River Secrets (11 page)
The next morning, Razo asked Talone if he could be assigned to the prince for the summer.
“You think he may be ordering the burnings,” said Talone, slicing his sword along a whetstone.
“I don’t know. After Enna I don’t dare think twice in the same spot. If he tells the truth, then he doesn’t have enough power. Most of the time his thoughts don’t go deeper than his tongue, but maybe he’d be useful….” Razo tried to wrestle impressions into words. “Everywhere we went, everyone was looking at him like he was an almond cake. He mayn’t have power, but…”
“But the people love him and watch him. The people’s opinion influences the assembly, and when they renew session for autumn, the assembly will vote if Tira returns to war. Very well.” Talone’s sword screeched in sharpening. “Lady Megina has tried to meet with the prince, but he seems to avoid any activity that smells of politics. Go see what you can do.”
The prince’s apartment was one open chamber, claiming the entire fifth story of the main palace wing. Razo passed Wasking men and women, dodged pillars, ducked beneath torrents of hanging fabric, and cawed back at a caged bird that screeched, “By your leave! By your leave!” He finally found the prince in a courtyard at the chamber’s center, surrounded by potted fruit trees and flowering vines.
“It is Razo’s-Own!” said the prince, jumping up. “I told Nom, I do not think he will come, and Nom said I might send a messenger, and I said I did not know how and never mind, let’s go out on the porch, and if he does not come today, then he won’t be welcome, because I am not a patient man and I cannot wait a week. It is my season, after all. So let’s be off!”
Within half an hour they were strolling the restless market.
“Rupert, my old tutor, bet me another tithe that if the Bayern don’t eat babies, at least they don’t keep their word. And, ha-ha! He was wrong again. How I love it when Rupert is wrong.”
“Me too,” said Razo.
“Rupert cannot come to the market with us, for if he moves too much, his bones might break. Look, a new shipment of amber is in!”
Razo spent several hours in the numbing heat of the market, anticipating his own sudden murder, and questioning if this mindless outing really was ensuring peace.
At last he spotted what he’d been hoping to find—a merchant tendering pouches of Bayern dyes. He was Wasking, bearing a shaggy head of black hair and skin like honeyed wine. The merchant sat in a sad little cart with a rodent-gnawed cloth to screen the sun, its legs so crooked that if it had been a horse, its owner would have offered it a quick and compassionate death.
“No demand for goods from the north,” he said, avoiding even the name of the kingdom.
The prince frowned. Razo purchased a few pouches.
Razo spent two weeks accompanying the prince to the docks and market, theater and music hall, and no burned bodies popped up. The heat seemed to have chased the murderer into hiding, but Manifest Tira stayed like the stones. Often he could hear one of their number orating in Speaker’s Corner. “Why should we roll over and lick Bayern’s hand? Their presence here dirties us and distracts us from our destiny. Tira is the greatest country in the world, and one day our borders will stretch north and west….”
The summer heat built like the tension before a tavern brawl, until it finally exploded into rain. Razo gathered his Tiran-made clothing and Bayern dyes and ran through the storm to the kitchen to borrow their pots.
“You’ve been away,” said Pela with pouting lips.
“I’ve got this new friend….”
“We know,” said the freckled girl. It’s the prince.”
“And all of Ingridan knows you were attacked,” said the girl with smooth hair.
“What’s all of Ingridan saying?” Razo asked.
“That Bayern or no, people had no right attacking anyone under the prince’s protection.”
Progress,
Razo thought.
He pulled a thin, pale blue scarf out of his stone pouch and wound it around the pastry chef’s neck. “The prince was going to toss it, said I could have it if I wanted. It’s called silk.”
The chef fingered the fabric and blushed, and the girls oohed and whistled. When she saw Razo’s bundle of clothes and packs of dyes, she insisted on helping him, and soon many of the girls were lending a hand, though none could fathom why he would want to ruin the beautiful white fabric.
A few hours later, Razo climbed into the freshly dyed and dried orange pants, long yellow tunic, and red lummas. He felt like the birds for sale in the market, the ones from Wasking with different-colored heads, wings, and tails, and he was betting that the prince would be intrigued.
The afternoon still thundered when Razo climbed the stairs to the top floor of the main palace wing and the prince’s personal apartment. He said hello to his Wasking friends reading by the door, swiping from them a piece of cracker bread for his favorite caged bird (the one he’d trained to shriek, “Razo the great!”). All the windows were covered in thick-slatted shutters, allowing air in and keeping most of the rain out. The prince was lazing on a peach-colored pillow, looking horribly bored. As soon as he saw Razo, he bolted upright.
“What are you wearing?”
