Froi of the Exiles (20 page)

That night, Froi was allowed to attend dinner. Bestiano stared at him from where he sat at the head of the table, as though practising to be the King himself. Froi gave a polite wave of acknowledgement.

He was assigned a place sitting with a cluster of the women Quintana had referred to as the Aunts. Their heads were bent and they were speaking rapidly, furiously.

Suddenly Quintana was beside him.

‘I searched for you all day,’ she said, and he could see that she was back to her indignant self, all breathless and irritated.

‘I was avoiding you.’

The Princess Indignant seemed oblivious of any type of malice directed toward her. Sometimes it made him want to be even crueller. To punish her for doing nothing to stop herself from getting killed. Isaboe would have fought to survive.

‘You can sit on our right,’ she instructed. ’Aunt Mawfa will bore you senseless.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. The moment Aunt Mawfa speaks, everyone falls asleep. It has to do with the pitch of her voice.’

She nudged him. ‘Look at her shoes,’ she whispered, pointing under the table. Froi humoured her and ducked his head under. Lady Mawfa had plump little legs that barely touched the ground and a pair of silly pointy shoes with red bows.

Froi sat back up again. ‘She had them sent from Belegonia,’ Quintana said in a hushed tone. ‘They are said to have belonged to the first goddess who walked the earth.’

Froi looked under the table again and sat back up.

‘Not possible. I’ve been told that goddesses are a practical bunch,’ he said. ‘They’d never have tolerated the red bows.’

She covered her mouth, laughing. A truly ridiculous laugh, all snorts and giggles.

‘Quintana!’ Bestiano shouted out to her. Froi stiffened. The last thing he wanted was for Bestiano to drag her out of the hall. Froi looked at her and put a finger to his lips to quieten her.

‘Ask her something,’ Quintana whispered. ‘Ask her about the weather and you’ll see what we mean. When she speaks, no one listens. It’s why we’ve chosen to be like her. We don’t get into half as much trouble.’

He studied Quintana, waiting for the announcement that she had been jesting the whole time. That she was an ‘I’ and not a ‘we’. But she swung her eyes to the side and flicked her head towards Lady Mawfa and for a moment he wanted to laugh. He turned and politely asked Lady Mawfa about the weather.

Lady Mawfa responded in an indignant voice that was high-pitched. It was as hushed and dramatic as one reporting the enemy at the gates of the Citavita. The only part of Quintana missing was the squint.

‘… and it’s all suffering for my joints. Poor, poor me.’

Froi choked out a laugh, thinking of Quintana’s own dramatics when reporting on events.
Poor Lirah. Poor, poor Lirah
.

A moment later he felt her lips to his ears. ‘So have you fallen asleep yet?’

Although the Princess’s indignant tone had not changed, all of a sudden everything else seemed to.

Froi had no idea what lay beneath all the incessant chatter, but there was more to her than even the cold unsettling Quintana and the savage he had caught a glimpse of outside Arjuro’s window.

‘Have you?’ she asked again.

‘At about the time she spoke of the dew on her windowsill.’

Quintana covered her mouth again, snorting. Bestiano barked out her name, but Froi grabbed her hand and pulled it away. And there were those teeth, small and crooked in parts. Froi was slightly charmed, snorts and all.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he whispered, dragging her to her feet.

F
innikin was crouched on the rock of three wonders surrounded by the children of his mother’s village. They stared back at him, wide-eyed and full of awe, and he found himself swallowing a lump in his throat. This rock would always remind him of Balthazar: Lucian’s adored cousin, Finnikin’s beloved friend, Isaboe’s brother and saviour, and once the heir of Lumatere. But since the birth of his daughter, the rock also had Finnikin thinking of his mother.

When he had lived here as a child, he rarely imagined Bartolina. His mother had died giving birth to him and her spirit had failed to reveal itself to Finnikin, despite the fact that Aunt Celestina sensed her all the time and even Trevanion had mumbled about days when he felt her presence. But in these past years Finnikin had dreamt of his mother often, especially when he brought Jasmina with him to visit his people.

Aunt Celestina wept each time, embracing both Finnikin and Isaboe. ‘Thank you, my darlings. Thank you for returning to us the image of my beloved sister.’

