Bright Thrones
“No, I mean the way you pronounce your Saroese. It’s not the way I pronounce it, and it’s not the way Lark and Ash speak it, which has that Shipwright lilt. It’s as if you and Agalar learned to speak Saroese in the same place.”
“An interesting theory. What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t say.”
Ash and Lark laughed. The doctor did not. In silence he led them back within sight of the command compound with its hawk banner and coin-eyed owl. Opposite a back gate into the compound sprawled a horse-line where tethers held the animals that would be ridden and driven by the highborn officers. Amid this busy scene a single large wagon sat unhitched, shaft resting on the ground. There were about ten men inside the barred cage built into its bed. Most were sitting with arms crossed over their heads in a vain attempt to keep the sun at bay. Agalar had been forced into a corner with no scrap of shade, pressed against the bars with the sun blasting right on him.
“I appreciate the company,” Doctor Soras said to Lark and Ash, “but it’s better for you to go back to your crew. You shouldn’t get any more involved with this than you already are.”
“We’re just here to keep an eye on her,” said Ash.
“She can go too.” He caught Bettany’s eye, tipped his chin.
“No.”
He tilted back, head coming up as if he’d just glimpsed a scorpion. “No?”
“I owe him my life and the lives of people I was responsible for. I’m not just walking away. Also he’s lost his hat. His skin will be burned in no time and he could get sunstroke and die from convulsions. Can’t you appeal to the lord treasurer?”
“The lord treasurer has probably known about the charge the entire time. Those men who were guarding Agalar—Sunny and Flint—were hired by Lord Rakonis to keep Agalar in line.”
Ash scratched his chin. “Given the severity of a charge of murdering a lord, why did Agalar believe they’d let him walk free when the mission was over? Do you know?”
“Agalar received a note from Lord Rakonis promising that if the mission succeeded, the threat to reveal his impersonation would vanish and Rakonis wouldn’t tell anyone, especially not the lord treasurer.”
Ash shook his head, tut-tutting. “That’s always the first lie of blackmail.”
Bettany stared at Soras. “Are you suggesting he actually did murder the real Lord Agalar of Nerash?”
“I am not suggesting it, no.”
“You’re not suggesting it… because you know it’s true. Is that what you’re saying?”
Ash tapped her shoulder. “Come on, Bett. You’ve heard what you need to know. Doctor Soras is right. You shouldn’t get any more involved. You have more than fulfilled your obligations.”
“Go if you must. I know you have a ship to catch. I’m not leaving.”
Ash said to Lark, “I told you Pearl sees her youthful self in her,” and Lark nodded, satisfied at the comparison. They did not budge.
She turned back to Soras. “Why did he do it? And why impersonate him after? The doctor I worked with wasn’t greedy. He didn’t take what he wanted and discard the rest. So I don’t believe he’s a murderer and thief out to enrich himself. Nothing about him is like that. Tell me what you know, and then I’ll leave.”
“Oh, I see. You’re in love with him.” Soras shook his head, smiling wryly. “Which almost certainly means he’s in love with you.”
The words surprised Bettany, and yet didn’t surprise her at all. They just gave her a rush of triumph and elation.
“In other words, I’m right about him!” she said with a cocky jut of her chin.
“He killed Lord Agalar of Nerash in self-defense.” Soras spoke in a detached tone like that of a lecturer. For emphasis he raised a hand, lifting the forefinger and then the middle finger to join it like a doubled warning. “Obviously he had to flee Nerash afterward. A man who kills a lord cannot hope for justice, no matter how much of a threat that lord may have posed to him and his family. Afterward he maintained the impersonation by writing up monographs of his discoveries and letters to esteemed colleagues, all to create the fiction that Lord Agalar was still alive. But in reality he did it to protect people left behind in Nerash who would be in danger if they were accused of being accomplices.”
Ash whistled softly, and Lark shook her head.
Bettany set down the basket. “Whose life was he defending? Yours?”
A twist of the lips was all the reply Soras gave.
“You aren’t his associate, met while he traveled, are you?”
Soras said nothing, just watched with the gaze of a person who is accustomed to carefully studying those around them in order to avoid trouble.
“You have the same way of speaking and certain gestures you both use. It confused me at first because you look nothing alike, but I should be the last person to make the assumption that siblings have to look alike. Are you Sorshia? It’s the only possibility that makes sense.”
Soras met Bettany’s examination with a clear gaze. “Sorshia is a name I was given when I was a child. Soras is who I am.”
Ash said, almost mockingly, “What does that even mean?”
For the first time a flash of irritation creased Soras’s brow. “It means exactly what I said.”
“Each individual has five souls,” Bettany broke in. She needed Soras’s help and couldn’t allow Ash to offend him. “Here in Efea we call them spark, shadow, name, self, and heart. It happens sometimes that a person’s self and name don’t fit with the flesh they have. There’s nothing strange about that.”
The tension in the doctor’s shoulders eased. He gave Bettany a nod and, to her relief, opened up a bit more. “Leaving home allowed me to become myself, although I regret the circumstances that forced us to flee. I pray every day that our mother and youngest brother remain safe. We had to leave them behind because she is lame and he has seizures that worsen if he is frightened or tired. They still live in Nerash. We were all servants in Lord Eudes’s household.”
