The first thing I became aware of was music. Threes were so important that I was not surprised to hear triple beats, but when I passed down the narrow street between high-piled snowbanks, above which peeked steep-roofed houses, I heard syncopated rhythms in ravishing chords. Instead of threes in four-beat measures I heard five counts, ONE-two-three-FOUR-five.
Though the sun hid behind a solid bank of white cloud, rendering the wintry air extra bitter, everybody seemed to be out and about after those days of blizzard. People of all ages walked about on peg-bottomed clogs. Here, as in the lower levels of the palace, people had a variety of hair colors, mostly dark, but with a few fair heads here or there.
They talked and smiled, carrying baskets or pushing or pulling little carts, but no one seemed to be worried about pickpockets or thieves. I saw coins glinting in baskets, right out in the open. That never would have happened in Fara Bay, or anywhere on Thesreve’s coast.
I could feel those quick, curious glances but no one approached me, just as in the lower layers of the palace. People either backed away to let me pass or flowed around me at least a pace away, eyes averted. They acted as if I were invisible, but my life had depending for too long on my remaining undetected for me not to know the difference between people pretending not to notice me and actually not noticing me.
The houses differed from those of the continent not in the steep roofs, common in all mountainy areas I’d ever seen, but in the eave edging of smooth curves. All the houses had this edging, large and small. Pale stone formed walls and stairs and street alike, the sameness broken by patterned tiles on the roofs. Touches of color appeared in windows, especially in the upper stories, behind which potted flowers grew.
Here and there people had tunneled ice-blue arches through the snowbanks. I paused when I spotted a half-collapsed archway in an enormous snowdrift where an avalanche had obviously fallen from farther up the mountain. People squeezed in and out one at a time, some sliding on the glassy smooth ice, which seemed to be too deep for their clog pegs to penetrate.
I stepped around a clump of ice. When the crowd thinned I held my breath, aimed through the mental pin-hole and flash! The entire drift melted in a pleasing hiss, hot water streaming away to run off the lower zigzag.
I hurried away, pausing at another burst of music in entrancing rhythm. What was going on in those houses? Not all could be inns offering entertainment! Who would be traveling in this weather?
At the end of that street before the downward curve to the next switchback, the houses tucked into the bend had windows that enabled me to look down inside. The upper rooms appeared to be empty, but in a lower, gold-lit room I glimpsed a circle of people weaving silk as a trio of musicians played while they worked.
This reminded me of Thesreve in summer, when at sundown musicians played on balconies for the entire street to hear and everybody would toss them a coin, however small in value. Only in Thesreve, windows and doors stood open to vent the heat. Many preferred to work or visit during the long twilight once the heat had begun to wane.
In those days sometimes when the music could not be resisted I’d danced on rooftops where no one could see me. The Djurans’ entrancing melodies tingled my toes, but I was too self-conscious to want to dance in that icy street with all those sideways glances.
I’d almost reached the first turning when the splash of quick footsteps behind me caused me to whirl around. A small boy ran toward me, short silky red hair swinging at each step. Then he faltered, one hand brushing over his scarf-swathed throat. He swayed, and when he saw my gaze, his mouth rounded, and he dropped to his knees—splash!—and banged his forehead on the ground.
“Don’t do that,” I exclaimed, springing forward at the same time a fair-haired man hurried up, throwing anxious glances left and right and bobbing apologetically.
“Mor,” he said when he reached the boy, his voice low and anxious. And to me, “I beg forgiveness of the Imperial Princess, and request her pardon for my son, who is still learning civilized behavior.” Splash! He too went to his knees and bowed down.
“Please get up. It’s so cold,” I said, and to the child, “Did you want to talk to me, Mor?”
The little boy looked up. He couldn’t have been more than three. “You have a tail,” he ventured in his piping little voice.
I laughed, and swished it from side to side.
“I want a tail,” he stated.
“Mor,” the man said in an agonized undertone, and reached to take the boy’s hand.
