“It’s the priest-king and Celie.”
“At this hour of the night?”
“Sefton let them in at the gatehouse, and they took a wrong turn and ended up in the garden, facing the end of Perri’s sword. They’re on their way up.”
She groaned, holding out a hand to him. “I need a catapult to get me out of this bed.”
The priest-king and Celie entered the residence, lugging chronicles in their arms, all apologies but flushed with excitement.
“How long have you been home without seeing me, Celie?” Isaboe asked, embracing her.
“I arrived not even two days past and have spent the whole time with blessed Barakah>. Not even Mama or Father or the boys have seen me.”
“Blessed Barakah, you shouldn’t be out at this time of the night,” Isaboe said.
“Sit, sit,” the priest-king said. “We’ve worked it out.” His voice was full of emotion.
Perri joined them and then Sir Topher entered and they all sat around the long bench. The priest-king held a parchment out to Isaboe. Finnikin reached over to steady the old man’s hand. But it was excitement more than age that caused his trembling.
“The markings on the nape and skull are written in a language very few know about,” he said. “I searched everywhere. Had chronicles sent from Osteria and Sarnak, and Celie agreed to . . . deliver one home from Belegonia.”
“Deliver?” Isaboe asked Celie.
Celie and the priest-king were silent for a moment.
“Perhaps . . . smuggle would be the correct word,” Celie said.
Sir Topher buried his head in his hands, and Isaboe heard him mutter, “Augie.”
“And no one suspected?” Isaboe asked.
“Well . . . the castellan of the palace searched my room. He’s very suspicious. But I was clever. And I wept, of course. You see, he accused me of theft in front of the king’s men.” Celie looked pleased with herself. “My tears are very convincing. There was some quite pathetic sniveling.”
“Oh, so underrated, the sob and the snivel,” Isaboe said. “I wish I had been taught. I would have used them more often in exile.”
“If you had sobbed and sniveled when Sir Topher and I first found you in Sendecane, we wouldn’t be here today,” Finnikin said. “I would have left you behind.”
“Yes, because you had so much control over the situation, my love.” Isaboe laughed.
“Can we get back to why they’re here at this time of the morning?” Perri asked politely. “I almost tackled blessed Barakah to the ground.”
“Then, let’s begin with insanity,” the priest-king said. “All great curses do. Because you will always find some sort of genius in it. I found an interesting passage in one of my books from the Osterians. Three thousand years ago, there was a Yut touched by the gods. He was mad — those most touched by the gods are — and his greatest claim was remembering the moment of his birth.”
“Mad, indeed,” Finnikin said.
The priest-king shook his head. “You didn’t see your daughter come into the world, Finnikin. It’s our most savage entry into any place on this earth. One that killed your own mother. Imagine the state of one’s mind if they were to recall its details. All those months cocooned and then the onslaught of this ugly world. Light and noise and strangeness. It’s no wonder we scream with terror at our birth.”
“And you found all this in the Osterian chronicle?”
The priest-king shook his head. “Just a mention of the Yut and his theory. So I continued my search. What kingdom has profited most from Yutlind’s mess and has become the greatest hoarder and pilferer of its works?”
“Belegonia,” Sir Topher said.
“Although it could have been worse,” Finnikin said. “The great works of Yutlind could have ended up in the hands of the Sorellians. At least the Belegonians have a love for words.”
The priest-king nodded. “Thus Celie’s achievement in their spring palace.”
“I pride myself on being the greatest spy there is,” Celie said. “When I was in the Belegonian capital, I had no such luck finding any foreign chronicles. In the spring castle, however, I found exactly what we were looking for.”
“Celie,” Isaboe reprimanded. “I told you to find yourself a lover, not hide yourself in a library.”
“No, you said we could make these invitations to Belegonia work for us,” Celie said.
“Well, I don’t know what we would have done without her,” the priest-king said.
“Can’t you be both?” Isaboe asked. “Someone’s lover and our greatest spy?”
