She had started to climb down when the door opened. Corinn entered, moving hesitantly, looking around the room as if she did not know it well. She stared at Dariel’s sleeping form. One of her hands rose up and touched her lips. She whispered something, like a superstitious peasant on witnessing a violent act of nature. In her stillness she became an island surrounded by motion. Servants stepped in behind her and fanned out to prepare the room for the day, throwing back the curtains and snuffing out the lamps, taking away the tray of uneaten food and replacing it with another laden with fruit and juices.
Corinn roused when she saw Mena walking toward her. Her face was blotched and puffy, her lips pouting and soft. “He will not die,” she said. “He told me he wouldn’t. He said that he would never leave me. He promised Mother he wouldn’t, not until he had met all my children and they knew him so…not until they knew him and had heard from him all about Mother. He said he would tell us about Mother. About how she had been when she was young and they were first married…”
“You spoke to him?”
Corinn’s hand danced in an explanatory way. “Not since it happened. I mean before he promised me. I mean before all of this-”
Sensing that she might carry on in such manner, Mena interrupted. “But what of him now? Tell me what you know. How is he?”
“What do you want to know?” Corinn’s eyes would not settle but bounced nervously around the room. “Father was stabbed. Some assassin from the Mein…They claim the blade was poisoned, but I don’t believe it. ‘What poison?’ I asked, but no one could answer. They don’t know anything. No one would tell me the truth. And they wouldn’t let me in to see him. Even Thaddeus wouldn’t see me! They are all acting mad. They have called Aliver to council, as if father was gone already. But he’s not. I’m sure he’s not!”
She is more frightened than I, Mena thought. She took one of Corinn’s hands in both of hers and squeezed it. The touch seemed to comfort Corinn, enough so that her voice dropped and words slowed, her eyes fixed for a moment on her sister’s shoulder, closer to meeting her eyes than they had so far.
“Mena, it was horrible. I saw it happen. I saw the man before he revealed himself. I watched him move through the crowd. I thought him handsome. I thought, ‘That’s Gurnal, isn’t it? He looks younger than I remember. How strange I never noticed that he was comely before.’ And then I saw him pull his knife. What was he doing with a knife at a banquet? If I had yelled at that first moment…I didn’t realize…I don’t understand anything.”
Mena squeezed again, pulling her closer. Instinctually, she knew it might be better not to say anything in response to such a declaration, but something in her felt that the roles each occupied were no longer as they had been. She thought of the dream again and in a burst of revelation realized that the girl with her on the rocks had not been a stranger at all. It had been Corinn, some different version of Corinn. How could that have been? She had been there with her sister and yet thought her some other person entirely. It did not make sense, but the sleeping mind rarely did. She pushed the dreamworld away. Right now, she realized, it fell to her to comfort her older sister. The problem was that she could not comfort her with lies, and it took her some hushed, fidgeting moments to find the right tone to proceed. “We will be all right,” she said. “If Father-”
“Stop it!” Corinn snapped. Her eyes fixed on her, wide and fierce. “Father will not die. Stop wishing he would! Don’t even say that he might!”
Mena was aghast. She had started all wrong. “I-I did not say that. I don’t wish that. It’s all so frightening. That’s what-what…”
For a moment it seemed Corinn might strike her, but instead she stepped forward and pulled her younger sister into her arms. There Mena experienced the first inkling of comfort since the banquet. It was a sad thing, really, but there was something soothing in the awareness that the two of them felt at least the same fear and sorrow with a shared clarity reflected in no other aspect of their relationship.
CHAPTER
From a distance the bird looked much like the smaller variety of pigeon from which it had been bred. When seen near at hand the creature’s form took on a different substance. It was the size of a young sea eagle and muscled accordingly, with a predatory beak and eyes that scanned the world with far-reaching acuity. It wore leather gloves of a sort over its talons, with sharpened steel barbs at the tip of each toe that early training had taught it the use of. There was a tube fastened to its ankle into which rolled notes could be inserted. It was a messenger bird, a pigeon in name, perhaps, but a creature with a fierceness to match its dedication in flight. It almost never fell prey to other avian predators. Thus it was the bird of choice for the most urgent of dispatches, like the one sent late on the night Thasren Mein struck King Leodan.
The pigeon stepped off its keeper’s arm in the district of Acacia reserved for foreign dignitaries. Its wings beat down the salt-tinged air and lifted it into the night sky. It flew at first through the cascade of snowflakes, the world grayed and soft edged. Somewhere over the mainland west of Alecia the skies cleared. The bird kept on through the dark hours, its wings seldom pausing to glide.
It reached another keeper at a seaside village along the coast outside Aos at dawn the next morning. It glided in with a glimmering vermilion sky at its back. The message fastened to its leg was removed and attached-unread-to another bird. This one flew the stretch to lower Aushenia that day, rising and falling with the contours of the slab-broken prairie lands. Another carried on through the Gradthic Gap and arrived at Cathgergen about an hour before sunrise two days after the journey began. This time the message was slipped from its container and hurried through the chill corridors of the place and delivered to the expansive quarters which temporarily housed Hanish Mein’s younger brother, Maeander, and his entourage.
Maeander woke to the awareness that his name had been called. The caller remained outside his door, softly singing the coded prayer that both asks forgiveness for interruption and promises that the disturbance speaks to a matter of importance. He rose naked from the warmth of his nest and stood looking down on the puzzle of bodies and pillows and fur blankets amid which he slept. His bed was in fact the greater portion of the padded floor. It was heated from below by the vent system that distributed the earth’s steam through the fortress. Bits and pieces of smooth-limbed women peeked out here and there, a spray of flaxen hair, a length of leg, an arm wrapped over the naked back of another, fingers entwined in the soft mat of white fox fur. Five, six, seven of them: looking on such a mйlange one could not be sure. When Maeander took lovers he took them in quantity, and he wished them to look so similar that one faded into the next without a singular identity. Standing upright, the chilly air of the room pimpled his flesh. He liked it best when sensations fluctuated between extremes, from hot and cold, from delight to pain, from the soft contours of concubines in one moment to the hard edges and clipped formality of his military life the next.
By the time he snapped open the door and shot out his hand for the missive he was fully awake. He closed the door and read the note. Once, twice, and then again, brief as it was. It seemed he had waited a lifetime for the news it detailed. His heart reminded him of all those years by beating furiously, as if it would count out all the many days in as short a time as possible.