Corinn finally began to descend toward them to close the last few steps. She stretched out both her arms, palms upward, her head listing to one side, her eyes gone kind. “Welcome home,” she said, “my sister, my brother. Welcome, Acacian warriors.”
She carried on speaking, words that seemed strangely formal, as if they were part of a scripted greeting, meant more for the onlookers than for Mena and Dariel. Corinn brought them into a short embrace and then pulled them back and studied each of their faces in turn. Her eyes brimmed as she did so, her full lips trembling slightly. In everything she was courteous and loving and generous, and yet it also seemed wrong somehow. Even when she raised her voice and asked the crowd to welcome this “daughter and son of Acacia” home, and as she smiled down on them through the answering cacophony, Mena could not help feeling that behind the loving faзade Corinn was not actually pleased with what she saw in them.
That was how it had been between them ever since. Mena could not point to any specific slight on Corinn’s part. Her words were never cruel, never less than appropriate. They spent evenings together over fine food and wine, talking of the past, all of them coming to know one another again. They rode horseback as they had done as children, and they sat together as a unit facing the myriad challenges of putting the empire back together again. Dariel seemed completely trusting of her, enough so that Mena never voiced her uneasiness to him. But through it all Mena feared that there would never be the easy, natural warmth between them that there had been with Aliver and that she still felt with Dariel. Corinn went through the motions of such a relationship but did not quite allow it in substance. If they were a triangle now-as Corinn herself said-three points of a family core, Corinn seemed to want them to understand that she was the apex; Mena and Dariel were the base that supported her.
None of these things was far from her mind during the wind-buffeted funeral procession. Corinn smiled as she fell in step beside Mena. She lifted her arm from the now-obvious swelling of her pregnant belly and rested her fingers on Mena’s arm a moment. “Sister,” she said, “the day has finally come. We will make our father very happy today. You know that, don’t you? I’m sure he always hungered for the day that he would be released into the air like mother was years ago. He’ll blend with her and become part of the very soil of this island. He’ll be in every acacia tree. Remember that.”
That, apparently, was all she meant to say. As she began to move away, Mena asked, “Are we going to make a better world?” Corinn looked at her, quizzical, and she fumbled for the right way to explain the question. “You didn’t know Aliver-at the end, I mean. If you had heard the things he said…He had so many ideas of what we should do with power. He talked of a different order to the world. He believed we could eliminate things like the Quota-”
“I don’t have quite as much time to ruminate on such things as you do,” Corinn said. “Are we going to make a better world? Of course. We rule it instead of Hanish. Who doubts that is an improvement already?”
In her recent conversations with Corinn, Mena had grown wary of disputing her sister. It was not that Corinn grew angry or touchy, as she had done when she was younger. It just seemed that she had usually decided matters in her own way. Once decided, she was unassailable. “Of course it’s an improvement,” Mena conceded. And then gently added, “It’s just that we’ve not abolished the Quota. We haven’t closed the mines or-”
“I don’t lack ideals,” Corinn said, “if that is what you’re suggesting. But speaking of ruling is a very different thing from actually ruling. There is no rest from my work. I will get to all the issues you have mentioned in time. For now, we are still hunting down fugitive Meins, those that fled Alecia and Manil with all the treasure they could pile on their yachts. And the provinces…you’d be amazed, Mena, how they turn against us, throw up barriers, insist on conditions, lay claim to things that are not theirs to claim. If they would just accept the order of things, we could get on with making the world-what did you say-‘better’? And the Lothan Aklun, whom none of us have ever seen, they are a worry hanging over all of this. The irony is that I find myself relying most heavily on two forces I had most loathed before: the league and my Numrek. In the end they made everything possible for me.”
Mena almost said that an army fought and thousands upon thousands died for the cause as well. She almost invoked Aliver’s sacrifice, almost reminded her sister that the Santoth had a great deal to do with their victory as well. But Corinn had not mentioned their victory. She had claimed the Numrek as her own and used the word me instead of our. Mena could have challenged her on all these things, but instead she said, “I will help in any way I can. Just ask me.”
“You are already helping. Carry on with organizing the army and training a new class of Elite. We will need superb warriors, ones with nobility and skill. Who better than you to instruct them?” Corinn smiled, thin lipped and curt. “I hear the storytellers are already spinning a legend about you. They talk of how you did battle with a goddess and tossed her down from her mountain perch. Those who wish to reopen the academy come to me promising that they will teach your swordsmanship methods as their highest Form. You, my little sister, are as much a legend as Aliver.”
“It was just a tree, actually,” Mena said, “that the eagle nested in-not a mountain. And I did nothing more than manage to survive against it.”
Corinn studied her a moment, amused, her eyebrows ridged like two identical peaks. “The storytellers never get it right, do they? In any event, I am glad that your gallantry was not the death of you.”
Suspecting Corinn was about to break away, Mena asked another thing that had been troubling her. “Sister, what did you offer the Numrek for their allegiance? I still don’t understand it.”
“They may govern a large portion of Talay as they see fit.”
Mena thought a moment. “Yes, but that doesn’t seem like enough.”
“So you say.” Corinn looked away, seeming to have lost interest. “Enough speaking, though. We are here to honor two men. Let us do so without distraction.”
In many ways it was wonderful to look upon the polyglot diversity of the company that gathered beside the cliffs. They all stood rooted to the earth, trying not to grimace at the bird stink that roared up on the wind ascending the cliff, cold and damp from the sea below. Candovians stood touching shoulders with Senivalians, who, in turn, stood next to Aushenians, brilliant in their white garments. Outer Isles raiders mixed among Acacian aristocrats. Sangae, Aliver’s surrogate father, stood among a group of Talayans, beside a band of Halaly, and another of Balbara. Vumuans had tied eagle feathers into their hair. The Bethunis wore pale paint on their faces.
In keeping with tradition, two honored persons not family members lifted the urns from the wagon. Dark-skinned Kelis, healed from the wound that almost took his life on the same day as his friend’s, carried Aliver’s urn; Melio, with his long brown hair whipped about by the wind, held Leodan’s remains: the two of them beautiful in the manner distinctive to their peoples. So young, Mena thought, youthful and strong, full of life. This was all as Aliver would have had it.
She wondered, though, what he would have made of the more dubious guests, like Rialus Neptos, who hovered at the edges of the company, red faced and sniffling, the collar of his cloak pulled up around his ears. Sire Dagon and several other leaguemen also attended, each of them seated on stools carried out for them by servants. What place had those men here-men who had abandoned Leodan, who had for years hunted and tried to destroy Dariel? They watched the proceedings with their chins tilted, their eyes often drifting up into the cloud-heavy sky, as if their minds were already elsewhere.
And Calrach and his Numrek contingent stood in a place of honor. Mena found it hard not to stare at them, almost more so because of the gentility of their demeanor, the neat clothing they wore, and the way each of them had his hair swept back from his face and fastened in a braided tail that hung down his back. Their faces were not actually that different than those of other races. Mena was not sure, however, if she thought they now looked more like other humans than before, or if she had come to feel that other humans resembled the Numrek more than she had acknowledged before.