An Accident of Stars (17 page)

But in the end, she rejected the notion out of hand. She didn't like Yasha, with her sharp eyes and ugly pale skin and bristle-bald head, and though she might – just
might
– have seen her way to confiding in Pix, the sky would rain fire before she told that wrinkled old woman a single thing more than she had to.

Unable to help herself, she glanced again at Zech, resenting her continuing presence almost as much as Yasha's. Now that the threat of the crowd was gone, she noticed how unsettling the calico girl truly was. Her whole skin was blotchy, white and brown and gold; together with her weird grey hair and pale eyes, she looked like a rag doll stitched together from scraps. Viya owed her nothing for the rescue: she was Cuivexa, after all, and anyway, it was Ke and Na who'd truly saved her. But asking for her to leave would have implied that Viya considered her presence meaningful, and as such a thing was beneath a Cuivexa's dignity – even a Cuivexa in flight – she was forced to endure her company.

Ever since Zech had stopped talking, Yasha had been enumerating what might be meant by sanctuary, but Viya wasn't listening. Thanks to Luy's interference, she was fed up with lowborn strangers telling her what to do. All she wanted now was for these people to show her the deference she was owed as Cuivexa – give her shelter for the night (
and a horse tomorrow
, she thought savagely,
they ought to at
least
give me a horse!
) and help her on her way, none of which was being achieved by Yasha's prating.

“Enough!” she snapped, cutting the old woman off mid-sentence. “Pixeva, have you had any contact with my secondmother, Rixevet ore Hawy? She went to our holdings at Avekou before Vex Leoden was crowned, along with my fourthfather Kadu and bloodfather Iavan.”

Irritatingly, Pix glanced at Yasha before answering. “No,” she said slowly. “But if you're travelling north, Cuivexa, we'd be happy to offer escort.”

“That won't be necessary,” Viya said, inwardly shuddering at the thought of travelling with Yasha. “A horse and supplies will suffice.”

Yasha raised an eyebrow. “You'd brave the roads alone?”

“I know the way,” Viya said, “and a single rider covers more ground than a convoy. As for bravery, I have already abandoned the palace. Riding alone could hardly require more courage than leaving did.”
There,
she thought,
let that remind you of what I've done and who I am!

“Fairly spoken,” said Yasha, but though her tone was mild, there was a hard glint in her eye that Viya mistrusted. “Even so, I hope you'll spend the night within our walls. While I trust the discretion of everyone who learned your identity in the courtyard, I am more discerning when it comes to our other occupants. I would suggest we refrain from the usual deference–”
As though you've shown me any!
Viya thought, “–and continue to call you Rixevet. Or is there another name you'd prefer to be known by?”

“Viya will suffice,” she said, firmly. As much as she disliked the idea of being called her intimate name by Yasha, it would have been dishonest to reclaim Rixevet's name among people who already knew it for a lie, particularly as Pix knew her secondmother personally.“Well then, Viya,” Pix said, gesturing to the door, “if you're going to be with us for the night, I'll show you where everything is, shall I?”

“Yes, and my thanks,” said Viya. She was only too glad to exit the room, but as she left, she could swear she felt Yasha's gaze burning her neck, like coal-sparks kicked up from a fire.

The compound was quiet at night, and Gwen savoured it.

She sat alone on the front verandah, rolling a cup of warm mege between her palms. A faint breeze stirred the courtyard dust. She clutched the shawl wrapped around her shoulders, the action more reflex than necessity. She didn't yet know what to make of the fugitive Cuivexa; she was young and prickly and powerful, and watching her snub Yasha had filled Gwen in equal parts with schadenfreude and secondhand embarrassment, but as to what she was planning…

Lifting her chin, Gwen contemplated the Kenan stars and wondered, for neither the first nor last time since Leoden's betrayal, exactly what Kadeja had done to be cast from Ashasa's priestesshood; how Leoden had met her; what the two of them saw in each other. She knew now, with the bitter certainty of hindsight, that Kadeja had been working with Leoden long before Gwen and Pix ever knew she existed; and worse, that Leoden had always planned to make her his Vex'Mara. His lengthy “negotiations” about the conditions of his marriage to Tevet and Amenet had been a stall tactic in the first instance, and a means of getting close enough for murder in the second. Nothing more.

