The Silences of Home (23 page)

“And you are not dealing with sea animals now!” Baldhron spat. Scribes and selkesh were beginning to emerge from behind the stage, two or three at a time, their eyes wide. “You hunt people now—and you have no idea—”

“Baldhron,” Mallesh said, hearing his own voice as if from far away, as if he were drunk or ill—though his head was clear and his limbs were coiled with power. “You are upset that I took this action without telling you. Maybe you are angry that the first Queensblood was spilled by selkesh. But remember: you are aiding us. That is the way of it.”

The men had all gathered now. Baldhron’s eyes darted to them, and to the unguarded doors that were so close. His chest heaved as a drylander’s might, if he had been diving. “Indeed,” he said after a moment, not looking at Mallesh. “We are giving aid to you in this place
that only we know
. Do not act without my agreement or knowledge again. Do not, Mallesh.”

He did turn then, and Mallesh met his gaze, allowed his head to lower just a bit. He could hear the palace; he was near and strong and no longer concerned with the pride that had tormented him when Baldhron had given orders beneath the city. “Very well,” he said.

Baldhron nodded once. “Retrieve your spears, then,” he said. His voice sounded different, thinner, the words pressed by air. “We must go in now, before anyone passes by here. We have already lingered too long.”

“Very well,” Mallesh said again, and heard his laughter ring like waves against the city’s song.

“Did you hear something?”

“Hmm? No. You were probably half asleep again. I tell you, you’ve been dozing every few minutes since midnight.”

“It’s the baby. He used to be wakeful at night and sleepy during the day, but now he’s older, he’s awake in the day too, when I used to sleep.”

“Ask for a few nights away, then—just enough to get yourself rested. And anyway, he’ll change. Mine did, though I admit it seemed . . . What? What’s—”

They were green and brown, like creatures risen from the earth of the Queenswood after the rains—like the trees themselves, so tall. There were others among them, these ones familiar. All of their mouths were open, but they made no sound—just ran and raised their arms and loosed their wood and metal before she could get her own arrow nocked. Her bow clattered against the stone by her feet. She heard this, and a grunt from the man beside her. She saw him pitch forward, though not clearly; her eyes were full of mist that would not blink away, and now scarlet like the mourning ribbon the Queen wore in her hair when she grieved for someone lost.
Me?
the woman thought, and fell.

The child should have been asleep. His grandmother would flog him if she found him here—but she slept longer and longer each night; and he was twelve now, old enough to come and go a bit without her knowledge. And anyway, he was pursuing his passion: the stars, the pictures they made, the shadows on the face of the moon, the luminous trails that sprayed across the darkness like the path of a giant sand snail.

He bent to scratch a notation on his skymap. It was getting bigger and bigger all the time; soon he would have trouble hiding it in his bedchamber. His grandmother would flog him for this too. Parchment and writing sticks should only be used for scribes’ tasks—this is what she thought, what she had told him since he could remember. He was to be a scribe, as his mother had been. He went to his lessons and concentrated and was praised by his teachers—but only here did he feel joy.

He had not brought a lantern with him tonight; the moon was full, and his house was the highest of all the Queensfolk houses by the palace. The brightness of the moon made it difficult for him to see the stars surrounding it, but he would wait, and the moon would set, and he would look at its neighbour stars then, if he wasn’t too tired. For now he peered at other, farther stars, and sketched their positions on his map, which had small round sections for every hour of the night.

At two hours past midnight he heard noises among the houses below him. His own house was silent. He was so relieved by this that his limbs felt like water for a moment. He leaned out over his flat roof and tried to blink away the dazzle the moon had left in his eyes. He saw dark shapes running up the staircase; it was the scuffing of their feet that he had heard. He looked at them for a few breaths, then crawled all the way back to where his roof met the palace. He should not be awake. He should not be here now—but surely these men were not coming to find him?

He closed his eyes when he heard the slight squeak of his door. Perhaps they
were
here for him; perhaps they were going to talk to his grandmother before they came up. He whimpered and hugged himself and his skymap, even though he knew he should probably be running or hiding or doing some other clever thing to avoid detection.

