The Silences of Home (28 page)

Go inside
, he told himself—but he remembered how Alea and Lanara’s laughter had grated in his ears, how he had left them in the kitchen baking bread because their amusement had been as stifling as the silence of the upper floors. Lanara always seemed to be laughing these days, and reaching for his hand, kissing the back of his neck when she passed him. He woke to her every morning sliding her skin over his, taking him into her when he was still half-asleep. All things he had missed and yearned for, since their arrival in Fane, and yet he ached with wrongness, with fear and pain that would not dissipate.
She is happy because she will leave soon, on the ship with the Queen. She will leave and I will not, and she is happy
. He clutched his sodden cloak around him and shuddered, and sank into the cold as if it would numb the other ache in him.

The voices were difficult to hear at first, above the waves and the wind and the bell that was swinging, clanging its warning to whatever ships were sailing in the storm. Nellyn glanced toward the tower door. Perhaps Lanara and Alea were there, or Aldron, returned from laying stones on the path. One of the voices was certainly Aldron’s, though it was not coming from inside.

Nellyn rose from his stool and took several unsteady steps over to the part of balcony that overlooked the ledge. He peered through the slanting snow—thick enough to his right to obscure any view of ocean swells—and saw Aldron. He was standing where the path ended, shouting and waving his arms. The person who was with him was swathed in a cloak. Even from his height, and with blowing snow between them, Nellyn could see the cloak’s colours and the dark hair that curled out from beneath the hood. The Queen was about five paces away from Aldron. She turned her head briefly to look at the door and then called out to Aldron. He fell silent. Nellyn could not hear her words, but he saw Aldron’s face as he walked toward her. He was smiling—but Nellyn did not recognize this smile; it was new and strange, and intended only for Galha, who spoke two last words and glanced up over her shoulder and saw Nellyn. He did not move, not even when she lifted her hand to him, stepped over to the door and in; not even when Aldron followed her without an upward glance, or when Galha’s consort-scribe walked after them both. Only when Nellyn heard the front balcony door bang shut did he turn.

The Queen was alone. Nellyn looked past her and saw Malhan’s face in the round window that was set in the top of the door. He was inside, watching. He stayed there as Galha walked to stand beside Nellyn.

“The last time we met on a balcony,” she said, leaning close to his ear so that the wind would not scatter her voice, “the sun was shining. We were warm and comfortable. And now look at us.” His eyes were fixed on her hands, which were hidden by woolen gloves: green and blue, of course, speckled with gold. He remembered the wind that had torn at him above the endless sand and the heat-gauzed city. He remembered vines and water and music, and wine that had spilled.

“I do not like high places,” he said.

She nodded and gazed at the sea, which he imagined would be foaming and heaving. “Well, Nellyn,” she said at last, “you are the only one I have met in the last three months who has not mentioned the murder of my daughter.”

He looked into her eyes then, and saw how sleepless and sunken they were. She was hardly blinking, despite the driving snow. He said, “I have no words to give you, so I am quiet.”

Her brows rose up toward the edge of her hood. “What—no wise shonyn expressions to soothe me? No descriptions of your people’s death rituals to distract and educate me?” Her voice was hard and tremulous at the same time, as Lanara’s sometimes was—but this woman was not Lanara. Galha’s words were more than words, or perhaps less.

He shook his head and took a steadying breath. “No,” he said, and waited, not looking away from her face.

Her lips moved: a kind of smile, stiff because of the cold, or something else. “Thank you,” she said, and turned away from him as the door behind them slammed shut.

“My Queen!” Lanara cried. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you—I was in the larder. Do not linger outside; please come in—we have spiced herb water and fresh bread. . . .”

Alea glared down at the sitting cushion by her feet. Lanara had already sat, as had Nellyn. Alea put her hands beneath her belly and wondered how rude it would be if she stood in the Queen’s presence.

“Here—let me help you.” Alea looked up. Galha was beside her, offering her hand. Alea took it immediately, reflexively. Galha’s grip was firm but gentle. “I remember how ungainly I felt when I was carrying Ladhra,” she said as Alea sank down onto the cushion. “Lying, standing, sitting—nothing was comfortable. Will the babe come in the spring?”

