The Lotus Ascension Read online

  Sillara's mouth twisted wryly. “I am not Lady Merieke.” Sillara was quite certain that Merieke, who was a close friend and childhood playmate, was not a maid any longer. Sunjaa girls came of age at fourteen, and Sillara doubted that Merieke had retained her maidenhead much beyond that date, four years ago now.

  “And they are not, Mistress, at common quarters.” Ileke adjusted the collar of Sillara's Ausir gown. Of all her attendants, Ileke best understood the complex Ausir fashions. “There are girls with them, you know.”

  “I know.” Sillara closed her eyes. After putting so much effort into her song, she was tired. She had practiced that particular song in her head during the three hours between Soren's arrival and the party itself, but the self-harmonizing always exhausted her. She had, by the grace of the goddess, been able to divide her voice, to sing multiple parts at once, a gift given only to the most favored of Melara's priestesses. Melara Rose-goddess, the goddess of wine, music, beauty, and impossible love.

  “Mistress?” Ileke's voice startled Sillara, and she realized she had been lost in her own thoughts again. Sometimes it happened that Sillara could close her eyes, and the image of a garden bower, filled with roses beautiful enough to adorn the Rose-goddess's own hair, would snatch her from herself. It was not a place she had ever seen, no place she had ever been. It was rather the shadow of a dream, a half-remembered echo.

  “Yes, Ileke?” Sillara shook her head, as if by doing so she could shake loose the last tendrils of the vision.

  “We are here.” Ileke helped Sillara from the litter, but no sooner had Sillara left the curtained privacy than she saw the gathered knot of people outside her father's gates. They were not, she knew, here to see her father. They were here to see her.

  “You have supplicants.” Ileke's attitude shifted, and Sillara smothered a sigh. Though Ileke, having been Sillara's attendant since they were both no more than six, was generally able to overlook Sillara's qualities in the familiarity of mistress and maid, there were times when Ileke drew back to the same distance as nearly everyone else in Sillara's life. Ileke's eyes no longer held the cheerful affection Sillara was fond of seeing. Instead there was an almost worshipful look that served only to remind Sillara that she was not really a Sunjaa. No more was she really an Ausir.

  “I will see them, of course.” Sillara did not show on her face any of her discomfort. “But do not let my parents be disturbed.”

  “Of course not, Mistress.” Ileke slipped away from Sillara's side and went to the gate. There she held a whispered conversation that Sillara could hear perfectly.

  “The Queen of the Ausir will hear your pleas,” said Ileke. “If you will be quiet, orderly, and patient, she will touch each one of you.” She unlatched the gate, and the small crowd—not so small as Sillara had at first hoped—entered as quietly as twenty-five barefoot Sunjaa could.

  “We will do anything if the Queen will only see us.” The spokesman for the crowd was a middle-aged man with a withered arm. “Her touch is our only cure.”

  Sillara did not bother trying to refasten her hair. She squared her shoulders and moved toward the gathered crowd. “How can I help you?” she asked. She hoped that her parents were already indoors. The last time Kamen had caught her at this she had been kept within her chambers for a week.

  “We seek your gracious touch, O Queen.” The same middle-aged man spoke again. “Our Queen, Queen of all the destitute.”

  Ileke had resumed her place by Sillara's side, and the pride with which her body-slave walked would have brought a smile to Sillara's lips had she not made out her parents' litter entering the courtyard.

  Sillara resolved to continue. It was too late now to retreat, and she would not have it said she turned away any who came to her, even if what they sought she could not give. “I will touch you.” Sillara smiled at the man and laid her hand on his arm.

  “Thank you, mighty Queen.” He bowed to her and shuffled away, walking backward lest he turn his back to her.

  Sillara bit her lip. Her father would doubtless see this. Even as she touched the feverish baby a young mother held out, Sillara heard her father and mother exiting their litter.

  “What is going on here?” Kamen's roar broke the stillness of the courtyard, and despite his volume, Sillara could make out the harsh intake of her mother's breath.

  “I will be just a moment, Father.” Sillara quickly touched a young woman with no visible illness, but the haunted, haggard look in her eyes told Sillara that there was something indeed amiss. Perhaps she cannot conceive.

