by Kate Elliott
“Which is why you wanted the West Saroese to see her, but without a formal announcement, so no commitment is made, in case your plans change,” I say. “But doesn’t Kalliarkos also have a claim to the throne of Saro-Urok through Lady Adia?”
Menoë’s prim smile is all the answer I need but she goes on anyway. “With these new alliances, we can easily defeat the current king of Saro-Urok and place Kalliarkos on that throne. Then I can rule Efea without his sanctimonious interference.”
“That is indeed a comprehensive strategy,” I say. I’m suddenly so nauseated that I clutch my stomach.
“You care for him, don’t you?” Kal’s mother says with more kindness than I expect. “I can see the news upsets you. Don’t you understand, my dear child? You would not last one week as the king’s mistress. In truth, I am surprised you are still alive.”
The chamber seems to heave and sway around me, an attack of dizziness. Of grief. Of savage jealousy. Leaving Kal because we disagree about the path our lives must take is a choice I can deal with. But to think of Talon and him… She is beautiful as only Patron women can be, and also really good at the Fives, a true adversary in the way he respects most, the only reason he fell in love with me.…
I cannot endure it.
“Why are you still alive?” Menoë asks sharply.
“Because my father is smart enough to watch over me,” I snap. How badly I want to yell in her face that my father went to see my mother because he still loves her. But if Menoë cares for him, she may protect him, and she won’t if she knows the truth.
“Esladas is too much the strategist to allow anything to happen to you,” she muses in a tone whose ardor I can’t like. Her gaze grows puzzled. “But then why are you here?”
“Because I challenged Lord Gargaron and beat him.”
“Ah. There are many things Uncle Gar can ignore, but not that.”
“I am sorry for you,” says Lady Adia as if she means it.
I grab for this tiny piece of rope. “Will you help me and my sister and her husband escape, for the sake of the love your son has shown me?”
“No. I will not interfere with Lord Gargaron’s plans.”
“Is that why you let them throw your son into this ugly game when you know he doesn’t want to play it? Because you fear Gargaron?”
She shakes her head pityingly. “You don’t fear him enough.”
“Come, Mama,” Menoë says. “There’s no point in wasting your wise advice on her. She’s too mulish to listen.”
They walk to the door.
In desperate haste I rise, water dripping off me. “Will you tell my father where I am? Will you tell Kal what’s become of me?”
Holding aside the curtain, Menoë looks back a final time. “I owe you one kindness for saving my life. So no, I’m not going to tell them. It’s better for you that they not know.”
17
I leave Maldine in a cage pulled by mules. At Lord Gargaron’s order, they drape the cage in curtains and sew them shut. After much tugging with fingers and teeth, I rip open a gap along a seam and peer out, desperate to figure out where they are taking me and what’s happened to Maraya and Polodos.
The wagon in which I am being transported follows directly behind Lord Gargaron’s traveling carriage. In a way it’s a relief to still be with him because I’ve heard he intends to personally deliver his son to the Temple of Lord Judge Inkos atop the table mountain. Surely Maraya and Polodos travel with him. If they don’t, it means he has killed them. Yet as much as I frantically pry at the other corner seams, I can’t get a look at the rest of the party, only his carriage and the ubiquitous Captain Neartos riding alongside.
Our route takes us around the mountain’s base. We pass abandoned villages, roofs broken and storehouses scorched, and the trampled fields where armies met. Here my father fought a foreign army. I’ve nothing to do in this cage but fret or think, so I think. The battle took place when Father still served Clan Tonor. Maldine, its harbor, and the surrounding region are all lands that Father’s previous sponsor, Lord Ottonor, was responsible for.
It strikes me as suspicious that Garon Palace personally took over administration of Lord Ottonor’s former territory. Although Father accepted Lord Gargaron’s explanation that Ottonor died of ill health, I can’t help but remember Mother saying that she was sure he’d been poisoned.
