Authors: Carol Berg
Transformation (17 page)
Sometime in the long, cold hour after I was stripped and bound to the flogging post to await my punishment, a modestly outfitted Suzaini gentleman came into the slave house. He had a word with Durgan, who sat grimly beside his brazier at the far end of the deserted room. Durgan nodded and the stranger came over to me. From a brown leather pouch hanging from his belt, the slight, gray Suzaini pulled a blue vial, then opened it and held it to my lips. “Drink this. You’ll be glad you did.”
“Who are you?” I said, pulling my head back as far as my restraints allowed. The stuff smelled dreadful. “And what is this? I try to avoid mysterious potions from people I don’t know.”
He pursed his thin lips in irritation. “I was told to give it to you, but not to force you if you didn’t wish it. I was told nothing about answering questions from a slave.” He yanked open his pouch to return the vial.
“Wait!” I said. “I’ll take it.” Faced with fifty lashes, I had to scrape up a bit of faith.
It tasted as bad as it smelled—something like a mouthful of sheep entrails that had been boiled with pepper pods. But even as I felt a pleasant numbness roll out from my stomach and begin to deaden my extremities, I managed a soggy grin. “Giezek, the physician. Am I right?”
He snorted and walked away.
It was a party of twenty or thirty bandits who had raided the mountain town of Erum, only six leagues from Capharna. In most years, early spring was the best of times for bandits. When the narrow defiles through the wilder mountains began to open up, travelers and caravans started moving through them again. The caravans could move faster in the summer and a few outriders sent into the hills could protect the way. But in the spring, while snow still lay deep, wagons and horses moved slowly and bogged down easily, and those who were familiar with the snow-buried terrain could have their way with them, earning a year’s livelihood in the matter of a few weeks. The caravans bringing supplies or guests for the dakrah were heavily guarded, however, so that spring the raiders were forced to seek their profits elsewhere, a town that was lightly defended due to its proximity to Capharna.
Aleksander, chafing at the inactivity of the Dar Heged and the endless consultations and fittings for the dakrah, decided that he himself would lead the troop of warriors dispatched to hunt down these latest offenders. He left orders that while he was gone, all his correspondence was to come through me, and I was to determine whether it made sense to risk a messenger to forward it on to him. It was an astonishing responsibility for a slave, and Fendular came near exploding at the news. His formidable jowls quivered in indignation.
“Your Highness, pardon my forward speech, but I have many excellent scribes and assistants available for your service. It is unseemly for a barbarian slave, one punished just yesterday for incompetence and gross insults to our honored guests—”
“You will not tell me what is unseemly, Fendular. I choose my servants as I please. Were I to make this slave my Lord High Chamberlain, who would dare dispute it save my father?”
“But, Your Highness—”
“This slave was chastised severely in your sight and in the sight of his victim. Now I require him to serve me and repay my trouble in allowing him to live.”
Fortunately Fendular was not bright enough to question how I was able to walk or kneel after fifty lashes, or he might have guessed that the good Giezek had kept me well supplied with his blue vials throughout the previous night and morning. The physician had also given Durgan a salve that quickened healing, and though I was not comfortable, neither was I crippled, as I might have been otherwise. Mercifully I had felt little of the lashing itself, and I suspected that Durgan had been told to modify his strokes to make more show than true damage.
Fendular bowed stiffly and left the room, glaring at me as if I had eaten his children. I did not look forward to the next time I would be required to submit to his direction.
The guard captain, Sovari, was strapping Aleksander’s sword belt about the Prince’s waist. I wondered what had become of the Khelid knife. I had spoken no private word with the Prince since the incident. There were always two dozen people around him, and to summon me from the bare attic room I now shared with twenty other house slaves was difficult to do discreetly with a slave handler always posted at the door. The Prince must have noticed my glance, for he drew his knife and turned it in the lamplight. “I suppose I’ll have to make do with my old knife. Unfortunate that the blade the Khelid brought was unbalanced. I had the smith melt it down. Perhaps he can do better.”
