“Mena, my wise daughter, I am not so strong a man as you may think.” He reached up and tugged on her chin. “I could not change the world. I could not stop others from committing crimes-terrible crimes-in my name. I could not stop your mother from leaving us when illness took her. But I love my children. So you are my work now, all four of you. I thought, ‘Why not build within my house the world as I would have it?’ If I can raise you to adulthood in bliss unusual to the world, I will have accomplished something. You will see what foulness men do to one another eventually, but before then, why not know joy? You want to be a child for whom dreams come true, don’t you?”
Dariel had come into the room then. Her father had called out to him and the brief intimacy between them was suspended until chance allowed for it again. Remembering this now made her tears flow again. She had not answered him. She had not asked just what these horrors of the world were. She had never seen them and knew only of the old struggles written of in the triumphant eloquence of her history books. But she wished she had answered him. She did want-very badly-to be a child for whom dreams come true.
She was sure she would not be able to sleep, but at some point she drifted off, still perched high in the tree, leaning back against wood sculpted to comfort. She dreamed of something that even as she experienced it she thought of as a memory, although she would not later be sure whether it was a recollection of an earlier event or of an earlier dream. She and a girl whose name she did not recall crawled over the rocks of the northern shoreline and out onto the stone pier that jutted into the sea. The girl carried a fishing net with the childish notion that they would bring in the evening’s dinner. They knew they should not be down there on the jagged rocks, with the sea heaving below them, billowing with fronds of seaweed, crawling with blue-shelled crabs, and bristling with mussels. But all would be right if they brought home a living treasure in their net.
As they neared the end of the pier Mena saw a strange commotion in the water. Just below the surface swam a teeming school of fish. They moved past in a great mass, so many that she could neither see the beginning of the school nor where it might end. They were side by side and stacked many deep, each fish perhaps two or three feet long. The upper ones were so near that sometimes their tails sliced through the air. She could see between them far down into the depths. She had not known the sea was so deep here, but it was fathomless and teeming with fish.
The princess called for the net from the other girl, grasped it, and bent in preparation to cast it. The girl whispered that they should not catch these fish. “They journey to the sea god,” she said. “It would curse us to eat of them.” Mena did not care. What sea god, anyway? Nonsense. She splashed the net down into the water, bracing herself for the impact of writhing life that she expected to fill it. A moment later she pulled up the net, empty. The fish swam on, teeming just as before, but not one of them had entered the trap. She swung the net in from another angle, pulled it up, dripping: nothing. No matter how she moved her net below the surface-side to side, thrusting down deep into the water, jerking it up-she could not catch even a single fish. They just hurtled by, so close that she could see the minute adjustments of their fins and the flexion of their large scales as they slipped over one another. She watched their eyes roll up to study her in passing, sorrow in them. Something about those eyes drew her. She set the net aside and tumbled forward into the water, sure that this way, at least, she would manage to touch the fish, sure that they wanted her to do so. If they went at the call of some sea god, they did not do so willingly. She could help. This seemed a very important thing as she punched through the water and plunged downward…
Mena started awake. Her arms jerked out, and she almost fell from the tree. For a few moments the world hung around her without context. She felt the dream fade and knew that there was something more important to remember, but it was only through staring and waiting that the evening’s events came back to her. Looking up through a narrow, high window she saw the sky had brightened with the coming dawn. Thin clouds tiled the sky with touches of salmon pink. It was a new day, she thought. How much of yesterday’s damage will now be mended? How much would be shown in the bright light of morning as nothing more than tricks of shadows and nighttime gloom?
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-”