by Sylvia Kelso
Therkon on the stern-deck was smiling too. Until we saw the rowing boat put out.
A fair-sized boat with two pairs of rowers and by the scarlet and flash of precious metal, a dignitary rather than a steersman astern. Not waiting to traverse the quay afoot. Headed at racing speed for our galley, whose ensign marked the crown prince’s craft.
Therkon grimaced, but not in surprise. “Excuse me, my lady Chaeris. It will be news, of some sort.”
He did not have to add that news delivered by such a messenger, at such a pace, was usually bad.
The boat came alongside. The dignitary teetered up the ladder: scanned the deck, fixed Therkon, and burst out, “Your Highness, we must speak! Instantly!”
They were half an hour in the hencoop, with Deoren’s crop-haired Dhasdeinis lowering progressively darker about the door. When they emerged, I felt no surprise that Therkon was giving orders and the rowers had been summoned, the sailors already gathered forrard to weigh anchor, before the messenger’s boat cast off.
In galley terms perhaps a third of a watch’s light remained. Two proposed a hamlet called Gratha as night-stop, no more than ten miles downstream. What could send them off for such a small gain, after a long wearying day? I tried not to chew my fingernails as Therkon went down his roster of officer-briefings. Until at last, in the first mellowed glow of sunset, he crossed the deck to me.
Two said, “Word from the Archipelago?”
Therkon nearly recoiled. Caught himself, and managed a clipped fragment of smile. “I do forget.” The smile snuffed. “Not the Archipelago. Yet. There has been a storm.”
I did not need Two for this. “In the ocean? This side the Archipelago? Your ships?”
“Five of them. Five first-class, deep-laden freighters. Travelling together, carrying silk and inlaid furniture and fine-tempered weapons. And grain.” The long mouth set into iron. “A couple of sailors were blown to Greenhill on the lid of a dower chest. A refugee boat brought them home.”
Another voyage then, back to Dhasdein, atop the original excursion, and the ship-wreck’s span. “How far is Greenhill . . . How long ago?”
His eyes closed solidly with mine. “The storm came when I was traveling upRiver. In Verrain.”
“In . . .” Then Two turned the world to roiling white.
Reality came back. Two was saying, “That is too soon.”
Therkon said, “What?”
“If there was influence, it was not ours. Or from Iskarda. If there was intent, the interval precludes a sure forecast. Sheer wantonness.”
Therkon almost wailed, “What?”
“I’m sorry,” I gabbled, shutting Two up with a snap. “Two means, we didn’t arrange it, and neither did the seed, the Iskardan qherrique. And if it was arranged, to stop you finding me, or bringing me downRiver, then it was done too early to be sure it would be needed. So it was pure—wantonness.”
“Arranged? To stop me? Not to bring you? Arranged?”
“They talked about it in Iskarda.” Of course, his head had to be reeling as ours had then. “That when we met, in the rocks, it was just too big a coincidence. Too many pebble falls, Tanekhet said. And it was the same when my mother and Alkhes first met, and, and maybe that was—arranged. And—”
“The River-lord save me.” Therkon hardly ever blasphemed. But his brains were catching up all the same. “They thought you,” his eyes added, either of you, “might have done it? Or, or the seed?”
“Two said, it wasn’t us, but it could have been arranged. Tez said, if my mother was meant to meet my father, it must have taken all the motherlodes of Amberlight to fix it. And maybe our seed was, is—too small.”
Therkon’s voice failed altogether. Then he took a two-handed grip on the rail below the stern fan, and swallowed. “Lady—my lady Chaeris, will you answer me truthfully? Is there—could there be—some other qherrique?”
It was a question all Iskarda had asked long since. “So far as we know—no.”
Therkon looked as dazed as a man just hit on the head. But there was no daze inside.
“Then was it, could it have been, uh, arranged by—something else?”
Two said, “The probabilities of such an event at that moment being chance are too low to be plausible. There are too few facts to fix a source.”
Therkon actually gulped. But his wits had been more than spurred awake. “Then something could have arranged it. Tried to stop you coming downRiver. So you are important. We do need you in Dhasdein.”
