The Poet King Read online

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  For Yaakov, my chevalier.

  We walked this road together.

  PART I

  CHAPTER

  1

  RIANNA stood at a window overlooking the city lit gold in sunrise. A new day. Red slate roofs and cypress trees were a view she had seen all her life, but not from this height. This was the Tamryllin palace, with its towers. Blackbirds made a whooping spiral, winging around the towers and down, toward the rooftops of the city. She could hear the bells of the Eldest Sanctuary welcoming the sun.

  She heard him come in, come up behind her. When she turned, she was struck—as ever—by how handsome he was. How noble he appeared with that strong jaw, the red-gold forelock with a slight curl that fell, appealingly, from the peak at the center of his forehead. He was a picture of nobility—in ways the nobility themselves rarely were.

  Elissan Diar smiled a little, to see her. For him it was a rare expression; the man who had conquered Tamryllin and seized its throne showed a stern countenance to most.

  By now she had often seen his smile turned to her.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “A good morning to you, too,” was her sharp reply, and he laughed.

  A part of her was immediately ashamed. Rianna knew she had been disingenuous in her sharpness.

  She’d known he would like it.

  “What has you gazing out so pensively?” he said, and joined her at the window. She was seated on a cushioned bench. He took a place at its other end. Despite his powerful frame, there was yet a distance between them. A proper distance, one might say.

  She thought she read the question behind his question. He’d wonder whether she was thinking of her husband. “I was remembering my girlhood,” she said. “Of the view from my father’s house. And how … I was happy there.”

  “We never forget where we are from,” he said. “Nor the places where we were happy.” He spoke with a soft clarity, as if visited by memories of his own. “I’d fain see you happy once more, lady. It would become you even more than melancholy already becomes you.” He smiled again. “I doubt there is any mood which does not suit your face. I would consider it a gift if I might see them all.”

  Rianna let a silence fall. She heard the faint, busy chatter of the blackbirds. The bells had ceased. Finally she said, “You have seen much in your travels, is that not true?”

  He picked up on her meaning. It unnerved her, a bit, that he often did. “I have seen queens adorned with gems and cloth of gold,” he said. “Beauty to make a man weep. Yet none to match Lady Rianna, in her plain grey dress.”

  She waited. She was interested to see if he would say what most men would have said by now. The obvious thing. Your husband is a fool. But this was the man who had conquered Tamryllin by means of enchantment. Who had moreover succeeded in winning over the people of Tamryllin in a short time. Rather than executing the royal family, he’d had them exiled—a gesture of magnanimity. He’d pointed to the destruction in Majdara, the chaos of civil war on the border, as a reason for new leadership.

  For Kahishi was at war. The Court Poet somehow in the midst of it. All the more reason for the capital to surrender to Elissan Diar and his Chosen. Tamryllin’s palace guard had been overcome by magical attacks. Rumor had it that warriors had suddenly appeared in every corridor, overpowering the guards within moments.

  Once he assumed control, Elissan Diar attended first to stifling dissent, while at the same time put in action a plan to win the hearts of the people. He lowered taxes, including that which was most reviled—the tax on olive oil. This perfectly coincided with trade tariffs rising as a result of the border wars. Thus Elissan showed himself a man with the people’s interests in mind. It helped that King Harald had been unpopular and weak; that the Court Poet, the true power behind the throne, was in Kahishi.

  A man who had accomplished all this, in so short a time, would know better than to speak of Ned. He would not be so crude. He would rely upon her to remember in every bone what her partner in love and life had done: that Ned had had, if the rumors were true, a passionate liaison with the queen of Kahishi, Rihab Bet-Sorr—said to be lovely beyond description. He’d done that, and then helped her escape the palace, and had run off with her.

  He’d done that.

  Elissan did not need to remind Rianna of any of this. She was yet married to Ned Alterra, which made her one of the nobility. It meant she had become, in this new way of things, a lady-in-waiting to Elissan’s daughter, Sendara.

  “Plainness suits a married woman, and mother,” said Rianna, looking down at her lap. “I am done with frippery.”

  He laughed. “Oh, my lady,” he said. “With every word you please me more.”

  “I must see to my lady Sendara,” she said, rising. With his back to the window, Elissan was edged in sunlight. “If my lord will excuse me.”

  “Wait,” he said.

  She stopped.

  “Please, Rianna. Call me by my name. Do that for me.”

  She nodded, a curt gesture, and departed.

  * * *

  SENDARA’S hair was a curtain of red-gold to her waist. The task of brushing it out fell to Rianna, most mornings. The girl looked nervous. She kept smoothing her skirts, fidgeting with the cross-ties on her sleeves, which were the fashion. Rianna could read her well enough. Once, she had been that girl: desired by all, cherished by her father. Though not precisely that girl—there was a chilly self-centeredness to Elissan’s daughter that repelled Rianna, despite that she knew she ought to have compassion. The girl had lost weight; it gave her a ravaged, hungry look beyond her years. All at court knew that Sendara was consumed by her feelings for her father’s closest advisor, Etherell Lyr. While he, though displaying the requisite devotions as her intended, was oddly distant. A distance that intensified Sendara’s craving. That may have edged her voice when she hissed, “Watch it, fool—you’re hurting me,” as Rianna worked at a knot in her hair.

