The Sacred Band (55 page)

“Is the queen not here?”

“No, not here. I have not spoken to my sister since the coronation. Not many people know that, but I guess I can tell you. You can’t, after all, say anything the queen would not want you to, can you?”

Barad felt his pulse quicken. Why that should alarm him he could not say. It was not his doing, after all. He tested his lips. They seemed to obey him. “No, I cannot.”

Aliver stood over Aaden. He looked down at the open pages of the book as he said, “I didn’t think so. Aaden here was sure of it. It must have been hard for you these past months. I can only imagine that your heart has not been behind the words your mouth has spoken.”

“Was yours?” Barad asked.

By the way that Aliver twisted his mouth before answering Barad knew he was not yet free to speak his mind. As if to prove this, he said, “My name is Aliver Akaran. My sister is the queen. The greatest queen the nation has ever known.”

Barad blinked, unsure what to say. Could they manage to speak in coded messages? How convoluted that would be. How easy to misunderstand each other. He was glad that the prince’s mind seemed intent on other things.

“We’re trying to understand the Santoth,” Aliver said. “That’s why we’re here, studying these old books. They are not proving helpful, though.”

“I wish that I could help,” Barad said. “I know nothing of these things.”

Rhrenna arrived. She stepped inside the door but did not descend toward them.

“Your Highness,” she said, brittle voiced, “Corinn has sent word. She’s on her way here.”

“You’ve spoken with her?” Aliver asked. “She told you she was coming?” “No, she wrote a note.”

“A note?” Aliver looked like he had never heard of such a thing. “And it said that she is coming?”

“Yes. Right now, I believe.”

Barad watched the mix of emotions move across Aliver’s face in waves: relief and then worry, happiness and then trepidation and then hope. When he turned to his nephew, it was that emotion that he clung to. “Good,” he said, testing the word and then getting more forceful with it. “This is good. Aaden, your mother …”

“Is coming here,” the boy finished. “I’m sitting right here, Aliver. I can hear, too.”

A person appeared in the open door. Corinn. She walked in with a formal posture, with her hands clasped together at her waist. She wore a dress of light blue; she was shapely as ever, distinctive as ever. A knit cowl wrapped around her neck and up over the lower portion of her face, just touching her nose. The ensemble was elegant. She might almost have been dressed to step outside on a breezy winter day, but Barad knew that cowl was not there as a defense against the weather.

Hanish Mein stepped into view. He slid up beside the queen. He took her by the arm and, whispering in her ear, drew her forward into the room.

For a long moment the gathered company stared at the queen, not at the ghost that stood with her. It was only when Corinn turned her back to them and withdrew toward the farthest alcove among the stacks that Aaden ran toward her. He dashed through tables, bounded up the steps to the higher landing, and cried for her with his arms outstretched. Corinn spun around. One hand kept the cowl in place and the other palm slammed out toward the others, freezing any movement in the room other than her son’s. Aaden impacted with her at full speed, knocking her back a few steps. His arms slammed around her and cinched tight. She bent over him, whether with pain or emotion Barad could not tell. Both, most likely.

Hanish stood with a hand on Corinn’s back. With his other, he wrapped both mother and son into a protective embrace. Father, mother, and son. A triumvirate that only Barad could see. Hanish looked up and sought out Barad’s gaze. “You can hear me, can’t you?”

Barad moved his stone eyes around the room. Everyone stared at Corinn and Aaden. None of them, he could tell, had any inkling of Hanish being there. They were all silent.

“You can hear me, yes?”

Barad nodded.

“Good. We need your mouth, Barad the Lesser. The queen needs it. She cannot speak to anyone but me. And I cannot speak to anyone but you. That’s why you were summoned, to be the voice that speaks for we who cannot. First, you must know that you are freed. The queen releases you. Right now, as I speak, she is wishing for the ties that bind you to fall away. This is an easy spell for you to break. Simply understand that you are free and you will be. You can feel it, can’t you?”

It was true. Barad did feel it. It might have just been because of the way Hanish described it, but invisible cords did loosen around his neck and jaw and the crown of his head. They had been there so long, unseen and unfelt, that his skin prickled as it remembered the true touch of the air.