“No,” Alea said. Her voice sounded very faint. “Not until early summer.” She saw Galha’s expression of surprise and looked away. She had had no intention of speaking to the Queen; she had willed herself to silence before stepping onto Nellyn and Lanara’s living floor. But now she
had
spoken, and about the baby—and Galha had mentioned her daughter, who had died. Alea flushed at her weakness, her pettiness, the clumsiness of her body.

She had never met the Queen before this moment. She had seen her at the prow of the enormous ship, and from time to time standing on the wharf watching the boats come down the river—but she had been a speck until now, a small, featureless blot of blue and green cloth and red-brown skin. Aldron, though, had seen much of her, ever since that first day, a month ago, when he had Told for her.

“What did you Tell?” Alea had demanded, and he had waved his hand at her and shrugged.

“Nothing much. A summer scene and some water—easy things, but they seemed to comfort her. She’s nearly as simple to please as the townsfolk.” But he had not met Alea’s gaze—not then, and not on the many occasions after, when he went down to the town to see Galha. He usually went with Lanara, but sometimes he slipped out alone. He would be gone for hours, most of a day. At first Alea told herself that he was merely laying stones for the path he had begun, but then he would return, pale and quiet and sick as he only ever was after a difficult Telling.

She said she worried about him. She begged him to stay at the tower. She hurled the yellow vase across the room and it shattered against the stairs. She demanded to know whether Galha was beautiful—and this question alone, among all the others that were equally ridiculous, made her cringe and long to swallow back the words until they were unsaid. He had not answered her, had walked back out of the tower, back down the half-finished path, back to the bright stone harbour house.

She looks sick. And old
. Alea thought this when she saw the Queen at last. A tall, slender, strong body, its lines visible once her cloak and outer tunic had been removed—but her face was sallow and drawn.
She is sick with grief, you heartless woman
, Alea told herself, though she could not quell her relief and her shame. And then Galha had smiled and held out her hand, and Alea had shrunk from her.

“As Lanara and Aldron already know,” the Queen said after she had helped Alea to sit, “my war fleet is nearly assembled.”

Alea looked at Aldron, who was sitting next to her. He did not meet her eyes. His attention was on Galha, of course, who was still standing while the rest of them sat like eager students at her feet—the rest of them except for the strange, silent man who had accompanied her and now stood beside the stairs.
If only we were in the writing room
, Alea thought,
she would look striking with the storm stretched out behind her. Or the lightroom, even: she would stand among the flames and the blinking glass pieces and we would prostrate ourselves before her brilliance. . . .

“Only a few more boats will come, and then we will be ready—but for one thing.”

Lanara said, “What thing is that?”

Alea could not stop her own words; they spun away from her like leaves falling in the autumn woods. “What—something Lanara doesn’t know about the Queen’s plans? Something perhaps even Aldron doesn’t know?” She laughed. She was a girl again, railing against her father or Old Aldira or Aliser, throwing her defiance at them all. “Even I can guess what this one more thing is: how can this great fleet sail forth when there are mountains of ice in the harbour?”

She heard the wind howling and rattling the shutters. As the minutes passed she thought that it was reaching within, sucking away her defiance, along with her voice. She stared down at her mound of belly—not a girl at all, and so far from woods and wagons.

“You are right,” Queen Galha finally said, as evenly as if there had been no outburst and no awkward pause. “The icemounts are the only obstacle to our departure. There is just enough room between them to allow small vessels into or out of the harbor. You will have been observing this from your tower, I’m sure. The largest ships have reached Fane from upriver. Two lie anchored in perilously rough seas by the northern cliffs. We cannot wait for the icemounts to retreat in the spring. My ships must sail now.”

“Well,” Lanara said, “perhaps Alea can tell us what should be done.”

Aldron gave a cry and leapt to his feet, and Alea laughed, though not the way she had earlier, and Lanara began to speak again. “Quiet, all of you!” Galha said, and they were, as quickly and clumsily as chastened children. Alea felt Aldron touch her shoulder then slide his hand down to lie against her belly. Their baby stirred and dragged a hand or foot to where his palm rested. He sucked in his breath and Alea smiled.

“It’s likely,” the Queen continued, “that Alea
could
tell us this—for the Alilan worship a flame goddess, do they not?”

