by Sylvia Kelso
“We must know what we see.”
“Everything you can learn, you want to know, yes. From last season’s block tally to the names of the Dhasdein dynasties.” I could not tell which of us Tez addressed. “But next season’s tally: can you estimate that?”
“We speak what we know!”
“Ruand,” Iatha used the Head’s formal title so sharply even I jumped, and Tez lifted both hands swiftly and sat back. Oddly enough, she did not seem displeased. I could feel my muscles shaking, about to spasm, as they would sometimes when Two sparked the worst, my belly beginning to quake. But Tez simply nodded to me. Or to us both.
“Two doesn’t want to consider the future, and you’ve never tried. You don’t even know if you should ask. Will you leave it then, in our hands? To give that message to Therkon? Rather than speak yourself?”
Two’s agitation eased. I nodded, grateful I did not yet have to manage words. It was Eria, at the table end, who asked the unsettling question yet again.
“And if Therkon won’t leave it at that?”
Tez looked at her, then at me, and said, “Then we consult with Chaeris.”
“And if—”
“That,” Tez said evenly, “will be in the Work-mother’s hand.”
The cutter’s invocation. It used to be a common prayer. It was also the House-head’s sealing phrase: I have spoken. The debate is closed.
Chapter II
Question how we would, neither Two nor I could get any more out of Tez. Cornered, Tanekhet would give me a courtier’s answer and slide away. Iatha knew less than I: it all deepened my apprehension as the last quarter moon slid by, till Two was sparking at the least alarm.
I also had a demonstration, in small, of a true prophecy’s effect. Therkon was bringing six guards, a personal servant, a cook and a chamberlain, and the fuss over what to feed them, where to lodge them, who would fettle their mules and do their washing, went the length of Iskarda.
With Asaskian and the children gone our own house had the most spare room, but though the most secure, it would also put them closest to me. Eventually, it took the whole council’s decision to billet them at the Market inn. From there they might stray into the village, or elude our troublecrew, but they were on the outer environs of the House. As for food . . . by the last day, I could have consigned Therkon’s fads and preferences to the River bottom along with everything else.
Nor did I see them arrive. I was forbidden so much as to peek from an upper window, let alone, perish the thought, stroll by like some nameless worker in the street. Instead Azo took me up past the village cistern to the high valleys where the hares had begun to breed, and we hunted there all day.
It was nearly dusk when we came home, the time when, usually, I love Iskarda most. Spring, the trees full of pristine new green, the irises in sheltered spots flowering creamy gold or horizon blue, the air redolent with growing grain. Iskarda’s single street full of homing workers and hunters and men fetching the last wood, sunset steeping the high, gabled wooden house-fronts in dusty gold. And beyond, the great tapestry of the River’s prospect, faded and blurring under immanent night.
That evening the street’s feel had Two jittering before we reached the market-place. Everybody for once wanted to talk at if not with me, gossip or opine about the arrival, orate, worry, exhort. It took Azo, dour, stolid, silently interposing a wall-solid shoulder, to get me in our gates without a check.
With my cousins there, Darr would have raced up in the passageway to babble everything I did want to know, what time they came, what they looked like, what was happening at the Market, under the stress of housing a crown prince. I could almost hear his high-octave squeal, “And you should’ve heard what he said about the baker’s rolls!”
As it was, I had only Iatha’s grumble of, “The usual speeches. Tez offered ’em hot water and a night to recuperate before the yapping starts.”
The reception, I knew, had been in the market square, Tez and Eria together. In our kitchen, Shia had heard the prince had been courteous if travel-stained, after bucketing on muleback the fifty miles up from Marbleport. Duitho and Ashar were already up the village on patrol.
“And tomorrow,” Iatha added flatly, “you’re out at daylight. Before it starts.”
Before the council meeting, she meant. The house was on edge too, a fine underlying tension I could neither escape nor ignore. Having failed to pump Iatha on what Therkon actually looked like, I let them push me out of the kitchen conclave when my yawns grew noticeable, and went almost willingly to bed.
