Acacia,War with the Mein

M,

You were right about everything, of course.

I was slow to learn, but I know it now,

Below this, not an afterthought but a postscript that it took her a few minutes to pen, she wrote two more lines.

I love you.

If ever the world allows it, I’ll prove it to you.

It took a few hours of hushed preparation to move her plan forward. There was only one last deception necessary to open the path toward the heart of things. She moved stealthily to her dressing chambers, stripped naked, and washed in the basin of flower-scented water. She dressed in the goddess’s robes. She slipped into the garments in the closed space of her dressing chambers. She applied her makeup by feel. When she felt she was passable in appearance and when she sensed the coming day, Mena left her compound and went to the magistrate’s house, wherein lay the sleeping Meinish party.

The rest happened quickly. Maeander asked her only a few questions before being satisfied as to her identity. She was on their vessel within half an hour, and the ship was unmoored and in motion only minutes later. She felt it when they cleared the shallow harbor waters and began to ride the heaving ridges that rolled south to north this time of the year.

Maeander seemed to enjoy his time questioning her, despite the fact that she could not tell him anything he did not know already. She knew only as much about her brothers and her sister as Melio had been able to tell her, and none of that was particularly concrete intelligence. Actually, Maeander informed her of much more than she told him. From him she learned that Aliver was, in fact, alive and well in Talay. He was amassing an army in the center of that nation, gradually moving northward as his numbers grew.

“They say he’s become quite the speaker,” Maeander said. “He’s been touched by a sorcerer’s hand and now he’s rousing the masses with his oratory. He speaks of freeing the Known World from suppression, from forced labor, from harsh taxes, even from the Quota. Strange that he seems to have forgotten who created that world order in the first place.”

There was a rumor, unconfirmed as yet but credible, that Dariel had joined him. Until recently this youngest of the Akarans had been but a raiding thief of the Gray Slopes. And Corinn, Maeander said, had been converted to the Meinish cause by the pleasures of his brother’s bed. “Many called her the chieftain’s whore behind her back. I’d never do so myself, of course.”

“No,” Larken added, as if on cue, “if you were to call her anything, you’d do it to her face.”

Listening to all this, Mena managed to control the emotion that swelled in her. She had dealt with much of it already, in her own way. As she dragged Maeben’s corpse through the forest she had been bombarded by memories from her childhood. They jabbed at her as much as the tree limbs and gnarled root networks and bloodsucking insects. She even spoke to her siblings as she walked, trying to explain herself to them, asking what they had become, trying to see if they could unite again and be the same again. Of course not, she knew. Nothing could be the same. Nobody could have imagined she’d become what she now was, nor could she imagine what they were. But she decided that there was no doubt in her-she loved them no matter what. Nothing Maeander said changed that in the slightest.

Maeander disembarked at Aos. He had something to attend to there but would likely arrive in Acacia about the same time as they would. Mena was left in Larken’s care. Out of Maeander’s shadow, the Acacian was a different man. He swaggered the same way, smiled with the same arrogance, held his body with the same self-adoration. But these things were natural to his character. What was different was that he conveyed himself as a free man, not just a hanger-on. He spoke with a casualness that almost suggested disdain for Maeander’s authority, although Mena was not entirely sure why it felt this way. It was nothing he actually said, just something in his attitude.

The evening after they sailed from Aos, Larken entered with several Acacian servants trailing behind him. Mena had noticed that all of the servants were Acacian and most of the crew was made up of Talayans. Only the captain himself, his first mate, and the Punisari guards were of Meinish blood. The servants set out trays of cheeses and olives, small broiled fish, a carafe of lemon wine. He thought he would share this last meal with her, he said. The next day they would sail into Acacia and she would no longer be exclusively his.

Mena found no reason to object. It was not that she liked Larken or wished for his company. He felt Mena’s fate was in his hands now and would soon be in Hanish’s hands. Mena herself had no say in the situation. But speaking from this assumption, Larken was somewhat careless in the things he said.

“Is it true?” Mena asked. “The things he said about my siblings, I mean.”

“Oh yes,” Larken said, running his fingers over his cheekbone, down and under his lips, a gesture he often made while talking. He sat on a stool, near enough that he could reach out and touch Mena if he leaned forward. “Maeander never lies. What he says is always true. It’s when he is silent that you have reason to fear things aren’t well.”

Mena lifted a glass of wine to her nose and inhaled it. The scent was familiar, but she was not sure why; she had never drunk wine before. “I look forward to seeing my sister. I will see her, won’t I? Hanish won’t keep me from her.”

Larken considered the question, seeming to weigh not the answer itself but to turn over how much of it he should give her. “Let’s just say that Hanish has a purpose for you and Hanish has a purpose for Corinn. But they are different purposes, separate destinies.”

