The other man said nothing although evidently he burned to. After so many years as a boy required to defer to his elders and betters, Esladas found it difficult to adjust to the way Efeans deferred to him, as if he had power when he was nothing more than an impoverished immigrant with an enlistment contract and an ambition to make something of himself in a foreign army.
Kiya appeared at the gate. Her injured eye had a white salve painted over it, making her look as if she wore half a mask. She didn’t pretend at coyness; the moment she saw he was still there she walked to him, accompanied by a very old woman and a number of family members. He stood his ground for Kiya’s sake even though he felt incredibly outnumbered by Efeans. Yet the mounting disapproval of people on all sides made him more determined than ever not to back down.
The ancient woman spoke first. “Domon, you honor us by your visit to our humble home,” she said in the easy Saroese of a person who has grown up speaking it.
“My thanks, Honored Lady,” he answered in Efean.
She gave him a considering look, clearly surprised to hear Efean words emerge from Saroese lips. “Please excuse my blunt speaking, Domon. I honor you in my turn by offering the truth. Kiya is a village girl, unaccustomed to the city. She has grown up with village ways, rather old-fashioned, and knows nothing about city life. For example, in the village, for a man to offer flowers to a woman is a declaration of an intent to court her.”
Wenru opened his fingers and let the petals of the crushed flower fall to the ground.
Kiya made a noise, not quite a word, in protest.
Esladas bent to scoop up what he could of the remains, for more than any insult flung into his face it burned him to see a gift cast onto the earth like rubbish. And it meant so much more now, as he finally comprehended Kiya’s surprise when he had offered the flower to her.
“I did not know of this custom. The flower I gave her was not meant as a courting gift. I would not have presumed. A young woman like Kiya can have no reason to consider the interest of an impoverished young man like me, one with no connections and nothing to his name but a few belongings and the enlistment papers I signed this week that give me the hope of a career in the army.”
“You are understandably confused, Domon. You yourself admit that you barely know Efea, much less this girl.”
“My intention in inviting her to walk the city with me today was for us to become better acquainted. She and I trade words. I need to learn Efean and Kiya wishes to learn Saroese. As we learn, we get to know each other better.”
He and Kiya exchanged a look. Even though she could not understand the words he and the dame exchanged, Kiya still stood beside him as if she and he were fighting a common foe.
The dame struck her cane against the ground three times. “It isn’t done. It can’t be done.”
“That is what my father told me all my childhood when I told him I would become a soldier,” he said softly. “I will prove him wrong just as I will prove you wrong, Honored Dame.”
“No Saroese man can marry an Efean woman. It is against the law of your own people, proclaimed by your king and queen.”
“I left my home to escape what the law proclaimed as my destiny.”
“You will make her life a hardship. Is that what you want?”
“Of course that is not what I want.”
“Yet it is what you would achieve.”
“How we choose to live our lives is for us to decide, surely?” He turned to Kiya, because in the end hers was the only opinion that mattered. “Kiya. We meet? Or I go?”
He gestured to the narrow, gloomy lane down which he would walk if she told him to leave.
She lifted her chin, not looking at those around her, for in this moment they were the only two people in the world who mattered.
“We meet,” she said.
How could you not be astonished by how the gods scattered precious gifts where you least expected to find them?
“Kiya has spoken,” he said to her uncle and the dame, and it was impossible to hide his glow of triumph. To Kiya he said, “Tomorrow.”
She repeated the word back to him. “Tomorrow.”
He walked as if drunk, floating, all the way back to the boardinghouse and the dormitory. He’d thought to find the place dark, his friends asleep, but instead they all sat on their cots with the lamp lit, and when every face turned his way as he leaped up the steps with an excess of joyful energy, his sunny mood clouded over. He halted in the door.
“What a lovely flower, Esladas!” said Cahas in a voice too hearty and with a smile too wide. “Fortunate man! Ha ha!”
Esladas said nothing as his whole body tensed. These were his friends!
Cahas drummed his fingers on his cot. Several of the others looked everywhere except at him.
“Listen, Esladas.” Cahas spoke with obvious reluctance. “I don’t say this to mock you. But is it true what you told me that time, that you’ve never been with a woman?”
Geros opened his mouth as if to make a joke, and Beros said, “Shut up. This is serious.”
“We just don’t want you to get into trouble with some scheming wench,” Cahas added.
“I’m not in trouble.”
They all looked so mournful that Esladas wondered if they were about to tell him off as those soldiers in the market had.
