The Assassins of Tamurin (61 page)

“It’s going to be a different world,” I said. “When and where will you proclaim the Restoration?”

“In Seyhan, before the leaves fall. We’ll have the city by then. I will be raised as Emperor there, as it was in the old days.”

“So we’ll have our empire back.” A frog was sculling across the pond, leaving an arrowhead wake. It risked sudden death from the carp beneath, but reached the bank without being engulfed. Lucky frog.

“Yes, we will, but that will be just the beginning of the work. We’ll need two generations to rebuild what’s been rained, but rebuild it we will.”

“Terem,” I said, when he didn’t go on, “please, what are you going to do with me and the others? We need to know. It’s not like you to make us wait like this. It’s cruel.” Suddenly he had an utterly unfamiliar expression on his face. It was an anguish such as I’d never seen in him, and it cut me to the heart; my throat closed up and my eyes stung with tears. I couldn’t look at him and instead fixed my gaze on my lap and on my trembling, clasped hands.

“In the case of Nilang,” he said in a strained voice, “she was never my subject, so there is no taint of treason. I would consider her a prisoner of war, but she fought Ardavan on my behalf, which makes her an ally of sorts. If she gives me her word, in the name of her gods, that she won’t oppose me again. I’ll release her and her companions.”

At least the Taweret would salvage their freedom from the wreckage. “Thank you,” I said. “But will you help her in the matter of her daughter?”

“I’ll do what I can to bring the girl here. In the meantime, Nilang and the other two can move as they wish, beginning tomorrow. You, however, are another matter.”

A dull ache settled under my breastbone. I was to be punished after all. Was it to be prison or exile? If exile, where would I go? It hardly mattered. When I reached wherever it was, perhaps I could get my hands on a little money and try my luck as a printer or bookseller. I had no heart anymore for acting. I had paid for its joys with misery and suffering, both my own and that of many other people.

Yet I knew I’d miss the life I’d led, my life in the palace, my life among the great and beautiful of Bethiya and Kurjain. Not so much the luxury and ease, though I’d loved that, too, but the excitement of being at the center of things, the sense of power over my own fate—illusory though that had been—and the feeling that I somehow mattered.

Most of all. I’d miss Terem.

“What do you want of me, Lale?” he asked.

“Don’t torment me, Terem, even if I am a traitor. What choices have I? Exile or prison? I’ll choose exile, if you’ll let me.”

“I’m not tormenting you,” he replied quietly. “I’ve thought about you a lot since Gultekin. Yes, you were a traitor. But if it were not for you, I think that I would be dead, and so would all my men, and Kuijain would be nothing but smoking embers.”

I tried to speak but could not. And then he said, “Lale, I love you still. I forgive you everything, if forgiveness is needed. If, that is, you’ll forgive me for my harshness at Gultekin and for letting you go to face Makina Seval alone. I wasn’t thinking clearly, or I would never have allowed it. I know that Tossi nearly killed you. When I think that she might have, and that you might be gone . . .” He spread his hands. “It would have tumed victory to a heap of ash.”

Dizziness washed through me. And then that hard knot of grief, which I had believed I must carry with me forever, began to loosen. But I wouldn’t burst into tears, I wouldn’t.

“You told me in Gultekin that you loved me,” Terem went on, “but I didn’t know whether I could believe you. I should have realized then that you spoke the truth, but I sent you away without a word. Do you still love me, even after that?”

“Yes,” I answered. By now I
was
weeping, just a little. “And this time,” I added, “just for your information. I’m not acting.”

“Lale.”

“What?” To my chagrin, I had begun to sniffle. Fortunately, the servants had left finger cloths on the table. I picked one up and blew my nose into it.

“Marry me, Lale,” Terem said. “Come with me to Seyhan, and sit with me on the dais as Empress of Durdane.”

The world became very still, as if time had stopped. One word hung in the air:
Empress.
Not Inamorata, not Surina, but
Empress.
It was the glittering dream of that ragged, determined child who marched up the road from Riversong so many years ago. How overjoyed she would have been at this.

“Lale? Do you accept?”

I didn’t answer. I thought about the reality of that dream, for I’d seen enough to predict it. I remembered the stifling rituals of the House of Felicity, and imagined all the things I couldn’t do if I were Empress: go alone to the theater or the Round, buy my own books in a bookstall, saunter around the Mirror with friends, decorate my own villa. Even as Inamorata I had been bound tighter than I liked. If I were Empress, those loose bindings would become manacles: golden ones, but still manacles. How would I put up with it?

But as I thought this, a sudden revelation swept through me. Why was I worrying about such things? For pity’s sake, I’d be
Empress.
If I wanted to scull my own periang through the Round, who was going to stop me? If I wanted to spend an aftemoon in the Mirror, who would tell me I mustn’t? Terem? Hardly. He’d probably be with me in the boat or at the gaming table. So if I didn’t like the imperial protocol, I didn’t have to put up with it—I could rearrange it to suit myself.

There were going to be changes in the palace, and lots of them.

""Now
what are you smiling about?” Terem exclaimed in exasperation. “How hard a question is it?”

“I'll be a very bad Empress,” I warned him. “I'm willful and headstrong. I hate ceremony and I want my own way too often. And I like going places by myself. And I'm not likely to change, not even for you. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“I don’t want you to change. I want the Lale I already know. Will you marry me or not?”

