The Sacred Band

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Barad was not familiar with this wing of the palace. He followed the slim shoulders of the young woman who showed him the way, feeling awkwardly massive behind her. How was it that he could live in his body for so many years and still feel an impostor within it? Perhaps Corinn had recognized that in him when she set her curse on him. She made his feeling into a real thing. Turned him into a puppet. Even now she controlled his heart. She must. Why else would he be so driven to learn of her welfare? Why else would he be so hard on the heels of this woman, like a dog running to answer his master’s summons?

The servant did not look him in the face when she indicated that he should wait in the alcove outside the library door. She pointed at the two couches, the chairs, and even at the tree that grew from a circlet cut in the stone. She left before he could thank her. Barad stood, arms drooping, unsure what to do. He reached for one of the tree’s long, silver-green leaves. Running his finger down it, he wondered how deep the soil in the circlet was. Did the roots run deep, or were they balled in a tiny knot, as he had seen before in potted plants?

Someone approached from down the hall. Just one person, quick strides of some hard-soled boots. The charlatan Delivegu Lemardine clipped his way into view. Ah, Barad thought, what is with my luck today? One of my least favorite people in the world, and I’m waiting here to speak to my enslaver.

Delivegu took in Barad without a hitch in his step. He did not even seem troubled by Barad’s eyes, as almost everyone was. Nodding, he slid right past him to the door, which he promptly rapped on with his knuckles.

The door opened. Aliver leaned out. His gaze touched on Barad, acknowledging him and then settling finally on Delivegu. The man leaned in and whispered something to him. Aliver’s face went slack as he absorbed whatever he had said. Without a word, he beckoned Delivegu inside. The door closed.

Barad took his seat again.

The door to the room opened again a few minutes later. Delivegu strode through. He strode away. Aliver stepped into view. He watched Delivegu recede, lost in thought. “Everyone, it seems, has messages for me.” Aliver only noticed the seated man long after the charlatan’s footfalls had faded. “I hope some of them prove true. Barad, do have you a message for me as well?”

“No, Your-Your Highness, the queen summoned me.”

He looked surprised. “Did she? And you were brought here?” When Barad nodded, Aliver expelled a surprised breath of air. He stepped back and motioned for him to enter.

The library smelled strongly of its primary inhabitants: old books, ancient papers, stained sandalwood shelves. Tall windows cast elongated rectangles of red-gold sunrise light, but the room’s candles still burned, thick ones that jutted through the tables like tree trunks and burned with flames the size of spearheads. Prince Aaden sat at one of the long tables in the sunken center of the space, a large book opened before him. The prince looked tiny in comparison. What must he be going through? Barad descended the steps toward him. On reaching his level, Barad hovered near, knowing that despite his kind wishes there was little he could do to comfort him, not with his stone gaze and his bulk and his mouth that he was never sure would speak his mind. He tried just to be near, to fill the space around him with compassion, protection.

“Is the queen not here?”

“No, not here. I have not spoken to my sister since the coronation. Not many people know that, but I guess I can tell you. You can’t, after all, say anything the queen would not want you to, can you?”

Barad felt his pulse quicken. Why that should alarm him he could not say. It was not his doing, after all. He tested his lips. They seemed to obey him. “No, I cannot.”

Aliver stood over Aaden. He looked down at the open pages of the book as he said, “I didn’t think so. Aaden here was sure of it. It must have been hard for you these past months. I can only imagine that your heart has not been behind the words your mouth has spoken.”

“Was yours?” Barad asked.

By the way that Aliver twisted his mouth before answering Barad knew he was not yet free to speak his mind. As if to prove this, he said, “My name is Aliver Akaran. My sister is the queen. The greatest queen the nation has ever known.”

Barad blinked, unsure what to say. Could they manage to speak in coded messages? How convoluted that would be. How easy to misunderstand each other. He was glad that the prince’s mind seemed intent on other things.

“We’re trying to understand the Santoth,” Aliver said. “That’s why we’re here, studying these old books. They are not proving helpful, though.”

“I wish that I could help,” Barad said. “I know nothing of these things.”

Rhrenna arrived. She stepped inside the door but did not descend toward them.

“Your Highness,” she said, brittle voiced, “Corinn has sent word. She’s on her way here.”

“You’ve spoken with her?” Aliver asked. “She told you she was coming?” “No, she wrote a note.”

“A note?” Aliver looked like he had never heard of such a thing. “And it said that she is coming?”

“Yes. Right now, I believe.”

Barad watched the mix of emotions move across Aliver’s face in waves: relief and then worry, happiness and then trepidation and then hope. When he turned to his nephew, it was that emotion that he clung to. “Good,” he said, testing the word and then getting more forceful with it. “This is good. Aaden, your mother…”

“Is coming here,” the boy finished. “I’m sitting right here, Aliver. I can hear, too.”

