Chapter the Sixth
The Hold of Arachscing had been whittled, painstakingly and over a great many years, from the cragged face of the island that they had once called Godhome. As the small party entered its shadow, the sky sank below the stone; birds called nervously from the farthest reaches of the cliffs, and the water became darker and murkier, as though reflecting his own misgivings. From here, he could see the stone steps carved into the bluffs, winding their way through the rocks into the hidden castle of the Sixth Land; from here, he could see the place in the clouds where they had been split and churned like seafoam; from here, he could see his own flesh seeing him.
His scion awaited him on the beach.
He alighted from the boat before they had reached shore, and went through the water to her. She was standing with her grandfather. The light broke about her silhouette as though afraid to brush against her; the old man stood in shadow, and waited for Naoise to approach him.
There was something like vindication in his scion's eyes as she watched her chevalier kneel.
This was a pledge: this was service. He did not think that words were necessary, so he spoke none.
The sand under his knees seemed to drink all strength from him; for a long moment, he thought he might sway into sleep. If only, he thought, and no-one said, a fine chevalier you are, as ever you have been.
"Up," said the old man.
Naoise managed not to grumble as he rose again. Sepideh Arachscing's eyes moved with him as though her gaze had hooks, as though latched to his very flesh; when he stepped back, her steel gaze rose to his face, and her mouth twisted.
He reached for the dagger at his waist, unsheathed it from its hold, released it into his hand, and held it to her. He held his palms up like a surrender. She took it from him and placed another blade into his fingers, ginger-light, like she thought his very skin would burn.
It was a tradition in this place to exchange weapons with your chevalier when he departed you: it was a betrayal of a peculiarly awful kind to wake in the night and find that he had taken your knife and left his own in its place. If Sepideh wore that betrayal on her now, she did so lightly, and perhaps deliberately so: her eyes were exceptionally cold, and her movements exceptionally elegant, as she turned her own dagger around in the light, inspecting the handle as another woman might peruse the face of a lover. Did she expect to find it damaged? He could have reassured her to the contrary: he had barely touched it.
Perhaps she had used his knife more than he had used hers: brown crept along the blade, and Naoise pressed a thumb to it, drawing blood. He wanted to see what, exactly, she had used it for. If he made a sound as he did so, it was unconscious and unintentional, drawn from him in a way only this wretched rock and these wretched people could.
No-one said, who could ever mistake rust for blood? a fool, only, or perhaps the hopeful dying man.
He had thought they did not look so different; there were similarities, certainly, here and there, a resemblance, at the very least, a kinship.
She said, "brown. Is that what you mean? Brown?"
He said, "knives oughtn't be brown, my flower."
The old man said, "hypocrisy from the man with the black sword."
That was different: that was vanity, vanity of a kind that Naoise had, for the most part, exhausted in his travails and travels upon the continent. But he would not contradict the Sixth Lord. He would not say a word against the smile that flashed across Sepideh's face now, and was gone just as quickly. Didn't she know that she only had to sing glory to him and he would perform horrors? Her hair had grown since last he had seen her: the wind caught and toyed with it, little strands fluttering feather-like against her cheeks and lips.
He said, "hypocrisy, indeed," and heard his own voice for the first time in a fortnight. It ground out, gravel-like.
The Sixth Lord clasped his hands. "You will depart tonight," he said, "just as soon as you can be armed and provisioned: I know the Paper King wishes for the Selection to begin as close to immediately as we can manage."
Sepideh had folded her hands over her knife and held it to her sternum, as might a warrior queen in her coffin, albeit white-knuckled. She said, "I'll tack up, then, while the chev sorts himself out."
No-one said, how long do you expect that to take?
Naoise nodded.
The old man said, "no questions, Naoise?"
Naoise shook his head.
"That isn't like him," Sepideh said softly, venomously.
He said, "the other chevaliers?"
"We don't know much," said Sepideh. Her thumb ran across the hilt of her dagger. "Two necromancers. At least one Burned Scholar. Ezust's hound, of course, and Bahram, of course."
And Naoise. Of course. "And the tasks?"
"Unsportsmanlike to ask," said Sepideh's grandfather. The sharp word, barked thus, was a rebuke of a kind Naoise had not received in years. He was sure that Sepideh had seen the way his eyes narrowed to be spoken to thus, for her mouth had turned up again, just a little, before she had realised again why he was so out of practice in his position as chev and servant.
"Apologies," said the chevalier, and Lord Ahura Mazda Arachscing was good enough to wave it away.
"It's good to have you back," he said, only that: "it's good to have you back."
He ground the sand beneath his boot when he turned to go, churned it up underheel, and did not wish them luck. There were attendants standing by the stone steps to help him in his ascent back towards the hold: Naoise had not realised in stillness just how feeble he had become, how old the old man had become.
"Chevalier," said Sepideh Arachscing. She was in her silks, a thin chain wound about her neck and following her sternum down so that the stone pendant lay against the seam of her waist. She was not wearing the stone crown of the Sixth, as he had expected that she might, but a gold circlet in the shape of a monster devouring its own tail.
She had earned more of her marks in his absence: there was not a single bare part of her now, so thoroughly had the calligraphers dressed her in their inks, winding around her features, twining her collarbones, running down her arms like rainwater.
She said, "we'll have nothing to discuss so long as you serve as you ought. Do you think that I can I trust you for that much?"
"One flesh," Naoise said. The words sounded more hollow when he spoke them aloud. It sounded like he was lying, and he had never managed to lie to Sepideh before. "One end."
