Pathfinder

CHAPTER 15 Trust

“I’m so sorry,” said the expendable. “One of the versions of Ram Odin did not include the word ‘immediately,’ and therefore his order was complete a fraction of a second before all the others. He is the real Ram Odin.”

Ram gave a little half smile. “How ironic. By specifying that you should act at once—”

The expendable reached out with both hands, gave Ram’s head a twist, and broke his neck. The sentence remained unfinished, but that did not matter, since the person saying it was not the real Ram Odin.

Rigg fell asleep almost as soon as he lay down among the tangle of boys in the space behind the fireplace. The one wall was quite warm from the fire on the other side; the opposite wall was cold from the late autumn air beyond it. Rigg chose one of the unloved spots near the cold wall, partly because that’s where the most empty space was available, but mostly because he was used to sleeping in the cold and preferred a bit of a chill to overheated sleep.

He woke only four hours later, as he had schooled himself to do, in the silence of the dark hours before dawn. The nook was fuller now—the late-shift boys had taken their places as well. Most of the boys’ hair was damp from sweat, for even as the fire slackened during the night, the boys’ own body heat kept them warm. Rigg himself, despite keeping his back against the cold wall, was too warm, and he stepped outside into the courtyard to cool off before beginning his morning’s work.

In the garden there was no one keeping watch—what mischief could anyone do inside the courtyard, unless he were a thief of herbs and flowers? Rigg knew, however, that if he approached the front gateway or the servants’ entrance, there would be guards to challenge him. Even if he walked around in the garden he might attract notice. So he chose a place near the door to the kitchen—the pepper door, it was called, because the cooks sent servants through it to gather fresh herbs—and sat on the ground. The air now was quite cold. Soon the basil would die back, and then, when the snow came, the thyme. Only the woody-stemmed rosemary would last the winter.

To Rigg, the garden was almost as artificial and unnatural as the wood-floored interior of the house. Nothing grew wild here, and there was no life more complicated than a few birds, which were not allowed to nest here. Insects left paths, but so thin and faint that even if he wanted to, Rigg would not be able to single out individuals. It was just as well—for every vertebrate creature’s path there were ten thousand insect paths, and if all paths glowed equally wide and bright in Rigg’s mind the insects would blot out everything else.

Rigg kept his eyes open only so he could find where the paths went in relation to the building. He could sense all the paths, no matter how many walls rose up between. The outside walls of the house were clear—for six hundred years at least, there had been no passage that crossed those barriers.

Rigg had many things to learn, but he attached first importance to the path of the person who had placed the half-dozen akses in a flimsy cage under the bed he was supposed to have slept in. Without quite knowing how he distinguished them, Rigg had learned when very young how to identify a particular person’s path and recognize it when he saw it again in another place. The older the path, the harder it was to do this, as if they lost detail and resolution with age—though Rigg could not have described exactly what the details were that he recognized. He simply knew.

The would-be assassin had come in through the servants’ door in the alleyway, and from the way his path moved—smoothly, until, inside the large pantry, it lurched upward and then down—he concluded that he had come into the house inside something, most likely a barrel. He had emerged last night at the same time Rigg arrived inside the courtyard in a sedan chair; that’s when the akses had been placed.

What Rigg needed to see was whether the assassin had had any contact with anyone in the household. He also had to know whether he had used any of the secret passages. No, to both questions. The assassin had moved unerringly and without encountering anyone else or even pausing to hide somewhere, straight to Rigg’s designated room.

But he did not go back to the pantry. Instead he went up onto the roof by way of the steep ladderway used by the workmen who fixed leaks, removed the nests of birds and wasps, and washed the skylights and the windows in the attic cupolas. There he had been until the exact moment Erbald had walked Rigg to the gate—for Rigg had also learned to discern the relative ages of paths, to a high degree of precision with very recent ones.

At that point, the assassin had emerged onto the roof, scooted over the top of it, and down into the next-door neighbor’s courtyard. No one had been awake in that house, and though it was almost as fine a house as Flacommo’s, it had no need for a guard beyond the sleepy old man who was apparently dozing at his post—for the assassin passed right by him, vaulted the gate, and went into the street without the old man waking.