Cahas went on, “We’ve been to the taverns while you’ve been out… doing whatever it is… and the local Patron men have been telling us how things go here.”
“I know how things go here.”
“We made a pledge to stick together. Firebirds, remember? We are your friends, Esladas.”
“You’ll ruin everything for yourself,” said Beros, and Geros said, “Ambitious men have to marry wisely.”
“She’s not what you think,” said Esladas, hands clenching into fists.
“We don’t think she is,” said Beros, and Geros added, “That’s what worries us.”
Cahas sighed, rubbed his eyes, then rose to look Esladas in the face, man to man. “Do you know what the locals call children who have a Saroese father and an Efean mother? They call them mules.”
For the first time he faltered. “Mules?”
“You’ll be a laughingstock, and so will your children,” said Beros, and Geros said, “You won’t get promotions. Those only go to men with Saroese wives.”
“We don’t know that is the case,” he protested, but the words sounded thin and weak in his ears.
“You came here to succeed in the army, Esladas.” Cahas clapped him on the shoulder, as a brother would. “Isn’t that right?”
Esladas nodded slowly as he looked around the circle. His friends weren’t mocking or scolding him; they cared about him. “It’s what I’ve dreamed of since I was a boy.”
“We know that for men like us it’s already a tough road to walk. It will be immeasurably harder and maybe impossible if you go down that path. Is that what you really want?”
* * *
We meet, she had said. But after a fretful evening at the persimmon stall, too anxious to concentrate, she found herself watching the shadows. He should have come already, but he wasn’t here.
He’d changed his mind. He’d realized all the objections were prudent and wise, which they were. They hardly knew each other. It was a passing infatuation born from the lure of the strange and unknown. It would wither, and he would go on his way with his Saroese friends and, in time, a Saroese wife.
Amayat clucked her tongue.
“Ah, lass, I can see your sad face, but young men are fickle and it’s better this way. There’s no future for an Efean woman with a Saroese man.”
Abruptly Amayat glanced past Kiya, face brightening.
Kiya spun around.
But it was only Amayat’s son, coated in dust and dragging his feet with weariness. “Long day, Honored Mother.” And to Kiya, “Greetings of the night, Kiya. Say, I have a cousin who has seen you in the market and wishes me to introduce him to you, with your permi
ssion. He’s a clerk in a Patron lord’s household and looks to go far. An educated city-born Efean man is a good catch for a village girl!”
“My thanks, but I’m not interested right now. If you don’t mind, Aunt Amayat, I’ll go home early.”
She made her way through the market, searching for him amid the bustling people, but he wasn’t there. After Esladas had walked away with the remains of the flower clutched in his hand, her uncle and the dame had hammered into her head how difficult, how inappropriate, how rash, and how impossible it would be to build a life together for two like them.
They were right. Of course they were right.
Did he feel irresistible only because he was such a stranger to everything she knew? All she asked was a chance to get to know him better. But maybe in this city, in this world, even that was too much to ask.
She walked to the butterfly fountain with her gaze fixed on her feet, one plodding step after the next, as she thought about going home to the village, stuck forever, never to change. After she’d seen Saryenia, the village would never content her.
Yet the memory of the heady scents of the village flower gardens drifted so strongly in her mind that she smelled jasmine and tuberose and orange blossom, their fragrance like comfort, like hope, like love.
“Kiya.”
She looked up.
He stood by the gate with his arms full of flowers.
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Will Kiya and Esladas overcome those who wish to keep them apart? Find out in Court of Fives, an imaginative escape into enthralling new lands where a girl named Jessamy struggles to do what she loves in a society suffocated by rules of class and privilege.
And look for Poisoned Blade, the second book in the Court of Fives series, available August 2016!
About the Author
Kate Elliott is the author of more than twenty novels, including her young adult debut, Court of Fives; the Spiritwalker trilogy; the Novels of the Jaran; and the Crossroads trilogy. King’s Dragon, the first novel in the Crown of Stars series, was a Nebula Award finalist, and The Golden Key (with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson) was a World Fantasy Award finalist. Kate was born in Iowa, raised in Oregon, and now lives in Hawaii. She invites you to visit her website at kateelliott.com or follow her on Twitter @KateElliottSFF.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Katrina Elliott
Background © Verbena/Shutterstock.com
Flower © mhlam/Shutterstock.com
Ornaments © ERSP/Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Becca Dunn
Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permission
[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
First ebook edition: December 2015
ISBN 978-0-316-34445-6
E3
Kate Elliott, Night Flower
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