The Will of the Empress (14 page)

He shrugged. Daja had the peculiar notion that if she looked into his eyes she would see comets and whirling stars where common sense ought to be. With a sigh, she pulled him around the corner onto Kylea Street, where she found a strawberry vendor’s cart. She grabbed a woven reed basket filled with strawberries and flipped a silver argib coin to the vendor who sold them, then thrust the basket at Zhegorz. “Eat those,” she ordered. She had to spend the next several minutes showing him how to remove the leafy crown after he ate one strawberry whole. He was silent as he worked his way through the basket, popping fruit after fruit into his mouth.

He’s starving, thought Daja as she continued to steer
him along the back way to the town house. The Namornese gods are cruel, to make someone like him mad. For all his raving, he’s got a good heart. Most crazy people would have run off on their own in that fire, or never even offered to help. Not that he offered, but he did as I told him when I ordered him to. And he didn’t want me to walk back into the burning hospital. That was sweet.

The servants’ gate at Landreg House was open. Gently, Daja guided Zhegorz inside and turned her mount over to a hostler who came for it. Then she looked at her charge. “If I put you in a hot tub in the bathhouse, will you stay there?” she asked him.

Zhegorz ran a quivering hand over his chopped hair, his eyes scuttling back and forth. “Is the tub hot or the water hot?” he asked. “Specifics, what’s to be heated and what’s not—”

Daja interrupted him again. “I
forbid
you to talk crazy,” she told him sternly. “Not here. Here you will talk like a normal human being or say nothing, one or the other.”

“What’s normal?” the man asked. He rubbed his long, bumpy nose. His thin lips trembled.

Daja frowned at him. “I don’t know. You’re older than me—you think of something. But don’t frighten the servants, all right? I’m going to put you in the bathhouse to wash up, and I’m going to see about fresh clothes. You
stay
in the bathhouse until I come for you, understand?”

“Do I shave?” Zhegorz asked. He was hollow-cheeked and stubbly. Daja shuddered to think of him with a sharp blade. Someone had shaved him recently enough that his salt-and-pepper beard was only stubble now. “Some other time,” she said, grateful not to deal with that on top of everything else. She led him into the bathhouse and waited as he undressed behind a screen, wrapped a towel around his waist, then climbed into a tub full of steaming water. The servants kept the baths ready at this time of day for anyone who might come in.

“Stay,” she ordered as he leaned back against the side of the tub. He nodded, thin lips tightly closed. It seemed he had chosen silence of the alternatives she had given him. Daja could accept that. Off she went in search of clothes and something more for him to eat.

Shan left Sandry and the rest of her party at the town house gate with a bow, a smile, and a cheerful good-bye. Briar and Tris nodded, but otherwise said nothing as they surrendered their mounts to the stable hands and followed Sandry into the house.

“I believe Daja will be bringing a, a guest of some sort,” Sandry told the head footman. “See that they have whatever they need, and please tell Daja she will find me in the book room.” I can’t
wait
to hear what that was about! she thought.

She then found the ground floor book room. She wanted nothing more than to sit and put her feet up on a
hassock—attendance on an empress involved a great deal of standing, even when one was privileged enough to be allowed to sit in her presence now and then. She was just relaxing when she realized that Briar and Tris, instead of going to their rooms, had come in behind her and shut the door. They both stood there, Briar with his arms crossed over his chest, Tris with her fists propped on her hips.

“What?” demanded Sandry as they glared at her. “What did I do?”

“Did it occur to you that perhaps we might like to be consulted on yet another long ride?” demanded Tris.

Briar added, his voice mockingly proper, “Thanks ever so for asking,
Clehame
Sandry. Our lives are yours to arrange like you arrange embroidery silks. We have no minds—or rumps—of our own to help us decide if we want a daylong journey so soon.”

“I asked you, didn’t I?” demanded Sandry, startled. “I was sure I asked you. I told Cousin Ambros.”

“You did not,” snapped Tris. “You
told
us, like you’d
tell
‘Cousin Ambros.’ In front of the empress and her court, so it’s not like we could discuss it with you.”

“Well, you could have said something before now,” replied Sandry with a shrug. “My lands
are
the main reason I came.”