“I’ll try very hard to please you, my queen,” Celie said with a laugh. “But let me start as a spy. I searched the chamber of chronicles in the spring castle every opportunity I could. There’s a foreign section. We’ll speak later about what they’ve pilfered from Lumatere. Finally I came across the chronicles of Phaneus of Yutlind. Of course, I couldn’t understand a word of it. So I returned home with the chronicles. It had been a strange time in the spring palace, and I told the king that I was sick at heart and needed to be with my family. And here I am.”
“And you were able to translate it, blessed Barakah?” Finnikin asked, and Isaboe heard envy in his voice.
“I promise it wasn’t easy,” the priest-king said. “Phaneus of Yutlind’s writing rants and states that we all speak one tongue before we’re born.”
“I don’t understand,” Isaboe said.
“There’s no Lumateran, Charyn, Yut, Sorellian, Sendecanese, Osterian, Belegonian, Sarnak,” Celie said, excitement in her voice. “He called it the tongue of the innocents.”
The priest-king glanced down to where Isaboe held a hand on her belly.
“I listen to you speak to the babe, Your Majesty. But according to Phaneus of Yutlind, that babe does not understand a word of Lumateran. All it understands is the universal language of the innocents. Untainted by life.”
“Why can’t we remember it, then, according to this Phaneus?” Finnikin asked.
“Oh, Phaneus doesn’t have the answer to that. He was barely lucid at times. Dearest Celie had to witness some unmentionable sketches before we reached the pages of the unborns.”
“Unmentionable,” Celie said, her cheeks pink at the memory.
“How unmentionable?” Isaboe asked, intrigued.
“I’ll tell you later,” Celie said. “Among other things.”
“Celie, you have taken a lover,” Finnikin said. “Why is it that Isaboe gets to hear everything and I get nothing but Phaneus the mad Yut?”
Sir Topher made a sound with his throat that meant he was irritated by the chatting.
“Go on, blessed Barakah,” Isaboe said.
“My guess would be that we don’t remember the language because we don’t remember birth. Perhaps the shock wipes it from our memories. Who knows?”
The priest-king swung the chronicle around and pointed.
“The mad Yut’s tongue of the innocents,” he said, pointing to the strange but familiar lettering.
Isaboe recognized one or two symbols with stems and curves that she had seen in the letters sent by both Froi and Tesadora.
“I found a strange code that matched every symbol to Yut characters I recognized, and then I tried to translate Yut into Lumateran, but the Yut words on both Froi’s and the Charyn girl’s bodies didn’t seem to exist.”
The priest-king retrieved the two parchments with Froi’s and Quintana’s lettering.
“Until I did this,” he said, placing them together. They all moved closer to study the words in Yut. “Half of the message was with Froi. The other half with Quintana of Charyn.”
“We are incomplete,” Finnikin translated.
Isaboe felt her breath catch.
“Is this saying that they’re incomplete without each other? Froi and that savage?” she asked.
The priest-king didn’t speak for a moment.
“I think it’s something even more powerful than that,” he said quietly. “
It’s the spirits of the unborn babes that spoke.”
Perri was on his feet, pacing the room, and Isaboe felt the tension from them all.
The priest-king laid Froi’s letter out on the table. “We have to go back to the events of the night of our lad’s birth. A strange, horrific night when a mother and her son are wrenched apart, a man loses the love of a brother, another man loses faith in his king and himself, a babe loses her mother and twin sister. All those involved, the oracle among them, were so powerful that their loss and pain and fury and grief became a splinter in the soul of a kingdom. We know it’s referred to as the day of weeping, when every Charynite woman who carried a child bled it from their loins.”
Isaboe held out a hand to Perri and he sat, his fists clenched.
“Look at what Seranonna did to Lumatere,” the priest-king continued. “All that rage and anguish. That wasn’t planned. It wasn’t conjured up in a spell. It came from in here,” the priest-king said, pointing to his heart. He flicked through another of the chronicles. “Two hundred years ago, it also happened in Sendecane. A young girl’s passion destroyed the kingdom, and it is still a wasteland today except for the cloister of Lagrami. Five hundred years ago, it happened to an island north of Sarnak, a place that no longer exists. Never underestimate the power of our raw emotions.”
