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“Trust me. There will always be some who dislike you, but that’s life. Over this business?” The Champion grinned. “People like to hear tales of things in distant realms, but they never believe them. There might be strangeness at first, but you’ll be surprised how quickly they forget.”
Daine rested her head on the woman’s shoulder. “Good,” she whispered. “I don’t like the person I’ve been here.”
Alanna held her. “No one can refuse a god.” Her voice was kind. “It’s over, and you’re the same person you’ve always been. Once you’re home, it will seem like a tale even to you.”
The next day, in a break between rains, she and Numair were sitting in a garden, watching Bonedancer, Kitten, and Zek play with brightly colored stones, when Alanna brought Kaddar to them. He smiled hesitantly as the girl and Numair got to their feet.
“May I talk with you briefly?” he asked Daine. “I won’t take much of your time.”
“Take all you want, Your Imperiousness,” she replied with a grin, patting the chair next to hers.
“Here, laddybuck,” Alanna told Numair. “You come with me.”
The tall mage sighed, but didn’t argue. The Champion led him back into the house.
“Sit, please, Daine. I know you haven’t been up very long.” Kaddar joined her. The new emperor was dressed simply, as he’d been on his tours with her. The only changes she saw were a gold sunburst ring on his left index finger, and an air of purpose. For a moment they watched the animals play.
“What about Lindhall’s Bone?” he asked. “The other dinosaurs you awoke have vanished, but he’s still here.”
“I don’t know,” Daine admitted. “It seems to be up to Bone.”
Bonedancer looked up at them and nodded, a trick he’d learned from Kitten.
“This is the first time I’ve seen him away from Lindhall. He must like you.” Kaddar looked at his hands. “They’ll be going north, too, it seems.”
“Numair mentioned it. I’m sorry,” she told him. “I know you’ll miss Lindhall.”
“I offered all I could to get him to stay. Gold, books, a menagerie like your king is building. Head of the university, or just of the School of Magecraft. He says he’s borne it here as long as he can. He wants to go north, where he won’t see another slave.” He laughed shortly. “It seems his only reason for staying this long was to help runaways out of the country!”
“Are you surprised?” Daine asked.
“No, not really—I had my suspicions all along. I just wish he could stay. I trust him. I don’t know about some of these other people, particularly the ministers who served my uncle.”
“Can’t you get rid of them?”
Kaddar shook his head. “The country’s already in turmoil. I need to keep a few of the same faces around, at least until I get their measure.”
“It doesn’t sound like much fun. I wish you luck with it.”
“I’ll need luck,” Kaddar took her hand. “Daine, I found my uncle’s papers. He was going to have me arrested and charged with conspiring against him—which means he planned to have me killed. I owe you my life. I know this will sound trite, but I mean it: whatever you want that I can give, even to half of my kingdom, all you need do is ask.”
Daine gave him a skeptical look. “Your ministers wouldn’t like the half-kingdom part.”
He grinned. “Actually, they want to arrest you for crimes against the state.”
“Me?”
“It will take a year just to figure out how much we lost. We have to do a census now, and draw up new records and tax rolls for every part of the empire.” Daine whistled, impressed. He went on, “What amazes me is that creatures dead long before man ever walked the earth fixed on the treasury and the imperial records, where they could do the most damage. We’ll never replace it all, and what we do replace will cost a fortune.”
She fingered the badger’s claw around her neck. “I had help,” she reminded him.
“Yes, but haven’t you seen how often people look for someone to blame? Not to find a way to keep some bad thing from repeating itself—just to blame.”
“Send them to the Graveyard Hag,” Daine suggested impishly. “She’ll set them straight.”
Kaddar shuddered. “My blood runs cold at the very thought.” He squeezed her hand. “I mean what I say. I want to reward you, so think fast. Your ship sails at dawn. I know you’ve no family or home of your own, so shall it be gold or jewels? My own wealth was invested here in the city, and there are imperial treasures all over the empire. We may not have a palace, but neither are we poor. Name your desire.”
She stared at the dragon, marmoset, and skeleton. Bone had discovered a puddle to splash in. “I want some humans—slaves—to be freed, with enough in their purses to start a new life. A good life, with work they enjoy, the chance to buy apprenticeships for their children, and proper clothes and food and such. If they want to return to Tortall with us, they can.”
“All these things for others? Nothing for yourself?”
“No, Kaddar. The Graveyard Hag did most of this, not me. Use whatever you might have given me to help them that suffered in your famine.”
He looked her in the eyes for a moment and saw that she meant it. “Name these people, then.”
“The Banjiku—all of them, please, and their animals. And the emperor’s mutes.”
“The mutes?” She nodded. “But—they’re useful, and since they’re mute already—” Daine stared at him. The emperor sighed. “Very well. I have to bustle, if they’re to leave tomorrow.”
As he tried to get up, Daine held him back. “Kaddar, it’s not my place to criticize the way you live, but if I were you, I’d think about your slaves. Animals endure cages if they must, but not two-leggers. If your slaves ever think to break out, it’ll make what I did look like mud pies.”
