Troubled Waters (56 page)

If anyone came to the door asking for her during those four days, Hoden did not admit them or even mention their names to Zoe.

Even after the rain tapered off, leaving the skies sullen with clouds, Zoe felt little inclination to leave the house. She spent most of her time in the green sitting room, staring through the symmetrical scallops of the fountain to the churning river below. It had been dangerously high the night she arrived, wild and fractious in its banks, but it had subsided considerably as Zoe regained her peace of mind. She knew that if she made her way down the mountainside and knelt at the river’s edge, her hand wrist-deep in the water, she could soothe the Marisi from a torrent to a stream to a trickle to a dry bed.

It was an odd thing to know.

Only one of many odd things her mind held now.

T
he morning of Quinncoru changeday, Zoe woke at dawn. She asked the servants to draw a scented bath and set out her favorite perfumed lotions. She allowed a maid to style her dark hair, teasing it into curl and texture, and she arrayed herself in a simply cut tunic of woven gold. It was so long, it fell to her toes, completely obscuring the matching trousers beneath it.

Over her shoulders she draped her mother’s festive shawl. She had spent part of the last nineday sewing more gold coins into its much-mended hem. It was clear to her that she was poised to run—at the least, to be disinherited; at the gravest, to be arrested for treason and sabotage. Armed with her mother’s remembrance and a small amount of treasure, she might have another option. If she had the chance, she could simply walk out the door and disappear.

Another bend in the river. Another change in the life of a
coru
woman.

But her heart, it seemed, was not entirely certain that flight was in her future. She had pinned the bright wrap in place with the
hunti
brooch Darien Serlast had given her before that final day at the palace. Around one wrist she wore a wide, flat bracelet of matching dark wood; on the other, her blessing bracelet dangling with power, love, and beauty.

She had proved she was powerful. Today she had gone to some trouble to make herself beautiful. It remained to be seen if she could be loved.

She stood in the
kierten
, in front of the window overlooking the river, and spent an hour watching the empty road. There was sunshine for the first time in days, and it fell greedily on the landscape as if famished for the taste of green. It poured in through the
kierten’s
vast windows and pooled on the burnished floor like sheets of caramelized honey.

A little before noon, she caught the first glimpse of a small smoker car wending its way upward. This wasn’t one of the spacious palace vehicles that could carry six passengers plus a driver and a guard; this was compact and maneuverable and probably seated no more than two. At the moment, it held a single occupant, who traveled so slowly he might be dreading his arrival at his destination.

Zoe watched as Darien Serlast navigated between the fountains, cut the motor, and stepped out of the car. He stood for a long time gazing at the front of the house, though she was fairly certain the glare on the windows made it impossible for him to see inside, then he stepped out of her field of vision as he came close enough to ring the door chimes three times. She heard his voice lifted in a brief exchange with Hoden, heard their footfalls as Hoden ushered him inside, heard the clamoring unregulated excitement of his heartbeat as he caught sight of her again.

Hoden bowed and disappeared. Darien stood where he was, watching Zoe. As they had once before—a day that seemed like years ago, though it had not even been two quintiles—they studied each other from across the width of the room.

She had not planned to be the first to speak, but a thought skittered through her mind and she found herself voicing it. “If you had known, the first time you saw me in this room, what would have transpired between us by the next time you found me here, I wonder if you ever would have set foot inside my grandmother’s house.”

“I was asking myself much the same question as I drove up the mountain,” he said. His voice was composed, neutral, giving nothing away. But she could still hear the clatter of his pulse, too fast for an indifferent man.

“What answer did you find?”

He shrugged. “What permanent answers does one ever find with a
coru
woman?”

She wanted to face him coolly, tranquilly; she did not want to betray restlessness or unease. But she could not stand still. She turned away from him and began a slow and measured pacing around the room. Darien stood where he was, pivoting slowly to track her progress.

Coru
woman, who could not be contained.
Hunti
man, who could not be moved.

