The Silences of Home (34 page)

For eight days the sea raged and Aldron slept more deeply than sleep. Lanara was able to count these days only because Galha sent a Queensfighter to the cabin every morning with food. The Queen herself came three times—though Lanara wondered whether there had been more. She slept most of the day and night now, when she wasn’t cleaning and binding Aldron’s wound, or dripping water into his mouth, or feeding herself, when she remembered to do so.

He shivered and sweated through a fever for three days. He also shouted and muttered, though she could not understand the words. The fever passed and he vomited for another day, a dry retching that produced nothing but bile and then not even that. When this sickness passed, she kept herself from dozing as much, expecting that he would soon wake, for his wound was clean and his skin cool. But he lay silent and motionless beside her, his eyes darting under closed lids.

And then, on the eighth day, she woke from a colourless dream to find his eyes open. His head was turned toward her, his face so close to hers that it was blurry—but she saw his eyes very clearly. She smiled and touched the line that ran through the skin of his forehead. “Welcome back,” she said. He blinked slowly and licked his lips. She reached for the waterskin that hung from the bed frame and lifted his head, and he drank, one hand raised a bit as if he wanted to hold the skin himself. “Now,” she said when he had finished, “talk to me. Just a few words. I want to hear your voice again.”

The door behind them opened. There had been no knock—or maybe there had; she had been so intent on him that she might not have heard it. “My Queen,” Lanara said, struggling to sit up and swing her legs over the bar, “he is awake—look, he is here again”—but the Queen frowned, and Lanara saw that his face was turned to the wall. “Aldron?” she said, but he did not stir.

“Well,” said Galha, “perhaps it was a momentary thing. He is still very weak, that much is certain.” She was speaking at a normal volume; the sea was quieter today.

“Perhaps,” said Lanara—but when the Queen and Malhan had gone, she leaned over Aldron and saw that his eyes were open, fixed on the wall. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

He lay quietly on that day and on the ones that followed, and she stopped speaking to him, asking, begging him to speak to her. But although she no longer talked, she still lay beside him, hoping that her warmth would do for them both, hoping that it might dissolve the fear that was rising in her, ringing in the silence.

Leish was not seasick. He wondered at this dimly, as the ship bucked and plunged. The wind screamed, and when his eyes were open he saw the waves breaking on the windows of the Queen’s cabin—but he was calm. His body and mind both, though he did not understand this. He had yearned for death in his palace prison chamber, in the harbour house, on the last ocean crossing. And on the gathering pool stone most of all, when he had seen what the Queen had done to his land and his people. Queensfolk had cut him down from the stone (which was white and smooth as a bone, not the same stone as before) and dragged him over the steaming rock to the shore and put him in a boat. And then, as the water tossed him and choked him, he had stopped wanting to die. The strange new calm had settled over him, and nothing had yet ruffled it—not the Queen’s cabin, where she tied him yet again (
How much rope have they used on me?
he had thought once), not the rotten fruit and maggot-foaming meat, not Galha’s eyes and mouth, when they taunted him. He felt nothing and feared nothing, and he was not sick.

One day when the ship rode more gently on the water, Leish was unbound again. The Queen ordered this done, and stood very close to him, watching. He also watched her, without defiance or curiosity or dread. They took him to a hatch, half-dragging him since his legs would not hold him. They pushed and pulled him up into the daylight, which seemed very bright even though he soon saw that the sky was heavy with clouds. The only glow was far away, maybe at the horizon, where lightning spat. The wind sucked away his breath when they hauled him up onto the place where the great wooden wheel stood, above the deck. He could hardly see the deck; it was an expanse of Queensfolk blue and green. Leish’s eyes skimmed over their faces, stopped abruptly when they saw two he recognized.
Lanara
. He said the name carefully in his head, as if it might change something—but it did not.
Aldron
. They were beside the hatch at the prow, apart from everyone else. Aldron was sitting on a tall coil of rope. Lanara was standing close beside him with a hand on his shoulder.
They look different
, Leish thought, and that was all—no curiosity, no feeling to make him wonder more.

