The Rose Throne, Page 2

  “A wager is it, then?” said King Haikor, raising his eyebrows.

  “A wager,” said Ailsbet. She knew her father loved to gamble.

  “Then play,” said King Haikor.

  “If you do not mind postponing the reason you have for requesting my presence in your court,” said Ailsbet daringly.

  “Let us see how well pleased I am with your playing,” said King Haikor. “Though all shall happen according to my own plan, as I am king of Rurik.” Of course, he could not be seen to capitulate to his daughter in matters of state.

  Ailsbet opened the wooden case and took out her flute. She closed her eyes. She had practiced this piece a hundred times perfectly, and yet each time brought a new twist. There were many people in this room, and that would change the sound, as would her own fears, which she could not completely hide.

  There was no chance for her to warm up. The piece was nearly thirty minutes long, and she could also not afford for a single person in the court to become distracted or bored. It had to be surprising, delightful—perfection itself—to people who cared not a whit for music.

  She began, softly, the first note rising slowly like the whispered flight of an owl in the night. From there, she lost all her self-consciousness. The anger she had felt before, with Kellin, slipped away, and she felt only the music. She became sure of herself, her hands moving gracefully, strong and delicate at once.

  She let the music lift her, winging her way on the wind, over treetops, over freshwater, looking down on the world of cities and palaces. If the neweyr was like this, she could understand what it meant to those women who had it in abundance and could feel connections to plants, animals, and other women hundreds of miles away.

  She could almost imagine that she could reach all the way to Aristonne, to Master Lukacs, who had been the anchor of her childhood until he had left four years ago. He had been stern with her, had loved her and complimented, chastised, and disciplined her as her parents had not bothered to do. She missed him desperately sometimes, and never more than when she played her flute. Yet she always felt happier when she had the instrument in her hand.

  Suddenly, she was at the end of the song, the final delicate notes that had to be played with a haunting quality that would make them ring for days afterward in the minds of those who had heard them. She finished them and held tightly to the flute, her whole body spent and exhausted, her head bowed.

  Then she heard one set of hands clapping. She lifted her head just enough to stare into her father’s eyes. He was pleased indeed.

  She knew then that it did not matter that the others in the court had not applauded. His reaction was enough. A moment later, the rest of the court joined in, as if they had intended to do so all along.

  As Ailsbet curtsied to accept the applause, she saw Kellin staring at her in surprised pleasure, the first real emotion she had ever seen on his face.

  “So, Princess Ailsbet, high musician of the court of Rurik, you shall have your reward,” said King Haikor. “What is it to be?”

  Ailsbet bowed. “I thank you, Father. If you do not mind, I should like to spend a few weeks alone this summer, in peace.” A last summer of freedom before she was betrothed.

  “Where?”

  “Wherever you should choose to send me,” said Ailsbet. She had not gotten that far in her thinking. It only needed to be away from here, from him, and from the thought of marriage.

  “Then I shall choose, and you will be informed in the morning,” said King Haikor. A small revenge, this not telling her.

  Ailsbet did not care. She nodded.

  “Your mother will go with you, with the women she chooses,” said King Haikor.

  “Of course,” said Ailsbet, who did not wish the queen and her ladies to go with her at all.

  Ailsbet shifted her gaze to her mother. It was not that she disliked Queen Aske as much as she feared she would become like her, insignificant and powerless.

  “And as for Duke Kellin, I have a special errand for you in the north,” King Haikor added.

  Kellin glanced up at the king. “Of course, Your Majesty. I am eager to serve you, as always.”

  “Come to me this evening, in my private chamber, and I shall tell you the details,” said King Haikor.

  Ailsbet, as well as the rest of the court, were left to guess at what this errand might be. Something to do with the land bridge? Or with Weirland itself?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ailsbet

  IN THE MORNING, King Haikor sent a message to Ailsbet announcing that she would go to the south for the summer to visit Baron Bartel of Terrik on the coast of Hewell as her reward for her performance on the flute. Terrik was a nobleman not well known at court, and Ailsbet could not tell if her father meant to burden him with the support of the princess, the queen, and their entourage, or if the man was deserving of some honor that the king did not want to bother with in another, more expensive way.

