Sword and Verse (4 page)

I looked up at him in shock.

“So you'll do it?” he said, his eyes locked on mine.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Gyotia, mightiest of the gods, flew to the mountains in an instant and overpowered Sotia.

Gentle Lanea nursed Sotia through her childbirth, and Aqil was born. Lanea refused to lie with Gyotia again, so the king of the gods reached deep into the earth and gathered stone and fire to make Lila, goddess of war, his second wife. Together, Gyotia and Lila overcame Lanea and subdued her to Gyotia's will.

LAIYONEA RETURNED AT
fourth bell with a tray of tea and honeycakes that meant she intended to keep us working in the Adytum for hours yet. She frowned when she heard that I'd agreed to do the pantomime, but not nearly as much as she did an hour later, when she finally gave up trying to teach me anything; I was simply too preoccupied.

She and the prince left, but my work wasn't done. I swept hastily—as only the three of us ever used the Adytum, it was rarely dirty—and refilled the asotis' seedbowls, then carried dippers from the rain barrels to fill the basin at the center of their cage. We called it a cage, though it had no bars, only a raised lip around the edge of the waist-high platform to keep the sand from spilling over. That had puzzled me when I'd first watched Laiyonea plucking the asotis' feathers for quills; even uncaged and
complaining, the birds did not fly away.

“They
are
caged, when they're first born,” the prince had explained, when I'd timidly asked about it. “Soon they're so used to the bars that they won't fly away even without them. They fight less without the bars, though. Makes for fewer damaged quills.”

I scooped droppings from the sand and threw them over the wall, then turned to my least favorite task: gathering feathers. The birds protested but didn't struggle as I whispered apologies to them. Many Scholar homes kept the small gray birds for their quills, but I remembered seeing them flying free on the islands when I was a child.

My work finished, I made a circuit of the courtyard, peering over the wall to make sure the beach below was empty. My eyes flicked nervously to the guard towers atop the rocky outcroppings on either side of the inlet. Those were always manned, but the guards would surely be watching the sea for enemy ships or storm waves that might warrant raising the floodwalls to protect the palace.

At last I went to the clump of red poppies and chamomile at the far end of the Adytum. I pushed aside the flowers and removed the loose stone in the wall, then pulled out a roll of paper. Sitting back on my heels, I unrolled it so that the tattered scrap inside remained in its cover.

The symbols on the thin paper were faded, some blurred beyond recognition, others running into their neighbors. Some greeted me like old friends, my father's voice whispering sounds in my memory even as Laiyonea's voice intoned words. Other symbols meant nothing to me.

This scrap had come with me all the way from the Nath Tarin, and I was no closer to understanding it than I had been on my sixth birthday, when my father had presented it to me.

“This is your heart-verse,” he'd said. “Soon you will learn to read it, and to write the language of the gods yourself. When you are grown, I will train you to take my place among the Learned Ones.” I had been thrilled at the idea of one day serving among the council of four who arbitrated disputes and passed on the teachings of our people.

My mother had made a special pouch to hold my heart-verse. I'd pinned it to the inside of my skirt, and kept it with me always, even when the raiders attacked our village.

When my mother turned to me and my fifteen-year-old brother and said, “Go to Margara's house,” I obeyed without question, though my brother darted away to help Father. I watched through the window, my mother's best friend sobbing behind me, as the raiders plunged their swords into my brother and set fire to my house. I didn't see what they did to my parents; Margara made me look away. But I knew even then how the Qilarites exterminated the Learned Ones and their families every chance they got. I didn't need Margara's whispered instructions to know that I had to pretend to be her daughter when the Qilarites lined us up outside. Amazing, really, that they believed I was Margara's daughter; she and her children were fair-haired, and I had my mother's auburn hair and my father's features. But all Arnathim looked the same to the Qilarites—like slaves.

My heart-verse had traveled with me on the sweaty, dark ship and on airless carts where we sat packed together in chains. Over
the years I had hidden it in bundles of clothes, in my straw pallet in the palace slave quarters, and finally here, behind a stone in the Adytum.

