Aerie (24 page)

“It should have been.” One of the couriers chimed in, and Peri smothered a smile when she saw the hero-worshipping look on his face. “They should have summoned you to reward you. You should have been given the Gold of Favor and the Gold of Honor, Lord Kiron.”

Kiron laughed aloud. “To what purpose? When I was his dragon boy, Ari had a chest full of the gold, and never even looked at it. I am no courtier to wear that nonsense about; there are no festivals, no feasts at Aerie, we are working far too hard for such things. Serving well is enough of an honor.”

Aket-ten rolled her eyes, when Kiron was looking the other way. Then he glanced back and caught her at it and his eyes glinted. “I am going to get no satisfaction from you, am I?” she demanded.

“You said yourself, you serve the Great Queen and answer only to her,” Kiron replied, a little smile playing over his lips, but sounding as innocent as a child. “Go and ask her yourself.”

The exasperated look that Aket-ten gave him made Peri hide another smile. Peri’s only real rival here was doing herself no service with her attitude. Not that Aket-ten seemed to care.

Finally, she found an opening in the conversation to ask about Kiron’s childhood, a moment when he reminded them all that he was from a very simple background and was more at home in the rough surroundings of Aerie than the Palace—“Unlike you, Aket-ten.” That was when Peri metaphorically pounced. He seemed very grateful for the change in subject, and as a consequence readily answered questions that under other circumstances would have been considered impertinent, not to mention prying.

And the more she asked . . . the more points of identity she had. He had the right number of siblings and the right ages. And although Letis-hanet was a very common name for an Altan woman—it meant “flower of the goddess”—still, there was that point of identity as well. Unfortunately all he remembered of his sisters were the pet names he had for them, which didn’t match what Letis had called them. But other than that, she soon had almost all the evidence she needed. Until she pulled out the final jackal for her game board . . .

“Surely your sisters cannot always have been inclined to spoil you at every opportunity!” she laughed. “Surely there must have been times when you were at each others’ throats! I have never in all my life heard of siblings who did not fight, especially eldest with youngest!”

He smiled a little. “Well,” he began, slowly. “There was
one
time—”

And as he recited the story, with much laughter all around, she knew that she had what she needed and wanted. It was the same incident. Him winning the argument only because his mother said he should. His sister going red in the face with anger. The handful of flour thrown into his hair.
Him
going red in the face with anger as the “insult” sent him into a senseless fury. His mother finally intervening, separating them for the rest of the day, only to bring them back together again at sunset and force them to apologize to each other.

“Oh, now I can admit that I was completely in the wrong,” he laughed. “And I know now that the reason I became so angry was precisely because I was in the wrong and would never have admitted it then. But I was an arrogant little toad then, and as sure that I was the ruler of all about me as any Great King.”

“Aren’t all boys?” she teased.

“And all girls are the Princesses of the Household, and just as arrogant in their way!” he challenged her. “There was many a time when my sister won an argument only because my grandmother supported
her
with no more reason but that she was a girl and must therefore know all things!” He chuckled. “That was the great rivalry in that house; my father ’s mother supporting the girls because my mother supported and spoiled me. And yet, let a neighbor so much as deign to hint that any of us were less than perfect, and lo! The ranks were closed, the armies assembled, and they faced the enemy as one!”

Peri laughed, able to see it all so clearly, for exactly the same situation was true in most of the village families she had grown up around.

By then, bored with it all, the rest had drifted away, even Aket-ten, who looked rather determined to, in fact, go to the Great Queen and demand to be told what this “business” was all about.

Well that was her outlook. Peri was only interested now in one thing. This
was
Letis’ son; this was the young man that her friend was determined she wed. And she liked him—oh, how very much she liked him, indeed!

And he was smiling at her as he had not smiled at any of the others.

Her heart lifted, and an unexpected thrill went through her.

She felt her breath catch, she flushed—and she quickly turned the conversation back to his past. Because now she wanted to hear it. All of it.

Because it was his, and no other’s, and she wanted to know everything, everything that had made him what he was.

When the little female Altan Jouster in training took herself off to her duties, Kiron rose and stretched and immediately forgot all about her. Her simple questions, her conversation, had been a much-needed distraction, but now he needed to return to the Palace. Not to hare off after Aket-ten—though he was going to have to apologize to her at some point for teasing her in front of her wing—but because it would be better if no one had to send a servant to go looking for him if he was needed. And because if he was going to have to take the Chosen of Seft back to the border, he might need some special arrangements and the best person to arrange those was probably Ari’s own vizier.

As he had partly anticipated, he was expected at the Palace, and arrangements were already in place for him to bypass most of the protocol that others had to thread. He did have to present himself to the Keeper of the Door as any other petitioner, but once his name was known, the man nearly turned himself inside out to get Kiron straight to the rulers. Within moments, he was put into the guidance of one of Nofret’s personal servants and taken straight to Ari and Nofret’s private quarters, just as he had been last night. This time, however, the rooms that had been empty were thronged with people, many of whom looked at him with curiosity, envy, or both as he passed.

It was to a different set of rooms that he was taken this time, in the womens’ wing, and by the opulence, the wall paintings of Queens being greeted as equals by various goddesses, it was Nofret’s own suite of rooms. Which was—and he would have expected this, if he had just thought about it—where he found Aket-ten, alone in one of the rooms set aside for those who were especially favored of the queen. Servants there offered them both drinks and little dainties; he declined, but Aket-ten took a delicate goblet of pomegranate juice absently, staring at him with a rueful expression on her face.

