Tortall (14 page)

Ochobai may have consistently been the first to wake and scream for a meal, but it was Junim who caused the nursery women to flutter and whisper two days later. Aly was in her office deep in the palace for the first time, but Nawat was present when the women set up a stir. Looking around from the game of bounce-me that he played with Ulasu, he asked, “What is the matter?”

“Junim turned over,” the younger wet nurse said, pointing to Nawat’s son. The boy was on the floor with Terai’s crawling child and Ochobai. Instead of lying on his belly to look around, as he’d been doing when Nawat picked up Ulasu, Junim now rested on his back, gazing with interest at the new world he’d found.

“I turn over all of the time,” Nawat said to Ulasu, giving the baby a slight jiggle. She chuckled and drooled on her father. “No one gets excited when I do it.”

“Only very clever babies do so when they are just a week old,” Terai said patiently. “Most wait a couple of months, or three.”

Nawat shrugged at Ulasu. “I don’t think it’s clever,” he replied. “Crow nestlings stand right away, long before humans do. The belly is too vulnerable.”

The women glared at him. “Most fathers are proud of what their children do,” Terai informed Nawat. “One day these little ones will hear you compare them unfavorably to crow-children. It will hurt them.”

Nawat smiled at her from his position on the floor. “One day they will learn to become crows. They will understand what they have been missing.”

Junim blew a spit-bubble, and new scents reached Nawat. The crow father sighed inwardly. His son was about to pee. There would be no easy way for Nawat to hand off Ulasu and gather up Junim, now the object of so much attention from the women, in time to make it to the window unobserved. That meant that Junim was soiling his diaper. He would soon begin to smell.

Nawat sat up, keeping Ulasu upright in his hands. How was he to teach his children the proper ways with so many humans to look on? If only humans didn’t have such foolish ideas!

Junim did not remain the sole master of the front-to-back rollover for long. Within two days Ulasu was doing it as well. Ochobai tried and tried, until she managed it two weeks after the triplets’ birth.

While the women congratulated Ochobai and told her what a big girl she was, and how much more clever all the triplets were than other children, a messenger entered the nursery with a sealed document. Seeing Nawat, she trotted over to give it to him. It bore the seal of both the queen and Aly’s Department of Information.

Orders, Nawat thought. His quiet time with the nestlings was over. He broke the seals and began to read. Once he had mastered the contents of the message, he went to the crow barracks to get his war band ready.

That night, in bed with Aly, he told her of Ochobai’s new skill and his own preparations to travel north. “Everything’s in order,” he finished. “I think Ochobai will miss me.”

“Those smugglers,” Aly murmured. “I wish we could send the army, but it’s not enough trouble to justify the expense. Especially not when the army’s preparing for the monsoon. It’s been so nice, having you here all the time. I don’t know about Ochobai, but
I
will miss you.”

“My crows ache for a long flight and time away from Rajmuat,” he told her. “My humans feel the same. The Rajmuat flock has kept a watch here. It makes my war band tense.”
He’d seen the city crows observing his visits to the window with an infant in his hands. He didn’t appreciate their spying on him, either. “If all goes well, the journey will be short. These smugglers think we do not know they are there. We will take them by surprise. Since the rains are late, I’ve already sent my crows out. Our ship leaves before dawn.”

“No,” Aly said, wrapping her arms around him.

Trick, watching from its bowl overhead, sighed. “Now she will mope,” the darking said. “She always mopes when you are away.”

“Everyone says she is perfectly fine when I am gone!” Nawat protested.

“I work hard to make them think that,” Aly whispered, burying her face in Nawat’s hair.

Nawat was gone less than a week. When he returned, Ochobai saw him first and cried out. She set off a chorus of noise from Ulasu, Junim, and even Terai’s boy, who knew actual words and could yell “Nawat!” Nawat gathered Ochobai up and gave her a sparkling rock he’d brought from the northern tip of the island. He handed a monkey doll to Terai’s son, who snatched it gleefully.

“No, no stones,” cried a nursemaid, swooping down on them. “She’ll put it in her soft little mouth and hurt herself!”

The moment the stone was taken from her hands, Ochobai began to shriek. “Does this mean I am not to give Junim his shell, or Ulasu her feather?” he shouted over his daughter, frowning at the woman. “Must I take the doll away, too?”

