by Sharon Shinn
Another bend in the river. Another change in the life of a coru woman.
But her heart, it seemed, was not entirely certain that flight was in her future. She had pinned the bright wrap in place with the hunti brooch Darien Serlast had given her before that final day at the palace. Around one wrist she wore a wide, flat bracelet of matching dark wood; on the other, her blessing bracelet dangling with power, love, and beauty.
She had proved she was powerful. Today she had gone to some trouble to make herself beautiful. It remained to be seen if she could be loved.
She stood in the kierten, in front of the window overlooking the river, and spent an hour watching the empty road. There was sunshine for the first time in days, and it fell greedily on the landscape as if famished for the taste of green. It poured in through the kierten’s vast windows and pooled on the burnished floor like sheets of caramelized honey.
A little before noon, she caught the first glimpse of a small smoker car wending its way upward. This wasn’t one of the spacious palace vehicles that could carry six passengers plus a driver and a guard; this was compact and maneuverable and probably seated no more than two. At the moment, it held a single occupant, who traveled so slowly he might be dreading his arrival at his destination.
Zoe watched as Darien Serlast navigated between the fountains, cut the motor, and stepped out of the car. He stood for a long time gazing at the front of the house, though she was fairly certain the glare on the windows made it impossible for him to see inside, then he stepped out of her field of vision as he came close enough to ring the door chimes three times. She heard his voice lifted in a brief exchange with Hoden, heard their footfalls as Hoden ushered him inside, heard the clamoring unregulated excitement of his heartbeat as he caught sight of her again.
Hoden bowed and disappeared. Darien stood where he was, watching Zoe. As they had once before—a day that seemed like years ago, though it had not even been two quintiles—they studied each other from across the width of the room.
She had not planned to be the first to speak, but a thought skittered through her mind and she found herself voicing it. “If you had known, the first time you saw me in this room, what would have transpired between us by the next time you found me here, I wonder if you ever would have set foot inside my grandmother’s house.”
“I was asking myself much the same question as I drove up the mountain,” he said. His voice was composed, neutral, giving nothing away. But she could still hear the clatter of his pulse, too fast for an indifferent man.
“What answer did you find?”
He shrugged. “What permanent answers does one ever find with a coru woman?”
She wanted to face him coolly, tranquilly; she did not want to betray restlessness or unease. But she could not stand still. She turned away from him and began a slow and measured pacing around the room. Darien stood where he was, pivoting slowly to track her progress.
Coru woman, who could not be contained. Hunti man, who could not be moved.
“Let us have plain speaking between us, at least this once,” she said, a slight tremor in her voice despite her efforts to sound serene. “If you have come to tell me the dying king wants me stripped of my position, I will turn over whatever trappings I can divorce from my body and leave the mountain today. But don’t come here and merely look at me and force me to ask what you want from me this time.”
His face relaxed into a smile of true amusement. “But all I want from you this time is a chance to see your face, which I have missed. I have no other official agenda, and no commissions from my king.”
That was impossible to believe. She came to a ragged halt, flinging words at him as if they were rocks. “Not even questions? Not even accusations? Not even exclamations of horror? Zoe, you flooded the palace and ruined half of the city and destroyed any chance of alliance with Soeche-Tas! Surely you have some recriminations to heap upon my head—if not the king’s, then your own.”
“Officially, there is a great deal of royal consternation at your actions, and I am afraid the Lalindar estate will have to bear some of the cost of paying for the damage which your heedless flood caused,” he said seriously. “Unofficially—” He paused, shaking his head. “Unofficially, if it had been within my power to do so, I would have brought the whole palace down in huge chunks of stone that crushed the heads of all of them. The king, the viceroy, their scheming friends. I would not have bothered with anything so insubstantial as water.”
She stared at him, struck speechless.
He took a tiny step toward her. “You knew—surely you knew, you guessed, that I had had no knowledge of plans for such a marriage. My father had told me stories about the viceroy of Soeche-Tas that turned my blood to ice. I never would have allowed or ever approved any arrangement that gave that man a child-bride. Before I say another word, tell me you knew that. You believed that.”
“I believed it,” she said.
He nodded. “So, I cannot condemn your actions—but there is no denying that there has been a great deal of suffering by a good number of people who also had no hand in arranging the marriage. Those are the ones you must reassure and reimburse.”
“I will make restitution, and gladly,” she said. “But even so, I am sure there are plenty who will find my deliberate destruction hard to forgive. Surely there are questions about whether or not I am fit to be prime—”
“Questions,” he admitted. “But not asked by anyone who matters.” When she gave him an inquiring look, he added, “By that I mean the other primes. Mirti and your uncle Nelson repeated the stories brought back from Soeche-Tas by my father and yours, and Taro and Kayle have flatly refused to condemn you. There is no way Vernon could strip you of your title without their cooperation. And he is too weak to try, at any rate. Your position is intact. Your standing among the people of Chialto is seriously weakened,” he said, attempting another slight smile, “but if you show remorse and largesse, you are likely to retrieve their goodwill.”
