Chapter Fifteen

 

As it turned out, Nirithu had barely begun to compose the outline for his book—Hohkiun's book—when his work was interrupted. He'd returned from a lesson with Dijliy with an armful of new texts, and was jotting down notes on scraps of palm-leaf when Kilats came into the room with Jinrung close on his heels.

"I'd rather not be the one to give you the news this time," Jinrung said. "If you hurry, we may both hear it for ourselves."

Nirithu quickly set his pen down and wiped the ink from his fingers onto the hem of his robe—it was a dark robe, anyway. "What—" he began, but there was no answer forthcoming as he looked between Jinrung and the bedroom, where Risokh was still eating his lunch.

"I'll be here," Kilats assured him. "Go."

"What?" Nirithu repeated when he and Jinrung were out in the corridor. They weren't alone, either. From every direction, courtiers and servants hurried toward the outer courtyards of the palace.

"There was a messenger from Hegvi, and the queen called in Yrishi son of Tilbe," said Jinrung. "Beyond that—"

Hegvi was a mid-sized city on the Gudikel side of the Jenpu River, not far from Pilorukel Fort. Nirithu couldn't think what it had to do with Yrishi—if it was more heresy, or insults to herself and her family, that the queen needed to suppress, would it have drawn the attention of the entire court like this?

Nirithu had no more breath for questions, even if Jinrung could have answered them. They were both occupied in elbowing their way through the crowds gathering in the great courtyard where the king and queen had received Yrishi's gifts not long ago. There was no dais there this time, or splendid warriors and animals, only Yrishi prostrating himself in front of the queen as he had before.

"My lady, only give me the word," he was saying, his voice carrying far enough that Nirithu heard it before he saw the man himself, "and I will crush this little pretender and his idolatrous allies for you."

Pretender? Allies? Jinrung laid a hand on Nirithu's arm as if he were holding him back, but Nirithu wasn't going to attack anyone, or otherwise make a spectacle of himself. He was simply shocked. Whatever ultimatums his father had delivered to the queen, he wouldn't have joined his forces with Jimjavu son of Nahim's. He might, on occasion, be treacherous. He wasn't stupid.

"No," said the queen. She didn't have as carrying a voice as Yrishi, but she needed no herald to make her words heard. "Do you know why the son of Nahim has crossed the river now? Do you know why he's dared to set himself up as king in Hegvi, and the son of Hlubir as the judge of the city? Because when they see me sitting on the throne of Gudikel, they see weakness. And the sooner my enemies learn that they are wrong, the sooner Gudikel will have peace." She extended her hands to Yrishi and raised him to his feet. "I will crush the little pretender. And as for the Gmou Bim—they will fly to my fist when I call them. Or they will fall as well. I'll need your men, and I will also need someone I can rely on to stay behind and keep the king safe. I give him and the palace into your hands, Lord Yrishi."

Yrishi looked as if he would throw himself on the floor again, but the queen checked him, and he satisfied himself with saying, "I am your servant in all things, my lady. God grant you victory."

"Do well," said the queen, "and when He does, you may fortify Lame Donkey to your heart's content."

It took only a day for the queen to be ready to march forth from the palace. Most of her army would have to be raised along the way, but the queen's guard, and those of Yrishi's warriors that he'd brought with him to the palace, still looked splendid as they rode through the streets of Gudikel Town with the queen at their head, saffron-colored veils spilling from beneath a crested helmet. Nirithu wondered where she'd gotten it. She had hardly had time to have had it made since the messenger had arrived from Hegvi, and it was chased in silver and brass in elegant knotworks of design, clearly not borrowed from a common soldier. If she'd been preparing for this for longer than Nirithu suspected, he hoped her preparations had included some training in the warrior's arts. She sat her horse well and betrayed no fear, but that was different from being able to fight.

As for Nirithu's own family, it was impossible to say. There'd been no more angels, at any rate, which might have given him hope, if only he knew what to hope for. According to one rumor, Mephimor had added his forces to Jimjavu's as he crossed the river; according to another, he and his entire garrison had been slaughtered in one night, a judgment of God against the idolaters (or for Jimjavu, but no one would say that in the palace). A third rumor whispered that Pilorukel Fort had been abandoned in advance of Jimjavu's forces, after a message from Lirun only three words long: Mephimor, come home.

