Troubled Waters

by Sharon Shinn

  And that—even more unexpectedly—made Zoe laugh. “He certainly was, even at the end.”

  Now Keeli offered a tentative smile. “When you laugh, you look just like I remember you,” she said. “I think I was only ten the last time I saw you. We were running through the fountains, trying to time it so that we would jump out onto the grass before the water shot up again.”

  At the description, Zoe suddenly had a complete memory of an afternoon she had wholly forgotten. “Yes! And we were absolutely drenched!”

  “And we tracked water through the kierten and down the hall and up the stairs to our rooms.”

  “Christara was furious,” Zoe added, “but we couldn’t stop giggling.”

  Keeli took a step closer. “I feel like I should give a hug to the girl I used to know,” she said. “But I can’t tell if the woman you are now would welcome such a thing.”

  Zoe caught her breath. “I think I would,” she said, and closed the distance between them.

  Keeli’s embrace was quick and light, but Zoe was amazed by the degree of comfort it conveyed. Or—no—something more. She was flooded with a sense of kinship, of connection, for that brief moment that her heart rested against Keeli’s. This is a blood relation, her body seemed to be saying, overjoyed by the news. Zoe felt a little dizzy when she pulled back, a little giddy. She was relieved to hear Hoden approaching, so she could have something else to think about.

  “Come in,” she called before he knocked, and he pushed an elegant wooden cart through the door. It was covered with cups and carafes and cakes and candies. One plate held a carefully arranged pyramid of chocolates. She had mentioned once that she loved the sweet confections, and ever since then, they had appeared anytime the servants brought Zoe food.

  “Thank you,” she said as he set the cart up in front of the two chairs nearest that spectacular view. He bowed and exited, and Zoe took Keeli gently by the arm. “Let’s sit and talk awhile. There’s so much you can tell me.”

  In fact, Keeli was an invaluable source of information, and she chattered happily for the next hour. Zoe poured drinks for both of them—cool river water that still carried the taste of the mountain, flavored with rinds of fruit. They both nibbled on various foodstuffs while Keeli filled her in on the state of the Lalindar family. This cousin was married to a sadly inferior Dochenza man; that one had gone into business and prospered, though his wife was unfaithful to him and there was no telling who had fathered his youngest child. Their uncle Broy lived nearby on a sprawling estate; Keeli’s parents owned property in the city.

  “It used to be Christara’s house, but she gave it to my mother outright before she died,” Keeli said a little anxiously. “This house is yours, of course, but not the one in Chialto.”

  Zoe smiled. “I remember the city house and it’s far too big for me,” she reassured Keeli. “I wouldn’t want the responsibility of trying to maintain it. It even has a pool inside, doesn’t it?”

  Keeli was laughing. “It does. I swim there almost every day.”

  “I’d like to come to Chialto, though, at least to visit,” Zoe said. “Maybe I’ll look for a small place to rent.”

  “I’ll help you look at properties,” Keeli promised. “I could also—well—if you were planning to do any shopping for new clothes—”

  Zoe laughed. “You think that I shouldn’t be wearing my grandmother’s clothes, even if they’ve been altered to fit me?”

  Keeli giggled. “You wouldn’t be denied admittance at the door, but everyone would talk about you as soon as you left.”

  “I would be most grateful for your fashion advice. And your time. I imagine it could take days to assemble an entire wardrobe.” Not for the first time, Zoe spared a thought for the outfits Darien Serlast had purchased for her two quintiles ago as they traveled from the village. She quickly closed her mind to the memory.

  “We can get started even before you leave for the city,” Keeli said. “I have all the latest patterns, and Christara’s seamstress is very good.”

  “Excellent,” Zoe said. “I am already feeling more confident about my eventual return to the city.”

  “So when do you plan to come to Chialto?”

  “I’m not sure yet. It’s been so long since I’ve been in this house that I think I want to stay here awhile longer. Maybe for the rest of the quintile. I want to remember what it’s like to be a Lalindar and learn what it’s like to be prime.”

