“You shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“You sound like Kellin,” said Issa.
“You should listen to him,” said Ailsbet. “Kellin knows King Haikor well.” If Issa could maintain her betrothal with Edik, perhaps that was the best that anyone could hope for.
“Kellin is not well loved of the king today,” said Issa. “He spoke on your behalf. He thought you should be banished as your brother will be, instead of executed.”
“My brother will be banished?” said Ailsbet. She had hoped that Edik would not be touched by this scandal. But she should have known that her father would make sure everyone suffered because of his displeasure.
“At least, he will live,” said Issa.
Ailsbet shrugged. She knew already that she would not. “And what of you?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Now that the betrothal is at an end, there is no reason for me to remain here.”
“Yes, go home. You will be safe there.”
“For a little while, perhaps,” said Issa.
King Haikor wanted Weirland, thought Ailsbet. What Issa had hoped to prevent would come regardless: the two islands at war, the two weyrs more apart than ever before.
“And I shall be without Kellin,” said Issa. “When I need him most.”
“Why without him? He should go with you. You should both go, as soon as you can.” Kellin could not want to stay here now, no matter how loyal to Rurik he claimed to be. With Edik banished and Ailsbet gone, with the feckless Lady Pippa at King Haikor’s side, there would be no safety for anyone.
“I shall not go until you are free,” said Issa.
Ailsbet shook her head. “It is useless to do that. Take care of yourselves while you can. I am a lost cause.”
“Kellin and I shall not go until we are certain there is nothing left to do for you.”
“I thank you for coming, and for trying to help me. But now you must leave,” said Ailsbet. “Go to the door and call the guard back. He has not gone far. Go home to Weirland and take Kellin with you. Be happy there. Truly, that is the best thing to do for me. I shall think of you until the very end, and I shall share a little of your happiness.”
“There must be some way to save you,” said Issa stubbornly. “Kellin is still your betrothed. Perhaps he can once again petition the king to save you.” She knew Kellin had not been successful yesterday, but she still thought that as the king’s favorite, he might have another chance to sway King Haikor.
Ailsbet shook her head. “Please. I do not want to die knowing that I stole anything from Kellin. Rather ask him to spit on the memory of me, to refuse to say my name, to declare that he hates me now for my betrayal of all he thought of me, and that he will be at my execution to laugh in my face.”
“Kellin does not hate you,” said Issa.
“Then he can act the part. He is very good at acting,” said Ailsbet. “And he knows how to protect himself well. He has been doing it for a very long time.”
“He has never been protecting himself,” said Issa. “It is always someone else. His brother, Kedor, or me or you or the kingdom of Rurik itself.”
Ailsbet did not argue.
Issa put a hand on Ailsbet’s. “It is so cold here. So cold and hard.”
“Yes,” said Ailsbet.
“How do you bear it?”
“When there is no other choice, it can be done,” said Ailsbet.
“How I envied you!” said Issa. “Your strength. Your independence.”
“You envied me?” said Ailsbet bitterly. She could not see how that was possible.
“You do not see yourself clearly if you do not see why,” said Issa.
“But you are the one who has the enviable life,” said Ailsbet. “You have a father you are not ashamed of. People who love you. You have the proper weyr, and you know how to use it. You have Kellin.”
“And you have your music. And your certainty. You have the courage to show your true self, to challenge your father.”
“That was not courage,” said Ailsbet. “I did not know what I was doing. The taweyr drove me. I assure you, if I had been in control of myself, I would not have done it. I would have been safe instead of courageous.”
Issa let out a laugh. “I do not know if I believe you. You have never been safe, Ailsbet. And I always have been.”
Perhaps she had been, but it was not true anymore, Ailsbet thought. “You will live to change the world,” she declared.
“Or to see it end,” said Issa.
“But you will live. You will do something.”
“You will leave a mark,” said Issa. “I promise you that.”
And Ailsbet would have to be content with that much. She could have no more.
Then came the sound of the footsteps once more, and Issa was forced to leave, while Ailsbet was left alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Issa
WHEN ISSA RETURNED to the palace in the bright light of morning, it was abuzz. There were servants in every hallway, but they looked away when they saw her. At last, she heard voices and flattened herself around a corner to eavesdrop.
“Prince Edik. Yes, cold as stone this morning. He was to be gone, but the guard called and called for him. Finally, someone went to fetch him out of his bed to ask if he wanted to meet the executioner with his sister—”
With a sinking heart, Issa moved toward the servants who were speaking and demanded more information. “Tell me what you know. Did you see him yourself or is this a rumor you are passing about?”
The man seemed affronted. “I didn’t find him, if that’s what you mean, but I saw him on his bed, still as death. His lips were closed, but his eyes were open. He looked like he’d been covered in ash.” He did not seem to realize he was speaking to Princess Marlissa.
“Did you call the physician?” she asked.
He shrugged. “He came and said the same that we all knew. Dead hours ago. Poisoned.”
Just as his mother had been poisoned. Edik was dead, not merely banished. Issa should have known it would happen this way, no matter what King Haikor had promised.