Dinner at court that night was quiet, and the king was looking very small again. Risokh might have said something to him after they paid their respects if Nirithu hadn't hurried along. Yrishi was sitting at the royal table, and Nirithu didn't want to spend any more time under his eye than he had to.

The next day when Nirithu came to Dijliy's rooms, the books were nowhere in evidence, and Dijliy greeted him with a clouded face.

"I'm afraid we must give up your lessons for the time being," Dijliy said. "Yrishi son of Tilbe has made it known that he looks with disfavor on these professional associations between Walkers and Piloruun, and—"

"And the queen got the intelligence she wanted," said Nirithu, leaning on the doorway, positioned awkwardly between Dijliy's quarters and the public corridors. "So there's really no point in continuing, is there?"

"She did," said Dijliy mildly. "Did you not?"

It was true. It still felt like a betrayal, more so than when Nirithu had learned that Dijliy had reported on him to the queen.

"It's only temporary," Dijliy went on. "When all this is over, I will gladly take you on again as a student, if you wish."

Dijliy had survived at court under the son of Prijlidi, after all. And he'd also taught someone he shouldn't have been teaching—but that was different. The stakes were entirely different. Nirithu couldn't blame him. At least he hadn't demanded his books back.

Jinrung stopped by the next day and waved Nirithu back down when he started to square away his papers and get up from his desk; he'd only come to let Nirithu know they were both in much the same case. "Itgal has preserved all the illustrations I've done for him so far, at any rate," he said. "My lady will have to find someone else to finish the project. As a migrating bird, I know when to move on. Will you come?"

With Jinrung leaving so close on the queen's heels, Nirithu wasn't going to be left with many friends at court. "I can't. There's still—my lord and I are still outcasts. The queen's protection is all we have."

"As far as it lasts." Jinrung leaned over Nirithu's shoulder to rifle through his scraps of writing. He had no background in sorcery, even if he'd had context for Nirithu's disjointed notes, but Jinrung was like a magpie: whatever caught his eye, he picked up. The habit would have annoyed Nirithu more if he didn't also put things back neatly. "Distance from the court that cast you out would protect you just as well. The world is wide, believe me."

Once again, Nirithu wondered why Jinrung had left his homeland. He'd never volunteered the information, and Nirithu couldn't bring himself to ask. "Where will you go?"

"Where the road takes me."

"Then," said Nirithu, unfolding himself from beneath the desk so he could grasp Jinrung's hands properly, "God keep you safe."

"And you." Jinrung had a strong grip and smooth calluses on thumb and forefinger from long work with pen and brush. "It's a pity—travel is pleasanter with a companion."

"And my lord?" said Nirithu skeptically.

Jinrung grinned. "Him as well. Why not?"

The next new moon came and there were no crescent-shaped pastries delivered from the kitchens. Nirithu opened the outer door of their rooms and left it open, but no one came to visit, and Nirithu and Risokh didn't leave. Every time Nirithu looked up from his writing and saw the open door he felt it as a shadow falling over him, as if enemies might burst through it at any moment. It was a relief when night fell and he closed it again.

Not long afterwards, Nirithu, along with the rest of the Piloruun of the court, was disinvited from dinner with the king. "It isn't as if you ever shared bread with the court," said the sub-steward who ushered them into a large room in the outer sections of the palace, bare of practically everything except for tables and utilitarian cushions. "In any case, there are too many of you now to feed you all from the royal kitchens."

Which was how Nirithu found himself face-to-face with Lokhior, chief engineer of the Gmou Dibh.

Lokhior, along with a dozen of his men, was already in the hall when the party of court Piloruun arrived. Highmol, as Eldest, went to greet him, and Lokhior rose and bowed shallowly.

"Blessings on your house," said Highmol, extending his hands. "I regret that you've come to court at such a troubled time."

