Cybele's Secret - Juliet Marillier - Cybeles Secret
“Your father uses you well,” Duarte said eventually, his tone level. “A man allows himself to be diverted by your wit. He starts to enjoy the lash of your sharp tongue and quite forgets you are a merchant’s daughter. Since the piece is broken, your question is no longer relevant, Mistress Paula.”
I was so offended I found myself without a reply. Maybe I had offered to obtain information from Duarte and others by exercising my limited charms on them, but the question I had just asked had been framed out of genuine curiosity, nothing more devious. And did I really have a sharp tongue? I heard Irene draw a deep, indignant breath, ready to speak.
“Kyria.” A deep voice from behind me: Stoyan’s. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Your father is ready to go.”
“Then I will bid you good night, Mistress Paula.” Duarte was all smooth courtesy, but he was looking over my head, and his eyes were full of challenge.
“Good night, Senhor Duarte,” I said. “It’s been…interesting…talking to you.”
“Good night, Mistress Irene.”
Irene gave the Portuguese a frosty nod, then Stoyan steered us away like an efficient sheepdog gathering up strays from a flock. I could think of no reason why we would ever see Duarte da Costa Aguiar again. I should have been relieved. He had flattered me and insulted me, made me feel warm with pleasure, intrigued, confused, and angered me all in the space of an evening. Talking to him was like treading a path across stepping-stones set a little too far apart. But what I felt most strongly was disappointment.
I was in the storeroom of Irene’s library, poring over another leaf from the Persian manuscript. It was quiet. I was alone, standing by a high desk on which the piece had been laid out with care, its corners weighted down by squat creatures with bulbous toes. The light was fitful, and I could not see the tiny illustration clearly. Inside the lamp, fireflies swarmed, their bodies glowing behind the glass shade. I winced as they blundered against it. I had never been fond of insects.
The miniature. I must concentrate. I must study it, for time was running out. I narrowed my eyes, trying to focus. Was that a figure standing on another’s shoulders? A girl? She was wearing trousers—most indecorous—and was reaching up to grasp something above her head. Picking apples? The man supporting her was balancing on something himself. It all looked quite precarious. And there was something else there…. I must carry this out into better light. But carefully. Nobody must see.
The hanging was down over the door to the main chamber, and when I brushed against the cloth, a swarm of little flies arose from within its fibers to hover around my head. I held my breath and squeezed my eyes shut, ducking around into the library proper.
I opened my eyes. There was a scholar at every table: a hooded soothsayer, a wizard in a hat with stars on it, a tiny gnome hunched over a map, an old man dipping a peacock-feather quill into an inkwell of faceted crystal. Light poured down from above, an otherworldly light as pale as dawn and pure as springwater, but not from the holes pierced in the plasterwork or from a torch or a lamp. A sphere floated there, two arms’ lengths above the scholars, held by nothing but sheer magic. I walked forward, but nobody so much as gave me a cursory glance. I opened my mouth to greet them, for they were all dear and familiar, my friends from the Other Kingdom with whom I had argued and debated on every night of full moon through the years of my childhood. A moment later, everything shifted and changed, and I was no longer in the library but in Dancing Glade, scene of the fairy revels I knew so well. Ileana, queen of the forest, sat on her willow wood throne, and before her knelt my sister Tati, clad in a white gown with her dark hair flowing down her back and her big violet-blue eyes desperate with feeling. Around them were gathered the same folk I had just seen in the library. Many others, from dwarf to giant, from salamander to owl, watched on in silence. I was part of that crowd, and yet I knew I was there only in dream form, unable to speak or move.
“I need to see them!” Tati was pleading. “You know I have accepted this way of life. I have done my best to become part of your realm. Love brought me to the Other Kingdom, and it will hold me here forever. I mean no disloyalty to you and yours. But my love for Sorrow did not cancel out my love for my family, Your Majesty. It seems cruel that I can never go back. I just want to hug my sisters and talk to them a little. I need to know they’re safe and well and to show my father that I am all right.”
Ileana was wearing her feathered headdress. She towered above my sister, her robe swirling around her with a life of its own. In its folds, clouds of small bright butterflies danced. Her eyes were cool. “Do you not speak with those of our own folk who are permitted to go across?” she asked. “Grigori or the dwarves? They can report to you on your sisters’ progress. I expect they’re all doing very well, Jena in particular, since we took such a hand in her learning. I can’t imagine why you would concern yourself about them.”
