'Yet your family is pledged to Ishii's house.'
'This is true. And to pledge myself to you, Lady Terese, must seem to a Tai-endi like yourself the grossest and most repugnant of behaviors. But I have observed and studied, and I have reflected on this man, Bakhtiian, and seen that by his own efforts he creates opportunity for himself. I am clever. I am industrious. Yet my emperor decrees that I must toil in the same position as my father's father's father, and suffer the consequences of an act committed by an ancestor I could not even know. Does this seem fair to you?'
'No, truly it does not. But Hon Garii, to work for me is to work for my brother, the duke. You must know what this means.'
He bowed again. 'I am yours, Lady Terese. Command me as you wish.'
This was it, then. She took in a deep breath. 'I must see the maintenance rooms. I must know the truth of this palace, why it is here, and why Cha Ishii was ordered to investigate. Will you meet me tonight in the eating hall after the rest are asleep?''
His skin remained white, colorless. So easily did he betray his emperor. 'As you command, Lady Terese.'
She nodded. 'Then return to your duties now, and say nothing of this to anyone.' He bowed and walked past her back to the shrine. She let out a long sigh and tested the water in the fountain with her finger. It stung. She wiped her finger on her sleeve and turned, hearing Kirill behind her.
'What an unmelodious language they speak,' he said, looking after Garii's retreat. He hesitated and considered the grass, a peculiar expression on his face. 'Tess, what does it mean that your brother is this prince in Jheds?''
Coming from Kirill, it seemed a puzzling question. 'It means that he rules a great city and a great deal of farm and pasture and woodland lying all around it and supervises a port with many ships and rich trading from lands close by and lands far away across the seas.'
'When you go back to Jheds, what will you do? If you are his heir, then-then you would become like an etsana, wouldn't you? You would have your own tent, and eventually children. You would need a husband, or a man to act as your husband-' He pulled his hand through his red-gold hair. 'Tess, no one ever said-Bakhtiian can never go back there. He has given himself to this work now. Whatever he wants from you, he can't go with you.' He looked at her finally, hope sparking in his eyes. 'But-' He broke off, took in a deep breath, and went on. 'But I could.'
Foliage covered the verdant height of the surrounding hills, wreathed here and there with a curl of cloud, like some half-forgotten thought. An insect chirruped and fell silent. 'Oh, Kirill,' she said, and stopped.
He smiled a little wryly. 'I know very well, my heart, that your brother probably already has some alliance arranged.'
'No,' she said in an undertone. 'He doesn't. I won't lie to make that my excuse. I can't take you with me.'
You can you can you can. Her thoughts raced wildly. His leaving would not alter anything; his knowing the truth about where she really came from would never matter. But what would life be like for him? She would be his only anchor in the bewildering confusion of space, of Earth, of the Empire. He would be utterly dependent on her. The kind of love they had was not strong enough to weather that sort of relationship, was not meant to. One or the other of them would soon fall out of love; one or the other would grow to resent their circumstances. And once he had left, Kirill could never return. She could not tear him apart from every seam that bound him to the fabric of life. Kirill loved her sincerely, she believed that, but she also believed that Kirill loved and had loved and would love other women as well. That was the real difference between Kirill and Ilya: Kirill was far more resilient.
'Gods, Kirill,' she said, moved by his asking, by his offering. 'Believe me, if I could, I would take you.'
He hung his head, and she grimaced and went to hug him. He allowed this freedom, he put his arms around her, but after a moment he disengaged himself gently. 'I believe you. Tess, I will always respect you most of all for your honesty.' He kissed her chastely on the cheek, hesitated, and then walked away.
There was a stone bench beside the fountain. Tess sat on it and leaned her head back, letting the weak heat of the sun beat on her face.
