What Kessa Warned

The messenger came on the third day of the heat, and she looked as if she had walked out of the winter.

She was a girl of perhaps fourteen, small and fierce and burned the color of dark honey, wrapped in layers of gray felt and ragged fur in the middle of a blazing afternoon. Her lips were cracked. Her hair, which had been rubbed with ash, hung in stiff gray ropes to her waist. She stood in the palace gatehouse among the astonished sentries with a staff of black wood in her fist and a look of unshakable purpose, and when the corporal of the guard asked her business, she said in a thick, flat, northern accent, "I'm for the Mother."

"The what?"

"The Mother. Who was in our village. With the dragon." She leaned on the staff. "I walked nine days."

It was Berylla who brought her up.

Solaia was in the small sitting room at the end of the east corridor, with a book open on her knee that she had not read a line of. She had been there since breakfast. She had not gone to the Archive, or the practice yard, or the Aerie. She had not taken her usual walk along the terrace, nor sat on the low wall to watch Soot chase the sparrows. She had simply sat, with the window open and the heat pouring in, and thought.

She looked up as the door opened.

"My lady," said Berylla, a little stiffly. "A visitor."

The girl came in and stopped dead.

She stood in the middle of the carpet in her filthy furs, with her black staff upright in her hand and her mouth a little open, and stared. She stared at the high ceiling and the silk hangings and the gilded clock. She stared at the vase of lilies on the table. And then, last of all, she stared at Solaia, and the color went out of her cracked face, and she dropped to her knees on the rug with such force that the staff clattered to the floor.

"Mother," she whispered.

"Please. Don't. Get up." Solaia was already across the room. "Berylla, a chair. And water. And something to eat. She's half starved."

"My lady, she has walked from the mountains."

"I can see that."

"She has fleas."

"Then bring a bath as well."

Berylla's lips tightened. But there was something at the corners of them that was not quite disapproval, and she went.

…

The girl's name was Imra.

She ate like a wolf. She drank three cups of water in a gulp each, and then sat holding the fourth in both hands, staring into it, while Solaia sat across from her and waited. She was frightened. That was plain. She had walked through the wilderness for nine days without once flinching, and she was frightened now, of a white-curtained sitting room and a woman in a gown, and her hands shook so hard that the water slopped.

"It's all right," said Solaia gently. "Take your time."

"I'm not supposed to take time." The girl swallowed. "Mother Kessa said. She said to go straight. She said if you were on the road I wasn't to wait, but to run." She set down the cup. "She sent a thing."

"What kind of thing?"

Imra reached into the breast of her tunic and drew out a flat bundle wrapped in oilcloth. She unfolded it with grubby, careful fingers. Inside lay a piece of gray cloth, no larger than a handkerchief, ragged at the edges as though it had been torn in haste from a larger garment. It was felted wool, coarse and heavy, still faintly smoky. And across it, in a rough brown script that looked as if it had been written with a burnt stick, were three lines.

Solaia knew the hand. She had seen it on a slate in a cramped cell beneath the palace. It was the same old sloping script that the women of the north had used for a thousand winters.

She read.

Mother. Do not climb the black mountain.

Whatever he says. Whatever he offers. It is not a throne. It is a mouth.

We saw it in the fire. We are coming.

She read it three times. Then she folded the cloth very small, and sat with it clenched in her fist, listening to the sound of her own breath.

"When did she write this?" she asked.

"Eleven days ago. After the Seer burned the fire." Imra twisted her fingers. "She'd been sitting at the hearth three nights. We didn't know what for. She didn't eat. On the third night the white flame went black, all at once, and she screamed. She screamed like a bird." The girl's eyes filled. "She tore her sleeve off, and wrote it, and sent me. She said there wasn't time to tell it properly. She said you'd know what to do."

"What did she see?"

"A mountain." Imra swallowed. "A black one. With white teeth. And you at the top of it. And the Emperor on his knees. And a great..." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "A great hand. Closing."

