What she sees in my face I can’t know but she frowns and grasps my hands.
“This is foolishness, Jessamy. I know you are infatuated with the prince. The attention of a handsome young man who walks astride the world because all must bow before him is a heady drink. But it is poison.”
“I’m going.”
“Of course you are. It is just like you. I am glad you came to tell me rather than sneaking off. Take a knife.”
My sisters hug me, and I grouchily say, “It’s not as if I’m not coming back.”
“Don’t come back here. No place in the Saroese parts of the city are safe for us now.” She rests gentle fingers on my cheek and gazes into my eyes, seeing what mothers see who love their children enough to let them make their own lives and their own mistakes. “You will find us in the courtyard where the Mother of All offers Her bounty to Her people. I will wait for you there, beloved daughter.”
With a kiss, she releases me.
In a delivery wagon filled with barrels I am taken to Garon Palace. At Helias’s order, the Efean driver waits beside the wagon as the captain and I enter the compound.
The ruins of the palace make jagged shadows as we pick our way past its toppled gates. Charred debris crunches beneath our feet. The festival pavilion lies like a shattered skeleton, pillars toppled.
“This way, Doma.” The captain escorts me to the foot of the stairs leading up to the only private pavilion spared destruction. The others have been eaten away by flames, stairs smashed, roofs caved in, support pillars gouged with ax marks. When I climb the steps and go inside, I am surprised that although all the gold-inlaid furniture and gold-threaded carpets in the audience room are gone, the paintings of hunting and war remain untouched, as if no one had the heart to deface an artist’s exquisite work.
A single lamp burns on the balcony. Its glow illuminates his face. All the sweet, easy confidence has vanished. In its place he looks grief-stricken, his eyes dark with lack of sleep, his forehead wrinkled with manifold concerns, his lips tight with the look of a man bracing himself for bad news.
The king of Efea speaks no word as I cross the empty room. I don’t mean to go straight to him, to take the lamp out of his hand and set it on the floor, to pull him into my arms. But that is exactly what I do. Everything in my mind crashes into oblivion as my heart and my body embrace what they desire.
He holds me so tightly I can barely breathe. “Jes. I thought you wouldn’t come.”
I don’t answer because I can’t speak. Once words start they will not stop, and I do not want to hear what I am going to have to say.
Not yet.
He sweeps me up into his arms and carries me through the open doors into the bedchamber. The bed stands in the center, the only object left in the room. He pushes aside the draped netting. His manner is as solemn and desperate as my own, none of the laughter and wrestling and endearing awkwardness of our other times. Because the lamp has been left on the balcony, we are left in the shadow of each other, communicating by sighs, by the touch of lips and the pressure of hands.
The heart has its own speech. That is the only language and light that we need.
Yet eventually this physical conversation comes to an end. We lie in a restless silence that grows ever more tangled and uncomfortable as our sweat cools and our kisses cease. These are the hours when shadows slip free from the bodies that house them and prowl in search of satisfaction. I cannot see my own shadow. It’s too dark over here where I am.
“Why is this bed still here when everything else of value was stripped from the pavilion?” Although I whisper, the sound of my voice makes me wince as if I were shouting, alerting the entire city that I’m here, where I’m not meant to be.
He shrugs, the movement shifting my head as it rests against his shoulder. “I wondered the same thing. I can only suppose it was a signal from the people of Saryenia that they respect my person enough to leave this one thing alone.”
“Yours is the only pavilion that wasn’t burned by the mob.”
“Besides my uncle Thynos, I am the only person in Garon Palace who hasn’t been reviled in public at one time or another. Or at least not yet,” he adds with a curt laugh. “I am sure there will be plenty of opportunity now.”
“Do you fear the people of Saryenia will not accept your sister as queen because of all the rumors about her?” Bitterness sours my tone. She is on her way here now to become queen and to claim my father as her husband.
“Gossip is the least of our worries.” Kal’s fingers squeeze my arm. “The allied army of East Saro and Saro-Urok is about to lay siege to Saryenia. We could all still die. So Meno? must stay far away. She and the rest of the family will continue on to Maldine.”
“What is in Maldine?”
“Extensive lands and a safe harbor. If Uncle Thynos has made a marriage alliance with West Saro, as we hope, then he will bring a fleet with soldiers there.”
“But you are staying here in Saryenia.”
“Yes. It is my duty and responsibility to lead the defense of the city. The king must protect his people, must he not?”
How can I possibly answer when I can hear the constriction in his voice?
His heartbeat has slowed to a lazy, exhausted pulse, but he keeps tracing circles on my skin like the spinning Rings of his agitated thoughts.
So softly I can barely hear him, he says, “This is what you wanted for me.”
I sit up, pushing away. “It’s not what I wanted for you!”
“No, you’re right. It is the choice we both made. We cannot leave Efea to the cruel mercies of Nikonos and Serenissima and their greedy allies.”
“What if there is another way?” I ask.
“What other way? Let Nikonos rule? He hasn’t the patience to act with wisdom and prudence. If he is king the foreigners will conquer us as soon as they can safely rid themselves of him. They’ll place their own prince and a new dynasty upon the throne, probably with Serenissima’s connivance. Only Meno? and I can save Efea.”
The memory of Eternity Temple, and the dim passageway down which a screaming Serenissima was dragged, just like so many generations of Patron girls, rises as a sickening roar in my head. I can’t bear to think of how Kal watched her be carried away, sobbing, into a sunless tomb and did nothing to stop it, thinking it an act of justice.
“You can’t save the tree if the roots are already diseased.”
“What does that mean?” he asks, sounding defensive.
“No person can rule justly if the laws and customs of a land are already corrupt. For one thing, you have to immediately end the custom of giving girls to the temple. Of burying women alive as oracles. You know it’s wrong.”
“Of course it is shameful to entomb living people. But it’s the tradition we’ve always had. People believe Efea thrives in part because secluded holy women pray for our well-being. The priests won’t alter the custom just because I ask them to.”