Daughters of Ruin (20 page)

Cadis watched as her sister rummaged through the clothes of the dead woman, checking the lining of her vest and the heel of her boots with the practiced efficiency of an undertaker.

Who is she?
thought Cadis.

Little Iren who liked to embroider.

Quiet Iren who never fussed.

Cadis thought of a faraway evening, so many years ago, when they had just arrived in Meridan. Cadis lay in her chamber bed, ten times the size of her bed back at home, in a dark stone room, staring at the flickering light beneath her door and wondering if strange guards would steal inside to throttle her.

When the door finally opened, she clenched tight the dagger under her blanket. But no looming shadow filled the doorframe. Nothing did. It was as if the door had opened and closed. A mouse had stolen into her room. Cadis noticed only when her blanket rustled and Iren climbed in next to her.

For a long time, they lay without speaking, almost nose to nose. Cadis didn't know what to do with the knife. Or what to say. It had all been so new. They were strangers yet. Iren had been scolded already for acting sullen. Cadis was already the one Rhea hated most.

Iren stared at her for what seemed like half the night. When she spoke, Cadis almost mistook it for a sigh.

“Are you scared?” she said.

Cousin Denarius had not raised a dormouse.

“No,” said Cadis. Her voice was loud. Anything above a whisper was like a scream. But Iren didn't wince. She didn't seem herself scared. She simply took the information in and considered it, like a thresher parsing through chaff.

After another interminable silence, she said, “Are you interested in being friends?”

Cadis had never met someone as peculiar as Iren. Back home, Jesper had become her friend after he flicked her ear really hard and she hit him in the face with a rotten peach.

“Okay,” said Cadis.

Iren nodded, but didn't seem happier to know it.

“Have you had a friend before?” she asked.

Cadis nodded. “Yes.”

“Good,” said Iren. “Then you'll know what to do.”

That seemed to conclude the subject as Iren settled herself into Cadis's pillow and closed her eyes.

Cadis stared at the peculiar girl from Corent. She seemed like an entirely different creature. After a while Iren broke the silence, when she whispered, “You can put that knife away. We're friends.”

Cadis didn't know how she had known, but she tucked the knife back under her mattress. For a long time she couldn't sleep with a stranger in her bed.

Eventually, she woke up with her friend curled up next to her.

And ever since, Cadis had been steering their relationship—reminding Iren when it might be appropriate to apologize, or seeking out her company when she buried herself too long in the archives.

She hadn't known quite the magnitude of the task she had accepted all those nights ago—to be friends with Iren.

As Cadis watched Iren outwit the king's spy, run her down, kill her, and immediately loot the body, she considered—for the first time since that night so long ago—that it had all been a calculated shadow play. That she had been used in the way that a puppeteer uses. Perhaps she had done it to avoid suspicion. That all those years of friendship were no different than a terra-cotta mask, a costume Iren could put on to seem the happy child, the docile princess, the queen with kitten teeth.

Maybe Cadis was as naive as they believed.

They rode in silence after that. Iren seemed as content as an engorged mantis, while Cadis wondered if Iren even noticed that Cadis was no longer putting forth the effort to speak with her.

With every mile, at every stop to rest, Cadis felt a mounting agitation that perhaps that night Iren would steal upon her in the darkness and kill her in her sleep.

A full half day later Iren slowed her horse to come alongside Cadis and said, “I can tell you're mad at me, because you've spoken very little, and haven't sung anything either.”

“I'm not mad,” said Cadis. She refused to be read like a broadside.

“I can also tell you're mad because your tone is . . . curt. You're not usually curt.”

“I'm not curt,” said Cadis.

“You're also being contrary.”

“How
else
would I disagree with you?”

“You usually avoid confrontation. You charm the situation. You're not charming, so you must be mad.”

“You want me to charm you?”

Iren paused. She looked at the passing countryside. “Yes,” she said finally.

“Ha! I'd have an easier go of it with a rootsnake.”

Cadis laughed to herself, but it was the sort of laugh that betrayed—even more—that she was uncomfortable.

When Cadis looked at Iren a few moments later, she perceived in her silence, in the slight bend of her shoulders, in the way she squinted straight ahead at her horse's mane, that she was nearly ready to burst into tears.

Cadis sighed. “Oh, come on. I didn't mean that
you're
a rootsnake.”

It had the opposite effect. Iren's eye glimmered. She would hold them back, but barely.

The road to Findain was beautiful this time of year.

The birds had no sense of wars or betrayal.

Iren tightened her composure once again and said, “Do you think I would harm my friend?”

“I spoke out of anger. You were right. I was angry. I don't think you're a rootsnake.”

