The Other Lands (75 page)

She thought of Hanish for a moment, but not in the way she wanted to. She pushed it back and calmed her voice and said, “You’re not my blood. So I don’t care what is in your heart. I care what comes out of your mouth, and I think only of how it will help me protect the Known World. You, Barad, are going to be one of my staunchest allies.”

“Never.”

Corinn launched herself at him. Big, gangly as he was, she smashed into him, grasping his head in her arms. “Your mind is mine!” The man fought against her for a moment. He drew back a mallet of a fist, cocked, and began to bring it forward, until she slipped her thumbs around and pressed them against his stone eyes. The fist froze. His body went limp, as if she held the center of him and he could do nothing.

“Your mind is mine,” Corinn repeated. “Listen, and don’t deny it.”

E
arly that evening Corinn went to the gardens of Mena’s region of the palace. Though she felt the fatigue of the song she had sung for Barad, Corinn knew there was more left in her. And there were two more things she had to do before she rested. Tonight was the night for it. She felt full of resolve, powered by a measure of certainty, and she planned to see it through.

She walked cautiously, her eyes often flicking up to the bluing sky. Elya was far away, flying behind Mena, and though she had many guards looking up at the sky to spot the creature’s returning and pipe a warning, Corinn still moved fast. She wove her way through the tables and benches and chairs that seemed to absurdly crowd Mena’s balcony.

Delivegu had given her no specific information on where the eggs might be. In the gardens, yes, but it was no small space. It could take hours to find them; and this assumed they were real, which was not something she could be sure of. The night was crisp, the moon lighting the stones and plants and furniture well enough. She had dismissed Mena’s staff, but still, still she felt a tingling urgency to—

And there they were. Corinn realized she had expected something grander than what she found, but that suddenly seemed silly. This was no foul nest like Mena’s stories of Maeben. It was not elaborate. It did not smell of death, nor was it gilded. Four eggs nestled in a curl of fabric. They were strangely shaped, oblong and flatish, with swirls of color set into a creamy base. Warm to the touch, they gave her a certain joy. It came right through her fingertips, a welcome.

Corinn looked around. She held still for a long moment, sure that she would hear and feel if anybody was observing her. Nobody was. She slipped her hands down into the basin, grasped the cloth in her hands; and pulled the entirety of it out, the eggs snug inside. She sat down on a stone bench a little distance away, cradling the bundle to her chest. She could feel the life pulsing within them. Wonderful, powerful, fierce: that’s what they would be.

She whispered the notes of the song that had been building in her head. She would sing to these children. Sing to them in the Giver’s tongue, so that when they emerged into the world they would do so in a form shaped to her needs. She could not have Elya, but she would have her children. Yes, they were lovely already. Full of goodness, but it was not goodness that she would need in future days. Before then, she would need weapons like none the Known World had ever seen. These babies would not be feathered, timorous protectors. They would be her warriors. She sang all this into them, and she knew they heard and liked what she was telling them. They shifted inside their eggs, shouldering and stretching the shells, already eager to hatch.

A
nd then the final thing. Her last work for that night. Late now, in her room, the lights dim and all her servants sent away. The largest of the spells she had planned. It would exhaust her, she knew, but she did not want to wait for another day. There was strength in doing, she realized. There was power in using the song. There were voices happy to aid her. Voices who, in more and more tangible ways, urged her on.

What choice did she have? they asked. Everything was in danger. She had to be able to trust someone completely, someone whom the people would love and rally behind, someone who would take part of the burden from her and carry it with her, someone who had held the world in his hands already. Someone who loved her and would be truly by her side. Someone who would thank her for forgiving him.

Barad, the agitator from the mines of Kidnaban, a rebel, a seditious, treasonous, poisonous barb in her side—a blind fool—was right. She was alone. She had been for years. Maybe she had been since the day she saw herself in the fingers of her dying mother’s hands so many years ago, when she was but a girl, when first she learned how callous the world was. That was then.

The things to come she could not do alone. She did not face the future for herself and she did not want to face it
by
herself. She did not have to. She just had to take from one place and give to another. In this case, she had to take from her family’s blood. She understood that better now. The voices helped her. The song made more sense now. The worm had a beauty as it turned and it helped her gain control. She was not a child anymore: awkward with her motions, clumsy, seeing a blurred world. Her hands were her own now. Each digit, each contour and wrinkle and blemish. They were
her
hands!

Confident in this, reassured by whispers from far away, she opened her mouth and let out the song that would make for her what she wished. Death was not so great a barrier. She had spent her life thinking it was the final, the absolute, the end, the horrible curse. But that was only part of it. The voices helped her understand this.

