Riversend: An Amberlight Novel. Sylvia Kelso

      “Assassination, faction battles, civil war up there.” Had she been a River Quarter stevedore, she would have smacked her lips. “Seems Dinda was worse than most.”

      Dinda being Cataract’s half-crazy military tyrant, who had died among the first in the fall of Amberlight. And being from a line of military tyrants, had left the city to settle his successor in a more than usually bloody way.

      “Shuya’s got her hands full with an Oasis uprising; they say she’s lost another five caravans.”

      President of Verrain, our downstream neighbor; whose wealth comes cross-desert from the Oases, gold freighted in on the endless camel caravans, to sustain the forty Families, over whom she ruled by uneasy consent. And, as with the Oases, by plentiful coercion. For which she had used qherrique. Before I recalled we used to supply her, I had almost answered, Good.

      “And Dhasdein?”

      She frowned. The impersonal talk had relaxed her; it was the shrewd, informed judgment of a politics-reader, a report such as any officer might give her Head.

      “No trouble in the colonies. No word that the Emperor wanted to hang his general, or crucify the officers, or even fell down and foamed. He’s got his busted army back. There’s trade, or at least, they’re buying some timber. But . . .”

      But Dhasdein was the River’s strongest state, whose army and navy had been the mainspring of our overthrow. Whose might had been hurled down in turn. Whose general had absconded with the enemy. Surely, one might expect more action from Dhasdein?

      Such worries are for House-heads, to gnaw the vitals in some sleepless morning watch. I said, “Your news is precious.” With a Navy officer, no call for more. “Iatha, will you see to Tez here?” Find what she needed, what she had brought—some came with what they stood in, some lacked shoes to stand—where she could be quartered, what she was good for now. Despite everything, I could not withhold a smile.

      “I’m so glad to know you’re safe. To have someone here from Wasp.”

      To keep the honor, and the memory, and the family alive.

      We had both risen. The smile came back to me, but with constraint. “Ah—Ruand—”

      “Your father. Of course. I think they’re in Zariah’s house.” Hanni nodded. “Then let’s find him now.”

      * * *

      Settling. Week 8.

      Journal kept by Sarth

      One could wish, at times, that House-heads were less—god-like in their resolutions. I see quite clearly why Tellurith spoke as she did with Darthis: balancing consecration against sacrilege, saving the House. Shielding us both. I understand I had no more right to cry, I want to save myself! than he to protest his breached privacy. But—!

      There has been no time for nursing wounds or grudges since. The epidemic has left us no time for nursing anything. Except the sick, where and whenever Caitha sends us. Heat hellien-steam, boil willow-tea. Wash faces, wipe noses, wipe bottoms, boil nose-wipes, boil bottom-wipes, mop up vomit, carry, wipe, clean . . . And I must admit, Alkhes has amazed me. I thought he would jib, or turn up his general’s nose, and the perverse creature has kept with me in the thick of it. With his arm healed he has even learnt, after a fashion, to rock a fractious toddler to sleep.

      I asked him how, once, in a house-nursery’s bedlam: fifteen children from one to ten bellowing, weeping, coughing, choking, throwing up . . . He gave me one of those looks, all eyes and dagger-points, and said, “Nobody’s bleeding here.”

      Meaning, I think, that it is worse in a field hospital. Astonishing that one who kills so proficiently should be at all concerned about patching the debris. Let alone confronting his victories’ price.

      I was the more astounded when he shot into the dispensary this morning squeaking, “Sarth, what am I supposed to—Sarth!”

      The dispensary is the storeroom of Zariah’s barrack-half: shelves for medical supplies, filthy clothes and gear in heaps, stairs to the wash-tub and boiling cauldron. Huis and I had just heaved another load of water home. Unsighted indoors, I read only the body-stance. But experience, let be Tower skills, forbade, What’s wrong?

      I grabbed the newest basket of foul linen and said, “Help me get these on.”

      “I can’t, I need—”

      A fresh child began crying. Huis rubbed his head and hurried off, I hissed, “We can’t talk now!”

      Down in the washing bay I tipped water in the big cauldron: four trips, and half of it gone. Automatically he shoved wood underneath, and while I sorted fouled blankets from used nose-wipes I demanded, “What’s wrong?”

      “Sarth, I can’t—!” He burst up from the wood-pile looking wild enough to bolt. “I’ve done everything else but I—”

      “What is it?” I did manage to soften the tone.

      “Asaskian.” Suddenly he was red to the ears. “She wants—she needs—and I—”

      “Asaskian!” Laundry went every way. With mother and eldest sister among the rare cutter-wielders, vital to the stone-work, Zariah’s second daughter had become the pillar of her house. Just fifteen, she had carried us all, calm, unflustered, resources never failing, until she fell ill herself. “You haven’t let her out of bed?”

      “Gods, of course not!” She had gone from fever to chest chokeage. Caitha said it was worry atop exhaustion and dosed her with as much sleep-syrup as she dared. “But she—she—”

      Asaskian was a daughter to dream of: slim and lithe and elegant as a walking palm, perfect honey-gold skin and great amber eyes and clouds of copper-auburn hair. There were times I wondered if my heart would break, just looking at her.

      And when the complications began . . . I tore up the stairs, snapping back at him, “Then what is it, for the Mother’s sake?”

      “Sarth . . . !”

      The tone swung me round. If he had been scarlet before he was crimson now. “She’s all right, she just—I just—oh, gods!”

      All too clearly, the crisis was here.

      I came back down. Threw the last nose-wipes in. Got flint and tinder. When I thought he could suffer it, asked quietly, “What is it, Alkhes?”

      His ears were still scarlet. He was so like some Tower adolescent netted in disaster, it was all I could do not to push his hair back as on that first day. At last he muttered it, to the distant floor.

      “She needs a—uh—a bed . . .”

      A bed-pan. When he had been emptying chamber-pots and wiping bottoms for a solid three-quarter moon.

      “And I—Sarth, I can’t go in there and do that, she’s a grown girl!”

      Mother, the Outland notion of modesty is something I will never plumb. I managed to swallow that too. To say, almost reasonably, “You’ve done it for all the rest. You’d do it,” a stroke of genius, “for Tellurith.”

      “I’m married to Tellurith! I’m not even related to this one!”

      “Oh.” It was modesty, then decorum, however convolute. Meanwhile, the girl was probably bursting. “Watch the cauldron,” I said, and shot upstairs.

      Asaskian shared her mother’s room, halfway down the corridor. Having been all but embraced for my rescue, having listened for a renewed whisper in her chest; having once again sheathed in my own flesh the thought that said, These speaking eyes, this daybreak smile, the bones under this peaked skin and the delicately wasted shape under this coverlet, these could, these should have been yours; having kicked up the brazier, I hurried for the slops buckets inside the front entry; and ran straight into Tellurith.

      With Iatha, and Zuri, and another pocketful of luminaries, some House progress. And—

      My