The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (24 page)

Exemplar
, said the sisters,
come closer
.

His feet managed to obey. He stepped onto the shale slab. Now he saw movement inside the body of the goddess, and he heard moaning.

These women need fresh water, and food. Nothing heavy, just bananas for now. And aloe cream. Lots of it
.

“Women?” he repeated, idiotically. “What women?”

No answer.

Panic rose in him. He felt like a child must feel, on the verge of tears, when confronted with an inexplicable, confounding aspect of the adult world.

Go, exemplar, get what we asked you. These women are nearly dead.

Squinting, he tried to peer into the goddess’s mouth—and he
did
see them, he did! Two women, prone, arms at their sides. There was room inside the throat of the benevolent sister for a dozen people or more. No blood at all, just hard shapes in there and what looked like chairs and shimmering figures of light, and the two women, half-naked, reclined on cots.

Go
!

The host sent jolts through the exemplar’s body. He staggered off to obey.

The chatelaine arranged for her fire to be relit, and asked that servants be sent up to the dungeon to light her father’s fire. Naturally, there was mild protest concerning this request, for none of the women wanted to venture up a tower only to have the naked castellan heap abuse on them, but protests over assignments from the chatelaine could not last for long, or be particularly strong; two fat women vanished, faces covered by gauze, grumbling from her chambers, to carry out the unpleasant task.

The afternoon tryst with Octavia had taken an edge off the chatelaine and helped give her the fortitude to recover from the visit with her father, though his comments about a grandchild still stung. The castellan was hurtful, and the chatelaine was not sure why she insisted on treating him as anything but. Snippets of the conversation were impossible to ignore and these fragments disturbed her chances at more pleasant daydreams. Of course her pets were like children to her. Given the countless times and countless partners with which she’d had congress, she was quite positive that bearing children of her own was not possible. Her father should know that and show more sensitivity, especially on the day that one of her lovely pets had been stolen.

Maybe she and the kholic could raise a child together?

The chatelaine shook her head, almost laughing aloud; these thoughts were ridiculous. She lay down on her bed. Now that she had taken measures to replace the cherub—having sent Octavia in her stead—she found herself reconsidering her decision to grant the palatinate access to the entire palace. What were the chances that she would get robbed again? Did she
really
want Jesthe—and Nowy Solum, for that matter—to return to the grip of authority it had once been crushed in?

She sighed, imagining guards outside her room at night, scowling with disapproval while she lay in bed, spooning with the kholic.

Presently, the chatelaine heard the sounds of logs being added to her fireplace and the business of someone trying to light them; she realized she had dozed off. She sat up.

The women by the fireplace were not paying her the least attention.

“Thank you,” said the chatelaine, brushing herself off. She had spoken loudly and promptly to preempt any comments that might be made about her, if the women had not seen her asleep on the bed. They turned to watch her now before returning to their tasks. The chatelaine considered leaving her chambers so the servants would not see that she really had nothing to do, no tasks at this time of day, but instead she got up and lingered over by her cages, feeding her remaining pets pieces of dried bread from a basket she kept filled for such occasions.

She wondered how Octavia’s second encounter with the fecund had played out. By now, the girl had surely made her way from the kitchens to feed the creature prerequisite scraps. Each day Octavia would need to repeat this: the fecund, when pregnant, ate voraciously.

Each day, the monster would change.

Suddenly overcome by a mad urge to see her kholic lover again—who might possibly be the only person in existence ever to understand the chatelaine, she said, “You there, women by the fires.”

Both staff turned once more.

“I’m afraid I have forgotten your names.”

“Georgia,” said one.

“Thea,” said the other.

“Fine. Please fetch Lorichus when you are done, Georgia and, er, Thea, was it? I wish to get dressed.”

“Yes.”

The fire stoked, beginning to crackle, the two servants left. Shortly after, Lorichus arrived. The chatelaine commanded Lorichus to fetch her blue surcoat, the one with the yellow fur lining, and to find her green leggings. She believed this outfit to be her most flattering. Lorichus did as she was told and then helped the chatelaine get dressed, pulling on the hose while the chatelaine sat on the edge of the bed, attaching the garters, getting her feet into the slippers. Finally the servant arranged the chatelaine’s long hair so it was piled precariously atop her head.

“A special visitor?”

She searched the woman’s round red face for traces of irony or sarcasm but Lorichus, who was fussing with the pins in her hair, seemed sincere enough. “Of course, I have the quotidian assembly with Erricus, but for now I am going out.”

Perhaps recalling a previous outing, one that had ended rather unpleasantly, Lorichus paused, eyebrow lifted. “Outside of Jesthe?”