The boy looked back at me, forehead puckered. “Make it go?” His fat little hand lifted toward what I’d taken to be an extra high snowbank between two shops. It almost blocked a smaller, older house set back a ways. From the looks of it, they’d tried to make a tunnel but it had caved in.
The man said apologetically, “My son noticed from the window above my shop the magic the Imperial Princess made that melted the snow.” His hand indicated the cobbler’s sign halfway up the street. “It is our most earnest hope that the Imperial Princess would be merciful and forgive his curiosity.”
“He wants me to melt that snowdrift?”
The man dropped to his knees again. “It is nothing, Imperial Princess,” he said to the ground; distracted, I noticed that his hair like those of many others around me was clipped short at collar length.
I groaned, and he looked up, startled out of his “civilization.”
“I am new to Sveran Djur,” I said carefully, nerves prickling. The Evil Emperor had to be watching me, probably hooting with amusement. (If he was annoyed, I’d feel it.) “If the snow needs melting, I can easily make that happen. If my doing so doesn’t break a rule of civilization—” I barely got that word out. “That I don’t yet know.”
“We would never presume,” he began, and paused, as if searching for the correct words in a situation never before encountered.
So the Chosen didn’t walk about talking to non-Chosen people. They stayed in the skies, either in the palace or in their floats.
I said, “If I melt that snow, it won’t cause a problem below, will it?” My eyes tracked the water’s likely path, and I made a discovery. “Oh.”
Now that I could look down at that house tucked into the switchback curve, I saw that what I’d taken to be curved eave decorations were rain gutters.
By now the spell was easy enough to perform, and it took me only a few steadying breaths to recover. As little Mor watched, I melted the snowbank with a greenish flash, and we all watched as the steaming water gurgled and chuckled in a stream across the street past our feet, dropping into a gutter at the side of the road and then falling from roof to balcony to fence to street in beautifully arranged cascades that had to have evolved over centuries.
Mor gave a crow of laughter.
“Did you like that?” I asked him, and when he waved his arms in a semblance of that palms-to-the-side gesture of assent used by adults, I found another awkward snow bank on the next turn and flashed that one, too.
When I recovered, my shoulder blades crawled. I turned to find a huge semi-circle of people. At my gaze, they bent like grass in the wind, knees hitting the pavement. They had to hate that. Clearly there was no regular interaction between Chosen and people, and I wondered why Dhes-Andis had given me permission to explore. To discover how isolated I was? To tempt me to do something that would get me burned?
My gaze flicked back to Mor, and I remembered that little falter. Obviously I’d seen a correction, but it couldn’t have been much more than a quick sting unless these folk were made of steel.
“Does anyone else want their snowbank melted?” I asked.
The adults didn’t move but another child, a spindle-legged girl, pointed silently at a dirty pile of snow backed up covering the windows of a shop. An adult hissed, and the girl flinched slightly then dropped to her knees.
“I like doing this,” I said into the icy air, hoping it made a difference.
I flashed the girl’s pile of snow and did i
t three more times along the lower street, as some people followed at a cautious distance, and others faded away. At one point I heard a wavering elderly female voice from a window overhead: “Why, it’s the Empress’s day come again, may her memory be blessed. She used to walk among us. . . .”
“Mother, come inside and close the window! You’ll be heard.”
I could feel the resistance of habit and of expectation in them, and I knew I was not going to overcome it.
Mindful of tiring myself when I had the long climb ahead, I turned back. Mor and his father were still there so I smiled down at him.
“Farewell, Mor,” I said to the little boy.
His father’s finger tugged at his hand. The child obediently mimicked the adults and my heart dropped right along with those little knees, hitting the icy ground.
TWENTY-ONE
As soon as I was safely out of sight of the townspeople, I began running up the steps, and then leaping. Though it was a long way up, it felt good to leap again, even when my heart began thumping and I became short of breath.
