Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  The silence was a thunder-hush.

  Then Tanekhet said even more softly, “Did you heed my warning, Chaeris?”

  When I could only hang my head he moved. He would have gone straight out the door and I did not need the Sight to picture where and why, horror-images filled my inner sight, Dhanissa dispatched straight back downRiver on a killing mission, trouble­crew, Tanekhet’s own men, Tanekhet himself landing in Rivers­end, getting into the palace, finding . . . “No! No!”

  I grabbed him in earnest, with every ounce of trained trouble­crew’s strength. “It wasn’t his fault!”

  They were both staring. The same look was on both faces:

  understanding, misunderstanding, quiet but lethal, all but

  uncontrollable homicidal rage.

  “We were lovers, yes. Only once! He didn’t want to, he tried not to, he kept saying, his honor, my honor, the family, my fathers would kill him, he was too old, I was too young. He would never have done it, but I made him! It was the last chance. I made a bargain, I said, I know you have to marry the Riversrun daughter, but I want you first. I want this one night.”

  Tanekhet had both hands in his hair. His sole vulnerable point was that he thought it unlovely, and he never, ever, disarranged it in public view. He groaned, and I knew what he was thinking. He himself had done this, with a well-intentioned warning, trying to avoid the selfsame thing.

  Tez’s eyes were daggers and she was very nearly white. Then she moved, and the words slid out thin as a dagger point.

  “I’ll kill him,” she said.

  “No!” I grabbed her too. “I made the bargain, I got what I wanted. I just couldn’t. Couldn’t—”

  Keep the terms. Bear the consequences to their full, public end.

  She tried to detach me. I hung on. I actually glared at her, and Two reacted before I thought. White fire danced at my sleeve-cuff, sharp-tongued, ready to spark.

  “Let him alone!”

  She stared down at our hands, then, with the strangest

  expression, up at my face.

  Then the look changed. Wryly as if she bit into a lemon, but deliberately, she said, “You are of Iskarda. You are a woman. Of age. And I think,” suddenly, she was using her own Sight, “you have come into your Craft.”

  She did not mean Two’s spark. When I nodded, I felt both her and Tanekhet’s muscles ease with paradoxical relief.

  “So,” Tez went on after a moment, even more quietly, “you are entitled to your choice.”

  “Yes.” Suddenly I could not bear any more. The voyage was done. The night was over. Everything was over, between Therkon and me. The Isles were behind us. Dhasdein was behind me. Now I only had to deal with the rest of my life.

  “Can we,” suddenly the tears rose again, recurring showers after a deluge, blood from a re-opened wound. “Can we just—go home?”

  * * * *

  They gave me the same mule I had ridden down from Iskarda. After horses in the Isles, it no longer seemed daunting, any more than Two or I had to strain to check every hillside as they passed. The spaces at my side still echoed the absence of Verrith and Azo, but though Tanekhet and Tez rode with me, they hardly spoke. Mirror signals had already sent the vital news: I was back, we had succeeded. The rest could wait.

  On the Iskans autumn was well in train, silver-tawny grass that ruffled the hillsides like folded silk at the wind’s every dust-and-wood-smoke breath. The few deciduous trees had taken on a lemon tint, so conifers and helliens stood out dark, or unmoved silver-grey, green, blue. The morning air already had a hill

  country sting. In Iskarda the fields would be stubble, bleached stalks over darker earth, the plums all eaten, the few appletrees ready for harvest. The roses, all the flowers of summer, the great festivals of Spring Thanks and Midsummer, would be long gone.

  When we came round the quarry-head it all looked the same, yet irreparably different. The named, known, remembered house fronts, the vistas of crest and hillside beyond, the traffic of homing hunters and water-carriers, quarry folk dribbling out the gate. The Market chimneys, higher than the rest, dark stacks against golden cloud-shapes, emitting their evening cloud of smoke.

  At my elbow Tez said, “We told them, No fuss.”

