The Bone Shard Daughter

Chapter 25. Lin Imperial Island

The tabletop was smooth and cool beneath my fingertips, and I tried not to sweat. Father had called me in for questioning again, but this time I thought I knew the answers.

“Where did you go on your fifteenth birthday?”

I’d nearly finished reading the green-bound journal. I wished I’d written more specifically about my immediate world, the way things had smelled and tasted. Mostly I’d written about the way I’d felt about things. I’d written a little about my father, and strangely, even my mother – whom I knew had died when I was just a little girl. The father I’d written of was firm but kind, and that was all I could glean. I’d written like I’d known who I was and would never have cause to doubt it.

Father was watching me. My thoughts had flown away, though my gaze had remained locked on his. I was so tired. So much studying.

My fifteenth birthday.

I thought back to the journal, trying to organize my scattered thoughts. Oh yes. I’d written of that day with a good deal of excitement. “A lake, up in the mountains. We spent the day there.” I smiled, as if remembering something pleasant. And if I thought about it, I could almost see the lake I’d written about. The sunlight glittering off its surface, the wind rustling through the trees. “We took a picnic lunch and ate on the shore, throwing crumbs to the birds.”

Father nodded. He let out a long breath; he’d been holding it. “You said it was one of the happiest days of your life.”

How could I have known that? I’d only been fifteen. That was eight years ago. But I held my tongue and watched as he slid a key across the table to me. I waited, not daring to touch it.

“The library,” he said. “It’s down the hall from here if you take a left, four doors down on the left, near my rooms. It’s time you started learning how to create a construct, and how to write its commands.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his sash pocket and slid it across the table to me. “Here is a list of titles you should start with. Finish reading them and come back to me so I can test your knowledge.”

I glanced at the titles, recognizing them as books I’d already stolen and subsequently replaced, devouring the contents as if the words were fish and I a starving cat.

“You may go.”

I rose to my feet but was held fast by the question rising in my throat. It was important to have this unfettered access to the library, but I still felt the absence of my memories like a hollowed-out portion of my chest. “If the lake was one of the happiest days of my life,” I said, hesitating, unsure if I should continue, “why did we not ever go there again?”

Father’s eyes narrowed. “Who says we didn’t?”

My heart jolted. Of course. We might have. But I didn’t let it show on my face. I held my ground, hoping he was bluffing, hoping I was calling his bluff.

Father thumbed absently at his robe at the spot where he usually kept his long chain of keys. His gaze went to the window, to the lights in the city below and the stars above. “I’m not sure. We had other things to do. Always other things.”

“We could still go.”

The look he shot me carried with it a tidal wave of pain and remorse. “Don’t you think I’ve thought of that?” he said, his voice soft. And then he shook his head and waved his hand. He cleared his throat. “Go. Read the books. Tell me when you’re done.”

I left the questioning room, more baffled than I’d been all those times I couldn’t answer his questions. The library key – the real one – lay heavy in my pocket. I could have hoped for a new key, a new room, but at least this way I could study day or night in the library without being spied upon.

But the library was not empty when I arrived, and spies were not always constructs.

Bayan sat on the rug, his back to the wall and a book in his hands. He looked up when I entered. The light from the lamps seemed to gild him, turning his taupe skin golden. He looked even more beautiful by lamplight, an ethereal being of light and shadows. “You got another key,” he said, his voice flat.

I brandished it, taking a little delight in the fact that I now officially had more keys than he did. “I did. And well earned, too.”

He only nodded back at me, his face solemn. And then he reached into his sash pocket and produced another key – this one with a golden bow. “So did I.” The solemn look on his face burst open, cleanly as a cracked egg, revealing the smile beneath. “Poor Lin, always playing catch-up.” The words didn’t bite the way they usually did. I couldn’t tell if it was his tone, or if it was because I had a few more keys Bayan knew nothing about.

I shrugged. “What are you reading?” I strode toward him and leaned over his shoulder to look.

He twisted away from me, cradling the book as though it were an infant and I’d just jeered at it. “It’s none of your business.”

“Does it matter? I’m allowed to read it now too.”

“You wouldn’t understand it,” he spat back at me.

Oh, a fair bit more defensive than he should have been. I made as if to turn around, and then as soon as he’d relaxed, whirled and bent my head to the side.

“‘Era of the Alanga’?” I read aloud. “Aren’t you supposed to be studying?”

He glared at me, sullen. “Aren’t you?”

Well, he had me there. I couldn’t look for the books I needed to reprogram Mauga, the Construct of Bureaucracy, not while Bayan was here. So I lingered. “Is it interesting?”

He seemed to weigh whether my words mocked him or not. When he couldn’t dig out even a grain of contempt or derision, he sighed. “Yes, it’s interesting. It’s about the time before the Sukai Empire was even a thought in someone’s mind. Before the Alanga began fighting one another.”