Kenans didn't play poker, Gwen thought sourly, but if they did, Leoden would make bank on it. He'd fooled her – fooled them – so comprehensively that, even now, even knowing what he was, a part of her still couldn't separate out the lies from the truth. Was Leoden Kadeja's pawn, or vice versa? It was, of course, entirely possible that they were equal partners in crime, but on the basis of having met them both – albeit briefly, in Kadeja's case – Gwen somehow doubted it. Or maybe she only wanted to doubt it, hungry to believe that the man who'd betrayed her was himself in danger of betrayal. If Leoden and Kadeja were quietly working against each other, then they were vulnerable, which was a comforting thought. But if they were truly pulling in harness, then what did that mean for Kena?

Gwen sipped at her mege, and remembered.

Kadeja had been there, the day they'd finally persuaded Leoden to sign the marriage contracts. Her head was shaved then, and together with her piercing eyes and fine-boned face, it had given her the look of a bird of prey, for all that she sat demurely in a plain white gown, her bare arms banded with heavy gold bracelets.

“And who is this?” Pix had asked, her eyebrows shooting up. In all the times they'd come to Leoden's residence, he'd never had company beyond his servants. Which, in retrospect, made sense: he'd taken care to keep them from seeing who else he'd been talking to. “An ally?”

“A friend,” replied Leoden, smiling in that brisk, warm way of his, like winter sunlight flashing through glass. He was more magnetic than handsome, and when he spoke, his hands could be as eloquent as his words. “Pixeva ore Pixeva, Gwen Vere, this is Kadeja Etmahsi.”

Etmahsi.
It was a word, not a name, but for all the time she had spent with Vekshi women, it still took Gwen a moment to place the meaning. When she did, her gaze sharpened. Etmahsi meant
motherless
, and in a culture of matriarchs, it wasn't a title you earned through anything good. Still, Gwen didn't like to judge – the Many knew, she found Vekshi customs strange enough at the best of times – and so she said nothing, moving aside as Pix laid out the contracts on Leoden's writing desk.

As the two nobles went through the documents, Kadeja rose and padded over to Gwen.

“You're the worldwalker,” she said – a statement, not a question. Gwen nodded, silent beneath Kadeja's appraising stare, and waited for the other woman to speak again. After a moment, she did. “Kenan aristocrats are peculiar creatures, aren't they?”

Gwen hadn't contradicted her, not least because Pix had spent an hour that morning deciding how best to wear her marriage-braids. “They certainly have their moments.”

“I was worried, when I first came here, that I wouldn't understand them.”

“Oh?” said Gwen, gaze flicking to track the movement of Leoden's fingers over the vellum. “What made you change your mind?”

“Power is power,” Kadeja said simply, and Gwen wished then – as she'd wished many times since – that she'd seen her face as she said it. Instead, she turned too late, and any further insight into the remark was lost forever.

“This looks to be in order,” Leoden said. His words were for the room at large, but Kadeja smiled as though at a private joke. “Let me get my quill.”

“Here,” said Kadeja, passing it to him, and if any part of Gwen thought it odd that a Vekshi woman, newly-disgraced – she knew what her missing fingers meant, even without the inauspicious name – would rush to act so submissively around a Kenan nobleman, she must have ignored it.
Or maybe
, she thought,
you were so used to feeling odd yourself that you privately welcomed a little oddness from others.
Regardless of whether strangers truly believed her to be a worldwalker, she was still a foreigner here, and even after so many years, the sting of being thought alien was undiminished.

Then Leoden signed the marriage contracts – the ink was purple, Teket's sacred colour, and ferociously expensive – and that was that.

“I look forward to meeting Amenet in particular,” he said, unfailingly polite as they made their parting courtesies, and all the while Kadeja stood back and watched, a slight smile on her face.

Two weeks later, he'd poisoned Amenet, married Kadeja and crowned himself Vex of Kena.

Now, Gwen drained the last of her mege, rubbing her head as she set the cup aside. She wanted to trust in Iviyat, but past experience made her wary.
She's a child, Gwen. Younger than Saffron is, even. Would you force her to prove her innocence before offering aid?

Yes,
said a different inner voice, the one that sounded disconcertingly like Yasha.
A hundred times over, if it saves us the same mistakes.

