Green Wild (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 2) Page 17

  **Humans,** sent Jinriki, even as the noises abruptly stopped. Tiana sat up, holding up her hand to gain her attendants’ attention. The activity of the camp stilled and several of the guards half-lifted loaded crossbows. A pair of faces peeked out of the leaves.

  Both were smudged with dirt and tree sap, with identical preternaturally leaf-green eyes, but the one who spoke seemed more masculine. “Oh no. Who are you?” The figure pulled himself to a higher and less obscured tree branch, while his companion remained hidden. He wore only rags, and his hands and feet were stained green.

  Lisette rose to her feet, as elegant as if at a tea party. “First, you must tell me who you are. After that, I can introduce you properly to Her Serene Highness, the Princess Tiana.” It wasn’t exactly a proper introduction, but they weren’t exactly at a cookie reception. Maybe it was the right form of introduction to forest wild children, Tiana reflected. Lisette would know.

  The young man’s eyes flicked to Lisette. “You don’t need to know who I am.”

  Lisette sighed. “Then I’m afraid we’re at a standstill.”

  He frowned. “But you just told me—” The figure below him giggled and he stopped short, flushing. Setting his jaw, he stared at Tiana again. “I don’t believe you. But it doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be here.” Without looking away, he added, “And the crossbows aren’t winning me over.”

  Impatiently, Tiana motioned for her guards to lower their weapons. “Why don’t you believe her?” She’d never before encountered somebody who hadn’t recognized her as a member of the Royal Blood on sight.

  Those remarkable eyes assessed her again and he shrugged. “The Blood are all nine feet tall, and majestic. You’re lying in the dirt. Besides this isn’t a place for the Blood. It’s... protected.”

  The figure mostly hidden below him said, “We heard stories—”

  The young man’s hands tightened on the branch he held. “If the story is true, you’re even less welcome. Atalya’s blessings are not for the taking, not here.”

  Lisette helped Tiana to her feet. “Who tells stories of the Blood here?”

  “What’s your name?” he asked in response.

  “Do you need to know?” she responded, then added, “No, that’s unkind of me.” She curtsied prettily. “Lisette, of the Regency.” Dimpling at him in that way she had, she asked, “And your own?”

  He smiled crookedly back, as if he couldn’t help himself. They never could. “Fai. You look too gentle for your companions, Lisette. A tamed lady. You can let that go here, you know.”

  Tiana said, suddenly annoyed, “Excuse me, can we return to the subject of the Blood and recent tales?”

  Fai’s gaze lingered on Lisette as he said, “The Voice tells us the Blood descended on the Citadel of Niyhani and claimed the power of that Firstborn for their own, leaving the Citadel in ruins. Is it true, gentle Lisette? Were you part of such devastation?”

  **Intimately,** said Jinriki, in some satisfaction, but Lisette said only, “It is no misdeed to accept a gift freely offered.”

  “Ah,” said Fai, sounding almost disappointed. “Well, Atalya will offer no such gifts here. Not of that variety.”

  Tiana stared at him. “What do you mean? The light is here, I feel it everywhere. Why won’t she help?”

  Fai’s smile wasn’t pleasant. “Outside, the Lady’s blood is shed every year for the good of the world and all the horrible people within it. Only here is she free, Queen instead of pawn, and here, she does not sacrifice. Not for hunters, and not for Blood Princesses.” He spoke with an easy authority that made it hard to argue.

  Frustrated tears sprang to Tiana’s eyes. “But the Blight—Ohedreton—we need her. Why do I feel her light if she won’t help us?”

  Fai tilted his head and not unkindly, he said, “Perhaps She has other plans.”

  The girl hidden in the leaves said, “The others...”

  Fai swung a foot and lightly brushed the girl’s head. “Yes. There are other powers here. If you are so very desperate, perhaps you can convince one of them to help you against the Blight. I’ll spread word of your visit.”

  Tiana ducked her head, her eyes burning, and felt Lisette’s fingers close on her own comfortingly. Then Lisette said, “Tell also the true story of what happened at the Citadel: that Niyhan reached through all his monks to place a power and a quest in her, and that after, the Blighter tried to pull down the mountain itself in an attempt to thwart her quest.”

