The Fall (13 page)
Farric kicked his heels on the rocky outcrop until his slippers went flying into the deepening shadows of the ravine below. To the west, heavy cloud cover smothered the sunset. Gray above, dark below, darkness all around—and darkness had taken Parania’s heir. He had enjoyed their many lively debates, even if he had never convinced her to change her position. She had been a good friend.
Vondra
. In death, she would keep her name, and never have it taken away, never come to power as the Parania.
He took a deep breath to quell the ache in his chest.
The news of Parania’s loss had ended his diplomatic mission and sent him hurrying home. If he had entertained any notion that Father bore no responsibility for the accident that took Vondra’s life, it turned to ash the moment he sensed Father’s presence. Outwardly, the Monral observed the proper forms expected when an ally experienced such a crushing loss. Inwardly, he exuded satisfaction, which only deepened as the time for the sending approached.
After the evening meal, Farric had fled the stronghold and hiked up into the hills. Between his own grief and the turmoil Father’s estrangement from Sharana had created among the staff, he needed solitude to gather his wits. Tradition demanded he attend Vondra’s sending. To get through it, when he suspected his own father of murdering her, would be… a challenge.
Perhaps his satisfaction is circumstantial
. After all, Father harbored considerable ill-will toward Parania. To see the Paran lose such a remarkable heir might gratify anyone wronged by the Paranian ruler.
He kicked the outcrop again, with his bare heels, and the rock bit into his skin.
But if Father is responsible, we could all die
.
Soon or late, someone would discover who did it, and the ruling caste would either execute the guilty party or force him to walk into the dark. But if it was a bonded ruler—
Farric shuddered and stared up into the rapidly darkening clouds. A ruler’s dishonor spread through the ruling bond to the entire province. A few would decide to live with it. They would cut their hair and take refuge in an outcaste sanctuary.
The rest would walk into the dark, by their hundreds of thousands.
It had happened twice, early in history. But the third time had occurred in the spring of this year, when Detralar’s ruler defied the Jorann’s order of protection and tried to assassinate Marianne Woolsey. All but a few Detrali had walked into the dark.
And if Father had done what Farric feared he had done, it could happen to Monralar.
* * *
“Did you learn English from Smitty Russell?” Laura asked.
“Damn sh-shtraight,” the Paran slurred.
Her beloved stood swaying in the middle of his sitting room, a bottle of spirits in one hand and a shotglass-sized cup in the other. And he’d been like that, almost without interruption, for three days.
How had he learned so much English profanity?
She stared at the crimson robe he wore. Red flowed everywhere in the stronghold, arranged over every door and bleeding across every wall. Every member of the staff had deep red sashes tied around their waists. She too wore a crimson robe. Dark crimson—the color, she had learned, of untimely death.
“Join me.” He waved the bottle.
“No, beloved, I can’t. I’m pregnant, remember? I don’t want to harm the baby.”
He shrugged like a human, with both shoulders, and took a long drink from the bottle. “Then I will drink for both of us,” he said with exaggerated care. He tilted the bottle up again and lost his balance, stumbling backward with an English curse, pulling red drapes down from the wall.
“That’s not a nice word,” she said.
He shook with drunken titters. “I know.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her down on top of him. “I want to fu—”
She stopped him by placing a finger over his lips. “That’s an even worse one.”
Another drunken giggle. He tried to kiss her and missed.
“Come to bed, beloved. Sleep it off. I’ll stay with you.”
“Will you let me stick my yin in your yang?”
“You have it backward. I’m yin. You’re yang.”
“I am the Paran.”
“You’re drunk. Come to bed?”
“Sleep right here.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He belched.
She expelled a long sigh. “Come on, let’s get you to bed before you pass out. Guard!”
The guard by the door dropped his camouflage.
“Help me get the Paran to his sleeping mat.”
The guard called another to help, and between the two, they got the staggering and protesting Paran onto his mat. Once there, her sotted beloved promptly fell asleep.
