The Other Lands (48 page)

Corinn eyed him a moment, deciding how severe to be with him. At a glance he was just as elaborately garbed as ever, his shirt brilliantly white, his black breeches tight enough that they seemed to have shrunk to fit his form. The hoops of his gold earrings sparkled, and he wore bracelets on one wrist that clanged together as he moved. But for all the gaudy finery, his face did not betray his usual arrogance. Perhaps his time out of favor had mellowed him.

“You knew Hanish Mein?” Corinn asked.

“To look at, yes. Only to look at. He didn’t know me, but he was hard to miss when he had the reins of power. I liked his style.” As an afterthought, he added, “Then, I guess you did, too.”

Or perhaps it had not mellowed him, Corinn thought. She was unsure as yet. She ordered him to explain his claim and document the identity of the man sitting in the room below them. Delivegu did so readily enough. He explained that he had gained intelligence that led him to a certain commoner’s message service. There he had intercepted a message meant for the rascal. He hurriedly transported himself to the message’s destination. It was a gamble, a considerable personal expense, but it paid off. He did spot the man. He spied on him long enough to satisfy himself of his identity, and then he decided on a way to capture him.

“How did you do that?”

Delivegu shrugged and looked the closest he could to sheepish. “I’m not proud when it comes to such matters. I came up behind him when he was fumbling with the keys to unlock his rented room. I hit his head with a club.”

“Without warning?”

“Of course. How better to do it? And lucky I did, for he didn’t go down from that one blow. He turned and reached for me. I needed to hit him twice more before he dropped to his knees. Then he was easier to deal with. A bit, at least.”

“How did you know it was Barad?”

“Before I approached him, I questioned an acquaintance of his. A young man with, I daresay, insufficient resilience to resist me.”

“This initial information you gained—that which took you to the message service—how was that come by?”

Delivegu cleared his throat. “I have something to report that you may find disturbing.” He paused, brow furrowed in an expression of consternation that looked odd. “I wished you to know the other details first, but this part cannot be avoided. You’re right to ask. Hear me through, please, before you respond.”

Corinn kept her eyes fixed on him as he proceeded. She kept them pinned to his features, focused first on his face as a whole and then on its smaller components: the crook of his nose, the motion of lips, the black hairs of his beard. The focus was necessary, for otherwise she feared she would betray the fact that her heart pounded at twice the rate it had a moment before. She would not even look at Rhrenna, who was hearing the news with her. She knew her face had flushed red, but her expression remained unchanged. Alleys and spying. Following a servant … What he was telling her was—

“As you can imagine, I had to be quite rough with Barad. He’s a big man, you see, so I had to be careful. Anyway, he was a little bit out of it, and he asked me, ‘Did he betray me to her?’ I had explained to him that I was in your employ. When he asked, I almost asked him, ‘Who?’ The word was on my tongue, but I snipped it.” Delivegu demonstrated just how precisely he did so by making scissors of his fingers. “Instead, I said, ‘Of course, he betrayed you. He’s royalty after all. Why would he side with commoners?’ I said this to provoke confusion or disagreement or something. But he responded with none of those. He simply accepted it sadly.

“So …” Delivegu inhaled a long breath, then said plainly, “There can really be no doubt, Your Majesty. Barad, your enemy among the people, was in a partnership with King Grae. As I traveled with Barad I returned to this subject several times. He didn’t give much, so I told him how it was. How King Grae had come to you speaking of a plot they had concocted together. How you and he worked to find a way to capture him. I even said that you and the Aushenian were secretly engaged. It’s a skill I have, finding the truth even when the one I’m interrogating doesn’t say a thing. There’s no question, though. He was in league with Grae, and now he believes Grae betrayed him. I deliver him to you in the hope that you will mete out justice as is right.”

Inside Corinn’s head a hundred different thoughts assailed her. On her face she made sure that nothing could be read. Despite the internal turmoil, she heard herself say calmly, “We’ll see about all this soon enough. I will speak with him now.”

Delivegu straightened like an obedient servant, eager to please and seemingly happy at her reaction—or lack of reaction. Corinn paused at the door and let Delivegu advance ahead of her. Leaning close to Rhrenna, she whispered, “While I am with him, bring Grae to the upper terrace. Let him see to whom I’m speaking. Watch his face. Tell me if he shows signs of recognizing him.”

Time must have passed, but she lost track of it. Why it was so hard to concentrate she could not say. Her mind felt sluggish but also touched with a panic that might spread if she were not careful. It was not just thinking of Grae, not just the disbelief that she might have read him so wrongly, not just the gasping knowledge that he had held steel and fenced with Aaden, not even realizing how very close she had come to folly.

In addition to all this, emotions she had not allowed within herself for years rushed in. Memories of her father, of Igguldan, of Hanish: the men who had betrayed her, each in his own way. Was Grae another of these? Was she still the fool she had been at sixteen? More, images of her mother during her illness, the memory of crying and crying and crying on her bedspread as the woman—she who was dying—tried to comfort her. More, there came a bone-deep longing, which she almost never acknowledged, to sit and speak with Aliver, right now, as adults, both of them living.

And then she was striding through the doorway behind Delivegu. She walked into the room and circled around to the front of the chair. The guards followed her with their eyes, and she watched as the prisoner’s square profile came into view and then changed as it filled out. She pulled in her attention, blocked out the noise, and concentrated all her being on the exchange she was about to have. It felt necessary to focus her eyes on a single point, while the rest of the world blurred. The man’s eyes were brown, spaced wide. Rolling toward her, they looked heavy, as if just moving them would be a monumental task, as if they were stone. She could almost hear the grinding rumble as they shifted.