Terai moved into his view, as stately as an eagle. “Babies
put things in their mouths, my lord,” she said calmly into Nawat’s ear. “They even try to swallow them. The doll is a splendid gift for my boy, and I thank you.”

“Crow nestlings inspect objects, and learn from them,” Nawat retorted. “How do you know my infants will not do the same?”

He did not wait for an answer, but carried the wailing Ochobai to the nest he shared with Aly. There he rocked and bounced his oldest daughter until she began to calm, and to think of filling her diaper. They made it to the window just in time.

As he cleaned her, Nawat had a feeling, the same one he’d gotten from her once or twice before. It was something in the smell of her dung, he thought, but closer sniffing as he wiped her did not reveal the scent. Once he’d cleaned her off, he ran his nose all over the baby while she pummeled his head with her fists and tugged his hair. Deep in thought, Nawat replaced her diaper from those kept in the bedroom, then carried Ochobai out to the nursery.

The darkings, nursemaids, and wet nurses, often confused by his behavior, watched him curiously. He removed first Junim’s diaper, then Ulasu’s, and gave each infant as thorough a sniffing as he had given Ochobai. He thought they smelled sweeter than their older sister, but the scent was so faint, and so elusive, that he couldn’t be certain it was real.

As he replaced the diapers, he finally realized everyone was staring at him. He smiled. “Getting reacquainted,” he said. “They don’t have feathers for me to preen, so I do this.”
It wasn’t even half a lie. Crows did have greetings after they returned to the nest. “How have Aly and the little ones fared?”

It was a good distraction. It kept his children’s caregivers talking until kitchen servants arrived with supper for the nursery folk. Seeing that Nawat was there, they set another place at the table for him. Nawat ate with the women. Afterward he remained to play with the children and talk to their caregivers.

There was no sign of Aly. Terai said that Aly had not been present for the last feeding, an hour before Nawat had arrived. It was three hours later, time for the next meal, and Ochobai was starting to fuss. Aly rarely missed two meals in a row if she could help it. She had confided to him that she felt like a bad mother if she always left it to the wet nurses to feed her children. Not only that, but she liked nursing, now that the bumps in the road were smoothed.

Nawat unpacked his bags as the wet nurses fed the infants, setting gifts for Aly on the bed. He was taking the gifts for the wet nurses and the nursemaids out to them when he saw that his wife had come at last. Aly stood in the middle of the nursery, her hands folded neatly before her. Today she wore a sarong in greens and browns that made her look like a tree spirit with very forbidding eyes. The room felt much colder to Nawat. The maids and wet nurses all had their faces averted. The darkings, except for Trick, who rode as Aly’s necklace, had vanished.

Aly took a breath. “Nawat. I would like a word with you, if you please. Elsewhere.”

Nawat followed Aly, wondering what had pulled her tail feathers. Normally she threw herself at him when he came home, and let him spin her around. If she was not brooding eggs, they had other fun as well. Something was wrong, because she did not take him into her office in their rooms, as he expected, to scold him in private. Today she led him downstairs to the second level and around the outer wall to her official offices as the queen’s spymaster.

As they walked in silence, Aly slightly in the lead, Nawat began to get irritated. He was no longer an unschooled island crow, to be ordered about this way—he was her mate and war leader of one of the queen’s finest commands. Surely he deserved an explanation!

Aly entered the offices that served her and her spies. At the moment they were empty: everyone was at supper. It was when they walked into Aly’s private office that Nawat found that some people were
not
taking their evening meal. Queen Dove sat on one of the chairs, her small cat-face expressionless. The hanging gems on the points of her fanned crown shivered in the candlelight: her body was quivering. At her left shoulder stood Taybur, at her right Duchess Winnamine, their own faces unreadable. Darkings pooled at the queen’s feet.

Nawat bowed deeply; Aly curtsied. “Your Majesty,” Nawat said.

“Nawat Crow,” Queen Dove said quietly. “There is a thing I hoped you might be able to explain to me.”

“I am always at Your Majesty’s service,” Nawat replied cautiously. The queen’s gems shook harder than ever. The
entire population of the royal palace knew this to be a sign that Queen Dove was most displeased. The harder the gems swayed on the delicate crowns worn by the Isles’ queen, the worse the trouble was for someone. Had one of his people offended Dove in some way?

