The Silences of Home (19 page)

“No.” He had to try several times to say the word. When it finally emerged, it was barely more than a whisper. The Queen was smiling before the yllosh-woman spoke the word.

“Thank you,” Galha said.

He hung between the Queensguards and gaped his confusion, and still she smiled. “You may not have told me where your army is, but you have confirmed that there is one. For which I thank you. I will return later with a bit more water, and you will respond with a bit more information, and soon this will be over.”

She murmured something to her daughter that the yllosh-woman did not translate, and the Princess too smiled. Leish thought,
Mallesh will kill you both
, and just for a moment his hatred of them was so pure that he believed this. But then they left, and the hatred turned to him in the empty room, and he clawed at his own flesh until blood dried with the water on the floor.

Ladhra ran her fingers slowly down the red wood of the Queensstudy drawers. Her lips moved as she read the dates on each drawer. “Do not murmur as you read,” her mother had said when Ladhra was a child. “And do not let your lips tell others what you are reading. Words are for you alone, unless you choose to share them with others aloud.”

“Or I could share them with my writing,” Ladhra had said. “I could write to my people and they could read—”

“No,” Galha had interrupted, “you know you could not. Not with anyone outside the palace—for most of our folk cannot read. You can, and scribes and Queensguards and their children can, as can those who do my work far away. But that is all. I have told you this before, my dear: remember it this time. Remember that words are the Queen’s power—and written ones are the greatest mystery of all, to our people. You must guard this mystery well.”

Ladhra pressed her lips together, her cheeks as flushed now as they had been every time Galha had scolded her as a child.
She’s not even here
, Ladhra thought as she pulled open one of the drawers, a
nd yet I still obey her
.

She frowned down at the pages that lay stacked before her. Malhan’s tiny, neat letters flowed across the parchment. She skimmed the close-set lines, bending down to see them better.

“I’m sorry, Ladhra,” said Galha from behind her, “that in my brief absence you required something. May I help you find it now?”

Ladhra straightened, flushing again, a child again, and always. Her mother was standing beside the table, the fingers of her right hand resting lightly on the wood.

“I didn’t hear you come back in,” Ladhra said, even though this was not an answer, and she knew that it would make her mother shake her head, just once, and look away from her as if to gather patience from the air.

“That is not an answer,” the Queen said, her eyes lifted up to the arrowslit windows that we so high and so useless.

“No, I’m sorry. I was looking for the record describing the strangers’ arrival. I’m going to write to Lanara and I wanted to see how Malhan. . . .” Her voice trailed away as Galha lifted her hand from the table and waved it in a languid, looping shape.

“You’ll find no such record. Malhan has not written of this event.”

Ladhra shook her own head. She glanced at the double doors. They were closed, and Malhan stood with his back against them. He was looking at Galha.

“But,” Ladhra said, “this happened two weeks ago, and he’s such a quick writer, even though he has to record everything. He writes especially well when he describes momentous things like Queenswrit Eve—so I wanted to see how he’d describe the strangers. The selkesh. I thought I’d look for this while you were gone, so that we could discuss it later. . . .” She looked down at the parchment again, as if the words would be there now, beneath the date, as if her mother had been wrong.

“Come, child, sit with me here”—and Ladhra did, still staring at the open drawer. “It’s true that Malhan watches and remembers everything, but he does not write everything. At night he sits with me here, and we decide together what should be written. This is a precious time, and a vitally important one. You will value it as I do when it is your turn to rule.”

“But the selkesh are strangers. You . . . justice was done when one of them died, and the other is now our prisoner—and yet none of this has been written?”

“You will discover,” the Queen said, “that sometimes you must know how a story ends before you tell it. This discernment is one of the greatest skills a Queen possesses.” A tiny frown puckered the skin between her eyes. “I myself had ascertained the truth of this before I was your age and without direct guidance from my mother. I had hoped that you would display a similarly subtle wit.”

The table was so smooth. Ladhra tried to see a line or nick in its wood and could not. “So I’ve failed some sort of test,” she said after a moment. “Because I didn’t even know it
was
a test.”