It seemed best to not to disturb him by trying to get him out of his robe. Laura covered him with a blanket and sat next to the mat, brushing the hair away from his eyes. Even in sleep, his brow creased from the grief haunting him. She sighed, about to disrobe and get under the blanket, when a soft buzz came from her tablet.
Scrambling up off the floor, she went into the sitting room, pulling her tablet out of its pocket as she walked. It could only be Marianne. Trying to remember the last time she spoke with her friend, Laura propped the tablet on the Paran’s writing desk and touched the blinking sigil.
Marianne’s face appeared, pinched around the eyes. “I hope you don’t mind a call,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”
Laura nodded and took a deep breath. “As much as I can be, considering.”
“I’m so, so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. We’re all pretty shocked here. A tunnel collapsed on Vondra’s transport pod.”
Marianne blinked. “I wanted to mention that. You know it’s—Laura, do you know anything about the transport tunnel system? They were built to last—I mean
really
last. And engineers monitor them constantly. It’s not possible for one to just collapse without warning, especially not with a pod traveling through it. The pods know when a tunnel is safe or not.”
A chill settled in Laura’s stomach. Marianne couldn’t mean what it sounded like she meant. “I suppose it couldn’t have collapsed if it weren’t damaged in some way,” she said, picking her words with care.
Her friend’s expression turned grave. “Is the Paran looking into the possibility of sabotage?”
Laura bit her cheek. She couldn’t think about that—not yet. “The Paran is looking into the inside of his eyelids. The guards tried to talk to him a couple of times today, but he kept himself pretty well sauced. He’s passed out right now.”
“Drunk?”
“Three sheets to the wind.”
“Well.” Marianne blinked a few times. “It’s not like they can’t get drunk, but I wouldn’t have thought...” She trailed off.
“I didn’t know, myself. But think about it. He’s a bonded ruler. He’s not just dealing with his own grief. The reflected grief from his people started coming back at him through his ruling bond. It’s—” she paused to swallow hard “—overwhelming.”
“Are
you
all right? It hasn’t been very long since your own loss.”
“I’ll be fine. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but there’s something to be said for taking care of someone else to keep your own problems at bay. There’ll be time enough for me to fall apart later.”
“I am so, so sorry, Laura.”
“Thank you.” She closed her eyes a moment, then opened them and set her jaw. “And thank you for calling. I do appreciate it. I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you sooner.”
“Don’t worry about us, we’re fine. I understand completely. You just take care of yourself and your Paran. Like the Tolari say, my heart grieves for his pain.”
Laura nodded and cut the connection. With a sigh, she pushed herself away from the desk. On the mat in the sleeping room, the Paran had turned into a log, but he still needed her, even so. Weary beyond thinking, she shed her robe and dropped onto the blanket beside him.
* * *
Laura woke to the sound of water in the bathing area. Outside the windows, clouds loomed gray and dripping—on the day of Vondra’s sending, even the sky wept. She stumbled off the mat to join the Paran.
“Stay by me today,” he said, when she joined him in the spray. He kept his face carefully blank, but grief surrounded him like a cloud.
Thousands of people will attend the funeral. Tens of thousands.
Fantasies of isolated ice caves drifted through her imagination. “An army couldn’t keep me away,” she said.
He answered with a wan smile.
He knows what your feelings mean, Laura
. Still, he said nothing and accepted it when she glued herself to his side through the preparations. He met with… servants, mostly the stronghold seneschal and a woman she’d never seen before, with black embroidery on the cuffs and collar of her black robe, which turned out to be an indication of her rank as leader of the servant caste. Ambassadors from other provinces began to arrive, and he closeted himself with one of them, the heir to Brialar—Vondra’s lover, and Veryth’s father. No, the man who had
fathered
him. Underneath the Briali’s grim exterior, his heart was torn in a way Laura recognized.
Finally, after what felt like forever but was more likely two or three hours, they stood before the great doors of the stronghold, which had been thrown open, facing a crimson-draped bier and a gathering crowd. The lowering clouds had stopped raining, and a cool wind blew.