  “How frightening,” said Fai, unimpressed. “Would you have us be vulnerable to the same devastation if you could strip the power from this place? No. She will not sacrifice her only sanctuary.”

  Without warning, Minex pressed against Tiana’s other side. “Lady Lisette forgot one detail,” she announced. “It’s all right, she was right in the middle, she wouldn’t have noticed.”

  The girl whispered something and Fai said sharply, “What is that, little earth spirit?”

  Minex looked like a cat contemplating a bowl full of cream. “The servants of Niyhan could not hear his message at first, so distracted were they by their own lives. They couldn’t hear him until the most profound silence swept over the Citadel and its protections had already started to crumble.”

  The young man’s face grew cold, and without another word, he vanished back into the branches. His companion peeked out a moment longer before also withdrawing, the rustling of the branches first loud and then no more remarkable than the wind.

  Plaintively, Tiana said, “What’s going on?”

  “They weren’t from the local population. The villages outside the forest, I mean. He spoke like a noble and those rags were once fine clothing,” said Lisette. She sighed. “Minex is right. Nobody at the Citadel had any idea what was going to happen. Don’t let them discourage or confuse you, Tiana. They don’t know any more than we do.”

  “Somebody does,” said Kiar. “The one they called the Voice. News faster than we could travel, and slanted in the worst possible way. This is not nearly as friendly a place as the Citadel.”

  Chapter 15

  Eyes In the Dark

  JERYA WENT TO the meeting the Ambassador arranged with more hope than she should have. It wasn’t only the Crown Princess and the Justiciars, but the Mayor, a handful of prominent tradesmen, two nobles, a common laborer, a shipwife, a midwife, a bespoke enchanter and the manicured editor of a women’s serial, all apparently invited because they weren’t afraid to speak their minds. It wasn’t a meeting, it was chaos. If they could have harnessed the various sneers of disdain, they could have pulled a war wagon into the heart of the Blight. When Jerya came back again and Iriss asked about the meeting, all she could do was shake her head and try to forget the gleeful way Scriber Stone had transcribed every single outburst and insult.

  “At least,” she told Iriss and Siana, “Most of the citizens were respectful to me. They just hated each other. And the nobles. And the Justiciars,” she finished, with satisfaction. That thought kept her warm through the disarray and constant worry of Yithiere’s departure with Cutter and a handful of Guards and a counselor assigned by the Chancellor.

  But by the time night fell, she couldn’t stop thinking about the veiled looks they’d given her, and about the way the shipwife and the serial editor had politely disapproved of her and the Justiciars equally, in a cool, stinging way. The memory mixed up with her concern about sending Yithiere so far away. The Chancellor sent his man along more for appearances’ sake than any expectation that it would do any good; Yithiere simply didn’t trust anybody he hadn’t known from either his childhood or theirs. Even those he did trust he did conditionally, these days.

  By the middle of the night, Jerya gave up on sleep. She was exhausted, but her brain wouldn’t stop working, spinning endless possible scenarios. Yithiere. Vassay. Seandri. The Blighter. Winning. Losing. Escaping. Ruling. Dying.

  She got dressed and left the room, intending at first on visiting Seandri. But as she entered the hall, shrouded
in the velvet darkness, she stopped. The thought of cuddling close to Seandri didn’t appeal to her like it used to. She realized that while they’d been close as children, what they had now was.... Habit. Trust, yes. Reliability—but he surprised her the day before with his decision to help the Vassay. He never surprised her. He was always there. But one day, he wouldn’t be. What if that night was tonight?

  She couldn’t stand the thought. It made her think of Tiana, gone far away. But she didn’t want to think. Thinking had kept her up this late. After a moment’s thought, searching for something she could do, she turned to Great-Uncle Jant’s chamber. A dim light under the door told her he was still awake, too. She nodded at the guard outside, then knocked and called, “Uncle?” softly.

