Spring...
She was about five feet seven inches tall, her complexion peach-golden.
-Pg 137, Squire
He traced the familiar border of dragon claws stitched on all her shukusens, and the kudarung wings scratched on the steel ribs. She read his mind. She always did.
"I was born in the month of the kudarung, in the year of the dragon."
"An ill omen for any female child, so the Yamanis say," he jested.
"Tortallans wear their hopes on their sleeves, Yamanis on their almanacs." She flicked her shukushen from him, the stiff, raised embroidery of her sleeves grazing his knuckles. "You have your ways, we ours."
The hunchbacked crones in attendance at the family temple claimed that as the Emperor's niece's birth-cries sounded through the palace, the votive candles at the Wavewalker's shrine guttered out. But the mirror did not crack when Princess Etsukokami held her firstborn daughter before it as per custom. It ought to have, her husband, Prince Hideyoshi said, it ought to have. From her birth till her second betrothal his eldest daughter had brought fourteen years of bad luck with her.
"My sire, Prince Hideyoshi, and His Imperial Majesty were never close. For the better part of my life, we seemed to drift in and out of disgrace, always wondering when we'd be sent into exile." She propped up her fan to screen the lower part of her face. "They were born of the same mother, so perhaps that would explain it. For our people, too-close kinship is cause enough for enmity." She was embarrassed. He was learning to read her.
"My lady," he said tentatively. Her name came harder to his lips than any female's. To name her was to somehow desecrate her, to profane it's purity with his unworthy lips. "Shinkokami," he said slowly, timidly, as though fearing a reprisal. "You needn't-"
Her eyes reminded him of the spring brown of the earth when soft buds rose from it. Pale for a Yamani's he had thought. Too tall at five feet seven for a daughter of a race that prized it's women for smallness of form and delicacy of feature.
"Porcelain dolls fanning themselves with miniature halberds," Neal drawled, ruffling his dark hair so it flopped messily from the widow's peak into which Kel had neatly combed it into. It would have been becoming if there were discerning feminine eyes nearby to appraise the squire. Neal was not meant for the curtains, it was evident. Roald ought never have introduced him to his hideout.
"Restraint is quite fashionable nowadays," Roald hissed back.
"Waka-misquoting boulders," a voice in prettily accented Common murmured. Neal grinned down at the round-faced girl who seemed to melt out of the shadows, not in the least put out. "This particular doll would advise you not to meddle with Yamato uta - it doesn't become you."
"Then what does, Lady Yukimi?" the love-crazed boy murmured, apparently under the delusion that his voice was husky, a treat to female ears. One day Neal would hurt himself trying to flirt, and Kel would hurt herself trying to help.
"Dancing," the girl said, slipping her arm through the crook of his elbow. She looked up at Roald, whom she seemed to just have noticed. That wasn't unusual - given half-a-chance Roald attempted to fade into the tapestry, the Gods and his father permitting. "Your Highness," she said, curtesying deeply. Neal was dragged into a half-curtsey as well. "Shall I call for my mistress?"
"No," Roald said quickly, panicking. He could imagine few things worse than hiding behind the curtains with his dignified betrothed. "No, that won't be necessary."
"I want to. A wife must have no secrets from her husband," she said. "It is better, no, that we are to wed on even terms?"
Chisakami, who would have been Queen of Tortall, was crushed to death in the earthquake that laid to waste the southern Ajikuro holdings and all the fourth- and fifth-rank princesses in the Isles mourned. Shinkokami, as a second-rank princess knew she would have no cause to fear being sent as a peaceoffering to the nation of barbarians. It would perhaps be Yukimi noh Daiomoro whose family was in favour with her imperial uncle. Or one of Princess Kimiko's sisters, renowned for their classical beauty. It would never be a blood-niece of the Emperor. It would never be the betrothed Princess Shinkokami.
"Sayuko has danced in my bowl," she would write bitterly in rice-paper scrolls, before sealing them into embroidered cases. It was the way Yamani ladies of refinement kept diaries, a much-encouraged habit. If she listened hard, she felt that she would be able to hear the tinkle of the spinner of fate's laughter.
"Back home," she began. She used it to preface many of her statements. She paused and then reconsidered. Amended it. "In the Isles, a daughter-in-law is the chattel of the matriarch of a family - she belongs more to the dowagers than to her own husband till she has proven herself by the birth of a son."
"Your Highnesses," a voice interrupted. Prince Eitaro and his lady had come to be acknowledged by the newlyweds. It was Shinkokami who first dipped her head, graceful as a dancer, dignified as a queen. Roald followed her example, as he always did. He had given up trying to be graceful hours ago, settling for endurance. He wondered whether her head ached after wearing the heavy golden crown ritual demanded, for so many hours - his certainly did, and he'd had years of practice with weighted armor. He'd never dreamed a crown could hurt so much. Her slender neck looked too fragile to bear the weight, as though it might snap.
She bore it so beautifully.
Princess Kimiko Eitaro leaned forward to whisper in her ear and Shinkokami smiled, smoothing the heavy folds of her brocade gown as she only did when she was strained. Everyone from the Emperor of the Yamani Isles to the Queen of Tortall had wanted a Yamani-style wedding - the Emperor in contempt of the Tortallan ceremonies which were certainly not good enough for a second-rank princess, the Queen because she wanted her daughter-in-law to be happy. Shinkokami had refused - and endeared herself to the commoners who were as set against customs that smacked too much of the 'heathenish' Yamani ways as the Emperor was against their Tortallan counterparts. She had been wed in yellow brocade broidered with blue - yellow for constancy, blue for devotion - not in the red kimono and the white obi, passed down through the generations, of her foremothers'. The shukushen she had kept beside her all throughout the ordeal - for it was an ordeal - of their wedding had been the only symbol that she was Yamani-born and bred.