Lokhior shrugged. "We've been living under Yrishi son of Tilbe for nearly a year. None of this is new to us."

"Didn't your clan take employment with him by choice?" said Nirithu, settling into his accustomed place near the head of the table, with Lokhior opposite.

"Taking employment is simple, especially when it's offered at such favorable terms as we initially got. Leaving his service has proved more difficult. Even now, he's brought us here to strengthen the palace's defenses in the interests of keeping the king safe, but our wives and children, do you see, are still in Lame Donkey."

Nirithu did see. For the first time, he felt a pang of sympathy for Lokhior, which naturally Lokhior immediately spoiled.

"You're fortunate, Lord Nirithu," he went on, "that the queen knows precisely how little your father values you."

"Please, Lord Lokhior," said Highmol, with a quick glance aside at Nirithu. "It's bad enough without us being at each other's throats."

Nirithu still wasn't used to being someone whose temper must be carefully walked around. Especially when Lokhior cast a glance around those present, dropped his shoulders, and said, "I apologize, Lord Nirithu."

Nirithu ought to have been gratified. He also ought to have been offended by Lokhior's original insult. Instead he was beginning to understand what Risokh had meant when he'd said that he didn't miss honor. He couldn't see how anything Lokhior had to say mattered.

In the days that followed, repairs were made to the walls of Gudikel Town and the palace, gates were strengthened and cannon mounted on them. Workmen, and warriors to replace the guards that the queen had taken with her, drifted into the capital. Servants and pages in the palace had their work stretched thinner, which might have explained why Shimgiri and Kilats were no longer always with Nirithu and Risokh. Dinners were more like meals on the march with the warriors than royal feasts, with the stark setting and the Gmou Dibh coming in exhausted and barely scrubbed from work. Nirithu quickly stopped painting his eyes and Risokh's for the occasion.

Then one evening, as Nirithu and Risokh were returning to their rooms with Risokh's dinner wrapped in a napkin, they were accosted by a servant. It took Nirithu a moment to place him as a page he had often seen in Dijliy's rooms.

"My master asks you to come," said the page. "Please, it's his sister."

"Lady Mimbunu?" said Nirithu.

"She's hurt," said the page. His obvious distress drove other thoughts and questions from Niritithu's mind, and he hurried after the page, with Risokh on his heels, through the familiar corridors and gardens until they came to the royal apartments. The guards there were new, and immovable in the face of the page's arguments and pleas. Nirithu said a brief internal prayer of thanks that he always kept the queen's commission with him; it didn't make the guards happy, but it gained him admittance to the other side of the gate, where Itgal son of Alphimu was waiting.

The physician was a slight, drab man. At court dinners he enlivened his eyes with whorls of red and blue, and if Nirithu had seen him in any other context, he might not have known the man without them. They'd never spoken, and they wasted no time in introductions now.

"It's a poison," said Itgal. "It acts on the heart, and quickly—unconsciousness comes in instants, and death in hours. If Lady Mimbunu hadn't been found when she was there would be nothing to be done."

"Found?" said Nirithu. "But the king and his brother and sister—surely they were with her."

"Ah, well, there's the trouble. They were seen by some of the guards with Lady Mimbunu as usual, some time after she must have fallen."

"Oh," said Nirithu. "Or someone whom the guards took for Lady Mimbunu."

"Quite. But my concern now is my patient. And yours as well. I know of no antidote to the poison, but it's derived from the fruit of a certain marshland tree, and Lord Dijliy thought that since your source is some manner of plant as well—"

"I don't know if I can do anything," said Nirithu, "but I'll try."

Mimbunu was laid out on a couch in a small, richly-appointed room. Nirithu's eye took in and quickly dismissed silk wall-hangings, lamps of colored glass, brightly-painted floor tiles. Her face was bare, though a veil had been arranged over her hair, and her robe had been loosened and then pulled back over her nakedness without being refastened. At first glance she appeared peacefully asleep, but a closer inspection revealed a crust of vomit at the corner of her mouth, traces of blood on her nostrils, the uneven rise and fall of her chest. When Nirithu put a hand there to feel her heartbeat, it was like a caged, panicked bird beating its wings.

