The Very Best of Kate Elliott (16 page)

After placing a stake of two silver brooches on the table, An shook out the dice for her own play. They fell as a calligraphy brush, a mortar and pestle, a stalk of rice, and a knife.

“You are a predictable person,” observed Yara with a flicker of the eyelids that made her seem ready to laugh. “Each of these represents an aspect of your work at the hospital. Also, two cups defeats your one knife, so Lady Norenna defeats you.”

Lady Aunt placed three silver sticks shaped as bamboo on the table as her stake. As the old woman carefully weighed each of the eight-sided dice to measure how much power burned in them, An slipped a curled strip of rice paper from each of the ornate silver tubes Lady Aunt had just set down.

On the first paper Lord Ejenli had written:
The sea wind knows no walls. The waves are its bride.

“As I hoped,” said An, nodding. “He will take our offer. He is more interested in his own quest than in our garden.”

Lord Kini had written:
Past the weir lies the empty pond gilded in sunlight.

“He means the fish will be trapped in a golden cage that offers no sustenance or companionship,” murmured An. “The mountain bride does not desire to become queen.”

Yara looked pensive, studying Lord Kini’s formal hand, which was correct in all its curves and angles but too precise to be beautiful. “The man’s passion is not for brushwork, but his metaphor is good.”

“More importantly I believe his heart will be willing to do what needs to be done. Yet all turns on this last.” Her hands had begun trembling as they did when her thoughts became agitated and so she had to nudge the last paper to her sister.

Yara unrolled the last message, read it quickly, then silently passed the note to An.

Lord Varay had written in a hand as elegant as An’s lovely script. The letters wore the crowns and curlicues customary to the more elaborate writing style of Emerald Island, almost too decorative, yet on the page he made it joyful, like a laughing smile.

He had written:
A man savors the first two fish brought to his table and eats his fill of them. The rest he throws to the pigs.

An frowned and Yara read the note again.“Is he calling us fish?”Yara whispered.

Lady Aunt picked up the dice. “I interpret the message otherwise. He is speaking of sons, not daughters. A fifth son holds little interest for a prince already surfeited with healthy boys. Such a prince may even have tried to kill or exile the extra boys to protect the ones he favors so there is no struggle for succession. It is no wonder a fifth son travels with humble merchants, for like best quality silk he may be worth a good price to the right buyer. Or he may simply have escaped an untenable situation.”

She rolled the dice with so much force they slammed into the silver sticks, flipping to rest with a wheel, a ship, and two knives on display.

“Two knives defeat two cups,” said Lady Aunt with a triumphant smile. She flashed a teasing glance at Yara as she reached out as if to collect her winnings.

Yara affectionately tapped Lady Aunt’s arm with a closed fan.“Not so fast, for I have not yet played.”

She set out her own stake of four silver bracelets. She scooped up the dice, shook them in her cupped hand as she murmured a charm under her breath, smiled at the other three women, and tossed. The bone pieces clattered over the table and came to rest.

Four knives.

“That looks ominous, does it not? Every blade will meet its target.” With a lazy smile, Yara swept in her earnings.

Over on the cushions where their ladies played flutes and lutes, a woman was singing the lament of the dying phoenix as it melted into sea foam and dissolved into the ocean.

“I am sorry for it, but he has driven us down this road by his own choices,” said An, wiping away a tear.“Let me write answers to each man using the same inkstone. Then we must shatter the stone into pieces and seed the fragments into the garden gravel. After that we will pull apart the brush and feed each separate hair to a separate fire. We must be careful to be sure the king’s sorcerers cannot possibly steal from stone or brush the truth of what we wrote and planned.”

To Prince Ejenli she sent nothing except a small seal, its stamp depicting the royal horn of their ancient ancestress who was both a woman and a rhinoceros.

To Lord Kini she wrote:
The bird will fly home if its tether comes unleashed.

To Lord Varay she wrote:
A subtle dish graces the banquet table.

So it was done.

That night Lord Kini escaped the palace barracks with his face concealed beneath a veil. A string of remounts gave him speed toward the mountains.

The next morning, unaware that his hostage had absconded, the king ate his dawn soup of rice, fowl, cilantro, and pepper, cooked to its usual perfection in the royal kitchen tended by Lady Norenna’s gracious expertise. Afterward, nose twitching, he expressed an urgent desire to ride at once to Seven Falls to collect his bride. Because much of his army had already been mustered to march to the coast where they would set up defenses against the expected invasion from the Empire of Saro, he took only the palace guard as escort.

Three days later, at the turn of the tide, Prince Ejenli departed in his sunbird-haunted ship, bearing the seal of the noble lineage of the Lady Rhinoceros.

The sisters waited, watching. In the warp and weft of the loom a vision unfolded, for Yara had woven the eyes of peacocks’ feathers into her threads. With this magic they could see across the whole of the land that prospered under the protection of their sacred ancestress.

The king’s company leaves behind the dense green farmlands and golden temples of the lowland and rides up into the mist-shrouded mountains. As the road steepens the company straggles out into a long line, the winged lancers in the vanguard with their rainbow banners flooding the air with streaming color and the night guard bringing up the rear in their rich indigo uniforms sewn with an ornamentation of silver vines. The king himself is carried in an elaborately carved litter whose roof and curtains are sewn of many layers of gold and purple silk so that like wings they seem to fold and unfold with each step.