He wondered whether it was significant that it was a weapon.
Roald did not need to ask. As soon as the Eitaros had left, Shinkokami turned to him. Did she not always read his thoughts? "She approved my wisdom this morning," she said softly. "There is a belief among the old wives of Tortall that the one who steps from the blessed altar first, after the completion of the ceremony will play the dominant role in the marital life."
"Who stepped first today?" Roald asked. He had quite forgotten - he hadn't even known such a belief existed. No doubt some obscure lore that pleased country gossips'.
"In the Grimhold Mountains if the gopher shies on the Equinox from his shadow, it'll mean a long winter." Imrah of Legann fingered Jasson the Empirebuilder's memoirs thoughtfully. "And for the Bazhir, the sand grouse carving its tunnels means the rains will come soon. Curious isn't it?"
"Old wives' lore," Roald scoffed. His knightmaster was usually so sensible.
The older man's smile was peculiar when he said, "There'll be diamonds in tailings if you care to look for them, lad."
"And by the same logic, tailings in diamonds," Roald couldn't resist adding.
"Again for those who look for them."
"Why do you care?"
"You did," Shinkokami said softly, referring to his first question. "The princess complimented my foresight in permitting you to step first." She did not reply to his second question, but she did not say that she didn't care.
He went back to what they had been talking about. "Yukimi told me you burnt incense at every temple on your way here, as thanksgiving," he said. He tried to imagine her joy. He could not - she seemed incapable, no, not incapable, simply too fragile, too ethereal, yes, for strong emotions. An immortal unruffled by mortal passions. She smiled. She smiled as though the amusement she had afforded him had given her pleasure. A devoted wife, indeed.
She was born to be bought and sold like chattel, her father would tell her on a good day. On a bad day, he would scream that she ought to have been drowned at birth, that he would let her roost with the swine for that was where she belonged, filthy, evil-bringing, worthless daughter. Ravens had cawed at the dawn of her black birth.
When she met her betrothed, her mother had to remind her to be grateful that he was young and healthy and noble-born, to save her from weeping. Her fate could have been worse, she could have been married off as the third or fourth wife of a wizened duke, widowed when she was little more than a bride, condemned to the ignominy of a poor relative, dependent on charity. Her uncle could have gifted her as a concubine to one of his favoured, common-born generals as an insult to her father.
"What you Easterners call beautiful is repulsive to us," she said, brushing a stray thread on his blue velvet doublet. The gesture was so familiar, so like a wife's that it discomfitted him. For a moment he wondered whether he would not just turn tail and flee when they were taken to their bridal chamber that night. "I suppose my uncle thought it would please you if he offered his ugliest niece. It amused him immensely to command the noh Sanchis to break off my marriage contract."
"Too tall and thin, just like a weed! Eyes like weak tea!" Lady Katashi noh Sanchi screeched. Trained to the dignity of silence, Shinkokami listened, her eyes alert, attentive. She afforded her mother-in-law-to-be the courtesy of her attention till the very courtesy was defiance. Before her, Katashi was reminded once again that she was a general's daughter, at least ten ranks below the princesses in her tatami room. Incensed, she continued, "And where she'll get the milk to nurse a son I'd like to know - those lemon-seeds on her won't be likely to bloom into watermelons any time soon. And I've been hearing tales of the company's she's permitted to mix with-" She shot the girl's mother a malicious glance.
Princess Etsukokami knelt and listened in silence. She had no place defending her daughter any more - the girl belonged now to Lady Katashi.
"Consorting with the likes of those Tortallan barbarians! That jumped-up Mindelan bullfrog's brats-"
Shinkokami's voice was low and soft, with the grave politeness due to an elder. It was firm. "Honourable Lady noh Sanchi," she said, "Baron Piers and Lady Ilane have done naught to incur your contempt or the discourtesy of your words. Lady Keladry, with whom I spend much time, in the grace of her manners and person is beyond reproach, even as a daughter of Tortall." She met Lady Katashi stare for stare. "And I speak not too boldly if I mention that we of the Isles have much to learn of the Tortallans in the ways of courtesy."
"I think she made a vow at the Wavewalker's temple that night that she'd break every bone of my body on my marriage night," Shinkokami said. "My mother certainly took no pains to be over-gentle with me when she whalloped me with a ratton cane after I spoke so to Lady noh Sanchi."
"Weren't you aware of the fact that your words would be considered impolitic?"
"I was nine," Shinkokami said dismissively. The star sapphire he'd slid onto her finger that morning glittered under the light of a thousand candlebras as she waved to a dancing couple. Yukimi, in Neal's arms, waved back. Her skirt swished, barely audible, as her little feet tapped restlessly. She loved to dance. He hated it. "And I couldn't bear her words - I shouldn't have. You would have done the same." She didn't even glance at him for confirmation - she seemed so firm in her belief that he would have that a backward look wasn't necessary.
"Perhaps you could exercise royal authority-?" suggested Neal carefully. Roald looked down, his mouth tight.