“I’ll build them a fountain right in the spot where the water was most destructive,” she said. “That will be my memorial of regret. And I will hand out money, too, as long as it is still mine to give.”
“The coins will be even more welcome.”
She didn’t want to move away from him, but she couldn’t hold her feet in place. She resumed her pacing. “But there are still so many questions,” she said. “If not you—if not Mirti and the other primes—who was helping the king plot this obscene marriage? Because I do not think, in his confused state, Vernon was likely to have come up with such an idea on his own.”
“No,” Darien said. “As far as I can tell, his only advisor for this particular course was Elidon.”
She whipped around to stare at him again. “Elidon? But why? She despises Alys, of course, but she is not petty enough to take out that hatred on a child.”
“She is being very close-lipped about it, but her reasoning seemed to go like this: Alys wanted Corene to be named heir, so Alys had made several attempts on Josetta’s life. Elidon decided Josetta would not be safe unless Corene was removed from the picture—but Elidon is not coldhearted enough to murder Corene. So she sought to marry her off instead. In its way, a clever solution to an intolerable situation, if barbaric in this particular instance. She swears she believed the marriage would not be consummated until Corene was of a suitable age. I am inclined to believe her, though I still do not condone her actions.”
“But I thought you were not convinced that Alys had been the one trying to harm Josetta. Have you changed your mind?”
Briefly, he looked tired beyond endurance; his frame sagged a little, as if those hunti bones had failed him. “No, in fact, I am pretty sure I have located the villain, but Elidon was convinced Alys was the guilty party. A belief she seems to have come to,” he added, “when you made your furious accusation at the queens’ breakfast.”
Zoe brushed that aside. “I only said what many people thought. But you have found the
person who is truly responsible? One you are sure of?”
He nodded. He still looked weary. “Though the discovery gave me no pleasure,” he said quietly. “I finally tracked down one of the sailors who abandoned Josetta’s boat, and told him he would spend the rest of his life in a cell if he did not identify his employer. He was quick to give a name, which led to another name, and eventually led to Wald Dochenza. Kayle’s nephew.” He gave Zoe a swift look. “The man who always seemed most likely to be Corene’s father. He wanted to see a daughter of his on the throne. Which he thought seemed more likely if Josetta was dead.”
“Ahhhhhh . . .” Zoe said with a long sigh of both comprehension and dismay. She realized she was pacing again, slipping from one square of glorious sunshine to another, and finding no peace in any of them. “It is an answer that makes sense but breaks the heart. Has he admitted it?”
“When confronted, Wald confessed the whole, and then began sobbing hysterically, in a way that led me to believe he is not quite sane,” Darien replied. Now she understood some of the weariness in his stance. “The scene was even more unpleasant than you might think questioning a would-be murderer could be.”
She slewed around to face Darien again. “Was his uncle involved?”
“I am convinced Kayle had no part in the scheme, though he has taken his nephew’s treachery very hard. He asked that he be the one to administer justice and I agreed. My thought is that Wald—a child of air—will never again be granted his freedom. It is difficult to know which of them will find this punishment most bitter.”
“It is all the more tragic because, of course, Wald Dochenza is not Corene’s father.”
Gazing unwaveringly at Zoe, Darien slowly straightened his posture, leveled his hunched shoulders, planted his feet—braced himself, she thought, for whatever wild storm she might conjure next. “You took hold of the princess when you snatched her from her Soeche-Tas suitor,” he said in an uninflected voice. “I suppose that was the first time you decoded the secret of her blood.”
Zoe said, “Corene is your daughter.”
Along shuddering sigh shook Darien’s body. He stayed silent, briefly closing his eyes. Zoe added, “She’s your daughter, though you claim to despise her mother above all others. So I wonder how that liaison came about.”
As if he could not have this conversation while he was standing still, Darien opened his eyes and began to pace the perimeter of the room. Now Zoe was the one to stand firm, watching him, turning slightly to keep him in view. “I was twenty-one,” he said. “Still the eager romantic, willing to do anything to serve my king. I had seen your father work in stealth to help Vernon produce an heir. I thought it was my duty, I thought it was an honor, to be asked to give the third wife a child.”
“You were in love with her,” Zoe said.
Still pacing, he nodded. “I was in love with her, or I thought I was. She was all red hair and wicked beauty. She was—life and desire and excitement and endless fascination. She was—” He shook his head.
Zoe said, “A sweela woman makes a hunti man burn.”
“Maybe,” Darien said. “But she burned very fast through whatever fuel my soul had to offer. It wasn’t long—less than a quintile—before I began to see her for the woman I now know her to be. Scheming, inconstant, ambitious, selfish, jealous—I could spend the next hour coming up with unflattering words to describe her.”
“She still has feelings for you, though—deep ones.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. She says so. I think she is just petty and possessive. She thinks that because once she thought she owned me, she should own me forever.”
