Chapter 13
Thirteen
No one was chasing us. We traveled fast, the electro mages running the ships working with the sailors so that each ship kept pace.
Seeing the Imperium from the ocean, I was reminded of the weeks it had taken Eona? and me to get to the Imperium. We had passed familiar coastline, lands filled with pines and other fragrant evergreens, the last hint of frost melting off the branches.
Then we had hit Dragon’s Rest Mountains, the faraway range that had always marked the limit of both our view and our hope.
They had seemed small in the distance, yet they had towered above us when the ship passed them—peaks so tall it would have taken years to climb them, pinnacles made of jagged ice and snow so thick that not even conifer trees could grow on them.
Faced with their majesty, I had understood why the Imperium had failed to cross them.
I remembered holding my sister’s hand on the deck as we watched the mountains pass, knowing it was the last time we were ever going to see the Northern Kingdom.
We would never again see my mother’s great hall or watch the winter snows cover our lands.
We would never again hear the tales told around a campfire as they had been told to every generation of northerners before us.
Going south again on an imperial ship left me with a similar sense of uncertainty. All I knew of the Imperium was the land around the palace, and the familiarity of that was disappearing with each league we traveled.
Seabirds fished along the coastline, and the houses went from the terracotta roofs popular in the inner Imperium to steep thatched roofs and houses built on stilts to withstand winter storms and floods.
We passed fishing villages at a distance, their small boats built differently than the ones we had taken from Lady Jolushi.
I spent most of my time above deck, working over and over in my head the anxiety I had expressed to Tallu. Tavornai was massive. How could I hope to find Spider in its many islands?
It would be like walking into the northern ice fields and hoping to see the great northern bear.
My thoughts were still running in circles, chasing each other, as Tallu slept beside me, his body so still and his breath so even that I continuously checked the whole night to make sure his illness hadn’t taken him, that my husband still lived.
The sails were drawn, and the hum of the motor vibrated throughout the ship, the only sign that we were still moving, guided by stars and experience. General Saxu had proven more useful than any of the sailors on the ship.
They had never traveled further than the rivers leading to the Imperial Capital; although they knew how to sail on open ocean in theory, they had never done it in practice.
Beside me, Tallu snuffled, his mouth opening in a sharp gasp before he settled into quiet breathing.
I sat up, moving so gently that he didn’t even stir when I got out of bed. I dressed in silence and cracked open the door, the pressure in my throat loosening at the sight of one of Saxu’s soldiers-turned-Dogs, his blade already drawn.
He relaxed when he saw me, and I shut the door behind me, gesturing with one hand toward the deck. He nodded, and I headed up, the call of the night sky too great, the feel of Tallu’s rooms too claustrophobic.
I stopped when I reached the top stair. There were already two people on deck. I narrowed my eyes, squinting in the dim light toward the single lantern set between them.
The Kennelmaster grinned at his companion, and it was the first time I had ever seen such an expression on his face. Irad?o snorted, rolling her shoulders to dislodge his hand. He let it fall to his side, turning back to the dark waters.
What did the two of them have to talk about? Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps they were merely exchanging experiences as spymasters for two separate nations. Perhaps they had formed some attachment, both reporting to Tallu only to have their advice ignored.
I crept forward, keeping to the shadows, my body low even as I finally reached the mainmast, hiding behind the enormous pillar of wood.
I heard snatches of words.
“… forgive… never… how can I show…”
My mind spun. The Kennelmaster coughed, loud and harsh, the sound thick and vibrating as though his lungs were about to come up through his mouth.
“Are you satisfied?” Irad?o asked, her voice carrying in the silence as the Kennelmaster wheezed, trying to catch his breath. “With your life, with how you spent it? Are you satisfied?”
“Satisfied?” The Kennelmaster’s voice sounded raw, scraped into nothing. “How could I not be?”
The question hung between them and he shook his head where it hung between his arched shoulders, his forearms resting on the ship’s railing. Then he straightened, and I shrank even more, curling into the merest shadow, the hint of a shape in the darkness.