Sir Topher was a man of logic, and even he looked spellbound.
“So the two babes and two brothers, and Lirah of Serker and the oracle cursed the kingdom much the same way as Seranonna did?” Isaboe asked.
The priest-king shook his head.
“No. They didn’t curse the kingdom. They cursed a day and created the weeping.”
“Destroyed only one day?” Finnikin said.
“Then, who cursed the next eighteen years?” Sir Topher asked.
The priest-king looked at them all, his eyes finally settling on Perri.
“I believe the spirit of those bled babes had nowhere to go. Some were days from birth. They had no name, and no way of being called to rest. So they searched for the source. The vessels.”
“Froi?” Perri said.
The priest-king nodded. “And the princess. Two vessels more powerful than we can ever imagine. Come to me. Come to me, they would have called out, hearing the cries of their lost brothers and sisters. All they wanted to do was protect them. And the spirits did come to them but were splintered.” He looked at Perri. “Part of the spirit of your unborn child went to Froi and the other part went to Quintana of Charyn.”
The priest-king paused a moment, looking at them all. “It’s what takes place during chaos, whether in this known world or that yet to be born. Look at what happened to us here all those years ago. Lumatere was divided in two. Those who were trapped and those in exile.
“And the spirits of those babes have been full of fury and despair all these years. They’ve wanted the part of them that was lost returned. And now, finally, each has become one again, united in the babe that Quintana and Froi created. Let’s pray that it’s born, dear friends. Let’s pray that it stays safe in its mother’s arms.”
“Mercy!” said Finnikin.
Mercy indeed, Isaboe thought, placing a shaking hand on her belly. The kingdom of Charyn had not been cursed by evil. It had been cursed by innocence. By the power of the unborn.
Froi heard the words often that day.
“We’re going to battle.”
They were said with uncertainty most of the time. Although the lads understood that they were going to war for Quintana of Charyn, there was still no guarantee that she would be found in the valley between Lumatere and Charyn. It was where they were heading. But first they had to get through the three hills and Bestiano’s army.
That night, they all gathered in the keep to listen to final commands, shuffling for room wherever they could. Froi was on the ground. He looked up at each archway, all the way to the top, and he felt the flatness of everyone’s mood. It wasn’t the way he wanted these men fighting for Quintana’s place in the palace. From the third-floor balcony, Gargarin spoke to them all. He called the next few days the most important hours in Charyn’s history. Said that they would be spoken about in years to come. As impassioned as his words were, the men still seemed lost. Froi remembered what Fekra had said. That the Nebian army Bestiano commanded didn’t know what they were fighting for anymore. Nor did these men.
They were about to leave when Dolyn’s voice was heard.
“Priestling, can you sing Charyn’s ballad?”
Froi watched Arjuro look up to where Dolyn stood. The leader of Lascow was beside Gargarin and De Lancey.
“I heard you once,” Dolyn continued. “It was many, many years ago. Your voice rang clear in the crowd. More powerful than any other priestling.”
“No,” Arjuro said bluntly.
His voice echoed strangely in the quiet space.
“Arjuro —” De Lancey called out.
“My answer is no! It’s a song for a Charyn that no longer exists.”
“We go to war tomorrow for a Charyn Tariq believed in, sir,” one of the Lasconians shouted out boldly from one of the upper balconies.
Arjuro shook his head, his expression weary. “I miss my sisters and brothers in the godshouse,” he called back in response. “I don’t care whose voice rang clear in the crowd. I sang Charyn’s ballad alongside them . . . and now they’re gone. I don’t sing . . . except for the dead.”
“Then, perhaps we can speak it out loud,” a Turlan lad said. “As a blessing before battle.”
There was a halfhearted mumble and then words were spoken, disjointed and feeble.
“. . . the stone we shaped with hands of hope to build a kingdom of might . . . the roads we paved with the blood of our toil . . .”