We hit an incline. As the beasts haul us higher, I get a view of the road below. An army marches inland, its ranks passing as in review and swelled with an unusually high number of Efean grooms and drivers. Lord Thynos rides at its head with General Inarsis beside him. If I can just shout loud enough to draw their attention to me—
Captain Neartos slaps at the bars with the flat of his sword. “Whsst! Don’t try me, Spider.”
I jerk back, but it’s too late. He stops the wagon and orders a soldier to tie the seam closed, twice as strong this time.
By the time we halt, I’m light-headed from the way the heat has built around me like uncombed cotton being stuffed piece by piece into a bag until I’m choking on it.
One wall of the cage is lifted away. I crawl to the tailgate, roll off, and brace myself against it as I stand, gulping in fresh air. It’s hot but we have stopped in the shade of a wall so that’s a mercy. By clinging to the edge of the wagon, I work my way forward. The mules have been unhitched and are being led away.
“Come along, Spider.”
Neartos walks me to the stable. Inside the thick-walled building it’s blessedly cooler, air circulating through slots set high in the wall. I’m given my own stall at the very end. It’s actually a cage set into a stall, but I am grateful for clean straw. Neartos passes a flask of wine and three rounds of stale flatbread through the bars, then leaves. I’m so thirsty I gulp down half the wine before nausea hits. I throw it all up in a corner.
My stomach churns, but I force myself to eat a few bites of the dry bread, softening it with wine. It stays down. Day turns to night. I doze off and on, relieve myself in the corner where I vomited, and as dawn lightens darkness to gloom, I hear voices.
Without a word of greeting, Neartos escorts me outside and across the stable courtyard, back to the carriages. I look around frantically for Maraya but see only a threshold overlooking a wide stone staircase that descends into a bowl-like depression. Neartos’s back is turned, so without asking permission, I go over to the top of the steps.
Below, filling the depression, lie the grounds of a temple dedicated to Lord Judge Inkos, an orderly arrangement of gardens, courtyards, barracks, a servants’ village, and pavilions for the higher-ranking priests, all set around a central garden with a pond.
From this height I can’t help but notice how the substructure resembles the ruins outside Akheres Oasis, where Amaya and I begged Bettany to come home, where Gargaron concealed stolen gold in his uncle’s tomb and murdered innocent Efeans to keep the hiding place secret. Where I noticed how similar the ruins were to the arrangement of a Fives court: four outer quarters surrounding a round center.
A storm of comprehension blows through me, spinning my thoughts.
“If the Fives court represents the land of Efea, and the land of Efea is the Mother of All…” The circular nature of the answer is both too easy and too far-fetched. “Then the Fives court represents… the Mother of All.”
“Spider! Get back here at once!” Captain Neartos calls to me from the carriages.
“You buried her beneath your dead,” I whisper in Efean.
And yet she still lives.
In the servants’ village a figure limps out onto a porch. My breath catches. I’m sure it is Maraya, although she’s too far away to see her face. I loose the arrow of my heart toward her, willing her to look this way, and she glances up but I’m not sure she sees me.
I murmur a prayer under my breath. Am I filling my heart with false hope?
A crow startles me by landing on top of a lantern post an arm’s length from me. Below, a Patron boy using a cane taps his
way up the stairs in the depression. He has a crow on either shoulder, one looking ahead and one behind, and empty sockets for his eyes.
“What is this?” says the boy.
He reaches toward me, misses, and recalibrates, just as I do when I train. This time he pats a hand up my arm.
“You smell like straw.” He wrinkles his nose and sniffs. “And wine. And something sour.”
“You’re learning to see through their eyes,” I say.
He grins, but before he can answer Neartos strides up.
“Your Holiness, pray excuse the disturbance. The mule slipped her harness.”
“I see no mule, only this Efean girl,” says the boy with such innocence that I want to hug him.
Neartos points down into the temple. I look that way just in time to see Lord Gargaron emerge from a pavilion, make his farewells to a black-hatted priest of Inkos, and start up the stairs.
“We must withdraw to our carriage, Your Holiness. It is time to leave.”