“What does the book say it was like?” I should have been needling him, trying to get him to leave, but I couldn’t help my curiosity. Father’s entire justification for the bone shard collecting, for the constructs, was to keep the Alanga from rising again.

“They could make the wind rise up when they called it, they lived for thousands of years and no one dared to challenge them. Each one ruled an island. It could be a dream or it could be a nightmare, depending on who you asked. If you didn’t agree with the way they ran things, it wasn’t like you could disagree. But things didn’t get really bad until they went to war against one another. Their capacity for destruction was immense.”

I thought of Deerhead Island, the way it had been wiped from the map. Father had put out a statement saying the sinking had been caused by a mining accident, which, if the servants’ gossip was anything to judge by, had been less than reassuring. “Did the Alanga sink islands?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“But the Sukais found a way to kill them.”

“Yes, well, we know all about that.” He snapped the book shut. “Unless you don’t remember lessons?”

I wasn’t a lackwit; I still knew my numbers. “It’s not like that. You know it’s not like that. You gave me this illness in the first place.”

He ran a hand over the binding of the book. “It could be that you had forgotten through ordinary means.”

“What, like old age?”

He looked at me, startled, and then we both burst out laughing again. I really should have hated him. I’d strongly disliked him for the past five years. And now it seemed that was fading. The sharp edges of him looked different, now that I understood why he disliked me. We diminished into giggles, and then into silence once more. “Does it say how the Sukais killed the Alanga? I know Rise of the Phoenix likes to pretend it was a special sword. Father said that isn’t true: it just plays well with commoners.”

“A special sword that gets handed from one Sukai to another so they can kill the Alanga? Why wouldn’t the Alanga just take the sword from them then? They certainly were powerful enough to.”

“I didn’t say that I believed it.”

Our words were combative, but they didn’t hold the bite they’d had before.

“Of course it doesn’t say,” Bayan said. “That knowledge is passed from Emperor to Emperor. They didn’t write it down.” He rose and put the book back on the shelf. His sleeve fell to his elbow, exposing bruises on his arm.

Four bruises, four straight dark lines. All the mirth went out of me. My father’s cane, marked across Bayan’s flesh. “How often does he hit you?” The words spilled out of me. I put a hand up to stop them, but it was too late.

Bayan stiffened. He was back to the old Bayan again – cold and distant, mocking and cruel. “Only when I make mistakes. Not often.”

“He shouldn’t hit you at all.”

Bayan pushed the book into the shelf until it knocked against the back of the bookcase. “I lied,” he said, holding my gaze with his. “He hits me more now. Ever since you started getting your memory back. You skulk around and feed spy constructs – oh yes, I’ve seen you doing that – and act as though you aren’t the favored one. As though you might be cast onto the streets at any moment.”

“He threw me out once four years ago—”

“And you didn’t even leave the palace walls before he called you back. You know how he is. He did it to scare you, to light a fire in your belly. He watched your face for what it did to you and knew it was working. But has he ever hit you?” His eyes searched mine, his chin out, head tilted, waiting for a response.

I didn’t know what to say. All the little diplomacies I’d learned fell away. I couldn’t give Bayan an answer that would satisfy him, that would make him my friend, that would soothe him. “I’m sorry.”

Bayan seized the ends of several books, pulling them onto the floor. “I don’t want your pity! He doesn’t hit you because you are the favorite. You are the one he wants to win. You think he doesn’t care, but if he didn’t care, he’d hit you twice as hard. You don’t need all your memories back to see what he’s doing.” He stood there for a moment, his chest heaving. And then he swept for the door, the dark blue hem of his flowing pants like a retreating wave.

He slammed it, and the dust rose from a few shelves by the door.

It was what I’d wanted, I supposed.

I took my time searching the shelves and finally pulled down a few more complex books on the bone shard language. One on building constructs that obeyed someone other than its maker, another on effective ways to write over existing commands and another simply on higher-level commands.

I’d have to rewrite Mauga’s commands at night when my father slept. Mauga spent much of his time in the palace, in a room he’d reshaped into a lair. I’d have to study quickly.

Bayan’s words wormed their way back into my mind. Was it true? Was I the favorite? Was I somehow playing into my father’s hands? I couldn’t imagine why he might want me to reprogram his constructs and to overthrow him. And what would I do with Bayan once I was Emperor? A cold trickle of guilt bled into my chest. I wondered if there was a way I could keep him here in the palace alive, or a way I could force his fealty to me. I didn’t want to kill him.

Other days for other problems.

First was the matter of rewriting Mauga’s commands in a way my father wouldn’t know.

And I had no guarantee I would live through that.