“Sit down, Snowlock, please.” Aditu waved her hand. “I believe Jiriki has a visitor.”
Before Simon could follow her suggestion, the room’s far wall began to billow. A section flew up as if it had torn free. Someone dressed in bright green, whose braided hair was a jarringly contrasting shade of red, stepped through,
Simon was surprised at how quickly he recognized Jiriki’s uncle, Khendraja’aro. The Sitha was muttering gruffly in what seemed to be fury—seemed, because Simon could see no discernible emotion on his face at all. Then Khendraja’aro looked up and spotted Simon. His angular face blanched, as though the blood had run out of him like water from an upended pail.
“Sudhoda’ya! Isi-isi’ye-a Sudhoda’ya!” he gasped, his voice full of an anger so astonished as to seem like something else altogether.
Khendraja’aro dragged his slender, beringed hand slowly across his eyes and face as if trying to wipe away the sight of gangly Simon. Unable to do so, Jiriki’s uncle hissed in almost feline alarm, then turned on Aditu and began to speak to her in rapid, quietly liquid Sithi that nonetheless strengthened the suggestion of spitting rage. Aditu absorbed his tirade expressionlessly, her deep, gold-shot eyes wide but unfrightened. When Khendraja’aro had finished, she answered him calmly. Her uncle turned and regarded Simon once more, making a series of strangely sinuous gestures with his splayed fingers as he listened to her measured response.
Khendraja'aro took a deep breath, letting a preternatural calm overtake him until he stood motionless as a pillar of stone. Only his bright eyes seemed alive, burning in his face like lamps. After several moments of this overwhelming stillness he walked from the room without a word or sideways glance, padding silently down the corridor to the door of Jiriki’s house.
Simon was shaken by the unmistakable force of Khendraja’aro’s anger.
“You said something about breaking rules…?” he asked.
Aditu smiled strangely. “Courage, Snowlock. You are Hikka Staja.” She brushed her fingers through her hair, a curiously human gesture, then pointed to the flap where her uncle had entered. “Let us go in to my brother.”
They stepped through into sunlight. This room, too, was made of fluttering cloth, but the fabric of one long wall had been rolled and drawn up to the ceiling; beyond this opening the hill dropped away for some dozen paces. Below lay a shallow, peaceful backwater of the same river that passed before Jiriki’s front door, a wide pond with a narrow inlet neck, surrounded by reeds and quivering aspens. Little red-and-brown birds hopped about on the rocks at the center of the pond, like conquerors strutting the battlements of a captured stronghold. At pond’s edge a bale of turtles basked in the sun streaming down through the trees.
“In the evening the crickets are quite splendid here.”
Simon turned to see Jiriki, who had apparently been standing in the shadows at the opposite end of the room.
“Welcome to Jao é-Tinukai’i, Seoman,” he said. “We are well-met.”
“Jiriki!” Simon sprang forward. Without thinking, he grasped the slender Sitha in a tight embrace. The prince tensed for a moment, then relaxed. His firm hand patted Simon’s back. “You never said farewell,” Simon said, then pulled away, embarrassed.
“I did not,” Jiriki agreed. He wore a long, loose robe of some thin blue cloth, belted at the waist with a wide red band; his feet were bare. His lavender hair descended in braids before either ear, and was gathered atop his head with a comb of pale, polished wood.
“I would have died in the woods if you had not helped me,” Simon said abruptly, then gave an awkward laugh. “If Aditu had not come, that is.” He turned to look at her; Jiriki’s sister was watching intently. She nodded her head in acknowledgment. “I would have died.” He realized as he spoke that it was absolutely true. He had begun the process of dying when Aditu had found him, growing more distant each day from the business of life.
“So.” Jiriki folded his arms before him. “I am honored I could help. It still does not discharge my obligation, however. I owed you two lives. You are my Hikka Staja, Seoman, and so you will remain.” He looked over to his sister. “The butterflies have gathered.”
Aditu replied in their lyric tongue, but Jiriki held up his hand.
“Speak in a way that Seoman can understand. He is my guest.”