* * * *
Azo did rouse me at dawn: I could tell from her even rarer than usual words that she was no happier in exile than I. We prowled the higher hills, going gradually blind to the spring revelations of new beasts and the onset of familiar flowers, and by a little after noon we were both at rebellion point. Azo made the merest demurral, when I said, “Let’s go back to the look-out. I want to see the qherrique.”
The women of Iskarda have used the place time out of mind, in formal ceremonies for the Mother, for trysting, or just to be alone. Inevitable that the House should propose it first, when the time came to establish our seed, the tangible legacy of Amberlight. And the qherrique had been as willing as we.
We clambered to the closest crest above the village, right to the brink where the bastion of creamy grey rock thrust from its cluster of low-growing, pure white snow-helliens. Azo made one circuit, a bare formality, and settled on a backside-polished boulder. I stood a moment at her back, while we stared out through greenish silver leaves over the River’s green and silver prospect, and down, in a hawk’s vista, onto the street of Iskarda.
Neither of us had to say that they should have eaten by now. The Market workers would be soothing frayed nerves after another meal’s success—or debacle. Tez and Tanekhet would be back in council. And so would the embassy. Surely, at this hour, we could go home?
“I’m hungry,” I said.
Azo did not answer, but the line of her neck agreed.
“Could you get something, do you think? Even if it’s at the Market.” I giggled a little, too tired and bored and stressed to help it. “One of his majesty’s rejected rolls?”
Azo gave me an eye-corner, but I knew she was trying not to snort. She said, “You’d be alone.”
“What would get me up here? What can get me up here? Especially,” I stood back a pace, “if I’m with the qherrique.”
I withdrew another step. Azo eyed me dourly. Then she growled, “So stay there,” and got up herself.
I walked dutifully back to the secret bay among the rocks. Tiny hyacinths had always grown there, purple-blue, so my father Sarth once claimed, as the depths of a sunlit sea. Around them thin mountain grass swayed and jounced in the wind, and through the helliens’ dancing shadow, at a boulder’s foot, I saw the qherrique.
When they planted it, the year I was born, it was no larger than the pearl it had once seemed. Now my father Alkhes called it the size of a Dhasdein phalanx shield, a man’s armlength in diameter, rising at the boulder foot, a mushroom rock, an oysterless pearl, a gleaming, convex, mist-grey curve. A presence. Two had already acknowledged it.
And the seed was beginning to glow.
In the old days, coming to the mother-face, the cutters would sing. Crafters preparing to work the cut slabs would sing too, the merest troublecrew waking a light-gun would hum. I alone had no need, though sometimes I liked to. But as the seed would never, had never stung me, so when I came, it always knew.
The light welled up in the boulder-shade, softened by high sun but purer than moonlight and as clear. Here, if nowhere else on earth, I was not unusual, my greeting not uncertain. Here I was known and welcomed by my own.
I walked up, as even my mother or my father Sarth would hesitate now to do, and laid my hand on the breathing stone.
How long I—we—stood th
ere I have no idea. Very often when we touched I would lose track of time. Nor can I put into words what thoughts, or feelings, or whatever they cannot be called, that we exchanged. Like the exchange itself, its matter is not something that fits in human terms.
But eventually, as if reluctant as I was, the glow began to fade. I sighed, finding muscle and bone and earth underfoot again. Then I took my hand away and stepped back a pace. There was no need to say farewell.
The outer world re-assembled: swaying grass, tick-tack of hellien leaves, a little sigh of air through the balmy spring afternoon. Sunlight ricocheted among the rocks, shadow dappled the hyacinths and the flank of the qherrique. In a year or two, my mother said, we could take the next step. Someone would bring a cutter, in the moon-dark and her own cycle’s dark, and make the covenanted approach. Take the first, almost miniature slab, this time with a truly complete assent.
