The Sacred Band (17 page)

Delivegu regained his seat. “You don’t drink much of that, do you? It’s poison. I doubt very much the baby is well served by it.”

“But a short glass a day,” the older teen said. “That’s all I’ve seen her take.”

“Good. That’s all right, then. I guess …” Leaning forward, he said to Wren, “I do insist that you stop riding. You’re putting the child at risk.”

“Is that an order from the queen?”

“No, just an expression of concern from myself. I’m confident she would say the same, though.”

“You care about my baby?” Wren asked. Her Candovian features could have been classically beautiful had she been raised with any sense of courtly decorum. She had not, and her facial expressions—when she made any—were as blunt and straightforward as a tavern owner’s.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I? A royal child is a royal child.”

“A royal bastard, you mean.”

“Surely you don’t mean that. It’s … just the pregnancy. It affects women’s moods, I’ve heard. Mistress Wren, do you think me so crude?”

“Of course I think you crude. Look, neither of us was born to royalty. I never planned to be mistress to a prince, let alone mother of a royal bastard.” She speared a morsel of meat and brought it near her mouth, waiting for a retort.

“You should be overjoyed,” Delivegu said. And for the moment he said it, he lost sight of the irony of the statement. “You’ve been lucky. I know what that’s like.”

She jabbed the morsel in her mouth and chewed. “Am I lucky? Dariel is lost, probably dead. My child has no father. What it does have is—” Glancing around the table, she backed away from whatever she was about to say. “I live with uncertainty. That’s all. I know you know what I mean.”

She directed this pointedly at Delivegu, but the senator said, “We all do. Trying times test us all.”

The later hours of the night found Delivegu entertaining the serving girl Bralyn. It turned out she was the warden’s daughter and therefore granddaughter to the first Peter, the one who had overseen the lodge since King Leodan’s youth. He had died only recently, and the girl spoke fondly of him. It seemed to be the only thing she had ever liked about living at Calfa Ven.

“Will you take me back with you to Acacia?” she asked.

Delivegu lay on his back, with his head resting against her shoulder, enjoying the sweaty press of her breast against cheek. “Oh, that’s a tempting possibility.”

“Take me with you, and you can have me whatever way you want. Whenever you want. Are there courtesans at court?”

“So many it’s hard to miss them.”

“They’re all better than me, aren’t they?”

Not the sort of question Delivegu would ever answer honestly. He sat up and studied her, to look as if he were giving the question due consideration. The girl pouted as she awaited his answer. In truth, most of her appeal was the raw stuff of youth. She kissed with a sloppy abandon that he had not been able to make sense of. He had liked her best when he got behind her and did not have to duel with her tongue. She was country, and would remain so for the few short years of beauty she had left. He said, “You’re gorgeous by any standard. A lover of infinite talents.”

She swatted at him, clearly pleased. Delivegu surged in on her, growling. The two of them wrestled a moment. He found a fleshy place to press his mouth and blow skin blubbers. A strange habit of his, he had to admit. But when he was not yet ready to perform sexually he often played in such childlike ways. Nobody had yet complained. Not really.

“Why do you want to leave?” he asked a little later. “Your life is good here. Better than most. You work is guaranteed for life. You get to serve the queen. Many would trade places with you.”

“When the queen is here, it’s grand,” Bralyn said. “But she hardly ever is. It’s boring most of the time.”

“Somehow I doubt that. You have guests of some sort here constantly. Men to seduce …”

She swatted at him again.

“You must know the queen intimately.”

“A bit,” the girl admitted.

“Have you seen her work magic?”

Bralyn considered him but then dropped any reticence the moment she began answering. “We’re not supposed to, but it’s hard to miss. She sings all the time when she’s up here. Prince Aaden is always on her to create things.”

“Like what?”

“All sorts. Animals you’ve never seen before. She created these bird things and set them flying over the archery meadow. Those she didn’t hide in the slightest. She and Aaden used them for target practice, and some of the staff ran about retrieving the fallen ones. They were strange things, birds with feathers, aye, but with three and four sets of wings, stiff ones like dragonflies. Strange … but beautiful, too. I saw her once blow life back into a slain stag. My father had just come in from a hunt and had a wagon stacked with dead deer. The prince didn’t like the sight and got upset, and the queen just went over and worked a spell and then kissed the stag on its nose. A moment later it got up and looked around, and then bolted from the wagon like it never had an arrow in its side. She did other stuff, too, things she really didn’t let us see.”

