Sword of the Deceiver (2 page)

She was not supposed to be running from the priests of the northern empire and their barbaric sacrifice.

When they reached the dark wood and gilt walls of the palace, the gates were already open. Father, King Kiet of Sindhu, waited there, his craggy face taut with fear and fury. The bearers barely had time to set them down on the palm-lined lawn before Mother leapt out to grab his hands.

“The horse … from Hastinapura,” Mother gasped. “The emperor’s horse.”

“I know. We had a messenger.” Father covered her long hands with his square ones.

“Why now?” she demanded. “Chandra has been on the throne four years, why does he send out the horse now?”

When Father just shook his head, Mother covered her face. “Ah! Why not yesterday? Why today?”

Ancient Tia had come up to the side of the litter, wheezing from the run, and was tugging at Natharie’s arm. “Come chil … Natharie. You cannot be seen like this.”

But defiance filled Natharie and she stayed where she was. Malai slipped up to her, grasping her hems.

“What’s happening?” the little girl demanded. “Tell me!”

Father looked at her, and Natharie swallowed as she saw the unspoken order in his eyes. Her first duty as a woman had come. She wrapped her arm around Malai’s thin shoulders. “We cannot talk of such things here.”

Malai pulled back, belatedly aware of how many people filled the yard — secretaries, servants, soldiers, merchants, farmers, all sorts of people kneeling before the royal family with their heads pressed against the dusty ground, but with their ears wide open. She straightened herself up and tilted her chin up. Showing all the angry dignity an eight-year-old girl could muster, Malai turned on her heel and walked toward the doors of her palace home with her nurse fussing behind her.

Mother pressed Natharie’s hand. “There will be an audience,” she said, and quickly turned to Natharie’s sisters and the other women.

Natharie felt light-headed. A strange buzzing filled her ears as she walked slowly, carefully to her own chamber. There, her maids greeted her with fuss and flutter and a hundred questions.

“There will be an audience,” she said, hearing her own voice only at a great distance. “I must be ready.”

To their credit, her women stopped their questioning. They hurried forward with basins and cloths, to clothe her properly in red and gold, to wash her skin with cool water, to comb and dress her hair and make it ready to receive the high golden cap that was her crown as eldest of Sindhu’s royal daughters.

While they worked, Natharie stared out of the great arched windows leading to her balcony, overlooking the gardens, the fields, and the river beyond. She was looking along the bank for dots of white and red. She saw nothing but the roots of the white mountains that held up the sky.

Hastinapura. The great empire to the north. Natharie had been only four years old when they last came. She remembered being held in her mother’s arms to watch Father as he led away the long columns of the army. Father had been gone for more than a year. When he came back, he was dusty and he stank, and he had the wound that left a white and ragged line behind his ear, but he was triumphant. He and Mother had talked a lot about treaties and other things she did not then understand. She did understand that her father had persuaded the emperor on the Pearl Throne not to bring his armies into their land of Sindhu and take her parents away.

Now, three times a year, Sindhu sent tribute up the river on long lines of flat-bottomed boats: bales of rice, great logs of teak and mahogany, chests of the gold dust that washed down from the white mountains into the streams that fed the Liyoni. All of this went to Hastinapura, where the men were so afraid of women they locked them up and wouldn’t even look at them in the time of love, yet allowed sorcerers to live right in the palace with the king, instead of sending them into the forest monasteries to study and pray and keep the temptation and corruption of power away from the weak and the vulnerable.

These were the red-and-gold men who walked over their grasslands behind the shining black horse. This was the lead soldier with the cold eyes. Eyes that had seen blood sacrifice over and over again, that helped it and honored it. Eyes that looked on the land of Sindhu and saw it as their property.

Then she thought of Malai alone in her chamber, at least as frightened as she herself was, and bewildered at the wreckage of this celebratory day. When the maids finished tucking the last fold of Natharie’s scarlet gown, she rose and went to her little sister.

Malai’s nurse, old Seta, was finishing Malai’s hair, braiding it with gold as she knelt on the floor, looking more stunned than patient still. The girl had been dressed in emerald green embroidered with golden birds. She was a delicate child, Natharie thought fondly, sadly, and she would be a beautiful woman when her turn came.

