The Widow's House

Geder

The spring season in Camnipol opened with the usual ceremony and pomp, but without men. At the Festival of Petals, Geder sat on the dais with Aster and an empty chair. The prince, the regent, and the king. But that was not the only empty chair. Half the great men of court, it seemed, were on campaign. The sons of the great houses were with Jorey or else the occupying forces in Nus and Inentai. Or busy building up their holdings in the territories that had once been Asterilhold. Or overseeing the passage of Timzinae slaves to the farmholds. Wherever they were, it was not here, and so the hall was rich with a great overabundance of women, youths, and old men.

The ballroom was wide and tall. Paper lamps floated by the heat of their own flames, kept from scorching the ceiling only by narrow tethers. Jugglers, gymnasts, rare animals, freaks, and curious objects stood in their niches along the walls to be considered by the court. Cunning men passed through the crowd conjuring balls of flame and telling fortunes. A small orchestra played from beneath the floor, the music filling the air like a scent without the awkwardness of making room for the musicians. Wine and beer flowed freely. The meat was rich and well spiced. After two years of war, the farms of Antea might be drawing sparse crops, but for the evening at least, the ballroom was well fed to the point of decadence.

The ladies of the court had a table of their own, with all the great names present. Daskellin, Caot, Broot, Tilliaken, Skestinin. And now Kalliam again, twice. Sabiha could take her place there on the strength of her being the daughter of Lord Skestinin, but the servants whose job it was to place the seats according to custom had gnawed themselves raw over the problems that Clara presented. Geder hadn’t restored Jorey to his father’s barony yet, and so Clara was both mother of the Lord Marshal and wife of a traitor, honored and tainted. In the end, she’d been placed at the foot of the high table, both present and set apart. Geder would have felt awkward about it, but she was smiling and gracious, so apparently that was all working out well enough.

The dresses of the young women at court this season tended toward the bright and the revealing. Green silk-sheath gowns as bright and rich as a beetle’s shell. Wire-stiffened lacework skirts of pure white that hinted at the legs within them like a thin fog that might part at any moment. Rouged lips and painted eyes. Breasts constrained by white leather corsets. All about him, Geder found invitations toward lust, and he resented each of them individually and the class of them as a whole.

“I saw Basrahip,” Aster said. “Is he coming to the ball?”

Geder turned to the boy and smiled. “No, I didn’t mention it to him. I didn’t think he’d want to.”

Three small lines drew themselves on Aster’s brow, and Geder felt the urge to reach out a thumb and smooth them away again. He didn’t want the boy distressed, but more and more over the course of his regency, he’d found he was unable to prevent it.

“Are you avoiding him because of Cithrin?” Aster asked, and Geder felt it in his sternum like a punch. He answered with a false lightness.

“Oh, probably. The goddess is the power of truth, after all. I may not be quite prepared for that.”

“It’ll be all right,” Aster said. “The goddess chose you, and she knows everything. Basrahip will help.”

How could he? Geder thought, but didn’t say. It would have been too hard to keep the venom out of the words. Instead, he patted Aster’s knee and nodded. The empty chair stood behind them.

The music changed, and the ballroom floor cleared. Geder shifted in his seat, looking behind him. His personal guard stood at attention against the wall, ready for violence should violence come as it had before. He might have welcomed it over dancing.

The first girl who approached the dais was Paesha Annerin, cousin of Lord Annerin and so related by marriage to Jorey Kalliam’s sister. She was a tall girl with dark hair and golden skin. She wore a gown of yellow silk that clung to her thighs. She bowed before them in a pose that let Geder see down the top of her dress to the sheer undergarments and the curve of her breasts. The tightness in his throat might have been embarrassment or desire or rage. When she spoke, it was to Aster.

“My prince,” she said. “If you would honor me?”

“Of course,” Aster said. She smiled, bowed again. Geder had to look away. As the girl made her way back to the floor, Aster motioned for a servant to take his cloak. The prelude to the dance floated up through the floor and would until all the dancers had taken their positions. There was no hurry.

“I hate it the way they all dress,” Geder said.

Aster, handing away his cloak, made his expression a query. Geder waved a hand at the ballroom.

“Look at them,” he said. “They’re all showing their bodies like they were fruit on a streetcart. I’m not closed-minded about these things, but there are limits, Aster. There ought to be limits.”

“It looks the same as always to me,” the prince said, rising. “It’s just fashion.” And with that, he moved out toward the floor. Geder watched him with a mixture of alarm and admiration. Aster was a boy. He’d been part of the court since he’d been born, and he knew the steps of the dances much as anyone would, but he strode out with a confidence and calm that no age or experience could guarantee. He would walk the dance with the Annerin girl, talk with her, be charming, and come back to his chair unflustered, unchanged, and without the slightest fear of being humiliated by her or by himself. Jorey was the same. Jorey had even asked Sabiha to marry him, and she’d said yes, and the two of them had been sharing a bed ever since. The raw courage it would take to ask that of a woman boggled Geder’s mind, and yet to other men it was normal. Easy.

