So what? a part of her mind whispered.
Siri stared at the ceiling. She found it hard to summon her customary shame at having ignored her lessons. She’d made a mistake. How much time was she going to spend moping, annoyed at herself for something done and gone?
All right, she told herself. Enough excuses. I might not have prepared as well as I should, but I’m here, now, and I need to do something.
Because nobody else will.
She climbed out of bed, running her fingers through her long hair. Susebron liked it long—he found it as fascinating as her serving women did. With them to help her care for it, the length was worth the trouble. She folded her arms, wearing only her shift, pacing. She needed to play their game. She hated thinking of it that way. “Game” implied small stakes. This was no game. It was the God King’s life.
She searched through her memory, dredging up what scraps she could from her lessons. Politics was about exchanges. It was about giving what you had—or what you implied that you had—in order to gain more. It was like being a merchant. You started with a certain stock, and by the end of the year, you hoped to have increased that stock. Or maybe even have changed it into a completely different and better stock.
Don’t make too many waves until you’re ready to strike, Lightsong had told her. Don’t appear too innocent, but don’t appear too smart either. Be average.
She stopped beside the bed then gathered up the bedsheets and towed them over to the smoldering fire to burn, as was her daily chore.
Exchanges, she thought, watching the sheets catch fire in the large hearth. What do I have to trade or exchange? Not much.
It would have to do.
She walked over and pulled open the door. As usual, a group of serving women waited outside. Siri’s standard ladies moved around her, bringing clothing. Another group of servants, however, moved to tidy the room. Several of these wore brown.
As her servants dressed her, she watched one of the girls in brown. At a convenient moment, Siri stepped over, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“You’re from Pahn Kahl,” Siri said quietly.
The girl nodded, surprised.
“I have a message I want you to give to Bluefingers,” Siri whispered. “Tell him I have vital information he needs to know. I’d like to trade. Tell him it could change his plans drastically.”
The girl paled, but nodded, and Siri stepped back to continue dressing. Several of the other serving women had heard the exchange, but it was a sacred tenet of the Hallandren religion that the servants of a god weren’t to repeat what they heard in confidence. Hopefully that would hold true. If it didn’t, then she hadn’t really given that much away.
Now she just had to decide just what “vital information” she had, and why exactly Bluefingers should care about it.
* * *
“MY DEAR QUEEN!” Lightsong said, actually going so far as to embrace Siri as she stepped into his box at the arena.
Siri smiled as Lightsong waved for her to seat herself in one of his chaise lounges. Siri sat with care—she was coming to favor the elaborate Hallandren gowns, but moving gracefully in them took quite a bit of skill. As she settled, Lightsong called for fruit.
“You treat me too kindly,” Siri said.
“Nonsense,” Lightsong said. “You’re my queen! Besides, you remind me of someone of whom I was very fond.”
“And who is that?”
“I honestly have no idea,” Lightsong said, accepting a plate of sliced grapes, then handing them to Siri. “I can barely remember her. Grapes?”
Siri raised an eyebrow, but she knew by now not to encourage him too much. “Tell me,” she asked, using a little wooden spear to eat her grape slices. “Why do they call you Lightsong the Bold?”
“There is an easy answer to that,” he said, leaning back. “It is because of all the gods, only I am bold enough to act like a complete idiot.”
Siri raised an eyebrow.
“My station requires true courage,” he continued. “You see, I am normally quite a solemn and boring person. At nights my fondest desire is to sit and compose interminably periphrastic lectures on morality for my priests to read to my followers. Alas, I cannot. Instead, I go out each evening, abandoning didactic theology in favor of something which requires true courage: spending time with the other gods.”
“Why does that take courage?”
He looked at her. “My lady. Have you seen how positively tedious they all can be?”
Siri laughed. “No, really,” she said. “Where did the name come from?”
“It’s a complete misnomer,” Lightsong said. “Obviously you’re intelligent enough to see that. Our names and titles are assigned randomly by a small monkey who has been fed an exceedingly large amount of gin.”
“Now you’re just being silly.”
“Now?” Lightsong asked. “Now?” he raised a cup of wine toward her. “My dear, I am always silly. Please be good enough to retract that statement at once!”
Siri just shook her head. Lightsong, it appeared, was in rare form this afternoon. Great, she thought. My husband is in danger of being murdered by unknown forces and my only allies are a scribe who’s afraid of me and a god who makes no sense.
“It has to do with death,” Lightsong finally said as the priests began to file into the arena floor below for this day’s round of arguments.
Siri looked toward him.
“All men die,” Lightsong said. “Some, however, die in ways that exemplify a particular attribute or emotion. They show a spark of something greater than the rest of mankind. That is what is said to bring us back.”
