Cards of Grief (9 page)

Selah.

Place
: Palace of the King, Apartment of the King

Time
: King’s Time 1, First Patriarchy; 2137.5 +
A.D.

Speaker
: the King, called B’oremos, also called the Singer of Dirges, to anthropologist Aaron Spenser

Permission
: King’s own

T
RAITOR IS SUCH A
soft word, don’t you think? And what, after all, is a betrayal? What I did
to
Gray, I did
for
her as well. She became stronger, she grew in her art because of it. And besides, I was only following the Queen’s orders. So where was the betrayal? Whom did I really betray?

I rode off that very night, my skin still smelling from the Queen’s unguents and scents. She lent me a mount from her own stable, a perfumed white charger that lifted its feet clumsily along the cobblestones but once in the meadows was swift as arrowshot.

In the fields I could see last year’s liliroot nodding in the passing winds. Purple-and-white sweet lanni and wild narsis covered the hillocks. And along the ridges, capped with windstrife, were clouds like gray puddles against the darker sky. Nightsight, we say, is truesight. It is the one gift of the Common Grievers we have bred into Royal lines.

As I rode, it was as if I saw everything anew, as if I had been born again to represent all the lost celebrations of our kind. It is said that the Queen’s first touch renews the spirit. For me that was certainly true. I rode toward the complacent Middle Lands with an enthusiasm I had not felt my entire mission year. I even hummed as I rode, the horse’s gait lending a strange vibrato to my voice.

It took me a day and a night more to reach the millhouse where Gray’s mother and grandmother ruled over that houseful of slack-jawed, runny-nosed boys.

If my coming surprised them, they let me in without too many questions and only a single argument between them. I assured them that their Linni was comfortable and had already made a great impression at court. Three times I had to tell them of her entrance down the aisle of princes: how she looked, what she wore, who had dressed her hair. I told them what the Queen had said and what Linni had said in return, but I did not mention the priestess’s words. I did not mention
betrayal.
If they sensed it behind my stories, they did not say.

At last we sat down for dinner, the usual overcooked and understrained common meal of Lands. The greens were limp and the meat—some kind of local fowl—had been boiled until its wings had fallen off. I pushed it around my plate enough times to seem interested.

The three brothers had questions about the white charger, for they had unsaddled it and stabled it willingly.

“Is it fast?” asked the youngest.

“Faster than the wind,” I assured him, which said little since the winds across Lands are soft and slow.

“Does it handle easily?” asked the eldest.

“
It
is a
she,
and the handling is all done with wrists and thighs,” I explained, showing them and thus ending my charade with the tasteless meal. They aped my gestures until, at a signal from their grandmother, the youngest rose to clear the table.

I let them finger the leather leggings I wore over my rainbow-colored kirtle. The padding on the inside of the thighs made them giggle until I pointed out how chafed a rider might become without such extra padding. “Though,” I added, “no one but a true Royal needs extra padding.” A lesson at such a time is always a good idea with these doltish Lands boys.

Their mother smiled and nodded at my bit of moralizing, though her mother frowned.

“Linni could use it,” said the younger boy, coming back with a damp cloth to make a swipe at the table, clearing it of the few crumbs. There was a scramble at our feet as the house pets fought over the scraps.

“Stick-legs. Old bony behind and fore.” It was the middle boy, the one from the Hall. He and his sister had obviously never been close, though for him to speak so in front of me meant the name-calling was more ritual than real.

I cuffed him anyway, before his mother could speak to him. He looked at me through slotted eyes but made no sound, not even a whimper. “She is a Royal now, your sister, your better. You will not use such words about her again.” There was no arguing with my tone and he knew it.

Rising, I said, “I would sleep here tonight and tomorrow have a quiet word with Granny alone.”

There was a sudden small silence in the room; it chilled me even though the fire in the hearth chose that moment to flare into life, a small pocket of sap bursting in a piece of wood. Then the two women spoke at once.

“It will be so,” said the granny.

“I will make your bed up,” said the mother.

