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July 7 - July 12, 2021
Something was changing in her. A feeling, small as a rosebud, was opening its petals.
Kalyba was no ordinary mage. From what little Ead remembered about her, she had possessed gifts unknown to the Priory, including immortality. Perhaps dream-giving was another. But why should Kalyba be concerned with tormenting the Queen of Inys?
The wyrm gazed at her with eyes as green as willow. She had never seen that eye color in a Draconic thing.
He wondered dimly if anyone had ever felt worse than he did at this moment. This was his life now. He should have been grateful for his little house in Orisima. Suddenly he missed the sunken hearth and the pothook, the bedding he left to air in the sun, the dark walls, and woven mats. It had not belonged to him, but it had kept a roof over his head.
Did you ever hear the story of the mulberry tree?”
Within this impossible sea, every star, every constellation, every fold and spiral of the cosmos was reflected. As if there were two firmaments, and their ship was a ghost ship, adrift between worlds. The sea had turned itself to glass, so the heavens might finally look upon themselves.
The Queen of Inys did not have the plague, but she would never bear a living child.
Fragments of historical evidence from the world over agreed that there had been five High Westerns. There were likenesses of them in the caves of Mentendon and the bestiaries made after the Grief of Ages. According to that evidence, none of those High Westerns had possessed green eyes.
“Damn you, obstinate bitch. I will have your head myself if you do not do as I command.” “By all means. I doubt I will have much use for it once it has bid my neck farewell.” Sabran twisted to face her. “I will kill you.” The cords in her neck were straining. “I despise all of you, overweening crows. All any of you think about is what you can peck from me. A pension, estates, an heir—” Her voice broke. “Damn you all. I would sooner throw myself off the Alabastrine Tower than I would swallow another spoonful of your pity.” “Enough,” Ead snapped. “You are not a child. Cease this wallowing.”
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“Perhaps I should think of lighter things. Ros would tell me so. What shall I think of, Ead? My dead companion, my barren womb, or the knowledge that the Nameless One is coming?”
“I turned my back on the Knight of Generosity for all that he had given me. I resented having to give just once in return.”
“She was so . . . delicate. Glorian,” Sabran rasped. “Like the tracery of a leaf. The frail after the green has left it.” She gazed into nothing. “They tried to hide her from me, but I saw.” A different lady-in-waiting would have told her that her child was safe in the heavenly court. Roslain would have painted her a picture of a black-haired baby swaddled in the arms of Galian Berethnet, smiling forever in a castle in the sky.
“Ead,” she said, “there is a pouch of gold in the coffer.” She nodded to the chest her jewels were stored in. “Go into the city. The shadow market. They sell a poison there called the dowager.” The breath went out of Ead. “Don’t be a fool,” she whispered. “You dare call the last Berethnet a fool.” “Of course, when you speak like one.”
“You have tried to turn yourself to stone. Do not be afeared to find that you are not. Queen you may be, but you are flesh and blood.”
The words came from a place she had tried to lock. The place where a rose had grown.
As black hair brushed her collarbone, Ead thought of the Prioress and the orange tree. She thought of what Chassar would say if he knew how her blood sang for the pretender, who prayed to the empty tomb of the Mother. Scion of Galian the Deceiver. Sabran drew her close, and Ead kissed the Queen of Inys as she would kiss a lover.
Her body was spun glass. A flower just opened to the world. When Sabran parted her lips with her own, Ead understood, with an intensity that wrenched the breath from her, that what she had wanted for months now was to hold her like this. When she had lain beside Sabran and listened to her secrets. When she had stowed the rose behind her pillow. It was a realization that pierced her to the core.
She was lost and found and wandering, all at once. At the cusp of dreaming, yet somehow never more awake.
Their breaths were hushed, held in anticipation of a knock on the door, a key in the lock, and a torch to bare their union. It would light a flame of scandal, and the fire would rise until it scorched them both. But Ead called fire her friend, and she would plunge into the furnace for Sabran Berethnet, for just one night with her. Let them come with their swords and their torches. Let them come.
She felt no regret. Confusion, yes, and birds in her belly, but no desire to turn back time.
“It is almost impossible for a queen to tell what comes from deference, and what from the heart.” Those eyes sought hers. “Tell me the truth of it, Ead. Was it your own choice to lie with me last night, or did you feel compelled because of my rank?” Her hair was a tangle about her shoulders. Ead softened. “Fool,” she said. “I would not be compelled by you or anyone. Have I not always given you truth?” Sabran smiled at that. “Too much of it,” she said. “You are the only one who does.”
“Come.” Ead draped the mantle over her shoulders. “I would see you walk under the sun today.”
