Blade of Dream, page 3
Elaine put her hand on Theddan’s wild, smoke-salt hair, and her cousin pushed her head into the palm like a cat being petted. The wine fumes on her breath should have been rancid, but they weren’t. They were like some exotic perfume that Elaine could have but never use. Something beautiful that didn’t suit her. Elaine told herself that the tug she felt in her breast was concern for Theddan and annoyance with her, but she knew that wasn’t the whole truth.
“I just worry for you,” Elaine said. “That’s all.”
“I worry for you too. They want so much from us, you know?” her cousin said, her voice taking on a softness and drift. “They take so much of what we are, and then tell us how to use the little bit we have left. And you trust them, love. It scares me how much you trust them.”
“You’re drunk.”
“You’re sober, and I’d save you from it if I could. You know I’d save you if I could, don’t you?” A tear fell from Theddan’s eye, the wet shimmering bright in the candlelight.
“We’ll just have to watch out for each other.”
“Always,” Theddan said, and Elaine was almost able to believe she wasn’t lying. “Always, always, always.”
Her cousin smiled and settled deep into the pillows. Before long, Theddan was making small, soft noises—not quite snoring and not quite not. Elaine lay in the dim, trying not to shift and wake her. Sleep returned slowly, and it brought no dreams when it did.
Deniya Abbasann had had three children with her husband, Byrn a Sal. The first two, twin boys, died young. The third, Elaine, had been a difficult birth, and Deniya had lived long enough to see her daughter breathing and give the child her blessing. Or that was the story they told Elaine. Her understanding of her mother was made entirely from other people’s words. Sometimes, she could conjure up a woman who looked a bit like her, but older, wiser, happier. Other times, she imagined a woman with dark hair and eyes, a cutting laugh, and a permanent, unresolvable disapproval of Elaine and everything she’d become. Her mother was a story in her own mind, and part of that story was that her daughter wasn’t quite good enough because that was what Elaine feared about herself.
After Deniya’s death, Byrn had chosen not to remarry. Elaine’s great-uncle, Prince Ausai a Sal, had fathered no children. When—if—Elaine had children of her own, they would have a Sal blood, but some other name. Even if her father remarried, Elaine would be the prince after him, and her children would take the throne after her, but they would not be a Sal. As it stood, House a Sal was the most powerful in Kithamar, and also it was fading.
It didn’t matter. The powerful families of Kithamar shared blood and beds like a vast, complicated dance whose ballroom was history. The prince had been an a Sal for four generations, House Reyos for two generations before that, and House Adresqat half a dozen before them. Almost every time a woman took the throne, the name shifted, and the city itself was reborn in lineage if in no other way. It was a permissible kind of change.
The five great families had been seven and twelve and three, as the winds blew them. Families of great power faded, and there were minor houses—Erinden, a Lorja, Karsen, Mallot, Foss, and a dozen more—waiting to rise. But Kithamar was Kithamar, and all through its history, from its first founding to that day’s morning sun, there was a thread that held it together. No usurper had ever taken the throne. No civil unrest, however violent, had split the city. If, in her studies, Elaine sometimes heard a drone of cruelty behind the symphony of her city’s past, it was only the price they paid for peace.
Theddan, her face still and relaxed, was still lost in sleep when dawn drew its beams between the slats of the summer doors. Elaine watched her sleep until she was certain that she couldn’t fall back into dream herself, then slipped out of bed without waking her wayward cousin and let her servant dress and groom her in silence. They could likely have sung tunes and clapped, as far beyond waking as Theddan seemed, but Elaine left her apartment quietly. The house itself was broad and grand, with room enough for a dozen to be kept in style, though there were only her and her father now. The guest house had been closed for years, and the south and east wings of the main house were shuttered. The north wing and its gardens were enough. More than enough.
She took her morning meal in the moss garden, sitting under a canopy of silk and iron with morning glories arranged around her table as if by chance. She was drinking cool water flavored with citrus when she noticed the carriage. It had the symbols of the Daris Brotherhood, and the man standing at its side wore the colors of House Chaalat. His face, webbed as it was with the scars of a terrible fire, was still handsome enough. She knew him by sight, if not by name. More than that, she knew what his presence meant. She ate the last few mouthfuls of egg and sweet barley, gestured for the servants to take the dishes away, and went to her father’s rooms. She pretended not to be in a hurry, but the tension was already growing in her throat.
When she reached the great hall outside her father’s private drawing room, she found her father’s cousin Andomaka Chaalat coming out. Andomaka smiled her pale, kind smile, but concern was in the tightness around her eyes.
“Cousin,” Andomaka said. “You’re looking well.”
“I appreciate your charity. I was up late with a friend,” Elaine said, and laughed. “Palace intrigue, I suppose. Are things well with you?”
Andomaka paused the way she sometimes did, as if she were listening to music no one else could hear. “No,” she said, then kissed Elaine on the cheek and went on her way. Elaine turned toward her father’s drawing room. She didn’t pretend to be relaxed anymore.
Byrn a Sal sat on a wide leather couch with knees apart and his hands clasped between them. The room was wide enough that she could cross halfway to him and still feel the distance dividing them. He lifted his chin to see her without quite raising his head.
