by Steven Poore
At some point during this hour of intense grooming, another of Rais’s servants must have brought the remainder of her possessions back from the Court of the Watch: Cassia spotted them, neatly folded, on a low stool by the door. Her staff leaned against the wall next to it. There was no sign of Malessar’s sword, or her own. That was no surprise, but it still infuriated her. She wanted what was hers.
The drums in her head echoed agreement.
She winced and rubbed her temples slowly, spreading the oil with the tips of her fingers.
These aren’t my thoughts. They belong to somebody else. Just like that sword. I’m only borrowing it. They’re borrowing me.
The two girls reached some silent accord; as one they bowed their heads to her and retreated from the room, leaving her alone. Suddenly Cassia had no focus, no direction. Not until it was time for her audience with the king. Rais’s father. And they said the fruit did not fall far from the tree. This would not be easy.
Habit drew her back to her staff. The room was long and narrow, in the style of the dhars in the mede, but there was sufficient room for Cassia to move through some of the simplest forms Meredith had taught her. It was about all she could concentrate on. Familiarity and repetition had helped her to think before, when she was piecing together the fragments of Baum’s conspiracy, and she would need every weapon at her disposal.
Be as Pelicos. A good idea.
Rais had changed his clothes again, Cassia noted sourly. Silver and sky-blue threads created waves across the weave of his shirt, while his trousers were flowing white linen. Boots of polished leather clicked on the tiles. He looked absolutely nothing like the concerned captain of the Watch he professed to be. Cassia took great pleasure in not showing any reaction to his appearance.
“Now you fit your role,” Rais said approvingly.
“That would depend on what my role is,” she told him. “Am I still your indebted servant?”
She shook out her storyteller’s cloak and settled it over her shoulders, keeping her movements sharp and pointed. The contrast between that and the expensive gown she wore beneath it was deliberately jarring, and it would give the Court something to talk about.
Rais sighed, and though he still smiled it did not touch his eyes, and there was an edge in his voice. “Stubborn Northerners,” he said in the Galliarcan tongue.
Cassia bowed her head. “At your service, sir,” she replied in the same language.
A small entourage waited in one corner of the garden; servants and fellow nobles; the periphery of the king’s court, angling for a prince’s favour. She recognised a few of them from Rais’s gathering the previous night. Despite – or perhaps because of – the new gown and the assiduous grooming that had been forced upon her, they still stared at her with suspicion, trying to calculate how she fitted into the palace’s ever-shifting schemes. She matched and returned each stare, using the back-stiffening beat of the drums in her head as a new source of strength.
Rais led the way from his Court. Cassia found herself manoeuvred into the third or fourth rank of the procession, behind a few young men who she assumed were the prince’s closest companions. According to the stories she knew, they would be the younger sons of powerful rulers or lords, or scions of recently elevated families. Most of the women amongst them would not have come to the palace without contracts of marriage already arranged; others might have been forced here by their fathers to create such an opportunity. She might have sympathised with them, if they had been a little less aloof.
The pair of men who flanked her, on the other hand, were most definitely decorated men of the Watch, here to ensure she kept her place and did not cause trouble. The slender swords they wore at their hips looked as though they belonged there, their heavy quilted jackets adding even more bulk to their considerable frames. If the heat of the day made them uncomfortable – and her own scalp baked beneath the oil – they did not show it.
The procession flowed through other gardens and halls, and Cassia noticed that the palace had become much busier. More soldiers, more rich gowns and cloaks; men with scarves looped around their necks, clothes stained by travel; acolytes and priests of the Two Gods. Rais paused frequently to acknowledge them, accepting and returning bows and compliments, apparently in no hurry to join his father’s audience. He was enjoying himself. Cassia was not.
