The Usurper's Crown (8 page)

The lock to the imperial canal was at least open, and the keepers reverenced as her men pulled them past The buildings cramming themselves up to the shore gave way to willows, pines, and sloping, groomed banks planted with lilies and bluebells, rare orange poppies and bleeding hearts. The air was fresh again, filled with the scents of the green and the growing. Birdsong replaced the endless gabble of people.

Which meant they were close, but not close enough.

Then the barge rounded the canal’s great bend, and the trees parted to show the red-and-white granite of Vyshtavos, the palace built by her grandmother to show that Isavalta was a united and peaceful land, and that its rulers had no need to hide themselves behind castle walls. The imperial dock was imported teak wood inlaid with ivory. More uniformed bargemen waited there to receive the ropes the oarsmen tossed them.

But Medeoan saw them only for an instant. Her gaze skimmed past them to the broad, white granite steps, where the Council of Lords stood, with Kacha before them.

Her mind went numb. She could not feel her body anymore. It was a paralysis even more profound than that which had taken hold after her failed spell. Her utterly failed spell. Prathad and Vladka had to grasp her arms and propel her forward before her feet would move. They had to walk along the dock and climb the steps, carrying her between them.

Kacha was the first to kneel. He would be. It was so very like him. The first to bow his head and murmur, “Imperial Majesty.”

The first to catch her as she tumbled to the ground in a faint.

The next hours passed in a blur of moving color and the rustle of cloth. Crowds of people whose faces she could not make herself see kept on marching solemnly up to her to kneel and bow their heads and call her by her mother’s title.

At last, her ladies took her back to her private rooms. She stood as still as a wooden doll while they removed her daytime finery and dressed her in her nightclothes. They laid her in her bed and covered her over with velvet and eiderdown, and she still did not move. She lay staring up at the canopy, trying not to think of what had happened.

Mother and Father had to tried so hard to prepare her for this time. She, in her turn, had tried so hard to hide from it. Her efforts were of no use, however. The moment had found her, and all her evasions had accomplished were to make sure that it had found her stubbornly unready.

“My heart?”

For once, Medeoan found herself with no answer for Kacha. She heard his soft step as he passed the screens. She felt the feather beds sink as he sat beside her. She rolled over, huddling like an infant before him. His warm and welcome hand laid itself on her head and stroked her hair.

“I thought there would be more time,” she whispered.

“I know,” he said simply. “I believe everyone does.”

“I don’t know what to do. They spent years teaching me, testing me, lecturing me, and now I don’t know what to do.”

“That will come. What is important right now is that you realize you are not alone.” He grasped her shoulders and raised her up until she knelt on the bed before him. “I am here with you. Together we will be the autocrat for Isavalta. You will be the flesh and blood, and the oh-so-passionate heart. I will be the bone on the inside, supporting and binding.”

“Yes.” In the darkness, her mouth sought his to kiss him hard and desperately. The press of his body against her held all the promise of life and the future. Together, as they were, they would know what to do. Together, hand to hand, skin to skin, and she would never be alone or confused again.

Some time later, Medeoan woke again to darkness. She lay for a time, listening to Kacha’s breathing and feeling the warmth where his hand almost touched her shoulder. Beyond the curtains and screens that isolated them, she heard the soft rustles and sighs of her ladies asleep in their truckle beds. It was deep into the night, she felt that in her bones, and knew it by the sounds of sleeping around her.

Gently, Medeoan drew back the covers and slipped from the bed. Her black-and-gold mourning robe stood on its form waiting for her in the faint light of the brazier smoldering at the bedside. Before she could reach it, one of her ladies, in the dim light she was not sure which one, was there holding it out for her. She slipped into its warmth and let herself be buttoned in. Wrapping her sleeve around her hand, she gestured for a brazier’s dish, which the anonymous lady brought so that she might have some light to see by. By its muted flames she could see it was Vladka who stood before her, ready to accompany her wherever she needed to go, and it was Vladka who she waved back to her post as she made her way between her sleeping ladies to the chamber door. The soldiers of the house guard and the young pages stationed there snapped to instant attention as she padded down the broad hall with its inlaid wood, its murals and mosaics.

