Chapter Twenty-One
Noon came.
Silver Star came, a solid body of men and women pacing through the stale snow of the great square. Brother Ailo met them on the steps.
'Are you ready to clear out?' Mr Mariel asked.
'We are not,' Ailo said. 'We wish to remain.'
'We've had people watching you all day. This place has been like a broken ants' nest. You've been getting ready to pull out. You know we can make you.'
'We don't wish to fight you,' Ailo said, 'because if we do, we will win, and we will kill many of you. We would like this to remain a peaceful operation. We have said before that we came to help. Your hostility and distrust are unnecessary.'
'I might actually do a deal with you,' Mr Mariel said slowly, 'if it were just you. But those two' He jerked his head upward, indicating people inside the building. 'The little king and that weird girl. It's an insult to send them. Shows us what you think of us. We're not that beaten.'
'But you are beaten,' Ailo said coolly. 'You have had several months but you have not managed to restore civil order to even this city. Fanelia is almost rebuilt. In Asturia, business is good. In Freid, the Zaibach garrisons that were left behind as an occupying force have been absorbed into the population. They don't care about being from Zaibach. They have turned over their guymelefs for research, and are finding jobs and homes. As a nation, Zaibach no longer really exists.'
'We still have our pride.'
'Pride and empty stomachs.'
'Damn you. You could at least have done this so we kept some dignity. The King of Asturia could have come.' He kept his voice low, not wanting the waiting people to hear.
'If you mean King Aston, he died in late summer. His daughter, Queen Millerna, is now the reigning monarch; the king is simply her consort.'
'That what's his name, that Fassa boy. The businessman.'
'Allen Schezar. A Knight of Heaven.'
'Schezar - she's - he sent his little sister?' Mr Mariel's face went blank with surprise. 'What is going on over there? The reports were so confused we thought they must be wrong. We heard they had Dilandau Albatou on trial. No-one was clear on what happened, though. Some people said he killed himself. Some people said a girl killed him. Was that her? Surely not.'
'He killed himself,' Ailo said. 'But you're underestimating her. She has still to prove herself.'
'It's a damn shame,' Mr Mariel said. 'That boy was really something.'
'Yes, he was something.' It was so neutral that Mr Mariel laughed.
'You're very polite, I like you.'
'Will you consider accepting the offer of an alliance?'
Mr Mariel seemed to turn the idea over in his mind. 'I would,' he said, 'I would if the Queen would come out here. I wouldn't expect that poor little kid who's running your country now to make the trip. But I want to speak to the Queen. You go and tell blondie that if she wants to prove herself, that's what to do - know when you're the wrong person for the job, and get the right person.'
'I have no idea how the Queen of Asturia will respond to that requirement,' Ailo said, 'but I'll pass the message on. In the meantime, we stay.'
'Feel free. It's a pleasure doing business with you.' He touched his brow in an ironic gesture of deference, and turned back to his people to tell them the new plan.
The Queen of Asturia opened a window in her bedroom, and leaned out to breathe the air. It was so cold it made her skin prickle. The air of the room had grown stuffy, and the fireplace was smoking slightly. Millerna knew she had to take care of herself, especially since she had not felt at all well in the last few days, but she was feeling desperately shut in.
'I am a pregnant woman, not an invalid,' she had told Allen that morning. The statement would have carried more weight if she had not been sitting up in bed, recovering from fainting at breakfast. It was infuriating that she could not quite understand what was happening in her own body; of course she had never made a deep study of obstetrics or gynaecology, but her partial knowledge made her feel more helpless in the hands of other doctors. She was professionally reassured, told not to worry; first pregnancies were often a little bumpy, but they had seen many women safely through worse complications. Her trouble was simply exhaustion; she needed to rest and eat well and not think about anything that bothered her.
She had spent the morning reading over old letters and papers of Elise's, by herself, really by herself for once because she had told her maids to leave her alone, and Allen was meeting a committee of merchants to discuss something dull. He was taking up the slack for her, just as the doctors said he should, protecting her from any pressure. He was loving and gentle; he refused to talk to her about the business he dealt with during the day in case any of it upset her. 'I want my angel to be happy,' he told her. He slept with her because she asked him to, seeming uneasy about any intimate contact.
