“Many will praise me,” he said, speaking these words in heavily accented Acacian. “Many will praise and follow me.”
He pressed the curved tip of his dagger against his neck and yanked the blade clean through his main artery. A moment later he lay on the smooth stones, taking in a skewed view of a world in chaos. His body crumpled in such a way that the pumping of his heart shot gouts of blood into the air above him, coating his face and chest with a mist of red. Blinking, he peered through this curtain. The king was hurried from the room at the center of a mass of men, like workers around a queen bee. They ushered him out of the chamber, supported between them in a half-seated position, their hands all over him, some holding their palms against his bloody chest. For a few seconds when the sightline between them cleared, Thasren saw the oval of the king’s mouth. Pain shivered across his cheeks. His eyes were two bewildered questions, full of dread.
Watching this, Thasren thought of his eldest brother and wished he had beheld this deed, hoped that the tale he eventually heard of it would make him proud. He felt a voracious emptiness eating up his body, extinguishing him inch by inch. He whispered it through the blood in his mouth, a taste like liquid metal. He felt possessed by awe. He had accomplished at least one great act in his life. With it behind him, he felt no fear. He had unleashed a great deal of it, but he himself went to the afterdeath without fear, as a soldier of a righteous cause always should. Before fading from consciousness he began to recite the Prayer of Joining, the praise song of the Tunishnevre.
CHAPTER
Mena would never again be able to look at the eight-sided dice of the children’s game called rats running without feeling sick to her stomach. It was this game that she and her younger brother had been engaged in at the moment Leodan was attacked. Dariel had feared that their father might not honor his promise to entertain them after the dinner, and the princess had agreed to sit near the door with him so that they could pounce on the king as soon as he was free. They tipped the dice from their palms, watching time and again as the green glass octahedrons rolled to stillness, nestled into their bench’s silk contours. Mena did not particularly care for the game, nor see the point in being so involved with a simple act of chance, but she did enjoy the feel of the dice bouncing around within her loosely clasped fist. She often shook the dice long enough that Dariel grew impatient with her.
It happened no more than a few moments after the great doors had been closed. Mena had half registered the muffled sound of commotion inside the hall, but she jolted when the doors burst open again in one great thrust. They swung fully around and banged hard against the stone wall. Mena’s hand, which had been about to toss the dice, jerked so that she spilled them on the floor. For a moment she watched one of them roll across the carpet, feeling embarrassed and ready to spring up and retrieve it. But then she saw the huddle of men press through the door. They were close together, bent around a burden, their legs shuffling and awkward as they tried to speed along, one shouting to another and all in confusion. A voice rose above them yelling to make way for the king, make way for the stricken king! Mena had not yet fully registered the words when she realized that the burden they carried was a man. Her father…
The king’s skin had drained of color, the rich hue gone pale as that of a powdered corpse. His trembling lips were pursed, eyes naked with fear, crown askew. A white froth of spittle clung to his beard. There beneath all of the unrecognizable distortions was the person she loved foremost in the world, stripped bare of everything that was strong and fatherly and wise. She pulled Dariel to her and covered his eyes. With him hugged tight against her she turned away, as if through the movement she might manage to shake loose what she had just witnessed.
Later that night in Dariel’s room she sat on his bed with her arms cradling the sobbing boy. She repeated many times that it was all right. Father would be all right. He would be, of course. It was just a pinprick, they said. Did he really think a pinprick could harm the king of Acacia? “Come now,” she said, “don’t be silly. Father will find you in the morning and laugh at the puffy eyes you get when you cry before sleeping.”
Once Dariel’s breathing fell into the steady rhythm of sleep she untangled herself from him. She set her back against the wall and watched the slow rise and fall of the boy’s chest. She studied the slack features of his face. She loved him so, so much. This realization brought tears to her eyes for the first time that evening. He could not truly understand, could he? She actually knew little of what had happened or whether or not her father was in mortal danger, but the details did not seem to matter. Her father’s face had explained things completely. No matter what happened tomorrow or the next day the look of fear she had witnessed was irradicable. She would always see it beneath the surface of his presence. It felt as if she had caught him in some lewd act, something degrading enough that she could never step back into the innocence of moments before. The ease between them would never be the same.
She crawled out of bed and paced the large room for a while, looking at the stones of the floor, unsure what to do, where to go, if there even was anything to do or anyplace to go. She knew nobody would tell her anything tonight. She considered sneaking out of the room and into her father’s quarters, but she would certainly be stopped, especially in the dead of night and after such events. She would not be able to get anywhere near him until the morning, and perhaps not even then.
Eventually, she strode across the room and climbed into the lower branches of the acacia tree that occupied one corner of the room. It was a strange thing to find inside a palace. It had been a birthday present from Leodan to Dariel the winter before. The king had come up with the idea himself, spoke of it to craftsmen and woodworkers, and had the project worked on secretly while he and the children sailed to Alecia for a short stay. On returning, all the children entered Dariel’s room to find that the bulk of an old, gnarled acacia tree had been salvaged after its slow death and embedded in the stone floor. Its branches twisted above and in places seemed to merge into the walls and provide them support. It had been sanded down and the thorns blunted so that just the knobbed remnants of them remained. The wood was stained a reddish brown with oil infused with sandalwood. It was adorned with ribbons and studded with green leaves made from silk, so that the tree might appear to live forever. Platforms were set into the branches with ropes, ladders, and swings to move between them. All this simply to surprise a boy with a grand structure for him to climb and play upon. It was an unheard-of idea, a strange extravagance in a culture that generally ignored children until they were old enough to emerge as adults. It had gotten more than a few tongues wagging about the king’s sanity.
From the bowed beam of a platform she looked back across the room. Low-burning wall lamps cast the room in orange light. Dariel slept on undisturbed, beside him a tray of food and tea brought by the maids. They had bustled around them when they first returned, anxious eyed and nervous. They asked over and over as to their needs, but they could not answer the only question either child actually deemed important. None of them would whisper a word about the state of the king. All would be better in the morning, they said. Let the king and his people do what they must and all would be better in the morning. If they had not repeated this so often, Mena might have believed them. Instead, she knew that nothing was as they said. The maids had always whispered about the king. Even within her hearing they had made innuendos about his desires or motives or actions. Usually they had been wrong, but this was different. They were scared. They were confused. And they were lying.