He nudged her mouth open. It wasn't difficult; all her muscles were slack. He placed two fingers on her tongue, seeking traces of the poison in her saliva, anything whose life he could feel doing its invisible, deadly work.

With his other hand, he gripped his source, the edges of the stone digging into his flesh, his thoughts sinking themselves beneath memories of the ancient forest from which it had come. No words, no vision, only darkness and warmth and the rush of blood, and shot through it a fine thread of pain, singing like a harpstring, or a bowstring once the arrow was loosed. The thread was woven all through Mimbunu's body, wrapped around and around her heart and throat like a strangler-vine.

Nirithu drew a breath and another, surfaced. Light. Mimbunu before him, spread out on the couch where he knelt on the floor. Risokh standing behind him. And Itgal by the foot of the couch, waiting for his answer.

"I could draw the poison from her blood," said Nirithu, "but it's already done its work. To undo what has been done—" If Nirithu couldn't save her, the blame would fall on him. But, he realized as he spoke, if he did save her it would do nothing to quell whatever rumors might be circulating that he was engaged in human sorcery. "It may be possible, but it will take some time. And her breathing may fail, or her heart may fail, while I'm working."

Itgal nodded. "I'll do what I can. And you, work quickly."

Nirithu had seen other physicians milk the venom from snakes in order to concoct medicines from it. And if poison was a harpstring, then he would make it play a different tune. He sank beneath his thoughts to where there was only blood, and began.

Time passed. Someone—Risokh?—gave Nirithu a cup of water, and he drank. Itgal hovered, but Nirithu couldn't tell what he was doing. Pain spiked—Nirithu thought he heard himself cry out with it—burned, ebbed away. Mimbunu vomited again, a spoonful of thin yellow bile. Her eyelids fluttered.

"The children…" she muttered. Her eyes flew open, pupils abnormally small in the dim light of the lamps. "Treachery."

"Who?" said Itgal.

"A dead man," said Mimbunu. Then she slumped back onto the couch and slept once more, her breathing even, her heartbeat steady.

Nirithu couldn't feel his fingers. He shivered with cold and exhaustion. Lady Dipu had insisted that no one had told her that Risokh was his brother's ghost—that it had been her own conclusion. But her tutor had said: it's that nurse of yours, filling your head with ridiculous stories.

And the queen had said: I knew that even Mimbunu could be turned against me, though she would never do so of her own will.

The corridor beyond echoed with heavy footsteps, and Yrishi son of Tilbe swept into the room, flanked by guards. Risokh and Itgal fell to their knees. Nirithu was already there, nor could he have risen if he'd wished to.

"I'm told the lady has recovered," said Yrishi. "I will speak with her now."

"She will live," said Itgal, "but she's exhausted. Perhaps in the morning—"

Yrishi turned to one of the guards. "Rouse her."

The guard bent down and struck Mimbunu across the face. She shifted slightly in her sleep. Itgal's cheeks flushed as if he'd been the one to feel the meat of the guard's hand.

"Before she sank again into insensibility," he said, "Lady Mimbunu did speak a few words." Yrishi whirled on him, saying nothing, the fury on his face making his demands for him. Itgal continued, "The children. Treachery. And when I asked her who, she said: a dead man."

"Treachery," Yrishi repeated. "The king's guards were found slaughtered outside the eastern gate, where the workmen have been stationed. Of the king, and his brother and sister, and the false nurse, no trace."

The workmen. Lokhior and the Gmou Dibh. "I might," said Nirithu, his voice sounding weak and distant, "I might question the stones of the gate." Though where he would find the strength, he had no idea.

"And who will question you, son of Lirun?" Yrishi snarled. "If it comes to that, beware: I will learn all you know, and I will not get it gently."

He left, and Itgal got shakily to his feet. Risokh wordlessly handed Nirithu the napkin containing his own dinner, which he must have kept by him this whole time.