Little Bartolina, Jasmina was called by the rock villagers. Of course, she loved the attention. He had noticed in her first attempts at speech she had referred to herself as Jasmina of Bartolina. Whenever she spoke the words, everyone would clap at the sweetness of her voice. So Jasmina of Bartolina would repeat them over and over again until Isaboe would smother her face with kisses. ‘Enough, my love,’ she would laugh.

Each time Finnikin returned to his rock village the elders would beg him to tell the children a story from the chronicles he had collected for the
Book of Lumatere
. Sometimes he’d tell them tales about the kingdoms beyond. If any good had come from the exile and entrapment of their people, it was that the world became bigger than Lumatere’s walls. One time, he told the children of a great waterfall in Sorel, other times he told them about the jungles of Yutlind Sud, or the bazaars of Belegonia.

‘Your Highness, Your Highness,’ they called out that day, their arms waving for his attention.

He pointed to a sweet little girl.

‘Is it true that our goddess of blood and tears carried the Flatlands to the Rock?’

There was a scoffing sound from the boy beside her, who Finnikin suspected was her brother.

‘You’re an idiot, Clarashin,’ the boy shouted at her.

‘Fa says the goddess carried them,’ she bellowed at the boy, grabbing his hair and yanking hard.

Finnikin stepped in and pulled the two apart, settling the girl beside him. She placed an arm around his shoulders, boldly staring out at her brother. Finnikin dared to look at Jasmina, who was sitting on the lap of a young cousin, squirming. He had noticed that every time one of the children embraced him or clutched at his hand, his daughter’s eyes would narrow. She wasn’t much for sharing, he had come to realise. On certain occasions, she grudgingly allowed Vestie to enjoy Trevanion’s affections, only because she believed that Vestie belonged to her, as well. Finnikin, as far as she was concerned, belonged to both Isaboe and Jasmina. But Isaboe was all hers. If there was one thing he and his daughter shared, it was the desire to be the only person in Isaboe’s life. He stood once more and stepped into the crowd of children, holding out his arms to her and she fell easily into them.

‘It’s one of my favourite stories,’ Finnikin told the children when he was settled again, Jasmina in his lap and Clarashin by his side. ‘Do you want to hear it?

There were shouts of ‘Yes please!’

Finnikin turned to Jasmina, who seemed most impressed by the shouting. ‘Do you want to hear it?’

She nodded solemnly and everyone laughed. He looked up and caught Isaboe’s smile. She was standing with the elders and Great-Aunt Celestina, who had earlier hinted that perhaps Jasmina could stay a night on the Rock alone when she was no longer fed at the breast. Isaboe saw that as a reprimand. Finnikin saw it as the right moment to walk away and not get involved.

‘Well, it’s a strange story, but the strangest of stories are the best to tell,’ he said. ‘And sometimes the saddest.

‘You see, quite some time ago, long before the gods walked the earth, there was a war in their world between two great gods. Many were slain or lost their homes and the realm of the gods was all but destroyed.

‘Some say it was the blood of one god and the tears of the other that formed the mouth of the Skuldenore River, and others say that a songbird lapped up a drop of those tears and blood, and sprinkled it on a piece of land to its south.’

‘Lumatere!’ they all shouted.

Finnikin shook his head. ‘Not for a very long time. For it was once a strange place, broken into four pieces, each one of them surrounded by vast bodies of water. There were the Mountains. The Forest. The Flatlands and …’ Finnikin feigned a frown. ‘What could I have possibly forgotten? I’m sure there were four.’

‘
The Rock
,’ the children shouted. ‘
The Rock
.’

‘Ah, of course. The Rock,’ he said, hitting a hand to his head. ‘How could I forget the Rock? Anyway, out of the soil of the Flatlands, where the songbird had sprinkled the blood and the tears of the gods, a girl grew from the earth and we now know her as the goddess of blood and tears. Sagrami and Lagrami.’

‘But they’re two people, not one,’ Clarashin retorted.

‘Well, that depends on what you want to believe,’ Finnikin said, looking up at Isaboe. Their decision to worship the Goddess complete in Lumatere had been met with hurt and fury. ‘But whether she is Lagrami or Sagrami or the goddess complete, no part of her is better than the other, nor is anyone who worships one better than the other.’

He looked out to the children. ‘Understood?’

They nodded solemnly.

‘Let’s get back to our young goddess,’ he said. ‘You see, she was very sad. Each night, while she slept with her head pressed into the very earth she had come from, it would whisper to her that once, long ago, it belonged to the Rock and Forest and the Mountain. So one day, the little goddess of blood and tears began to drag the Flatlands all the way to the Rock.’