  In any case, three days later, Princess Ailsbet and Queen Aske rode from the palace in separate litters, through the capital city of Skorosa, to the south of the kingdom. Ailsbet wished she could simply ride one of the horses that would be coming with them, but it was not considered appropriate for noblewomen to be seen riding in public, except on the rare occasions when they joined the hunt, so she was forced to travel by litter.

  She could hear the sounds of wagons all around her, the natural music of voices in different accents from all the travelers who converged in Skorosa. The road was not quite wide enough for wagons passing abreast, and so they constantly had to stop and start as horses were maneuvered on and off the road. Were the king traveling himself, he would have demanded the road cleared for the entire day, ending any hope of commerce. But for the queen and the princess, such extreme measures were unnecessary. Ailsbet peeked out once to see a merchant beating a horse with taweyr as the animal whinnied its distress. She turned aside, sick at the noise and at her own interest in it.

  This was the main road that led south from Skorosa, and it was far better, from what Ailsbet had heard, than the web of roads that went north in the kingdom to the land bridge and to Weirland. It took all of the morning and into the heat of the afternoon to get through Skorosa. In the later afternoon, the road grew quieter.

  Ailsbet wondered if her mother would lean out and ask for a stop to rest, but she did not. Hot and bruised from the bumpy road, Ailsbet looked forward to seeing an abundance of neweyr at work in the countryside. She had seen paintings of what the south had looked like in her grandfather’s time, and even generations before that, when the two islands were newly separated from each other. She had expected to see fields golden with wheat, to hear songbirds overhead. She had wanted to see the neat lines of cultivation, the deep, reddish brown of fertile fields, the green and white and yellow of growing crops.

  The palace itself was so filled with taweyr that there was little greenery there. There were only patches of neweyr in the city, where women looked after small gardens. Most of the food for the populace and for the palace came from surrounding lands. But in the summer heat, as they went deeper into the countryside, Ailsbet saw men and women side by side, kneeling and tending crops by hand in dull black dirt that did not look rich or fertile. Ailsbet recognized wheat and barley but few of the other plants, and she was embarrassed at the ignorance this revealed.

  Her mother ought to be touring the kingdom regularly to add her own neweyr to the fields or leading the ancient neweyr rites in spring and harvest season. But the queen had never been strong in the women’s magic, and since King Haikor saw little use for it, she had done even less than she might. Beyond the crops, Ailsbet could see the trees drooping, bark shedding from their trunks. The animals looked wild and hard-eyed, some of them staring at Ailsbet as she passed, not tame, but uncaring.

  Ailsbet wondered what sort of princess she was, that she could do nothing to help her kingdom. But because she was unweyr, the only thing she could do for her kingdom was to marry and produce heirs. It was a
somber thought. She felt vaguely guilty that she had never even thought of coming this far from the palace before now. Her father took the court into the countryside on occasion, but she had not been invited with them and had always enjoyed the quiet time in the palace when they were gone.

  At the end of the journey, late at night, Baron Bartel came out to greet the travelers and the queen with his pregnant wife and his five daughters. He had no son. As his wife greeted her royal guests, it was clear she was ready for sleep herself, so Ailsbet allowed herself to be shown to her room. The house had only two wings, and it was obvious that the guests had been given the larger wing, which meant that the baron and his family must be sleeping in the servants’ quarters. Still, Ailsbet suspected that her own servants in the palace had sturdier walls than these and that their floors were not of dirt. She looked at the rushes that had been laid on the bed and could see ticks and other creatures moving around them. She shuddered and contemplated sleeping on the floor, but told herself that the creatures would be just as plentiful there.

