MEHTA
Mehta became used to the waves, and quicker than she ever expected to. The movement of the ship, the endless swish of the water, was so different from the land, but she had spent so much of her life on land she did not hunger for stable earth.
After three days of hugging the coast or seeing it in the distance they struck out into places where the water was as gold as it was blue, and she could see the life of the sea beneath the glass waves. The sky above mirrored the sea in an endless blue, and the air was warm every day,
“I don’t know where I am,” she said to Karmine one day, and the pirate woman asked her, “Does it frighten you?”
“No,” Mehta told her. “It makes me feel free. More free than I’ve ever been before.”
“You could stay with us,” Karmine said. “A woman like you. You could stay with us forever if you wished.”
She did wish it, but for some reason her heart grew sad with it, and then Karmine said.
“I think you wish for something else.”
“Maybe,” Mehta said.
“You want me to tell you?” Karmine said. “You want me to tell you that you are in love with a handsome southern prince—a King if all goes right—who will have many princesses who come with strong allegiances and wealth thrown at him. How in the world would he choose you? And even if he did, how would his family accept it?”
“Well, now that is the truth,” Mehta said, gripping the ship’s sides. “And we must live in reality.”
“Fuck reality,” Karmine declared. “Reality is… when people tell you to deal with it, it is their way of saying accept the limits we have placed on you. But you have passed under the earth and onto the sea with sorcerers at your side and seen a great jewel taken from a mighty demon. It is we and our choices that are limited. Not reality. Make sure you choose what you wish. If what you wish fails, there is always a place for you with the Sea Women.”
“Bless you, Karmine,” Mehta said, then she cried out, “Oh!”
Mehta had never seen a whale before. She knew they were huge. Once she had talked to a ship’s captain who said, “Think of the largest creature you can. Then imagine him twice as large.”
The ship did not rock, for the whale was far below the water, sailing in the opposite direction of the ship. But now she realized that this was not the proper shape for a whale, and as the great length of the whale went on, it undulated, like a serpent, and Mehta remembered the tales of the Great Sea Serpent, but Karmine seemed undisturbed, and now they saw…. Hair, streaming back from a whale sized head, and for a moment, with a long revolution, the head looked up, and across a moon wide face with placid, wide lips and thin, pupilless eyes, the creature stared into Mehta’s face.
It was gone just like that, leaving Mehta shaken, remembering a face, perfectly round and easily large as half a human body, with a merry pink tongue sticking out and pupilless, narrow tilted eyes that smiled at her. But now it was gone, and Mehta blinked at Karmine for confirmation.
“She was a Nereid,” Karmine said. “You have been blessed.”
“A… what?”
“They are the mothers of the mermaids,” Karmine said. “There are many mermaids, but only fifty Nereids, all sisters, the daughters of Nereos the Old Lord of the Sea and his wife the goddess Doris. They watch over the oceans and seas though Nereus’s mother is Tethys, the Goddess of the Sea, the Sea itself, the Lady of the Depths, sometimes called Aiuryn or Yeman. A Nereid has smiled upon you.”
“Are they… animals?”
“Child, no!” Karmine said. “That is heresy. They are to the sea what… the Wood Folk are to the forests, or the Duegar to under the earth. They are goddesses, of a sort. Not the High Gods, who are God, but… more than a fairy, less than God. I… destroy it by trying to define it. Only know that you have seen one of the Nereid, and so you have been blessed.”
“I wonder where she was going,” Mehta murmured.
Karmine smiled.
“Perhaps to tell her mother about you.”
WESTRIAL
“We go on until we meet them,” Cedd said that night as they sat in the tent. “We do not allow them to come into Westrial.”
“We could, perhaps,” Anthony noted, “simply enter Sussail.”
He looked to Isobel.
“I would not speak against it,” the Queen said. “Only, I do not think we could get there in time. The Short Country is called the Short Country for a reason. No, we should hope to meet them at Herbacum. This means they will enter a little onto Westland territory, but we will have the uphill advantage.”
“It is you who should have been the general,” Francis smiled on her.
“I am no general,” Isobel shook her head. “Only a princess who saw her father fight in the first wars.”
