Crannag leaned back in his seat. It was but a campstool with a slim backrest, but he managed to lounge in it. “We were acting, Queen. Just acting. Waiting. You promised us that you would help us return to Ushen Brae. You never meant to keep that promise. You lied. Now you pay for it.” He drew phlegm from his throat and spat toward Corinn. Considering the distance between them, the spittle landed surprisingly close to her feet. She felt her Marah tense. Someone drew his sword a few inches from its scabbard. “You came for nothing. We won’t fight. We can wait there”-he pointed up toward the plug of stone that rose out of the rolling landscape behind him-“for as long as we need. When the Auldek come, we will greet them as cousins and brothers and we will show them the bounty we’ve found for them.”
“You don’t know that the Auldek will come. For all you know they still scorn you.”
“You know nothing.” Crannag rose, and his shoulder swiped at the air as he turned away, almost like a blow.
“I know this!” Corinn said. “You are a coward!”
Crannag trudged away. He waved one arm, dismissing her accusation as if it were an insect.
“The Numrek hiding in that fortress are quivering,” Corinn continued. She stood and began to follow him. Her guards jumped to keep pace with her. “Your men are dogs, no braver than your children. Your women are whipped bitches. I will tell the world this is so. News of it will fly on every bird to every province. The Known World will scorn you, and if the Auldek ever arrive, they will learn of your cowardice. I would not wish to be you.” She spat toward him. “Not after I tell the world that I came here and offered you battle on these terms: an equal number of my force to fight yours. Equal numbers, Crannag! One Acacian for every Numrek. No more.”
The warrior paused but did not turn back to face her.
“How will you explain that?” She stood in the full sun now. The shade tent flapped behind her with a sudden gust of air. She waited a moment longer, then added more lightly, knowing that Crannag would turn to make sure he heard her correctly, “I will be one of them. I will take to the field myself.”
A few days earlier, on the evening before she was to leave for Teh, Corinn had been occupied with affairs of state all day. She did not join Aliver until after her late meetings. She found him, to her surprise, standing inside the door that would have led him out into the upper courtyard, into the view of the guards and general palace staff.
“What are you doing?”
He blinked rapidly for a moment. “I want to see my quarters. My own rooms, with my things… I should see them. I should stay in them.”
“You will.” Corinn gently turned him and led him away from the door, back into her own chambers. “Don’t rush, though. You have everything you need here. Stay here until I return from my trip.”
“Your trip. Why are you going? What trip is it?”
Having gotten Aliver seated in a side parlor, Corinn lowered herself to the plush chair opposite. She relaxed into it, truly fatigued, knowing that she should rest in preparation for the morrow. A small fire burned in the hearth, and she commented on the warmth of the room and the early chill in the air tonight. Aliver watched the fire, but not with the curiosity he had shown during the first few days. He was changing already. The world did not amaze him as it had before. He was more at ease in his body, quicker with words. In the new clothes Rhrenna had brought for him he looked very much a prince. At times his eyes still glazed over, but just as often he snapped out of it with a shake of his head.
“There are things I don’t understand,” Aliver said.
Corinn bent her head forward as she unwrapped the lace shawl from around her neck. “You have to relearn the world. It can’t happen overnight.”
“I’m already forgetting death.”
“Good, Aliver, good. Life is what matters. Even in death, spirits told you of the living. That’s what you said to me the first night we talked.”
“I thought that, but it doesn’t seem the way it was anymore. When I was dead, I was not a self. I was not a single mind. I was spread thinly across the world. I was part of everything. Like a very fine dust that gets into everything.” Aliver no longer had difficulty controlling his facial expressions. He frowned, and Corinn did not question whether he meant to or not. “When I was like that, the lives of humans did not register as of much import. I cared about the tree of Akaran about as much as a stone on the path in the gardens outside does.”
“But you said you knew things that had happened after your death.”
“I learned those things in the moments you were pulling me together. I did know things. I do, but they didn’t have meaning until I was becoming Aliver again.”
A piper announced the midnight hour then. Both siblings cocked their heads to listen as the tune passed from the palace down toward the lower town, a delicate cascade of sound.
It reminded Corinn of her fatigue. “I wish that we could stay locked away for days upon days. I would tell you everything. Absolutely everything. I’d have you understand me completely, so that you saw the world with my eyes.”
The rapidity with which his gaze snapped back to her caused her to pause. “I prefer my own eyes,” Aliver said.
“I mean only that I will help you, until you can see fully on your own. The world has changed, Aliver, as I’ve been explaining.”
He shook his head. “No, you haven’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“You told me you needed me. That I am here to help you.”
“You are,” Corinn said.
“But you’re not telling the things that matter! You’re going away tomorrow, but you haven’t told me why.”
For a moment Corinn was speechless. She stood up and moved behind her chair, running her hands over the backrest and then gripping it. “Of course I did.”
Aliver’s mouth puckered into a sour expression Corinn remembered from years ago. He said, “No, you didn’t. You brought me back from the dead, but you haven’t even explained how. You haven’t spoken of Mena or Dariel. From your lips-nothing about them.”
“That’s not true.” She must have! They spoke for hours. What else was more important?
“You talk and talk, but you tell me nothing. You haven’t even told me of your son.”
To that she had no response. It was an impossible statement. She thought of Aaden always; she visited him several times each day; she whispered to him all about Aliver’s return; she had come back to Aliver and…
I told him nothing of my son, she thought. Why? It took all her concentration to nod and say, “Aliver, I have a son. His name is Aaden. He is your nephew. He is to be heir. He will be the greatest Akaran monarch yet.” There! That’s what I meant to tell him.
“I would like to meet him.”
“You will. He is not well right now, though. When I return from Teh. Just rest here until then. When I return, you’ll meet Aaden and see the rest of the palace. You’ll see others and talk to them. We’ll send a bird to Mena and we’ll talk about Dariel, too.”
Aliver eyed her. “You are going to confront the Numrek in Teh?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What I must,” she said. “What they brought upon themselves.”
“You can’t kill them all.”
“What do you know of it?” Corinn retorted. “You know so little of what’s happened. Let me explain it to you, but give me time.”
“As you have made such good use of the time we’ve had so far?”
Corinn rubbed the plush arms of her chair. She watched the way the passage of her hand changed the look of the velvet, from light to dark, dark to light. “I don’t like this side of you.”
“Which side is that? The one that thinks?”
“The one that blunders through the world with noble ideals based on nothing. Look at the fact that you died and I did not. That you failed and I did not.”
“If that’s what you believe, you should have left me with the dust. You’ve made a mistake.”