“I have rid the court of several people in my years as Principal Secretary. My predecessor would pay off those she wanted gone, but I am not so wasteful. I prefer to make use of my exiles. They become my intelligencers, and if they provide what I require, I may invite them home. Under circumstances that benefit us all.” Combe clasped his thick-knuckled fingers. “And so my web whispers to me.”
“I love you like my own sister, Ead Duryan. We will meet again.” She pressed a kiss to her cheek. “May the Saint go with you.” “I know no Saint,” Ead said honestly, and saw her friend’s confusion, “but I take your blessing, Meg.”
The guards came after her. They hunted a ghost, for Ead Duryan was no more.
“Another enemy of the Night Hawk. He ought to start paying us.”
I’d usually expect coin for safe passage—but perhaps, with so many wyrms in the sky, we should all be kinder to each other.” “Soft words for a pirate.” “Piracy was more of a necessity than a choice for me, Meg.” Melaugo eyed Valour. “You can’t take that horse.” “The horse,” Ead said, “goes where I go.”
Fire, the element of the winged demons, required constant feeding. It was the element of war and greed and vengeance—always hungry, never satisfied. Water needed no coal or tinder to exist. It could shape itself to any space. It nourished flesh and earth and asked for nothing in return. That was why the dragons of the East, lords of rain and lake and sea, would always triumph over the fire-breathers. When the ocean had swallowed the world and humankind was washed away, still they would abide.
Miduchi Tané had long hair. The ghost she had become did not.
They had stripped her of her weapons in Ginura, so she had torn herself apart within. All she had wanted was to mourn her dream until she breathed no more.
The knot in her side was a knifepoint. Cold pain—the bite of ice against bare skin, freezeburn in her innards. Tears jolted into her eyes as waves of agony pitched through her.
Another shock went through the ground, and inside Tané something called out in answer. She tried to keep the pain from her face, but Elder Vara was too sharp of eye.
“She did not die needlessly,” Tané said, her gaze blank. “With her dying breath, she restored the joy of a dragon and, in doing so, restored the world. Is there a more honorable thing to do with a life?”
They looked at Ead with pity, too. She had heard them whisper that she was a wandering spirit in the body of a woman, trapped between worlds.
“When you have made the crossing as many times as I have, you will see beauty in that desolation.
My favorite story, as a child, was how it received its name.” “That is a very sad tale.” “To me, it is beautiful. A tale of love.”
“Love and fear do strange things to our souls. The dreams they bring, those dreams that leave us drenched in salt water and gasping for breath as if we might die—those, we call unquiet dreams. And only the scent of a rose can avert them.”
Looking at the plains below her, Ead felt the homesickness fade at last. No matter how much of the world she saw, she would always believe this was its most beautiful place.
“Go. A servant will take you to the Prioress after.” Golden eyes looked solemnly at her. “Tread lightly around her, daughter of Zāla.”
Tread lightly. Ichneumons did not give careless warnings. The Prioress would want to know why she had been so insistent upon staying in Inys. You must always stay with me, Ead Duryan.
She looked like the women she had longed to be when she was growing up. Like she was made of stone.
The Mother herself had been the first Prioress. The second was Siyāti uq-Nāra, from whom many of the brothers and sisters of the Priory, Ead included, claimed descent. After the death of each Prioress, the next one would be chosen by the Red Damsels.
“This may have weight, Prioress,” Chassar said thoughtfully. “There are times of plenty, when the tree gives freely—we are in one now—and periods where it offers less fruit. There have been two such times of scarcity, one of them directly after the Grief of Ages. This theory of a cosmic balance does something to explain it.”
“You are strong-willed, Eadaz. Like Zāla was,”
The last Prioress would not have brooked this indifference. She had always believed the Mother had meant for the Priory to protect and support humankind in all corners of the world.
Mita Yedanya was a blunt woman, brisk in everything. She delivered Ead her dream as if it were a piece of fruit on a platter. Her years in Inys had only ever been meant to bring her closer to that cloak. Yet the timing of this was purposeful, and it stuck in her craw. The Prioress was using this to conciliate her. As though she were a child to be distracted by a bauble.
Pain flowered sharply in her midriff. She closed her eyes, imagined that pain as a candle, and snuffed it. Later. She would let the grief burn when there was room for it to breathe.
“All legends have truth in them.
“I don’t want to carry on! Do you not understand? Does nobody in this world understand, damn you? Is no one else haunted?” A quiver of wrath entered his voice. “Everything I did—everything I was—everything I am, is because of him. He was someone before me. I am no one without him. I am tired of living without him at my side. He left me for that book and, by the Saint, I resent him for it. I resent him every minute of every day.”
Zāla du Agriya uq-Nāra, who had been the munguna before Mita Yedanya.
