The Very Best of Kate Elliott (17 page)

The Saroese fleet set sail.

Out on the Fire Sea, Prince Ejenli saw them coming with the magic he held in his turquoise eye. After the Saroese fleet had sacked the Emerald Island, Prince Ejenli used the gusting winds and his knowledge of the shoals to drive their ships onto the rocks near the coast. Then, having been given permission by the queens’ seal to take what he wanted from those ships he defeated, he pillaged the Saroese fleet and became wealthy enough to restore his family’s holdings.

So it was that the kingdom of Anyara prospered, at peace. In time a daughter named Raya was born with the queen’s mark on her breast. It is Queen Raya who now dwells in the queen’s garden, the sacred heart of the land, while I, her sister, have traveled all these years as her ambassador and am now returned to guide you, all you girls of the palace, as you come into your womanhood.

This story is the first and most important lesson I teach you. The Lady Rhinoceros understood the dangers her daughters and their descendants would face. The queen’s garden is open to any we invite in, and it is a garden well worth sharing, but it belongs to us. Never forget it.

It belongs to you.

O
N THE
D
YING
W
INDS OF THE
O
LD
Y
EAR
AND THE
B
IRTHING
W
INDS OF THE
N
EW

A
C
ROSSROADS
S
TORY

OUT ON THE WATER, paddling a canoe, the four women could speak without fear of being overheard. It was a windy day, sloppy water instead of steady swells, and their canoe battled an east wind blustering in over the bay. Mai set paddle to water, pulled, and lifted it out and forward to cut back in again, following the rhythm of the woman in the first seat.

“There’s a spy in Bronze Hall,” said the woman in the seat behind Mai. “What makes you think so, Tesya?” Mai called the question back over her shoulder.

“Yesterday Marshal Orhon’s courier bag went missing. The bag contained his orders for which reeves were to shift station, which to come home to roost, and which to stay where they were and what routes they were to patrol. Good information if you were wanting to trap reeves stationed out in isolated eyries.”

“Orders can be changed,” said the woman in the first seat, Zubaidit.

“Neh, it’s worse than that,” said Tesya. “There are eyries which are well hidden. Observation posts known only to Bronze Hall reeves. Not even fawkners like me know them. Those places have been kept secret for generations. Furthermore, the marshal’s cote is locked and guarded at night. There’s no shoreline to bring up a boat, and no lights anyway. No one could have stolen it except someone who lives on the island.”

Mai blinked eastward into the wind. The barrier islands lay too far away to be seen except for scraps of cloud caught on their low peaks. “So you believe a reeve, a fawkner, or one of the hall-sworn stewards stole it. If that’s so, then who is the spy working for?”

“I think we all know the answer to that, don’t we, Mai?” said Tesya too sharply.

Before Mai could answer, a set of choppy waves rocked the canoe. The long float lashed by wooden arms to the left of the canoe skipped twice on the water’s surface.

In the last seat, steering, old Fohiono spoke brusquely. “Get your minds back in the boat, sisters. Weather’s coming up. Best we turn back to shore.”

The steerswoman angled her paddle against the curve of the hull. The canoe swept a wide half circle. Mai called a change, and they each swung their paddle over to the other side, Mai paddling opposite Zubaidit and Tesya. As the canoe straightened, Zubaidit set them a steady pace for the town of Salya, barely visible as a scar of brown walls and white stone against the vibrant green of the mainland.

They paddled for a while in silence. Sweat and sun and spray glistened on Zubaidit’s brown back. Out on the bay Zubaidit usually stripped down to just her linen kilt. It was easy to see her muscles working as she cut the paddle in and out of the water.

Eventually Mai felt obliged to speak.

“It’s exactly the kind of information King Anjihosh will want. He does not like what he cannot control. He will do whatever he feels is necessary to bring Bronze Hall under his command. He believes it is best for the Hundred to be ruled by a strong man with a clear vision and a firm hand.”