  “Sillara.” Kamen traversed the courtyard and laid his hand on her arm, staying her.

  “Yes, Father?” Sillara looked up into his eyes, but she did not see there the disapproval she had dreaded. She saw fear, and her heart ached.

  “How often do they come?” asked Kamen. Ajalira was at his side, and Sillara saw reflected in her mother the same fear she felt in her father.

  “Not too often.”

  “Sillara.” Ajalira shook her head.

  “At least once every three days,” said Sillara. “But since they came last night I had hoped they would not today.” Since her parents were not sending away her supplicants, Sillara turned back to the poor, suffering people. Touch and touch. A coin given. A kiss dropped on the brow of a child. Touch and touch.

  Sillara hoped that, by the time she had finished, her parents would have already gone back inside, but she knew her hope was vain. She did not hear their footsteps retreating, though she did not turn to look at them.

  “What do they call you, daughter?” Kamen seemed suddenly old to Sillara's eyes, and tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “I am sorry, Father, truly.”

  “Let us take this indoors, my love.” Ajalira's hand on Kamen's trembled slightly, and Sillara caught the movement.

  In silence Sillara followed her parents through the wide corridors of her father's house, and she knew with a cold piercing of her heart that this was not her home.

  No one spoke, aside from Kamen giving order for a fire and mulled wine. The sea breezes could lend a chill to the marbled rooms, and only when Kamen and Ajalira sat side by side on a soft sofa with Sillara seated across from them did Kamen speak again.

  “What do they call you, daughter?” He asked the same question again, using the same words, and Sillara could not meet his eyes.

  “Queen,” she said.

  “Queen of the Ausir?” asked Ajalira.

  Sillara heard her parents' breath cease. They were both waiting, both afraid.

  “No.”

  Her parents both exhaled, but Kamen's was more a groan than any other sound. “Queen of the Sunjaa?” he asked.

  “No.” Sillara could not bear to make the situation worse, and she hoped that this would at least comfort them.

  “Then of what?” Kamen's voice was tight.

  “Of them, of the destitute.”

  Kamen shook his head, but Ajalira smiled.

  “I tried to give them coin, Father, truly.” Sillara paused. “But they did not want it, at least not most of them.”

  “They want you to touch them. I heard.” Ajalira's smile did not reach her eyes.

  “Does your touch heal them?” asked Kamen.

  “I do not know.” Sillara wished that Soren were here. He would understand. “I do it because they wish it. It makes them feel better.”

  “Have you seen the same people more than once?” Kamen pressed her for an answer.

  “No.”

  “But they keep coming back?”

  “Yes.” Sillara knew as well as her parents that this was most likely due to at least some of her petitioners being healed. “May I go to bed now? I am tired.”

  “Yes, daughter.” Ajalira did not embrace her, nor did Kamen. Instead they held to each other as Sillara bowed and left. She knew, with an ache at her heart, that it was dread of her eventual apotheosis that filled them. Sillara herself felt no particular confidence that she would become a goddess, but
this was manifestly what her parents feared. And there was some small part of her mind that could not ignore the facts. She prayed; her prayers were always granted. And yet she was certain no god heard them.

  Ileke was waiting outside the door. “Mistress?”

  “Is there a bath drawn for me?” asked Sillara.

  “Yes, Mistress.” Ileke's earlier deference had not entirely faded, and Sillara could almost have wished she had imitated Merieke and gone back to the party. Not that she wanted to participate in the orgy. She simply wanted to see faces that were not touched by either worship or fear. To see Soren or Konas. As for the orgy itself, sex was something that would come to her eventually.

  And soon. She knew that, unlike the Sunjaa, the Ausir did not account a girl to become a woman at fourteen. The Ausir considered a girl a child until eighteen. And Sillara's eighteenth birthday had been a week before. Soon King Tivanel would summon her to his city, Duildal, and she would become the Ausir Queen in truth.

