(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (84 page)

What do these people want from me?
Qinnitan wondered hopelessly.
Do they truly wish to drive me mad? Or are they simply murdering me slowly, for some strange reasons of their own?

She was becoming obsessed with the idea of being poisoned, and not just because of the high priest’s foul elixir. Each time someone handed her a cup, any time she accepted food that was not spooned out of a communal pot, she felt as though she was about to step off a cliff. It was not merely the open and obvious malice of Paramount Wife Arimone—many of the other women had begun to look at her strangely, too, regarding her sessions with Panhyssir and the other priests of Nushash as a sign of some kind of unwarranted favor, as though that daily misery was some prize Qinnitan had secured for herself! Even Luian, who had been her staunchest ally, had grown a little distant from her. Their conversations had become awkward, like two women meeting in a marketplace who both knew that one had slandered the other recently. It was Jeddin and his ridiculous, unreasonable passion for her—it stood between them now like a closed door.

So now Qinnitan lay sleepless in her narrow bed in the deep watches of the night, thoughts scurrying like busy ants, the occasional snoring of her maids outside her door poking at her like a cruel child every time it seemed she might be drifting toward slumber. The days in the Hive seemed impossibly far away. Everything that was happy and simple seemed beyond reach. And because she lay wakeful, thinking such feverish, miserable thoughts, Qinnitan heard the quiet noise of someone moving at the far side of her chamber as plainly as if they spoke to her, and knew that she was not alone.

Her heart lurched, sped. She slowly sat up, squinting into the near-darkness beside the door. All she could see by the glow of the shuttered lamp was a shape, but it was a shape that had not been there when she had crawled into her bed.

Tanyssa. The First Wife has sent her for me.
She could see the Favored gardener’s square face in her mind’s eye, the eyes empty but for the guarded sullenness of a whipped dog.
Even if I scream, she’ll kill me before help can come.
And if the gardener was on Arimone’s business, Qinnitan knew she might scream herself hoarse without bringing any help at all.

She slid out of the bed and onto the floor as quietly as she could, letting out a small whimper like a disturbed sleeper in the hope of covering the sound of her own movements and perhaps even making the assassin stop moving for fear of waking her up. Desperate, her heart still hammering painfully fast, she struggled to think of what she might use for a weapon. The scissors that the slaves used to cut and shape her hair! But they were at the bottom of the basket under her bedside table, inside the ivory sewing kit—she could never get them out in time.

As her hand passed over the small table, she touched something cold and hard and her fingers closed on it. It was a dressing pin Luian had given her, a handspan long and ornamented with a gold-and-enamel nightingale. She curled the nightingale into her fist, raised the pin like a dagger. Tanyssa would not murder her without bleeding for it, Qinnitan decided. Her mouth was dry, her throat as tight as if the strangling cord were already twisting tight.

The shape by the doorway began to move again, slowly, silently, feeling its way with outstretched hands. With much of the dim light behind it now, it seemed scarcely even human, too thin of limb to be Tanyssa, let alone any of the other stranglers Arimone or the autarch might send. For a moment Qinnitan’s already racing heart threatened to stop entirely. Was it a ghost? A shadow-demon from out of Argal’s night kingdom?

The thing was almost upon her. She saw a shadowed face loom up and her superstitious terror turned her arm to stone when she should have struck with the pin, should have buried it in the dark spots of the intruder’s eyes; instead she felt the thing bump against her and recoil. The feeling of cool, human flesh was so startling that the sinews of her arm finally caught life and she slashed at it. Her attacker fell back with a strange, breathy whimper but no words, no shout of pain or surprise, and Qinnitan’s heart stuttered again with superstitious fear.

“Leave me alone!” she cried, but it came out a choked murmur. The thing scrambled away from her, still making the strange, animal noise, and cowered on the floor. Qinnitan leaped past it and ran toward the door, ready to scream for the huge Favored guards waiting only a few dozen paces away from the sleeping chambers, but then she stopped in the doorway. The thing was weeping, she realized, a bizarre, rasping sound.

She reached up and burned her fingers pulling the lamp from behind its slotted screen, but when she had the handle and lifted it up, flooding the room with yellow light, she saw that the fearsome thing crouched on her floor was only a small, dark-haired boy.

“Queen of the Hive!” Caution and fear still kept her oath of surprise quiet. She moved closer. The boy looked up at her with wide, frightened eyes. A long scratch down his chest dripped blood, showing where she had caught him with her nightingale pin. “Who are you?” she whispered.

The child stared at her, tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. He opened his mouth but what came out was only a low grunt. She flinched and he threw his arm in front of his face to protect himself.

One of the Silent Favored!
He was a mute slave taken in one of the wars of Xis, an infant at his capture, perhaps. The autarchs of the Orchard Palace and their highest servants had always liked to surround themselves with such boys, who could neither spill secrets nor cry out, no matter what kind of cruelties were visited on them. “You poor thing,” Qinnitan said, half to herself—it did not immediately occur to her that one who could not speak might yet be able to hear and understand. She put out a cautious hand and he shrank away again. “I won’t hurt you,” she said, hoping that at least the tone of her voice would convince him. She was talking too loud, she realized—she might wake up her maids, and although moments earlier she would have welcomed it, suddenly she did not want anyone intruding. When she spoke again, only the wounded child could hear her. “Let me help you. I am sorry. Do you understand? I thought you were . . . You frightened me.”

