Froi of the Exiles (21 page)

Later, when they were half-sated, and he could taste the salt in the dampness of her skin, he pressed a gentle kiss to her throat.

‘Don’t ever ask me again if I hate living anywhere with you and Jasmina,’ he said. ‘This Rock reminds me of the boy I was and being with you in the palace reminds me of the man I want to be.’

‘Not just any man,’ she whispered. ‘A King. Mine.’

A
fter a week in the Citavita, all Froi had achieved in his mission to Charyn was the suspicion that the King lived somewhere in the vicinity of the fourth or fifth tower. He knew he had to act fast. In less than a week, the Provincari would arrive for the day of weeping and the guards in the palace would double. But what competed most with the task at hand was Froi’s fascination with two brothers separated by a gravina, a Princess with two people living inside of her and a woman imprisoned for twelve years whose only contact with her daughter was a holler from a window.

The days that followed began in the same way. Each morning Froi would test himself, lying in Quintana’s bed after pleading tiredness or inventing an illness attributed to the body part important in the art of planting seeds. He would play the game of trying to work out who she was from the moment her eyes opened. Princess Indignant always,
always
woke in fright. She’d squint and nod and mutter, ‘
There’s a man dying in Turla
.’ On the other hand, Quintana the ice maiden was always cold and usually called him Fool. If his body was anywhere close or touching hers, she’d snarl, and he came to understand that the savageness appeared with her rather than the Princess Indignant, and could be witnessed in the curl of Quintana’s lips and a glimpse of slightly crooked teeth. But something always seemed able to soften her. Froi would see it happen before his very eyes. The nodding. The ‘Yes, yes, I’m trying!’ Whether he wanted to admit it or not, his heart would pound with excitement every time he saw the madness.

Princess Indignant also loved nothing more than spending her time watching the ritual between the brothers from Abroi, Gargarin and Arjuro.

‘Blessed Arjuro? Can we come visit?’ she called out from her balconette, trying to capture Arjuro’s attention with a ridiculous wave, just in case he had lost his hearing.

Arjuro ignored her.

‘Do you think he went mad in the dungeons?’ she asked.

‘Not in the dungeons,’ Gargarin said quietly.

‘Do you think he loved Lirah beyond life itself?’

Silence. Froi looked over at Gargarin, watched the lump in the man’s throat move as he said, ‘No, I don’t.’

‘I think you’re wrong, Sir Gargarin,’ she said.

‘Gargarin,’ he corrected. ‘No “Sir”.’

‘When I woke that time after Lirah took me to search for the Oracle, Arjuro was there.’

‘The Oracle?’ Froi asked.

‘We searched for her in the lake of the half-dead.
Poor Lirah
.’

And there was Aunt Mawfa again. ‘Oh my
poor bones
,’ the woman had whispered while stuffing herself with the fattiest part of the piglet that morning.

The Princess prattled on. ‘I was six, Sir Gargarin. They were all frightened because of the godspeak that was coming from my mouth. I wrote it on the wall, you know. With the blood from my wrist. My father was desperate for Arjuro to decipher it and they dragged him into the room from the prison tower and I’ll not forget his face, Sir Gargarin, when he saw Lirah half-dead on the wet ground. He fell to his knees and wept, I tell you, gathering her in his arms. As if Lirah was the most beloved of women.’

Froi saw Gargarin’s knuckles clench as he leaned on the balconette.

‘What were you doing with blood on your wrists? Why was Lirah half-dead?’ Froi asked, alarmed.

Gargarin elbowed Froi into silence.

‘I always believed blessed Arjuro would return for her, Sir Gargarin. I’ve prayed to the gods that he would. More than I’ve prayed to the gods for myself. But then they released him in my eighth year and he disappeared for so, so long.’

‘You have a good heart, Reginita,’ Gargarin said gently before walking into his chamber.

The Princess stared after him as if she was trying to determine his meaning.

‘That was actually a compliment,’ Froi said.

‘What about when you told me about my dress that morning?’

Froi didn’t want to think of what he witnessed that day.

‘Not a compliment,’ he said, contrite. ‘Being rude, I was. You’ve got awful dress sense so don’t ever believe anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. But that,’ he said, pointing inside his chamber. ‘That was the real thing.’

He saw her face flush and she held a hand to both cheeks for a moment, as though surprised by the heat. Then she disappeared inside, and Froi wondered if she went in there to cry.

