Authors: Sonia Lyris
The general snorted. “I am shocked to hear this.”
No, not what he wanted. What he needed. What was that?
Lines of Teva atop shaota, streaming out of sight, A battle horn sounding. A child’s howl, a woman’s cry of anger, horses’ hooves pounding dirt.
“Release the Teva,” she said, sorting through fogs of images. “Offer them the crown’s apology.”
An outraged, wordless howl from the general. “This is sedition you tolerate. Now hear my prediction, Innel: we have come to correct a treasonous wrong against our queen. This is no moment to bleat like a lost lamb.” She looked at the five Teva, now standing. “I tell you why they win, Commander, and you might do well to pay heed: they do not give in.”
To Amarta, Innel said, darkly. “Try again, Seer.”
“Pah!” The general exhaled loudly. “You take this one’s advice over mine? You mock my decades of experience, Commander. Perhaps you two really are relations.” She stormed out of the pavilion.
Amarta realized it wasn’t enough to tell him what would come. She must tell him what to do. But first he had to believe her.
One step closer. But to what?
To a future where the wars of the empire didn’t spread like a killing flood, ever closer to her family.
Something must change. But what?
Under a starlit night a striped horse jumped a fence. Men howled. A horse screamed.
It wouldn’t work, she knew, but she had to say it: “Let the shaota go.”
Finally she looked up at the Lord Commander. He was beyond anger, hands flexing and releasing as if looking for a target.
And indeed, in one of the next moment’s many futures, he hit her hard enough to knock her across the room, sending her into a table at the edge of the large, tented room. In another future she ducked the blow, but his anger only escalated. He called guards. She was overcome. Sent back to the wagon. Captive, again.
No: she was done being sent back to that wretched, stinking prison.
She drew herself upright, and met his furious look, feeling the next moment’s options narrow. “A horse dies in the next few minutes, ser. Then there will be more blood.”
At this, Jolon began a sound, a warbling trill, deep in his throat. The rest of the Teva joined him, their voices combining into a loud eerie call. From outside the pavilion came echoing calls, the shaota’s not-quite whinnies, the sound that was almost like laughing, but wasn’t.
“Don’t let them out,” Innel said to the guards as he left.
Standing at the edge of the corral, Tayre was one among the thick crowd gathering to gape at the five oddly colored horses. The sun was going down, its last rays touching the animals, turning their chestnut-and-ocher striped bodies into lines that nearly glowed.
The horses were restless, testy. The crowd pressing in was not helping.
Suddenly there came a loud sound of song, a warbling, from the commander’s pavilion. The ears of every shaota pricked up. Together they turned to the east.
East. Where the town of Ote was.
Tayre could immediately see where this was going, as he could clearly see what the horsemaster and the large crowd around the corral did not.
Better to be elsewhere. He ducked down, wormed his way backward through the press of people, the space he vacated quickly filled. He backed away until he was well clear, then climbed atop an open wagon, joining a handful of others watching the action.
One of the shaota backed up, clearly—to Tayre, anyway—to get a running start at the fence, which was high enough to keep the much larger Arunkel warhorses confined for a short time when the horsemaster needed to. The first shaota lunged into motion rather faster than he expected, heading for the fenceline.
A sudden, eerie silence took hold as the crowd and handlers realized what was about to happen, then struggled to clear the space where the five horses were now clearly headed.
As the first shaota cleared the fenceline, the crowd scrambled to get out of the way, but they were too thick, packed in too tightly. As the rest of the horses jumped the fence, landing atop the human carpet, there were sounds of breaking bones, roars, and screams.
In the midst of this panic, one white-haired soldier calmly took his spear and launched it in a smooth arc at the next-to-last shaota to land. The spear took the shaota through the neck. As the animal began to twist and buck, flattening even more people as it fell, flailing, the shaota just behind it landed in a small clear area. It made a fast motion, a sort of stutter step almost too quick for Tayre’s eye to follow, an odd sideways motion. As it launched again, jumping to clear the rest of the crowd and follow the other shaota, it gave a final kick. The white-haired soldier who had launched the spear flew backwards. It looked like he would not get up again.