“I can see that you can feel it. Now, please … in your own words tell them that you can hear the queen’s voice, and that she will speak through you. You need not say anything about me. Please, speak now, Barad.”

“But …” He gestured toward the others.

“Just speak the truth. They’ll hear it in your voice.”

Though he did know his mouth was his own again, it was very hard to make it shape sounds. He moved his lips and jaws, as if unsure of how to use them. “Ah …” No one even turned. It had been but an incomplete whisper. “Aliver.” Still a whisper. “Prince Aliver, I have something to tell you,” he said. “The queen wishes to speak through me. She asks me to be her voice, for … she cannot be her own.”

Hanish said, “Tell them that the Santoth took her voice, but that she is still herself.”

Barad did. The others were looking between him and the queen now, confused. They all noticed when she raised a hand and drew circles in the air with her fingers. The gesture conveyed agreement with Barad’s words. They all saw that, except Aaden, who was still clinging to her.

“What are you saying, Barad?” Aliver asked. “Are you deceiving us?”

Barad had no idea what to say. “No,” he tried, but it was not enough. He looked to Hanish, pleading through his stone eyes.

Hanish turned his head slightly to the side, seemed to listen to something. He nodded. “Say this to Aliver. Tell him that you can hear his sister’s thoughts. That she is speaking through you. Ask him to remember the time that she and he and Mena and Dariel rode horseback with their father down to the beach, where he threw seashells into the waves and Mena walked holding Leodan’s hand and Dariel chased crabs and Corinn … Say that she stood on the trunk of a tree and imagined that she was a queen of an ocean empire. Say those things to him.”

Barad did.

“Tell him that he is free from any of Corinn’s control, just as you are.”

Barad explained this and watched as the truth of it dawned on Aliver. He saw him become free beneath his skin. It was as if a ghost skin had covered him until that moment. As it vanished, the man beneath came into sharper view.

“Now, come to us,” Hanish said.

Moving through the others, Barad climbed up toward the threesome. When he reached them, Hanish said, “Speak quietly to the prince. After this we will speak of other things, but for now, tell Aaden what I tell you. Tell him his mother loves him more than anything else in the world.…”

The old mine worker, the large man with a voice that had often boomed before throngs to whom he had preached both for and against the monarchy, was some time whispering closely into the young prince’s ear. The words he repeated were Hanish’s only for a few sentences. After that, he knew them to be the queen’s, intimate things that he spoke with reverence. These things were between a mother and a son. He let them slide from his memory, a vessel that, for once, served the queen with all his heart.

Where is he?” Naamen asked. “He said he would be back by now. How long must we wait?”

Kelis did not answer. He had heard the query enough times already. He knew it was not a real question. It was a nervous tic, an expression of agitation. His answer—“I don’t know”—was the same. He saw no use in giving it again. He knew no more than Naamen himself did.

Kelis stood pressed against a wall behind a tavern, his weight hard on the rough stones and his eyes heavy lidded with fatigue. Behind him, Naamen and Benabe and Shen sat against the wall, hidden behind debris and shadowed from the structures all around them. Rats moved through the rubbish, growing bolder the longer the humans remained in their territory. It was a foul place, but in the chaos that the lower town had become it was at least a safe one.

When was the last time he had slept? Weeks, it seemed. He was functioning without sleep. He was, more than ever before, afraid of sleep. He did not want to take his eyes off the waking world for even a moment. Nor did he wish to dream, for he felt certain that his dreams would be horrible. Prophetic and horrible.

It was days ago that he had left the Carmelia with Delivegu Lemardine, the man who had clamped his hand to Kelis’s elbow, half an escort, half a jailer. Moving through the opulent upper terraces of the city had been difficult. People rushed about, scared and confused and unkind because of it. Some wished to lock themselves away in their homes. Others were intent on fleeing the island. Marah and regular soldiers and private guards ran rough through the streets, calling for order and stirring turmoil in the process. It was hard to know what had happened. Kelis saw and heard enough to know that all his vague fears had just been shown to be real and worse than he had imagined.

