When we break surface, I point to the top of the Half Bridge at the same time I hear Saen screaming. “Mistress Sepora, get away from it! Can you swim?” Her voice is full of panic, and I can’t help but feel guilty that I’ve dragged her from her warm bed to witness what she must have thought was a suicide.
“He’s not going to hurt me,” I shout back, startling the Parani next to me. He backs away. “I’m sorry,” I tell him softly, kicking my feet harder so I can raise my open hands at him in a show of amity. I point up again, at Saen, who lies on her belly on the Half Bridge, dangling her arms down as though trying to reach me and fish me out of the Nefari.
“You’ll have to come down here,” I call up.
She stops waving her arms and appears to brace herself on the wood beneath her. “You’ve gone mad, mistress. Positively mad.”
“How else are you going to communicate with him?”
“They are beasts,” she insists. “I won’t understand him.” Frustration and fear laces itself around her words. By this time, a small assembly of people have gathered around her, peering down into the water and exchanging whispers.
“They understood that they shouldn’t kill me,” I reason. Lingot that she is, Saen should know that I’m telling the truth.
“Perhaps they don’t prefer the taste of you.”
“Have you ever known Parani to be selective with their meals?”
Saen huffs. Clear indecision wrenches her brows together. She keeps me waiting several more moments and the Parani grows impatient beside me, giving me a small whine of what I sense is complaint. “Mistress Sepora,” she says. “I—I cannot bring myself to jump.”
“Then climb down.”
The Parani gives me an uneasy look as Saen begins to descend down the wooden beams of the Half Bridge. I nod to reassure him, uncertain of what else I could be doing differently.
“It’s suicide!” someone shouts from above.
“Come back, Mistress Saen. You can’t save her now,” someone else insists.
“You’ll be devoured alive,” a young girl shrieks.
“Oh, do shut up!” I yell back. “Have none of you something else to do?” Of course they do. Their busy day should be starting. Surely they have mouths to feed, work to be done. But what else could be more interesting than not one, but two royal servants offering themselves willingly to the likes of a vicious Parani?
Saen’s motions are tight and hesitant as she grips the poles and beams on her way down, taking care to clutch them for several more moments than necessary to gain her balance. When she finally reaches us, I can see how loathe she is to slip into the water. She licks her lips and clings to the last beam, looking at the Parani swimming apprehensively beside me. “He … he doesn’t seem to want to hurt me,” she says, unsure. “But what if I’m reading him incorrectly? He is after all an animal—”
“Look at his face,” I tell her. “At his eyes.”
She fixes her stare on him long enough for my companion to think her rude. The Parani whines to me again, and Saen freezes, eyes wide. “He … it can’t be.”
“What?”
She shakes her head, then leans her temple against the beam, never taking her eyes off the Parani. Several more moments pass, just as several ranges of emotions overtake her face, the last one resting on curiosity. “He called me a coward.”
26
TARIK
“What do you mean, I sent her on an errand?” Tarik beholds the guard in front of him as though he’s grown an extra pair of eyes. The giant guard squirms under the weight of his stare.
“She insisted you’d sent her to the Lyceum. I called a chariot for her, Highness.” He worries his hands together. “I’m sorry, Highness. She said she’d wake you and tell you I was not complying with your orders. I would never—” Tarik allows him to babble on about his dutiful loyalty, which turns out to be very real. This guard would not dream of disobeying his king.
He closes his eyes against the irritation he’s trying to keep out of his voice. This guard—what is his name, Guner?—is the victim here, after all. The victim of a clever little sphinx who is apparently very good at lying. “Did she say what I sent her to the Lyceum for?” What an absurd and telling question. If he’d wanted to hide the fact that Sepora had committed an offense against him, he isn’t doing a very clean job of it.
“She was in need of a Lingot, I believe.”
“I am a Lingot, Guner.”
“Yes, Highness. And a very good one, I’m sure, Highness. It’s just that I assumed the task she was assigned was too mundane for you, Highness, and so—”
Tarik waved him off. “Very well, Guner. Very well.” And what else is there to say? The man had acted on what he truly believed were orders from his king. If Rashidi were here, he would pass out forthwith. What was I thinking, recruiting a mischief maker like Sepora to assist my closest friend? What kind of judgment does that show on my part? Father would certainly extract the title of Falcon King from him if he were still alive to see this.
He wonders how the Mistress Sepora fared with the Lingot she engaged for her foolish adventure. Surely the Lingot would hear the lie in her tone, no matter how smoothly Sepora delivered it. There are ways around speaking with a Lingot, he knows. But his training at the Lyceum taught him to recognize such trickery; perhaps Sepora drafted one of the newer pupils who cannot yet identify the deception.
And, pride of the pyramids, what is she up to?
Tarik wishes he could bury his face in his hands but doing so in front of the entire court would be inappropriate at best. If anything, he should be burying his face because of the increased percentage of cases of the plague brought to his attention at court. Of the way the noblemen and women look at him askance, as though he knows the cure but is hiding it from them. The Superior class has been exceptionally difficult to appease. Their children, their servants, their spouses, all contracting the plague and needing to know what their king is doing about it. And what can he say but “All I can,” and assure them the Healers are working tirelessly on a cure.
