Treason's Shore (31 page)

“I know that you were taken by pirates.”

She laughed. “You could say, in a manner of speaking, that I took them. But I will not bore you about my experiences while you are making a point.”

“I don’t know that it’s worth making.” He spread his hands. “I can respect rank based on merit. I have trouble respecting the unmerited supremacy of birth rank. When I looked beyond the dazzle of wealth, fine clothes, and houses, the brilliance of art and intricacies of fashion, I discovered that in any other hierarchy other than a royal court, one does not have to suffer fools and defer. Pirate leaders are savage, but not stupid, or they don’t last long.”

Saris’ amusement verged on laughter. “Do you consider yourself free from snobbery?”

“I’m a vile snob,” he retorted. “I was raised to be.” And when her eyes narrowed, “My personal hierarchy ranks people according to wit and skill. Style. And power. And so I’m leaving. Mother, why did you give me the education of a prince? That’s not a requirement of the sex trade.”

Saris set down her little gold bread knife. “Walk with me.”

She opened what had once been an arched window, scarcely more than an arrow slit. Someone had knocked out the stone to floor level, widening the window just enough to permit passage. A door of mullioned glass had been fitted in, the central muntins worked around colored glass in a pattern of twining lilies.

Tau followed his mother out onto a narrow parapet. The stone was pale gray, the crenellated edges of the wall weather-worn. This was the oldest portion of the castle.

She shaded her eyes with her hand, gazing over the terraced valley, where people moved about tending the grapevines. In the distance, a carriage rolled along the road, pulled by four horses. Her gaze drifted past and came to rest on a pair of horseback riders proceeding up the steep hill at a sober pace; they vanished round a cliff. Ah.

“Let us return to the matter of masks.” Saris smiled at her son. “You’ll probably remember, if your memory is as clear as mine, that I taught you all about how humans mask emotion. That we in the pleasure houses see people not just unclothed but unmasked. Desires bared, emotions unhidden.”

“I remember. But—”

She held up a hand, her smile wry. “How long before you discovered how wrong I was?”

“When I was taken by pirates. Later when I worked at the Lark Ascendant. I learned that some don’t take off their social mask even if they remove their clothes. Pretence is among the lineaments of desire, just like anywhere else.”

She laced her fingers together tightly. “My mothers warned me, when I was small, but like you, I thought I knew better than they. What did old people know? Then they died within two weeks of one another before I turned fifteen. I knew enough to run the house, and inside I was queen. Everyone deferred to my so-called wit and wisdom.”

“What happened?”

“I discovered the real world when my house was burned down. I still prevailed, but my life was . . . difficult for a time.”

Tau held out a hand in appeal. “I’m not going to rail at you for my upbringing. I know I couldn’t raise a child well. And you were about the same age I am now when you were raising me.”

“I realize now that I was lonely, but at the time I thought to create the perfect being,” she admitted. “And my intention was to send you as an elegant weapon against our family in Sartor, who’d had the temerity to drive my parents out. You were not surprised when I told you our name. How much of the rest have you figured out?”

“That we’re tied in with the Montredavan-Ans in some way, that there was probably a runaway match, and that there was some sort of disgrace or I would have been claimed by cousins years ago. And you kept changing our name.”

Saris nodded on each point. “A runaway match indeed. The Marlovans were angry because a missing Montredavan-An bride upset their marriage treaties, and the Deis were upset because my mother had been chosen to mate with a distant cousin she loathed. Both girls were disinherited. Not that that presently means anything for the Montredavan-Ans. But for the Deis, the worst crime of all is acting contrary to family decree. The Dei family, in their own view, (as you have probably discovered) transcends mere governments.” She dusted her fingertips together. “So they are raised.”

“So you resumed one of the names you were entitled to when you married”—
your duke
—“his grace?”

“Yes. With the Deis everything is fine, and you are welcome to as much of their attention as you want. I never met any Montredavan-Ans, and what little I’ve heard makes me disinclined to pursue their acquaintance. I will never lay claim to their name.”

“I’ve met a couple of them. Back to why you raised me the way you did.”

“Can’t you guess it? Well, no, you don’t have the crucial piece of information yet. The runaways ended up in Colend for many splendid years. Thence to Sartor, full of art and style. They were initially welcomed by the eastern Deis, probably as a snub to my family; the western Deis. They set up in the pleasure business, bringing the newest Colendi arts to it. Unfortunately, this was just when the current queen was beginning her reign of austerity, and to counter it—she was ruining business—they used their popularity to begin to interfere in politics. I can tell you more if you really want to hear it, but they were invited to leave and not return.”

“Ah. So they returned to Iasca Leror, and set up in Parayid under a new name?”

“Exactly. They were very old before thinking about an heir. The Birth Spell gave them me. Our success by then was known up and down the coast, all the houses with pretensions copying our styles to varying degrees and becoming social centers. I was raised to resent the pretensions of the Sartoran Deis and thought the best revenge would be to send you back to Sartor one day as a prince in every way superior to them.”

“Revenge?” Tau gave his soundless laugh.

“You were to break hearts, then snap your fingers under their noses. Or carry off the most wealthy and prominent of them. The choice was yours, you were just not to reveal who you were until it was done.” She chuckled. “Well, I was very young and arrogant, I must confess.”

“So you will not raise your heir the same way you raised me?” He indicated her middle.

“No. I believe in retrospect I told you too much far too young. There was no chance for discovery, to emotionally comprehend the facts I required you to learn. But I only comprehended that after you were gone.”

Tau almost laughed. “Had you planned to tell me who I was before sending me to Sartor?”

“Oh, yes. You were to outwit them, you see, and outmatch them at their own games. See beneath their masks.” An airy flick of fingers from an arched wrist. “You know what is said of us in the histories:
Deis are kingmakers though never kings.
” She smiled. “Let us finish our breakfast in peace.”

