“There is no better time to take Shen and the Santoth to Acacia. It may resolve everything. Sinper Ou is still a danger, but if you get Shen to her father, he will be no threat. You must take her, just as they asked you to. Stay in your small group. Keep the Santoth hidden. Join the pilgrims converging on Acacia and announce Shen directly to Aliver.”
“And if he has not really returned?”
Sangae worked his fingers into the wrinkled skin of his forehead. “Pray to the Giver that he has. I feel that the fate of the world depends on him once more.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Standing before a gathering of Bocoum’s merchants, Barad the Lesser knew exactly what he wanted to say. He had rehearsed the words inside his head both waking and in his dreams. He would tell them this: “The Akaran dynasty was founded on acts of evil. Deep in the cushion of the royal chairs is the blood of two brothers slain by another brother’s hand. It’s a nation built on the split between old friends, one that sent the other into exile. It’s the product of a man driven so mad by the power of his sorcery that he banished his companions from the land to punish them for raising him up. A people has but two choices when faced with such dreadful truth: deny it and live sucking at the tit of the lie like infants or face it with the open eyes of adults. And if you face it, what then? Only one possibility. You must dismantle the lie. You must tear down all the things built on it, for they are corrupted and will bring you down ere you look away.”
The merchants listened, applauded him, praised the queen, and thanked him for his words.
Days later, speaking to the rich of Manil, he decided to say this: “You may ask me, ‘Why must I change what has worked so well? Why must I cast my wealth and pride and history onto the ground?’ I say to you that you have no wealth. You have no pride. You have no true understanding of history. These things you cling to are vapors in guise of truth. A man cannot eat vapor. A woman cannot wrap vapor around herself and find warmth. A child cannot wake in the night and rush to vapor for solace. And you may say to me, ‘My mother lived and died like this. My grandfather lived and died like this. The world thinks my nation is supreme. What madness that you want me to turn from that.’ How do I rebut those words? With a certainty. That certainty is that each and every crime and lie and falsehood will be returned to you with interest. You may say, ‘Prove it.’ I have only to point north to do so. That is what treads toward us across the ice. Not foreign invaders. Not the whim of fate. Not horrors set against us without reason. What treads toward us are the living forms of our years and years of folly and injustice.”
The rich of Manil offered him toasts in his honor.
Before a meeting of the Acacian Senate in Alecia-called into session specifically to hear him-he intended to roar, and did: “There is but one thing to do! We must tear apart the lies. We must shred the swaddling clothes we were born into, pull back from the delusion, stand naked and afraid for just long enough to reorder the world as it rightly should be. It will be hard. It will be painful. It will be a trial like none we have faced. But we will emerge closer to the true beings we all wish to be. We will be Kindred.”
Among the jubilant faces that applauded him as he exited the chamber, Barad saw Hunt, the Kindred representative from Aos. He was still, close-lipped, and grave. Barad wanted to rush to him, but instead he walked by, turning his face away as he neared. Why did I do that? he wondered, even as his feet moved him away.
When he was done with each of these speeches, when he had no more words and his bass voice went silent, when he dropped his animated gestures and looked through his stone eyes at the faces his words had worked miracles on… he knew that he had not said any of the things he had intended to. Instead, he had praised the queen. He had sung her praises and reinforced the empire’s shackles. Somehow, she controlled each word spoken through his mouth. Each destination she had chosen. Each time he turned his strides in a specific direction it was following a path she had laid out.
At times the words he uttered were his own, but only for short moments. On occasion barbed comments and asides and even criticisms of the queen escaped his lips. In his first days he had thought he could build on these, string them together so that he might explain his true sentiments. But he managed only to weave a folksy, familiar humor in with the comments.
Nor could he express how much he loved the people to whom he preached, something he was reminded of at every turn. He recognized the faces of the farmers north of Danos. They were the same ones among whom he had shepherded King Grae of Aushenia. Now, as he spoke to them, he could see in their faces how they struggled to twin his former message with whatever it was he now espoused. In Bocoum an elderly woman fixed him with her bloodshot eyes, her face ridged with some great effort of comprehension. He so wanted to explain everything to her. Instead, he had pressed his lips together as he turned and walked away.
Watching as his boat sailed out of Alecia’s harbor, he saw the rocks from which children swam with dolphins. He caught a splash of spray on his fingertips and touched them to his lips. This was a land to love, peopled by souls who had never yet been allowed to be fully themselves. Though he returned to Acacia full of dread, even the sight of the isle itself reminded him of this. To his eyes, the island and the sky, the moving sea and the leaping creatures in it were all gradations of stone, different textures of a granite world. Solid stone here. Liquid stone there. A stone as transparent as vapor there, and stone as glistening as a wet dolphin’s back there. He saw with a clarity no different from before, but it was a clarity of sand and rock, of white and gray and black.
In his dreams the world was as it had been, sometimes so vibrantly colored that he gasped himself awake with the joy of seeing it. Awake into his gray curse of world. The way Acacia thrust up through the turquoise sea. Layer upon terraced layer climbing ever higher, so full of color, each spire a jewel trying to outshine its peers as it pierced the belly of the sky. How could the heart of a nation so corrupt be so terribly beautiful? How could a world he had lived in for so many years continue to astonish, confound, defeat him? How could he see one thing and remember another each and every minute of his imprisoned freedom?
It was maddening, but he should not have been surprised. The queen had told him it would be this way. Weeks ago, when she leaped at him and grasped his head in her hands, he had lifted his hand to smash her. He would have done it, except that she slipped her fingers into his eyes and pressed. On her lips and in those fingers hummed a power that took away the connection between his will and his ability to act on it. His anger did not die within him, but the fist raised to crush her recognized no kinship with it. It hung there a moment, until the fingers opened and the hand came to rest gently on her arm.
She whispered, “Your mind is mine.”
In answer, he formed curses behind his lips, refutations, a litany of condemnation. When his lips moved they said, “Yes.” He heard this and screamed “No!” but his lips said “Yes.”
N o longer a pariah, Barad could wander wherever he wished in the palace, even up to the higher terraces near the royal quarters. He was trapped, but to all the world he looked to be a free man. He could follow his feet wherever they cared to take him. Clearly, the queen had given instructions that he was to be indulged like some dignitary of high rank when he was on the island. But he could not form actions from any desires contrary to the queen’s wishes. He might decide to leave the island and flee into hiding, but he would forget his mission after only a few steps. One time he even imagined his own death. Instead of using the knife he had chosen for the purpose on his own flesh, he peeled an apple.
Because of this curse, he was sitting on a bench in the center of the maze work of canals, listening to the gurgling fountain and watching the slow-moving piscine forms gliding through the water beneath him. He was exactly where the queen wished him to be. He knew it, and he could do nothing about it.
Rhrenna sat beside him, scribbling notes on a sheaf of parchment. “A successful trip, I would say. The queen will be pleased with you.”
Barad pulled his gaze from the water and rolled his eyes toward her. The effort of moving the stone orbs was considerable. It fatigued him more than moving his large frame through the world, and if he moved them too much he developed headaches that lasted for days. There was an advantage to them, though. At times they saw with a clarity his old eyes never had. It was not a matter of visual acuity, really. It was more that they translated the truth more completely, as if he read emotions and thoughts as clearly as he saw the features that hid them.
He cleared his throat to avoid responding to her comment. He would have told her that he hated the queen, not cared that she be pleased. He would have spat at her and called her a servant of suppression, a deluded tool of an evil mistress. But none of it would come out as he intended.