“Oh, shit,” someone next to him breathed.
Now the crowd turned loud, shouting, calling. Screaming. Tayre guessed a tencount or two Arunkin had been killed, another tencount broken in various ways that they might or might not survive.
“Demon horses!” someone called and the cry was taken up. Most were fleeing, some tending to the howling injured.
As he jumped off the wagon, retreating farther from the fray, Tayre wondered if it were time to leave the army. The night would be chaos.
Well, he thought, as he left the action, at least everyone who had been so eager for a good look at the nearly mythical horses now had it.
Amarta heard the sounds of men shouting, breaking, screaming. Then a sharp, inhuman cry.
At this one of the Teva howled and launched himself at the guards. The other Teva exploded into motion as well. A struggle followed, but the greater count of guards overcame the unarmed Teva and tied them, hand and foot, setting them on the ground.
The one Teva man was sobbing, his grief obvious.
His shaota, Amarta realized suddenly. The dead horse she had foreseen. It had been his.
Jolon caught her gaze. He looked to one side, then the other, then back at her, blinking oddly. It took her a moment to realize he was giving her an Emendi signal. She did not at first recognize it; it had been too long.
He repeated it.
Help us,
he was signing.
A glance around the room. She could not imagine a way to free the Teva, not with so many guards.
But she didn’t need to imagine; she could ask vision. Was there a way?
Distant screams. The flicker of fire. Guards distracted. In an improbable moment guided by vision, she strolled past the Teva, dropped a knife on the ground out of view of the guards.
They would cut their bonds. One by one, passing the knife along behind them. And then—
No and no: she had a contract. To free the Lord Commander’s prisoners was far from any reasonable interpretation of her oath.
Sorry,
she signed to Jolon.
So sorry.
His look of disappointment tore at her, as did the continued weeping of the man by his side.
The Lord Commander returned. He looked around the room. At the Teva. At her.
Stepping close, he dropped his voice. “The Teva heard your prediction, Seer. Now there is a dead horse. Are you foreseeing the future or creating it?”
“I did not kill that creature,” she answered angrily.
“Predict something useful for me, then.” His tone matched hers.
Many columns of fire. Sparks against a starry sky.
“You can still rescue this, ser. But it must be soon. Go to the Teva leaders with a white flag. You must—”
“Your visions are not serving me well, girl.”
“—apologize to them. Otherwise, ser, there will be so much blood and death and you—”
“Can you predict nothing else?” he asked loudly.
“Can you do anything but slaughter?” she demanded.
She could see she’d gone too far. Faster than she expected, the back of his hand snapped to her face. She turned a little, just enough, changing the distance a tiny bit. His hand barely brushed across her cheek.
He reached for her shoulders. She twitched her upper body. His hands fumbled, failing to find grip. Next he lunged for her neck. A fast rock-step back and forward. His fingertips barely missed the front of her neck.
She was in the same position from which she had started. Making a point that she hoped he understood.
His eyes widened briefly and his hands dropped to his sides. His expression turned hard. “I have your sister and nephew, Seer.”
“What?” she breathed. “No, you don’t. You can’t.”
“But I do.”
“Our contract. You said—”
“Safe, I said. And they are. Very safe. Indeed, it was the only way I could be sure they
would
be safe, to use my power to keep them so.”
Amarta gulped for breath, dread and pain lancing through her. A tightness gripped her throat; fury threatened to overcome her. She sank into a haze of seeing, pawing through the futures that fanned out from this moment.
She craved this man’s destruction. Not merely his death, but to somehow tear him apart, to take everything for which he cared and rend it to shreds.
