The other lands

CHAPTER SIX

Do you ever wonder what the world would be like if Aliver had lived?" Melio asked.

"Of course," Mena said. "You know we all do."

"Yeah," Melio agreed. "We all do."

He pulled her closer with the arm he already had wrapped around her shoulders. The two of them lay together in the predawn, touching along the length of their naked bodies. They had just made love, the sort of silent, spontaneous coupling they were often driven to in the quiet hours before facing danger once again. Though they had said nothing since wishing each other a good rest the evening before, Melio's question seemed the continuation of an ongoing conversation.

He continued, "What if he really had abolished the quota trade? What if he had really freed all the races to govern themselves? Can you imagine that? I know it would be a grand confusion in some ways, but it might have been beautiful. Corinn has betrayed it all, though. Your sister, the Fanged Rose. She rather scares me, Mena. You know that?"

"You don't understand her."

"You do?"

Mena shrugged. "I haven't always. And… no, I don't completely. But I do know that she tries. She tries harder than you know to do what's right. It may not look like what Aliver would have done, but she is no less devoted to us, to the empire."

"Forgive me, Mena, but she seems mostly devoted to keeping an iron grip on power."

Staying silent for a time, Mena weighed whether she should answer. Talking about her sister-no matter whether she was being critical or speaking praise-always felt like a betrayal of sorts. Certainly, Corinn herself would have thought of it that way. But Melio owned part of her heart as well. He gave her so much and deserved to know how she felt.

"I need you to understand something about her," Mena said. She started slowly, seeking out the right words, testing them first to make sure she was speaking truly. "Corinn is strong. You know that. But she is also very scared."

"The Fanged Rose scared?" Melio laughed. "That I don't believe. I've seen her look warriors in the face as if she were about to bite off their noses."

Mena stayed him with a hand. "I said she was strong as well, but you have to know that strength… well, it springs from different sources. It has different roots in different people. In Corinn, it's fear."

"Fear of what?"

"Of being alone. Of being unloved. Of dying. No, don't laugh. I knew some of this about her even as a girl. When our mother died, Corinn felt like part of her died. Everyone had always said she was our mother reborn. Her twin. She was the beautiful one." Melio began to make some jibe, but she cut him off. "No, listen to me. When our mother died, Corinn felt that she lost part of herself. And then… well, I don't know how I know this, but I always felt that she believed Father should live for her then. That some of the love he held for Aleera should be transferred to her, just to her. I don't know that I can blame her for that. I was too young to even remember our mother. The loss was different for her. But then Father died, too. She took it as a betrayal. And then there was Igguldan, her first love, I think. He died, too. And then she didn't even manage to escape Acacia like the rest of us. Her guardian, Larken, betrayed her to Hanish Mein. You see, every time she trusted someone… every time she put her heart in someone's hands and let him decide her fate… And then came Hanish. She fell in love with him."

"Only to find out he was planning on sacrificing her to his ancestors. For all her beauty, she's not lucky in love, is she?"

"You see the pattern, then?"

"I do," he conceded, "and I know all these details. But we all have tragedies in our lives. It's no excuse."

"I know," she said, "and Corinn would never offer it as one. She's the last person who would ever do that."

"But think of the quota! Aliver would have abolished it; Corinn just reentrenched it. It seems so sad that instead of one monarch, we got another. Instead of one future, we-"

"Melio? Shhh. You're making a complicated thing sound simple. Don't." She wasn't sure that he would believe that. It was easier for him to see the black and white of it. But there was more to the world than black and white. Much more. He did not share blood with both of them, and she could only go so far in explaining her feelings about her siblings at one time. It was complicated, to her at least. "It's easy to see fault, I know. Fault is there, but she's my sister, Melio. I love her. She's part of me beneath the skin. Anyway, I would not want her position. I pray she lives long and that Aaden makes a strong ruler in his time."

Though she did not look at him, Mena could see the crooked smirk Melio likely greeted that thought with. "Never you?"

"Never. I wouldn't want that sort of burden."

"You risk your life-"

"You know that's different. That suits me. What Corinn carries is another thing. I would not accept the crown even if-may it never happen-it was thrust upon me."

"And Dariel? What if rule ever went to him?"

"I don't know," Mena said. She was quiet for a moment. "He did not fight Corinn for the throne when he could have. He has his own demons to wrestle with. He does search for a destiny. I know he wants to do something grand. He's talked about it, but I don't know where or how he'll find it."

The world outside their tent started to gray its way back into being, stirring others into life. Mena sat up, knowing the time had come to take up her role again. Her fingers flexed, wanting to hold her sword. Before that, though, there was something more mundane to take care of. She crawled off the sleeping mat and toward the basin she used to wash Melio's seed from inside her, infusing the water with a concoction of herbs prepared for her by a physician back on Acacia.

