Nico grinned, cradling Serafina in his arms. The baby fussed for a moment, then quieted as Nico rocked her unconsciously, staring down into the baby’s face. “Her eyes are so big,” he said wonderingly. “And her hands are awful small. She’s really my daughter?”
“Yes. Yours and Liana’s.” Varina reached down and stroked Sera’s head. Her hair was fine as down, the skin smooth and warm. Her tiny hand waved, finding Varina’s finger and clutching it. She laughed.
Nico shook his head. He was watching the interplay. “I don’t remember Liana,” he said. “I don’t know how…”
“I’ll tell you one day,” Varina told him. “Right now, we still have to get ready to go to the Kraljica’s funeral. Here…” She held out her hands, and Nico carefully placed Sera there. Varina heard Michelle’s audible sigh of relief. Varina kissed Sera’s forehead, hugging her for a few breaths before handing her back to Michelle. “She’s fed?”
“Fed and dressed and ready to go,” Michelle answered. “I have a change of clothes and diapers. I came up to tell you that the carriage is here from the palais.”
“Good,” Varina told her. “Go ahead and get her in and settled. Nico and I will be down in a few moments. I just have to finish his boots.”
Michelle glanced at Nico again. “A’Morce, the young man’s dangerous. What he did…”
“What he did with the Tehuantin saved us,” Varina answered. “And cost him far more than most would have been willing to give.”
“He could be faking his condition, or he could recover his wits. What then?”
Nico said nothing as they discussed him. He only looked from one woman to the other as they spoke.
“Then,” Varina answered, “we will deal with that when it happens.” It was the same question she’d heard already a dozen times or more. There were those on the Council and among the ca’-and-cu’ of the city and the teni of the Faith who wanted Nico tried and executed for the deaths he’d caused and the damage to the Old Temple during the Morelli takeover. For that matter, there was a part of Varina’s own heart that was still angry with him for the destruction and deaths he’d caused, unapologetically, to her own friends during Karl’s funeral.
Nico, truly, had much to answer for, yet he had nearly single-handedly saved the city when it was about to fall. There was also no denial of that-or of the fact that his efforts had cost him greatly, and perhaps, perhaps that had been punishment enough. The Nico in front of her seemed to remember nothing of that day or much of his previous life at all. The Nico before her was an innocent-he might inhabit the same body, but he was not the Nico who had claimed to be the Absolute. Perhaps the Kraljiki would demand punishment for the past, but Varina would fight that, with all the efforts she could muster. “For now, he’s a child, and he needs to be treated as such.”
“As you say, A’Morce,” Michelle answered. Serafina cried, and Michelle rocked her gently. “I’ll get her quieted down again, and we’ll see you in the carriage.”
As Michelle left the room, Varina bent down again to the laces of Nico’s boots. He was watching her, frowning. “It’s all right, Nico,” she said. “Michelle’s not angry with you. She’s just concerned about you, as I am. Now, watch me and let’s see if you can tie the other one. Loop the lace like this, then pass the other end around it…”
The teni were already in attendance at the Archigos’ Temple. A’Teni Valerie ca’Beranger of Prajnoli would conduct the service-the rumors were that she would most likely be elected Archigos when the Concord A’Teni convened in a few days. Brie escorted the children up an aisle lined with e-teni in white robes-the color of death- trimmed in green. The teni watched, silent: like lines of white bone arrowing toward the Stone of Cenzi as Brie and the children ascended the dais and approached the altar, the great Stone of Cenzi, draped in a brilliant azure cloth.
“There,” Brie whispered to Elissa, Kriege, Caelor, and Eria. Her voice sounded loud under the dome and she glanced up once at the frescoes of Cenzi and the Moitidi far above them. “This is your great-matarh Allesandra. She was a great woman, and she told me that she wanted so much to get to know all of you. I wish you could have known her when she was alive.”
This was not how she’d intended for the children to meet their great-matarh. She’d hoped to introduce them to the woman, not the dead container that had once held her. She wondered whether it might not have been better to let the children remain in Brezno for the funeral, but for the fact that they would then have missed their vatarh’s coronation.