Natharie must have made some sound, because Malai turned her head. She did not speak. She just tilted her chin up again, letting her interfering older sister know that she was still angry.

Natharie was smiling; and since she was not refused permission to enter, she walked into the room. Malai smelled of sandalwood, sunlight, and sweat. Seta placed a pillow for Natharie beside her sister. Natharie knelt on the cushion and began to speak. She spoke slowly and calmly, falling into the rhythms of reciting an old poem, grateful for the distance and discipline the pretense gave her. “In Hastinapura, when a new emperor ascends to the Pearl Throne, they have a week of mourning for the old emperor, and then a week of sacrifice and celebrations for the new. At the end of this time, a black horse is sent out from the city. The horse roams where it will for a year before it returns to be sacrificed.”

Malai swallowed and Natharie nodded, silently acknowledging the little girl’s thought. The Seven Mothers who were worshipped in Hastinapura demanded blood for the smallest blessing, it was said. The magnificent creature they had seen was destined for the knives of the priests.

“Whatever land the horse crosses is said to belong to Hastinapura, by the will of their Mothers.

“Centuries ago, an army of conquest followed the horse, but now it has only an honor guard, as you saw. If any of those who accompany the horse do not come back alive, and with enough celebratory tribute following them, it is the land where they were last seen that will bear the blame, and the punishment.”

Slowly, the meaning of those words sank in and Malai shuddered. Natharie knew what she was thinking, because she had been thinking the same thing since they had reached their home and she was able to think at all. The emperor on Hastinapura’s Pearl Throne expected more tribute. Wealth. Servants.

Women.

There were always women in the tribute. Mostly servants, but every so often, a daughter of one of the high houses.

Why did it have to come today?
Mother had wailed. Today, when Natharie became a woman and was ready to be given in marriage as the treaty spelled out. True, the contract had not been formally witnessed, but letters had been exchanged between the kings, promises had been made, and her name had been bound to those promises. Yesterday, when she was still a girl, she could have been the one to go to Hastinapura. Now, if a daughter was demanded, there was only tiny Malai left to go.

Nausea gripped Natharie’s stomach. Only little Malai, the youngest of three daughters. Only a daughter, with three brothers who would remain in the house. Oh, no. Malai was not too much to ask. Not too much to give to Hastinapura and their bloody goddesses to prevent a war.

The thought made Natharie sick, even as she realized the same reasoning could apply to any of them.

“But we have a treaty,” Malai said, invoking the word like a magic charm. It had prevented so much, surely it could prevent this.

“We had a treaty with the old emperor,” said Natharie. “Our father, and our ambassadors, say his son is a very different man.” She had heard the gossip late at night, after banquets and around corners. The new emperor was not well liked. He was shiftless and lazy. The most daring, when they thought no one was listening, wondered softly if King Kiet had made the Hastinapuran treaty knowing that when the old emperor died the young one might not be able to hold the new lands. Natharie had often wished this was true, but if it was, that plan would come to fruition too late for Malai. “There are … complications with his rule. It may be he has decided it is time to make his authority …” Her mouth twisted sourly. “Well understood.”

Malai stared up at Natharie, her wide brown eyes blinking for a moment. Then she leaned forward, wrapping her arms tight around Natharie’s neck. Natharie hugged her back, as if she could keep her sister safe with the strength of her own arms.

“All will be right, little sister,” she whispered. “The wheel turns for us, that is all.”

But she did not feel serene or resigned as she spoke. Instead, she felt hard as flint and as sharply edged, and when she tilted up Malai’s chin so her sister had to look into her eyes, she knew an anger so fierce, Natharie was surprised Malai could not feel its heat.

“Come, Sister.” Natharie stood, holding herself with all the poise she could muster. “Let us go hear what is required of us.”

Cool and graceful, Malai rose, much more a woman than the girl who ran laughing to the river, and followed Natharie to the audience chamber.