After some seven or eight days, Aleksander returned from his successful foray, leaving the heads of twenty-three bandits hung on the charred walls of Erum. The Prince was ebullient. “Athos’ balls, it felt fine to be on horseback again with a sword in my hand,” he said to a party of young priests three days before the dakrah was to begin. “The magistrate of Erum said I should execute only the leaders of the bandit troop, that the others were only hungry, desperate men. But I’ve been idle too long and could not stomach mercy. The villains picked an unfortunate time to be hungry.”
While my own stomach turned in disgust, the five shaven-headed servants of the sun god nodded in sympathy. They had come to plan a footrace to the top of Mount Nerod for one day of the dakrah. It was a sacred custom in Capharna. I wondered if the sun god would shine on top of the cloud-shrouded mountain on the day of the race, for surely he never did any other day. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t notice the despicable habits of those who governed his Empire.
“Surely your swift and forceful retaliation will make the passes safer for the dakrah guests,” said one of the priests. “Many of the new arrivals tell of the boldness of the raiders.”
“At least three parties have reported attacks in the western passes,” chimed in another priest. “Two of them lost guards to the villains.”
The mention of dakrah guests dimmed Aleksander’s sunny mood. “Seyonne, has there been any word from Dmitri?”
I shook my head.
The Prince scanned my face. His eyes narrowed, then he shoved me from the stool and told me to get out of his apartments. “They asked for it,” he shouted after me. “They should not have burned my town. And it is not your business.” I had said not a word.
In the last days before the ceremonies were to begin, Aleksander went back to his auditioning, this time for magicians. He spent an entire day watching one Derzhi magician after another demonstrate elaborate creations of colored clouds, fountains of light, flowers, sultry maidens, monkeys, and birds. “Druya’s horns,” he shouted, after a trio of women magicians made yet another flock of birds appear from behind a mirror. “Is there not a decent magical entertainment left in Azhakstan? Could you devise nothing at all unique for your prince’s dakrah? My Ezzarian writing slave could come up with something more exciting.”
I wanted to stuff Aleksander’s mouth with my writing paper. Ezzarians needed no more animosity from the Derzhi Magician’s Guild. It was the Guild who had called Ivan’s attention to the fertile hills off his southern borders, and convinced him that the secretive Ezzarian sorcerers were dangerous. And it was the Magician’s Guild who had paid or tortured or coerced an elderly Ezzarian scholar named Balthar into devising the way to strip an Ezzarian sorcerer of melydda.
“Perhaps if we showed you more, Your Highness,” said one of the magicians, a tall, anvil-chinned woman with protruding cheekbones. “This is only the beginning.”
“Perhaps we should ask the Ezzarian what he would suggest,” hissed another woman. It was the women of the Guild who were the most brutal in administering Balthar’s Rites. Perhaps they were jealous of the status of Ezzarian women, equal in all things to men save in the matter of governing, where we had deemed it best they hold sway. Only in Ezzaria, of all the lands conquered by the Derzhi, had a woman held a throne.
“Seyonne, a proclamation.” The Prince yanked me out of my wandering thoughts. I dipped my pen and nodded, having an uneasy conviction that whatever Aleksander was going to have me write, it was going to be a mistake.
“No Derzhi magician will perform at my dakrah or at a dakrah in any noble House for twenty-three years. Perhaps by the time I have a son coming to his majority, they will have thought of something new.”
“Your Highness! Surely you can’t mean this.” The three women were aghast.
I hesitated before committing ink to paper. “My lord, I want to make sure I get the wording correct,” I said. “I dare not insult you or the honorable Magician’s Guild by misinterpreting your saying.”
Perhaps if the women had been quiet, Aleksander might have reconsidered, but they would not leave it.
“Your Highness, this is unthinkable.”
“What will the Houses think to have no magic for their most sacred celebrations?”