Alea felt the wind again, this time beneath her skin. She had watched the icemounts every day. She loved their glancing, changing colours, their leaping, jagged, bubbled edges. They seemed to breathe—and they certainly spoke. She listened to them when she was alone, and she watched them dance, so slowly, so close to the freedom of the open sea. They danced. She had dreamed sometimes of Telling their shapes and hues and voices to her child. She closed her eyes so that she would not see the Queen when her next words came.

“I will come to you again tonight, since this is a high place with an excellent view. I will come here after the fires have been set, and I will watch the icemounts burn.”

Midnight. Clear sky, calm water. Queen Galha arrived at the signal tower in late afternoon. With her came the Sea Raider captive—for she desired him to witness her first conquest, that of the icemounts—and the fishperson who acts as his translator.

Lanara lifted her writing stick from the page. “The Sea Raider captive”: very detached, entirely descriptive; an amazing thing, since she tasted bile in her throat when she thought of him. She had seen the man-creature behind the Queen, approaching the tower door. It was the first time she had glimpsed him close up, for he had been confined to a cellar room at the Queenshouse since his removal from the ship. “He is unwell,” Galha had said, “so we must tend him carefully. We do not wish him to die before we reach his land.” He had walked to the door with his arm around the fishperson, who seemed to be bearing much of his weight. When she had finally looked into his face, Lanara saw that it was lined and cracked and oozing a clear thick liquid. She had felt the first welling of sickness then, imagining him tearing Ladhra from her horse, imagining more like him swarming through Luhr’s palace and streets. Lanara had been proud that she had not wanted to kill him—not any more. She understood the Queen now, understood that bitter hatred could also be patient.

The Queen had not spoken his name, though Lanara remembered it from her letter.
Leish
: a thin, weak name. She might say it to him someday, with spittle and scorn. For now she had merely looked at him as he looked at the floor. When the fishperson led him upstairs, Queen Galha had lingered with Lanara in the kitchen.

“Nara,” she had said, “I must speak with you alone”—and Lanara’s cheeks had flushed as they did now, remembering. She could not write of this conversation; it was a secret thing, intended for silence. “There is a change in me,” the Queen had murmured. “A change I have felt since I learned of Ladhra’s death and the Sea Raider attack on my city. I am growing, within. Something is growing—a heat, a light that gathers in my chest and throat.”

Lanara had stared at the hand the Queen had placed on her forearm. “Could it,” she had said, unwilling to reveal ignorance but almost certain already that she understood, “—could it be that what you feel is an ancient power?”

She had looked up and flushed again at Queen Galha’s smile. “I think that you are right. This force within me is still gathering, but already it shakes me to my bones. It can only be the mindpowers possessed by Sarhenna the First herself. She has chosen me as her true heir in my time of direst grief and need. With her gift I shall wound our enemies as they have wounded me.”

Mindpowers.
Lanara clutched her writing stick so tightly that it cracked.
Will they look like lightning called down from a cloudless sky? Or will they be invisible things, forces that cause confusion among the Sea Raiders? Whatever they are, I’ll write of them someday
,
after they’ve been seen and known. And I’ll write that she told me of them before she ever used them.

The Queen was on the high balcony now with the prisoner beside her, watching the fires below. Lanara reached for a new writing stick and set it lightly against the page in front of her. She wrote, revelling again in concentration and clarity:

In the afternoon, before the signal candles were lit, we watched small boats row out to the icemounts in the harbour. Deep narrow holes were hacked into the icemounts’ flanks and lit torches placed in them. Many of these torches died before the flames reached the ice; many others sputtered and caught. By dusk, most were alight. It was a marvellous sight: all the ships and boats lining the Sarhenna River, up past Fane’s western limit, bathed in the glow of the icemounts’ fires. And every fire was a different colour: blue-tinged or green or pink. Scarlet and gold. Whatever hue the ice had been became that of the flames. The Queen was well satisfied. I stood with her until I could no longer put off my duties. Aldron is with her now.

This will be my last log entry before the sea voyage.

“It’s horrible,” Alea said. Her voice was muffled, her forehead lying on her arms, which were propped on her belly.

She and Nellyn were in the kitchen. The casement shutters were closed, and the door, but still the terrible music reached them—piercing, cascading melodies that swelled together until one fell silent or another became a scattered wail that had no music in it.

