Kate Elliott - An earthly crown

He sipped at the tea. It was spicy, and it scalded his tongue. Lal really was very good, better than Samae had ever been, about making everything just as he liked it. Already, without being asked, the boy had begun fanning him against the afternoon heat. He recognized all at once that Samae had rebelled against him constantly, in subtle ways, primarily by never acting until he ordered her to act, so that her obedience was never a thing of her choosing but always a matter of her being forced to endure his commands.

The captain arrived and touched his forehead to the carpet in front of Jiroannes. "Eminence, you sent for me."

"Captain." He explained the terms that Mother Sakhalin had set them.

"But, eminence, many of us have wives, proper Vidiyan wives, at home. These foreign women are good enough for whores, it's true, but they aren't our kind."

"Captain, I understand your reservations, but I am presenting you with a solution. Keep whores, but treat them as if they were wives and all will be well. I will see that you have enough rations to cover everyone."

"But, eminence, what about their husbands?"

Jiroannes tilted his head back. Smoke rose in the distance. He wondered if the city had fallen yet. "I doubt they have husbands left. I doubt there are any men left alive in this land. I expect, captain, that many women will be grateful for such shelter as you and your men can provide them."

"If they bring children, eminence?"

"As I said, captain, treat them as you would your own wives. As long as we do not antagonize the jaran, you may keep them here. Do you understand?" And because the captain was wise enough to have risen up through the ranks to his current command, he did.

"Are you hungry, eminence?" asked Lal.

"Why, yes, I am." At the outskirts of his little camp, Samae appeared, trudging under the weight of two full buckets hung from a pole slung over her shoulders. Her face was still, bearing no expression. Why had she refused her freedom? The question nagged at him. It had bothered him for twenty days, now, but he could think of no answer.

"Eminence, here are some delicacies I made," said Lal, breaking into Jiroannes's reverie. He knelt before Jiroannes's chair and held out a plate of chased pewter on which savory looking pastries were arranged in an artful pattern. "I hope they please you."

Jiroannes wrenched his gaze away from Samae. He accepted the food. "Thank you, Lal," he said. "These are very fine."

The boy beamed and padded away to fetch warm water and a cloth to wash his master's face and hands after he had finished.

At dawn, Jiroannes was woken by Lal. "Eminence. I beg pardon, eminence, but there are men here to see you."

Jiroannes started awake and sat up. It was dark in the tent. A man shouted outside, answered by a whoop. A troop of horses pounded past. The rush of fear that hit him astounded him. What had he done? Whom had he offended? Had his guards raped some woman? Did his people, with their fine, superior Vidiyan blood and upbringing, treat their wives in a manner repugnant to the jaran? But they had no wives here, and no women in camp, not yet.

Lal brought him a knee-length brocaded coat and helped him into it, then tied his turquoise sash around his waist in a casual style-not too formal, for this kind of meeting. Hands shaking, Jiroannes went outside. In the half-light of dawn, he recognized two of the riders: one was Anton, the brother of the princess. One was the brown-haired actor, the man who took the most demanding parts of the dance.

"Ambassador, I am Anton Veselov," said Veselov. "I beg your pardon for disturbing you at this hour, but we are conducting a search."

Jiroannes blanched. He thought wildly about what items he possessed that might get him executed. Lal appeared in the doorway of his tent, and immediately Jiroannes was convinced that they had come to accuse him of consorting with the boy, but no one remarked on the slave as he hurried off to wake Syrannus.

"One of the khaja Singers, the actors, has vanished. Perhaps you have seen him?"

The brown-haired actor chimed in. "His name is Hyacinth. He has bright yellow hair, and he's this tall." He used an expressive hand to measure a space above his own head. "Surely you were at the performance of the dream play. He played the spirit who causes so much mischief."

"I believe I know which you mean." Jiroannes discovered that his voice was shaking with relief. This matter had nothing to do with him at all.

"I do beg your pardon for disturbing you, ambassador," continued Anton Veselov, "but we're asking at every camp, to see if anyone heard anything last night."

"He stole some things, you see," added the actor. "From our camp.''

"And either he, or his confederates, stole horses as well."

"Ah," said Jiroannes, suddenly quite sure who his confederates had been. "No, I'm sorry, but I haven't seen or heard of him. But perhaps you'd like to question my people. They may have seen something I did not."

"Thank you," said Anton Veselov.

In the end, to Jiroannes's surprise, Syrannus provided them with the first scrap of information. The captain of the guards had asked Syrannus to ride with him down to the river, where a ragtag collection of refugees had gathered on a flat field next to an abandoned village, there to negotiate with the whores. While Syrannus had been waiting, with the unholy glare of distant fire and the luminous stars and the last gleam of the waning moon to attend him, he had seen three riders splash across the ford, riding north. At the time, he had thought nothing of it. Now, he recalled quite clearly that one had been a woman, and another very awkward in the saddle.

Tess heard the altercation in full flower as she and Aleksi rode up behind her tent.

"No, damn it! I won't rest! There's too much to do. We must move on at dawn tomorrow.''

"Bakhtiian, you aren't nearly strong enough to ride yet." This from Cara, sounding cool.

"I'll ride a gentle mare."

"Ilya, you're going too damned fast. You know better than to-"

"Out, Niko! Out!"

Tess dismounted and threw her reins to Aleksi along with a wry grin. Then she hurried around the corner of the tent to see Ilya, lying propped up on pillows under the awning of the tent, yelling at the combined forces of Niko, Cara, Sonia, and young Katerina. His personal guard stood with expressionless faces just beyond the carpet. Farther away, at the first ring of guards, Elders and dyans waited for their turn to see Bakhtiian. Like flowers turning toward the sun, Ilya's four victims shifted to look hopefully at Tess.

"Out," said Tess mildly. They left. "Vladi, Konstans, you too." They left. Ilya lay there glaring at her. He was pale and he looked exhausted. "You're going to bed," she said to him.

"I don't have time to-"

"I said, you're going to bed. Come on."

"Tess-!"

"You only woke up yesterday, my love. You were unconscious for fifteen days. You need to rest."

He heaved himself up to sit. His eyes flashed with anger, and his lips were white and drawn tight. "I need to order my army. According to the information I've received this morning, Sakhalin has given them orders to destroy everything. How are we to make use of a country that is ruined so thoroughly?''

She crouched and grabbed him around the back, under his arms, and hoisted him to his feet. "Let me rephrase that. You will rest. Now." He was thin, much too thin, and he still wasn't eating much. Although he swore at her, he was far too weak to resist her marching him into the tent and back to their bed. She eased him down and he collapsed. Then, taking pity on him, she lay down beside him and stroked his hair and talked to him soothingly about whatever news she had gotten in the past sixteen days. His left hand came to rest on the swell of her abdomen. He fell asleep. She stayed beside him for a while, continuing to stroke his hair and his face, filled with such impossibly intense elation that she thought she might well burst from the strength of it. She kissed him a final time on the forehead and went outside.