In the chief ’s voice he replied, “Our clan’s future is too vast for one person to see. Do not concern yourself; you have your own duties. Become a mother, and soon. And learn what Banreh has to teach you.”
“Yes, Father.” She wiped her eyes and looked at his boots. So hard, such strong leather.
He took her hand, and dropped it. It seemed almost an accident. Then he turned and made his way through the mud to his Riders.
Banreh’s eyes met hers with their usual composure, and he raised both hands to his chest, a sign of service. Clever hands. But those and his tongue were the two edges of a sword, concealed behind a patient expression. As terrible as a weapon could be, she knew it was nothing more than a tool for a strong man. She turned away from him and took three steps towards her longhouse.
“Mesema,” he called out, his voice a croak, “are you unhappy?” She stalked back to him, her hands on her hips.
“Do you not remember the Red Hoof Wars, Lame Banreh?”
His cheeks grew red at the name. “I remember them.”
“Do you remember my brother died that year? Stuck through the heart with a spear?” When he nodded, she went on, “Do you remember when some Redders got into our village and took Hola’s daughter against her will? She was too little to have that baby, and she died trying to give it life. Do you remember that?”
Banreh nodded again. She could see from his eyes that he understood now, but she didn’t stop.
“When you convinced me not to run, when you convinced me to turn back that day-you knew the war depended on it, and yet you said nothing to me.”
“It is not for you to concern yourself-”
“Not for me? Don’t make me laugh. You are barely more than a woman yourself, and my father uses you the same way.” As soon as the words left Mesema’s mouth, horror crept over her.
Banreh sucked in his breath, but his next words were mild.
“At midday, then.”
“Banreh-” Mesema said, but he turned away.
“Tame your mouth before you meet your Cerani royal.” He limped past the horse-pen, pulling his bad leg through the mud.
The first chill wind of autumn swept over her. Mesema looked down at her feet, still in their summer slippers with no linings. She wouldn’t need to put the linings in this year. She would be warm. She would give birth to a prince in the summery sands. Or an emperor: a Windreader emperor, who might bring the two people, Felt and Cerani, together. Would that not bring a longer peace, over time?
Perhaps Banreh had been right.
“Greetings, Your Majesty,” she said in Cerantic. “Yes, Your Majesty.” The words felt sharp and unmanageable. But she would learn them.
She turned towards the fields, breathing in the scents of home. A sharp wind came, bending the grass, and Mesema’s hair blew across her face in a dun storm. The grass thrashed, furious before the squall, and in the waving tumult she saw something, or thought she did. She shook her hair out so it streamed behind her and climbed the fence of the horse-pen for a better vantage point. A Red Hoof thrall, shovelling manure, gave her a look, halfsmirk, half-sneer. She turned her gaze away from him.
In the rippling grass, ephemeral amid the seething green, gone and there again, a pattern lay, writ wide from West Ridge to East. Mesema gasped and blinked away the wind-tears. This was different from what she had seen before. Moons, half-circles and pointed shapes spread from one hill to the next, a pattern repeating and expanding in intricate themes, reaching out in all directions. The lines and underscores around the alien signs reminded her of Banreh’s scratchings.
The wind cracked and Mesema fought for balance on the round logs of the horse-pen. A hare ran across the shadowed lines as if they held his path, binding him to a labyrinth. He turned wildly, this way and that, as if beneath the very talons of the eagle, drawing always closer. His brownish fur faded into the darker green. She could hear the rustling of his feet, but could no longer tell where in the pattern he ran.
Though she didn’t understand it, she murmured a prayer to the Hidden God to thank Him for the message. The wind shook her once more, and fell still. Each blade of grass raised its head towards the sun, as if there had never been any message at all.
Chapter Seven
"The supplicant may now approach.”
Tuvaini walked forwards and ran a sour eye across the young Tower mage. Though she kept her face blank, Tuvaini suspected some hidden enjoyment in naming the high vizier “supplicant.”
“I would speak with Govnan.” No titles or honorific from the supplicant.
“High Mage Govnan has been informed of your presence.” The young mage met Tuvaini’s gaze, her eyes the winter-blue of the wind-sworn.
So I wait on his pleasure, do I? Tuvaini held his peace. He craned his head to look up at the Tower. The stonework cut a dark line across the sky; he could make out no detail.
“We so seldom look up.” Tuvaini addressed her in a friendly tone. “We go about our duties in this city that reaches for the heavens, and we so rarely raise our eyes above the first six feet of it all.”
If you don’t draw your enemy out, what have you to work with?
“The wind-sworn are ever watchful of the skies.” Though she had Cerani coloring, something in the curve of her cheekbones, and in the way she clipped her words, suggested her homelands lay on the easternmost borders of empire. It seemed to Tuvaini that hardly a mage among the two-score of the Tower hailed from Nooria. Perhaps the local water left one unsuited to the pursuit of magic, or maybe it wasn’t a calling fit for true Cerani. Either way, the presence of so many near-foreigners in the heart of the city always irked him. Supplicant! The word burned.
“And what have you seen in the skies?” He kept the scorn from his voice. No wind-sworn had flown the heavens in his lifetime, not since the great Alakal. He had always felt his father’s stories of Alakal were tales for children rather than for men.
“Patterns.” The half-smile she offered held a strangeness that silenced him. In the Tower’s courtyard minutes crawled by as if time itself flagged in the heat. The vast enclosure covered some twenty-five acres, and yet the Tower’s shadow still reached the walls, overtopping them and delving into the palace sprawl. Tuvaini didn’t need reminding of the Tower’s reach. He glanced at the young mage again. He didn’t trust her. He didn’t trust any of them. He never knew whether he was speaking to the person, or to the elemental trapped inside.
“High Mage Govnan will see you now.” She turned to face the door, the sudden movement setting her robes swirling around her. The brass door swung open at the touch of her fingertips.
Tuvaini followed her in. He remembered the heavy metal door from his last visit to the Tower. “The emperor does not have such a door at the entrance to his throne room,” he said.
I don’t have such a door!
“We are the emperor’s door, his gatekeepers. There are foes to whom a door of brass is as nothing, and yet we keep them from the emperor.” She led him through the entrance hall, past the statued relics of the rock-sworn.
“Invisible defences against invisible enemies. It puts me in mind of the old fable wherein the emperor buys a set of invisible clothes,” Tuvaini said. He paused at the last of the statues. “Well, well. Old High Mage Kobar. His prisoner finally escaped.”
The mage turned back. If she took offence, none of it reached her face. “All bound spirits seek release.”
Tuvaini shuddered: to have something like that inside, growing and gaining power, until at last it no longer serves, but masters…
The idea filled him with peculiar horror.
“Lead on,” he said.
They reached the stairs. Tuvaini remembered them well; he saved his breath for the climb.
The high mage kept his rooms not at the top of the Tower, but in the middle. Tuvaini had no notion what the upper half of the Tower housed. His escort led him to Govnan’s door, and took her leave with the briefest of bows.