To reach the estates from the sea, one docked within the protection of a gated port, hemmed in by great blocks that had been lowered to serve as breakwaters. One morning well into the Acacian spring, Corinn stepped from a pleasure vessel onto this stone pier, Hanish Mein at her side. The two climbed into an open-top carriage and began the switchback ascent up a series of ramps. Though she still tried, it was getting more and more difficult to hold to her aloofness. Hanish was constant in his attentions, more so recently than ever. In the weeks since Calfa Ven he had requested her company on every journey. And there had been several. He had somehow managed to get her to serve as a guide to the high circles of Bocoum. With carefully placed questions-during what must have been orchestrated moments of solitude-Hanish again and again got her to open her mouth and speak civilly to him. She still planted barbs in him when she could, but he proved more consistent with his courteousness than she could be at rebutting him.
The villa they were to stay in was lavish in the way only vacation homes ever were, designed to attest to the owner’s wealth, to pamper guests for short periods. It would have belonged to an Acacian family, perhaps one known to her. She did not ask. Such things failed to trouble Corinn as they once had. Everything, it seemed, had once belonged to Acacians. Now it belonged to Meins. She knew she should consider this a personal affront, but indignation was hard to hold on to year after year. She had been fluent in the Meinish language for some time. Aspects of their culture that had once seemed foreign to her now blended-in courtly circles, at least-so intricately with Acacian ways that it was hard to know where one ended and the other began.
The villa had been anchored to the plains above the cliffs. It draped over the upper rim and stretched down several stories. One room flowed into the next with a sensation almost like sliding, as if the rooms moved to adjust to your progress. One reached a room simply by initiating a motion toward it. Corinn found it all somewhat disconcerting, yet pleasurably so. All the walls facing the sea made full use of the vistas, with building-length patios or windows set low on the walls to reveal the heaving sea far below. The mosaic pattern on the floor simulated ocean waves, whitecapped and frothy. Porpoises leaped into and out of the swells. Fishermen clung to tiny boats, tilted at precarious angles that would have overturned actual vessels. Left alone in her room, Corinn spent a portion of the afternoon on her knees, studying the details, dragging her fingertips across the tumultuous motion. It was so well done. She loved the way the fishermen seemed always on the verge of destruction, loved that their smiling faces suggested they thought it all a great game.
The first evening, she and Hanish attended a banquet hosted by a newly rich Meinish family. In times past Hanish would have entertained the gathering at her expense, finding something to needle her about. But the usual entourage had not come on this trip. Hanish was cordial enough with his hosts, but he never truly engaged with them, despite their repeated efforts to bring him to the center of things. He simply did not seem that interested, neither in them nor in the music; nor in the food and drink so abundant around them; nor in the fawning gestures of men and women alike, all of them so eager to praise Hanish Mein, their hero, the only Mein to ever ascend to the throne of an empire, the one who might yet lift the old curse. He was the greatest chieftain in the history of their people, and folk such as these never tired of praising him for it.
Instead of paying them any mind, he blocked out a space for himself and Corinn to share privately. She could no longer deny-at least not to herself-that she enjoyed speaking as he listened. She enjoyed answering queries, liked to have his gray eyes upon her, liked knowing that the rest of the room watched from outside the pull of his gravity. The confidence which she had once thought of only as arrogance actually had an allure to it.
And Hanish relaxed in her presence, even as troubling affairs of state crowded his mind. He told her of the league’s ongoing campaign against the Outer Isles raiders. It had not gone as easily as the league had predicted, he said. Not at all. One captain of the bandits called himself “Spratling”-an ironic play on words, no doubt, as there was a tiny, inconsequential fish that went by that name. This Spratling was not at all inconsequential. In addition to hobbling a warship and actually killing a leagueman, he had exploded a portion of the league platforms. The initial blast tore the warehouses to pieces and threw up a spray of flaming pitch that set the entire structure ablaze. Even the stuff that fell into the sea continued to burn. It floated on the surface and came riding the swells toward the other platforms with each shift in the tides. The fires, his sources said, burned for a week before they were contained or dissipated. The raiders had done so much damage that the league postponed the spring shipment of mist. They would be months working to recover, backlogged in every province.
“All because of a little spratling.” Hanish dismissed it all with a wave of his hand. “Anyway, it’s only a temporary setback. The league has a thousand weapons to bring to bear. That’s what they’re saying; I’d like to believe them. When they’re crippled, we’re crippled as well.”
“Have you considered doing away with them?”
“With the league?” Hanish asked.
Corinn hesitated a moment. “I know the league has been around for ages, but if they cannot even defend themselves against a band of raiders…why not handle the trade directly?”
“No chance of that. You cannot imagine how entrenched the league is. They have steel hooks planted in every aspect of the world’s affairs. They are efficient at what they do usually. Perhaps most to the point, they’ve made many powerful persons rich beyond their dreams. This was true in your father’s time; so it is true in ours.”
“You never miss a chance to point out that my people began the world’s injustices,” Corinn said, feeling a flare of her old anger. “We were the villains who created the Quota, who brought mist to the Known World, who conscripted slave labor to work the mines. You want me to know that this foulness was inside me all along. You act as if you had a righteous mandate to overthrow it, but how have you made the world better? You’ve killed the slave master, but instead of freeing the slaves you’ve stepped into his place-”
Hanish interrupted, speaking in a flippant tone that ignored the import of her argument altogether. “Will you dance with me?”
Corinn showed her annoyance with a cold stare. “Meinish music isn’t fit for dancing.” This was not just an insult. Their tunes were still strange to her ears. Compared to the lush, all-encompassing fullness of Acacian ensemble groups, the plucked notes of the Meinish instruments were discordant, the melodies spare and unpredictable. She could not imagine how to dance to it. Nobody else was.
“So you would dance, had we the proper music?”
When she did not answer immediately, Hanish took her by the wrist. He squeezed her fine bones between his thumb and forefinger and tugged her toward the center of the room. “In all the many centuries that musicians have played Meinish tunes, I’m sure that someone has danced to this one. Someone has felt within the sounds a rhythm suited to the movement of two bodies. That’s how I like to think of it. One must find rhythms others’ ears don’t hear.”