"You know he hates to call on royal privilege," Kel told Neal sternly. "He's trying to be the same as we are." The look of gratitude the prince gave her warmed Kel's heart.
Would I have? Had he risen when Vinson had spoken? Garvey? Joren? No he hadn't - but there had been a reason. Yes, there had been, and what she had done was wrong. It was quixotic, a child's impulse, and...
"I always feared abusing my position," he said slowly. She raised mild eyes to his. Was there a flash of disappointment in them? "What?" He said defensively.
No, they were as sweet, as gentle and understanding as ever. Shinkokami had never raised her eyes in contempt to anyone. "I said nothing, sweetheart." Sweetheart.
Cleon of Kennan slipped his arm around his bride's waist. His smile seemed painted on his face, a mockery of the good cheer of his wedding day. Kel, stately and sedate, murmured bland congratulations while Neal's eyes flickered over the pair, as though expecting (perhaps awaiting, the ridiculous boy thrived on excitement) an expolosion.
"All Gods bless, Sir Cleon, Lady Ermelian," Roald said formally, bowing to the heiress who had restored the Kennan fortunes. "Will you grace us with your presence at the Beltane festival? The court will be travelling to Port Caynn - it is a sight worth watching." He meant Port Caynn decked in the brazen lights and colors of Beltane, not the whole court packing up and travelling but both, he decided, were spectacles worth watching.
Lady Ermelian looked timidly up at her broad-shouldered husband, as though seeking his approval. Her eyes shone with longing but Cleon said, a trifle too harshly, "No, sweetheart and I were thinking of turning back, getting the crops underway before market-time." To soften the words - Cleon could never be cruel - he bent low to kiss the innocent girl's forehead. She smiled happily, like a placated child and Roald's heart throbbed in pity for her. Sweetheart... Roald wondered how Cleon dared address the woman for whom he cared as much as he would a painted doll 'sweetheart'. It sounded tawdry, unfitting, the sweet caress of the words coarsened, cheapened.
He had been betrothed for six years. He had never kissed her. He had never called her sweetheart.
The one word rang like a clarion call in his mind. She slid her cool hand through his and raised it high. The minstrels were playing a slow tune, sad and sweet like the ice-sheathed petals of a winter rose. Then in the full sight of the five hundred guests, she kissed it, a long, lingering kiss - the gesture of devotion of a vassal laced with the love of a passionate young bride. He heard her sigh softly and shivered, felt the softness of her golden cheeks against his knuckles. Slowly, thunderously the room burst into applause.
She had kissed him, the bridegroom's prerogative usurped by the bride.
She had not needed to step before him when they descended from the altar. It would have been a hollow symbol of a hollow victory over him.
Summer...
"I don't think I spoke to you, Ralon of Malven," the boy called "Highness" said. His bright blue eyes fixed on Ralon's. The two boys were of the same height, but the dark-haired boy seemed to be about a year younger and much more commanding. "Unless I'm mistaken, I told you not to talk to me at all."
-Pg 35, Alanna: The First Adventure
"Even in a peasant's tunic and breeches, the king shone brighter, to me, than Mithros himself. The king, my father."
"Never your father, the king." It was a statement from those polished red lips which seemed ever to drip pearls and roses like the blessed virgin in the parable. Her lips dripped wisdom, which was worth more than jewels and bouquets.
"No."
He was godlike, his fingers resting almost languidly on his charger's silken mane. The unyielding, inflexible strength of the taut muscles of his arm, the rein looped tightly around them, belied the languidness of his posture.
He was like a woodcut illustration of the ideal king, brought to life in the glowing colors of a saint's stained-glass window.
He was speaking, and the child allowed the deep, sonorous notes of his voice to roll over him, barely registering the words. As always, he felt humbled, like a worshipper permitted in an inner sanctum.
"There's nothing to be frightened of, Roald," he was saying. "Are you afraid?"
"No, Father." He glanced back at his mother, who was fitting her bowstring. She never noticed.
Kally, her silky black curls hidden under a Rider's cap that had been stitched for her small head, was leading her white palfrey with a five-year-old's slow ceremony around the riding ring. Her brothers gazed enviously at her - Liam because he was certain that at two, he was quite old enough to ride, Roald because he was equally certain that at six, he was too young to be permitted a real horse.
"Let me guess - the horse threw you." She was flicking through an account of battles by Emry of Haryse. "It happens to everyone once."
He made a wry face. "Again and again and again and to this day, I am notoriously horse-shy."
"Dance-shy too." She cast an arch glance of amusement at him. "It takes all sorts to make a world."
"Not Conte men. Not sons of K'miri mothers, born in the saddle. I was a disappointment, to put it gently - and what made it worse was that Jasson and Liam never took a fall when they learnt to ride later." He felt a need to unwind, to throw himself on her pity. He was very tired tonight. Grudgingly, Shinkokami rose, interpreting his thoughts correctly.
"Lie still," she ordered crisply, more in the way of a healer than a loving wife. Slim fingers stripped off his shirt in quick, brittle movements. He felt her naginata-toughened hands rub vigorously and moaned as his muscles loosened.
"You don't have to-" he began halfheartedly, feeling guilty. Shinkokami was so acquiscent that it was almost a crime not to take advantage of her willingness to serve.
"Do you leave me any choice?"
He was cautious of his Gift, keeping it always in tight lease, wary of it's power. It was a demon, masquerading in chains as a helpmate - chains that could come off at any time. If the Lioness had known, she could have helped. But she did not, his teacher was his father who grew more and more aggrieved at his timorousness by the lesson.