She stared at him for a moment. “We met Khendraja’aro. He is not happy.”
“Uncle has not been happy since Asu’a fell. No plans of mine are likely to change that.”
“It is more than that. Willow-switch, and you know it.” Aditu stared hard at him, but her face remained dispassionate. She turned to look briefly at Simon; for a moment, embarrassment seemed to darken her cheeks. “It is strange to speak this tongue.”
“These are strange days, Rabbit—and you know that.” Jiriki lifted his hands toward the sunlight. “Ah, what an afternoon. We must go, now, all of us. The butterflies have gathered, as I said. I speak lightly of Khendraja’aro, but my heart is uneasy.”
Simon stared at him, completely baffled.
“First allow me to take off this ridiculous clothing,” Aditu said. She slipped away through another hidden door so quickly that she seemed to melt into shadow.
Jiriki led Simon toward the front of his house. “We will wait for her below. You and I have much to speak about, Seoman. but first we must go to the Yásira.”
“Why did she call you…Willow-switch?” Of all his countless questions, this was the only one he could put into words.
“Why do I call you Snowlock?” Jiriki looked closely at Simon’s face, then smiled his charming, feral smile. “It is good to see you well, manchild.”
“Let us be off,” Aditu said. She had come up behind Simon so soundlessly that he gasped in surprise. When he turned a moment later, he gasped again. Aditu had shed her heavy snow-clothing for a dress that was little more than a wisp of glimmering, nearly transparent white cloth belted with a ribbon of sunset orange. Her slim hips and small breasts were clearly silhouetted beneath the loose garment. Simon felt his face grow hot. He had grown up with the chambermaids, but they had moved him out many years before sending him to sleep with the other scullions. Such near-nakedness was more than disconcerting. He realized he was staring and turned hurriedly away, his face coloring. One hand made an involuntary Tree before his chest.
Aditu’s laugh was like rain. “I am happy to be shed of all that! It was cold where the manchild was, Jiriki! Cold!”
“You are right, Aditu,” Jiriki said grimly. “We find the winter outside easy to forget when it is still summer in our home. Now, it is off to the Yásira, where some do not want to believe that winter exists at all.”
He led the way out his strange entry hall to the sunsplashed corridor of willows beside the river. Aditu followed him. Simon brought up the rear, still blushing furiously, with no choice but to watch her springy, swaying walk.
With the added distraction of Aditu in her summer finery, Simon did not think about much of anything for a while, but even Jiriki’s lissome sister and Jao é-Tinukai’i’s myriad other glories could not distract him forever. Several things had been said lately that were beginning to worry him: Khendraja’aro was angry with him, apparently, and Simon had distinctly heard Aditu say something about breaking rules. What exactly was happening?
“Where are we going, Jiriki?” he asked at last.
“The Yásira.” The Sitha gestured ahead. “There, do you see?”
Simon stared, shielding his eyes from the strong sunlight. There were so many distractions here, and the sunlight itself was one of the strongest. Only a few days before he had been wondering if he would ever be warm again. Why was he yet again allowing himself to be dragged somewhere else, when all he wanted to do was flop down on his back in the clover and sleep…?
At first the Yásira seemed like nothing so much as a grand and oddly-shaped tent, a tent whose center pole mounted fifty ells into the air, made of a fabric more shifting and colorful than any of Jao ?
?-Tinukai’i’s other beautiful structures. It took another two dozen paces before Simon realized that the center pole was a gigantic ash tree with wide-spreading branches, whose crown rose into the forest sky high above the Yásira itself. He drew another hundred paces closer before he saw why the fabric of the vast tent shimmered so.
Butterflies.
Trailing to the ground from the ash tree’s widest branches were a thousand threads, so slender that they seemed little more than parallel glints of light as they fell a hand-span apart all around the tree. Clinging to these strands from top to bottom, lazily fanning their iridescent wings, huddling so closely that they overlapped each other like the shingles on some impossible roof were…a million, million butterflies. They were of every color imaginable, orange and wine-red, oxblood and tangerine, cerulean blue, daffodil yellow, velvet black as the night sky. The quiet whisper of their wings was everywhere, as if the warm summer air itself had been given voice. They moved sluggishly, as though near sleep, but were otherwise bound in no way that Simon could see. Countless chips of vibrant moving color, the butterflies shattered the sunlight like an incomparable treasury of living gems.
