Age of Ash, page 20
Andomaka was out among the celebrations somewhere, standing for the Daris Brotherhood and Chaalat. The double duty meant that the little time she could spend at the brotherhood’s house was in its public halls and temple. On Sixthday, Byrn a Sal himself came to the house with Halev Karsen at his side, and Andomaka had welcomed them both as if there were no dark war between them. It made Tregarro’s neck ache.
There were rumors of unrest. The quarantine in Stonemarket set a nervousness about the season, and Byrn a Sal did little to reassure people. There were stories of him drunk and shouting in the palace, as if his unclean conscience haunted him. Maybe it did. But the most dangerous animal was a cornered one, and if the prince lashed out, he would do it with the force of law behind him. Tregarro was pinned to the brotherhood’s house, protecting not Andomaka but the boy who had been Ausai.
That one kept to the most private rooms of the brotherhood’s house, sitting in the temple itself for hours playing a game with red and white glass beads on a complex board. It was one Tregarro knew, though he wasn’t expert at its strategies. Sometimes, Ausai would play against himself, shifting one red bead and then a white with equal concentration. Other times, he would invite Tregarro to take a color. They sat across from each other, passing the long, anxious hours, and vying for position on the board. Sometimes, they drank beer. Sometimes, they talked.
“I keep wanting to call the palace guard,” Ausai said, taking one of his beads to a corner spot where it could shift to a different circle. “It’s habit, you know? I haven’t been cut off from my guard for… well, for a very long time. It chafes to think Byrn has their loyalty and I don’t.”
“You should have,” Tregarro said. “You will again.” He reached for a white bead, ready to block the corner transit, but stopped himself at the last moment, pulled his fingers back. The corner move was a trap. He chose a different bead on an inner circle.
Ausai smiled mirthlessly. “It’s a dangerous moment. I hate relying on stealth. Give me a chance to open a few necks, and I’m fine. This… waiting? I feel the risk in every minute of it.” He moved not the corner bead, but one beside it, then rocked back a degree and passed an open palm across his chin and cheek. Tregarro felt a moment’s vertigo at the gesture. He had seen it many times when the prince had done it. Though he knew better, some part of his mind had rebelled at this deep magic. Without intending to, he had put the boy in the same class as street-corner actors and performers for the court, aping the expressions and cadences of their betters. Having that one unconsidered gesture come again in this unfamiliar body drove the strangeness of their situation home.
Ausai looked up at him with a question in his young brown eyes. Tregarro moved one of his beads. “We will not fail you again.”
“You’d better not. The farther the blood connection gets, the harder the transit. Children and siblings are best. Nieces and nephews are good too. Cousins like this start to get tricky. Having a few disposable offspring is good as a storm port, and I have enemies. There are gods in the streets these days. And look at me.” He lifted his thin, boyish arms. “If you think anyone’s putting this lump of skin into the palace of Kithamar, you’re drunk. Until I am in the palace again, I’m at risk, but being this child is worse. Put me in a noble skin, and I have some status at least. If Byrn a Sal threw some Bronze Coast boy in a dark room for a few decades, who’d object?”
Tregarro understood that Ausai didn’t need an answer from him. The prince was using him as an excuse to talk to himself. Also, he was more than a little drunk. Ausai shook his head and shoved the corner bead in a level toward the center of the board.
“Irana has to have known that Byrn was a bastard,” Ausai said. “She was there at the getting of him. But maybe Tallis knew it too. He was a strange one from the time he was born, and looking back, Byrn doesn’t even look much like him. The mysteries unnerved him. But can you imagine letting your wife fuck another man and then raising the child as your own, knowing it all the time, and swallowing it all just to spite your brother?”
“The issue’s never come up,” Tregarro said.