Some of the children had heard the story before. Others looked at Finnikin in wonder. He nodded.

‘She was that strong?’ Clarashin’s brother asked.

Finnikin nodded. ‘But she did get help,’ he conceded. ‘Luckily, the river of blood and tears felt a strong kinship with the girl and allowed her to use the Flatlands as a barge to sail upon the river. But the little goddess of blood and tears was not satisfied. Because look what she saw,’ he said, pointing.

The children stood and on tiptoes they stared out as far as their eyes could see.

‘The Mountains?’ one asked.

Finnikin nodded. ‘The goddess had to find a way to join them, but it was not going to be as easy as before. The River was able to help again, but it was much harder with two parts of the land now. So she placed the Rock on her back, tied a rope around the Flatlands and dragged them both over her shoulder to the Mountains. It took days and months and years and more years and by the time she was finished, the girl was now a woman. She could have settled on the Mountain with her friend the River, and the Flatlands she had been born from, and the Rock she had come to love. But what of the Forest? The songbird would return to her over the years and tell the most magical stories about the Forest. About its beauty and power and how the ancient trees would whisper to the wind.

‘One day, the god who had wept the tears that had partly made the goddess was returning from another war in their realm, when he saw a kingdom in our land of such beauty and light. This time he wept and wept and wept from the sheer joy of it and that’s how the river of tears that began in Sarnak and flowed into Lumatere actually became long enough to run through the land of Skuldenore. Lumatere was so rich that the gods chose it as a place to live and it came to be that they walked the earth and left their mortal children behind to rule the world.’

‘I used to love that story,’ Isaboe murmured later that night, as they lay side by side in Aunt Celestina’s home. ‘There were times in exile I was so full of despair I thought I’d end my life from the sheer loneliness of it all. But then I’d think of the little goddess. If she could live by herself in this kingdom for all those years, so could I. If she could carry the kingdom on her back, I could too.’

And Isaboe did, Finnikin thought, gathering her to him.

‘Remember when Lucian, Balthazar and I would play-act the goddess’s voyage,’ he chuckled.

‘Yes, very amusing,’ she said. ‘At least Celie was always chosen to be the Rock and was fortunate enough to be carried on Lucian’s back. I always had to be the Flatlands, dragged along by my hair.’

‘And Balthazar would stand on a barge and pretend to be the river.’

He laughed again and he felt her eyes on him in the dark.

‘I do love it when you laugh, my love. I don’t hear it enough.’ There was sadness in her voice.

‘Do you hate living in the palace?’ she asked quietly.

Finnikin sighed. ‘You ask me that every time we’re up here,’ he said. ‘Have I ever given you reason to believe that I don’t enjoy my life with you?’

He expected her to laugh off his question, but she didn’t.

‘You go strangely rock-native when you’re here,’ she said instead. ‘There’s a rumbling in your voice and your shoulders don’t seem so stiff.’

‘And you go all barefoot and primitive when you’re up there in the mountains with your feral cousins,’ he said.

‘Do you hate living in the palace?’ she asked again.

His hand travelled up her nightdress, ‘Do you want to know the truth?’ he murmured, pressing a kiss to her mouth. ‘About what I was thinking today?’

‘No, I don’t think I do.’

‘Well, here it is. I was thinking how wonderful it would be if Jasmina and you and I lived in Lumatere all alone in the same way the goddess of blood and tears did.’

She laughed at that. ‘And your father? Wouldn’t you want him there, as well?’

He thought for a moment and sighed. ‘Yes, and my father.’

‘And you’d want Great-Aunt Celestina. And your father would want Beatriss, and Beatriss would want Vestie, and I would want
Yata
, who would want Lucian and all her sons and grandchildren. And in the end …’

‘In the end, things would be exactly as they are now,’ he said, his fingers lightly trailing against her skin. She shivered from his touch and he moved to cover her body with his.

‘Quietly,’ she murmured, knowing that being the leaders of their land meant they were never left completely alone. There was always someone outside their chamber guarding them. Over the years they had learnt the art of loving each other in silence. For some reason, tonight he resented the need to contain their sounds, but he captured her cry with his mouth on hers, felt the nails of her fingers sink deep into his flesh and gave thanks that there was no frailty in this Queen of his.