And sometime after that we would have new light-guns and cutters and shapers, and once again, all the tools of Amberlight.
I lifted my hand once more, as I always did, in acknowledgement of the pact: and stopped.
Someone was coming through the rocks.
Not Azo. I knew that instantly. The foot was light, but not troublecrew’s stealthy, almost soundless tread. And not a woman. It was slightly too measured, the pace a little too long. A man.
Our men could come here now. Some did, those who found rapport with the qherrique, who would follow a Craft one day. But this was a stranger. I knew as if I saw it, hearing that careful, just not quite hesitant footfall among the stones.
I turned about as troublecrew would and stood four-square, Two roused and hackling, before the qherrique.
At first I thought it was Keshaq. The black-bronze hair was as straight and silky, drawn back from temple and forehead with beauty’s carelessness, the features were as exotic, the long coffee-dark eyes, the high brow and flaring sweep of nose. He was as tall and narrow-built, his muscle carried in haunch and chest rather than width, and he moved with the same unconscious, bone-deep bearing of birth and rank.
But Keshaq never sported a knee-length tunic of some flame-orange, almost diaphanous, double-thread silk, over narrow cotton trousers of glistening leaf-green. Or a shirt whose embroidery would beggar temples, just in the narrow band the tunic revealed. Rings did not glitter on Keshaq’s long, beautiful hands, nor did he pull back his hair with jewelled pins, and secure it in a thillian clip.
I stood like a lump of rock. My nascent troublecrew reflexes could not get past, Sweet Work-mother! How did he get up here alone?
He navigated the last rock-step. Looked up. Stopped.
For a moment I saw some dark, beautiful deer, elegant and cautious, picking its way through a dangerous wood. And then a deer that had thought itself, just this once, unpursued. For one blissful moment, free.
Then, just noticeably, he drew himself up. He was the foreigner, the interloper, and he knew it. My body language must have been shouting, Stop, Stand back, Beware. You have no business here. His eyes met mine, cool and steady, the armour complete now. Even at a disadvantage, he would be composed.
After another moment he said, not quite tentatively, “Damis.”
It is the old Amberlight word, title, courtesy, to greet an unwed maid.
My lips parted and my breath caught. Mother aid, what should I call him? But Two already knew.
“Your Highness,” I said.
He did not start. He was a crown prince, after all, trained and inured to almost anything. But for half a flash the eyes did widen, in more than surprise.
Then I realised where Two had got the title. Iskarda would say, Sir, Amberlight, My lord. “Highness” was a Dhasdeini usage. Straight from Tanekhet.
When he spoke it came with his rank’s authority. He said, “You know the Riversrun Suzerain.”
Oh, Mother! I nearly cried. He was as fast in the wits as my fathers, he already had a first-class clue, he need only look behind me to guess the rest. The one person he was not supposed to encounter in Iskarda. The one person I should never, ever have met.
Without knowing it I took a step back. I forgot to be troublecrew, I put my hands out as Two had suddenly ordered, not to protect but to take shelter, to protect myself.
He saw past me then. His eyes did open, almost white-ringed in that dark flamboyant face. He said, “You’re the one. The oracle.”
Two answered before I could stop it. “And you are the Dragonfly.”
* * * *
For all his birth and schooling it caught him unawares. His eyes flicked downward, over his clothes, perhaps. Then he let out a little involuntary laugh.
“So some call me,” he said.
“But what,” I had the weirdest sense Two was actually quoting, using others’ words as happened under stress, “are you doing here?”
His chin lifted a little. Again his eyes went past me, this time by intent. After a moment he said, “I wanted to see the qherrique.”
With a touch of longing, and a stronger touch of defiance, that told us both what he understood. No need to reply aloud: he was a stranger. And a man. Strange men do not, are not permitted, to approach the qherrique.
The next question was reflex. “Where are your troublecrew?” I asked.
He actually shifted weight a fraction, the sort of move that would have been a shuffle in anyone else. “Ah. Well . . .”