Galha rose and closed the drawer. Its latch caught with a tiny, final sound. She remained standing, though Ladhra, still staring at the table, only saw this peripherally. “You must not be sullen,” Galha said. “You must never show an excess of sensitivity, for people will—”

“This is us,” Ladhra said. She lifted her head, anticipating anger and needing to see it. “Us alone. Surely I can be permitted an honest emotion in the privacy of our own chambers?”

Galha’s lips were pressed thin and pale, and her voice, when it came, was higher than it usually was. “Privacy? Not here, Ladhra. Not in your life, though it may have seemed like something you had when you were a child, running around the palace like a wild thing.” A tremor ran through these last words. She paused and swallowed and looked briefly at Malhan. When she continued, her voice was steady again. “When you were a child, you believed you were alone. Now that you are a woman, you must entertain no such illusions.” She took four long strides around the table and stopped with her back to her daughter. “I fear for you. You have apparently not learned the many lessons I have tried to teach you, and yet you may be called upon to rule sooner than either of us expect. And what if you should prove to be the one blessed with Sarhenna the First’s mindpowers, as no queen since her has? What then? I fear for this realm.”

Ladhra’s chair scraped as she pushed herself away from the table. She felt a fluttering in her throat. She wondered whether Galha would see it, and was furious with herself for wondering. “I am sorry that I disappoint you,” she said over the fluttering. “But how am I supposed to take responsibility if you give me none? How can I truly learn these lessons you want to teach me if you never let me
try
things?” Her own voice was perilously close to cracking, but she did not stop speaking. “You keep me beside you nearly every moment of every day, and you say this will help me learn—but all it does is bore me. Let me learn how to be a worthy queen, even if I’m not destined to be the one with mindpowers. Let me go into the city and meet my people, or travel on my own to another Queensfolk city to see how it’s governed, or accept trade goods here at the palace in your place—anything, as long as I’m
doing
something!”

The Queen glanced at Malhan and they smiled at each other. “My dear,” she said, turning back to Ladhra, “I am pleased that you at least have some of my spirit.” She took a step forward, her hand raised to touch Ladhra’s cheek, but Ladhra walked past her, past Malhan. She pulled the door open.

“And I’m pleased that I amuse you,” she said. She wanted to say more, but she was already in the corridor and would not look back at them. She walked quickly; she heard Galha call “Let her—” but that was all; she was beyond the voice, following the staircase that would take her away.

Ladhra meant to go to the Queenswood; she wanted shadow and silence and the illusion of solitude. But when she stepped into the corridor that led to the western doors, someone called her name.
Run
, she thought.
Just run
. She slowed. The call came again, closer, and she stood still.

“Thank you, Princess.” Ladhra frowned at the fishperson’s watery voice and gesturing hands, which were covered with scales. She had seen the fishfolk in the marketplace motioning to each other. She knew that they spoke in hand signals when they were in the deep waters of their homes, but surely they could use their voices when they were together in the air? This one continued, “I am W—” (
completely unintelligible names
). “I translate for”—its white eyes darted around the empty hallway—“the prisoner.”

“Yes?” Ladhra said, looking past it at the sunlight that swam on the flagstones by the door. The rains had passed, but the earth beneath the trees would still smell damp. “What do you want?”

It glanced again around the corridor. “I am sorry to seek you out in this way,” it said quietly, “but your mother would not listen to my words, and I fear she will suffer for this. And so I come to you.”

Ladhra said, “And? What were these words that the Queen did not listen to?” She felt the silence suddenly, and the stillness of the bright stone.
I’m alone now
, she thought, and leaned closer to the fishperson.

“The prisoner is dying. At first, as you know, the Queen visited him every day, and each time she brought water to give him. But when he would not answer her questions, she began to come less often—and only she gives him water. I told her of his increasing weakness, but she refuses to allow me or anyone else to aid him. If he dies, she will find out nothing—so I thought that you . . . that you might. . . .”

“Well?” Ladhra demanded, though she felt the shape of the words that were coming, and her heart raced.

“That you, who have such influence, might prevail upon her to help him. You seem wise and strong and not so . . . determined as she is. I wanted to come to you rather than secretly to provide him with water. I wanted you to know my honesty and tell her of it. But most of all I wanted you to impress upon her the prisoner’s fragility, since I cannot.”