A person appeared in the open door. Corinn. She walked in with a formal posture, with her hands clasped together at her waist. She wore a dress of light blue; she was shapely as ever, distinctive as ever. A knit cowl wrapped around her neck and up over the lower portion of her face, just touching her nose. The ensemble was elegant. She might almost have been dressed to step outside on a breezy winter day, but Barad knew that cowl was not there as a defense against the weather.

Hanish Mein stepped into view. He slid up beside the queen. He took her by the arm and, whispering in her ear, drew her forward into the room.

For a long moment the gathered company stared at the queen, not at the ghost that stood with her. It was only when Corinn turned her back to them and withdrew toward the farthest alcove among the stacks that Aaden ran toward her. He dashed through tables, bounded up the steps to the higher landing, and cried for her with his arms outstretched. Corinn spun around. One hand kept the cowl in place and the other palm slammed out toward the others, freezing any movement in the room other than her son’s. Aaden impacted with her at full speed, knocking her back a few steps. His arms slammed around her and cinched tight. She bent over him, whether with pain or emotion Barad could not tell. Both, most likely.

Hanish stood with a hand on Corinn’s back. With his other, he wrapped both mother and son into a protective embrace. Father, mother, and son. A triumvirate that only Barad could see. Hanish looked up and sought out Barad’s gaze. “You can hear me, can’t you?”

Barad moved his stone eyes around the room. Everyone stared at Corinn and Aaden. None of them, he could tell, had any inkling of Hanish being there. They were all silent.

“You can hear me, yes?”

Barad nodded.

“Good. We need your mouth, Barad the Lesser. The queen needs it. She cannot speak to anyone but me. And I cannot speak to anyone but you. That’s why you were summoned, to be the voice that speaks for we who cannot. First, you must know that you are freed. The queen releases you. Right now, as I speak, she is wishing for the ties that bind you to fall away. This is an easy spell for you to break. Simply understand that you are free and you will be. You can feel it, can’t you?”

It was true. Barad did feel it. It might have just been because of the way Hanish described it, but invisible cords did loosen around his neck and jaw and the crown of his head. They had been there so long, unseen and unfelt, that his skin prickled as it remembered the true touch of the air.

“I can see that you can feel it. Now, please… in your own words tell them that you can hear the queen’s voice, and that she will speak through you. You need not say anything about me. Please, speak now, Barad.”

“But…” He gestured toward the others.

“Just speak the truth. They’ll hear it in your voice.”

Though he did know his mouth was his own again, it was very hard to make it shape sounds. He moved his lips and jaws, as if unsure of how to use them. “Ah…” No one even turned. It had been but an incomplete whisper. “Aliver.” Still a whisper. “Prince Aliver, I have something to tell you,” he said. “The queen wishes to speak through me. She asks me to be her voice, for… she cannot be her own.”

Hanish said, “Tell them that the Santoth took her voice, but that she is still herself.”

Barad did. The others were looking between him and the queen now, confused. They all noticed when she raised a hand and drew circles in the air with her fingers. The gesture conveyed agreement with Barad’s words. They all saw that, except Aaden, who was still clinging to her.

“What are you saying, Barad?” Aliver asked. “Are you deceiving us?”

Barad had no idea what to say. “No,” he tried, but it was not enough. He looked to Hanish, pleading through his stone eyes.

Hanish turned his head slightly to the side, seemed to listen to something. He nodded. “Say this to Aliver. Tell him that you can hear his sister’s thoughts. That she is speaking through you. Ask him to remember the time that she and he and Mena and Dariel rode horseback with their father down to the beach, where he threw seashells into the waves and Mena walked holding Leodan’s hand and Dariel chased crabs and Corinn… Say that she stood on the trunk of a tree and imagined that she was a queen of an ocean empire. Say those things to him.”

Barad did.

“Tell him that he is free from any of Corinn’s control, just as you are.”

Barad explained this and watched as the truth of it dawned on Aliver. He saw him become free beneath his skin. It was as if a ghost skin had covered him until that moment. As it vanished, the man beneath came into sharper view.

“Now, come to us,” Hanish said.

Moving through the others, Barad climbed up toward the threesome. When he reached them, Hanish said, “Speak quietly to the prince. After this we will speak of other things, but for now, tell Aaden what I tell you. Tell him his mother loves him more than anything else in the world…”

The old mine worker, the large man with a voice that had often boomed before throngs to whom he had preached both for and against the monarchy, was some time whispering closely into the young prince’s ear. The words he repeated were Hanish’s only for a few sentences. After that, he knew them to be the queen’s, intimate things that he spoke with reverence. These things were between a mother and a son. He let them slide from his memory, a vessel that, for once, served the queen with all his heart.