The Other Lands (54 page)

Dariel spoke easily enough. The topic now—his naval battles with the league during the war with Hanish Mein—seemed to fire his oratory. He wants us to think him a hero, Mór thought, and because of it she wanted to doubt his version of events. Still, it was easy to listen to him, easy to forget her skepticism as he told of ships smashing together, of nighttime raids, hidden raider camps, and the great work of sabotage that destroyed much of the league’s platforms. Mór remembered that place well, and it was stunning to imagine the scene he described. Flames roaring up into the sky …

“Why did you hate them so?” Skylene asked, the scratch of a scribe’s stylus right behind her words. “Your family did—and does—partner with them. You came here with them—”

“It was personal back then. There I was, a prince of an overthrown empire, hiding among brigands, fighting the league because they made life hard for the criminals who were my new family. … Yet I came here, allied with them, more aware than ever of their crimes, but was then betrayed by them to the people who enslave you. And now I’m in your hands. All very amusing.” He laughed. “How can I live day after day, trying to make decisions, and yet feel that I’ve not had one moment of control of any of it?”

“At least you laugh,” Tunnel said.

“At some point, what else can I do?”

“You control more than you acknowledge,” Skylene’s voice said. “I would have loved to have seen the platforms destroyed.”

“That didn’t come without a price.”

“What was the price?”

Dariel took a moment to respond. “I lost a person dear to me, the man who was my second father.”

A second father. Mór recalled Yoen’s eyes embedded in the vessel’s face, but then pushed the image away. It was not the same. Whatever the Akaran had experienced, his loss was nothing compared to what each of the People suffered.

Dariel continued, “And I came to understand later that my actions killed many quota children. I wish that weren’t so. It was children like you who died there.”

Mór felt like clearing her throat and spitting, or bursting into the room and slapping him again. What right did he have to make those deaths a weight on
his
conscience? It was an indulgence he didn’t deserve. She was pleased by what Skylene said in reply.

“You Akarans dwell on past failures too much. I’m beginning to think that’s what made your line so tyrannical: guilt, and hiding it.”

“Yes,” Dariel said, no indication in his voice that he took offense. Mór imagined him grinning as he propped a leg up on a stool. “But enough of me talking. You give me something now. You said you would.”

This was met with a moment of silence, then Skylene cleared her throat. Mór imagined the tight face she was making, the way she would dip her head and sweep her left hand from her forehead up lightly across her plumage. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Everything.”

“That’s a bit too much to tell at one sitting.”

“Tell me about the Auldek, then.”

And she did. Mór pressed her ear even closer to the gap, for Skylene began speaking softly. Good, she thought. Yes, do give the Akaran truth. Let it be a punishment to that weak side of him that embraces guilt.

Skylene spoke with her usual conciseness, laying out the details in a dispassionate manner that Mór herself could not have pulled off. It was hard to know truth from myth, but some among the divine children had been entrusted with keeping the Auldek’s oral history. They passed on what they had learned to the People. The clans of Ushen Brae had once been much more numerous. Theirs had been a warrior culture, rooted for millennia in intertribal strife, a culture in which men lived to die in battle, risking everything to earn a place in the warrior halls of the afterworld. They worshipped a god of war, Bahine, and a pantheon of lesser animal deities, warriors all.

“If they had stayed such,” Skylene said, “there would never have been a quota trade.”

But things did not stay that way. Though the tribes were rich in fertile land and resources, the constant warring made for feast or famine, triumph or destruction. They might have been strong with swords and axes; when the Lothan Aklun arrived, they thought them hounds fighting over scraps.

“Arrived?” Dariel interrupted. “From where?”

Skylene admitted that she did not know. But they came and, soon after, the league did as well. “It was so long ago that the truth is hard to know for certain, but some believe that the Lothan Aklun and the league were in partnership right from the start, as if the Lothan Aklun discovered Ushen Brae, saw the potential for trade, and called on the league to sail the seas for them.