The assassin had moved with the confidence of someone who had been in the house before and knew his way, so Rigg began looking deeper and deeper into the past, finding older and older paths. In a way his eyes could never have done, it was as if only the paths of the age he was looking for were visible, while the newer and older ones attenuated until he shifted his attention to yet another set. It was time-consuming work, and required iron self-discipline, like forcing himself to read fine print in a dim light and refusing to give up just because the letters were hard to focus on. But he had trained himself to peel away each layer, examine it thoroughly and methodically throughout the entire house, then start with the next layer back, and so on.

The assassin might have been sent to scout the layout of the house only in the days since General Citizen’s report arrived, or he might have come the moment the first rumors of Rigg’s existence reached Aressa Sessamo nearly two months ago. Or the assassin might have learned the house before the royal family ever moved into it, in the expectation that at some point his services were bound to be needed. If his previous visit was that old, Rigg was unlikely to be able to find it—a slow, methodical search would take months to get back that far, and a quicker, skimming search would be likely to miss a single visit.

Realizing this, Rigg chose a different strategy. Instead of searching the whole house, he searched only at the gate. On his first visit, the assassin would surely have entered on some legitimate pretext; he would be someone with a cover story so bland as to make him forgettable. If he hadn’t come through the gate, he would have come through the servants’ door; if Rigg didn’t find him in a thorough search at the one place, he’d search again at the other.

Found. The assassin had come through the gate, and it had been only a month ago. Before General Citizen’s messenger could have made it here, but not before a different messenger might have come, from some spy in O who might have investigated Rigg before Citizen even arrived.

Still, it was something of a relief to know that whoever sent the assassin was not someone who depended on General Citizen to inform them. Rigg had come to rather like, or at least respect, General Citizen, and he didn’t want him to be the type of man who resorted to assassination.

Who ushered the assassin into the house on his first visit? The normal servants who greeted everyone, and then Flacommo himself—but that meant nothing except that the party was of some lofty social standing. Most of the party went on with Flacommo to meet with Mother in a room just off the garden where her paths showed she spent most of her waking hours. But the assassin was left behind.

That suggested that he was posing as a servant, and his master had dismissed him. The assassin prowled the bedroom level of the house, exploring every room. No one challenged him, though he took at least an hour doing it.

Then he went straight to the room where the rest of his party was conversing with Mother, and the whole group left almost at once.

If only he had Umbo with him! Then he could slow down the paths to see whether Mother knew about the plan to assassinate Rigg when he showed up there.

This much was certain: Mother spent an hour talking with the people who brought the assassin along with them.

But there was no indication whether the rest of the party knew the assassin’s real mission, still less whether Mother knew about it. And just because Flacommo never encountered the assassin on either of his visits to the house said nothing about what he knew, or what the Revolutionary Council knew. Rigg’s gift told him many things that no one else could know—but it did not tell him a tenth as much as would have been useful to him.

Someone was in the garden with him.

He could see the path, and it was new—it was being created even as he watched. But it moved incredibly slowly, and faded more quickly than usual, and when he looked with his eyes, there was no one there.

There were folktales about invisible people, about saints who had the power to walk through a crowd unseen, or people who had offended a wizard and been turned invisible so they were always alone. But he had never believed them for a moment. Since Father had explained to him how vision worked—the photons of different wavelengths variously reflected or absorbed, and the retina of the eye detecting them—it seemed impossible to Rigg that someone might be able to make it so every atom of his body became transparent to photons.

But hadn’t Father said, “Only a fool says ‘impossible,’ the wise man says, ‘unlikely.’” That had become a joke between them for several months—instead of “no,” they told each other “unlikely.” Now it occurred to Rigg that Father might have had a specific example in mind when they were discussing whether invisibility was impossible or not.

Stubbornly, Rigg decided he would not yet believe in a human being transparent to photons. There must be some other explanation, and he closed his eyes and studied the slowly moving path for some kind of clue.

There was the fact that it was moving more slowly than any human being could possibly move. More important, though, was the fact that the path faded far too abruptly. The beginning of the stranger’s path into the garden was actually earlier than Rigg’s own path as he came in.

