“The others,” she said, looking behind her, “can they come back in too?”
I waved a hand. “They’re your patrons, not mine. It’s not my business to say who can frequent your establishment.”
They trickled in behind her, hesitant as feral cats still hungering for a meal. I watched them in dismay as they took in the destruction, and their eyes widened in awe. I groaned inwardly. First the song, and now this. If I’d wanted to just be left alone, I wasn’t doing such a great job of lying low.
And then they began to approach me. I leaned on my elbows and debated draining the entire mug. I knew what they were going to say.
“Jovis.” A young woman sat in the chair opposite me, her hands wringing together. Still, she held my gaze despite her fear. “What could I give you to save my son?”
21
Lin
Imperial Island
The steady beat of hammer against anvil soothed me as I worked. The spy construct was small and required more concentration than I thought possible. I hadn’t tried this part before tonight – reaching into a construct’s body to manipulate any shards within. I’d returned the pieces of the small construct I’d built to the storeroom; this spy construct was a more pressing issue. And now that I needed to reach inside a construct, I felt the frustration building. I concentrated, held my breath and tried again.
My fingers met only fur and flesh, and the spy construct squeaked.
“By Dione’s balls!” I wiped the sweat gathering on my forehead. I had time, at least. I wasn’t rushing back to beat my father to his rooms. No keys, just the beginner’s book beneath one arm. I could stay out all night before he noticed I was gone.
I wasn’t concentrating hard enough; I was angling my fingers the wrong way . . . I wasn’t even sure what I was doing wrong. My father and Bayan had locked themselves into a room to practice the bone shard commands, so I had time. I looked to Numeen. He’d be packing up soon, heading back to his family for a well-deserved meal. I should hurry. I shook out my fingers, closed my eyes, breathed deeply. What had the book said? To imagine I was dipping my fingers below the surface of a lake.
But I hadn’t been to a lake before, not that I could remember. So I thought about dipping my hands into the pond by the Hall of Good Fortune, feeling blindly for the koi fish beneath. My breathing steadied, my heartbeat slowing.
I lowered my fingers.
It was more like a warm bath than the pond at home. I still felt the creature’s fur tickling my palm, but beneath it the flesh was liquid between my fingertips. Something small and jagged met my touch. A bone shard. I had to tug a little to free it, but it came loose. The hammer stopped striking the anvil.
When I opened my eyes, I held the bone shard between my fingers, and Numeen was looking at me with a mixture of fear and awe. The spy construct lay frozen in place beneath my hand. “Do you have an etching tool?” I asked.
After a moment’s hesitation, he reached into a drawer, pulled out a thin metal tool and tossed it to me. I caught it in my free hand and turned the shard over. There was a gray smudge on it, which I wiped clean. I squinted at the commands etched onto the tiny shard and set to work.
Amunet – to observe. Pilona – servant. Beneath that, in subtext, was written remal – clothing – with what looked like a star etched next to it. Next to pilona was written essenlaut – within these walls – with another star etched next to it. On a new line, oren asul – report and obey – and then Ilith, with one more star etched next to it. I stuffed the construct back into its iron birdcage and studied the words for a moment. Amunet pilona essenlaut. Oren asul Ilith. The answer came to me, quick as a minnow darting from the shallows. The construct was to observe servants within the palace walls, and report to and obey Ilith.
I couldn’t change much. The shard had already been bound to the palace, to the servant’s clothing and to Ilith. But I had a clean shard in my sash pocket.
I pulled out the fresh shard, took the etching tool and created my own command, trying not to think too much on whose shard this might be. Oren asul Lin. And then I pressed the shard to my breast, and while doing so, carved a little star next to my name.
The construct inside the cage hadn’t moved. With a deep breath, I closed my eyes again, held my breath and lowered my fingers to its body. Again I felt the warmth, the strange sensation of moving my fingers through liquefied flesh. I lodged the shard inside and drew my fingers away.