  I felt my shoulders and even my mule-braced legs relax. The lookouts would have signaled our approach, but there would be no general welcome, such as Iskarda must have been panting to give. Their youngest, most sensational daughter, safe home, bringing success. And no salt in the wounds, either. No voices calling, openly, for Verrith and Azo. Nobody needing me to wave, smile, hug, behave as for a victorious hero’s return.

  I need only tell the story, the full story, in council. They would do the rest.

  * * * *

  Nor did I have to do it that night. Tez decreed that Chaeris was weary from the ride, the voyage upRiver, all the prior labour and stress. I did not even have to face supper in the kitchen with the House, the explosive cries of Darr and Saarieq and Aretho, long since back from Amberlight, who would certainly demand the whole story with piercing queries and absolutely no abridgement if they were let in earshot of me.

  I heard their clamor outside, the thumping rushes of feet. I myself had been slid indoors, deposited with my gear in my old room, left to unpack. Later, I had supper, with the consort: Tez, Keshaq, Asaskian and Tanekhet. With equally rigid care, nobody said a word about my trip. It was all news of Iskarda.

  I did not have to ask my most important question, the one that had burned like a coal under my breastbone all the way UpRiver. Tez had told me, before we ever left that Marbleport office, at my own just-steady, “Are the others back?” Quietly, knowing my

  desperate need to fly like a veritable child to my mother’s

  embrace, my fathers’ comfort, she had answered, “Not yet.”

  Nor had there been letters from upRiver. It was a long way, they reminded me over the supper dishes, the familiar, estranged food of home, new season plum jam, barley bread, the dish of harvest-plump quail. Nobody could reasonably expect a letter yet. Even if all had gone optimally well.

  “We did send,” Tez added, her nearest approach to my own affairs, “a copy of yours.”

  So they might already know, I realized as Two added weeks, about the wreck, about the deadlier second enterprise. Another anxiety amid their own dangers. My mother, both my fathers, would burn with it: their dearling, their daughter in peril, and they elsewhere.

  Despite it all I slept fairly well, in the peculiarly safe yet limiting confines of my own bed, and what should have been my own room. Now it felt only like some new, slightly cramped casing for a person who had never actually been here before.

  And directly after breakfast came the chief ordeal. My official report, as the daughter, but also the emissary, an agent sent on a mission, of Iskarda.

  I let Two begin, with Skalr’s tale. At its end, as I blinked my own eyes back into focus, the faces round the council table wore the same expressions as Skalr’s hearers. Quiet, assimilation,

  respect. Wonder. A tinge of naked awe.

  Then Asaskian’s cool, clear voice enquired, “How many islands are down there?” Just as Duitho leant past Eria and began with eagerness verging on open rapacity, “Chaeris, with the dagger: how far could the light reach?”

  I started to laugh. I could not help myself. Oh, Mother, I did not have to cry aloud, I’m home. There would be no candle-lighting here. Awe, perhaps, assuredly sympathy: but first and foremost would come the politics, the strategy, the weapon-potential. The import for Iskarda.

  Then Iatha snapped over the hubbub, “What will Dhasdein do now?”

  The noise stopped. The floor lurched under me. I could feel all the eyes turn. The eager or anxious or simply concerned eyes of the unenlightened, the too carefully blank eyes of the consort, who already knew the rest.

  And I could not tell it. A
t the mere thought my throat tightened, my eyes burned, if Two did not spark or throw a tantrum, in a moment I would burst into tears.

  Tez said in her Head’s voice, “We should ask, what will the River do, now Chaeris has her Sight?”

  Uproar broke instantly, Iatha among the rest. As usual, like my mother, Tez let them burn the first of it off. So they were ready to listen when she broke in, again in that carrying Head’s voice.

  “Sight or no Sight, our concerns are little changed. We must still find a way to protect Chaeris from oracle-chasers. And to keep the overflow, the chaos they would cause, from Iskarda.”

  Several people began an exclamation or suggestion or query, and stopped. Tez’s expression said she had already prepared a proposal, at the very least.