He took his lantern when he left, his footing steady as he made his way below deck, even as he gripped the railing in tight fingers.
I crept forward, keeping my footsteps quiet, covering my movements with the noise of sailors calling out to each other in the dark. When I was behind Irad?o, I asked, “What were you talking about?”
She jumped, spinning to search the darkness until her eyes caught on me.
I knew what she saw. I was nothing more than a slightly darker shadow behind her. She shook her head, turning back to the water.
An owl hooted from somewhere up in the rigging of the ship, and Irad?o waved it off.
“You always were like that,” she said. “You might say you resented Yor?mu’s teachings, but I know you loved them.”
I stepped alongside her, leaning against the railing. “Maybe. What were you and the Kennelmaster discussing?”
“Techniques,” Irad?o said finally. “How to manage a kennel of spies. How to manage the flow of information to the ones we’ve pledged our loyalty to.”
“I don’t know that Mother would like you discussing her with the Imperium’s master of spies,” I said. Northern felt strange on my tongue after speaking the barbed imperial language for so long. Eona? and I had practiced our Imperial over and over again with each other and with Lord Fuyii.
We had practiced it with Mother, who had learned the language to better understand her enemies. Eona? had become fluent, not just in the language itself, but also in the nuance, and the ability to insult without being explicit, to imply without tipping her hand.
I had only ever learned the language, and it had been Tallu’s tutelage and watching the way he spun circles around his own court that had taught me more than a word-for-word translation.
“I wasn’t speaking of your mother,” Irad?o said.
I went still, watching her carefully. I remembered what I had thought earlier in our journey, before we had even set off for Tavornai. She and I could each start anew. We could change who we were trained to be. But it was more than that. It wasn’t simply that she and I could change.
I had chosen to change. She had been forced into it, and then my mother had sent her… Only, no, my mother never would have sent her spymaster south. How had I not understood all that my cousin’s presence implied?
“Mother doesn’t know where you are,” I said.
Irad?o smiled thinly, the straight line of her lips illuminated by the moonlight.
“Eona? showed up—the crown princess returned!—and you lost the position you had been training for from the time we were born.” I couldn’t take my eyes off her, the way her face slowly froze, her pursed lips becoming a tight clench of her jaw.
“You would never be the northern queen. What position did mother offer you? Advisor?”
“The same. Spymaster. She suggested I go south to Dragon’s Rest Mountains, do my work from there and report home only when I had news.” Irad?o chuckled. “All those years training to be her successor, only to be exiled for my trouble.”
“Mother couldn’t have known that her plan was going to go so awry.
” But the words tasted sour. I wondered how Eona? felt.
She had been promised an early death, and before that she would be given to a man whose predilections were monstrous.
And, instead, now she was expected to take our mother’s place, be the northern queen and keep the fractious clans from tearing themselves apart without the threat of the Imperium to keep them united.
“You think I blame your mother?” Irad?o shook her head. “I blame you. I blame the emperor you love so dearly that you’re willing to risk the north for him.”
“Do you?” I asked, because I could hear self-recrimination in her words, the irritation that ate up her throat like bile.
“No. I blame myself,” she said.
In the northern tongue, we had three words that meant myself.
There was myself, meaning your physical body.
There was the self that you were when you actually meant your position within your own clan, distinguishing you as a single piece of the larger puzzle of your kin.
Then there was the word that meant your innermost self, the piece of you that no one else could possibly know, the piece of you that was separate from your clan.
For Eona? and me, this last myself had truly always been ourself, plural and singular together.
Until Tallu, I had never allowed myself that singular identity.
What was the point when it only meant loneliness?
Irad?o used the last, most subtle, meaning. She blamed her innermost self, her soul. And she had no twin to share the weight of it.
Water lapped the hull of the boat, and the hum of our motor was audible. I watched the stars, tracing familiar constellations that looked different this far south.
“What will you do?”
“I pledged my loyalty to you.” Irad?o looked up at the stars, then down at the deck. “What choice did I have? Where else could I go?”
“You could have stayed in the north. You could have fought for your position,” I said.