N. Jemisin: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

T’vril said something then that I simply did not digest, so he said it again. This time I looked at him. “This,” he said, pointing to his forehead. The half-moon mark.

“What?”

He repeated himself a third time, showing no sign of the exasperation he should have felt. “We must see Viraine, so that he can apply the blood sigil to your brow. He should be free from court duty by now. Then you can rest for the evening.”

“Why?”

He stared at me for a moment. “Your mother did not tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Of the Enefadeh.”

“The Enewhat?”

The look that crossed T’vril’s face was somewhere between pity and dismay. “Lady Kinneth didn’t prepare you for this at all, did she?” Before I could think of a response to that, he moved on. “The Enefadeh are the reason we wear the blood sigils, Lady Yeine. No one may pass the night in Sky without one. It isn’t safe.”

I pulled my thoughts away from the strangeness of my new title. “Why isn’t it safe, Lord T’vril?”

He winced. “Just T’vril, please. Lord Dekarta has decreed that you are to receive a fullblood mark. You are of the Central Family. I am a mere halfblood.”

I could not tell if I had missed important information, or if something had been left unsaid. Probably several somethings. “T’vril. You must realize nothing you’re saying makes any sense to me.”

“Perhaps not.” He ran a hand over his hair; this was the first sign of discomfort he’d shown. “But an explanation would take too long. There’s less than an hour ’til sunset.”

I supposed that this, too, was one of those rules the Arameri insisted on being sticklers for, though I could not imagine why. “All right, but…” I frowned. “What of my coachman? He’s waiting for me in the forecourt.”

“Waiting?”

“I didn’t think I’d be staying.”

T’vril’s jaw flexed, containing whatever honest reply he might have made. Instead he said, “I’ll have someone send him away and give him a bonus for his trouble. He won’t be needed; we have plenty of servants here.”

I had seen them throughout our tour—silent, efficient figures bustling about Sky’s halls, clad all in white. An impractical color for people whose job it was to clean, I thought, but I didn’t run the place.

“That coachman traveled across this continent with me,” I said. I was irked and trying not to show it. “He’s tired and his horses are, too. Can he not be given a room for the night? Give him one of those marks and then let him leave in the morning. That’s only courteous.”

“Only Arameri may wear the blood sigil, my lady. It’s permanent.”

“Only—” Understanding leapt in my head. “The servants here are family ?”

The look he threw me was not bitter, though perhaps it should have been. He had given me the clues already, after all: his roaming father, his own status as the steward. A high-ranking servant, but still a servant. He was as Arameri as I, but his parents had not been married; strict Itempans frowned on illegitimacy. And his father had never been Dekarta’s favorite.

As if reading my thoughts, T’vril said, “As Lord Dekarta said, Lady Yeine—all descendants of Shahar Arameri must serve. One way or another.”

There were so many untold tales in his words. How many of our relatives had been forced to leave their homelands, and whatever future they might have had, to come here and mop floors or peel vegetables? How many had been born here and never left? What happened to those who tried to escape?

Would I become one of them, like T’vril?

No. T’vril was unimportant, no threat to those who stood to inherit the family’s power. I would not be so lucky.

He touched my hand with what I hoped was compassion. “It’s not far.”

On its upper levels, Sky seemed to have windows everywhere. Some corridors even had ceilings of clear glass or crystal, though the view was only of the sky and the palace’s many rounded spires. The sun had not yet set—its lower curve had only touched the horizon in the past few minutes—but T’vril set a more brisk pace than before. I paid closer attention to the servants as we walked, seeking the small commonalities of our shared lineage. There were a few: many sets of green eyes, a certain structure of the face (which I lacked completely, having taken after my father). A certain cynicism, though that might have been my imagination. Beyond that, they were all as disparate as T’vril and I, though most seemed to be Amn or some Senmite race. And each of them bore a forehead marking; I had noticed that before but dismissed it as some local fashion. A few had triangles or diamond shapes, but most wore a simple black bar.

I did not like the way they looked at me, eyes flicking near and then away.

“Lady Yeine.” T’vril stopped a few paces ahead, noticing that I had fallen behind. He had inherited the long legs of his Amn heritage. I had not, and it had been a very trying day. “Please, we have little time.”

“All right, all right,” I said, too tired to be strictly polite anymore. But he did not resume walking, and after a moment I saw that he had gone stiff, staring down the corridor in the direction we were to go.

A man stood above us.

I call him a man, in retrospect, because that is what he seemed at the time. He stood on a balcony overlooking our corridor, framed perfectly by the ceiling’s arch. I gathered he had been traveling along a perpendicular corridor up there; his body still faced that direction, frozen in midpace. Only his head had turned toward us. By some trick of the shadows, I could not see his face, yet I felt the weight of his eyes.

He put a hand on the balcony railing with slow, palpable deliberation.

“What is it, Naha?” said a woman’s voice, echoing faintly along the corridor. A moment later she appeared. Unlike the man, she was clearly visible to me: a reedy Amn beauty of sable hair, patrician features, and regal grace. I recognized her by that hair as the woman who’d sat beside Dekarta at the Salon. She wore the kind of dress that only an Amn woman could do justice to—a long straight tube the color of deep, bloody garnets.

“What do you see?” she asked, looking at me although her words were for the man. She lifted her hands, twirling something in her fingers, and I saw then that she held a delicate silver chain. It dangled from her hand and curved back up; I realized that the chain was connected to the man.

“Aunt,” T’vril said, pitching his voice with a care that let me know at once who she was. The lady Scimina—my cousin and rival heir. “You look lovely this evening.”

“Thank you, T’vril,” she replied, though her eyes never left my face. “And who is this?”

There was the faintest pause. By the taut look on T’vril’s face, I gathered he was trying to think of a safe answer. Some quirk of my own nature—in my land, only weak women allowed men to protect them—made me step forward and incline my head. “My name is Yeine Darr.”

Her smile said that she’d already guessed it. There could not have been many Darre in the palace. “Ah, yes. Someone spoke of you after Uncle’s audience today. Kinneth’s daughter, are you?”

“I am.” In Darr, I would have drawn a knife at the malice in her sweet, falsely polite tone. But this was Sky, blessed palace of Bright Itempas, the lord of order and peace. Such things were not done here. I looked to T’vril for an introduction.

“The lady Scimina Arameri,” he said. He did not swallow or fidget, to his credit, but I saw how his eyes flicked back and forth between my cousin and the motionless man. I waited for T’vril to introduce the man, but he did not.