“It’s what happened in Sarnak to the River people of Lumatere,” he said quietly.
“We heard the stories of the Sarnak slaughter,” Gargarin said. “Is it true that your queen bore witness and demands that the Sarnak king arrest the men responsible?”
Froi nodded. “Those River folk belonged to Trevanion. He and Lady Abian are the last of their village. Only now have the queen and Finnikin allowed others to live in Tressor. The land is too fertile to waste, but there is a signpost with the name of every man, woman, and child who ever lived there. When Princess Jasmina was born, the queen and Finnikin had her blessed and titled Jasmina of the River in honor of her pardu. Her grandfather.”
But Gargarin’s attention was again drawn ahead to Lirah. “See to her, Froi,” he said, his voice low.
“She’ll not want me there.”
Lirah was weeping. It twisted Froi up inside to see Lirah the strong, Lirah the fierce and cold and unbreakable, weeping.
“Go,” Gargarin said.
Froi hurried to catch up with her, but the moment she saw him, Lirah wiped her tears fiercely, her attention on the bridle of Beast. Froi didn’t know what to say. He glanced around, trying to think of something. Everything was dead. Or so it seemed at first. But what he had come to understand in his travels with the Lumaterans and Charynites was that nature chose to defy man’s will to destroy. Close by, wild pink and purple flowers peppered the landscape on the road beside them.
“Let me up,” he said.
Lirah made room, and Froi climbed onto Beast behind her. He pointed over her shoulder. “Bronshoi.”
She looked up and then nodded. Then she pointed to another. “Sajarai.”
And Froi understood Lirah’s passion for her prison garden. She had planted the Serker that she couldn’t forget.
They continued riding through the province, mostly in silence. Froi couldn’t help but think of Lumatere. It was less than a day’s ride from Isaboe’s palace to Lucian’s mountain. Here, it was more than a day’s ride from one end of Serker to the other.
Lumatere had never seemed so vulnerable.
When they reached another barren settlement of half-standing cottages, a murder of crows swooped close by. Froi dismounted and walked toward whatever had drawn them to the ground.
“What is it?” Gargarin asked, pulling up beside Lirah’s horse.
“Someone’s here,” Froi said. “Those birds would have nothing else to scavenge otherwise.”
Gargarin looked around and then struggled off his horse.
“We’re out here in the open,” Gargarin said. “If they want me dead, they’d have killed me by now. Let’s set up camp and wait for whoever it is to politely come calling.”
“I haven’t exactly been trained to wait for attackers to reveal themselves,” Froi said, irritated.
“Wait, I say.”
The three of them found refuge in a half-standing cottage that at least protected them from the wind. Gargarin built a small fire, and Froi watched him cover Lirah with the robe he had borrowed from De Lancey, and for a short while at least, she slept.
“You asked before about the sound,” Gargarin said later. “If it’s not the wind, what is it?”
Froi shook his head. He didn’t want to say the words.
“You’ve got some of my brother’s gifts. That I’m certain of,” Gargarin said. “Do you hear the Serkan dead?”
Froi felt Lirah’s eyes piercing into him.
“I sense nothing,” he lied. Because the truth was that he sensed agony and despair and unrest.
Something moved outside the shelter, and Froi crept toward the sound. Gargarin gripped his arm, held him back.
“Wait until he chooses to reveal himself.”
“No,” Froi said firmly. “We do this my way.”
He stepped outside and stared into the darkness. He could hear the sound of shallow breathing. It was a human sound, unlike the shrill whistle of the dead that he couldn’t block out. Froi knew they weren’t dealing with an army. It was one person, perhaps two. Good at staying concealed, but not good enough. Or perhaps their intruder wanted to be found.
Froi retrieved his dagger. “Reveal yourself!” he called out. There was no response, and he called out again.
“Are you armed?” came the response.
Froi recognized the voice and sighed with relief, regardless of its hostility.
“Of course I’m armed,” he said, irritated.
Gargarin was suddenly at Froi’s side.
“Get back inside,” Froi ordered.
