Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  My mother whipped round. A cutting, shaming revelation, that even she doubted our control so deeply she would count me and Two a risk to her troublecrew, not the other way round. Her expression now made me want to hide under the council table as I had done in toddlerhood.

  My father Sarth stood up. “I think,” he said softly, in that pure Tower accent, “that if anyone in Iskarda could meet Chaeris on the fighting-floor, and trust her and Two to keep control—even in losing—it would be us.” He glanced at my father Alkhes. And then he turned to me.

  “So, daughter. What do you think?”

  There had been a great deal to assimilate, not all palatable. But now I had to swallow: at the prior pains, at this newer, fearful joy. “We—yes, Da. We would like to train with you. To learn to—manage ourselves. And we would never—never—do you harm.”

  None of us needed to mention the lawless past when, however unintentionally, that had not been so.

  * * * *

  The new roster brought risks and chances at which, in hindsight, I quail as my mother and Zuri must have. But beside troublecrew war-work, tactics, weapons, the more perilous fighting hand-to-hand, came the extra dimension: learning to bring our impulses, that my father Sarth said might go right back to the Amberlight qherrique, under more than haphazard control.

  So we were on the practice floor, deep in a loose-form hand-to-hand bout, when Zuri’s second blew past what was ordinarily the dining-room door, calling, “Hanni! Where’s the Head? Signal just sighted. From Dhasdein!”

  I missed a check. My father Sarth pulled the blow that would have sent me head over heels. We stuck as if the instructor had called time, frozen in mid-move. As in a bout, his eyes held mine, but I saw their expression change.

  Then, as coolly, as evenly, as my father Alkhes atop the signal-platform, he said, “Take stance, Chaeris.”

  Two rose in frenzy behind my eyes: It’s a message, it’s news, it’s vital, we must know! I thrust the panic down like another assailant. We were prenticed, admitted where no other child and almost no adult could go. More than that, we were trusted: to have learnt that lesson from the signal-station. Not to need it again.

  I said, “Guard,” and pushed Two from my awareness, as I could do only in the furious intensity of fighting hand-to-hand.

  Later, I heard the message contents, no more than a variation on the other velvet demands. At three, at five, at ten years in human time, they had been the same. But in my twelfth human year, everything changed.

  * * * *

  “I have to go.” My mother had Iatha by both hands, halted just outside the council-room. Her unheard-of exit in mid-meeting had brought Two and me out right on their heels. “Errisal wouldn’t—Errisal would never ask—! Not for us. Not till the absolute last—Yath, you know—!”

  Iatha produced her dour, wordless grunt. They seldom used names, let alone touched. Superfluous, when they had been closer than sisters since before the fall of Amberlight.

  “I wouldn’t leave for anything else!”

  The tone brought Two hackling toward sparks. Iatha glanced inside, where the messenger still sat puffing on a chair. A copper-dark Heartlander, sweating in his sailor’s clothes. He had run with the summons, physically, all the way from the River, uphill to Iskarda.

  “They pulled double-oar down from Cataract—it came post through the Heartlands—” she actually wrung Iatha’s hands. “It left Forest-landing a whole moon past.” She almost hurled Iatha’s hands away and took four charging paces down the passageway. “We’ll be longer getting that far, and who knows what’s happened since? Yath, it’s Thilliansar!”

  “Ah.” Iatha growled it in her throat. “The Source.”

  My mother whirled to speak, and stopped. Her eye had caught me and I knew already that neither she nor Iatha would let slip more. The Source, the River’s head, lay somewhere beyond the Heartlands, and somewhere up there was a mystery to do with my mother’s beloved partner, Errisal. Her image fascinated Two, because they were like mirror pictures, down to the speech, the mannerisms, the walk. I tried to look harmless and incurious, lest my mother banish me altogether. But my feelings must have been plain as hers.

  She yanked in another huge breath and opened her mouth as if to dive underwater. Let it out, and came to take me in her arms.

  “Dearling. Chaeris. It will be all right.”

  She stopped with a jerk and behind her I saw my father Alkhes stop too, mid-stride halfway up the passage, with an armful of travelling gear.

