Land of the Burning Sands (53 page)

“It’s good you can keep the cats from eating the birds,” Mienthe told Tef earnestly. “But do you mind?” People who could speak to an animal, she knew, never liked constraining the natural desires of that animal.

“I don’t mind,” said Tef, smiling down at her. He was sitting perfectly still so he wouldn’t frighten the purple-shouldered finch perched on Mienthe’s finger. “The cats can catch voles and rabbits. That’s much more useful than birds. I wonder if you’ll find yourself speaking to some of the little birds one day? That’d be pretty and charming.”

Mienthe gazed down at the finch on her finger and smiled. But she said, “It wouldn’t be very useful. Not like speaking to cats is to you.”

“You’re Lord Beraod’s daughter,” said Tef. “You don’t need to worry about being
useful
. Anyway, your father would probably be better pleased with an animal that was pretty and charming than one that’s only useful.”

This was true. Mienthe wished she were pretty and charming herself, like a finch. Maybe then her father… But she moved her hand too suddenly, then, and the bird flew away with a flash of buff and purple, and she forgot her half-recognized thought.

When Mienthe was nine, a terrible storm came pounding out of the sea into the Delta. The storm uprooted trees, tore the roofs off houses, flooded fields, and drowned dozens of people who happened to be in the path of its greatest fury. Among those who died were Mienthe’s brother and, trying to rescue him from the racing flood, her father.

Mienthe was her father’s sole heir. Tef explained this to her. He explained why five uncles and four cousins—none of whom Mienthe knew, but all with young sons—suddenly appeared and began to quarrel over which of them might best give her a home. Mienthe tried to understand what Tef told her, but she was frightened and everything was suddenly so noisy and confusing. The quarrel had something to do with the sons, and with her. “I’m… to go live with one of them? Somewhere else?” she asked anxiously. “Can’t you come, too?”

“No, Mie,” Tef said, stroking her hair with his big hand as though she were a kitten herself. “No, I can’t. Not one of your uncles or cousins would permit that. But you’ll do well, do you see? I’m sure you’ll like living with your Uncle Talenes.” Tef thought it was Uncle Talenes who was going to win the quarrel. “You’ll have his sons to play with, and a nurse who will stay longer than a season, and an aunt to be fond of you.”

Tef was right about one thing: In the end, it was Uncle Talenes who vanquished the rest of the uncles and cousins. Uncle Talenes was one of the half-uncles, Mienthe knew: one of the sons of Grandfather Berdoen’s second wife. Uncle Talenes finally resorted to the simple expedient of using his thirty men-at-arms—no one else had brought so many—to appropriate Mienthe and carry her away, leaving the rest to continue their suddenly pointless argument without her.

But Tef was wrong about everything else.

Uncle Talenes lived several days’ journey from Kames, where Mienthe’s father’s house was, in a large, high-walled house outside Tiefenauer. Uncle Talenes’s house had mosaic floors and colored glass in the windows and a beautiful fountain in the courtyard. All around the fountain were flowers, vivid blooms tumbling over the edges of their beds. Three great oaks in the courtyard held cages of fluttering, sweet-voiced birds. Mienthe was not allowed to splash in the fountain no matter how hot the weather. Nor was she allowed to walk on the mosaic floors in case she should get them muddy. She was allowed to sit on the raked gravel under the trees as long as she was careful not to tear her clothing, but she could not listen to the birds without being sorry for the cages.

Aunt Eren was not fond of Mienthe. She was not fond of children generally, but her sons did not much regard their mother’s temper. Mienthe did not know what she could safely disregard and what she must take care for. She wanted to please her aunt, only she was too careless and not clever enough and could not seem to learn when Aunt Eren wanted her to come forward and speak up and when she wanted her to stay out of the way and be quiet as a moth.

Nor did Aunt Eren hire a nurse for Mienthe. She said Mienthe was too old to need a nurse and should have a proper maid instead, but then she did not hire one. Two of Aunt Eren’s own maids took it in turns to look after Mienthe instead, but she could see they did not like to. Mienthe tried to be quiet and give them no bother.

Mienthe’s half-cousins—Terre was twelve and Karre fourteen—had pursuits and friends of their own. They were not in the least interested in the little girl so suddenly thrust into their family. Usually they went their own way, but sometimes Aunt Eren made them include Mienthe in one activity or another. That was worse, because when Mienthe was with them the boys made a point of speaking only to each other, deliberately over her head.

Nor, aside from the courtyard, were there any gardens. The wild Delta marshes began almost directly outside the gate and ran from the house all the way to the sea. The tough salt-grasses would cut your fingers if you swung your hand through them, and mosquitoes whined in the heavy shade of the mangroves.

“Stay out of the marsh,” Aunt Eren warned Mienthe. “There are snakes and poisonous frogs and quicksand if you put a foot wrong. Snakes, do you hear? Stay close to the house.
Close to the house.
Do you understand me?” That was how she usually spoke to Mienthe: as though Mienthe were too young and stupid to understand anything unless it was very simple and emphatically repeated. Nor did Aunt Eren understand how a girl of nine could have so little ability with a needle. What
had
her nurses been teaching her? And she was appalled at Mienthe’s letters, which were clear enough but
not at all
the graceful looping letters a girl should write.

