Most of the wisest courtiers felt certain that Tulim’s survival was a mark of how little a threat he was to anyone. The few who knew him better, who might have had suspicions that things were not as they seemed, also knew him well enough not to gossip about him. Many of these truly wise ones survived to serve him.
Wisest of all, of course, was Uncle Gorhan, who had recognized a certain implacability in young Tulim—perhaps the reflection of his inner flame—and cast his own fate with the obscure princeling, so far from the throne. This was a genuine gamble on Gorhan’s part because he was the sort of wise, unthreatening elder most likely to survive the accession of a new monarch, most likely to carry his service through another reign or even two, to die at last peacefully and in dignity and then be interred along with as many as a thousand living slaves, a mark of the royal family’s great favor. Instead he was risking everything on one unlikely throw of the dice . . . or so it would have seemed to anyone who had not looked deeply into Tulim’s disquieting golden eyes.
“I could do nothing else, Blessed Highness,” Gorhan told him. “Because I knew what you would be when I first saw you and nothing could make me betray you. You and I, we are like this.” The older man lifted his hand, index and middle fingers raised and pressed tight together to show the completeness of his connection to Tulim. “Like this.”
“Like this, Uncle,” echoed the prince, raising his own hand, fingers twinned. “I hear you.”
As it happened, it was not long until their partnership bore its final fruits. One of the lesser princes was having an uncomfortable dinner with Mehnad, one of the two main rivals for the throne. In the midst of the meal the lesser princeling began to breathe like a man who had an entire duck egg stuck in his throat. He turned black, lurched to his feet and walked through the sumptuous meal set on the floor without seeing it, then fell into a crowd of servants bearing finger bowls and wine jugs, making such a clatter that for long moments it obscured the fact that his young wife had also died of a similar, although quieter, apoplexy.
Prince Mehnad, furious, shouted that this was nothing to do with him, that it was a plot to make him look petty (because what else was one to think of someone who poisons guests in his own house, and not only men but a woman as well?) Certain that his brother Ultin was behind it, Mehnad took a squadron of guards and went to Ultin’s apartments in the city’s Blue Lamp Quarter, but news of the murder had gone before them, and Ultin was waiting with a squadron of his own guards. Both brothers were so tired of the months of plot and counterplot, of murder and mistrust, that they needed no excuse to settle their differences now once and for all. As the guards brawled among themselves, Ultin and Mehnad singled each other out and, like the fierce soldiers they were, fought each other without mercy.
It was only when Ultin had finally cut down his brother and stood over his body in triumph, bloodied by a few wounds but largely unhurt, that the nature of Tulim’s plan became obvious. Even as he crowed in victory, Ultin suddenly began to choke as the unfortunate princeling had choked—as if a duck egg were lodged in his throat. Blood passed from his nose and mouth, then Ultin fell down on top of his dead brother. Both men’s swords, it was later discovered, had been poisoned by some third party, but Mehnad had not lived long enough to suffer the effects.
And as the two princes’ household guards stood around the bodies in a cloud of confusion and rage, Tulim and Gorhan stepped out from the place where they had been watching. They had only a few of Gorhan’s own guards with them, a much smaller number than either Ultin’s or Mehnad’s forces, but those who had so recently fought for the two older brothers recognized quickly that if they fought Tulim the best they could hope for was to be in search of new employment afterward—for what is a prince’s guard with no prince? After all, Tulim was one of Parnad’s heirs, and although he had begun as a very unimportant one he had managed to outlast nearly two dozen others—that in itself was enough to convince them his candidacy was worth considering; Gorhan’s small but firmly committed bodyguard and their sharp spears were enough to make the argument convincing.
So it was that Prince Tulim, whom few had even noticed and none had particularly feared, walked across the bodies of dozens to achieve the Falcon Throne of Xis, taking for himself the autarchical name Sulepis am Bishakh. In days to come, Sulepis would reassert the historical right of Xis to rule over all the continent of Xand, walking across the bodies of hundreds of thousands more to do so, covering most of the land south of the Osteian Sea with his bloody footprints. And if he then set his sights on conquering the northern continent of Eion, who could blame him? He clearly had destiny on his side: his flame had indeed proved to burn brighter than all others.
And, like a god, Tulim-who-became-Sulepis didn’t only mete out justice on the scale of continents: he could be personal as well. Within a few days of taking the throne he found himself in disagreement with his uncle Gorhan over some minor matter of statecraft, at which point Gorhan gave the new autarch a look calculated to make him feel, if not shame, at least discomfort at his own ingratitude.
“I am disappointed, my lord,” Gorhan told his nephew. “I thought we were to be like this,” he held up his fingers, index and middle pressed together. “I thought you cared enough to heed my advice. You are like a son to me, Tulim. I had hoped to be like a father to you.”
“Like a father?” Sulepis raised one eyebrow, fixing Gorhan with a stare as remorseless and golden as that of a hunting hawk. “So be it.” He turned to the captain of his Leopard guard. “Take the old man away,” he said. “Flay the skin from his body—but slowly, so that he may feel it. Not all at once, either, but in a single strip winding the length of his body, starting at his feet and continuing to the top of his head. I would like him to live until then, this new ‘father’ of mine.”