And then there was Lirah. It wasn’t as though Froi was half in love with her, but there was a force at play whenever he saw her. An ache he could not comprehend. He convinced himself he liked her garden more than her and so one day he found a more convenient way of visiting her rooftop prison from the battlement of his tower. Froi would break into a run, sailing through the air, his legs eating the gap between the two towers, his arms outstretched as though they would grab him space, his grunt muted by the shouts from the other side, until he landed on the opposite battlement, almost, but not quite, securely on his feet. When he stood up, brushing the debris from his trousers and inspecting the damage to his arm, he turned and saw the combination of awe and horror on the faces of Dorcas and the soldiers on the opposite roof.

‘Are you an idiot, or an idiot?’ Gargarin hissed, watching Froi climb back down to their balconette one time.

‘The first one. I really resent being called the second.’

Thankfully, the fool Dorcas didn’t try to stop him because there didn’t seem to be orders preventing the guest of one tower leaping over to visit the prisoner of the opposite tower. And Froi noticed each time that the battlements of the fourth and fifth tower were guarded by twice the number of soldiers of any other in the palace. Froi needed to find a way inside them.

Meantime he made use of his time with Lirah, although she wasn’t much one for talking, and most of their gardening was done in silence.

‘Tell me honestly,’ he demanded on a particularly boring day in the palace when he visited three times. ‘In the how many years that you’ve had this garden, has the petunia ever survived beside the tulip?’

Sometimes, without a word, she’d relinquish a plant to him and Froi would choose the best place for it to flower.

He found out little through Lirah. She asked of Quintana each time. Over the years, the King had allowed them in the same room only once, seven years after Lirah’s imprisonment when Quintana turned thirteen and her first blood came. ‘That’s when they decided to whore her to Charyn,’ she said bitterly.

Since then, Quintana and Lirah had only seen each other from the dungeon window. The three images of the Princess on Lirah’s prison wall now made sense. They showed the first time Lirah saw her babe, the last time before imprisonment, and the one and only time they had been in a room together between then and now.

‘Were you in love with Arjuro?’ he asked.

As usual, she didn’t stop what she was doing and refused to look his way. ‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Because you’re both … I don’t know. Savage. Cruel.’

‘Are you trying to flatter me?’

He laughed. It was the first attempt at humour that Lirah had made. She turned to him, as though surprised by the sound.

‘Well, you both seem the kind who would find each other in a crowded room,’ he said.

Her study stayed intense until she went back to her digging. ‘Arjuro prefers men to women.’

‘Oh,’ he said, surprised for a moment. ‘Well that makes sense, come to think of it. I can’t imagine a woman putting up with that stench.’

‘Yes, well he always did have an aversion to bathing.’

‘But that doesn’t mean you weren’t in love with him.’

She wiped her brow with the back of her hand and it left a mark of dirt.

‘I can safely say we despised each other.’

‘Why?’

Lirah didn’t respond and then Froi understood. ‘Ah. You loved the same man.’

‘You could say that,’ she said quietly, and he knew that he had asked too many questions and that if he didn’t stop, she’d go back to her silence.

‘When I return home, I’ll find a way to send you lavender seeds,’ he said when the sky began to darken and he knew he’d have to leap back.

‘Lavender? In Charyn?’

He waited a moment.

‘About Quintana –’ he began, but she cut him off.

‘I don’t answer questions about Quintana to strangers.’

‘I’m forced to share her bed,’ he said. ‘How can I be a stranger to her?’

‘You ask that of a whore?’ Her eyes flashed with anger, but Froi saw pain there too.

‘Is it true that there’s more than one living inside her head?’

‘Are you asking me if she’s mad?’

He didn’t respond.

‘Do you know what those in the palace say?’ Lirah said. ‘That the King should have tossed her the moment she was born.’

Lirah shuddered at the sound of her own words.

‘Was she always so strange?’ Froi asked.

‘You find her strange?’ she said, harshly. ‘When as a child she managed to separate parts of herself and make them whole beings? Each situation requires a different Quintana. But she survived. In this cesspit. That’s not strange or mad.’ Lirah sent him one of her scathing looks. ‘It’s pure genius. Do you think she was like you or the rest of the lastborns? You may not have been born into wealth, Olivier of Sebastabol, but you’ve been pampered by your province and your mother and father all your life.’