“You must recant this proclamation.”
“You insult our Guild.”
“We will carry our protest to the Emperor. He has ever shown respect for our profession. He’ll not hear of our being forbidden to pursue our craft at the most significant events of the noble Houses.”
“Silence, all of you,” said Aleksander, leaping from his chair and sweeping their paraphernalia from a long table, “or I’ll forbid you to practice your craft on any occasion whatsoever. Return to your towers and vaults and learn your business. And protest to the Emperor at the peril of your necks. He favors Khelid magicians at present. Perhaps we’ll not have need for you at all in the future.”
The three withdrew with such hatred boiling on their faces that I wondered if I should attempt to warn Aleksander. Could he have no idea what he had done? Even those with so little true power could be dangerous.
All further consideration of the matter was erased by the announcement of the arrival of Lady Lydia and her party from Avenkhar. The servants quickly cleared the room of the grumbling magicians when the Prince said he would be damned if he would move to the formal reception rooms to receive the woman his father had chosen as his bride.
“I’ll not move a step to see her. Curse it all, why could the witch not have fallen prey to bandits?” growled Aleksander to the Chamberlain’s back. “I won’t marry the she-wolf. I’ll hang myself first.” He straightened his shirt of fawn-colored silk and flopped down in his chair by the hearth, while servants bustled about bringing chairs and footstools to set close to the fire and setting a pot of steaming wine on a table.
I continued writing out his proclamation, adding all the formalities that were required to make it law. If I was quick I might make my obeisance and escape before the lady entered, lest I be unable to get permission to leave and thus miss my evening rations.
From Aleksander’s horror of the woman, I expected a horse-faced, pockmarked Derzhi harridan twice his age, someone from a rich and powerful family that no one else would have. Every female under the age of forty seemed to fawn over the Prince—whether he scorned her or bedded her. I supposed they believed that there was always a possibility that the strong-willed heir would convince his father to allow him to marry whomever he fancied, and the chance to be Empress of the Derzhi was too tempting to risk.
But my first glimpse of the Lady Lydia of the House of Marag told me she didn’t care whether or not she was the Empress. She would do it if required, and do it well, but she would take not one step out of her way to make it more likely. In that and in every important way, she completely confounded my expectations.
She was no older than Aleksander, and as tall as I, taller if one counted the scarcely tamed red curls piled atop her head. Though slender and well formed, with long, elegant bones, she was neither fragile nor delicate. She was not exquisitely beautiful. Her short, straight nose, her prim lips, and somewhat narrow, angular face might even have been called plain. But her long, graceful neck could have driven a sculptor to madness, and her green eyes, stark beneath pale brows and lashes, caught wicked fire when she raised up from her deep curtsy and laid them on Aleksander. I found her breathtaking.
“Welcome, my lady,” said the Prince, pointedly remaining seated at her entry, much as if he was staking out a position on a battlefield. “I trust your journey was uneventful.”
He motioned her to a chair, and she slipped out of her dark fur-lined cloak and into the soft cushions in one fluid motion. Without fuss, disruption, or command, one rosy-cheeked serving woman had a footstool under the lady’s feet, another held her cloak, gloves, and fur muff, and another was pressing a cup of hot wine into her slender hands. The three servants were not slaves.
“Is ‘uneventful’ the best you can wish me, Your Highness? I should think you could at least hope for satisfactory, or perhaps even pleasant, as we’ve known each other so long.” Her voice was as low and melodious as the stringed viols the Kuvai played.
“Of course. Those, too.” The Prince recovered well from the first assault. “We’ve had bandits six leagues west and heard reports of attacks on our traveling guests, so uneventful is perhaps a greater hope than it seems.”
The lady nodded seriously. “I’ve heard likewise, but I was assured that you had shed enough blood to make us all safe again. Is it not true?”
“I did what was necessary.” The Prince was picking at the threads of the brocaded chair, not quite squirming under her steady gaze.
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