The Gantean (Tales of Blood & Light Book 1) (19 page)

T
here
I was
, in the High City, less than a league’s walk from the Palace. Was my necklace still sitting on the opalescent ground of the pillar garden where I had lost it—and so much more—or had Costas gone back to retrieve it? Even if I somehow recovered the necklace, which at the moment seemed an unlikely proposition, where would I find the Cedna? Twice I’d been within reach of her. Twice I’d failed to execute the task Nautien had entrusted to me.
What kind of Gantean was I?
Self-loathing kept me awake, night after night.

Despite the lush bed with its down-filled mattress, Tiriq could not rest beside me. I attributed his distress to his missing sister. How I worried over her—did she thrash and fuss this way as well, wherever she was with Atanurat and the others? Would Amethyst take my Tianiq in her arms to offer her a milk-mother’s comfort? Would they find a way to feed her without my breasts? Would Miki find the others and tell them how I could be found? Did I deserve any rescue?

No wonder I could get no rest. Guilt and unanswerable questions plagued my every thought.

I waited for Costas’s return like a prisoner for a sentence. One afternoon melancholy bells rang out over the City. I sat in the front parlor, playing on the thick carpet with Tiriq. He had begun to gain greater skill in moving on his own, able to roll from back to belly and then push himself up, looking around the finely furnished world of his father’s secret house with quiet curiosity.

The bells’ chiming went on and on.

“What is it?” I finally asked the guard stationed on the parlor door. They never left me alone, the Dragonnaires. Even at night, sentries lurked at the bedroom door and below the window. I knew, because I’d looked, trying to assess if I could manage a climb from the third floor with Tiriq in his carrier.

The Dragonnaire bowed stiffly. “Queen Jhalassa passed on this morning, my lady. The bells of Amatos ring for her.”

“She’s dead?”

“Yes, and the king’s health is said to be precarious. His wife’s death has sent him into a downward spiral. One can only hope Prince Costas arrives back here soon.”

The ung-aneraq that stretched between Costas and me still felt as vital as living flesh. This morning I had risen with it a hot, scratching presence inside my body. I knew, but did not say, that Costas must have arrived already.

I plucked Tiriq from the ground and nuzzled my face into his neck, inhaling his fresh, perfect scent. How would his father react to him? I did not have enough experience with Costas to know. My headlong rush into Costas’s arms that evening in the opal garden now struck me as beyond foolish. What a rash idiot I had been! Had Costas considered that mating led to children, and that children posed a responsibility to their fathers? I certainly had not, not then.

A cloud of confusion had shaded my life since that terrible spring day in Gante. My life on the island had been simple—the rules as sharp and clear as glass. This sayantaq life had no such structure, no straight lines to follow, no edges.

The ung-aneraq chafed. I was torn in two directions. Despite my fear of him, I wanted to see Costas again. He could so easily relieve many of my anxieties; he might reunite me with Nautien’s amulet. I hoped that he would look after Tiriq with a sayantaq father’s care, and that he could help me find Tianiq.

“Tianiq,” I whispered against Tiriq’s bronze skin, so like his father’s. I carried the memory of my girl like a precious jewel in the box of my heart, despite the fact that our bloodcord had been severed. The Iksraqtaq chunk of my soul did not mind giving her up, but the sayantaq part wanted her back and would give up anything but Tiriq to find her.

The parlor door flew open, surprising both me and my Dragonnaire guard, who dropped into a fighter’s crouch on instinct.

“Out,” Costas snapped, waving at the guard. “I want privacy.”

“Your Highness.” The guard’s eyes widened as he moved to obey, bowing, and closing the door behind him.

“Tiriq. That’s an unusual name,” Costas said. His gaze ran over me with flaying intensity. In two strides he stood at my side. He pushed the black hair from Tiriq’s eyes and examined his face, frowning all the while.

