Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons) (5 page)

“Oh … Aranyi … darling,” whispered Beri, changing her name to the diminutive, most cherished form. “I’m so cold.”

“Don’t … Beri, please. I’ll hold you. It’ll be alright, you’ll see.”

But the blue of her lips shocked Aranya. She had never seen a person deteriorate so fast. Two thin trails of blood marked the back of her right hand, rising from the base of her little finger. Beri had sat near the pillow. Exactly where that girl must have hidden the viper. The sheer audacity of that little wretch, to lie in wait to see the Princess of Immadia perish. She shook her head.

Beri vomited weakly.

Abruptly, she remembered what she had tried to do for her mother.

She whispered, “Yes.”

As carefully as though she were dream-walking, she laid Beri back on the bed. She placed her hands on Beri’s chest. Aranya closed her eyes, clearing her mind, seeking to summon up that feeling, so long denied and buried, the way it had been … and suddenly, there it was, a mysterious potential blooming within her mind, drawn from an unfamiliar place that she knew was
other
and yet part of her, a sense of welling power contained behind the terrace lake barriers of her mind. Deliberately, she gave herself over to it. She poured herself out for Beri’s sake. She gave her all, expecting nothing in return.

Aranya collapsed beside Beri on the bed. The coverings felt unbelievably soft, as though she had pillowed her head on the cotton-puff billows of the Cloudlands.

Her eyes, lacking the strength even to shutter themselves, watched her maidservant sit up, patting first her chest and then her hand in apparent disbelief. She must be dreaming. Beri was dead. She was dead, looking back from the next life at the activities of the living. The bed moved. Shortly, a hand appeared beneath her nose. Aranya tried to squint, but her muscles were so enervated that they refused to focus.

A scent of jasmine and reloidik oil wafted by her nostrils.

Strange–a glowing person stood in the corner of the room? She saw her mother, garbed in one of those flowing Fra’aniorian lace-gowns with their extravagant ten-foot trains. She was smiling.

Aranya drew breath
. Oily scents exploded as colours in her brain.

She gasped.

“Come back, Aranyi. Come back,” Beri muttered. She slapped Aranya’s cheek gently. “You’ve living yet to do, Princess.”

“I
… see my mother. Izariela.”

Startled, Beri glanced over her shoulder. “There’s no-one there, petal.”

Aranya could not understand. Her mind was playing tricks on her. She perceived the world at a level of detail she had never appreciated before. Dust motes, highlighted in a sunbeam creeping through a tiny tear in the drapes, individually impressed their presence on her senses. Beri’s wrinkled cheek became a fantastical landscape. She saw life wriggling and pulsing and struggling within the teardrop that sparkled in the corner of Beri’s eye.

“Princess? Why’re you looking at me like that?”

“Because I see love written in every crease of your face–didn’t you know?”

The old woman’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly. The teardrop filled, expanded, spilled ove
r the corner of her eye and tracked down her cheek.

“You’ve gone soft in the head, Princess,” she said, gruffly. “Your mother used to say things like that. I’m going to find us some food in this mausoleum. You need to eat. Then I’ll find out how we get a few nice things in here.”

“And a bed for you.”

Beri nodded. “Rest
. If you move so much as one inch from this bed I’ll whack you harder than you did that fool girl, Princess or none.”

“Will you check the bed first, Beri?”

As the servant carefully turned over the pillow-rolls and bedding, Aranya silently thanked her father for sending Beri, and Beri for being willing to accompany her, and traced the warmth of gratitude within her soul for the life that still flowed through her old friend’s veins.

“All’s clear.”

Aranya lay on the bed and watched the motes dancing, infinitesimal golden Dragons frolicking in the golden suns-light, whirling and swooping in glorious flight.