"He urged me to be bold. He kept on frightening me with how the Dominion Jewel would be in my hands someday and how I must work to overcome my fears and use it's powers for good, how I must hold it firmly in hand and how could I do that if I was so weak, so-"
(And you'll still never be me, you'll never stand where I stood and reach what I've reached. Never.)
She was chuckling softly. "You were always more his heir than his son. You would always represent more to him than what you truly were." An insult wrapped in sweetness, like a poisonous seed sheathed in a fragrant fruit.
"Tortall's golden future embalmed in a green sapling," Roald said wryly. "Entombed in my case. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet - horsedung, don't you think? Sir Myles once told me I was far more like my grandfather than my father."
"And they say your father was evermore like the Old King, the Empirebuilder," Shinkokami reminded him. She sat back on her heels, her pale, silken robe flowing loosely over her torso till her swollen abdomen was barely discernible. "I have often thought that when encouragement is least offered, when left to it's own devices, a child flourishes more. Good seeds fluorish even on rocky ground, so the proverb goes."
"And what of those seeds which are not good?" Roald asked. He was thinking of himself.
Shinkokami's answer was indifferent, as though she couldn't care less about those. "They perish."
Kel noted Roald's look of wonder and pleasure as Shinko revealed a thorough grasp of strategy, supply problems and tracking. Pressed by Raoul and Buri to tell what she knew, she described Yamani battles and tactics.
"When my father caught me reading a book by Lord Isamu, our greatest general - a book he'd meant as a birthday present for my brother-" She didn't finish the sentence, just mimed a slitting gesture with her finger. She was adapting to Tortallan customs - the expressiveness of which, she had once mentioned, appealed immensely to her sense of the grotesque. "I never let him catch me with a book in my hand afterwards."
"You were never beautiful in the conventional way," Roald said softly. "You were born on an evil star. You frightened him." Shinkokami, inspite of her defective beauty, was like a Yamani painting on a silk scroll. The grace of stillness and motion caught in pastel-tinted brushstrokes on a fragrant canvas. Mysterious. A bird, wings swept preparing for flight, on a frost-laden branch. A maiden, face screened by a paper-thin umbrella, as inscrutable and beautiful as the silver moon she gazed at.
"So did you," Shinkokami said. "So did you."
"He's gentle," Thayet said softly, trying to protect her son. "Give him time."
"Too gentle," Jonathan said sharply. "He's fourteen and he melts into the pages and squires like a block of butter left in the sun. Keladry of Mindelan, the Stone Mountain boy - they lead the pack. And him? Too frightened to speak out, even for a good cause. Too soft, too cursed weak!" He thumped the table for good measure. "I'll be turning in my grave when he sits on the throne," he said sullenly.
("All right," said Prince Roald. "Cleon and I are fourth-years, Faleron's third and Neal's sixteen. We appoint you to speak for us, and we will back you."
Kel met his level blue eyes and saw the prince's mind was made up. He did not like to put himself forward - he seemed to think people would accuse him of abusing his station if he did - but he was every bit as stubborn as his famous parents.)
Thayet laughed. "Just like your father did. What do you think he'd say to your reforms?"
Jonathan refused to be placated. "What I did, I did and took the consequences. Him-" he shook his head. "Gentle boys do not make great kings, Thayet. They do not even make good ones without strong counsels. You've seen your father - a generous man, a kind man, a loving husband." He had been a kind man, man-to-man, whatever could be said of him. More suited to the ease of life of a country squire, not the king of the land of thirteen rivers. He had even been a doting father when the mood suited him - he had only been a man of Sarain, stoneset in it's customs, never unable to forget that his only heir was female. It had hounded him to the grave, his lack of ability to get a son out of his beautiful queen, his personal demon. As a grown woman, Thayet could understand the late Adigun jin Wilima's actions better - and forgive them - while still remembering and forgiving Kalasin. It was part of her.
Jonathan was ranting. "Weak as a windblown leaf, swayed by his nobles." He shook his head. "If Tortall emerges unscathed from Roald's hands it will be because of Shinkokami."
"You've made up your mind to have your lying in at Olau?" Roald asked. The barony was as famed for it's rosy apples as for it's mild clime. Shinkokami would do well there, under his sister Lianne's, Baroness of Olau, care. Lianne and Alan's son would be three soon - he would have to get him a good present. Certainly not the magnificent set of horse tack his misguided Aunt Alanna and Uncle George had gotten him when he was three - oh how mortally disappointed he had been then, though he'd had to swallow it for the sake of propriety. Still it had been hard on him.
"Yes," Shinko said, her eyes shadowed. "A change of air will do me good." The last time she had left for Port Caynn because she thought the healing waters would do her good. It hadn't. Seven years of marriage, five miscarriages and a son who had not survived his first month. Roald could forgive her, could forget, but she could not.
"As queen, your first duty will be to bear an heir. A son."
"I hope you won't be too clever. Clever women are like clever slaves - dangerous. Disposable."
"Men with unconventional mothers desire conventional wives."
Words could poison a soul. "What do you hope for?" Roald asked gently, trying to deflect her thoughts. He smiled, "I want a girl. Just like her mother."
"A boy," Shinkokami said decisively. A boy to bind a kingdom. "With eyes of Conte blue. I want a boy." Just like his grandfather.