And at the head of the path, right where the person should be visible, but wasn’t, the path flickered.

Not blinking on and off, but the color of it—or flavor, or whatever sense you might want to use as a metaphor—seemed to be changing slightly in abrupt shifts.

Rigg opened his eyes again. If this was another assassin, Rigg would certainly have no problem getting away from him, his progress was so slow. Then again, he might move slowly when invisible, then turn visible and leap upon Rigg like a stooping hawk.

Still, Rigg had to learn more. So he stood up, walked directly to the head of the slow path and blocked it.

It took a few moments but the path stopped moving, and then began moving backward. But in that moment of hesitation, when the invisible one did not move forward or back, his shape became faintly visible to Rigg’s eyes. Not enough that Rigg could see him clearly, but he knew where the eyes were, could see the height. He could see the outline of the clothing and the hair, telling him that this was a woman. And in the eyes, he caught a glimpse of—what, fear? Startlement?

Rigg knew that he had revealed to the invisible person that her invisibility was not complete. But he had also learned that when the invisible person ceased moving, she became somewhat visible again.

“Who are you?” Rigg asked softly. He was so close she could not help but hear him, though no one inside the house could have. Yet there was no hint of a response. The Invisible just kept moving away, moving perhaps a little faster but not much.

Frustrated, Rigg walked up her path and did not pause, but kept moving right through the place where she had to be.

He passed right through.

Did Rigg feel anything odd during that passage? Perhaps a slight shakiness, or perhaps a little warmth. Or maybe he was just imagining the sensation because he knew he had to be passing through a living person.

When he looked back at the path, it was unchanged, except that it continued moving forward—perhaps a little more swiftly than before, if “swiftly” could be used to describe a speed that would make a snail ashamed.

Rigg had a good idea now who the Invisible might be. If he could not speak to her or force her to become more visible to him, he at least could find out where she had been and who might know who she was. Rigg stood out of the Invisible’s way and closed his eyes so he could focus on her path backward in time. Not terribly far away, the path changed—it lost its trait of rapid fading, and instead seemed quite normal as it moved through the house. Back to a bedroom where Mother lay asleep.

The Invisible had come straight from Mother’s room, and at a normal pace. But she had done so in the middle of the night, when no one was about. Rigg made the reasonable assumption: When the Invisible moved at an ordinary speed, she was completely visible, and remain unnoticed because the house was dark and everyone was asleep. As soon as the Invisible realized there was someone in the garden—Rigg—she slowed down and became invisible.

She is not “slowing down,” Rigg realized. Whatever she’s doing affects her path, and paths have to do with time. The Invisible is actually jumping forward in time, in tiny increments.

Silently in his mind, Rigg explained it all as if he were expounding his theory to Father. Suppose the Invisible moved an inch a second. Suppose that at the end of every second, she then jumped forward one second in time. To the Invisible, she is making a continuous forward movement, one second per inch. But because she is jumping forward a second at the end of every second, to an outside observer she would seem to move one inch every two seconds—but for one of those seconds she would seem to flash out of existence.

Now suppose that instead of a second per inch, it was a millionth of a second per millionth of an inch. The pace would be the same, but now she would not exist in any moment long enough for a significant number of photons to hit her.

He could almost hear Father’s voice raise an objection. If she exists in any moment for exactly as long as she does not exist between moments, then she should be half visible, for half the photons would pass through her, and half would strike her and reflect or be absorbed.

All right, Rigg answered himself. Suppose the Invisible exists for one millionth of a second, but then jumps forward a thousandth of a second. Now she exists far less time than she does not exist. She’s only reflecting light for one millionth of a second every thousandth of a second. Our eyes simply can’t notice that tiny amount of light, can’t focus on it.

She has to keep moving, though. And very quickly, so that each thousandth of a second, when she reappears so briefly, she’s in a different place. When I made her stop and back up because I stood directly in front of her, for that fleeting second she did not move quickly enough and she became much more visible—I could see her height, her shape, her eyes, a trace of her mouth. Then she sped up, moving backward, and disappeared again.

She never disappeared, really. She was always there. When I walked through her, she was there.