  “Chaeris deserves to keep her home, and her life, intact.” She did not look at me. I did not have to look as if such a thing might be possible. “But her Sight is known, and that cannot be either repressed or denied. Nor,” carefully blank now, “do we have the right to deny the River her resources. Or Chaeris her true Craft.”

  Now I knew where she was going I could as easily have kissed as strangled her. She meant, on the one hand, to protect both me and Iskarda. On the other, I had claimed amnesty for Therkon, and she had granted it, as my choice. As a woman, a Crafter, whose decisions about her body, at least, were hers alone.

  But as a Crafter, I was expected to work for the House. I had claimed Crafter’s right, and she was calling my bluff. Making it the basis of House strategy. Planning, demanding, that I use my Sight. For real.

  It was Iatha who asked for me, wary to gruffness if not yet belligerent.

  “What do you suggest?”

  Now Tez looked at me, with more concern, compassion, outright love than her first words had implied. “Firstly,” she said, “we double-garrison both roads. From this new moon.”

  New moon was barely two days ahead. Blood and old custom told me without need for thought. And Tez had already estimated that no desperate oracle-seeker would reach us before then.

  Iatha frowned. The hills, she did not have to say. Iskarda had no walls, no outer defenses, no force to defend them if we did. What would blocking roads do?

  “And the blockade guards,” Tez said evenly, “will say the same thing as the customs and quay-watch at Marbleport, as the customs at Amberlight. As the Notes we will send to Verrain, and Dhasdein, and Cataract. Our Seer is returned from the Isles,” already hardly anyone was saying Archipelago, “and she has her Sight. And she will See for those who ask. But only for five days every moon. Only for those who seek a proper audience. And only at Marbleport.”

  No wonder, I was thinking among the hubbub, that my

  mother named her Head. She has the wits, the speed in planning, the grasp of resource and strategy. She hardly needs a Sight.

  It was bearable, as well as practicable. I could feel Two calm, even as my own muscles eased. Five days a moon, five covenanted, ordered, rigidly arranged days. No need to ensure that I would have protection, an escort down, my own troublecrew, other

  people to meet the seekers, to sieve their demands, to allot waiting places—I struggled to keep my face straight.

  Because of course, while this protected Iskarda, it would bring the flow of custom and demand and wealth straight into Marbleport.

  The council were already past that. Suggestions and questions and projections flew like hail, where I would stay in Marbleport, what new buildings would be needed, stables, another inn, perhaps a hostel of some sort, a quay-watch, customs craft to catch the River inflow, provisions, suppliers, stipulations for those who came.

  “We must expect to deal with the first comers here.” Tez was making another general announcement. “This autumn. We have perhaps another two months, before winter shuts the River. We can use that time to spread the word and organize Marbleport. By spring, we will need everything in place.”

  Because spring would see the arrivals in full flood. None of us doubted it. Twelve years the River had been waiting to call on my gift. Everyone who had a concern or a problem or a dilemma or simply a question about the present or future would come. Everyone from farmers to emperors.

  Iatha said it, sharply, again, into the resuming flood. “And Dhasdein? What will Dhasdein do?”

  Tez did not look at me. Iatha knew the story by now, no doubt of it. She had not asked to pain me, but because the question had to be voiced. Tez’s answer was flattened with the charge of what she herself knew. The tension of speaking, with different nuances, to us both.

  “Dhasdein will do nothing,” she said.

  * * * *

  And she was right. As autumn lengthened we garrisoned both roads, though only two or three would-be supplicants got

  beyond Marbleport or Amberlight. At Applegather, the last

  harvest feast, both House and village held a ceremony for Verrith and Azo, who had gone to the Mother, not through fire and water in the old Amberlight way, but through water alone.

  In earliest autumn I had faced the journey’s last trial: telling the news to Herar, Azo’s husband. He had married her as a youth, he had gone with her upRiver to the Source, he had shared her,

  always, with Verrith. But the hole her loss would leave in his heart, I knew even the story of her going could not close.

  I said and did what I could, with fellow feeling deliberately smothered under the sympathy. Nothing would heal him, except time. If he ever healed.