Uncle Talenes was worse than either Aunt Eren or the boys. Mienthe had learned very young how to be quiet and not bring herself to her father’s attention, but Uncle Talenes seemed to notice her no matter how quiet she was, and never to her credit. He had a sharp, whining voice that made her think of the mosquitoes, and he was dismayed,
dismayed
, to find her awkward and inarticulate in front of him and in front of the guests to whom he wanted to show her off. Was Mienthe perhaps not very clever? Then it was certainly a shame she was not prettier, wasn’t it? How fortunate for her that her future was safe in his hands…

When she could, Mienthe fled out to the courtyard and hid behind the hanging moss that draped the largest of the oaks. The little birds fluttered in their cages when she disturbed them, their wings flashing yellow and blue and green, but when she tucked herself down close to the trunk and held still, they calmed. Sometimes they would sing. One of the birds, bright gold, had a clear and delicate song that seemed to Mienthe to be the very voice of grief. She often looked at the wires that held the birds trapped away from the sky and wished that she had wings herself, and no cage to keep her pinned close. She wanted to open the cage, all the cages, let all the birds go… but she did not dare.

Most of all Mienthe missed Tef. She tried to think about him working in the gardens, patiently teasing the roots of new flowers apart or carefully pruning the shrubs. But the images she called up seemed faint and distant and not very persuasive, even quite soon after she moved to Uncle Talenes’s house. She thought perhaps Tef was no longer the gardener at her father’s house. But she did not know how else to imagine him.

Mienthe also wondered who was living in
her
house now, who walked in her gardens? But in her mind, everything seemed empty—waiting for her father, who would never come back. She felt she would never go back to that house herself, even though her uncle said it was still hers. Her memories of the house, too, seemed strangely distant.

But her uncle’s house seemed much too real.

Those three years were the worst of Mienthe’s life. She could never please Aunt Eren, not even after she had learned to embroider neatly and write prettily. Uncle Talenes was worse: Mienthe sometimes felt her uncle did not see her at all, but only a kind of large doll he had won by a feat of cleverness and kept now as a trophy. And as an investment for the future. She understood that, eventually. But she had nothing in common with her cousins, nor did they care for her—no more than they cared for a new servant or a new table. They were interested in horses and hunting and swordwork. Neither of them was in the least interested in a
cousin
, even a half-cousin, no matter how much an heiress. Anyway, Karre already had his eye on the pretty daughter of one of Tiefenauer’s wealthier merchants. Terre accepted with resignation his father’s decision that he would eventually marry Mienthe, but he did not like the idea. He told Mienthe, matter-of-factly, that she was too pale and skinny and her eyes were too close together.

Then, when Mienthe was twelve, her cousin Bertaud came back to the Delta from the royal court. For days no one spoke of anything else. Mienthe gathered that this was a full cousin, that his father and hers had been full brothers, but that he was much older than she was. He had grown up in the Delta, but he had gone away and no one had thought he would come back. Only recently something had happened, something violent and dangerous, and now he seemed to have come back to stay. Mienthe wondered why her cousin had left the Delta, but she wondered even more why he had returned. She thought that if
she
ever left the Delta, she would never come back.

But her cousin Bertaud even took up his inheritance as Lord of the Delta. This seemed to shock and offend Uncle Talenes, though Mienthe was not quite sure why, if it was his right inheritance. He took over the great house in Tiefenauer, sending Mienthe’s uncle Bodoranes back to his estate in Annand, and he dismissed all the staff. His dismissal of the staff seemed to shock and offend Aunt Eren as much as his mere return had Uncle Talenes. Both agreed that Bertaud must be high-handed and arrogant and vicious. Yes, it was vicious, uprooting poor Bodoranes like that after all his years and
years
of service while Bertaud had lived high in the court and ignored the Delta. Why, Bertaud was nearly foreign; as good as let someone from Tiearanan itself come and try to hold the Delta! What would Boudan have thought of his wild son? And flinging out all those people into the cold! But, well, yes, he
was
by blood Lord of the Delta, and perhaps there were ways to make the best of it… One might even have to note that Bodoranes had been regrettably obstinate in some respects…

Since it was full summer and sweltering, Mienthe wondered what her aunt could mean about flinging people into the cold. And how exactly did Uncle Talenes mean to “make the best” of the new lord’s arrival?

“We need to see him, see what he’s like,” Uncle Talenes explained to his elder son, now seventeen and even more interested in girls than he had been at fourteen, as long as they weren’t Mienthe. “He’s Lord of the Delta, for good or ill, and we need to get an idea of him. And we need to be polite. Very, very polite. If he’s clever, he’ll see how much to everyone’s advantage raising the tariffs on Linularinan glass would be”—Uncle Talenes was heavily invested in Delta glass and ceramics—“and if he’s less clever, then maybe he could use someone cleverer to point out these things.”

Karre nodded, puffed up with importance because his father was explaining this to him. Mienthe, tucked forgotten in a chair in the corner—she had been looking at an illustrated herbal—understood finally that her uncle meant to bully or bribe the new Lord of the Delta if he could. She thought he probably could. Uncle Talenes almost always got his own way.

And Uncle Talenes seemed likely to get his own way this time, too. Not many days after he’d returned to the Delta, Lord Bertaud wrote accepting Talenes’s invitation to dine and expressing a hope that two days hence would be convenient, if he were to call.

Aunt Eren stood over the servants while they scrubbed the mosaic floors and put flowers in every room and raked the gravel smooth in the drive. Uncle Talenes made sure his sons and Mienthe were well turned out and that Aunt Eren was wearing her most expensive jewelry, and he prepared detailed charts showing just how additions and increases to the current schedule of tariffs would benefit the whole Delta. He also explained several times to the whole household, in ever more vivid terms, how important it was to impress Lord Bertaud.

And precisely at noon on the day arranged, Lord Bertaud arrived.