The imperial hand waved dismissively at Hlanan as every word struck my heart with splinters of ice. Hlanan stared back at his mother, his profile pale and still as marble as the equerries gripped his arms.
Geric shrugged. “I’ve no orders concerning him.” His tone changed. “And he did me signal service.”
As Geric motioned for the equerries to free Hlanan the Empress lifted her voice, every utterance cold and precise. “Take the thief and get you gone from my Kherval. Which,” she added in an acid undertone, “is shortly to include Thann. Geric Lendan, you are declared foresworn, and as such are herewith stripped of title and holdings. Family Lendan will be summoned to hear this judgment. . . .”
The Ravens had closed around me and though I looked about wildly for any means of escape, I found none.
Without a glance at the Empress still sonorously pronouncing her decree, Geric advanced on me. I wasn’t certain he even heard her as the Ravens closed in, permitting no escape. I poised for a leap, but the chandeliers hung out just of reach. And beyond the immediate circle of Ravens stood more with arrows still fitted to bows. They’d easily shoot me out of the air even if I could spring that high.
Hlanan tried to shove his way past the Ravens but they fended him off easily. Sick with terror, I drew ready magic from all around me and fashioned it into the arrow of voice cast as Geric closed the distance. I drew in a breath, hurled the magic—and staggered in reaction as it splashed in coruscating fingers as if it had hit a wall.
So that was a ward.
I fumbled desperately for my bag of liref, though there were far too many of them to dose, as Geric blinked, staring at me in shock. “You do know voice cast,” he murmured, faltering a step. He frowned at me as if trying to bring me into focus, but blinked rapidly. His fingers blurred. Quick as a heartbeat greenish light flickered as something golden and sinuous snaked through the air and snapped around my neck.
Transfer magic wrenched me away from that place of desolation and betrayal.
FIFTEEN
I fell to my knees, every muscle contracting. I wanted to be sick but I couldn’t catch enough breath for that. The reaction lasted only a few heartbeats, but it seemed eternal. Then my breath came in a shuddering gasp, leaving me trembling.
When the nausea receded enough to permit me to move my limbs I tore at that necklet and pain, hotter than fire, sheered through my nerves.
I splatted on my face.
Once again I crowed for breath. For a second eternity—this one much longer—the struggle to breathe overwhelmed me. Gradually sight returned: shades of green in a worked pattern. Sensation: I lay on a soft carpet.
Sound: quiet laughter.
My poor, lacerated nerves chilled with recognition. Though I had only heard that voice mentally, I knew that resonant baritone. It belonged to Jardis Dhes-Andis, Emperor of Sveran Djur, Empire of a Thousand Islands.
My shoulder blades crawled as I forced my hands under me. Swaying with dizziness, I blinked away the blur in my vision.
Soothing green light resolved into pale-barked argan trees, lower branches gracefully espaliered in perfect symmetry and the upper branches pleached so that the silver leaves formed a canopy overhead, warmed by sunbeams slanting down through a domed ceiling of glass worked in arabesque patterns.
And below it, seated in an elegant wing-backed chair, a man. I scrubbed my grimy sleeve across my tear- and snot-smeared face, and my eyes met a pair of slanted eyes the same color and shape of my own, the light brown of mead in the sunlight.
The Emperor Jardis Dhes-Andis was very tall, or that might have been the effect of his layered robes. They were made of silk of a complicated weave threaded in white and gold that highlighted his golden skin, two of the panels ending in long golden tassels.
The only dark colors were the hint of a high-collared black shirt under all those layers—which framed something that glinted gold, and diamond, at his throat—and his black hair, worn long and tied back. He wore a thin golden coronet that dipped to a V between his brows.
My head swam when I tried to turn it, and I flopped onto my back. “Go ahead and kill me if you’re going to,” I croaked when memory crashed through the throbbing in my skull.
Much as my body hurt, betrayal hurt so much worse.
Again the laugh. “You are a pathetic object, are you not?”
Miserable in body, mind, and soul, I found enough sting in those words to mutter a retort, “Then send me back.”