The flare of hope snuffed in its moment of birth.
“But was it arranged,” he was suddenly overcool, “to stop you coming? Or to be sure you came?”
“Oh.” This was a level of suspicion worthy of Iatha. “You mean, was it meant to be a, a bait?”
His eyes did not waver. “For Dhasdein, yes.”
My flesh had chilled. My hair was creeping upright. Whatever forecasts of disaster I had learnt in Iskarda dwindled to insignificance. Never, before, had I expected this to touch me personally. Never had I been physically, immediately, afraid for myself.
I swallowed too, and knew I did not need to spell out the answer’s second part.
“Two doesn’t know.”
A quick evening breeze washed over the stern-deck and bore away the smell of tar and water-worn wood and sweating, apprehensive men. The timing pipe rose into earshot, a tune I had heard them use to move quarry blocks at home. Oars, planks, rigging, creaked in time or counterpoint. I sat on my silly formal chair like the most ordinary twelve-year-old, and watched Therkon think. Revolve, extrapolate, construct decisions that would shape my life.
His attention came back to me. He was suddenly very still.
Then he said, too evenly for reading, “Tell me the truth, my lady Chaeris. Do you wish to go back?”
Can I? I knew my eyes asked, with shock, with alarm, with instinctive hope. And his answered, dark as the weathered galley-planks and as unwavering. You can. I will take you. If you really want.
“Oh . . .”
I said it stupidly, mind riven by twin visions: turn the galley about, back upRiver, disembark at Marbleport. Fifty miles up the range, and Iskarda. Tez, Iatha, all the others. Home.
Away from risk, and peril, and Dhasdein. And the future. The unknown.
Stupidly enough, what tipped the scales was a trivium: the thought of working our way back through the gauntlet of Mel’eth and Shirran, with men who had rowed their hearts out to bring me this far. And what they would feel, if I bade them turn around, and run the risks twice over. Row me back again.
“My lady.” Therkon suddenly had both my hands, sitting on his heels before me like the veriest cabin boy. “My lady, if you wish it, you have my word. No-one will blame you.” Sometimes his understanding was so sharp it cut. “You can go.”
That magnanimity dropped the last straw on the load. “Oh,” I said again, and heard the sob rise like panic. “I can’t. I can’t! It would just be for me, it wouldn’t fix anything and Dhasdein would still be stuck, and whatever it is could really happen, and it might get Iskarda as well!”
I clenched his hands like a life-rope and fought desperately not to disgrace Iskarda before strangers, not to weep like a chicken-heart at the first true threat of battle. To deal with it as would my mother, and Tez, and Iatha, and all the women of my kin.
The tear-veil faded. Finger by finger, I unlocked my hands, and had time to notice the imprint his rings had left on Therkon’s own fingers, before I looked in those shadow-deep eyes and got out, almost composedly, “Thank you. But no. I should—I will stay.”
The reward was in that expression, in the instant when he very nearly kissed my hands. My pulse was still quaky and I had time to rehearse Tanekhet’s warning, twice over, before I reached the outer world in time to catch the end of the crown prince’s commands.
“. . . dou
ble-speed at every second oar-relief. And sail till after sunset. My lady Chaeris has chosen to go on with us. Now we can, we must, make best speed to Riversend.”
Chapter V
‘Best speed’ worked until the third day out of Serythir: then the rain began.
They were scuds at first, quick passing showers. Then came squalls, sudden boisterous clouts of wind that made the galleys lurch like an unbalanced horse. By midday our speed had halved, both clouds and rain had thickened to solidity, and the wind, though still gusty, had settled its bearing. UpRiver.
“Spring snap,” Azo said, as we unearthed our wet-weather cloaks. She did not have to add that it would blow from the south, cold as very winter, and rain with it, maybe the best part of a week. She glanced forrard over the troops huddled under half-rigged tent-flies, the streaming rowers. “We’ll stay inside.”
