Tiungpei sold her family’s house in town to the fish merchant’s son, and commissioned an elegant home to be dug into the cliffs near the water. Their new rooms were much smaller but very beautiful, with tiled walls and floors of polished wood. Jian had a room all to himself, with a bed deep and soft as an albatross’s nest carved into the wall and a little stone oven to keep him warm on a winter night. Three great arched entries of bamboo and precious sea-glass overlooked a sunken courtyard, and high stone walls, painted red and yellow, kept the sea from his mother’s garden. There were mango trees in the garden, and a little stone fountain where tiny bright fishes begged for crumbs. They kept black chickens, and orange ducks, and of course the goats. Jian grew particularly fond of those goats.
He knew from an early age that, aside from the scolding, his mother was not like other mothers. She was a beautiful woman with a face round as a harvest moon and the long, sensitive hands of an artist, and she took great pride in dressing well. Even her plainest clothes had a bit of embroidery, a scrap of silk, a flash of color. Her hair, when it was unbound, rippled down her back and almost to her knees like a dark and perfumed waterfall. Yet she never painted her face, or modulated her voice into a soft and breathy little song, or walked with the mincing steps of a oulo-dancer. Tiungpei strode through life as if she were going to battle in her finest silks, and the enemy had best beware. The only pearl diver in Bizhan, Tiungpei brought honor and the emperor’s favor to the village. Her otherness was tolerated, and her daeborn son as well, but the common people of Bizhan were only too happy to keep them both at a distance.
A child, after all, was only a child, and even a strangeling child was more of an oddity than a threat. Daechen children, without exception, disappeared behind the great walls of the Forbidden City on the very dawn of adulthood and were never seen again. The boy Jian with his seal eyes and otherworldly ways might be ignored, for Daechen Jian would never return to the village. He would never walk past the fruit-seller’s cart and the herbwoman’s garden, never set foot upon the grassy pebbled path to his mother’s house. He would never again walk through the tall red gates of their little courtyard and see his mother’s face light from within at the sight of him.
* * *
There came a tap, tap, TAP! Upon the bamboo screen.
Jian jumped, his reflections shattered.
“I am here,” he called, unsure of the protocol in this strange place. He turned from the window as a troop of servants marched in and proceeded to ignore him completely as they set his room to rights. The servants of the lesser palaces unnerved him. Clad all in dark gray silk, with their faces powdered white and long braids hanging with severe precision down their backs, the lashai, as they were called, were slender and alike as the silvered trunks of bamboo in a long-dead forest. Jian could not tell, from the peeks he had stolen, whether they were male, or female, or both. He wondered if they were all related, but thought perhaps it was rude to ask.
They rummaged through his belongings much as his mother had done, shook out his clothes and hung them straight and neat, cleansed the air with a bundle of burning sage, and tossed salt into the four corners of the room. All the while he stood there clenching and unclenching his fists, feeling both violated and invisible.
A second mob blew into the room on the breeze of their departing, and this group carried buckets of steaming water. They filled the big copper tub, stripped him of his clothing, herded him into his bath, and proceeded to bathe him as efficiently as he would have washed a kid bound for the market. An oil was ladled into the water and scrubbed briskly into his hair and skin. It smelled of lemons and mint and burned his eyes. The servants ignored his coughing and muttered indignations.
So much for being an honored prince of the Forbidden City.
Jian tried to banish thoughts of a sparkling white kid led merrily down the path to slaughter.
When he had been sufficiently cleaned, herbed, and marinated, the servants dragged him from the cooling water and scrubbed him dry with rough linen cloths till his skin gleamed like burnished wood. His face glowed especially warm. He had been cleaned in places he had not known were meant for scrubbing. The gray servants combed more of the fragrant oil into his hair with a wooden comb, brushed it with a boar’s-bristle brush till it gleamed like wet black silk, and then twisted it atop his head in a knot so severe he could hardly blink. This they tied off with a length of yellow cloth. They dressed Jian in the silks his mother had given him, and his feet were clad in golden slippers soft as a baby’s skin and utterly unsuitable for what he had in mind, which was climbing out the window and running all the way home.