“Aket-ten, I really need to apologize—” he began.

Just as she blurted, “Kiron, I have been a pigheaded goose—”

They looked at each other, and laughed nervously.

“You have, and I have,” he said. “And we were both wrong, and that is of little importance right now. Now . . . did they tell you what is toward?”

“A very little. Enough to frighten me half to death.
Could
some of the Magi have escaped?” she asked, and she truly did look frightened. “Do you think they really have set themselves up in the east?”

She shuddered. Well, he couldn’t blame her. She, not he, had been the one they had held captive. She, and not he, had been the one that had seen the evils of the Magi in a very personal way; they had, not once, but twice tried to drain her of her power and spirit, and she had felt their dreadful power at first hand.

They had cut her down out of the sky and taken her captive, and the last thing she had seen as they dragged her away had been Re-eth-ke lying in a crumpled heap on the ground. She, not he, had been the one to think she had lost her dragon forever.

To contemplate the idea that some of those same Magi could still be alive must be the stuff of her worst nightmares.

He had to shrug. “There is no telling. That is what the Chosen of Seft hopes to learn, I suppose. But as he rightly said last night, the Magi are not the only ones of their sort in the world. He pointed out that they had to learn their magic from somewhere . . . and that
is
the border over which the Nameless Ones came.”

She bit her lip. “That is another thing I would rather not think about. The Nameless Ones . . . what if we must face them again?” She rubbed her hands together nervously. “And another thing . . . we
thought
we knew why Aerie and Sanctuary were deserted. But what if we were wrong? What if it was magic that lured their people away—magic of the Nameless Ones—”

He grimaced; he didn’t want to think about this either.

That is for wiser heads than mine—Ari and Nofret, Kaleth, and the Chosen of Seft. Not one simple wingleader.
“How are your Jousters?” he said instead, changing the subject, and grinned. “Have you found the need to set a watch on beds yet?”

She groaned. “I cannot do that, they are adults. Much though I wish I might. And when I move them to Aerie, it will be worse.”

“Why move them at all?” he asked, invoking logic. “There is no real need, is there?”

“I—” she began, and was interrupted by the entrance of the Great Queen, who looked every inch the Great Queen indeed.

Nofret wore the tall ceremonial headdress, rather than the soft, draped cloth with the cobra headband. It was not as heavy as it looked, being made of starched blue cloth, adorned at top and bottom with a ribbon of gold. The headdress, however, was the only thing other than her dress about her that was not heavy. She wore a collar of gold, coral, lapis lazuli, and turquoise beads, and a matching belt that encircled her hips and dangled two ends down to the floor. This, in turn, matched the beading on her sandals. She sported both upper and lower armbands of enameled gold as wide as Kiron’s palm, and carried the same ceremonial crook and flail as Ari did; both of enameled gold, the stringers of the flail being composed of beads that matched the rest of her jewels.

Underneath all this, she wore a gown of closely pleated mist linen. Each such gown took one girl the better part of a day to wash and iron all the pleats back in. The jewels were so heavy that Nofret often changed gowns four and five times a day.

And the first thing she did when she entered the room was to hand over the crook and flail to the appropriate attendant, while her hairdresser came to lift the headdress from her head, revealing that she kept her hair cropped closely. It was the only sane solution. There were so many ceremonial hairstyles for a Great Queen, and all of them were so complicated, that the only way to deal with them was to wear wigs.

Another attendant came to lift the collar over her head with both hands, while a fourth removed the belt. Nofret herself kicked off her sandals and sank onto a couch with a sigh.

“Court would not be nearly so difficult if I didn’t wear enough jewels to sink the royal barge,” she complained, reaching for the fruit juice a fifth attendant brought her. The gown was now in crumpled ruins, rendered distinctly sorry looking by the heat and humidity and the press of the jewels. It hung limply from her shoulders, all the fine pleats vanishing. She sprawled onto the couch and allowed her attendants to fan her. “So, Ari told you the simple version, I trust?”

Aket-ten nodded her head.

“The complicated version is still simple at this point. There is too much we do not know, and the gods are not speaking to Kaleth. Tedious of them. Life would be so much simpler if they revealed everything to us like sensible beings.” She handed the empty goblet to one of the attendants. “Kiron is here to transport whatever priest the Chosen of Seft designates to go back to the town. We want Kiron to do this because he is the
most
trustworthy of an already trustworthy lot and because of all of his experience. And because the Bedu trust him. That is no small thing.”

“I feel very badly that I can do nothing,” Aket-ten said plaintively. “It seems as if there should be something I can do. . . .”

“Train your couriers,” Nofret replied instantly. “No, do more than train them. Your young women will be carrying messages of a sensitive nature, and it is imperative that they learn discretion. Make them see that they cannot conduct themselves like the little temple gossips they once were.”

Aket-ten rolled her eyes. “Ask for a miracle,” she muttered though Nofret probably couldn’t hear it.

“Seriously, Aket-ten, if they become nexuses of gossip, they will ruin the reputation of female Jousters for all time.” Kiron put in. He had not wanted these women, but now that they existed, he had no intention of permitting them to fail. For all of their faults, he had seen them with their baby dragons, watched them grit their teeth and throw themselves into training. They
were
Jousters. “Just tell them that.”

“Precisely.” Nofret passed her hand through her cropped tresses. “They are not stupid, Aket-ten, or you would never have chosen them.”