Father had taught Rigg that all solid objects were actually mostly empty space, the atoms very far apart, and within each atom the nucleus and electrons were separated by spaces many times their size.

So when he passed through the Invisible, the Invisible must have flashed into existence many times, maybe a thousand times. Most of the actual particles of their bodies would not have collided, and the Invisible jumped ahead in time before they could distort or destroy each other.

But some particles must have collided, and those that did . . .

No wonder the Invisible backed up rather than collide with Rigg. Even though such a collision would do no visible harm, there must be significant radiation from the relatively few crashes between atoms that did take place during the passage. If the Invisible did not avoid collisions as much as possible, eventually the radiation would become significant. Enough, perhaps, to make her sick or even kill her.

For the first time, Rigg understood that it was useful that Father had taught him so much about physics. He wanted me to be able to make sense of things like this.

Except that it didn’t really make sense yet. How could a human being divide time into such tiny bits? How could the Invisible possibly even comprehend such intervals?

Again, Rigg answered his own objection. The Invisible no more understands what she’s doing than Umbo understood what he was doing when he “slowed down time,” no more than I understood the nature of the paths that only I could see. It was instinctive. A reflex.

Like sweating. You know what causes sweat, but you don’t have to consciously activate every pore for sweating to take place.

No, sweating was involuntary. More like walking. You don’t think about each tiny muscle movement involved in walking, you just walk, and your body does what it does. Or like seeing—you decide what to look at, how wide to open your eyes, how long to stare—but you don’t have to understand the photons striking the rods and cones of your retina.

The Invisible may not even know that she’s moving forward in time. She only knows that when she becomes invisible, her forward movement slows down. With years of practice, she would learn just how much time-movement was needed to stay invisible, because if she became too invisible, her movement through space would become so slow she would be unable to get from one place to another. But if she did not move forward far enough with each tiny time-jump, she would become visible and people would see her—as a ghost, a dream, an apparition, a memory, but they would see her.

So over the years she has learned to control it the way Umbo learned to control his sense of timeflow, the way I learned to distinguish among the paths and see at a glance how old they were compared to each other, and peel them away with my mind so I could concentrate on the paths of a certain time or of a certain person rather than all the paths that passed through that point in space.

This Invisible is like me. And like Umbo. Talented.

Umbo and I were both trained by Father to hone our talents. So was Nox. Did Father know this person and train her, too?

Rigg remembered Father’s voice as he lay dying under the fallen tree. “Then you must go and find your sister. She lives with your mother.”

Father had sent Rigg to find his sister, not his mother. His mother, the queen-by-right, was not the important one. What mattered to Father was Rigg’s talented sister.

Everything came together and made sense. His theory fit all the facts and omitted none that he could think of. He might later learn of many flaws in the theory, but for right now, as Father had taught him, it was useful enough to act on the assumption that he was right.

Rigg allowed himself to notice the paths again. The Invisible was moving toward the door she had come out of—and she was moving much faster. Which meant she was actually leaping forward in time by smaller increments, or less frequently, which meant that she was reflecting more photons. And sure enough, Rigg could make out a shadowy form, and it was running—running so very slowly that he could still have overtaken the Invisible in a dozen steps.

This is how the Invisible has learned to escape—trading a little bit of visibility for speed in getting away.

Now he knew better than to try to speak to her. Existing only a thousandth of a moment in any one position in space, there was no way the Invisible could distinguish speech.

The Invisible. She has a name. Param Sissaminka.

Rigg walked into the kitchen, where the morning shift was now beginning to be about their business—bakers shaping the dough that had been left for them by the night bakers, cooks starting the pots for the afternoon stews, servants sleepily going here and there, taking care of their needs so they could begin their chores.

“Did you sleep at all, young master?” asked the head baker. This was a woman that Rigg had not met the night before, but of course the kitchen staff talked to each other, especially since Rigg had been a stranger sleeping in the nook behind the fire.

“I did,” said Rigg. “But I wake early—no doubt I’ll be back in the afternoon for another nap, if you don’t mind.”

The baker looked at him with a hint of amusement. “If you’re sleeping away from your room for fear of someone meddling with you, perhaps you should sleep in a different place every time, and not go returning to the nook to sleep.”