“Or your father, maybe,” Ausai said as if he hadn’t spoken. “Maybe it was something I did when they were children, and he hated me as his father before he hated me as his brother.” He sighed. “They were good children, those three. Two boys and a girl. Tallis and Ausai and Hanan. But maybe I did Ausai too many favors, and left Tallis jealous. He was a sensitive child. There was the hound of his that Ausai wanted, and I let him take it. Maybe that was the seed of all this shit. They say it of girls, but mark me, young boys are pettier. The gods all know I’ve raised enough to see it.”
Tregarro felt another wave of strangeness as he realized the boy wasn’t speaking as Ausai any longer, but as Ausai’s father, Prince Airis, dead almost a century ago. The wistfulness in the young boy’s voice was born from memories of things his grandfather by blood had seen and said. Prince Ausai had once had his name written in water and welcomed this spirit into his flesh. The man he had been before that, Tregarro had never met. Ausai moved another bead, trapping one of Tregarro’s white ones. He plucked it from the board like it was an insect and tossed it into the dead pile.
“You’re losing focus,” Ausai said.
“You’d beat me even if I didn’t,” Tregarro said.
“True, but it means more if you give it some effort.”
“I will do my best to defeat you, my lord,” Tregarro said with a smile. It took him some time to find a good counter-move, but he did. Ausai nodded in approval when he saw where the white bead landed, but did not otherwise respond to Tregarro’s little joke. The scarred man grew concerned that he had given offense. “I don’t mean to presume.”
“You might as well. I’m not prince of anything right now.”
“We both know that isn’t true, but thank you for your permission.”
Ausai waved him on with a thin Bronze Coast hand. Tregarro was already beginning to regret the curiosity that had brought him this far. But there wouldn’t be another moment for it. “Andomaka has no children, my lord. When she becomes prince of the city…”
“Yes, I’ll have to take care of that. It’s been a long time since I was pregnant. It will actually be nice. There are some very pleasant aspects to it.”
“You’ve been women before, then?”
“Men, women. Fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons. I’ve watched my children grow and become my siblings, and then my aunts and uncles. Great-aunts and great-uncles. I’ve held babies for their first breaths and held their weary, bony, liver-spotted hands at their last. Birth to death. I’ve seen its whole arc, again and again and again. I know what we are better than anyone.”
“Who were you? First, I mean. Who were you born as?”
Ausai, or the boy, or Airis, chuckled. “I am Kithamar. I was born a city,” he said, moving a red bead at the center of the board, and Tregarro saw how the game would be lost.
In the palace of Kithamar, the great hall was lit by a thousand tiny candles, each no larger than Andomaka’s smallest finger, and half a tree burning in a long iron grate. The air was thick with the scent of burning sap and spiced wine and the low, earthy perfume that seemed to be the fashion this year. A singer moved through the crowd, crooning hymns to half a dozen gods in turn, with a drummer following along behind him as accompaniment.
In the side galleries, people clustered and spoke. An Inlisc woman in gaudy scarves cast little spells or else little sleights of hand while the nobles appreciated or ignored her. A juggler cracked jokes crafted to offend no one. A priest from the common temple passed the charity bag, taking coins of silver and bronze and giving a sense of absolution in return. Even those in the finest silks and furs, with jewels on their necks and wrists like flakes in a snowstorm, could feel generous.
Servants carried shallow plates of beef and boar to the noblest mouths in Kithamar, and then took the plates away to have the grease toweled off. Nothing used or soiled was allowed there for long. Even the little candles had a team of unobtrusive young women walking with eyes turned away from their betters and waiting for a flame to gutter and be replaced. The palace guard wore their red cloaks like costumes, with flares of embroidery at the collar and sleeve special to the occasion.
The walls, by contrast, were stone and old and dark. They remembered war and violence. Light, they seemed to say, passes quickly. Soot and scorch endure. At times like this, the palace reminded Andomaka of an old soldier forced to wear a frilly dress. The decorations were beautiful and bright. They promised lightness and gaiety. The frame beneath them suffered the illusion but didn’t share in it. The palace was hope, as worn by history.
