Major Pieces, page 4
“My . . . targets,” Lisinthir said. “You want me to waltz into the capital and bag one of these women like a deer to restart the House that died under you?”
His father shrugged. “If it helps you to think of it that way, then yes.”
“And why shouldn’t I marry, in my own time, a woman who will take me into her House? Presumably one still viable?”
“Because then you wouldn’t be Head of Household, boy! How daft do you have to be to understand that? Or do you want to be some woman’s servant all your days?”
Lisinthir nudged one of the portraits, shifting it in its wooden hole. So much, so clear. “I don’t want to go to the capital, my Lord Father. I am happy here.”
“Are you?” he asked.
Damn him. “Happier than I will be chasing a widow three times my age or wrestling a luckless maiden into a cheap marriage.”
“You’d have me believe you are bereft of ambition,” Father said. “I’m not stupid, boy. This little lodge of yours is all your mother has to give you, and you know as well as I do that hunting for pelts isn’t going to earn you an estate big enough for your tastes. Don’t try to tell me you’d be happy here for the next thousand years.”
“I’m not without ambition, no,” Lisinthir said, pushing the board back across the desk. “But this is your ambition, Lord Father, not mine. You want to re-start your dead House? Divorce my mother and go widow-hunting yourself.”
“You will go,” Imthereli said. “Because if you don’t, we will disinherit you.”
Lisinthir froze.
“Don’t even bother with ‘Mother wouldn’t allow that.’ Your mother thinks it’s past time for you to go to court and find a bride. If you refuse, she’ll find a better use for this land.”
“She wouldn’t.”
“We would be better served by the money to be gained by selling it than by keeping it,” his father said. “Your mother might be royal Galare, boy, but her branch of the family is a weak, far shoot off that trunk.” He nodded to the pouch. “I’m giving you a choice. Go to court and choose a girl who will let you run your own Household . . . or find some rich family who’ll pay your mother a fat sum to put you in their daughter’s bed, and under their thumbs.” He grinned without humor. “Your choice.”
“I see,” Lisinthir said.
His father pushed the board back over the desk. Lisinthir could have pushed it back, but didn’t.
The Slave Queen knew Emerald had come up the stairs, but did not turn to look at her. It was not that the view compelled her, nor that the female distressed her . . . but rather that after long revolutions struggling, she was no longer interested in pushing against the females of the harem. They had ostracized her as the most debased and the most privileged of the females in the Emperor’s Tower. She was numb now to their company.
“Do you fear to fall out the window?” Emerald asked. The slight impertinence of the question intrigued the Slave Queen, for while the women often used personal pronouns among one another, with her they constructed sentences without them as they spoke around males, as if reinforcing her status as an object.
“No,” the Slave Queen said.
“Is it because you were born winged?”
“No,” the Slave Queen said.
“That’s good,” Emerald said.
The Slave Queen finally looked at the other female and chanced a similar intimacy. “You confuse with your words.”
“It would be pitiful poetry if having been born winged gave you any emotion you still claimed now that your wings are the Emperor’s.”
They all said it that way, when they said it at all. “Her wings were the Emperor’s.” As if he’d cut them off entirely instead of leaving them on her back, their decorative perforations laced with jewels and lacquered so the delicate designs wouldn’t tear.
As for being pitiful—the Slave Queen went back to staring at the vista through the window. It was insulting, but also true.
Emerald stared out the window with her. The attempt at camaraderie surprised the Slave Queen, particularly since the other Chatcaavan could not disguise her trembling. The Slave Queen’s display chamber occupied the topmost room in the second highest tower of the palace. The drop to the cliff’s edge and then to the sea was so far that clouds sometimes obscured the tower’s base. The typical Chatcaavan female, born with four arms instead of arms and wings, preferred nests to heights. And yet there Emerald stood. Confused, the Slave Queen looked at her again.
Emerald met her eyes, then looked out the window.
“Should I come away to the pillows?” the Slave Queen asked.
