The Silences of Home (38 page)

“
Tell me
,” she said, and he did.

The well shaft was slippery and stank of mildew. There had been no rain in a long time; it was possible to paddle from the bottom of the shaft into the tunnel beyond with head and lantern held above the water. The tunnel stank too, but not as much. There was more air here, more space.

“There were lanterns shining all along the tunnels leading to the biggest pool. . . .”
They were not lit now, of course, but they still hung from old torch brackets. Careless, that they had been left here—but who would ever come to see them and wonder who had brought them? She walked slowly so that she would not fall on the moist ledge, and so that she would see where the lanterns led. She did not even glance at the glittering stones in the walls. Her eyes were steady on the lanterns, which she followed without a false turning to the chamber with the pool and the bridge.

“Bags hung from the walls. The scribes tended them, always opening them to add parchment or take out stone and brush it, maybe to clean. . . .”
No bags now, either, though she had not expected to find any. She held her lantern as close to the pool as she could without losing her balance, as if its feeble light would cut through the murk and show her tablets and scraps of cloth, writing sticks and letters that had not bled away.
“There were many scribes—maybe a hundred, maybe more. Men and women, who listened to Baldhron. He said there were people like them in other places. He said there were people like them many years ago, who wrote the truth while queens did not.”
She rose and walked along the right-hand wall, which was broken only by the gem patterns.
A hundred or more here,
she thought
as she went carefully across the bridge.
I would have known some of them. Ladhra would have. This cannot be true.
The wall on the other side of the bridge was rough, studded with metal hooks. She ran her fingers over them one by one, sometimes bending, sometimes reaching high. Thirty-seven hooks, and a bridge, and a pool whose southern tunnel burrowed under the city wall into the open desert and its string of wells.

So the Sea Raider was right about the chamber beneath the city
, she thought as she wove back through the tunnels
, but perhaps he lied about who used it, or what they did. Perhaps only his own people used it, and he now wishes to implicate others who will never be found. . . . 
The Sea Raider’s eyes had not wavered from hers as he spoke to her by the pool. His limbs had been shaking, then rigid—yet his eyes had been still.
What he told me about Ladhra—this, at least, I must confirm to be falsehood
, she thought as she climbed back up the shaft to which the unlit lanterns had brought her. She felt limp with dread and weariness.

“There was much blood. On the tapestry was mine, on the floor beside the bed was hers.”
Lanara laughed a high, giddy laugh when she looked at the tapestry. She put her lantern up next to it, but this hardly mattered, for it was dawn and the chamber was full of silver light. She saw each thread, each whorl of colour. Everything was clean, even the lightest spaces—and it was impossible to leach blood from weaving completely; there would always be smudges, imperfections that a seeking eye would find. There were no dagger tears in the cloth either, or places where it had been mended.
Ladhra didn’t die here. There
was
a battle before the city gates. I should never have trusted any part of the Sea Raider’s account; he is a ruined man. And the Queen would not deceive me so.
Lanara backed up and her legs buckled her to the bed. The prisoner’s face was as vivid to her as if he stood before her, Aldron’s face as well, pale and blood-spattered, and his body motionless on the hot stone of the Raiders’ Land.

Lanara was still sitting on the bed when she heard footsteps on the stairs—slow, scuffing ones that paused often and were accompanied by a soft blur of words. When Galha and Malhan appeared in the open doorway, Lanara rose and went to them, took Galha’s hand to lead her to the bed. “Please, sit,” she said, thickly, as if her tongue were swollen with thirst. “You should have sent a guard so that I could have come to you and spared you this effort.”

“No, my dear,” the Queen said, and smiled. A stronger smile than yesterday, perhaps, and her skin looked less sallow in the light, which was golden now instead of silver. “I had to see you here. I could not sleep, so intense was my desire to come to her room—to you.”

Lanara felt herself smile as well. “I remember this room with such fondness. I’ve been looking at every detail. They’re all so fresh, as if I’d just been here with her yesterday. Why, this tapestry—” she turned, gestured, “—looks just as it always did. I used to stare at it in the dark, after Ladhra had fallen asleep—it always frightened me a bit, but in the morning I forgot my fear. Just a tapestry—and here it is, still.”

