“I heard from Lord Durward that you called to give him your condolences,” she said. “That was good of you.”
“He was kind to me.” She looked at Terza. “So were you.”
Terza dismissed the compliment with a wave of her elegant hand. “You were Richard’s friend from childhood. I did nothing, really, but welcome you as one of his friends.”
But for someone, like Sula, who for so many years had no real friends—and who was not in any case the same human being Lord Richard remembered from childhood—the gesture had called forth astounded, unforgettable gratitude.
“Lord Richard was good to me as well,” Sula said. “He would have given me a lieutenancy if he could—and maybe I’m not wrong if I think that was your idea.”
Terza glanced toward a spray of purple blossoms near her right hand. “Richard would have thought of it if I hadn’t.”
“He was a good captain,” Sula said. “His crew liked him. He looked after us, and he talked to everybody. He was very good at keeping the crew cheerful and at their work.”And his eyes crinkled nicely when he smiled.
“Thank you,” Terza said softly, her eyes still cast down. A servant came with the tea and departed. The scent of jasmine floated from the cups—venerable Gemmelware, she noticed, centuries old, with a pattern of bay leaves.
“How is Lady Amita?” Terza asked, referring to Lord Durward’s wife.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see her.”
“She’s prostrate, I understand. Richard was her only child. She hasn’t been seen since his death.” Terza looked away. “She knows that Lord Durward’s father will expect him to divorce her and remarry, so that he can father another heir.”
“He could hire a surrogate,” Sula said.
“Not in a family that traditional. No. It would have to be a natural birth.”
“That’s sad.”
There was a moment of silence while Sula looked with appreciation at the cup and saucer as she raised them in her hands. Jasmine rose to her nostrils. She tasted the tea, and subtle pleasure danced a slow measure along her tongue.
“The Li family is leaving Zanshaa,” Sula said. “Going into the Serpent’s Tail.”
“To be safe, I suppose,” Terza said simply. “A lot of people are going. The summer season in the High City is going to be dull.”
Sula looked at her. “You’re not leaving?”
Terza gave a movement of her shoulders too subtle to properly be called a shrug. “My father has taken a little too…prominenta part in resisting the Naxids. He knocked down the Lord Senior, you know, in Convocation. He threw rebel Naxids off the Convocation terrace. I’m sure the Naxids have already decided what’s going to happen to him—and to me.”
Sula looked in surprise into Terza’s mild brown eyes.
“If Zanshaa falls,” she said, “my father will die, probably very badly unless he cheats them through suicide. I may die with him—or I might be disinherited, as you were, or otherwise punished. There’s no point in fleeing, because if Zanshaa falls we lose the war and the Naxids will find me sooner or later.” She gave a little shake of her head. “Besides, I want to be here, with my mother. She’s…a little too high-strung for all of this.”
Sula’s heart gave an uneasy lurch as Terza, in her calm, low voice, so easily spoke of her own possible annihilation. It bespoke a kind of courage that Sula had not expected—in her former life, as Gredel, she’d known such courage only in criminals, who accepted their own deaths as an inevitable result of their profession. Like Lamey, she thought, Lamey her lover, who was certainly dead by now at the hands of the authorities.
It was not as if she herself hadn’t looked at her own death. Everything she’d done since she’d stepped into the soft leather boots of the real Lady Sula had qualified her for nothing but the garrotte of the executioner tightening slowly around her throat. She had publicly claimed the Sula name at Magaria, as she destroyed five enemy ships. “It was Sula who did this!” she’d transmitted.“Remember my name!” If the Naxids won the war, theywould remember. Sula could expect no more mercy than could Lord Chen. The only difference was that she could expect to die in battle, in a blaze of antimatter fire. After all the years of suspense, all the years in which she’d wakened in the middle of the night, clutching her throat in a dream of suffocation, simple extinction was something she didn’t fear.
What Terza said next surprised her even more.
“I’ve admired you,” she said, “for the way you’ve managed to do so well, even though you have no money and no connections. Perhaps—if I’m disinherited instead of killed—you’ll have a few tricks to teach me.”
Admired.Sula was staggered by the word. “I’m sure you’ll do well,” she managed.
“I don’t have any useful skills like you,” Terza judged, and then she smiled. “I could make a living as a harpist.”
She played the harp very well, at least insofar as Sula judged these things. “I’m sure you could.” And then, more practically. “Your father could give some money to one of his friends—a safe friend—for you to use later. I think that’s what my parents did for me, or perhaps their friends just got a little money together and set up a trust.”
Terza gave a solemn nod. “I’ll suggest that to my father.”
“You’ve discussed this?” Sula asked. A macabre little conversation over evening coffee, perhaps. Or a chat in the kitchen, while Lord Chen brewed up some poison so that he could cheat the public executioner.
“Oh yes,” Terza said. She took a deliberate sip from the Gemmelware cup. “I’m the heir. I’ll probably be in the Convocation sooner or later, if the war goes well. I have to know things.”
And Lord Chen, Sula knew, was on the Fleet Control Board, and knew how the odds favored the Naxids. For over a month he had been staring every minute at his own death and the extinction of his house, the lineage that went back centuries, and then gone about his business.
There was courage there, too. Or desperation.
There was a step behind on the gravel path, and Terza glanced up from her cup. As Sula rose from her chair and turned, her heart gave a leap, and then she realized that the tall man behind Lord Chen wasn’t Gareth Martinez after all, but his brother Roland.
“My dear Lady Sula,” Chen said as he stepped forward to take her hands. “My apologies. I so wanted to go to the ceremony yesterday.”
“Terza explained that you had an important vote.”
Chen looked from Sula to Roland and back. “Do you know each other?”
“I haven’t met Lord Roland, though of course I know his brother and sisters.”
“Charmed,” Lord Roland said. He strongly resembled his brother, though a little taller, and he wore his braided, wine-colored coat well. Like Martinez, he retained a strong provincial accent. “My congratulations on your decoration. My sisters think very highly of you.”
But not the brother? For a moment bleak despair filled Sula at the fact that Martinez hadn’t mentioned her name. And then the hopelessness faded, and she found herself thankful that Martinezhadn’t told the story of their last encounter, where they had danced and kissed and Sula, thrown into sudden panic by the arrival of a deadly memory, had fled.
“Tell your sisters that I’ve been thinking of them.”
“Would you pay us a call?” Lord Roland suggested. “We’re having a party tomorrow night—you’d be very welcome.”
“I’d be happy to attend,” Sula said. She considered her next comment for a moment, then said, “Lord Roland, have you heard from your brother lately?”
Roland nodded. “Every so often, yes.”
“Has something happened, do you know?” Sula asked. “I get a message from him now and then, and—well, the last few messages have been heavily censored. Most of the contents were cut, in fact. But nothing seems to have gonewrong — in fact he seems lighthearted.”