  Then, whatever griefs endured, routine resumed. I worked out with troublecrew, took my turns, anonymous in shirt and cloak and leggings, on the mirror-signal lookouts, on the guard-posts, in the household work. What they told Darr and Saarieq and Aretho I cannot imagine, but when they were at last let near, they treated me like something made of cut-crystal. Not dangerous, like qherrique, just too fragile for common touch.

  I used my Sight in earnest at a trial of the Marbleport

  arrangements, the first day of the first winter moon.

  We rode down to the biggest inn the night before. I had not wanted to seem an oracle—in a Marbleport inn parlor? But they insisted on some adornment. “If we don’t seem to prize you, neither will they.” So I sat between my advisers, retinue, troublecrew, leaning on the arms of an austerely ornamented, cushioned chair.

  The questioners had been rigorously selected too. There were only three, already warned that they were not guaranteed a r­eply. One was a Verraini farmer whose father had died leaving the household treasure lost, buried during the Families’ overthrow. One was a woman of Amberlight, desperate to know if she could conceive a child. And one was the kinglet, once a Dhasdeini

  pup­pet, now genuine ruler, of Mel’eth.

  “I think,” Tez said reluctantly, as we discussed the choices, “that we must allow this one. He’s a slaver, he probably raids the River trade, but . . . He wants to ask, can Mel’eth live without selling slaves.”

  Two was already whiting out our vision. I myself could see past the surface question, past the deeper calculations based on current income, known resources, history, to the projections of possibility. And where those outcomes might lead.

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re right.”

  In the event, it was far simpler than my over-keyed nerves let me expect. For the woman, fidgeting and white-faced, the answer came as much from her skin and shape as Caitha’s lore, accumulated long past. A posset to drink, a regime to observe. And the answer would be, Yes.

  For the farmer, a handful of questions on his father and his farm let us See, clearly as if we stood in the caissyn field among the tall, rustling, purple-skinned stems ourselves.

  For the kinglet there were questions too. I tried to be

  diplomatic, but Two was more than half in charge by then, and some queries pressed harder than I feared he would bear. But though he had entered already pale under his gorgeously

 
brocaded cap, and there were times when his sweat reeked, however impassive he kept his face, he answered, if with due thought, every time.

  So we could store the harvest of new information atop the old, and answer, with the full confidence of the Sight.

  “Mel’eth can live without selling slaves. To balance the extra people, improve the western waters. Dig deeper wells. Look into River aqueducts. Or covered channels. Consider exports: dates from the oases, your spun goat-hair. Wall hangings. To the River, and also to the Isles. Seek finance, to begin. Expect to find it, for the price of peace and an alliance, in Dhasdein.”

  * * * *

  When he had gone, after copious obeisances and a cascade of thanks, wonder, eagerness, even an offer, which my trouble­crew thankfully discouraged, to kiss my hands, Tez let out a long, long sigh.

  At my other elbow, Iatha said, very softly, “Mother be praised.”

  I found myself shaking. Now it was over, the tension, anxiety, relief were uncontrollable. In the act there had been no time for self-consideration. We had been one entity, one vision, no more than a faculty of perfected Sight.

  Tez touched my elbow and handed me a half-cup of watered wine. As I sipped, she said softly, “I cannot imagine what it must be like.”

  “Like . . . It is a Sight. But it’s more than place. It’s time. The, the threads run forward, and back, and through the present, as it spreads. Then it all connects, it’s all the one thing, ahead and behind and out to the edges of the world.”

  Iatha too drew a wondering, very nearly awed breath.

  “It won’t always w-work.” Now I could not keep the quaver at bay. “There’ll be times—questions—too little information, things we just can’t see. Things, maybe, we can’t say.”

  Tez’s arm shut round my shoulders, warm and firm as a human shield. “But to have you do it, at last. To watch it happen.” She hugged me. “Chaeris, that was worth everything.”

  Then suddenly she laughed aloud and called past me to Iatha, “Imagine the faces, in Riversend!”