He sat down again. “It would beggar the empire if we freed them. No one could pay wages to so many when they pay only for room and board now. My nobles would rise against me. Even my soldiers would rebel, thinking that freed slaves would attack and their homes and families would be in danger.”
“I know it’d be hard, but please, think about it. If you whip an animal long enough, it turns on you. If all the world were slave, I don’t know if it would be so dangerous, but all they need do is look across the Inland Sea to know life doesn’t have to be like this.”
To her surprise, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “I will think about it; I promise.”
At dawn, she stood on one of the ships that would convey the now much larger Tortallan party north to Corus, the Tortallan capital. Their small convoy would raise anchor once the Banjiku and their animals boarded Daine’s ship. The mutes—those who had chosen to come—were already aboard another vessel. To Daine’s surprise, half of them had chosen to stay behind. Talking in sign language to Numair, they had explained that they preferred to stay with the life they knew. Emperor Kaddar would be far kinder than his uncle, they were sure, and Carthak was their home.
“When’s the coronation?” she asked Kaddar, who had come to see them off. Numair, standing nearby, picked up Kitten, trying to pretend he wasn’t listening.
“Full moon,” the young man said. “I wish you could be there.”
“I don’t,” grumbled Numair. Daine kicked him gently.
“You’ll write?” asked Kaddar, turning to go. The Banjiku had finished boarding. “You promise?”
“I’ll write,” she replied. The early fog had burned off at last, giving her a clear view of the palace. While some parts remained as they had been, she saw plenty of cracked and broken walls. The upper reaches were scarred by flame and soot. Of its five towers, only three remained standing.
She also saw one more thing. “Your Imperial Majesty? Kaddar!”
On the dock, he looked up at her. “Yes?”
“About the palace? I wouldn’t rebuild over there, if I were you. You’re going to have a dreadful problem with pests, and no dogs o
r cats will stay in it.”
The captain shouted the order to cast off. She waved cheerfully.
“Pests?” Kaddar glanced across the river. The entire slope between palace and water was covered with rats.
It’s ours, now, they thought to Daine.
It’s only fitting, she told them, and waved goodbye. Thunder rolled softly overhead as, once more, it began to rain.
Turn the page for a preview
from the last book in
THE IMMORTALS series:
THE REALMS OF THE GODS
The Stormwing sat on a low wooden perch like a king on his throne. All around him torches flickered; men spoke quietly as they prepared the evening meal. He was a creature of bad dreams, a giant bird with the head and chest of a man. As he moved, his steel feathers and claws clicked softly. For one of his kind, he was unusually clean. His reddish brown hair had once been dressed in thin braids, but many had unraveled. His face, with its firm mouth and large, amber eyes, had once been attractive, but hate deepened the lines at mouth and eyes. Dangling around his neck was a twisted, glassy lump of rock that shimmered in the torchlight.
Now he stared intently at a puddle of darkness on the ground before him. An image grew in the inky depths. In it, a tall, swarthy man turned the reins of his black-and-white spotted gelding over to a young hostler. Beside him, a girl—a young woman, really—lifted saddlebags from the back of a sturdy gray pony. When the hostler reached for her reins, the mare’s ears went flat; lips curled away from teeth.
“Cloud, leave be,” ordered the girl. She spoke Common, the main language of the Eastern and Southern lands, with only a faint accent, the last trace of her origins in the mountains of Galla. “It’s too late for you to be at your tricks.”
The mare sighed audibly, as if she agreed. The hostler took her reins carefully, and led mare and gelding away. Grinning, the girl slung the bags over her shoulder.
She is lovely, thought the Stormwing who had once been Emperor Ozorne of Carthak. The boys must swarm around her now, seeing the promise of that soft mouth, and ignoring the stubborn chin. Or at least, he amended his own thought, the ones with the courage to approach a girl so different from others. Boys who don’t mind that she converses with passing animals, not caring that only half the conversation can be heard by two-leggers. Such a brave boy—or man—would try to drown himself in those blue-gray eyes, with their extravagant eyelashes.
Ozorne the Stormwing smiled. It was a pity that, unlike most girls of sixteen, she would not make a charm this Midsummer’s Day to attract her true love. On the holiday, two days hence, she—and her lanky companion—would be dead. There would be no lovers, no future husband, for Veralidaine Sarrasri, just as there would be no more arcane discoveries for Numair Salmalín, Ozorne’s one-time friend.
“I want the box,” he said, never looking away from the dark pool.
Two new arrivals entered the image in the pool. One was an immortal, a basilisk. Over seven feet tall, thin and fragile-looking, he resembled a giant lizard who had decided to walk on his hind legs. His eyes were calm and gray, set in beaded skin the color of a thundercloud. In one paw he bore his long tail as a lady might carry the train to her gown.
The other newcomer rode in a pouch made of a fold of skin on the basilisk’s stomach. Alert, she surveyed everything around her, fascination in her large eyes with their slit pupils. A young dragon, she was small—only two feet long, with an extra twelve inches of tail—and bore little resemblance to the adults of her kind. They reached twenty feet in length by mid-adolescence, after their tenth century of life.