The Queen was next to him, a few paces ahead. She was leaning on a slender length of wood and holding a drinking horn, a golden horn with jewels around its rim and water glittering inside. Leish remembered Ladhra and Wollshenyllosh holding it, or one like it. He steeled himself somewhere very deep within, but felt no pangs in his heart, or in his body that had to be so desperate for water.

“Some of you whisper about me.” The crowd, which had been silent, somehow became quieter yet. Hair and clothing blew, but these were the only movements. “You mutter that my mindpowers should be able to calm the storms that have beset us. You say that my mindpowers should have saved the boats that have been lost.” Some of the Queensfolk were shaking their heads, some were staring at their feet. “Our beloved Sarhenna, the First Queen, was until now the only ruler in our history to have possessed mindpowers. She spoke to her last arrow, when she and all our people were lost and starving in the desert—and when she loosed it, this arrow struck the ground above a hidden spring. She called upon her mindpowers and moved the earth. She exposed the spring and made it a pool and caused many tributaries to flow from it. She summoned green things and water creatures. The great palace at Luhr was built around this vast summoning. The pool in the Throne Chamber is the very one that Sarhenna created. The city is the legacy of her mindpowers, which were true and potent.”

Galha edged her walking stick forward. “The First suffered for her act of creation. She lay weak and ill for a month, while her people rejoiced in the hope she had given them. It is said that she never fully recovered—and she certainly was never able to call upon her mindpowers again. The only thing that gave her ease was the iben prophecy of another queen who would possess powers that would make the realm even greater.” The Queen lifted her stick for a moment. She seemed to sway as she did so, her legs loose and unsteady. “All of you saw what I did in the Raiders’ Land. I am the queen the iben foresaw. I am the first since Sarhenna to possess mindpowers, and I too have paid for their use with my strength. For over three weeks I lay in my cabin, dreaming of dark things, sunk in fever. For days after that I could not walk. Only now am I able to climb stairs, though slowly. Yet some of you would demand more of me, and some of you doubt me and claim that mindpowers have only ever been a tale told to amuse children. How could you possibly think these things after what you have all witnessed?”

Leish heard another storm approaching. His ears and webs and the roots of his hair ached with its song, as they had when he was a boy hoping for angry waves beneath which to dive. Galha raised her head as if she smelled this storm. She looked up at the lowering clouds, then back at the assembly below her. “Mindpowers are not trifles summoned in an instant. I became aware of my own only after I learned of my daughter’s murder, and yet I could not use them until we reached the Raiders’ Land. Only then, at the peak of my outrage, was I able to draw them forth. It may be that I will never do so again, just as the First did not. But her gift was a lasting one, as anyone who has seen Luhr can attest. Mine will also endure.”

The hatch beside Leish opened. He did not turn at first, but he heard a rising murmur and saw a surge of movement below, and he looked to see what had caused them. Three selkesh were standing by the Queen, held upright by Queensfolk: one woman, one man, the last a girl-child. They struggled against the arms that held them, but only briefly; then they looked at each other, too parched even for tears.

I know them
, Leish thought, and now he struggled to feel—rage, dread, fear, anything that would make him shudder and live. But he still felt nothing, not even when Galha said, “My mindpowers will live in the bodies of every Sea Raider from now until the end of their line, whenever that may be. I have cursed them thus: they will have enough water and food in their land to sustain them. Should they travel to other lands in an attempt to escape their misery, they will be able to eat—but one taste of foreign water will kill them. Such will be the fate of all these people, both living and not yet born. They will always remember the fountains their ancestors defiled, and the Princess of the Fountains, who should have lived to be a queen. These,” she continued, gesturing to the three selkesh, “will be the first to prove the power of the Queenscurse. I am holding in my hand water brought from Fane. Watch now, all of you, and remember.”

Leish felt nothing—no twinge or stab, and no desperation for this nothingness. The Queen tipped the drinking horn and a thin stream of water fell onto the child’s skin. She made a high, trembling sound and cringed, and her parents strained toward her—but the girl was still breathing, staring from her wet arm to her parent’s faces.

