The Stars Undying, page 11
“Perhaps not,” I said. “But a martyr will be seen. She will become a display that no one watching her will soon forget.”
He blinked at that, a slow, dark sweep of eyelashes. “Make myself a villain,” he said. “So now both your reputation and my own are entirely dependent upon your good opinion. Forgive me if I doubt that. It’s a Ceian habit, I’m afraid.”
“I forgive you,” I said. “It’s a queen’s habit to be generous to her guests.”
At that I saw his mouth twitch upward, though he stifled the movement almost at once. “Your guests,” he said. “Your palace, and your good opinion. No one could ever accuse you of not being possessive. I might even be forgiven for forgetting that you came here to ask for my help.”
“To negotiate your mediation, Commander,” I said, a little more sharply than I intended to. I was having some difficulty keeping control over my own mouth, which wanted to curl in reply.
“To negotiate my mediation, Patramata,” said Ceirran. “My deepest apologies. I’ll watch my words more carefully in your presence.”
I almost thought I was being condescended to again—there was an edge in his tone that suggested mockery—but his face made me uncertain: His body was as unmoving as a stone, his gaze intent. I met it unblinkingly, and saw some minute muscle at the corners of his eyes relax.
“You guard your words with so much care already,” I said. “I think if you had guarded your presence as closely, Commander, I might never have managed to arrive here to ask for help at all.”
His face broke open: a real smile, broad and unhidden. “Now that was very nearly a compliment,” he said.
“Does that mean you care for my opinion after all?” I said. Something funny was happening in the area just under my rib cage, a warm and peculiar adrenaline, sharper and stronger than wine. I thought briefly of the hard, terrible spikes of fear, which had stolen my breath every morning of these past months as soon as I opened my eyes, and dismissed the thought at once. What made me breathless now was clearer than fear, and had neither its sense nor its wisdom.
“What an interesting question,” Ceirran said. “Perhaps a better one would be whether you care for mine? You have burst in upon my conversation, put yourself entirely in my power, demanded my judgment in your favor, and insulted me openly. You know my reputation. How do you suppose I might answer that?”
Did he mean it? Was he threatening me? His smile had vanished. The silence was stretching, and he made no move to fill it. I was conscious of the weight of his anticipation, of his fierce and steady stare. I met it as I had done before, but this time he looked away abruptly, down toward his tablet, and my heart jumped.
“Might,” I said. “You might take me to my sister’s guards, and have me thrown in prison, as you have already threatened to do. You might shoot me where I stand. You might take me to Ceiao and parade me as a captured enemy. You might cut off my head and present it to my sister as a gift.”
At that last he looked back up at me, eyes narrowed. “I might,” he said.
“But you haven’t,” I said.
His head tilted. “And why shouldn’t I?”
I swallowed. My heart was singing in my ears, as high and thin as a piper.
“Because if you and I are at all the same,” I said, “I think I am the first person in a long while who has managed to surprise you.”
The commander leaned forward, his hands splayed on the desk and his face as blank as stone, and I nearly was afraid of him. Then he closed his eyes, and sat back again, and smiled a smaller smile.
“Do you know,” he said, “perhaps you’re right.”
Then he turned to the captain, who was staring. “Please leave us,” he said. “The princess of Szayet and I have much to discuss.”
“Ceirran,” said the woman.
“Captain,” said Ceirran. “You may stay outside the door, if it pleases you. Nevertheless I assure you that I do feel capable of defending myself against open attack by a weaponless refugee.”
The captain gave Ceirran a look, which had a great deal too much in it for me to read. “Sir,” she said, and strode from the room in a swirl of blue cloak. A moment later I heard her bootheels clacking down the corridor.
Ceirran pushed his chair away from the desk and stood. “I thought you might prefer not to be outnumbered,” he said.
“How generous,” I said.