Soon the company slows to a crawl as it picks its way up toward a cloud-capped pass along a narrow valley surrounded by steep hills.

Suddenly rocks tumble and crash down onto the road. Earthquakes are common here in the Fire Islands, not that anyone felt a tremor this day. When the rumble subsides and the dust settles, the survivors scramble to claw twisted bodies out of the rubble. The rocks have split the party into two groups, one before and one behind the new barrier. In the ensuing confusion men and women wearing the stripes of forest cats and the dappled skin of mountain wolves rush as if out of the rock itself although in truth it is just that armed people had secreted themselves in caves and brush-hidden overhangs to carry out their ambush.

The men carrying the king’s litter fall as their group is overrun.

A woman armed with a bow and painted all green in the manner of a whip snake steps onto the road. It is her arrow that pierces the king’s eye as he stumbles out of silken draperies, and it is Lord Kini’s knife that finishes their father off.

The soldiers who surrender are allowed to live and are sent back to the lowlands with the king’s body wrapped in the silk he died in. With the rockfall still blocking the road behind them, the mountain people stride up into the mist and rain of their ancestral home.

The woman wearing the snake’s aspect pauses before she departs. She looks up into the sky as if she can see the brilliant feathered eyes that see all. Around her neck she wears the token of her ancestress, a gold neck ring bearing the face and tail of the whip snake. With a green hand she makes the sign of “peace,” and then Lady Nasua follows the others out of sight into the rugged wild slopes.

An wept when Yara released her hand. Dust motes sank through strands of light. The rustle and chatter of women in the adjoining weaving hall drifted in to ease the silence.

“I love him because our mother loved him and because he treasured us,”An said.“But this is our land, not his.”

Yara shed no tears. Unraveling the pattern took her the rest of the day while An made her usual rounds at the hospital, her tears watering every sufferer she attended.

In the sorcerers’ garden, the ears whispered the words spoken aboard the Saroese ship as it flew over the waves on its way to the emperor’s harbor far to the south. “King Karanadayara will pay personally for his insult to the emperor. Afterward the riches of the Kingdom of Karan will belong to the empire.”

Three days later the remnants of the palace guard returned bearing the king’s body. The day after King Karanadayara’s funeral, Lord Varay tossed the first torch onto the roof of the palace founded and built by the deceased king in the first years of his reign. The entire court watched from afar as the palace burned to the ground, all the while placing bets on which chambers and structures would collapse in first.

Before the ashes had cooled the sisters married Lord Varay in a quiet ceremony. In this way the least of the sons of the Emerald Prince became King Anyaravaray by means of his marriage. An ceased speaking ill of his smiles when she discovered he indeed had a particular interest in the hospital because his mother was a mountain woman who had taught him her healing lore. That he truly thought her lovely was no small inducement even if she pretended otherwise. Yara encouraged their attachment; she had her own paramours among her ladies and loved the king well enough in her own way.

After the burning, the new king commanded the royal architects to measure out the grounds of a new king’s palace upstream past the third bridge and thereby close to the royal hospital. Breaking with tradition, he asked for Queen An’s input because she had some ideas about better plumbing and running water that she wished to put into practice.

Gifts were delivered from Lord Kini and his mountain bride: A bow and arrows for Yara and for An a set of bat-haunted calligraphy brushes made with hog, badger, civet, mongoose, and weasel hair. The new king received an ally’s knife with an ivory hilt and a blade engraved with promises.

Some weeks later the king’s sorcerers brought the whispering ears before the king and queens in a temporary hall hung with tapestries and roofed with palm fronds. The envoys had reached the imperial court of Saro. They all listened as the emperor swore that with a mighty fleet he would avenge the insult and punish the impertinence of King Karanadayara by invading the kingdom of Karan.

So they prepared.

Thus it happened that half a year later when the winds shifted front to back in their usual pattern, the Saroese fleet sailed with its golden sails and gull-haunted ships across the Fire Sea and up the river to the new palace.

King Anyaravaray sat clothed in gold and purple on the peacock couch in the king’s audience hall. He received the invaders with an easy smile. Queen An and Queen Yara watched from the queens’ balcony as three men strode forward in the manner of conquerors: a Saroese general clad in silver-gray, a Saroese admiral marked by the badge of the sea-swift gull, and a Saroese ambassador with his hair plaited into three tiers.

“We are come to chastise King Karanadayara and the kingdom of Karan which he rules,” announced the ambassador. “King Karanadayara is required to make personal restitution for the insult he gave to the Emperor of Saro.”

The king acknowledged the ambassador’s heavy words with a gracious wave of his purple and gold silk scarves.“Then you have journeyed a long distance to the wrong place, for this is the kingdom of Anyara, not Karan. King Karanadayara is dead, most grievously murdered by his enemies. Indeed, his palace was burned at the order of a prince of the Emerald Island. What an outrage that you have come so far to find that others have taken your righteous act of justice away from you! How can I aid you?”

Trapped by their own words, the envoys felt obliged to join in an uneasy friendship with a man who presented himself as their new ally. They drank with the king at a banquet prepared by Lady Norenna. Inspired by the feast they swore vengeance on those who had stolen their revenge. Vengeance first, whatever they might secretly plan about invading this rich land afterward.