“No.” Galha was frowning, shaking her head. Malhan lifted a hand and took a step forward, but the Queen was already speaking again. “This is not the same tapestry—this is a new one. We put it up after Ladhra—after. . . .”

Lanara sank to her knees, dizzy, still holding Galha’s hand—but searching as well, brushing the coverlet away from the flagstones. The stains were dark and long, as if a brush, in trying to remove them, had smeared them outward and ground them even more deeply into the floor.

“Nara, I have something to tell you. Look at me, child—I must see your face when I speak these words.”

Lanara did look up, though her fingertips lingered on the stains. She waited for the truth—all of it. For the truth, and then perhaps for understanding.

“Lanara,” Queen Galha said, smiling still, “who was the daughter of Salanne: you are my daughter now and always, and you will be the next queen of this realm.”

Nothing changed. Leish waited, after Lanara’s night visit, for the Queen to come to him and beat him again, for Lanara to ask him more questions, or at least confirm that she believed him or didn’t. But none of these things happened.

He had trembled, as he told her of the attack. And when he had said, “Ladhra brought me here to swim,” and gestured at the fountain pool so close to him, he had had to close his eyes to keep himself from seeing Ladhra turning to him, smiling, giving him this gift. Lanara had said nothing to him, after her last “Tell me,” and he had not heard her go, or seen her (his eyes still closed against memory). And she had not spoken to him all these weeks since. She sat on a stool by the Queen’s throne and listened to the people who came to weep or stare. Sometimes she spoke to them after the Queen did. But she never glanced at Leish, never once acknowledged him with eyes or words. At first he had been tempted to cry out to her. “Tell the Queen what I told you the other night. Tell everyone gathered here, and see what they think of the truth.” But he had kept silent. He would be overcome otherwise. He would need to think again and feel again; everything would change.
And why not?
he had demanded of himself the day after Lanara came to him.
Why not force change, welcome it, even—for you have no life to lose and nothing to fear.
He had been afraid again when the answer came to him.
Because I am such a coward that I need this life
. He had shied away from the words, retreated from the emotions that had made him tremble. It was easy enough to do; he had been in an empty place for so long before, and he remembered how to return to it.

“Let them in.” The Queensguards moved to obey Lanara, who spoke to them more often than Galha did now, and the supplicants entered. All these entrances sounded the same to Leish: there were always shuffling footsteps, brisk ones, measured ones. The mixture of faces was the same as well: old and young, scarred and smooth, some awed, a very few angry. Always the same—and yet they were different people. Every few days, Queensfolk arrived who had not been here before. Leish wondered, without much curiosity, how many more there could be.

Today there were thirty-two, too many for a semicircle, so they stood in a long, neat line. Leish watched them, blinking to clear a haze from his eyes (
thirst
, his body told him,
hunger
—but he ignored it, as ever). The grieving mother, the lame child whose parents’ faces shone with hope—Leish looked past them, to the end of the line. The last person was hunched and swathed in a cloak, despite the heat in the chamber. The cloak’s hood was drawn well forward, and Leish could not see the face beneath it. A disfigurement, perhaps, or an illness of the eyes. He would find out soon enough, for the line was moving quickly forward. Those who had spoken to the Queen stood at the edge of the pool. They would all leave at once, as they had come in. The lame child was looking down into the water and crying, looking down into the water.

The cloaked person stepped up to the place before the throne. The Queen murmured something, and Lanara bent to listen. “The Queen bids you stand taller and remove your hood,” Lanara said, but the person was doing so already, throwing back cloth and a black tangle of hair.

“No!” the Queen cried, and Lanara stood up—but Leish noticed these things only dimly, as his numbness fell away before the change that had come at last.

Alnissa had been crying since they arrived. Her new teeth coming through, perhaps, or all the noise around her; but it was this very noise that covered her wails, and Alea was thankful for it. “Hush,” she whispered, or crooned, or snapped. Once she snatched Alnissa up from the ground, where she was rocking on all fours, and held her very close to her face. “
Why
are you so easily distressed?” she hissed. “Alilan babies are strong and brave—
quiet
, Nissa”—but then she held her daughter very close, her anger spreading inward, to where it belonged.

People were very kind to her—to both of them. Alea had not expected or wanted this; not here, where she had longed only to hate. But the people who gave them water and food and a place for their blankets were not all Queensfolk. Some were lighter-skinned, some darker. Others were not like people at all, with their horns or scales, double-lidded eyes, toeless feet.