  Sillara did not linger in her bath. As quickly as Ileke could bathe her, she was done, and she slipped on a flowing nightgown of simple white. It was neither fitted like her Ausir gowns, nor translucent like her mother's Sunjaa dresses. Her hair hung in damp ringlets down her back, and she could feel her nightgown soaking up the water. But instead of going to bed, Sillara turned to the shrine of Melara in her bedchamber.

  Melara Rose-goddess was usually depicted as a dancing maid with flowing hair, laughing and lovely, but sometimes she was shown as a melancholy musician, with sad eyes and an unplayed lyre in her lap. It was before this latter image, cast in silver and decked with fresh roses, that Sillara knelt.

  “Melara of the downcast eyes, lady of the lost love.” Sillara began the litany she had written for the Rose-goddess. Over her own murmuring voice she could hear Ileke turning down the coverlet on the bed. The scent of roses hung heavy in the air, but the heady shalar, which Konas had shipped in from his own castle in the far-distant Ausir homeland, were opening. Their sweetness rivalled the roses', and Sillara inhaled deeply.

  “Lady Sillara?”

  Sillara turned to the sound, and she gasped aloud. Nathen stood, framed in her window, the night sky black behind him. She did not know what shocked her more, the fact that Nathen had climbed her walls to enter in by her window, or the fact that she had not heard him doing it.

  “Nathen.” Sillara rose from her knees and gestured to Ileke, who brought a robe to drape across her mistress's shoulders. “Why have you come?”

  “I saw how moved you were by your brother's words of his heroism, but he didn't even tell the half of it. I thought that I would come to you and tell you more.”

  Sillara looked eloquently at the window. “At this hour?”

  “Everyone else is awake, Sillara.” Nathen waved vaguely out the window at the harbor. “Thanks to your faith, Lady, that we were still alive, they are celebrating in a fashion fit for our exploits.”

  Sillara felt a warm glow in her cheeks. “You praise me too much, Nathen. I did only what any sister would do.”

  “Mine didn't.” Nathen stepped down out of the windowsill.

  Sillara could have bitten her tongue. She should have remembered that Merieke, along with everyone else, had believed the ship had gone down. “Merieke could not—” Sillara stopped. She was only making this worse.

  “Besides.” Nathen did not seem aware of the impropriety of his being in her bedchamber in the middle of the night. “At the party I did not have time to speak with you privately. You might have questions about … about your brother's deeds.”

  “You should go, Nathen.” She gestured first to the window then the door. “You must not stay here now. If you wish to talk to me more about Soren—and I dearly love hearing about him, as he is too modest to tell all his own bravery—then you should come tomorrow. I am sure that my father would be pleased to entertain any friend of my brother's.”

  “No, that would not serve my turn at all.” Nathen stepped toward her, and his eyes glowed in a fashion that Sillara mistrusted. “For then Lord Itenu and Soren himself would hear, and I should not be able to speak freely.”

  “Please go.” Sillara was acutely aware of the fact that all her attendants were female, and most even of them were abed. Ileke and she were alone for the space of several passages.

  “I think I should stay, Sillara.” Nathen stepped toward her with an unnatural silence of motion.

  Sillara did not hesitate further. She did not think that Nathen would attempt to lay violent hands on her—there was too much of adoration in his looks, and he must know Soren would never forgive him. No, she did not fear that. But she did fear that he would stay the whole night in her chamber, refusing to leave, and that would be enough to sully her reputation in Ausir eyes. So she ran. She fled her own chamber, with Ileke hard behind, and Sillara did not stop running until she stood before her parents' bedchamber door. She heard sounds from within, but she knocked anyway.

  “Go away.” Kamen's voice sounded farther away than Sillara would have thought, and she realized he must be in an inner chamber.

  “Father, Nathen is here to see me.”

  A low growl came from the other side of the door, and Kamen soon opened it. Her mother lay on the bed, and from her disheveled state and Kamen's tented skirt Sillara knew what they had been doing. She pushed the thought from her.

  “Where is that pup?” Kamen's anger flashed in his eyes.

  “I left him in my bedchamber.”

  “Abrexa's cunt!” Kamen whirled back to Ajalira. “He's bought the loyalty of my own slaves!”

