by E D Ebeling
Pash and his wife were there. “Let him go somewhere else. Take him away somewhere,” the countess cried, wiping her eyes with her shirtfront. “No one is safe.”
“Let me see my brother,” came Rischa’s voice. “Where is he?” He was pushed by the crowd to where Savvel knelt on the ground, sedate, hands bound together with a strip of cloth.
“Yelse is my sister,” Sarid said over and over again. “Yelse is my sister. Savvel will tell you. She’s my sister.” Yelse was lying on the bed, being attended to by medics, ignoring Sarid. Just like everyone else.
Sarid pushed through the crowd, grabbed Rischa’s shirtsleeve. “If you’ll let me explain––”
“Did he force you up here?”
“She’s my sister.”
“Sisters?” He rubbed his eyes. “Gods I’m stupid.”
“You remember my sister? I told you about her, right after I met Savvel––”
“She’s not your sister.” He looked her in the eye, grabbed her shoulders, gently shook her. “You’re still in his head. It’s happened before. With your hound.”
“This is real.” Why hadn’t she told him about Yelse immediately?
“You’ll come out of it. You came out of it before.”
“There’s nothing to come out of.”
“I’ll look after you, until you come out of it.” He held onto her arm.
“If you would listen––”
But he didn’t. “Are you all done looking on?” he said coldly to everyone, and they began to filter through the door. He and Count Pash spoke together and decided to set a guard on Savvel’s door, and Savvel was led away by two big men.
“I’m going to bed,” said Sarid. She tried to shake off Rischa’s hand, but he only held her tighter.
“I’d feel better if you slept in my rooms.”
***
“Peitr,” Rischa called to his manservant, who rose from his pallet and blinked blearily. “Turn out the bed in the small room, will you? I’ll find you a nightshirt,” he said to Sarid, and walked into his own chamber.
Peitr lit a lamp. “Here.” He beckoned her towards a room. The door had a lock on the outside––she shuddered to think why. She was irritated enough to blow Peitr out the window. But Rischa hadn’t done anything and she didn’t want him to think her any madder, so in she went.
The bed was small and well appointed. Peitr put the lamp on the dresser and began thumping dust off the counterpane. He looked at her and stopped thumping. “Rischa,” he called out the door. “Come here.”
Rischa came through the door, a long shirt in his hands. Peitr took the lamp and held it next to Sarid’s face. “She’s covered in them.” Sarid looked in the mirror over the dresser. She’d a black eye, swollen nose, and other welts and bruises just starting to darken. Behind her Rischa’s face was stark like a mountainside. Peitr pulled out the collar of her dress and peered down her back.
“I did it,” she said. “I did it. To myself.” She pulled away and took the shirt from Rischa.
“You can’t very well hit yourself between the shoulders,” said Peitr.
Rischa left the room and Sarid heard him say, “I must make a visit.”
She said, “If you go to your brother––”
“Shut up about my brother,” he called.
Peitr shook his head sadly. “I’ll find some liniment.”
Eight
Judging by the light outside the window it was late afternoon. Sarid rose from the bed, twisting awkwardly to avoid a bruise on her hip. She tried the door. Locked. She gave it three fierce knocks.
A key turned in the lock and Rischa opened the door. He seemed sick, his eyes bagged and shadowy. “How are you feeling?”
Sarid looked down at her feet. “I need to talk to Yelse.”
She glanced at him. His eyes grew large; he looked owlish. “You don’t still––?”
“No,” she lied, shaking her head. “It’s passed. Please, Rischa, I must speak with her about what happened. She’s confused and scared.”
“All right. But I’m sending a chaperone.”
“Fine. And then if I could just see Savvel––”
“No.” It was the most resolute no she’d heard from him. She would have to find her own way.
***
Yelse had given up being bedridden. When Sarid entered, her sister was sitting by the window and looking out at the lake, which was goose-grey and wrinkled under a white sky. Her breast was bandaged beneath a loose shift, and her lip swollen to twice its normal size.
She nodded at Sarid, and both of them turned around to face the chaperone––a nervous female medic. The chaperone’s lids drooped sleepily and she turned and left them alone in the bedroom.
Sarid shut the door. “What are you planning?” she said. “Why do you torture Savvel?”
“Why go through all that nonsense last night just to ask me that?”
“To break your enchantment. I won’t be a puppet. Tell me what you’re doing and why. It’s only reasonable.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” said Yelse. “No matter.” She laughed. “Sit here,” she patted the bed. “Don’t bite me again.”
Sarid sat in a chair across from her.
“Tell me what you know about our family,” said Yelse.
Sarid spoke in a toneless voice: “Our grandmother fell in love with a saebel. They had a son together. Grandmother bade her son kill her three brothers so she might inherit Charevost. He killed them, but of course she didn’t inherit, and the next closest kin got the hall. The Pashes,” she added. “Then our father abducted our mother and begot us.”
Yelse smiled like an indulgent nanny. “What a sad, boring little story. Let me tell you the real one.