As I ran I thought about how good it felt to please little Mor though I hated the idea of exerting myself to please Jardis Dhes-Andis. In each case I had done something that I thought useful and good, but the little boy had no power to demand and to punish if I denied him. He had the freedom to ask, I had the freedom to answer. In pleasing Dhes-Andis, I felt as if I lost ground in the invisible battle between us.
I was breathless when I reached the palace again, my mood pensive. It worsened to bleak when I arrived at my suite to an invitation from another of the Chosen.
I recollected what I’d overheard from Ingras, who’d told the truth only when I wasn’t around to hear it. She’d made it very clear that these invitations were not prompted by any friendly or welcoming emotions. They’d been ordered.
I considered refusing, but I knew what the result would be: another visit to the Garden Chamber. I would do anything to avoid that, especially as the outcome was easy to predict. If their emperor was ordering his Chosen to pretend to welcome me, then I was expected to be there. And boring as it was, what else was I going to do, sit in that suite with twelve servants standing around waiting for orders?
On my way to the formal chamber I was startled when one of the black cats chased a white one across my path. The first turned and faced the other, humping up. They met, teeth showed, and they batted at each other. When I took a step toward them they separated, running off with tails in angry bends. The weird thing was, neither had made a sound.
The room for this prospective reading featured a low platform running around its perimeter. Refreshments? I wondered hopefully. Though I wasn’t hungry, eating would give me something to do.
No. I discovered that we sat on cushions around that low platform, each with our own tiny table containing gold-nibbed pens, three colors of ink, and squares of rice paper. We faced inward, where the readers came out to perform.
My place was on the slightly higher platform at the far end, next to an empty cushion so beautiful with its pure gold tassels and the dragon embroidered I knew it was intended for Dhes-Andis’s imperial backside. I sat on the silver-tasseled cushion next to it, grateful that he was lurking somewhere else.
At my right sat the sisters. They greeted me with sedate courtly effusions that I recognized now as empty courtly palaver. Maybe I could still ask them questions. Just not about anything that had to do with me.
“I went into the town today,” I said.
Pelan’s brows lifted minutely in surprise. Ingras’s lips tightened the measure of a hair. I was beginning to see past the mask, and noted that they did not look at all alike: Pelan’s hair had those warm reddish highlights and her cheeks were round. Ingras’s hair was a dead blue-black—I sensed the magic—her chin square.
“If you would honor me with your expertise,” I said, striving to mimic their smooth singsong, “would you tell me what those creatures are attached to the rolling carts?”
“Lizardrakes, Your Imperial Serenity,” Pelan said. “I understand they are rare outside of our islands, but they are common here. Very difficult to find outside of ours bred from the egg.”
The first reader came out then and the conversation perforce ended.
The readings were long, intricate poems with internal rhymes in interchanging threes, about history I didn’t know. In Erev-li-Erval the courtiers express their pleasure by tapping fingers lightly against palms. Here, it was a low, musical “Ah-h-h.”
If the listeners were so moved, they wrote extemporaneous (or so it seemed) poetry in response, and one by one stood to read their responses, again to that sigh of approval.
Naturally I had nothing to say even if I had known their alphabet. Therefore, as the readings went on I studied the others, trying to find individuality under the courtly masks. I spotted Darus, the tallest, his profile severe. No Raifas. I would have recognized those eyebrows again, the blade cheekbones, the ironic curve of his lips.
At my left—on the other side of the emperor’s empty cushion—sat Amney, who was easily the most beautiful of them all. Either she paid the fantastic price in gold and time to have a mage permanently dye the roots of each hair follicle so it would forever grow out black, or she’d inherited the color they prized most. She had the delicate widows peak above a heart-shaped face that, according to their art, they most prized. Her long-lashed eyes were so dark a brown they looked black, and her gestures were neat, graceful without being fussy or fluttery or too studied.