It was someone with horns, in fact, who told her about the Queen’s audiences. Alea was walking from stall to mat to well. It was her fifth day in Luhr’s marketplace, and she was fascinated despite herself, and too weary from all her travelling to allow herself to rest. The man with horns was crouching atop a pile of stones. She looked up at him, swaying so that Alnissa would stop crying.

“Let me speak to you.” Alea turned, looking for the other person who must be standing beside her—but she was alone here, at the foot of the rock pile. When she looked back at him, the man was slipping down toward her. She saw his talons, his cloven animal feet. The sunlight glancing from his horns made her flinch and blink.

“I will not ask for payment, to tell you these words of future.” He was so close to her that she could see his eyes. Alnissa had gone quiet, though she was not asleep; she was holding her head up, looking at him.

“Your return will have no ending.” His voice was strange. She knew that he was not speaking his own language, but the strangeness went deeper than that, to a sound beneath his words. She stood mute and still, and he said, “Why are you here, woman of the fires?”

She found her own voice, though it was small and cracking. “To see the Queen.”

He smiled. Suddenly he was just a man. “She receives Queensfolk visitors every two days, in the palace. There is surely no reason she would not receive you as well.”

“Indeed,” Alea said, raising an eyebrow as if he were an Alilan boy trying to court her, as if his other words were not echoing, waiting for her.

Two days later she stood before a great wooden door in a long hallway broken by sunlight. “What is your business with the Queen?” the guard before the door said.

Alea stared at her feet in unfeigned discomfort. The palace was intimidating from the outside—but at least outside there was still sky. Within, it was a world of seamless stone and countless corridors, everything tall and long yet dizzyingly contained. She cleared her throat and glanced back up at the guard, who was smiling at Alnissa.

“I have heard tell of the Queen’s wondrous powers. There is much in me that needs mending, and I thought that I might ask her. . . .” She let her voice trail away when the guard began to nod.

“All right, then,” he said with a chuckle. Alnissa was pulling at one of the blue ribbons that hung from his sleeve. “In you go—all of you now, one by one, through here.”

Alea had not expected her own fear, any more than she had expected Queensfolk kindness—but as soon as she stepped through this door, she was terrified. The birds, the reeds, the fountain and pool, the painted sky that looked so real: this was a kind of magic, surely. And the second chamber, with its water creatures and its darkness—she bit her lip to keep from crying out.
This is why
, she thought as she waited to pass through the last door.
It is places like this that make the Queen’s people believe her.
Alea felt a different fear then, and for a moment she thought of running back through the tunnel, back through the bird room and the corridors until she reached open air again. But she had come so far alone—and there was rage beneath her fear. When her turn came, Alea stepped into the dazzle of the Throne Chamber without hesitation.

She saw only snatches of this place, since she had drawn her hood over her head and face. The stones beneath her feet glittered. She smelled blossoms, felt fountain spray on her feet. She peered up just long enough to see when the person before her halted. She stopped too, and stood with her own breath ringing in her ears.

She was sure that Alnissa would fuss; she had been fussing for a week, after all. But although she was entirely covered by Alea’s cloak, the baby slept. She had been awake in the first two chambers, silent and wide-eyed.
As awed as a Queensbaby
, Alea thought irritably, trying to shift Alnissa’s weight a bit from shoulder to hip. Irritability, not fear: she clung to it, hoped that it would sustain her until the waiting was over.

Aldron had been wrong. He had warned her, had said that the Queen’s city would swallow and silence her. She had grasped his tunic and twisted, as if anger might return him to himself. Her tears had not, nor had pleading, nor tenderness.

“You are
Alilan
!” she had cried, pummeling, pulling. “We are people of honour, and we fight. Come with me. Take your revenge on this woman who has ruined all of us. Be an Alilan man again.”

“Alilan,” he had said steadily. He was covering her hands with his own, firmly, without anger. “Man, revenge: these are words now. Just words.”

They had been in the caves then, high above the ocean he could not seem to leave. Alnissa had just learned to roll herself from back to belly. He had not touched his daughter in all their weeks of wandering.

“Go back to the Alilan,” he had said as she had let go of his tunic. “They’d take you back, if I was gone and you could assure them that you’d never see me again. Alea, they’d let you come home.”

