The Will of the Empress

by Tamora Pierce

  Isha curtsied. “Very well, Your Imperial Majesty.”

  “Put a guard on Trisana,” Berenene snapped. “Have her watched. Place your best people on alert. She is not to leave Dancruan, should she be in any condition to try.”

  That same day, Tris got out of bed. She ached from head to toe and had to be helped into a bathtub, but she was on her feet. Grimly she made herself walk the circuit of her room twice that day, five times the next. The healers ordered her not to test the healing, ignoring her glare. On the third morning, as she stood on the landing and contemplated the stairs to the next story down, Ealaga came up to her.

  “Are you supposed to do that?” the lady asked.

  “I’m supposed to be with my family,” Tris replied. She gripped the banister and took one step down. “It’s a very nice bed, Ealaga, and you’ve been wonderful about sharing books, but I do them no good here. None of us believes Sandry will be allowed to dance out of Namorn.”

  Ambros’s wife steadied Tris. “Dressed yourself, I see,” she remarked, redoing the topmost button on Tris’s gown. “Come to my room and tell my maid how to pin your braids.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Tris said. For once she did not thrust away the offer of help. I don’t want to admit I can’t walk down on my own, she thought. “I want to visit the palace tomorrow, but when I try to tuck up my braids, I get dizzy lifting my arms.” Tris paused to catch her breath, thinking, Five more steps and then I’ll sit down. I’m in splendid condition for a fight, I am!

  “The palace?” Ealaga asked, puzzled. “You aren’t fit to visit anywhere, let alone the palace. Who did you wish to call on? We can invite that person here.”

  “I’d rather have my chat with Viymese Ladyhammer somewhere else, if you don’t mind,” replied Tris, taking the next step with trembling legs. “It may not go well.”

  “That chat seems like a very bad idea to me.” Ealaga was as full of practicality as her husband. “Surely your business with her is best left undone.”

  “It is not,” the redhead answered. “I’ve had plenty of time to pick apart that whiff of magic I smelled before I decided to do bad tumbling tricks on the stair. It was her work. I don’t know what I did to Ishabal to deserve that, and I don’t care. I just want to express my unhappiness in the clearest possible way.” They had reached the second floor. Tris leaned against the banister, her face beaded with sweat from exhaustion as much as pain.

  Ealaga helped Tris into her own dressing room. “Well, then, if you’re foolish enough to want to quarrel with a great mage, I can’t be sorry to tell you that your luck is out. Viymese Ladyhammer is not at the palace. She and her imperial majesty left some days ago, to do some hunting.” She guided Tris onto a chair and rang the bell for the maid.

  Tris watched Ealaga’s face in the looking-glass. “Do you know where?”

  Ealaga met her gaze with sober eyes. “She has a residence in the Carakathy Hills, near Lake Glaise and the Olart border.”

  “Where the Imperial Highway crosses the Olart border,” Tris said.

  “Yes.” Ealaga beckoned to her maid. “The empress often goes there, Tris. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Tris shifted in the chair so she could meet Ealaga’s eyes. “You don’t believe that.”

  Ealaga sighed and took a seat of her own. “It’s said she was in a rage when she left, and Pershan fer Roth was missing. The gossips believe he may have gone to try to persuade Sandry to marry him after all.”

  Tris took a moment to explain to the maid how each braid was tucked and the mass of braids coiled before the silk net Tris offered her was pinned in place over them. As the woman got to work, Tris bit her lip, her brain racing. Shan is the empress’s toy, thought the redhead. Her lover. If he went after Sandry—if he was fool enough to do it!—Her Imperial Majesty would feel he’d shown her disrespect. If there’s one thing rulers hate, it’s disrespect. That and the possibility that people might think they’re weak if it looks like someone has defied their will. So now the empress is angry. She’s worried people might say Shan, Sandry, Daja, and Briar are getting away with saying no to her. She’ll want to stop them from leaving, to prove they aren’t defying her.

