The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (29 page)

“Of course you’re my friend,” I whispered. His hand tightened for a moment, then he went to the door to leave.

Before he could, I heard a startled murmur from him; the voice that responded was familiar, too. I turned, and as T’vril stepped out Viraine stepped in.

“My apologies,” he said. “May I come in?” He did not close the door, I noted, in case I said no.

For a moment I stared at him, amazed at his audacity. I had no doubt that he had magically enabled Scimina’s torture of Sieh, just as he had Nahadoth’s. That was his true role here, I understood now—to facilitate all the evil that our family dreamt up, especially where it concerned the gods. He was the Enefadeh’s keeper and driver, wielder of the Arameri whip.

But an overseer is not solely to blame for a slave’s misery. Sighing, I said nothing. Apparently deciding this constituted acceptance, Viraine let the door close and came over. Unlike T’vril, there was nothing resembling apology in his expression, just the usual guarded Arameri coolness.

“It was unwise of you to interfere in Menchey,” he said.

“So I’ve been reminded.”

“If you had trusted me—”

My mouth fell open in pure incredulity.

“If you had trusted me,” Viraine said again, with a hint of stubbornness, “I would have helped you.”

I almost laughed. “For what price?”

Viraine fell silent for a moment, then moved to stand beside me, almost exactly where T’vril had been. He felt very different, though. Warmer, most noticeably. I could feel his body heat from where I stood, a foot away.

“Have you chosen an escort for the ball?”

“Escort?” The question threw me entirely. “No. I’ve barely thought about the ball; I may not even attend.”

“You must. Dekarta will compel you magically if you don’t come on your own.”

Of course. Viraine would be the one to impose the compulsion, no doubt. I shook my head, sighing. “Fine, then. If Grandfather is set on humiliating me, there’s nothing I can do but endure it. But I see no reason to inflict the same on an escort.”

He nodded slowly. That should have been my warning. I had never seen Viraine be anything but brisk in his mannerisms, even when relaxed.

“You might enjoy the night, at least a little,” he said, “if I were your escort.”

I was silent for so long that he turned to face my stare and laughed. “Are you so unused to being courted?”

“By people who aren’t interested in me? Yes.”

“How do you know I’m not?”

“Why would you be?”

“Do I need a reason?”

I folded my arms. “Yes.”

Viraine raised his eyebrows. “I must apologize again, then. I hadn’t realized I’d made such a poor impression on you over the past few weeks.”

“Viraine—” I rubbed my eyes. I was tired—not physically but emotionally, which was worse. “You’ve been very helpful, true, but I can’t call you anything like kind. I’ve even doubted your sanity at times. Not that this makes you any different from other Arameri.”

“Guilty as judged.” He laughed again. That felt wrong, too. He was trying too hard. He seemed to realize it, because abruptly he sobered.

“Your mother,” he said, “was my first lover.”

My hand twitched toward my knife. It was on the side farthest from him. He did not see.

After a moment passed with no apparent reaction from me, Viraine seemed to relax somewhat. He lowered his eyes, gazing at the lights of the city far below. “I was born here, like most Arameri, but the highbloods sent me off to the Litaria—the scrivening college—at the age of four, when my gift for languages was noticed. I was just twenty when I returned, the youngest master ever approved by the program. Brilliant, if I may say, but still very young. A child, really.”

I was not yet twenty myself, but of course barbarians grow up faster than civilized folk. I said nothing.

“My father had died in the interim,” he continued. “My mother—” He shrugged. “Disappeared some night. That sort of thing happens here. It was just as well. I was granted fullblood status when I returned, and she was a lowblood. If she were still alive, I would no longer be her son.” He glanced at me, after a pause. “That will sound heartless to you.”

I shook my head, slowly. “I’ve been in Sky long enough.”

He made a soft sound, somewhere between amusement and cynicism. “I had a harder time getting used to this place than you,” he said. “Your mother helped me. She was… like you in some ways. Gentle on the surface, something entirely different underneath.”

I glanced at him, surprised by this description.

“I was smitten, of course. Her beauty, her wit, all that power…” He shrugged. “But I would have been content to admire her from afar. I wasn’t that young. No one was more surprised than I when she offered me more.”

“My mother wouldn’t do that.”

Viraine just looked at me for a moment, during which I glared back at him.