Rigg was surprised that the baker was so forthright. “Am I in danger?” he asked.

“It seemed to my sister that you thought you were, and so you may well be. My sister is the night baker, Elella. I’m Lolonga.”

“Then let me tell you something, Lolonga,” said Rigg. “Something was left in my room last night, which is why I didn’t sleep there. Something designed to kill. And I’m afraid that if anyone goes into that room today, and jostles the bed, the trap that was set for me might be sprung on some innocent who does not deserve to die.”

“Do you deserve to die?”

“I’d like to think I don’t, but there are those who think the world will be a better place without me.”

“Since you haven’t told me what the trap is—though I assume it is involved with the bed—I take it you’d like me to warn people away from that room without it being known that the warning came from you.”

“I’d like that, yes, but it’s not worth lying about. If someone asks point blank, someone whose trust you need to retain, then by all means tell them I warned you. It will come out soon enough anyway. But if they don’t ask, please don’t volunteer the information.”

“The housekeeper, Bok, is an early riser,” said Lolonga. “Even though my idiot apprentices will no doubt ruin the day’s bread in my absence, making the dough too dry or too wet, I’ll go find her and tell her so she can save the life of some silly worthless chambermaid.”

“Even the silliest chambermaid is worth saving,” said Rigg.

“Really?” said Lolonga. “But I never suspected that one of you would feel that way.”

“One of . . . who?”

“Royals. The rich. The educated. Those we wait upon, who have all the money and fame and power. You.”

“Ah, well, there’s your mistake, ma’am. Until a few months ago, I was one of you. No, worse—I was a wandering trapper whom folk like you would look down on and not let into the kitchen.”

Lolonga grinned. “I sensed that about you, lad,” she said, “which is why I didn’t have you thrown out of my kitchen the moment you stepped in. I don’t let your mother in, you know. Not while I’m baking. It distracts my people and ruins the breads and cakes and pies of the day.”

“Ma’am,” said Rigg. “I have to know. Between you and your sister, which one is head baker?”

“We both are. It’s a constant battle between us. She thinks she gets to decide what dough to make each night, and I’m stuck with making whatever bread she determined we’d need. But I got even with her. I made her take on my lazy worthless son, Long, as her apprentice on the night shift. It’s a punishment that goes on and on.”

“I like Long,” said Rigg.

“So do I. That’s why I put him on her shift—so I don’t have to spend all day every day yelling at him and cursing him for a stupid lazy son of a stupid lazy father. That might interfere with the affection between us.”

She left the kitchen on Rigg’s errand. He went out by another way and found himself in the dining room, which at the moment stood empty, the table cleared away. Soon it would be set for breakfast, he was sure, but for now it was a quiet place, and almost completely dark, illuminated only by the starlight coming through the windows—the Ring cast its light from the other side of the house.

Rigg sat in one of the chairs and watched the path Lolonga took through the house. He saw her path encounter the housekeeper’s path, and then followed the housekeeper—Bok?—as she went to the maids, no doubt to give them instructions about avoiding the room with the trap.

Then he cast his attention to his mother’s room, and sure enough, the Invisible, Param, had moved back into it. Now Rigg had the leisure to study the paths in that room, and he could see that Param came there every night. So did someone else, always arriving and leaving just before Param came invisibly in. Rigg traced that path and saw that it led to a serving maid he had seen last night. In fact, he had watched her on what must have been that very errand—taking a tray of food out of the kitchen and going . . . somewhere. Now he knew where. He thought back to the tray of food and realized: This is how Param eats. An invisible has to hold still, become visible in order to interact with the physical world enough to eat, to drink, to wash, to void her bladder and bowel. Such would be the times of greatest danger. So she does all this in Mother’s room.

Param is under Mother’s protection. “She lives with your mother.” So to Param, Mother is a refuge, not a danger.

I wish that it were so for me. But I can’t know. I can’t be sure. Param is the female heir to the Tent of Light. Mother might be her protector, and my deadliest enemy. The games are all too deep and layered here for me to fathom them.

Rigg sat down to breakfast at the table with Flacommo, Mother, and a dozen guests and courtiers.