“Yes, and fight alongside Rufus, against us,” Anthony noted.
Teryn was irritated by his one time lover. Why would he say such a thing at such a time?
“That isn’t fair,” Prince Adrian said beside Princess Linalla.
“The very reason the Five Lands suffer is because too often we have fought against each other. Now Inglad is gone from us into Hale hands, no matter how friendly those Hale may be. But Essail and Westrial are in the House of Aethelyn, and we of Senach are your cousins. Sussail, momentarily exiled from us, is with us once again.”
Adrian shook his head. “We have to get away from petty squabbles.”
Isobel nodded, liking the prince, and King Cedd said, “My cousin is right. We are not fighting old battles and, quiet as this is kept, we are not fighting for Sussail. We are fighting to defend ourselves.”
“We will not even enter Sussail,” Isobel said.
“Really?” Francis and Anthony spoke at the same time, the former in surprise and the latter in doubt.
“My father made his bed, and now he must lie down in it,” The Queen said. “Whatever certain people may think,” her eyes landed on Anthony Pembroke, then left him, “I am Queen of Westrial, and my lord is its King.”
MYRNE
The King and Queen sat in their high seats looking on the land passing far below them.
Eryk Waverly came to them and genuflected.
“Ambridge has fallen,” he said. “Are their any orders you have to communicate?”
King Osric looked to his wife, and she nodded.
“See that the former Queen is kept in Whitestone Palace and that she is left to administer it as any lady would govern a household. See that Cynric is instituted as interrum governor and that any hostility he may have faced is amended.”
“And Lord Baldwin?”
“Allyn Baldwin may remain with his sister for a time, or he may go to his reward in the south. Everything else we will see to when we return.”
“And your Graces?”
“Yes?” the King and Queen said together.
“What of the cousins? The Lady Ardith and her sisters? What is to be done with them?”
“When Edmund sought to be king he murdered every Wulfstan scion he could,” Myrne said. “Those girls are not even Baldwins. If memory serves me, they are connected to the Herrells, the former Queen’s maternal family. Allow them to live on as they did before.”
“The Queen is gracious.”
“The Queen is wise,” Osric said as he looked out of the window of the skyliner.
“The very reason Edmund and the Baldwins fell was because they were so cruel no one was left to help them in their time of trouble. It will not be so with us..”
“And relay to the former Queen that she will maintain the title she held before her marriage to Edmund. That she will remain Lady Edith Duchess of North Hale.”
“She should be thankful for that,” Eryk said.
“She will not be,” Myrne predicted. “She will think how the queens of dead kings are still referred to as Queen and never remember that at the hands of others she would have been beheaded or shut in a convent. That is the type of woman she is.”
Eryk cracked a smile at his cousin, and then saluted the monarchs and left the large apartment where they sat.
“We’re nearly there,” Kryse Lord of Cleave said, looking out the window as he re-entered. “We have a remarkable captain in Ralph Curakin by the way.”
“Lord Kryse,” King Osric began, “how long has Cleave had flying ships?”
“As long as Ossariand,” Kryse said. “As long as the Royan kingdoms have. And the skyliners are more than flying ships. They are… well, all of Royan technology is also charged with magic.”
“And yet,” the King noted, touching his small beard, “as long as the Royan cities in Hale have had these, the Hale cities have lived two hundred years behind the Ayl. The Dayne more so.”
“It is because your ancestors tried to conquer this land and impose their ways,” Lord Kryse said, honestly.
“In the Young Kingdoms, and especially in the north, there were too few of us to hold all the land you came to and, really, there was no need. And so we retreated to our cities. Those who did not go into the west to live in Rheged or Elmet. But we have kept our knowledge and never shared it because the Hale lands have ever been divided, never one.”
“May that change,” King Osric murmured.
“Your Grace, it already has,” Lord Kryse pointed out, “else how would you and the Queen be riding to Westrial with one hundred thousand troops on four skyliners?”