Amid all the off-watch officers and Therkon’s entire suite, imperial affairs conducted in earshot, and the brazier his body-servant insisted on keeping alight, we survived till mid-afternoon. Then I demanded we reclaim the stern-deck. The captain rigged an awning, which did little more than rattle, but our cloaks kept us dry, and a workout now and then kept us warm.
Though the hencoop was soon crowded daylong with drenched, exhausted rowers, Deoren had flatly refused to let Therkon outside at all. Nevertheless he escaped the third day, and scrambled under our awning with his own version of midday bread and cheese.
“It’s a pity you’ve had such a poor view of Riversrun, my lady Chaeris,” he said, politely setting me innermost along the hencoop wall. “This weather is most inconsiderate.”
I took my eyes from the shivering but deeply impressed steersmen fixated on Verrith, wiping her knives after a last throw into the hencoop wall, and heard Azo strangle her rare, true, belly-laugh. I was too busy battling Two’s explosion of, Unseasonal, dangerous, not factorable in our data! to manage more than a gasp and a, “Yes. Yes, it has been a—a—disappointment—” And let his bright sidelong glance assume all the rest.
“We must hope,” the quirk of a smile acknowledged it all, “things improve for your first view of Riversend.”
I swallowed the panic along with the questions. After all, he knew no more than we about the possibilities of intent or delay, and their reasons, or the records of past springs that could retort, This is not outside the usual. And I was Tellurith’s daughter. A woman of Iskarda. If he could handle it urbanely, so could I.
I said politely, “I hope so. Yes.”
* * * *
Perhaps the River-lord heard him, for the wind eased just above the Gates, the huge gorge down which the River falls past the guard citadels in a long chute of white-frothed water, torn round bulwarked islets where, in war, they would fasten the enormous blockade chains, designed to prevent downRiver attack on Riversend. I knew Azo and Verrith were thinking with me that if worst came to absolute worst, they might hinder attack coming upRiver too.
Then the pale sealight’s threshold widened and we swept past a convoy of upward-labouring freighters into the Delta’s brief immensity of reeds and labyrinthine waterways and the mirror-shimmer of endless water under open sky. Before it narrowed into the stone-paved banks and fetid by-canals of outer Riversend.
From Two’s memories, almost nothing had changed. First slums, then factories, then the factory owners’ quarter, the seats of the great merchant guilds, then abruptly divergent neighbours: the nobles’ city estates, ashore, and the boat-city afloat. Refuge of the entirely homeless. Probably, I thought, resort of Archipelago refugees.
On the thought Therkon said beside me, “We do try to help them. The Archipelago folk, at least.”
“Yes,” I said at last, my breath easing. “I mean—I think you would.”
He had caught the slight involuntary stress on “you.” He inclined his head gravely. The somber expression matched his splendidest garb yet. The over-tunic was actually cloth of gold, an opulently brocaded almost blackish purple, the narrow Dhasdein trousers were true black, some kind of handkerchief-soft suede, and even through the River’s spectrum of odors I caught a hint of scent: something subtle, almost crisp enough to call bitter, but every tang of it proclaiming, Expense.
He must have caught my sniff. The smile flickered. “One must do one’s best,” he murmured, “for the Empress.”
“The Empress! You’re going to the Empress? Tonight!”
Under the cloud, the light was already waning toward dusk. Starting back from the rail, I saw torches kindle along the crest of a wall that met the left River bank. Bringing his profile out in chiseled shadow against what I already knew were the lights of the Imperial quarter, as he murmured, “I think, she expects us both.”
The best I could manage was a gulp.
Unlike my parents, we disembarked at the emperor’s private wharf. In full dark the quayside blazed with cressets and hand-borne torches, light flashing off burnished armour, flapping purple cloaks. An Imperial guard dekarchy, complete with full-face helmets and twelve-feet high pikes, restraint for a seething mass of dark but lavish silk and brocade and velvet getting heedlessly wet in the drizzle’s glitter. Palace officialdom.
At the gangplank foot Therkon was engulfed. The uproar smothered the dekarch’s bellow, the salute-crash of grounded pikes, but after a precarious moment, as we tried at once to find our land-legs and keep our feet, I found the whole mass was oozing backward down the quay. Therkon must simply have kept moving, bearing officials along.