* * * *

Aranya and Beri hibernated for five days after the snakebite incident. By day three, Aranya had tossed her cane into a corner and was feeling fit enough to start climbing the walls. Beri turned her own mysterious magic on the Tower staff. There was a moderately successful shopping trip to Sylakia Town–for Beri, because she apparently could wangle privileges her captive Princess would never gain–and then a day where a bevy of workmen appeared a dozen an hour to replace the drapes, carry in a bed and various dressers, deposit mounds of mysterious boxes and packages around the room, setup a changing screen, fill in the ‘extra aeration features’ around the ancient crysglass windows, replace the door locks, and fix the minor flood her first attempt to bathe had occasioned in the bathroom.

By the ninth and last day of the week, they had a bedroom that looked like a bedroom–nothing fancy, but it was serviceable.
Aranya had commandeered a corner for her painting and spent all her hours churning out canvases. She knew she was being a hermit, but found herself unable to contemplate taking on life in the Tower of Sylakia in all its dubious glory.

“Ha
!” Beri congratulated herself for at least the fifteenth time, eying up the new drapes she had ordered. “Brightens the whole room, wouldn’t you agree?”

Aranya set down her paintbrush. “Beri, you’re a marvel. I don’t say it often enough.”

“Oh, you’re just humouring me.”

“I am. But you are a marvel. How did you find canvas? And paper–isn’t that ridiculously expensive?
Just look at the quality of these paints …”

“Girl, what’re you painting that
’s got your head floating in an Island suns-set?”

Aranya beckoned her around the easel. “
Come on, Beri. You’ve been itching to take a look.”

“I’m itchier than a bowl full of prek-brush fluff. Which, may I remind you, you stuffed inside my mattress not too long ago.”

Aranya groaned. “These things seem funny when you’re eleven summers old, Beri.”

Beri tilted her head critically as she studied the painting. “It’s all wrong. No, don’t hiss between your teeth at me. That’s not how it happened–not according to the man in your painting, anyhow. This
outline will be you, here? I love the windroc–so fierce. The expression on Ignathion’s face is stunning, riveting … but he’s protecting you?”

“It’s more dramatic this way,” she hedged. “His face took me two days to paint.”

“I hope this doesn’t signify your pangs of romantic love for the First War-Hammer, Aranya.”

“
Beri!
Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Girls your age tend to get funny notions into their heads,” Beri returned, with a testy snort better suited to a grumpy mountain goat, in Aranya’s opinion. “Funnier ones, even. Believe me, I was your age once.” She soothed, “Well, I did swaddle your grandfather when he was an infant, but still. This work
will be one of your finest.
The War-Hammer and the Windroc.
I love it. And this one?”

“Life inside a teardrop,” said Aranya.

“Why don’t you paint a few canvases to go up on these horrible, bare walls?”

Aranya smiled. “At once, o great commander. I’ll need more easels, however.”

“Aranyi … I’ve been meaning to tell you something that I learned today.” Beri grimaced as she stretched her back uneasily. “Everything we bought, everything we eat–
everything
–is charged back to Immadia.”

“But …”

“I didn’t know. The room costs money. Even our share of the guards and the administration of this place–it all comes from Immadian taxes, as if they aren’t burdensome enough.”

“That’s …
evil.
We’ve got to send these things back.”

Beri sighed. “Petal, your father wouldn’t begrudge you bread on your table,
or a few paints. He doesn’t want you pining away in exile. But let’s not leap off the Dragonship. Why don’t you finish that scroll-letter to him? I’ll have the censor read it and get it sealed and sent.”

Aranya stepped away from the easel before she succumbed to the temptation to start throwing
her costly paints across the room. Her voice rose. “There’s a censor?”

“A nasty little viper of a man,” said Beri, who was not usually so quick to dismiss someone. He must be terrible, Aranya thought. “But before we talk about how things work around here, there’s something else I want to discuss with you. Something important.”

Taken aback by her tone, the Princess of Immadia immediately swallowed her anger and raised her hand in an interrogative gesture.

Beri lowered her voice. “I’ve seen your hair.”

