“So you have.” Without a murmur, without any sign of recalcitrance— and yet, he wished he did not have to exact obedience. Not from her, in any case. Some men liked their congress perfumed with shuddering fear, but he had ever preferred to be matched, whether outside the confines of a bed or within. Shiera had been such a partner, and her loss still burned within him; he had hoped Gamwone…but that was beside the point. His business was the present, not an old man’s nattering upon the past. “I would not press. I do not wish to cause you pain, Kanbina.”
“There is none.” Now she was decisive, for the first time in many years. “I have had a very quiet life, my lord husband, and I have a son after many years without. I am content.” She moved as if to rise. A susurration slid through courtiers and sober-robed eunuchs alike.
They could be forced to withdraw, but their gazes devoured an emperor and his concubine without mercy.
“You came to warn me.” Tamuron loosened his hands, arranging them upon his belly. At least he had not run to fat; the malady wasted him but did not make him soft.
“I did.” Freed, and visibly gladdened by liberty, she reached for the bentpin holding her veil aside. “Forgive me, I know you did not need it.”
If Heaven had willed it, he would have been glad to marry her in place of Gamwone, but Wurei had come last in his catalogue of conquest for many reasons and she was ill-suited to a queen’s responsibilities. Not that Gamwone performed hers, wifely or ceremonial, with alacrity or even willingness these days. The Second Queen took on the ceremonial duties, but she did not exceed their compass. “Will you return?”
“If you command it,” she repeated, and let her veil fall. She was probably relieved to have its blurring between herself and the world. And in other words, she would obey, but she did not mean to seek him out.
As ever.
He could hardly blame her, and yet. “I prize your peace, Garan Wurei-a Kanbina.”
“So do I.” She righted her skirts, distractedly. “And soon I will have much of it. I will beseech Heaven’s blessing upon you daily then, husband, as I have for many years.”
He granted her leave to flee with a simple nod. She gathered her skirts and glided from the room with a decorous rustle, her step still as light as that of the highborn girl he had taken last to seal the keystone of Zhaon’s unification, the sole surviving member of Wurei’s once-powerful, once-royal clan.
His lips tightened. Gamwone had much to answer for, indeed, but a husband was the head of the house as the Emperor was head of Zhaon. Tamuron had made his First Queen what she was, just as he had failed to protect a shy, terrified girl. Senescence was a time of reckoning, was it not? His succession was ordered, but what of other affairs?
His chosen heir would not speak to him. His second son was entirely his mother’s creature; his third son disdained his presence unless it was to deliver a cutting, barely polite remark; the fourth was a scholar to be proud of, certainly, but uninterested in other affairs; his fifth was all but useless; his sixth still a boy. His first daughter, on her way to a queendom of her own to the south, was in histrionics; his second seemed amenable enough but who could tell what preening poison her mother poured into her not-yet-adult ears?
And what of the mothers of that clutch? His first wife was a poisonous problem, the second indifferent, his first concubine cold, the second wracked by his mistakes. War threatened from the north once more, and the hordes of pale Tabrak were restive as they had been before their last great swathe cut through Shan and the south of Zhaon before melting back into the Westron Wastes. And, to finish the list, Garan Tamuron was pissing strange colors, twisted with bone-pain, and scratching furrows in his own peeling, discolored skin.
If he had ever thought himself mighty, he was roundly punished for the misapprehension.
Tamuron beckoned Zan Fein forward. The eunuch glided much as Kanbina did, the usual clicking of his jatajatas absent in deference to the Emperor’s condition. “A most charming visitor,” he murmured, his sleepy eyes half-closed.
The Emperor, frowning, had no desire for pleasantries. “Where were we?”
Zan Fein acknowledged his master’s mood with a slow flick of his fan and a draft of umu scent. He was drenched in the costly perfume, as usual. “The matters of taxation in Lord Yulehi’s province, Your Majesty.”
Yes, the First Queen’s uncle was taking advantage of his half-year at court to fatten the clan’s coffers. Some care needed to be taken to allow him just enough to whet a clan’s natural appetites but not enough to produce overweening ambition. “Very well.” Tamuron sighed as a scribe availed himself again of the chair by the bedside, arranging the implements of his trade. “Take this down, then. In the matter of taxation, list territories…”
Matters of rule went on, a runaway armor-cart with maddened horses rolling irresistibly upon a screaming, blood-drenched battlefield, crushing any wounded slow or unlucky enough to be in its path. So many battles fought, and now he could see the smallest, most ignored engagements were the only campaigns that mattered.
And the only ones Garan Tamuron had ever truly lost.
SAFEST COURSE
In another part of the Kaeje— that most royal of palaces within the great walled complex— a small breakfast-room was muffled with a double layer of embroidered hangings because the queen it held like a pearl in folded silk despised any chill. Every corner was rounded, there was no partition to a garden’s free air, and a multiplicity of pillows for propping a royal body in any languid posture necessary to aid digestion crowded the table as well as the three royal bodies they were meant to aid.
It should have been a comfortable room, but Second Princess Garan Gamnae oft found it anything but. Especially lately.
“I did not ask you,” Gamnae’s elder brother said coldly, and the Second Princess of Zhaon almost gasped.
It was not unheard of for Garan Kurin to utter a sharp word at the breakfast table, but it had never been common for his ire to fasten upon his mother instead of his little sister.
Well, at least, it had been uncommon before now. Second Princess Gamnae, caught in the act of pouring fragrant jaelo tea, halted in astonishment. Amber fluid rippled inside her thick, expensively glazed balei-ware cup, and she hastily glanced in their mother’s direction to gauge the effect of this strangeness.
“You have an ill temper this morn.” First Queen Garan Gamwone, her round, pretty face patted with matte zhu powder, did not raise a manicured black eyebrow. Instead, she paused as well, dabbing delicately at her lips with a square of pressed-rai paper as she surveyed the arrangement of sliced fruit and sweetbroth that was her usual first meal of the day. “Did you sleep badly?” Her tone was cajoling, meant for a child who had overstepped and must be firmly reined.
“Mother.” Kurin’s eyes narrowed. His topknot, caged in gold-beaded leather and stabbed savagely with a dull-iron pin, was oiled today, but it looked a fraction too tight. Maybe that was why he was so irritable, but then, he had been exceedingly snappish lately, and not just to Gamnae. “If you open your mouth to speak again before I receive an answer from Gamnae, I may be forced to break your dishes.”
“How dare you—” Mother began, but Kurin’s fist landed upon the tabletop, hard. Every piece of pottery or glass jumped. Gamnae’s eating-sticks trembled, their tips resting politely upon a tiny fish-carved stand.