“Where are you going?” the boy asks, then confides to me, “I’ve never been outside the temple except up here to the stable. I’ll go when I’m older.”
“Will you join the spider scouts?” I ask.
“Silence!” says Neartos.
“No, let her speak.” The boy leans closer excitedly, although he makes sure to touch my belly to gauge how close I am. “Do you know about the spiders?”
“My father was a spider scout.”
“That’s what I dream of doing. To see the land outside these walls.”
I’m already in trouble, so I give up on obedience. “Will you learn to take the spark out of one body and place it in another?” I ask.
The crows all shift their gazes to me.
Affronted, the boy says, “You aren’t allowed to know about that.”
Neartos takes hold of my arm with an iron grip. “You never fail to take the leap, do you, Spider? Thank you for your patience, Your Holiness. We will take our leave now.”
Steering me to the door of the traveling carriage, he indicates I must get in. Gargaron climbs in after and settles opposite me, his whip across his thighs.
“Where are my sister and her husband?” I ask.
“Out of your reach.”
“Have you killed them?”
“If it weren’t for her foot, I would consider taking your sister as a concubine. Her intelligence is astonishing, and she’s a lovely girl.”
With a false smile scalded onto my lips, I silently count to ten, and then ten more.
He smiles. “Very good, Jessamy. You are learning self-control. Good Goat! She’s not a true Patron woman, despite her looks. As it happens, Menos has taken an intense liking to your sister. In the outer precinct of the temple, where boys live for their first two years, they are allowed attendants. Who am I to deny him such comfort when he will afterward live a stringent and severe life in the service of the gods? Anyway, she is a brilliant tutor. I already see great improvement in his grasp of the Precepts.”
“She is pregnant.”
“Indeed she is, and not the first woman to be so encumbered, nor will she be the last.”
“What will happen to the baby?” I demand.
“You must accept that the baby’s destiny is out of your hands.”
“Do you mean to have it killed?”
“I do not like this tone from you.” His hands tighten on the whip.
I swallow my temper like sour wine. “What do you mean to do with me?”
“Why, Jessamy, I told you when I brought you to Garon Stable that first day what would happen if you did not pass muster.” He taps the whip against my knee. “Imagine all you might have had and the glory and triumphs you could have won as an Illustrious! You have brought this on yourself.”
We travel across the windswept plateau of the table mountain and descend its northern flank into a barren ravine. Cliffs hem us in like fortress walls. Sentinel towers rise from their heights, silhouetted by the sky, as we negotiate a guarded bottleneck. What lies beyond must be extremely valuable if it’s guarded so tightly.
Stony hills devoid of vegetation are pitted with cave openings supported by pillars, the entrances to many small mineshafts. Outside the shafts, under the merciless sun, men hammer chunks of stone into smaller pieces. Most of the workers are Efean, dressed in keldis so worn they are little more than rags. Those branded with a criminal’s mark on their shoulder come in all kinds, Saroese and foreigners as well as Efeans. Every one wears the gray look of people aware they are dying step-by-step.
Patron guards watch the carriage with the curiosity of people who see the same boringly cruel sights every day. Workers glance up before their overseers crack them back to work.
We pass through a dusty settlement tucked away in a side gully and enter the courtyard of an auspiciously large compound painted with bright murals as if to hide from the grit and misery outside. A man wearing an Inkos priest’s garb hurries out with a coterie of fawning servants and unctuous clerks scurrying behind him.
“Your Holiness. I believe you are expecting me.”
“Lord Gargaron! I had the message from a crow just a short while ago. Please, refreshments await you.” He stares as I climb out of the wagon, but recovers. “This way.”
The audience hall has incongruously exquisite couches, silk embroidered with delicate songbirds and windblown petals. Desperately thirsty, I wait as the lords drink.
“I am leaving a valuable object with you, Your Holiness,” says Gargaron. “See that she is put to work, but do not allow her to be molested in any way. Let me make myself clear: what the king has claimed belongs to him alone.”
