‘I only let you do that last night because you asked,’ Lavik said. ‘It isn’t a ritual. Besides, when you play with her, you always pretend she’s going to grow up to be a little general. I don’t know whether I like that.’
‘Well, it’s only fair that I get a chance to play with her before she grows and becomes a girl — don’t you think?’ Ardra stood. ‘I’m going for a walk around the near garden anyway. Just as though we didn’t have a guest.’ He strode across the room, in stiff-legged mocking of a military strut.
‘If he really wants to — ’ began Pryn, while the earl and Tritty and Jenta all thrust out consoling hands and uttered stabilizing protests. The last voice over all was Tritty’s:’…to learn that he can’t always have his own way!’
But Ardra was out the door.
‘Come on,’ Lavik said. ‘I think it’s important that lots of people hold her, so that she gets a sense of the range of society. Don’t you think?’
The sleeping Petal probably had little sense of anything right now. Shoulder to shoulder with Lavik, Pryn carried the baby between the dining couches. Behind them Tritty clapped her hands: the room filled about them with white-collared men and women, some younger than Pryn, others quite old, some of whom Pryn had already seen serving, but many of whom she hadn’t. Lavik led her through a smaller arch. ‘If you get tired, just let me know.’
Pryn had expected to pass through at least as many corridors and halls as she had on her journey in with Tritty. But they walked through a low, stone passage with blackness at its end, and stepped out into it…Pryn thought they’d entered some cavernous hall, a roofless one with dozens of lamps set at unfathomable distances, making myriad small lights…
But they were outdoors.
What she’d thought lamps were flares about an expanse of garden that, it was clear, even in the dark, would have dwarfed Madame Keyne’s walled enclosure. Pryn remembered the plural that had always accompanied their references to the grounds. One of the gardens? They walked along a path, paved — they passed a flare and Pryn glanced down — with brick. Yellow? Red? Some other color? She couldn’t tell. In the distance, holding aloft more brands, each with its raddled smoke ribboning up into the darkness over its own pale halo, moving along other paths, pausing here and there to light another pathside flare, moved innumerable slaves!
Some dozen steps ahead walked resolute Ardra — though Pryn only realized who it was when he passed one of the brands.
Lavik said: ‘He thinks he’s protecting us.’
Pryn glanced at her. ‘From what?’
‘Was your home ever occupied by soldiers?’
Pryn shook her head.
‘Ours was, once. Right after dad and Tritty first married. I was ten. Ardra was only three, so you wouldn’t think he’d remember. But he became the occupying soldiers’ mascot. Tritty’d been through things like that before — so had dad, I suppose. But for me and Inige — and Jenta too, I guess — it was awful.’ She sighed. ‘Ardra, however, hasn’t thought about anything but growing up to be a soldier ever since. I say he’s protecting us. Sometimes, though, I think he dreams of slaughtering us all in our beds. The soldiers who were here — when I was ten — did some of that too! Jenta is dad’s oldest living son. But we used to have two more half-sisters and a half-brother, by his first wife — only she was related to all the wrong people; they wouldn’t let her — so we heard later — or her children live.’ Lavik hunched her shoulders. ‘It wasn’t pleasant. Believe me, that’s the only reason dad tolerates my running off to have babies with jungle savages or Jenta’s going off to live like a hermit with a girl goatherd, nice as she is, from the next town over. I mean it’s a way of survival, of putting us outside the normal political considerations of bloodlines and alliances and the like — the sort of things that get you clapped into dungeons or murdered, when you’re really interested in other things entirely. What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity, and dad doesn’t have enough for that. So we use other means. Now with Ardra, of course, it’s different.’ Lavik nodded ahead at the would-be captain, stalking the garden night. ‘Thanks to the people he’s related to, both through Tritty and his real father, he doesn’t have our options. Oh, he’s safer here than he would be in the north — and don’t think Tritty isn’t grateful to father, either. The odd thing is, though, he’s turning out exactly the way he should. Inige and I have spent hours discussing it! Oh, I don’t mean the way dad would want him to be, or even his mother. But he’s exactly the sort they’re going to want to do all the jobs that are waiting for him as soon as he comes of age. You’d think there was some sort of power guiding it all.’ She took a large breath and gave a small sigh. ‘Really, it’s uncanny. I wish there were something I could do to make him a little…I don’t know — looser, I suppose. But maybe it’s just as well. I’m glad you’re here,’ she said suddenly. ‘I mean it’s nice to have ordinary visitors who aren’t always plotting to do someone in — especially when it’s you. Honestly, we all think so!’
‘I’m…glad I’m here too!’ Pryn looked at the young man walking ahead, whom, she felt now, she’d deprived of the warm, marvelous responsibility she held.
The warmth shifted; the breathing changed.
Pryn looked down. ‘She’ll be all right, don’t you think?’
‘Sure,’ Lavik said. ‘She’s been on the mend for two, really three, days now. Though, if you listen to the old slaves upstairs, who, for some reason, everyone thinks know about such things — and that’s all Tritty ever listens to — they’ll scare you to death!’ She glanced at Petal over Pryn’s arm to check her own pronouncement of recuperation. ‘She’ll be fine. You know — ’ Lavik’s tone grew thoughtful — ‘I was thinking about something you said — to father, when we were up on the hill. When you travel to Kolhari from the south, the road really goes around the marsh below the city, joins the northern road, and enters over the same hills you come over from the mountains. But you’ve seen it on maps…?’
‘Yes?’ Pryn said, listening to the dark around them, which sounded the same tone on which Lavik spoke.
‘Do you remember,’ Lavik asked, ‘when I said I’d never seen Kolhari at dawn from the hills?’
Yes?’
‘Well, when I went to court, it wasn’t just my furniture in the provision wagon. In fact I went with nearly a dozen nobles’ children, boys and girls — more girls than boys, actually. When we reached the hills above the city, they stopped our sleeping carriage — it was dawn. We all woke up, the few of us who’d managed to sleep. The drivers and chaperones called the boys out to see. Everyone started out, I remember, but they told the girls that we had to stay inside, because it wasn’t seemly for young ladies to go pell-melling out on the highroad in their night shifts, even if it was dawn and nobody was about. So we stayed in, all excited at what the two — yes, there were only two — boys might be doing. And you know something? As soon as he came back from court, Jenta immediately saw the city in the water — Neveryóna. Just the way you did. But J couldn’t! We’d both always heard about it, of course. But it had to be explained to me, and the streets and alleys and buildings had to be pointed out and outlined before, at sunset, I could even be sure it was really there! And it was only because I had seen some city maps of Kolhari, finally, that I was able to be sure what the rest were talking about.’ They walked through the dark gardens, whose extent and plan Pryn kept silently trying to assess. ‘Do you know what a map is? I mean a real map?’