“It was a brief affair,” he said. “Just a few weeks. Then she met your father and lost interest in me.” He smiled thinly. “I can’t say I was happy about that.”

“I told you—” I began with some heat.

“You didn’t know her,” he said softly. It was that softness that silenced me. “No child knows her parents, not truly.”

“You didn’t know her, either.” I refused to think about how childish that sounded.

For a moment there was such sorrow in Viraine’s face, such lingering pain, that I knew he was telling the truth. He had loved her. He had been her lover. She had gone off to marry my father, leaving Viraine with only memories and longing. And now fresh grief burned in my soul, because he was right—I hadn’t known her. Not if she could do something like this.

Viraine looked away. “Well. You wanted to know my reason for offering to escort you. You aren’t the only one who mourns Kinneth.” He took a deep breath. “If you change your mind, let me know.” He inclined his head, then headed for the door.

“Wait,” I said, and he stopped. “I told you before: my mother did nothing without reason. So why did she take up with you?”

“How should I know?”

“What do you think?”

He considered a moment, then shook his head. He was smiling again, hopelessly. “I think I don’t want to know. And neither do you.”

He left. I stared at the closed door for a long time.

Then I went looking for answers.

I went first to my mother’s room, where I took the chest of letters from behind the bed’s headboard. When I turned with it in my hands, I found my unknown maternal grandmother gazing directly at me from within her portrait. “Sorry,” I muttered, and left again.

It was not difficult to find an appropriate corridor. I simply wandered until a sense of nearby, familiar power tickled my awareness. I followed that sense until, before an otherwise nondescript wall, I knew I had found a good spot.

The gods’ langauge was not meant to be spoken by mortals, but I had a goddess’s soul. That had to be good for something.

“Atadie,” I whispered, and the wall opened up.

I went through two dead spaces before finding Sieh’s orrery. As the wall closed behind me, I looked around and noticed that the place looked starkly bare compared to the last time I’d seen it. Several dozen or so of the colored spheres lay scattered on the floor, unmoving, a few showing cracks or missing chunks. Only a handful floated in their usual places. The yellow ball was nowhere to be seen.

Beyond the spheres, Sieh lay on a gently curved hump of palace-stuff, with Zhakkarn crouched beside him. Sieh was younger than I had seen him in the arena, but still too old: long-legged and lanky, he must have been somewhere in late adolescence. Zhakkarn, to my surprise, had removed her headkerchief; her hair lay in close-curled, flattened ringlets about her head. Rather like mine, except that it was blue-white in color.

They were both staring at me. I crouched beside them, setting down the chest. “Are you all right?” I asked Sieh.

Sieh struggled to sit up, but I could see in his movements how weak he was. I moved to help, but Zhakkarn had him, bracing his back with one big hand. “Amazing, Yeine,” Sieh said. “You opened the walls by yourself? I’m impressed.”

“Can I help you?” I asked. “Somehow?”

“Play with me.”

“Play—” But I trailed off as Zhakkarn caught my eye with a stern look. I thought a moment, then stretched out my hands, palms up. “Put your hands over mine.”

He did so. His hands were larger than mine, and they shook like an old man’s. So much wrongness. But he grinned. “Think you’re fast enough?”

I slapped at his hands, and scored. He moved so slowly that I could’ve recited a poem in the process. “Apparently I am.”

“Beginner’s luck. Let’s see you do it again.” I slapped at his hands again. He moved faster this time; I almost missed. “Ha! All right, third time’s the charm.” I slapped again, and this time did miss.

Surprised, I looked up at him. He grinned, visibly younger, though not by much. A year, perhaps. “See? I told you. You’re slow.”

I could not help smiling as I understood. “Do you think you might be up for tag?”

It was midnight. My body wanted sleep, not games, which made me sluggish. That worked in Sieh’s favor, especially once he recovered enough to actually run. Then he chased me all over the chamber, amusing himself since I presented very little real challenge. It was doing him such noticeable good that I kept at it until he finally called a halt and we both flopped on the floor, panting. He looked, at last, normal—a spindly boy of nine or ten, beautiful and carefree. I no longer questioned why I loved him.

“Well, that was fun,” Sieh said at last. He sat up, stretched, and began beckoning the dead spheres to himself. They rolled across the floor to him, where he picked them up, petted them fondly, then lifted them into the air, giving each a practiced twist before releasing it to float away. “So what’s in the chest?”

