Sand & Storm

Chapter 2-2

“You’re not failing your country. The people will understand.” Many women had the same problem.

“No, they won’t. And I won’t fail them. Just give me . . . a bit of time to recover. Two weeks will do.”

“Don’t be silly. The midwife said you might die.”

“Stop telling me what to do!”

“You might die! Just for once listen to me. There are other solutions. Let’s use them.”

“No! No, no, no.” She clamped her hands over her ears.

“Listen to me. I love you and I don’t want you to die. And I’m sick of seeing you suffer like this. I will—”

“No. No!” She burst into tears.

Isandor closed her in his arms. She cried in great wracking sobs.

A feeling of great helplessness came over him. Arguing with her always led to this. He understood how she had grown up amongst a group of leering Eagle Knights in the days when the Knights ruled the land in her name and she lived as a prisoner in a gilded cage while the Knights bickered over which of them was going to father her children.

He did understand all of that, and he understood how that life had made her frightened, damaged, but she didn’t aid her cause by acting like a spoilt child.

He helped her change into a comfortable gown and installed her in the bed. He asked a maid to bring the queen some tea, and went down to the atrium, feeling empty and dejected.

Short of yelling at her, what could he do to make her see sense?

Had he really signed up to be a puppet king just so that he could watch her grow increasingly mad?

“Isandor.”

Isandor’s friend Rider Carro of the Eagle Knights came out of the entrance from the atrium to the downstairs hallway. He’d been on patrol and was still wearing his shorthair cloak. His cheeks were red from the cold air. “I heard what happened. Is it true?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“Accept my condolences.”

“Thank you.”

A brief moment of silence passed between them. Carro pressed his lips together. He was the same age as Isandor, and at one point, years ago, the child Jevaithi had lost had been his, back when they still had hope that changing the blood of the father would make a difference.

In silence, he led his friend into his private study at the far end of the downstairs corridor, a room that jutted into the garden, and had a view of the bay with its dark blue water and large rocks where legless lions would lie in the sun.

“Drink?” he asked Carro.

Carro didn’t refuse as he normally did when he was still on duty or planned to be flying later in the day, so he had probably come off duty. Isandor went to the cupboard against the back wall and found a bottle of yellowish, syrupy fluid. He was in the mood for Chevakian honey liquor.

Carro brought the glasses, Isandor poured and they both sat down on the couch in companionable silence.

Isandor sipped from his glass, letting the mellow taste of the liquor roll over his tongue.

There was a time they used to drink bloodwine, but it had become expensive lately. Young people these days thought that to drink the blood of an animal was barbaric. Back then, he’d never seen it that way. Meat was all they ate because the land was frozen and there was nothing else, and the blood was a by-product of the meat. It was all they had. But bloodwine—blood mixed with distillate—was not a great, durable or refined product, and, like so many in the City of Glass today, Isandor had lost the taste for it.

He sighed. “I don’t know what to do about Jevaithi.” What to do about my entire life.

“What do you mean—what to do about her?”

“She can’t go on like this. It’s been—like—the twentieth child she’s lost. The midwife says that every child is bigger risk, and yet she won’t listen to any arguments.”

“She’s the queen.”

“She’s my sister, and I can’t see her suffer any longer. She wants to try again, but there’s no point. It’s not going to make any difference.”

Carro sipped from his drink. “You should try a breeder.”

“Yeah.” Isandor blew out a breath. “But that means going through the whole selection and approval process again.”

Isandor had tried a breeder five years ago, but after he had selected the girl, Jevaithi insisted on getting involved in the choice and hovered around while he visited the girl, and even asked about the bedroom particulars.

Then he had told her to lay off, and she had refused to speak to him for two months.

He shuddered at the thought.

Why did his sister make both their lives so difficult?

The thought of having to go through the selection process again, including the gossip spreading all over town, and the lewd jokes in the bars, the weaselly attitude of the girl’s parents, the sickly visit to her house to perform the deed, which he’d never felt less like doing. How had noble men been able to pay fertile women to have their children for so long? How were they still doing it?

Carro said, “Adoption?”

He turned to Carro. “We can’t adopt a child, because if we adopt a child from the Thillei clan, the Pirosians will be angry and if we adopt a Pirosian girl, then the Thillei will be put out.” And a flare-up of the clan conflicts had the potential to shatter the fragile prosperity they’d been able to build.

Carro nodded. “A breeder, then.”

Isandor cringed. “Who can we consider? We did a lot of work choosing a breeder last time.”

Back then, they had chosen a woman who had given birth to many children already, one of the professional breeders. And that hadn’t worked either, at least for the only time he had been able to bring himself to visit her.

She reminded Isandor too much of his foster mother and the men who visited her. He remembered sitting in the snow outside the limpet in the Outer City, waiting until his mother had finished with her customer. When carrying a child for a noble, that man would be able to buy her services until the child was born. The whole idea of it made him feel sick.