“She doesn’t like the notion of any of her past lovers showing a preference for someone else,” Zoe said. “When one of her friends merely spoke of Wald Dochenza with affection, Alys went to some trouble to get her ousted from the palace. I would not be surprised if—in the past ten years—other women you were interested in found themselves the targets of Alys’s unfriendly attention.”
He paused long enough to throw her a humorous look. “Hard to be certain,” he said. “Since there have been very few other women in whom I have shown an interest.”
Zoe did not bother mentioning her own wardrobe, slashed to ribbons by the malicious queen. “So what made you fall out of love with her?”
“What could it have been?” he said in a mocking voice. “The fact that she entertained other lovers and told me about them? The fact that she offered love or withheld love in order to control me? The fact that she was endlessly and inventively cruel? Pick your reason. There were many.”
“If she had a lot of lovers, how could she be sure who Corene’s father was?”
He shook his head. “She couldn’t be, of course—and neither could I. She pretended to be certain that Corene was mine, but my guess is that she pretended to be certain with Wald Dochenza as well. And maybe others—who knows? But I have always known Corene could be my daughter. It has given me a tenderness for her, even though I have tried not to show it. I have showered her with many a small gift, pretending it was from the king, saying only that it came from her father. I figured that, at least on some level, what I said was true.”
“She is a sharp and difficult girl, but she was very glad to be saved from the viceroy’s wedding bed,” Zoe said. “I don’t think Alys has entirely ruined her. It might require some very public battles, but you could claim her as your own and do what you can to change her life.”
Darien came to a halt only a few feet from Zoe and nodded gravely. “I would like that,” he said.
“Of course, that would mean revealing a terrible truth about her. About all the king’s daughters.”
His face showed a ghost of a smile. “You are behind on the gossip, then,” he said. “Shortly after Romelle revealed she was pregnant, the four primes still in the city announced that they were ready to ratify her unborn child as the next successor to the throne. That was when they also announced that none of his other three daughters were actually heirs of Vernon’s body.”
“That must have created pandemonium!”
“It would have, I think, if everyone wasn’t already so numb from all the other shocks. And then a few people stepped forward to say they had known it all along—the blind sisters had told them so—or they had always suspected such a thing was true.” Darien shrugged. “It has gone very quickly from being the greatest secret of my life to commonly accepted fact. Under no other circumstances do I think that would have been the case.”
“When the primes revealed that the princesses were not sired by Vernon,” she asked, “did they also reveal the various fathers?”
“Not yet,” Darien said. “I suppose they will convene to discuss that at some point, perhaps debating how much damage the revelations might do to the reputations of the men.”
“Well, my father’s reputation could hardly suffer more,” Zoe said cheerfully, “and I am eager to claim Josetta. So, I hope it is time to tell these truths very soon. Of course, we have to make sure Josetta and Corene hear the news first—they might be devastated to learn how their stations have changed.”
Darien glanced around, as if expecting to find the princesses suddenly materializing from the corners of the kierten. “I have been authorized to let them know how the situation currently stands at court,” he said. “And to bring them back with all speed. So, if you send for them now, I can begin to tell them their own stories.”
“Unfortunately,” Zoe said, “they’re not here.”
“Not here?” he repeated.
She shrugged. “I didn’t know how the situation would unfold at the palace. I didn’t know if madness or reason would prevail. I didn’t know who would be the first person to show up at my door, demanding I return the girls. So they’re not here.”
He nodded. “It makes a sort of convoluted coru sense,” he said, almost smiling. “So where are they? In the village where I first found you more than a year ago?”
“I considered that as a hiding pla
ce,” she admitted. “But I decided it would be the second place you looked, after you came to this house.”
“The third place,” he said. “I first searched for you among the river folk.”
“So I gave them over to the care of friends, who will bring them to me when their travel takes them this way.”
He stood very still, watching her, clearly torn between disapproval and worry and a hard-won trust. “I told Seterre and Alys they were in your hands,” he said at last. “It was the only thing that allayed their fears. I told them the princesses were safe.”
“They are.”
He bowed his head. “Then I believe you. Please bring them to Chialto as soon as you can once they are back in your care.”
“I will,” she said. She paused and then went on in a tentative voice, “Unless you wish to wait here for their arrival.”
He smiled briefly. “I do wish it—very much. But I am greatly in demand at the palace, as you might imagine, for it is still in utter turmoil and I have, for the most part, a steady hand. I am not even sure how well the many factions will survive my absence for as long as it will take me to complete my journey here and back.”
“Then I will feed you and send you on your way again,” Zoe said, trying to conceal her sudden sharp disappointment.
Darien blinked in surprise and then smiled with so warm an expression that for a moment he looked like a sweela man. “I hoped to be allowed to stay a little longer than that,” he said. “I hoped to be invited to remain overnight, at least, so that we have the opportunity to talk of things that truly matter.”
Zoe made a sweeping gesture. “What could matter more than the subjects we have already discussed? The fate of the realm and the safety of the two girls we care about most—my sister and your daughter?”
