Troubled Waters

by Sharon Shinn

  “Let’s eat something,” Darien said, making his way toward the storefront of a retail kitchen. “It will make a nice change from the sad meals I have put together every day.”

  Zoe followed him into the warm, aromatic building, where customers were already lining up at a glass counter near the back and filling the dozen or so tables set up front. Her mouth was tugging itself into a semblance of a smile. Darien was not much of a cook; he had clearly been at a loss when she had showed no disposition to make meals, either for herself or for him. She wondered what he had eaten during the long journey to find her. Had he subsisted on bread and dried meat, assuming that he would be well-fed on the return journey with the king’s intended bride preparing elaborate meals? Her father would have relished such hunti arrogance. Imagining him laughing was almost enough to make Zoe laugh.

  Almost.

  Behind the glass counter was an excellent assortment of baked goods, fresh vegetables, and cooked meats, and Zoe was surprised to feel the stir of hunger. She ordered everything that looked appetizing, which caused Darien to give her a sideways glance full of amusement. He ordered almost as much, and then asked for a basket to carry any uneaten portions back to the wagon. They would have decent meals for the next few days, at least.

  They found a table near the window and watched the townsfolk hurry past, heads bowed against the rain that had started up again. Zoe saw a circle of children splashing enthusiastically through a particularly big puddle, and several adults who paused and turned their faces up to let the water sluice down their cheeks.

  “It’s good to see children playing in the rain,” Darien said, gesturing toward the streets. “The Marisi River is lower than it has ever been, though snowmelt still comes down from the mountains. A few of the smaller towns have been hit very hard, since the farms that feed them have essentially shut down. This is the first time they’ve seen rain here in a quintile.” His mouth twisted into a sardonic smile and he added, “I could wish its timing was better, since it has slowed our journey to an intolerable pace, but I am glad to see it.”

  Zoe swallowed a mouthful of a deliciously flavored meat-and-rice dish. “You must welcome bounty whenever it comes, hunti man. It is often inconvenient. But if you insist on accepting it only when it suits your schedule, you will find yourself very poor.”

  He laughed and then crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, watching her. “I knew Navarr Ardelay a little, and that sounds like something he would say.”

  She nodded. “All the time.”

  “So are you like him?” Darien pursued. “You have been so quiet that I have not been able to form a sense of your personality. Your mother was a woman of blood, your father a man of fire. Which personality do you favor, or have you developed an entirely different one on your own?”

  “I am coru,” she offered.

  “And when did you decide that?” he asked.

  In Welce, it was believed that all children came into the world receptive to one of the elements. Most often a child would take after a parent, or perhaps a grandparent, who exhibited a certain set of traits. But, really, there were no sureties. All children were encouraged to discover their own internal sympathies. A girl born to two sweela parents might find herself drawn to air; a boy with primarily hunti relations might be entirely torz. It was assumed that, at some point in his ancestry, there would be a torz forebear, and the affinity had merely skipped generations. It was just a matter of discovering what kind of longing was in the blood, what kind of certainty was stamped into the bone.

  “Very young,” she said. “I cannot remember a time I did not consider myself coru.”

  “So you are a woman of blood and water,” he said. “But what else is there to know about you? Is there curiosity in you? Kindness? Greed? I cannot tell.”

  Zoe took another bite before answering. “I’m not sure I can answer that.”

  He leaned forward. “Why not? Was your father such a strong personality that you had no room left to form your own?”

  She raised her eyebrows, her expression sardonic. “Would that please you if it were so?” she asked. “Wouldn’t that be the right personality for the fifth wife of a king?”

  He settled back against the chair again, his gray eyes even more intent. He was clearly finding her more of a puzzle than he had expected, Zoe thought. It would have been amusing if she had been trying to confuse him, but she hadn’t even made that much effort.

  “It might make life simpler for you,” he said slowly. “The king’s second and third wives have strong personalities—very—and there is much subtle feuding between them. A new wife who was scheming and ambitious might find herself with two seasoned enemies.”

  Zoe knew the prospect should be alarming. She knew she should feel dread and uncertainty about her new position; she should ask this court insider for advice on how to navigate the treacherous palace waters. But she merely shrugged. “I am not at all ambitious,” she said. “I don’t think they will find me much of a threat.”

  “Alys sees everyone as a threat,” he replied. “And Seterre is not much better.”

  “I don’t think anyone has ever hated me before,” she said. “It will be an instructive experience.”

  He watched her for a long time in silence. “I believe I am seeing glimmerings of it,” he said at last.

  “Glimmerings of what?”

  “Your true personality. There is humor in you, is there not? A deep appreciation of the ridiculousness of the human condition. And a certain tolerance for the vagaries of human nature.”

  It was hard to know if his assessment was accurate or not. She had never spent much time on self-analysis—not even back when she had time and energy to think about herself. “My sweela father used to say that he had passed on to me the gift of clarity. From my coru mother, I inherited a certain amount of resilience. I think this means that, no matter what my situation, I can look about me, I can appreciate what it offers, and I can adapt.”