“After the trouble you’ve put me to? More than I have tolerated for most circumstances. That in itself was entertaining, to see how far I was willing to exert myself.” Dhes-Andis’s voice’s tone shifted from warm and amused to dispassionate. “But I am convinced you will prove worth the effort.”
“I’m not convinced of anything at all,” I retorted, my voice croaking from the effects of the transfer magic, my gaze on those trees. As if not seeing him would make him go away. “You lied to me!”
He laughed again. “When? How?”
“You said you were my father, and you don’t look much older than me.” Whatever age that might be, I couldn’t help thinking.
“There are seven years between us,” he said, still sounding amused. “And you are the one who leaped to that curious conclusion. I merely let your assumption stand, if it would enable me to bring you home the faster.”
“So that blond man in my memory, he’s really my father? And the Blue Lady, my mother? Or was that another trick?”
“Rid your mind of those selfish fools who abandoned you and ran off. You are home again, and ahead of you is a new life, one worthy of your birth. Come along.”
A soft thud—a cat hit the ground and leaped over me—then cloth whispered as Dhes-Andis rose to his feet.
My neck hairs prickled. I lay there angry and miserable, staring up at the trees. “Those fire things with the neverquench spell. That was real?”
“Oh yes. It would have made quite a spectacle, viewed from the mountains. Until the smoke obliterated it all, of course, and they summoned mages to douse it. After the cities and towns turned to dust. Get up, Elenderi.”
“That’s not my name,” I snapped.
Fire-hot agony seared through me, far worse than mere transfer magic. Through it spoke that remorseless voice. “Long ago I lost my interest in witnessing the effects of pain. It’s predictable, and too much of it robs the wits entirely, leaving the subject uselessly craven.”
I gasped for breath, curling in a ball as the throbbing unstrung my muscles and turned my bones to water.
“But we discovered centuries ago that such correction is the purest as well as the most effective means of cauterizing that which is uncivilized in our natures. And you are uncivilized, are you not? Get to your feet and come along.”
Somehow I found the strength to roll to my hands and knees. Trembling in every limb, I fumbled my feet under me. The throbbing began to fade, but its echo weakened me to a stunned dread. I straightened up, blinking pain tears away.
“Now.”
It had been stupid to refuse to face him after that first quick look, as if he would vanish, and with him take away Aranu Crown’s betrayal. I longed with all my strength to return to the Thann kitchens, Hlanan by my side working at his pastry and worrying at his plan to avert a war.
Before he stood in silence while his imperial mother flung me away as trash.
Anger flooded through me, as searing in its own way as Dhes-Andis’s “pure correction.” Anger enabled me to tighten my middle and raise my head so I could glare at my enemy. My stomach boiled with resentment and pain and fury and horror as he lifted his hand toward the door, his attitude best described as ironic patience.
He moved with a controlled, noiseless step, those long golden tassels swinging above his toes. His control called Rajanas to mind; a dip and a deft, graceful swipe of his train and he led the way out at a pace making it plain whatever else he did with his day besides torturing me, there was more to it than lolling arou
nd on a throne.
My strength and wits trickled back as I jogged awkwardly at his heels, the last of that lightning receding in decreasing throbs through my watery joints. I tried looking at my surroundings for any means of escape, taking in high vaulted ceiling of white marble veined with silver. Lancet arched windows divided into three panes gave onto a view of night sky.
“This will be your suite, Elenderi.”
“My name is Lhind,” I retorted, and when he glanced down at me, I sucked in my breath, shoulders to my ears, and braced.
He said, “I will tolerate waywardness as long as it amuses me, but two things I will not tolerate: insolence and lies. Understood?”
I glowered.
His voice softened. “Do you understand me?” He raised two fingers, twitched one, and heat flashed white-hot at my neck and seared through my nerves.
“Yes!” I squawked, dancing around on my toes and flapping my arms, though I knew the fire was magical, not real flame.