“Let us have plain speaking between us, at least this once,” she said, a slight tremor in her voice despite her efforts to sound serene. “If you have come to tell me the dying king wants me stripped of my position, I will turn over whatever trappings I can divorce from my body and leave the mountain today. But don’t come here and merely look at me and force me to ask what you want from me
this
time.”

His face relaxed into a smile of true amusement. “But all I want from you
this
time is a chance to see your face, which I have missed. I have no other official agenda, and no commissions from my king.”

That was impossible to believe. She came to a ragged halt, flinging words at him as if they were rocks. “Not even questions? Not even accusations? Not even exclamations of horror?
Zoe, you flooded the palace and ruined half of the city and destroyed any chance of alliance with Soeche-Tas!
Surely you have some recriminations to heap upon my head—if not the king’s, then your own.”

“Officially, there is a great deal of royal consternation at your actions, and I am afraid the Lalindar estate will have to bear some of the cost of paying for the damage which your heedless flood caused,” he said seriously. “Unofficially—” He paused, shaking his head. “Unofficially, if it had been within my power to do so, I would have brought the whole palace down in huge chunks of stone that crushed the heads of all of them. The king, the viceroy, their scheming friends. I would not have bothered with anything so insubstantial as water.”

She stared at him, struck speechless.

He took a tiny step toward her. “You knew—surely you knew, you
guessed
, that I had had no knowledge of plans for such a marriage. My father had told me stories about the viceroy of Soeche-Tas that turned my blood to ice. I never would have allowed or ever
approved
any arrangement that gave that man a child-bride. Before I say another word, tell me you knew that. You believed that.”

“I believed it,” she said.

He nodded. “So, I cannot condemn your actions—but there is no denying that there has been a great deal of suffering by a good number of people who
also
had no hand in arranging the marriage. Those are the ones you must reassure and reimburse.”

“I will make restitution, and gladly,” she said. “But even so, I am sure there are plenty who will find my deliberate destruction hard to forgive. Surely there are questions about whether or not I am fit to be prime—”

“Questions,” he admitted. “But not asked by anyone who matters.” When she gave him an inquiring look, he added, “By that I mean the other primes. Mirti and your uncle Nelson repeated the stories brought back from Soeche-Tas by my father and yours, and Taro and Kayle have flatly refused to condemn you. There is no way Vernon could strip you of your title without their cooperation. And he is too weak to try, at any rate. Your position is intact. Your standing among the people of Chialto is seriously weakened,” he said, attempting another slight smile, “but if you show remorse and largesse, you are likely to retrieve their goodwill.”

“I’ll build them a fountain right in the spot where the water was most destructive,” she said. “That will be my memorial of regret. And I will hand out money, too, as long as it is still mine to give.”

“The coins will be even more welcome.”

She didn’t want to move away from him, but she couldn’t hold her feet in place. She resumed her pacing. “But there are still so many questions,” she said. “If not you—if not Mirti and the other primes—who was helping the king plot this obscene marriage? Because I do not think, in his confused state, Vernon was likely to have come up with such an idea on his own.”

“No,” Darien said. “As far as I can tell, his only advisor for this particular course was Elidon.”

She whipped around to stare at him again. “
Elidon?
But why? She despises Alys, of course, but she is not petty enough to take out that hatred on a child.”

“She is being very close-lipped about it, but her reasoning seemed to go like this: Alys wanted Corene to be named heir, so Alys had made several attempts on Josetta’s life. Elidon decided Josetta would not be safe unless Corene was removed from the picture—but Elidon is not coldhearted enough to murder Corene. So she sought to marry her off instead. In its way, a clever solution to an intolerable situation, if barbaric in this particular instance. She swears she believed the marriage would not be consummated until Corene was of a suitable age. I am inclined to believe her, though I still do not condone her actions.”

“But I thought you were not convinced that Alys had been the one trying to harm Josetta. Have you changed your mind?”