  For a moment, Keeli studied Zoe out of her dark blue eyes. “So where were you?” she asked, as she had before. “All this time?”

  Living in penury, in isolation, in a village so far from here you would never find it. Camping on the river flats in the city. Sleeping on the floor in a merchant’s shop. “My father and I had a house in a village in the far southwestern territories,” she said. “We lived very simply. You wouldn’t have liked it.”

  Keeli sighed. “And now he’s dead, and Christara, too, after all their fighting.”

  “I never did know what they argued about,” Zoe said. “Just that they hated each other.”

  Keeli was staring. “You,” she said.

  For a moment, Zoe was distracted by the sound of her own suddenly thundering pulse. “What do you mean?” she said faintly.

  Keeli spread her hands. “They fought about you. Christara wanted to keep you here. Raise you to your duties as prime. But your father refused, and your mother sided with him. They would not give you up. They almost refused to let Christara see you again, until she promised she would not try to lure you to stay.”

  “But—me—she knew—she picked me as her heir that long ago?” Zoe stammered. “No one ever told me that! And why? I was a child. What would even make her think I would be suitable to be prime?”

  Keeli leaned forward and plucked at the bracelet dangling, as always, from Zoe’s wrist. She sorted through the three charms until she came to the one she wanted. “Because of this,” she said. “None of her other descendants were given such a random blessing.”

  Zoe bent her head to see which charm Keeli had singled out, but she knew what it would be even before she looked.

  The one that held the symbol for power.

  THIRTEEN

  After Keeli left—promising to return in the morning with patterns and sketches—Zoe paced through the house and up the open stairway to the long corridor that ran the entire length of the second story. Like the sitting room, the hallway itself faced out over the river; the twelve doors opening off it led to bedrooms that overlooked the mountain. Only the prime’s room, directly above the kierten on the far western edge of the house, was so huge that it had windows on three sides—one that showed the river, one that showed the mountain, and one that faced toward the western sea. Everyone else who slept in Christara’s house had to rise from their beds and step out of their private rooms in order to get a glimpse of the Marisi.

  Decorating the long wall of this corridor were colorful patches of art that Zoe had always thought represented Christara’s one slight concession to whimsy. But now she realized that these images, like everything else in Christara’s life, were purposeful, calculated, and emotionally stark.

  It was a blessing wall.

  The first three blessings had been painted next to the doorway to Christara’s room. They had been done by a master artist; each separate glyph had been rendered as a trellis that vines and flowers twined around and birds perched upon to sing. Winding through the triptych and tying the separate images together was a narrow blue river. Christara’s three blessings were all coru: persistence, resilience, luck.

  Along the rest of the corridor, scattered between the bedroom doors, were the blessings for Christara’s children and grandchildren. Zoe couldn’t discern any pattern in how they had been laid out—certainly not by chronological age, or gender, or claim to a particular bedroom. So here were the blessings that had been bestowed on her aunt Sarone, and below them the blessings for one of Broy’s daughters.

  The style of artw
ork for each separate set was completely different. One series of blessings contained nothing but the symbols themselves, drawn on the wall in a flowing calligraphic hand with no other ornamentation. Another series was presented in childlike blocks of bright color. The one Zoe liked best showed each blessing as an animal; surprise was conveyed by an owl’s wide eyes, imagination sprouted a butterfly’s wings, and the symbol for contentment was curled in the fur of a sleeping lamb.

  She had always known where her own blessings appeared; Christara had shown them to her when she was very young and made sure she visited them whenever she came to the house. They had been painted between two doors in the very center of the hall, and now they were at eye level. When she was a child, someone had had to pick her up so she could touch them with a cautious finger. There was nothing about them to indicate that Christara had considered them any more meaningful than the blessings of any of her other descendants. In fact, they were rather simple—traditional, unadorned blessing glyphs laid over squares of summer blue. Zoe lifted her hand and very gently traced their lines and curves.

