CHAPTER ONE
Halfway through his twenty-fifth year, and to his acute relief, Prince Kadou became an uncle.
Despite Kadou spending the entirety of his sister’s pregnancy in terror and worry, the whole affair ended up being quite as routine as such things could be, but for the fact that the niece in question pushed him one joyous rung further down the line of succession. The night of Zeliha’s labors, Kadou prayed fervently in the temple for hours until, finally, the good news arrived with the sudden crack of fireworks above, the shower of colored splendor—and Kadou felt like he could breathe easy for the first time in months. Years, maybe. It was the lamp of the lighthouse above him, at last, after a long, stormy night at sea.
Of course, peace and relief were a luxury that not even princes could easily afford for more than a moment or two: Princess Eyne’s birth was followed by days of celebration—for the court, for the people of the capital and the rest of the kingdom, for the hundreds of kahyalar who served throughout the palace and the government with loyalty and devotion. With his sister the sultan indisposed (and gleefully taking advantage of her own opportunity for some peace), the duties of representing House Mahisti to the populace naturally fell to Kadou, as did a greater than usual proportion of the daily concerns of the realm—a very alarming break-in at the Shipbuilder’s Guild on the night of the birth itself; a wealthy merchant from Oissos caught committing one of the most blasphemous crimes Kadou could conceive of, several days later; a number of perplexing tantrums thrown by Siranos, the body-father of the new princess (which Kadou’s already shaky nerves found as upsetting and alarming on a personal level as the former two catastrophes were on a larger scale) … All these added up to a solid whirlwind week during which time Kadou barely had a chance to breathe, let alone hold his new niece for more than a minute or two the morning after she was born.
But waters rising to the peak of a hectic king-tide meant only that they would inevitably fall back to a time of dull lax-tides. It seemed Her Majesty decidedly agreed, and moreover felt that it was up to her to hurry things along.
“You look thin,” Zeliha had told him, not two days before, in a very bossy, big-sister sort of voice when they’d finally found a moment to speak beyond Kadou’s hectic official reports. Zeliha had waved off any further need for rest and recovery from childbirth when she’d heard what the Oissic merchant had been arrested for, declaring that she would attend to that matter herself so that Kadou could give his full attention to the Shipbuilder’s Guild. They had heard that a satyota from Inacha was visiting the city—a truthwitch, as they were called in the slangy street-dialect—and had hired him to question Azuta Melachrinos tou Thorikou about where, precisely, she had received the huge amount of counterfeits with which she’d attempted to pay a gambling debt. The interrogation hadn’t gone well. Azuta was too clever to answer a question straight when she could reply with a rhetorical question or a half-truth instead. But when Azuta had been dragged off back to her cell, Zeliha and Kadou had had a brief moment alone, free of anyone who they had to playact formality for. “You look like a wrung-out dishcloth. Are you eating? Are you sleeping?”
He hadn’t been, particularly, on either count. He’d been too worried about the progress that wasn’t being made on the investigation at the Shipbuilder’s Guild, about Siranos arrogantly inserting himself into conversations he didn’t belong in and passionately declaring that Azuta Melachrinos, his fellow countrywoman, deserved a fair trial and representation in court …
Too worried about having confided some of these worries to the wrong people.
No, of course he hadn’t been sleeping, nor eating more than scratches here and there.
But before he’d been able to answer her, Zeliha had declared that it was high time they all got out of the palace for a day and thought about literally anything besides kingdom-running. A hunt, she said, would be just the thing.
* * *
It was said that in ancient times when the great conqueror Asanbughaa had come to this coast and declared that here was where she would build the capital of her new kingdom, it had been one of her sorcerers who had raised the great plateau where the palace now stood. The rest of the land around was mostly flat forest or open farmland, rising to gentle hills further inland, and thence to mountains deep in the backcountry to the east and north.
The inland side of the plateau had a path downward, to match the winding switchbacks of the kingsroad along the face overlooking the city. The back path was even steeper and more carefully concealed—it was deliberately left in a state of slight neglect: bare dirt, rather than cobblestones, with trees and shrubs allowed to grow wild along its edges and turns, the better to disguise it from casual observers. It was barely wide enough for two horses to pass each other, and in some places their riders would have had to dismount to do it.
In the forest below, there was a particular clearing, the usual staging area for the beginning of royal hunts. Servants had come ahead hours before—or perhaps even the day before—to assemble airy, colorful tents and pavilions, floored with carpets and cushions. The grandest of these was the sultan’s, of course, and Kadou was surprised to see Zeliha already waiting when he arrived with the few other courtiers who had not returned to the countryside after the week’s festivities wound down.