“Perabo?” Gargarin called out. “Is that you?”
Froi heard the sound of something being lit, and then a flicker of light appeared as a figure with a large bulk and craggy face and oil lamp in hand crawled out of the shadows.
“You know each other?” Froi asked. Perabo ignored him and held out a hand to Gargarin.
“It’s been a long time,” the keeper of the caves said as the two men shook hands.
“And sad days in between,” Gargarin responded. “Our boy always spoke highly of you.”
Froi was confused. He had never mentioned Perabo at all, but then he realized with a wave of gut-deep envy that Gargarin was referring to Tariq. He felt Perabo’s accusing stare on him. Even after everything that had happened in the Citavita with Quintana’s rescue, Perabo would never forgive him for not getting her out sooner.
“What are you doing here in Serker, Perabo?” Gargarin asked. “On your own, at that?”
“Waiting and hoping,” Perabo said. “And here you are.”
Gargarin ushered Perabo into the shelter.
“Tell me there’s an army here,” Gargarin said. “One gathered in Tariq’s name.”
Perabo shook his head. “I’ve found nothing here but old ledgers hidden by a moneylender, and the town gossip’s chronicles.”
“You have them?” Lirah spoke up.
Perabo looked beyond Froi and Gargarin and stared at her, his expression showing appreciation at what he was seeing. He retrieved the chronicles from his pack and reached out to give them to her.
“Lirah of Serker,” he said, not needing to be told who she was. “This must cause you great pain.”
“What in Charyn doesn’t?” she said in a flat tone.
Perabo’s attention was back on Froi. “I heard it was you who lost her,” the keeper of the caves said bluntly.
Froi bristled but didn’t respond.
“You’re being followed,” Perabo finally said. Froi nodded, glancing at Lirah and Gargarin with a shrug.
“I saw something when we rested in the valley of Sebastabol,” he said.
“Can you keep us informed of the ‘somethings’?” Gargarin said sharply.
“I reveal information when it needs to be revealed,” Froi responded.
“There is no army for us here,” Perabo said, and Gargarin gave a sound of frustration. “But I can take you to one.”
“Where?”
“North,” Perabo answered. “Two days’ ride beyond the great lake of Charyn.”
When five sacks of barley arrived on the mountain, on a horse and cart from Lord Tascan’s river village, it caused more interest than Lucian cared for. At first, one or two of the Monts stopped their midday work to watch the sacks being offloaded outside Yata’s residence, but then Lucian’s kin began arriving in clusters of interest and intrigue, and by midafternoon there was no more work to be done on the mountain, just a whole lot of observations and opinions and rubbish.
“Enough now. Back to work,” Lucian ordered.
“It’s a dowry,” Jory said.
“A what?” Potts asked.
“A dowry.”
Everyone turned to look at Jory, who was nodding with certainty, his stare fixed on Lucian.
“Lord Tascan is offering you five sacks of grain as a dowry for Lady Zarah. That’s what this is.”
“And what do you know about a dowry?” Lucian asked, irritated because suddenly everyone was
fascinated by what Jory had to say.
“Phaedra,” Jory said. “She explained them to me. The way I understand it is that if I want to betroth myself to a girl, her family will offer me something to take her off their hands.”
Lotte sniffed. “Oh, sweet Phaedra,” she lamented.
“Which I didn’t understand really, Lucian,” Jory continued, “because wouldn’t Phaedra have been enough of a gift?”
Was there a challenge in his young cousin’s stance? Had Lucian been as obnoxious and bursting with all that thumping boy-blood energy when he was fifteen? He was sure he hadn’t. All that pent-up emotion that pointed down to one area of a lad’s body. Thankfully spring was coming. The Mont boys had been confined too long.
“He’s right,” Cousin Alda said.
“I’m going to have to agree,” Lucian’s uncle said.
Hmm. Yes, yes. Everyone had to agree. Everyone. Nothing better than a good death to create such affection for a Charynite.
“Enough,” Lucian snapped, well and truly sick and tired of it. All this talk of Lady Zarah and the two visits she had paid to the mountain had driven him to madness. Or was it Phaedra in the valley who had driven him to madness?