The sunlight lay in a long bar across the carpet. Outside, in the garden, a bird sang, unconcerned.

"Is the Emperor coming to the north?" said Solaia, very quietly.

"Not that she said."

"Then why are the Ashborn coming?"

"To be near you." The girl looked up. "Mother, we've been waiting all our lives. We won't be far if you call. That's what she said to tell you. That whatever happens on the black mountain, we'll be on the plain below it. Every one of us. With the torches."

"Imra."

"Yes, Mother?"

"What's the black mountain called?"

The girl blinked. "It hasn't got a name. Only the Church has names for it. They call it the Ridge."

…

She did not tell Kieran.

She would ask herself, afterward, why. She would lie awake, in places far from the palace, and turn it over, and each time come to a different answer. Cowardice. Pride. A stubborn small hope that she had misread him, that the sweat on his jaw had been the heat, that the click of the key in the dark had been a man seeking his tobacco. She wanted very much to be wrong. She wanted so much to be wrong that she could taste it, bitter and bright at the back of her throat.

She found him in the study at dusk, writing a dispatch.

He looked up as she came in, and the lines of his face eased. It was a small, instant, unguarded softening, the kind that happens when a man sees the one thing in a room he wants to see. He put down his pen. He said, "You have been avoiding me all day."

"I've been tired."

"You have been thinking. I know the look." He leaned back in the chair. "Come and tell me what about."

She crossed the room. She sat on the arm of the chair, close, and he reached up without looking and took her hand, and brought it to his mouth, and kissed the knuckles. His lips were warm. He smelled of ink and sun-warmed leather and the faint clean sharpness of the soap he used.

"I had a visitor," she said.

"So I am told. A child from the north."

"Imra. She brought me a message."

"From Kessa."

"Yes."

"What did it say?"

She watched his face. It was a trick she had learned in the first week, in the gold bedchamber, watching the faces of men who wished her dead: do not look at the eyes. Watch the mouth. It was the mouth that could not lie, because it had not been told what to do. And she saw, with a small cold shock, that his mouth had not moved at all.

It had not moved, because he already knew.

"She said she was coming south," said Solaia, steadily. "With a few of the village. For the harvest festival. She said I'd like to meet the children."

His fingers eased on hers.

"That is kind of her."

"I thought I might see them. If it's safe."

"Of course." He kissed her hand again. "Whatever you wish. I shall have rooms prepared." A pause. "Is there anything else?"

She looked at him.

Behind him, through the tall window, the western sky had gone to flame. The long light lay along his shoulder and the line of his cheek, turning his hair to bronze. He looked like a prince in an old painting. He looked tired, and young, and utterly sincere. And in the second drawer of the desk, a foot from his elbow, behind a false panel she had seen him slide shut an hour ago, lay a thing she could not see.

Ask him.

The words rose to her lips and stuck.

If she asked, he would answer. He would take her hand and look her in the eye and tell her a story she could not break, and she would nod, and the thing between them would fold over and close like a wound. And then she would never know. She would be left, forever, with a thing that might be love or might be management, and no way to tell.

Or he'll tell me the truth, said a small voice. And then I'll know.

That was worse.

"No," said Solaia. "Nothing else."

She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, light and quick, and rose.

"Dinner at eight?" he said.

"I'll be there."

She went out. She closed the door behind her. She walked down the corridor with her back straight and her hands loose, past the guards, past the footman, past the long gilded mirror in which a pale woman in a gray gown went by without a glance. She reached the end of the passage, where the light failed. And there, in the shadow of an empty window-bay, she put her fist to her mouth, and bit down, and did not make a sound.

The cloth was still in her other hand. It was warm, and rough, and smelled of smoke and the far cold north.

It is not a throne. It is a mouth.

She opened her fingers. She read it one more time by the last red light. Then she pushed it deep into her sleeve, against the skin of her wrist, where she could feel it, and went to dress for dinner.