The man continued, “The only question now is—who did it? Duke Kellin, do you think? To show the king his loyalty? Or one of the other nobles?”
Issa was angry enough that her neweyr sprang up out of her. A vine grew from the edge of the palace through the cracks in the walls and up the floor beneath the servant’s feet. It pressed him back and pinned him against the wall.
She was ashamed of herself, using the neweyr in this way, and let him go. He and his companion fled silently down the hallway.
She went to Edik’s rooms herself, realizing only then that she had never been to them before. She knocked, but no one answered and the door was not locked. She stepped inside, smelling something sweet and rank. She wrinkled her nose. She saw no sign of Edik’s body in his inner chamber. The bed was stripped, but the room looked as if it had not otherwise been touched. There were metal soldiers on the floor, as if Edik were to return any moment to play with them. She noticed a piece of paper and bent down to see a crude drawing of a hound. It was Midnight, the black puppy she had given Edik. Had the king poisoned Midnight, as well? She would never be able to ask Edik what he thought now. Issa wiped away tears at the sight of this last memento of the prince.
“Good-bye, Edik,” she said quietly, and stepped out of the room, returning swiftly to her own chambers.
Issa sat before her fire and thought what she might do while Ailsbet was still alive. There was only one choice that had any hope, but it felt wrong, a betrayal of all she had ever believed in, but she could not leave Rurik knowing that she had not done all she could for the other princess. The execution was set for the morning of the following day, so she did not have much time.
Issa put on her best gown, made of golden silk. She struggled without the help of maids, to do up the stays and put on the sleeves. At last, she put on her stockings and shoes.
When she was finished, she per
fumed herself with rose water and rouged her cheeks. She tucked tiny wildflowers that she drew up out of the floor of the palace into her loose, unbraided hair and went to the Throne Room to appear before King Haikor. Lady Pippa was sitting in the queen’s smaller throne, but Kellin was not there, and Issa felt relieved at his absence.
“I have come first to ask you of your own free will to release Princess Ailsbet from the Tower,” said Issa to the king.
“Release her?” said King Haikor. “She is a princess no longer and therefore qualifies for no royal mercy. In addition, she is ekhono, and all my life, I have hunted and killed her kind. What reason is there for me to do differently with her?”
Issa raised her chin and spoke loudly enough that no one could mistake her words. “Because I am the woman with taweyr.”
The effect on King Haikor’s court was immediate. Lady Pippa shrieked and stood up, pretending to swoon. Her ladies cried out and hurried to her side. The men of the court drew back as if Issa had threatened them physically, raising their weapons.
King Haikor was the only one who remained calm. “Impossible,” he said. “We all saw what she did.”
“Did you? I was right there, on the horse directly behind her. And besides, with the taweyr, there is no need to be close enough to touch, is there? You have killed men a battlefield away, have you not?”
“I know what I saw,” said King Haikor. “I was there. Many witnesses were there.”
“Yes, but I purposely misled them, and you. I have both the taweyr and the neweyr, and I come to show them to you today.”
“Impossible,” said King Haikor.
“Ah, but it is not.” Then Issa made sure that all in the room heard her clearly, for she wanted no mistake about the prophecy. “There is a prophecy that I learned of years ago, that the two islands will come together as one when the two weyrs are again joined in one person.”
“The two islands come together? But the land itself has changed. Even the taweyr and the neweyr working together cannot alter that,” said King Haikor.
“Can they not?” asked Issa. She thought of the servant she had trapped with her vines not long ago.
“Prove it, then,” said King Haikor. “Prove that you have taweyr.”
Closing her eyes briefly in order to focus, Issa pulled vines from the palace garden toward her, climbing them up the outer walls and into the mortared stone, keeping them hidden until they were underneath the marble floor directly beneath King Haikor’s throne.
Issa made sure the vines did not grow spindly, but kept their full heft and strength. Then with a cry, she opened her eyes and pulled them violently up underneath the marble floor where the throne was. The heavy, ashen chair, carved with roses, was thrust suddenly into the air and came crashing down. The marble floor beneath it was cracked, though the vines themselves could not be seen. Issa was relieved, for she could not reveal that she was using only the neweyr, and making it appear to be the taweyr.
King Haikor stared at the throne. “You—you are ekhono.”
“I am a woman with both weyrs,” said Issa, holding her head high, thinking of the prophecy and how it might frighten King Haikor that she had begun to fulfill it.
“A throne destroyed—that is a simple thing. Easily done,” said King Haikor. “It means nothing.” But his voice trembled.
He might not feel the power she had used as his own familiar taweyr, but he could not believe it was anything else. As far as King Haikor wished to believe, the neweyr could not do something like this.
“Do you wish me to prove myself a second time?” asked Issa. She had expected this, had prepared for it as much as she could.
King Haikor looked around the Throne Room, into the eyes of his nobles. He could see that they were astonished and afraid, terrified of the ekhono in their midst. Only Haikor himself was defiant.
“Yes,” he said. “And do it unmistakably.”