There was a tap on the door and when Shinkokami gave the command, a servant entered with a sheaf of papers. Roald groaned and buried his head in the pillows, not caring that it was undignified in the heir to the throne - if the servant was trusted enough to be permitted in the inner royal chambers, he could be trusted to hold his tongue about the prince's antics. Shinkokami maintained her seat, her spine ramrod straight, queenly even in nightclothes.
"They're for you to seal," she said, scanning through them. "If you want, I'll do them for you."
"Thank you," Roald said reverently. "Thank you. Good night, sweetheart." He turned around, drawing the light coverlet up above his bare shoulders. Shinkokami sat cross-legged on the floor, a quill poised between her lips and read through, crossing out words that did not meet her approval, drawing up a list of notes that she meant to look through with Duke Gareth on the morrow - Goddess, how state expenditures had risen since the slump in rice exports from the Drell basin! They would have to be cut, cut, cut...
It was long before she blew out her candle. It was not Roald's bed into which she climbed into. It was not Roald around whose shoulders she wrapped her arms and nestled her aching head against.
The man she loved stayed up later hours than her.
Autumn...
Priests whispered to ever-ominous peasants that the rain was the gods' tears, the howling wind their lament for the greatest king that ever was. White roses, with sapphire hearts, crowned the brow of the godlike king's marble effigy, like gold leaf on the cedar coffin. Noble and commoner lined up alike to pay tribute to a king who had ruled both court and country. Few had.
(Discreet, calculating glances at the unanointed successor in crepe)
Few would.
Two sons and three daughters stood shoulder-to-shoulder while the skies broke forth, and the River Olorun overflowed its banks. Roald, the unanointed King of Tortall, made in his late father's image - image alone, the wise had already begun to say. Kalasin, Empress of Carthak, moulded of the fire and immortal clay of her foremothers. Liam, Duke of Conte, raw-boned and battle-scarred like his namesake. Lianne, Baroness of Olau, ripe and rosy, blossoming with new life, like a Barony apple. Vania, the youngest, still childlike inspite of the ponderous dignity of her crepe mourning robes, in rank a step lower, in height a few heads higher than her niece, Roald's heiress.
From her window, black-veiled Thayet watched the five dark heads bowed in prayer for the late king's safe passage to the Black God's realm. In Tortall, widows did not witness their husbands' interrment. Her heart did not ache - his time had come -, instead it swelled with pride for his children. One, two, three, four, five... where was the sixth?
Jasson the Prince stood apart with the queen-to-be.
"Do you know," Roald said casually, "in your isles-"
"They are not my isles," Shinkokami said instinctively, mechanically through years of habituation. She had not been born or even brought up on Tortallan soil but it had done more for her than her fatherland ever could. As far as she was concerned, the Yamani Islands were hers no longer.
"In the Yamani Isles, imperial matriarches often take lovers among the nobility, among boys young enough to be their sons. A queer fancy among the many queer fancies of your people. It would be called treason in Tortall," Roald said mildly, delicately stressing the word 'queer'. Like any Tortallan, he was chary of the unconventional in sexual practices. "You were too young perhaps to be exposed to such court gossip."
The queen shook her head gently, as though to insinuate that one was never too young to pick up salacious court gossip. She unfolded a miniature flowered kimono, done in a fusion of Yamano-Tortallan style. A gift from the Emperor of the Yamani Isles. It was a beautiful creation meant for a little girl and Shinkokami unconsciously let out a grunt of displeasure. Of disappointment perhaps. The child who had lived the longest among the eight she'd carried would be a year old soon.
It was a daughter.
"You had better be careful," Roald said softly.
She turned her face up to him, as pure of sin and delicate of line as a white orchid glimpsed by moonlight. A face of ghastly beauty. "My dear?" she asked innocently, unruffled as always. Her Yamani mask would never fail her - always it would stand between them for he had been judged and deemed unworthy to be permitted to see beyond it.
"Don't insult your intelligence and mine by dissembling," Roald spat. "The punishment for infidelity is-"
Shinkokami had risen and was arranging the early magnolia blossoms in a bowl of black jade. In the watery light, her profile was like a child's painted on silk. "Painful," she said serenely, betraying no shade of emotion. "The punishment for treason is worse. Do you remember the Countess of Legann's trial?"
She was his late knight-master's wife. Swallow's black hair, wistful china-blue eyes, satiny red lips made for kisses. The older woman that young lads fell hopelessly in love with before moving on to greener pastures - at once sensuous and mothering. He had fallen as madly, as hopelessly, as innocently in love with her as had any of Imrah's previous squires. The perfect wife for a man of war, he had thought, sultry enough to warm a bedchamber, cool-tempered enough to run a fief with mannish efficiency in her lord's absence.
Too cool perhaps.
He had chosen Duke Turomot to preside. It would be the old man's last trial and it was fitting that it should be sensational. Treason, high treason, never failed to attract a crowd, and the hall was thronged with agawp spectators, gleaned from every strata of society. The woman in white, shorn of adornment save her limp, once lovely, swallow's black hair, had sagged with exhaustion at the prisoner's chair. If she had not plotted against his life, Roald would have felt sympathy for her. His eyes picked out Imrah's form, as limp and pale-faced as his wife's. He wished he was permitted to rise out of the chair reserved for the king, to comfort the man. Imrah was a friend.