She was so intent upon the prince’s demeanour – a charade, she thought, designed to guide others into underestimating him – that she failed to notice the high doors raised up at the end of the hall they now walked through, until Rais halted at the base of the wide steps. Cassia tilted her head back to see how the doors vanished high into the vaults of the roof; they were decorated with bright tiles and polished and embossed figures of gold and silver. Images of kings dominating the beasts of several lands, and leading their vassals to war. Peleanna cast blessings from above, while the threatening bulk of Kolus was represented only by vast clawed hands that reached into the scene from the lower hinges of each door to support the heroic lords and pull their enemies into cracks in the ground. It was an overwhelming sight, even from down here; she knew it would be impossible to take in the entire design from the top of the flight.
She wondered how they opened. Did the courtiers have to gather together and push? That would be undignified . . .
A troop of guards, armour gleaming in ceremonial perfection, appeared from behind the grand columns on either side of the doors. They took up stations along the edge of the top step and, with drilled synchronicity, brought their right arms across their hearts to salute the prince.
His head moved slightly to speak over his shoulder to her. “If I’d been first-born, I would have died of boredom before now,” he murmured in Hellean.
Cassia did not understand the comment, so she chose to ignore it.
Rais returned the salute with a sigh and carried on up the stairs at a measured pace. As he reached the mid-point of the ascent a deep thud – like a hammer striking a large post – reverberated through both the hall and the steps themselves. The doors cracked open – but only to a point. There were smaller doors set into the larger pair, Cassia realised, in the same way that most entrance doors in the mede were set into larger, decorated frames. She wondered if the massive doors had ever been opened.
And beyond . . . beyond the doors was a garden so vast that she hesitated to call it such. The ground had been sculpted into rises and dips to mimic the open pastures she remembered from outside Hellea itself, and immaculately paved paths led between the contours, wide enough for two or three to walk abreast with comfort. That this place was enclosed seemed beyond doubt – cloisters stretched away in both directions, with private rooms behind the doors and lavish curtains, and she could see where those cloisters turned inward to create another two sides of the square – but the far side of the garden was beyond sight. To enclose such a vast area and keep it so private was a staggering concept. The dhar, but on a scale to dwarf every house in the mede added together. Only royalty could do such a thing.
With that thought, it ceased to intimidate her. Though Rais probably still believed that it did. She decided to leave him that illusion.
The Gardens of the King. This was where Pelicos unmasked the treacherous minister and stole a kiss from the prince’s wife before escaping on the back of a giant eagle. Cassia smothered a smile. Now she remembered the story, the enormous garden almost felt familiar to her. There was no giant eagle to be seen, and she was unlikely to steal any kind of kiss, true, but she could breathe far more easily.
Be as Pelicos. Indeed.
Gardeners worked discreetly, away from the paths that Rais took. His entourage gossiped and voiced their admiration as he showed them freshly planted patches or specific flowers brought from far-off lands; Cassia paid them no mind. She watched the people instead, noting that she was still the subject of a number of veiled glances and oblique comments.
Is this what Rais had in mind for her servitude? To be another face in his
crowd? To applaud every word and fawn over his hobbies and habits? How many of the people in this procession were actually servants rather than friends, dependent on their rank in the prince’s favour? They might see her as a threat, a reason to suspect they were no longer protected by his grace. Cassia saw the irony in the situation.
I was a slave to fate in Keskor, and now here as well. It doesn’t seem to matter who I really am.
The path rose slowly as it wound through the garden. The land was sculpted to form a hill that would look down upon the rest of the palace. The whole confused grid of courts and halls lay below her. Beyond that, and beyond the high walls that protected the palace, was the much more understandable maze of the mede, the sky overhead hazed with dust and smoke. At the top of the man-made hill was a flattened plaza, edged with decorated stone rails and statues of the Two Gods and the most famous of the Galliarcan kings of old. She had reached the Court of the King.
The Court was large enough to contain two hundred people, even before their servants and the large company of palace guards were added to the total. All eyes had turned to Rais as he entered the Court, the nearest men and women lowering their heads in deferential greeting. The robes and gowns they wore were grand enough to make Cassia’s eyes ache. The crowd parted to allow Rais and his closest companions through, Cassia’s escorting guards nudging her to follow. The remainder of his entourage was already dispersing into the crowd.
