was said to come from a tuberous vegetable, which when simmered produced a deep and pure scarlet. ‘It’s the colour of blood,’ she said. ‘This is what everyone in Kharkanas is going mad for?’
The seamstresses flanking her in the reflection looked pale and drab, almost lifeless.
Seated off to the left on a settee, Cryl of House Durav cleared his throat in a manner all too familiar to Enesdia, and she turned, brows lifting, and said, ‘And what shall we argue about this morning, then? The cut of the dress? The style of the court? Or is it my hair that now dismays you? As it happens, I like it short. The shorter the better. Why should you complain about it, anyway? It’s not as though you’ve let your hair go long as a horse tail just to fit in with the day’s fashion. Oh, I don’t know why I invited you in at all.’
Mild surprise played with his even features for the briefest of moments, and then he offered up a lopsided shrug. ‘I was just thinking, it’s more vermilion than scarlet, isn’t it. Or is it our eyes that are changing?’
‘Idiotic superstitions. Vermilion… well.’
‘Dog-Runner wives call it the “Born of the Hearth”, don’t they?’
‘That’s because they boil the root, fool.’
‘Oh, I would think the name more descriptive than that.’
‘Would you now? Haven’t you somewhere to be, Cryl? Some horse to train? Some sword to whet?’
‘You invite me only to then send me away?’ The young man rose smoothly. ‘If I were a sensitive soul, I might be offended. As it is, I know this game — we have played it all our lives, haven’t we?’
‘Game? What game?’
He had been making for the door, but now he paused and glanced back, and there was something sad in his faint smile. ‘I hope you’ll excuse me, I have a horse to whet and a sword to train. Although, I should add, you look lovely in that dress, Enesdia.’
Even as she drew a breath, mind racing for something that made sense — that might even draw him snapping back on his leash — he slipped out and was gone.
One of the seamstresses sighed, and Enesdia rounded on her. ‘Enough of that, Ephalla! He is a hostage in this house and is to be accorded the highest respect!’
‘Sorry, mistress,’ Ephalla whispered, ducking. ‘But he spoke true — you look lovely!’
Enesdia returned her attention to the blurred image of herself in the mirror. ‘But,’ she murmured, ‘do you think he’ll like it?’
Cryl paused for a moment in the corridor outside Enesdia’s door, near enough to hear the last exchange between her and her handmaid. The sad half-smile on his face remained, only fading as he set out towards the main hall.
He was nineteen years old, the last eleven of those spent here in the house of Jaen Enes as a hostage. He was old enough to understand the value of the tradition. For all that the word ‘hostage’ carried an implicit pejorative, caged in notions of imprisonment and the absence of personal freedom, the practice was more of an exchange than anything else. It was further bound by rules and proscriptions ensuring the rights of the hostage. The sanctity of their person was immutable, precious as a founding law. Accordingly, Cryl, born of House Durav, felt as much an Enes as Jaen, Kadaspala or, indeed, Jaen’s daughter.
And this was… unfortunate. His childhood friend was a girl no longer, but a woman. And gone were his childish thoughts, his dreams of pretending she was in truth his own sister — although he now recognized the confusions swirling through such dreams. For a boy, the role of sister, wife and mother could — if one were careless — be so easily blended together into a heady brew of anguished longing. He’d not known what he’d wanted of her, but he had seen how their friendship had changed, and in that change a wall had grown between them, impassable, forbidding and patrolled by stern propriety. There had been moments of awkwardness, when either he or Enesdia stumbled too close to one another, only to be drawn up by freshly chiselled stone, the touch of which yielded embarrassment and shame.
They struggled now to find their places, shifting about in a search to discover the proper distance between them. Or perhaps the struggle was his alone. He could not be sure, and in that he saw the proof of how things had changed. Once, running at her side, he had known her well. Now, he wondered if he knew her at all.