  “Come in,” he responded, and when she opened the door, she found him sitting up in his bed, writing on a lap desk. He was alone, but Jerya could pick up the faint floral scent of the recent presence of his wife Julina.

  Her great uncle looked so wizened and frail—but he’d always looked wizened and frail. Alone of all her relatives, he hadn’t changed since she was tiny. He was her grandfather’s younger brother, and he’d watched four monarchs before Jerya rule and fall. He had his limits—he couldn’t bear to be outside most of the time—but he had much of the experience Jerya lacked, through direct observation, and through his studies. He maintained a network of contacts all across the country and beyond; he was always writing letters and in books.

  He kept writing as she entered the room, saying, “The young need their sleep, child. What do you want?”

  Jerya plucked a possibility out of the storm in her mind: something she’d talked about before with Seandri, something that might help everybody. “The phantasmagory was a thing, Uncle. A physical object.”

  His writing stopped, then picked up again. “I saw. We all saw.” They’d all been pulled into the phantasmagory by an unfamiliar ghostly woman right before the Blighter had destroyed it, so Jerya’s father wasn’t alone at the end.

  Jerya started pacing around the room. “It was a thing, but it was also an eidolon, Kiar said.”

  “And that I’ve heard,” said her great uncle. “Don’t pace like that, Jer, it disrupts my rhythm. No wonder you’re not sleeping. Sleep requires stillness.”

  “My mind won’t be still, Uncle, I’m sorry.” But she made an effort to calm her body. “You’ve studied the phantasmagory a long time.”

  He folded his letter. “I did. I studied what was inside it, what could be done with it. I always considered it an extension of our own minds. And now it is gone.” His voice was even, but Jerya fancied that if the phantasmagory did still exist, she’d be able to feel the ripples of his rage and grief.

  Curiously she asked, “Did you write down much of what you found in there? The old stories and memories?”

  “Some,” he said, putting his lap desk aside and folding his hands. “Those I thought would be interesting to my correspondents or to scholars. But all those papers are in the Palace, my dear, if you were hoping to do some research.” His eyes glinted brightly. She’d forced him to leave when the mudslide came. Apparently he was still annoyed about that.

  Well, maybe she could redirect his energies. She took a deep breath, looking at the idea she’d plucked from the storm. “All right. That’s fine. Actually, I was thinking... could we recreate the phantasmagory? Could you? Perhaps it was some kind of gestalt eidolon.”

  He stared at her, his eyes widening slowly. Then he shook his head. “Where would I even begin? If it was a gestalt eidolon, who did it belong to? And it was amazingly complex if so; beyond my capacity. How would you even fold the substance so you could achieve the layers...” his voice dropped down into muttering, until he shook his head again and said, “Why would you even think such a thing is possible?”

  Jerya gnawed on a pinky nail, then made herself stop. “The andani, and the other soldiers of the Blighter seem independent, but Kiar was able to absorb them like they were her own eidolons. She’s clever, not unusually gifted with Family magic. That started me thinking about eidolons and what they are. Then I made a gestalt eidolon with Seandri and I could... feel him, even without the phantasmagory.” She shrugged. “I don’t have any answers, just questions. And you’ve been looking at questions like this a lot longer than I have.”

  “Sometimes we forget how to ask new questions,” Jant muttered, and Jerya thought again about her relationship with Seandri. His hand twitched and an emanation carried away his lap desk. Sometimes we forget to ask questions at all.

  Great-Uncle Jant began working the emanation around a tiny eidolon: fox-shaped, as all his eidolons were unless he chose to change them. Jerya watched him, holding absolutely still in case her restless activity would interfere with any sudden flights of brilliance. But after only a moment, he let both forces dissolve. “I don’t know. I haven’t any idea of where to start.”

  “I’ll have Gisen help you,” said Jerya, in her own fit of inspiration. “She’s the youngest, you’re the oldest, the two of you can come up with something. She’s really good with eidolons, too. And if it’s gestalt, you won’t be able to do it alone.”