"Yes," she said. "That's certainly what they say."
"Will you cope?"
"I shall have to."
"I cannot believe it."
"You've said that twice already."
"It's simply unbelievable."
Rosamund stood in the window of Sepideh's enormous stone chamber, and watched the chevalier move about the courtyard below. She had managed to knot Sepideh's green velvet dress between her hands, so intently did her fingers twist and turn as she observed the scene below. Sepideh edged past the curtain and lifted the garment from her friend's hands before permanent damage could be done. "Yes," she said. "Well. He's my chevalier. That's why he exists."
Rosamund shook her head, and relinquished the dress to Sepideh's hands but reluctantly. Sepideh took it, and shook it out, and inspected it, wondering if she should bring it to the Selection, as her maid said, inquisitively, "what did he say?"
Sepideh threw her eyes to heaven. "Little."
Against her better will, she was still thinking of the dagger he had returned to her, and thinking of the damage it had done, and the damage it might do again.
"And when do you go?"
"Just as soon as I can." She was carrying little with her to the palace, and the necessities had been packed just as soon as the message had gone out to Naoise that he was to return to Sixth. Necessities had been the term that her father had used, though she suspected that her grandmother had interpreted the term loosely enough if the heft of the trunks stacked outside the stable was an indication. Sepideh had to concede that she was grateful for these preparations, for she knew little what she ought to expect in the trials which awaited.
For however long the Selection lasted, she would not exist but by his mercy: the thought of it twisted her mouth into a shape somewhere between smile and scowl, and had her tightening her fingers over the dress just as intently as Rosamund had.
"We'd be gone already," she said, and found that the word weighed heavily on her tongue, barbed, "if Father had his way."
The Hold was always peculiarly shadow-strewn, as though shadows had soaked into the very stone of the structure. It created interesting shadows across Rosamund's face when she turned towards her friend; it gave Sepideh herself a peculiarly menacing look, emphasing the hollows of her clavicle and the long, curling shapes of her House marks. Rosamund said, "have you tacked Song?"
Sepideh shook her head. She had come to this room to fetch his saddle; she had not intended to stay long, but had been entirely caught up with how passionately Rosamund had attached herself to the issue at hand. "My very next task," said she, and Rosamund nodded, and returned herself to the task to which she ought to have been attending, which Sepideh suspected was not a task at all but an excuse to skulk about the principal halls of the Hold.
Occupied thus with the picking and shaking of random garments, Rosamund said, "and does he sound the same?"
Sepideh arched an eyebrow, and pronounced the word derisively, drawling. "Song?"
"Swanskin."
A lightning burst of irritation she had not realised that she contained until it spilled from her: "don't call him that."
Rosamund's eyes remained on her friend, rapt.
Quick to recover, Sepideh said, mutinously, "he still mumbles. If that's what you mean."
He had started out with a stutter, when first they had been sworn to one another. That, combined with his accent – he had the guttural brogue of an adolescent from the windswept north side of the island, where they said that wild dragons had once nested – had rendered him incomprehensible for the initial years of their acquaintance.
Truth: Sepideh had never comprehended him truly, and suspected she would die long before she did or could. This was the Selection, and it yawned wide.
For her House, she thought, as she pulled on her riding gloves, for its continuation and for its ascent. She was the scion, but she was not the heir. That honour was her father's, for as little as the Sixth Lord thought of him, and would remain so. If Sepi fell in the Selection – and she had, she thought, a very excellent chance of falling, and the thought was bile in her throat, falling – then her sister, Anahita, would have the Lordship for herself. And lovely Anahita would beautify it, render it as pretty as she. The Hold would burst with colour and with flowers; the goats would be spared the knife for as long as Anahita was.
The girl herself was at the door now, eyeing her sister sadly, footsteps echoing in the enormous stone spaces of the Hold long after she had ceased to step forward.
"I know that we already said goodbye this morning," said Anahita, and then could say no more, for Sepideh had crossed the enormous stone flagstones of her chamber to pull her younger sister into a tight embrace which left no space or air for idle words.
Daena and Allatum had followed her, and followed her now into the hug, so that the four sisters stood for a few moments as delicate petals to the same flower, clinging to one another and swaying softly in a wind that they did not feel. The three younger Arachscings were but smaller versions of their sister, clad similarly in silks and chains and silver circlets resting upon their heads like pathetic, paltry halos that would save them little.
"Come home," said Daena.
"Naoise will protect you," said Allatum.
"Be good to Song," said Anahita.
She could make promises none, nor accept them thus. She only smiled, and kissed their foreheads – Daena ducked from it, protesting, and then accepted it in good humour, smile fading – and said, "you never know. It might come good."
"It shall," said Rosamund. "You know that Sixth has no interest in the Paper Throne, girls. Your sister shall enjoy an idle few weeks."
Sepideh said nothing. She rose, and smoothed her skirts, and lifted the saddle into her arms, pressing her fingers and thumbs into the soft, supple leather of the seat and belts.
"So you're going to lose." Allatum pronounced it direly.
"Oh, no: your darling sister," Rosamund said, "doesn't know the meaning of the word."
"Sixth must show their face," said Sepideh. "And First depends upon a show of fealty from their old friends upon this island."
There were, she thought grimly, far worse choices for an ally than Ezust the First and sainted Santora the chevalier.
In fact, one of them had alighted upon the shore of Sixth only a few hours earlier.