As soon as my fingers left the construct’s body, I felt it leap to its feet again.
“You’re mine now too, little one,” I whispered to it. I gave it a little pat on the head and pulled a nut from my sash. “Your name is Hao. When I call your name, you must do as I say.”
The little thing whisked it from my fingers, turning it over in its paws, devouring it. When it was done, it groomed its whiskers and then leapt to Numeen’s shelves. It scampered along, leapt to another one and then absconded out the open window above Numeen’s head.
I was safe.
I held out the etching tool to Numeen, but he shook his head. “Keep it. Looks like you need it.” He turned back to putting away his tools and extinguishing the fire in the forge. And then, falsely casual: “Did you happen to find my shard yet?”
The question was always like a knife, twisting in my ribs. I’d checked more than once, but Bayan still kept Numeen’s shard. “Not yet.” I kept my tone neutral. “I’m still looking for the room where my father keeps the shards for Imperial.”
He nodded like that made sense. “It will be difficult, taking your place as Emperor,” he observed, “if you do not have the key to all the shard storerooms.”
“There are many rooms in the palace, and most of them locked.” I didn’t have to feign any bitterness. “I can steal maybe two keys at a time, but if I didn’t make it back in time, my father would notice. One key he might pass off as some other accident. I wish I could do this faster, I really do. But there is much he doesn’t wish me to know.”
Numeen frowned. I knew the way of it on most islands. Children often learned their trade from one of their parents, or at times from a close and trusted friend. But knowledge was meant to be shared, one generation to the next. Instead, my father locked it away from me, guarding it more jealously than he did the piles of witstone in his storeroom. I shook my head. “I should go. You need to get back to your family.” A warm home, a warm meal, a warm bed.
He rubbed his big hands over his face and let out a sigh. “What do you do for meals most nights?” He asked like he wasn’t sure he wanted the answer.
“Sometimes Father requests my presence at dinner. Otherwise, I call a servant to bring food to my room.”
Numeen pushed himself up from his workbench, wiping his palms on his apron and then hanging the apron on a hook over the anvil. “Come on. If you don’t need to be back right away, you can come have a meal with my family.”
Out in the city, among its people. The idea of it called to me, pulsed in my blood like the sweet strains of a violin. “Are you sure?”
“Or you could go back to the palace and eat a rapidly cooling meal in your room alone,” Numeen said, his voice a grumble. “I made the offer. Take it or leave.”
“I’ll go,” I said before he could rescind.
He only nodded and went to the door. I hurried behind him and waited as he locked it. The air outside had the petrichor smell of rain after a long dry season. The eaves of the nearby buildings still dripped from the afternoon’s storm and lamplight reflected off the cobbles of the street. The dry season had broken in a spectacular way.
My spy construct hadn’t gone far. I could feel its presence, a tickle in the back of my mind. It followed us as we moved, as though expecting something. I pulled another nut from my sash pocket and offered it. The creature scampered down, took it and then climbed back to the rooftop to eat it.
“Don’t tell them who you are,” Numeen said as I fell into step behind him. “And don’t let that construct follow you i
nside.”
“I’m not stupid.”
He gave me a sidelong glance over his shoulder.
“I’m doing the best I can with what I have. Tell them I’m a visitor who frequents your shop.”
Numeen shook his head. “You are the daughter of a wealthy patron, but the steward of your household forgot to check your roof before the rains. Your dining hall is a wet ruin and since you were at my shop to pick up a lock and key; I invited you to dinner. Lin is a common enough name.”
“Very well.”
We picked our way through the streets of the city, farther from the palace walls and toward the ocean down below. The moon had risen, and it cast a silver glow across the water. I thought I could hear, even from here, the knock of ships against the docks, the creak of rope as docking lines were pulled taut.
