Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  attempt to distract me, perhaps ease my loss. Now, as Two’s

  projections flew by lightning leaps, I decoded with outrage

  another, more nefarious cause. Oh, they had connived to match me, and Nethor had wanted companionship, and perhaps he too had wanted more. Hero-worship, status as the Seer’s friend and sparring partner, at the least. But my consent had sent a signal elsewhere.

  And they had answered it, all the unattached young men. Bees to a honeypot. They had swarmed around me, as they had once, Two remembered, with Asaskian. She for her beauty, I as the highest ranking single woman in Iskarda. What a coup, to be the man who attracted, won, married or just partnered me?

  Two almost burnt a hole in the door-curtain as another

  memo­ry blazed past: Tanekhet writing a report. Asking my

  mother, Am I here to build a new world only as a man buys a

  stallion, for his breeding stock?

  I, too, had new, precious blood. In kindness, with my parents gone, Therkon only a disastrous memory, they might wish, even mildly scheme to find my heart a substitute. But this was a House from Amberlight. There would be no more children like me. They would want—the whole room swam in fury—to hand down my heritage.

  How did I manage not to rip that curtain apart, storm down the passage and rend Iatha, at least, limb from limb? Not that Tez was innocent. My sister, my surrogate mother, she was still the House-head. She would be complicit too.

  I did find myself soundlessly and suddenly at Iatha’s elbow, asking, with a hiss Two remembered as my father Alkhes’ edge-of-killing voice, “Which bee should I take first?”

  Chapter XX

  Iatha yelped and stumbled into incoherency. Tez, sharper as well as more candid, said only, “Oh, dear.”

  “Oh, dear, yes.” I was still hissing. Two trembled at my very fingertips. “Do you have no favorites? Or did you just hope I’d breed, no matter who?”

  They both yelled, “No!” And Iatha cried, “Chaeris, we never meant that!” with pain that needed no verifying. But Tez spoke with the lethal softness of her most deadly ripostes.

  “Are you not of age, Chaeris?”

  I stared back into her familiar, beloved, ruthless eyes. We both knew what she meant. I had claimed I was of age: I had used it, to shield Therkon. And a woman of age in an Amberlight House, especially a woman of Craft, might, would, if she had any sense of her importance, be looking, however leisurely, for a lover. A partner, perhaps a marriage alliance, but certainly, at some point, a child.

  I gritted my teeth and answered, “Yes.”

  Iatha started to say something. Tez lifted a hand and she fell quiet.

  “And do you have a woman in your eye?”

  Around us the house smelt of people and food and woodsmoke, the prolonged winter froust. Someone, perhaps Ashar, who had a good ear, went whistling liquidly toward the outer door. Tez and I looked at each other, and it needed no words to reply.

  Tez dropped her voice a little and asked almost gently, “Then what harm can it do to look?”

  At the young men, she meant. The ones who were begging to be seen.

  “If you wanted, had thought of a partner, we would thank the Mother. We would be grateful if you chose to stay alone.” It was a choice even in the Crafts of Amberlight. “If,” her brows knotted in a look of pain, “you were only happy in that choice.”

  “Oh, my dearling,” Iatha broke in suddenly, sounding choked, and put both arms round me, “we don’t care about children. We only want you to be happy. We just thought, if you had a choice . . .”

  That if every bee thronged round me, I might forget the one I had already accepted. And agreed to give away.

  “You’re still so quiet. So sad.”

  My throat had shut. I hugged her back, convulsively, the smell and shape and presence old as memory. Impossible to wound

  further, when all they had wanted was my good.

  “All right,” I said, and tried not to sigh. “I’ll look.”

  * * * *

  For the rest of winter I dutifully walked, talked, ate, worked, played with young men, bore every version from crass to subtle of the attempts to impress, cajole, outright seduce me, or simply make themselves visible. I could have snubbed the eligibles, the mature young men who already had a trade, or even a Craft. I did not have the heart to rebuff the third sons of Iskardan families, or the Craftless House youths who knew their cause lost before it was begun. I could not bring myself to rank them all like horses in a market. But nor could I bear to manufacture passion from a spark of momentary pity, or of liking only well-enough.

