The Winged Histories (5 page)

My sister despised silence. She had a willful and hectic happiness with which she was determined to conquer the world. Sometimes I would hear them screeching, her and Kethina, swinging on the boughs of the Lathni chestnut tree by the well. The house grew quiet only when my father shouted for peace and then I would hear again how it was when we were absent, the growing hush of solitude in the halls where no one walked and the lifeless parlors and the rows of abandoned bedrooms. Then it seemed like our house again with the alien element banished. And for a few days the girls would slip out early, whispering in the hall and returning only when the sun was setting to lock themselves together in Siski’s room. But irrepressibly the laughter would burst from her balcony and soon it would spread through the house again, into all the corners. Once she dashed upstairs and shouted as she passed my room, “We’re eating out on the terrace, I must put on my shawl.”

Whirling past my door again with the shawl about her shoulders she paused, the black and scarlet fringes settling slowly against her dress. “Don’t you want to come outside?” she said. “They could bring you in a chair.”

“No,” I said.

She did not move, she stood by the door.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said.

She stood there for a moment. Then she said: “Then why won’t you look at me?”

I told her that I was tired and when I glanced at the door again she was not there, she had slipped away without making a sound. And I felt my bandages under the blanket and struggled to sit up. I’d work, then pause, holding my position, propped on trembling arms. Work, then pause. Work, then pause. Thinking of the last time I’d seen her, five years before, when our happiness had shattered. Her horse, the beautiful Tuik, had died. Siski mourned through the corridors, knot-haired like a bereaved woman in a song. We all supposed she’d get over it, it was terrible, of course, but after all not the end of the world, everybody said. I remember the intense darkness of the house that autumn, the way the halls seemed to lengthen when you stepped in with a candle. I didn’t like to go up the stairs alone. Dasya was silent and morose—he too seemed wounded by the death of Tuik. And I was outside, subtly abandoned, too young for them, for the first time. On the day of the first snow they went out alone. No one knew they were gone until Siski returned without our cousin, chilled and filthy and with blood upon her cheek.

Work, then pause. Work. When I swung my legs out of the bed the pain slammed into my gut and nearly made me retch. I sat there sweating and shaking like an overworked mule but I would stand up, I was going to stand. I clasped the bedpost. I had never asked my sister what had happened that dreadful day. It seemed impossible. They bathed her and put her to bed in Mother’s room. The doctor was called and prescribed a draft of oinov. Nenya stopped me when I tried to go in: “My heart, get back, don’t you know your sister is ill?” Her eyebrows, flecked with gray, stood up like the quills of an angry goose. But what was wrong with Siski? No one would say. And when Dasya returned, very late I learned from Gastin, they dressed him in traveling clothes and sent him down to Klah-ne-Wiy in the coach.

Work. Work. I stood up, gasping, my weight on my good leg. It is possible for the world to change in an instant. Siski needed to be alone, she needed peace and quiet, Mother said. My sister who thrived on noise. I was to go to Bain, to spend the season with Uncle Veda, who had recently been called upon to take up his role as duke, to leave his dogs and horses, his dusty carpets, the stedleihe brewery in his cellar, and go into the west. Before I left, I visited Valedhara. Uncle Veda’s former steward—now the owner of the house—met me at the door. He clung to the doorjamb with small, alert fingers; his eyes had grown very bad. “It’
s cold in here,
” he said, “since the old man left.”

Late in the summer Siski and Kethina’s friends came from Nauve. I was walking then, I had even ridden Na Faso in the meadow, and we had heard of a slaughter in the Valley, unarmed peasants massacred on the orders of the Priest of the Stone. I had had no letter from Dasya, but I knew what he must be thinking: that this was our chance, that for the first time the Valley was divided against itself. That if the anger simmering in Kestenya could be released now, swiftly, we might see freedom in the east at last. At Ashenlo no one spoke of such things: Siski’s guests arrived laughing, their scabbards ringing as they hung them on the wall. They poured in led by Siski who was radiant and triumphant in a pink silk bodice cut low and tight in the arms.

“This is the informal parlor, the oldest room in the house,” she explained, her face aglow above the rosy silk. She put her hand on a young man’s arm. “Don’t smoke those things, we’ll never get the smell out of the carpets. Let me fill you a nice pipe.” I thought of her as a child, collecting apricots and standing on a stool to watch the jam boil on the big stove, and I thought of her riding Tuik into the desert outside Sarenha and coming back with her hair in tails and her skirt shredded by thorns. She used to be so happy there, especially in the mornings, giggling over her breakfast, making herself choke, then laughing harder. No one could understand her. And Nenya, spooning out the porridge, would say: “Some people eat crow berries during the night.”