“An excellent start, Imperial Princess Elenderi.” Each word was enunciated deliberately as the doors opened and silent servants stood to either side. “This was once your great-grandmother Lison’s personal suite,” Dhes-Andis said, taking no notice of the door-openers; I wondered if he would have walked nose first into one of those carved doors had not the servants known when to open them. And then what? Hours of torture?
My wits fled when The Imperial Enemy turned his palm outward. “Kal will be your steward.”
Framed against a grand half-circle of tall lancet windows stood a dark-haired young man whose brown gaze was so familiar that once again my nerves sheered hot and then cold. Not familiar, not, my brain wailed; gratefully I noted his golden skin instead of brown, and his slanted eyes, and his long face with the pointed chin. I had never seen him before, ever. He, like the door-openers, wore a robe of muted gray pleated once in the front, high necked, though when he moved metal glinted above the collar.
Not familiar.
“Kal heads the staff who will see to your needs. He will also,” Dhes-Andis’s voice dropped a note into that amused detachment I had so distrusted during summer, “communicate my orders. Should you choose to ignore them, he and your staff shall feel the consequences of your actions. Responsibility,” he measured the words, “comes with consequences, Your Imperial Serenity.”
My breath hitched; the evil emperor swept out, the servants closing the door noiselessly behind him.
I turned quickly away from Kal, still shivering with reaction. Spy, I thought. He was there to spy on me.
That thought steadied me. It gave me a goal—resistance—and an enemy to outwit, to despise.
“If the Imperial Princess would honor us with any needs or wishes, it is our honor to obey,” Kal said, bowing low.
He spoke Djuran, of course. I wanted to pretend I didn’t understand it, but where would that get me? The Emperor of Evil knew I comprehended languages as soon as I heard them.
I scowled at the fine woven rug under my grimy bare toes. “I’m not an imperial princess,” I said. “My name is Lhind. I like my name. I picked it myself.”
Of course he didn’t answer. And of course he’d be blabbing that to the imperial stinker as soon as he could. If that selfsame I. S. wasn’t already earing in by some magical means. My scalp itched. My entire body itched as if invisible bugs crawled all over me.
I needed to retreat, to be alone. “Bath,” I said.
Kal led me through an arched door to a tiled chamber that made Rajanas’s splendid guest bath look like a tin tub at a dockside inn: an entire pool, shaped to look like something you’d find in nature, surrounded with more of those beautiful trees, their roots mysteriously tidied away below the tile, their branches trailing upward in graceful arcs so symmetrical and artistic they looked more like drawings than real trees. Fresh steaming water cascaded down a rocky incline covered with orchids whose blossoms represented every hue in the rainbow. In the opposite corner stood a beautiful porcelain stove, not as large as the one in the main room.
The door shut noiselessly behind me, felt in the stilling air currents.
I was alone.
Alone.
As if someone had gouged out my heart and slung a javelin of ice down my spine, I dropped to my knees, forearms pressed over my ribs. I choked on rib-shuddering sobs I could no more control than I could rip mountains up by the roots, or hurl this palace into the sky.
I don’t know how long that lasted. It seemed an eternity. Every time I tried to get hold of myself my mind returned to the empress’s words, to Hlanan standing there, shocked and silent while she threw me to the enemy.
When at last I got control of my breathing I lay in a damp, grimy, miserable ball, aware of the chuckle of running water nearby. I forced myself to sit up and shrug out of my filthy, rumpled drape, my thief tools falling to the floor in a soft thud. Feverishly I picked them up, looking around for a hiding place until it sank in that I was in far more trouble than these silly things would get me out of. I could knock those servants out there into slumber with the liref, use the lock picks (assuming the doors were even locked) but Dhes-Andis could lift a finger and smite me into witlessness through this horrible thing around my neck.
I dropped the bag of thief tools and knelt there, tugging and yanking at that golden choker until the burn-magic flashed.
I gave up, and slid into the warm water.
Physically it was bliss. But mind and heart still lay in smoking pieces. I floated on the water, my breath shaky as I gazed up through another small domed ceiling, the glass pieced in stylized orchid shapes.
I was alone, but for how long? I had to think!