“It’s ugly here,” Elissa had proclaimed on disembarking from the carriage at the palais. She looked around at the buildings, broken and scarred by fire and war. “It smells horrible, too. Brezno is much prettier, Matarh. Why can’t we just stay there?”
“Nessantico is our new home now,” she’d told them. “And we’ll make it prettier and more impressive than Brezno-as it was once before. We’ll help your vatarh make it that way, all of us.”
She hoped that had not been a lie.
Now, in the Archigos’ Temple, they stared at yet another broken ruin, that of the Kraljica.
The toddler Eria hung back, a thumb firmly planted in her mouth. She refused to approach the bier at all, content to look at the body while hanging onto Brie’s tashta. Caelor approached only hesitantly, and then moved quickly away close to Brie. Kriege stalked forward with a firm grimace on his face, stared down at the white-painted face there, then took a step back, sniffing as if he could smell the corruption through the scent-shield that the teni had placed around the body. Elissa, who had walked forward with Kriege, remained there, staring down at the body as if she were trying to memorize every detail: the lines of her great-matarh’s face; the golden funeral mask that the teni would place on her face in just a turn of the glass, when the doors of the Archigos’ Temple were opened so that the funeral could begin; the iron rod of Kraljiki Henri VI cradled in her left hand; the signet ring of the Kralji displayed on her upturned right palm, which Jan would take when the funeral rite was finished. The blue cloth over the altar was covered in wreaths of yellow trumpet-flowers. Seven candelabra were set around the stone; they were alight not with flame but with brilliant teni-light, bathing the body in a yellow-white light so intense it seemed that the dome of the temple had been lifted so the sun could shine down on the Kraljica.
Elissa touched Allesandra’s arm with a tentative finger, then looked at the fingertip as if it were a foreign object. “She’s cold,” Elissa reported. “And kind of hard.”
“That’s what happens when you die.”
“Oh.” Elissa seemed to consider that. “Her face looks pretty, though.”
Brie could hear Jan’s voice, talking with Sergei ca’Rudka, Starkkapitan ca’Damont, and Commandant ca’Talin to one side of the quire. Talbot, Allesandra’s aide who had agreed to stay on as Jan’s aide, cleared his throat near the pews. “Hirzgin, they’re ready to let the ca’-and-cu’ enter the temple. I’m going to go get the Hirzg and the others-you have a bit yet, but…”
She nodded to him, and he stepped away. “Don’t touch that,” she told Elissa, who was reaching out with a tentative hand toward the ring. Elissa snatched back her hand as if she’d burned it.
“I wasn’t going to touch it,” she told Brie. “Is that going to be Vatarh’s ring?”
“Yes, very soon,” Brie told her.
“And will it be mine one day?”
Kriege glared at Elissa. “That’s not fair, Matarh,” he howled, his voice shrill under the dome. Brie saw the white lines of the teni ripple and someone laughed, a quick sound that was choked off. “She gets everything.”
She could hear Talbot chuckling as he strode across the nave toward Jan. She laughed, too. “No one’s going to get the ring-at least not for a long, long time, when you’re all grown up. We’ll see then. It may be that neither of you will want it.”
“Then I’ll take it,” Caelor interjected. “It’s a pretty ring.”
Brie laughed. “Come on,” she told her children. “We need to take our seats…”
The wind-horns called mournfully, their low wail sending the pigeons erupting from the ground on the plaza outside. Inside, Rochelle could feel the temple wall throbbing against her back. She’d slipped into the temple via a back door much earlier, picking the lock well before dawn, sliding up to the choir loft and along the side to a shadowed corner behind the arch of one of the buttresses, where she could look down at the quire, the bier and the closest pews.
She thought she could smell smoke here: not just the spiced aroma from the censers on the altar, but a fume that was a remnant of the black sand bombardment of the Tehuantin, lingering here below the painted arches of the dome. She had sat there hidden for several turns, waiting. She’d watched the white-robed teni file in; the choir settling into their seats not far from her.
She’d seen her vatarh and his family enter to view the body midmorning, had watched Brie escort the children