“The thing is, Dariel,” Skylene said, “the Lothan Aklun did not want to trade in ore or spices or oils. Even the mist was important only because the Known World wanted it so. For some reason, they wanted to base their trade of slaves on quota, on souls. They created the soul catcher. It’s not a thing. Not a device or tool, exactly. It’s the place where the life force is taken from one and given to another. We don’t know how it works, or why. There are words written on the floor, they say. Perhaps the spells are written there, or perhaps in some way it focuses the Lothan Aklun’s power. With it, they can take the life force from one body and place it into another, on reserve for when it’s needed. This is the reason why Devoth didn’t die when that arrow burst his heart. He has many lives within his skin. Killing one is anguish, but goes away.”

Dariel said, “This is making my head spin. For weeks you tell me nothing. Now, suddenly—”

“Yes, well, your respite is over. Don’t faint on me just yet, though. The result of all this is the Ushen Brae of today. The Lothan Aklun traded mist for quota children, and they took them and sold them to the Auldek, who paid great sums for them. The Auldek, in turn, used the slaves to run their world, to build their grand cities and produce a greater flow of wealth than they and the Lothan Aklun could ever have produced themselves. See how it all works?”

“Not really. I mean, I do, but what kind of men would think up such a system?”

And you thought your people were devious, Mór thought. You’re children by comparison.

“Everybody in it is exploited,” Dariel continued, “except the Lothan Aklun themselves.”

“Ah, yes,” Skylene cut in. “And now, with them dead, we have a host of new problems to face. Perhaps you should have a drink of water. I have a few more things to say that may make you dizzy.”

M
ake her fly higher!” Aaden called.

“As high as she can go!” his friend Devlyn added.

“I don’t make her,” Mena said. “I just ask. She chooses on her own.”

“I know, but she should go higher. If I were her, Id go up and up and up. I wonder how high she could go?”

As high as she wants, Aaden. As high as she wants.” Mena smiled, watching her nephew’s upturned, enraptured face. His mouth hung open with the unanswered question. For a moment, Mena was tempted to snatch up one of the grapes left over from their lunch and drop it on his tongue. Instead, she formed the image of rising in her mind and wished it toward the creature.

The aunt, nephew, and his friend sat on a quilted blanket that had been laid out on the short grass of the Carmelia, the massive stadium named in honor of the seventh Akaran king’s wife. Around them, the flat field stretched out in all directions, running right up to the walls that hemmed the exhibition grounds. Beyond that, terraced levels of bleachers rose up, enough contoured benches to hold thousands of spectators. They were empty at the moment, though, save a few cleaners working their slow way down the aisle. These Mena barely noticed. The four Numrek guards who stood on watch were more conspicuous, spaced throughout the bleachers in an approximate square around Aaden, their special charge.

Above them, Elya soared through the air. She, of course, was what so captured the boy’s attention. Seemingly in answer to Aaden’s request and Mena’s thought, she steadied her wings and tilted into a slow, circular flight, lifted higher on thermals of warm air.

“You’ll get a stitch in your neck if you keep looking up like that,” Mena said, winking at one of the three servants that stood attending them. The young woman smiled back.

Aaden showed no sign of having heard her.

Eventually, Elya was but a speck in the sky.

“She’s going to disappear,” Devlyn said. He was a handsome boy, slightly taller than Aaden, dark haired but with features that did not clearly mark his ethnicity.

“She won’t, will she?” Aaden asked, his enthusiasm exchanged for concern. And then, as if something had just occurred to him, “Tell her to come down now.”

“But you just told me to send her up! She’s barely gotten started.”

Mena joked with them for a time, playing with their growing anxiety. When both boys began to look truly troubled, she set an arm on Aaden’s shoulder and did as he requested. She was no surer now how the communication between her and the creature worked than she had been at first. There were no rules to it, no way to explain or quantify it. She simply thought to Elya, and Elya responded. It was not words Mena used but visual images. As now: she saw the world from high above and imagined plum meting down, the contours beneath her taking shape, the outline of Acacia amid the shimmering cobalt sea, the terraced palace and the lower town and the spit of land upon which the Carmelia lay, three people waiting on a square of woven fabric. She imagined all this and knew that Elya would both think it and understand what Mena meant by it.