They slipped back inside and finished their meal, each feeling far better about the other than they had expected.

At last she smiled. “May I make one last request?”

It was lightly said, and she did not move, but he sensed that this next surprise was also planned. Maybe everything had been planned. Exasperation drove out regret: dealing with his mother was like walking in a maze of mirrors and glass. You think you’ve found the path at last, then walk smash into an invisible deflection.

“Of course,” he said, because of course he could not say no.

“Stop in the blue parlor on your way.” She rose and shook out her skirts. “It’s the little room where you were first brought.” She kissed his brow and rustled out.

A short time later he opened the door to the blue parlor, and then stood on the threshold, stunned into speechlessness.

Chapter Twenty

J
ORET Dei caught herself up first.

“Where is Her Grace? The footman said she was coming.” Joret narrowed her eyes, offering a friendly smile. “You will be her son Taumad, am I right?”

It took Tau a few long breaths to gather his wits. Was this how people felt when they saw him? But what did people
see,
besides pretty features? His kin-cousin Joret Dei was even more beautiful than Saris in a way that had nothing to do with youth. There was no mirror maze in Joret’s dimpled smile or dark-fringed blue gaze. There was no vestige of artfulness in her exquisite features or dramatic coloring, no studied grace in the straight limbs clothed in the plainest of riding outfits. Her hair was braided up into a coronet in the style of the Marlovan women when at work; she did not hide her thoughts as her expression changed from doubt to gravity and then interest.

“I-I don’t know what to say,” he muttered finally, awkward and unsettled.

“You don’t have to say anything. I rode up here to Elsaraen on her invitation, and I did want to meet you. I just did not expect it to come about so suddenly. Where is the duchess, and why did she send you alone?”

“I don’t know.” Tau made a rueful gesture. “I still don’t understand why she does some things.” And then, the humor fading, “You rode all this way to meet me? I trust you don’t believe I’m here to make trouble.”

Her mouth deepened at the corners. “You haven’t met the Sartoran Deis yet, have you?”

“No. But I heard some gossip about the one my age. What was his name, Yaskandar?”

“Yaska
is
trouble.” She shrugged. “But then all of us are. That’s what I’ve discovered. Even when we don’t mean to be.”

Tau was about to say
You weren’t,
then remembered the gossip from the other Marlovan Runners about how Evred’s older brother, Alden-Sierlaef, had chased this Joret clear around the Marlovan kingdom. In a sense, the violent change of government could be laid at her door. And was, in some people’s minds. Yet she had not intended any of it.

“Is the entire family . . . like us?”

“Yaska could be your brother, though his skin is darker than yours. Not as dark as mine. His hair is almost as dark as mine as well, but your eyes are exactly the same pale brown that people call gold. My mother had your light eyes, but a long nose, and hair the color of mud. My cousins have large blue eyes, round cheeks, and button chins.”

“So we don’t all spring out as miracles of beauty.”

Her chuckle was deep, in her chest, not the least like an artful court titter. “No. Though the older generation values beauty first and fame second. You had better be prepared. Both branches of the Deis will probably come wooing you, breathing sincerity and talking up the life of art, because they want to preserve the family legend by cross-matching distant cousins.”

He wiped his arm across his brow, an instinctive gesture his mother had worked hard to train out of him when he was small. “I still don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “I went to sea to get away from art. By the time I was ten, artful had come to mean artificial.”

Joret said, “Yes. I understand. Though I wouldn’t have before I left Iasca Leror and came here to court.”

“Marlovans, I’ve discovered, are often brutal, but seldom artificial.”

She did not deny it. “What did you learn about art, and artfulness, at sea?”

He made a self-deprecating gesture. “There are few worse bores than those who go on about their past.”

She gave a short laugh. “I’m not bored.”

“Oh, it took capture by pirates to convince me that artfulness was not necessarily deceit or deviousness, and being open about one’s intent was not necessarily admirable. On the other hand, you did meet Jeje, am I right?”

Joret smiled. “Yes, when she came to Nente looking for your mother.”

“She and Inda are my proof that words, thoughts, actions can all match and yet be admirable.”

“The word is integrity.”

He sighed. “I grew up thinking that word actually meant ‘the ability to be convincing.’ ” He opened his hands. “I don’t intend to stay in this kingdom. Or is this conversation in some sense a mark of distrust aimed at my mother.” It wasn’t a question.

Joret gestured upward, toward the rest of the castle. “Your mother told me before she left Nente that politics are tedious and fatiguing, the running of a business made large. When she returns after the birth of her child, she promised me the extent of her ambition is to transform a stagnant, fractious court into something with its own style, instead of mimicking Colend. I begged her to try, because I can’t do it.”

Tau paced to the window and halted, fingering a wind chime hanging before a closed window. “I’d thought of going to meet Jeje, since she did not wait for me.”

Joret thought back, uncertain whether or not to share one of Jeje’s remarks. Though nothing had been said about confidence, it had felt like one:
Tau needs to be needed
.

Joret picked her words with care. “She went north, I believe. Said something about taking ship at Bren Harbor.”

Tau’s head lifted. “I wonder if that means Inda’s fleet is in the strait.” Though they had never met before this day, he was comfortable with her. It wasn’t just their shared family, he sensed that they shared similar experience. “Another discovery I made at sea was a taste for danger,” he said slowly, and sure enough, she did not bridle or mime horror. Just gave a sober nod. “But I’ve faced enough of it to want my efforts to be for a purpose. I could rejoin the fleet and fight pirates. Getting rid of pirates is a worthy goal. But anyone can do it. Pirates are predictable. They will always choose bloodshed over wit or art.” He swung around. “Do we Deis all think alike?”