35
“This came for you,” the Dacran queen said in her language, handing Arin a parcel. “A Herrani ship brought it to the temple island.”
He tucked the package under his arm. It couldn’t be simply a package. It was news. Arin hid his eagerness.
And he hid his surprise. At the queen, delivering something to him. At her standing in his room, which was only one room, not a suite. The bed—much higher than Arin was used to, and narrower—was in a corner, neatly made. The light was soft and gray. It haloed a geometric star of small, triangular windows clustered into a radiant pattern. The queen’s black eyes, lined with streaks of blue paint that swirled greenly down to her brown cheekbones, seemed to glow. She was tall; her gaze was almost level with his.
“Open it,” she said.
Arin rubbed a palm against his scarred cheek.
“Do you understand me?” she said. “You seem to. You’ve learned my language quickly.”
“So could Herrani soldiers. We could fight together.”
“And yet you cannot obey even a simple command.”
Arin opened the package. It was a shirt edged with intricately woven trim in colors he knew well. He shouldn’t have stared and begun to decode the knots and colors beneath the queen’s gaze, but he did. The Moth—
“That cloth is too heavy for our weather,” said the queen.
“I’ll send it back.” Arin would cut away the woven trim and sew on a message of his own for Tensen.
He draped the shirt casually across the back of a chair, reading in the threads that the imperial water engineer was living beyond her apparent means, and was unfriendly to Herran. The Moth believed that the engineer had made a bargain with the emperor. There was no proof, but—
It began to rain. Arin heard water rushing through the castle pipes. The queen had been silent, watching him. He forced himself to turn away from the shirt.
Maybe it was because his mind was full of the Moth, and the way the gray thread that represented her wove throughout the entire trim. Arin looked at the queen and saw Risha instead. The queen had those straight brows, the same shape of the mouth, and the same—he began to suspect it, the idea grew—generosity.
“I am sending my brother outside the city,” she said. “You will go with him.” She paused, then added, “You are good for him. He is restless.”
“Was he with your sister when she was captured by the empire?”
The queen’s face closed.
Arin said, “I think he blames himself.”
“He blames me.”
“I don’t understand.”
The queen went to the kaleidoscopic windows and watched the rainfall. She pretended his words had meant something else. “It can’t be easy to learn another language so quickly. Do you have a gift for it?”
He wasn’t sure. Even now, he didn’t recognize every word she used. His mind darted meaning into the blank moments and made sense of what he didn’t know, crafted whole sentences from understood parts. It felt like a game …
As this last thought occurred to him, he saw its danger. He felt the kick in his gut that told his mind to stop, and he snatched at that half thought about words and meaning and games. He tried to drag the thought back. It spun away. It began to think for itself, about Bite and Sting, and about how he could beat someone without knowing each tile in play. Yes, he had won, even when playing against Kestrel made it feel like all the tiles were blind on both sides.
He slammed that thought down. Because the truth was that guessing at what he hadn’t known about Kestrel had served him badly. He had believed in things that weren’t there … or weren’t there anymore.
“No,” he bluntly told the queen. “No gift.”
“Perhaps Dacra and Herran shared some common ancestor, thousands of years ago,” she mused, “and that is why our languages are close. But no. We are too different.”
“We don’t have to be.”
She turned to face him. “Stop asking for an alliance.”
“I won’t.”
“Fool.”
“I prefer to think of myself as an optimist.”
She clicked her teeth: a Dacran way to say no. It was an impatient noise. Arin had heard it used with children. “Herran has nothing to offer us but lives,” the queen told him. “I would pack your people into the front lines. When we win, I would take your country and make it mine. The word we want for you is not optimist. Nor, I think”—she appraised him—“fool. It is desperate.”
The rain must have stopped. The pipes hushed.
She said, “I would be, too. I would ask what you ask. But I would offer more. Then I would negotiate better terms of an alliance.”
He thought of that emerald earring he’d paid into the bookkeeper’s hand. He thought not about what it was, but what it had meant. He held the value in his mind, its pricelessness, and he cast about for an idea of what could match it. “Tell me what I can give you.”
She lifted one shoulder in a delicate shrug. “Something more.”
“Tell me what that is.”
“I will know,” she said, “when you give it to me.”