She said, “Lower your eyes.” The man stared at her a moment longer and then obeyed. “How could you think the monarch of one kingdom would betray the monarch of another … for peasants? Don’t you see how foolish that is? How impossible? And they told me you were bright. Devious. Cunning. Instead, you’re none of these things.”

Had she really gotten all that out without a hitch or quaver of emotion? She had. The man’s steady attention confirmed it. He stared at her feet but said nothing.

“You may speak freely to me,” Corinn said, trusting her voice a little more now. “I am not easy to offend. Nor do you frighten me. If your language is coarse, so be it. I have some rough about me as well.”

One corner of the man’s mouth crooked upward. It looked like a tic, a jerk of his cheek muscles, but the expression held. A lopsided smile.

“Well, speak. That’s what you like to do, isn’t it? Make up speeches. Exhort. Rant to the masses! Try it on an audience of one.”

The man bowed his head, moving that smile out of her view. She watched him gather himself with a series of inhaled breaths. She could have him beaten, she thought. Mutilated. Killed. She could—right now, right here—order his tongue cut out. No more speeches then. And, she realized, part of what was jumbling her mind was the song. It was high in her, roiling about the curve of her skull like liquid flame mixed with sound, hungry to get out. She did not even need to order another to act for her. She could open her mouth and sing him into oblivion.

“You have betrayed your brother’s dreams.”

She saw the words on his lips, and then she heard them, and then put the two together and understood them.

“Have I? And did my brother detail his dreams to you?”

Barad took a few breaths before answering, but his voice was sure when he did, no hint of deceit or hesitation in it. “Yes. Many nights he spoke to me in dreams.” He looked up. “I make up no speeches, Corinn Akaran. I simply recite what I remember, what Aliver wished me to say to the world. You would do well to listen yourself. It is not too late to save yourself from ruin.”

Corinn was quicker even than the Marah in responding to this insult. She said nothing. She only opened her mouth slightly and let out the ribbon of song already waiting. It slipped through the air on a whisper, and the thing she had but thought was done. The eyes that had dared to look up at her were eyes no longer. They were stone replicas, frozen in place. Delivegu gasped. One of the guards whispered a curse of amazement. Barad himself did not move at all. His stone eyes stared at her, his expression otherwise unchanged.

She spun away.

I
n her offices an hour later she recalled the dream she had just that morning. In it, she had arranged to meet Grae in her chambers. She had not explained why, but when he arrived, the room was lit with low lamps, heavy with incense. A single musician in a hidden closet piped a faint tune on a bone whistle. And she stood in a thin shift, a diaphanous garment.

His eyes had widened into two blue saucers when he saw her.

She was naked beneath the dress. She could see by the nervous difficulty Grae had controlling his eyes that he had noticed this. The light from the candle beside her, she knew, would be languid around her curves, and the thought of the power she had just standing there pressed her nipples erect against the thin fabric. He noticed that as well.

“I am no virgin,” she had said. “I am no blushing maiden. I have no desire to be in love again. Such things are of my past. I come to you as I am. A queen. A mother. A woman. Those three things may be too much for you to handle, but if you think yourself monarch enough for it, I will have you as a husband. This is me. Consider.”

With that, Corinn had slipped loose the knot at her waist and shrugged the silken shift from her shoulders. Corinn let Grae take her in from head to toe. It pleased her to have his eyes adoring her—that prodded her to cut his examination short.

“I’ll have your answer now, by the way.”

His answer, in the dream, had been to rise and walk toward her, swaying oddly as he did, raising first one arm and then the other. It was a strange ballet that she understood as a custom of his people, a dance of the cranes or some such. She had thought it lovely, and began to return it.

But that was just a dream. In real life, she had not worn that shift. She had not made that offer. Sitting in her office after her encounter with Barad, she checked these facts several times to be sure of them. No, she had shown the Aushenian nothing but gracious hospitality. She had been more generous with her time than normal, perhaps had smiled too readily and spoke to him with unguarded familiarity. But nothing more than that. She was so grateful for this fact that she pressed the tips of her fingernails to her forehead and squeezed, thanking the Giver for her having had at least that much reserve.

When Rhrenna entered, her face as pale and distorted as beeswax grown soft in the sun, Corinn already knew what she would report. The secretary confirmed as much tersely. Grae had nearly swallowed his tongue when he saw Barad. Though Rhrenna spoke to him innocently about what was happening—betraying no suspicion of him—Grae had stammered and even trembled a bit. Sweat had appeared in instant droplets along his forehead, and his attempts at looking casual were clearly forced.

“I cannot believe it was all an act,” Rhrenna said, “but there it is. He scorned you—”

“This is not about being scorned,” Corinn cut in. The words came before she knew she was to say them, but they were true. Scorn was for lesser people than she. “It’s about ruling an empire,” she said, and then gave new orders.

S
he can’t climb these mountains,” Naamen said. “There’s no way.”

“I can carry her,” Kelis answered.

The younger man plucked the knuckle root he had been sucking on from the corner of his lips, indignant. “So can I! And I will! But still, when we drop from exhaustion she’ll be no better off.”

Kelis answered this with only a sharp grunt and walked on with his chin high. Inside he feared the same thing. They had trudged toward the peaks for several days, their scale growing as they approached, deceptive, massive in a way that surprised him each time he looked upon them. They seemed to swell when his eyes touched them, as if they inhaled breaths and puffed out their chests to seem larger. Nor did the play of the light as the sun progressed seem to follow the natural order. At times, the upper regions of the mountains were snow dusted. At others, they appeared to have thick vegetation right up to the peaks. On occasion, he stopped, convinced he faced geometries of sheer black rock, unclimbable.