“Tell you in front of the court, or the servants, or the empress?” Briar demanded. “Is all this royalness making you soft in the head?”

Sandry tightened her lips. “No one would have known if you’d spoken to me the way we
used
to talk to each other,” she said mulishly. “
Silently.
Remember? No one to eavesdrop,
ever.
Now stop complaining. If you want to stay here, I’ll go on to my estates with Ambros by myself.”

“And have the imperial friends who’re coming along report back that we gave them the cold shoulder?” asked Briar. “Maybe
you
don’t have to worry about them getting us in trouble, but we aren’t highborn. We’re vulnerable.”

“You’re just being disagreeable,” Sandry told them both. “I’ll say you both got sick, will that silence you?”

“You treating us like equals instead of servants—
that
will silence us,” Tris replied. “You didn’t act like this back at Winding Circle. Either we’re your household or your family. Make up your mind.”

Sandry’s mouth quivered. I’m homesick, she realized, distressed. I’m homesick, and I don’t want them to scold me anymore. “Oh, leave me alone!” she cried, wanting them out of the room before she actually began to cry. “I didn’t ask for you to come! It was Uncle’s idea—I just wanted to make him easy in his mind! How was I to know you two had gotten all, all prideful and arrogant?” She fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief.

“
We’re
prideful and arrogant?” demanded Briar, shocked. “Who’s issuing orders around here,
Clehame
?”

“Oh, splendid. Tears.
That
solves ever so much,” snarled Tris. She flung the door open and stamped out of the room.

Briar followed her out after he allowed himself one parting shot, “See you at dawn,
my fine lady.
”

Sandry managed to wait for the door to close behind them before her eyes overflowed. I didn’t feel so blue on the road, she thought, tears spilling over her cheeks. There was too much to do, and we had the Traders with us. But this court, with its standing and sitting and curtsying and sitting and bowing and standing and walking and gossiping and curtsying…Uncle
never
makes anyone carry on like that! We bow or curtsy when we see him, and that’s that for the day. And I never,
ever
felt like I was surrounded by envious people in Emelan, not like I do here. Everyone wants what I have, and I just want to go home!

Her soft mouth hardened. And Briar and Tris can just go and do as they like. Obviously we had something wonderful as children that we can’t have now we’re grown. I was a fool to think we could, and now I have more important things to worry about.

Tris climbed up the flights of stairs to her room and proceeded to shed the clothes she had worn to court as Chime fluttered around her in welcome. All of them had decided Chime was too excitable for their first day at court. Although her mind knew that Sandry had woven all kinds of protections against stains, wrinkles, and mishaps into the fine cloth and seams, Tris could never be as comfortable in her dressup clothes as she could her other garments. Now she tugged
on a linen shift and a blue cotton gown with a sigh of relief. Her court shoes came off to be replaced by leather slippers.

Comfortable at last, with Chime on her shoulder, Tris was on her way downstairs again when she nearly ran into Ambros fer Landreg. “Excuse me,
Saghad
,” she said, curtsying for what felt like the hundredth time that day. They had been introduced briefly over breakfast that morning.

“
Viymese
Trisana,” he said, with a bow. “Did you enjoy your visit to the palace?”

As much as I’d enjoy a rat pasty, she thought, but she did not say it. “Please, it’s just Tris. I’m not much for titles as a rule.”

“Then you must call me Ambros,” he said in his quiet way. “You are Sandry’s sister, after all, which makes us kin of some kind. At least we are better than acquaintances, or should be.”

Tris smiled at him, appreciating that tiny hint of a joke. She liked this man; she had thought she might. Everything she had heard of him from the duke and from Sandry had spoken well of him. Sandry called him prosy and picky all the way here, but in her shoes, I’d want someone meticulous and careful looking after my affairs, Tris thought. Someone I could trust to check everything.

She realized she had a piece of information that he might want. “I’m afraid there are going to be a few more of us visiting Landreg than you had expected,” she explained. “Her Imperial Majesty invited four of her courtiers to bear us
company, and I think—I’m not sure—Daja met a friend she means to invite to stay for a while.” It had been interesting to see Daja go all protective over someone as unendearing as a crazed beggar in the street.