  And however I looked, not a spark of deeper feeling woke for any of them.

  Nethor brought it to a head. We were riding back from Marble­port, the day before Spring Thanks, the festival my mother

  founded, in the first spring moon. It is really too early for a

  festival: the snow is just gone, the deciduous trees bare, ploughing just begun. Food is short and motley, and hardly any flowers are out except the crocuses. Nor do I know why it has to be exactly at the end of first quarter, but there it is.

  Spring had suffered a change of heart as well, so we rode amid biting wind and showers if not actual snow. I told myself the greyness was purely the weather. That the leaden weariness that seemed to overhang me was just winter’s usual tail. That the festival would raise my spirits, as it was designed to do.

  Nethor was quiet too, though it was natural with him. Or so I thought, until we rode away from the last signal-station. In the temporary lee of the next hill, he said, “You all right, Chaeris?”

  He was troublecrew. Companion, fighting partner, friend. I could tell the truth for once. I answered with one quick shrug. No.

  He let the mules take another five paces. Then he asked, “Anything I can do?”

  He was always calm, often he seemed almost casual. But this was too consciously easy. It rang in my ear, attuned to his

  inflections, like a cracked bell.

  A signal, an appeal. An overture, of the most subtle, careful, precious sort. Nethor had never courted me, never shown the slightest sign of partiality. Now I knew otherwise.

  And if it cracked both our hearts, still the most honorable

  response I could give him was the truth.

  I looked at the muddied, raveled snow between the mule’s ears, and sighed. And let him hear me sigh. He deserved the truth of that, more than anyone else in Iskarda.

  “I don’t think,” I said, “there’s anything anyone can do.”

  The mules leant into the next slope. We stood in the stirrups to help. As they grunted over the crest and he settled back in the saddle, Nethor answered quietly, “If there ever is, just let me know.”

  I had not cried for weeks, it seemed. The tears had finally dried and withered, lost, like almost all feeling, in this overmastering grey. But I did blink tears back before I could answer, almost whispering, “Thank you, Nethor.”

  * * * *

  I was scrubbing saddle-oil from my riding trousers next

  morning when Asaskian came into the washing bay, Saarieq at her heels. Between them they sorted a load of children’s gear, filled a boiling-copper, found wood and set it alight. You hardly noticed Asaskian’s missing arm, except when she did such work. We exchanged day-greetings. But then Asaskian waved Saarieq upstairs, and settled herself like any lazing urchin on the steps.

  “How are the bees?” she asked.

  My every trouble-sense came alert. Iatha’s hasty simile had become a private joke, but Asaskian rarely made jokes. I knew her best in council, a piercing critic if not a source of strategies, I was coming to know her in the House. Iatha might be Steward, but Asaskian actually ran our household, so smoothly you hardly noticed trouble’s lack. And where Tez treated Tanekhet as a lover, House-mate, fellow strategist, Asaskian was the one who noticed, and
took steps, when he had a cold or over-tired himself.

  I thumped the current trouser leg harder and found a smile. “Oh—much the same.”

  In a moment she said, “Not going well?”

  She had to be scouting, for the consort, for the House. I

  decided not to prevaricate.

  “No.”

  She said nothing. I thumped harder at the trouser leg, until her sheer silence forced me to go on.

  “Iatha—and Eria—even Tez—all hope I’ll find someone. Like someone. But I can’t.” The silence impelled me on. “You can’t make yourself like anyone! It doesn’t work like that!”

  Asaskian looked down at her remaining fingers, still slender and shapely as the rest of her. Still, despite the rise of a new generation, the beauty of Iskarda.

  The memory of her own past nerved me to go further. “What did you do?”

  She looked up. A glimpse of topaz Amberlight eyes in that

  perfect face. Acknowledging that she too had been courted, pressed, pestered to take a husband or partner. Then she answered, however cryptically, the question I had really asked.