Emerald stared at her with wide green eyes, the eyes she’d been tagged for. The Slave Queen wondered if referring to herself in the first person had been too much.
“The pillows are soft,” Emerald said, composing herself.
The Slave Queen stood, then, mutilated wings tightly folded against her back and tail curled beneath them. She followed Emerald to the depression in the center of the room, the one that was supposed to simulate a female’s nesting spot and succeeded only in reminding the Slave Queen of the narrow cage that was the life of a Chatcaavan female.
Emerald settled on a pillow, one set of hands clasped in her lap and the other set resting on top of them. “There is a request,” she said.
The Slave Queen canted her head.
“The title of Mother is unfilled.”
“Ah,” the Slave Queen said and leaned back against the walls of the nest. She should have known; there were very few requests that she had the power to fill. She studied the female with a different eye. Emerald was attractive—no female in the harem was unattractive to the Emperor who’d collected them—instead, the Slave Queen considered the breadth of Emerald’s hips, the sheen of her eyes. The area where the skin of the stomach and sides pebbled into scales was smooth and brightly colored: a good sign of health.
“You seem able,” the Slave Queen said. “One presumes you are willing.”
“It would be a great pleasure to serve the Emperor,” Emerald said.
“And win a title,” the Slave Queen replied.
Emerald fidgeted, a twitch of tail tip. “A title is always desirable.”
“Is it?” the Slave Queen asked.
Emerald stared at her and trembled. “Mistress!”
“Mother is a good title,” the Slave Queen said before Emerald’s distress could overwhelm her. “You seem a good candidate. Is there another who competes with you?”
“None at this time,” Emerald says. “The others have fear now after Mother’s last birth.”
“Ah,” the Slave Queen said. The last Mother had died bearing the Emperor two angry sons, so large they’d looked like yearlings rather than infants. The amount of blood and the constant screaming had sent most of the harem into a frenzy, and one of the females had prophesied that the Emperor’s seed had grown too violent to be safely fostered in any female’s belly. It was ridiculous superstition, but fortunately the Emperor didn’t care: he already had a sufficiency of children and thus no pressing need for another Mother-candidate.
Still, to become Mother was to leave behind the burdensome sameness of a tag. And the Emperor always favored the Mother while she remained the Mother.
“You have permission to make the attempt,” the Slave Queen said.
Emerald inclined her long neck and stood to go.
“Wait,” the Slave Queen said. She climbed out of the depression and walked into the bathing chamber. When she returned, she had the box in her hands. Emerald watched uncertainly as the Slave Queen opened it and withdrew a necklace. She had only one set of hands, so she did not pass it to Emerald with the grace that Emerald received it, lifting it so she could see the dangling loop of electrum, a pendant carved in an elaborate loop that only just closed at the top. In its center was a dependent opal.
“It is fragile,” the Slave Queen said. “But it is for luck. And while you wear it, the Emperor will know what you attempt and give you special favor.”
“Mistress!” Emerald exclaimed, astonished.
“Also, though it would be wise not to allow anyone to know, if you appear on the mender’s floor wearing it, the mender will give you specifics to help you conceive.”
Emerald clasped the necklace to her breasts, all four hands over one another. “This is a significant gift—”
“It is for the use of the Mother, or the Mother-in-progress,” the Slave Queen said. “You are now the Mother-in-progress. It is yours.”
“I have never had a thing of my own,” Emerald said, looking at the pendant. “I will cherish it while it is mine.”
“Good,” the Slave Queen said. “Now go and make yourself acceptable to our master.”
The female looked at her. “You could be crueler.”
“I could be, but I’m not,” the Slave Queen said, and cared not at all that she made of herself a male by using such language. “Go.”
Emerald hurried away, her clawed toes scratching on the stone steps on the way down to the harem proper. The Slave Queen sighed and returned to her sky-gazing.
Disengage
Before the events of both Even the Wingless and Earthrise
“You are a dancer, a dueler and the last son of the House of the striking drake. You will acquit yourself magnificently.”