After the normal social niceties had been observed, and after a polite amount had been eaten without distracting conversation, Rigg turned to his mother and said, “Actually, my lady mother, I did not set out for Aressa Sessamo to meet you. Nothing delighted me more than to learn that you were alive, though naturally I wondered why I had never met you, or why my adopted father had never mentioned you until he lay dying. But his first instruction was for me to go to Aressa Sessamo to meet my sister. And I can’t help but wonder where she is. Is she unwell? Doesn’t she want to meet her brother?”

Rigg pretended to be surprised at how silent everyone grew at the mention of his sister.

“Is there some reason why it isn’t right for me to ask after her? No one on my journey hinted that there might be something wrong; I assumed that I would meet her.”

All eyes were on Mother now. She alone looked completely poised, paying attention to the bite she was chewing, while looking at Rigg with twinkling eyes. “I’m not surprised you’re curious,” Mother finally said. “But you see, your sister has withdrawn from society for more than a year. She had a very unpleasant experience when one of the peasants who periodically burst into the house of our host, to demand that we let him shave our heads or take our clothing, forced her to surrender all her clothing. It was a cruel thing, and ever since that happened, she sees no one.”

Or rather, no one sees her, Rigg thought. “Is there no hope, then, even for her long-lost brother?” he asked aloud.

What he did not say was that he knew perfectly well his sister was in the room right now. He had seen her path moving slowly into the room and then pacing back and forth in order to stay in motion. No doubt she was as curious about Rigg as he was about her. She knew that he could see her, or at least that he knew where she was. In fact, after he sat down at table he had turned toward her and given her a little wave, though he held his hand below table level, so no one else could see. He waved very slowly, too, so that she would be able to detect the motion.

“There is hope indeed,” said Mother. “I’m quite sure she’s eager to see you, and when the time comes, I will fetch you to the place where she is in seclusion.”

“It must be setting back her schooling dreadfully,” said Rigg.

“Her schooling is a paltry thing, compared to the heartbreak of her humiliation,” said Mother.

Flacommo chimed in now. “It was a shame to all of us, that someone would use a child so harshly. The Revolutionary Council immediately changed the law to prevent anyone from taking the clothing of the persons of the family once called royal from their bodies. It was a change long overdue.”

“In other words,” said Rigg, who of course already knew the story, “the Council discovered that the humiliation of the royals no longer played well with the crowd, and they discontinued it. Could it be that the public hatred of the royal family is slipping?”

“I think that would be wonderful,” said Flacommo. “Someday, of course, the royals will be just like any other family. But right now they remain a constant hope for certain revolutionary factions.”

“Then I wonder we haven’t all been put to death,” said Rigg.

There were gasps all around the table.

“It’s a matter of pure logic,” said Rigg. “As long as members of the royal family survive, we will be used by this or that group as a rallying cry, even if we never lift a finger against the Revolutionary Council. Wouldn’t it be better for the sake of the nation if we ceased to exist entirely?”

“I will never be persuaded of that!” cried Flacommo. “Once there was much talk of it, but your mother—and her mother before her—conducted themselves with such humility and deference to the Council, obeying all laws and never countenancing any talk of revolt, that the Revolutionary Council has thought it wiser to keep them here, accessible to the public, though not to so great a degree. Your mother graciously allows the people to see that royals own nothing and live as obedient citizens.”

“We eat rather well, though,” said Rigg, looking at the lavishly spread table.

“No,” said Flacommo, “I eat rather well, and so do you all when you share my table as guests. But many a day each year your mother dines with whoever invites her, no matter what their station or how simple their fare.”

“I see,” said Rigg. “Then there will be no objection if I do the same?”

“You may accompany your mother whenever she accepts such an invitation,” said Flacommo. “But of course you may not do this on your own, because each time a royal leaves my house and goes forth into the city, she—they—must be kept under guard. There are those, alas, whose rage against the royal family is unabated after all these years of Revolutionary government.”

Rigg was quite sure the guards were there to keep the royals from running off, escaping the city, and going out to raise an army. But there was no reason to say this. He had a different item on his agenda. “Oh, I know about that!” he said. “Someone tried to kill me last night.”