"Oh…" said Nirithu. "You haven't dined. We should return to our rooms, and—"

"You should eat it," Risokh countered. "You've drained yourself, Nirithu. If one of us might be mistaken for a dead man now, it's you."

In the end, they compromised on dividing the provisions as they had on the road, and on finding an odd corner of the royal apartments to eat in, with a private alcove for Risokh. It turned out that Risokh was right—without eating something, Nirithu couldn't even make it back to their rooms. So that by the time they finally headed in that direction, dawn was already silvering the leaves in the queen's gardens.

They never did make it. Before they could, Nirithu overheard a herald proclaiming that Yrishi son of Tilbe, Defender of the Palace, had apprehended the traitors who'd sold the king, and that those who would see justice done might come to the great courtyard.

Nirithu and Risokh shared a look.

"I don't think," said Risokh, "that I particularly want to see justice done."

"No," said Nirithu. "But I doubt it would be wise to miss it."

The raised platform in the great courtyard might have been the same one that the king and queen had received Yrishi on when he first arrived, but it wasn't a royal dais now, it was a scaffold. The queen, of course, was gone, and the king wasn't present either. If Yrishi had managed to retrieve him, he wouldn't have missed the chance to display him, so Nirithu concluded that he hadn't, whatever the heralds might be saying.

Yrishi stood on the platform in his ceremonial armor, back straight, head thrown back. He must not have slept the night before either, but he wasn't showing it, or whatever anxiety he might be feeling at having failed his charge so spectacularly or at the eventual consequences of his failure. He did, however, keep himself in the background. The main spectacle was in front: the headsman with his heavy, curved sword, the stained and pitted chopping block, Lokhior and his engineers, in chains, all in a row.

Lokhior's face was swollen and bloody, his body stiff, his voice an indistinct mumble. The herald at the foot of the platform spoke for him: "I sold the king to his enemies for gold. I smuggled the agents of Jimjavu son of Nahim into the palace."

Not long before, Nirithu had wondered how the words of Lokhior of the Gmou Dibh could matter. These—however ungently Yrishi had gotten them, and regardless of whether they were true, or even if they were truly the ones that Lokhior was speaking—these mattered. Let your justice shine forth with the dawn, Nirithu thought numbly. But there'd been no court convened, neither a Walker one nor a Piloru, and the only judgment handed down was a shove between the shoulder blades, forcing Lokhior to his knees before the block, and the fall of the headman's sword. Yrishi knew how to choose his workmen well. It only took a single stroke. Gasps rose from the crowd, and here and there a cheer, from the courtiers and from the people of Gudikel Town who'd crowded into the palace courtyard to see. And from the court Piloruun, silence.

But not complete silence. As the executions continued, Eldest Highmol appeared at Nirithu's elbow, as if he had merely been jostled in that direction by the vagaries of the crowd. "Do you recall, Lord Nirithu, what Lord Lokhior said when he arrived here? That his wife and children, and those of his men, remained behind in Lame Donkey as hostages for their good behavior?"

Highmol had spoken almost too quietly for Nirithu to hear, and Nirithu gave his answer equally softly: "Yes. I recall."

"Someone must tell them what has happened here. Perhaps they know already, but it's forbidden to rely on miracles. Someone must warn them what is coming," said Highmol. "Lord Nirithu, you traveled from Khippush-Jilh to the palace alone, a hunted fugitive, and lived."

Not quite alone, but that wasn't the point Nirithu most wished to address. "And I'm still a hunted fugitive," he said. "If I do this thing, I would prefer not to have to fear my own people as well as the son of Tilbe's men. Will you lift the ban against me and my lord, and say we are no longer outcasts?"

"I have no authority to overrule the Great Court," said Highmol. "And you must understand—if you do this thing, I did not send you."

"Of course," said Nirithu bitterly. On the scaffold, another head fell. "Of course I'll go." He looked up at Risokh, who was looking pale, ill, and still. "My lord—"

"I'll go with you, Nirithu," he whispered. "Just tell me what I must do."

Nirithu would rather have left him in the safety of the palace. But there was no more safety here. "Then we will have to go now," he said.