Carro continued, “I could find you a strong breeder with Thilleian blood, so that the princess will resemble you and Jevaithi.” That was another problem: if finally a child was born and it was a boy, they would have to start all over again. The City of Glass must have a Queen.

Carro sipped from his drink, in deep thought. “I’ll make some investigations.”

“Please be discreet,” Isandor said. “Offer a good fee, but don’t make a big fuss. Contact some regular breeders. Talk to them, but don’t say who it’s for. Ask them if they are booked.”

Carro said he would do it, finished his drink and made for the door, leaving Isandor alone in the silence of his office. He finished his drink, too, set the glass on the table and went to his desk, but he couldn’t concentrate, and leaned his head in his hands.

He thought of Jevaithi, who was possibly writing letters to men she wanted to try, stubborn as ever. Queen Maraithe, the mother he had never known and who had never held him, had wasted away as a skeleton under the imprisonment of Rider Cornatan and his Knights of the old guard, who had ruled the land with an iron fist after her death.

By all accounts, she had been quite deranged, calling out for help at every whim, asking the servants to attend her most ridiculous needs. He’d heard that in her last year, she had a servant devoted solely to washing her backside in the outroom. He had also heard rumours, more reliable because they came from Rider Barton who had seen it, that she would eat strange things and that apparently those outroom visits grew increasingly frequent and nasty.

He could see Jevaithi set on the same course.

She desperately wanted a child, and she would do everything possible, and impossible, for it. She would ruin her relationship with him and with all her advisors for that one goal.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in.” Isandor lifted his head from his hands.

A member of the palace guard came in with the words, “The mail is here, Your Majesty.”

Isandor accepted a small pile of letters. Most of the mail that came to the palace would go to the correspondence service, but these were considered too personal or important for the secretaries to deal with.

He spread the letters on the table.

One was the monthly report from the treasury detailing public expenditure. Most of it had gone into the Harbour District, which was still far from finished, and now the citizens were complaining that too many foreigners lived and had businesses there.

A letter from the town administrator of Bordertown was about the progression on the duplication of the railway tracks and the joint project between Peria and Chevakia to build a faster cable train down the steep escarpment that allowed for easier movement of goods between the two countries. And he was reminded that he’d promised to investigate the opening of the land route through the mountains. Yet more work to do.

The last letter was a dust-stained envelope bearing the seal of the Chevakian doga, which was their government assembly. Across the front, his name was written in loopy handwriting.

Sadorius han Chevonian, or Sady.

Long-time proctor of Chevakia, husband to Isandor’s foster mother—who had once been a breeder in the City of Glass—and father of the last child she would ever have.

To see his familiar handwriting brought memories of Sady’s large house with its many courtyards; the straight, tree-lined streets of Tiverius, the Chevakian capital; warm sunny weather; and dinners around the table in the large kitchen.

He lifted the envelope to his nose as if he could smell the essence of Tiverius on the paper. Oh, the memories of enjoyable times.

He inserted his finger under the flap and ripped it open, looking forward to reading about everyday life in the house. His foster mother Loriane was very ill, but if anything bad had happened, Sady would have sent a telegraph message.

He unfolded the paper inside, and then breathed out disappointment. Sady was writing to him in his capacity as King of Peria. The letter was addressed to the Knight Council and contained no personal in formation.

I have in the past year or so observed a number of meteorological changes that I find troubling. I think I mentioned during our last visit to the City of Glass that the northern half of Chevakia is gripped by a severe drought. The drought has still not broken. Villagers have walked away from their fields and are coming into town. They speak of dust devils, whirlwinds that destroy their crops and sometimes their towns. The entire northern region is slowly turning into a desert. Even in Tiverius, we are feeling the effects of the drought. The water stores are low, and this year farmers were forced to plant their crops early for the fear of missing out on rain. For the first time in known history, the Solmeni River has stopped flowing and the legendary falls are dry.

I’m facing an influx of people from the north, and we’re having enough trouble coping with our regular citizens. The situation is achingly familiar to the one we faced after the sonorics explosion in the City of Glass: we have refugees, but nowhere to house them and no resources to give them. This is only from our own country so far, but according to my meteorologist, Arania faces worse problems. There are people on the move in Arania in the direction of the border. When the refugees come across the border, we will have to deal with them.

Most worryingly, my chief meteorologist and his students have observed some anomalous increases in sonorics. We have seen these spikes occurring over the past years, but they had been on a strong diminishing trend. We are now seeing a reversal of that trend.

Isandor’s heart thudded in his throat. What the Chevakians called sonorics was the same as icefire, and yes, he had sometimes seen flickers of the golden light dancing over the shoreline when he looked out of his bedroom window at night.

The Heart was really destroyed, wasn’t it?