He laughed. “I call that fair. You have risked it all, haven’t you? There’s five hundred of your sister’s sworn men between you and the door. If I opened it and shouted for Captain Ana to fetch any one of them, you’d be dead within a minute.”
“I would,” I said. “But you haven’t.”
“I haven’t,” he agreed, and circled slowly round the desk. He was not a thickset man, but even without the scars, it would have been plain he was a fighter: There was a presence to his body, a consciousness to how he moved and leaned and crossed his arms, that made him seem larger than he really was. “I suppose you’ve guessed what the queen has offered me.”
So she had already tried to cut her deal. “Arcelia is a fool,” I said.
“A rich fool,” said Ceirran, “if she can deliver.”
I had known Ceians at my father’s court. There had been nothing they loved better than a rich fool. Ceirran was watching me closely, now. I tried to picture him among them, tried to picture that sharp stare following me across my father’s crowded banquet hall, and my mind shied away.
“No one could deliver on that promise,” I said. “Not a single ingot of the cheapest iron will come onto any Szayeti beach without half the populace rioting. What you’d buy wouldn’t be treasure, but a bloody and expensive war. You’d lose the whole system for the sake of a plunder that would last three weeks.”
He inclined his head. “A fair answer,” he said.
“I should think so,” I said.
“Fair,” he said, “but too quick. Too confident. I would linger over it a little—I might even look sorry to deliver the bad news, if I felt I could manage it.” His mouth softened, though his eyes did not. “And another tell, Patramata,” he said, almost gently. “You avoid saying she. If discussing your usurper is so painful you cannot do it without wincing, you had better not let me know so soon.”
“I hadn’t—” I said, and then stopped when my voice caught.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t think you had realized.” He turned away and busied himself deliberately with his tablet.
The sudden absence of that gaze was like surfacing from water. Awareness surged back into my body, like blood returning to a limb. “Do not offer me pity,” I said harshly.
He stopped, though he did not turn. “I don’t pity you,” he said.
There was none of that terrible gentleness in his voice. There was no generosity in it at all. But still I said: “Then look at me.”
His hands on the tablet curled briefly into fists.
“I have been looking at you,” he said roughly.
I was conscious at first of a great heat in my face. Following it almost at once, so strong my ears nearly rang, was a fierce rush of deep and brilliant feeling, too unfamiliar and too savage for me to name as triumph. “Commander,” I began, and then, blindly, impulsively, “Ceirran—”
He winced. I was sorry for that, abruptly, in a way I did not entirely understand. Every inch of me felt a tender place, and I was still conscious of the tightness of the carpet, its heat and airlessness, its constriction of my lungs and hands. “Ceirran,” I went on, my heart still skipping with that brutish electricity, unable to see any other path forward except to strike home, “isn’t there anything I might say? Isn’t there any bargain you’d strike with me—isn’t there anything I could offer you—anything I can do for you, to convince you to help me—”
“What an absolutely merciless person you are,” he said softly.
I was very nearly sorry for that, too. It was not the question, which had hung between us since the moment I had rolled out of the carpet. Rather it was the fact that I had said it aloud at last, and there was no taking it back now.
“Ceirran,” I said again, and stepped forward, meaning to set a hand on his arm, but he turned then, and came toward me.
There was a startling grace to the way Matheus Ceirran moved. It was not at all like the grace I had learned, carefully and diligently, in the ballrooms of this very palace. Rather it was of a piece with that consciousness that made him seem greater than his actual size: the certainty that he could move with great speed, or great violence, and what was notable was not his potential for savagery but his restraint over it. A hairsbreadth before his nearness might have been called crowding, he stopped before my face.
“Tell me to believe you,” he said. “About your sister—about your treasure. Tell me to believe you.”
I wet my lips, almost more nervousness than show, and watched his eyes flicker. “Believe me,” I said.
“Tell me to trust you,” he murmured.
“Trust me,” I said.
“Tell me to give you the Szayeti throne,” he said.
“Ceirran,” I said, more breath than sound, “give me whatever I want.”