“And what if I did go back?” she had demanded. “What would you do then?” She had been afraid, as soon as the words were said, and had yearned to pull them back.

“There is a thing I must do,” he had replied, staring out beyond their small fire at the water. “Alone. So we must decide whether I’ll leave you or you’ll leave me. That’s our only decision.”

She had left him a month later. She knew that he had been gone from her long before this—but she cried anyway, as she walked. She would not cry this time. She was no longer afraid, just uncertain, and this would change. She was the strong one now.

The person in front of her in the line was gone. Alea took two paces forward and steeled herself for more inaction—but the guard who had accompanied them from the last door whispered, “You, now.” She heard a woman’s voice as she prepared to look up. Not Galha’s: another, which Alea knew much better. She heard it, and her uncertainty vanished in fury, and she threw back her head and cloak and began to speak.

“I am here to tell truth!” the woman from the signal tower cried, and Leish looked at her as all the others in the chamber did. He could not have looked away—not if someone had dragged him backward by his chain or doused him in water.

“Alea!” Lanara would have sounded composed if it had not been for the loud cheeriness of her voice. “It is a joy to see you again. Come, why don’t we retire alone, to talk of—”

“No. The things I have come to say must be said before people who will remember them.”

“Guards!” Galha called, and then Leish heard Malhan and Lanara murmuring, soothing. When the Queen spoke again, a moment later, the terror was gone from her voice. “Very well. I shall entertain the wish of this woman, who is evidently disturbed in her mind. Tell us this truth of yours.” Vaguely amused, indulgent, much as she had been with Leish a year ago. Two Queensguards had come up behind Alea, and they held their bows before them, each with an arrow almost nocked.

“You mock me—and I expected this. I knew that you would pronounce me a madwoman, and now you have, even though I’ve said nothing at all. So let me say it. Let me tell everyone here that you have never possessed ‘mindpowers’—that the force that won your battle for you was wielded by an Alilan man, Aldron of the Tall Fires caravan.”

The Queen did not speak until all the gasps and hissed comments had subsided. Alea watched her, one hand clenched at her side, the other holding her sleeping baby against her. “Where is this Alilan man, then?” Galha said. “Why has he not come to me himself?”

Alea was very still, hardly blinking or even breathing. “Because he is gone. He was sick and weak and nearly mad after he used his Telling power as you bade him to. He left me and his daughter, for he could no longer bear love or companionship.”

“Where has he gone?” The Queen was leaning forward. Leish saw this and felt her cloak tug at the chain as she moved.

“Why should you care,” Alea asked with a smile, “If you do not believe me?”

More murmurs. Galha rose, quite steadily, and held up a hand. “I remember him, of course. I met him in Fane. He came to me there, for he was young and hotheaded and eager for a battle. He fought well, I remember, and took a grievous wound.”

“
From you
,” Alea said. “You wounded him. You wanted him dead, so that he would never reveal what he had done for you. But he lived, and goes on living, though he can hardly stand it—while you amaze your people with lies.”

“He must have envied my mindpowers—he must have been desperate for them. He considered himself quite a warrior, yet he could never possess what I did.”

Alea took a step forward. The guards behind her raised their bows, which creaked as the strings pulled taut. “Show us, then! Use these mindpowers of yours here, now, and prove that I am as addled as you say I am!”

Galha shook her head, as if disappointed, or sympathetic—but she swallowed too, convulsively. “My dear, I wish that I could. Sadly, like my ancestor Sarhenna, I have only been able to use my powers once. We must be content to recall their manifestation in the Raiders’ Land—”

“Their
manifestation
.”

“Yes,” Galha said, gesturing another guard forward. “Come, now—show our young friend to the kitchens. We will give her food and wine. . . .”

The guards reached for Alea. One of them looped his fingers around her wrist. The other Queensfolk were shifting, looking at each other, not at the Alilan woman. Leish drew a shaking breath and turned away from her himself, to look again at the group by the thrones. Lanara was motionless, frowning—but Malhan and the Queen were smiling, as if at something finished, or averted, or merely comical.

“Tell me, Galha,” Alea cried over her shoulder as the guards urged her around and on, “tell me, anyone who was there: did these mindpowers look something like this?”