Everyone at the table cried out at once. No! Who! When! How did you stop them!

“I stopped them easily enough,” said Rigg. “I simply didn’t sleep where I was supposed to sleep. The assassination attempt was a stealthy one, a trap set for me.”

“What kind of trap!” demanded Flacommo. “If someone came into my house and—”

Rigg made a soothing gesture and smiled. “I’m sure it was done without your knowledge, my dear friend. I may call you ‘friend,’ may I not? You have been so kind to my mother and sister.”

“Yes, please, I’m honored if you think of me that way,” said Flacommo. Though of course he would not have forgotten what Rigg had said the night before.

“It was a little box containing akses, which was placed under my bed. The box was flimsy enough that the very action of lying on the bed would break the box and release the akses. And of course you all know how long I would have remained alive after that, since they are drawn to body heat.”

“But how did you defeat them?” someone asked.

“I didn’t,” said Rigg. “I avoided them. As far as I know, they’re still there. I would advise sealing the door to the room and leaving them alone. They’re bound to starve to death within a few weeks, especially if the room is kept warm. It’s very tricky trying to dispose of them any other way. There are gases that will immobilize them—but it takes time for such gases to act, and in the meantime whoever brings the gas near them runs the risk of one of the akses taking a flying leap and winning the engagement preemptively.”

“And such creatures were left in your room?” Flacommo said, incredulous. “How did you detect them?”

“Having been warned that there are those who still hate the royal family, one of them having made an attempt on my life during the voyage here, I’ve become cautious. I look under beds.” Rigg hoped that no one questioned Long, since he knew perfectly well that Rigg had not even entered the room, let alone bent down to peer under the bed.

“Thank the Wandering Saint for that!” said Flacommo, and many at the table agreed.

Rigg turned to his mother, who did not seem alarmed at all, but merely regarded him between bites of her breakfast porridge—for she ate much simpler fare than any of the others at table. “Lady Mother,” he said, “I’m not sure how to take this incident. I’m really quite certain that I was not sentenced to such a death merely because I’m a royal—after all, the assassins could have killed any royal in the house, and yet they targeted only me.”

She took another bite.

“I can think of two reasons why I would be singled out. One is that my presence destabilizes the arrangement under which you and my sister have lived under the protection of such flunkies of the Revolutionary Council as our gracious host Flacommo. In which case it might be the Council itself, or some faction of it, that wants me dead. On the other hand, I’m a male, and ever since my great-grandmother killed all the males of the royal family and made it a law that only females of the family could rule, there have been those who have eagerly awaited the birth of a male heir, hoping he would live long enough to strike down that old decree and reestablish an emperor rather than an empress.”

“If there are any such people,” Mother said mildly, “I doubt they’d try to kill you.”

“Probably not,” said Rigg. “Ever since I learned of my true identity, or at least the possibility of it, I have wondered who it was that kidnapped me and carried me away from my mother and father and sister. One possibility was that I was taken by members of the faction that wants a male heir restored to the throne. But if that’s so, why wasn’t I trained and indoctrinated to fulfil that role? Why wasn’t I raised to be a king? Because I can assure you, I never had a breath of a hint that I had any connection with royalty, or any great destiny to fulfil. So I have to conclude that the man who raised me was not of that faction.”

Mother said nothing, but smiled slightly.

“Still, you never know what people so insane they would seek the restoration of the royal house might do—surely the ones who want to restore the male line are the craziest of them all.”

“There are so many crazy people in the world,” said Mother. “Some who are crazy and remain silent, and some who in their madness keep talking and talking, annoying everybody.”

“I understand your rebuke, Mother, but I really am trying to learn how things stand, so I can guess where danger might come from.”

“It can come from anywhere,” she said sweetly. “It can come from everywhere at once.”

“I simply wondered if the attempt to kill me came from the faction that supports the restoration of the female line, and regards the existence of the male heir as a great danger. That faction would have been waiting all these years for me to surface again, so I could be killed, in obedience to great-grandmother Aptica Sessamin’s edict.”

“That law was rescinded by the Revolutionary Council,” said Flacommo. “Most people have forgotten it ever existed.”