Delivegu considered that a moment. With all the things Corinn was letting the world see these days, what sort of sorcery might still merit secrecy?

“I’m hungry,” the girl said, stretching back across the cot and sliding one leg over the other, as if this were what one did to combat hunger.

“Of course you are. How about I get you something?”

“Are you serving me?”

Delivegu leaped to his feet and looked around for his robe. “Exactly. What would you like? Bread and cheese? Some of that roasted venison?”

She puffed out her cheeks. “Cheese gives me nightmares. And venison? I’m sick of the stuff. I could never eat another deer in my life.”

“Ah, what then?”

“You’ll get me in trouble.”

“Nobody in this place can say a word against me, or against you, if that’s my pleasure. What will you eat? Be quick. I feel a stiffness coming on.”

“Custard. Bring me custard. Do you know how to find it? I should show you.”

“What would be the use of my serving you? Just lie there looking ravishing.”

The notion did not seem nearly so romantic as he scurried down the exposed passageway toward the kitchens. The wind batted his robe around, thoroughly shriveling his sex in the process. He paused at the kitchen door, first to check that he was alone, and then a moment longer to listen to a wolf’s lonely call floating up from the valley. “Hello, brother,” he whispered, and then opened the door and entered.

A single oil lamp burned in the center of the preparation table, and by its light Delivegu began his search. He was not looking for custard. It did not take him long, for the servants had left the bottle in easy reach. It stood aligned with the condiments and relishes that had earlier been cleared from the table. He picked up Wren’s bottle of palm wine, uncorked it, and sniffed. Just as foul as before. Strange girl, Wren. Something about the fact that she drank this stuff without flinching brought the blood back to his groin. In different circumstances, he would have loved to have a drinking contest with her. Another life, maybe.

He stood still a moment, listening, letting his eyes roam the dark corners of the room. Satisfied that he was alone, he slipped a vial from his robe’s inside chest pocket. He plucked out the vial’s little cork and measured a few drops into the mouth of the palm wine bottle. Wren’s little poison indeed.

A few minutes later, bottle set back in place, Delivegu slipped into the chill air of the corridor again. He carried a large bowl of custard, enough for two. He would enjoy the night and be on his way in the morning. The queen would want a report.

Bralyn would, alas, not be going with him.

The view over the rooftops of Avina had always transfixed Skylene, never more so than now. From where she stood on the balcony of the offices that had once belonged to the Lvin Herith, the city looked endless. It thrust up to the south in a jumbled bulk that went on for miles, farther than she could see: all the towers with their sun-bright colors, flags of the clans hung now just as they always had, lines of smoke rising to a certain height, at which point the wind bent each column and sent it off to the west. Seabirds and starlings and pigeons cut arcs through the sky and filled the morning air with their calls.

“The only city I’ve ever truly known,” Skylene said to herself. A child of the Eilavan Woodlands, she had only ever seen Aos from a distance, on the march that took her to the league transport that began her life in bondage. Her memory of that city was that it was vast, but she suspected that was not true. A child’s perception of things. This city, Avina, truly was vast. It had been too large to occupy entirely even when the Auldek lived in it. Now, with them and their chosen servants and the divine children gone, the dead haunted the city as much as the living. It did not have to be that way, but the glory that could have been a free Avina had already started to fracture.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a person emerge through the archway that led onto the rooftop. Tunnel strode toward her, moving his bulk with a heavy, muscular grace. Standing beside her, he touched the metal tusks curving up from his face. “We should go now.”

Skylene nodded. She let her gaze linger over the city a little longer and then she turned and walked back toward the arch, down the slope, and onward. Beside Tunnel, she was as slim as a reed, a figure drawn with the smooth lines of a thin brush. Her skin powder white, nose the elongated point customary of selected Kern slaves, hair tufted in a manner that made her otherwise peaceful visage look potentially savage, touched with avian anger. She might need some of that for the meeting they headed to, the first summit of leaders of the clans of the quota slaves of Ushen Brae.