Something inside Froi’s head jolted. He knew this song. The priest-king had taught him. The old man had taught him everything about Charyn. “It’s a song of their hubris . . . a song to show off their talents,” the priest-king had murmured, but he made Froi listen to it each time they were together. “Sing with me, Froi,” he would say. But Froi had refused. He sang for no man. Not since his days on the streets of the Sarnak capital. But now he understood. Had the priest-king guessed who Froi was all along and taught him this song, not to conquer an enemy, but to find his own people? Clever, wicked man. Froi had never loved the priest-king more.
There’s a song in your heart, Froi. You must unleash it or you will spend your days in regret.
“I’ll sing it with you, Arjuro,” Froi called out, and everyone searched for him in the crowded keep.
“I know it . . . I was taught by the blessed Barakah of Lumatere,” he said loudly for everyone to hear. “He believed . . . a well-rounded education was the best,” he continued to explain, partly with a lie.
A silence came over the room as they waited for Arjuro’s reaction. And somewhere in the crowd, Arjuro and Froi found each other and stood side by side. Men crouched around them. From above, Gargarin’s eyes seemed to pierce into Froi’s. As long as he lived, Froi would never be able to determine his father’s thoughts.
He waited for the cue from Arjuro. It was a song for more than one to sing and Arjuro began alone, his voice robust, his warble perfect, a sound still so youthful despite the years. Froi felt a catch in his throat thinking of the young gods’ blessed Arjuro, who would have bewitched the hardest of spirits. He was still bewitching De Lancey of Paladozza now. The love on the provincaro’s face was potent. Catching. Froi waited, ready to commence with the second stanza. His voice had been deep for some years now. Not as a boy. Back then, it was high and pure and it fetched him a price. Back then, he didn’t understand the words he sang. All he understood was an empty stomach that needed to be filled. But now, as he started his song, he knew exactly what he was singing, and his voice reached depths that he hadn’t known existed. And when Arjuro’s voice joined in, it was a communion, a blood tie, and Froi felt the strength that both their voices gave to those listening. He watched men pla
ce clenched hands to their chests; he saw tears spring to surprised eyes. He saw Lirah push her way through the men on the balcony above, transfixed. Froi’s voice felt like a caress for his battered soul. Because he sang for Quintana of Charyn. He sang for the misery of her life, the poison in her body, the scars on her skin, and the courage in her character. And he sang for the child he would never call his own. He sang for the Charyn he would leave behind, and he felt his hand clench in a fist at the thought of such a kingdom. It made his voice soar with Arjuro’s, to a height that matched its earlier depth. And when it was over and he pushed through the crowd, he felt hands clap his back, ruffle his cap, and shake his hand as he moved among them. He felt their euphoria.
He returned to his post on the wall, looking out into the darkness and wondering what the next day would bring. Death. Of course there’d be death. Would it be him? Grij? Who would live and who would die?
Perabo joined him, with Gargarin.
“Your lad here is lethal,” Perabo said. “Let’s hope a bit of that blood runs through the little king.”
“Say it louder and I’ll cut out your tongue,” Gargarin snapped.
Perabo gripped Gargarin to him, and Froi stepped between them.
“Your secrets, whatever I may believe they are, die with me,” Perabo said through clenched teeth. “Doubt me or threaten me again, and you’ll have to find yourself another constable.”
Gargarin cupped the man’s shoulder, his hand shaking. Froi could see that something wasn’t right, but to Perabo, at least, Gargarin seemed contrite.
“You’re the only constable I want, Perabo. No more doubts or threats. Make sure the names of the lads going into battle are recorded.”
Perabo nodded, glancing at Froi. “This one needs to rest. Ariston is going to want Froi by his side.”
“He won’t be going with Ariston and his men,” Gargarin said.
Froi stared at him, stunned.
“What are you saying?” he shouted. “You know I’m as good as a Turlan. You’re only doing this because —”
“Because what?” Gargarin hissed. “Because you’re my son? You’re mistaking me for someone with choices, Froi. I don’t have choices.”