One of the servants pulled a plug from the bottom of the tub. The water swirled and gurgled and drained away down a drain too small to be used as an escape route.
The screen door slid open with a bang, and a short person with the air of authority and robes the color of deep twilight blew into the room like an early summer storm.
“Excellent, you are almost ready. Excellent.” She smiled, and her small, bright eyes all but disappeared into the folds of flesh. She glided closer—this woman had quite perfected the manner of walking like an oulo-dancer—and Jian was enveloped in a cloud of jasmine. It was not subtle, but neither was it unpleasant. She had a kind face, he thought. Kind and formidable. She was probably a mother.
“Come here,” she said. “Here. No, not there… here. Turn around, let me see you.” She tugged at the cloth wrapping his hair, poked his shoulder, and pinched his cheek, hard. “Still a bit of the baby fat, but it will do. It will do. Let me see your teeth… aaaah.” She pried open his mouth, and flashed a smile of her own. Jian startled to see a dragon’s hoard of gems and gold in her mouth. “And those eyes. Oh yes, you will do just fine.
“Some children born during the Two Moon Dawn are simply human children whose fathers had bad timing. But you, my boy, are the real thing. Give you a few years to grow into those eyes, and you could pass for pure Issuq. I can smell the sea on you.” She took a deep breath, as if she really was smelling him, and let it out in a satisfied sigh. “Would that I had a thousand of you, we would march upon Atualon this day and return with the false king in a cage. Azham, Ninianne il Mer, even that she-cat Sareta would strew our path with flower-petals to be out from under his shadow. I will make such a gift of you to the emperor, young prince.” She patted his bruised cheek, smiling like a cat that had gotten in the morning’s catch. “One empire stretching from Nar Bedayyan to the shores of Nar Intihaan. A glorious future, do you not agree?”
The names meant no more to Jian than did her vision of a glorious future. He really just wanted to return to his home by the sea.
“I am confused, ah, Gianpei.” He was not sure how he should address this woman. “Do I not already belong to the emperor?”
“Hush you. Do not cast your fishing net at a dragon. And I am Xienpei to you.” She dug into the deep pocket of her robe. “One more thing, and then we are finished with you. Here. Jade for luck.” She stood on the tips of her toes and looped a heavy strand of beads about his neck. “Amber for courage. Finally, pearls… pearls of wisdom.” The last necklace was the most magnificent Jian had ever seen, and he had seen a lot of pearls. Black pearls, almost purple in the sunlight, big as the last joint of a man’s thumb. A prince’s ransom.
“From your mother.” Those small, bright eyes watched him, weighing his reaction.
Jian’s eyes stung, and he tried to blink the tears back.
“She does me much honor.”
“You honor her with your tears, boy. Remember that.” She pinched his cheek again, hard enough that he winced. “Remember her. Remember who loved you first, and you will never forget who you are.”
“Forget who I am?” Jian resisted the urge to rub his cheek. “I do not understand.”
“Of course not, foolish boy. You are a yellow-road princeling with the taste of mother’s milk still sweet on your tongue. You know nothing. Accept that, remember where you come from, and yo
u may survive.”
Jian looked at her, and then at the pearls hung about his neck, dark as the last breath of twilight. He thought of his mother, of the way she tossed the wet hair back from her face and laughed when she broke the ocean’s surface with a basket of fat oysters. He closed his heart around the memory, and he closed his fist about the pearls, and he stood up straight as if she was there to scold him for slouching.
“Yes,” he promised. “I will remember.”
FOUR
“Life is pain. Only death comes easy.”
The invaders came as a dark stain upon the moon-blue water, bladed keels of the great vessels hacking through the soft tourmaline skin of the great Dibris, sails like halberds stabbing into the sky.
Every one of the Atualonian ships was an artist’s life’s work. Carven dragon and kirin and roc glared across the water, offended that the peoples at water’s edge did not yet bend knee to Ka Atu, the Dragon King of Atualon. Each had oars bristling along its sides like the spikes on a quillfish, and colored lanterns hung fore and aft. Massive drums labored and throbbed with the urgency of a thousand frightened hearts, and one could smell the incense even from this distance.
