AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Oren blinked for a moment. “What do you mean, why?”
“Why do you want to marry me?”
“Do you remember,” Oren said, “when we were children, and we would play hide-and-seek in the gardens? No one else could findyou, but I always could. I always found you in the end. You are lost like that now, Lin. Only I can find you. Help you.”
A sour note sounded on thelior.Lin glanced over, saw Mez looking at her, his eyebrows raised, as if to say:Do you need me to stepin?
“Lin,” Oren said. “What are you thinking?”
She shook her head minutely at Mez, and turned back to Oren. “Just that I wondered if those were the words Sulemon used, when he was trying to convince Adassa to join with him and the other kings.Join with me and I will keep you safe. I will help you. You are lost on your own.Isn’t that the sort of thing he said?”
Oren stiffened.
“Although,” Lin said, “he probably at least told her that he loved her. And you haven’t even done that.”
The music had stopped. Mez must not have been able to stand it any longer, Lin thought, the way Oren was looking at her, and she could not blame him. Nor could she look at Oren anymore. His face was creased with anger, his eyes hard and bright as stones.
She walked past Natan and Mariam as she hurried away from the dancing. She took herself to one of the tables, found a silver cup of wine, and drank, letting the heat of the alcohol settle the vibration in her bones. Turning, she looked about but could not see Oren among the crowd. She let herself relax slightly.
Oren was not the Sault, she reminded herself. Most of them, her friends and neighbors, were not like that: not rigid or judgmental. They had empathy, like Chana. Compassion, like Mez. Wisdom, like Mayesh. (Yes, she told herself, it was all right to think it: Hewaswise, and cared about goodness, even if he was not always kind.) Most of the elders had not voted to exile the Maharam’s son. It was the Maharam himself, in the end, who had cast the deciding vote.
Mez began to play again, this time a slower song, a sweeter refrain. Sparks from the lamps were flying up, salting the air with firefly light. Lin was hot from the dancing and the wine, but the space between her shoulder blades was clammy-cold.
She sat watching the dancing, the couples circling under the glowing lanterns. She did not know all their names, she realized—not the younger ones, who had not been in school with her and Mariam. It was almost as if she were observing a play, or a performance in the Arena. Some part of her ached. These were her people, their ways her ways. And yet even as one song blended into another and the moon glided across the sky, Lin did not move to join them but sat and watched, a spectator.
“Lin!” Mariam hurried up to her with Natan following, hands in his pockets. He had a nice smile, Lin thought, an easy smile. “How long have you been sitting here?”
Lin glanced over the walls of the Sault, at the Windtower Clock rising against the sky. To her surprise, some hours had passed; it had felt like only a few moments. Midnight was looming on the horizon.
Mariam said, “I saw Oren with you—”
“It’s fine,” Lin said quickly. “We danced, that’s all.” She turned a smile on Natan. “I had wanted to ask you—”
“If I saw your brother on the Gold Roads?” Natan said. “I did, actually. At a caravansary near Mazan. Josit seemed well,” he added, hastily. “He told me that if I made it back here before he did, I should send his love to you both.”
“Did he saywhenhe might be coming back?” Lin asked.
Natan looked mildly puzzled. “I don’t believe I asked him. He’d bought a pet monkey, though,” he added. “Off a Hindish trader. It was stealing people’s hats.”
Natan, Lin was beginning to think, might be handsome, but was not that bright. “Hats,” she said. “Imagine that.”
Mariam shot her a chiding look, though she looked close to smiling herself.
“I doubt he had any news as exciting as yours,” Natan said. “The Crown Prince, in the Sault? I doubt that’s ever happened before.”
Lin wondered if she should start telling people that Conor had come to see her because he had some terrible version of the pox anddesperately needed treatment. That seemed, however, like the sort of untruth that would get you arrested by the Arrow Squadron.
“He was looking for Mayesh,” she said. “That’s all.”
Mariam grinned. “Everyone says he’s going to sweep Lin away to a life of luxury on the Hill.”
Lin thought of the Hill. The brilliance of it, the colors. The way people spoke, as if every word were dipped in sweet acid. The way Luisa had wept in humiliation. The way Conor had watched her when she danced.
“Well, that’s just silly,” she said around the tension in her throat. “The Prince is as good as engaged, and besides, he would never marry an Ashkari woman.”
“He wouldn’t,” Natan agreed. “There is no alliance to be made there. We are a people without a country, and kings do not marry people. They marry kingdoms.”
Perhaps Natan was cleverer than she’d given him credit for, Lin thought.
