Lady Mawfa responded in an indignant voice that was high-pitched but as hushed and dramatic as one reporting the enemy at the gates of the Citavita. The only part of Quintana missing was the squint.
“. . . and it’s all suffering for my joints. Poor, poor me.”
Froi choked out a laugh, thinking of Quintana’s own dramatics when reporting on events. Poor Lirah. Poor, poor Lirah.
A moment later he felt her lips to his ears. “So have you fallen asleep yet?”
Although the princess’s indignant tone had not changed, all of a sudden everything else seemed to.
Froi had no idea what lay beneath all the incessant chatter, but there was more to her than even the cold unsettling Quintana and the savage he had caught a glimpse of outside Arjuro’s window.
“Have you?” she asked again.
“At about the time she spoke of the dew on her windowsill.”
Quintana covered her mouth again, snorting. Bestiano barked out her name, but Froi grabbed her hand and pulled it away. And there were those teeth, small and crooked in parts. Froi was slightly charmed, snorts and all.
“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered, dragging her to her feet.
Finnikin was crouched on the rock of three wonders surrounded by the children of his mother’s village. They stared back at him, wide-eyed and full of awe, and he found himself swallowing a lump in his throat. This rock would always remind him of Balthazar — Lucian’s adored cousin, Finnikin’s beloved friend, Isaboe’s brother and savior, and once the heir of Lumatere. But since the birth of his daughter, the rock also had Finnikin thinking of his mother.
When he had lived here as a child, he rarely imagined Bartolina. His mother had died giving birth to him, and her spirit had failed to reveal itself to Finnikin, despite the fact that Aunt Celestina sensed her all the time and even Trevanion had mumbled about days when he felt her presence. But in these past years, Finnikin had dreamed of his mother often, especially when he brought Jasmina with him to visit his people.
Aunt Celestina wept each time, embracing both Finnikin and Isaboe. “Thank you, my darlings. Thank you for returning to us the image of my beloved sister.”
Little Bartolina, Jasmina was called by the Rock villagers. Of course, she loved the attention. He had noticed in her first attempts at speech, she had referred to herself as Jasmina of Bartolina. Whenever she spoke the words, everyone would clap at the sweetness of her voice. So Jasmina of Bartolina would repeat them over and over again until Isaboe would smother her face with kisses. “Enough, my love,” she would say, laughing.
Each time Finnikin returned to his Rock village, the elders would beg him to tell the children a story from the chronicles he had collected for the Book of Lumatere. Sometimes he’d tell them tales about the kingdoms beyond. If any good had come from the exile and entrapment of their people, it was that the world became bigger than Lumatere’s walls. One time, he told the children of a great waterfall in Sorel; other times he told them about the jungles of Yutlind Sud or the bazaars of Belegonia.
“Your Highness, Your Highness,” they called out that day, their arms waving for his attention.
He pointed to a sweet little girl.
“Is it true that our goddess of blood and tears carried the Flatlands to the Rock?”
There was a scoffing sound from the boy beside her, who Finnikin suspected was her brother.
“You’re an idiot, Clarashin,” the boy shouted at her.
“Fa says the goddess carried them,” she bellowed at the boy, grabbing his hair and yanking hard.
Finnikin stepped in and pulled the two apart, settling the girl beside him. She placed an arm around his shoulders, boldly staring out at her brother. Finnikin dared to look at Jasmina, who was sitting on the lap of a young cousin, squirming. He had noticed that every time one of the children embraced him or clutched at his hand, his daughter’s eyes would narrow. She wasn’t much for sharing, he had come to realize. On certain occasions, she grudgingly allowed Vestie to enjoy Trevanion’s affections, only because she believed that Vestie belonged to her as well. Finnikin, as far as she was concerned, belonged to both Isaboe and Jasmina. But Isaboe was all hers. If there was one thing he and his daughter shared, it was the desire to be the only person in Isaboe’s life. He stood once more and stepped into the crowd of children, holding out his arms to her, and she fell easily into them.
