Corinn was the centerpiece of this arrangement. How marvelous she looked! Mena remembered that she had always thought her sister a beauty, but the sight of her was more astonishing than she had expected. She wore a long-sleeved gown of a light, shimmering fabric, a creamy color touched with a hint of orange. Her hair was intricately made up, ribbons woven into a tight bun, pierced through with a spray of quills and the white plume of some bird. Her features were perfectly formed, delicate, her bosom and the flare of her hips highlighted by the shapely gown. Her arms were sensuously formed-shapely but not overly lean or muscled, like Mena’s-her wrists and fingers as expressive as a dancer’s when she extended them in a gesture of greeting.
Clearly, she was waiting for them to climb the steps. As they did so, Mena had an unforgivable thought. She did not know where it came from and thought it a coarseness of her war-weary mind. She imagined Corinn snatching one of those hairpins out and snapping it forward, a weapon, a poisoned dart. How frustrating and foul, she thought, that such an image would come to her at what should be a happy moment. What was wrong with her?
With that question in mind, looking up at Corinn’s splendor, Mena realized what she herself looked like in comparison: half naked in a short skirt and sleeveless tunic, small and wiry, leather brown, her arms and legs scripted with all manner of cuts and abrasions, her hair an unkempt cascade. She suddenly felt the salt crusting her cheeks and the grime in the creases of her elbows and the film of dirt and sweat on her sandaled feet. She glanced at Dariel. Dashing as he was with his open raider’s shirt and sun-burnished skin, he too looked more a ruffian than a prince of Acacia. Why had they not thought to make themselves more presentable?
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.”