'I'm not even that pregnant yet,' she said in frustration. 'It's perfectly all right for us to make love. I would feel much better if we did. Does it put you off that I'm getting so fat?'
He assured her that of course it did not; she was always beautiful to him. Actually, there were times when he seemed rather fascinated, in a guilty sort of way, by the changes in her body. That pleased her as a concept but rather worried her in real life, for reasons she could not quite put her finger on. Probably, she thought, because she was still so ambivalent about the pregnancy herself. She wanted to to be all right, she truly did. Wanting to be rid of it was an abstract sort of thought, really wanting it never to have happened. For the pregnancy to actually end would be terrible. She thought happy thoughts about a beautiful, healthy baby; about how she would love it, how caring for it together would create a deeper bond between herself and Allen. She prayed every night and every morning that the child would take after herself, that it would not be a visual reminder of Dryden to either of them. I want a dear little girl, I think, with fair hair and blue eyes. No, no, I should want a boy. A boy would make Allen happier. I think. I should really ask him. Men do want sons, don't they? But perhaps he would rather a son was all his, one of the children we'll have later. We must have more children later. As soon as possible. Oh, if only this were over with!
It was terrible to realise that it would never be over with now that it had begun. Once you had a child it was part of you for the rest of your life. My baby will be born around the time I turn sixteen. Oh, I shouldn't have said yes! I should have dug my heels in. I should have listened to that ridiculous old man. I wasn't fair to Dryden. I've made him so unhappy. I wish I could give the baby to him. Perhaps he would like that. But I must ask Allen before I ask him, and I can't do a thing if it would make him unhappy.
Thoughts like these crowded her head like warm fusty smoke, and only cool outdoors air dispelled them. There was something else she had to think about, anyway, something more to ask Allen about.
She heard the bedroom door open behind her, and Allen's voice.
'Angel, what are you doing? You'll catch cold.' He hurried over and leaned past her to shut the window.
'You're back early,' she said.
'It took less time than I thought,' he said. 'So I have all afternoon to spend with you. We can do anything you like. Within reason, obviously.' He looked closely at her face. 'My darling, you're looking a little pale. You shouldn't be standing. Remember this morning.'
'I want to talk to you,' she said.
'Of course! What will we talk about? Come and sit on the couch. I'll make you comfortable.' He took her hand and led her to the soft couch in front of the fireplace, and she submitted to his attention, the placement of cushions and elevating of her feet. He sat beside the couch on a low stool, holding her hand again, gentle and mild. 'What did you want to say, little pet?'
'Today,' Millerna began, 'I was reading Elise's old letters and journals.' She saw him frown.
'Not a very good idea, when you're meant to be relaxing and avoiding anything worrisome. I can understand you gettng bored when you're laid up, but why don't you read something pleasant? If you're tired of your books, I'll get you new ones. That funny diary-novel everyone's been talking about. I'm sure that would be much more enjoyable than what poor Elise had to say.'
'You wrote to her,' Millerna said.
Allen blinked. 'Yes, for a time. I didn't know she'd kept my letters. We stopped because she was angry with me, and I thought she must have got rid of them.'
'She was angry with you.' It was a flat repetition, with a trace of a challenge.
'Well dearest, I don't remember it very well. Just for a few weeks we corresponded, it was a few years ago. I think she hoped for more than a friendship and I had to let her down. How much did you read? Shouldn't you respect her privacy?'
'You don't want me to have read them because of the kind of letters they were,' Millerna stated. 'You wrote her poetry! Sonnets!' She pulled several folded sheets of stationery from her dressing-gown pocket. 'Love poems! Why on earth would you do that if you only wanted to be friends? You must have known what it meant to her. What did it mean to you?'
Allen looked troubled, but not guilty. 'It was an experiment.'
'An experiment!'
'After everything that happened with Marlene, of course I was very unhappy,' he said. 'I don't pretend for a minute that I had the worst of it, but I did suffer. It was the first time I had loved anyone besides my family and everything had gone wrong. Your father posted me out to the swamps - really, he saved my life doing that, because if I hadn't had the challenge of getting those men to respect me, and to respect themselves, I would have felt like fading away into nothing. I was lonely. I felt that I could never love anyone else. I didn't want to love anyone else, partly because it would have felt like a betrayal of Marlene, partly because I felt sure it would turn out equally badly. I believed I was bad luck.'