Mena set the wineglass down, having consumed none of it. She realized the reason the wine scent had smelled familiar. It had often been on her father’s breath at night, when he told her and Dariel stories. He always had a glass of the wine nearby. He would sip it and talk, sip and talk, and when he kissed her good night she had tasted it on the warm air exhaled from inside him. “What makes you think my brother won’t have wiped Hanish Mein from the Known World before we get too far into these separate destinies?”

“It will not take that long.” Larken grinned and looked down in a manner that indicated he was leaving things unsaid. “And beyond that it’s a matter of simple logic. I hate to tell you this, Mena, but we’re ready for him. We welcome it, really. Meins are fighters. They are not happy when the peace lingers too long. They never stop training, preparing, hungering for the next battle. The boys not old enough to fight last time are young men now. Oh, how they want to prove themselves! We still have the Numrek. I’ve been surprised at how well they take to a life of leisure, but they will be happy enough to pick up their spears and axes again. And we have other weapons as well. Not the same sort that Hanish unleashed the first time. One can do such things only once. But we’ve other weapons, believe me. The type of things that will wake you screaming in the night. But they are no nightmare. When Hanish releases them, they’ll roam through the bright daylight. Believe me, Hanish is quite ready to face Aliver Akaran and an untrained, polyglot horde, no matter how large it is or how much Aliver whips them into a frenzy.”

Mena stared at him for a long time, fingering the eel pendant at her neck as she did. “Larken, tell me something… You are an Acacian. You always will be. Don’t you have some wish to redeem your honor? Is that not in you somewhere? You could do so even now. You could join me and my brother and help take back the things you betrayed earlier. With your knowledge you would be an immense aid to my brother. You could null your crime.”

“Hardly,” Larken said. “I hear you, though. I would not be the first to have a change of heart like that. But it’s not…a way of being that suits me. I’ve cast my lot with the Meins, and I’m quite happy with it. You should see my villa in Manil. I have servants for every purpose, Mena. Every purpose. I live a life I would never have achieved as a Marah guard. When Hanish or Maeander calls for me, I come and serve, but most days I am no different from the richest of nobles.”

“You care only about yourself, then?”

“Who else is there to care about? I am only myself…”

“Change yourself to something better, then! You have only to do it, and it will be done. This is something I’ve discovered for myself.”

Instead of answering directly, Larken asked her if she had ever heard the Meinish legend of the bear giant Thallach. This Thallach was an enormous northern bear, he said, against whom the first men of the Mein tested their valor. They went one after another into the mouth of his den and did single combat with him. They died one after another, such a steady feast that Thallach never even had to leave his den. His food came to him instead. This went on for many years. Many men died. One day a holy man convinced the people to try another way. Why send their best and strongest and most beloved to their deaths time and again? Why not make peace with the bear? The people, weakened and fearful, believed there was wisdom in this. The holy man went at the head of a delegation, offering Thallach a feather of peace, promising him that they would feed and care for him and worship him as a god from that day forward. “Do you know what Thallach said to them in answer?”

Larken had moved his stool up close to Mena’s bench. He let the question hang a moment, although from his pleased expression he obviously did not mean for her to answer. “Thallach said-” he leaned forward, bared his teeth, and growled, a long, low rumble of sound and vibration and the heat of his breath on her ear. “Then he devoured them, one and all, just as he had done all the others. What else, really, would you expect a bear to say or to do? Thallach could not be anything but what he was. Nor can I. Nor do I wish to be! So don’t try to make me something that I am not. I’ll tell you something you don’t know about me. I’ll ask you afterward if you still think I can be redeemed.”

He explained his role in handing Corinn over to Hanish. He wanted her to understand that he had not just switched sides from the standpoint of a defeated soldier. He had not just sworn loyalty to a new master. He had lived his life in preparation for just such a betrayal. He had behaved in such a way as to gain the highest degree of trust within the Marah hierarchy. He had been a perfect soldier, without a blemish on his record. He had honed his sword skills with a drive his teachers always commented on. He had withstood anything training threw at him without so much as a whimper of protest, and he had willingly put himself forward as a candidate for special assignments. But he had done all of this so that if the opportunity ever came to grasp for something grander, he would.

He had watched Hanish Mein rampage into the world, and he knew fighting against him was a losing proposition. He got his hands on Corinn with joy in his heart. She had been so easy to trap. You can believe in me. I live only to protect you, was all he had to say. When he turned her over, he felt not the slightest remorse. He would have done the same with any of the rest of them, even with Mena herself, if she’d had the misfortune of falling into his hands.

“I have had that misfortune,” Mena said, a joke spoken without mirth.

She spent the night examining a thought that she had not considered before. What if Larken had captured her all those years before? What if she had grown up in the palace just as Corinn had? Would she be the same person she now was? Impossible. Might it be a better thing to have grown into something different? Of course not. She could not imagine that to be true. She could not conceive of not having grown to maturity on Vumu, with the villagers around her. She could not imagine never having become Maeben on earth. It was so much a part of her. Even though she had to break with the goddess, even though she had found her out as a fraud and cast her down to her death, she still would not want to be anybody but who she was now: the Mena who emerged from Maeben’s shadow.