She was lounging on a low couch, surrounded by ministers, with Princess Eyne cuddled in her arms. Her pavilion, heavy blue silk embroidered with silver and topped by a fountain of white feathers at its peak, cast cool, watery light over her. She looked up at the sound of hooves. “Kadou!” she called. “Little brother, do come here.”
“Majesty,” he replied, scrambling off his horse and bowing. “I wasn’t expecting you to come.”
“I arranged it, didn’t I?” she replied dryly, shifting Eyne a bit so she could free a hand to wave Kadou over. “Come here, I said. The rest of you are dismissed, thank you.”
“I hadn’t thought you would have recovered enough to hunt.” Kadou handed Wing’s reins off to one of his kahyalar and ducked his head to clear the hanging drape of the pavilion’s walls, which had been pulled back and tied off to the corner posts to let the breeze flow through. The ministers, withdrawing as ordered, bowed to him as they passed.
“Oh, I definitely haven’t,” she said, and gestured to a seat near her. Kadou took it. “The kahyalar hauled me here in fine style in a sedan chair like I’m already a dowager. It’ll be a few more weeks yet before I can bear to sit on a horse. By the way, please help yourself,” she said, nodding to a tray of sliced fruits that had been laid within reach, and plucked a piece of melon for herself. “I don’t recommend childbirth, Kadou,” she said seriously. “You ought to endeavor to avoid it.”
He rolled his eyes at her, and let her see it too, and she grinned. It was better out here, away from the palace and the court—easier to pretend they were both still children or adolescents, just the prince and the crown princess, with very few concerns beyond tutors and scholars harrying them at every moment, kahyalar fluttering nervously around them while Zeliha announced some new adventure and dragged Kadou along after her.
“Truly, though,” she said, “I can’t imagine having a baby without six kahyalar to help. And even then, they always disappear just at the wrong moment. Can you take her? My arms are about to fall off. She’s deceptively heavy.”
Kadou dragged his chair closer to oblige and, between the two of them, they managed to get Eyne transferred into his arms with no more than a few ominous grumbles from the child. She was, somehow, already notably bigger and plumper than she’d been the week before. Kadou had had no idea that babies grew that fast. “If you can’t enjoy the hunt yourself, why drag all of us out here?”
She sighed heavily, stretching and flexing the stiffness out of her arms. “I’m sick to death of hearing about Azuta Melachrinos. I’ve stared at so many counterfeits that my eyes ache.”
“Are they at least … bad counterfeits?” Kadou asked, without much hope.
“See for yourself.” Zeliha took a pair of coins from her pocket and held them out. A gold altın. A silver yira. He freed a hand from holding Eyne and, feeling like he might be jinxing himself, gingerly touched the altın.
The instant the metal brushed his skin, he flinched. His gift for touch-tasting—the Araşti sense for metal—was only faint, manifesting as a few wisps of sense-memory. The sensation that met his fingertips as he touched the counterfeit was a flat clank, a dull and hollow sound like an empty bucket dropped on flagstones. It was so wrong feeling and so startling that he snatched his hand away and flexed his fingers before he tried again.
In one of his two very earliest memories, he was knee-high to all the adults, clutching at the skirts of his mother’s silk kaftan and burying his face in them from shyness whenever strangers looked at him—and there were so many strangers looking at him, smiling at him, bowing to him and Mama. There was a lot of activity around them, a loud jumble of noises and talking, and the air smelled sooty and dirty, and it was very warm, and Mama was talking to one of the strangers and only absently petting his hair as he pushed his face against her leg, and the kahya assigned as his nurse had disappeared somewhere, and—
Mama had bent down and picked him up, settling him on her hip, and he’d put his face into her hair and neck to hide, but she’d said, “Look, sweetheart, it’s your grandfather.” When he’d looked, she’d held up a coin—perfect, round and shining as the sun, with a little picture of Grandfather on it in profile, wearing his crown. And then, “Look, watch how the nice lady makes them,” and the smiling stranger sitting at the anvil in front of Mama picked up a flat, blank circle of gold with tongs from a plate near the fire beside her, placed it between two mysterious pieces of iron on the anvil, and struck it with a hammer, a loud, clear clang that made him jump. She set down the hammer, took off the top part of the thing she’d hit, and—there was Grandfather’s picture again, as if by magic.
The stranger had plucked it out and handed it to Mama, and Mama had tucked it into his palm. It had still been a little warm from the fire, as if it had been lying in the sunshine. “Do you know how much gold is in an altın, love?” Mama had asked.