“A touch,” Galha said, “and she is not harmed. But now a drink”—and she stepped up to the man, and a Queenswoman pried his clenched teeth open. The Queen poured water in and down. He swallowed twice, opened his eyes wide, and fell. The Queensman who was holding him let him go, and he lay for a moment on the wood, twisted and motionless. Then the Queensman picked him up again and swung his light, limp body from side to side for all below to see.

The woman cried, “Murderers! My land and now my family. . . .” Leish understood her words, knew he was the only one who would. He closed his eyes so that her gaze would not fall upon him and see his heartlessness before she died. Or perhaps she might not see him at all; perhaps his body was as absent as the rest of him.

He heard her fall. The child was crying.

“This one, though”—the Queen’s voice was slow and grave—“this one is just a child—an innocent, just as my own daughter was. I will not have her suffer the same fate as her parents. I will not belabour a thing that has already been made plain. No. I am a mother who has lost her child, and I will let this child go. Her kind can swim superbly well and even breathe underwater. I will set her free.” Leish heard a scrabble and a scream, a distant splash.
Swim and breathe, yes
, he thought,
but it is too far and she is too small
. . . . 

He lost his thoughts beneath a wave of noise: cheering, shouting, the clamour of bow-ends and sword-flats on the deck. He opened his eyes to watch all the Queensfolk calling out their adulation, their frenzy of joy; to watch the Queen acknowledge them with bowed head. He looked back over the throng and saw that not everyone was cheering. Aldron was gaping. Lanara was bending, maybe speaking to him. He thrust himself to his feet and tried to turn. She caught him when he fell, and helped him from knees to feet, and led him away down the hatch.
He is shocked, he is sick with horror
, Leish thought, and envy was the thing he almost felt.

“Mindpowers!” Aldron was on his side in Lanara’s bunk, rocking back and forth with his arms around his knees. He lifted his head to speak the word—though it was more sung than spoken. Lanara stood by the door and watched. During the month since he had first opened his eyes, he had not uttered a sound. He had lain straight and quiet, or stood at the side of the ship, when she had convinced him that they both needed fresh air. He had looked on cabin and sea and her with hollow eyes, and said nothing. Nothing, until the Queen had clutched her stick and addressed her people, and the Raiders had died on the deck before her. “No,” Aldron had said then, very quietly. Lanara had leaned over him to ask for more words, but before she could speak, he had gripped her arm and leaned his own head against her leg. She had set her hand lightly on his hair. His breath was warm and quick; she had felt it as keenly as if there had been no cloth between his mouth and her skin. “No,” he had murmured again, clutching her—and a moment later he had tried to rise.

“Mindpowers!” he cried again from her bed, and she strode toward him.

“Stop.” She attempted to catch hold of his hands, which were now flailing. “Aldron—” She climbed into the bed and sat down, hard, on his thighs.

“You believe her,” he said. His sudden calm was as unsettling as the frenzy had been. Lanara frowned as he went on, “You believe that Galha destroyed the Raiders’ Land with mindpowers she inherited from an ancestor.”

“Of course. How else could she have done it?”

He did not seem to have heard her. “Have you ever doubted her? Or have you ever hated yourself for believing her?”

She leaned closer to him. “Aldron, you’re still not well—your wound was grave, after all, and you must also be feeling the shock of what happened in the battle. You were right there by the stone when she used her mindpowers. You were so close. Of course you’re not recovered.” She wondered as she spoke why he had been standing so close to the Queen; why, in fact, he had slipped behind the stone. Questions about Galha, questions about Aldron—Lanara shrank from them all, and would not ask them.

He was looking at her, truly
at
her, for the first time since the Raiders’ Land. “Recovered? No. No.” His voice was trembling now.

She shifted her gaze down, away from his. “Look, you’ve opened your wound again.” She laid two fingers on the bandage.
He’s so helpless
, she thought,
so lost
. She touched his cheeks with her palms. He shook his head once as she slid her hands down his neck and onto his shoulders, beneath his tunic. His arms came up and his fingers dug bruises she would not feel into her own shoulders. He held her away and she waited, and very soon his arms fell back again, drawing her with them. She saw the ragged line of blood on his bandage, and his eyes—and then his mouth opened against hers and she saw nothing more.