“My clothes,” Razo said impressively. “Touched with the Bayern dyes. Now they look proper, except they pinch…. Maybe the dyes shrink fabric a bit? Don’t know why everyone in this country drags themselves along in white all the time. White’s only good for funerals and weddings. No Bayern right in the head feels at home in—”
“I want that, Nom.” The prince pointed at Razo and spoke to the tall Wasking man.
“You wish your clothing dyed like the Bayern boy’s, Radiance?” asked Nom, his accent smooth as water over stones. “Very well.”
The prince beamed. “What a noise we’ll make among the drab and dull, how we’ll…Wait, I want more green. I hope I did not imply I only wanted your colors. We can’t turn a cold shoulder to green, and blue, and purple, for the sake of all ordered things, how can you dismiss purple? Celi, call Nom back and tell him of my need for purple!”
That week, Razo brought Enna and Finn into the city for the festival of seven rivers, and with his friends by his side, he felt safer than he had in weeks. They laughed and ate all day aboard the prince’s boat on the Tumult, the river so crowded with wooden crafts banging and scraping one another that they could scarcely spot any water. The prince was elated to have three whole Bayern in his party.
“Look at their hair!” the prince shouted to passing boats. “Black as pitch. And such salty accents. Marvelous!”
Enna took Razo aside, whispering in his ear, “He’s kind of odd, isn’t he? I mean, are you the only friend he doesn’t pay?”
“He pretends not to be lonely,” Razo whispered. “Enna, when you write to Isi next, tell her the prince here needs a wife. If he marries a Bayern woman, it might help sway more Tiran to our side.”
“Huzzah!” the prince shouted from the deck of the boat. He was dressed in one long tunic, purple from shoulders to ankles, with a river-blue lummas running across his chest and flung over his forearm. Every time someone remarked on his new clothing, the prince mentioned “those dashing Bayern dyes.”
The prince kept wearing his colors all summer. Razo’s heart thumped the first time he noticed a Tiran woman in the market wearing a bright green lummas over her hair. A few days later at the music hall, Enna counted five dyed lummas cloths in the audience. By the next feast day, the rickety stall of the Wasking merchant had transformed into a sturdy structure—steps up, a planked floor, extravagant shade. The merchant had combed his hair and broadened his smile.
By the time the summer heat got lazy and let the wind from the ocean tear it into strands, and the nobles tottered back dusty and bored of country life, one in ten citizens had cast off their white and pale hues for the darker, richer tones of Bayern.
“There’s number twenty-two—yellow!” said Megina, watching the street from a window and counting dyed lummas cloths. “I can send our traders back for more dyes and other Bayern goods at last. The queen was right—trading will make peace more plausible. You surprised me, Razo.”
Razo squelched a pleased grin. “I watched you that time you had dinner with the chief of assembly, how you didn’t try to convince him that Bayern’s good and innocent. You were just friendly. At the time, I thought you weren’t so smart, but that’s all I tried to do with the prince. Look, there’s twenty-three….”
Razo stopped, realizing the orange he saw entering the palace gates belonged not to a dyed lummas, but to a girl’s hair.
A queer crush in his chest felt both painful and exciting. Dasha was back. Summer was over. The darkness that had clutched at him all spring and been stifled by the summer heat now seemed to crouch and wait, ready to pounce again.
The banquet hall rose three stories, and the shadows swayed and crept under the light of a thousand oil lamps. To Razo’s mind, the crossing and snapping of light and shadow made the walls feel alive and crawling, the room tangled in spiderwebs.
Then the food arrived, and Razo was distracted from dread—pork skewers, bowls of sweet onions, cucumbers, and watermelon deliciously chilled. Would that the assembly renewed session every night to celebrate with such a feast.
“Ingridan food isn’t so bad,” he said. “Or am I just getting used to it?”
“You’d eat a plate and call it pleasantly crunchy,” said Enna.
Finn just nodded. His mouth was full.
Razo’s idea of paradise was a place where the pigs ran around already roasted, and that night he wondered if he might actually be dead. The pork was tender in the middle and seared on the outside, the chunks of fat crispy. It almost brought a tear to the eye.
Razo was on his ninth skewer when the chief of assembly called out for music. Dasha complied, sitting on a cushion in the center of the hall, a harp on her lap, and coaxed a song from the strings. Razo stopped eating. The music jabbed and tugged as though she plucked at his organs. It seemed a lullaby, but one that made the hairs on his neck feel like pressing needles. He hated for it to stop.
How could she know which string she touched with her eyes closed? Razo stared, fascinated, until Talone approached Razo’s table and knelt behind Megina.
“Lady …” He spoke just loudly enough that Razo could catch his words if he leaned forward. “Lord Belvan just informs me that his men found two burned bodies outside our barracks. They have taken the bodies away from Thousand Years to be buried secretly.”