"Maybe you shouldn't do that," Melio said. He propped himself on his elbow. "Why not just trust what happens?"

Mena measured the herb powder and swirled it into the water. "Don't be silly. How would I look fighting foulthings while carrying around a fat belly? It would break all sorts of taboos."

"Then stop fighting foulthings," he answered, ignoring her joking tone. "You're not the only one who can do it. Give someone else charge. Not even Corinn could fault you. We've been wed for five years now, Mena. Let's make a child and live like-"

"Like what? Like everybody else? We're not everybody else." I'm Maeben on earth, remember? Wrath in raptor form. What sort of mother would I make? She did not say these things. She only half believed them, and she knew Melio would refute her point by point. He had many times before this. He started to say something else, but Mena had had enough of talking for the time being. She said, "Come. I want to reach Halaly by tonight. There's work to be done."

There was always work to be done. Or so it had felt for months now. Finally, though, it looked as if there might be an end in sight to this war against the foulthings. As far as she knew, there were only two left to face. One in Halaly, one across a large swath of hill region of northwestern Talay. Reports of the latter were scattered and unreliable. The word coming out of Halaly, however, was specific. And dire. It was toward that once-powerful interior tribe that she had pushed her band once the tenten creature had been vanquished.

With Melio and Kelis at her side, Mena spent her first evening in Halaly with Oubadal, the chieftain, and his councilmen. They sat on woven mats, beneath the cone-shaped shelter in which the aging leader held court. Mena pushed thoughts of home-or rest and calm and time for reflection-to the back of her mind and focused on the matter most immediately at hand. The tribesmen were impassioned, troubled, and anxious. The waters that had provided them with fish for all their history had been turned into a liquid desert, all because of a foulthing's voracious appetite.

"Tell me of it," Mena said, sitting cross-legged before the chieftain and the few elder councillors still living. She had marched in a few minutes ago, but she came with a purpose and wished the Halaly to know it. Around them, others of all ages rimmed the semiopen shelter; and beyond that, standing in the late-day sun, still others-women and children and the many of Mena's own hunting party-craned forward to hear.

Oubadal let others tell the tale through a chorus of voices. At first, they said, the thing had been but a rumor. Two years ago fishermen on the western edge of the lake had started telling tales of large aquatic creatures that would appear to eat the fish they already had on their lines, sometimes shredding their kive nets to get at the small, silvery fish. There had been many of them, they said, but as they grew larger and easier to spot-their back fins cresting the water when they attacked-their numbers began to drop.

Once they found a carcass washed ashore, a hideous thing longer than a man was tall, like a fish but none that they had seen before. It had been bitten nearly in half, something no fish naturally in the lake could have done. They concluded that the monsters had begun to battle one another. That war went unseen by human eyes, except that still other corpses, bits and pieces of malformed piscine body parts, washed ashore as testament to the contest beneath the surface.

Eventually, only one of the creatures remained, but this one fed unchallenged by competitors. It became a massive lump of a monster, all bulbous protrusions on the outside, with one massive, circular mouth at its center. It sucked the life out of their shallow lake. Fishermen could stay on shore and watch it pushing through the shallows, ravenous, too large to be denied.

The tiny fish that had schooled in the warm waters by the millions had dwindled in one area of the lake and then another. It was a collapse of unimagined proportions. Gone were the tiny kive fish, such an important source of protein fried or dried or ground into paste. Gone were the waterfowl that hunted them. Fading was the Halaly vigor-which had been so based on their reliable food sources-and dwindling were the tribute and trade that had made them the beating heart of the continent. If all that wasn't bad enough, the air swarmed with the mosquitoes and biting flies that now gestated in the lake untroubled by the kive fish that had once thrived on their eggs; one of these spread disease, while the other left welts on the skin that easily grew infected.

The dark-skinned men telling all this spoke with voices both angry and incredulous. They seemed to doubt the tale they told even as they spoke it. Mighty Halaly so weakened by a single fish thing? So enfeebled that the bites of an insect laid men low and feverish. They barely seemed able to believe their own words. And yet here they were.

"Has the creature taken any human lives?" Melio asked.

"It has," one of the councillors answered. "It does not hunt us for food, but many men have died trying to kill it."

Another added, "The Halaly have not rolled over and accepted defeat. No."