Ladhra took two steps past the fishperson. Her palms were slick with sweat; she pressed them against her leggings. “I may do all of these things,” she said slowly so that her thoughts would have time to grow solid before she spoke them. “I may. But first,” she went on, turning back to look at the fishperson, “I will go myself to see him.
I
will bring water to him.”

The fishperson walked over to her—though it didn’t walk, really, it glided, as if it were swimming through the air. It stood in the sunlight. Ladhra had to close her eyes briefly against the dazzle of its scales.

“I will take us to him by a different path,” she said, “one that is not guarded. Until I have ascertained his condition, I will attempt to avoid involving my mother the Queen.”

“I see,” the fishperson said. Ladhra thought,
Do you? I very nearly do not.

“Well, then,” she said. “Good. Come with me”—and she walked quickly away from the doors that would have taken her, alone, into the Queenswood.

Mallesh lay at the bottom of the well and looked up at the sky. The circle of brilliant blue wavered as he breathed. He watched the bubbles dissolve and the water smooth, and then the distant sunlight returned to taunt him. From time to time the hole above darkened and a bucket came clattering down, and he had to kick away from the wall, into the tunnel beyond until it had been pulled up again. Each time, he glided back to his place at the foot of the shaft and watched the bucket’s slow, bouncing upward progress; each time, he imagined grasping it, pulling so hard and so suddenly that the person holding its rope would hurtle down into the water.

He was here because of the sky, and because he was alone. He would have thought it inconceivable, back in his own land, that he would seek out solitude from the army under his command, but this is what he did now, at least once a day. The scribes seemed to sneer at him—at all of the selkesh, but at him in particular. Baldhron treated him with respect, though Mallesh was never sure what the man said when he turned and spoke to his own people. Sometimes he smiled in a way Mallesh distrusted, and then all the Queenspeople smiled a bit; so perhaps even Baldhron was mocking him.

The selkesh were also beginning to show signs of disrespect. They muttered to each other in small tight groups that broke reluctantly apart when Mallesh approached. Several times he had come upon gatherings of them beneath the water; he had watched them direct each other to distant tunnels before he slipped among them and they scattered with false smiles and excuses.

“We were talking of home. That is all.”

“We were going to see the other waterways—these ones are dull to us now.”

They lie
, Mallesh thought.
They are talking about me
. Back in the jungle, or on the earth of Nasranesh, he would have attempted to talk commandingly to them of faith and leadership. Here, snared in rock so far below the sky, he fled from them.

Mallesh watched the well circle dim for a moment.
A cloud
. He drew a thin stream of water into his mouth to remind himself that he was thankful for it, and for this place—but he thought again,
A cloud
, and remembered mist dissolving from the treetops around the gathering pool, and again he cursed himself for the yearning that made him weak.

He swam back to the main selkesh pool very slowly, turning his body around in the water. When he surfaced, he saw some of his men on ledges and rafts, sleeping with their legs in the pool, and he saw others who were awake and waiting. He knew they were waiting: they were still and silent, standing in a line against the wall nearest him.

“What is it?” he asked them as he pulled himself onto one of the sleeping rafts he had ordered them to make, before Baldhron had told them they could no longer go to the jungle for wood and plants.

One of his men lifted his hand, as Mallesh had instructed them to do, if they wished to speak. “We are . . . very hungry,” the man said. “Hungry and weak.”

Mallesh stared at the man’s fingers. The fans between them looked thin and red-gold in the lantern light. “You know,” he said, standing up carefully, “that I can’t allow anyone to go back to the jungle to gather food. Baldhron has told us that the Queen is sending her guards out of the city to search for us. She knows there are many of us, though Baldhron’s palace contact has assured him that Leish did not give her this information.” He saw their eyes flicker at each other when he spoke his brother’s name. He continued more loudly, “The scribes are bringing us as much food as they can—and we still have cut seavine from home. This will have to suffice until we go above.” His own innards ached with emptiness, but he did not speak of this, or even think much about it.

“As to going above,” the man—
Who
is
he?
—said, “we would like to know why you keep us here when Leish is a captive. Why has no attempt been made to free him? If the Queenspeople will not help us with this, we should do it alone.”

His last words came very quickly, and when he had finished, he bent his head. His seven companions were already gazing down at their own feet. Mallesh looked at the row of them and swallowed a shout.