In that moment, as Simon first saw it, the Yásira seemed the breathing, glowing center of Creation. He stopped and abruptly burst into helpless tears.
Jiriki did not see Simon’s overwhelmed response. “The little wings are restless,” he said. “S’hue Khendraja’aro has brought the word.”
Simon sniffled and wiped at his eyes. Faced with the Yásira, he suddenly thought he could understand the bitterness of Ineluki, the Storm King’s hatred for childish, destructive mankind. Shamed, Simon listened to Jiriki’s words as though from a great distance. The Sitha prince was saying something about his uncle—was Khendraja’aro talking to the butterflies? Simon didn’t care any longer. This was all just too much for him. He didn’t want to think; he wanted to lie down. He wanted to sleep.
Jiriki had at last noticed his distress. He took Simon carefully by the elbow and guided him toward the Yásira. At the front of the mad, glorious structure, butterfly-laden strands trailed on either side of a wooden doorway, which was no more than a simple carved frame wound round with trailing roses. Aditu had already stepped through, and now Jiriki led Simon in.
If the effect of the butterflies from outside was one of gleaming magnificence, the view from within was entirely different. The multicolored shafts of light leaked down through the living roof, as if through stained glass that had somehow become unstable. The great ash tree that was the Yásira’s spine stood bathed in a thousand shifting hues; Simon was again reminded of some strange forest thriving beneath the inconstant ocean. This time, however, he was beginning to find the thought a little much to bear. He felt almost as though he were drowning, floundering helplessly in an opulence he could not entirely understand.
The great chamber had few furnishings. Beautiful rugs lay scattered everywhere, but in many places the grass grew uncovered. Shallow pools gleamed here and there, flowering bushes and stones around them, all things just as they were outside. The only differences were the butterflies and the Sithi.
The chamber was full of Sithi-folk, male and female, in costumes as variegated as the wings of the butterflies that quivered overhead. One by one at first, then in clusters, they turned to look at the new arrivals, hundreds of calm, catlike eyes agleam in the shifting light. What seemed to Simon a quiet but malicious hiss rose from the multitude. He wanted to run away, and actually made a brief, stumbling attempt, but Jiriki’s grip on his arm was gently unbreakable. He found himself led forward to a rise of earth before the base of the tree. A tall, moss-netted stone stood there like an admonishing finger sunken in the grassy ground. On low couches before it sat two Sithi dressed in splendid pale robes, a woman and a man.
The man, who was seated closest, looked up at Simon and Jiriki’s approach. His hair, tied high atop his head, was jet black, and he wore a crown of carved white birchwood. He had the same angular golden features as Jiriki, but there was something drawn at the corners of his narrow eyes and thin mouth that suggested a life of great length filled with vast but subtle disappointment. The woman who sat beside him on his left hand had hair of a deep, coppery red; she, too, wore a circlet of birchwood on her brow. Long white feathers hung from her many braids, and she wore several bracelets and rings as black and shiny as the hair of the man beside her. Of all the Sithi Simon had seen, her face was the most immobile, the most rigidly serene. Both man and woman had an air of age and subtlety and stillness, but it was the quiet of a dark old pond in a shadowed wood, the calm of a sky tilted with motionless thunderheads; it seemed entirely possible that such placidity might hide something dangerous—dangerous to callow mortals, at least.
“You must bow, Seoman,” Jiriki said quietly. Simon, as much because of his shaking legs as anything else, lowered himself to his knees. The smell of the warm turf was strong in his nostrils.
“Seoman Snowlock, manchild,” Jiriki said loudly, “know you are come before Shima’onari, King of the Zida’ya, Lord of Jao é-Tinukai’i, and Likimeya, Queen of the Dawn-Children, Lady of the House of Year-Dancing.”