“It’s true he saved us from a terrible civil war,” said Zubaidit.

“I was there when Copper Hall was burned down and my comrades slaughtered,” added Tesya.“That was a dark day. I admit I was glad when King Anjihosh and his army of outlanders stood up to fight the Star of Life and its cruel army. I cheered their victory.”

“He did not act alone,” remarked Fohiono.

“He did not,” agreed Mai.“Many acted. They just acted under his leadership.”

“You had some part in it, I have heard,” the steerswoman continued.

“Maybe I did. And Anji might thereafter have chosen to retire to a quiet life, as I have. But that is not the kind of man he is.”

“By all accounts, you could have been his consort and ruled beside him here in the Hundred,” said Tesya.

Zubaidit flashed a glance back over her shoulder.

“Watch your rhythm!” said Fohiono with more tartness than usual.

Once the memories might have brought tears to her eyes and a lump in her throat. But the wide waters and hard winds of coastal Mar had scoured the remnants of regret right out of her.

“I could have remained his possession, however well I was treated and no matter how beautifully I was dressed. Honestly, my friends, even though I was offered a palace of my own and all the fine silks and sweets and soaps and tender kisses I could desire, I would rather be out here in this wind paddling with you and with my back screaming and my shoulders like to freeze up. Just a dawn paddle to catch a few fish and discuss matters of life and death! I didn’t think you would take us out so far, Fo.”

That got them laughing.

“You’re the youngest among us,”barked Fohiono, chuckling. “When the year turns, you’ll be able to count twenty-six years, won’t you? You ought to be ashamed to complain.”

“I am! You can be sure I am bitterly ashamed! But I still hurt!”

Waves slapped the hull. The float skimmed the tops of wavelets. The sun glowered in a sky beginning to turn the sulky blue-green that marked a storm blowing in from the ocean.

“You know the man best,” remarked Fohiono. “If the theft is his doing, what does he want?”

Mai considered the character and ambitions of the man she had once called husband. “He has had eight years to settle his new government in the north. According to report, he’s gained control of the major trade roads so all is peaceful and secure and to his liking. Now he’ll turn his gaze to those regions of the Hundred that have not fully bent their heads to his rule. He already has agents here in Salya.”

“Watching
you!”
cried Tesya. “We would have a quieter time here in Salya and at Bronze Hall if
you
hadn’t settled here.”

“Yes, he has agents in town watching me.” Mai had accepted the consequences of leaving him but she knew some resented the complications her presence brought despite the success of her mercantile dealings. “But it isn’t as if I am the sole reason he keeps spies here. Bronze Hall is the only one of the six reeve halls that has not acknowledged him as its commander. That makes Bronze Hall’s reeves suspect in his eyes. They might foment disorder. They might urge the councils and guilds hereabouts to rebel.” She glanced again over her shoulder.“Tesya, have you anyone in the hall you distrust?”

As a fawkner in the reeve halls, handling the huge eagles, Tesya had earned impressive scars. They glittered like fireling’s threads scored across her left cheek and down her neck to her left shoulder. The scars twisted as she grimaced.“A new reeve flew in with his eagle two months ago. I’m sure you’ve all seen him.”

Fohiono whistled appreciatively. “That young, pretty fellow? Sure I’ve seen him.”

Tesya went on, her tone sour. “Folk at Bronze Hall say he’s the kind who visits the Merciless One’s temple as often as he can. What do you think of him, Zubaidit?”

Zubaidit was the ruling priestess in charge of the local temple of Ushara, goddess of Love, Death, and Desire. Her even stroke did not slacken as she answered, while her tone remained entirely neutral.“You know I can’t reveal who enters the temple, nor what is said within the Devourer’s garden, but I do know who you mean. What makes you think he might be a traitor and spy, Tesya?”

“He tells a funny story of where he and his eagle come from. The tale doesn’t hang together, if you take my meaning. Then after he arrived, little things started disappearing from around the hall. A carry bag. An eating knife. A celadon tea cup.”