“Who is Lord Eudes?”
“The father of Lord Agalar. We did our best to cover our tracks, to make it seem the young lord had sailed off on a whim with newly met friends, something he was prone to because he was short-tempered and dissatisfied. If my brother hadn’t had the misfortune to be recognized by Lord Rakonis in a foreign port we’d not be here now.”
Bettany had grasped the crucial piece of the puzzle. Not all of it, of course. The why and how remained, but she believed in all her five souls that Agalar had truly acted in self-defense, to save his own and Soras’s life, to save the lives of others. To watch him work was to see that all his five souls nested peaceably together, anchored by the desire to heal.
Acting as his assistant had given her the same fragile peace as when she had assisted her mother. It wasn’t that she wanted to become a healer but that the work gave her a sense of competence and, more than that, the knowledge that she was accomplishing something that at least tried to mend the wounds of the world rather than cut them deeper.
“I have an idea,” she said, thinking about how her father made things happen. That was what she admired most in him: his ability to command not because he desired aggrandizement and praise but because he wanted to get things done. Because he’d had a vision of a life for himself and hadn’t been afraid to take flight toward the horizon, into the unknown, to find the place he knew he belonged.
All these years she had raged when really what she had been spoiling for was to pick up the fight and lead the charge herself.
9
The sun was going to kill him, and in a way he welcomed its fierce assault. However unpleasant the dizziness, nausea, and confusion would be, eventually he would pass out. Over the years he’d learned that one of the great mercies of life is when death brings its kiss to the suffering who have found peace in sleep.
None of this would have happened if the real Lord Agalar hadn’t decided that an epileptic slave would make a good object with which to show off
to new friends when they were all drinking too much.
“The mark of a good surgeon is if he can open up a pig while it is still alive, identify all its organs and their functions, and sew it back together again without it bleeding to death. If you cut the voice box it doesn’t squeal. Isn’t that right? Since you were the one who complained about the squealing and figured it out.” He kicks the pale youth who has attended him and studied beside him since the day his father, Lord Eudes, came back from campaign with a new housekeeper (and mistress when the need takes him) and her three children: one too dark, one too pale, and the youngest one that has those ugly seizures. Stricken by wine and the mocking laughter of his new friends, Lord Agalar adds recklessly, “I’ve cut open a living man before.”
“No! No! That’s impious.” His companions look appalled and yet delighted at his blaspheming words. “The gods would not approve.”
Their fear emboldens him. Sensing that people are afraid of him is the only time he truly feels alive. “The gods don’t scare me!”
They should scare you, thinks the pale youth, but in company like this he has no voice.
“My father intends me to be the greatest physician in the Three Seas. He denies me nothing. The local magistrate sends criminals to the medical school and lets us do whatever we need to them. I could show you today, couldn’t I, slave?”
Again he kicks the pale youth, who also goes by the name Agalar, because that’s what Lord Eudes calls him, Agalar the More Clever, as a joke meant to needle his arrogantly oblivious son.
When the youth does not obediently reply, Lord Agalar answers himself.
“Wait, there are no criminals in the cages today. How about that brother of yours? Wouldn’t it be interesting to cut open his brain and see if it looks different from a criminal’s? Ha ha!”
“Hey!” An elbow ground into Agalar’s ribs. “Move out of that shade. I want it.”
He hadn’t noticed the sun shifting as he’d leaned against the bars, dazzled by the vivid burst of memory. His lips were dry and his tongue like sandpaper but at least the sun was almost at the horizon. Blessed darkness might bring a reprieve.
Yet as night settled around them, his thirst and the heat of his burned face made the world twist and distort. Lanterns bobbed as messengers and servants made their way through the sleepless camp. Men sang hymns to victory to gird their loins for the coming battle.
He had survived a battle before, long ago, a memory muddied by distance and yet in other ways stark and clear.
He is a young child standing in a field overrun with fighting. A soldier looms above him wearing an expression contorted with fury, yet a woman jumps between him and the soldier. The blade comes down. The tumult rages on, dragging the assailant away from him. For a long while he is afraid to move so there is nothing but the warm blood slowly congealing and growing cold as the stars watch from their bright thrones and do nothing. Eventually he shakes the body and calls to her, he begs her to wake up, to get up, but she never moves again.
The bitter night drags on.
After a long time, an older girl’s face appears with the light of a lantern.
“Don’t cry or people will hear you and come looking.” She scolds him, then calls into the night: “Mama! Come see what I found.”
The woman who is now the only mother he truly remembers appears, dressed as raggedly as any beggar and with an infant bundled against her back.
“This is probably his own mother,” she says as she kneels beside the body and begins to strip the clothing from it. “The dead do not need clothes,” she adds, addressing him, “but we do.”
“What will happen to him, Mama?” asks the girl.
“He looks healthy and well cared for. What a sweet face he would have if he were smiling. Poor little mite.”
“We can’t feed him! And he’s too small to be useful.”
“Small things can grow. Even a little boy can carry a few items, can’t he? I bet you’re strong enough to carry this baby for a short ways, aren’t you? Do you want to take care of him?”