“You gave them the slip.” I was too surprised for outrage. “You didn’t leave them outside the rocks. You never brought them at all!”
“And where, pray, are yours?”
The unaccustomed Iskardan frankness might have stung him, or perhaps the return was pure instinct. I could feel the color rise, though, on my face.
“Azo’s just gone to the village. I’m perfectly safe!”
His eyes went past me again and the expression became something I understood. Recognition, wonder, a rising hint of awe. And then wistfulness, for a marvel he would never share.
“It does talk to men. Sometimes.” I stopped. To go on would only be telling him what he already knew. Even to remind him how little freedom he must have left.
“But,” I said again, “how did you get up here?”
His eyes went down and up. He knew what I meant. Then he ducked his head a half-fraction and a hand brushed his jaw.
“The, ah—the salad. There was so much oil.” Less off-balance, he would never have committed such a solecism as to criticise his hosts’ food. “I had to postpone the meeting . . . They had leave to wait.”
To leave him alone. To let his notoriously sensitive stomach settle. It was not just gossip or exaggeration, and down in Iskarda the Market workers would be chagrined to their souls.
But he did not know that. Therkon, crown prince of Dhasdein, the Empress’s hatchet man. Staring at me in defiance that this time shielded embarrassment, or maybe, something more.
A flash of Two’s memory played past me. Therkon the crown prince, the cipher, the nonentity, extinguished in his father’s shadow. Perhaps, belittled by his father as well as the rest.
“I’m sorry.” It was out before I thought. “They were all so worried, but they didn’t know what was safe—” My father Alkhes’ audacity rescued me. “Our intelligencers aren’t as good as yours.”
He nearly gave a little gasp. Surprise, affront? Our eyes met and locked while the rest of the understanding passed between us. Going both ways.
Then his stance loosened, his eyes’ focus widened, and the long mouth eased. I had a moment’s image of that dark, beautiful deer, temporarily at bay. At length, with the hunters’ passing, lowering its head, safe now to turn away.
“I found a back-stair.” Now he spoke with a soft, flexible quiet that had nothing in common with Tanekhet’s mannered calm. “You should not blame them. They thought I’d have to lie down an hour and more.”
&n
bsp; “So you came out.”
His eyes tracked round again, this time with a different wistfulness. “The qherrique: it was a reason. I thought—it seemed—quite wonderful, that somewhere, along the River, you could be quite alone.”
The choice of verb said it all. Where he could have been alone, for a crown prince of Dhasdein the ultimate luxury. But I had been here first.
“I’m—”
The little gesture was purely imperial: apologies are unnecessary. Other gifts have cancelled them. His eyes came back to me, this time frankly curious.
“I thought,” he said, “you were only twelve.”
“I grew.” I had become accustomed early to winnowing curiosities at a glance. Some were comfortably innocent. More were wary, some hostile, the worst, both invasive and prurient. To this one Two and I responded as easily as grass to the sun. “My mother thinks Two helped. Because of the River. You know?”
Because of the impatient waiting world. Because of Dhasdein.
He inclined his head a little. Admission, acknowledgement. But it was candid wonder in his voice. “You look, sixteen, seventeen.”
“My father is tall . . .” The wave was upon me, it was shoot it or overturn. “My father Sarth. You know?”
He nodded solemnly. His eyes were still fixed on me. I re-
assayed that attention, and still found no taint of prurience. No hint of adult-to-child patronage either. I might have been his own age.
I took my own bracing breath. “You know I have two fathers, I suppose.”
After a minute, he said, “I heard.”
The pause spoke our common knowledge. Of course he had heard, just as he had known where to find the qherrique. Dhasdein intelligence.
“It—sometimes people feel confused. Sometimes, they—they—”
He moved a fraction, almost as if to put out a hand. “People always talk,” he said, “about the unusual. Or,” with a wry little turn of the voice, “the notable.”
As they had talked about him. For the length of his life, with reason or not.