Tiriq screeched and leaned precariously in my grip, batting at Costas’s face. “Ti-ti-a-ni!” he cried in the warning pitches of a frenzy.

“Tiriq, no!” He grabbed Costas’s jacket in both hands and nearly tumbled from my grasp as he continued to scream.

“What is wrong with him?” Costas demanded. “Is it permanent?”

“Ti-ti,” Tiriq whimpered, reaching towards Costas even as I shifted us away. I was flummoxed. Tiriq had never given such a display before. I hadn’t even known he could nearly form words.

“It’s—”

“Prince Costas! Prince Costas!” A shout rang out beyond the door.

Costas whirled, scowling, and stalked over to open the door again. “Did I not just ask for some privacy?”

My Galatien Guard bowed. Another man in Galatien livery, breathing hard, stood beside him. “An urgent report,” the newcomer said. “It’s your father. He—he’s passed, Your Majesty.” The messenger gave Costas the address of the king and could not lift his gaze from the fine carpet.

Costas’s face hardened. He covered his eyes with one hand, as though to hide the stricken, fearful glint in them.

“Where’s Adrastos?” he whispered.

“Your brother is safe at the Palace, under guard, Your Majesty,” the messenger said.

Costas’s hand dropped from his face, and our gazes caught. I’d never seen a person in more need of comfort. I settled Tiriq on my hip and hurried to Costas’s side. I lifted his fallen hand and squeezed.

“I’ll return as soon as I can,” he murmured. “Tonight, at the latest. Leila, don’t—”

He broke off and retracted his hand from my grip.

Tiriq leaned quietly against my side now, twining his hands around my braids in his favorite pastime of pulling my hair.

Costas gave him a soft smile. “He’s like me,” he said, brushing a hand over Tiriq’s cheek.

“Your Majesty,” the messenger said with tugging urgency. “The Council awaits your presence at the Palace.”

Costas gave a curt bow, sighed, and departed.

I
sat
up in the townhouse parlor for hours, my insides twisting with anticipation. Night fell, but still Costas did not come. I finally fell asleep—a deep, restful sleep the likes of which I had not enjoyed since leaving Gante—with Tiriq in my arms.

The sorrowful Bells of Amatos woke me in the morning, ringing out the announcement of Mydon Galatien’s death. On and on, they tolled, longer and sadder than their song for Jhalassa.

I rose, gathered still-groggy Tiriq up from the divan, and opened the parlor door. A new guard stood at attention beyond it, of course. Even with Costas’s return, I would not lose these shadows.

“I’m going to the kitchen to break my fast,” I told him.

He nodded and dogged my steps along the hall.

Voices rang out from the kitchen where two guards sat eating their own morning meal.

“Costas has ordered that the mages strengthen the barrier further to give him time to gather his troops and solidify his alliances,” the first was saying. “Houses Powdin and Powdon are sending us additional troops, and Amar’s navy prepares to battle Ricknagel in the Parting Sea.”

My presence didn’t halt the conversation. “One doesn’t like to speak ill of the dead, but at least Costas is taking more action to protect Galantia than Mydon did,” he said.

The guards kept the kitchen stocked with fresh food, Lethemian fruits and the clotted cream that was my favorite breakfast. I doled out portions for myself and Tiriq as the men continued their talk.

“The entire High City is going on a rationing plan. With magical barriers in place all around us, Galantia will be cut off from overland trade routes. Galantia will depend entirely on the sea and the waterways for rations once our supplies run low.”

This last piece of news made me nervous. No one’s navy ruled the seas, and Allian’s rumors had said the Cedna was allied with Xander Ricknagel. I knew too well the power she commanded over the waters.

As if noticing me for the first time, a guard at the kitchen table rose and held out an envelope. “My lady, a missive for you from the king.”

I took the note with a quivering hand, boosted Tiriq on my hip, and hurried up to my bedroom to read.

