Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Mena always knew when they were coming down to her. She heard the impact of their hard-soled boots on the narrow wooden stairs. Maeander always stepped in first, followed by his shadow, the Acacian traitor named Larken. They always stood on the far side of the room, rocking with the motion of the boat, staring at her with bemused expressions. They could not come to terms with how she had been delivered to them. They asked her several times why she had come to the magistrate’s house that morning. Each time she answered the same. She had heard they were looking for her, she said. This simple statement never failed to make Maeander grin and look back at his friend.

There was a great deal more to it than that, of course, but she felt no need to tell them anything more. They were carrying her back toward the center of the world, toward Acacia. That was what she wanted. Despite themselves, they were doing her bidding, not the other way around. Better to keep quiet about it, though. She told them nothing of the events directly prior to her showing up at the magistrate’s. If they had not left so promptly they could have learned a great deal more about her than they knew, but this suited her as well. They saw before them a young woman of small, almost petite stature. She sat demurely, with an upright posture, dressed as a bird, feathered and adorned, a priestess who had lived a cloistered life. No doubt they knew her to be a virgin and took amusement from discussing it.

They could never have imagined that she had returned from Uvumal in the middle of the night. She had trudged up from the shore through the shadows of a wood-shaded lane. She limped on her battered right leg, bruised so deeply that the whole of the thigh was blue and purple and black. She wheezed from an injury done to her chest. The damage might have happened during the fall through the canopy, bouncing as she had from branch to branch, poked and jabbed and snapped about like a dead thing until she had finally come to rest tangled in a crosshatch of branches. Or she might have caught the lung sickness from a chill she had taken as she worked her slow way back through the forest, dragging a heavy burden behind her and then sailing a rainy sea toward Vumair. She would never know.

Ruinat had been hushed and sodden, pressed beneath the black blanket of a cloud-heavy night. Water collected in wagon ruts and footprints and depressions of every sort. She walked without care for the puddles. She just cut through them, halfway up to her ankles in the muck. She wore her sword strapped to her back, and behind her she pulled a burden great enough to cause her strain. She had twined the rope around her waist several times, tied it off, and run the rope up over her shoulder. The far end had been wound tight around the trussed bird, pinching its wings into its body. She was bringing it home, an offering to the people of Vumu, one they would have to decide themselves what to do with.

Climbing the temple steps took considerable effort. The corpse caught on each corner. She had to lean forward to ascend. Once on the top step, she loosened the rope from around her waist and flung it over the stone carving of Maeben. She tugged with all her weight, which was only enough to drag the bird into a semiupright position. There she left it. She simply dropped the rope and turned away without considering it further.

Inside her compound she moved with greater ease. She knew where every servant slept and that they would not vary their routine in her absence. That was how she noticed an extra person sleeping in one of the rooms. Melio. She had only to hear his breathing and to smell his scent in the slumbering air to know it was him. She hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t accounted for it in her planning of the evening’s events. But she knew she had to communicate with him in some way. It would be incomplete, she knew. It would drive him mad. But she had to give him something in return for all he had done for her.

It took her a few moments to pen a note to him. She held it to her chest as she entered his room. She sipped shallow breaths and moved with the silent stealth that had always come to her at moments of need. She propped her sword against the wall, where he was sure to see it on waking, and then she approached his sleeping form. She knew she would not wake him, so she placed the folded square of paper close to his face, safe within the shelter described by his bare arm. She risked extra moments gazing at him. She took in the generosity of his sleeping features, and for the first time she did not question why her eyes so loved to linger on his features. They were perfectly imperfect. She had never seen a face that pleased her so. Not, at least, since she had last looked up into her father’s face as he told the myths of the old times.

Though what she felt for Melio was different from what she had felt for her father, she still knew that people named the emotion love. She had known this was what she felt before she entered the room. She loved him so much that if she woke him she would never have carried through her plan. That was why she had let him sleep and instead wrote in crabbed, rusty Acacian letters…