“I have come from a most embarrassing interview with the Tyran ambassador,” Dove said, her soft voice measured. “Apparently he and his aides took Moon Orchid Walk on their way out of the enclosure not long ago. As they passed the northeastern side of our residence, the Tyran ambassador stepped aside to admire a blossom. The god must have guided him. The splash of dung that might have drenched him struck his secretary instead.”

Uh-oh, Nawat thought, bowing his head. I was certain no one was out there.

“Of course,” Dove continued in that same quiet tone, “their party was quite startled. They looked to see what sort of bird had anointed the poor man. Imagine their surprise when they saw a pair of arms pull a naked infant into an open window of our residence. Imagine
my
surprise when the ambassador told me all this!”

Nawat understood the reason for Dove’s quivering gems now. She was furious with
him
.

The young queen got to her feet. The darkings moved away from her in an arc. “I had to apologize to that condescending moneybags for the insult to his delegation when I am trying to get a
very
big loan to repair the damage that was done during the rebellion. I offered my own maids to help his secretary bathe the stain away, silks from my own
storehouse to replace the ruined clothes, and the best of our shaving and hair oils.” Small red patches had appeared on her cheeks. “Once I had rid myself of him, I sent for word from my household. My gardeners tell me they have been cleaning dung from that spot since your children were born. Aly says she knows nothing of it!”

“Crows don’t foul their nests, Your Majesty,” Nawat replied calmly. He had never seen Dove so angry, but she was reasonable. She would understand where Aly and the women of the nursery had not understood. “We go to the edge and eliminate outside it. Aly and the nursemaids insist on cloth diapers, but they’re smelly and unnatural. I clean our babies right away. They don’t get the rashes that make Terai’s son cry, and they don’t stink like he does.”

Dove sighed. “It could have been the ambassador from Carthak, Nawat. They once started a war because they thought the presents for an imperial birthday weren’t impressive enough to be anything but an insult. That’s how they added Zallara to the Empire. Or it could have been one of the Yamani embassy—any of them. Then the defiled person, because they think anyone contaminated with the dung of others is defiled—that defiled person would have to kill himself immediately, probably on my doorstep. Then the emperor would have to avenge his relative, because everyone in the embassy is related to him somehow, except for the people who haul away the contents of their privies!”

“Oh,” Nawat said, applying one of Aly’s first lessons in diplomacy to himself.
When faced with angry nobility or royalty
, she had explained,
be still
.

“Yes. Oh.” Dove sank onto her chair. Her lips twitched.
“You should have seen his face.…” She made herself look stern again. “I have to show him that I’m punishing you, so get yourself and your band ready for a lot of stupid small tasks. And I can’t believe it’s healthy to stick your babies outside when the monsoons are coming.”

Crows live outside, Nawat wanted to reply, but he remained still instead and bowed to his queen. She rose and left the chamber, her darkings following her like a train. Taybur and the duchess nodded to Aly and left in the queen’s wake. Nawat could not help but notice that the guard captain’s body was shaking. Was Taybur getting ill?

Aly cleared up his confusion by whispering after Taybur,
“It’s not funny!”

After the door closed behind the queen and her companions, Nawat considered what had just taken place. He’d received his first reprimand from the queen. There would be tasks, but he had heard that such things were also usually accompanied by other punishments, such as a demotion in rank, or a reduction in salary. Technically, he had no rank. His war band operated on its own rules with Nawat as
lurah
, leader. Nawat dealt with the queen’s generals, admirals, and captains, but only she had the power to command him. She had spoken as if command of his flock remained his. As to reducing his salary …

“Do I get a salary?” he asked his mate.

“What!”
Aly shrieked behind him. Nawat turned to stare at her. She looked as though he’d turned into a kraken.

“Why do you raise your voice?” he asked, though if the truth was to be told, he had a good idea.

“You embarrass the queen—and our family!—with
people we are asking for
money
, with the representatives of a foreign nation, a nation that might take offense, and you want to know why I might raise my voice?” she demanded, though she also asked it more quietly. “Nawat, what am I to do with you? Human babies wear diapers, and ambassadors are living symbols of their realms!”