He’d replied in a little whisper so the strangers couldn’t hear him, “Nine, eight, six.” She had smiled as bright as new-minted coin and kissed his cheek and told him to keep his altın safe and not to put it in his mouth.
Nine eight six. Nine hundred and eighty-six parts pure gold out of every thousand, he knew now, a fineness that had been set hundreds of years before and had never once changed, not for generations, not for dynasties. He still had that altın somewhere, and even now, part of the signature for coin gold as he experienced it—proper coins, that is, genuine ones—was the clear, bell-like chime of a hammer striking a die.
The counterfeit had to be mostly gold, because the rest of the signature had seemed mostly the same as usual—the smooth flow of warm, thick cream poured from a pitcher, the flash of sunshine on nearly still water. But when he plucked it off Zeliha’s palm and rubbed it between his fingertips, savoring the metal as closely as he could, he could just barely distinguish other differences. The water-sparkle tasted faintly reddish, as if it were the light of sunset, or colored by the smoke of a wildfire.
Looking at it with his eyes rather than just the senses in his fingertips, he could see that the counterfeit was extremely well made. If he had only glanced at it lying on the table, perhaps amongst genuine altınlar, he wouldn’t have taken any notice of it.
He drew his hand back, feeling a little sick. Zeliha snorted and tucked the coins away again, murmuring, “Yes, that’s the face that all the other touch-tasters have made, too.” Kadou wasn’t surprised. The consistency of the value of their coinage was the foundation their nation was built on. The Araşti mercantile empire was vast and robust enough that their currency could be used nearly anywhere around the Sea of Serpents and in many places further beyond, because everyone, everywhere, knew that an Araşti coin was a coin you could trust. If a merchant in Imakami, Map Sut, Oissos, Aswijan, Mangar-Khagra, Kaskinen, or N’gaka was offered an altın, they would know exactly what its relative value was.
The country’s power did not come from the edge of a sword, nor from enormous tracts of conquered territory, nor from even the navy, though Araşt had the fastest ships in the world. Their power came instead from the clink of coin, an open palm, a smile. Theirs was an empire built on the bedrock of reputation before all else.
“The ambassador of Oissos is behaving with no sense of decorum whatsoever,” Zeliha went on. “She keeps following me around and declaiming as if she’s in the middle of her Senate. I don’t know who thought a Senate was a good idea. All it seems to do is turn out a load of annoying power-hungry bureaucrats.”
Kadou snuggled Eyne a little closer, flexing his hand again to rid himself of the sense-memory of the befouled coin. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “It must have made sense to someone, once.” It might be nicer to choose power than to be stuck with it, he sometimes thought. Being prince often felt like he was seated on the back of a ferocious wild horse that could bite or trample anyone around him who didn’t have a horse of their own. He had to be careful of it and aware of it all the time, lest it yank the reins out of his hands and buck him out of a solid seat. And who was to say that he was the best rider to tame it, simply because he had been born to it?
But then, Zeliha was right too—the Oissic Senate did seem to draw power-hungry bureaucrats, primarily.
“Anyway,” she said. “It’s a nice day, and investigating Azuta Melachrinos won’t go any faster whether I’m there to hover over it or not. I needed a break and some fresh air and entertainment, and there’s really nothing more entertaining than watching a bunch of fussy people traipse around on their ponies and try to kill things without getting their hands or their hems dirty.” She picked over the tray of fruit without looking at him. “And I missed you,” she added. “You usually call me Majesty these days, and it makes me feel far away from you.” She shrugged, looked away.
“I miss you too,” he said softly. He bit his lip and occupied himself with fussing over the wrinkles and folds of Eyne’s swaddling cloths. She stared up at him solemnly as he did it—her eyes were huge and already quite dark grey, promising to darken to the classic blue-black of the Mahisti family, the same as his and Zeliha’s.
“And,” Zeliha said, her tone shifting, “I haven’t gotten to talk to you about what happened at the kahyalar’s party when you went for the Visit. You were very naughty, I heard.”
He nearly choked, and it was only because he was terrified of dropping Eyne that he forced the wave of panic back.
Someone must have seen him talking to Tadek at the Visit.
(Gods, he realized immediately, of course they had seen it. He and Tadek had been right out in the open, they hadn’t been subtle in the least—)
There were times when Kadou acted and only later realized, in a flash of crushing humiliation just like this one, how his actions might look from the outside. It had rather been at the top of his mind lately due to the troubles with Eyne’s body-father, the way he stalked around Kadou, scrutinizing him so closely, glaring at him, making it clear with every glance that he believed that Kadou was up to something.