“Yes,” I said.

And so, a year later, in the Hall of Heaven’s Illumination in Seyhan, I became Empress of Durdane. Terem and I had already moved from Kuijain to the ancient capital. After our marriage and my ascent to the dais, we settled down together in a restored wing of the imperial palace.

Perhaps
settled down
is the wrong phrase. Ours was still a rough-edged, raw-boned empire, and already I sensed that it would be more than a mere continuation of the old, largely because of Terem. With the Juren Gap now secure against the Exiles, he bubbled like a hot spring with ideas. He refounded the Academy of Seyhan, then ransacked both empire and Despotates for men of learning and scholarship to teach there. He established the Imperial Printing Bureau, to replace the myriad books destroyed during the Partition, and ordered the printers to use the new technique of metal letters instead of carved pages. He reopened the Thousand Lilies Theater and attached to it a school for actors and musicians. He set up the Bureau of Original Devices and sought ingenious men to find new ways of doing old things, from glass-making to canal construction. This was greatly needed, for so much in the east needed to be rebuilt after a century of ruin and neglect at the hands of the Exiles. And Terem seemed determined to do it all at once.

Even I could barely keep up with him. Halis Geray sometimes shook his head and grumbled, but I could see—though I never said it—that the student had overtaken the master.

I gave Terem as much help as I could, but I still wanted something to do on my own, besides be patroness of the Thousand Lilies Theater and the like. One moming, as we ate breakfast in the Opal Dining Room, I told him this.

“Hm. I do have an idea. I've been thinking about it for a while. Halis likes it.”

“Oh, good. Does that mean I will?”

“You might.” He pushed his plate to one side, waved the two servants out of the room, and put his elbows on the table. I perked up. This suggested something interesting.

“You’re very skilled,” he said, “at the profession Nilang and her instructors taught. You are extremely quick-witted and you can make people follow you.”

“All this is true,” I said modestly.

“Halis has finally brought himself to admit how inept his spies were, compared to the Despotana’s. He’s decided that a school like Three Springs would be very useful for training agents, not only young women but young men. But he needs someone knowledgeable to be in charge of it.”

“Nilang?” She’d extracted her daughter safely from her homeland, aided by lavish bribes provided by Terem, and now lived quietly in Kuijain. The faithful Master Aa and the others were still with her.

“That had occurred to me. However, Halis is very badly overworked these days, and within a year I want all secret activities transferred to the control of the palace. Along with that would come the school, which you and Nilang would have already organized. You’d be in charge, with her as your deputy.”

“Me?” I exclaimed. “A spymistress?”

“Well, why not? Your experience and talents are too great to waste.”

“But what sort of people would let their children enter such a profession?”

“There are more than enough foundlings in the world these days, sadly enough. Do as Makina did with the School of Serene Repose, but give the students a real choice and don’t force them into the trade—give them another one if they want it. And you could call on some of the girls from Three Springs. They might be willing to help. Why not put their abilities to the best use?”

I considered this. I knew where most of my former sisters were, for Halis had spent the past year digging them out of their hiding places. I’d prevented him from punishing them, however, because there was no point in it. The few whom Nilang considered dangerous had been exiled to Abaris or the archipelagoes, but with Mother dead, most of them seemed lost and sad, not vengeful. I’d seen to it that they took up their trades again, for real this time.

But now I imagined them as they had been in the old days: beautiful Kidrin, saucy Tulay, Temile with her lisp, and all the others I’d known in the Midnight School: scattered now, and as alone in the world as they had been before Mother found them.

But I could have some of them back. Bring them together in Seyhan. Make a family of them again.

“All right,” I answered. “I’ll do it.”

The spring sun is warm. I gaze across the flowery expanse of the school gardens, where the students stand in expectant rows. They inspect me carefully, thinking perhaps that the Dowager Empress is too old and shortsighted to see their quick darting glances. But there is nothing wrong with my eyes.

Or with my hearing, happily, because the younger students will soon sing for me, and then the graduates will come up to my dais for their seal rings. Until then, I can sit in the warmth, ignore the speeches of the tutors and tutoresses, and gaze across the river to Stone Flower Hill, where the imperial palace gleams in the sunlight. There, on the great dais that Terem and I ascended long ago, our son sits in the thirteenth year of his reign. And Terem, whom I loved all the days of my life, lies now under his tall green mound at the Eternal Mercy Gate, where I will, I suppose, soon join him.

I look down at my hands. The brown spots on my skin are many, one spot for every summer of my age, perhaps, although I have never bothered to count. I have outlived everyone I knew in my youth, from actresses to Despots. But there are no Despots anymore; the Emperor rules north of the Pearl and south of it, too, from the Juren Gap to the sea, just as Terem and I dreamed so many years ago.

I still, sometimes, disbelieve my life. How could I have imagined, when the palace sequina carried me toward my first meeting with the Sun Lord, that I was to become an Empress and my son an Emperor? Or that I would become, like Makina Seval, Mother Midnight? For that, by some odd coincidence, is what my students call me, when they think I cannot hear.

The speeches have ended. I smile at the Music Tutoress and incline my head. She raises her arms, and there on the grass in the spring sunlight, like small bright birds in the wilderness, the children begin to sing.