What was I to make of such a letter? Behind the polite, gracious words, a leashed anger seethed. I threw the paper on the small writing desk in the bedroom and stared out the window. Tiriq lay asleep on the bed. Not for the first time, I considered the drop from the window.

T
he Dragonnaires
and I walked to the Temple of Amatos behind a group of students from the Conservatoire, all in their stark white mages’ robes. For anonymity I wore a veil, one of the ones Allian had brought, though I wore my hair unbound beneath it in the fashion of Gantean ritual. I did not know what to expect from a Lethemian ceremony for the dead. Our practice in Gante was very specific, and involved both magic and blood.

Along with the rest of the crowd I trampled chrysanthemum blossoms that had been strewn everywhere on the Temple Road. Tiriq rode Gantean-style, strapped to my back, with a wide strip of fabric from another veil.

Costas stood at the entry to the Temple beside a marble statue of the god. He held his brother’s hand. Young Adrastos’s face looked tear-streaked, but Costas appeared composed, though stern. His eyes held a fire I had never seen there before.

A priest gave a short speech, while six masked figures in black robes emerged from the Temple and lifted the large urn at that contained the royal couple’s ashes. Lethemians burned their dead. I wondered why, those centuries ago when the pillars had been taken from Gante, the knowledge of the need to offer blood in exchange for magic had failed to travel with them? Burning the dead struck me as a terrible waste when I could feel the hungry pulse of the six crystal pillars so nearby. What a different world we would live in if the sayantaq had learned to observe this most basic principle of magic: all magic stoked an insatiable hunger, and that the food it craved was bloodlight.

My gaze found Costas; he stared back at me fiercely. Temple acolytes threw more yellow petals everywhere.

The door to the Temple of Amatos slammed closed behind the acolytes and the urn. I shivered; Tiriq cooed from my back.

One thing was clear to me from observing this perfunctory ceremony. The Lethemians knew or cared little for making payments for their magic. What the Elders had always said of them was true. That meant the task that Nautien had given me so long ago was all the more important. I had to find my necklace, and I had to find the Cedna. Sooner, rather than later.

The afternoon had spun into dusk, and the crowd on the Temple Way dispersed. Many people carried a lit candle as they departed, for the Lethemians honored their deceased king by burning neither gas nor magelight for the night after his funeral. Tiriq had fallen asleep in his sling on my back.

My Dragonnaire guards made no move to return to the townhouse. They stood in formation around me, in such an obviously soldierly manner that I worried someone would wonder who it was that needed such an entourage.

Costas, flanked by a mage in white and his young brother, followed by his own cohort of four Dragonnaires, stepped down the Temple stairs and headed towards me. As he closed in on, I could almost feel the world narrowing around me, too.

“Come,” he said to my Dragonnaire guards. “We’ll all proceed to the Palace.”

W
e
passed
beneath the opal pillar, which thrummed with magic more furiously than ever, and the mage and Adrastos Galatien departed. After walking through the Palace’s western gate, we began shedding the Dragonnaires, too, until Costas and I stood alone at the bottom of the western wing’s staircase. Candles glowed in alcoves, and Costas plucked one free and used his free hand to guide me onwards.

He hurried through corridors until we came to another staircase—one I had not seen in my brief time at the Palace before. “I’ve arranged rooms and a nurse for Tiriq,” he said as we climbed the stairs.

“He doesn’t need a nurse,” I said. “He has me.”

“I was told Ganteans had no such maternal sentiment,” Costas said as he gestured to a door in the hall. I opened it. “And while I’m glad you’ve rejected that unnatural habit of your people, you must understand that a royal child, bastard or no, requires a nurse. Not to mention bodyguards. He must be protected and cared for.”

I liked the sound of that. I nodded. Perhaps if Tiriq could be settled for the night I would have the opportunity to ask Costas about my necklace, amongst other matters.

As we stepped through the door, Costas nodded at two Dragonnaires who stood posted on the entry. “Felix, Marq,” he said. “This is my son.” He lifted Tiriq from the makeshift carrier I had made and displayed him, proudly, to the Dragonnaires.