“Andomaka was here,” Elaine said. It wasn’t a question, but it could have been.
“Not as our cousin. She’s high priest of the Daris Brotherhood. She keeps the mysteries for them. And for Uncle.”
“We aren’t Daris.”
“We aren’t,” he agreed, “but apparently they have a rite that calls for a bit of blood from the person’s nearest relative.” He held up his arm. A tiny scratch of red showed where he’d been cut. “It seemed rude to say no.”
“A healing?”
“A death rite.”
“Oh.”
“He hasn’t passed,” her father said, looking down again. “But she says he will. That it won’t be long.” He shook his head. “Grandfather lived until he was a very old man. I thought there would be years yet. Decades, even. I thought…”
He looked around the room like it was a painting of something he’d already lost. He was about to become the most powerful man in the city, and he looked like a carter with a missing dog. She knew what he was going to say next and willed him not to. Just this one time, not to sound that same chorus.
“I wish your mother were here.”
“I do too,” she said, and her father didn’t seem to notice the tightness in her voice.
“It hasn’t happened, though. It’s not yet. Andomaka might be wrong. He might still recover. I mean, there’s no reason to give up hope.”
Hope was such a strange word to hear from his lips, tied as the moment was to the death of her mother, the death of her grand-uncle, the life she had and the one she would be permitted. All she knew was that her father wanted the world to be something other than what it was, and that his wish enraged her. Everything she’d meant to tell him about Theddan and the night’s adventure fell away, trivial. She watched her father retreat into his thoughts again, uncertain whether she wanted to go to him or leave the room.
A soft tapping came from behind her. An older man in a house servant’s robe stood in the doorway. She raised her eyebrows, ready to send the man away with a snap and a gesture, but her father was already on his feet.
“Is he here?”
“Yes, my lord a Sal,” the servant said. “Lord Karsen is in the morning garden.”
“Thank you,” her father said, already walking briskly toward the corridor. He paused, seeming to remember her, and stepped back. He kissed her on the forehead the way he had when she’d been a little girl and then took her hand. For a moment, she thought he would speak, but he only squeezed her fingers and released them before turning to his business. He bustled away, leaving her alone in the drawing room. Elaine stood silently for a long moment, then went and sat where her father had been, her own legs apart, her own hands clasped between them in the same pose of despair he had taken.
Her father was about to begin his reign as prince. He would leave for the palace, and the compound of a Sal—buildings, gardens, fountains, family temple, library, kitchens, stable, and all—would be her. Just her. Like a single seed rattling in a giant, dry gourd, she would be expected to fill the emptiness that her parents had left until one day her father died and the hollow houses were left empty even of her.
She imagined her mother—not her real one, but the ghost-image she’d cobbled together from other people’s stories—standing where she had stood, looking at her as she’d looked at her father.
You expected something else? her not-mother said. The great secret of noble blood is it gives you everything because it costs you everything.
You’re late in learning that, my girl.
The Khahon flowed from the north, fed by distant glaciers and the snows that gathered in the mountains. Thousands of brooks and streams found each other, growing wider and stronger as they came together like strands of thread weaving into rope. Lumber camps fed wood into the flow, but apart from a few stretches scattered along the river’s length, the waters were too shallow and rough for travel by boat. The last cataract was just north of Kithamar. The cliffs were lower now than they’d once been, stone eroding under the constant, driving flow. It would be lifetimes before the river remade the land enough to flow smoothly, but the water was slow and patient and powerful. Given time, it would win its struggle against the land.
Nor was the cataract the only place the Khahon was making its mindless, eternal will felt. The curve of the river within Kithamar remade the city, but too slowly for any mortal to see it. The piers and docks of Riverport did what they could to break the power of the flow, but soil and stone washed away a finger’s width at a time. Every few generations, the quays would be reinforced or rebuilt. And what the Khahon took from the cliff and the banks, it let settle in the slow water that eddied south of Oldgate and east of the Smoke. Soil and seed, timber and grass, old bones and things lost to the water; they all built up slowly into the strip of wild land within the city walls that was called the Silt.
In the height of summer, it was lush as any of the forests that lined the river to the south. Deep green leaves on the trees, and underbrush as thick and impassable as the bramble walls of a child’s fable. An old Inlisc woman led a pack of ragged Longhill children as they scrounged for valuable trash washed up on the dirt and harvested wild blackberries from under the canopy of boughs. Barges made their way up toward the port and floated back down from it, the boatmen calling out to one another in a language of vulgarity and technique peculiar to this part of the river, their voices as lovely and impenetrable as birdsong. The river muttered against the bridges that ran to Oldgate and spun whirlpools on the southern side of the lichen-slicked stone stanchions. The traffic across the bridges looked like children’s dolls come to life from the shore of the Silt: toy guardsmen in sweat-stained blue cloaks gathering taxes from toy carters while miniature horses and mules flicked away invisibly tiny flies.
The world smelled of summer, rich and verdant, with only a hint of the decay that autumn would bring. Two people sat in the shade under the trees, Oldgate to their back and the shifting surface of the water before them. The man had wiry white hair and an expression of broad amusement. The woman, round-faced and curly-haired as an Inlisc, had a scar along the side of her face and one milky eye. To look at them, anyone would have thought they were human.