  “No, Father. He climbed the wall of my tower and crept in by the window.”

  Kamen's fury lessened slightly, and he laughed. “Silent and crafty as his mother.”

  Now it was Ajalira's eyes that flashed with emotion, but the feeling was jealousy. Despite Nathen's pestering Sillara found it amusing that her mother should, even now five years after Saerileth's death, be jealous of the friendship Saerileth had shared with Kamen.

  “When I asked him to leave he would not, so for my reputation's sake, I did.”

  Kamen's ire rose again, and Sillara heard him muttering curses under his breath.

  “We will have him escorted out,” said Ajalira. “But you're not worried, daughter?”

  “No.” Sillara smiled. She was not afraid of Nathen.

  “I will speak to Darien tomorrow,” said Kamen. “This presumption of Nathen's has to stop.”

  “You are the Queen of the Ausir, after all,” said Ajalira.

  “And more than that.” Kamen did not explain his statement, and Sillara was not sure she wanted to hear her father speak of a divine nature in her. “Once Nathen's been taken care of, you should go back to bed.”

  As Sillara had expected, once Kamen made his appearance, Nathen became tractable and left without difficulty. But when she had her room to herself again, Sillara could not sleep. Ileke was curled up beside her, sleeping soundly, but Sillara's eyes would not stay shut. She could not stop thinking about Nathen's behavior. It was not like him, or at least she thought it was not. She admitted she did not know him overly well. He was two years Soren's senior and had been at sea for four years now. But she did not think that ordinarily a man, even a man in love, would behave as Nathen had.

  A man in love? Sillara sat up straight in bed. Melara's mercy, no. Sillara rose from her bed once again and went to kneel before the statue of the Rose-goddess. Sillara had sung of unrequited love, and here was unrequited love right before her.

  “Forgive me, Rose-goddess,” murmured Sillara. “I did not intend to so abuse your gift.” Though she doubted that this power came from Melara, she did not wish to offend the goddess. Worry gnawed at her. If Nathen had loved her before this night that was one thing, but if she had inflamed this passion with her song, was that not her fault? She wished that Soren were here. He knew Nathen best. He would be able to advise her.

  The sound of the sea filled her room, and Sillara sighe
d. What if Nathen were to return?

  “Ileke.” Sillara rose from her knees and went to her maid. “We are moving to Soren's room. I will sleep in his bed tonight.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” said Ileke sleepily. “You would not want Lord Nathen to return.”

  If even Ileke had thought of it, Sillara did not want to discount the possibility.

  Soren's room, empty for two years, smelled like him again. Two hours was long enough for his scent to cling to the room, and when Sillara nestled down under Soren's sheets she felt safe. She was asleep within minutes.

  Chapter Four

  Konas had seen Soren’s kind before—that overhasty, prized stallion who is out of the chariot gates before the race has begun. The orgy had not even properly begun yet. Konas had not invoked Abrexa, as he always did, yet Soren had already conquered his first lover. Sweat shone on his beautiful skin, beautiful much like his sister’s, though Konas had never seen Sillara after such exertion. Not that he would not want to. Soren was his sister’s copy, or rather she was his, he being born moments before her. Konas remembered their births perfectly, and the beauty which had awestruck him on that day was only a shadow of the promise that the twins had grown into. Sillara was gone for the night, and to Konas everything grew dim. The violet streamers that covered the walls were dull, and the incense did not arouse him as it had in his lascivious youth. Soren was right: Konas was not on form, not living up to his reputation, but how could he? How could he continue on as he had, fucking anyone who wanted him, moving from lover to lover as his indiscriminate tastes led him? How could he when there was such a woman in the world as Sillara? On the day of her Sunjaa ascension, as she stood dressed in traditional Sunjaa fashion with translucent linen through which Konas could just barely make out—or imagine he could—her shaved pussy, Konas had loved her. Though he said nothing, he was sad to see her return to her Ausir dresses, which hid her charms, though in no way diminished her beauty. From that point on, the lessons had grown harder for him, sitting next to her every day, instructing the woman he loved in how to be a proper wife for his brother—a brother he knew did not want her.