“No, no,” the chatelaine replied. Her answer evidently caused the servant more confusion, though the woman asked nothing further.

At last satisfied with the hair, Lorichus rubbed sheep fat onto the chatelaine’s cheeks but, growing impatient, the chatelaine dismissed her servant with a wave of both hands.

From the other side of the room, her fire roared.

Moments later, the chatelaine strode the Great Hall, surcoat billowing.

Without assistance, though he lay groaning, reaching out, even calling for help, path’s father finally managed to get to his feet. Feeling very tiny in this place, and quite ill, he came slowly to understand that his son was no longer around. The sling, still around his neck, was not only empty but the frame had been smashed when he’d fallen and was useless. In more ways than one, he felt lighter. Could it truly be that path was gone? He looked all around: dozens of people, going about their cryptic business in this city, but no sign of the boy.

Then, for these crowds of citizens and for Nowy Solum, he felt a quick rush of giddy gratitude. He almost exclaimed with the surprising joy that burst inside him. His eyes watered. Though the journey had nearly killed him, the destination had taken away his burden as soon as they had entered the front gates. There was no more strange presence, no more fear of what his son was becoming, no more pressure.

He took a deep breath, filling his lungs to capacity for the first time in ages. Under a dark archway, he removed the sling from around his neck and let it drop to the street.

Without path, well . . . he might even linger here, in Nowy Solum. For a little while. And, if he ever felt that his boy was nearby, why, he could just steer clear. There was room enough here for both of them. That is, if path was even still alive.

He searched inside himself to see if this morbid thought left residues of remorse, but it did not.

He was
free
.

Had not a massive man leaned over path, as path rolled into the gutter? If this man had taken his son, and the spirit that had entered path continued to transform him, then the big stranger would need the best of luck.

“Viti,” he said, which was the name of path’s father, the name he had been born with. No one had spoken it aloud, not since his wife’s death. He smiled. His name had invigorated his tongue and palette. His name echoed off the walls and faded down the streets. He said it again, louder, feeling as though he were waking from a deep sleep. The giant could keep his damned son! Helpless and demanding, the rotten boy had killed his own mother, draining her day by day. Path was the reason she had gone mad, the reason she did the things she did with the men who passed through. Death for his wife had been a merciful release.

Shame she hadn’t lived to be here now, with viti, in the big city! All the fights, the arguments: these had been path’s doing, the pressure of having a child like him for a son—

Grinning again, viti took a step forward, not caring which direction he went, for each direction held unknown futures and unlimited possibilities, but as he put his foot down he heard a loud crack from above and someone screamed. The last thing viti did was glance up before the briefest flash of discomfort was followed by an eternity of grey static.

Nahid came awake, familiar pains throughout, dim light driving into his eyes, still very much under the ill-effects of his melancholy, which had been surging inside of late. At first, he assumed it morning, and that his memory and body suffered not only from the curse in his veins but from a compound of too many buds and ales. His vision was blurred, his head pounding, his nose excruciating.

He was outside, in an alley.

Had there been a fight?

Half-sitting, with his back against a mossy wall, he discovered that more than just his face was sore: most of his body, in fact, when he tried to move, ached. His head must have hit the soft brick behind him because his skull felt like it had split in two. Something had bruised his chest and shoulders.

There
had
been a fight.

With a gang? Had he battled a hundred officers of the palatinate?

Daytime. Not morning at all. The faint sounds of people from a nearby street, but there were no people here, nor windows in the adjacent walls. The alley itself was hardly wide enough for him to stretch out both arms, if he could move them—a dead end.

Then he realized where he was. He used this route as part of a shortcut to scale the roof and then descend on the other side of the row of tiny houses, to get to the Gardens of Jesthe: he was just off Endicott’s Alley, verging the centrum.

He had been about to visit Octavia.

He remembered waiting, then, outside Jesthe, to see her, and the guards—

Nahid tried to get to his feet but the pain in his limbs was fierce. He shifted his shoulders and legs to ensure his spine was intact. There had already been morning today. During the night, he had entered Jesthe with Name of the Sun, released the cherub, gotten dumped at Hakim’s place.

And had been smashed backwards against the wall.

Nahid propped himself up on one elbow, though his body continued to protest, and the throbbing in his head so intense it threatened to make him pass out. Whatever had crashed into him lay still, in a heap, at the end of the alley. He saw a hand, part of a thin leg. To Nahid, trying to understand what he was looking at, it appeared as if a small, skinny teen had been stuffed into a black sack of some sort—with arms and legs poking out—and then wrapped in a large, shiny blanket before being thrown with considerable force at the wall.