In her room, only a short time ago, he’d spoken of the games now played between them. Not like the games of old, for these were not, strictly speaking, shared. Instead, these new ones held to personal, private rules, solitary in their gauging, and nothing was won but an abeyance of unease. And yet to this she had professed ignorance. No, ignorance was the wrong word. The word was innocence.
Should he believe her?
In truth, Cryl felt lost. Enesdia had outgrown him in every way, and at times he felt like a puppy at her heels, eager for play, but that sort of playing was behind her now. She thought him a fool. She mocked him at every turn, and a dozen times each day he silently vowed that he was done with it, all of it, only to once more find himself answering her summons — which seemed to be uttered ever more imperiously — and finding himself, yet again, the arrow-butt to her barbs.
It was clear to him, at last, that there were other meanings to the word ‘hostage’, ones not codified into the laws of tradition, and they bound him in chains, heavy and cruelly biting, and he spent his days, and nights, in tormented stricture.
But this was his twentieth year of life. He was only months away from being released, sent back to his own blood, where he would sit discomfited at the family table, trapped in his own strangeness in the midst of a family that had grown around the wound of his prolonged absence. All of this — Enesdia and her proud father, Enesdia and her frighteningly obsessed but brilliant brother, Enesdia and the man who would soon be her husband — all of it would be past, a thing of his history day by day losing its force, its power over him and his life.
And so, too sharply felt for irony, Cryl now longed for his freedom.
Striding into the Great Hall, he was brought up short at seeing Lord Jaen standing near the hearth. The old man’s eyes were on the massive slab of stone laid into the tiled floor, marking the threshold of the hearth and bearing ancient words carved into its granite mien. The Tiste language struggled with notions of filial duty — or so Kadaspala’s friend, the court poet Gallan, was fond of saying — as if hinting at some fundamental flaw in spirit, and so, as was often the case, the words were Azathanai. So many Azathanai gifts to the Tiste seemed to fill the dusty niches and gaps left gaping by flaws in Tiste character, and not one of those gifts was without symbolic meaning.
As a hostage, Cryl was forbidden from learning those arcane Azathanai words, given so long ago to the bloodline of Enes. It was odd, he now reflected as he bowed before Jaen, this Tiste prohibition against learning the masons’ script.
Jaen could well have been reading his mind, for he nodded and said, ‘Gallan claims he can read Azathanai, granting him the blasphemous privilege of knowing the sacred words of each noble family. I admit,’ he added, his thin, lined face twisting slightly, ‘I find the notion displeasing.’
‘Yet the poet asserts that such knowledge is for him alone, Lord.’
‘Poets, young Cryl, cannot be trusted.’
The hostage considered that statement, and found he had no reasonable reply to it. ‘Lord, I request permission to saddle a horse and ride on this day. It was my thought to seek sign of eckalla in the west hills.’
‘Eckalla? None have been seen in years, Cryl. I fear your search will be wasted.’
‘The ride will do me good, Lord, none the less.’
Jaen nodded, and it seemed he well understood the swirl of hidden emotions lying beneath Cryl’s bland words. His gaze returned to the hearthstone. ‘This year,’ he said, ‘I must give up a daughter. And,’ he glanced back at Cryl, ‘a most beloved hostage.’
‘And I, in turn, feel as if I am about to be cast out from the only family I truly belong to. Lord, doors are closing behind us.’
‘But not, I trust, for ever sealed?’
‘Indeed not,’ Cryl replied, although in his mind he saw a massive lock grinding tight. Some doors, once shut, were proof against every desire.
Jaen’s gaze faltered slightly and he turned away. ‘Even standing still, the world moves on around us. I well remember you when first you arrived, scrawny and wild-eyed — the Abyss knows you Duravs are a feral lot — and there you were, wild as a cat, yet barely tall enough to saddle a horse. At least it seems we fed you well.’
Cryl smiled. ‘Lord, the Duravs are said to be slow to grow-’