“It’s one of my favorite stories,” Finnikin told the children when he was settled again, Jasmina in his lap and Clarashin by his side. “Do you want to hear it?
There were shouts of “Yes, please!”
Finnikin turned to Jasmina, who seemed most impressed by the shouting. “Do you want to hear it?”
She nodded solemnly, and everyone laughed. He looked up and caught Isaboe’s smile. She was standing with the elders and Great-Aunt Celestina, who had earlier hinted that perhaps Jasmina could stay a night on the rock alone when she was no longer fed at the breast. Isaboe saw that as a reprimand. Finnikin saw it as the right moment to walk away and not get involved.
“Well, it’s a strange story, but the strangest of stories are the best to tell,” he said. “And sometimes the saddest.
“You see, quite some time ago, long before the gods walked the earth, there was a war in their world between two great gods. Many were slain or lost their homes, and the realm of the gods was all but destroyed.
“Some say it was the blood of one god and the tears of the other that formed the mouth of the Skuldenore River, and others say that a songbird lapped up a drop of those tears and blood and sprinkled it on a piece of land to its south.”
“Lumatere!” they all shouted.
Finnikin shook his head. “Not for a very long time. For it was once a strange place, broken into four pieces, each one of them surrounded by vast bodies of water. There were the Mountains. The Forest. The Flatlands and . . .” Finnikin feigned a frown. “What could I have possibly forgotten? I’m sure there were four.”
“The Rock,” the children shouted. “The Rock.”
“Ah, of course. The Rock,” he said, hitting a hand to his head. “How could I forget the Rock? Anyway, out of the soil of the Flatlands, where the songbird had sprinkled the blood and the tears of the gods, a girl grew from the earth, and we now know her as the goddess of blood and tears. Sagrami and Lagrami.”
“But they’re two people, not one,” Clarashin retorted.
“Well, that depends on what you want to believe,” Finnikin said, looking up at Isaboe. Their decision to worship the goddess complete in Lumatere had been met with hurt and fury. “But whether she is Lagrami or Sagrami or the goddess complete, no part of her is better than the other, nor is anyone who worships one better than the other.”
He looked out to the children. “Understood?”
They nodded solemnly.
“Let’s get back to our young goddess,” he said. “You see, she was very sad. Each night, while she slept with her head pressed into the very earth she had come from, it would whisper to her that once, long ago, it belonged to the Rock and the Forest and the Mountains. So one day, the little goddess of blood and tears began to drag the Flatlands all the way to the Rock.”
Some of the children had heard the story before. Others looked at Finnikin in wonder. He nodded.
“She was that strong?” Clarashin’s brother asked.
Finnikin nodded. “But she did get help,” he conceded. “Luckily, the river of blood and tears felt a strong kinship with the girl and allowed her to use the Flatlands as a barge to sail upon the river. But the little goddess of blood and tears was not satisfied. Because look what she saw,” he said, pointing.
The children stood and on tiptoes they stared out as far as their eyes could see.
“The Mountains?” one asked.
Finnikin nodded. “The goddess had to find a way to join them, but it was not going to be as easy as before. The river was able to help again, but it was much harder with two parts of the land now. So sh
e placed the Rock on her back, tied a rope around the Flatlands, and dragged them both over her shoulder to the Mountains. It took days and months and years and more years, and by the time she was finished, the girl was now a woman. She could have settled in the Mountains with her friend the river, and the Flatlands she had been born from and the Rock she had come to love. But what of the Forest? The songbird would return to her over the years and tell the most magical stories about the Forest. About its beauty and power and how the ancient trees would whisper to the wind.
“One day, the god who had wept the tears that had partly made the goddess was returning from another war in their realm, when he saw a kingdom in our land of such beauty and light. This time he wept and wept and wept from the sheer joy of it, and that’s how the river of tears that began in Sarnak and flowed into Lumatere actually became long enough to run through the land of Skuldenore. Lumatere was so rich that the gods chose it as a place to live, and it came to be that they walked the earth and left their mortal children behind to rule the world.”
