The War With The Mein (52 page)

Mena always knew when they were coming down to her. She heard the impact of their hard-soled boots on the narrow wooden stairs. Maeander always stepped in first, followed by his shadow, the Acacian traitor named Larken. They always stood on the far side of the room, rocking with the motion of the boat, staring at her with bemused expressions. They could not come to terms with how she had been delivered to them. They asked her several times why she had come to the magistrate’s house that morning. Each time she answered the same. She had heard they were looking for her, she said. This simple statement never failed to make Maeander grin and look back at his friend.

There was a great deal more to it than that, of course, but she felt no need to tell them anything more. They were carrying her back toward the center of the world, toward Acacia. That was what she wanted. Despite themselves, they were doing her bidding, not the other way around. Better to keep quiet about it, though. She told them nothing of the events directly prior to her showing up at the magistrate’s. If they had not left so promptly they could have learned a great deal more about her than they knew, but this suited her as well. They saw before them a young woman of small, almost petite stature. She sat demurely, with an upright posture, dressed as a bird, feathered and adorned, a priestess who had lived a cloistered life. No doubt they knew her to be a virgin and took amusement from discussing it.

They could never have imagined that she had returned from Uvumal in the middle of the night. She had trudged up from the shore through the shadows of a wood-shaded lane. She limped on her battered right leg, bruised so deeply that the whole of the thigh was blue and purple and black. She wheezed from an injury done to her chest. The damage might have happened during the fall through the canopy, bouncing as she had from branch to branch, poked and jabbed and snapped about like a dead thing until she had finally come to rest tangled in a crosshatch of branches. Or she might have caught the lung sickness from a chill she had taken as she worked her slow way back through the forest, dragging a heavy burden behind her and then sailing a rainy sea toward Vumair. She would never know.

Ruinat had been hushed and sodden, pressed beneath the black blanket of a cloud-heavy night. Water collected in wagon ruts and footprints and depressions of every sort. She walked without care for the puddles. She just cut through them, halfway up to her ankles in the muck. She wore her sword strapped to her back, and behind her she pulled a burden great enough to cause her strain. She had twined the rope around her waist several times, tied it off, and run the rope up over her shoulder. The far end had been wound tight around the trussed bird, pinching its wings into its body. She was bringing it home, an offering to the people of Vumu, one they would have to decide themselves what to do with.

Climbing the temple steps took considerable effort. The corpse caught on each corner. She had to lean forward to ascend. Once on the top step, she loosened the rope from around her waist and flung it over the stone carving of Maeben. She tugged with all her weight, which was only enough to drag the bird into a semiupright position. There she left it. She simply dropped the rope and turned away without considering it further.

Inside her compound she moved with greater ease. She knew where every servant slept and that they would not vary their routine in her absence. That was how she noticed an extra person sleeping in one of the rooms. Melio. She had only to hear his breathing and to smell his scent in the slumbering air to know it was him. She hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t accounted for it in her planning of the evening’s events. But she knew she had to communicate with him in some way. It would be incomplete, she knew. It would drive him mad. But she had to give him something in return for all he had done for her.

It took her a few moments to pen a note to him. She held it to her chest as she entered his room. She sipped shallow breaths and moved with the silent stealth that had always come to her at moments of need. She propped her sword against the wall, where he was sure to see it on waking, and then she approached his sleeping form. She knew she would not wake him, so she placed the folded square of paper close to his face, safe within the shelter described by his bare arm. She risked extra moments gazing at him. She took in the generosity of his sleeping features, and for the first time she did not question why her eyes so loved to linger on his features. They were perfectly imperfect. She had never seen a face that pleased her so. Not, at least, since she had last looked up into her father’s face as he told the myths of the old times.

Though what she felt for Melio was different from what she had felt for her father, she still knew that people named the emotion love. She had known this was what she felt before she entered the room. She loved him so much that if she woke him she would never have carried through her plan. That was why she had let him sleep and instead wrote in crabbed, rusty Acacian letters…

M,

You were right about everything, of course.