  “When it comes to the point,” she said, “you must listen to your heart. No-one else.”

  “Oh!” I let the trousers slip back in the tub and just bit down a curse. Don’t feed me such pap, I wanted to shout. I did manage to get out, “Don’t mock me,” not quite between my teeth.

  She had weathered far worse tantrums than mine. Unflustered. “I listened,” she said, “too.”

  Two gave me what history I did not already know. When with Iskarda at her feet she had chosen to love, and love without waver or substitute the most unsuitable man available, even in his own estimation. When she had fixed her choice on Tanekhet.

  I fished the trousers out and muttered something that might have been apology.

  “At whatever cost,” Asaskian said.

  I looked up, startled. She held my eyes and let me remember the rest. That she had wanted Tanekhet alone, and Tanekhet had wanted Tez alone. And then become involved with Keshaq when he despaired of winning Tez. Asaskian had only joined the consort afterward. She had never had Tanekhet wholly, completely, on her terms. But she had taken him on what terms she could get.

  For an instant hope shifted my heart, as a fledgling rocks a hatching egg. Then I thought of Dhasdein. Of Tanekhet’s

  warning. Even if I chose to be Therkon’s mistress, Iskarda would never stand for it. It would be his death. Therkon himself had

  admitted he could not marry me. I saw the dark, elegant deer again, turning and turning in a net it could not, did not want, could not bring itself to break.

  “For you, perhaps,” I said. “Not for me.”

  Asaskian was quiet a moment. Then she said in her strategist’s voice, “Are you quite, quite sure, this is the one? The only one?”

  Two did not have to answer, I did not have to think. It was printed like flesh’s map in every drop of my blood.

  “It’s impossible,” I said.

  I rolled the trousers over and slapped them on the tub-side. Water trickled down the drain. The copper fire muttered, and above it rose the first wisps of steam. I looked at the splattered floor, the dripping clothes, and the greyness seemed to close down as if it would swallow the rest of my life.

  Asaskian got abruptly to her feet. “Then if there can be no other,” she said, “and you cannot live without him, you should stop thinking why it cannot happen, and begin thinking how it could.”

  And she walked briskly up the stairs.

  * * * *

  I fumed at her smug certainty, her own successful vantage atop a love achieved. I spat her words out like bitter aloes twenty times a day. Loving Tanekhet had been a matter for compromise, a choice within her power. Loving Therkon was not an option, and winning him was a field where I could not prevail.

  I fumed clear through Spring Thanks, and the horde of ‘bees’ who besieged me to dance, talk, eat supper with them. I was still fuming when moon-end came. And with it, the first of the

  covenanted five days in Marbleport.

  Tez claimed, afterward, that it was better than she had feared. Most of the arrangements did work: the outer seines of customs and quay-watch, set this time to siphon off all but the most

  urgent petitioners, the people delegated to organize food and beds and latrines, the influx of outland night-watchmen and cooks and even apprentice troublecrew of sorts, who had already cost half

  Iskarda’s yearly building funds. People surged into Marbleport from upRiver, downRiver, from both Riversides, and miraculously, the system channeled them where they had to go.

  All I had to do was sit five days in an inn parlor, and bear the voracity of their need.

  The very sieve that made the numbers manageable also

  ensured only the most desperate reached me. And the questions hardest on us both: what’s wrong with my daughter, has my

  husband been drowned at sea, is my wife dying? Is there a remedy, an answer, a cure?

  And sometimes, Two and I had to answer, No.

  Worse were the ones to whom I could only say, “There is not enough data. We cannot See.”

  And then the reactions, the grief, the break-downs, simply watching the impact of the blow. Or, when I could not answer, the pleas, the demands. Sometimes, before troublecrew dragged them out, the actual abuse.

  Worse again were the physical pleas: My children are starving, I can’t redeem my debts. Can you give me money? Can you help? I need a place to live, my boat was sunk in a storm, I fell under a log in a timber-yard and lost my leg . . . Until I thought, listening to them, that my heart would break.