He fell silent.
“You died showing great bravery, then?” Siri asked.
“Apparently,” he said. “I don’t know for sure. Something in my dreams suggests that I may have insulted a very large panther. That sounds rather brave, don’t you think?”
“You don’t know how you died?”
He shook his head. “We forget,” he said. “We awake without memories. I don’t even know what work I did.”
Siri smiled. “I suspect that you were a diplomat or a salesman of some sort. Something that required you to talk a lot, but say very little!”
“Yes,” he said quietly, seeming unlike himself as he stared down at the priests below. “Yes, no doubt that was it exactly . . .” He shook his head, then smiled at her. “Regardless, my dear queen, I have provided a surprise for you this day!”
Do I want to be surprised by Lightsong? She glanced about nervously.
He laughed. “No need to fear,” he said. “My surprises rarely cause bodily harm, and never to beautiful queens.” He waved his hand, and an elderly man with an extraordinarily long white beard approached.
Siri frowned.
“This is Hoid,” Lightsong said. “Master storyteller. I believe you had some questions you wished to ask . . .”
Siri laughed in relief, remembering only now her request to Lightsong. She glanced at the priests below. “Um, shouldn’t we be paying attention to the speeches?”
Lightsong waved indifferently. “Pay attention? Ridiculous! That would be far too responsible of us. We’re gods, for the Colors’ sake. Or, well, I am. You’re close enough. A god-in-law, one might say. Anyway, do you really want to listen to a bunch of stuffy priests talk about sewage treatment?”
Siri grimaced.
“I thought not. Besides, neither of us have votes pertaining to this issue. So let us spend our time wisely. We never know when we will run out!”
“Of time?” Siri asked. “But you’re immortal!”
“Not run out of time,” Lightsong said, holding up his plate. “Of grapes. I hate listening to storytellers without grapes.”
Siri rolled her eyes, but continued to eat the grape slices. The storyteller waited patiently. As she looked more closely, she could tell that he wasn’t quite as old as he seemed at first glance. The beard must be a badge of his profession, and while it didn’t appear to be fake, she suspected that it had been bleached. He was much really younger than he wanted to appear.
Still, she doubted Lightsong would have settled for anyone other than the very best. She settled back in her chair—which, she noticed, had been crafted for someone of her size. I should be careful with my questions, she thought. I can’t ask directly about the deaths of the old God Kings; that would be too obvious.
“Storyteller,” she said. “What do you know of Hallandren history?”
“Much, my queen,” he said, bowing his head.
“Tell me of the days before the division between Idris and Hallandren.”
“Ah,” the man said, reaching into a pocket. He pulled out a handful of sand and began to rub it between his fingers, letting it drop in a soft stream toward the ground, its grains blown slightly in the wind. “Her Majesty wishes one of the deep stories, from long before. A story before time began?”
“I wish to know the origins of the Hallandren God Kings.”
“Then we begin in the distant haze,” the storyteller said, bringing up another hand, letting powdery black sand drop from it, mixing with the sand that fell from the first hand. As Siri watched, the black sand turned white, and she cocked her head, smiling at the display.
“The first God King of Hallandren is ancient,” Hoid said. “Ancient, yes. Older than kingdoms and cities, older than monarchs and religions. Not older than the mountains, for they were already here. Like the knuckles of the sleeping giants below, they formed this valley, where panthers and flowers both make their home.
“We speak of just ‘the valley’ then, a place before it had a name. The people of Chedesh still dominated the world. They sailed the Inner Sea, coming from the east, and it was they who first discovered this strange land. Their writings are sparse, their empire has long since been taken by the dust, but memory remains. Perhaps you can imagine their surprise upon arriving here? A place with beaches of fine, soft sand, with fruits aplenty, and with strange, alien forests?”
Hoid reached into his robes and pulled out a handful of something else. He began to drop it before him—small green leaves from the fronds of a fern.
“Paradise, they called it,” Hoid whispered. “A paradise hidden between the mountains, a land with pleasant rains that never grew cold, a land where succulent food grew spontaneously.” He threw the handful of leaves into the air, and in the center of them puffed a burst of colorful dust, like a tiny flameless firework. Deep reds and blues mixed in the air, blowing around him.
“A land of color,” he said. “Because of the Tears of Edgli, the striking flowers of such brilliance that could yield dyes that would hold fast in any cloth.”
Siri had never really thought about how Hallandren would look to people who came across the Inner Sea. She’d heard stories from the ramblemen who came into Idris, and they spoke of distant places. In other lands, one found parries and steppes, mountains and deserts. But not jungles. Hallandren was unique.