“That seems clumsy, and pointless,” said Zubaidit.

Tesya shook her head stubbornly. “Some of us at Bronze Hall have got to thinking that a spy would start by stealing little things, so we get accustomed to thinking we’ve got a petty thief on our hands. A spy might hope to cast suspicion onto the boatmen who bring supplies. What a newcomer can’t know is the boatmen are never allowed off the dock onto the island.”

As Salya’s busy piers hove into view, Mai broke into the discussion. “If you know you have a spy in your midst before he knows you know, you can cause the spy’s master more trouble than the spy is worth.”

“How might one do that?” demanded Tesya.

“I’ll think about it,” said Mai.

They approached Gull Pier with its pilings encrusted with barnacles to the high water mark and its banner-posts topped with beautifully carved gulls at rest. Zubaidit released a hand from her oar and scooped up her vest from the sloshing trickles of water running under their feet. She slid an arm through one arm-hole, flipped the paddle to her other hand, shrugged into the vest, and managed to cut right back into the stroking rhythm the others had kept up. Men at work on nearby piers shouted ribald comments at Zubaidit, to which she replied with insults so bald that the words made Mai’s ears burn even as she could not help but laugh. This was not the kind of town she had grown up in! There, a woman would never talk back to a man.

“You’re not the catch we went out for,” called Fohiono to the men mockingly, for she had no doubt done the same as Zubaidit when she was young.

“At least we caught something,” said Mai, still laughing.

The catch amounted to a paltry fourteen muhi-fish, just enough to give the women an excuse for going out on the water on a morning when they might have been expected to be preparing for the Ghost Festival. They slipped past Gull Pier to Gull Beach, being raked clean by a pair of boys. Several young men came running to help them carry the canoe up into the canoe shelter. Fohiono’s clan’s canoes rested under a thatched roof above the wrack of the high water line.

Mai gave a kiss to Fohiono and a more formal goodbye to Tesya.

Zubaidit gestured with a quick chop in the hand-talk that meant,
“I’ll see you later.”

Mai fetched the cotton taloos she’d left folded atop a crossbeam. She draped the length of cloth around her body and, after shucking the linen kilt she wore when out on the water, wrapped the taloos with the elaborate tucks and folds that turned it into a dress. The short kilt and tightly laced vest were the only practical thing to wear out on the bay. But unlike many of the women here, she could not bring herself to wear kilt and vest while walking around town. She had grown up in a different world, where women young and old covered their legs and never displayed any glimpse of midriff or breast. It was not so easy to leave that world behind even though it had been almost ten years since she had been carried away from her desert oasis home. Certainly she had been accustomed as a girl to selling produce in the market— nothing exceptional in that!—but to show so much skin, in public! That she could not do, not even now.

She grabbed her paddle and her leather bottle, draped a silk shawl to cover her shoulders, and set off. The waterside district was lively this morning as last-day shoppers made ready for the Ghost Festival. Folk greeted her as she passed; a few men greeted her with hopeful grins but she knew how to smile to warn them away. She reached the Grand Pier and headed inland up the wide avenue locally known as Drunk’s Lane. The town rose in tiers on the hillside beyond; she could see the sprawl of her porch and the bright yellow walls of her compound against the hillside. Usually walking up an avenue lined with inns and drinking houses posed no problem before midday, but because no ship would be caught out on the water during the Ghost Festival, the establishments were crowded with bored sailors stuck here for three days.

A rather young and good-looking stranger stopped stock still and whistled under his breath, nothing crude, more a comment to himself. Judging by his gear and his clean-shaven chin, he was a sailor from out of town. Beneath his unlaced open vest and snugly tied sailor’s kilt he had a stunningly attractive body, all taut planes and wiry muscle. He caught her looking, and recognized immediately the manner of scrutiny she was giving him. A reckless smile flashed on his face. He touched all five fingers together, then opened them with an emphatic flourish, the hand-talk for “startling beauty!” as in a flower blooming.