But who could blame him? Siranos’s family had been devastated two generations ago by the machinations of a jealous second son, and he had no reason to believe that Kadou would behave any differently. Most people in his position, Kadou supposed, wouldn’t have been joyfully happy to find themselves a step further away from the throne. But it made him nervous to be the target of such suspicion. He’d been second-guessing himself constantly, worrying and half-confused over his own motivations, lying awake at night wondering whether it was an inevitable matter of when he brought harm to his sister and niece, rather than an impossible, unthinkable if.
Someone had seen him talking to Tadek at the Visit. How could he explain? Was there any explanation that would be sufficient?
The night of Eyne’s birth, Commander Eozena had come to the temple where Kadou was praying to give him news about the Shipbuilder’s Guild break-in, had asked him to take charge of the matter since Her Majesty was indisposed in childbed, and had escorted him to the royal administrative offices so they could hurriedly scrawl out orders to secure the guild and limit passage out of the city, buying them time until they could ensure that the crucial secret held within the guild was secure and had not been … taken. It had been past midnight when she had left to see those orders executed. Kadou and Melek, one of the kahyalar assigned to his personal service, had remained behind to search through the files and find out whether any other incidents or concerns had been recently reported by the guild.
They’d been up to their elbows in documents when Siranos had come in, demanded to know what Kadou thought he was doing, and had not-quite-accused him of making his move against Her Majesty and his new daughter. Kadou had denied it—of course he had, the thought was horrifying to him—but Siranos had escalated, had seized Kadou’s arm hard enough to bruise … It was only Melek, so firm and calm that çe hadn’t even needed to raise çir voice, who had finally convinced Siranos to back down and leave.
No matter that Zeliha had brushed all these incidents off the very next morning when Kadou reported to her—all except the finer details of what Siranos had said and done, of course, because that felt like retaliation, like making a fuss about nothing, like escalating the conflict again after Melek had gone to all the trouble of deflecting it. It was no crime for Siranos to be a little out of sorts on the night of his body-child’s birth, after all. But resolving to keep the peace made no difference in the privacy of his own mind, and neither did the fact that Zeliha had cheerfully agreed with Eozena’s executive decision to delegate responsibility. Kadou did what he always did with incidents like these—he held tight to it, interrogated it from every angle, worried over it, ate himself up with anxiety until he was a shaking, nervous wreck. He hadn’t been able to stop circling his mind around it all week—why was Siranos so suspicious of him? Was he seeing something in Kadou that Kadou hadn’t yet noticed in himself?
All that would have been fine, but then …
He’d confided his fears to Tadek—another of the kahyalar, who he had known for some time, and who he had once been … close to. Tadek, who was so easy to talk to, even about matters Kadou barely dared to whisper aloud to anyone else.
Tadek had comforted and reassured him, had kissed his hands and smiled at him, had offered to ask around as to whether anyone else had heard mention of what Kadou had done (or was doing) to make Siranos so angry and suspicious. That was the point where things had started to go … awkward. Awkward, even before this moment, when his perspective wrenched and he was able to look at it from an outsider’s perspective: Sending a kahya after Siranos was tantamount to having him tailed. Anyone else would conclude that easily.
Zeliha had a whole ministry of professional spies whose job it was to know everything that went on in every corner of the palace, in every alley of the capital, and in every village in the country. Of course she knew. Someone would have reported to her that Tadek, who had been assigned to Kadou’s personal service last year, had suddenly been asking around about Siranos, about his motives, about any gossip surrounding him. That too would have been forgivable. But Tadek was a kahya of the core-guard, and that meant loyalty, and devotion, and a certain inclination to go above and beyond the call of duty.
Tadek—clever Tadek, too cunning for his own good, that expression of sly hazel mischief always sparkling in his eyes—had done just that. He’d asked other questions of his fellow kahyalar as well—questions that Kadou certainly had not asked him to investigate and would not have asked. When Kadou had paid his formal visit to the kahyalar’s enormous celebration of the birth of the princess, Tadek had come to Kadou in the crowd, bearing news and secrets and whispers like guest-gifts. They had briefly left the courtyard of the garrison for a discreet walk. I know a dozen kahyalar who would happily die for you, Tadek had murmured to him, as if that were at all what Kadou wanted. Fireworks had been cracking and hissing overhead, reflecting bright off the surface of the garrison’s laundry pond as they strolled around it and Tadek whispered all he’d found. I myself, Highness, would of course lay down my life to protect you without hesitation, particularly from a—well, we can’t yet call him a villain, can we?
Copyright © 2022 by Alexandra Rowland