Long minutes passed without further disturbance. He was straining so hard to hear that his ears felt the silence, like a cloud that muffled and breathed at the same time. Nothing, nothing—then the creaky door again and the scuffing footsteps. He crushed the skymap against him and waited for someone to vault up onto the roof—but no one did, and the footsteps moved away.

When he was sure that they were gone, he slid back toward the edge of the roof. The men—he saw them clearly this time, though some looked much too tall to be Queensmen—were on the landing below his, pushing open the door to that house. He saw other men on the landing below that. Men everywhere, dark as insects, scuttling in and out of houses with flashing steel. He had been moon-blind before; he had not seen these weapons.

His door gaped. He slipped inside. A short time later he slipped out again. He was crying, holding a kitchen knife that dipped and wove as if he were drawing a star pattern on the air. He stood and wiped his cheeks with the back of his free hand. He saw that the men were far below him now. He put the knife between his teeth and climbed, hand under hand, foot under foot, down the long, straight palace wall that supported the cluster of houses. He climbed carefully but quickly. When he reached the sand, most of the men were still above him. He removed the knife from his mouth and turned—and looked up into the face of someone he knew.

“P-Pentaran,” he stammered. One of his teachers—here, now, holding a blade as those other men were. Pentaran staring down at him, his mouth agape; Pentaran about to say something. The child cried out and sprang forward. He ran through the shadows toward the palace doors, faster than fountain water or the arc of a dying star.

“You are an artist,” the female Queensguard said just before she took another short, noisy sip from her soup bowl. “I can’t imagine why no woman has yet forced you into marriage.” Her four companions chuckled. “Is that eastern redspice I taste? Or pepperflower?”

“Neither,” replied the burly guard who was the chef. “And I’ll never tell. Unless, that is,
you’d
like to marry me?”

Though there were only five of them in the stone vastness of the kitchen, their laughter sounded loud and full. They were sitting cross-legged on top of the broad wooden counter that hours ago had been scrubbed and swept clean of the day’s food. They had coaxed the fire back to life and, after much preparation, set the soup over it. The soup’s scent was like their laughter: large and nearly living in this cold, darkened chamber.

“Must be off,” one of the men sighed.

“Nonsense!” cried another. “You’ve only had one bowl of soup and two cups of wine! And our watch only ended an hour ago.”

“One more cup,” the woman insisted, pouring, spilling red droplets onto the wood.

“No—I really should go,” the man insisted, pushing the cup back toward her. “There’ve been too many nights like this, recently. I need to sleep.

“Poor wee dear needs his rest,” she trilled as the man slid off the counter and walked over to the wall where all of their bows were leaning. He slung his bow over his shoulder and turned to scowl at them; they were calling mock-aggrieved entreaties, holding out their arms. When he disappeared up the short staircase that led to the corridor, they dissolved again into laughter.

There was a long moment of silence, after the laughter. Then, from just outside the door, came a short, twisting scream. The Queensguards leapt down—cups and bowls tipped, fell, rocked—and ran for their bows and the stairs.

The corridor seethed with men. Lizard-men—by the First, what
were
they?—and Queensfolk, all of whom turned from the body on the floor when the door crashed open. The Queensguards fumbled for their daggers, which until now had only been drawn in pretend battles, or to subdue drunken palace intruders or adolescents who stole in from the city to prove their mettle to their friends. The guards parried, mostly, until the woman sprang forward and slit a lizard-man’s chest from right to left. When he faltered, she jumped up and sank her knife into his neck. He was so tall that she had to wait for him to fall before she could retrieve her blade, through gouts of blood and the last bucking of his limbs. But then there was someone else standing in his place. She rubbed the blood from her eyes and readied her dagger, then gaped at him.

“Nalhent?” she said, and he fell back a pace, his own dagger shaking in his hand. “
Nalhent
!” she cried. He took another step back, his mouth working soundlessly. A lizard-man pushed past him, thrust a hooked knife into her and wrenched it, deeper and around, until she fell.