ISOBEL
She wished for the Rootless Isle, or maybe even her girlhood when, dressed in the old unbleached robe, she came to the steps of the temple and entered under the simple lintel into the old court where many girls and many boys too were sitting about queit and at peace. And then she went across that court under the next door to the first two pools, and there she stooped and lathed water up and down her arms and then passed to the next pool and now to the last room where she undressed and bathed, and came out, and the white robe was wrapped about her and she came into the central court to sing with the maidens:
magē hadavata utum tēmāva pirī æta
mama raja magē prakaśa kaverda;
magē diva dakṣa lēkhakayā pǣna vē.
oba minisun vaḍāt viśiṣṭa vannē
obē tol karuṇāva abhiṣēka kara æta,
deviyan vahansē siṭa sadahaṭama oba āśīrvāda kara æta.
Isobel stood before the open door at the end of the court, swinging a smoking censor as other girls came up to lay cakes on the altar and join their voices to the singers. She could hear Meredith singing:
Deviyan vahansa, obagē siṁhāsanaya sadahaṭa ma pavatinu æta;
yuktiya jayakontaya obagē rājyayē jayakontaya vanu æta.
oba dharmiṣṭhakamaṭa prēma karana hā duṣṭakamaṭa dvēṣa,
ebævin deviyan vahansē, obē deviyan vahansē, obē mituran ihata oba niyama kara tibē
prītiya tel saman̆ga oba ālēpa visin.
And now, to her great surprise, Meredith of the strong frame, dark brown skin and twiggy hair came to her and handed Isobel the censor, and Isobel took it, marching into the holy place, laying it down on the darkened ledge of an altar and then reaching back while Melisiane handed her the lamp.
Obagē siyalu sivuru bara gandharasa hā agil saha kæsiyā kurun̆du samaga suvan̆da ya;
æt daḷa samaga alaṁkāra māligā siṭa
nūl mē saṁgīta oba satuṭu karayi.
rajavarungē diyaṇiyan obē gauravayak kāntāvan atara ya;
obē dakuṇu pættē ōpīr ran rājakīya manāliya vē.
As they sang, Isobel lit the seven lamps and increasing light bloomed on the ancient image, older than this place, The Goddess in her worn pleated skirt with her pupiless eyes, plaited hair, and girlish smile. Isobel reached back, again and again, for the cakes to lay them out on the altar before Her, and when it was gone, she censed the ancient face of the Goddess, and then turned to leave. Later, after many had made their visitations, when the the stone chamber still smelled of frankincense, and the floor was warm from all who had sat down to visited the Goddess in quiet, Isobel would do so as well.
That image was older than anything else in the Rootless Isle. No one remembered from where it had come, though some said it came from the far East, from the same place as the new religion came, and that it had come way back in the Flooded Time. To Isobel, as she entered the quiet of the Holy Place while the candles burned low, the image was the Goddess Amana from before the beginning of days and now, at last, she rested in her presence.
The rest had turned to mild slumber when Isobel heard her name called. She knew it was Myrne, and it was not long before the dark haired girl entered, making the sign of Binding and folding her hands to her chest as she knelt before the Goddess.
“Issa, did you hear me calling you?” she reprimanded, but before the older girl could answer, Myrne said, “It does not matter. Nimerly says its time.”
“Have I been gone long?” Isobel asked.
“Long enough for Nimerly to send me after you.”
Isobel smoothed her unbleached gown. Back home it would have been silks, but here, on the Rootless Isle, she felt freer, more herself than she’d ever been before.
“Come, Little Sister,” she held out her hand to Myrne. “It is time.
“Sister,” Queen Myrne held out her hands as the wind from the landing skyliners blew her cloak and her dark hair all about her.
On the top of Vahayan Hill, the pregnant Queen Isobel came to her. About them, Cedd and Wolf, Anthony, Ralph Curakin, their closest companions stood. Beside Princess Linalla, Prince Adrian looked down the hill and saw the men of Daumany setting up camp on the other side of the vale.
Isobel placed her hands in Myrne’s and the women stood together, eyes closed. Isobel felt the tears press between her eyelids and roll down her face.
When she opened them, Queen Myrne was smiling, though her wet eyes were sober.
Myrne said, “Sister, it is time.”