The shadows slunk across the walls and the servants had come to light the tapers on the third day, when the trial was concluded. "Lady Electra of Legann, you are hereby found guilty on five counts of conspiracy against His Blessed Majesty, the King, and the Royal Family, with possession and distribution of seditious documents, of contempt of the judicial body and the laws of the country and of high treason." Duke Turomot's voice rumbled, as elemental and unyielding as what Roald imagined the Chamber of Ordeal's voice would be - if it had a voice. "The Court of Tortall in it's most infinite mercy sentences you to the death reserved for treason most foul - quartering, dismemberment and hanging." The shudder that ran over Imrah's body passed like a wave over Roald's.
Shinkokami leaned over, her fingers playing over the ribs of her shukushen. "Deserved punishment for traitors," she said, her satiny red lips shaping venomous words. "No more, no less, Your Majesty."
He looked at her. "No more, no less, Shinko." Her tea-colored eyes bored into his, but he kept his blank, guileless. It was not the first time he had misled his beloved wife.
"It happened less than three months ago," he said evenly. "I would be an imbecile to forget."
Shinkokami was oddly restless. She began to braid an ornament of pearl kingfishers through her hair, and then put it down absently. She plucked the strings of a miniature mandolin inkstand. Dismemberment could put things in perspective - even for a Yamani. "You have nothing to fear, my snowbank," he drawled, thrusting the words savagely into her heart - he hoped. "Men have been cuckolded since time immemorial. The wise ones have been indifferent. Enlightened society cannot exist without a pinch of equivocation."
"How long have you known?"
She had trained herself to a composure as thick and impenetrable as glacial ice. A habit ingrained in her. He had trained himself to observing her.
"Perhaps before you did," he said. "I was attached to you, you know - years watching my parents playing lovesick fools had given me the delusion that when a boy and a pretty girl are joined in unholy matrimony they ought to play fair." He put up his hand before she could speak. "Oh I don't mean playing fair in the carnal sense you attribute to it. Liankokami is mine as surely as you can never bear a man sons. Daughters are what you're good at." She flinched at this and for a moment his pride was assauged. So she could be hurt. "You'll never play false to me, duty's ingrained too well in you - I'll always be the Conte stallion you'll mount." The crass words rose unnaturally to his lips before her but he wanted to insult her. To tarnish the ivory figurine he'd put up on a love-hallowed pedestal. Bruised gods could not be worshipped. "A tool to help you breed sons, eh?"
"Yes," she said, and the words she had kept stifled in her bosom for ten years, bubbled like acid to her lips. Her rose-red lips, hissing and spitting, while her face and eyes remained immobile. "But you never will, Roald of Conte. The Tortallans said a man was a man by the price he paid on his women's honour. The Yamanis said a man was a man by the sons he bred. You will never be a man." She was pacing the room now. "I came to Port Caynn and the first Tortallan man I laid eyes on was your sainted father. I thought the son would be like his father."
"And you were brought before a milky-blooded boy," he said dryly. "And the milky-blooded boy had the lack of sense to fall in love with the angel-faced girl. To dare to fall in love and try to make her happy by accomodating her, by trying to understand her! You'd rather wear a martyr's halo, wouldn't you, sweetheart? Why Jasson, Shinkokami? Why not Liam?"
He had been a child - the youngest of the Conte brood - when she had first landed. Vania had not even been thought of then. Lianne was in a convent, Kalasin in Carthak, Liam a gawky page who shied away from the beautiful Yamani princess as any awkward little boy would. There was just something endearing about plump, roly-poly Jasson. Jasson the Prince, for no other epithet or fief was to be his due - the boy of whom nothing was expected. Third sons did not rank high.
"He takes after his father," Shinko remarked to Thayet.
"Yes, in a way," the queen said disinterestedly, her mind sliding away already to far more important affairs. Jasson was a child, an inconsequential child at that. He would never be a bargaining chip in planning alliances, he was too young yet to display any unusual accomplishments. And then as always, she seized onto a more consequential topic - Shinko's husband-to-be. "Roald," she said, pride and fondness brimming in her voice, "is Jonathan's spitting image."
He was one of the few Tortallans she could approach without fearing judgment or scorn. She taught him how to skid stones over the water's surface - a fact that made him positively ecstatic. He taught her how about the secret life of ants and told her that she was very ugly, but her niceness made up for her yellow skin, excessive makeup and crinkled-up eyes. Well, at least children were honest.
"There's more in a name than playwrights ever give credit for," Shinkokami said thoughtfully. "Roald - haven't you been compared often enough to the Peacemaker? Your sister, Kalasin, they say she's as beautiful as death. Like your grandmother. Liam - battle-hungry, isn't he?"
"Jasson - the Empirebuilder," Roald murmured. "Well I should say he's already marked his empire."
"So that is why you had him sent to New Hope," Shinkokami says quietly. "I wondered whether I ought to be suspicious then. I underestimated you, my dear." The endearment came naturally to her lips, gilded by the false caress she had perfected. Why was it such an ordeal to him to do the same, to lie at night by her side, to take her in his arms, to feel the weight of her smooth hair over his arm and not take it and wrap it like a rope around her little white throat? He wondered if the same hatred clawed through her as she accepted his caresses. It must have - but even if it did she could bear it.
Her hatred did not have to contend with her love. His did.
His eyes racked his wife's willowy body, his eyes lingering on the slim curves of her waist, the shape of her breasts just discernible under the muslin. She returned his stare blatantly, and her fingers crept to her throat, slipping open the pearl-studded hooks that held it in place, baring her milky collarbones, a hint of her bosom. Her body would always be open for his pleasure, but she would never be his.