I kept in silent step behind Numeen, my mind wandering. I’d been reading from the green-covered journal, trying to glean what useful information I could. Most of it was the dithering, excitable words of a young girl. Had I truly been so carefree at some point? Younger me had delighted in koi ponds, in mountain bamboo, in the goats she’d seen one sunny afternoon in the countryside, climbing a tree. Present-day me cared only for the keys and for establishing myself in the palace. “What did you know about my mother?” I said.
He took a moment to answer. I couldn’t read much from his back. A slight tilt to his head, which could have read as either confusion or digging deep into old memories. “I only know stories, rumors, gossip.”
“What sort of gossip?”
“Just that she was more clever than she was beautiful, a governor’s daughter and that it was an advantageous political marriage. But they said your father could do better if he’d chosen to. He was always too immersed in his books and his constructs. So handsome as to be beautiful, but wasted within the confines of his library. Keeping us safe, they said, so they admired him.”
“They. Who is ‘they’?”
“Most people,” Numeen said.
But not him. “And you?”
He shoved soot-blackened hands into his pockets. “How honest do you expect me to be? You are seeking the Emperor’s throne, to take over the Sukai Dynasty. You could become the most powerful woman in all the known islands, and you ask me to speak ill of your family?”
“Please.” There was so little I knew. I grasped the whispers from the servants the way one might grasp spiderwebs in their hands. I could not weave a tapestry from these threads. “I won’t get angry.”
“What are you hoping to gain?” he asked, rolling his shoulders in what could have been a half-hearted shrug.
Everything. Knowledge. A past. A connection to a father who treated me more as a pet than a daughter. I couldn’t tell him the truth about my memory. “I want to know what people say about my mother and father. What everyone says.”
“It’s not pretty, and it’s not romantic. If you’re looking for beautiful stories, I have none. From what I heard, your father didn’t like your mother much at first either. And then something changed, maybe a year into their marriage. I don’t know what it was; no one does. But after that, the Emperor heaped both affection and praise on her. He brought her into the city and paraded her about. So I suppose it was romantic in the end.”
They could have fallen in love – it happened often with these political marriages. At first both parties were indifferent, but familiarity bred comfort and comfort bred closeness and the end result of all this was love. But such a thing seemed too simple for Father. There was something about him, the way he disappeared into locked rooms, the way he dealt with both Bayan and me, that spoke of secrets even darker and deeper than Ilith’s lair.
“Nearly there,” Numeen said. His broad back was like a mountain in front of me. We turned into a narrow alleyway, and then he stopped to unlock the front door of a fairly large house. A rush of warm air hit my face as soon as it opened. The smells of cooking fish and steamed vegetables assailed my nostrils, making me remember I hadn’t eaten since late morning. I followed him inside and left my shoes and construct at the door.
Past a short, narrow hallway, the home opened into a large room, the kitchen and dining area merged into one. Several people were in the kitchen, gossiping with one another as they chopped vegetables or fried fish in a pan. The sizzle of oil sounded as the man at the stove flipped a fish. He was built like an anvil – short and broad – just like Numeen. If I looked at them from the corner of my eye, I might have trouble telling them apart. I judged the rest of them. Two families in the one household, with a treasured grandparent between them all. That was why the house was larger than I’d expected.
Four children sat at the table, peeling garlic and shelling nuts. They looked up as I approached and stared, but said nothing, though I could nearly see them bursting with it.
Numeen stepped into the kitchen. “I brought a guest. She’s the daughter of a patron of mine, and their servants didn’t prepare for the rain. Their dining area is wet through and through. I offered her a dry place to eat.”
“Next you’ll be telling the birds to roost in your room with you and your wife,” Numeen’s brother said. “No offense meant.”
A smile tugged at the corner of my lips. “None taken. My name is Lin.”
Numeen’s brother only grunted and tilted the pan. The two men were more similar than probably either of them cared to admit.
I stepped into the kitchen. “Can I help?”