Ten days had passed since Longest Night. Most of the city had already fallen back into the rhythm of its usual life. The garlands were either down from the walls and windows, or still there but turning brown and losing their leaves and needles. The markets were open for those who had things to buy and sell in the cold. Only Green Hill and the palace held on to the festival air, celebrating a moment that had already passed because they could. It was, by common keeping, the first ten days of the new year, and the beginning of the long, slow cold that would lead eventually to spring. There were other ways to mark years, though.
The legal calendar began on the day Byrn a Sal had stolen his crown. Followers of Shau or Lannas or the Emurian mysteries counted theirs from the day the river froze. The Dajan, from the equinox. There were a thousand ways to describe the cycle of seasons and the motion of the sun along its arc, and someone, somewhere championed each of them. If it had been music, it would have been cacophony. But palace and temple kept the common calendar, and so they celebrated Tenthday, when the prince opened the city’s private rooms, but not too wide. Enough to let the nobility in. Andomaka had heard that Riverport merchants had started a feast of their own, since none of them were welcome here, as an echo of the real thing. She wondered whether that were true, and whether Elaine a Sal’s clandestine lover would attend it. It would be interesting to see, even if she had to go in disguise.
“You’re looking lovely tonight, Andoma,” a voice said, and she pulled her mind back from the imagined merchant feast to where she actually stood. Barasin a Jimental was at her side, his sharp cheeks a little softened since she’d seen him last. Marriage was thickening him.
“You’re very kind,” she said, bowing her head. They both understood that he’d just made her an offer, and that she had turned it aside. Anyone who understood the court would have seen it, but it had been done correctly. No offense could be taken by anyone except perhaps Barasin’s new wife. He smiled, nodded, and returned to the crowd. She had kissed him once when they were both children, and he’d never quite let go of it. It was sweet, in its way.
All around her, the companions and families of Green Hill and the palace moved and spoke, touched and avoided touch. Micha Reyos, head of her family now that her husband was ill. Andomaka’s own cousin, Ober Chaalat, his smile a little too wide and his face sheened with sweat, already drunk. Little Jabin Karsen with a ceremonial sword at his side that would probably bend if he tried to draw it. Every one of them had secrets and intrigues, loves and hatreds. The party was as many different parties as there were people attending it, and only a few had much in common. Andomaka found it all beautiful and comic and melancholy in more or less equal measures.
The one person she wanted to find, however, wasn’t there.
She tried the lesser halls, with no better luck. The palace, for all its majesty, was denser and closer than the compounds of Green Hill. It had been made when Kithamar was a smaller, less forgiving, and less civilized place, and it wore its history in thick, cold stone walls and galleries and meeting halls that had been grand when they were built. There were few places among the music and entertainers, wine and beer and cider that a girl like Elaine could go, and fewer still where she could be alone. Andomaka knew many of them, but not all. Not yet.
She felt herself getting close when she went up the narrow stairway to the stone gardens that stood on the palace roof. A bonfire roared there, thickening the air with its smoke, and the heat of it radiated without warming. One cheek could feel almost burning, and the other bitten by the cold. The older cohorts of the noble families stayed below in relative comfort while their children danced in steady blue moonlight and red flicker of flame.
It hadn’t been so many years since she had been among the new generation of noble blood. She clearly recalled breaking away from the dour, slow, dull conversations of her elders and finding where the others of her age were meeting. Of course the constant eyes of the palace guard and the house chaperones were on them. The freedom they had was a performance, but it was the closest they would have until they reached majority. She strolled in the play of light and darkness. The wind at the rooftop of Kithamar was cold, and there was nothing to break it.
Elaine was at the eastern edge, far from the bonfire, in a gown of yellow and blue. Her hair was plaited with silver threads, and she wore a scarf around her neck against the cold. She was speaking with one of the palace guard, a young man whom she dismissed when she saw Andomaka drawing near.