Still kneeling, Simon looked up dizzily. All eyes were focused on him, as though he were a singularly inappropriate gift. Shima’onari at last said something to Jiriki, words as harsh-sounding as anything Simon had yet heard the Sithi tongue produce.
“No, Father,” Jiriki said. “Whatever else, we must not so lightly turn our backs on our traditions. A guest is a guest. I beg you, speak words that Seoman can understand.”
Shima’onari’s thin face pinched in a frown. When he spoke at last, he proved far less facile with the Westerling tongue than his son and daughter.
“So. You are the manchild that saved Jiriki’s life.” He nodded his head slowly, but did not seem very pleased. “I do not know if you can understand this, but my son has done a very bad thing. He has brought you here against all laws of our people—you, a mortal.” He straightened up, looking from face to face among the Sithi-folk that surrounded them. “What is done is done, my people, my family,” he called. “No harm can come to this manchild: we have not sunk so far. We owe him honor as Hikka Staja—as bearer of a White Arrow.” He turned back to Simon, and a look of infinite sadness crept over his face. “But neither can you leave, manchild. We cannot let you leave. So you will stay forever. You will grow old and die with us, here in Jao é-Tinukai’i.”
The wings of a million butterflies murmured and whispered.
“Stay…?” Simon turned, uncomprehending, to Jiriki. The prince’s usually imperturbable face was an ashen mask of shock and sorrow.
Simon was silent as they walked back to Jiriki’s house. Afternoon was slowly fading into twilight; the cooling valley was alive with the smells and sounds of untainted summer.
The Sitha did nothing to break the silence, guiding Simon along the tangled paths with nods and gentle touches. As they approached the river that ran past Jiriki’s door, Sithi voices lifted in song somewhere in the overhanging hills. The melody that spilled echoing over the valley was an intricately constructed series of descending figures: sweet, but with a touch of dissonance winding through it, like a fox dodging in and out among rainy hedgerows. There was something unquestionably liquid about the song; after a moment, Simon realized that the invisible musicians were in some way singing along with the noise of the river itself.
A flute joined in, ruffling the surface of the music like wind on the watercourse. Simon was abruptly and painfully struck by the strangeness of this place; loneliness welled within him, an aching emptiness that could not be filled by Jiriki or any of his alien kind. For all its beauty, Jao é-Tinukai’i was no better than a cage. Caged animals, Simon knew, languished and soon died.
“What will I do?” he said hopelessly.
Jiriki stared at the glinting river, smiling sadly. “Walk. Think. Learn how to play shent. In Jao é-Tinukai’i, there are many ways to pass time.”
As they wa
lked toward Jiriki’s door the water-song cascaded down from the tree-mantled hillside, surrounding them with mournful music that seemed ever-changing but unhurried, patient as the river itself.
23
Deep Waters
“By Elysia the Mother,” Aspitis Preves said, “what a terrible time you have had of it, Lady Marya!” The earl lifted his cup to drink but found it empty. He tapped his fingers on the cloth as his pale squire hurried forward to pour more wine. “To think that the daughter of a nobleman should be so ill-treated in our city.”
The trio sat around the earl’s circular table as the remains of a more than adequate supper were cleared away by a page. Flickering lamplight threw distorted shadows on the walls; outside, the wind sawed in the rigging. Two of the earl’s hounds brawled over a bone beneath the table.
“Your Lordship is too kind.” Miriamele shook her head. “My father’s barony is very small, just a freeholding, really. One of the smallest baronies in Cellodshire.”
“Ah, then your father must know Godwig?” Aspitis’ Westerling was a little difficult to understand, and not only because it was his second tongue: the goblet in his hand had been drained and filled several times.
“Of course. He is the most powerful of all the barons there—the king’s strong hand in Cellodshire.” Thinking of the despicable, braying Godwig, Miriamele found it hard to keep her expression pleasant, even while looking on the goldenly handsome Aspitis. She darted a glance at Cadrach, who was sunk in some dark mood, his brow furrowed like a thunderhead.