  Beauty. Love. Power.

  No other piece of artwork on the entire wall showed the glyph for power.

  It took her some time to find the set of blessings she wanted suddenly, desperately, to see. At some point, she was sure, she had known where they were, but apparently she had not returned to them as faithfully as she had checked on her own. At last she located them, very low to the floor, small monochrome squares no bigger than her hand. They looked like etchings or woodcuts, with thin, precise lines printed directly on the wall itself in a sepia-colored ink. Creating a background pattern behind the lovingly crafted symbols were tangles of stems and briars and the occasional wistful rose.

  Resolve. Intelligence. Love.

  Two sweela traits for Alieta Lalindar and one hunti blessing. No wonder she had fallen in love with a man of fire and clung to him so stubbornly that her coru mother disowned her.

  No wonder she would not give up her only daughter.

  Unexpectedly, Zoe was overcome with grief for the bright, fierce, laughing, quarrelsome, irresistible creature that she remembered as her mother. Flattening her hand against the wall, centered on the trait for love—the blessing that they shared, the blessing that bound them together—she sank to the floor and began weeping. She had cried so hard when her mother died, cried so hard that no one had been able to soothe her. Twelve years later, it was as if that long-healed wound was raw again; all the complex memories crowded once more to the forefront of her mind. An old despair should not feel so new, but a new despair could haul an old one out of hiding. She wept for her mother, for her father, for the lost little girl she had been and the bewildered woman she had become.

  When she was too tired to weep anymore, she laid her body down on the floor, there in the hallway, with her back pressed against the blessing of her mother’s love. Facing the river and drawing strength from its ceaseless benediction, she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  The next nineday was full of chatter and motion and outings both pleasant and tense. Keeli, it seemed, had decided to make herself responsible for transforming Zoe into a proper prime, and she was taking her duties very seriously. She arrived at the house every morning carrying swatches of fabric and sketches of current fashions and trivial bits of information about the other Five Families.

  “Kayle Dochenza has made a fortune with this compressed gas business, but it’s made him even more peculiar than he was before,” she told Zoe. A little later she observed, “Taro Frothen is big and brown and stupid-looking, but my father says you should never underestimate him. And there’s something likable about him, even though to look at him you would think he was the dullest man in the kingdom.”

  Finally she introduced the name Zoe was most interested in hearing. “Mirti Serlast is plain and unfashionable—I never saw a woman give less attention to her hair—but very clever. Don’t ask her opinion unless you really want to know what she thinks, because she doesn’t bother with the usual political niceties.”

  “Are the Serlasts in favor with the king these days?” Zoe asked casually.

  “Oh yes. He turns to them for everything. He won’t make a decision without consulting Mirti—or, more often, Darien.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Darien Serlast? Mirti’s nephew. He can’t be more than thirty-one or thirty-two, but he acts as if he’s fifty. So serious and stern and—weighed down, I sometimes think. He’s the king’s closest advisor and you never see Vernon unless Darien is along.”

  Zoe toyed with one of sketches Keeli had brought over, showing a fantastically ornate ensemble. “Does he seem like a good advisor?” she asked. “Someone you trust to counsel the king?”

  Keeli shrugged indifferently. “I suppose so. At any rate, you never hear anyone say anything against him.”

  Zoe remembered the blind seer at the Plaza of Women, who refused to discuss Darien Serlast at all. “Maybe people don’t talk about him because they’re afraid of him.”

  “Maybe they don’t talk about him because he’s boring,” Keeli said. She took the sketch from Zoe’s hands. “Yes, I love this, but it’s too grand for everyday wear, even at the palace,” she said. “You might wear it to a coronation or a wedding.” She held it up in Zoe’s direction and squinted, as if imagining Zoe in the completed outfit. “Have it made in gold and scarlet. You’ll look beautiful.”