“You saw
what?
”

Her question was barely more than a wheeze. Beri, of all the staff to the Immadian royal family, knew about the absolute ban King Beran had placed on servants invading the Princess’ privacy. Since her tenth summer, no-one else, not even the King himself, had seen her hair.

Aranya stormed across to the bathroom and slammed the door so hard that dust and grit rained down on her head.

After a few moments, a quiet knock came. She thumped her head against the wooden panels and said, “Go away, Beri, please.”

“You have your mother’s hair.”

That
comment was dry tinder tossed upon a bonfire. Aranya raged, “Why does everything have to be about
her?
I’m … me! Aranya! Princess of Immadia! Not my mother. The War-Hammer of all stupid Sylakia is still in love with my mother. I don’t feel the cold, just like my mother. I’ve pointy Fra’aniorian ears–thanks, Mom. I love Dragons, just like my mother. Everywhere I turn I’m just like my mother. I hate it! Hate it, do you hear?”

“Well, you are her daughter,” Beri replied.
“Right down to the pointy ears. Funny, that.”

Aranya
punched the door so hard her fist went right through the thin wood.

“With her temper, might I add.”

She could not help it; a treacherous chuckle escaped her lips. “Oh, Beri.”

“Let me in, Aranyi.”

The door handle twisted. Beri looked kindly upon her charge–so kindly, it broke her. “Why did she have to die, Beri? Why?”

S
he put her head on the old maidservant’s shoulder, and wept.

After a time, she heard, “You tore off your he
adscarf to bind my arm, Aranya. Part of the hairnet came with it. I couldn’t help but see. I’m sorry, petal. But you do have her hair, in all its wild glory. White, gold, emerald, black, aquamarine–”

“Freaky hair,” said Aranya.

“Hair like the Cloudlands,” Beri returned, stunning her into silence. “May I see it properly?”

Aranya nodded. It was all she could manage just then.

In a moment, she stood in front of her new mirror–one neither cracked nor inhabited by twenty spiders–as Beri gently untucked her headscarf from beneath her chin. She slid the thin material back from her forehead before unclipping the opaque hairnet from the braid coiled beneath it. Aranya shivered. She was fully clothed, but felt naked. Now the thick braid, liberated from its pins, tumbled down past the small of her back.

“By the mountains of Immadia, there’s a sight,” Beri said.

Aranya shivered as Beri pushed back her hair to reveal her left ear. “Aye, Fra’anior right there, petal. Ears of the seven enchanted Isles, they call these. Anyways, who cares about ears? They’re always covered up. Beran loved your mother, pointy ears and all. Risked his life to kidnap her. Someday, some man’s going to fall in love with these ears and this multi-coloured waterfall of hair.”

“Beri! You’re making me blush.”

Aranya had always thought of Fra’anior as one Island, but in reality there were seven Islands clustered together like jewels on a bracelet–the seven points of an ancient volcanic peak, she had read. Her mother was not from the main Island of Fra’anior itself, but from another in the cluster called Ha’athior. The caldera between the Islands was active, sometimes covered in Cloudlands mists, sometimes not. Her mother’s land had a strange reputation, legends of magic and Dragons and strange happenings. Perhaps that came along with living in the edge of an active volcano, and apparently making a national sport of kidnapping women for marriage. King Beran had beaten them at their own game.

She wished she had asked him to tell that story before she left. She had so many questions.

Beri combed Aranya’s braid out with her fingers, saying, “Where I come from there’s a story–I grew up in a village called Reayho, which lies right on the northern tip of Immadia Island, beyond the mountains–well, this story was old when I was a child. And that’s
old
.” Aranya smiled at her in the mirror. “It’s about an enchantress who could change her shape into whatever animal she desired. ‘And strange hair she had, the Lady of Immadia, hair shaded as the rainbows that grace the Cloudlands. This is the hair of an enchantress, a magic most rare.’ Of course, the enchantress in the story is as beautiful as the suns-rise, as wise as the hills–”