  Etherell had not been to see Sendara Diar more than briefly for at least two weeks. She kept eyeing herself in the glass. The dress she had chosen was red, cut low. Once Sendara asked, as she turned this way and that before the glass, “Do I look pretty?” Struggling to look defiant, even though Etherell Lyr was not there to witness it, and these women who waited on her were, as far as Sendara was concerned, no better than servants.

  Rianna spoke the truth, though without warmth. “You are beautiful.”

  There were other things she could have said. About men, and about power. Elissan Diar was to be crowned King of Eivar. Preparations for the coronation were under way. As the king’s daughter, Sendara was a desired commodity beyond her beauty. Etherell might love her
; he might also, more plausibly, have other motives. But Rianna was not here to say those things, and besides—she didn’t think the girl would receive them well. There was a row of severed heads on pikes by the palace gates. It would not be wise to anger Elissan Diar’s daughter. Or be heard to speak poorly of Etherell Lyr, who was in high favor with the king. Elissan may be intrigued by Rianna now, but she knew how expendable was women’s beauty. She combed the hair in silence.

  * * *

  OFTEN her thoughts went to the day the city fell. Though that had not been the outcome, exactly—the coup had left Tamryllin outwardly the same. At least, to begin. She’d known, when she heard who had taken the city, what it could mean. There would be changes, significant ones. It was important to appear loyal. It was important to come to grips on her own with these events, before someone else could dictate the terms. She knew this even before the executions began.

  At the time she’d been living with her father, and her old nurse, who helped care for Dariana, her two-year-old daughter, who every day looked more like Ned.

  Rianna had borne her daughter shortly after her wedding. By the age of nineteen she was a mother. As Dariana Alterra strengthened, seemed fit to survive, Rianna came to accept that her life would never again belong entirely to her. Even though she had not made the decision to give it up.

  It had happened fast.

  Rianna had felt foreboding when Ned went with the Court Poet to Kahishi. Fearing for his safety. She’d never have imagined how events would unfold. She’d trusted him. That was Ned, to her—the one she could trust. But then had come that day in the spring when she learned he had vanished … and the reason.

  So she lived with her father. She went through her days wondering how to go on, knowing—for her daughter—that she must. The rage building in her was familiar, from a time before her marriage, but the agony … was not. Was new. This was not her first experience of betrayal, but it was the deepest cut.

  She’d killed the first man to betray her. Had slit his gullet and gut with her own knife, and though it sickened her to recall it now, she was not sorry.

  This was different, however. It was Ned. The safe harbor throughout her life. Now there was no harbor, no safety. She was unmoored. Worse—abandoned.

  It was midsummer, glaring heat on the streets and redolent of honeysuckle in the shade, when word came that the palace of Tamryllin was taken. By Seers, it was said. Then amended—no, by one Seer and a force of poets. Some were only students. The enchantments were back, and finally it was clear what this meant for Eivar. A power long confined to Academy Isle had asserted dominance in the capital.

  Rianna had wasted no time. She’d convinced her father to take Dariana and her nurse to his estate in the south. They’d put about a story: that the child suffered from illness, needed the soothing warmth of the southlands. Rianna would stay behind.

  Rianna’s father had aged visibly since his imprisonment and torture by the prior Court Poet. The news of Ned’s betrayal had already shaken him. And now there was this. He seemed to age further on the spot when Rianna informed him of her decision. The dangers he had thought she’d escaped—sheltered in a courtly marriage and motherhood—threatened again.

  “Why?” he had pleaded. “Why won’t you come with me?”

  A reasonable thing to ask.

  * * *

  RIANNA sat at the window so she could look out on a city still aflame with autumn colors. Around her the ladies-in-waiting chattered. Each embroidered a panel for Sendara’s coronation gown. The piece Rianna worked was a sleeve, to be trimmed in a pattern of thread-of-gold. The cloth was velvet, forest green. It was painstaking work. Sometimes she liked that it allowed her mind to roam free; other times, thought it would be a kinder fate to leap from the high window. She missed her father’s library.

  The women often tried to boost their lady’s spirits with gossip. Today the story of a maid who’d been sent away after making too much of her dalliance with a lord’s son—a man with a wife and children—seemed to make Sendara forget her troubles. There was pitying laughter. All agreed that the poor girl had brought it on herself, imagining such a man could have feelings for her. Rianna bit her lip against distaste. Once in a while she made an effort to smile, or even put in a comment. She knew these women had an eye on one another. If Rianna seemed to put on airs or be “above herself,” they could make trouble for her.

  Once she might have stored up her observations for later, to relay to Ned; now there was no one to confide in, in her cell of a room. Each night was silence.

  Elissan Diar would know that, of course. How she spent her nights. There were eyes and ears throughout the palace—Rianna knew about that from Ned, who had once controlled them. She knew of the hidden tunnels, the spyholes. The Tamryllin palace was not for keeping secrets.