Ambros grimaced. “I had anticipated the noble company,” he admitted. “Her Imperial Majesty won’t want Sandry to forget the attractions of life at court if it can be helped. I am grateful we have only four extra nobles. I half-expected Her Imperial Majesty herself to come to call.”

“Shan fer Roth mentioned something about a cousin from Lairan coming to visit the palace,” Tris offered.

“Ah. That would explain it. Thank you for the warning, though,
Viy
—Tris.” Ambros smiled at her. “You’ll find Landreg can house all manner of guests. My family is already there.” He bowed and headed on up to his rooms, while Tris continued down to the kitchen.

Wenoura, the cook, looked at her from where she chopped onions and gave a leopard’s grin. “Someone I can trust to chop without dismembering herself,” she said. She and Tris had gotten acquainted the day before, when Tris had needed something to do with her hands. “Aprons are on those hooks. I sent the maids out to shop and they aren’t back. Take over for me while I warm soup for that one.” She jerked her head toward the table at the end of the room.

Daja sat there with her friend. Her face might as well have “don’t ask” written on it in light, Tris thought, helping herself to an apron. Chime unwrapped herself from Tris’s
neck and glided down to the floor to curl up under the worktable. Onions had no charm for the glass dragon. As Tris tied the apron over her dress, she yanked a thread of breeze from the back door to carry the scent of the onions away before they reached her sensitive nose. She yanked a second, fatter thread of air from the front of the house past Daja so that she could eavesdrop on what she said to the bony man. Only when those bits of business were taken care of did she begin to cut up the peeled onions that awaited her attention.

“Zhegorz, why are you here?” Daja asked the man as he drank from a heavy mug. “I thought you’d still be in Kugisko—”

“Locked up,” said the man—Zhegorz, Tris repeated to herself—when Daja fumbled her words. “I got out of the hospital. I told them I was cured. I acted cured. I can do that. They didn’t have the kitchen witch look at me. She always knows the truth, see, and she would have told them. Maybe she smells it on me, I don’t know, but I pretended to be like them for a whole week. The locked wing was crowded and there were more like me waiting so they asked me questions and gave me an argib and new clothes and let me out.”

“That green robe you were wearing isn’t new,” Daja said as Wenoura set a pot of soup to heat on one of the small stoves. “That’s the robe you wore when you helped me get the others out during the fire. It’s still got scorch marks on it.”

“I told them it was my lucky charm,” Zhegorz replied. “It
is
my lucky charm. I wore it and even though I knew the governor saw me at the fire and I knew his torturers would come for me, I pretended to be like the outside people and fled Kugisko, and it worked. So the robe is lucky because the torturers didn’t get me. I truly
was
better outside the city, in the grasslands, or they’re grasslands when there’s no snow. But it’s hard to eat grass and I’m no hunter, so I go back to the cities and towns and I leave those places when the voices get to be too much but I have to eat.” He hung his head. “I made my way here alone with my, my…” He sighed, his bony shoulders slumped. “Madness.”

Wenoura rolled her eyes at Tris, who had finished the onions and started on the parsnips. It was getting stuffy in the kitchen. The cook went to a set of shutters and opened them.

“But there are voices, don’t you hear them?” asked Zhegorz suddenly.

Tris freed her string of breeze now that she was finished with the onions, letting it mingle with the larger one. The maids had returned, their voices blurring Daja’s and Zhegorz’s. One of them took over on chopping.

“Well, the maids are back,” Daja told him. Tris removed her apron and hung it up, then went to wash her hands near where the pair sat so she could hear.

“No!” Zhegorz cried. “Voices everywhere in the cities and towns, voices in the air, talking of love and fighting and money and families and—”

Daja trapped his hands in hers, holding his eyes with her own. “
Calm down
,” she told him sternly. “You’re safe.”

Tris dried her hands with a frown.

“But sometimes the voices and visions, though I haven’t seen so many visions, sometimes they have secrets and if you let them slip, husbands and fathers and soldiers come for you with knives!” protested Zhegorz. He trembled from top to toe. “They hunt for you and they hurt you to see how you know their scheming, so nowhere is safe—even when it’s just the blacksmith meeting his best friend’s wife in a barn, they hurt you because they think you spy!”