His mouth parted a little. Then he said, “Tell me something. Tell me the truth.”
“What do you want me to say?” I said.
He said, “Did you come here to try to seduce me?”
I looked him in the eye. Then I let my gaze travel, very slowly, down the length of his body: the glitter in his eyes, the breadth of his shoulders, the faint stubble peppering his jaw. Ceirran held very still. When my eyes drew back up to his face, he exhaled silently.
I said, “Will you let me?”
He said, a little roughly: “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Oh,” I said. “All right,” and I reached behind myself, and undid the little knot that held my robe together, and let it slither to the floor.
Ceirran’s face went absolutely blank. I said, “Let me know when you do.”
He looked up at the ceiling and mouthed something. If he had not been Ceian, I would have thought it was a prayer. “‘Crude,’” he said despairingly, and lifted his fingers to the edge of my jaw.
“Oh, please, Commander,” I said, my eyes wide, “tell me how you would have done it differently,” and he was laughing as his mouth met my throat.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
CEIRRAN
She lay boneless on the floor, afterward, with one knee hitched up and her breaths slowing minute by minute. I watched her from the corner of my eye, and after only a few seconds of my observation the faint line between her eyebrows disappeared, and she tilted her chin a little, and the soft curve of her jaw caught the light. I leaned over and cupped her cheek in my hand.
“It’s a lovely picture,” I said.
I would not have seen her mouth twitch if I had not been looking. “I thought it might be too much to hope for a moment’s truce,” she said.
“I could say the same,” I said. “Another man might be insulted by it, princess—how relentlessly you press at my borders.”
“Your borders,” she said, laughed disbelievingly, and opened her eyes. The sun was a cool living white on the walls and the desk and on the planes of her face, and it hollowed her irises into metal where the light struck them through. “And would you like me to stop?”
That was pressing, too, but she knew it—she knew I knew it—she was smiling again, and I bent to kiss her mouth, helpless not to and more than a little amused by it. When I withdrew, she stood, and picked up my cloak where I had discarded it beside the desk and drew it around herself, and went to the high window and twitched aside the curtain there. Her mouth worked, either in thought or disappointment. I wondered which.
“It doesn’t escape me that you have made me no promises,” she said.
I stood and went to her, and peered over her shoulder at the sea of milling soldiers. The fabric of my cloak was rough, and thin enough that I could feel beneath it her warm shoulder blades, pressing into my chest. I curved a hand round her waist, and let it slip forward and down, along the swell of her stomach.
She let the curtain fall, and I could feel the edge of her smile. “I might have known a general would never really rest,” she said. “Why? Is it too like being unprotected?”
“On the contrary,” I said. “What protection do I have left? You caught me out of my armor, and now you have stolen my cloak. I don’t doubt that if I had a crown, you would lift it from my head.”
At that she went still, and shrugged the cloak off so it slipped between our bodies to the tiled floor. “Is that what Ceiao expects of me?” she said, without turning her head.
“No,” I said, and bent, enjoying the pleasant tiredness in my muscles, and lifted the cloak and tucked it around her bare shoulders again. “Take me lightly. I haven’t even given you a Szayeti crown yet.”
She did turn to face me then, and she was smiling. “So it is yet,” she said.
It had been some time since I had walked into so plain a trap. I looked away, but it was too late: She had seen me smiling, too. “It doesn’t escape me that I have made you no promises,” I said, and spread my fingers out over the warmth of her arms beneath the cloth.
“Haven’t you?” she said. “Let me see if I can find them,” and stood up on her toes, and fit her mouth to mine. Behind her, the cloak crumpled to the floor again, forgotten.
Before, we had been on my desk, her legs spread and her head thrown back, her long black hair brushing the surface of my tablet as it swayed back and forth. Now I pushed her gently against the wall beside the window, one hand on her shoulder and the other on her hip. Her mouth was curved again, but there was a curious distance to how she looked at me. I felt as if I were being watched through a pane of glass.