Nellyn said, “Would it comfort you to see the fires? Perhaps then the sound—”

“No.” She raised her head, placed her knuckles on the cushioned bench beneath her. “The Alilan worship fire, but fires made of the earth, things that once lived and are now dead. Fires that bring life.” She thrust a strand of hair behind her ear. “Though what are these beliefs, to me? I am no one. I belong to no. . . .”

Nellyn walked over and stood by her. She cried almost soundlessly, though her body shuddered from her head to her heels, which drummed against the bench. He waited for a time, until she gasped and gripped his wrist. “Alea,” he said, “I will go and get Aldron.” She shook her head in short, snapping jerks, but when he drew his hand away and went to the staircase, she did not stop him. She did not even look up—just wept and traced circles on her belly.

Malhan, the prisoner and the fishperson were in the lightroom. Malhan nodded at Nellyn; or perhaps he had not nodded—it was difficult to tell. The chamber rippled with a light Nellyn knew: thirty-six candles that stood in a massive candelabra, their flames reflecting off a copper disk, and hundreds of hanging glass pieces. But in addition to this familiar glare were ribbons of blue, pink, scarlet, green, and Nellyn had to stand still for a moment before he made his way through the colours toward the people by the window.

When Nellyn reached them, the prisoner turned to him slowly. He was very tall, but stooped, as well. Nellyn looked at his body and his face and thought that he almost seemed old, like a wise one who would soon be rowed over to lie beneath the lynanyn trees. The icemounts’ fires stained his skin and the liquid that ran from it, pooling in its hollows like congealed tallow. Nellyn wondered what his voice would sound like, how it would say the name Leish, which Lanara had spat like a Queensfolk curse when she told it to him.

Nellyn wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He noticed that the fishperson was holding its scale-encrusted hand over its nose and mouth; the smell of burning fat, no doubt, which Nellyn now hardly noticed, as Drelha had predicted.

“Aldron?” he said, and Malhan angled his head toward the window. Nellyn peered through the brilliant glass and saw the Queen with Aldron beside her, standing on the highest balcony. Nellyn swallowed and walked over to the door he had never before passed through, and opened it, quickly before his legs could turn to water.

He pulled the door closed behind him and took a wobbling step toward Aldron, but neither he nor the Queen looked at him. Perhaps they had not heard him: the icemounts’ death songs were much louder here than they had been inside. But then he took another step, his palm slick against the lichen-rough stone, and saw that Aldron’s lips were moving as they had at the inn, when he had been drunk; as they had in the tower’s kitchen, when he had made Alea laugh and cry at the same time. Fire in a hearth and a flower in a vase. Nellyn gripped the stone and turned to look at the sea.

The icemounts in the harbour had shrunk to small masses that glowed only fitfully. These had been the first to blaze, for they had been easy to reach by boat. The icemounts outside the harbour had been impossible to access; some of the smallest vessels had tried, but the water there had been very rough, and they had turned back. Once the harbour icemounts were alight, the ones past them had been utterly inaccessible. A few people had stood in their tipping boats and flung torches, but all had fallen short and been swallowed by waves.

Now, Nellyn saw, the outer icemounts were burning. The flames were double the height of the ice, maybe even more, undulating towers of every shade that never flickered or wavered. He walked closer to Aldron, heard the humming of his words beneath the icemounts’ keening.

“Aldron!” He shouted. Aldron did not look around, so Nellyn shouted again, louder. Aldron’s voice stopped and he moved his head, so slowly that he might have been wracked with pain or half asleep. Nellyn saw his eyes and fell back a pace, so that his back was flat against the wall. Aldron stared at him, his mouth still slightly open. It was the Queen who said, “Yes, Nellyn, what is it?”

Nellyn ran his tongue over his dry lips. “Alea,” he said. “She needs him.”

Galha bent her head until it was almost touching Aldron’s. Nellyn could not hear what she said, but Aldron blinked and nodded and shook himself like a sodden animal. He stepped away from the railing. His legs buckled, straightened again almost immediately.

“Thank you,” he said as he passed Nellyn. “I’ll go to her now.” His voice was as thin and misshapen as a lynanyn husk without its fruit.

Nellyn looked back at the Queen. For a moment she met his gaze, and he felt as if he were receding from her, into a distance she had created with her height and her stillness and her eyes. Then she turned again to the fires, and he stumbled back to the door, heedless for once of the yawning space beneath him.