  Tris had spent much of the last three years entering and leaving countries. One thing most had in common was magical walls at the borders, walls that could be relied on to slow an invader and stop an individual. They could not remain up all of the time. It was too costly to do so: Such walls demanded immense amounts of magical power. They were shaped to be raised on command. The mage who did the raising had to be a great one, a mage with the power to raise a shield that held other mages back.

  Berenene has lost patience, thought Tris. She means to keep all four of us as a lesson to others. Ishabal has gone with the empress to raise the border against my sisters and brother. Namorn means to hold us like caged birds.

  Tris didn’t notice when Ealaga left her alone. When the maid finished, Tris thanked her and tipped her a coin for her labor. Then she left the room and began her slow, weary, aching climb back up the stair.

  It took her the rest of the day to pack, including stops to rest and to nap. She worked steadily with shaking hands. She had to make sure that she carried all she would need. Chime looked on. She had been in and out during Tris’s recovery, and she did not care for the way Tris was acting.

  At sunset, Tris opened her window and turned her face into the cool wind that blew south off the Syth. She gathered its strength and put it behind her call to her friends: I think they mean to raise the borders against you. Can you find a way around? The empress and Ishabal will be there, I think. Maybe Quenaill, too. Can you hear me? Can you take strength from me?

  There was no reply. It could be a few things, Tris thought, lurching back to the hated bed. It could be they’ve gone too far, and there’s too much ambient magic between us that blocks my voice. More likely, I’m worn out. If they knew I was calling and reached back, I could speak easily then, but they don’t know. They’re walking into the empress’s arms with no one to warn them except Zhegorz.

  She lay down and slept, rising in the pale gray hour before dawn. Once dressed, she freed a wind to take her saddlebags out through her window and down to the ground. That was all she dared to take with her if she wanted to move fast. It cost her a pang to turn her back on the wardrobe Sandry had made her for court, but perhaps Ambros and Ealaga would ship the trunks to Emelan. She placed her letter to them on her bed, gathered Chime up in her arms, and slowly made her way down the stairs and out of the house. While she had enough control over her magic and her winds to lower saddlebags, she didn’t feel confident enough to lower herself. She would need all of her strength to get through the day.

  Once outside, her wind met and followed her to the stable, where it left her saddlebags. Tris thanked it and set it free.

  The stables were dark. Tris didn’t care: She could see perfectly well. Her mare, an easygoing creature that was accustomed to Tris’s peculiarities, stood quietly as another wind from that same braid lifted blanket, saddle, and saddlebags to her back. Slowly Tris did up buckles and settled bits of tack, checking it all twice. Finally she placed Chime on the saddlebags and dragged a stool over to the mare. When she tried to pull herself into the saddle, her strength failed her partway. She lay there, half-on and half-off, wondering if this would be how she departed Landreg House.

  “If I had any sense, I would leave you there,” Ambros said, pushing open the stable door to admit the early morning light. “You’re in no condition to attempt anything like this.”

  “I have to get closer to them,” Tris mumbled. “Close enough at least to warn them. The healers said I was mended.”

  “If they had known you meant to attempt a three-hundred-mile ride when you’d been out of bed less than a week, they would have revised their diagnosis,” replied Ambros at his driest. “They might even have determined that you took a harder blow to the head than they had originally thought.”

  Tris cons
idered telling him “You can’t stop me,” but it was hard to do while hanging crosswise over a horse’s back. “I’m going,” she said, gripping the saddle horn. She shoved from the foot that was in the stirrup.

  A firm pair of hands gripped her ankle and pushed, helping her slide the rest of her weight onto her horse. Ambros went around to tug the free leg down and place that foot in its stirrup. Then he went to saddle his own horse.

  Tris watched him as Chime climbed up the back of her gown and onto her shoulder. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked Ambros.

  “Since I have an idea I’ll face lightning or something worse if I try to keep you, I had best go along,” he replied calmly. “That way, when you fall off sometime around noon, I will have the very great pleasure of saying, ‘I told you so.’ Should you remain in the saddle, you will need me to pay innkeepers.” He hesitated as he checked the placement of his bridle, then asked quietly, “Do you honestly believe the four of you can overcome border protections raised and held by a great mage? Perhaps more great mages, if Ishabal sends for them?”