I was slow to learn, but I know it now,

M.

Below this, not an afterthought but a postscript that it took her a few minutes to pen, she wrote two more lines.

I love you.

If ever the world allows it, I’ll prove it to you.

It took a few hours of hushed preparation to move her plan forward. There was only one last deception necessary to open the path toward the heart of things. She moved stealthily to her dressing chambers, stripped naked, and washed in the basin of flower-scented water. She dressed in the goddess’s robes. She slipped into the garments in the closed space of her dressing chambers. She applied her makeup by feel. When she felt she was passable in appearance and when she sensed the coming day, Mena left her compound and went to the magistrate’s house, wherein lay the sleeping Meinish party.

The rest happened quickly. Maeander asked her only a few questions before being satisfied as to her identity. She was on their vessel within half an hour, and the ship was unmoored and in motion only minutes later. She felt it when they cleared the shallow harbor waters and began to ride the heaving ridges that rolled south to north this time of the year.

Maeander seemed to enjoy his time questioning her, despite the fact that she could not tell him anything he did not know already. She knew only as much about her brothers and her sister as Melio had been able to tell her, and none of that was particularly concrete intelligence. Actually, Maeander informed her of much more than she told him. From him she learned that Aliver was, in fact, alive and well in Talay. He was amassing an army in the center of that nation, gradually moving northward as his numbers grew.

“They say he’s become quite the speaker,” Maeander said. “He’s been touched by a sorcerer’s hand and now he’s rousing the masses with his oratory. He speaks of freeing the Known World from suppression, from forced labor, from harsh taxes, even from the Quota. Strange that he seems to have forgotten who created that world order in the first place.”

There was a rumor, unconfirmed as yet but credible, that Dariel had joined him. Until recently this youngest of the Akarans had been but a raiding thief of the Gray Slopes. And Corinn, Maeander said, had been converted to the Meinish cause by the pleasures of his brother’s bed. “Many called her the chieftain’s whore behind her back. I’d never do so myself, of course.”

“No,” Larken added, as if on cue, “if you were to call her anything, you’d do it to her face.”

Listening to all this, Mena managed to control the emotion that swelled in her. She had dealt with much of it already, in her own way. As she dragged Maeben’s corpse through the forest she had been bombarded by memories from her childhood. They jabbed at her as much as the tree limbs and gnarled root networks and bloodsucking insects. She even spoke to her siblings as she walked, trying to explain herself to them, asking what they had become, trying to see if they could unite again and be the same again. Of course not, she knew. Nothing could be the same. Nobody could have imagined she’d become what she now was, nor could she imagine what they were. But she decided that there was no doubt in her—she loved them no matter what. Nothing Maeander said changed that in the slightest.

Maeander disembarked at Aos. He had something to attend to there but would likely arrive in Acacia about the same time as they would. Mena was left in Larken’s care. Out of Maeander’s shadow, the Acacian was a different man. He swaggered the same way, smiled with the same arrogance, held his body with the same self-adoration. But these things were natural to his character. What was different was that he conveyed himself as a free man, not just a hanger-on. He spoke with a casualness that almost suggested disdain for Maeander’s authority, although Mena was not entirely sure why it felt this way. It was nothing he actually said, just something in his attitude.

The evening after they sailed from Aos, Larken entered with several Acacian servants trailing behind him. Mena had noticed that all of the servants were Acacian and most of the crew was made up of Talayans. Only the captain himself, his first mate, and the Punisari guards were of Meinish blood. The servants set out trays of cheeses and olives, small broiled fish, a carafe of lemon wine. He thought he would share this last meal with her, he said. The next day they would sail into Acacia and she would no longer be exclusively his.

Mena found no reason to object. It was not that she liked Larken or wished for his company. He felt Mena’s fate was in his hands now and would soon be in Hanish’s hands. Mena herself had no say in the situation. But speaking from this assumption, Larken was somewhat careless in the things he said.