They had tried time and again to trap the creature, to poison it, to spear it or hook it or something. Thus far, though, they had only smashed boats and seen men broken and drowned. For the last few months they had put their energies into building a fleet of sailing skimmers, light vessels with large sails and compact hulls that could run even through the shallows. With nearly a hundred of such craft now, they had hemmed the beast in to the inlets of the eastern corner of the lake. It had grown so large that it was trapped in the deeper areas, and these they had limited by opening the dams to drain the lake more than usual. It was an extreme measure, but because of it the beast-fat and bloated as it was-had never been more vulnerable. They were ready, he said, to end it.

"Good," Mena said, trying to sound confident and yet respectful of the somber mood of the meeting. "I am glad we will be here to help you do so. I regret it took us so long to aid you, but there were many foulthings. Now, thankfully, there are only two more. One of those we'll kill tomorrow, yes?"

The councilmen answered her with nods, a few grunts-not exactly enthusiasm to match her own. Unsure whether the response was fatalistic or whether it was a comment on her delay in arriving, Mena said, "My family has not forgotten that the Halaly joined us in the fight against Hanish Mein. Truly, you are honored friends in our eyes. All of Talay is so."

Oubadal cleared his throat, the first sound he had yet added to the meeting. He looked quite different from when Mena had first seen him, years before when Aliver had summoned the might of all Talay to his banner. Then he had been in his regal years, slow moving and powerful, heavy and rich and sure of his ownership of his world. He had been insolent to the point of insult in his initial response to Aliver. Mena knew that. Back then, younger men had bowed to his authority, and behind him a chorus of the aged had praised his wisdom. Now the younger men did the talking; the aged were nowhere to be seen. Except, of course, Oubadal himself. His flesh hung limp around him, overripe and flaccid. The skin on his face was still rich and dark, but the eyes that looked out were fatigued, small.

"Your words are kind, Princess," Oubadal said. "You remind me of the Snow King, may he rest forever." He bowed his head at this and then righted. He set his bloodshot gaze on the princess and studied her, as if verifying for himself that he did see the resemblance he had just claimed. "When I first met your brother, I was not as respectful as I should have been. He was a cub in my eyes, a prince without a people to lead. And what is that but delusion? I thought him weak. And then when he died, I thought him unfortunate. Unlucky. I thought he had failed and I felt bad for him."

Though the council shelter was open to the air on all sides, it had grown very quiet within and without. A few crickets held long-distance conversations, but mostly it seemed the night had hushed to listen to the chieftain.

"I know now that I was mistaken on all counts," Oubadal continued. "He left this life in a swirl of noble battle. He left it a man in his prime, lean and strong, a lion whose jaws would yet have grown stronger. He left this life with the fight still in his breast. Many say so. That is how he will be remembered, as a lion. You hear me? Tongues will never tire of his name. Now, Princess Mena, I envy him. Heroes always die young. I should have realized that much earlier."

Mena, understanding the old man better now, rose from her cross-legged position and moved closer to him. She placed a hand on his. "Heroes always die, yes, but they need not be young. I don't believe that. Oubadal, you are a king among your people. You will be remembered as such forever. When I walk from here, I will remind the world how you steered your people through tumultuous times. I will tell them that your people had prepared everything to defeat this monster. You have already killed it. We are fortunate to be able to help complete what you have already all but accomplished. In a few days, we will hoist it from the water and end it. After that the fish will come back. Prosperity will return to your people."

Oubadal pulled his hand out from under hers and patted her with his fingertips. He smiled, sadly. "Dear girl, you don't understand. Yes, the fish will come back. Halaly will come back. My people may thrive again. But I–I won't see it all. Unlike your brother, I've had many, many days to come to understand this. I've had too many days. It is not easy." He paused, seeming choked by emotion, but he forced the moment to pass quickly. He coughed and then said, "Please, Princess, go with my men and see our new fleet. It is all we have left to fight the beast with."

Mena did as requested. Part of her wanted to stay with the old chieftain, wanted to let the others move away so that she could sit with him in solitude for a time. Here was a man who knew her brother and had sparred with her father when he was a young man. She wanted to comfort him, like a grown daughter might an ailing father. And, perhaps, she wanted to let him comfort her as well. Surely, tales of the past would help her make sense of the present. Wasn't that the way it was supposed to be? Couldn't she talk him through his melancholy and find within his long span of life greater meaning that would be a balm to them both? She believed so, but that was not the tenor of the moment. Instead, she bade him farewell for the time being and followed the younger men out to inspect the new fleet.

It was a sad tour. The Halaly tried hard to demonstrate their resolve, but the toll of the months of suffering and food shortages was palpable in every pause in the conversation, written in the haggard lines of women's faces and in the hunger contained within the ovals of children's eyes. The skimmer ships were interesting, but they looked like vessels meant for youthful recreation, not for battling a monster. Mena went to her tent aware that there was still much to be prepared physically and much to be repaired in the tribe's morale.