To Cassia’s surprise, the king of Galliarca sat at a small table in the centre of the Court. Clerks and ministers surrounded him, but none encroached on the large carpet that the table and chair rested on. There was a plain jug of water, a single glass, and a plate of bread upon the table. A scabbarded sword – Meredith’s greatsword, Cassia realised – lay across the far side of the polished surface.
Jianir, Blessed of the Gods and Protector of the Sea and Sand, was the very image of a Galliarcan ruler. He was broad-shouldered, his limbs sculpted more than they were toned, distinguished but not yet fading into his dotage. An unornamented circlet of steel sat at his temples, a sole concession to the jewelled finery a king ought to wear. There was more grey than black in his hair and beard. Cassia could imagine Rais, several decades from now, looking like this. Though he would need to lose the insufferable smugness.
Rais knelt at the edge of the carpet, one hand pressed to the weave. “Father.”
Jianir did not look up from the leather-bound volume he was reading. “How considerate of you to attend,” he said in Galliarcan. Cassia just about managed to translate that before he continued. “Do you now have the answers this Court requires?”
“I believe so,” Rais said. He stood again, but still did not move on to the carpet to join the king. “The scholar Torcilides was most helpful.”
“And the scholar Karak?”
“He is still confined to his bed. The sisters will keep him there until they are satisfied he will recover from his injuries.”
Jianir nodded slowly. “Then make your report.”
“The scholar Karak was attacked by a sorcerer named Baum, who died in the assault. There may also have been an accomplice, but he has disappeared.”
No, Cassia thought. He is there, in plain sight.
“We do, however, have two witnesses to the duel. One is a kitchen maid; her testimony has already been presented to this Court and to the Court of the Watch. The other is a young woman from the mountains north of Hellea.”
Cassia felt all eyes turn in her direction again. She was, after all, the only Northerner present. The drums pounded at the base of her skull and she bit the tip of her tongue to force them to lessen.
“A storyteller, no less,” Rais said. He half-turned, and that hard, conspiratorial smile was there once again. “Father, this is Cassia, the Northern Rabbit.”
The king’s gaze could have stripped the scales from a dragon. “I may be old, but I am not yet a fool, boy. I thought you had long outgrown your childish pranks. The sole witness you bring to this audience is an itinerant Northerner? You have spent the last two days assiduously interrogating this girl?”
There was a note behind his words that Cassia did not like, and it dawned on her that there was a second meaning, too, when the courtiers behind her tittered dutifully. A flush rose upon Rais’s cheeks. He isn’t as sophisticated as he makes himself out to be. He had tried to be clever in front of his father, and the king had swatted him back down. He was still a boy himself, playing at being a man.
And such boys were dangerous in their own right, as she well knew.
But the other aspect of the king’s insult was also quite clear. Her fists clenched at her side as she stepped forward to join Rais. The king’s ministers stiffened and the Court itself seemed to draw in a sharp breath, but at this moment she did not care about protocol. “I have a name, sir. And a title, should it please you to know that.”
For a moment Jianir’s expression was as immobile as Meredith’s had been. As Meredith was now. His emotions, however, were reflected openly on the faces of his assembled ministers; shock, anger, outrage. Cassia glared back at them all, daring them to insult her again.
She’d had enough of this. All of it. It was never her fault. And now the North would not leave her alone. The drums throbbed in time to her pulse once more, pulling at her, calling her . . .
Jianir raised one hand and made a sharp dismissive gesture. Not at her, Cassia realised, catching movement at the edges of her vision. The half-dozen guards who had sprung into an arc behind her, their spears raised high to impale her, stepped back a single pace. She heard Rais exhale softly and it dawned on her just how close she had come to sudden death.
Again.
“We know your name,” Jianir said flatly. “But please, do enlighten us. Where are your lands?”
“Caenthell,” she replied, refusing him any honorific at all this time. The Court was as silent as the dead air of Karakhel had been.