And now this. This spectacle of Sepora in court, or rather, not in court.
The entirety of the situation is his fault, he knows, and his to repair. If only he had listened to Rashidi and sent Sepora straight back to the harem where he could have doubled the guard and kept her safe yet secure. If only he had thought with his mind instead of his eyes that day. If only she didn’t have such discerning silver eyes and such an enchanting temper.
Enchanting? Fool! Oh, how he would punish her for this. He would have to think long and hard for a discipline worthy of such an act of—
“Highness, that’s the charioteer I sent her off with,” Guner says, pointing to the back of the throne room at the man stalking toward them.
“Forgive me for interrupting your court, Highness,” the man says breathlessly. “But the Mistress Sepora has jumped from the Half Bridge.”
27
SEPORA
I climb the bank of the river, just enough to sit at the water’s edge. Saen follows, hoisting herself next to me in the mud. “He says this is far enough away,” she tells me of our Parani companion. He’d wanted to leave the crowd of spectators—both Parani and people—to gain some privacy for our talk. I’m grateful he’s willing to speak with me at all. I’ve caused quite a commotion among his kind, and some of them clearly do not approve. Saen said she’d overheard one of them say that this Parani—whose name she’d gathered is Sed—was foolish for communicating with us.
Sed stays in the water, a few arm’s lengths away. He keeps his eyes trained on Saen, clearly curious as to her ability to translate. He opens his mouth, letting out a crude series of whines that from far away could be mistaken for the frantic neighs of a goat. She nods at him, then turns to me. “He would like to know our purpose.”
“Tell him that we need nefarite. We’d like the permission of the Parani to harvest it from the river.”
The wails she returns to him sound n
asally and lack fluidity, and her voice cracks a bit as she finishes. She winces. “I’m afraid I’m not very good at this,” she says.
“You’re doing well,” I tell her. “And I’m grateful for your efforts.”
Sed speaks again, this time gesturing with his hands. “He says that we ask much of them, when we’ve mistreated them for as long as their memories stand.”
As long as memories stand. These are not beasts. A cow does not remember even what it ate the day before, let alone annotate the history of its own kind. I want to point this out to Saen, but by her expression, she has already come to this conclusion herself. I endeavor not to smile.
“Mistreatment? How so?” I ask. Instead of mistreating the Parani, Serubel avoids them. Going to the Nefari involves going to the Underneath, and Serubelans would much rather stick to their mountains.
It is then that I realize Saen is giving me a quizzical look. I think of the question at hand, the charge against Theoria for mistreating the Parani. And I remember the way Chut and Rolan had handled their catch. They were going to let her die a slow, tortuous death. And, from what I’d gathered in my own experience with the Parani, the Theorian criminals pushed from the Half Bridge fare no better. The small bites still prickle in my arms, my legs, my back. The Parani take their time in killing their meals—at least, their human ones.
Saen’s mouth becomes a straight line. She doesn’t want to ask my question—of course, she’ll already know the answer, having grown up in Anyar, and from our conversation on the chariot ride here.
“We need to know everything we’re up against, all of their grievances. We need a starting point for negotiations.” Ha. Negotiations. As the servant of a servant, what am I in the position to negotiate for? But surely I didn’t misread the longing in the king’s voice. If he could get his hands on nefarite, he would save his people from certain destruction.
I want to believe that if he could, he would. It occurs to me that I want to believe much of this boy king.
Saen sighs against my reasoning, but proceeds to render my intentions to Sed. He looks at me for a long time. Then he speaks for even longer. It must be a burdensome list of complaints he has to lodge against Theoria. This is not good.
Finally, Saen turns to me. “He says we’ve diverted the river in too many places, causing the water levels to become too low. Many fish have died off, and they hardly have enough to feed their young ones from day to day.” She cringes. “He said the food we offer them from the Half Bridge comes far too infrequently to be of any help.”
The food from the Half Bridge. At first, I actually think the Theorians take the time to feed them. I quickly realize, though, that he speaks of humans who have been deemed unworthy of keeping their lives. The criminals sentenced to death. I shudder.
“He thinks of us as food,” Saen says, her tone full of warning. “They are beasts. We should leave here.”
“Have you ever spoken to a cow before, Saen?” Ah. Her beliefs are more deeply entrenched than I’d given her credit for. “Have you ever addressed a sheep or even one of the giant cats you Theorians are so fond of?”
She scoffs. “Of course not.”
“Yet, here we have a Parani who is telling us of the devastation we’ve wreaked among his kind, and you can turn a deaf ear to that? Has a cat ever told you how much he adores his morning meals? Has a cow ever complained of being milked?”
She purses her lips.
“Think of what this means, Saen. We can communicate with them. Perhaps we can form an alliance with them. They are the guardians of the Nefari—what opportunities could we glean from this? Don’t you think the king would want to explore the advantages of such an alliance? And think of your reputation,” I say, making a play for her vanity. “You are now the first Lingot to ever communicate with a Parani. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
Her expression softens. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Tell him that I will speak to the king of this, and that I will return with an answer for him. But tell him I need a gift of good faith to bring to our leader, just as I’ve given him one.”