“So ask, princess,” I said, and let go of her hip and slid my hand across her belly, my palm broad and rough against her soft skin. “Demand a promise from me.”
She said nothing, still, but her breath gave her away, hitching and irregular. I could feel her hiccuping pulse under my hands. Her mouth was a little parted.
“Say, Promise me soldiers,” I said, and moved my hand down and down. Her pulse, beneath it, beat harder. “Say, Promise me a crown,” and I curled my fingers, and began to move them.
“And what then?” she said roughly. I bent to kiss the sensitive spot on her neck, so that she would not see me smile, and felt her shudder against my body. “Do you mean to tell me this is an exchange?”
“An exchange?” I murmured against her jaw. “Of course. What else would it be?”
Then her hand was between us, covering mine. I stilled, but she only laughed breathlessly and pushed it down harder; after a moment I understood and began to move my hand to the rhythm she set me, slow and steady.
“A collusion,” she said into my ear, and spread her legs, and it was not thought but instinct that fit me between them.
The next morning Anita sulked for six hours, a new record, and then sauntered up behind me while I was locking the door of the Yellow Room. “All right,” she said. “What are you going to do with her now? I don’t suppose you can keep her locked in a spare office forever.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said. “In fact, I was imagining I would put the matter of her queenship to the priests.”
If I had been hoping to surprise her, I failed. She smirked and fell in beside me as I turned toward the staircase down to the lower levels of the palace. “They might drum you out of the Merchants’ Council,” she said.
“They won’t, I think,” I said. “A rather unstable woman, the current queen. Not precisely the kind of partner Ceiao would like to have in the region, especially not if Kutayet appears threatening. She may have made attractive promises, but can she deliver, et cetera, et cetera? Does that sound convincing to you?”
“If it doesn’t, I can think of something that will,” she said, and then, when my stride stumbled, “Don’t give me that look. You know what I mean.”
I looked straight ahead at an elaborate tapestry of what appeared to be a Szayeti king wrestling a lion. At last I said, “I would prefer not to use her death for this.”
She was quiet as we passed through the door at the end of the hallway and made our way down the spiral staircase. The whole palace seemed to be nothing but staircases and hallways: Three centuries of limited space had led Dom Caviro to build its house up, rather than out, and it made my legs ache. “Ceirran,” she said, “how much of this is about sentiment? You don’t have to lie this time.”
“Sentiment for Quinha,” I said, “or sentiment for Gracia?”
“Oh, she’s Gracia now?” said Anita.
“I’m afraid she will remain Gracia,” I said. “At least for the foreseeable future. If the priests perform as she expects, I think she will be a better friend to us than her sister would have been—no matter the sister’s promises. She is at least a reasonable woman.”
“I don’t doubt she is,” said Anita. “But that’s not what this is about, is it? You like her.”
I shot her a hard look, but she only smiled.
“I like her, too,” she said.
“You hardly know her,” I said, surprised. We had at last reached the bottom of the staircase, which turned outward into a long entrance hall, nearly all marble floors and walls and pillars. Only the ceiling was ordinary limestone, painted with stylized scenes of Sintian soldiers marching over mountains and rivers. At the end were a wide pair of double doors, beside which four Szayeti soldiers stood, faces impassive.
When I pushed the doors open, I looked down the long expanse of the Bolvardo del Tombo, which stretched before me through hundreds of cross streets until it came to a point at the thin silver hem of the sea. Along it, Alectelans drifted by in groups, ducked into shops, sat on steps nibbling on bread from street carts. There were plenty of my soldiers, too, sitting on the sidewalk out of the way of the scampering crab-litters and drinking beer. Those few near enough to see me jumped to attention and saluted guiltily. At the end of the road nearest us, standing at the base of the palace steps with the hood of her robe over her head and her arms crossed, was an elderly Szayeti woman half my height.