“Let’s just agree that Phaedra was a gift and maybe I could have treated her better and kept her on this mountain and taken care of her as she deserved to be taken care of, the way men take care of women in all . . . ways, but the past is the past and we move forward!”
The Monts were gaping. Even Yata. Had he revealed too much?
“No, I mean I agree about the fact that the sacks of barley are Tascan’s attempt at a dowry,” Alda said.
Lucian watched Jory hide a smirk.
“You can’t accept the barley, Lucian,” Yata said practically. “Finnikin has chosen you as judge of the crop for market day, and to accept five bushels of barley at this point from one lord over another will cause a feud.”
Wonderful. Now Lucian was going to be responsible for civil war in Lumatere.
“But sending it back will seem an insult,” Potts pointed out. Potts always pointed out facts with no good solutions.
“A humiliation of Lord Tascan,” one of the aunts said. “Imagine the sacks arriving back on his doorstep for the whole kingdom to see. The river lot don’t know how to keep their mouths shut.”
“True, true,” Lucian said, “and the gossip will spread like plague.”
“Sweet Phaedra,” Lotte cried. “Taken from us by a plague.”
“Lucian! Respect.”
Perhaps a wrong choice of word.
“If Lord Tascan is insulted, there goes our exchange of pigs for crops,” Alda said, irritated. “Don’t ruin this, Lucian!”
Everyone agreed that Lucian would ruin this.
“Diplomacy is needed,” Jory said.
“You know what that means, do you?” Lucian demanded. It was Jory who had started all this talk of dowries.
“I didn’t,” his young cousin said, “until Phaedra told me about it. ‘Diplomacy is better than war,’ she would say.”
“Phaedra’s not here!” Lucian shouted.
Lotte cried into her apron, and Lucian was the target of much head shaking and disgust.
The sacks of barley and Lotte’s crying and Jory’s smugness haunted Lucian all the night long.
“So what would you do?” he demanded out loud, as if Phaedra were in the room.
I’d be diplomatic, Luc-ien. And I’d do the right thing.
He fell asleep to those words and woke to them the next morning and found himself at Yata’s, where the sacks of grain were exactly where he had left them in the courtyard. He fought himself not to kick them hard for being the cause of a sleepless night.
From her kitchen, Yata knocked at the window and beckoned him in.
“You are so hard on yourself, lad,” she said when he was seated at her table, drinking warm tea.
He could see outside the window, where the mountain looked sublime with its crawling fog. On the slope close to his cousin Morrie’s home, Lucian saw a goat’s black face among the sheep. Beyond that were Leon and Pena’s vineyards. Sometimes Lucian forgot the beauty of his mountain, but here in Yata’s kitchen he truly understood why his ancestors had built the compound on this slope. So they could see their people.
“Every decision I want to make hurts someone I love,” he said. “Every decision I don’t make hurts someone I love. Fa never had doubt. Never.”
Yata sat before him. “On the day Saro decided to take us down that mountain and outside the kingdom walls during the five days of the unspeakable, he wept at this very same place you’re sitting now. Some of the Monts were furious. They weren’t going to leave their homes, and Saro had to decide whether to stay or leave them behind. I asked him what his heart said, and he didn’t hesitate. ‘Keep the Monts together, regardless of anger and resentment. Keep them together.’”
And his father did just that.
“What does your heart say, Lucian?” Yata asked. “You’re not torn about the barley. It’s more than that.”
Lucian and Isaboe and any of the cousins would agree, they could hide little from Yata. He sighed.
“Half of my heart says it would be so simple to share what we’ve got here with the Charynites in the valley. But the other half of me says I don’t want to share it with the enemy, and then I have to work out who the enemy is. I mean, look at what we have,” he said, pointing outside at the lushness of their mountainside, even in this winter haze. “And look at how little they have down there. And why don’t I care?”