The king laid aside his book at last, leaving a black feather between the pages to mark his place. Every movement was measured and exact. “Caenthell. An easy land to claim, when there is no proof.”
“I am the Heir to the North,” Cassia said. It wasn’t as difficult to admit as it had first been.
The king looked across at Rais. “Your witness is ill-mannered. And hardly convincing. You are a gullible fool, boy. Even when you should be assuming responsibility for my interests in the city, your head is in the clouds.”
“Hardly, father,” Rais said. He sounded angrier, and Cassia was not surprised. She remembered how it felt to be humiliated by her father. “Torcilides attested that Karak’s dhar was ravaged by sorcery. Any man who visited that house would soon come to the conclusion that the scholar Karak was more than he made himself out to be. Even a boy could see that. The scholar’s housemaid has suffered a grievous loss, and so I have not questioned her closely, but Cassia was also a witness to that attack. She attempted to flee the dhar afterwards, and defended herself in that attempt with a large sword that clearly did not belong to her. And, as you have already pointed out, father, she is a Northerner. Like Karak himself.” Rais favoured her with a narrow smile. “Naturally, my suspicions were aroused.”
“I am fast losing patience with this story,” Jianir said.
Cassia had the distinct impression Rais and his father did not agree on many things. And she was stuck in the middle of their needling argument. Exasperated beyond caring for her own health, she stepped around the prince before he could continue, and confronted Jianir again.
“His real name is not Karak,” she said. “He is Malessar, the Destroyer of the North. The curse he placed on Caenthell is broken. And I am the Heir to the North.”
Jianir raised his hand into the air. “Torcilides.”
There was a brief pause and then the ranks of ministers parted to allow another man through. A much older, bearded man, gaunt and visibly exhausted. He walked with the aid of a stick, staring down at the ground to avoid misstepping. The edges of his
sleeves were stained with ink, as were the fingers of both hands. He fitted Cassia’s image of a scholar. He would not have looked out of place in either the great Hellean library, or the school back in Keskor. He stopped at the edge of the carpet and began to sink slowly and painfully to his knees.
“There is no need, Torcilides,” Jianir said. “Stand.”
The scholar pulled himself upright once more. “I am in your debt, sire.”
“Nonsense.” The king’s tone was warmer now. Torcilides was an old friend, Cassia decided. “I trust you heard these claims?”
“Yes, sire. And the prince discussed some of their ramifications with me last night.”
“At least he has some sense. Well?”
Torcilides hesitated, as though loath to upset the king. “I have talked – briefly – with the scholar Karak, as Prince Rais asked me to do. He has not said very much, to be fair, so I have little evidence on which to base any kind of judgement. He is very learned, however, and I look forward to further conversations with him.” He paused again. “Sire, I learned some of my craft from the great Stervis, but I am no sorcerer. I can feel the sorcerous power that surrounds both Karak and this girl here, but I can do nothing with it. I can neither prove nor disprove her claims. But my understanding has always been that Malessar’s curse on Caenthell could only be broken by a descendant of Jedrell’s line. Theoretically, such an event is possible – but Jedrell’s line was effectively wiped from the face of the earth.”
Cassia sighed. The man was like all scholars; he spoke much, but said very little of consequence. “And yet I am here,” she reminded him. “And the wards at Caenthell have fallen. Sir – would you know what might happen if the curse was overturned?”
Rais glared at her, but Cassia was far too angry to be intimidated by him. Or his father, even if he was the king of all Galliarca. Neither of them had the faintest idea what was inside her head. The weight bearing down upon her.
The scholar looked up, a speculative light in his eyes. The question seemed to have galvanised him, re-energising both his body and his mind. “There is no literature on that subject either, but Stervis did, on several occasions, invite discourse from his peers and his students. With no clear precedent to steer our thoughts, however, there was no way in which to test our hypotheses.” He caught the full heat of Cassia’s impatience and juddered to a halt. “Though there was common agreement that removing those curse wards would not be a good thing,” he finished, somewhat apologetically.