The destiny their father had intended for Corinn had been curtailed and warped even more than Mena’s had. Larken had robbed her of the challenge to become herself in a world away from Acacia. That was the gift their father had given them, but only now-an adult inside herself, just beginning to learn what her siblings had become in their respective exiles-did she begin to understand the gift for what it was. Because of Larken, Corinn had been denied it. Mena, who had not felt an emotion she could name for the man throughout their discussions, named one now. She hated him. She spent the night deciding what she would do about it.

The next morning four Punisari guards gathered her. Larken stood waiting for her near the bow. He was in full military dress, his torso wrapped in a thalba, two swords of differing length at his waist, a small dagger sheathed horizontally across his flat abdomen. Her eyes were quick in studying him. If he noticed, it was only with a certain amount of vanity. “So, you’ve had the night to consider it,” he said. “Do you still think I’m redeemable?”

“Yes,” Mena said, continuing toward him, “in a manner of speaking, you are.”

“What manner is that?”

Her strides were steady, unhurried. It took great effort to keep her eyes on his in the brilliance of the morning light and to block out the bombardment of motion and sound of a ship at sail. “It would not do to explain it to you now,” she said. “You may understand when it happens or you may not. It doesn’t really matter.”

“You’ve become resigned. That’s almost sad, Princess. Almost sad-”

Mena arrived before him. She stepped so close one might have thought she was about to kiss him. Instead, she reached forward and grasped the hilt of his long sword. The fingers of Larken’s sword hand twitched, but he did not reach to wrest her hand away. Even this he found amusing. “That’s an intimate touch, Mena. You should take care what you grasp hold of.”

The blade sang free in one smooth pull.

Larken held his arms up in a gesture of mock alarm. “Impressive, Mena. Do you know that drawing another man’s sword isn’t an easy thing? It’s the type of move one often botches: angle of pull wrong, the motion hasty or jerky-you know, that sort of thing…”

Mena backed a few steps, testing the feel of the blade, weighing it. She knew guards rimmed the deck behind her, but Larken had stopped any attack with a motion of his fingers. She had calculated he would. She could feel their eyes pinned to her, but she also knew that the Talayan crewmen and Acacian servants watched her.

“What now?” Larken said. “What do you mean to do with that?”

“To kill you.”

“I’m affronted, but that’s very unlikely. You have guts, Mena. I would never say otherwise. Your problem is that swordsmen don’t get much better than me. I don’t think a girl raised as a Vumu priestess has much of a chance. I’m just being honest with you. I could have stopped your hand before you ever drew. You know that, don’t you? And as you can see, you are surrounded by my guards and by an entire ship’s crew.”

She said, “I’ll take care of them after.”

Larken could not help but grin. “I wonder if your brothers are equally bold.” Motioning toward his companion sword, a blade shorter than the other but just as deadly in its own right, he said, “I also have another weapon.”

Mena positioned herself as if to begin the First Form. “That’s why I took but one.”

Larken drew his sword as Mena began toward him. Slack wristed, he swept his sword low, from right to left in the motion to counter Edifus’s unusually low opening attack. It was a disdainful gesture on Larken’s part, and it was the last motion he was ever entirely in easy control of.

Mena’s attack bore no resemblance to the Form. Her very first move broke out of it, a whipping motion of her blade. The tip drew a quick circle that caused Larken a moment of hesitation. Her sword bit into his wrist at an angle. The honed blade sliced up along the bones and cut free a sizable amount of flesh and muscle like it was soft cheese. His sword hand died, dropping the weapon.

Despite the shock and pain of the cut, Larken was quick enough to extend his left hand for the hilt. He would have caught hold of it, too, except that Mena circled her sword back and sliced the grasping hand. His four fingers twirled into the air, each of them dragging thin loops of blood with them. Mena would never forget the look on his face just then, nor in the following moment, when she carved a smile into his abdomen.

Before Larken had even crumpled to the deck, Mena severed the sword arm of the Punisari nearest her. A moment later she took a second one out with a jab that cut the neck artery and drained the man’s head of blood. There were two more to kill, she knew, but she had never felt more in control of her destiny. She circled away from the remaining guards, leaped up onto the railing, tiptoed along it, and came down on the other side of several crates. The move gave her enough time to speak a few words to the sailors and the servants, who all watched her with expressions of awe. She named herself and demanded-in the name of her father and in the cause of her brother who would be king-that they rise up at that moment and take the ship with her.

When a beige-skinned man from Teh shouted her name joyously from the crow’s nest in which he watched the scene, Mena knew that the ship would be hers.