The god house lay down the south stairs and at the end of the Gilded Corridor. Tonight, its wide doors stood open, releasing a flood of incense and candlelight. The double-wicked, braided candles that she had last seen at her wedding would be burning all night tonight. Those were the candles of Vyshko and Vyshemir, and their light called the gods to watch over the dead as well as the living. The court sorcerers and the keeper and his assistants moved about the room, shadows in all that gold and light, going through the forms of the ritual, keeping the vigils that were necessary to ensure that no ghost or goblin took advantage of the presence of death to make mischief.

Medeoan handed the brazier dish to one of the page girls and with a sharp gesture ordered her escort to stay outside.

The god house shined like a cave of jewels and fairy gold in a midwife’s tale. The gods stood on their pedestal dressed in mourning black, and Medeoan imagined she could see tears shimmering in their glassy eyes. She looked up at them because she had no wish to look down to see the biers that flanked the gods’ pedestal, piled high with flowers and green branches. Translucent white shrouds had been draped over her parents, so she could not see the yellow tint to their skin anymore. Those shrouds had been woven with care by the court sorcerers and contained spells as well as flaxen thread. Spells of peace, spells of protection, spells to keep the spirit from attempting to return to the flesh it had abandoned so that all things would remain in their proper orbits.

They would have fresh graves. The graves that had been dug in case of imperial deaths in winter were filled in when spring came. Medeoan had, more than once, walked through the cemetery with its stone monuments to see the gaping hole laid open for her, just in case she died while the ground was frozen hard. Every year it got a little bigger. There was a shroud for her too, somewhere.

So much laborious preparation for this ending. So much of life spent getting ready for death. This was what she had fought against since she had been old enough to fight, that her whole life was to lead up to this moment, to this end.

Well, now the end had passed, and here she still stood.

“Majesty.” Iakush Vtoroisyn Gabravin, Lord Sorcerer to her father and Lord Sorcerer to Isavalta until she said otherwise, stepped softly up beside her. “It is not time for you to be here yet.”

Until she said otherwise. “I have decided to be here,” she answered him. “Therefore it is time.”

“You wish to speak to them,” said Lord Iakush with a sigh. “You have something you want to say, or something you want to hear.”

Medeoan bit her lip, unable to answer. She had not thought her plan so evident.

“I stood beside my father’s bier, just as you do, Majesty,” Lord Iakush said. “I still remember the feel of his shroud under my fingertips. But my teacher was there with me.”

Medeoan swallowed. “My teacher is a traitor.”

Iakush paused only a moment at that. “Then I must ask you to hear me. It is a dangerous thing to call upon the newly dead. They remember too well the touch of this world, and if called back to this place they have loved, they may not wish to leave.”

“But the living are always stronger than the dead.” The words sounded hollow in her ears. She did not feel strong. She felt weak as water.

“Stronger, but sometimes not so desperate, nor so frightened, nor, at the worst, so angry,” Iakush told her gently. “Your parents did not die easily. To call them back from the Land of Death and Spirit so soon will be to call them back to their hearts’ best loves and worst fears. They may not be able to let go again.”

“If I bring them back, I can send them away again.” Medeoan did not look at the lord sorcerer. Her gaze remained fastened on the white-shrouded figures that were all that remained of her parents in the living world.

“It will be a struggle, Imperial Majesty. Would you wish on them more struggle now that they have gone to rest?”

“It is Vyshko and Vyshemir who are your living parents now.” Keeper Bakhar rounded the pedestal of the gods, coming to stand at her other side. “They protect you, and expect your duty in return.”

Medeoan turned her gaze up to the gods in their black gowns, especially to Vyshemir with her cup and her dagger, the tools she had used to save Isavalta when Isavalta was only one city and Vyshemir was only a mortal woman. It was Vyshemir’s sacrifice of her life that saved Isavalta from invasion from the barbarians of Tuukos, and blessed it so that it could grow into the empire that had been placed into Medeoan’s hands.

