There was a great deal more to it than that, of course, but she felt no need to tell them anything more. They were carrying her back toward the center of the world, toward Acacia. That was what she wanted. Despite themselves, they were doing her bidding, not the other way around. Better to keep quiet about it, though. She told them nothing of the events directly prior to her showing up at the magistrate’s. If they had not left so promptly they could have learned a great deal more about her than they knew, but this suited her as well. They saw before them a young woman of small, almost petite stature. She sat demurely, with an upright posture, dressed as a bird, feathered and adorned, a priestess who had lived a cloistered life. No doubt they knew her to be a virgin and took amusement from discussing it.
They could never have imagined that she had returned from Uvumal in the middle of the night. She had trudged up from the shore through the shadows of a wood-shaded lane. She limped on her battered right leg, bruised so deeply that the whole of the thigh was blue and purple and black. She wheezed from an injury done to her chest. The damage might have happened during the fall through the canopy, bouncing as she had from branch to branch, poked and jabbed and snapped about like a dead thing until she had finally come to rest tangled in a crosshatch of branches. Or she might have caught the lung sickness from a chill she had taken as she worked her slow way back through the forest, dragging a heavy burden behind her and then sailing a rainy sea toward Vumair. She would never know.
Ruinat had been hushed and sodden, pressed beneath the black blanket of a cloud-heavy night. Water collected in wagon ruts and footprints and depressions of every sort. She walked without care for the puddles. She just cut through them, halfway up to her ankles in the muck. She wore her sword strapped to her back, and behind her she pulled a burden great enough to cause her strain. She had twined the rope around her waist several times, tied it off, and run the rope up over her shoulder. The far end had been wound tight around the trussed bird, pinching its wings into its body. She was bringing it home, an offering to the people of Vumu, one they would have to decide themselves what to do with.
Climbing the temple steps took considerable effort. The corpse caught on each corner. She had to lean forward to ascend. Once on the top step, she loosened the rope from around her waist and flung it over the stone carving of Maeben. She tugged with all her weight, which was only enough to drag the bird into a semiupright position. There she left it. She simply dropped the rope and turned away without considering it further.
Inside her compound she moved with greater ease. She knew where every servant slept and that they would not vary their routine in her absence. That was how she noticed an extra person sleeping in one of the rooms. Melio. She had only to hear his breathing and to smell his scent in the slumbering air to know it was him. She hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t accounted for it in her planning of the evening’s events. But she knew she had to communicate with him in some way. It would be incomplete, she knew. It would drive him mad. But she had to give him something in return for all he had done for her.
It took her a few moments to pen a note to him. She held it to her chest as she entered his room. She sipped shallow breaths and moved with the silent stealth that had always come to her at moments of need. She propped her sword against the wall, where he was sure to see it on waking, and then she approached his sleeping form. She knew she would not wake him, so she placed the folded square of paper close to his face, safe within the shelter described by his bare arm. She risked extra moments gazing at him. She took in the generosity of his sleeping features, and for the first time she did not question why her eyes so loved to linger on his features. They were perfectly imperfect. She had never seen a face that pleased her so. Not, at least, since she had last looked up into her father’s face as he told the myths of the old times.
Though what she felt for Melio was different from what she had felt for her father, she still knew that people named the emotion love. She had known this was what she felt before she entered the room. She loved him so much that if she woke him she would never have carried through her plan. That was why she had let him sleep and instead wrote in crabbed, rusty Acacian letters…
M,
You were right about everything, of course.
I was slow to learn, but I know it now,
Below this, not an afterthought but a postscript that it took her a few minutes to pen, she wrote two more lines.
I love you.
If ever the world allows it, I’ll prove it to you.
It took a few hours of hushed preparation to move her plan forward. There was only one last deception necessary to open the path toward the heart of things. She moved stealthily to her dressing chambers, stripped naked, and washed in the basin of flower-scented water. She dressed in the goddess’s robes. She slipped into the garments in the closed space of her dressing chambers. She applied her makeup by feel. When she felt she was passable in appearance and when she sensed the coming day, Mena left her compound and went to the magistrate’s house, wherein lay the sleeping Meinish party.
The rest happened quickly. Maeander asked her only a few questions before being satisfied as to her identity. She was on their vessel within half an hour, and the ship was unmoored and in motion only minutes later. She felt it when they cleared the shallow harbor waters and began to ride the heaving ridges that rolled south to north this time of the year.
Maeander seemed to enjoy his time questioning her, despite the fact that she could not tell him anything he did not know already. She knew only as much about her brothers and her sister as Melio had been able to tell her, and none of that was particularly concrete intelligence. Actually, Maeander informed her of much more than she told him. From him she learned that Aliver was, in fact, alive and well in Talay. He was amassing an army in the center of that nation, gradually moving northward as his numbers grew.
“They say he’s become quite the speaker,” Maeander said. “He’s been touched by a sorcerer’s hand and now he’s rousing the masses with his oratory. He speaks of freeing the Known World from suppression, from forced labor, from harsh taxes, even from the Quota. Strange that he seems to have forgotten who created that world order in the first place.”
There was a rumor, unconfirmed as yet but credible, that Dariel had joined him. Until recently this youngest of the Akarans had been but a raiding thief of the Gray Slopes. And Corinn, Maeander said, had been converted to the Meinish cause by the pleasures of his brother’s bed. “Many called her the chieftain’s whore behind her back. I’d never do so myself, of course.”
“No,” Larken added, as if on cue, “if you were to call her anything, you’d do it to her face.”
Listening to all this, Mena managed to control the emotion that swelled in her. She had dealt with much of it already, in her own way. As she dragged Maeben’s corpse through the forest she had been bombarded by memories from her childhood. They jabbed at her as much as the tree limbs and gnarled root networks and bloodsucking insects. She even spoke to her siblings as she walked, trying to explain herself to them, asking what they had become, trying to see if they could unite again and be the same again. Of course not, she knew. Nothing could be the same. Nobody could have imagined she’d become what she now was, nor could she imagine what they were. But she decided that there was no doubt in her-she loved them no matter what. Nothing Maeander said changed that in the slightest.