As she sang it just seemed more and more obvious. She had found a truth that escaped those with no knowledge of the Giver’s tongue. As she sang, she peeled back the barriers between life and death. As she sang, she searched among the vague forms on the other side of what she had believed to be life—though she knew the barrier was not the simple thing she had feared.

And there she found one of the ones she sought. At first he was as diffuse as a scent lofting on a breeze, spread thin and in communion with so much of the world. She drew the traces of him in. She sang, and the far-flung essence of him could not deny her invocation. For a time it was like her words were hands and the one she sought was sand draining through her fingers. But she sang the harder for it. She pulled him toward her, so forcefully that eventually …

He stood before her. He was there, upright, diaphanous, luminous at moments, but also tangibly physical. It was a he, and she knew him, though the details of his face moved and rippled and would not settle. Not yet.

“What have you done?” he rasped, like an aged man stirred from a dream of youth.

For a horrible moment, Corinn thought the figure was questioning every decision she had made since they had last seen each other. She could never explain it all! Life had placed before her a thousand challenges, each with a million barbed entanglements and dangers. Decisions had to be made and they fell upon nobody but her. She had made them as best she could. None could fault her. None could understand her. None could know what it meant to rule an empire. None, except perhaps the very one who had posed the question.

She realized time was passing and she had not answered. The man’s eyes bored into her. He asked again, “What have you done?”

This time she heard the question differently, or chose to. “I have pulled you back to life.”

“Why?”

How could she answer? She could say that she was afraid of the threat marching toward the Known World. She mistrusted herself now more than ever before and could no longer tell whether the things she did were for good or for ill. She could explain that all the power she had amassed was nothing if she was blind to those who would harm her son. She had so nearly lost Aaden! If that could happen, what other horrors might yet await her? She could have admitted that each weapon she held—her allies the league, who lied to her with every other word; the wine with which she would make a nation of obedient servants; the song that even now danced out over the world, stirring a worm deep in the bowels of the earth as it did so—was a two-faced treachery waiting to strike. She should swear that she hated sending Mena and Dariel out as unwilling agents, loathed that she seemed incapable of opening herself fully to them. She might declare that she wanted none of these things to be so. She needed him to help her remedy it all. It was all too much to carry on a single pair of shoulders; and if he would help her, perhaps together they could chart a surer course together than either of them could alone. She could have said that she doubted every high ideal that had ever escaped his lips but admitted that a part of her very much wanted to believe.

All this she might have said, but she did not. Though she meant it all, she also knew that she still clung to each writhing portion of the things she hated; she was herself the two-faced treachery that she feared and that she wished he might save her from. She was, even now, just a breath away from wishing she had summoned a different person altogether. So instead of confessing everything, she said, “Because the world needs you. Things are not complete. We need you in life, not darkness.”

“Darkness?” the figure asked. He closed his eyes as if remembering the meaning of the word. “No, death is not darkness. Nor have I forgotten life. Each moment brings new souls into the afterdeath. They bring news of the living, though it fades from them fast. But I have not been dead to life.” He opened his eyes again. “I know of you and the things you have done.”

Corinn had not expected to say what she did then. She had not even known she thought it. But it was true, and it felt very important to say it now. “Then you know that only you can save me. Please.”

As she waited for the answer, the figure before her became that much more tangible, just a little more solid, not quite so transparent, even though he remained vague and half formed. The man held up a hand. He nodded, not in affirmation but to indicate that he would answer her. It was an offer that deserved consideration, and he was not so at peace with death that he would fail to think it through. He just needed a few moments. Then he would answer her.

Queen Corinn Akaran folded her hands in her lap and sat as straight backed as she could in her fatigue, awaiting the spirit’s answer, ready—if he should accept—to whisper his name and complete the spell and bring him truly back into the world.
Aliver Akaran
, she would say, and mean every word,
life needs you still. I need you still. Come back. Fight the coming war at my side. Complete the work you left undone…
.

Acknowledgments

Gudrun reads everything first, which is lucky for us all. I thank her for that; readers should, too. I’d also like to thank Jamie Johnston (aka Dariel) for giving this novel the once-over. Hannah Strom-Martin was a wonder with an editorial pen, and this novel is better for her efforts. As ever, I’m so pleased and lucky to be able to work with my editor, Gerry Howard, and to have the guidance of my agent, Sloan Harris. I’d also like to welcome the widening family of editors and readers coming to my work around the world, in tongues I don’t yet speak. Thank you.