Even the hardened captain hesitated as old Gorhan fell to his knees, weeping and begging for mercy. “A single strip, Golden One?” the soldier asked. “How wide?”
Sulepis smiled and lifted two fingers. “Like this.”
PART ONE
THE KNOTTED ROPE
1
A Cold Fever
“This Book is for all children of gentle birth, to give them instruction of the good example of the Orphan, holiest of mortals, beloved of the gods . . .”
—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”
THE DISTANT MOUNTAINS WERE BLACK, as were the rocky beach and the pounding sea, and the sky was like wet gray stone; the only bright things he could see were the crests of the waves that ran ahead of the stiff breeze and the gleaming white foam that leaped toward the sky each time a wave died against the rocks.
Barrick could scarcely take it all in. Overwhelmed by the clamor of the Fireflower voices, the inside of his head felt louder and more dangerous than the crashing surf, as though at any moment this storm of foreign thoughts, ideas, and memories might sweep him away, batter him and push him under, drown him utterly. . . .
... Not since Mawra the Breathless walked the world . . .
... But they came not by sea as Silvergleam had expected, but from the air . . .
... She was never after seen, although her lover and his pack searched the hills until the winter snows . . .
It was all he could do not to scream at the unending storm of thoughts. He clenched his teeth and curled his hands into fists as he struggled to hold onto the Barrick Eddon at the center of it all. He had hoped the confusion in his thoughts would ease when the king’s funeral ended, but instead the silence that followed had seemed to make it worse.
The queen of the fairies was walking with him—or rather Saqri walked a little ahead, dressed all in billowing white so that she seemed hardly more substantial than sea foam herself. Ynnir’s widow had not spoken a word to him since she had summoned him with a single imperious gesture to follow her, then led him out of the halls of Qul-na-Qar and down a winding path to the restless, dark ocean.
They were alone,
Barrick and Saqri, or as alone as they could be: three armored, manlike figures stood at the foot of the path watching every step their queen took. These were Ice Ettins, Barrick could not help knowing, part of a clan called The Whitewound, from Bluedeeps in the north. He knew their names, too, or at least the gestures they made for their names—despite all their potential for violence, the Ice Ettins were a quiet and secretive race. He knew that their dully shining armor was nothing a smith had forged, but a part of their skins, as nerveless as nails or hair; he also knew that though none stood much taller than a mortal man, each Ice Ettin with his heavy bones and horny plates would weigh at least as much as three large men. These creatures were bound to the Fireflower by their clan oath, and each had earned a place in the queen’s guard through victory in one of the murderous ceremonial games that The Whitewound always conducted in icy darkness.
Barrick knew all this as well as he knew his own name and the names of those who had raised him through childhood—but in a completely different way: all this new knowledge, countless histories and namings and connections and even more subtle things that could not be named but simply were, all these delicate understandings shouted and muttered in his head—shouted, but without noise. Barrick could not look at anything, even his own hand, without a thousand intricately foreign Qar ideas battering his thoughts like a sudden hailstorm—bits of poetry, scholarly associations, and countless far more meaningless and mundane memories. But these storms of knowledge were as the balmiest spring weather compared to the swelling of imagination and memory that crashed over him when he looked at anything significant—the towers of Qul-na-Qar or the distant peak of M’aarenol, or, worst of all, at Queen Saqri herself.
... When she first as a child stood in snow, laughing . . .
... The night her mother died and she took the Fireflower, and her sense of what should be would not let her weep . . .
... Her eye, knowing . . .
... Her lips, warm and forgiving after that terrible fight . . .
The associations went on and on, unstoppable, and Barrick Eddon was terrified by how little he could do beyond holding onto those parts of himself he could still recognize.
I was a fool to agree to this, he thought. It is like the story of the greedy merchant—I will get everything I wanted, but it will fill me until I swell like a toad and then burst like a bubble.
Saqri suddenly stopped and turned toward him—a graceful transition from motion to absolute stillness. She used words to speak out loud but he heard them in his thoughts as well, where the meanings were subtly different. “I have thought all the day and I still do not know whether to embrace you or destroy you, manchild,” Saqri told him. “I cannot understand what my beloved great-aunt thought she was doing.” A tiny shift of the mouth betokened a scowl. “I stopped wondering at my late husband’s actions long ago.”
Her thoughts came with a sting even sharper than the wind off the booming black sea. “It isn’t ...” He fought to keep his concentration through the flurry of foreign recollections and impulses. “It doesn’t matter anyway. What she wanted. She sent me and . . . and then your husband gave me the Fireflower.”
She looked at him with an expression that did not quite reach compassion. “Is it painful, then, child?”
“Yes.” It was hard to think. “No, not painful. But it . . . I think it is too much for me. That soon it will . . . drown me ...”
She took a few steps toward him, her head tilted a little to one side as if she listened. “I cannot feel you the way I could always feel him—but nevertheless, you are there. How strange! You are truly shih-shen’aq.” It was a thought that did not become a word in his language, but still blew toward him with its meaning trailing—flowered, enbloomed, blossomhearted : it meant to blaze with the inner complexity and responsibility of the Fireflower.