  Because we could See possibilities and offer suggestions, but money, work, a place to live, the concrete help I ached to give, was impossible. Iskarda simply could not save them all. And I would not, could not bear to help some, but not all.

  Was the worst the three barefaced swindlers who tried to cozen money out of me?

  There, Caitha had to risk her own life and grab me because Two got out of hand. Not merely in disappointment at their cheapness, but in fury that they could so befoul our gift, I had let her wake the fire. And we would have struck the last one where he stood.

  Of course that threw all Iskarda into consternation, not least because the whole River would now hear of my other gift. But on the fifth afternoon, when Duitho reported with grim pleasure that there had been a sudden decline in late petitioners, Tez grinned like a veritable wolf.

  “Makes ’em think twice,” she said, “that the Sight reads true for more than questions. And that the Seer bites.”

  I was too fraught and exhausted to think, let alone dispute. All I wanted was to get on a mule and flee, fast as hooves could carry me, from the din and the crowds and the guards, the tension, the threat of some mad or maddened attacker. And with every day, the accumulating memories. The faces. The questions. The

  answers. The hideous, unanticipated ordeal of the Sight.

  When we were away at last, Marbleport and its compendium of distresses dwindling amid a prospect of unpeopled hills and

  remembered trees, the wide rampart of the Iskans rising like sanctuary ahead, I said it first to Tez, riding close beside me.

  “I don’t think,” I said, mostly to my saddlebow, “I can bear to do that again.”

  I felt her shoot me one stabbing Head’s glance. But she did not burst out in the obvious, callous protests, I had a gift, I had contracted to use it, I could not deny people who knew about it and needed it. Or, far more compellingly, that I had opened the box of horrors. They would not stop coming. Whether I could bear it or not.

  Or clinching closure, You have to go on. To protect Iskarda.

  What she did say, as quietly as I, was, “There’ll be no more liars.”

  Then, before I could react, “This will have been the worst
. Because we had to favor the really bad ones, and there will have been a build-up. And because you’ve made your own protection. Before they come asking now, a lot of people will think twice.”

  Hard, Head’s consolation. Taking the unarguable premise, that I had to go on, as read.

  I leant both hands on the mule’s neck. Her hand came out to clasp on mine.

  “We’ll cut the days back. Four, at most.” Five days had literally drained me. That, too, she knew. “And filter tighter. Troublecrew right in with you.” To silence protest or abuse at the start. “Make it clear that if you can See, what you See is the truth. Not for negotiation. Not your fault. If they’re not prepared to accept that, they don’t get in at all.”

  I could hear the strain in her voice now, too. She had overseen the entire operation, as complicated and stressful as any war initiative. And had to watch what it did to her sister, her surrogate daughter, the core, for the last twelve years, of every concern for Iskarda.

  “For the rest, we’ll set up some kind of, hmm, assistance.” A snort. “We’ll levy the River.” The River’s rulers, she meant. “They’ll all be here next round: Verrain, Mel’eth, Shirran. Cataract. The assembly.” Of Amberlight. “Half the land-mayors in Verrain, half the tribe-leaders in Quetzistan.” She did not add, Dhasdein’s own overlords. “Half the Isles after them, I shouldn’t wonder. You don’t work for pay. But if they want your Sight, from now on, they put in for their own people. Let the ones on top pay back to the ones underneath.”

  Oh, Mother, I thought, as Two’s seven hundred years of illusionless memory unrolled before me. Did she have any idea of the corruption, the deceit, the outright swindling, on both sides, that such a charity would breed? Of the monstrous size to which it might grow? How could Iskarda, which all but exhausted itself organizing this one month’s convulsion, sustain such a thing?

  Iskarda would not have to: Two told me that, a moment before the Sight. If we chose to help the ones the Sight could not aid, we could draw people from the same place as the money. From the River nations. From another, handier, less corruptible source.

  “Maybe, some of the people who need help could stay. Could work?”