  Tris leaned down to rest her forehead against her mare’s mane. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “If I tell them they aren’t going to be allowed to leave, they’ll be angry enough to try. It may be we have a few tricks to us that no one knows of yet.”

  They were riding out the house gate when Ambros drew up. “I had forgotten we were being watched,” he admitted.

  Tris squinted to see what he meant. Across the street, two mages stood on either side of a smaller town house. They were coming forward now, the silver fire of their power flickering around their hands. Chime darted forward, uttering her nails-on-glass screech, forcing them to watch her as she flashed close to their faces.

  Tris took advantage of their distraction to undo a quarter of another fat wind braid gleaned from a tornado. As the watchdog mages tried to strike at Chime with their power, Tris released her wind. It blasted down the street, whipping up dust, making the manes and tails of the horses stream. It yanked the female mage’s veil off her hair. Chime instantly flew upward, out of the wind’s reach.

  Tris called the gale-force wind back to circle the watchdogs. It grabbed them, scrabbling in their clothes with greedy fingers. Tris did up the braid again, then gave the small gale another spin. It picked up speed, whirling around the watchdogs like a cyclone. Inside it they were blind and captive, unable to move or see. Tris gave the wind a last, hard spin, then freed it into the open air over Dancruan. It fled, leaving the pair behind. Briefly they wavered, then fell.

  It took Ambros a moment to shake off what he had just seen. “You killed them,” he said nervously as Chime dropped down to land on Tris’s saddle horn.

  “Nonsense.” Tris glared at Ambros. “I knocked them out. They’ll come around. I don’t go around killing people, you know. Not unless I have to.”

  Ambros dismounted and checked for himself. He had to yank at the watchdogs’ disheveled clothing to uncover their faces and find if they were still breathing. They were. Ambros shook his head, covered their faces again, and mounted his gelding. “Let’s go, before they wake up,” he said, still shaking his head.

  “I told you I don’t go around killing people,” Tris said fiercely. “It’s not exactly something I’d want to lie about.”

  Normally Gudruny’s children were patient travelers, helping with chores and gleefully striking up conversations with passersby. But the closer their company came to the Blendroad crossing and its horse fair, the unhappier the children got. Sandry could understand their basic disgust at the slowness of their travel, the dust, the lack of consideration from others on the road, and the noise, but more than once she considered cocooning the children to silence them.

  Zhegorz did not help. He still insisted on riding beside Sandry, his bony nose in the wind, whatever its direction. His declarations—“I hear the palace”—got to be maddening. The problem was that the empire maintained fortresses along the highway to preserve the peace. Could his palace sounds simply be the conversation of servants of the empire? He couldn’t say. From time to time he would go silent, but he always started up again. The only rest Sandry got from his declarations was if she chose to ride at the back of their group, when she got dust in her teeth. By the time they finally crawled into the overstuffed courtyard of the Blendroad Inn, Zhegorz was shouting his news, drawing stares from everyone who heard them, and Sandry had a headache.

  “Zhegorz, will you please be quiet!” cried Gudruny as Sandry rode forward to talk to the innkeeper. “The children are bad enough”—she glared at her crying youngsters in the cart—“and I mean to paddle them if they do not stop it, right now! I will paddle you as well if you cannot act like an adult!”

  Briar, too, was covered with dust and headachy with sun, but Gudruny made him smile. “Here I thought she was a mouse,” he remarked to Daja as Sandry passed them. “Seemingly she’s not.”

  “I don’t think mothers are supposed to be mice,” murmured Daja. “Maybe that’s what Zhegorz needs—a mother.”

  “I hear the palace,” Zhegorz called back to Gudruny. “Plots and betrayal and intrigue.”

  “Hear them quietly,” Gudruny insisted. She gave her children one last glare. They at least had heard the tone of their mother at the end of her rope, and fallen silent.