“I used to love that story,” Isaboe murmured later that night as they lay side by side in Aunt Celestina’s home. “There were times in exile I was so full of despair, I thought I’d end my life from the sheer loneliness of it all. But then I’d think of the little goddess. If she could live by herself in this kingdom for all those years, so could I. If she could carry the kingdom on her back, I could too.”
And Isaboe did, Finnikin thought, gathering her to him.
“Remember when Lucian, Balthazar, and I would playact the goddess’s voyage?” He chuckled.
“Yes, very amusing,” she said. “At least Celie was always chosen to be the Rock and was fortunate enough to be carried on Lucian’s back. I always had to be the Flatlands, dragged along by my hair.”
“And Balthazar would stand on a barge and pretend to be the river.”
He laughed again and he felt her eyes on him in the dark.
“I do love it when you laugh, my love. I don’t hear it enough.” There was sadness in her voice.
“Do you hate living in the palace?” she asked quietly.
Finnikin sighed. “You ask me that every time we’re up here,” he said. “Have I ever given you reason to believe that I don’t enjoy my life with you?”
He expected her to laugh off his question, but she didn’t.
“You go strangely Rock-native when you’re here,” she said instead. “There’s a rumbling in your voice, and your shoulders don’t seem so stiff.”
“And you go all barefoot and primitive when you’re up there in the Mountains with your feral cousins,” he said.
“Do you hate living in the palace?” she asked again.
His hand traveled up her nightdress. “Do you want to know the truth?” he murmured, then pressed a kiss to her mouth. “About what I was thinking today?”
“No, I don’t think I do.”
“Well, here it is. I was thinking how wonderful it would be if Jasmina and you and I lived in Lumatere all alone in the same way the goddess of blood and tears did.”
She laughed at that. “And your father? Wouldn’t you want him there as well?”
He thought for a moment and sighed. “Yes, and my father.”
“And you’d want Great-Aunt Celestina. And your father would want Beatriss, and Beatriss would want Vestie, and I would want Yata, who would want Lucian and all her sons and grandchildren. And in the end . . .”
“In the end, things would be exactly as they are now,” he said, his fingers lightly trailing against her skin. She shivered from his touch, and he moved to cover her body with his.
“Quietly,” she murmured, knowing that being the leaders of their land meant they were never left completely alone. There was always someone outside their chamber guarding them. Over the years, they had learned the art of loving each other in silence. For some reason, tonight he resented the need to contain their sounds, but he captured her cry with his mouth on hers, felt the nails of her fingers sink deep into his flesh, and gave thanks that there was no frailty in this queen of his.
Later, when they were half sated and he could taste the salt in the dampness of her skin, he pressed a gentle kiss to her throat.
“Don’t ever ask me again if I hate living anywhere with you and Jasmina,” he said. “This rock reminds me of the boy I was, and being with you in the palace reminds me of the man I want to be.”
“Not just any man,” she whispered. “A king. Mine.”
After a week in the Citavita, all Froi had achieved in his mission to Charyn was the suspicion that the king lived somewhere in the vicinity of the fourth or fifth tower. He knew he had to act fast. In less than a week, the provincari would arrive for the day of weeping and the guards in the palace would double. But what competed most with the task at hand was Froi’s fascination with two brothers separated by a gravina, a princess with two people living inside of her, and a woman imprisoned for twelve years whose only contact with her daughter was a holler from a window.
The days that followed began in the same way. Each morning Froi would test himself, lying in Quintana’s bed after pleading tiredness or inventing an illness attributed to the body part important in the art of planting seeds. He would play the game of trying to work out who she was from the moment her eyes opened. Princess Indignant always, always woke in fright. She’d squint and nod and mutter, “There’s a man dying in Turla.” On the other hand, Quintana the ice maiden was always cold and usually called him fool. If his body was anywhere close or touching hers, she’d snarl, and he came to understand that the savageness appeared with her, rather than Princess Indignant and could be witnessed in the curl of Quintana’s lips and a glimpse of slightly crooked teeth. But something always seemed able to soften her. Froi would see it happen before his very eyes. The nodding. The “Yes, yes, I’m trying!” Whether he wanted to admit it or not, his heart would pound with excitement every time he saw the madness.