‘Wrong person to say that to,’ he said quietly. ‘Anyway, aren’t you convinced I’m from Serker?’

She looked at him closely. ‘You’re orphaned?’

Froi didn’t respond. ‘Regardless, Quintana wasn’t orphaned. So it can’t have been that bad for her. She had the King, and she had you, her mother.’

Lirah’s laugh was bitter. ‘The King? Have you met the King? A more degenerate man doesn’t exist in Charyn or the land of Skuldenore. The only thing the gods did right was to instil a fear in him of his own daughter because if they hadn’t, his wickedness would have shattered her body and her mind.’

Froi’s blood ran cold. In Lirah’s mind, Quintana may have escaped the depravity of her father, but he knew she hadn’t managed to hide from Bestiano.

‘The gods gave her you,’ he said. ‘That must count for something.’

Lirah gave a laugh of bitter disbelief. ‘Do you know why I’m here? In this prison?’

‘You tried to kill someone. Apart from Gargarin. Was it a man you were forced to bed?’ And then a thought came to him. ‘Sagra! You tried to kill the King?’

She shook her head.

‘There are not many places to hide a dagger when you’re taken to the King’s chamber as his whore.’

Froi stared at her. Wanted to tell her he understood. Wanted to confess the depravity in his own life on the streets of the Sarnak capital as a child. But there was too much shame. Girls were small and helpless. Boys should be able to protect themselves, no matter how young or slight in build.

She stood, brushing the dirt from her shift.

‘What do you think of the cold one? The one that seems to be in charge?’ she asked.

Froi shrugged. ‘I like it better when she’s not around me.’

Lirah collected her pots and string and walked towards her prison. ‘She’s the one to fear. She’ll make you do things that break your heart.’

When it came time to visit Arjuro at the godshouse again, Froi didn’t have the nerve to leap over the gravina. The first time had been enough. Arjuro kept the window to the balconette shut and the curtain drawn most days, but Froi was patient, and one morning he intruded on the brotherly ritual. ‘Arjuro! I’m knocking on the door at midday,’ he shouted. ‘Be sure to open for me.’

Gargarin stared at him with disbelief. ‘Does the word street lords not mean anything to you?’ he asked.

‘Two words, not one. Street. Lords. Care to join me?’ Froi asked. ‘As far as they’re concerned, I’m the Priestling’s messenger.’

Arjuro, of course, didn’t play by the rules and Froi was forced to hammer the door for what seemed hours.

‘Didn’t think you’d be back here,’ the Priestling muttered, bleary-eyed.

‘Why wouldn’t I when there’s so much fun to be had in the Citavita?’ Froi said. ‘This what you’re looking for?’ he asked, holding up a casket he had stolen from the cellars. The Priestling was drunk, his eyes bloodshot and swollen. They studied Froi fiercely.

Froi followed him up the dark space. He’d lost count of the steps and almost understood Arjuro’s reluctance to open the door. When they reached the Hall of Illumination, Froi walked to the balconette where he could see Gargarin watching them from across the gravina. Gargarin didn’t usually stand out on the balconette at this hour of the day, but Froi suspected he was there to see what Froi was up to.

‘Last night I dreamt of the three,’ Arjuro said over his shoulder. ‘Did he?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Gargarin, myself and a third who didn’t live. Throughout my life the third has returned to me in my dreams, and he has returned to me these seven nights past. I wager if you ask my brother, he’ll say the same.’

‘Is it because you have the same face? Do you dream the same things? Sense each other?’

‘It’s because of the third. He haunts us when he needs to. He was born dead.’

‘Arjuro, you’re not making sense,’ Froi said.

Arjuro was quiet a moment, as though he regretted speaking.

‘Tell me about the third,’ Froi persisted.

‘Our poor mother was a girl of fourteen. She refused to believe the third was dead and kept him in the cot alongside Gargarin and myself. Placed him on her breast as if he lived and had the life in him to suckle. Until flies and maggots crawled over us. It’s what our father used to say. “You should have been choked by the maggots and flies that shared your cot.” ’

‘He was a charming man,’ Froi said, repulsed.

‘Is,’ Arjuro corrected. ‘He’s still alive. A madman, frightened of anything strange, and three babes with the same face was too strange for him. So he told all in Abroi that there was only one.’