“Go,” she indicated the door. “Out. Don’t worry, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before.” And indeed it wasn’t. This was not the first the time she had found Shenn in the company of someone else, and she doubted it would be the last.
“Go on,” Shenn said. He too looked embarrassed, but not as much as the boy.
Merit waited until the door shut behind the young man, her eyes exchanging a knowing look with Shenn.
“I thought I’d find you here,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to see that,” he said as he donned his ceremonial tunic of dyed black linen.
“No doubt, but still … I wish you were a bit more discreet,” said Merit as she watched him dress. “You have duties to attend to—you are my husband, Shenn. I expect you to stand by my side, and I don’t enjoy looking like a fool.”
Shenn was a friend, a co-conspirator, everything except for a husband, really. They made a handsome couple in public, Merit with her mother’s blue-green eyes, her father’s dusky skin, Shenn tall and strong-jawed and deeply bronzed. That the great beauty of Harkana was married to a man who was immune to her good looks proved that Tolemy, the bastard who had arranged her marriage, was not without a sense of humor.
“You were absent in the King’s Hall.”
“I know I should have been there, Merit, but you know how I dislike ceremony.”
“You are worse than my father, but at least you are not hunting in the north. Perhaps in the future you can see fit to wait until the evening to seek out the company of others. It’s what the rest of us do.”
“Right,” he said. Shenn fixed his hair in a circle of polished silver, moving his strong jaw from side to side. He could have made a decent husband, if only it were in his nature to love me.
“The Devouring has come and gone,” she said, continuing her rebuke.
“I was detained, by a messenger.”
“That one?” Her eyes flicked toward the door, in the direction of the man who had just left.
He shrugged. “Your waiting women told me about the sun and what Kepi said in the King’s Hall. I know Dagrun left the Hornring.” Shenn made his way across the room. He gave her a brief but comforting embrace. It felt good to feel the warmth of another pressed against her body. She’d loved him when they were first married. Even when she discovered he could not return her love, as her dearest friend and ally, she loved him still. But an endless parade of lovers had made her the butt of every joke from Harwen to the Cressel. Beyond, even.
Merit longed for something of her own. Someone of her own. “Dagrun’s not gone,” she said, “not yet. I can still make this right. But for now we have duties to attend to. The Devouring is not yet finished.” Each year, when the games were over, Harkana observed a feast as part of the five lost days. The sun had not dimmed, but the ceremonies continued nonetheless—there was nothing else to do. The tables were set, the bread was warm and the amber cool. Merit saw no sense in canceling the whole affair.
“Shall we?” she asked, ready to take her husband’s arm. She motioned to go, but something caught her eye. The young man had left a white linen scarf on the chair, the kind worn by the acolytes of the Desouk tribe.
“That man, who was he?” she asked. Merit recalled his dark skin and shoulder-length black hair. “He wasn’t Harkan.”
“No,” said Shenn. “I’d almost forgotten to tell you. He was a messenger. The Mother Priestess sent a scroll.”
Merit gave no reply.
“The Mother Priestess, she’s asking about our repository.”
Shenn passed the scroll to Merit, who nodded as she read through the correspondence, keeping her face calm, even if the very mention of the Mother Priestess made her twitch. Shenn was watching her carefully. He never quite understood why Merit did not take better advantage of such a powerful affiliation, why his wife shunned any contact with the priests of Desouk. He had badgered her to reconsider her stance on the issue, but Merit was firm: she would have nothing to do with Sarra Amunet.
She tossed aside the scroll, “Anything else?”
Shenn shook his head.
Merit walked to the door, her thoughts returning to Dagrun. I’ll try once more, she thought. I can’t go one like this, not with a husband who mocks me, and a kingdom with an absent king.
“Merit.” Shenn’s voice held an edge. “What should I do about the Mother Priestess’s request?”
“Give her what she wants. If the priests are after a few old scrolls, let them have them. Send your boys, have the scrolls ridden to Desouk.”
Shenn shot Merit a questioning look. He was not accustomed to hearing her acquiesce to the Mother Priestess’s demands, but Merit was feeling generous that day, her usual stubbornness weakened by her sister’s disappointing cleverness, her father’s absence, her husband’s dalliance.
“You heard me,” she said, her tone wry. “Give her what she wants. For once, I’d hate to disappoint my mother.”
13
“Order three cakes for my supper,” Kepi Hark-Wadi, the king’s younger daughter, told her waiting woman. The two were standing at the door to Kepi’s chamber in the Hornring. “One black bread, one barley, and a star of fast bread.”
As her lady scurried toward the kitchen, Kepi took a heavy black cloak—a woolen mantle reserved for funerals—and threw it over her shoulders, meaning to ride as fast and as far from Dagrun and Merit as her horse’s hooves could take her. She had not attended the banquet that followed the Devouring but instead had stayed alone in her chamber, listening to the guards chatter about the failed eclipse. Kepi hadn’t given the sun much thought; like any Harkan, she had little patience for Soleri superstitions. But now she was hungry, not only for food but also company. So she fetched her mount from the stables and made for the nearby city of Blackrock, riding along a path she had taken many times, a trail that allowed her to avoid the guards who stood on the Hornring’s wall, and the sentries at Harwen’s gate.
I need to be free of this place. For a moment she thought she might not return at all. If the empire would not grant her the freedom she desired, Kepi would take it for herself. She would flee and never return. As if that were even a possibility, she thought.