The Silences of Home (21 page)

He now spent all his afternoons and nights with the selkesh and the scribes, and some of his mornings in class. This meant that he had lost the thread of Ladhra’s daily doings, which made him irritable with his men. This irritability in turn made him impatient with himself, for it proved that his shadowing of the Princess had become a necessity, a dependence, rather than the voyeuristic pleasure it had once been.

He remembered how amusing it had been to compose those first letters to her, years ago. He had laughed aloud writing them, as he knew she had laughed reading them. He had planned to needle her, to work his way into her life and observe her reaction—this poised, proud girl who would be the next lying queen. But as he continued to write and she continued to laugh, something had changed. He saw her scorn as she read his letters or spoke to him, and his amusement turned slowly to anger. And then one day, standing before her among the shadows of the Queenswood, she had said, “I could never love someone like you—forgive me, but this is the truth.” Her pity had been new and unexpected, as had the desire that wracked him then, along with the rage—shocking, stabbing desire like a sudden illness or a wound. He had turned and left her. Later he had been proud of his restraint.
I was my own master
, he thought,
despite my need. It must remain thus
. For the exercise too had changed. He courted her scorn and pity because he knew that he would master her someday. When he and his scribes revealed the truth of the Queen’s corruption and the realm convulsed in chaos, then he would take Ladhra and watch her despair.

The arrival of the selkesh army had made Baldhron’s nebulous plan an achievable one. He taught them and fed them and assuaged, with infinite patience, their growing restlessness. He told them that they would wait until Queenswrit Eve to attack. He explained that the palace and city were poorly guarded on this night, for Queensfolk were inevitably drunk and sleeping by midnight, after the earlier festivities. He declared to his own men that, by striking on this night, they would forever alter the meaning of the date, which was so sacred, so beloved of the Queen’s ignorant people. The new rulers would change its name and its memory; from then on it might be called Scribeseve, or something to do with Truth or Victory. This idea so thrilled him that he risked selkesh discontent. He knew this and regretted it, but also knew that the revolt could take place at no other time.

“Wait!” he commanded the selkesh over and over, as their bodies hollowed and their eyes darkened. “Wait one more month. We can only triumph on this night, when the moon is dark and the city is weakened. Believe me: this will be the perfect moment.”

He would shake her awake. Perhaps there would already be screaming; perhaps Ladhra would be sitting up, confused, rubbing her hands over her eyes. In that case he would push her back again and pin her with his body. He would not cover her mouth; he would let her scream until she realized that no one would come for her, until the other screams made her own more like the mewling of a kitten. She would be broken even before she knew what was happening in her palace, her city, her realm.

He envisioned going to her in more and more detail, until this unspoken plan was as intricate and delicious as the other. Only his certainty of success and imminence enabled him to sacrifice the afternoon hours that he had often spent as Ladhra’s shadow. Soon she would be his whenever he wished; his army needed him now.

One night the men beneath the city seemed more content, quieter than usual. Most of the selkesh were sleeping; Baldhron did not allow himself to think that this was due to the lethargy of confinement and slow starvation. His own men were mostly above, since he had ordered them to be more cautious in these last few weeks and to remain visible to any who might be questioning their recent absences. Baldhron murmured to one of his scribes that he would be back in a few hours, well before dawn. Then he swam to the marketplace’s well shaft.

Why go up now?
he thought as he drew on one of the dry tunics that hung at the base of the shaft. The sky was only a little lighter than the air beneath the ground—because of the moon, which was full. Deep night already, moon risen and bright.
She’ll hardly be about at this hour
. But it had been so many weeks since he had lingered at her tower door, and perhaps tonight he’d go further, tamper with the lock every time the guard turned his back, run up the twisting stairs to stand against the door to her chamber. Baldhron climbed the well shaft as swiftly as he had once scrambled up the cliff above his cave.

When the moon waned to invisibility, the palace would be his. He attempted to imagine this as the Queensguards nodded to him and opened the doors, and as he slipped through the darkened corridors and took his customary place behind the statue of the Eighteenth Queen. He had spied and hidden for so many years that an end to such an existence was almost impossible to envision. But he did. He half closed his eyes and saw himself striding down the middle of the hallway, smiling at the guards, who would bow from the waist. . . .

Ladhra’s door opened. Baldhron stiffened and watched the Princess pull her door quickly shut behind her, unnoticed by the guard who was fifteen paces away, with his back to her. Baldhron’s surprise held him motionless for a few long moments, and she was nearly at the corridor’s turning before he leapt after her. He knew the guard was about to begin his march back to the door. Baldhron ran, glad for his bare feet and the swimming that also gave him speed on land.