  He listened closely. “Then this—this docility that you show is your true self, not some mask that has descended over you as a manifestation of your grief.”

  She blinked at him. Your grief. Such a casual way to describe such devastation. “I suppose that in general I am not a contrary sort of person,” she said, her voice muffled.

  His eyes were narrowed; he was making no attempt to disguise the fact that he really wanted to peer inside her soul. “And yet you are the daughter of a sweela man,” he murmured. “You cannot be as tame as you appear. There must be passion in you that can be roused by something . There must be something you would fight for, or against.”

  “I am a woman of water,” she replied. “I am more likely to slip away in stealth than to blaze up in wrath.”

  He looked dissatisfied. “All men and women have a little wood and bone in them. Somewhere, from some ancestor. Something that will not back down. Something that will not give way.”

  She turned her right hand palm up and studied the faint lines. “There must be bone in me somewhere, or I could not hold my shape,” she said. “But these days all I can feel is blood.”

  They passed the rest of the meal in silence, which suited Zoe just fine. The rain had slimmed down to a faint gray drizzle by the time they left, and the gaslights had been put out.

  “There’s a temple around the corner,” Darien said. “Would you like to stop in for a blessing?”

  It was a practice city dwellers honored more often than country folk. Zoe knew that after they had moved to the village, her father had missed having constant access to the blessing barrels. He was delighted whenever they visited a town large enough to hold a temple, so he could pull out a blessing for the day. She had always thought it was the ritual that appealed to Navarr, or perhaps the folly; how could a man really expect to receive guidance from a message presented to him entirely by happenstance? But he had taken advantage of every opportunity that came his way.

  “Yes,” she said, and they turned their step
s toward the temple.

  It was a small and pleasant round stone building filled with incense and lamplight, heated and dry on this chilly and wet day. The five benches lining the perimeter were painted in traditional colors—white for elay, blue for coru, black for hunti, green for torz, red for sweela. The space was so small, and the benches were so close together, that their edges almost touched, turning the interior into a pentagon. Darien tossed a tithe into the box at the door, and then he and Zoe went straight for the blessing barrel that was set squarely in the center of the floor.

  “You first,” he said.

  Zoe plunged her hand deep into the pile of coins, enjoying the cool, sliding sensation of the metallic disks against her wrist and forearm. She wanted to close her fingers over a whole pile of blessings, shower herself with gifts of strength and endurance, but she resisted. Instead she pinched a single coin between her thumb and forefinger, and brought it slowly up.

  They looked at it together. Its utter unsuitability would have made Zoe laugh, if she were capable of laughing. “The blessing of surprise,” Darien said. He inspected her. “It might have been the very last one I would have bestowed upon you at this moment.”

  “Perhaps that is why I need it,” she said. She slipped it into her pocket. Some people tossed blessings back into the barrel, particularly if they didn’t like what they’d been given, but Darien had paid the tithe, and a handsome one at that. It would more than cover the cost of minting new blessings to make up for any they walked out with today. “Now you.”

  He grinned, a surprisingly boyish expression. “I will, but I can tell you already what coin I will draw,” he said. “It will be resolve or power—perhaps loyalty—but it will be a hunti trait. It always is.”

  That actually roused her interest. “Always? Even at your birth?”

  His grin widened and he nodded. “My father went to the nearest temple and found three strangers to draw blessings for me,” he said. “All three pulled out the symbol for determination.”

  She tilted her head to study him. “If I had been your parents,” she said, “that might have made me a little uneasy.”

  Now he laughed. “You think such blessings would portend a stubborn and difficult child?”

  “Yes.”

  “You would be right,” he said. “But they were both hunti themselves, so they didn’t have much right to complain.”

  She gestured toward the barrel. “Show me. Very quickly, so you don’t have time to finger the embossing and pull out the one you want.”

  He gave her a derisive look that was easy to read—as if I would stoop to anything so petty—and dipped a hand into the barrel. Smiling, he offered her the token. Determination. “I told you.”

  She felt her face relaxing into a faint smile. “Again. Deeper this time.”

  He obliged, and retrieved a second coin from what very well might have been the bottom layer. Determination.

  “That’s remarkable,” she said. “A third time?”

  This time the coin he secured was stamped with the sigil for resolve. “You have to be cheating in some fashion,” she said. “But I can’t see how or why.”

  “Come here,” he said, although she was standing right beside him. He guided her over until she stood with her spine nearly touching his chest. He extended his right arm so it rested on top of hers, his open palm grazing the back of her hand. Carefully, he laced his fingers through hers and folded them down.

  “You plunge your hand into the coins and you pull one out for me,” he said. “See what you choose.”

  Its very oddness was irresistible. She actually smiled at him over her shoulder. “Very well, then, I will.” She narrowed her fingers and plunged them into the metallic bounty, blessings spouting up and curling away from their entwined hands. His skin was so much warmer than her own; it was almost a shock to realize that some people maneuvered through the world without the constant chill that had dogged her for the past nineday. It was tempting to back up a pace, to collect more of his heat along the other planes of her body. She was sure he had plenty to spare.