In many futures she next launched herself at him with a howl, ready to tear, hit, bite. But the struggle was short-lived; she had never before used vision to attack someone and did not know how. Vision agreed and told her this would fail. He and his guards would knock her to the ground, tie her. Her options ended.
In other futures, she yelled at him, revealed to him the worst things the future might bring him.
But telling him changed the very outcomes she predicted, and her threats became empty, his faith in her eroded even further.
And nothing changed.
She stood still, vibrating with frustration, mute with anger.
“They are well,” he told her. “Do you understand?”
“That was all I ever wanted. Them to be safe. From you.”
“And they are. Our contract is intact. Do you hear me? I simply needed to be sure of your cooperation.”
Where was the future in which she was no longer captive to this man? The one that made of her a wolf?
“Take her back to her wagon,” he said to his guards.
You can do this, Seer.
“No,” she shouted. “I won’t go back.”
He put up a hand. The guards stopped.
Flashes of metal. Howls of anger.
Moments were passing. The future was shifting. Options were closing. In truth, the battle had just now begun.
He reached for her, then hesitated, fingers hovering. “Come,” he said instead, walking to the edge of the partitioned area at the rear of the pavilion.
What else to do? She followed him to the back, behind the heavy drapes, where there was a large bed. A world away from a straw mattress in a stinking wagon.
“Don’t challenge me, Amarta,” he said, voice low. “You will obey me, or your family—”
“You won’t hurt them, ser. Not before you leave Otevan, and by then you—”
By then he might not be able to. Flickers of how Innel sev Cern esse Arunkel might finish this battle were still foggy, unclear, and changing.
He might survive. He might not.
She had no idea if her family were safe from him or not; she had simply lied. In a way. Foresight had told her that to say this would give her a moment more to act, a moment more of his attention before he called his guards.
And there it was, the answer to his earlier question: Did she make the future or predict it?
Sometimes both.
In the next moment, guards would drag her back to her hot, smelly captivity. She could not slip through a net of twenty strong men.
Yet.
“I
what
, Seer?” he prompted, and she knew from vision that this was her last chance to change the path forward.
“You will wish you had listened to me.”
“I am listening to you now,” he growled.
But he was not.
“It has already begun,” she said.
“What has? Tell me, damn you.”
She turned her gaze away from him, staring at the hanging tapestry. A deep red silk with the monarchy’s sigil in black brocade, like a field of blood over which was laid an iron blade and pickax.
And what was she in this tapestry?
Unique and beyond reckoning.
She was a short length of dyed thread, and that was all she would ever be, until and unless she was as willing to be the wolf as the man in front of her.
“Amarta, your oath. Do you break it now?”
“No, ser. I do not. But you ask the wrong question. Until you ask the right one, my answers will not serve you.”
“What is the right question?”
She looked at the Teva across the room. “What do
I
want, Lord Commander.”
“You?” he asked incredulously, hands again clenching into fists. “
You
?”
He waited for her to speak, but vision told her that any word she spoke now would only infuriate him further, so she stayed silent. He looked around the pavilion, at the tapestries, the bed, and finally back at her. “Very well; what do you want, Seer?”
“Untie the Teva,” she answered. “I already know you won’t release them, but you can treat them better than this.” She met his gaze. “An attack is coming, Lord Commander. I see no future in which it does not occur, but there are things you can do to make it better. If you do them soon. And I know what they are.”
His eyes narrowed at her, his expression darkening. Then he went to the guards. “Untie them. Send for cots, food, wine. And you—” He rounded on her, close and breathing hard. She struggled not to flinch, not to step back.
After a moment, with an exhale, he stepped back. “Tell me.”
“The stream from which the camp gets water,” she said. “Get more.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Always a delicate balance, thought Cern, looking out her window to the tranquility below, a garden of flowers and herbs and sparkling gems, while on the other side of the palace someone was dying in Execution Square. Behind her Sachare checked the bedclothes, the mattress, and the pillows.