  Apparently they were done talking about Darien Serlast. Zoe swallowed a sigh and toyed with the charms on her bracelet. “I don’t think I ever quite manage to be beautiful,” she said, “despite my blessing. When I make the effort, I’m attractive enough, but it takes some work.”

  Keeli made an inelegant sound. “It takes some work for everyone! When I first get up in the morning, I look like mice have been nesting in my hair, and I’m so pale I look ill. And yet generally everyone considers me a very pretty girl,” she added without a trace of self-consciousness. “But I have to style my hair and put on rouge and pick the most flattering colors. Everyone does. Just because you have a charm for beauty doesn’t mean you’re naturally gorgeous. It means you have potential.”

  Zoe laughed aloud. “So I suppose I have the potential for love and power as well?”

  Keeli grinned at her. “That’s right. You’d better get to work on those, too.”

  When they weren’t choosing a wardrobe for Zoe—and the occasional new piece for Keeli—they were making the rounds of nearby estates so Zoe could meet the Lalindar relations she had not seen in ten years or more. She was nervous on those occasions, having no reason to think these aunts and uncles and cousins would welcome her reappearance. Indeed, none of them was as warm as Keeli. More than one eyed her with disfavor; she was sure she read resentment in their faces when they were forced to acknowledge her as the new Lalindar prime.

  “Why didn’t one of them move into the house while I was gone?” she asked Hoden one day as she fretfully waited for Keeli to arrive and take her to another awkward social engagement. “Why didn’t one of them claim the title and the power? Christara was dead—who would gainsay them?”

  He answered in his careful, unalarming way, making impossible things seem wholly reasonable. “No one ever attempts to usurp the power of the prime,” he said gravely. “It is said a man who masquerades as the Lalindar prime will drown the minute he attempts to step into the Marisi. A man who pretends to head the Ardelays will be quickly consumed by fire. There is a tale of a Frothen imposter who was killed by a falling boulder. It is not so easy to assume an unmerited rank.”

  That explained why the house was still hers, she supposed, but it made her just a little leery of sticking so much as a fingertip in the river, in case, after all, she did not deserve the title she had assumed.

  She couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or relieved to learn that her ability to hear someone else’s heartbeat faded almost completely once she stepped outside of the fountain that encircled the estate. Oh, if someon
e in the room was excited about a piece of news, Zoe could often catch a faint eager thrumming, and when her uncle Broy took her hand, she was instantly aware of the race of blood through his body. Not only that, she could tell, as if she were a scientist relying on impossibly sophisticated analytical tools, that the composition of his blood was in some way the same as hers. He did not look especially happy to meet her and his face was pulled into what might have been a sneer, yet she could tell that they were related. Bound together, whether he liked it or not.

  “You don’t look nearly as wild as my sister,” he said. “Are you?”

  “I might have been, had I lived a different sort of life,” she said coolly. “But a wild heart would not have served me very well.”

  “It didn’t serve Alieta well, either, but that wasn’t enough to make her change her ways,” Broy retorted. “I am glad to hear you are a little wiser.”

  She hesitated when, a few days later, Broy invited her out on a boating expedition. “I think he’d like to push me over the side and see if the Marisi takes me,” she confided to Keeli, but her cousin laughed.

  “Oh, Broy’s all spite and sourness, but he wouldn’t actually hurt you,” Keeli said. “Anyway, no prime has ever drowned in the history of the Lalindars. I think you’re safe.”

  If I’m really prime, Zoe wanted to say. But she supposed she would have to go out on the water eventually, or the question would always linger at the back of her mind.

  Accordingly, she joined Broy—and, as it turned out, his wife, his two daughters, and Keeli—for an afternoon on the river. The Marisi showed no disposition to upend the boat and dash Zoe’s head to pieces against the banks. Even Broy seemed a little mellower once they were out on the water.

  The sun was directly overhead, fat and yellow and contented; the breeze off the water was playful and curious. Below the hull, Zoe could sense the endless lazy rocking of the current. She found she was not at all afraid for her life.