  Instead, she let her fingers close over a coin—and then let it go, and chose another one. She drew their arms up before she changed her mind again, the token clutched inside her fist so she could not drop it. He released her the minute their hands emerged from the barrel, and she half turned, so they could both see plainly when she showed off the treasure she had retrieved.

  Power.

  He was laughing outright. “I told you,” he said.

  Her own thought was so ridiculous she did not bother to voice it. What if this was a blessing meant to fall on me instead?

  They were three more days upon the road, since the malfunctioning gas valve did not prove entirely amenable to repair. Darien grew increasingly impatient, but Zoe was entirely unaffected. She slept later every day in the impossibly soft bed in the impossibly tiny bedroom, turned drowsy and content by the ceaseless rocking of the smoker coach. Sometimes she tried to lie awake and imagine life at the palace as the fifth wife of a man old enough to be her father, but she couldn’t make the picture form. It was so much easier to drift back into dreaming.

  On the last two days of the journey, they passed through bigger and bigger cities. The smaller towns they’d seen earlier had rarely featured a building taller than two stories, and most of the houses had been constructed of wood and plaster. In the cities, there was usually a cluster of buildings five or six stories high, and stone was in evidence just as much as wood.

  By this time, they were also encountering real traffic—single riders on horseback, caravans of horse-drawn wagons, even a few other elaymotives , though none as elaborate as their own. Their pace therefore slowed considerably, when it did not stop altogether because of the imperfect valve.

  On the seventh day of their journey, at an enforced halt, the drivers announced they would need a few hours to replace some key part. Darien took the news with relative sanguinity. He had just told Zoe they were only a day from Chialto. She assumed he could hire some other conveyance to get him that far, if he had to, which made him feel more cheerful.

  They had arrived in this town in the early afternoon, and naturally it was raining. Nonetheless, Darien proposed they go shopping.

  “I’d rather stay here and sleep,” Zoe said.

  He appraised her. “What do you plan to wear when you meet the king?”

  She gestured at her clothing. Loose gray trousers, a faded red tunic, and the ever-present beaded shawl. “This or something very like it,” she said. “By now, you have seen all the clothing I own. Pick the outfit you like.”

  “I like none of them,” he said. “You should buy something else to wear.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to choose.”

  “I will advise you.”

  She protested, but without much hope. He was not the kind of man to suggest a plan of action and then not follow through. Out into the rain they went and strolled through the respectably sized shop district. At least three small storefronts catered to women, displaying their wares in tall windows. Darien studied them critically before picking one based on criteria that Zoe couldn’t determine—perhaps current fashion, perhaps level of quality. She wondered if he had a wife back in the city, someone for whom he purchased fine ensembles in a fit of romantic affection.

  She must be starting to heal a little. The very thought of Darien Serlast in the throes of desperate passion was funny enough to make her truly smile. He very likely had a wife, but she would be some carefully chosen political bride with connections to the right families and a deep well of ambition herself. Probably sweela, brilliant and scheming. Zoe imagined her very tall, a little homely but impeccably attired. Living in her house would be like living in a museum. If there were children—though how could two such coldhearted individuals manage the mating process?—they were kept out of sight, perhaps at a country estate, and given over to the care of well-paid servants.

  “Zoe.” The sound of her name
jerked her from this detailed picture and painted a flush of guilt on her cheeks. Darien was standing in the doorway and regarding her quizzically. “Do you have a color you prefer?”

  “Green,” she said breathlessly and followed him inside.

  It was not the most unpleasant way to spend an hour or two, she decided later—being fussed over by professional seamstresses who had a clear monetary incentive to please their wealthy patron. They assembled five complete outfits for her of soft, colorful trousers and various tops—a long tunic for casual wear, a tighter-fitting bodice for formal occasions, a filmy overrobe printed with a bright design. They even sold her a pair of shoes made of such fine beaded leather that she could never wear them outside for fear of ruining them. She was sure she saw the clerks exchange horrified glances at the state her feet were in—callused and rough, the nails needing a trim—but they made no comment, at least not while she was within hearing.

  She didn’t care, of course. Let them whisper about her. Let them wonder what her relationship was to this powerful city man—she who was so obviously an unsophisticated west-province girl without the least hint of social grace. It amused her to think what their faces would show if she said, “I’m to marry the king once I arrive in Chialto.” But she didn’t bother. She didn’t care.

  “This should see you through the first two days at least,” Darien said as they left the shop, their arms piled up with bundles. “You’ll need more, of course, but Seterre and Alys can guide you in those purchases.”

  “Seterre and Alys,” Zoe repeated. “Those are the two wives who will hate me most?”

  He glanced down at her, an arrested expression on his face. “Yes. Well. They will not want you to embarrass Vernon in front of company. They might scheme against you behind his back, but you can trust their taste in clothing.” And then he laughed out loud.

  “I cannot wait to meet them,” she said politely.