All this time, Issa had assumed that the taweyr was stronger than the neweyr, at least when it came to brute force. But she had never tried to use neweyr as a weapon before. Perhaps no one ever had.
Issa poured all her energy into her neweyr, and into the vines that she had sent under the throne. Now she threaded them back to the gardens where their roots lay and then toward the Tower itself. The first half of the distance was easy because the vines had already lengthened that far. But once she had to go beyond that, her neweyr felt strained.
When she felt the first stone of the Tower begin to shake under the onslaught of her vines, she let out a little gasp, noticing that the nobles in the Throne Room were suddenly looking out the windows. It took another stone falling before one of them realized that it was the Tower she was targeting.
King Haikor strode forward. “You cannot do this,” he challenged her. “I know you cannot.”
But he was wrong. He did not understand the neweyr. How could he? He had spent all his life ignoring it. He had not wanted to see that there was any part of power that was not his own. And that would be his downfall.
Issa told herself the neweyr here had long been buried, but only needed some coaxing to return to its normal strength. The courtyard of the palace was empty of visible greenery, but that did not mean the lifelessness went into the soil itself. She could feel the female animals around the palace and in the city as distinct pulses of blood and life. They seemed to recognize her in return, and welcome her, as her own animals would have done in Weirland.
The vines grew as she wished them to, as if it were spring, and she were drawing them out of the earth. But the violence she intended them to be used for made them harder, stiffer. She had changed them to the very core in some deep way, and she did not know what the results would be, in those vines or in the neweyr itself. She did not know if this change would be permanent. She continued forward with it anyway.
Still hiding the thick vines from sight, Issa broke open the door to the Tower and felt the outraged cries of the guards within. The one who had laughed so nastily at Ailsbet was the first to flee, with one glance up at the palace where King Haikor watched him. Eight other guards were at his heels.
“No! Stop!” the king shouted. He made his hand into a fist, and the fleeing guards shot up into the air, screaming. Then he threw his fist forward, and the guards came crashing down into the dirt.
Issa heard a terrible crunching sound. She looked up and saw that all the men lay on the ground, dead, their necks broken.
Those men died because of her actions, she reminded herself. It was the first time she had felt so guilty. She had done it with the neweyr, and now her father could never tell her that she did not understand what it meant to make the difficult decisions necessary to rule. It was a weighty feeling, and for a moment, the vines stopped growing, and she had to breathe deeply while her vision cleared.
It was another chance for her to stop, but she did not do it. She put herself into the vines again and began to feel that they were like her own fingers. She had them climb the stairs of the Tower, always hidden so that they were beneath the stone and no one watching could see that it was the neweyr doing this work. It would look like the taweyr was cracking the stones one by one.
A gray dust filled the air of the Tower. Issa could see the dim figure of Ailsbet standing and moving to the door, looking out. She did not call for help or show any sign of terror.
She waited.
She trusts me, thought Issa.
And so she went on, using her neweyr from a distance, up and up, until she reached the door of Ailsbet’s cell. With the vines exerting pressure, the door popped open with a tiny sound.
Ailsbet let out a cry of surprise and hurried down the stairs.
Issa made sure that Ailsbet had enough time to get out. Then she sent the vines up to the top of the Tower, and instead of going in a straight line now, they went in circles, boring inside the outer walls, splitting them apart stone by stone. She began to speed up as she realized how easy it was. She had only to look inside the stones for the w
eakness, the bit of life that remained in each one. For even stones were not fully dead. She had always known that, but she had never used it before.
King Haikor stood open-mouthed, and the nobles of his court let out a combined, hushed sound of awe as the Tower’s uppermost level toppled over and dropped in bits and pieces to the ground.
The dust settled, and now Issa could see for herself what was left of the Tower. The top half had fallen, like a tree whose top branches had been clipped, or a moose with its antlers sheared off, or a man who had been beheaded.
Issa stared at it to make sure that no sign of any vines was visible. Then she found herself smiling, for she could not imagine anything she could have done that would have brought her more satisfaction. It was so right, this end of King Haikor’s Tower, where he had sent so many men to wait for death. The neweyr had defeated the taweyr in the end. And no one knew it was neweyr but Issa.
She thought suddenly of the prophecy, and wondered if this was what it meant, not that the two weyrs would be joined together in actuality, but that they would appear to be joined. Could it be that easy? Had she fulfilled it already, and would the two islands be joined back together?
But there was no feeling of moving ground, of momentous change. The skies were as blue as before, and the silence seemed to grow more profound. King Haikor, of course, was the one to break it.
“My daughter,” he said.
“She lives,” said Issa. Did he care about her, after all?
“She is condemned to death,” said King Haikor. “She is mine to punish.”
“She is yours no longer,” said Issa. “You gave her life to me when you told me to show you my taweyr.”
The king’s face hardened. “I shall not have you here in my court. You must leave now, this minute. I shall not tolerate your presence here. I should have you killed,” he said.
“I shall take your daughter with me. To Weirland,” Issa said.
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