But what if mistrust is a different error?
the first voice persisted.
What then?

Gwen sighed and straightened, heading back inside.
Pray that we learn from it quickly enough to matter.

S
affron lay awake in bed
, turning the day's events over in her mind. Even once Pix had presented Iviyat to them properly – they were to call her Viya, with no more to be said about it – an air of unreality clung to the situation. The Cuivexa herself had mostly remained in a haughty silence, occasionally initiating conversation with Pix, Matu and Jeiden, but otherwise dealing curtly with everyone else. Though Zech assured her this was all to do with rank – Pix's family were aristocrats, and had been highly placed at court before Leoden came to power – it still felt brattish and rude to Saffron.

The problem, she reflected, was that it was almost impossible for her to comprehend that plump, imperious Iviyat was a queen. Partly, this was due to the fact that she reminded her of Ruby; partly because she'd already taken to thinking of Kadeja that way; and partly, too, because the very idea of meeting a Cuivexa, or a queen, or a princess – or whatever she was in whatever language – was not one that came naturally to a girl from New South Wales whose entire family thought it was long past time that Australia became a republic. Mostly, though, it was because they were all pretending she
wasn't
royalty, and without any communal sense of awe or deference to tip the scales, it was hard for Saffron not to think of the whole thing as a sort of abstract joke.

Pix and Matu belonging to the nobility was one thing; she could get away with thinking of them as the Kenan equivalent of private school alums with property in Rose Bay, or, at worst, as politicians. But a queen –
the
Queen – was a smiling old white lady who gave the Christmas speech and had her face minted on coins. It would have required more mental agility than Saffron currently possessed to instantly confer identical status on a fourteen-year-old brown girl shorter than she was.
Not
, she thought hastily,
that race has anything to do with it
. The idea that it might, even a little, left her feeling deeply uncomfortable.But with sleep the only escape from her thoughts and it proving hard to come by, she was forced to confront the possibility that maybe it did. After all, she'd had no trouble believing in Kadeja's queenliness, and that was after the woman had cut off two of her fingers. (She touched her stumps again in the dark. The new skin felt waxy, like candles burned down to their nubs.)Disquieted, she rolled over on her mattress and stared at the moonlight sifting in through the shutters. “Not seeing Viya as a queen because she's not white is racist,” she whispered into the pillow. “I'm being racist. Stop it.” She felt bad because it was true, but slightly better for having admitted it. After all, if she didn't admit she was doing something wrong in the first place, how could she possibly fix it?

Saffron closed her eyes and, some minutes later, finally fell asleep.

And dreamed.

She stood in a place she didn't know, beneath a huge, white sun. The earth underfoot was brown and hard – a crossroads, placing her at the nexus of four different paths. Each one was narrow, not even as broad across as her outstretched arms, and all were surrounded by tall, lush grass, a blue-green sea that waved as high as her calves.

“Weird,” she murmured, feeling the dream-words sting her lips. “Either I'm in Wonderland, or due to meet the devil.”

“Why not both?”

The voice came from behind her. Turning, she found herself face to face with a handsome, dark-skinned man who looked to be about Pix's age. His hair was braided in leftwards-curving cornrows, and there was a quizzical tilt to his head. Like Matu, he wore a tunic and trousers – both deep blue – though his sleeves were short and his feet bare. His brawny arms were folded over his chest, and as he studied Saffron, a crooked smile tugged his lips.

“That's odd,” he said. “You really are here.”

“Why wouldn't I be?” said Saffron. “It's my dream.”

His smile broadened. “Are you sure about that?”

“It's a dream. I don't have to be sure.”

He laughed at that. “Good point.”

Movement flickered in the corner of her eye, but when she turned to follow it, the whole world somersaulted around her, spinning like a merry-go-round. She fell and kept on falling, rolling over endlessly as though down the world's longest slope. Then something caught in her throat, and suddenly she was on her hands and knees, gagging groggily as she vomited a spool of cloth onto the grass. With one hand, she pulled the last of it free and stared at the pattern: a golden dragon rearing on a scarlet field studded with flowers. The dragon twitched against its stitches, hissing like a punctured hose; the flowers opened, withered, regrew; and all around the crimson fabric rippled like blood–