Princess Indignant also loved nothing more than spending her time watching the ritual between the brothers from Abroi, Gargarin and Arjuro.
“Blessed Arjuro? Can we come visit?” she called out from her balconette, trying to capture Arjuro’s attention with a ridiculous wave, just in case he had lost his hearing.
Arjuro ignored her.
“Do you think he went mad in the dungeons?” she asked.
“Not in the dungeons,” Gargarin said quietly.
“Do you think he loved Lirah beyond life itself?”
Silence. Froi looked over at Gargarin, watched the lump in the man’s throat move as he said, “No, I don’t.”
“I think you’re wrong, Sir Gargarin,” she said.
“Gargarin,” he corrected. “No ‘sir.’”
“When I woke that time after Lirah took me to search for the oracle, Arjuro was there.”
“The oracle?” Froi asked.
“We searched for her in the lake of the half dead. Poor Lirah.”
And there was Aunt Mawfa again. “Oh, my poor bones,” the woman had whispered while stuffing herself with the fattiest part of the piglet that morning.
The princess prattled on. “I was six, Sir Gargarin. They were all frightened because of the godspeak that was coming from my mouth. I wrote it on the wall, you know. With the blood from my wrist. My father was desperate for Arjuro to decipher it and they dragged him into the room from the prison tower and I’ll not forget his face, Sir Gargarin, when he saw Lirah half dead on the wet ground. He fell to his knees and wept, I tell you, gathering her in his arms. As if Lirah were the most beloved of women.”
Froi saw Gargarin’s knuckles clench as he leaned on the balconette.
“What were you doing with blood on your wrists? Why was Lirah half-dead?” Froi asked, alarmed.
Gargarin elbowed Froi into silence.
“I always believed blessed Arjuro would return for her, Sir Gargarin. I’ve prayed to the gods that he would. More than I’ve prayed to the gods for myself. But then they release
d him in my eighth year and he disappeared for so, so long.”
“You have a good heart, reginita,” Gargarin said gently before walking into his chamber.
The princess stared after him as if she were trying to determine his meaning.
“That was actually a compliment,” Froi said.
“What about when you told me about my dress that morning?”
Froi didn’t want to think of what he witnessed that day.
“Not a compliment,” he said, contrite. “Being rude, I was. You’ve got awful dress sense, so don’t ever believe anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. But that,” he said, pointing inside his chamber. “That was the real thing.”
He saw her face flush and she held a hand to both cheeks for a moment, as though surprised by the heat. Then she disappeared inside, and Froi wondered if she went in there to cry.
And then there was Lirah. It wasn’t as though Froi was half in love with her, but there was a force at play whenever he saw her. An ache he could not comprehend. He convinced himself that he liked her garden more than her, and so one day he found a more convenient way of visiting her rooftop prison from the battlement of his tower. Froi would break into a run, sailing through the air, his legs eating the gap between the two towers, his arms outstretched as though they would grab him space, his grunt muted by the shouts from the other side, until he landed on the opposite battlement, almost, but not quite, securely on his feet. The first time, when he stood up, brushing the debris from his trousers and inspecting the damage to his arm, he turned and saw the combination of awe and horror on the faces of Dorcas and the soldiers on the opposite roof.
“Are you an idiot, or an idiot?” Gargarin hissed, watching Froi climb back down to their balconette one time.
“The first one. I really resent being called the second.”
Thankfully, the fool Dorcas didn’t try to stop him, because there didn’t seem to be orders preventing the guest of one tower leaping over to visit the prisoner of the opposite tower. And Froi noticed each time that the battlements of the fourth and fifth towers were guarded by twice the number of soldiers of any other in the palace. Froi needed to find a way inside them.