The boy whimpered again but let her examine his wound. It was long but shallow. Still, blood was already soaking the waist of his white linen breeches. She hunted for a moment until she found one of the clean cloths waiting for her next moonblood and pressed it against the cut, then found an old scarf and tied it around his waist to hold the bandage in place.

“It is not a bad wound,” she whispered. “Can you understand me?”

He touched the cloth gingerly. He still looked as though he might bolt at any moment, but at last he nodded his head.

“Good. I am sorry I hurt you. What are you doing here?”

Even in the lamplight she could see his face pale so quickly that she feared she had given him a mortal wound after all. She tried to restrain him, but he clambered grunting to his feet and reached into the blood-soaked waistband of his breeches, making soft hooting noises like a dove. He pulled out a bag that had been tucked away there between his body and the clothing. It was red with the blood of his body and wet, and for a moment she was reluctant to take it, but his expression was so anguished she realized that he was afraid something within had been ruined. She took it from him and saw that the drawstring was sealed with silver thread and wax. She held the lamp close, but did not immediately recognize the seal printed on it. Qinnitan took a breath, suddenly reluctant again, but the boy made a little whimpering sound like a dog waiting to be let out of doors and so she broke the wax away from the string and shook out into her hand a curl of parchment and a gold ring.

The signature at the bottom of the parchment said “Jeddin.” She cursed again, but silently this time.

“I have it,” she said. “It is safe—the blood has not soaked through. Was it the captain who sent this? The Leopard captain?”

The boy shook his head, puzzled. Qinnitan was puzzled, too, then she had another thought. “Luian? Favored Luian? Did she send this?”

Now he smiled, although it was a pained and sickly one, and nodded his head.

“Very well. You have done what was asked. Now you must go out again, as silently as you came, so as not to wake the ones sleeping outside. I truly am sorry. Have someone dress that wound properly. Tell them . . . tell them you fell on a stone in the garden.”

The boy looked doubtful, but he rose and patted his bandage to make sure it was still in place. He bowed to her, and the courtly display was so strange in the middle of the night, with the lamplight and the smears of blood on the floor, that she almost laughed with shock to see it. A moment later he slipped out through the curtains and was gone.

Qinnitan waited, listening to the silence, then bent to the task of cleaning the blood from the floor, blotting it up with another of her own rags. The thought of reading what Jeddin had to say filled her with a sour dismay. Was it some foolish love poem that had almost cost a child his life? Or was it something newer and more dangerous, him ordering her to meet him somewhere, with the same sort of threats he had used to cow Luian into cooperation?

Finished, with the room exactly as it had been before the midnight visitor’s arrival, she set the lamp on her bedside table and sat cross-legged on the bed, leaning close so she could read.

 

Beloved,

 

it began. She stared at Jeddin’s precise and surprisingly delicate script.
At least he’s left my name off it,
she thought, but a moment later the power of that single word reached out and struck her as powerfully as a blow. How had things come to this? It was like something out of an old story, that this powerful man should risk both their lives to prove his love, and that another even more powerful man—the mightiest on earth—should have already claimed her as his own.

Me! Me, Qinnitan.
It was impossible to compass.

I was a fool to take the risk of meeting you. You were right to tell me so. There is talk. One of my enemies suspects. It must be Vash the chief minister but he can prove nothing.

Dread seized her, so powerful it almost stopped her breath. She did not want to read any more. But she did.

He had signed his name with a flourish.

Fool,
she thought.
Oh, Jeddin, you fool!
Had the boy woken up the guards or even her servants, had this fallen into anyone’s hand, she and Jeddin and probably Luian would all be kneeling before the executioner this very moment. The captain of the Leopards was infected with a particularly dangerous sort of madness, Qinnitan thought, one in which he could praise the autarch even as he schemed to rob the ruler of the earth of his chosen bride.

She did not love Jeddin, she knew that, but something in his madness touched her. Beneath that powerful body beat the heart of a child—a sad child, running after the rest but forever too slow. And as a grown man he was handsome in a way she could not ignore, that was also true. Qinnitan caught her breath. Could there be something to it after all? Did she dare to have feelings for him? Was there a way he actually could save her from this horrid place?

She thought about it for only a very short time, then burned the parchment in the lamp’s flame until it was powdery, black ash. But she saved the ring.

32

In This Circle of the World

T
HE COLD RAIN WAS SLAPPING down and Fitters Row was a river of mud. Matty Tinwright stepped gingerly from board to board—some of which, like foundering boats, had sunk into the ooze until only the tip of one end protruded—in a determined effort to keep his shoes clean. His new clothing allowance had not run to wooden clogs, or at least the choice between clogs and the largest, most ostentatious ruff for his collar had been no choice at all as far as he was concerned. More than ever, he was determined to make a good appearance.

One of the boards in mid-street had now disappeared entirely and old Puzzle stood like an allegorical statue of his own name, marooned and peering shortsightedly at the gap in front of him, two full yards of mud as sticky as over-boiled marrow. An oxcart was rumbling downhill toward him, filling the road, its drovers making a great clamor as they guided it through the most treacherous spots. Others coming into Fitters Row from Squeakstep Alley—several tradesmen, some soaked apprentices, and more than a few soldiers mustered out of the provinces—now stopped in the shelter beneath the overhanging buildings to watch the unfolding events. The oxcart would not arrive in a hurry, but neither did the ancient jester seem to see it coming.