And still I had no idea what it said, this message from the past. Even the few symbols I recognized didn't make sense, not the way they'd been strung together. I had learned all four thousand and eighty-seven of the lower order symbols, but a mere handful of them appeared in my heart-verse. Surely the mystery symbols would be found among the higher order sets. Whatever I had to do in the pantomime would be worth it, if the prince kept his promise to teach them to me.

Somewhere beyond the green ocean, on the chain of islands where I was born, lived people who could read my heart-verse easily. “Nath Tarin” was what the Qilarites called our home—the name literally meant “northern islands,” and we were called “Arnathim” here, which meant “of the islands.” But I had never heard those words before I'd come to Qilara. Each island had had its own name, though I no longer remembered them. And we'd called ourselves the people of Sotia, because our Learned Ones, my father among them, passed down the goddess's gift of writing to all, no matter how many raiders came from the south.

The survivors of the raid would have hidden in the caves for days before daring to emerge. But I had no doubt that there had been survivors. For generations, the Qilarites had been raiding the Nath Tarin every ten years or so, punishing the descendants of the ancient, banished chieftain who had dared to spread Sotia's gift of writing among all his people. Though the exact timing of the raids was unexpected, the fact of their coming never was.

Every ten years or so.
It had been nine years since I had come to Qilara. Since the last raid.

The gate creaked below. Heart pounding, I rolled up the paper and shoved it into the hole, leaping clear of the flowers just as Prince Mati appeared on the top step. I grabbed the comb to smooth the sand below the asotis' perch.

“You're still here,” said the prince. I tried not to notice how happy he seemed about it.

“Just cleaning up.” My voice was unnaturally high.

Mati reached up and touched my hair, making my breath catch.

“Leaf,” he said, awkwardly taking his hand away and dropping the leaf onto the freshly swept paving stones.

I flushed, but he didn't question how the leaf had gotten there. Instead, his eyes fell on the tea tray. He made a sound of discovery and reached for my untouched honeycake.

“Oh!” I said. “I was saving that for . . .”

Prince Mati paused with his hand halfway to the cake and smirked. “Lamp Night isn't for days, Raisa.”

I flushed. If a girl ate a honeycake and slept with a crumb of it under her pillow when Gyotia's Lamp shone full in the night sky, she would supposedly dream of her true love. The prince would never have dared to make that joke if Laiyonea were here; as Tutors, we were supposed to remain utterly chaste and dedicated to Aqil. “No,” I stammered. “It's for . . . the children.”

Prince Mati's brow furrowed. “The children?”

My fingers tangled in my skirt. “The palace . . . children.” It was a delicate moment. He of all people knew that I had been one
of those children before becoming Tutor-in-training, but we'd never spoken of it.

The prince's face registered understanding. He frowned at the cake, surely thinking that it was too fine for their grubby fingers.

“This little bit?” he said at last.

That startled me into answering truthfully. “It's really just for Linti. She's the youngest . . . sometimes the others take all the food. So before I . . . left, I promised I'd hide food for her when I could.”

“How do you get it to her?”

“There's a place under the stairs in the front hallway . . . you won't tell anyone, will you?” Why had I said anything to him in the first place? No matter that Prince Mati acted like my friend—he was still a Qilarite.

“I won't,” he said softly. He cocked his head. “You're just full of secrets, aren't you?”

My eyes darted to the poppies. “Not at all. Just that one.”

“That, and a burning desire to learn the higher order writing.” I didn't know how to respond to that. Prince Mati's dark eyes studied me, and something softened in his face. “I'll . . . show you the first tenset now, if you want.”

“Now?” I squeaked.

“Why not?” He went to the writing chest and snatched up paper, ink, and quills, then plunked them down on the table and swung onto the bench. “Come on,” he said, patting the place beside him.

He's just making sure I won't back out of the pantomime,
I told myself. But it didn't feel that way. It didn't even feel like his usual
offhand kindness. There was something different in the way Mati looked at me now. My heart thumped painfully. Had he guessed about my hidden page or about who my family had been? Or had he simply realized how much his nearness affected me?

