“Another time, then,” Andomaka said, both to Halev and to herself in their different conversations. She would come back another time. The girl would die another time. There was a little thrill as her mind that drifted and her mind that lived in the world came together for a moment.
Halev made his bow and left. When he was gone, a redcloak came in to escort her out. They both pretended it was a sign of honor, but the sword at his belt wasn’t ornamental. The palace was on alert, and she had the sense—much as she’d sensed the winter caravan’s coming—that they didn’t know what they were guarding against. Like a sword fighter trying to parry with his eyes bound.
“What’s your name?” she asked the man as they reached the black, squat gates that led north from the palace and into Green Hill.
“Marback, lady.”
You will answer to my voice, Marback, she thought. This mouth will command you, and you will do what these lips say. She didn’t speak it aloud. He would only have misunderstood.
As she stepped out of the palace and into the openness of her quarter, most of the compounds stood elegantly to her left, bright stone and bare trees pregnant with leaf. She turned to the right. To the north and below her, the white ice of the river was darker. Bluer. A sound reached her, faint but vast. A giant the size of the world, whispering. The ice groaning. The living water restless in its sleep and ready to see the sky again.
If she had dreamed that her enemy had asked what brought her to the palace, and that the river had answered, it would have been prophecy. The thread of Kithamar had brought her here, at the moment of the thaw, when the world could shift again to keep her here but as prince.
All the way back to the compound, water ran. It was everywhere. Dripping from gutters, sliding down the streets. Filthy snow that the months had crushed into ice was transforming. The air itself felt lush with promise, and the world was changing. The implacable hold of winter had slipped. Thaw had come. A moment of change, and moments of change were dangerous and full of wonder. When she arrived, Tregarro was waiting. And Ausai was too.
She bathed before the ceremony, not because it was needed, but because it was beautiful that way. Warm water in a copper tub. The heat sinking into her flesh. She remembered her first initiations into the mysteries of the Daris Brotherhood. She’d been a child then. Her father, Drau Chaalat, had told her to put on her best clothes and come with him. That it was time. He had been the head of the brotherhood then, as she was now. He’d taken her through the doorless path to the private temple for the first time, and she had been astounded to find Prince Ausai waiting for her there. His hair had been thinning even then, but it had still been dark. The illness that had turned his skin dry as paper hadn’t declared itself. He’d been a man, strong and hale and vibrant with power. He had been the city.
That first ceremony had been little enough. He’d given her the words, and she’d mouthed them without understanding their significance. What she remembered best was the sense of him. His masculinity and grace, and the shivering sense of a great puzzle just beginning to solve itself before her.
That day had been the first step on the path that led to the last stone of today.
She rose from the water, dressed herself in ceremonial gowns and a jacket of red tapestry embroidered with gold. She brushed her pale hair for the last time, and a sense of peace descended on her like the first spreading warmth after a drink of wine. Life was made bearable through meaning, and the meaning of her whole life was this. There was no fear in her. Only the certainty that everything was as it should be. Everything was well.
She walked the doorless path alone this time. Her father was long since dead, his deathmark worked in stone. Still, she imagined him at her side. His calm approval. His certainty which was, after all, an echo of her own. Candlelight filled the temple, and a stray breeze that had somehow followed her in made the little flames shiver and dance like they were laughing. Tregarro stood at one side of the altar. Ausai, in the body of the Bronze Coast boy, at the other. Knife and scroll and cloth were all laid out. Her uncle nodded to her with the boy’s neck, and she bowed before him.
“This is the most important thing you have ever done or will ever do,” Ausai and Airis and every prince of the city back through the centuries said. She more than half expected the words to echo as Halev’s had, but they were only words. “We are proud of you.”
“Thank you, my lord,” she said, and began weeping from gratitude and joy.
“Be strong,” the boy said. The same tongue had once said, You don’t have to do this. We could escape together. You could be free. It had never been true.
The boy stepped to the front of the altar and knelt. Tregarro stepped behind him and put the cord across the thin, youth-smooth neck and tightened it. The boy’s face grew dark as he was strangled. She had wondered if there would be a struggle at the end, but apart from a moment’s reflexive and impotent gasping, the thread of Kithamar met this new death with calm. The stink when the body’s bowel loosened should have been disgusting, but it wasn’t. It was only an indignity of flesh, and almost endearing. Tregarro gently drew the corpse down to the floor at the altar’s foot and placed a dark cloth over the dark face and protruding tongue. They were alone in the temple, the two of them. She found herself weeping, but neither frightened nor sad.
When Ausai had died before, he had been older, ill, and surrounded by the members of the court. He had suffered then, fighting to remain on this side of death’s dark waters until the missing blade could be found, until the boy who was his secret refuge could be brought, until the conspiracy against him could be understood and defeated. His other caretakers and physicians hadn’t been initiates of the brotherhood, and he’d been too weak to visit the brotherhood’s house. There had been so few moments when she could sit with him and whisper their progress into his failing ears. She wondered now whether Byrn a Sal had called for a close watch on their uncle in order to keep his false claim to the throne secret, or if it had only been the care and attention it had seemed.
In the end, the old man’s flesh had failed him. He had drowned far from water, refusing anything that might ease his passage in a bid for just a bit more life. He had died with his hands in claw-like fists, not knowing whether she would find the way to bring him back, or if the thread of Kithamar was cut forever.
Byrn a Sal hadn’t suffered so much as a strange dream when the rite failed. And the boy—Ausai’s son and not Byrn’s cousin—had been left with the slavers hired to bring him. Everything she’d trained for, everything her father had raised her to do, had become meaningless.
And now, this new death of Ausai’s, quicker and without fear or illness. It was a death without struggle and with faith in resurrection. Andomaka was, before all other things, a priest. Her life was in the service of her god and her city. She sat beside the dead boy now, her hands wide above his empty body, and began his funeral. His soul was made safe, as it had to be. She sang the hymns and cleaned the body, Tregarro at her side with scented oil and fresh cloth. The dead boy-child who had been her uncle, she treated with reverence and respect. And when rite found its end, she drew his deathmark.
As she did, she felt something deep within the temple shift. Ausai was at peace again, and would be until she drew him forth. The thaw was in the air as well, a moment of change. Of thinness and possibility. Of renewal for the city, and of culmination for her. She let her eyes close and felt her own body, her awareness moving through each limb and joint like a hostess preparing a room for an honored guest.