Razo’s eyes roved the room—Ledel’s men back from the country and lounging at their banquet table, Dasha at her harp, Belvan near the prince, and the assembly members in white tunics crossed with red sashes like long scratches on pale skin.
“Thank you, Captain.” Megina’s voice was steady but full of breath. “Lord Belvan must indeed be a champion for peace.”
“As well, he told me something curious—a merchant complained about a ruckus in the warehouse district during the festival yesterday when all business should have been halted. Belvan’s men investigated this morning and found the place empty but for heaps of freshly burned crates. They know of no reason for the oddity.”
Maybe it’s not a fire-speaker,
thought Razo.
Maybe the murderer’s
burning his victims in a warehouse bonfire before tossing them outside
our barracks.
“Captain, was Lord Belvan able to identify the bodies?” Razo asked.
“No. And though he hopes to keep the public unaware of it, he’ll have to report to the assembly. We have just two weeks before they vote about a return to war.”
Razo set down a ceramic mug, cracking the handle, and realized he was spitting angry.
Why kill? Just to frame us? And
who’s the burner burning? Murders don’t make sense. Why not just
cause random fires and blame them on Bayern? Why go so far as murder?
His head felt bloated and throbbed with too many questions. So what that he knew who had ink-stained hands when he could not shake anything into sense?
While most of the banqueters stretched and staggered out, Razo lingered over watermelon rinds and dishes of minty honey crystals. He was keeping an eye on Dasha, who after chatting with two ladies in the hall at last strolled his way.
“Hello, tree rat.” Dasha sat beside him and began to pick through the remains of the feast. “I wondered when you were going to come talk to me.”
“You did?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said as she finished a slice of cucumber. “You do drag your feet. I have been away for weeks and weeks, and all you can do is sit there and stare.”
“I wasn’t staring at you….”
“You weren’t? I thought you were.” She studied an empty bowl. “So you were ignoring me.”
“No, I wasn’t.” His head felt even thicker than before, and he rubbed his eyes. “I was looking at you a lot, just not, you know,
staring,
necessarily.”
“And …?”
“And what?”
She sighed. “And what did you think?”
She wants a compliment,
he thought, pleased that he was catching on so quickly.
“
And
you look really pretty with your hair up like that, prettiest girl in here tonight.”
Dasha’s smile took a long time spreading from one corner of her mouth to the other. “So, you were looking. Well, thank you, but I meant, what did you think about the song I played?”
Razo stared hard at the short rope of pearls around her throat, commanding his face to be still, not to show any color, not to betray his utter humiliation with so much as an eyebrow twitch.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look as though you’re in pain.”
“Just a strained … toe.
Ahem.
Anyway, that’s what I meant, that you looked pretty while playing the harp. You
sounded
pretty.”
“Thank you.” She hooked a finger in her pearls, the action reminding Razo to look up. “I wanted to talk to you about the Bayern and how the situation has been over the summer. Do you have time tomorrow morning?”
“Yes,” said Razo without hesitation.
“I thought we could go riding through the heart.”
“Good,” said Razo, thinking that riding in a public place would be safer.
“On second thought, how about by the ocean?”
“You’re right, that would be better,” said Razo, now realizing that anywhere too public might be even more dangerous. He straightened for whatever she might say next, and no matter what it was, he was ready to agree.
Then he went cold, as if all his blood drained out of him from his head through his boots. He was ready to agree. No matter what she said.
She has people-speaking.
Isi had told him about people-speaking, how it was a talent like Enna’s fire and wind speech. He had been around people-speakers before—they were charming and persuasive, yet they planted an uncomfortable sensation in Razo’s mind, made him itch where he could not reach. And they had been safe only once they were dead.
“Perhaps if you liked we could—”
“I, uh, I should go,” he interrupted, standing and knocking an empty platter to the floor. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Razo scuttled away. He had barely fled the uncertain lamplight of the banquet hall for a dark corridor when a hand grabbed him and pulled him against a wall.
“Pela,” said Razo like a sigh of relief. “I thought you were Tumas at first. What’re you doing?”
“I baked this special for you.” Pela stood close to him, holding a pastry in both hands. She smiled, her two bunches of yellow hair bobbing.
“Uh, thanks, but I…” He was about to make an excuse why he could not take it, but she looked so much like a rabbit, cute and pathetic at once, he could not bear to hurt her. “But I don’t have anything for
you.
But thanks.”
He examined it as he walked away, and despite having just gorged at a banquet, his stomach burbled gleefully. It was his favorite kind of turnover—flaky crust, pears and syrup oozing out, with some dark red berries he’d never seen before. He raised it to his lips but stopped. Somehow accepting a gift from lap-sitting Pela felt like lying behind Dasha’s back.
Probably her people-speaking power over me,
thought Razo. He was passing by the kennels and tossed the tartlet to a large brown dog, who snapped it out of the air and gulped it whole.