“Myriah Lentian will serve as Tiriq’s nurse. She was my brother’s nurse when he was young.” I gathered that he spoke to reassure me. Costas handed my boy to a woman in a grey dress who emerged from the room’s shadows. She smiled as she wrapped Tiriq in her arms. A purely sayantaq jealousy lurched through me when Tiriq opened his eyes and smiled back.

“What a handsome boy,” the nurse murmured. “A perfect boy. Why, look at him. He’s the image of his father.”

Costas appeared to grow an inch taller—not that the man needed to take up more space. He took my arm and nodded to this collection of people he had gathered to look after his son. “We will return for him in the morning,” he said.

He drew me from the room, and I cast one look over my shoulder. I knew I should not fret, but I had never been separated from Tiriq. The nurse stood, rocking him in her arms. He gurgled happily, and I felt foolish. Had we been in Gante, I might have given him up to another woman’s care long ago. I could not cry like a sayantaq fool.

I followed in Costas’s wake farther down the hall. As if he could read the misery in my silence, he curled his arm over my shoulder and pulled me against his side. “The boy will be fine, Leila,” he said. “Look, we’ll only be two doors down from him.” He pushed through a heavy, ancient-looking door twice the size of all the others in the hall. “Here we are. The black star pillar garden.”

Where the opal garden had been all lightness and easy bliss, this one, dark and glittering with an ominous sparkle, succored the aching residue of death. I understood why he wanted to come here. I even understood what he wanted of me. Some slight comprehension of sayantaq death rituals dawned on me. Where Ganteans would release the blood of the dead to appease the Hinge and mourn the dead, the Lethemians came together in the mating act. How that served to redress the balance—what we Ganteans called tunixajiq—I could not say.

The garden’s black walls beat like a heart.

The heavy door fell closed behind us. Costas edged his fingers down the front of my dress, pulling.
Gung, gung, gung
. My own heart pulsed against his fingers, matching the steady toll of the garden walls.

My hands acted of their own accord, wrapping around Costas’s back, finding the edges of his hair, the skin of his neck, the collar of his shirt.

“Now,” he whispered, a dark desperation in his voice. Was it loneliness? Fear? Emotions were not my strong suit—I’d grown up learning only how to hide them. “Do not deny me. I can’t be alone tonight. Don’t ask it of me. I have already lost too much. I cannot lose you, too, Leila.”

“Yes,” I breathed, “Yes.” He had no release but this. This was how the Lethemians took the edge off the Hinge’s demands. I did not understand it, but I felt the magic of it.

He pushed my dress from my shoulders. “I’ve never liked this place,” Costas said. “But it so perfectly shows the outward tenor of my feelings tonight.” His hands paused on the ridges of thickened skin from Oruscani’s magic lash.

“Gods!” he said. “What happened? Who did this to you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Tell me. Who did this? How?”

“It is nothing. My brother already sliced the culprit’s throat.”

“Your brother? That murderous boy Allian told me about? The one who killed my mage, Oruscani?”

I pulled back so he could not feel the freshly healed wounds. “Oruscani gave me the lashing. Miki only sought to stop him from hurting me.”

“As any brother would,” Costas said, drawing me close again. “I wish I could meet him, your brother. Allian said he ran off.”

“We didn’t know what Allian meant to do to him for killing the mage. Nor what he planned for me and Tiriq, either. We felt like prisoners.”

Costas held me almost tenderly. “None of my men would ever hurt you, Leila. They guard you only to keep you safe. You will never suffer again.”

I doubted this promise, but I did not doubt the sincerity of his kisses.

Like the opal garden, this one had no ceiling. A sickle moon gleamed down on us like a mageglass knife. Costas took me, gently at first, as though he feared breaking me. Soon we lost ourselves in a silent frenzy of need as dark as the night sky.