“Is it true?” Mena asked. “The things he said about my siblings, I mean.”

“Oh yes,” Larken said, running his fingers over his cheekbone, down and under his lips, a gesture he often made while talking. He sat on a stool, near enough that he could reach out and touch Mena if he leaned forward. “Maeander never lies. What he says is always true. It’s when he is silent that you have reason to fear things aren’t well.”

Mena lifted a glass of wine to her nose and inhaled it. The scent was familiar, but she was not sure why; she had never drunk wine before. “I look forward to seeing my sister. I will see her, won’t I? Hanish won’t keep me from her.”

Larken considered the question, seeming to weigh not the answer itself but to turn over how much of it he should give her. “Let’s just say that Hanish has a purpose for you and Hanish has a purpose for Corinn. But they are different purposes, separate destinies.”

Mena set the wineglass down, having consumed none of it. She realized the reason the wine scent had smelled familiar. It had often been on her father’s breath at night, when he told her and Dariel stories. He always had a glass of the wine nearby. He would sip it and talk, sip and talk, and when he kissed her good night she had tasted it on the warm air exhaled from inside him. “What makes you think my brother won’t have wiped Hanish Mein from the Known World before we get too far into these separate destinies?”

“It will not take that long.” Larken grinned and looked down in a manner that indicated he was leaving things unsaid. “And beyond that it’s a matter of simple logic. I hate to tell you this, Mena, but we’re ready for him. We welcome it, really. Meins are fighters. They are not happy when the peace lingers too long. They never stop training, preparing, hungering for the next battle. The boys not old enough to fight last time are young men now. Oh, how they want to prove themselves! We still have the Numrek. I’ve been surprised at how well they take to a life of leisure, but they will be happy enough to pick up their spears and axes again. And we have other weapons as well. Not the same sort that Hanish unleashed the first time. One can do such things only once. But we’ve other weapons, believe me. The type of things that will wake you screaming in the night. But they are no nightmare. When Hanish releases them, they’ll roam through the bright daylight. Believe me, Hanish is quite ready to face Aliver Akaran and an untrained, polyglot horde, no matter how large it is or how much Aliver whips them into a frenzy.”

Mena stared at him for a long time, fingering the eel pendant at her neck as she did. “Larken, tell me something…. You are an Acacian. You always will be. Don’t you have some wish to redeem your honor? Is that not in you somewhere? You could do so even now. You could join me and my brother and help take back the things you betrayed earlier. With your knowledge you would be an immense aid to my brother. You could null your crime.”

“Hardly,” Larken said. “I hear you, though. I would not be the first to have a change of heart like that. But it’s not…a way of being that suits me. I’ve cast my lot with the Meins, and I’m quite happy with it. You should see my villa in Manil. I have servants for every purpose, Mena. Every purpose. I live a life I would never have achieved as a Marah guard. When Hanish or Maeander calls for me, I come and serve, but most days I am no different from the richest of nobles.”

“You care only about yourself, then?”

“Who else is there to care about? I am only myself….”

“Change yourself to something better, then! You have only to do it, and it will be done. This is something I’ve discovered for myself.”

Instead of answering directly, Larken asked her if she had ever heard the Meinish legend of the bear giant Thallach. This Thallach was an enormous northern bear, he said, against whom the first men of the Mein tested their valor. They went one after another into the mouth of his den and did single combat with him. They died one after another, such a steady feast that Thallach never even had to leave his den. His food came to him instead. This went on for many years. Many men died. One day a holy man convinced the people to try another way. Why send their best and strongest and most beloved to their deaths time and again? Why not make peace with the bear? The people, weakened and fearful, believed there was wisdom in this. The holy man went at the head of a delegation, offering Thallach a feather of peace, promising him that they would feed and care for him and worship him as a god from that day forward. “Do you know what Thallach said to them in answer?”