  The date of the coronation was set for winter, on solstice day. Most foreign dignitaries sent their regrets, anticipating impassable roads, but perhaps Elissan Diar had planned it that way. The ceremony was primarily for the people of Eivar, Rianna guessed; a cementing of Elissan’s legitimacy here. Lords with sizable holdings would swear fealty. It would be as if King Harald and his line had never existed.

  Rianna did not think the coronation date could be a coincidence. The winter solstice was a time of dual significance. For one, it marked the birth of Thalion, the sun god. Of the Three, he was the god who stood for justice, light, knowledge—among other things. Although Elissan was at least fifty years of age he appeared younger and gleamed with vital health. A golden god come to Tamryllin, to lead its people and ensure peace.

  There was also an ancient tradition of the longest night. Rianna wished Lin were around to ask. All she knew was that for poets, it was important. Now with the enchantments returned, there was more it would mean. And Elissan had to know it. Often she wondered if, at his councils with the Chosen, he revealed his plans.

  No secrets would escape the stone lips of those strange, bewitched boys.

  Without Lin to ask, there was little Rianna knew. Only that at the solstice Elissan Diar would be crowned king, and Tamryllin would rejoice throughout the long night.

  Lin. It was strange to think of her. She’d meant many things to Rianna through the years. No one knew where she was now. Rianna remembered the other woman as first her mentor, then friend; and then, finally, the Court Poet who had commanded Ned’s loyalty. That last year before Lin Amaristoth and Ned traveled to Kahishi, Rianna had scarcely known her friend. They’d seen each other rarely, and then often when Rianna had a squalling infant to wrangle. And each of these times Lin had been cordial, kind, yet it was impossible to forget who she was: Court Poet and highest advisor to the king. As time went on Rianna began to notice a shadow in Lin’s eyes, an expression that crossed her face now and again that reminded her, disquietingly, of Rayen. So over time Rianna had stopped visiting; and now she barely knew the Court Poet who had whisked her husband into a political maelstrom no one understood. All they knew in Tamryllin was that some magic had penetrated to Kahishi and instigated civil war. And that Ned Alterra had aided Queen Rihab in treason and disappeared. Likely he was with her at this moment. That luminous queen who had brought a king, and now an entire country, to their knees.

  Rianna tried to build a wall in her mind against such thoughts. To focus on the work at hand. Which at the moment was a panel for a coronation gown, thread-of-gold and green.

  * * *

  NED used to talk to her about his work for the Court Poet. When she sat at the long dining table for the evening meal, with residents of the palace and lords assembled, Rianna knew whom to watch. What to look for. Her glance scarcely grazed that of Lord Alterra, Ned’s father, though she knew he was anxious about her and Dariana. He was grateful, too—her voluntary service to Sendara Diar had mitigated whatever pall of suspicion might have fallen on him, father to Ned Alterra. The severed heads at the palace gate were those of nobility accused of treachery. Rianna had known those men. One, Lord Derry, had be
en kind to her when she was small. A ruddy man with a salt-and-pepper beard, who bellowed jokes to enliven any occasion. He’d had a strong presence in the council—no doubt too strong for the liking of Elissan Diar. And jokes … well, as any poet knew, satire was dangerous.

  She watched, from her place below, as Elissan Diar and his daughter were as suns to the spheres that orbited them at the high table. There were lords who paid fearful homage. There were, standing at attention at various parts of the dining hall, Elissan’s Chosen. These boys were not even graduates of the Academy, yet held a high status at court. They had taken part in the defeat of the castle. Intermingled among them were the palace guards, known derisively on the streets of Tamryllin as Ladybirds, proven ineffectual yet again. The Chosen were the true force now.

  There was something chilling about these boys. They were to a man hollow-cheeked, with deadened eyes. They evinced no interest in the palace women and girls. No interest in anything.

  They seldom spoke. The most Rianna heard from them was late some nights, when she couldn’t sleep—their singing. A layering of voices. Meetings held in moonlight. In those trained voices raised in song was a quality like a blade tapped on crystal. Exquisite and cold.

  Though he had served among the Chosen, Etherell Lyr, advisor to the king and prince-in-waiting, looked more hale than the rest. Rianna thought he probably did not participate in their activities as he once had. Not since being elevated to his current status. Rianna also thought, when it came to Etherell Lyr, that she’d never seen anyone so opaque. She could never guess what he was thinking. It was not hard to see the reason for Sendara’s infatuation. Rianna thought his beauty was like sunlit snow, too blinding. One could not see beyond it.

  Also in the dining hall was Syme Oleir, the king’s Fool. A young man of perhaps seventeen dressed in motley, the Fool was pale, his face oddly slack. He was often at the king’s side. Sometimes he entertained with tricks, or juggling, but at all times Rianna thought him strange. He was, just now, hovering over one of the lords at table with a grin: Lord Herron, who had made extensive obeisance to Elissan and provided men-at-arms. A gruff, older man, he was about the age of Rianna’s father. She could not hate him, despite thinking she should hate anyone who had so entirely capitulated.