“His character is not the issue,” Garyus tells her. “Jalan lacks the stability needed for training, and yes he’s strong, but to fill the role my sister saw for Nia’s child would require an extraordinary talent, something that might be pitted against the likes of Corion, or Sageous, Kelem or Skilfar. The Blue Lady is simply misled. Perhaps she has lost too many reflections and her mind has broken.”
Mother comes and sets her hand to my hair, a brief touch as she takes the cone and returns it to the box on the shelf.
“Perhaps you’re right.” A low rumble from the Red Queen that sounds more like a threat than an admission. “Take the boy, Nia. Keep close guard on him though.”
And as easily as that we’re dismissed.
“What’s an assassin?” Jally asks before reaching the stairs.
? ? ?
For a moment I glimpsed branches, lattice-worked across a bright sky, sliding past. A sense of bodies moving around me, a face leaning in, indistinct.
? ? ?
“Bite your tongue.”
I look up from the crimson carpet. “Sorry, Mama.”
“Queen Alica is your sovereign and you must never speak ill of her, Jally.” Mother kneels to be on a level with me.
“She’s mean,” I say. Or rather, I said it fifteen years ago and now I remember the moment, the feeling of the word, my mother still above me though kneeling, disapproval painted on her face, trying not to smile.
“Sometimes a queen has to be . . . hard, Jally. Ruling a land is difficult. The gods know I have a trouble enough getting three young boys through each day.” The gods. Sometimes Mother forgets herself. Father says there is only one God, but then that’s his job. Grandmother must have staked a lot by the bloodlines to match her cardinal to a heathen, converted from her many gods, glorious in their variety of form and virtue, to our singular invisible deity. How much did that dispensation from Roma cost the treasury I wonder? Father may have a cathedral and a fat book full of God’s own wisdom, but Jally likes Mother’s stories better, told in a soft voice by his bedside. She places a kiss on my forehead and stands again.
We’re back in the Roma Hall, in one of the galleries on the first floor. The north gallery, by the slant of the sun through its tall windows. These have glass, dozens of small panes of Attar glass leaded together, each with a faint green hue. When I was very young I called it the Green Sky Room.
“What’s wrong with your hand, Mama?” She’s standing with her right hand in her own shadow and it looks wrong . . . a touch too bright. She looks down and quickly folds her arms, a guilty motion. Jally stares up at her and I watch. She’s the same woman that I see in my locket. Not much more than thirty and seeming younger, long dark hair, dark eyes, beautiful. The picture I have is by a very skilled artist but somehow it doesn’t capture her. It’s only when these memories flow through me that I remember how far she travelled to be my mother, how alone she must have felt in a strange land. Grandmother may have picked Mother for her blood but whatever heritage she carried in her veins it made little impact on my appearance or that of my brothers. She may have darkened the gold of our hair but to look at us there’s nothing of the Indus to see. The blond comes from Gabron, Grandmother’s third husband, or from her father or grandfather, Gholloths one and two, passed down to our father—though he hides it beneath a cardinal’s hat often as not, along with his bald spot—and on down to us. “Your hand looks . . . different.”
“Nothing’s wrong with it, Jally. Let’s get you back to Nanna Odette.”
Where her fingers can be glimpsed behind the other arm I can see the glow, more pronounced now.
“Stealing is bad,” Jally says. I suppose it’s true—though I wouldn’t let it stop me—but I can’t see the relevance.
“It’s borrowing.” Mother brings her hand out and opens it. The orichalcum is glowing in her palm, brighter than it was in Garyus’s room, the light more steady. “But you’re right, Jally, it was wrong not to ask.” She leans forward. “Can you give it back to him and not say where you got it? He won’t be cross with you.” She looks worried and that makes Jally afraid. He nods slowly, reaching out to take it.
“I won’t say, Mama.” He says it in a solemn tone, confusion filling him. He’s sad but he doesn’t know why. I could tell him that he’s seen for the first time his mother do wrong, his mother be afraid and without certainty. It’s a hurt every child must suffer as they grow.