Our ung-aneraq swelled with bloodlight in a thick, throbbing magic.

Afterwards a languor fell over us both. The black garden walls hummed us into an oblivion we both needed.

Traces of dawn left sunlit gashes across the gleaming black floor of the garden. I lay tangled in my own clothing and Costas’s. He curled around me, his face nestled in my hair. His body radiated warmth, so I pressed back into him instead of rising.

My movement woke him. “Leila?” He turned me to face him and caught my wrists. “You never came,” he said in a deadly flat voice. All magic and tenderness had fled with the dawn. “You never came to the Pavilions as I told you to. Gods! The anxiety you gave me! I
worried
.” He said this as if I had burdened him greatly. So this would be our accounting: he would reprimand me; I would explain myself. “I thought you were different from all these other women at court,” he said, almost petulantly. “I thought you cared for me—the man, not the image. Jaasir warned me you were as cold as any Gantean, but I didn’t believe him. Yet you never came, you stayed away. Why?”

My entire life had been about the cold denial of needs. Ganteans learned to need as little as possible; satisfactions were so unlikely. We did not expect ease or pleasure or love.
Flow like water
, my clan’s motto had gone.
Need nothing, hold nothing. You will suffer less.
So much of our lives were shaped around the prevention of suffering, whereas here in Lethemia, they actively pursued pleasure. Two different worlds.

How to make him understand? “You were getting married, Costas. I did not wish to watch it, nor to be an anchor upon the bind you would make with her. She was the right kind of bride for you. I thought I would be safer on my own. I was wanted and hunted—by your father, by the Entila family. It was better that I disappear.”

“But not forever!” he expelled with a sharp breath. “I meant to help you hide, somewhere safe! And you never told me about my own son! I can’t—I can’t even express how furious I was when Allian told me—”

“Not only a son,” I interrupted.

He finished lacing his breeches and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“There were two. Tiriq and Tianiq.”

He grabbed my wrists again, pulling me to my feet. Bruises bloomed beneath his fierce grip. “Damned Amatos! There were two children? Twins?”

I nodded and repeated their names. “Tiriq and Tianiq.” I liked to say Tianiq’s name. It brought her closer to my heart.

“Where in the name of Amassis is the other one?” Costas cried, releasing me.

Shameful tears again filled my eyes. “I lost her when our ship sank.”

“What! What ship? What do you mean, lost? How do you lose a child? You mean she died?” He grabbed me again and shook me.

I took a deep breath. “No, she’s not dead. We were caught in a storm in the Parting Sea. One of the men got her on an escape boat—but we were separated—”

“Gods.” He let me go and sank onto a nearby stone bench, resting his head in his hands. “Gods. It’s too much. I can’t—I can’t absorb it. My coronation is in four hours.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” I soothed, sitting down beside him. “I hadn’t planned to tell you about her at all.”

“You were never planning to tell me about
my own child
?” He flew off the seat, pacing.

“I didn’t know how.” I let my hands fall onto my bare legs. He stared at me.

“What are we going to do?” he said, alarm written on his face. “We aren’t married. My son isn’t legitimate. Galatiens don’t have bastards. They never have. They cause too much trouble.”

“Bastard?” The Lethemian word had no translation in Gantean, but even so I knew what it meant; the southerners scorned children born outside of the marriage bond. But Costas and I were strung together by the deepest bond that could connect two people—the ung-aneraq. Surely that counted for something in this reckoning?

“Not once,” Costas bit out. “Not once in history. If a Galatien sired a bastard, it was cast out before it was ever born. I will not be the first. If you had come to the Pavilions as I directed this never would have happened. Dammit!” He paced the garden in quick, angry strides.

Was he threatening the children?
I crossed my arms over my waist as though I still carried them within my body and could protect them. “Ganteans don’t murder their children,” I said stiffly. “Not even when they are but specks in the womb.”