She was difficult to follow, for she was moving even more rapidly than he was. He tried to keep an appropriate distance between them—and then she would round another corner and he would have to sprint to keep up. Once he hurtled around one such corner and nearly collided with her. She was standing with her arm extended, holding a torch—which he had not noticed until now—to another that stood, lit, in a wall bracket. He waved his arms violently in order to stop himself before he touched her. Somehow she did not hear him or see his ridiculous flailing. He followed more carefully after this, even when she opened a door he had never seen before, one hidden by flowering vines as thick and heavy as a wall hanging, as he discovered when he pushed his way through them. The door was low and unlocked, and opened onto a stairway that stank of sand rats and mildew. Baldhron eased the door open and shut so that there would be no wind to tug at the torch flame—but she was already at the foot of the stairs, disappearing into a tunnel. He thought,
Sweet Drenhan, how have I overlooked this place?
and felt a prickling that was both excitement and anger.

He was calm and lucid until the moment she stopped at another door and raised her hand to it. As she did this, he remembered the words of a fishperson he had spoken to in the marketplace. “The selkesh man is alive—ill, but alive—and being held in a chamber that is not known to any palace folk except the Queen and her family.”

“And how do you know this?” Baldhron had demanded.

The fishperson had stared at him with its inscrutable underwater eyes and said, “Some questions cannot be answered and should never be asked. Would you, for example, answer me if I asked why you and your comrades throw vast quantities of food down the wells here every night? And why you slither down after it?” Baldhron had stared back at the fishperson, his voice vanished. “Well, then,” it had continued, “let us not concern ourselves with such questions. Now, if you please, my payment. . . .”

When Ladhra entered this new door, Baldhron began to feel dizzy, so dizzy in fact that he did not think to hide himself, in case she returned the way she had come. She did not; she turned the other way when she finally emerged again, her arm wound around the selkesh prisoner’s waist. Baldhron watched them lurch almost out of sight; then he stumbled forward. He followed, blind to the strange tunnels through which he was passing, seeing only her skin and the other’s, her shadow on the wall, rippling and bending and larger because it was not just hers. He halted when she opened a door at the top of another stairway. He watched her enter the chamber or corridor beyond, with the water-man beside her. When the door had closed, Baldhron stepped back into the tunnel and waited. He might have waited for minutes or hours; he had no idea afterward. He shivered and did not think to blame himself, as he normally would have, for this evidence of physical and mental weakness. He did not think at all.

When he heard the door above him open again, he pressed himself against a wall within a side tunnel. This time the water-man walked ahead of Ladhra. He was no longer stooped and shambling, and his breathing, which before had rasped, was now silent. They returned to the prison room and stood together. The water-man said, “Thank you, Ladhra.” She reached out her hands, not to support or aid him, this time, not for any other reason than to touch him: his hips, wrapped in strips of cloth that looked wet-dark, and his chest, against which she laid her cheek and her long black hair.

Baldhron’s dizziness evaporated. He leaned forward so that he would see clearly what the water-man would do, where he would touch her before Baldhron launched himself into the light. But the prisoner did not touch her. He stood very still, then moved her hands off his hips and turned into the room behind him. The door closed with a deep, shuddering sound, and Ladhra stared at it. Baldhron could not see her eyes, but he could see the rigid bones of her hands.

His instincts, restored and perhaps even keener, told him to remain concealed, told him to pause and consider how he would wound her best, now that she had twisted the threads of his plans. So he stayed there as she turned and walked slowly toward the stairs that would return her to the moonlit palace. He stayed there after that, so still that a sand rat drew very near and snuffled around his feet.

When he finally did move, he ran. He ran along corridors and covered tower bridges until the doors he sought were before him. The four Queensguards there stepped toward him, arrows nocked to bowstrings.

“Please,” Baldhron gasped, “I must see the Queen.”

The day after Ladhra took him to the room with the deep fountain seemed like the longest Leish had yet passed as a captive. He tried to hear the song of his brother’s army, so that his thoughts would be appropriately occupied—but he could not. He had heard no selkesh blood below the city since he had left his people by the stinking pools.
Maybe I cannot hear this song because we do not belong to this place
, he thought, and imagining Mallesh’s fury distracted Leish for a time. He tried then to hear the fountain and the underground river that fed it, but these notes were difficult to concentrate on. Leish reached for a different song, fainter but possibly more compelling. When even the delicate, distant music of Nasranesh could not hold his attention, he curled up and tried only to sleep.