In his imagination, he saw Cithrin as she could have been, pale and perfect among the women of the court. Her Cinnae blood would have made her stand out among the overwhelmingly Firstblood nobility, but as the consort of the regent, she’d have been undeniable. He would have dressed her in pale cream with emeralds in her hair, and the whole court would have spent the season starving themselves to look like her. The tightness in his throat made it hard to breathe.

The prelude reached its crisis point and began again. Geder shuddered and forced his mind away from her. The dancers were still strolling to their places. The floor wasn’t particularly crowded, and half the men on it were Geder’s father’s age or older. All the people who were forgoing the dance had crowded close to the wall, the concentration of them making for a hundred conversations and a mutter of shifting for position. He saw Canl Daskellin speaking with Jorey’s mother. Lady Broot was standing alone near one of the jugglers with a sour expression. Three male cousins of House Caot pushed and prodded each other like they were in private. It was hard to believe that Aster was only a little older than they were. A tight group of young women stood not far from the dais. Geder only noticed them because one girl—the one standing in the center—was looking at him. He thought she was Curtin Issandrian’s niece, and her name was something like Cheyla or Shaema. He couldn’t quite recall. Her jaw was fixed, and bright red marks showed in her cheeks. Her mouth was thin and hard, her chin lifted a degree. She looked like a warrior steeled for battle, and for a heartbeat, Geder was afraid she would draw a weapon. Then a worse idea occurred to him. She was going to ask him to dance.

He rose, turning his back on the floor, and walked briskly to the captain of his private guard.

“I have to go. Now,” he said, trying to keep the agitation out of his voice. “I have something I need to attend to. In the library. Alone.”

The captain gave salute, and Geder walked out through the entrance that only he and Aster and the guards were permitted. As soon as the door was closed, Geder felt a rush of relief like pouring cool water on a burn. He took in a deep breath and let it out through his teeth. The first chords of the dance proper came through the wall, and he turned his steps back toward the Kingspire and home.

The sunsets were coming later every day, the twilight lasting longer. He wore a jacket against the chill, but he needed it less often. The seasons he remembered from his youth had been longer. As a boy in Rivenhalm, he would spend what seemed like lifetimes in among his father’s books or watching the summer sun shimmer through the leaves of the trees near the river. The world had seemed dull then. It didn’t anymore, and he missed that.

The white crushed gravel of the path ground beneath his feet. His guard followed at a discreet enough distance he could almost pretend he was alone. The stars glimmered in the blue-grey sky as it fell toward black. The crescent moon hung over the rooftops of Camnipol, looking so heavy and close, it seemed like a long enough ladder would reach it. High on the Kingspire, the banner of the spider goddess shifted in the breeze, the red dimmed and the pale field with its eightfold sigil almost seeming to glow with the moonlight. All this was his to keep and care for until it was Aster’s. That was years away yet. For now, and for years to come, Geder was the Severed Throne. The power should have been freeing. Instead, it weighed him down.

In theory, he could do anything. He had command of life and death over all the subjects of the empire. If he wanted to, he could order any woman in the court to his bed. He’d read a book once about King Saavin of Berenholt, Berenholt being the third-age name for western Northcoast. Legend had it that Saavin had enjoyed intercourse with every woman in the kingdom before he died. The book had had woodcuts. Geder’s fantasies about sex had been fueled by the stories of the long-dead king’s lusty exploits. Now that he was in something like a similar position, he had to think the whole thing was a pornographic fantasy and nothing more. He couldn’t imagine ordering a woman to his bed. Ordering her to hide her disgust with him and his body. Or worse than disgust. Amusement.

Nothing about the regency was what he’d expected. If a cunning man had come to him in those days so long ago in Vanai when he’d had the worst accommodations Sir Klin could find for him, when his days had been filled with duties and errands designed to make the citizens of the once-free city view him specifically as the worst face of Antea, and told him that these were the good times, he would have laughed. What he remembered best now was finding the scholars who would hunt down old books of speculative essay. He remembered the joy and excitement he’d felt, curled up against the cold with his little lantern sputtering from the cheap oil, and translating words from a dozen different languages. Uncovering ideas that would never have occurred to him otherwise. Reading anecdotes that history had almost forgotten. He hadn’t known he was happy then.

