She was certain her father—and probably her mother—could do the same, if they wished. But there was no sane reason to do such a thing. That could be the source of the problem with Ta'nganata; eleven-year-olds, she knew from experience, were hardly sane. And yet, neither were many people, of any age. And why would someone incapable of suppressing awesome power at the age of eleven suddenly be able to at the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen? The center of the riddle was in that question, Hezhi knew. This was the age at which royal children either went down the Hall of Moments to live with their parents or vanished, had the -nata suffix added to their names. Like D'en.
And inexorably, she was drawn back to the fact that she was now D'en's age—or, rather, the age he had been when she last saw him. She was also Ta'nganata's age, for that matter.
Something wasn't right when she reached home. Qey met her at the door, twisting a dishrag mercilessly in both hands. Her eyes were red, and Hezhi abruptly realized that Qey had been crying. Next to her, Tsem stiffened. She felt his tension like a brittleness in the air itself.
"Hezhi," Qey said softly. "Some people have come to see you. I want you to do what they say, and not be worried."
Qey was clearly worried, but Hezhi did not say so. She caught the faint whiff of smoke; it was the same scent that the brooms of the priests gave off. She edged around Qey into the courtyard.
Four priests stood there, watching her entrance. They all wore cottonwood masks of a kind she had never seen before, blank-eyed, round-mouthed. They were fully robed, as if for some ceremony.
"Hezhi Yehd Cha'dune," one of them intoned, in a singsong voice as high and clear as a silver bell. "We have come to administer the rite of Ngess'e'."
The name of the rite was in the old tongue, but Hezhi knew it: "body." She recalled the glyph for "body," a vessel affixed to a Human Being.
"What? I have never heard of this rite."
"It is one of the rites of passage into adulthood," the same priest explained. "One does not learn of it until the time comes."
"Sh-she has not begun bleeding yet," Qey stammered. One of the priests turned his masked face toward her rather sharply.
"That does not matter, whether it is true or not," he asserted implacably. "The rite may be repeated, if we do it when she is too young. But we must not wait until she is too old," he said, his smooth voice seeming to imply more than he said. Whatever the implication was, Qey shrank away from it.
This was it, Hezhi was certain. Events had caught up with her before she could understand them. This was the day she would vanish or join her parents. Tsem knew it, too. He was as immobile as a statue.
If they take me, she realized, he will kill them. He will kill them all. She remembered Tsem, hugging her to his breast as he bore her away from the demon ghost, pulling her from the water when she was younger, insisting that she would never disappear as D'en had.
She laid a hand on his arm. "Tsem," she whispered. "I wish some flowers from the west roof garden, the blue ones and the red ones. Go gather them for me." The west roof garden was the farthest of their old haunts, above the deserted wing of the old palace. It would take some time for him to go there and back.
Tsem suppressed a glare—only because he was in front of the priests. "Princess," he said, voice thick with anguish, "the priests may have need of me…"
"No. We have no need of you," the priest contradicted. "You may gather her flowers. The rite is brief but uncomfortable— she may want them to cheer her up afterward."
"Yes, Tsem," she said. "It cheers me to think of you picking flowers." And alive, she silently added.
"I'm sure it does, Princess," Tsem said, trying to sound like his normal, bantering self.
"Go on, Tsem," Qey murmured. "I'll look after Hezhi."
Tsem nodded and turned rather quickly. He closed the door behind him.
"What do I do?" Hezhi asked the priests.
They motioned her toward her room.
IV
The Forest Lord
The next day the rain was gone, the sky a cobalt dome unalloyed with clouds. Perkar trudged down the talus slope beneath the cave, rubbing his tired eyes. Sleep had not been kind to him; mostly it had eluded him, but when he did drop into its depths, weird frenzied dreams had allowed him no rest. In the clear light, he hoped to sort them out, to find their importance, if any. But his mind was dull, and a chill wind sweeping down from that bluest sky numbed his body, as well.
This is like autumn, he thought. Autumn, though the season stood midway through summer. Hubara, the North Wind, should be sleeping yet in her faraway mountain. But perhaps another cold wind lived in the mountain Perkar could now see, for certainly the wind came down from there, with its smell of wet cinders and falling leaves. The mountain itself was a wonder, a nearly symmetrical cone, slopes pale in the morning light, crowned with dazzling brightness. Perkar wondered if he should offer something to it, but he didn't know the Mountain God's song or even his name. But then he remembered that the Mountain God was also the Forest Lord, Balati.
So he burned some incense for Balati, though the wind took it in the wrong direction. Then he braided a little fishnet of horsetail reeds and walked down to the stream, the one that had spoken to the Alwat. There he cast the fishnet in, softly sang a little song—a greeting, since he did not know its own song.
"Thank you for your words," he told it then. "If you speak to her again, tell her I only do what I must."
He sat by the swollen stream, knowing it would not answer him, and puzzled at his dreams. Some involved Ngangata, and those dreams were painful, embarrassing, almost like dreams of finding oneself inexplicably naked at some important gathering. Perkar perceived no clear reason why his dreams had that tenor; he was always clothed in them. The mere presence of the half man seemed to trigger the feelings. Others were of her, of course, of the smell of rose petals, of her pleading, of that sharp slap across his face. Those she had sent, with the rain; they were the only ones he understood. But mixed up with those dreams were the ones about the city and the girl. Houses and halls of white stone, a dry land and a river of unthinkable size. The River he knew, as certainly as he knew anything, though he had never seen it. In one dream the River was as red as blood, thick and sluggish. And the girl, standing at a fountain, saying his name. Asking for him.
"There you are." The Kapaka looked down at him from the trail to the cave. He was grizzled and unshaven, and he looked older than Perkar believed he was. You didn't sleep well, either, Perkar thought, and wondered what dreams might trouble a king.
The Kapaka cleared his throat and came on down to the stream. "You've made an offering? Good. That's good."
Perkar only nodded.
"Perkar," the old man began reluctantly, then with more force: "this expedition is an important one. If it weren't, I wouldn't have put my old bones in the saddle and come all the way out here. No Kapaka has done this in two generations, and I certainly never had any intention to. I would vastly prefer to be at home, telling my grandchildren stories. But younger sons are starting to fight among themselves, others are arming against the Mang. That is foolishness, Perkar; whatever the old songs may make of war, it is foolishness. Piraku is cattle, children, the love of family, giving gifts. War breaks things, tears them up, kills family, destroys cattle. Can you see that, as young as you are?"