Briefly, he looked tired beyond endurance; his frame sagged a little, as if those
hunti
bones had failed him. “No, in fact, I am pretty sure I have located the villain, but Elidon was convinced Alys was the guilty party. A belief she seems to have come to,” he added, “when
you
made your furious accusation at the queens’ breakfast.”

Zoe brushed that aside. “I only said what many people thought. But you have found the person who is truly responsible? One you are sure of?”

He nodded. He still looked weary. “Though the discovery gave me no pleasure,” he said quietly. “I finally tracked down one of the sailors who abandoned Josetta’s boat, and told him he would spend the rest of his life in a cell if he did not identify his employer. He was quick to give a name, which led to another name, and eventually led to Wald Dochenza. Kayle’s nephew.” He gave Zoe a swift look. “The man who always seemed most likely to be Corene’s father. He wanted to see a daughter of his on the throne. Which he thought seemed more likely if Josetta was dead.”

“Ahhhhhh . . .” Zoe said with a long sigh of both comprehension and dismay. She realized she was pacing again, slipping from one square of glorious sunshine to another, and finding no peace in any of them. “It is an answer that makes sense but breaks the heart. Has he admitted it?”

“When confronted, Wald confessed the whole, and then began sobbing hysterically, in a way that led me to believe he is not quite sane,” Darien replied. Now she understood some of the weariness in his stance. “The scene was even more unpleasant than you might think questioning a would-be murderer could be.”

She slewed around to face Darien again. “Was his uncle involved?”

“I am convinced Kayle had no part in the scheme, though he has taken his nephew’s treachery very hard. He asked that he be the one to administer justice and I agreed. My thought is that Wald—a child of air—will never again be granted his freedom. It is difficult to know which of them will find this punishment most bitter.”

“It is all the more tragic because, of course, Wald Dochenza is not Corene’s father.”

Gazing unwaveringly at Zoe, Darien slowly straightened his posture, leveled his hunched shoulders, planted his feet—braced himself, she thought, for whatever wild storm she might conjure next. “You took hold of the princess when you snatched her from her Soeche-Tas suitor,” he said in an uninflected voice. “I suppose that was the first time you decoded the secret of her blood.”

Zoe said, “Corene is your daughter.”

A
long shuddering sigh shook Darien’s body. He stayed silent, briefly closing his eyes. Zoe added, “She’s your daughter, though you claim to despise her mother above all others. So I wonder how that liaison came about.”

As if he could not have this conversation while he was standing still, Darien opened his eyes and began to pace the perimeter of the room. Now Zoe was the one to stand firm, watching him, turning slightly to keep him in view. “I was twenty-one,” he said. “Still the eager romantic, willing to do anything to serve my king. I had seen your father work in stealth to help Vernon produce an heir. I thought it was my duty, I thought it was an honor, to be asked to give the third wife a child.”

“You were in love with her,” Zoe said.

Still pacing, he nodded. “I was in love with her, or I thought I was. She was all red hair and wicked beauty. She was—life and desire and excitement and endless fascination. She was—” He shook his head.

Zoe said, “A
sweela
woman makes a
hunti
man burn.”

“Maybe,” Darien said. “But she burned very fast through whatever fuel my soul had to offer. It wasn’t long—less than a quintile—before I began to see her for the woman I now know her to be. Scheming, inconstant, ambitious, selfish, jealous—I could spend the next hour coming up with unflattering words to describe her.”

“She still has feelings for you, though—deep ones.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. She says so. I think she is just petty and possessive. She thinks that because once she thought she owned me, she should own me forever.”

“She doesn’t like the notion of any of her past lovers showing a preference for someone else,” Zoe said. “When one of her friends merely
spoke
of Wald Dochenza with affection, Alys went to some trouble to get her ousted from the palace. I would not be surprised if—in the past ten years—other women you were interested in found themselves the targets of Alys’s unfriendly attention.”