  Jant squinted at her. “It would be.... good to have the phantasmagory back. It is such a precious archive—even wiped clean as it was—it was a way for us to communicate. You used to monitor the phantasmagory for us during the Blights when you were tiny, do you remember? The children have always done that. I did it when my mother—” He stopped abruptly, and shook his head. “I will speak with Gisen. She needs to be kept busy in any case; she’s spending far too much time around those foreigners.”

  Again, Jerya decided not to fan the flames of his annoyance by mentioning Gisen attended the Vassay at her request. Instead she moved to the door. “I’ll let you sleep on it.”

  “Don’t forget to sleep yourself, child,” said Jant gruffly. She turned back and went to kiss him on the cheek.

  “Sometimes I feel like I slept through my entire childhood,” she murmured. “We’ve all been sleeping, hidden away, ignoring the real world.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to sleep than be awake,” he said cryptically, then said, “Go on. Let an old man rest.”

  She left. She couldn’t go back to her own apartment, though. It was too confining; all her thoughts bounced off the walls and came back at her.

  As she went to the inn’s exit, picking her way across the public parlour that had become a staging ground for the Royal Guard, Cara rose up from a couch against the wall.

  “Jerya,” she called, and when Jerya glanced over, came around a table and said, “Why? Why didn’t you send Seandri?”

  Her skin prickling, Jerya took in Cara’s bedraggled appearance. She’d been slowly falling apart since the mudslide, but the conversation with the healer had wrecked her. She’d been curled up on the couch like she hadn’t had the energy to move to her own bed.

  “Yithiere has more experience—” she began, giving the same excuse she’d offered yesterday. But the sudden flash of rage in Cara’s eyes silenced her.

  “You didn’t send Seandri because he’s your favorite. You dragged Shanasee into her worst nightmares because the city needed her, but you’d rather let the Blight overwhelm us than risk your favorite. You lie and play games; you think this is all a game and meanwhile Shanasee is trapped in a darkness she can’t escape from and you don’t even care.”

  Jerya felt like she’d been slapped. “Of course I care! I stayed with her, didn’t I? She sent you to safety with her paintings, and I stayed with her.”

  “And look how little good you did! My poor Shan, destroying herself for your precious citizenry so you can bask their love every day. Yithiere questions you, doubts you, and you send him away. Seandri never argues, and you never risk him. You are terrible. You’ll be a queen like your great-grandmother, oh yes, except you won’t because this Blight will consume us—”

  At this point one of the few Guards on watch in the parlour intervened, putting an a
rm around the weeping Regent and muttering to her comfortingly. He turned her away, back to the couch.

  “She’s very tired, ma’am,” said Raffey, who looked like he’d just woken. His hair stood up straight. “She can’t sleep alone and she can’t sleep when she’s near Princess Shanasee. So she naps in here, when she can.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Jerya said helplessly.

  “The Chancellor does,” Raffey said reassuringly. “That’s his job, ma’am, not yours. Although we’ll have to report this outburst to him. I suspect she needs more help than she’s getting. Are you going out, ma’am?”

  “Just for a walk, yes.” She stared at Cara’s crumpled form, wondering. Not if what she said was true: Jerya knew her own motivations and trusted them. Cara was only right in that Seandri was her favorite. Except for Tiana, she’d never loved anybody more—and Tiana was different, her little sister, a baby bird abandoned by her mother.

  But she wondered if other people saw the situation as Cara did. If so, what could she could do to change that impression? There would be a way to win, if only she could see it.

  All right, Cara was right about something else, too. “It is a game. But that doesn’t make it frivolous.”

  “Very good, ma’am. Somebody will accompany you, as usual,” said Raffey. “Enjoy your walk.”

  She went out into the night city. A guard followed discreetly behind her, far enough back that she had the illusion of being alone. She walked first to the plaza where she spent her days, the path already a habit, thinking about Cara’s words and Seandri’s choices and Yithiere’s instability.

  It was darker at night, but not as different as she expected. A woman leaned her head on the Tabernacle, still and silent, a long swathe of fabric in one hand. Jerya hesitated, then turned away. The biggest difference, she thought, between the Tabernacle at day and at night was that she wasn’t there. Those who went there at night did not want to share their pain.