Shadowplay

Nonem.”

“Ah, lovely. I didn’t mean to bother you, child, I was just...” At that moment, just to add to the madcap air of sudden festivity, Yazi approached, followed by a young girl in a very fine dress—the kind of dress the laundrywomen only saw when they were called upon to clean things from the upper apartments of the citadel.

“Nira, I just...” Yazi saw the old woman. “Losa! What are you doing here?”

The woman smiled, then quickly pulled her lips together to hide her ruined teeth. “Oh, I couldn’t get out the gate to get home. All kinds of soldiers coming in, and such a fuss! Wagons, oxen, people shouting. Someone said they were Sessians hired by the lord protector. I thought I’d ask if I could stay here.”

“We’ll talk to the dormitory mistress,” said Yazi, “but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” At any ordinary time Yazi would have pressed the old woman for details and it would have been the subject of the evening’s conversation all over the dormitory, but now something even more exciting was clearly pressing on her. “Nira, there’s someone here to see you.”

Qinnitan was beginning to feel quite overwhelmed. She turned to the very young girl in the beautiful blue dress and velvet petticoat. A crowd of women was beginning to gather as people came to see what had brought such an apparition into the dormitory.

“Yes?”

“I am to take you to my mistress,” the girl said. “You are... Nira?”

Qinnitan’s confusion quickly turned to panic, but she couldn’t very well deny it. She struggled to frame the Hierosoline words. “Who...who is your mistress?”

“She will tell you herself. Come with me, please.” Beneath the formal manners, the girl seemed a little anxious herself.

“Oh, that is too bad,” old Losa said. “I was looking forward to a chat.”

“You’d better go,” Yazi told Qinnitan. “Maybe a handsome prince saw you when we were wandering around lost today. Should I come with you, in case he has trouble making himself understood when he proposes to you?”

“Stop, Yazi.” Qinnitan just wanted everyone to go away and forget about this, but it was obviously going to be the talk of the dormitory, perhaps for days.

“She is to come alone,” said the girl in the blue dress. “But what about...my brother?” Qinnitan asked.

“I’ll watch him,” Yazi said. “We’ll have fun, won’t we, Nonem?”

Pigeon liked Yazi, but he clearly didn’t like the idea of letting Qinnitan go away with some stranger. Still, after a warning look from her, he nodded. Qinnitan rose, leaving the comb and mirror for Yazi to return to their owners, and followed the girl out of the dormitory into the cold, torchlit night.

She felt in the pocket of her smock for Pigeon’s carving knife and held it tightly as they walked back across the tiled immensity of the Echoing Mall.

“Who is your...mistress?” she asked the girl again.

“She will tell you what she wishes to tell you,” the little girl in the blue dress said, and would say no more. “

I am not happy,” said her father. Pelaya knew it was the truth. Count Perivos was not the sort of man who liked surprises, and all this had obviously come as just that. “Bad enough that a foreign prisoner should bribe my daughter to send messages to me when I already have so much else to worry on—using her as a...a go-between. But to find he also expects her to arrange some sort of assignation for him...!”

“It’s not an assignation and he didn’t bribe me.” Pelaya stroked his sleeve. The cuff needed mending, which made her heart ache a little—he worked so hard! “Please, Babba, don’t be difficult. Was there anything bad in his letter to you?”

Her father raised his eyebrow. “Babba? I haven’t heard that since the last time you wanted something. No, his thoughts are at least interesting, perhaps useful, and all he asks in return is any news I can give him about his home or his family. There’s nothing wrong with the letter, except that he knows too much. How could a foreign prisoner have so much to say about our castle defenses?”

“He told me he fought here twenty years ago against the Tuan pirates. That he was a guest of the Temple Council.”

“I remember those days, but he remembers where every tower stairway is and how many steps it has, I swear! He must have a memory like a mantisery library.” Count Perivos frowned. “Still, some of his warnings and suggestions show wisdom, and I am willing to believe he meant them in good faith. But what is this madness about a serving girl?”

“I don’t know, Babba. He said she reminded him of someone.” Pelaya spotted her servant coming across the garden with the dark-haired girl walking slowly behind her. “Look—here they come now.”

“Madness,” her father said, but sighed as if weak protest were all he was allowed.

Seeing the laundry maid up close, Pelaya was both relieved and confused. Relieved, without quite understanding why, to see that this girl was only a year or two older than she was, and that while she was by no means ugly, she was not astoundingly pretty, either. But something else about this laundry servant put her on edge, although Pelaya could not say what it was—something in the quality of the girl’s watchfulness, in the cool and measured way she looked around the torchlit garden, was not what the steward’s daughter expected from someone who spent every day up to her elbows in the citadel’s washing tubs.

Now the girl turned that dark-eyed gaze onto Pelaya and her father, examining them as carefully as she had the surroundings, which was strange in itself: should she not have been looking first at the nobles who had summoned her? Pelaya found the inspection a little unnerving.

“Your name is Nira, is it not?” she asked the girl. “Someone wants to meet you. Do you understand me?”

The girl nodded. “Yes, Nira. Understand.” Either she had not been in Hierosol long or she was far more stupid than she looked, because her accent was barbarous.

Not for the first time that day, Pelaya wondered what she had stumbled into. A simple friendship had become something larger and much less comfortable. She was reassured that her father and his bodyguard were here to ensure that nothing was passed between the prisoner and this servant girl and that no tricks were attempted.

Now Perivos stepped forward. He spent a moment examining the girl Nira as thoroughly as she herself had inspected everything and everyone else. “So this is her?”

“Yes, Father.”

“I wish Olin Eddon would hasten himself. I have better things to do...”

“Yes, Father. I know.” She took a breath. “Please, be kind to him.”

He turned on her with a look of surprise and annoyance. “What does that mean, Pelaya?”

“He is a kind man, Father. Babba. He has always been polite to me, proper in his speech, and always insists that his guards stay—and my maid as well. He says I remind him of his daughter.”

Her father gave a little snort of disbelief. “Many young women remind him of his daughter, it seems.”

“Father! Be kind. You know his daughter has disappeared and both his sons are dead.”

The count shook his head, but she could see him softening. More subtle than her sister, she had learned ways to bend him gently to her will, and sometimes he even seemed to collaborate in his own defeats. “Do not badger me,” he said. “I will grant him the respect of some privacy—he is a king, after all—but I do not like it. And if anything untoward occurs...”

“It won’t, Father. He’s not like that.” Pelaya Akuanis was far too ladylike to curse even to herself, and did not know any really useful curse words in any case, but Olin’s favor was costing her more than the prisoner could know. She could not besiege her father for favors like this very often: it would be long months before she could expect to get her way in anything important again. I hope it’s worth it for him, talking to some laundry trollop. But she knew even in her disgruntled state that wasn’t quite fair: there was unquestionably something more to this girl, this Nira, although Pelaya still could not guess what it might be.

Olin and his guards arrived even as a quiet rumble of thunder growled through the northern sky. A storm was on the way. Pelaya’s father stepped forward and bowed his head to the prisoner.

“King Olin, you are a persuasive man, or else we would not all be standing in this garden with the rains sweeping toward us and my supper waiting. My daughter has risked her father’s love to bring you and this young woman here.”