“About sixty years ago the Hyedas owned Charevost. They were one of the oldest families in these parts, and they were perforce haughty and exclusive. There was a girl who belonged to the family: Treninka Hyeda. She had three brothers, all older. The brothers were a domineering bunch, and thought very hard how they might keep the family lines purer. The eldest brother was twenty years his sister’s senior, her oldest living relative, so no one inside or outside the family questioned him when he locked the girl away. Years went by and people forgot her, thought she had died or been married off to some foreign count. In truth, the brothers had decided they would all try to beget a fine boy on their sister, and only the finest would be allowed to inherit.
“Of course the poor girl, only sixteen, wasn’t keen on the idea. She refused them for three years, growing thinner and paler, because they starved her and kept her inside. One evening she cried out in her anguished mind, and something heard her. Charevost Hall sits within the Vara: a queer place, otherworldly, folk say. Inside it are the oldest bits of saebelen-infested forest, and the Simargh stronghold of Lorlen. So something heard her. A saebel.
“Not one of those skulking, stupid ones you’re used to. It was a Puortha––a son of Paronna, goddess of high places. They called this one Strihegadje.”
“Wind,” said Sarid automatically.
“Grandfather Wind.” Yelse said the words as a lover would. “It was fall and the autumn rains knocked at Treninka’s window. She opened the window and the wind lay with her like a lover.
“A few weeks passed and she found she was pregnant. Thinking one of her brothers had drugged her, she went up to the roof to throw herself from it. The storms had blown all that week and still blew, even as she raised her arms and jumped. A man jumped with her. She thought he was a manservant, fallen in his desperate rush to save her. But she turned to look at him and saw that his skin took on the color of whatever passed behind it, and his eyes whirled in his face like hurricanes, and his hair crackled with lightning. He took her hand and the wind cleaved her body to his. Half a year later Treninka bore him a son.
“The son grew up and learned his mother’s story. Now here we come to the troubling bits, but surely you can’t blame Aleksei? His anger blew up gales and toppled trees. He ha
d to put the energy to use somehow. So one night he turned himself into a gust of wind––”
“He can’t just turn into a wind,” said Sarid.
“Yes he can. And so can you, probably. You’ve just never bothered to go completely mad.” She continued: “And when he came to the old hall he transformed himself into the image of his mother at sixteen, and confronted the three brothers in their den. They were sitting by the fireplace surrounded by their hounds. They saw her and stood up.
‘Disloyal bit of filth,’ said one.
‘Let’s set the dogs on her,’ said another.
‘She’s a ghost,’ said the third.
And Aleksei called up a storm right there in the hall: the lance above the fireplace blew down and gored the eldest; the second was torn apart by the hounds; and the youngest was blown out the window and into the lake. He couldn’t swim.”
Yelse looked out the window. Far below the lake beat against the side of the building.
“Old Eliav thought nothing of incest. The aristocracy’s rife with it. We were disinherited.”
“And our mother?” said Sarid. Lady Ilyne had been the daughter of a landless baronet, kin to the Pashes.
“Father met her wandering in the woods and they fell in love.”
“Why did she leave him?”
“She found out who he was,” said Yelse patiently, as though Sarid were a simpleton. “She ran away with you and ended here. Do you believe my story?”
“A lot to believe in one go.”
“Think about it, then.” Yelse made a gesture of dismissal, but Sarid didn’t get up.
“Why are you here?” she said. “You still haven’t said.”
“Paronna is a goddess of justice.”
“And what? Treninka’s brothers are dead.”
“Charevost isn’t ours.”
“You want the hall? The county?”
“I want,” said Yelse, “to squeeze these old families until the pride dribbles down their legs.”
“I don’t know that Paronna would call that justice.”
Yelse smiled and played with the bandage on her breast. “I torture Savvel because I want to be Ravinya. It’s fortunate the younger brother has a taste for saebeline lovers. I hear he’s a rake, Sarid. I’m only looking out for you.”
Sarid held her stomach with a hand. She tasted vomit in the back of her mouth. “I’m going somewhere to think.” She rose from the bed and walked out.
She closed the door behind her, as though she could trap the sickness inside. Mari Haek got up from a bed in the infirmary. She’d been waiting.
“Sarid.” She brushed dark hair from her face. “My sister’s telling me strange tales. She was up here with a sprained wrist last night. She says the bruises all over Yelse––” She looked closely at Sarid’s face. “You, too, it seems. Well, Savvel had nothing to do with it, says Leva. Which is good, I guess, because I stopped Rischa thrashing him this morning.”
Over her nausea Sarid’s head whirred. “Is he hurt?”
“Not badly. The long and short of it is that Leva thinks you’re sisters.”
“Keep Leva away from Yelse,” said Sarid, and she turned and walked toward the door.
“Are you sisters?”
Sarid didn’t answer.
***
She stood outside the infirmary for a few seconds, forcing her head back into order.
She went out the building, then, thinking fresh air might help her to think. The sun was low and the shadows chilly; and she walked around the bulk of the southern wing and hid behind a bush while a gardener trimmed the grass around a big tower.
When he’d made his way around the corner, she crept out and counted windows in the tower. She’d been wild enough as a young girl that climbing the oak alongside the wall wasn’t a problem. Her heart quickened, though, when she stepped from a branch onto a little ledge––barely more than a line––that ran under the window she wanted. She inched along, hands numb and sweaty, and tucked herself into the window.