Costas shoved his hands through his hair, frowning and distant. In that moment I actually feared him—not for myself, but for Tiriq. I scrambled to my feet and turned for the garden door. I needed to get back to my boy.

In half a heartbeat Costas had me by the shoulders, wrapped in an embrace that brooked no argument. One arm held me firm while he smoothed my tangled hair with the other. “Be still,” he murmured. “Just—just wait, Leila. You can’t go haring off every time you get frightened. Let me think, love.”

My upset rose, bile in my throat. Only for Tiriq’s sake could I speak. For the first time since the shipwreck, I was glad Tianiq was not with me. She was safer with Atanurat. “I won’t let you hurt him.”

Costas continued to stroke my hair, my cheek, my jaw, my throat. “I have no intention of hurting him. There’s only one solution, Leila. We must marry—as soon as possible. There isn’t any other choice, my love,” he whispered. “I will not murder children already born, but I will have no bastards, either. It is the only solution. Come. Come to me again.” He pulled me back into the garden, using his strength to ease me to my knees.

“We cannot go on like this,” I said. “We’ll make a ruin of each other.”

Costas laughed. “As though we haven’t already?” He remained behind me, one arm pinning me in place as he pushed our clothing out of the way. He took me again, urgently, no longer afraid of hurting me. He kept me kneeling, flayed open, helpless to the cords that bound us together.

My body would betray me a thousand times for him.

He only let me go when I pleaded that I needed to check on Tiriq. I raced back down the hall to the room where we had left him the night before. I found him ensconced in the nurse’s arms, but fussing. No doubt he wanted to eat.

“My lady,” she said, standing and handing him to me.

“Did he cry all night?” Since losing Tianiq, Tiriq had never slept well.

She hesitated before speaking. “He isn’t the most restful baby I’ve ever nursed.”

I snugged Tiriq closer against me, stroking his head. I murmured to him in Gantean, “You miss her, I know. We both miss her, and wherever she is, she misses us. But she has Amethyst and Pamiuq and Lymbok to look after her. She has Atanurat to keep her safe. We’ll get her back, Sweet Star. We’ll get her back. They’ll take the best care of her.” In some ways Tianiq was safer than Tiriq. Here in the Palace we were surrounded by politics—Costas said he would marry me, and this would certainly make Tiriq’s position more secure, but what of the councilors who had agreed with Mydon that I was a sorceress, who believed I had bewitched Costas at the Brokering? They would not accept me—or my son—so easily.

The nurse bowed and took her leave, but the Dragonnaires remained in position around the nursery door.

I sat with Tiriq on a window seat that overlooked green gardens with a hedge maze and let him nurse, murmuring to him in Gantean all the while.

Footsteps woke me from my reverie.

“You make quite a picture.” Costas stood before me, wearing a stiff cloak that fell past his ankles and must have weighed at least as much as I did. He held a bundle that looked like a gilded cloud. “I know I look ridiculous. I do not intend to suffer alone.”

He threw the bundle onto the window seat beside me. A gown unfolded, the shoulders and hem stiff with gold embroidery. It was as fine a gown as anything I’d ever put on Ghilene Entila.

“Are you sure this is wise, Costas?”

He ignored my question. “And these are for Tiriq.”

How like Costas to consider Tiriq’s costume before he had even asked to hold him. I offered Tiriq, sleepy and content after feeding, to his father. Costas held him at an arm’s length, awkwardly.

“My son,” he said as they studied each other. Tiriq wore a solemn expression, as though he felt the edge of his father’s regard. “They say the first and last duty of a Lethemian king is to make an heir. I seem to have managed the task before I even began. What does his name mean?”

“In Gantean ritual Tiriq is the boy who made the world.”

“A Gantean name. I like it.” Of course he would. Costas liked to push against the grain. “And the girl’s name again?” He let Tiriq settle into the crook of his forearm. Ever happy with sparkling things, Tiriq played with the gold chain on Costas’s chest.