I took the slack-jawed middle boy to bed with me, more for punishment than amusement. I wanted to hurt him again for his name-calling and I was not gentle with him. He did not complain of it, indeed he did not have enough imagination or experience to do that. But even his presence in the bed did not warm me. I spent most of the night awake, trying to imagine in what way he and Gray were related. Only at the end did I realize that it was to the Lands girl Linni he was linked, not the Royal Gray. The Gray Wanderer was someone he would know only in story and in song. A strange sowing that must have been, so many years before, that had deposited that particular nestling in this particular nest.

Morning finally arrived and when I arose and parted the curtains there was no one left at home but the grandmother and me. The boys had all fled to their chores and their mother was at the Hall tidying the memoria for another day of grieving.

“Old woman,” I said.

She turned toward me, her face unreadable, and smoothed her hands down the sides of her worn gray skirts.

“She will be a great griever,” I said. “Perhaps the greatest our world has ever known.”

She nodded.

“And the Queen would have her begin now, crafting poems of grief. But…”

She nodded again. It was then that I saw the intelligence shining in her eyes and it became clear to me that Gray had sprung from a line of crafty Lands women, though the planting was of a Royal seed. I really needed to go no further, but truth impelled me. “The Queen has sent me to—”

She cut me short. “You will make them remember me?” she asked, her eyes suddenly luminous, her mouth opening wide.

“Grandmother, I will.”

“Then I will make up the attic room. It has not been given a shaking since the departure of our Grieven One.” She turned and left me to stare into the fire. I heard her footsteps going up the wooden treads and the creaking of the floorboards overhead. The morning fire was only bright embers, but the embers seemed haloed with rainbows. I held my hands out to the hearth but I felt no warmth.

I do not know how long I stared at the dying fire, but there was a sudden touch at my elbow. I jerked around. It was the old woman. She held out a Cup to me. Clearly it was a family treasure, cut from a single piece of black stone and expertly faceted, centuries old. I took it and it was a solid, balanced weight between my hands. I could feel the carvings imprinting on my palms as I rolled it between them.

“I will change now,” she said.

“I will fill the Cup,” I answered.

I sat for a long moment at the table before I began, thinking about Gray and how she had looked at me, her face calm, whispering, “For all that you have done…” Have done! All that I was now doing was for her, too, though it was the Queen who required it. Then the face of the Queen, avid, vulpine, full of eager plottings, replaced Gray’s in my mind.

I took a small silk purse from around my neck, and opened it, and was assailed at once by a vivid musky odor. I tipped the purse and three dark kernels of Lumin fell out.

Only the Queen uses the Lumin nut. One small kernel can cause nights of sensual phantoms and phantasmagoria. Two can provoke hysteria and nightmare. Three kernels, soaked in wine, lead to a short, dream-filled sleep and death. It is the quickest, most painless death we can give. That is why only the Queen is allowed the use of the kernels. There are two Lumin trees that grow in her courtyard. All others, save for some that may be in the deepest, most impenetrable part of the forest, have been destroyed.

I looked at the kernels and sighed. Someone like T’arremos might have been tempted to pocket the nuts and smother the old woman instead. But I had had my orders and, besides, she was Gray’s grandmother. She would not suffer at my hands.

I picked up the kernels and dropped them one by one into the Cup. The faintest
tink
was all I heard. Then I poured a bit of Queen’s wine from a flask I had carried with me. It would not do to send the old woman on her final journey with that common Lands swill. She would go in style; that was my very own idea.

“I am ready,” she said.

I turned to look at her. She was standing by the stairway dressed in a long dark gown that covered her from neck to ankles. Lands go covered to their deaths while we Royals are laid out with only a diaphanous silken sheet over us. I did not show any emotion, even by a blink, for I did not want to shame her.

I followed her silently up the stairs, or at least as silently as the stairs allowed, for they sighed and moaned under our combined weight, a curious accompaniment to the journey.

The upstairs room was windowless, the thatch old, and there was a distinctive smell of mold about. The darkness was illumined by a single candle and in that small light I could clearly see the bed, its posters ornately carved, the linen sparkling clean. A drawing of rood and orb hung over the bed.