For a moment, he heard the voice of the fire again, saw a woman silhouetted on the walls of the burning city. He shied away from the memory. He didn’t think about it often anymore, but when he did, that nightmare was still fresh. Even years later. Would Cithrin’s empty compound in Suddapal be the same? A bit of the past that returned to hit him in the face like a scourge for years to come? For the rest of his life?

Probably.

The climb to the temple was a long one, past the royal apartments that he shared with Aster, past the great halls and meeting rooms. When he’d given the space at the Kingspire’s height to Basrahip for his priests and mysteries, it had been with safety against riots in mind, and to celebrate the goddess who’d brought victory to Antea in the large and Geder in particular. The decision had implications he’d never imagined, though. Including Basrahip’s increasing absence from court. The great bull-shouldered priest would still attend Geder whenever asked, but the sheer burden of climbing down the stairs and then up them again gave Basrahip reason enough to stay in his cell.

It was a humble room with a mattress laid out on the stone floor, an old iron brazier, and a low table so that Basrahip, sitting on the floor, could read and write the letters that he held in such contempt. Geder, in the doorway, cleared his throat. Basrahip looked up from the page in his hand and smiled.

“Prince Geder. It pleases me to have your company. Sit with me.”

Geder lowered himself to the floor with a soft grunt, his back pressed against the wall. The pile of papers on the little desk was thick as Geder’s palm and scattered enough that he could see letters written by half a dozen different hands. Basrahip followed his gaze and sighed.

“I had not thought when the goddess came again to the world it would require this of me,” the priest said. “I spend my days with dead words, empty of voices.”

“Being Lord Regent isn’t what I’d expected either,” Geder said. “And there’s hardly anyone I can talk with about it, too. I mean, Aster, I suppose, but he has enough to carry already. I don’t want to burden him with my problems. I suppose he knows, though.”

“He is a man who listens well,” Basrahip said.

“I’ve had reports from Jorey. The army’s moving west already. He sent ahead to Newport and Maccia, and the cities were entirely willing to give permission to move freely through their lands, so it looks as though he won’t have to fight his way across the Free Cities.”

“I am glad you are pleased with this.”

“What about you? Is this all messages from the temples?”

Basrahip nodded. “Much of it. They seek my guidance on many things, but they cannot hear my voice nor I theirs. And so we let our words die and send their corpses across the world.”

“It would be easier if you could really be there.”

“It would, but then I could not attend you as I promised. You are the chosen of the goddess, and so long as you have need of me, my place is here. But where there is confusion within your realm, more of my brethren are called for. Once all humanity has heard the truth of her voice, then her purity and her peace will follow.”

“Oh. Are things not peaceful, then? I thought everything was going well.”

Basrahip gestured at the letters, as if by their mere existence they showed the answer. “Her enemies are many, but none will withstand her. It was known that the children of lies would resist us. We spread as the light of dawn, and their resistance is powerless.”

“Still. It sounds annoying at least, eh?”

“Indeed,” Basrahip said with a rueful chuckle. “Also from our friend in the east. Dar Cinlama. He makes great claims, but his pages have no voice. They are shadows. Emptinesses. I long to hear his words and know.”

A Jasuru in the brown robes of the priests entered the room carrying a tray with a bowl of stewed grain and goat cheese and a cup of tea. Geder scowled, trying to place the man’s face, and felt a thrill of fear when he did. The assassin who’d tried to kill him on the road in Elassae and been taken by the goddess. He knelt before Basrahip now, his black eyes empty of all malice.

“My thanks,” Basrahip said, and the Jasuru priest bowed and left. Geder watched in silence until the sound of footsteps had faded.

“Is it safe? Having him here? I mean, he was planning to kill me. He did kill one of your priests, didn’t he?”

“That was before the goddess’s hand was upon him,” Basrahip said. “He will no more act against us than your cities will rebel. The truth of the goddess cannot be denied.”

“Well, that’s… that’s good.”

Basrahip took a spoonful of the stewed grain and slurped it. For a moment, Geder could imagine him as he might have been if it had not been for the goddess. A villager and goatherd in the Sinir mountains who might live a full life and die without seeing anything like a city. And here he was instead, in the center of Firstblood power in the world, sleeping on the floor and eating the same food he would have on the far side of the Keshet. Even if the goddess had given no other powers, that the man was here at all seemed miracle enough.

“And you, Prince Geder? Are you well?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine,” he said, knowing that Basrahip would shake his head slowly at the words even as the event occurred. “I’m not fine.”

“You will be,” Basrahip said. “Your wounds will heal.”

Geder felt a tug of hope, of something like relief. It wasn’t enough, but it was enough to make him want if more. “Are you sure of that? Because right now, it seems like they’ll all go on forever.”

Basrahip took another bite of his food and smiled around it. “Prince Geder, I am certain.”