And, gods, which was worse?

But he held out a quill to me, and I shook myself out of my stupor. He was offering to teach me the higher order symbols, right now, and why didn't matter.

I took the quill and sat beside him, and he started writing. I copied the symbols—
honor, star, power, council
—as quickly as he showed them to me, soon forgetting my embarrassment as I leaned closer to see the order of the lines. These symbols seemed lovelier than their lower order counterparts, more fluid.

More surprising was how often my father's voice came back to me. It had only happened sporadically before, but today I remembered sounds for three of the first five symbols the prince showed me.

He sketched something and pushed it toward me. “That means
spit
. Not exactly the excitement you expected, is it?”

I blinked. “I thought the higher order symbols were . . . more dignified than the lower order.”

The prince laughed. “You'd think so, wouldn't you? But you can write anything in the higher order writing, and a lot more easily than in the lower order writing too.”

The symbol he'd written had two spouting curves that might represent water arcing from a man's mouth. It was hard to imagine
that
helping me read my heart-verse.

“It doesn't matter,” I told myself out loud as I traced my dry
quill over the page, imitating the prince's strokes.

“No, the vertical line is first,” he said. I tried it again, then dipped my quill in the ink. The result was incomprehensible.

Mati laughed. “Don't press so hard on the second line.” He hesitated, then put his hand over mine and guided my quill. “Just let it flow . . . like that.”

My hand shook so badly that I had to try five times before I got the symbol right.

The prince cleared his throat. “Now, ten times to make it stick. See, I'm not as bad as Laiyonea.”

I smiled and wrote the symbol again.

“In the higher order sets,” said the prince, “there are a lot more precise symbols to choose from. Especially when it comes to things like bodily functions.” He snickered.

I'd never had to write about spitting before, but now that he said it, I realized that I wouldn't have known how. Though there were lower order symbols that represented
star
and
council
and the other higher order symbols he had shown me, there was no lower order symbol for
spit
. “If the higher order symbols are only for the king and prince—”

“And Tutors.”

Now, it was true that the Tutors learned higher order script to teach the next generation of rulers. But only the king, as High Priest of Gyotia, actually used the higher order writing for its true purpose: communicating with the gods. By law, Tutors' writings could only exist here in the Adytum, and had to burn in the firepit each day. Failing to burn even one page could mean death.

But Prince Mati did not seem to appreciate the difference,
so I only said, “If the Scholars aren't allowed to know the higher order symbols, how do they write about . . . bodily functions, if they need to?”

He grinned. “They use the lower order symbols creatively. They actually pride themselves on that. They have competitions to see who can come up with the best euphemisms. Laiyonea showed me a report once on a priest found ‘mouse against rooster' with a temple slave.”

I frowned, trying to untangle the meaning, and blushed when I did.

Prince Mati laughed. “Remember that day in the Library? That letter was King Makal asking Suna for relief from his bowel troubles. Even the Scholars wouldn't have known what to make of that one.”

“I remember that you laughed,” I said. “Actually . . .” I paused, but something about the intensity of his attention made me feel at once safe and precarious, like balancing on the cleaning platforms after years of experience. So I went on. “Actually, I remember wanting to slap you, for showing off.”

“A fine bit of gratitude,” he said in mock indignation.

I gave a little shrug. “I didn't slap you, did I? I was grateful. I . . . still am.” The humor drained from his face, replaced by something tentative that made the day seem suddenly warmer. For some reason, I couldn't stop talking. “I wouldn't even have been in the Selection if not for you. If you hadn't come along just then—”

“I'd been down in the dungeons.” His voice was so low that I had to lean forward to catch his next words. “Visiting Tyasha.”

I started—speaking her name out loud was forbidden, but of
course that didn't apply to the prince. Abruptly he straightened. “I wanted to ask her why she did it. She was always opinionated, and Laiyonea let her get away with a great deal. It was no surprise she got herself into trouble. She forced my father to punish her.” He glanced at my face, as if trying to determine whether I believed him.