And now, in the evening: her smooth face like a china dish, black brows and lashes starkly painted, a crisp light laugh. “I never did that, did I?” she said, looking around her wide-eyed. “
I don
’t remember, it sounds terrible, not like me.”

“Do you mean to say you’re not terrible?” said Kai of Amafein, leaning over her chair.

It was just what she had wanted him to say. Her tinkling laugh, the others closing in on her, the pipe smoke and her bright expectant face looking up at them.

And I was far away. Sometimes a guest spoke to me—it was clear Siski had told them not to shun me—but mostly I sat by the wall and drank. First we drank Eilami brandy and then we drank mountain wine and gaisk from my father’s cellar. “I knew how it would be,” Siski said bitterly, on one of the evenings—rare after her guests arrived—when she came into my room. “First he says he won’t have anyone and won’t pay for anything. But then he can’t bear to have others pay for it. I told him,” she said, lifting her chin and glaring at the closed door. “I told him, they’ve brought everything from Nauve. If you don’t want us we’ll sleep in the hills.” She was wearing a thin gray shawl and she drew it about her shoulders as though she were cold. Then she gave a hard laugh. “He’s with us now.
He can’t help it.” She turned toward me and her face grew soft in genuine amusement. “He’s going to give a party for you. To celebrate your recovery. A garden party with lamps and singers, everything.”

I said I did not want a party.

She grimaced fondly and tweaked my hair. “Don’t be silly. Why shouldn’t he give parties for us, if he wants to? I don’t care if he gives us some of his money.”

“He doesn’t have any money,” I said.

“Nonsense, where does he get that bolma from, and the wine? No no, don’t be stubborn.” She drew her legs up onto the bed where we were sitting and covered my eyes with her cool hand. “See your party.”

I took her wrist and pulled her hand away. “He has nothing,” I said. “Do you understand me? Nothing.”

And on the evening of the party, when the lamps were lit in the garden, she passed with her skirts whispering against the leaves, and with light falling over her shoulders and hair she knelt to give me a glass and grinned and said, “Have a sip of our father’s nothing.” I took the glass and smelled the gaisk; it reminded me of the mountains. In the garden all the voices and laughter were soft. It was not like being inside where the noise became unbearable; the loudness was drawn away and absorbed by the night. The feathery trees swayed above us, hung with round-bellied paper lanterns, and a wooden arch decorated with roses bristled above the musicians. We sat on wicker chairs and smoked. “Look, everything is the color of smoke,” said Siski. Talk and laughter rose in the thin trees. Gastin came out with a tray of difleta, and Armali took two glasses at once and winked at me. He braced one foot on the rung of the table. “Thank you, I’d rather not sit. Sitting too much is no longer restful. If only the heat would break we’d amuse ourselves with a hunt.”

Kethina shook her head in passing, wrinkled her nose and prodded his thick arm, crying, “Always in such a hurry!”

“Like yourself,” he boomed out after her. His smell was fresh and strong as if he had bathed himself in lemon verbena.

“Look, fireflies!” cried Siski.

He looked vaguely toward the garden and made a humming sound in his chest. “Yes, delightful!” Then he turned back to me. “What are you planning now? Going back into the army, I hear.” He gulped his second glass.

“No,” I said. “Into the desert.”

“Tav is going to visit a cousin of ours, Prince Fadhian,” Siski said quickly. She took a brief sip and added: “A very good friend of our uncle the duke’s.”

“Not so good,” I said, and at once felt foolish.

“Well, you told me they were friends.” She frowned, tapped her foot on the gravel and looked away toward the musicians under the arch, and everything gathered in me, the misery of being with her and being estranged from her, and I said: “He is a prince of the feredhai.”

Later, up in my room, I thought that I could easily have escaped, I could have avoided everything that came afterward, I might have said “He is my uncle’
s friend,
” I might have danced, I might have bowed to Siski’s request that I take off my sword. Instead I stood harsh and awkward in an old-fashioned frock, too tight across the shoulders now, with my old scabbard half smothered in its folds, and leaning on my cane I looked like a clown, Siski told me afterward.
A prince of the feredhai
.