Alea did not move when she heard Aldron on the stairs. She noticed that his footsteps were more halting than usual but could not summon the strength to wonder why. When he touched her hair, she hardly felt it. “Love,” he said, and tears rose in her throat again, even though she had cried so much already. “Alea.” He stroked the hair away from her cheeks and put his fingers beneath her chin. She let him raise her face up. So weak, no one would recognize her now, not even Aliser. “What is it? Why are you crying?”

His voice was flat, as it always was after a powerful Telling. She welcomed the heat of her anger, which seared away her trembling and her weeping. “Trifles, you said. And then you swore to me that you would never use your other power here, with anyone except me. Now look at you—too drained from killing icemounts to even pretend innocence.”

Aldron’s hand fell away from her face. He wrenched himself around—she saw what an effort it was for him to do this—and walked to the table by the fireplace. His head brushed some bundles of dried herbs that hung from a beam. His hair came away flecked with green and brown, and a bruised scent rose, but he did not seem to notice. He leaned over the table and said, in his transparent voice, “Do you not feel mad? Do you not yearn to Tell? Or are you so perfect that you are immune to this loss?”

She laughed. She thought,
Listen to me: I sound like a panicky horse
, but kept laughing until she gasped for breath. “My dear,” she said at last, “I feel mad nearly every moment. I yearn to Tell, even if just a trifle. To see a dune again, or the paint of my family’s wagon, or grass and leaves. But I do not Tell—not even for myself alone. I think the grief of it would be worse than the yearning.”

He rubbed a palm over his hair. The bits of dried herb spiralled away from him. “I don’t have your restraint. Though it may also be true that you don’t have my gift—at least not as intense a gift as I have—and so can’t understand me.”

“Can’t understand you,” she repeated, speaking the words as slowly as if she were holding them up to the firelight to see them better. He turned so that he was facing her, though he did not look at her. “Let me think, then, who might understand you. Who might truly appreciate your gift and what it costs you? Yes, let me see . . . the Queen? Might the Queen be this sympathetic and discerning person?”

She was standing despite the tugging pain at the base of her belly. She gazed at him and saw a boy, a youth, a man, the companion of her heart and steps for almost all her life—and now, suddenly, a body spinning away from her like a spark.

“Yes,” the disappearing Aldron said. And though she longed to reach out her arms to draw him in against her, she laughed another short, shrill laugh.

“In that case, go with her. Don’t worry about me, or our baby: get on a ship tomorrow and seek out a destiny worthy of your lofty powers.” He looked at her finally, up and into her eyes. “Ah,” she said quietly after a long, long time. “I see. Far too late, but I see.”

He thrust himself away from the table and took two steps toward her. He said her name in his strong, beloved, familiar voice and she cried, “Stop! Stop there.” She held her right arm out, hand up; her left was draped across her belly. “Stop there,” she said again, even though he had.

Lanara was talking, quite loudly and very fast. Nellyn felt dizzy listening to her, and he wondered why she was speaking as she was, frenetically even for her—and then she paused to breathe, and he heard the voices below them. He had listened to Alea and Aldron arguing before; the staircase that ran up through every floor allowed sounds to rise as well. At first Nellyn had stood frozen with fear: their voices had sounded strange and twisted. Shonyn voices never changed this way. But he had soon learned that Alea and Aldron’s disagreements passed as quickly as they began. The staircase brought other sounds afterward, which made Lanara roll her eyes and blush a bit.

He had not heard the beginning of this argument. He had come to Lanara in the writing room, as he did every midnight. She had been staring out at the towers of flame that seemed to reach even the black water at the horizon. Her writing stick had been resting on a piece of parchment that was covered with words. She had looked up at him and smiled and begun to talk—as she was doing still. The icemounts, the Queen, the ships. Provisions for the journey: the fish smoked in huts by the northern cliffs, fresh water stowed in barrels and bags, thousands of strands of dried seagreen. The weather. Ocean maps that extended only to a ring of islands—emptiness beyond; who knew how long it would take. . . . Then she had drawn a breath, and Alea and Aldron’s voices had echoed in the silence.

“. . . hemmed in—you know this,” Aldron cried. After these clear words was a jagged stream of others, all unintelligible: his, then hers, then his.