In the very midst of this fleet was a massive war-craft, a king among serfs, his prow and sides fashioned into the likeness of a great wyvern. His black face was twisted in a silent roar, and he plunged and reared in the water like an angry river-beast. Dark sails snapped and bellowed in the wind, and his decks were so crowded with the gold-masked Baidun Daiel that a glittering slick of pure magic rippled in his wake.
Hafsa Azeina was not impressed.
At her signal, shofarot began to wail up and down the beach as women raised them to their lips and sounded the ancient calls of welcome and warning: two short blasts followed by a drawn-out bellow, the ululations lapping up and down the river’s edge until ears rang and teeth rattled. The sounds faded away, leaving an odd tingling sensation on the skin. As the last call rolled across the water, it was answered by a long, thin shriek. Some large serpent had found in their song an echo of its own pain and loneliness.
She smiled. That should get them out of their boats quick enough.
In her hands Hafsa Azeina held the shofar akibra, a heavy, curled instrument she had fashioned from the horn of a golden ram. It was a thing of beauty, translucent and shining as a river pearl, delicate and deadly and sweet. The spirit within whispered to her, as it always did.
Use me, it urged. Release me. With this instrument she could open a door between worlds and summon the Wild Hunt, and rid the world of the Dragon King. That the Huntress would kill her summoner first was a matter of little importance. What was a king’s life, against the fate of all the people? What was her own life, when she had taken so many?
Of course, if Ka Atu died without an heir, there would be no one left who could control atulfah, no one to hold the Dragon fast to her slumbering state, and the world would be cracked open like an egg in her struggles to break free. It was something to consider.
She lifted the shofar to her mouth, and pursed her lips, and blew. All movement on the beach stopped for long heartbeats as the song of the golden ram drifted upon the air, stilling the wind, beautiful and terrible and lost. The river-beast bawled in terror—it had swum closer in those few heartbeats—and bellowed farewell from a greater distance as it took its leave. Even the beasts knew that voice.
Hafsa Azeina lowered the shofar and wiped at the mouthpiece with the hem of her tunic, ignoring the throbbing malice of the horn’s frustrated spirit. She had chosen not to summon the Huntress after all. Perhaps she was not as ready to die as she had thought.
That was interesting.
Outland men and women poured from the dragon-faced ships in a riot of color and noise—crimson silk and white linen, armor of leather studded with brass, and cold steel bright in the sun. Soldiers and fancy boys, matreons and patreons and slaves… the City of the Sleeping Dragon had descended upon the Zeera.
I would not go to Atualon, she thought to herself, so Atualon came to me.
Hafsa Azeina knew many of the Atualonians, some from her youth, others from encounters in Shehannam. Her eyes were drawn first to the king’s shadowmancer, a Quarabalese man who stood head and shoulders taller than the rest. His skin was black, not merely dark but true-black and studded all over with gems so that he glittered like a starlit night. Cat-slit eyes the color of a summer sky blinked languidly against the noonday sun. He was accompanied by a lush young woman half his height, swathed neck-to-ankle in pale green silks. His daughter, perhaps, and surely a shadowmancer in her own right. Only a dark mage could hope to survive the journey from the Seared Lands.
Mattu Halfmask had come, as well. The younger son of Bashaba wore his usual leather half-mask, this one fashioned into the face of a bull. Matreon Bellanca, in her heavy robes of state, trailed a clutch of dour-faced patreons like a mother hen with her brood. There were servants and slaves, soldiers and guards—the royal family’s Draiksguard with their wyvern-headed helms, the king’s Imperators in their studded leather armor, and a startling number of white-robed Salarians, private troops trained and maintained by the salt merchants of Salar Merraj.
Hafsa Azeina frowned when she saw them, and her frown deepened when she caught sight of a half-dozen Baidun Daiel, the blood-cloaked, gold-masked warrior mages who answered only to Ka Atu.
Then she saw Leviathus.