“But since the law was never rescinded by the Tent of Light,” said Rigg, “there are people insane enough to think that it’s still the law, and that killing me would be a noble act. I say this because the man who tried to kill me on my way here was exactly that kind of madman.”

“Your words dance around like those of the carefulest courtier,” said Mother. “It’s hard to believe you weren’t raised with royalty in mind.”

“The man I called Father taught me to think skeptically and curiously, that’s all. And to say what I think. And he always said, ‘If you want to know something, then ask somebody who already knows it.’ So I ask you, Mother, two questions. First, did you and my real father send me away as an infant in order to protect me from such enemies? Or was I stolen away by somebody else who thought I needed to be protected from you?”

Dead silence in the room. Mother stopped moving, her hand hovering in midair as oat porridge dripped in clumps from her tilted spoon.

Rigg was quite aware of the impression he had made, and pushed it further. “Let me make the question even simpler. Mother, is it your desire that I die? Because if it is, I’ll stop trying to save myself and let the next attempt on my life succeed. I have no desire to make you unhappy by coming home to you after all these years.”

She moved again, setting the spoon back into her bowl. “I am grieved that you could ask such a question.”

“And I am grieved,” said Rigg, “that you decline to answer it.”

“I will answer it, though the question itself torments me. I had nothing to do with your being spirited away. I believed you had been stolen by those who wanted you dead, and assumed they had killed you. I grieved for you every day for the first few years, and as often as I thought of you since then—which was often. I have shed thousands of tears for you. And when I learned that you might be alive I scarcely dared believe that you would be allowed to come to me. Even when you arrived, I tried to behave in such a way as to keep anyone from becoming alarmed at the strength and depth of my rejoicing. I’m glad that you recognize that you are in grave danger; I’m grateful that you were raised to be careful enough not to fall into the trap laid for you. But I’m bitterly disappointed that you would think I might have been behind the laying of it.”

“I don’t know you, Mother,” said Rigg. “I know only what is said of the royal family, and you can imagine that little of it is kind. I was well taught in history, and I know of the hundreds of times that members of various ruling houses slaughtered each other in pursuit of power, or out of fear of assassination or civil war. But hearing your words and seeing your face as you said them, and knowing something of the constraints under which you live here, I am satisfied that you are my loving mother indeed. Please forgive me for asking, for you know I had no choice but to ask. And thank you for answering at all, and even more for answering as you did.”

Rigg rose from his seat and knelt beside his mother’s chair, as she turned to face him. There was consternation from many of the onlookers, for it was illegal to bow to a royal, and Mother herself began to remonstrate with him. But he spoke loudly, letting his voice fly out like a whip, commanding silence. “I kneel to this woman as a son kneels to his mother. The humblest shepherd may kneel like this before his mother. Am I, because my ancestors were royals, forbidden to show my mother the respect that she deserves from me? Hold your tongues—I would rather die than let fear stop me from showing her how much I honor her and love her!”

Those who had risen sat back down. And now as Rigg bent his forehead to touch his mother’s lap, she reached out and stroked his hair, then raised him up a little and embraced him, and wept into his hair, and kissed him, and called him her baby, her little boy, and thanked the Wandering Saint for bringing him back to her from his long sojourn in the wilderness.

Meanwhile, Rigg wondered what his sister was making of all this, and thought how maddening it must be for her to see everything—but speeded up, and without any words or sounds to help her understand.

As for his mother, Rigg only half-believed her. After all, wasn’t this also how she would act if she wanted him dead? True, her emotions seemed real enough, and few people had the skill to simulate them so effectively. But wasn’t the very fact that she was still alive proof that she knew how to act whatever role was required of her in order to survive?

Yet Rigg had to trust somebody or his life in this place would be impossible. So he decided to believe that his mother had not survived by pretending to feel what she did not feel, but rather by pretending not to feel anything at all—the opposite skill—and therefore this outpouring of emotion was rare and real. She loved him. She did not want him dead. He would trust her. And if he turned out to be wrong in this decision, well, he’d deal with that disappointment when it came. It would be easy enough, since in such a case the disappointment would probably last only a few seconds before he died.