“Numair! Daine! Tkaa, and Kitten—welcome!” A tall, black-haired man with a close-cropped beard, wearing blue linen and white silk, approached the new arrivals, holding out a hand. The swarthy man gripped it in his own with a smile. As the young dragon chirped a greeting, the basilisk and the girl bowed. Jonathan of Conté, king of Tortall, put an arm around mage and girl and led them away, saying, “Can you help us with these wyverns?” Basilisk and dragon brought up the rear.
Something tapped the Stormwing’s side. A ball of shadow was there, invisible in the half-light except where it had wrapped smoky tendrils around a small iron box. The Stormwing brushed the latch with a steel claw; the top flipped back. Inside lay five small, lumpy, flesh-colored balls. They wriggled slightly as he watched.
“Patience,” he said. “It is nearly time. You must try to make your mistress proud.”
Mortals approached from the camp. They stopped on the far edge of the Stormwing’s dark pool; the image in it vanished. Two were Copper Islanders. They were dressed in soft boots, flowing breeches, and long overtunics worn by their navy, the elder with a copper breastplate showing a jaguar leaping free of a wave, the younger with a plain breastplate. The third man, a Scanran shaman-mage, was as much their opposite as anyone could be. His shaggy blond mane and beard were a rough contrast to the greased, complex loops of the Islanders’ black hair. Hot though it was, he wore a bearskin cape over his stained tunic and leggings, but never sweated. Few people ever looked at his dress: All eyes were drawn to the large ruby set in the empty socket of one eye. The other eye glittered with cold amusement at his companion.
“Still watching Salmalín and the girl?” asked the senior Islander. “My king did not send us for your private revenge. We are here to loot. The central cities of Tortall are far richer prizes than this one.”
“You will have your richer prizes,” Ozorne said coldly, “after Legann falls.”
“It will take all summer to break Legann,” argued the Islander. “I want to reunite my fleet and strike Port Caynn now! Unless your spies have lied—”
“My agents can no more lie than they can unmake themselves,” replied the Stormwing coldly.
“Then an attack from my fleet at full strength will take port and capital! I want to do it now, before help comes from Yamani Islands!”
Ozorne’s amber eyes glittered coldly. “Your king told you to heed my instructions.”
“My king is not here. He cannot see that you forced us into a fruitless siege only to lure a common-born man and maid into a trap! I—”
The Stormwing reached out a wing to point at the angry Islander. The black pool on the ground hurled itself into the air. Settling over the man’s head and shoulders, it plugged his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. He thrashed, ripping at the pool. It reshaped itself away from his clawing hands, flowing until it pinned his arms against his sides. The onlookers could hear his muffled screams.
When the man’s thrashing ended, Ozorne looked at the remaining Islander. “Have you questions for me?”
The younger man shook his head. Droplets of sweat flew from him.
“Consider yourself promoted. Bury that,” the Stormwing ordered, meaning the dead man. He looked at the Scanran shaman-mage. “What do you say, Inar Hadensra?”
The man grinned. Crimson sparks flashed in his ruby eye. “My masters sent me to see that Tortall is stretched thin,” he said in a cracked voice. “Where our forces go is no matter, so long as this bountiful realm is weak as a kitten in the spring.”
“Wise,” Ozorne remarked with a shrug of contempt.
Fire blazed out of the ruby, searing Ozorne’s eyes. He covered his face with his wings, sweat pouring from his living flesh, but the agony went on, and on. A harsh voice whispered, “Remember that you are no longer emperor of Carthak. Take care how you address me.” The pain twisted and went icy, chilling Ozorne from top to toe. Each place where his flesh mixed with the steel burned white-hot with cold. “The power for which I plucked one eye out of my own head is enough to defeat the magic of a Stormwing, even one so tricky as you.”
When Ozorne’s vision cleared, he was alone with the dark pool on the ground, and the shadow next to him. “I’ll gut you for that, Inar,” he whispered, looking at the box. “But not before I settle my score with Veralidaine and the one-time Arram Draper.” Grabbing his iron box in one claw, he took off, flapping clumsily into the ni
ght sky.
TAMORA PIERCE has nineteen fantasy novels for teenagers in print worldwide in English, German, Swedish, and Danish, and audio books in Danish and English, with two more—Shatterglass and Trickster’s Choice, the first book in a new Tortallan series—to appear in 2003. Alanna: The First Adventure is her first published book and the foundation of the Tortallan quartets: Song of the Lioness, The Immortals, and The Protector of the Small. Alanna received an Author’s Citation by the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Seventeenth Annual New Jersey Writers Conference and was on the Recommended Fantasy list of the Preconference on Genres of the Young Adult Services Division of the American Library Association, June 1991. Her other publications include short stories, articles, and her two Circle of Magic quartets. She was also an actor and writer for a radio drama and comedy production company in the 1980s and recently resumed her voice actor’s motley for Bruce Coville’s Full Cast Audio book company. Tammy has been a housemother, a social worker, a secretary, and an agent’s assistant. She lives in New York with her Spouse-Creature, technoweenie Tim Liebe, three cats, two parakeets, and wildlife rescued from the park.