“Like the land of Efea,” I mutter, although I ought to keep my mouth shut.
“Quite so,” he agrees blithely. “Who more than you is like the land of Efea, Spider?”
The thought that I am to be spared from assault makes me feel a rush of heady relief succeeded immediately by a wave of disgust and anger that I will receive a privilege not afforded to others.
Gargaron goes on. “You may beat her if she is recalcitrant. The point is, if she dies, you will have me to answer to, and you don’t want that.”
The priest sets down his cup as if the wine has turned to venom. “Of course not, my lord. But—”
“That is all you need to know. No matter what message you receive, or what person may arrive here, she will not leave this place unless I come personally to take her. Do you understand?”
He looks at me as he says it.
I always answer a challenge. “You want me alive to keep Kal as your puppet.”
He whips me across the face.
The pain slashes so hard tears spill instantly out of my eyes, and then I realize the liquid streaming down my cheek isn’t tears; it is blood. The whip has opened a gash on my right brow, a throbbing agony that doubles me over as I struggle not to cry because I will not weep in front of him.
“If you were dead, then our trial would be over and where is the challenge in that? Knowing you seek routes of escape but are trapped because your sister will be killed if you run is part of my victory. But yes, you are also a hostage. I have my own position to protect. So I am holding you in reserve.”
I straighten, a hand pressed to the gash, blood leaking through my fingers and clouding my vision. “It’s over between him and me. It’s better this way. He said so himself.”
A clot of grief chokes me, and it’s hard to go on but I force the words out.
“He’ll marry Princess Talessa and forget all about me.”
“Ah, Jessamy. If you believe His Gracious Majesty’s affections are so trifling, then you do not know him at all. I’ve come to see it is his good nature and sincerity that make him dangerous and unpredictable.”
The fear I have felt for myself is nothing compared to the sink of terror that opens up beneath me now. “Are you going to kill him once you no longer have a use for him? Like you killed his father and grandfather? Set a child king in his place? He
won’t go down easily! He’s smarter and tougher than you think.”
“Good Goat! Do you still believe the poetical fiction that I brought about the deaths of my uncle Menos and his son? I merely took advantage of the openings their improvident deaths gave me. As for the other, do you honestly imagine a child can lead armies or rule a powerful and wealthy kingdom?”
“A general can lead an army in the name of a child. Powerful advisers can rule powerful and wealthy kingdoms on behalf of underage rulers. It’s been done before.”
“My one regret is that you could not see where your best advantage lies.”
“Where is that?”
“Why, with me.”
He picks up a covered brass bowl and takes off the lid to contemplate the unmistakable gleam of gold dust and nuggets. The sheer wealth takes my breath away.
“You and I are alike, Jessamy. We unravel the complicated patterns within the spinning Rings before others do. Working together, we could have mapped a path to the victory tower. You would have been celebrated as one of the great Illustrious of the land. But it is not to be. We must all take the long view, as you will discover, for it may be years before I return to fetch you, if I ever do.”
When Gargaron leaves in the morning the priest in charge has the guards bring me from the stall where I’ve been chained up overnight. He examines me as he would a tomb spider found crawling across his bed. Tomb spiders are frightening creatures, big and brown, and it’s said their severed shadows haunt the dreams of any person who kills one.
“You look to be a sturdy girl, and better looking than most of your kind. If you behave, I will allow you to live quietly in the house.”
“No.” I’m not afraid of him. My head is in the game. Challenge accepted.
“No?” My refusal stymies him. He wrings his hands nervously.
Shivering through the night in a pile of musty straw as mules farted in neighboring stalls has cleared my mind wonderfully. Of course Mother was right. Of course Lord Ottonor didn’t die of ill health. Garon Palace wanted Maldine Harbor as a staging point for their bid to take the throne. They wanted control of the isolated Inkos temple where boys are taught the arcane and precious secrets of priestly magic. They wanted these gold mines. They wanted my father under their thumb. Gargaron spun paths through these Rings long before I even knew they existed.