Roald shook his head almost sadly. "Do as you will - with my blessings." He hesitated before adding timidly, "My love."
She said nothing, but the contempt that, in her unguarded moment, slid through her eyes was like a blow.
Winter...
Kel realized she would have to find a tactful way to let the Yamanis know that assassination attempts were rare here.
-Pg 140, Squire
"And borne to the mild-sceptred King Roald II and Queen Shinkokami the Wise was a single child, Queen Liankokami..." The teacher's voice drilled on.
The little girl could barely suppress her yawn. History was alright when it had stories in it - stories with blood 'nd gore, knights defending damsels and spies. That was made King Jonathan IV (or was it III? Whatever, he was in the last chapter) so awesome. That was what made the King Roalds', who'd never done anything, so boring. No wonder nobody liked naming their kid 'Roald' anymore - it was bad luck and everyone with the name 'Roald' turned out to be a wimp or something.
She tried not to yawn. Why did they even have this chapter in the first place?
"Princess Liankokami!" The iron-spined, horny-handed woman plucked the four-year-old out of her father's arms. A quick sinking of the knees in the most perfunctory of curtseys - Lady Kotone, masterful Yamani swordswoman, first-in-command in the royal nursery and devoted (to the point of slavish) attendant to the Queen, was not one to be swayed by royalty.
"A few minutes more?" Roald asked the woman almost timidly. He didn't dare sweep his daughter from her governess, though the child's wide blue eyes were tear-brimmed.
Mercilessly, Kotone wiped the tears glistening on the princess's eyelashes and thumped her back. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, crying and carrying on so," she said in sharp, rapid Yamani, spit flecking her tongue. "What will you do when you'll have a little brother, looking up to you, eh?" Shinkokami had never reconciled herself to the thought that Liankokami would be her only child. Years of fruitless miscarriages had not dimmed her yearning for a son in his grandfather's image, only strengthened it. Her attendants took their cue after her - there was always talk of the prince who would someday be born and relieve Liankokaim of the burden of Heiress Apparent. The prince who would never come. As an afterthought, Kotone switched to Common, regarding Roald with baleful, mistrusting eyes. "No Majesty, it's high time my lady was at her lessons." It was ridiculous. The lady in question was only four.
"You work her too hard," Roald said quietly, reaching out to brush his daughter's stiff, ink-black braids.
Kotone's eyes darkened in contempt. "I follow my Queen's commands, Majesty - if you wish to take up the matter with her..." She let the sentence trail off insolently. Roald would never dare countermand any of his wife's decisions, particularly none that involved their daughter's upbringing. He trusted her to know best what a girl, what an heir to the throne needed. He trusted her to have the child brought up meticulously, perfectly with the same steely, silky perfection she devoted to all her burdens. That was what her child would always be to her - a burden.
She was in the sunroom, a wicker-basket dripping wildflowers and curled leaves fresh-picked from the private garden in which he worked swinging from one arm, a sheaf of the papers she always seemed to have with her in the other. She was seldom attended by her ladies in her private quarters - attendants-in-waiting, she'd flippantly remarked, were the prerogative of a royal consort, not a ruler. She smiled when he entered, a smile so free of guile, so sunny that it would have looked more appropriate on their daughter's face.
"It's not Jasson, sweetheart," he said dryly. "What have you there?"
Her eyebrows shot up in amusement. "State papers - do you want them?" She waved them temptingly and he ignored them because she'd been so free with them.
He was skidding stones on the lake that shimmered under the sunlight like spilt ink. She'd taught him that. A gust of winter wind blew, whipping the skirts of her volumnious black gown. A few curled leaves blew from her basket onto the pebbled path.
"You're killing her with the amount of strain you're putting on her," he stated simply. "Lia," he said, in response to her questioning look. "She's just a little girl." She'd been able to read him once. Perhaps it had been because she'd cared to, then. "That Kotone pet you nurture is a perfect beast-"
"Ah, you'd call the face of comptence itself one of the Black God's demons," she said mildly, brushing a wave of dark hair from her face. Dark, where it once been the purest ink-black, shining with blue highlights in the sunlight that had reminded him of the rippling blue of tempered steel. The sheen of fat purple grapes growing on vine-slashed sunlit walls. It still hung as heavily, as glossily about her face but the roots were grey now. She dyed it.
"It's in your nature and nature mustn't be quarrelled with. It must be-" she was smoothing her volumnious black gown as she tucked the papers into her basket. He wondered why she was agitated. She always smoothed her gown when she was agitated. "Substituted." He wondered why she was wearing black - she had never been partial to it. "You're dreadfully incompetent, darling."
"Substitute me," he said wryly. An expression he couldn't make out flitted over her face, before she bent her head over her basket, ignoring him. She didn't smile. Had he expected her to?
She wasn't smiling as she came abreast of him. He had expected her to. Her skin, bleached white from the gold it had once been by Tortallan winters, seemed to glow against the sombre backdrop of her black gown and unbound hair. "Black?" he asked softly, putting his arm around her shoulders. She permitted him to and he wondered why. She rarely descended to the level of caresses. "Celebrating too early?"
"No," she said quietly, her fingers threading wildflowers into a chain. "Mourning."