“Oh, of course not.” A woman turned from the vegetables she was chopping. She was slender and taller than Numeen, built like bamboo – all narrow and flat and graceful. By her fairer skin and curling hair, I guessed her to be half Poyer. The timing was right. The migration patterns of the Poyer isles only brought them close to the Empire’s curving archipelago once every thirty years or so. She aimed an affectionate gaze at Numeen. This must be the wife he spoke of.
“Please,” I said. “I prefer to keep myself busy.” It wasn’t a memory, not exactly, but I felt I knew this dance in my bones.
“You’re a guest,” Numeen’s wife said, now chopping onions. She wiped at her watering eyes with an elbow. “You should just sit down.”
So I went to her side, picked up another onion and began peeling it. The pungent scent stung my eyes and my nostrils.
She gave me an approving glance but said nothing.
When the meal was ready, we all sat at the table together. It was so different than dining in my father’s palace, with the constructs lined up on one side of the long table, the quiet servants, the wind whispering through the shutters and my father’s ever-present disapproval. Here, I couldn’t hear any wind at all. Perhaps it was because the building was nestled between two others. Or perhaps it was because, even if there had been wind, it would have been difficult to hear above the din.
Two children sat to my left and Numeen sat to my right. Numeen’s brother sat with another man I judged to be his husband. Everyone spoke, several conversations going on at once. The little girl to my left patted my arm. She couldn’t have been more than five.
“That’s Thrana,” Numeen said. “My youngest.”
“Look.” Thrana held up a folded paper bird. “I made this today.”
I took it from her, the paper soft beneath my fingertips, refolded and crinkled in a hundred different ways. Black ink marks slashed across its wings. Something about peas and peppers. A piece of scrap paper, handed down to her and remade into something new. I could see the hope in her eyes as she watched me. “It’s lovely.”
A smile burst across her face. “Lin says it’s pretty,” she said to her brother. “You can have it,” she said to me.
“Oh, I couldn’t take it.” I handed it back to her. “Surely such things should be treasured by the ones who’ve made them.”
Thrana smiled shyly as she took it back.
Numeen shrugged. “She’s been trying to make one for a few days,” he said, spooning rice onto his plate. He passed the bowl to me. “She’s a stu
bborn girl, just like her father.”
“Not a trait I’d brag about,” his wife said.
I took a heaping spoonful of rice, the steam caressing my hand. “How long have you been married?”
“Fifteen years,” Numeen said at the same time she said, “Too long.” And then they both laughed, and he kissed her cheek.
It made me wonder what sort of marriage I could look forward to. One of power and secrets, and possible love – like between my father and mother? The only man I knew close to my age was Bayan, and we’d been at one another’s throats since I’d recovered. I couldn’t imagine – or thought I couldn’t – what it would be like to hold the hand of someone like Bayan, to lean into his side, to have him kiss my cheek. I felt the heat of a blush traveling up my neck as I thought of his hands at my waist, the fullness of his lips against my skin.
I stuffed the thought away and focused on the meal in front of me.
“Lin.” The elderly woman who looked like Numeen’s mother called to me from the other side of the table. “We’re not poor. Take more rice. You’re too skinny.”
Again, I felt I knew this dance. I took another spoonful and settled it on my plate before passing it on. I was hungry. “Thank you, auntie,” I said to her. It was as if my old memories were pushing against a thin sheet, and though I could make out the shape of them, I could not grasp them completely. But I’d never grown up in a household like this. I knew my mother had died when I was young, and my father had few relatives. I must have at some point met my mother’s family. Now I couldn’t even remember enough to write to them, and my father hosted very few guests.
“Do you live nearby?” Numeen’s wife asked.
“Not far,” I said. “Closer to the palace.”
She nodded. Most of the wealthier men and women in Imperial City lived close to the palace. It must have served some function years ago, under the rule of prior Emperors, when the palace gates were open, and people could seek an audience. “Your home is very beautiful,” I said to her. It was modest, but large, and someone had painted the beams.
The Bone Shard Daughter: The Drowning Empire Book One Page 18