The audience hall was already full by the time they reached it. Father sat on the ancient golden throne, the three-tiered crown on his head and the ivory staff in his hand. Mother, crowned in gold and pearls, sat at his right. Beneath the great symbol of her rank, her face was rigid and cold.

Look on her
, she thought toward the Hastinapurans.
We do not fear our women in this land
.

On Mother’s right-hand side, Natharie’s full-blood brothers and sisters sat absolutely still, without prompting from their nurses and governors who stood behind them. All of them, even little Bailo, were arrayed in their best clothing and crowned according to their birth order. Kitum, the oldest boy and the heir, did his best to look regal, but his young face was pale. He had listened well to his teachers, and knew enough to fear the northern empire.

To the left of the dais knelt the viceroy and the servants of the throne in their golden robes and collars. The “aunties,” father’s four concubines, knelt below these. Their children were arrayed with them, as serious and as still as the full-blood royals. What was to come affected them all. No one would be left untouched. For once even sly, insinuating Radana looked concerned, and all the fear was almost worth it for that sight.

Natharie walked deliberately, gracefully between the throne and the kneeling Hastinapurans. She moved slowly, keeping each gesture separate and precise. She knelt before the dais and set the edge of first her right hand, then her left hand on the woven rush mat and pressed her head to them in obeisance to her father. Beside her, Malai did her best to move in time with her older sister.

Natharie counted five full heartbeats before she rose with Malai and walked slowly to assume her place at little Bailo’s right hand. Natharie brushed Bailo’s hand with her arm as she sat, a gesture they had used many times before, and felt him move his little finger in response. They could not hug or even look at each other in formal audience, but they could share this bit of warmth and silent reassurance.

We are all here. We are together in this
.

She wished she could give such reassurance to Kitum.

As she knelt in her place on the carved platform, she was able to take stock of the Hastinapurans. Their leaders — the hard-eyed captain of the soldiers and the red-and-gold priests — knelt on the mats before Father and the throne. They all looked very proper and respectful, save one. The tallest of the priests let his gaze impatiently flicker here and there, taking in the audience hall with its golden images of the ancestors, the gods, and the Awakened One. His face grew more deeply sour with each thing he saw. His huge, hard hands plucked restlessly at the cloth of his robe where it lay across his thighs. What actions did those hands wish they could take?

The one woman who had accompanied the Hastinapurans was also there. She knelt at the back of the hall with the servants and the soldiers, her white clothing making her stand out among the vivid hues of silk and gold. Natharie felt an involuntary shiver run down her spine. She must be the sorceress who followed the prince. The rulers of Hastinapura had sorcerers accompany them wherever they went. Could this one weave some influence from where she sat?

No. If that could happen, Father would have denied her entrance
. Natharie tried to remind herself that Father knew much more of Hastinapurans and their ways than she did, but the trust she needed was hard to find.

Suthep, father’s wizened viceroy, thumped his ebony staff on the floor. At the same time, the great gong was struck, the deep, long sound reverberating throughout the hall.

“Kiet Somchai, Great King of Sindhu, will now hear the petitioners before him!”

The gong was struck again, and Natharie suppressed a smile. Petitioners. Very good. The deep frown on the big priest’s face showed he keenly felt the insult.

The captain of the soldiers kept his face absolutely still and dignified as he made his bow from where he knelt.

“Great King, I am Prince Samudra
tya
Achin Ireshpad, First Prince and Son of the Pearl Throne. I bring you greetings from my brother Chandra
tya
Achin Harihamapad, Emperor of Hastinapura, Revered and Respected Father of the Pearl Throne and Beloved of the Seven Mothers.”

Prince?
It was all Natharie could do not to stare in shock. This man in plain and dusty armor, commanding a tiny troop of soldiers from horseback, was a prince? Father would not even send one of her half-brothers out with so little to mark and protect his rank.

Father nodded once in acknowledgment of the prince’s statement. “You are welcome here, Prince Samudra. What has brought this honor to our house?”

The big priest flushed, clearly angered by this feigned ignorance. Natharie concentrated on remaining properly composed and calm. Malai shifted her weight, probably itchy. Natharie flicked her little finger. Malai caught the gesture and stilled.