“I don’t want the girl, Captain, the Overlord does. Why do you think I suffer a priest on this journey? Elfron had a vision or something, probably the result of too much self-flagellation, I suspect, but one does not question a priest when he’s on a mission from Xaphista. If the Overlord wants your sister, then he shall have her.” He looked at Tarja closely. “Perhaps you are not as comfortable with this arrangement as you first appeared, Captain?”
Tarja forced himself to shrug. “As you said, my Lord, we Medalonians have a different view of the world. You might do well to remember that, when dealing with my mother.”
The Envoy nodded in agreement, and they rode on in silence for a time. The keep and its desperate occupants slowly disappeared from view. Tarja kept his anger tightly under control. Lord Pieter’s agreement with his mother was too awful to comprehend. Joyhinia was planning to impeach Mahina and was prepared to sell R’shiel to the Kariens to do it.
Yesterday, he might have considered such a plan beyond even her, but in light of what Bereth had told him, he did not doubt it at all. R’shiel was not even her child. Which brought to mind another disturbing question. Whose child was she?
Tarja glanced back down the column wondering where Davydd and the others were. When they got to Lilyvale this evening, maybe he could invent an excuse to send the lieutenant on ahead. He had to warn Mahina that the instrument of her downfall was riding toward the Citadel while she unsuspectingly made plans for the future. He had to warn R’shiel that Joyhinia had traded her for the First Sister’s mantle.
And he had to find out why the Kariens wanted R’shiel so badly they were prepared to unseat the First Sister just to get their hands on her.
chapter 11
It was another week before Gwenell declared R’shiel was fit enough to return to her mother’s apartments. She was discharged with strict instructions regarding her diet, how much weight she was expected to gain, and the herbal infusions she was required to take daily to regain her strength. R’shiel grimaced when she saw the list. Gwenell was one of those physics who thought the worse something tasted, the better it was for you.
It was late in the morning, and Joyhinia was not home when R’shiel knocked on the door of her mother’s apartment. Old Hella opened it, pushed back a strand of wiry gray hair, and sighed mournfully when she saw R’shiel.
“Come in, then,” she said. “Your mother told me you’d be arrivin‘ today. It’s not as if I don’t have enough to do, without nursin’ an invalid.”
“I don’t like this any more than you do, Hella. I won’t be in the way.”
“Easy for you to say, girl,” the old woman grumbled. “I’ve already wasted a whole mornin‘ airin’ your room out. I’ve sent the wall hangin’s to be cleaned, so you’ll have to suffer the heathen creatures on the walls till they get back. I don’t know what your mother was thinkin‘, lettin’ you come here. It’s not as if I don’t have anythin‘ to do round here.”
Hella enjoyed being a martyr, a handy attribute when one worked for Joyhinia. R’shiel let her grumble on without interruption and carried her bag through to the room she had occupied as a child. She pushed open the door and looked around in astonishment.
The wall on her right glowed softly with the late morning Brightening, filling the room with gentle white light. Her bed, a large, carved four-poster, sat in the same position it always had against the wall. On the far wall, underneath the diamond-paned window beside the hearth, a matching dresser, polished to a soft gleam, stood unmoved from where it had always been. As long as she could remember, the wall on her left had been covered by a floor-to-ceiling tapestry depicting the stern countenance of Sister Param holding court with the first Quorum.
But now, the wooden frame where the tapestry had been nailed was empty, revealing the most astonishing scene R’shiel had ever seen.
A huge golden dragon, its wings outstretched, swooped down over a tall mountain range, where a white palace of impossible beauty sat perched high on the central peak. The wall was etched, yet smooth to the touch. The colors had not faded, despite the mural’s great age. It was as if the etchings were living images sealed behind glass. As she moved closer, the individual components of the illustration became clearer. What had at first seemed just a large landscape was filled with exquisite detail.
On the slopes of the mountain leading to the many-spired palace were figures of slender, naked, golden- skinned children, gamboling with small, wrinkled gray creatures amidst trees that seemed to have every individual leaf depicted in minute and loving detail. The closer she looked, the more complexity she discovered, the more the mural revealed. R’shiel thought with wonder that she could stand here for hours and still not take it all in. Were these the long dead Harshini? Were the tall graceful men leaning on the balconies and the black-eyed, elegant women the people of the lost race? Were the squat, ugly creatures supposed to be demons? She had expected them to be much more fearsome. She studied the dragon again, wondering how anyone could have conceived of such a creature, even in their imagination. A rider sat on the shoulders of the dragon, dressed in dark, velvety, skin-tight leathers, his dark red hair streaming out behind him, his expression rapturous. R’shiel smiled as she looked at him, thinking she would be wearing a similar expression if she had been riding such a glorious creature.
“Hope it don’t give you nightmares,” Hella said, pushing past R’shiel clutching fresh linen for the bed. The old woman looked at the mural for a moment and shuddered. “Damn, if that thing don’t give me the creeps.”
“It’s beautiful.”
All the years she had slept in this room she had never suspected the mural was there, although she had seen other etchings and other murals in more public places throughout the Citadel. Usually such artworks were painted over, but some of them had a surface that simply refused to take the whitewash. Those were covered with heavy, concealing tapestries. It was almost mandatory to accept a dare to sneak a look at the images of the forbidden Harshini depicted behind the tapestry in the Lesser Hall, which listed the virtues of the Sisterhood in dry, formal stitches. But she had never before seen a Harshini mural in the full light of day. Guilty glimpses of pale murals by torchlight were nothing compared to this.
“Beautiful?” Hella snorted. “It’s wicked! Look at those heathens! Not one of them is doing a lick of work. Just lollin‘ about naked or fornicatin’ like animals.”
R’shiel had to study the mural for quite a while before she discovered the couple Hella referred to, through one of the tall windows in the palace, locked in an explicit embrace that made her blush. She wondered how long Hella had studied the mural to find them.
“Well, I’ll try not to let it distract me,” she promised.
“See that they don’t,” Hella warned, tugging on the sheets to tuck them in. She finished making up the bed and straightened her back painfully. “There! Now you get yourself unpacked, and then we’ll be seein‘ about lunch. You look thin as a broom handle. I don’t know about young girls, these days. In my day, you took what food you was given and gladly. And you didn’t starve yourself till you looked like a refugee, neither.”
R’shiel wanted to tell Hella that she had done nothing of the kind, but there didn’t seem much point. As she left the room, still muttering about what it was like in her day, R’shiel crossed the room to the dresser and picked up the silver-backed hand-mirror that Joyhinia had given her on her twelfth birthday. It had never left this room. Such a gift was too valuable to leave lying around in the Dormitories, where girls of less noble breeding might be tempted. Or so Joyhinia had claimed.
She looked at her reflection, a little surprised at how thin her face was. Gwenell had prescribed a number of infusions to cleanse her liver, claiming her skin was yellowing, a sure sign that her liver was not functioning properly, and no doubt the reason for her inexplicable aversion to meat. R’shiel couldn’t see it herself, but one did not argue with Gwenell and hope to win on matters relating to the human body. The black circles under her eyes had faded a little, but her violet eyes seemed darker than normal, almost indigo. It was no doubt a sign of her failing kidneys, she thought grumpily. Or perhaps a sign of irregular bowels. R’shiel was heartily sick of the whole topic of her health. She actually felt better than she had in months. Her headaches had vanished, her appetite had returned, and everything seemed clearer, sharper than it had before. The prospect of spending another four weeks until Founders’ Day, recuperating under the watchful eye of her mother and Hella, was extremely depressing.
“R’shiel!”