Not so long ago she would have cried, “But I do not want this duty!” She had, so many times, thrown herself prostrate at the foot of this pedestal, begging the gods for some way out. She was too small, she was too scared, she did not know enough, she did not want this duty. They had not listened. Instead, they had taken her parents and left her here.

“I know what you feel,” said the keeper gently. “But if the gods trust you to rule their house, in their name, how can you fail to trust yourself?”

You are the heir of Vyshemir
, her mother had told her long ago.
This is not a gift that can be returned. In the end you are the one who will decide how to make use of it
.

She had scorned those words then, and if she had not stormed out of the room on that occasion, she had on many others.

“I just wanted to tell them that I understand now,” she said, wondering at her own words, but knowing the truth of them.

“When death comes so close, we find we understand many things,” said Keeper Bakhar. “Come, Imperial Majesty, let us not trouble your parents, but pray for their rest and comfort.”

So, for the first time, the new empress of Isavalta allowed herself to be advised, and let the keeper of her god house lead her to the audience alcove so that she might speak to her parents properly, through the gods. So that she might say she would do her best.

So that she might say that she truly did understand.

Kacha lay in his wife’s bed for a time after Medeoan left, listening to how, after a few dozen heartbeats, the rustlings of ladies disturbed by their mistress’s passage faded once more into the sounds of gentle breathing and sleep.

The withered fingers of his right hand tapped restlessly on the covers. He could not be absent when Medeoan returned, nor could he risk one of those ladies waking up and finding him engaged in improper activities. His fingers tapped more urgently, reminding him that he had other concerns.

You will simply have to be quick
. Kacha slipped from his wife’s bed. The darkness confounded his left eye but made little difference to his right. He waved the attending lady away and moved surely across the dank stone chamber to the unprepossessing door that led to his own suite.

The room on the other side was also shrouded in darkness, and his own flock of attendants snored in their rude beds, except for the two on night duty who sprang to their feet as he entered. He waved them back and did not spare them any other thought. Many of these were men he had brought with him. Those who had been assigned to him by the Isavaltan court, and could not be bribed, had long since been replaced by those who could. All of them knew better than to take any undue notice of what their master did after dark. Soon he would have to take similar measures with Medeoan’s ladies.

The single advantage to the eternal cold and everlasting stone of this place was that there was always a fire burning somewhere. Kacha carried the smoldering brazier from his bedside behind a carved screen to the inlaid work desk where he wrote his letters. He set the brazier carefully in the waiting stand. He uncovered it with his right hand and blew gently on the coals to raise a cluster of delicate flames.

As the flames strengthened, Kacha felt a hunger seep into his mind. It flowed from his right eye and his right hand. Fire was gate and guardian. Fire was power and peace. These were truths he had not understood before his transformation, but now they were as much a part of him as his new eye and hand.

Prepared ink and paper waited for him on the desk. With his right hand, Kacha picked up the pen. He spat on the silver tip before dipping it into the thick black ink. Closing his left eye, he forced himself to relax and let his hand work. It was never easy, but it was necessary. Kacha knew himself to be a tool as well as a prince, and this was hard knowledge.

His hand worked busily at its task, sketching out particular sequences of letters, not to form words, but to form patterns, waves, tight, interlocking circles, and stars. His right eye saw the work, and it reached out to see beyond ink, spittle, and paper to places Kacha’s mind would never touch.

When eye saw that hand had finished, hand laid down the pen and picked up the paper. Sweat prickled Kacha’s forehead and the strain of his spirit reaching outside his flesh made his temple throb. He turned to the brazier and laid the paper down atop the coals. With his right hand, he smoothed the flames over the page.

Pain flared down through his skin to the bone. Kacha clamped his jaw closed to keep from screaming.

It does not burn. It does not burn
. He tried to fill his mind with that thought. He had done this before and he knew his skin would emerge whole. If he had been a sorcerer in whole rather just in part, there would not even be any pain. But he could not stop his hand. He could not even pull it from the fire, so he must endure. Tool as well as prince. Conqueror and surrendered. But it hurt, by the names of the Seven Mothers, it hurt.