The fountain chamber had looked different in the darkness. At first, weak and confused, he had not recognized it. But then Ladhra had led him past the thrones, and he had remembered them in grey daylight, and the sound of these fountains and channels that had seemed so loud as Dashran bled silently onto the stones. Leish had almost fled after he remembered this, even when she spoke and he realized what she was giving him—perhaps especially then. For how could he accept this gift from her when she had stood beside the Queen and watched Dashran die?

The pool was quite deep. All his misery had fled as his skin and lungs breathed the water, which was somehow fresh and clean. It had taken him a long time to notice the bottom of the pool. He wove slowly down to it and looked at the layers of bones and bleached coral, and suddenly the water tasted foul. He had plucked up four shells for Ladhra, since they were the only beautiful dead things here, and he did want—Nasran help him—to give her something beautiful.

I am thankful to her
, he thought as they returned to his prison.
I am strong again
—and he had hated his need and his pleasure.

Leish sat up with a groan. He touched a hand to the place where her head had rested and summoned again images of Dashran dying, and the selkesh—his friends, his cousins, his brother—swimming beneath the city. He waited for these images to restore—or, more accurately, engender—a feeling of purpose. This did not happen—for he also waited for her.

As if she will return. I turned away from her. Even if she did return, I wouldn’t be able to explain this. She should never come here again. Soon my brother and Baldhron will end their waiting and attack, and either she or I will die. She should stay away.

He was still awake at midnight when his door swung open. He rose as she entered, and because he could not explain to her in words she would understand, he crossed the floor and fell to his knees before her. She put her hands in his hair, and he wrapped his arms around her hips. She rocked him, so gently that at first he thought the motion was only his own body’s shaking. She raised him up until he stood against her, wound in her arms and her unbound hair and her breathing. After a time she eased herself away and tugged on his hands, and he smiled at her smile and went with her.

This time she swam too. He surfaced after a brief, deep dive and saw her in the water, still clinging to the edge of the pool. He laughed and dove again, and she met him beneath. She clutched his waist and burrowed her head against his belly, and he drew her to the other side of the pool so quickly that she did not need a breath. He lifted her into the air and she spluttered, coughed, put her hands on either side of his jaw and pulled herself up to kiss him. When they drew apart, he watched her take a breath; then he took them both beneath again and found her mouth and her skin. She bit his lip when she needed air—so soon—and he let her slip from his arms. He saw her surface through the moonlit ripple of the water; saw her legs, which had kicked so frantically, go still. He saw her hands reach for the rim of the pool. He saw that she was not waiting for him or looking at him, and he took one last water-breath and kicked himself upward to find out why.

The Queen was standing there, so close that he could see the sheen of the pearls that held her shoes closed.
Not sandals
, he noted, numbly. Pale, white, soft things—shoes for a bedroom, for night and privacy. He moved his eyes from them, knowing he should not, knowing he must—but she was not looking at him.

She spoke her daughter’s name, soft and low. Ladhra did not stir in the water beside him. Only when Galha called out over her shoulder did Ladhra move—abruptly, clumsily. She was looking where Galha had looked. She fumbled her way out of the fountain without shifting her gaze. Leish saw something in her face that made him want to bury himself among the ribcages and the hollow pores of coral at the bottom of the pool. But he rose up after her and straightened, dripping, on the stone, and saw the man who was standing between the thrones.

“You,” Ladhra said, the word thin and vanishing as the water she had borne with her into the air. Baldhron inclined his head in a gesture that could almost have been one of humility or graciousness. She clenched her teeth, which had begun to chatter. “Why is he here?” she said, turning, looking at last into her mother’s face.

“He informed me of—”

“Yes,” Ladhra interrupted. Her bones seemed to be chattering now, grinding inside her skin. “Of course he did. But why did you allow him to come here with you?” She did not recognize Galha’s expression. She expected fury or indignation or at the very least disappointment, and she knew what forms these would take—but she saw none of them.

“He is here,” the Queen said quietly, “because he cares more about this land than you do. You needed to see this.”

Ladhra heard herself laugh. “Really. Really, Baldhron? Is this so?”

He smiled and moved his head again. Silver light shivered from his eyes to the pitted flesh of his cheek. “It is as the Queen has said,” he replied evenly. Ladhra thought,
Nara and I used to laugh at him
. She thought too of the man who stood beside her, and wanted to scream,
I’ve been such a fool
,
Nara
, as if her voice would reach east, all the way to the sea.

“There are two guards outside this chamber,” Galha said. “They will take you to your tower.”

“And lock me in?” Ladhra said, cringing at her petulance but too cold and distant to repress it.

“You know that I must,” Galha said, and these words trembled a bit. “Though it grieves me. It does grieve me, Ladhra.”