That was just how it seemed to work, with images and also with emotions. Elya could pick up Mena’s frame of mind readily. Sometimes Mena realized what she was feeling only because of something Elya did in response to it. When Mena grew pensive, thinking about Corinn or concerned about Dariel on his mission far away, Elya might make faces at her, invite her to fly, or simply draw near and let joy radiate between, like heat from her body.

At other times Elya knew when to withdraw. When Mena and Melio were intimate, for example, Elya acted as silly as any maid making a show of embarrassment for having caught them entwined in the bedsheets. She backed away with her head low, stepping lightly on the balls of her feet. Had her skin not been hidden beneath her soft plumage, Mena reckoned she would have seen her blush. Yes, between them there was no other word for it than what she had shouted to Melio back in Talay:
love
. Elya had brought a new level of love into the palace. Much needed.

As the avian and reptilian and wholly unique winged being plummeted down the last few hundred feet in a headlong dive, Mena greeted her with thoughts of affection, of admiration for her beauty, and thanks for the many ways she kept Aaden enthralled. Elya fell toward them with her wings close to her body, her head stretched forward and tail straight as an arrow behind her.

Only when Aaden and Devlyn raised their arms in alarm and the three servants dove for the ground did Elya snap her wings out. The effect was immediate. The membranes of her wings billowed back, stretched taut, and filled with air. Her wings caught hold of the air so completely that all of that incredible speed vanished. She hung above them for a few seconds, and then retracted her wings, that rapid clicking as they curled and shrank to nothing but small protrusions on her back. The air within them escaped and she touched down lightly on the grass.

Aaden rushed toward her. He threw his arms around her neck and pressed his face against her plumage. For a time the boy was lost in speaking with her, a tumbling stream of words that Mena could not follow. Elya, though, cocked her head, blinked her eyes, and wrinkled her nose as if she understood everything the boy was saying and found it all most engaging.

“It’s too bad Grae isn’t here,” Aaden said, wrenching himself away for a moment. “He would love this. If he was, would you let him fly with Elya?”

“Remember what I said. I don’t command her. She could let him ride if she chose, but … I think she is very choosy.”
As is your mother
, she almost added. She leaned toward him and nipped his nose between her fingers. “You should feel honored. You’re special, and not just because you’re the prince. That means nothing to her, and she likes you for what’s truly inside you.”

The boy took this praise as he took all praise, as if it were his due and as if it were as light as the words themselves. He climbed upon Elya and called for a servant to fetch his bow and blunted arrows. With his quiver slung over his back and the ash weapon in hand, he urged Elya into something faster than a walk. The creature was careful with him. Mena could tell by the awkward way she moved, taking care to keep him steady on her back, even though it required extra contortions of her limbs. Devlyn knew better than to ask to ride himself. He fetched his own bow and made a show of circling, an instant hunting party. Aaden shouted for Mena to join them, but she declined. She was content to sit on the blanket and watch them, to smell the salt-tinged air and hear the rhythmic concussion of the waves on the base of the seaside wall of the stadium.

Small ruminants, about the size of dogs and looking much like lanky potbellied hares, munched on the grass a little distance away. They had been brought in after Corinn chose to seed the field several years ago. They kept the grass trim, and their droppings made for a pleasantly fragrant fertilizer. At first sighting Elya they had fled in awkward, loping fright. Now they hardly took notice of her at all. At Aaden’s urging, Elya pressed her body low to the ground, intent as a carnivore stalking. The grazing animals were no more afraid than hens are with a toddler in their midst. They did not love being shot with the blunted arrows, though, and Devlyn seemed particularly good at stinging their backsides.

How strange to think that just a few weeks ago Elya was not even a part of her life. That seemed impossible now. She was family. Even Corinn saw it! And, like family, Elya had affection for the boy that went beyond his personal traits. Perhaps she smelled the bond between him and Mena and offered herself to him because of it. Or maybe he was special. Mena warmed to the thought. Maybe he was. Surely, he managed to balance both his childish nature and a calm acceptance of his heredity and the role it meant lay before him. She tried to imagine Aliver having been that at ease, but he never had been. What, she wondered, did this contrast between them mean? What might the reign of King Aaden amount to?