The tall youth who raced laughing down the gangplank, arms spread wide, hair whipping about his face like dark flames, could only be the surviving son of Ka Atu, grown to manhood in her absence. His gaze raked across the crowd, caught on hers, and his grin widened even further. He jumped into the water and strode through the river toward her as if the two of them were all alone in the world, and then he caught her up in a spine-crushing hug, laughing and twirling her about as she had once done with him.
Hafsa Azeina squeezed her eyes tight and her heart even tighter. Of course you would send your son, she thought, you dirty bastard. He had told her, and more than once, that only a foolish king would play by the rules.
“Zeina! Zeina! I knew I would find you.” Leviathus dropped her to the sand and grinned, and she could see the little boy she remembered peering out from behind the mask of a man. “Ah, Zeina, you are more beautiful than I remember, and I remember you as the most beautiful woman in the world. But you seem to have gotten shorter… and your skin, spotted like a cat’s! I had thought those stories were rumors.”
Hafsa Azeina tilted her head back to look up into the face of the boy who had chased at her heels all those years past, and who she had loved as her own. He had been a sad and quiet toddler when she had come into his life, and a vibrant, noisy youth when she had fled the city. She could see both of them in this beautiful young giant standing before her, the shadow of hurt curled behind his laughing eyes.
Though he stood before her soaking wet and smelling of the river, and though her heart would see him always as a boy, Leviathus was a man grown. He wore upon his brow a circlet of gold and sparkling gems, cunningly wrought into the shape of the Sleeping Dragon of Atualon. He wore the blue-and-gold kilt of the ne Atu, royal family of Atualon, and the sword at his hip was plain and well used. And so Hafsa Azeina did not cling to him, or smile, or tell him any of the things her heart wished he could know.
“You are welcome to this shore, Leviathus ne Atu, son of Wyvernus,” she said.
“Welcome to this shore, and no other, hm?” He gave her a measuring look. “Have things between us changed so much, Zeina? I think not. I would have you…” His eyes fell on her ram’s horn, and kindled with enthusiasm so familiar she ached with it. “Is that a shofar akibra?” He made as if to reach for the instrument, but drew back at the last moment. “It is, is it not? Did you slay a golden ram?”
He had defeated her before the game was even begun. Hafsa Azeina held up the horn so that he could see, and smiled. “I see you have only grown on the outside. Go on, take it.”
He h
esitated. “Is it safe?”
“Of course it is not safe. You may touch, but do not try to play it.” She smiled again at the expression on his face, an eager puppy that has been given a bone much too big for him to chew. Then there was nothing for it but that she should tell him of her hunt for the golden ram, how she had tracked the beast for six days along the cliffs above Eid Kalish, and how as it died it plunged into a chasm filled with blackthorn so that she almost lost her prize. She did not tell him what had driven her to the desperate kill, or show him the terrible scar high on her leg where it had gored her. As she told him the happier version of her story, he turned the instrument over in his hands, ran a reverent finger along its length, peered down its fluted throat.
He handed it back without meeting her eyes.
“I wish I could have been there,” he said.
She touched his arm, and let her hand drop away. “So do I.”
Sending Leviathus to her had been a very dirty trick.
Ani approached with the Mothers, a heavily pregnant Umm Nurati in their midst. Introductions were made and honorifics given. Leviathus went down upon one knee and kissed Nurati’s sunblade as if she were a queen. The Quarabalese man was presented as Aasah sud Layl, shadowmancer and advisor to the king, and the girl Yaela as his apprentice. Hafsa Azeina wondered if the pale and cat-slit eyes were usual among their people, or if it was the mark of a sorcerer.
Mattu Halfmask winked at her, and kissed Umm Nurati on the cheek, an offense for which he might have been gelded on the spot had Nurati not signaled an angry young Ja’Akari to back down.
Leviathus shifted from foot to foot all through the formalities, and finally gave in to impatience. “Take me to her, Zeina… please. I wish to see my sister.”
Not “my half sister,” Hafsa Azeina thought, not “the girl,” not even “the daughter of Ka Atu.” He wishes to meet his sister. If she still had tears, she would have wept. And how would Sulema react? Not well, she feared. Too late, she wished that she had prepared the girl for this moment.
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