Ladhra shook her head and half turned so that she would not have to see her mother’s eyes. She met Leish’s instead. “And Leish?” she asked, still looking at him. “What will you do to him?” The silence was so long that she glanced back at Galha.

“Go now,” the Queen said, and Ladhra finally heard anger, finally saw it in her lips and the skin beside her eyes.

“I am to blame,” Ladhra said. “Do not—”

“
Go
,” said Galha.

Ladhra walked past her mother, around the fountain, over the bridge that led to the thrones. Baldhron stepped back as if he were giving her room to pass. “My lady,” he murmured, and she ran the last few steps to the door, where the guards were waiting for her.

“Tomorrow?” Mallesh repeated.

“Yes.” Baldhron had already said this several times.

They were all assembled—as many of them as would fit—in the largest chamber where they had met that first day. Mallesh had no idea how long ago that had been—one month, two, three? Would the fireblossoms have fallen yet around the gathering pool? The only thing he was certain of, as he looked at his men, was that they had been down here long enough to grow thin and pale and sick. Even this chamber, where the selkesh did not usually come, stank of them. Their own place was worse. When Baldhron had grimaced and demanded to know what the odour was and how to remove it, Mallesh had said, “It is our skin rotting. We need air as much as water—fresh air, not what is in these tunnels. To be rid of this smell we must go above.”

“Well, then,” Baldhron had said, “I suppose we must learn to endure it.”

But now, weeks later, Baldhron was saying something different.
He
was different: loud and flushed, gesticulating at the maps and weapons that hung from the stone walls. He declared that the plan had changed. Something had happened that would distract the Queen; she was no longer thinking about the selkesh army. This army would attack tomorrow.

“But,” Mallesh said, groping for words through the aching of his head, innards, flesh, “you were so certain before that we had to wait. What is this thing that has happened?”

He saw Baldhron’s flush deepen. “I cannot say exactly—just that it has to do with the Queen’s family. For the first time in years, she is concerned with something private that will keep her from noticing other things until it is too late.”

“But the guards,” Mallesh said, thinking more clearly now because there was something wrong with Baldhron’s words, and the voice with which he spoke them. “You told us the palace on Queenswrit Eve would be quiet, hardly guarded—but that is not so now, even if the Queen is distracted, as you say. Why—”

“Listen,” Baldhron interrupted, and the muttering that had risen with Mallesh’s words subsided. “My scribes have spent these months feeding you, teaching you about the palace and the realm and the use of real weapons. You are ready. But if you do not wish to join us, after all our efforts to aid you, we will do this thing alone.” Now it was the scribes who murmured. Baldhron swept his gaze over their ranks until they were silent again. “I have led you this far with as much wisdom as I have. My first plan was promising—but the mark of a great leader is his ability and willingness to change his strategy, if such a change will lead to a better outcome. I ask you to trust me as you have until now. If you cannot, we will bid you farewell and carry out the attack ourselves.”

Leish
, Mallesh thought, and wondered with a tired, bruised pang how many of the other selkesh were thinking this. Leish would have known what to do and say. He would have led, in his quiet way, even though leading had never been a thing he had wanted.
May Nasran wash me with forgiveness
, Mallesh thought,
for I am glad he is not here, and I have hoped for his death, yet he is the only one who could help me now.

“And if we do join you tomorrow,” Mallesh said, “and the attack fails, what then? For as you know,” he continued quickly when Baldhron glared down at him from his place on the bridge, “a great leader should consider all possible outcomes.”

Baldhron cleared his throat. “Yes. Of course, yes. If . . . such a thing transpired, we would use these tunnels to reach the Sarhenna River. This river and its tributaries would lead us swiftly into wild places where we would not be found. From these places we could escape the realm.”

Mallesh nodded, as others did. Even if Baldhron had only now formulated this plan, as his voice and manner suggested, it was a good one.
Though I will not flee
, Mallesh thought.
If I do not conquer here, I will die here
.

“If you want to speak to your people,” Baldhron said, “we will await you in—”

“No,” Mallesh said, straightening his cramped, weak limbs beneath the water. “We do not need to discuss this. It has been our desire since we arrived to attack this city. You convinced us to delay, now you command us to proceed. We will do so. It is what we longed for even before we left the shores of our own land.”

He watched his men shift and smile. He saw their exhaustion and their hunger smooth away a bit as they rose up from the pool to grasp the swords and straight daggers and axes the scribes had taught them to use. They already carried their own hooked knives, honed and hidden against their chests. They all looked at Mallesh, their oozing, stinking skin aglow almost as the metal was.

Mallesh also rose and took up his sword. He faced Baldhron across the water. “Tomorrow,” he said.