a hand taller, Tellurith.” My father Sarth said it without expression. He did not have to add, Chaeris has never truly been one of them. Even before this.

  My mother looked at him in turn. Not a House-Head’s look. A woman’s, at a trusted intimate proposing a change she has neither foreseen nor likes. A mother’s, finding her daughter ready to take another, momentous step beyond the baby, the infant, that was hers most of all. To her, not so much an advance to maturity as another degree of loss.

  She turned to Zuri. Between them, too, questions seldom needed words.

  And Zuri looked back with her rain-grey, rain-cold trouble­crew eyes and said, “We can ward Chaeris anywhere in Iskarda. Possibly we could do it outside. But the best guards can fail. Better if she learns to ward herself.”

  Almost invisibly, my mother flinched. All of us knew what Two and I were, not only to her or to my fathers, but to the House, to Iskarda. To the River and its restive states, Verrain, Cataract, Amberlight. To that fire below the horizon, the brooding presence of Dhasdein.

  Even I could have voiced the addendum. We all knew what it would mean, if some raider, some kidnapper, managed to find me alone.

  “Chaeris has wards.” My mother spoke slowly, again voicing what we all knew.

  Zuri returned, unflinching, “Not wards she can trust.”

  Two and I are trying to be good! We haven’t had accidents this last twelvemonth! There’s no call for people to look at us the way they do!

  I had no chance to shout any of it. My mother and Zuri had locked eyes as on a practice floor. Then she shot at Zuri, “You think you can train her? Troublecrew? My troublecrew—!”

  “We think we can train her,” my father Sarth said. “Alkhes and I.”