  “Clehame, I’m sorry, but we have not a single room. You see how it is—every house in Blendroad is full up for the horse fair,” the innkeeper stammered. He had to talk between two of Sandry’s guards. They would not let him get any closer to her horse. “All who travel the highway this time of year know of the fair. I will turn folk out of their rooms, being as you’re a clehame, but it will cost me guests I depend on every year.”

  Sandry rubbed her temples. “No, please don’t do that on my account,” she told him, hating herself for caring about such things when she just wanted a bath. Why can’t I be like other nobles, and demand he look after me and mine right now? she asked herself petulantly. I can’t see Berenene caring if he loses customers or not, as long as she gets a bath.

  “Just like a man, not to offer a solution!” scolded a woman—obviously the innkeeper’s wife—as she thrust her way through the crowd. Reaching Sandry’s fence of guards, she curtsied. “Clehame, forgive my silly clunch of a husband. He’s forgot the Canyon Inn. It’s just ten miles down Deepdene Road.” She pointed to a road that led west. “Truly, it’s far better for a refined young lady and her household. ’Tis small, quiet, not well-known, but well-kept. My sister-in-law owns it. They’ve some guests now, but not enough to fill the house. My sister-in-law is not so good a cook as I am, but no one grumbles about her fare.”

  Daja leaned on her staff and looked the woman over. “If this place is such a gem, why isn’t it full?”

  “It’s ten miles off, for one,” said the innkeeper, clearly relieved his wife had stepped in. “And it’s more to the noble style and hunters’ style. They’re full when hunt season begins, sure enough, and with the fur traders in the winter, but less so this time of year.”

  Sandry had borne enough. Her head was killing her. “Let’s go,” she ordered her companions. “The sooner I lie down, the better.”

  One of the guards flipped coins to the innkeeper and his wife. Briar and half the guards followed Sandry, while Daja muttered for Zhegorz to be silent. He obeyed only briefly. Sandry was barely a mile down the smaller road when he cried, “Silks, brocades, swords—I see them on the wind!”

  “Because Sandry and her guards are upwind of you, Zhegorz,” Daja told him. “Are you going to behave, or will I have to make you take your drops?”

  “I said I’d watch over you,” Zhegorz informed her with dignity. “You should listen when I’m watching over you.”

  Daja looked at Gudruny. “Is this what having children is like?”

  The maid sighed. “Very like.”

  “Hush, or take drops,” Daja ordered Zhegorz. “I don’t care which.”

  Zhegorz hushed,
falling back to the rear where he could ride with the more sympathetic Briar.

  When they reached the Canyon Inn, Daja was relieved to find a very different situation from the last inn. The only other guests were four soldiers on leave from the army, which meant there were rooms for everyone but Sandry’s guards in the main house. Her guards were happy to make camp outside, on the nearby riverbank. The innkeeper immediately took their party over, escorting Sandry to a cool room, clean sheets, water to wash herself with, and quiet. As the others relaxed, Daja lingered in the common room to talk to their fellow guests.

  “It’s not as expensive as it is later in the year,” one of the men explained. “And honestly, Ravvikki, my friends and I are glad for the quiet.”

  One of the others nodded. “We’re here to fish, explore the river, and forget there ever was a place called the Sea of Grass. That was our last posting. We’re on leave, thank the gods.”

  “You’ve come a long way, then,” Daja remarked.

  “Thousands of miles, as fast as possible,” one man said reverently, to the rueful laughter of his companions. “And now we’re done. That Yanjingyi emperor is a cruel, hard fellow. We’re hoping our next post is a safe little soldier box in maybe Dancruan.”

  “Talk to my brother Briar when he comes down from his nap,” Daja suggested as she got to her feet. “You can trade curses on the emperor’s name. He just got back from Gyongxe this spring.”

  The men traded looks. “Saw some fighting there, did he?” the first one to speak asked. “He’s a busy fellow, that emperor. But we may not be around this afternoon.” He coughed into his fist. “We were thinking of riding off to the horse fair this evening for a spot of entertainment.”