Two men wearing deep red carried a litter filled with flowers out of the keep, and a burst of anguish from the Paran rent Laura’s heart in two. She slipped an arm around his waist and looked again. At one end of the litter, the blooms framed Vondra’s battered face.
The air left Laura in a rush. Tolari didn’t do more than wash their dead.
The Paran’s arm settled around her shoulder and squeezed, and she clung to him, taking deep breaths, while the two men placed the litter on the bier. To the sound of weeping from the growing throng, they lifted Vondra’s broken body with loving gentleness, positioning it on its side in the middle of the square platform, knees pulled up in almost a fetal position. Servants came forward to arrange the flowers and weave them into Vondra’s hair, and then… and then a woman in deep red walked through the great doors, cradling Veryth’s still form, and laid him in the circle of his mother’s arms.
Weeping swelled like a wave, rolling down the people standing on each side of the road that led to the city. Laura sobbed. The Paran, his eyes red, squeezed her shoulder again.
“There is no shame if you must retreat,” he murmured.
She made a desperate grab for the whales’ net and wrapped herself in thread after thread, until everything outside of herself and the Paran faded.
“No,” she whispered. “I said I would stay with you. I can do this.”
His brows pinched with doubt, but he nodded. The bier began to move down the road, self-directed, at a walking pace. The Paran took her hand and followed. Behind them, at least two dozen provincial heirs walked. Ahead, the crowds increased, an impossibly bright gauntlet. The blood drained from her face. If her empathic barriers crumbled, so would she.
The Paran gave her hand a brief squeeze. She returned the pressure.
You can do this
, she told herself.
Just hold on
.
The route covered several kilometers of a broad arc through the city, and the sun’s bright spot glared in the clouds overhead when they turned onto the broad avenue leading to its central plaza. Red fabric draped the windows and doors of the buildings lining the square, and in the middle stood an obelisk of brick-red marble, perhaps five meters high. Silvery glyphs dotted the polished, gleaming stone at regular intervals.
Silence fell, broken only by an occasional sniffle, as the bier stopped before the towering pillar. The Paran let go her hand and stepped forward to bend over the bodies of his daughter and grandson, pressing his forehead against each one’s cheek, murmuring words Laura couldn’t understand. When he straightened, he stepped back several meters and pulled Laura against his side.
A woman standing next to the obelisk began to sing. Though Laura couldn’t understand the words, her heart plunged.
The Paran’s hand at her waist squeezed. “The musician’s gift,” he said, in a low voice.
She took a deep breath as the music swirled around her, thrumming, sinking into melancholy. The music seemed almost alive, rising and falling as flames appeared beneath the bier and began to lick at its crimson draping. Fire had engulfed the platform by the time the woman finished her song and a man took her place to sing a different but equally sad dirge. When his song died away, another singer stepped up, and then another, and another, until Laura lost count of those joining with the fire’s voice to sing the bodies to ash.
When nothing remained to burn, and the flames had died away, servants knelt on the paving stones and brushed the ashes into a red crystal jar, which they placed at the base of the obelisk. Then the servant caste leader, with enough sadness on her face to fill an ocean, knelt to fit it with a cover. She stood and bowed, holding out the jar toward the Paran, who left Laura’s side to take it from her. He cradled the jar to his chest, head bowed, as the servant backed away. A profound silence fell.
I love you, my beloved
, Laura thought at him, hoping he could sense the feeling through the fog of grief enveloping him.
You still have me. You’ll always have me
.
He straightened and squared his shoulders. Taking a deep breath, he placed a hand on a glyph just above his head, which opened sideways to reveal a space barely large enough to fit the jar. The hollow scrape of crystal against stone rang through the stillness. Another touch and the niche closed. He bowed, deeply, both hands over his heart. Then, eyes glistening, he turned away from the spire to face his people.
Sobs broke from thousands of throats across the multitude assembled in the square, unleashing a tidal wave of grief and anguish which slammed into Laura, shredding her defenses. She was almost grateful when the world exploded into burning shards of darkness, and the agony ceased.
