The Other Lands (66 page)

The first time she planned to attempt it, she dismissed her servants and prepared her room herself. She dimmed the lamps. She lit sticks of incense and set a mixture of soothing herbs bubbling in fragrant, citrus-infused oil. She put on a formal dinner dress of dark green velvet, with a high neckline and full sleeves. Lying on her back atop her bedspread, she smoothed the folds of her dress out around her, feeling unnervingly silly. Did one dream travel in one’s garments, naked, or without a body at all? She did not know if any of her preparations were necessary, but she needed some sense of ritual, something to occupy her as she gradually drew nearer the moment.

And what to do in that moment was another riddle she had yet to solve. However Hanish had dream traveled, he managed it without true knowledge of the Giver’s tongue. Perhaps he used some fragment of it. Or perhaps his success had a different explanation. Corinn had consulted
The Song of Elenet
with this question in mind. As ever, the words and music of the book had surged up to engulf her. As ever, she closed it, knowing she had learned from it but incapable of putting her finger on the knowledge and examining it.

She slept for a time, a fitful slumber in which she counted the passing hours. Eventually, awake again, she just lay, calming her heartbeat, letting her body go limp against the bedding. She allowed herself to drift toward sleep again. She focused her attention on her breathing. No, on the awareness that her thoughts were a thing different from her body. Housed in it, yes, but not contained. Not trapped. She imagined her true essence floating up from her body and—

Ah! That did not work. She lifted her fist and smashed it against the mattress in exasperation. She sat up. This was not the way. It felt like something a fortune reader would instruct her to do. Some nonsense, like when she pretended to be able to read symbols in her girlfriend’s mind as a child.

Use the song, she thought. It all begins with the song.

She fell back against the bed, inhaled, called up the swirling music that was the Giver’s tongue, and, very softly, sang. She did not entirely understand the notes and words and shapes of sound that came from her mouth, but she knew the intent was right. She wove them in with her hopes, with the preparations she had already made. Trying to shape them even as she felt shaped by the song escaping her, she lost herself in the effort.

At some point, she realized the song was not on her lips anymore. It was in her. It was her and would travel with her. She pushed her spirit up and out of her body, floating free above the bed and then through the ceiling and beyond. For a time she swam through air above the palace. Such a strange feeling. She had an awareness of her physical form, but she also knew how very incorporeal it was. Part of her lashed at the air with limbs that were not entirely there but that were not entirely absent. Ultimately, it was thought, not physical effort, that moved her through space. More than thought, it was thought propelled by force of will.

For some time she flew from point to point above the palace, slowly learning to feel the presence of souls, sleeping and awake. She found she could draw herself to some individuals simply by settling thoughts of them in her mind and then driving toward them. Thus, she felt Rhrenna’s sleeping presence and Aaden’s. She knew the bed in which Delivegu slumbered, not alone. Any of these she could have stirred awake, but they were not her objective. She aimed for a person much, much farther away: Dariel.

She conjured every memory she had of him. She held her thoughts of him until she had them within her, contained like the seething balls of creation from which she built the creatures she summoned for Aaden’s amusement. The song helped her. It gave shape to what she wished to do. She took that swirling embodiment of memories and thoughts and images and emotions that to her were Dariel, and then she hurled them forward.

It was like tossing a great ball of energy, a thing that hungered to be released. She sped behind, hooked to it, shooting forward across the Inner Sea. Oh, it felt good! Such speed. She watched Acacia recede as she passed between Kidnaban and the Cape of Fallon. Before long, the mountains of Senival rumbled beneath her, as if they were a herd of stampeding creatures. Wonderful. Such power and freedom. She raced across the coast and farther until …

She forgot what she was doing. Her progress slowed. For a few moments she felt the force that had been pulling her casting about in one and then another direction. Then it simply stopped. In a spirit form, immune to the cold or fear, Corinn hung in the air high above the Gray Slopes. Below her, the ocean moved in unending undulation. Watching it, she knew the waves gave life to all the earth. She knew, looking down, that there could be no more horrible thing than a dead sea. It meant a dead earth.

By why am I thinking that? I’m here for a reason. I’m searching for—

Her eyes snapped open. She gasped a breath so loud she thought for a moment that she screamed it out. Sitting up on her bed, in her gown, the air heavy with incense smoke, she realized she had failed. Dariel! She had been flying toward Dariel, driven by her thoughts of him, scorching toward whatever place or fate in the world identified him … but then the energy that propelled her realized it did not know where to go. She should have been able to find him, but there was no scent, no trail, not even an intuitive feeling for where to head. At some point, there was nothing. That was why she had stopped somewhere out above the Slopes. If her brother was out there, she had no power to find him.

“Dariel,” she said. In speaking his name she felt a strange, dread certainty that she would never see him again, neither in life nor through the song.

T
he following day passed much the same as the one that preceded it. One appointment after another. One function before another. Her last official meeting that afternoon was with Paddel, the head vintner of Prios. She kept it short, not wanting to look too long at his heavily jowled, red-cheeked face. He sat at the far end of the table from her, as unattractive as ever, squeezed into a black jacket that was so tight he could barely move his chubby arms. She did not sit through all of his fawning, praise-laden greeting.

“Since last we spoke, have the trials of the vintage continued to go well?”

“Yes, of course! Better than well. See here, the reports—” He fumbled with his papers, rising to bring them to her.

“Just tell me this,” Corinn said. She signaled with disdainful fingers that he should stay seated. “It works as efficiently as you thought before? It lifts their spirits, gives them a feeling of bliss, and yet does not dull minds?”