“You must do something about that man,” Elenoriel Sora Mathanith said passionately. “He is a menace!”
Liolesa did not look up from the missive she had been reading before the woman intruded on her study. “Two weeks ago you raised no objection when he put a point through Gaviin Telde Sovenil.”
Elenoriel’s cheeks flamed bright pink—alas, not shame, but outrage. Shame would have behooved her more… but then, Elenoriel, for all her steadfast allegiance to the Galare dynasty, was a woman ruled by her impulses. And little else. “Don’t be vulgar, my lady. The past hardly matters. What does is that this… this creature is bound and determined to fell anyone who looks at him askance. It has ceased to be in poor taste and become a matter for royal intervention.”
“Has it?” Liolesa asked mildly.
“Obviously! Why, he’s cutting his way through his peers! Who will be left when he’s through?”
Typical hyperbole, if not, in this case, entirely unwarranted. Liolesa looked up from her correspondence. “Thank you for bringing the matter to my attention.”
“The matter is at everyone’s attention,” Elenoriel said severely. “Including, no doubt, yours. What I am attempting to do is make you cognizant of the dangers of leaving the knave at large.”
Liolesa returned to her letters. “Take care how you speak, Mathanith. The Nase heir is as wellborn as you are. You wouldn’t want anyone accusing you of impropriety.” She glanced up without lifting her head. “Who knows but that the man in question wouldn’t throw down a gage at you?”
Elenoriel gasped. “Of all the ideas!”
Such a tiresome woman. She was far more palatable with her husband to mitigate the worst of her emotional excesses. “Go,” Liolesa said. “With my thanks.”
Which succeeded in removing the woman from her study. For now. And did nothing about the problem in question which, Liolesa admitted, was indeed a problem. She rose and moved to the window, looking down on the area between the palace and the gates, what the map called a courtyard but was more accurately a plaza, given its size. The dueling circle should have been dwarfed by it, save that its significance made it far larger than the forty paces enshrined by custom.
That, and the fact that it hadn’t been erased from the dirt for weeks now.
“You know you’ll have to do something about it, my lady.”
Liolesa glanced from the curtain toward the door where her Chancellor was just letting himself in for their daily meeting. “And are you reading my thoughts now without the benefit of touching, Delerenenard?”
His expression was decidedly on the droll side. “The head of Mathanith just swept past me in high dudgeon the day after her sister’s son—and her favorite, even over her own child—was pricked in the dueling circle… and you are standing by the window, no doubt looking at the blood on the dirt. It does not take high intelligence, my lady.”
“They cleaned up the blood.” Mostly. “Noran Mathanith earned his fate. They spoiled him, and now he can’t keep his mouth closed to save his life. Literally, given how often such touches fester.” Liolesa let the curtain drop. “Of course, when the target was the Sovenil boy, who was succeeding so inappropriately at attaching Elenoriel’s daughter and heir…”
“Dueling excites the most volatile of reactions,” Delerenenard said. “You cannot expect rational thought from those affected. Particularly since our culprit cares not at all for the allegiances he should be observing.” When she lifted a brow at him, he shook his head. “You know it can’t be ignored, my lady. If he was killing only your enemies, and willing to be directed by you, then he could serve as your weapon. But he picks his targets based on his own internal criteria, and it makes his actions too unpredictable. If a Galare kills an ally to the royal House on the palace grounds? For insult?” His smile twisted on his mouth. “You cannot permit it.”
“I know.” Liolesa gathered her skirts under herself so she could sit.
“Will you speak to him?”
“And tell him to redirect his efforts to suit me?” Liolesa laughed, low. “And do you think that request would be well received, Delerenenard?”
The Chancellor paused. Chuckled. “No.”
“Then we must seek a different solution. Yes?”
“So long as that solution isn’t long in arriving, my lady.”
Liolesa thought of the request sitting on the top of her external mail queue, on the data tablet that so few people knew she had in her locked desk drawer. “We shall see.”