She landed on the floor in a tangle of ripped skirts. She was in a small, familiar parlor. Cherrywood and grey velvet.
She picked herself up and walked into an adjoining room. Savvel was lying fully clothed in his bed and didn’t bother to look at her.
“You were right,” he said. “Our lives are as good as ruined.”
Sarid wiped blood from a skinned knee. “He thumped you?”
“Only a little thump.”
“I’m sorry.” She walked closer. “I’m so sorry. It was a stupid, desperate idea––”
“Enough. It was my own choice.” He shrugged, still lying down. “And it worked. You’re sisters?”
“Yelse wants to become Ravinya.”
He sat upright.
“You’ll have to beat her to it,” he said.
“It’d make more sense,” she said, “if we tried to clean you up. Then she’ll find she’s focused on the wrong person entirely.”
“No good. I’m a monster. Look what is done to monsters.” He lifted a shock of hair––there was a shining bruise on the side of his head.
“You’d have me be Ravinya?” She undid a button on her front and fingered a welt.
“Yes.” He took the liberty of re-fastening the button. “That’s how sunk in despair I am.”
She slapped his hand away. “So sunk you can’t help me?”
“So sunk I can’t make out a surface.”
She sat beside him on the bed. “Because you put rocks in your pockets. You enjoy it, wallowing in misery.”
“I hate it.” His hands fidgeted with his shirt laces.
“Like ripping out a rotten tooth, I bet. Sticking a needle through a canker. The pain is unbearable and exquisite.”
“Yes,” he said sharply, “it feels exquisite, burning all the filth away. All the illusions.”
She touched the side of his head, and he jerked away from her. “Could an illusion do this?” She slapped his leg, hard.
He didn’t flinch. “Hit me all you like. It’s a dream. It’ll fade away, and the dog-end will burn out, and there'll be nothing. Nothing but wind over bone.” He wrapped the bottom of his shirt round his hands.
“A miserable conviction.”
“I have no convictions.”
“That is a conviction.”
“The end of them.”
“Comfortable, is it?”
“Yes,” he said nastily. She grabbed hold of his hair and dragged him off the bed. He hit the floor and shouted.
“I wish he’d beaten your brains out,” she declared.
He rubbed his shoulder. “You could’ve been a very wicked witch.”
She snapped her fingers under his nose. “Stop with the selfishness and help me.”
“How?” He rubbed his wrist.
“By acting as though we can cure you.”
The sunlight had withdrawn completely from the room. Sarid moved toward the window, but Savvel caught her arm. ”Forget that.” He led her over to a small bureau; the floor sloped slightly beneath it. He moved the bureau aside. There was a round, iron door in the floor.
“A door to the hypocaust,” said Sarid. “But it’s not, is it?”
“It is, actually, for a little while, so wear shoes.”
“Where does it lead?”
“The lake.”
“What’s it for?”
“If anything horrible were to happen to Charevost, the royal family is the most duty-bound to scarper. “ He nodded at her significant look. “Rischa has a door to this tunnel, too, and he’s conveniently forgotten about mine.”
“Why haven’t you used this?”
“Think, Ida.” He lifted the iron, and the hinges groaned. “They would find me, put me back, and nail the thing down.”
Nine
Sarid didn’t want to go to the spring banquet. She didn’t feel like sitting next to the stupid folk who’d stared at her for the past two weeks, whispering behind their hands. And she didn’t want to mak
e silly conversation about the brightening weather when all around her disaster seemed immanent. But when she heard that Yelse was going, she decided she had no choice.
Disaster seemed doubly likely on a barge in the middle of the lake, which was where the banquet was traditionally held, weather permitting.
The day came round, and the weather did permit. A few small clouds cast brief, chilly shadows over the warm grounds before blowing west.
Rischa and Sarid picked their way over to the docks, and Gryka ran around them, snapping at tadpoles and water spiders. “You won’t have to talk to anyone,” Rischa was saying. “They’ll be singing songs from the Liorsein Cycle. We’ll all be crying into our food.” They passed the cave behind the bulrushes that Sarid had crept from two weeks earlier after escaping from Savvel’s room. Rischa took no notice of it.
The barge came into view, trimmed with ferns and little bell-like flowers. There were three long tables in the middle, under a canopy. In the front a thurible hung from a pole, wafting incense all the way to where Sarid and Rischa had joined the queue of people being welcomed aboard by the Count and Countess.
“Master Rischa,” said Pash, “you’d do better to sit alongside Leva this afternoon. Things have taken a formal turn. The Princess Selya––”
“She’s here?” said Rischa, looking around for his cousin. “She wasn’t supposed to come for a week.”
“She’s here early, and so you ought to act with your station in mind so she can give a good account––”
“An account?” said Rischa. “She’s too silly. And who will Sarid sit with?”
“Indeed,” said the Countess. “And who will Leva sit with?”
“You’ll find,” said Leva behind them, “that anywhere I sit has two seats alongside it that will necessarily be filled. By whom, I don’t care. So if you feel sorry for me––”