  “Iatha will be here. And Eria’s been village Head two years now. Duitho will lead the troublecrew—you know Duitho, you’ve trained with her. Tez will come from Marbleport. Your cousins will be here—”

  She broke off in mid-breath. We looked in each other’s eyes. Then she shut hers a moment, and leant her forehead against mine.

  “Yes. Both your fathers have to come with me. And Zuri. And Varris, too. She’s Alkhes’ laf. You know what that means.” Two had told me long since. A Heartland warrior, pledged to an older, honoured, worshipped fighter, and pledged to more than war. Varris would not stay behind and live.

  “And . . . the others, yes. Not Azo, this time,” veteran trouble-crew, she would stay to bolster Duitho, “but Ahio and Keraz and Quiran and the ship-women from Marbleport. I—we’ll need them all. Everyone who’s been—who knows the River that far.”

  In case, Two translated far too fast and knowledgeably for comfort, of losses on the way. A better chance some might still reach wherever it was, to offer what help the remnant had left.

  “Ah, dearling, it cleaves me to leave you too.” She folded me more than tight. I felt the sob heave in her own breast. “The first time we’ve ever—and for such a cause—and for however long—”

  I hugged her back with tears burning my throat. When my eyes lifted my father Sarth had come to stand by my father Alkhes. In both their faces I read, clearer than in my mother’s smothered voice, the true depth of this farewell.

  We had not parted in my life’s length. As soon expect the sun not to rise next day. I opened my mouth to bawl like a truly human twelve year old, You can’t leave me! And Two spoke instead.

  “We have to go with you. We have to see.”

  My mother pulled her head back, more in consternation than surprise.

  “Oh! No, no—” She caught herself. And me as well, tightly in her arms. “No, Chaeris, dearling, I know you and Two want to learn things, have to learn things, but—”

  “We must go! It’s the Source!”

  “I know, I know what it means to Two, but no! The road—Mother shield us, it’s too far, too dangerous. And we’re known, remembered, if anyone realised who you were . . .”

  I had never seen my mother panic in my life. But my father Sarth was there already, his arm drawing us both in, that deep voice saying, over-quietly, “Chaeris, you know who—and what—you are.”

  And I did know. I had been twelve years learning what I had felt, however unclearly, that day in my cradle when I first heard the name Dragonfly.

  “Da.” I leaned against him and tried to swallow the tears. Tried to behave as that voice asked of me. As a woman. As a woman of more than Craft. As the cynosure of Iskarda, and the hope of the River. And the blood, the all-enduring, ever-enduring blood of Amberlight.

  “I know it’s r-risky. It’s just that Two . . .”

  “We will come back.” He spoke so quietly, it was more than statement, or even promise. “When we do, everything we know, we will tell you. Or show you. Everything.”

  I understood what he meant. And that he understood what it meant to us. For Two, above all.

  I looked up the now shortening way to his face, those statue’s bones, the perfectly set topaz eyes. Amberlight breeds beauties, women or men, but my father Sarth had been notable, even in Amberlight. I sniffled, because I could not help myself, then re
ached out to lightly tug the end of the troublecrew braid, bronze-dark highlit with copper, and the occasional thread of silver now, falling over his breast.

  His hand covered mine. “Troth-word, yes.” We had used the touch that way before I could walk. And from somewhere, for me, he found a smile.

  “Oh, Da . . .”

  I think we all wept a little then, the four of us with our arms round each other, there in the middle of the passageway. Before they had to hurry off, with more than usual Head or troublecrew’s haste, to haul out their old travelling gear and begin assembling provisions and plans.

  And not two days after, I stood by Iatha in the market-place, and worked to bite the tears down, to keep a seemly face, that would become the centre-post of Iskarda, as we waved goodbye. As we watched them ride away.

  * * * *

  “It has, of course, been just a matter of time.”

  Tez’s oldest partner turned the latest parchment on the council-table with one delicately fastidious fingernail. Both Two and I knew, now, the serpent and thunderbolt blazon on that broken seal.

  “To be sure,” Iatha snapped. “Just a matter of time. But why in the Mother’s name did it have to happen now?”