  Her mother knocked on her door, and Ailsbet was glad of the interruption. The queen looked old and tired, Ailsbet thought. The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth were deep and shadowed, and there was no ease in her movement.

  “You think to escape your duty to marry,” Queen Aske said. She was dressed for bed in a yellowed nightgown with elaborate lace and gathers on the sleeves and the high waist. It made her look bloated.

  “No, Mother. At least, only for a little while.”

  “You are a woman. Unweyr or not, you must do what is necessary to keep your father strong,” her mother said.

  “Is my father so weak, then?” asked Ailsbet.

  “He needs you, Bez,” the queen said, using the diminutive that had been part of Ailsbet’s childhood.

  “I have said I shall do my duty,” Ailsbet said.

  “And after that?” her mother pressed. “Will you love him still?”

  To have both love and obedience demanded of her seemed too much. “I am tired, Mother.” She yawned deliberately.

  “And so am I,” said her mother. “More tired than you know.”

  The queen left Ailsbet alone then, to toss and turn through the night. She dreamed she was dressed in her mother’s nightgown, walking the halls of the palace in Skorosa, but she must have been a ghost because no one heard her or paid any attention to her.

  She woke early the next morning, relieved to find herself in her own undergarments. She put on an everyday gown of dark, serviceable cotton and, with the household asleep behind her, went to the stables for a horse to ride. As long as she was near the shore, she was determined to see the ocean. The southern portion of the river Weyr was tidal. The effect of its salt water on the weyrs was similar to that of the ocean, and those effects grew as the river cut through the last section of land to the coast. Ailsbet had heard of men being burned by a mere splash from the ocean, of women becoming barren after they had fallen into the salty sea. She knew of the way the ocean’s storms tore at the weyr of any man or woman close at hand. For Ailsbet, of course, there was no danger in the ocean. It was the one advantage she knew of to being unweyr.

  As soon as her horse was past the gates of the estate and onto the dirt road that led east toward the ocean, Ailsbet could taste the salt in the air. To her surprise, even before she saw the great blue horizon that stretched over the coast of Hewell, she could feel pressure, a darkness clouding over her. Her heart began to beat faster. Even from a distance, she could tell there was something malevolent in the ocean, something toothful and grimacing. She could hear it as a voice in her mind, taunting her.

  But at the same time, Ailsbet could feel something pulling her closer. This was a different force, one that was like a song. It drew Ailsbet in with a beat of its own, slow and steady. It reminded her of the way Master Lukacs would play the first few measures of a piece of music for her to learn, before letting her hear how it resolved. She would beg him for the rest, but he would shake his head sternly. Only when she had played each section well enough would he play another few bars, and then another, until she finally knew the piece all the way to the end.

  The dark gray ocean taunted her in the same way. Ailsbet dismounted from her horse and stood on the very edge of the red cliffs, looking down at the waves on the rocky beach below. As unweyr, Ailsbet had thought she would feel nothing in the presence of the ocean. Instead, it called to her and made promises of what it could give her if only she was willing to give up her home, her place, her very name. If she was no longer Princess Ailsbet, nor even Ailsbet the daughter of King Haikor, she could be—what?

  Dead, for one thing, for she could not swim all the way to Aristonne. And even if she found a boat to take her, what then? On the continent, she would be hated for her father’s sake. Even if they did not know she was princess of Rurik, people who knew where she came from would likely be terrified that she would use her weyr on them, whether she could do so or not. There were not many who had left Rurik to live across the sea in Aristonne or in the Three Kingdoms, but on the whole they did not prosper.

  She almost fell to her knees from the pull of the ocean. Trembling, she did the only thing she could think of to restore herself. She put a hand into her pocket and drew out her flute, and played, harmonizing with the salt water.