And I used to think my life was complicated. Life as Charles's heir was beginning to seem like child's work now. She felt thoroughly exhausted and yet she had an uncanny feeling that she was waiting for someone else to accost her. Get it all over with in one long, miserable scene. King Lear must have felt like this, battered by one storm after the next. Then, because the comparison was so ludicrous, she chuckled.
Boots scuffed leaves. She looked around. 'Hello, Vladimir. You startled me.'
'You were here with one of the khepelli,' he said accusingly. 'Ilya has said all along you were a spy.'
Tess examined Vladimir. His vanity was the vanity of the insecure. He had taken great pains with his appearance, had trimmed his hair, and shaved his face so no trace of beard or mustache showed. Jewelry weighed him down: rings, bracelets, necklaces-were all of them from lovers? He had a deft hand for embroidery but no taste at all, so that the design adorning his sleeves and collar was merely garish. The ornately-hilted saber that Ilya had gifted him, the legacy of the arenabekh, simply capped the whole absurd ensemble.
'So I am, Vladimir,' she agreed amiably, 'which is why I sent Kirill after him.'
He blinked. 'But-' He shrugged suddenly, a movement copied from Bakhtiian, and sat down carefully on the grass. 'Why did you come here, then?'
'I'm traveling to Jeds. I thought you knew that.'
'I know what you say. Josef told Niko that you can read the writing here. But no one can read that, not even Mother Avdotya.'
'How do you know?'
'I was born here,' he replied without visible emotion. 'Or at least they say that I was.'
'You must know Yeliana. You must have grown up with her.'
'She was very young when I left.' Behind him, through a ragged line of bushes, she saw the slender lines of a statue, something human, its features worn away so that there were only depressions for the eyes and a slight rise to mark the lips. 'She is as much of a sister as I have ever had. But I did not want to become a priest.'
'So what did you do?'
He shrugged again, that childlike copy of Bakhtiian. 'I rode to join Kerchaniia Bakhalo's jahar-ledest. Ilya found me there.' So, thought Tess, your life began when Ilya found you. 'I'm very good with saber,' he offered by way of explanation for this inexplicable action on the part of the great Bakhtiian. 'And Ilya had lost his family.'
Had lost a nephew, Tess reflected, who might well have been around Vladimir's age now. Perhaps this was one way of atoning.
'You knew about the shrine,' said Vladimir abruptly. 'You came here, planning all along to trick him down the Avenue.''
The accusation was so preposterous that Tess laughed. 'You think I sailed across wide seas from a far distant land, risked my life, all for the express purpose of marrying Bakhtiian? Whom I had, incidentally, never heard of.'
'Everyone has heard of him,' said Vladimir stiffly.
'But Vladimir,' she said, deciding that the only fair throw here would be one equally wild, 'why should I want to marry Bakhtiian? I am a great heir in my own right, and anyway, everyone knows that Bakhtiian has never loved anyone since-'
'It's not true,' he cried, jumping to his feet. 'You'll never make me believe that of him.' He stalked away.
Since she had been about to say, 'since his family died,' she wondered what Vladimir had thought she was about to say. By God, he was afraid that once Bakhtiian had a legitimate family, he, Vladi, would be cast off again. Poor child, to have to live so dependent on one person's whim.
A flight of birds caught her eye as they wheeled and dove about some far corner of the park. She heard their faint calls, laughable things, like the protests of the vacillating. A rustling sounded from a bush, and a small, rust- colored animal, long-eared and short-legged, nosed past a crinkled yellow leaf and scrambled out to the center of the sward, huffing like a minute locomotive. It froze. The tufts of hair in the inside of its ears were white, but its eyes were as black as the void.
She felt inexplicably cheered. However hard it had been-and still was-it had been right to tell Kirill that he could not come with her. It had been honest, and it had been true. She shifted on the bench. The little animal shrieked, a tiny hiccup, and it fled back into the bush, precipitating a flood of rustling around her and then silence. She smiled.
On Earth she had learned to walk without hearing, to look without seeing. She had surrounded herself with a