  Without raising his head, Tanekhet lifted his eyes to her. Forest-green eyes, half-hooded, detached and ironic as they had been in the length of Two’s memories, as well as mine.

  “One would hardly suspect Therkon—or the Empress—of lacking intelligence.”

  “Of course they know how often you clean your fingernails!” Iatha slammed a palm down so hard the winecups jumped. “But to come so blighted pat: Tellurith barely gone a three-quarter-moon . . . Mother aid us, after that message, they’ll be upRiver of Amberlight already, and what hope have we of warning her, let alone bringing back—”

  She stopped short. Her eyes slitted. When she spoke, it came out softer than a hiss.

  “Do you mean—?”

  Tanekhet held up both palms, acerbically calm. “If you people could avoid jumping to conclusions quite so fast . . .”

  Tez leant forward in my mother’s chair and said across him, “You mean, that Dhasdein didn’t just have good enough intelligence to write so soon? Or to know my mother would leave? Or when? You think they engineered the summons?” A dagger pause. “Or its cause?”

  Iatha literally snarled. Tez looked at Tanekhet as my mother had used to look at Sarth. Near, dear, and for wisdom an unfailing resource.

  Tanekhet shut his hand over the parchment. The seconds trickled like coins falling in a balance pan. I forgot the ache in human memory that at every corner still listened for my father Sarth, that looked at every voice for my mother or my father Alkhes to charge through the outer doorway, dusted with snow or marble-grime. I forgot even the pang of watching Tez assume her post as Regent, not half a moon ago, installing her whole consort and their three children in our big, empty house.

  Two was trying to run projections, pulling memories of Tanekhet in similar situations, when his judgement had decided nations’ fates, recollections that he had once been Suzerain of Riversrun, the Imperial heart-province. Not simply Tez’s partner, my foster-father, but the real master of Dhasdein.

  “No.” He let the word out on a long, judicious breath. “It is not—plausible—that Dhasdein, even at its height, could—arrange matters—anywhere—upstream from Cataract.”

  And, Two had told me, he had been chief intelligencer at Dhasdein’s height. If anyone could say that with confidence, it would be Tanekhet.

  I said, “So they just have very good intelligence.”

  We had been admitted to councils in my eleventh human year, after troublecrew training proved itself. Until this year, I had rarely ventured to speak. Now Iatha gave me her accustomed snort. Tanekhet did me the honour not to smile as to an outsider or a child. His other partner Asaskian said, “And a cutter’s eye.”

  Meaning, as good a sense for the critical moment as a cutter would once have had, to establish rapport, and then lay blade to a mother-face of the qherrique.

  Tanekhet sat back, not bothering to smooth his sleeve after the minimal shrug that retorted, Yes.

  “It is certainly the optimal moment. Tellurith and her consort, down to the estimable Zuri, gone beyond recall. A new, if not, ah, lesser, party just installed at Iskarda.”

  “You mean,” Tez said without heat, “an untried Heir.”

  Tanekhet inclined his own head. He would not demean her, either, with pretty lies.

  “And,” Asaskian said, “Chaeris is twelve years old.”

  So long as I remember Asaskian has been the unchallenged beauty of Iskarda. Slender as a palm tree, beautiful in face and feature as her cloud of waving bronze hair, elegant in demeanour as an old Amberlight House-head. When she lost an arm in the Dhasdein raid, it did not spoil her looks. Or her wits.

  “She’s only twelve!” Iatha cried.

  Nobody bothered to reply. Twelve years was already a very long time to stave off an empire seeking such a promise’s fulfilment. As Tanekhet said, the end of Dhasdein’s patience had been only a matter of time.

  “What in the Mother’s name do they think she can tell them? ’Rith told me. I’ve seen it. Even the seed couldn’t say straight out, This will happen, or that! Do they imagine she’ll be any better, blight and blast their eyes!”

  The lift of Tanekhet’s brow supplied the retort. They don’t have to imagine, and they don’t care. If it’s never been done before, if it damages the vessel, the oracle, what matter? They only want results.