Randale of the Wrathic had called for a full gathering of the people; Dukish of the Anet and Maren of the Kulish Kra had balked, saying they should decide some matters at the level of the chieftains before airing their differences in public. Skylene did not welcome talk of chieftains. Nor did she like that they already defined themselves by the clan groupings of their enslavement. She agreed to attend only to buy time until Mór returned—and the elders, too, if that was possible.

Since Mór had left her in charge of the Free People of Avina, Skylene lived a troubled life. Part of it was being without her lover. They had slept entwined together for several years. Trying to find slumber by herself proved difficult, and her dreams rushed unpleasantly at her when she did sleep. She woke most mornings knotted in her sheets, more desolate for realizing it was only linen that bound her, not Mór’s shapely limbs.

The Avina she found on kicking off those sheets challenged her in new ways each day. In the first days of freedom the city’s occupants huddled nervous, unsure that what appeared to have happened really had. The Auldek gone? All of them? The divine children with them and many of the other slaves as well? They had all watched it happen, but they stayed in the same rooms, in the same buildings, finding it hard to believe that the Auldek would not appear again suddenly, ready to punish them for even daring to think themselves free.

Some youths rode out of the city on an antok. They returned a week later with verification that the Auldek carried on to the north, making haste, none of them looking back. At Skylene’s suggestion, the People agreed to set up watches to the north of the city to provide a warning should the thing they feared return to them. With that in place, they rejoiced. People ran through the streets, reveling in their new freedom. They were as giddy as the children they had not been allowed to be, laughing and dancing, feasting and making love and dreaming of what they would do with a city—an entire continent—all their own. It was too much for them, vast and filled with another race’s history—such a challenge, but a challenge all their own now. The very thought of it made them drunk with joy.

Skylene made speeches often during these early days. She reminded the revelers that the Free People had always planned for this day. The Council of Elders had lived far from them, but they had never ceased laboring for them, taking in the abandoned, hiding those who had run from abuse, keeping alive a dream of unity once they were as free in reality as they were in moral truth. Soon, she told them, Mór and Yoen and the others would join them. Together they would build their nation. It sounded wonderful. It was all true and all possible. But barely had the tail of the Auldek migration slipped over the northern horizon before the problems started.

By the end of the second week one man had killed another in a dispute over who had rights to an estate. The slain man was of the Kulish Kra; his murderer, an Anet. Skylene was at the trial called to decide the matter. She was one of the many who agreed to the punishment of a tattoo identifying the Anet as a murderer to be stenciled across his shaved scalp. Before the sentence was carried out, a group of Anet mobbed the chamber in which the man was imprisoned. They bashed their way in, freed him, and fought a battle in the streets to escape. They claimed the trial had been unjust. It was biased against Anets. Only other Anets had the right to try their kind, they claimed. How could they know justice was done otherwise?

The one who led them was a short man named Dukish, an Anet who had once been a golden eye, one of the quota slaves who handled financial affairs for the Auldek. He had been a man of some station, but he had not been chosen to go with them. Declaring himself the clan’s chieftain, he called on other Anet slaves to join him in putting clan interests first, saying none should govern them but themselves. Many flocked to him. He armed them, seizing a weapons cache he knew of from his former work. Before anyone could organize to stop them, they took control of a portion of the city, including a warehouse stocked with grain and beans and salt, great vats of vinegar and wine.

It got worse after that. Former household slaves laid claim to their master’s palaces, while field workers were kept at a distance. Golden eyes and others who had held higher offices for the Auldek claimed that those privileges should be transferred to positions of a similar rank in the new order. A gang of young Kulish Kra men harassed Kern women. It began as a joke played on one avian clan by another. But it grew violent, sexual. Before long the rumors were that the Kulish Kra youths had taken to raping and molesting Kern women. The Kern formed armed groups against this, to which the Kulish Kra responded in kind; and still other armed groups formed in response to the increasingly violent tension in the city, further fueling it. The league returned. They plied the water in their ships and in the Lothan Aklun’s soul vessels. It became clear that they were establishing themselves on the barrier isles, and everyone wondered how long it would be before they landed on the mainland.