A delicate balance, a bit like the creation of rods and tubes, hooks and chains in the next room. Her most recent creation attached to the ceiling and two walls, pressing and pulling upon itself. A wooden rod in a large ruby’s concave hollow, the rock pulled in two directions by delicate jeweled chains. The whole of the work would collapse if each piece did not depend on at least two others, and better yet three. Otherwise it was a weak arrangement, fragile and ready to fall to the floor. Forces from multiple directions were necessary to complete the puzzle, to draw it together into a single entity.
Now Sachare was grumbling. Someone had made the mistake of changing Cern’s bedding without Sachare’s oversight. Chambermaid and bodyguard both, Sachare was attentive and cautious.
As Cern must be. In action. In appearance.
Such a delicate balance.
The courtyard below was said to be the finest of the palace’s many gardens, looked upon, as it was, by the reigning monarch. At the center red and black chrysanthemums formed her family’s sigil, walkways radiating out in eight directions past walls of gemstone, iron trellises, and wooden sculptures, each of which had its own cascade of fragrant herbs, thick with flowers. Benches of stone, wood, metal, and coral were set about the circumference, kept exactingly clean in anticipation of the possibility that she might actually use them.
That was one of the many delicate balances, right there. No matter how carefully her guards were chosen, no matter how restricted the view onto this garden, when Cern sat on a bench, the House who had gifted it to the crown would soon be notified and then everyone would speculate on what the action implied.
The Great Houses who did not deal in substances that might reasonably be fashioned into benches must be satisfied in other ways, so tapestries and wall-hangings hung in a nearby room carefully adjudged a similar status to the garden below. That room, then, she also must be sure to visit on a regular basis while somehow making it seem as natural as a visit to the garden. One of her aides’ primary task was to keep track of what Cern had done to honor or neglect which House and to arrange ways to even the score.
Cern could never simply sit.
“What are you thinking about?” Sachare asked her softly.
“That time I sat on House Etallan’s bench, watching an ant try to drag a worm back to the nest.”
“I remember that. He wasn’t very happy.”
“No.”
Her father had called her to him and explained her error at fair length. She was to sit with good posture, at the center of the bench. Not slumped over, staring at the ground. It was insulting to the House. Did she understand?
She did.
The Houses. Ever-attentive, easily offended, and mercilessly unavoidable. Yet again she wondered if she could possibly move her suite to the other side of the palace, where she would instead have a good view of Execution Square. Let the Houses figure out what that meant.
But of course she could not; it would send all the wrong signals, among them that she mistrusted Innel’s oversight of executions.
No such message could be allowed. The aristos loved their executions. The more cunning and elaborate the better, and they relied on the Anandynar royals to make a good show of them.
That her family had a reputation for exacting brutal retribution against those who opposed them, she knew. That she had to live up to that if she were to keep the crown she also knew.
But while she might condemn a criminal to be bound and pierced, crushed and broken—all the various ways to achieve a meticulous and agonizing death that were the trademarks of her family—Innel handled the truly messy part. Trained for it. Raised in the Cohort.
Particularly well-suited. This was part of why Innel had been her first choice. Pohut, for all that he was handsome and charming and full of wit, simply did not have Innel’s keen edge of single-minded ruthlessness. Innel could do what needed doing.
But that wasn’t quite all of it. It had also become clear to her those last few years that despite how close the brothers were, whichever of them she did not marry would need to swallow a sort of humiliation. Pohut, she had reluctantly concluded, would take this with somewhat more grace than Innel. This had factored into her choice.
What would have been her choice, if Innel had not taken it from her.
Single-minded ruthlessness, she reminded herself. She needed a man like him at her side if she were going to hold the throne through these first and most difficult years.
“And now what are you thinking about, my lady?” Cern could hear the smile in Sachare’s voice.
A short sigh. “The Consort.”
“Ah.” Sachare returned a pillow to its casing, fluffing and setting it on the bed.
