looking at Banreh. “They have my wives.”
Instead of responding to the emperor, Eyul turned to Mesema. His eyes were still hidden by the cloth and she wondered what he looked at, and what he saw. “You should go and change now,” he said in a kind voice that didn’t feel kind, a voice that had steel behind it. “In another room.”
Mesema nodded. The goddess tiled into the floor stared at her, eyes glowing. She knew it was a goddess because there was no man pictured with her.
Eyul pulled a bit of silk from inside his robes. Then he produced Sarmin’s three-sided dagger and wrapped it up like a baby. “Don’t forget your knife.” Mesema shook her head at the knife, but he thrust it at her a second time. Beyon stood motionless at the window, his back to her. Resigned, she accepted Eyul’s offering. She walked slowly down the corridor and picked a plain white room. This had obviously been the women’s wing in a more austere time. A bench spanned the length of three windows. They were not open windows, nor glass, nor screened with wood like the one in the other room: these windows were fitted with a translucent stone that gleamed with yellow light. She had seen jagged bits of the same stone in Sarmin’s room. A small word had been carved into the very bottom, but Banreh had never taught her to read or write Cerantic words, or any words, for that matter.
Mesema wondered what Eyul was going to do about Atia, Chiassa and Marren. He put her in mind of her father, somehow, though her father was neither so strong nor so cold. Her father would try to rescue them, but if he couldn’t, and they were going to be in pain… She closed her eyes against the light.
The first scream rose from the courtyard.
Nessaket bowed her forehead to the green and white rug when Tuvaini entered. She had centred herself so that the leaf pattern appeared to generate from her emerald-colored skirt. Her spine curved prettily to where her head lay against the silk, a poison flower on a golden stalk.
“Rise and face me, Empire Mother, mother to dead sons.” Nessaket sat back on her heels, but kept her eyes cast down, and it angered him. She had always been ready to meet his eye, to speak before spoken to; now she chose to feign humility.
“Speak,” he commanded.
“I expected you last night, Your Majesty, but you did not come to me.” “I was occupied with matters of empire.” In fact he had watched the shadows glide across his wall, but there was no need to tell her that.
She kept her eyes down, calling back the girl she had been, but she was no longer that girl, and he was no longer the frightened, lonely boy in the shadow of Tahal’s robes.
“Did you sleep well without me, Empire Mother Nessaket?” Her shoulders tensed with his words, but she soon found her balance. “I did not, Your Majesty. I have grown accustomed to your arms about me.”
He paced around her one way, and then the other. He reminded himself of Beyon. He understood so much more about his cousin now. “We all make sacrifices.”
“I know about sacrifice, Your Majesty.”
Something in her tone made him turn to face her.
She shifted her knees. A strand of gleaming black hair fell over her chest.
“Tahal used to say that the empire does not give itself freely. That those who want it must pay for it.”
“In restless nights?”
Her voice grew strong, steely. “I have given more than restless nights, Your Majesty.”
The faces of her young boys passed behind his eyes. “You knew the price.”
“No price is truly known until it is paid.”
Stillness fell over Tuvaini like funereal silk. “And you would teach me this?”
“I have only kept you to your bargain: no wife but myself, no children but mine.”
And there it was. Herzu laid a hand upon his shoulder, his claws sinking deep. “Lapella could bear no children!”
“And Sarmin was harmless to you.” She spoke in such a quiet voice that if Tuvaini had so much as brushed his slippers against the carpet, he would not have heard it. But he was standing still, and so the words reached him.
Revenge? For Sarmin? He had no idea Nessaket had felt any affection for her second son. Tuvaini knew his madness kept her from visiting him more than once or twice a year. She never spoke of him, with love, or anything else.