None of it fazed Delivegu. He walked with deliberate strides, cutting through the crowds as if he barely noticed them. In the quiet of his sitting room a little later, he made Kelis tell his tale. A servant brought them a pot of strong tea. Kelis did not touch it, but Delivegu sat sipping from a cup as he listened. The truth came out, the story as Kelis knew it, each step of just how he had brought destruction right to Acacia’s shores. If he was going to have to tell it to the queen, he had better practice first. That was part of his thinking. Another, which never got near the front of his mind, was that maybe he would never have to tell it. Maybe this man would somehow do that for him. If he died before he had to stand before her, it would be no bad thing.

He blinked his eyes open without ever knowing he had shut them. Had he been sleeping? No, for the room was as before. He had only a second before stopped talking. That was all. A second of time lost, no more.

“Look at you,” Delivegu said with a sigh, “played like a puppet dancing a jig. Because of you we have a great problem on our hands. How great I don’t know, but I’m thinking we may all be leaned over a barrel and magically shafted before this is all through. It gives me no joy to be the bird that conveys this to the queen, but to me it falls.”

Kelis could not help thinking Delivegu did not look nearly as joyless as he claimed.

“Now, this girl you say is with you, is she really Aliver’s daughter? You have no doubt about this?” “No. There is no doubt.”

“Well, that’s something, then. We can use that.” Kelis looked askance at him.

“I’ll have food brought for you. Sleep here on the floor. I trust you won’t rob me. At sunrise, let’s go find them. I hope they come to where you told them to.”

Delivegu did not trust quite so much as that, though. As Kelis lay flat on the woven rug in the center of the floor, he could hear the scuffling sounds of the servant left outside the door to guard him. The servant fell asleep before long but did so pressed up against the door. His snores slid under it and crawled across the floor to where Kelis lay. He wondered if he should leave, but he could not see a better way in to the queen. He sat up, thinking how strange it was that a man who had fought so much for the empire and been so close to the Akarans could feel so powerless before the palace’s gates. He thought about this all through the long night, unsleeping despite his exhaustion.

In the faint light of the dawning day they found Naamen at the inner gate. He stood half hidden behind one of the lion statues, staring out like a frightened child. It only took a few minutes more walking to reach Benabe and Shen. They were hidden, tucked around a corner and in an alley that saw no light even in the day.

Delivegu had to beg them to come forward into the weak light. “This is the girl? This is Aliver Akaran’s daughter?” He squatted closer as Benabe said that she was. Kelis hated the way he touched Shen on the chin and moved her face from side to side. He almost smacked his hand away. He saw that Benabe was on the verge of doing the same thing, so he did not. His inspection of Benabe was no less insulting. Delivegu studied her lascivious eyes, weighing whether she was or had been enough of a beauty to seduce an Akaran prince.

He did not share his verdict with them, but he did say he would go and try to arrange a meeting with the monarchs. He told them to wait right there in the alley amid the debris. “Just stay hidden,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

And then days passed.

Kelis, blinking more and more often, fought to stay awake. His body was so tired, but his mind still reeled. He was starting to hope that Delivegu would not come back. If he did not, they could flee. They could join the outflow of people escaping the island. Why not do that? Whatever the Santoth were doing was beyond them. They could do nothing to help. Worse, they would be blamed for releasing them. Why step up and show themselves to have been the evil sorcerers’ guides? It had all gone horribly wrong, but nobody would believe that they had acted innocently, not when they had walked beside the sorcerers every step of the way from the Far South. They were either traitors or fools, and neither freed him of responsibility. If it were only him, he would have cast himself on the stones of the Carmelia yesterday and called for the Marah to arrest him. He did not care about himself.

He sought out Shen with his eyes and willed her into focus. She sat wrapped in her mother’s arms, face hidden against her breast. Shen was what mattered. This seemed no way for her to enter her father’s life. Not that he yet believed Aliver was truly alive and truly Aliver. More likely it was some sorcery of the queen’s, a walking and talking mirage of a man. This was one of the things he feared seeing in his dreams. He did not want to have it confirmed, or to have that confirmation make it true.