I glanced at Zhakkarn, who had not joined in our play. I suspected children’s games did not mesh well with the essence of battle. She nodded to me once, and this time it was approving. I flushed and looked away.

“Letters,” I said, putting my hand on my mother’s chest. “They are…” I hesitated, inexplicably reticent. “My father’s letters to my mother, and some unsent drafts from her to him. I think…” I swallowed. My throat was suddenly tight, and my eyes stung. There is no logic to grief.

Sieh ignored me, brushing my hand out of the way before opening the chest. I regained my composure while he took out each letter, skimmed it, and laid it on the ground, eventually standing up to enlarge the pattern. I had no idea what he was doing as he finally set the last letter into the corner of a great square some five paces by five, with a smaller square off to the side for my mother’s letters. Then he stood and folded his arms to stare down at the whole mess.

“There are some missing,” said Zhakkarn. I started to find her looming behind me, gazing down at the pattern as well.

Puzzled, I went to look myself, but could not read either my mother’s fine script or my father’s more sprawling hand from this distance. “How can you tell?”

“They both refer to prior letters,” Zhakkarn said, pointing here and there at certain pages.

“And the pattern is broken in too many places,” Sieh added, stepping lightly between the pages to crouch and peer more closely at the letters. “Both of them were creatures of habit, your parents. Once a week they wrote, regular as clockwork, over the span of a year. But there are six—no, seven weeks missing. No apologies after the missing weeks, and that is where I see references to the prior letters.” He glanced back at me over his shoulder. “Did anyone besides you know this chest was there? Wait, no, it’s been twenty years; half the palace might’ve known.”

I shook my head, frowning. “They were hidden. The place seemed undisturbed—”

“That might only mean it happened so long ago that the dust had time to settle.” Sieh straightened, turning to me. “What is it you were expecting to find here?”

“Viraine—” I set my jaw. “Viraine says he was my mother’s lover.”

Sieh raised his eyebrows and exchanged a look with Zhakkarn. “I’m not certain I would use any part of the word ‘love’ in what she did to him.”

In the face of such casual confirmation, I could not protest. I sat down heavily.

Sieh flopped down on his belly beside me, propping himself on his elbows. “What? Half of Sky is in bed with the other half at any given time.”

I shook my head. “Nothing. It’s just… a bit much to take.”

“He’s not your father or anything like that, if you’re worried.”

I rolled my eyes and raised my brown Darre hand. “I’m not.”

“Pleasure is often used as a weapon,” Zhakkarn said. “There’s no love in that.”

I frowned at her, surprised by this notion. I still did not like the idea of my mother lying with Viraine, but it helped to think of it as strategy. But what had she hoped to gain? What did Viraine know that no one else in Sky knew? Or rather, what would the younger, smitten Viraine—new to Sky, overconfident, eager to please—have been more likely to say than any other Arameri?

“Something about magic,” I murmured to myself. “That must be what she was trying to get out of him. Something about… you?” I glanced over at Zhakkarn.

Zhakkarn shrugged. “If she learned any such secrets, she never used them.”

“Hmm. What else is Viraine in charge of, here?”

“Magic use,” Sieh said, ticking off fingers. “Everything from the routine to, well, us. Information dissemination—he’s Dekarta’s liaison to the Itempan Order. He oversees all important ceremonies and rituals…”

Sieh trailed off. I looked at him and saw surprise on his face. I glanced at Zhakkarn, who looked thoughtful.

Ceremonies and rituals. A flicker of excitement stirred in my belly as I realized what Sieh meant. I sat up straighter. “When was the last succession?”

“Dekarta’s was about forty years ago,” Zhakkarn said.

My mother had been forty-five at her death. “She would have been too young to understand what was happening at the ceremony.”

“She wasn’t at the ceremony,” Sieh said. “Dekarta ordered me to play with her that day, to keep her busy.”

That was surprising. Why would Dekarta have kept my mother, his heir, away from the ceremony that she would one day have to undertake herself? A bright child could have been made to understand its purpose. Was it that they meant to kill a servant in the course of the ceremony? But this was Sky; servants died all the time. I couldn’t imagine any Arameri, much less my grandfather, denying that harsh reality even to a child.