King Jonathan and Queen Thayet had presided like monarches, amused and amusing, at their gilded ballrooms. Mural-worthy, he'd once remarked, made for vast sweeping stretches of canvas and vibrant daubs of oil paint. He was miniature-worthy, picture-perfect but only for a small canvas, where flaws, magnified by dimension, would be shielded by the delicacy of detail. He was a marionette, and she held the strings.
"Isn't it time for you to go riding?" she asked, glancing indifferently, as if it meant little to her, at the sundial. He went riding every morning. It was a good habit, his father had once said. One of the few good habits that would have pleased King Jonathan that he'd managed to inculcate.
He nodded, but lingered in the doorway. "Black," he said finally, as she looked at him, annoyance creasing her forehead already. Lines fanned out from her eyes, where once there had been none. "Why black?"
She rose. "Celebration," she said dryly. "Celebration." She swept away from the room, to the garden where he grew spring irises, summer roses, autumn lilies and where in winter, ferns and wildflowers thrived in sunnied nooks of their own accord. The garden where she met her lover every morning while he was out riding and their daughter, who would be told nothing, who would know nothing (for a few years longer at least) studied and the palace that she'd sealed off from her bower bustled around, singing to her glory.
She'd braided a crown of wildflowers and ferns. They could have passed for thorns.
(That crown whose thorns still carried stains of royal blood so rare.)
"Your crown," she said teasingly, standing up on tiptoe to place it lopsidedly on his head. He was taller than his brothers and even she, long-limbed and willowy, looked almost petite when she stood next to him. She liked that. "Don't take it off, wear it for me," she cooed, a smile quirking unwillingly on her lips when he was about to take it off. He'd do anything to make her smile - make her smile for him. Then she added flippantly, "You look beautiful, Jasson." Her smile was like a gaping wound, not far from the grimace she would not permit herself to make.
He bent down, scooped a pebble out of the mud and pressed it into her fingers. She tried to skid it over the surface but she couldn't - her fingers trembled too much. It sank with a plopping sound.
The sky was starkly, hotly, glitteringly white and the naked, tangling branches framed it like a cobweb. The air was colder, but it seemed cleaner. He reined in his stallion and drank it in, smiling. His face felt numb, but his smile didn't hurt. A bird broke into song.
Crouching, an archer strung his bow.
"Shall we sit down, Majesty?" he drawled, slipping the basket that swung from her wrist onto his. "I'm sure you feel faint."
Her eyes were shut and she was leaning against his shoulder, her lips pressed tightly together, the blank expression of the consummate gambler plastered on her face. Kel was a pond but Shinkokami was glacial ice. "He's at the gorge now," she was murmuring, "Near the gorge where King Roald fell - killed himself, Duke Gareth once told me. Did they ever tell you that? He must have loved Queen Lianne to distraction. And they're waiting for him, they're in place..."
"Shinko," he said softly, shaking her.
She had her eyes clenched shut, like a child who refuses to open them for fear of a bad, bad world. "And they'll draw parallels, oh how they will, till the end of time about the Peacemaker and the Mild-Sceptred, how one killed himself and the other-"
"Shinkokami!" he said sharply. Her eyes opened slowly. She had the look of a sleepwalker, trapped in a long-recurring nightmare - more bone-weary than frightened. "Incompetence," he murmured, bending down and selecting another pebble. "Should be punishable by law. Try this - it's rough. Easy to skid, remember?"
"Don't quote me," she said dryly, referring to his line about incompetence. She fingered the pebble and murmured, half in awe, "It's cold. Brr," she shivered exaggeratedly, smiling as he rolled his eyes for good measure. She sounded hysterical and he wondered whether it would not be better to lead her inside and apply a liberal dose of smelling salts. Or sedatives, if needed.
"It's winter," he reminded her, tangling his fingers through her hair and tugging. Hard. He'd done that as a child. He still liked to.
"No," she said and she was grinning now. Childlike. Playful. "It's spring." She held the pebble thoughtfully, forehead wrinkling in concentration.
He screamed and the sound cut through the forest, silencing the birdsong, a roar over the whiplike wind and his horse's neighing. He slid from the blood-slick saddle and skid over the ice.
She skid the stone over the surface of the water.
A/N: 'Yamato uta' is a genre of classical Japanese verse.
Ridiculously long, perhaps slightly improbable at parts *blushes guiltily*. I don't hate either Roald - who I've always felt is much more like his grandfathers (both!) than either of his parents, he always came off very Henry VI to me - or Shinkokami - who I felt was very like Thayet. Hey, if her grasp of strategy and war techniques has the likes of Buri, Raoul and Lord Imrah impressed she must be a tough cookie. And I've never been able to buy the sugar-coated cutesyness of the way their relationship is depicted in fanfic. They'd have one of the politest marriages ever, but only because both worked to maintain the politeness.
If Katashi noh Sanchi comes across as unbelievably coarse for a Yamani, it's because even Shinkokami said her mother-in-law-to-be was a 'terrible woman' and that's quite a strong statement for someone who's shown as so restrained and gentle in the books. Plus that little detail about her burning incense all the way to Tortall - the woman must have been quite a piece for Shinko to be so grateful. The reason I made Roald hate dancing is because in Squire, he could have easily danced with her to relieve the tension (and boredom) at the first ball they were at together, instead of sitting together like a pair of mute statues, but he never invited her to dance. In this fic I had Lianne marry Alan, Alanna's son, and thus she became Baroness of Olau.
I know I sound very antifeminist in making Shinkokami so son-obsessed, but that's the culture she was raised in.