  It was a disjointed tune at first, for the ocean seemed angry with her, and it resisted her, singing anger when her flute sang peace, calling out hope when she played despair. But then she began to see the rhythm, and she could play with it. Sometimes she enjoyed the dissonance of playing opposite the ocean. Other times she turned around and caught it, like a parent snatching up a mischievous, fleeing child. It was draining and exhilarating, and like nothing else she had ever done in her life.

  She could hear the muffled sounds of her horse behind her. She had climbed off without tying it up, and it did not like the ocean. It had shied away but was afraid to go too far, and it paced back and forth, whining for her.

  Suddenly, Ailsbet caught sight of a boat moving closer to the beach. It was too small to have crossed the ocean from the continent. It must belong to a larger ship that she could not see or to some unweyr trader who used it to move goods along the shore.

  Ailsbet stepped back from the edge of the cliff, her hands on the flute going slack. She watched as a white-haired man stepped out of the boat and pulled it toward the beach with a rope. Another smaller, wiry man waited within the boat.

  The white-haired man cried out suddenly and began waving. Ailsbet followed the direction of his wave and saw a third taller and broad-shouldered man, and a young girl of perhaps ten years of age, hurrying down toward the boat from the other side of the red cliffs.

  At first glance, Ailsbet assumed the two to be father and daughter, but as she looked more closely, Ailsbet recognized the man by his pointed chin and his long, forceful stride. It was her father’s favorite, Kellin, the duke of Falcorn. He was not dressed in court clothes, but rather in the coarsely woven, dark-stained linen of the peasant class. And why was he here in the south, when he was supposed to be traveling north on a secret errand for her father?

  Who was the girl with him?

  Ailsbet slid to the ground so as not to be seen, but kept an eye on Kellin.

  The girl stopped close to the ocean, moving stiffly, as if in pain. Kellin encouraged the girl to move forward, until at last she reached the boat and was hauled aboard. To the man on the shore, Kellin held out a bag that Ailsbet could see was full of coins, for it glinted in the early morning sun. Then Kellin turned and looked up at the cliffs. She lay flat against the ground until at last he headed back along the coast from where he had come.

  Certain the man’s attention was elsewhere, Ailsbet stood and turned back to the anxious horse. She felt cold, but she did not think she had been seen. She grasped the reins and wound them around her hand. But before she could mount, she heard the sound of barking.

  She turned to see a pack of large black houn
ds running along the gentle hills of the south, and behind them a half dozen men in black cloaks whom she recognized as her father’s ekhono hunters, closing on her.

  Now suddenly the scene below her made terrifying sense. The girl must be ekhono, one of those who had been born with the wrong weyr. Because she had taweyr, not neweyr, the hunters were after her. But why had Duke Kellin risked his own life to save the girl? And why had he come so far out of his way to do so?

  She thought quickly and realized that her father’s ekhono hunters must be frequently on the roads toward the north, where the ekhono fled, and if the girl was from the south herself, it might have been faster and safer for her to take a boat directly from here to Weirland. Not safer for Kellin, however. As her father’s favorite, Kellin was the last person she would have suspected of helping the ekhono. King Haikor hated them and claimed that they were able to do terrible things to those with the proper weyr. If he ever found out the truth, Kellin would face a death sentence.

  Ailsbet turned to the men on horseback, the ekhono hunters.

  One of them, a man with a hulking upper body, strode toward Ailsbet. “You there!” he called out. Clearly, he did not recognize her as Princess Ailsbet, daughter of King Haikor of Rurik, his master. She had dressed hastily this morning and at first glance must seem more servant than lady.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “How long have you been here? Have you seen anyone hurrying by? A man and a girl, perhaps?”

  “No one,” Ailsbet said.

  The man threw back his hood and she saw that his head was shaved and covered with scars. Burns, presumably, from the many fires he had set to burn the ekhono, in accordance with her father’s laws.

  “I saw no one,” she repeated.

  He came closer to her. “Do not lie to me, girl. Tell me where this man went. He is a sympathizer of the ekhono and will be burned with the girl. If either of them should escape Rurik, the king will be very angry.”