“But what does that mean?” he begged her. “Is there no way my thoughts can be quieted? I’ll go mad. The noise, it’s getting . . . stronger!” And had been since Ynnir had passed it to him, a fever in his blood just as terrible and mortal as the illness that had nearly killed him back in Southmarch, but a fever without heat, something altogether different than any earthly malady. “Please . . . Saqri . . . help me.”
Something moved in her face. “But there is nothing I can do, manchild. It is like asking me to save you from your blood or your own bones. It is in you now—the Fireflower is you.” She turned away to look toward the ocean. “And it is more than that. It is all of my family—all we have learned and all that we are. One half of it is in you. It may kill you.” She lifted her hands in a deceptively small gesture, whose meanings rippled out in every direction—Defeat is Ours was one meaning, a strange mixture of resignation, terror, and pride. “And the other half is in me and will certainly die with me.” She looked up, and for the first time he thought he saw something like pity in her hard, perfect face. “Take courage, mortal. The ocean has beat at this black shore since the gods lived and fought here, but it has not devoured the land. Someday it will, but that day has not yet come.”
Everything she said set off ripples in Barrick’s head like stones cast into a pond, each ripple intersecting with a dozen more and filling him with half-glimpsed memories and ideas for which the language of his thoughts had no proper words.
Black shore . . .
The first ships foundered here, but the second fleet survived.
The ones who sing beneath the waves . . . Listen!
It was like standing in a temple bell tower while the great bronze bells thundered the call to prayer. The voices seemed to shake him to his bones—but at the same time the attack was as silent as a subtle poison. “Oh, gods. I can’t . . . stand it.”
“But why did she do it?” Saqri scarcely seemed to hear him, looking up to the cloud-painted sky as if the answer might be swirling there. “I can understand Ynnir giving the Fireflower to a mortal, mad as it is—my husband would have taken any gamble, no matter the danger, to try to craft peace. But why would Yasammez mock him with that which she herself holds most dear? Why would she send you to him in the first instance?”
Her great age, voices suggested. Even the mightiest can decay . . .
Hatred, said others, full of anger themselves. Yasammez has built her great house on the rock of her hatred . . .
Barrick couldn’t understand why none of them, not Saqri, not the even the Fireflower voices, suggested that which was so obvious to him. Did they really understand so little of despair, these people who should have understood it better than any—who saw their lives as an inevitable defeat lasting thousands of years?
“She wasn’t . . . mocking the king,” he said, struggling to make words out of the cacophony of his thoughts and senses. “She was mocking . . . herself.”
Saqri whirled to stare at him. For a moment, by the weird, stony look on her face, Barrick thought she would strike him, or call her Ice Ettins to take off his head. Instead, she tilted her head back and laughed, a throaty burst of anger and amusement that caught him utterly by surprise.
“Oh! Oh, manchild!” she said. “You have taught me something. We must not let such a rarity end too quickly! I will honor my great-grandmother’s wishes, no matter how obscure their origin, and we will try to find a way to mute the Fireflower, at least until you have learned to live with it.”
“Can . . . can such a thing be done?”
She laughed again, but sadly. “It never has been. It was never necessary. But there has never been a scion of the Fireflower quite like you, either.”
Like a walking white flame, she led him back over the black sands to the foot of the stone stairs where her armor-skinned warriors stood waiting, their eyes only glints deep beneath plated brows. The row of huge creatures parted with surprising grace to let her lead Barrick past, then fell in behind and followed them back up the winding hill-steps to Qul-na-Qar.
It was worse for him inside the castle: the ancient walls and passages put so many thoughts into his head that the vo
ices in his skull swooped and chattered like bats startled from their roosts; it was all he could do to follow Saqri. A few times he stumbled, but felt the broad, stone-hard hand of one of the queen’s escort close on his arm and hold him up until he found his feet again.
The Ice Ettins were not the only ones following them now. As soon as Saqri had entered the castle, a flock of shapes had appeared almost as suddenly as the Fireflower voices—Qar of every shape and appearance—but they seemed hardly even to notice Barrick. It was Saqri they surrounded, their voices full of worry and even fear for her health, and those who could not speak through the heavy air found other ways to make their unhappiness known, so that a cloud of dismay followed Barrick and the queen across the great central halls and down the Weeping Staircase. It felt as though the jabber of their thoughts and the whirl of Fireflower memories were pounding away at his wits like a hailstorm.
Barrick stumbled again. He was no longer certain how to make his legs work properly.
“I . . . can’t ...” he tried to say, then stopped to stare at Saqri, her guards, and supplicants. They were all changing, stretching, shredding like shapes made of smoke under the barrage of so much noise, so much life, so much memory. He couldn’t remember what it was he had been about to say. Their now-unrecognizable forms curled into a dwindling whirlpool of color in the midst of the blackness and the clamor in his head suddenly went quiet. As the spin of light gurgled away, he fell into nothing, but he accepted the darkness with gratitude.