  “As this says.” He did not have to touch the parchment again. Or modulate the faint acidity in his voice. “The crown prince expects to land in Marbleport by second quarter of next moon. He is leading an embassy, for which he wishes safe conduct to Iskarda, where he hopes to ‘consult’.” The curl of his lip highlit the euphemism. “For an ‘embassy’ he will naturally bring an escort. Five or six pentarchies of phalanx troops.”

  Iatha spurted profanity like an over-boiled pot. Tez looked down the table and said, “Duitho, how many troublecrew do you have?”

  Duitho’s cheekbones still bore the faintest hint of a blush. Nobody need do more than lament Zuri’s absence to drive home its consequence: a young, untried Trouble-head, left, perforce, in the hope she need only keep a watching brief in Iskarda.

  “Azo’s here,” she said. “And Verrith.”

  Tez had been Amberlight Navy. In crisis she still sounded inscrutable as an officer.

  “And?”

  Duitho’s neck stiffened. “With me—five more.”

  “And no light-guns.”

  Duitho was troublecrew. She did not bite her lip, still less burst out, None of the younger crew have light-guns, those came from Amberlight, they’re dedicated to one person. We can’t—yet—make any more!

  Seven troublecrew and a village or so, a couple of Crafters with cutters they used to quarry marble. Against two or three hundred heavy-armed phalanx troops.

  “We can do,” Two said, “what you did before.”

  Tanekhet’s eyes whipped round. He had known me before I left the womb, he had heard Two speak as soon as I could manage words. He knew the speaker now.

  “‘Before’?” Then Tez’s brows snapped up. She has my father Sarth’s blood, sure enough.

  “Diplomacy? A delaying dance? Legal points? There’s nothing illegal about a signed, sealed ally sending an embassy to Iskarda.”

  “Diplomacy?” Iatha shot at me. “What about diplomacy, Chaeris?”

  “For an embassy, we can make rules too.”

  “What rules? How many times they piss on the road up—!”

  Tanekhet actually laughed. It broke from him in a quick spontaneous spill as soft and husky and infinitely flexible as his Dhasdein courtier’s voice.

  “The escort.” His eyes danced at me, young as a boy’s in his
lined but still finely modelled face. “We make rules about how many soldiers our ‘holy’ environs will admit.”

  Iatha checked in mid-word, her own brows flying up. “But will they heed?”

  “For an embassy?” Tanekhet was laughing inwardly. “By the rules of diplomacy, they must.”

  Iatha’s snort was more than eloquent. They had the power. What would enforce rules but their choice?

  Asaskian said it out, in her cool, soft voice, “And if they don’t?”

  Tez watched Tanekhet ponder. In matters of Dhasdein, he almost always had the final word. Two remembered, with some detail, consequences of the few times he had not.

  “It is officially an embassy,” Tanekhet said slowly. “When he can, Therkon still prefers glove to fist. He will not care for Dhasdein’s reputation, should he discard protocol quite so soon.”

  Tez’s left brow went up. Like my mother, she wore her hair in a Crafter’s plait. Loose ends tendrilled round her face, but there was nothing soft about the set of her jaw.

  “So, arrange a Note? From Amberlight?”

  Tanekhet nodded. “Dhasdein is no longer its previous force. No Archipelago galleys or Imperial marines. No wine-excise from Shirran or slave caravans from Mel’eth. Nor levied troops. If Amberlight made representations, on the sanctity of an ally . . .”

  Iatha drew an audible breath. “You think, even now, Amberlight’s strong enough?”

  Tez and Tanekhet calculated together. Two was calculating as well, with plenty of information even up to the war when the city fell, but little for the last twelve years. Just before Two exploded, Tez said, “They have last summer’s galleys. And five more on the slips. Enough to hold the River.” She meant, stop downRiver trade. “There’s Verrain. And Cataract.”

  “The one owing independence to Amberlight,” Tanekhet murmured, “the other remembering Zuri, as Regent. I think, if Amberlight called . . .”

  Keshaq said, “Verrain would come.”

  Tanekhet’s third lover seldom spoke in council. He was exotic in an Iskardan council-room as Tanekhet himself, bronze-black, eagle-nosed, flamboyantly beautiful. High Quetzistani blood, but with a past whose acquaintance with a very different Verrain spoke in his look.