Cern’s training had been a little different. When Cohort lessons became too full of blood and parts, she had been pulled away. She was to rule and judge, she was told, not slice and stab.
Rule and judge she now did. Finally free of her father, she would sink or swim entirely on her own. Innel was right that she must somehow make her own mark, become distinct, if she were to avoid being thought of as Restarn’s own mother—her grandmother—a monarch in name only, a stumble between the formidable Grandmother Queen and Restarn One, who had taken in hand the last holdouts between Perripur and the ocean, uniting the empire.
But to take it was not the same as to hold it. If she could not hold the areas her father had taken, no one would care what benches she sat on or for how long or what murmured appreciations she made while staring at some amardide tapestry.
The mining towns. The border cities. Smuggled gold. Counterfeit coins.
If this continued she was well on her way to being another interim ruler, a stepping stone for someone else in the family, enthroned only until someone with more fortitude could be found.
The way the other royals looked at her was disturbing. Bemusedly, as if wondering why she had been on her father’s list at all. From a handful of cousins her own age to Lismar and her Cohort, there was no shortage of those eager to try their hand at her position.
She knew she must make a succession list. The problem was that her father’s list already contained the obvious successors, and all of them knew it. To make a list the same as his felt like the worst kind of defeat, and stiffened her resolve not to die anytime soon.
Innel was entirely out of the question. Naming him, should anyone find out—or worse yet, the list be needed—would incite a war among the royals, something they’d managed to avoid for some time. Or even a coup from the Houses, by whose collective patronage and loyalty the Anandynars kept their throne.
“Do you worry, Your Grace?”
Always. But Sachare meant Innel. A safer subject than her thoughts, certainly.
“Not with the numbers of troops he’s taken,” Cern said.
He had also insisted on taking the seer, leaving the mage with Cern. She would have preferred it the other way around, finding the black-robed man a disturbing presence in her palace, but she had accepted Innel’s reasoning.
“No one ever lost a battle by taking too much force,” Sachare said.
“Well, he’d better not lose this one.”
Sachare made a thoughtful, noncommittal sound, something she did well.
If Innel lost this, she was going to need to seriously consider the not-very-subtle advice of her ministers about replacing him as Lord Commander.
He would not take such a step backwards gracefully.
Now Sachare was sorting through Cern’s just-delivered clothes. She took a red-as-blood silk jacket, creases pressed to knife-sharp edges, shook it, turned it inside out, and did it again.
“You really think the laundry a threat?”
“Not everyone is as delighted to have you enthroned as I am, Your Grace,” she said, tracing the hems and collar by running the seams through her fingertips.
So many ways to be afraid for your life. As she was growing up, her father had told her that ruling was never as splendid or amusing as those watching seemed to think, but he himself had managed to make it seem otherwise with his feasts and hunts and campaigns. She had not believed anything he said anyway, because it was clear he did not care much about the inconveniences of the truth, and that he would give himself every advantage no matter who might pay the price.
Like her mother. She pushed the thought away.
Now that Cern held the throne—for however long that lasted—she discovered her father had been telling the truth about how unpleasant it was, at least. Ruling was far from glorious.
Really, it wasn’t even much fun.
She was beginning to understand his various indulgences. Why not suck the marrow from every moment you could? Otherwise life reduced itself to a constant calculation of risk and reward and struggle and little else.
Could she take a stroll outside? Not if fog clung to stone walkways where shadowy corners could hide threats, or if the sun shone too brightly and her guards might be momentarily blinded. Should the Ulawesan envoy be allowed to petition her in person, accomplishing a more favorable agreement with that wealthy Perripin state by flattering the envoy? Not if he had never been in the royal presence before, and certainly not with that many retainers by his side.
Sachare gave a small cry.
“What?” Cern asked.