Not about that betrayal. It hurt too much. The echoing flare in my nerves when I moved urged me to remember my immediate danger. The first thing to do was to get distance between me and that steward-who-was-not-familiar.
What was Hlanan doing?
I shut my eyes. That didn’t matter anymore. Aranu Crown made that much really clear.
The instinct to physically get away—as if I could escape my thoughts—forced me out of that delightful bath. I shook all over, fluffing fuzz, hair, and tail.
I was going to put my grimy old drape back on, habit from spending most of my life changing my clothes once a year. But when I bent to pick it up, I spied a fluffy robe thing lying on a marble bench, and pulled that on instead. In my months away from concentrated grime I had come to like cleanliness if I could get it, and that drape really needed a cleaning frame. I swept it and the tools up, looked about, then remembered that staff I’d been threatened with. I set the thief tools down again.
Time to test the limits, I thought grimly, tugging the robe, which, made for someone larger, dragged behind me. I marched into the main room with its enormous bank of windows.
My gaze slid past Kal-who-was-not-familiar. Remembering the Emperor of Evil’s threats about insolence, I said as politely as I could, “My drape can be taken away, as I don’t see a cleaning frame, but the, ah, tools, I would like left alone.”
Everybody bowed.
“As for me, I am very much afraid that the heat in this chamber is not tolerable for one of my kind. Would you please open all those windows?”
I’d framed a question, but Kal clearly did not hear one. He sprang to the windows one by one as if I’d uttered the direst of threats. At the current of icy air that rolled in, I hid a grin.
An enormous bedchamber opened off the main room, with its own curve of windows (now open). More of those perfectly trained trees grew under the bank of windows, opposite a huge canopied bed.
I condemned the bed with a point of my finger. “My kind only sleep in hammocks,” I said as civilized as possible.
My grimy drape was born away in one direction. The bed was dismantled and more gray-clad servants came in with approximations of hammocks.
Apparently no one in the Empire of a Thousand Islands knew what a hammock was, or else “imperial” people did not lower themselves to such th
ings: they offered me slung brocaded quilts and netted ropes of silk, all of which probably would have worked fine, but I sadly shook my head to each one.
I counted twelve silent servants moving about under Kal’s watchful gaze as I stood near the windows in the dramatic currents of air and watched the suite dismantled a piece of furniture at a time.
The suite chilled in spite of the stove, which may have been fueled by magical Fire Sticks the way that most places (except Thesreve) do, but the cursed thing on my neck hummed with so much magic that I was not able to sense magic’s presence or absence beyond it.
A new stream of servants entered with armloads of costly silken clothes. “I fear these stiff shoulder things will be uncomfortable . . . this is made for a much taller person . . . I cannot possibly wear that . . . there is no place for my tail. . . .” I enjoyed finding fault with every single item.
At length the servants beetled off to hunt up more stuff and I withdrew to the alcove to the right of the bank of windows, where someone had laid out a repast on a low blackwood table inlaid with interlocked patterns of three in gold. A single silken cushion tasseled in gold sat on the floor below the table.
The windows had been judiciously opened there, too, in what seemed to be a tower room, judging by the circle of windows surrounding me. I stood where the currents of cold air roiled and snapped, fighting the warm air from the stove.
Hunger woke inside me, a ravening wolf. It seemed a thousand years had passed since I’d gobbled down those tarts. Hlanan’s tarts—
I shut away the anguish and sat on the cushion, glaring at the thin porcelain bowls, in which someone had thoughtfully arranged a wide variety of nuts: scorched ones, fresh ones, and nuts candied and mashed into crisply baked bites. I did not know the names of many of them.
I loathed the idea that Dhes-Andis knew my food preferences. Geric could be thanked for that, mostly likely, I thought, hatred burning through me.
Or did Hrethan mostly eat nuts? That had been one of the many questions I had wanted to ask other Hrethan during my time in Erev-li-Erval. And now I knew why they had stayed away from me. Or I was kept from them, I thought bitterly, as Aranu Crown’s contemptuous words echoed mercilessly in memory.