'Where does Elise come into that?'
'Well, she wrote to me. Just kind letters to say that she was sorry for my trouble. That she understood I had never meant to do any harm. That she thought it was still possible for me to make a good life. She believed in me, despite everything, so I was grateful to her. I could never ask Marlene to have anything more to do with me, I had to leave her to her husband, but Elise gave me a sort of connection to the memory of her. She was still alive then, of course.'
'Which still doesn't explain the poetry.'
'It was courtly love. Like the old troubadours. I idealised her. She let me feel some of the happiness of love without having to actually be involved with another person, and risk hurting her and myself. I wrote the poems as as an exercise in feeling, so to speak, like those exercises you do after an injury so the limb doesn't atrophy and you recover its use. She kept my heart from atrophy. I thought that was why she wrote to me, just to be kind, to help me that way. And then she wrote and said she loved me, and sent extravagant gifts, and actually proposed marriage to me - and of course I had to tell her no. I had too much respect for her to lie to her.'
'You were lying to her anyway! These poems are all about loving her, and that wasn't true!' Tears were starting in Millerna's eyes.
'I believed she knew they weren't true! It's only a lie if you are trying to deceive! That was poetry, it was fiction. It's meant to be artificial!'
'You broke her heart,' Millerna accused him. 'It's your fault that she was so unhappy. It's your fault that she couldn't be Queen.'
'You know that isn't true,' he said. 'Dryden looked up the records, he told us, she was removed from the succession because of her mental illness. She must already have been troubled at the time she was writing to me. No wonder she took it all too seriously. If I'd known she was depressed and vulnerable I would never have gone on, but naturally she didn't tell me.'
'She became ill because of you! The worst of it all came after you broke her heart. Dryden didn't read all her journals, he just found enough to explain the situation, and he didn't dig any deeper. She refused to be Queen because she was in love with you and couldn't have you. The Queen has to marry and produce heirs, after all. Or perhaps Dryden did find out about that and didn't mention it to spare my feelings. Elise,' and here she had to pause and blink fiercely to clear her eyes, 'Elise had more principles than I had, because she wouldn't marry if it couldn't be to the man she really loved. She loved you too.'
Allen bit his lip. 'Of course I'm sorry. I'd have to have a heart of stone not to be sorry that it turned out that way. But you can't say it was all my fault. She was troubled already. I didn't know what was really going on. I meant everything for the best, and I swear I never knew until now that I was the cause of any of her troubles. My darling, you mustn't get into things like this, it only upsets you. You have a chance she never had. Please don't let your sister's ghost haunt you.'
'She loved you too,' Millerna murmured. She was running her fingers along the folds of the notepaper, reinforcing the creases. 'You went through this family like a hot knife through butter. How many women have thought you loved them?'
'You're being very unfair,' he said stiffly, 'because you're upset. I've loved only Marlene and you.'
'You asked Hitomi to marry you.'
'And she didn't! And I realised I had been wrong about her, and I loved you.'
'I wonder if you would have "realised" that if she'd said yes.' She turned her face away from him, stormily looking into the fire. He put his hand to her cheek and turned it back again.
'Millerna, I love you. I married you. I will always love you best in all the world. You are my angel and my queen. Neither of us can change the past but it needn't determine our future.'
She looked into his eyes, angrily at first, and saw something she had not expected. He was afraid. He was really afraid that she might reject him, now, might harden her heart against him. He thought she could do that. He believed it was in her power. Perhaps he need not know that it was not.
'I know you love me,' she said. 'I love you, too. It just came as a shock to me to learn there was even more about you that I didn't know. And it hurt to realise that Elise had sort of the same problem as me, and the same problem as Marlene, and none of us could help each other. That's a terrible thing for sisters.'
'You think I'm going to be bad luck too,' Allen said, a little grimly. 'You're thinking "No good comes of loving Allen Schezar. Damaged goods. Poison to the touch."'
'No,' she said softly. I could be angry. I choose not to be. I choose to forgive him. I choose to love him. I need very much to love him. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead. His eyes closed for a moment and when they opened again the fear was gone. He returned the kiss to her mouth, very tenderly.
'I never want to hurt you, my angel. Please, please don't cry about my stupidity. Let me take care of you. Let me make you happy.'