“A pin,” Sachare said, sucking at her index finger. “An accident. Most likely.” She examined the offending bit of metal. “But this”—and here Sachare jabbed the air in Cern’s direction with the pin—“could as easily have been a spring-snap coated in a tincture designed to take your mind and rot it from the inside like a bad fruit.”
“Thank you for giving me more nightmares, Sacha.”
“My pleasure, Your Grace.”
“You seem healthy enough.”
“These things take time,” Sachare said dryly and resumed her inspection. She glanced up a moment, as if checking to see that Cern was still there.
Because she might escape? Climb out the window? Somehow wander off alone?
Stop that, she told herself sternly. If she could not trust Sachare, then she was truly lost, and her best hope was for a quick and painless death.
With a snap Sachare shook out a magenta tunic trimmed in lace overstitch and a repeating brocade of the monarchy’s sigil.
“Yes, my lady?”
Cern had been staring. “I envy you your long hair, Sacha.” A small thing. A tiny freedom.
Sachare’s face showed mild confusion. “Surely now you can wear your hair any way you choose.”
Cern’s hair had been cut too short to gather since she was old enough to walk; a practical cut, bangs at an angle that became more pronounced as she got older, allowing one short, token lock at the right side that might be tied or braided in decoration.
“Think of the many images of the Grandmother Queen. I can no more change my haircut than I can change my family’s colors.”
Sachare held up the magenta tunic. “So—a little?”
“A little,” Cern allowed.
A small chuckle from her chamberlain. Her friend, in truth, and possibly her only one. Certainly her closest companion of the most years. The boys of the Cohort, grown to men and heirs, were not friends, but something else.
Innel was a necessity first and foremost, though he would be more than the Grandmother’s Queen’s consorts, and more than her own father’s string of women.
Which put her in mind of her mother again.
As a child she had once secretly hoped to find that Restarn was not her father after all, but as she aged the facial resemblance became undeniable. Good thing, really; he might otherwise have disowned her as easily as he had discarded the many women he had bedded who were no more to him than dams to breed his hoped-for litters.
And all he had to show for it was a litter of one. Herself.
A knock at the door of the inner chambers. Sachare went to consult with the guards in the antechamber, the also-guarded space between the already-guarded hallway and her inner chambers.
So many chambers. So many protections.
As always Cern noted the voices, the sounds, the patterns, listening for aberrations.
Srel followed Sachare inside. This was rare, for Sachare to let anyone in her chambers. Something had happened. She fervently hoped it wasn’t bad news about Innel.
“Your Majesty,” Srel said with a bow.
“Speak.”
He took a breath and paused. Cern was used to this, but not from Srel, who usually knew better than to waste her time. It did nothing to reassure her.
“The Royal Consort’s sister,” he said. “Cahlen.”
“I know her name,” Cern snapped, tension overcoming her. “What happened?”
“She has taken a horse from the stables and left Yarpin at speed.”
“
What
?”
“As you may know, Your Grace, she is subject to—instabilities of temperament and inconsistencies of mind, so—”
Cern waved a hand. “Yes, yes. Where has she gone, and why?”
“We don’t know that. Yet. Quite. Though there seems to have been a message, arrived by bird.”
“What message?”
“Again, your majesty, I am so very sorry, but we don’t know. That the message arrived was confirmed by her assistants, but only the Consort’s sister read it. Cahlen took the message and apparently some of the feathers of the bird that brought it.”
“That’s”—Cern glanced at Sachare—“strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” Sachare confirmed.
“Send someone after her. Find out what happened.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“What direction did she go?”
“East, Your Majesty.”
Cern felt her mind wander again, and drew it back. The eparch of House Brewen was still speaking—how long had it been now?—a new posture with each point, holding his arm up, or a hand to his forehead, then a deep, ragged breath before resuming. Then the eparch of Finch would stand, interrupting, her high voice shrill as she became increasingly agitated. House Flore’s eparch shook his head at all this, making impressively loud clicking sounds to show his disapproval. With what, she wasn’t sure and didn’t really want to know.