The one named Nalhent turned and ran. Another Queensman called after him. All the Queensmen hesitated, looked at the corridor and down at the dead on the floor and, wildly, at each other. Then they too ran. The lizard-men turned as well, just long enough for the Queensguards to lunge and stab. “Go!” the chef cried to one of his companions who had reached the edge of the fighting. He fled, weaving so that none of the attackers would be able to throw a knife with any accuracy, and the lizard-man who tried to follow was cut down by an arrow.

After they had killed the two remaining guards, the lizard-men pounded down the hallway in the direction the escaped one had taken—but though their strides were long and desperate, they did not find him.

The Queenswood was on fire. The child had smelled and heard it even before he crawled over the body of the dead Queensguard at the palace’s western entrance. The fire had reached the top branches of a few of the smaller trees; the larger ones stood above the shower of sparks, as yet untouched. The child coughed and tried not to breathe too deeply, though this was very difficult, since he was running. He dodged among the trunks, weaving, turning, not thinking about where he was going. When he stumbled into a clear space among the tallest trees, he sat down heavily and sobbed. He tasted smoke at the back of his throat and wondered whether his tears would be black. He lay down as he cried. The earth was soft with the moss and springy spreading plants that had grown after the rains.

He must have slept. When he sat up, the web of leaves above him was ablaze. He swore and scrambled to his feet. How could he have slept when he had to do something? When he had to tell someone about the men? He stood very still. A picture was forming, slow but clear, and he knew what it was, where he had to go. He ran again, very fast, through spiralling, flaming leaves.

He was a very good climber, even now that he was twelve and his legs and arms were longer and clumsier. He found the base of the tower that jutted into the Queenswood and pulled himself up against its stones. This was one of the older towers; the stones were rougher, the surface less sheer than those of the newer towers. He scampered up, slipped, continued more slowly. He thought briefly that he could have tried entering the tower from within the palace—but he kept climbing. He had seen the silent spread of men among the houses; they would be inside the palace too, maybe posted at its tower doors in place of the Queensguards they had killed. Better to make this attempt from the outside.

Below him, wood shrieked and cracked. The fire was spreading; he heard its roar increasing, like the sound of a great beast goaded into rage. He rested with his cheek against stone that was still cool, and closed his eyes. He knew that he could not look down, especially now, when the flames might blind or frighten him. Up, up, up, rest; repeat. At some point his knife fell from between his numb lips—but that was fine; he was nearly at the first window, and in any case, what had he really expected to do with a knife?

He had often examined this tower in daylight, thinking he might climb it one day when he had nothing else to do. The lowest window was barred; the one above it was not. When he reached it, he saw shorn metal that must once have been bars. The strangest thoughts flitted through his head:
Did someone escape from here once? Why hasn’t anyone ever noticed and replaced the bars? Did someone know I would need to climb up here someday?“The boy will save us all—make sure to leave him a way in. . . .”

He dropped to the landing beneath the window and lay there, shuddering and sweat-sodden. He did not allow himself much rest; he dragged himself up through the darkness, stair by stair, like a wounded dog. His dog-boy whimpering sounded odd, probably because he could not feel himself making this noise. He wanted to sleep again. The darkness tugged at his eyelids and his head—but he shook it off and began to count the steps. He was at eighty-four when he reached for the next step and found only empty space. He had to stand up now. And after he did that, he would need even more strength. He lay and imagined that he was the Summer Archer, that each of the points of his body was actually a star. He was massive and powerful, spread above the eastern horizon, each of his movements a rumble.

He reached for the rope and felt it, though he did not open his eyes to look at it: rope as thick as both his legs together—but with his new star-arms he would have no trouble holding on. He pulled it in against him, wrapped himself around it. He would fly, in this darkness that was his open sky.

The boy swung himself off the wooden platform. At first he simply hung, swaying slightly. He shouted once—the Archer’s bellow, like thunder—and bent his body violently back and forth, until he and the rope were climbing up and plunging down together. Somewhere far above him, the Queensbell began to toll.