She blinks. “What gift did you give him?”
I want to tell her that it was a gift of meat—something I should have thought of doing much sooner—but I know I cannot lie to this woman. It was too bold of me to have Forged something for Sed, knowing that communications could be opened up between us and having no way to silence him on what he saw. I’ve risked much this day and only now realize that the consequences might not be worth the exposure. What if he refuses to negotiate with us? What if the king refuses? I’ve put myself in the middle of a centuries-old strife, and my fate lies with a Parani who doesn’t speak any of the languages I know.
Fortunately, though, Saen herself must not be that curious about my supposed gift because she rolls her eyes at my silence and begins to relay my message to Sed. He answers, shaking his head.
Saen’s brows knit together. “He says the nefarite is to be respected. That it is the Great Judge.”
“The Great Judge? Of what?”
She asks, but he only shakes his head again.
I don’t know what to make of it. Perhaps the Parani worship the nefarite, just as the Hemutians worship the great whales in the sea bordering their kingdom. Perhaps they think of the nefarite as a living element, the way the people of Wachuk believe fire must be alive, because it eventually dies. After all, they reason, everything that dies must have once lived.
“Tell him that we will respect the nefarite. That he will come to see that we are not evil, that we mean them no harm.” Or at least, I sincerely hope we don’t. The Falcon King must make the decision for his kingdom. I cringe at the thought that this all could have been for naught.
Saen gives me a sidelong look. “Very well,” I say. “Tell him that we no longer mean them any harm.” It’s then that I wonder if Lingots can lie—and if Saen will think she is lying when she says this. What an unfair advantage if Lingots have that ability, to lie yet discern the lies of others.
Sed takes his time mulling over this. Finally, he answers with a short staccato of grunts, after which he disappears into the water. The circles left by his departure spread and dissipate before reaching shore. Have we failed, then?
“Where has he gone?”
Saen brings her knees to her chest and rests her chin on them. “He’s gone to fetch you some nefarite. Then he wants us to be on our way.”
And so we shall.
* * *
The charioteer had abandoned us; the walk back to the palace was a long one. Saen and I had parted ways before ever reaching the market, and she’d been ruffled that she had probably missed some of her classes as the Lyceum. The sun shone midday above me as I left the Bazaar, with the palace in view ahead of me.
I resolve that on my days of rest, I’ll explore Anyar until I know it as I know the rope bridges of Serubel. If this is to truly be my new home, I must start acting like it. As it is, I hope the king will accept the rock of nefarite I clutch in my hand as a peace offering for not attending to my duties this morning. Still, I know I must be punished for what I’ve done. I’ve lied under assumed orders of the king, and I’ve delegated palace resources for my own personal use.
My father would find me deserving of imprisonment. I wonder what the Falcon King will decide. He seems to rule differently than my father does, with a lighter hand and a patient countenance. I would accept most any physical punishment, even a healthy flogging, if only he wouldn’t send me back to the harem. Pain is something I can grow to accept; even now the Parani bites all over me feel as though I’ve been branded in half-inch increments. The treachery of boredom, though, I cannot survive.
When I reach the palace walls, a cry sounds from one of the towers and I recognize my name being shouted in every direction. I have definitely been missed and probably searched for.
And I am most certainly in trouble.
28
TARIK
The two
guards pull the Mistress Sepora across the throne room to Tarik, and it appears as though she’s grateful for the assistance, her sandals dragging at the toe with each step. Her hair is a tangle of what appears to have been a braid at some point, wisps of it flying this way and that. The silver paint lining her eyes now streaks her face in rivulets as though she’s slept in it or not washed her face properly after wear. Small yet eye-catching wounds pucker her skin in places on her arms, her legs, her shoulders, some of them inflamed and giving evidence of the almost certain pain she must be in.
Tarik is irritated that his initial ire seeps from him as he beholds the very public mess that is Mistress Sepora. Perhaps he should have had her brought to him in his private day chambers to spare her this open humiliation in front of such a crowd. But a private meeting, a private confrontation about her offenses will not satisfy the curiosity of those present, of those who have witnessed the frenzy of a morning in search for her, of those who yearn to hear her punishment for having brought the king so much trouble and interrupting his morning of court. And a private audience with her would most definitely start petulant rumors that the mistress has a measure of control over him—which is not something he wants nor can afford in this climate of power changing hands, of him taking over the kingship. The king has been wronged, and some sort of discipline is in order, even if it appears as though the offender has already punished herself in some way.
He squares his shoulders, careful to arrange his expression into one of indifference. The morning of searching for her has already given the impression that he deems her more important than she really is—or should be. Whether this is true he’ll reflect on at another time. “I could not help but notice you did not report for your morning duties, Mistress Sepora,” he says, trying very hard to sound bored. “I do hope your outing today is worth the punishment you must suffer for your transgressions.”