Yata laughed. “Well, from where I’m sitting, it looks as if you do care, Lucian,” she said. “Too much in one place, not enough in another, and wouldn’t it be simple if we shared? It’s that way across this land, and it’s been that way since the beginning of time. Yes, it would be so simple to share. But there’s no place for being simple when blood has been shed and the people we love have been torn from us.” She took his hand across the table. “But forgiveness has to start somewhere, Lucian. It did start somewhere. It started with Phaedra. The Monts learned not to hate all of the Charynites because of her. I learned.” Yata had tears in her eyes. “Because you may not have seen it, my darling boy, but I hated with a fierceness I can’t describe. And do you want to hear something that was breaking my heart, day after day? I forgot the faces of my granddaughters in all that hatred. Hatred smothers all beauty. Beloved Isaboe has little resemblance to her older sisters, but your Phaedra — she made me remember those precious, precious girls, and I wasn’t angry anymore. I just missed them, and it’s the beauty in here,” she said, pointing to her chest, “that made me remember them. Her beauty.”
He could see the truth in her words.
“You know she lives,” he said softly.
Yata nodded. “Constance and Sandrine have sworn me to secrecy.”
He felt the strength of her hands.
“I don’t want you to take those sacks of grain,” she said firmly. “They’ll tie you to someone who will bring you regret and dissatisfaction all your life. It’s not what your father would have wanted for you.”
He swallowed hard. “I’ve made my decision.”
She made a sound of frustration, shaking her head, but he held up a hand to stop her. “I’m going to write a note to Lord Tascan and thank him for the grain, but explain that to accept it will compromise my role as a judge at the fair. I’m going to emphasize just how humiliating it may feel to him if anyone in the kingdom sees that I returned the grain, in case he doesn’t realize it’s humiliation he should be feeling, and then I’m going to suggest that I send the grain down to the valley where the Charynites are in need of it. I’ll promise him that no one in Lumatere will ever be able to say that flatland or river barley was consumed by a Mont judge, nor will they be able to prove that the grain existed in the first place.”
Yata smiled. “Oh, you’re a clever boy.”
“It’s not enough, of course,” he said. “The grain will ru
n out eventually.”
“Then, we have weeks to think up another plan.”
He traveled to the valley with Jory, who insisted on coming along.
“Do you want to know what I think?” his cousin asked as they passed one of the farms midway down the mountain.
“No, I don’t actually, Jory. I want peace and quiet.”
“I don’t think Phaedra’s dead,” Jory replied. “And you know she isn’t.”
“Really.”
“Yes, really,” Jory said, imitating his tone. “’Cause sometimes I come up to your cottage, you know, Lucian. You hide up there, all closed up, and everyone wishes you didn’t. At first, I’d see that small shrine you had to blessed Lagrami and how you’d lay petalbane beside it every day. For Phaedra. Because petalbane is the flower for grieving the dead. But then weeks ago, after Cousin Isaboe left the mountain, you stopped. So the way I see it, something happened in the valley that day and you know she’s alive and you know that it’s bad luck to bring petalbane to the living, and you don’t want to curse Phaedra.”
“It’s been some weeks since her death, Jory,” Lucian said, his voice practical. “We all have to move on. That’s why I stopped laying the petalbane.”
“The mourning season for Phaedra ends midspring. I know that because Cousin Cece was seen drinking ale and Alda, well, she blasted him. ‘How dare you?’ she shouted.”
“Funny that all of a sudden Alda cares for Phaedra,” Lucian said.
Jory looked surprised. “I don’t think Alda cares that much for Phaedra. She hardly knew her. But Alda, she said to Cousin Cece, ‘You show respect for Lucian. He’s our leader.’”
Lucian had never heard one of the Monts acknowledge that before.
“You know what my father says?” Jory said. “He says you weren’t born to lead, Lucian. That you were made to. But regardless, Fa says Monts couldn’t have asked for a better man to get us through this time.”
Lucian stared at him, overwhelmed. “What are you all of a sudden?” he demanded gruffly. “An ancient wiseman?”
Jory pointed to himself.
“Look at me, cousin. Did ancient wisemen have shoulders like mine?”