Without any extra fuss, the old woman lay down and put her hands one atop another over her stomach. “I need not confess to you,” she said. “I spoke my final piece to my daughter last night.”

I nodded. They had both known. These Lands women breed true. Gray’s lines were firm.

I knelt down beside her and held out the Cup. “Come, take the Cup,” I said. “You will like the wine. It comes”—I hesitated, then chose the lie—“with the Queen’s blessing and with three kernels from her Lumin trees.”

She took the Cup without a moment’s hesitation and drained it as if eager for sleep. Then she handed it back.

As the drugged wine took effect, her eyes grew first bright, then fogged. Her mouth began to stretch in that rictus we call the Smile of the Dead. She whispered and the snatches I heard convinced me that her dreams had started, for she spoke of bright and holy things.

I began to rise and her hand shot out and held my arm. She half rose onto one elbow. “You will make them remember me?”

“I will.”

“May your lines of grieving be long,” she said, her voice graveled and slow. She lay back and closed her eyes.

“May your time of dying be short,” I answered and sank down by her side again. I stayed there until she stopped breathing. Then I put two funerary gems on her eyelids, another gift from the Queen, and left.

I had planned to stop only briefly at the Hall of Grief, long enough to tell Gray’s mother about her mother’s death, touch the boys, and be gone. But when Gray’s mother saw me, her eyes met mine for a minute, then slid away as if she did not want to know the truth. She brought the back of her hand to her mouth. I wondered that she was so moved; she had always been fighting with the old woman.

Then she turned and whispered something to the older and younger of the boys. They left the Hall at once, to go home to put their grandmother’s husk out.

I knew then I had to honor the old woman’s dying request. I stepped to Gray’s mother’s side. “Granny’s time of dying was short,” I said.

She nodded, still not looking at me.

“I would grieve for her,” I said.

Still she seemed not to understand.

“I would remain for the Seven and grieve for her,” I said. “I do it waiving payment, and for the respect I feel.”

Mutely she accepted.

“Send this boy”—I fingered his shoulder hard—“to L’Lal’dome to tell Gray…Linni…that her grandmother is dead. Tell her that there was no pain, that there were bright dreams and an easy sleep in the end. Tell her…that I grieve with her.”

The boy left at once. I lent him the white horse and I understand he rode it as if born to the saddle. I had not expected that. Rather, I thought he would fall often and probably lose the horse, and have to limp into the city to deliver his message. But he clung to the saddle like a bellywort burr. It was his single talent.

I do not think Gray’s mother spoke to me the entire time. Without her own mother to argue with, she seemed tongueless. But I called many mourners to the old woman’s lines; she was well and truly grieved. I think her daughter had some satisfaction in that.

By the end of the Seven the boy had returned with the horse and I rode it home. He did not talk of the great city; I did not ask. But I saw the longing for it in his eyes. He would be jealous of his sister from now on. She would be Stick-legs to him no more.

All of L’Lal’dome was abuzz with Gray’s grieving when I arrived. She had written lyric after lyric, a wild flowering of grief. But if I thought to profit from her fame or get to touch her, I was wrong. Immediately after the Seven, she had been apprenticed to the Master Griever, the Queen’s Own, and no one but the Master and the Queen herself would be allowed to talk to her for that training year.

Then what happened in that year?

She lived and ate and slept in the House of Instruction, the small house that is in the inner courtyard of the Queen’s Apartments. That much I know. But the Master Grievers guard their secrets well. We are told only that the apprentices must learn the prime tales and the subsidiary tales as well. They must hold all the learning of the land comfortably in their mouths. There are three steps: Purity of Mouth, Purity of Mind, Purity of Heart. But of these, I know only the names and not what they mean.

But you are the King.

But I am not the Queen. And I am not a Master Griever.

I saw Gray twice on the walkways and once in the Queen’s Hall of Grief when she helped prepare the table for the mourning of the Queen’s last living sister. But I was not allowed to speak to her, for she was at that moment being purified of all but the tales she had to learn. They call it “being reborn.” She was being reborn into a Master Griever.