“
Do
they have princes?” Kethina asked brightly, looking around at the others.

Armali swallowed hastily in order to answer: “Not as we do. Not at all. There’s no—” He put down his empty glass and snapped his fingers, looking for the word. “No sense of continuity, of blood.”

“But they have such dreadful feuds!”

“Well, but in that case the bloodline is just an excuse. All of their squabbles really take place over cattle. Cattle and horses—it’s what they have instead of politics!”

Laughter.

“And what’s
your
politics?” crowed Kethina.

“My dear, gaisk and good weather!”

He motioned to Gastin for another drink. His foot restless on the rung of the chair. His calf pulsing and swelling. And Morhon was still talking about blood. The lamplight on his spectacles hid his eyes. “In order to have proper royalty, that is, princes of the blood, or as it is more genteel to say, princes of the Branch, one requires history, and in order to have history, one requires a means of recording history, and the feredhai, possessing no writing—” Kethina was helpless with laughter. Kai of Amafein nuzzling her ear. Something had fallen into her dress—a spider. And Siski sat under the spreading mimosa tree, a pattern of leaves falling over her face and dress, gazing up at Armali, nodding and smiling. Her plaits in a knot on top of her head, small curls escaping and glinting like black fleece. The greenish radiance of her gown. And on the side of her brow a small contraction, the hint of a frown, a pulse beating angrily, signs only I could read.

“Feredha politics are clean, at least,” I said.

Armali looked at me, surprised. “My dear girl.”

“Cleaner than ours. Look at the Lelevai. A feud over horses, a feredha feud—that’s a feud over something. The Brogyar war is a feud over nothing.”

“But think of—”

“Nothing.”

He laughed. A sound like a cough. “Hrrm, hrrm,” deep in his chest. His eyes glittered, chips of broken enamel. “I should think someone like yourself—you are, after all, of a Nainish House—would see the sense in protecting our northern border.”

“You are, after all, of a Kestenyi House. I should think you’d respect the feredhai, your own—”

“Don’t start that!” he barked, putting his glass down hard.

“Come,”
laughed Siski.

“Lady Siski,” he said, breathing hard through his nostrils, “my respect for you is absolute, but I will not stand to be called a feredha by anyone.”

“But you
are
one,” I said, “if we trace your lineage back far enough! So am I. So are we all.”

It was like running downhill. I waited for him to say it, and he did. “If you weren’t a lady, I’d—”

“Stop!” cried Siski, leaping up.

She seized my hand as I started to draw my sword, and I let it slide back into the scabbard, afraid of cutting her. “Stupid!” she hissed. “You’re making fools of us all!” She was so close I could smell her skin: liquor and summer rain. There was a brief silence, and then the music again, the singers’ repetitive song. The hum of voices resumed, but excited now, subtly energized, Kethina’s eyes sparkling under her pointed brows. “Drink!” Ermali shouted. “Where’s your idiot footman?” And Gastin hurried toward him over the gravel.

Siski caught her breath and gave my wrist a pinch—a single, childish gesture, a brief word in the language of boredom and the schoolroom. It startled me so thoroughly that I laughed. At once I wished I could take my laughter back, for her eyes widened and I knew she would not forgive me. Then she laughed, too. She leaned forward, embracing me gently, her breath warm at my ear, and for an instant I was transported back in time, and the cheap Tevlasi music wrenched my heart, for it was home.

She pulled me close. “You look like a clown,” she whispered.

Very well. I looked like a clown in my old frock. She was right. But I would not be a clown. I would not dance to a Valley tune like our hapless Uncle Veda. When I thought of him in Bain, in the stuffy rooms of the ducal residence, I knew that I had been right to run away. Siski had depressed me with her mysterious illness, Dasya had cut me with his desertion, but it was Uncle Veda who truly broke my heart. He met me at the door smelling of hair oil and fresh steam, squeezed into a figured coat, and I wished that I was dead. I wished I had died before I saw his anxious, sweating face, his lopsided mustache decorated with a pair of beads. He only owned carriage horses—“It wouldn’t be right to keep a proper horse in the city”—and dosed his “cold stomach” with Eilami brandy. Because he was a bachelor, and considered too stupid to deal with young ladies, my Aunt Firvaud had come from the Isle to help me settle in. The two of them led me upstairs to a bedroom crowded with lamps and couches. The window, my uncle informed me, overlooked the gardens.