From the rooftop’s edge, the western half of the city spilled out like a map of itself. At their feet, the long fall of Oldgate, its switchback avenue like a child’s drawing of a snake, and just beyond it, the pale ice of the river. The farther quarters glittered past its banks, torches and lanterns and candlelight. From here, the divisions between Riverport and Newmarket, Longhill and Seepwater all faded away. Only the Temple stood as a landmark, rising in stone above the night-dyed wood of the Inlisc buildings. And then the city walls, and the long, rolling darkness of the land beyond them. Seen from here, Kithamar was a single, vast organism, and they stood at its head. Above them, the waning moon and the vast spread of stars. It was beautiful and it was eerie. Elaine broke the silence.
“Andomaka.” Not Greetings, Cousin or Blessings for the new year or any of the more formal etiquette that could have passed between them. The girl was at ease with her, her guard down. It was like seeing a mouse trained to enjoy the company of cats.
“Elaine,” Andomaka said, matching the girl’s tone and cadence to keep her feeling at ease. “How is your heart?”
The girl’s laugh was short and hard as a cough. “It’s been better. I have…”
Andomaka waited, thinking that she was searching for words, then looked over to see that she was weeping. Andomaka made herself take the girl’s hand. Elaine’s fingers were strangely warm. Or maybe it was only that her youth kept the cold at bay.
“It’s all right,” Andomaka said. “Whatever it is, it will be all right.”
“It’s stupid. I shouldn’t be… I should be happy.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m free.”
Annoyance pricked at Andomaka’s breast as she began to guess the shape of the girl’s distress. “You’ve ended things with…”
Elaine looked up at the sky, her lips a quivering smile. “I have. It’s the only way to keep him safe.”
Well, that was inconvenient in a morbidly amusing way. As long as the girl had been sneaking out to meet her clandestine lover, there had been a time of vulnerability when she wasn’t under the eyes of the redcloaks. By protecting her lover from her father’s wrath, she’d made herself safe. Or safer, anyway. Andomaka looked down over the edge of the palace, to the cliffs below, and then back toward the bonfire. It wouldn’t be impossible to shove the girl over the edge and call it an accident. There were so many eyes on the rooftop, though, that it would be a gamble. Even an accusation that she’d killed the girl would come back to haunt her when she—or Ausai in her body—took back the city. She considered the girl’s hand in hers. Pull the arm straight to lock her elbow, and then turn at the waist. Elaine would have no choice but to swing forward. Would she let go when she fell? Or would she pull Andomaka over with her?
No, she thought. There were too many risks. It was better to be careful. She didn’t realize she’d sighed until the girl squeezed her hand.
“Thank you,” Elaine said, and Andomaka understood she’d taken the sign as sympathy.
She leaned over and kissed the girl’s brow. Perhaps there was another way. “Are you sure of this?”
“I’m daughter to the prince. What else can I do?”
You are not, Andomaka thought. Such drama and dudgeon to protect the honor of a bloodline that was already corrupt. She looked down toward the lights of Riverport. Right now, somewhere on those distant streets and low towers, a lovestruck boy was likely staring up at the palace, his heart twisted in the same petty grief as Elaine’s. It would have been endearing if the future of the city didn’t ride on it.
“You wouldn’t be the first person to have a lover,” Andomaka said with a gentle laugh. “Ausai shared his bed with more women than his wife. Everyone knew.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Because he’s a man?”
She thought she saw a blush on the girl’s cheek, but it was hard to be certain in the moonlight. “That makes it different.”
“It does. But it doesn’t make it impossible.” She turned the girl to look at her. The whites of Elaine’s eyes were shot with red, and her eyelids were so puffy it looked like she’d been struck. She was an ugly weeper. “We give our lives to the city, you and I. We marry for the city. We bear children for the city. And our family, and our blood. It’s the sacrifice we’re called to, and it’s our duty. But it isn’t everything we are. You have to take the pleasures you can in this life. They won’t be given to you.” Andomaka coughed, surprised by the passion in her own voice. She sounded almost angry. That was interesting. “What is his name?”
