“It’s not strange. But there’s nothing to say that whoever tried to kill you won’t follow us East,” she added cryptically.
Tasia took another bite of her hot oats while Joslyn sipped her smoky tea.
“Do you look forward to the journey?” Tasia said. “After all, we will be traveling through Terinto where the province touches the Zaris Mountains. That must be near your old village.”
“It wasn’t ever really ‘my’ village,” Joslyn said. “It was the village nearest to where my ku-sai lived, so he sent me there for supplies once or twice per moon cycle. But I never thought of it as home.”
Tasia hesitated. “How did you come to join the Imperial Army, Joslyn? I don’t mean the story Mylla made you tell on the beach,” she added quickly. “I only mean… It seems that you liked living with your teacher. And I know most nomads have little love for the Empire. So why leave your village? Why leave your teacher?”
“At the time, I believed I had learned all I could learn from him,” Joslyn said. “I was young and hard-headed and wanted a chance to prove myself.”
Tasia waited for the guard to say more, but when Joslyn went back to sipping her tea, Tasia realized she would have to prod if she wanted more details. “Have you gone back to see him? Since joining the Imperial Army?”
“Once. But he wasn’t there.”
“Where did he go?”
Joslyn shook her head. “It’s a long story, Tasia. One I do not believe you have time for.”
She pointed at the candle mounted to the wall across from them. The pewter backing was marked with twelve even hashes, and the candle flame flickered beside the hash three-quarters of the way down.
“Nearly eight and a half of the clock!” Tasia exclaimed. “You should’ve hurried me along sooner.” She stood from the stool and scooped the last bit of hot oats and milk into her mouth with little decorum. She’d already been late to her lessons with Norix once this week, and she didn’t want another lecture on the importance of consistent punctuality from him.
#
On the day of Mylla’s departure to the Northeast, where she would spend the last few months of her betrothment at House Farrimont before her eighteenth birthday, Tasia feigned the stomach cramps of her monthly blood in order to skip her lessons with the Wise Men and spend a little more time with her departing handmaid.
Her departing love.
Mylla was aflutter with nervous energy, packing and re-packing gowns and trinkets into her three wooden chests. The day before, she’d cleaned out her bedchamber, emptying it of all the things Tasia had come to think of as marking it as distinctly Mylla’s. The Western-style tapestries had come down from the walls, rolled up and stowed away in one of the three chests. The small cedar jewelry box, appropriately humble for a handmaid, and yet appropriately rich for a noblewoman, was also gone from its normal place atop Mylla’s dresser, along with the small oval mirror which normally sat beside it.
Tasia lingered at the dresser, skimming one finger across its top, staring at the place where the missing box and mirror should’ve been.
Four years. For nearly four years they’d been… well, if not always lovers, then something significantly more complicated than princess and servant. From the time Mylla was fourteen and the time Tasia was fifteen. Before Mylla, Tasia had hardly had the confidence to touch her own body, let alone that of another.
She watched the handmaid — no, the Lady engaged to be married to a lord’s heir — silently for a moment as Mylla pressed down on the dresses piled high in a chest. The handmaid looked up, blowing out a puff of air from cheeks red with strain and hurry.
“Tazy? Help me with this, will you?”
Tasia walked over to where Mylla still wrestled with the dresses inside the chest. At last they managed to force the lid closed, the two of them sat on top of it while Mylla snapped the brass latches down into place.
“There,” she said, nearly breathless. She glanced at Tasia and smiled.
“I’m going to miss you,” the Princess said.
Mylla grinned. “So you keep telling me. But I have no doubt that as soon as you get to the front, you’ll find a handsome soldier or two to warm your tent at night. Then you’ll forget all about Lady Mylla of House Farrimont.”
House Farrimont. Lady Mylla, wife of Umfrey, of House Farrimont.
“We will be cousins soon,” Tasia said.
Mylla leaned over, pecked Tasia on the cheek. “We shall. I will be the cousin of the Empress. I suppose it’s as close to royalty as I will ever manage to come.”
Tasia tried to return her lover’s smile, but found she couldn’t. She supposed she understood Mylla’s obsession with furthering her House’s position within the Empire; after all, advancement was the primary focus of most of the nobles she knew.
She sighed. In her mind’s eye, as if from a bird’s view, Tasia saw a sea of humanity covering a hill, with each man, woman, and child clamoring desperately to make it to the top. They crawled over one another like lice, with no regard for whom they crushed underfoot as they pushed their way closer to the crest.
And at the crest of the hill? What was there? What prize awaited them? Nothing. It was just the top of a hill, nothing more.
It was crush or be crushed, because there was no getting off the hill. Mylla understood that. But Tasia, because she had been born at the top of the hill, had never had to climb.
“What are you thinking about?” Mylla asked her.
Rather than answer the question, Tasia brushed the hair that had come loose from Mylla’s bun off her cheek. The Princess leaned in, pressed her lips against Mylla’s forehead. “Do something for me, Myll.”
“What, sweet Princess?”
“When you have your first daughter, name her for me.”
Mylla’s eyes grew misty, and she laced her fingers with Tasia’s. “Oh, Tazy. Of course I will.”
They kissed goodbye a few minutes later.
Tasia couldn’t have realized that when they met again it would be on opposite sides of a new battlefield.
Part II:
The East
“To the contemporary reader, as he considers the sequence of events that unfolded from the safe vantage point of thirty years after the end of the War in the East, the tragedy that unfolded within the Empire appears to be so undeniably obvious and inevitable that it seems the key players of the time — the Emperor Andreth, his chief Wise Man Norix, his war generals, and even the Princess Natasia herself — were as if willingly blind.
“‘How could they not see what was right in front of their eyes?’ cries today’s reader. ‘How could they not have acted sooner to avert what happened?’
“But what such a reader fails to realize is that, at that time, the facts as they presented themselves seemed entirely too preposterous to be facts at all. And so, rather than seeing the truth, those players mentioned previously could only see the warning signs in front of them as the most elaborate of fictions.”
— Wise Man Tellorin, The Updated Histories of House Dorsa