There were times when Liolesa felt a lingering exasperation with her cousin for having vanished for such an extended period.
This was, perhaps, unfair. She supposed it was also unfair that Hirianthial’s escape from their world, so abruptly after Laiselin’s death, left Liolesa with no one with whom she could mourn. She no less than Hirianthial had loved Laiselin, despite having been prepared to hold her in cordial dislike, for Laiselin had appeared to be another of those mealy-mouthed cowards Liolesa couldn’t bear.
But there had been no hating Laiselin, who had been so unfailingly kind, and so tender, that her faint-heartedness had felt inevitable. One could no more hate an ice fawn. As unlikely as it had seemed, when they’d married Liolesa felt she had acquired a second cousin, one who had reminded her to moderate her own excessive pragmatism merely by breathing the same air. It felt strange to Liolesa that she might miss Laiselin so, and yet, she had, and had often wondered what it would have been like, to discuss that amputation with someone.
But Hirianthial had left, and had not returned, and Liolesa had buried that hurt along with the ache of his continued absence. Her aunt had warned her that emotion was a luxury for any queen, and friendship an impossibility. “Too rare a bird that,” Maraesa had said, “to waste your time chasing it. Time is our most precious resource, and there is never enough of it. Cry to the Goddess, scream into your pillow, or write your gravest secrets and passions on the page… and immediately burn it. Otherwise, find surcease in duty. Duty will never fail you.”
Had Hirianthial been here, she might have sought his counsel. In his absence, she sent for the captain of the White Swords. Thelerenan Nuera, and not unexpectedly: Nuera tended to produce healthy tenants, and loyal ones, despite—or more probably because of—Thesali Nuera’s neglect. Another irritation, to have Nuera’s riches in the hands of a selfish and xenophobic bigot… Liolesa had been keeping a covert eye on her heir in the hopes of heading off any poison Thesali might be communicating to her daughter. Truly, with allies like so many of hers it was a wonder she needed enemies.
Thelerenan had gone to a knee, hand on his dagger and pale head bent. “My liege.”
“Rise, White Sword.” A handsome man, and steady. He had more of a sense of humor than his predecessor, Suleven, but the latter had come out of Jisiensire and no doubt had felt obliged to live up to Hirianthial’s example. “I wish to ask you an irregular question, Captain.”
“I am yours to command, my liege.”
Liolesa rested her chin in her splayed fingers, her other hand on her stack of correspondence. “Am I mistaken, or do my Swords construe the duels that have been happening lately as entertainment?”
He neither froze… nor lied. “My liege, I am afraid I have allowed off-duty Swords to watch, discreetly, if they are interested.”
“A great many of them are.”
Thelerenan cleared his throat. “Ah, well. Forgive me, my liege, but many of the popinjays on the other end of the Nase Galare sword deserve their comeuppance.”
She didn’t allow her smile to make free with her mouth, but she gave it license to touch her eyes. It was a personal rule that she not punish people for voicing opinions she herself would have, had she had the liberty… even if she couldn’t approve of them being spoken. Here in private, at least, she could let it go. “My other question, then.”
“Please, my liege.”
“Is he any good?”
Thelerenan’s start was so quick she would have missed it, had it not been her job to never miss such things. “I beg your pardon, my liege. Is he any good at dueling? Beyond the obvious point that he has never lost?”
“It is easy to win against people who are bad at dueling,” Liolesa said. “I’d like to know if he could lose at someone who was good at it.”
“Ah! Yes.” The man’s eyes glowed. “An excellent and perspicacious question, my liege. You will appreciate then that I can only guess, having never seen him work hard for his victories. But he is very quick, and his movements precise and confident. I don’t doubt his father engaged his tutor given the rumors of his interests, and as far as I know Shoriven Fol is still in the north, and the most likely candidate. Some of the disengages I’ve witnessed the heir using are typical of Shoriven’s style. And Shoriven is…” Wistfully. “A legend. I would like to meet him myself.”