He nods.
It would be two years before he spoke again.
“Hush. Stop moaning or the guards will hear and come looking.”
A hand settled on the torn sleeve of his jacket, a touch both gentle and reassuring.
He startled awake to find himself again slumped against the bars. The other criminals slept, some restlessly, some as deeply sunk as if they were already crossing the threshold into the hall of judgment.
“Agalar?”
His head weighed so heavily, but after a moment he managed to look up.
The lamp she held made Bettany’s face shine like that of a divine messenger. Her gaze was spun of raw emotion, nothing held back. In his eyes she wore the glow of paradise, the unobtainable peace that a murderer like him could never grasp. But as she examined him, he read a different message in her expression, a raging determination compounded of anger layered atop anger until it towered into the heavens.
She thrust a soft bundle through the bars. “The fire curse. Be quick. Share it with the others.”
“Hey! Hey!” A guard came trotting over.
She extended a basket filled with folded clothing so the guard could see, and spoke rapidly in the Efean language, which neither he nor the guard understood.
“What are you saying? Speak Saroese!”
She repeated herself in Efean more loudly and quite slowly, and again displayed the basket as if its presence should answer the question. That they could not communicate frustrated the guard, but Agalar, clutching the bundle against his abdomen, thought it was her unsmiling beauty that made her intimidating. Nothing about her was pliant. She did not give way. Her expression offered scorn rather than sweetness, but he knew it for what it really was: intelligence and an implacable compassion.
“I don’t know where those clothes are meant for,” said the guard in the desperate voice of a man who fears he looks a fool. By this time several of the prisoners were stirring, roused by the exchange. “The laundresses report to the lord chamberlain’s tent. Over there.”
He pointed toward a lantern hanging some ways along the canvas wall.
She walked away, looking back once over her shoulder but not at him. Rather she was making sure the soldier kept his attention on her as Agalar felt inside the bundle. Nettled leaves met his probing fingers. They stung.
“What was that all about?” murmured one of the prisoners, to which a second replied, “Why worry? I’ll be shed of this wretched land tomorrow, one way or the other.”
“Wretched? I’ve never seen so many good-looking women as in this country,” said a third, cracking a laugh. “And her especially. I’d wash her clothes!”
“Shut your barking, you dogs,” said a fourth. “I want to sleep.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead, so shut up yourself.”
A heated discussion ensued and soon all nine of the other men in the tight confines of the wagon were awake. Leaf by leaf Agalar moved through the confines of the cage, rubbing the nettle onto the bare skin of the other men as he was jostled around, cursed roundly for bothering people, and punched twice. The pain from the blows was later subsumed by an itching rash and, by morning, blisters and coughing. He had dosed himself most heavily of all, and his throat felt choked.
So it was with an intense if painful satisfaction that, wheezing, he gasped out to a startled officer that he had come from Akheres where, indeed, there had been an outbreak of the fire curse in the mines. Many people had died of suppurating blisters and swollen limbs. It always hit men worse, he confided, especially on their most tender extremity.
As with any storm, the winds hit hard. The lord treasurer’s aide took one look and fled. Doctor Vayalu was called in and pronounced, soberly, that the fire curse could devastate an army more thoroughly than battle. The other prisoners, blaming him for bringing the affliction from Akheres, began to berate him.
Meanwhile, a flood of messengers rode in with urgent
reports from the field that the Efean Royal Army was on the move. As trumpets sounded an army-wide alert, an impatient officer gave permission for the prison wagon to be hauled to the army hospital and put within the isolation tent enclosure. The prisoners were let out one by one, ropes around their necks and spears pointed at their bellies. Six were returned to the cage because they bore no particular signs of sickening, while the three most severely afflicted were laid on stretchers. Agalar was carried to a corner of the isolation tent well away from everyone else, with canvas curtains hung to keep the frightful sight of him hidden from the other patients.
He’d recklessly eaten one of the leaves, and each breath seared. But none of that mattered when his sister appeared, dressed as a man and carrying a leather doctor’s bag designed exactly like his own because they’d worked out the most efficient design as they’d traveled.
He reached for her hand, but before he could touch her she wrapped a piece of linen over his reddened skin. Through this barrier she squeezed his fingers.
“Sorshia. Thank the gods.”
“You sound awful. Open your mouth so I can see how inflamed your throat is.”
“Where is—?”
And there she was, sliding into the space with that same basket of folded clothing that allowed her to walk freely around a major army encampment because people only saw her as a servant. There were more people outside—he heard them shifting and murmuring—but it was Beauty whose hand he wanted to grasp.
“The juice of the plant we call heaven’s wand will soothe his throat and skin,” said Bettany to Sorshia, as if he wasn’t there and perfectly capable of speaking.
“Bettany has a plan to get you out of here.”
“What about you, Sorshia?” he croaked.
“If I could manage anything in the world, brother, I would rescue our mother and brother from Lord Eudes and set up a quiet hospital in some distant port where you and I could heal and they could manage the kitchen and pharmacy. Bettany has a plan for that too.”
“She does?”
“I’ll leave her to describe the whole to you.”