Her outer robe shimmered in pale blue with silvery tones, the embroidery not symmetrical. As she dipped her pen and wrote her commentary in superb writing, I studied the exquisite figures on their embroidery; the design began at the lower left and worked slantwise upward across her front in green arabesques meant to suggest rose stalks, complete with thorns. Lower down, the stalks attenuated into rosebuds of pale pink, but these opened out gradually to full-blown roses of mauve on the inner sleeves. You only saw those when she gestured, which had the effect of a bouquet of roses presented and then whisked away.
After each reading she read out her commentary, and fell into a kind of academic duel with one of the men. His writing was even more convolutedly ornate than hers. Then others took their turns.
I didn’t catch how they did it, but they decided that the Most Noble Artist’s commentary on one poem and Amney’s on another were worthy. I got the impression that their papers would be added to the book where those poems were kept.
Then at last it was over. Amney rose and glanced down at my empty paper, her face as expressive as a doll’s. She dipped her head gracefully, the tiny chimes dangling from her forelocks tinkling faintly, then said, “Your Imperial Serenity. I wish to give a reception in your honor. If you have a preference for the form?”
“Yes,” I said. “Music. Do you have dancing in Sveran Djur?”
Her face was utterly composed as she bowed again, but behind her Darus waited, and I caught the barest flicker of expression before he saw my gaze and smoothed his face.
“Our dances,” Amney said in her soft, musical voice, “are regrettably complicated.”
“I enjoy watching people dance,” I replied, trying to sound civilized.
“Would it please you to gather in the Chamber of Lilacs at starrise prime tomorrow, Your Serenity?”
“It would please me very much, Most Noble,” I replied.
She bowed. I bowed.
On my way back to my lair, I reflected on that hint of expression I’d seen in Darus. Disdain, derision. We’d never spoken outside of that reception. While I had thoroughly convinced myself I did not care what any Djuran thought of me, still, why? Because I didn’t know how to write in Djuran? Maybe I’d misread him, though I was fairly certain that whatever was going on behind that courtly mask wasn’t friendly feelings.
I walked on, determined to dismiss him as another Prince Geric, and veered in the direction of the music room to play the harp and shake off my uneasy
mood. As always, my fingers flexed into expertise as soon as I touched the strings, and within a few chords the warmth of sunrise glowed up my hands to my arms, to my heart, soul, and mind, bringing comforting memories.
I played out song after song, no longer questioning how I knew them. It was enough that I could play them, one beautiful melody after another.
Finally I sighed and began the long trudge back to my suite, tiredness weighing me down so much that my tail flapped against the back of my silken trousers.
When I got there, I sensed a subtle change in the atmosphere. Food awaited me, as always, and no one spoke first, again as always.
By now I knew I was expected to eat alone. Before I entered the alcove, I said, “Tomorrow there’s a dance given by the Most Noble Amney at starrise prime. Should I wear something different than what I’ve been wearing?”
Kal turned to Chith, who glanced at Tay, all faster than a single heartbeat, then Chith said tentatively, “Perhaps the Imperial Princess might wish to wear the butterfly robe?”
“What is that?” I asked.
Another exchange of looks, then Chith bowed herself out of the room into the alcove, and to my surprise returned with the very old woman I’d seen sewing. In triumph she spread her hands, watered silk hanging from her fingers like a shower of stars. The rich, muted glisten of this silk bespoke a weave I’d rarely seen. Over that shade of white, silver, pewter, and the faintest hint of blue had been embroidered butterflies with fantastic gold and black patterns, the lower end of their wings trailing in a such a way that when the silk billowed, it looked as if the butterflies pulsed their wings.
The winged sleeves were scalloped in graceful arcs, each with a tiny silken tassel.
“This was . . . left,” the woman whispered. “Folded away by those of us who made it. We think that it should be offered to the Imperial Princess.”
The beauty of the robe, the complete silence of everybody there, all added up to some story that they weren’t telling. Great, I thought. Another secret. Just what I need. But those expressions of hope could be no more denied than the beauty of that embroidered silk.