The next morning, Razo wheedled Finn and Enna up early, begging their company, and they followed him to the stable, yawning, pillow marks still imprinted on their cheeks. They sat on their horses and waited at the Bayern stables for Dasha.
“Enna, you’ve spent more time with a people-speaker than I have—”
“Ick. I really don’t want to think about that. Ever again.”
“I know”—Razo craned around, trying to spot Dasha among the early-morning errand runners—“but if Dasha’s one of them, then it might explain how she’s able to move the bodies around, you know, persuading others to do stuff for her. She doesn’t seem like a murderer, but the people-speakers I knew can seem so friendly and innocent and pretty and—”
“Hello!” Dasha rode up on a gray stallion, her orange hair in two neat braids. She wore white trousers with her tunic, and her lummas was dyed a dazzling Bayern turquoise, making her eyes appear the same bright color. “Are Enna and Finn joining us? What fun! I brought plenty of victuals”—she patted a basket tied behind her saddle—“so shall we go?”
She tapped her mount forward. Razo glared at Bee Sting when she followed without a prompt.
They rode through twisting side streets, Dasha begging details of what the city had been like during the blistering summer months. Razo could not speak fast enough, could not leap forward quickly enough whenever she wanted a thing, and could not pass Finn and Enna enough meaningful looks over his shoulder.
They were sitting on a blanket in the sand, watching the surf stroke the shore, when Dasha held up her hands and laughed, as pleased as a fish in a stream. “I am stickier than a stickle bush, I’m so drenched in peach juice.” She hopped up to rinse off her hands.
“So, am I right?” he whispered as soon as Dasha was beyond earshot.
Finn shrugged.
“There’s something wrong with her, no doubt,” said Enna.
“I knew it!”
“No, no, I mean something else. … Ugh, I wish I were better at wind-speaking. Isi would be able to tell. I don’t think she’s a fire-speaker. The heat
is
different around her, somehow…. But nothing makes me think she’s a people-speaker. What makes you—”
“How could you miss it? Just the sound of her voice makes my chest feel tight, and my face gets hot and my mouth goes dry whenever she’s near. It’s getting so bad, all I have to do is see her and I’m already thinking, What does she want? What can I do for her? She’s got some power over me, there’s no question, and what else could it be?”
There was a heavy pause, then Enna burst out laughing. Finn smiled at his boots.
“What, what?” Razo looked back and forth wildly. “What did I miss?”
Enna rolled her eyes. “This is delicate, and I’ll admit that I’m not at my best when things are delicate.” She stood and stretched. “I’ll go help Dasha scrape off the stickiness. Finn, would you…?” She gestured at Razo with her head.
“What is it?” Razo asked when Enna was gone. “If you and Enna knew that Dasha was an enemy all along and kept me ignorant for your own amusement…”
Finn balked at speaking, even more than normal, and kept running a finger on the inside of his collar as if his shirt scratched his neck. “It’s just … have you thought, Razo, that maybe what you were talking about isn’t because she has people-speaking, but might be that you’re, you know…” He looked at Razo hard, his eyes unblinking.
Razo was about to explode with impatience because he did not know and this game was getting dull and … then he knew. The thought rushed him like wildfire hitting an autumn wheat field. He felt his face burn, and he shook his head casually as if he did not know, then wished he had not, because Finn was forced to actually say it aloud.
“…falling in love with her.”
Razo’s voice stuck in his throat. He coughed. “I…uh, that’s just, that’s…”
“I found another in my saddlebag!” said Dasha, returning with a fig-and-egg cake in hand.
Enna was behind her, and whatever expression Razo had plastered on his face made her turn her back and double over in hysterics.
“Are you all right?” Dasha’s look skipped to each person. “What did I miss?”
“Didn’t you hear it?” asked Razo with some pressure in his voice. “Enna just let out some serious gas. That was coarse, Enna-girl, and not funny a whit.”
Finn snorted once as though trying very hard not to laugh. Enna’s chuckle stopped short, and she glared back at Razo.
Razo shrugged, his mouth miming, “What?”
Only when the party was mounted and returning up the beach, Finn and Enna in the lead, did Razo let his attention return to Dasha. She was watching the sea, her gaze lost where the horizon was misty. With the conversation hushed, the sound of waves pierced him again as it had the first time, whispered an ache of loneliness, made him feel full of secrets. The way Dasha watched the water, he thought she would understand.
In love. That’d be just my luck.
Razo grumbled to himself as he stabled Bee Sting and ambled back to the barracks. There was a commotion around the kennels, and something was lying on the ground. Razo thought if it was another burned body, he might as well cut his own throat. As he neared, he heard one man say to another, “Dead. Just up and died in the night. Wasn’t even sick yesterday.”
Razo slithered through the throng and saw—it was a large brown dog.