Suddenly the press opened, the Imperials materialized on our heels, Deoren’s men had fanned out ahead, and Therkon himself was at my side, saying mildly, “My lady Chaeris, we go this way.”
Marble, bronze, gold, glass, exquisitely tended, exquisitely alien plants, frivolous follies, towering facades, bedizened porticoes slid past, above immaculate paving flags. Rainbow garb and fusillades of perfume announced courtiers sallying for the night. My parents had seen it by day, but Two identified the occasional landmark. Frequently enough to stay calm until Therkon lifted his voice to include Azo and Verrith, who would be getting tenser by the second as the River fell behind.
“First we find the lady Chaeris’ lodging. Then we will seek audience of the Empress.”
Next day revealed the ‘lodging’ as an Imperial palace suite with an inner court, an outer door and guard niche, complete with guard, and fittings as you would expect. Kitchen, bedrooms, private bathroom, dressing room, meeting room . . . Feeling positively bilious, I left Azo to check defenses, which eased Verrith, at least. We took an extra moment of defiance to unearth our most decent shirts.
My mother’s memory gauged the Empress’ audience-room as small and informal, in Dhasdeini terms. Beyond the filigreed bronze door, the floor was for once not marble but a riot of entwining rose, ochre, umber, muted blue: priceless Quetzistani rugs. The chaste cream plaster ceiling had been coffered with bronze rosettes, the grey-blue marble fireplace bore a delicate bas-relief of lilies and leafy hunting spears. From a gilded cedar chair before it rose the Empress.
As my father Sarth remembered, she could have met him eye to eye. A living tower in a cascade of celadon-green brocade Quetzistani robes, she had a chaplet of pearls to confine the multiple braids of thick black desert hair. And a face whose features I already knew far too well.
Therkon made the Dhasdeini noble’s greeting: palms to forehead and lips, a bow to the waist. Deoren, the only escort permitted past the door, went prostrate. Verrith and I stood dourly upright, inclining heads, and trying not to feel like beggars in our plain brown Iskardan coats.
Naturally she had looked to Therkon first. She held out her right hand, the emperor’s favour sign. He took two paces and bent with all his courtier’s grace to kiss the Dhasdeini signet on her own forefinger. As he straightened she smiled in pleasure as well as open relief and said, “Back safe.”
She sounded like him too, in tone, in timbre,
though without the Dhasdeini consonant clip. From her face, I know he smiled. She took his other hand a moment. Whatever passed between them was the warmth of kinfolks’ flesh and blood. And kin well-loved.
Then she released his hands and as she looked past him her eyebrows rose, before her smile turned dazzling. She said, “Tellurith’s child.”
Therkon turned, but she was already bearing down on me. “Ah, you are her child indeed.” She took my shoulders and surprised Two beyond demur as she turned me like a veritable child to the gold and bronze extravaganza of the nearest triple-flame lamp. Her hand traced down my cheek, and she actually laughed in silent delight.
“Her brows, her bones, her look. Oh, it is Tellurith. And so tall, already. Like your father.” Her hand slid over a shoulder to touch my hair. “Like both of them.”
The hand came back. Both hands cupped my face.
“I bid you welcome,” she said. “Most welcome, Chaeris of Iskarda.”
* * * *
Were you determined to be curmudgeonly, it might have been read as a political, a ruler’s relief: a desperately needed, thoroughly dangerous pawn gambled for, won, and at last to hand. Fresh from the River and the weather and the night, and the fear that had underlain it all, it was only the welcome that I felt.
I stammered something, and managed to bend my head a little further. She laughed softly—she very seldom laughed out—and let me go. Then the mirth snuffed like a candle and she looked deep into my eyes.
“Do you think you can help us?”
It was the voice of the Empress. The weight of the whole Empire was upon her, the weight that even Therkon did not bear. And she had the imperial power.
I gulped and without thought my lips opened. Two said, “However we can.”
Her eyes went wide: long, long eyes, accentuated even beyond her son’s impact by the outlining kohl. Her head actually went back a little, and my heart sank out the bottom of my chest.