“By now, it knows that the blade’s gone,” the man said.
“It’ll have known for a while.”
“I wish I could have been there. The greasy fuck going for his altar and finding nothing but mouse shit and air.”
“A good moment,” the woman said.
“Don’t eat yourself over it.”
“It lost the blade. I lost the blade. If one of us is a fool, we both are.”
The man leaned forward, squinting at sunlight that blazed off the surface of the water. “In your defense, you’re literally surrounded by thieves and criminals.”
“But they’re my thieves and criminals. When a dog bites the kennel master, it’s always the master’s fault.”
“The dog’s the one to get culled, though.”
“That’s coming,” the woman said. Then, a moment later, “The blade’s trying to get back where it’s wanted.”
“Well. I’ve called some things to me. Not that I’m sure what they are just yet, but he’s not the only one who can play at this.”
“And Shau’s in the city.”
“Is he?”
“I think so.”
The man scowled. “Can’t say I like that, but it might work for us. Too many gods in the streets these days. Makes things unpredictable. But as long as our Byrn a Sal is where he’s supposed to be, we stand a chance.”
“This is the closest we’ve been in generations,” she said. “If we fail now…”
“We won’t.”
She turned her one clear eye toward him. “You believe that?”
At the edge of the water, one of the children shrieked and started digging in the pale dirt that the river put down. The man watched as the child lifted something over her head. A length of something metal. River trash, celebrated because it was more than they had.
The woman stood and clapped the dirt off her trousers. The man’s gaze softened.
“When this is over,” he said, “and it’s the two of us again—”
“When this is over, we’ll see whether we’re both still standing,” she said.
“Don’t say that.”
“Everything dies. Gods die. Otherwise, what are we doing here?” Her smile had a melancholy that didn’t suit her face. She walked away, heading south along the edge of the trees. After a time, she started whistling to herself, a low, complex melody that belonged to an earlier age. She swaggered as she walked, and the woman and the children pretended not to notice her.
At the southern edge of the Silt, the land narrowed and the southernmost of the city’s bridges stood above the smooth water, yellow brick and black mortar. Decades of land drift had put piles that had once stood in the river firmly on land, weed trees growing up around the dark arches. She didn’t scramble up the side as others did or meet one of the little boats that rowed across the river. Instead, she stood for a moment, her one good eye sweeping the land and water as if she were reading it like a text. Then she stepped into the shadows under the bridge and didn’t step back out.
Sometime later, in a brewer’s house in Seepwater, she walked up a stone stairway and into the light. The bettors’ window was covered by an iron cage, and she paused at it to look at the chalked marks. The man at the counter stiffened, but didn’t look away. After a moment, he nodded.
“Aunt Thorn,” he said by way of greeting.
The woman grunted in reply, turned east, and moved on.
In the end, Mother stayed for three days despite her best intentions. She kept away from windows, and Father avoided having guests come in past the front hall. He claimed that the servants were suffering a malaise, and wouldn’t they please come back in a week when the house had been cleansed? Garreth’s parents had his apparent new betrothed put in one of the guest bedrooms that looked out over the kitchen courtyard so that no one would catch a glimpse of her from the street.
The days were spent in close consultation. Sometimes Garreth and his younger brother Vasch were welcome to attend. Other times, only Garreth could be in the room as Mother, Father, and Uncle Robbson debated and chewed at each other. Sometimes even he wasn’t welcome. The plan on which the family had bet its future was this: They would seal an alliance with an Inlisc tribe that worked the snow roads between Kithamar and Far Kethil. The wedding of Yrith and Garreth was the assurance that the alliance was real. In a perfect world, there would be children, but the balances of their accounts didn’t leave time to wait. As a marriage gift, the Inlisc would take on a winter caravan for their new Kithamari cousins, the Left.
Winter caravans were desperate. House Cortan had hired one out eight years before with an experienced master and ten carts. When carts, horses, master, and goods had been swallowed up by a blizzard, Cortan had sold everything that remained to them and taken service where they could find other merchants to hire them. A broken house.
But with an Inlisc master, northern horses, and funding from a few carefully selected allies and investors, Left could pull the trick that Cortan had bungled. Spices, silk, alum, and medical herbs arriving months before their rivals. They could command the year’s contracts, deliver goods that were already in their warehouses, and clear profits enough to settle their debts and fund their next year’s investments besides.
And yes, they would have to be careful who they invited to help with the funding. Uncle Robbson wanted to approach Ocaso Durral, but Father refused. Mother argued for talking to Beris a Lorja, and Uncle Robbson called her an idiot to her face. No one took money from a priest and a nobleman and expected to come out the better for it.
When Mother finally took her leave, sneaking out in a deep-hooded cloak in the morning dark, the plan was still only half complete. But Uncle Robbson and Father had their tasks and negotiations clearly in mind. The stages of their plan were laid out and a timeline set. When the money would be gathered, when the orders would need to be sent to Mother and her agents in Far Kethil, when the caravan would arrive.