“Quite so. One might almost say it sharpens—”

“And once they taste it, they will forever crave it?” The man nodded vigorously. “What happens if they are deprived of it?”

“There’s no reason that they should be deprived of it. We have vast stockpiles of the raw ingredients. We have enough to last us until we win or lose the coming struggle.”

“That’s good. But, again, what happens when they are deprived of it? You said before that they will do anything to get it—but if they cannot get it, what happens to them? How long until they recover?”

The nodding stopped. Paddel’s mouth puckered, a stupid expression that Corinn wanted to slap away. “I don’t know. We didn’t deprive any indefinitely. They were so”—he grinned and lifted his shoulders, a gesture meant to indicate that surely she understood this point—”insistent and so pleased when they had access to it again. Why deprive them?”

The scowl on Corinn’s face stayed constant.
That annoys me, Paddel
, she said to herself.
You should have researched this area instead of taking so much personal pleasure from it
. It was too late now to conduct more tests. She had waited too long already.
Let it be done
.

“Send word to your people,” she said. “Release the vintage.”

“Yes?” he asked, excited, his mouth now like that of a dog panting in expectation. “Do you mean it?”

“I just said it, so obviously I mean it. How quickly can you distribute it?”

“Oh, quickly indeed. The main warehouse is in Prios, of course, but in preparation for your order we’ve shifted stock to Danos, Alecia, Bocoum. We even had a storage facility in Denben. We can send word by messenger bird and have crates riding south toward interior Talay by tomorrow evening. And across west to Tabith, which will give us the entire Slopes coastline!” The possibilities took his breath away. He stammered on for a time, and then, realizing something, looked at Corinn with new admiration. “You are so wise to have arranged this, Your Majesty.”

She showed no pleasure in the compliment. Instead, she flicked her fingers to indicate that he should leave. Before he reached the door, she stopped him. “One final thing. Do conduct the test. When one is addicted and is deprived indefinitely, what happens? Find out.”

Later, in her offices with Rhrenna, Corinn closed out the day’s business. The Meinish woman read from the meticulous notes she kept, detailing a variety of points achieved and yet to be faced on the morrow. Listening to her voice soothed Corinn. Much of what she said, conversely, did not. “Wren has petitioned for an audience with you. I told her the timing was ill but said I would put the request to you.”

“Wren …” Corinn exhaled. Dariel’s concubine. Pregnant and growing plumper every day. Though Corinn avoided speaking to her, she caught glimpses of the girl often enough. Her narrow eyes always seemed to be waiting for Corinn, fixed on her before she had realized they were going to make eye contact. She was pretty, indeed. A northern Candovian. One of those slim, athletic women upon whom a baby is but a shapely bump that adds to her attractiveness, a moon to be caressed. “I can’t see her now. She’d likely ask me to acknowledge her child as Dariel’s.”

“It is Dariel’s.”

“Yes, but I’m not at all sure that I want to declare that right now. Tell her I’m too busy. If she likes, she could retire to Calfa Ven. I’ll send physicians. She could have the baby there, in peaceful seclusion.”

“I already felt her out about that, Your Majesty. She would rather be here in the palace.”

“Fine,” Corinn said a little coldly, as she wanted to close the subject, “but she’ll have to wait for an audience.”

Rhrenna nodded and noted this on her documents. Watching her down-tilted face, Corinn remembered that she once thought Meinish women uniformly bland of appearance. Too pale, thin-skinned, with finely drawn features that had a coldness in keeping with their frigid nation. At the time she had thought it ironic considering that the men of the same race had been striking, especially Hanish. … Looking at Rhrenna now, she realized that her feelings about Meinish women had never been accurate. Yes, their features were as described, but they had their own style of beauty. What had kept her from seeing it was jealousy. Fear that Hanish might one day choose one of his own over her.

Forgetting the annoyance of a moment before, Corinn acknowledged a very different emotion instead. “Rhrenna, I’m sorry.”

The secretary looked up and studied her. “For what?”

Was this folly? To admit a crime and wish it otherwise? No, she did not think so. “For what I did to your people.”

“Oh.” Rhrenna cleared her throat, looked back at the documents. “We weren’t innocents.”

“I know. You knew all the time, didn’t you? All the time that we rode together and I showed you the ways of court and we were young together—all through that time you knew that Hanish might one day sacrifice me to the Tunishnevre.”

Rhrenna drew in on herself. She pulled her gaze in, head down as she stared at the papers on her lap. Her blond hair fell around her. “I never wanted that to happen.”

“But you knew it might. I’m not chastising you. You are closer to me now than my sister is. Perhaps I love the blood you share with Hanish. Maybe that’s why I feel so close to you. For some reason, I know that the fact that you would have betrayed me then means that you won’t now. Or ever again. Am I right?”

The young woman’s head bobbed. “You are right.”

“I know it,” Corinn said. She folded her hands in her lap and inhaled a long breath. Something about doing so made her feel she had sucked in Rhrenna’s promise and owned it. “When this is over and we’re at peace again, I will lift the ban on entering Mein Tahalian. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be opened again, lived in again. There’s every reason it should, actually. If I did that, would it please you?”

Rhrenna sat as if she were still studying the pages before her, but her gaze had drifted off slightly, unfocused. “I don’t think I could live there again. Maybe if I lived to old age I’d return, but I’m not sure. I think some others would, though. I know some want that very much. It wouldn’t be the same, of course. There are too few of us left, but I know some Mein who would take their families back to Tahalian. Even their mixed families. They’d pry off the beams that seal it, open the steam valves, and heat the place. It could never be the same, but it would be good for life to fill the place again. I would like to believe that an entire culture can’t just be forgotten.”