“I don't mind that you called me a rootsnake,” said Iren. She spurred her horse back into a canter. “I mind that your dagger's unclasped.”

The Findish playwright Jesiré Jesperdotter—for whom Jesper had been named—would have described the journey thus:

They rode and rode and rode and rode

Across the dale and under hill

The wheel of days and nights unslowed

Through keep and cloister, farm and mill

From Meridan to Findain's shore

A queen returned as ne'er before

Riding at her heels a store

Of rumors, rebels, raids, and war.

And so they arrived at the land gate of Findain's capital city, squeezed between the peddlers and returning caravans at noon hour of a sweltering early summer.

“They're certainly . . . boisterous,” said Iren, as a swarm of children surrounded their horses to beg and hawk and busk and cajole.

Cadis found she had forgotten such details as the smell of ripe fruit mixed with sweaty mules. The way in which old women winked to one another and the solicitous nod of the old men, a sort of rocking back and forth—as if the chin was a boat on the water—were distant memories to her. She had forgotten the murmur of the sea.

As they rode into the harbor and watched the fleets of merchant ships compete with the facing city for an audience, Cadis felt as much an outsider as Iren.

Jesper had tried to keep her informed of the constant ebb and flow of businesses that swept entire districts in and out of majority. He had mentioned the new amphitheater that towered above Cheapside, where the old fairgrounds used to be. And he had mentioned that the open-air market had been roofed, but he didn't mention the color—was it orange on purpose?

On the whole, he had done his best. Cousin Denarius had tried to keep her close by sending her transcripts of the broadside news reports—that told her all the latest market gossip and show times to theater she couldn't attend.

But neither could tell her the true happenings in the guildhalls for fear that Magister Hiram would steal the information. And none of it could have prepared her for the shock of returning.

“It's so small,” she whispered to herself when they passed the rusted roof of the market. She had remembered it as a massive labyrinth to run through.

The streets were dirt in places.

No one made way for their horses.

The children didn't fear the guards, and the guards smiled at customers as they held the doors open to the shops.

Cadis imagined every sight from Iren's point of view and cringed a little. “Provincial” was the word that leaped to mind. “Provincial” and “frantic.”

All around, the noise of commerce had a tense undertone that Cadis had never heard before. Hawkers seemed to press their wares with a desperate manner. Shopkeepers stuck to their negotiated sums, even past the usual friendly haggling.

“Is it really so bad?” said Cadis.

“What?” said Iren.

“The market. Commerce. It seems depressed. Jesper said the trade agreements with Meridan were crippling, but I didn't expect this.”

“This?” said Iren. “You mean the bustling harbor full of goods?”

“No, but you don't understand. When I was a child, the traders were like dukes. You could find an elephant with diamond-studded ears if you wanted, fruits like you'd never seen, and some you did, but never so big or so sweet. I once saw a ship sail into the harbor with so much jade and silk and ambergris in its belly that it dredged the bottom.”

“You remember with advantages,” said Iren.

“What does that mean?”

“You were little.”

“Just look—the stalls sell basic goods. There's no joy. People pay in copper.”

Cadis sighed. The differences were enormous to her but likely indistinct to Iren, who had no use for the great theater of the marketplace. Iren saw only a great hubbub of people and animals, all shouting at once. To Cadis, the chorus was out of tune.

“Cadis? Oh, dear gods, Cadis! Is that you?”

They both turned toward the voice. Cadis nearly fell from her horse.

Iren said, “Whoa.”

In the fourth cycle of
The Bones of Pelgard
symphony opera, the famed composer PilanPilan expresses the entrance of the legendary hero Khartik with an odd instrument. Not the lute, as he might have done if Khartik were a knavish flouncer on the stage. And not a dendo drum, as he would if Khartik were a gallant warrior. The genius PilanPilan signals the entrance of Khartik with a deep sultry tremor on the bass harp—a bawdy sound as the infamous rake enters the stage—and does as the liner notes specify in every performance of the symphony: he looks every woman in the audience in the eye with a hungry stare, as if she alone were his beloved Lia.

The casting for the part of Khartik was news for the broadsides. The role was more symbol than man—heat and youth and desire. Sex, even as it might live in the dreams of a virgin. A young man of endless appetite for Lia—lost Lia, whose witch mother hexed her into a lake flower and whose appearance magically shone onto the face of every woman Khartik met. This was the role that drove the directors of Findish theater companies to drink.

When Cadis turned and saw Jesper Terzi in the market square, a bass harp seemed to play from somewhere deep inside her, and she thought the directors must have been throwing courtesans through his windows.

As he approached with a retinue Cadis had not yet even recognized, Iren leaned over and whispered, “Is he the one I met three years ago?”