“They’re my sisters,” Tati said simply. “I love them. I miss them. I want to see them so much it hurts. Such things are important to human folk, Your Majesty. Isn’t there some way I can earn the right? Or if I can’t go across, couldn’t I win them the privilege of coming back here, just for a little?”
Ileana gave a slow smile. On the trees around her throne, the leaves shivered. “You do not know what you ask, Tatiana,” she said softly.
“With respect, Your Majesty, I do know,” Tati said. “I’ve talked to Sorrow about it, and he agrees. I am prepared to undertake a quest.”
“I see. And if you had to choose just one of your sisters to see, which would it be? Jena, to whom you owe so much? Little Stela, who lost the most by being forbidden the Other Kingdom, since she was only a child when the portal was closed? Clever Paula, whom our scholars miss so badly, or Iulia, who danced like moonlight?”
Tati’s eyes had widened. “Only one of them?” she whispered. “How could I possibly choose?”
“How indeed?” Ileana looked amused. My heart was pounding fast as I wondered what Tati would do, what cruel choice she would make. “As it is,” the forest queen went on, “you need not decide that part of it until your quest is complete. It will link very neatly with a mission we have for your sister Paula, who happens to be right where we need her. Drǎgua has been asked for assistance—an old, old friend in another part of the world requires human intervention to set matters right. This can become a threefold mission: We can assist Drǎgua’s friend, give you your chance, and, at the same time, help no fewer than three human folk to learn and grow. Tell me, how brave is your sister?”
Then, before I could hear more, the scene dissolved around me, Tati, Ileana, the scholars of the Other Kingdom fading away as if they had never been, and I was lying in my bed at the han, with darkness outside and only my tears for company.
Poor Tati! In all those years of missing her, I had not imagined she, too, might be unhappy. She had been so sure of her love for Sorrow, so certain in her choice to leave us. If only I had been able to hold the dream a little longer. I had so wanted to walk forward, to put my arms around her and tell her we loved her and missed her, as she did us. As for being brave, I hoped very much that I could be as brave as I needed to be.
Now I had to go to the privy. Stoyan was asleep, lying across the outer doorway, through which I must pass to make my way along the gallery. I fumbled for my cloak, then tiptoed out of my closet and across the larger chamber in my bare feet. Stoyan was lying on his back with one arm flung over his eyes and the other relaxed by his side, the blanket loose around him. His pose was that of a small boy exhausted by a day’s activity. For all my confusion, it made me smile. I put one hand against the door frame and stepped across him.
A powerful hand seized my ankle. I teetered, then sprawled at full length onto the hard floor of the gallery. “Ahh!” I exclaimed as a spear of pain stabbed through my ankle.
The hand released its viselike grip. “Paula!” He was on his knees, lifting me with an arm around my shoulders, his voice rough with comprehension come a moment too late. “I hurt you! Why were you out of bed? What is wrong—”
“Nothing,” I said, grimacing as I gingerly felt my ankle. “I got up to go to the privy, that’s all. I didn’t want to wake you. I’m fine, really.” But my ankle still hurt, and as soon as I tried to rise to my feet, it was obvious. I hobbled to one of the chairs by the little gallery table and lowered myself carefully onto it. “I’ve just wrenched it,” I said.
Stoyan looked devastated at what he had done. “You are crying.” He crouched by me, reaching a hand to brush my cheek. “You are badly hurt. I should wake Master Teodor—”
“Don’t. I will be all right soon, Stoyan. They’re not tears of pain. I had another dream. I really didn’t want to disturb you again. I’m sorry. And now I’m going to have to hobble to the privy. You might need to help me. So much for lessons in self-defense.”
Leaning on him, I got there and back well enough. Then I was wide awake, the image of Tati clear in my mind and the mission teasing at my thoughts. “I won’t be able to sleep for a while,” I said. “You don’t need to stay up with me. I’ll just sit here and think.”
“I will put a strapping on your ankle.” He was already looking in his bundle of belongings, stowed on a shelf just inside the main doorway of our quarters. “If you permit. It will swell before morning; this will make it more comfortable.”
The ankle hurt too much for me to worry about propriety. “Thank you,” I said. “Stoyan, I need to go back to the library in the morning. I dreamed about Tati again; she’s here because she’s earning the right to visit us—her sisters, I mean. That’s the reward for her quest. And it’s tied up with mine. Stoyan, if we go to Irene’s, I might see Tati again and be given my last clues so I can work out what it is we have to do. Will you have time to take me there before you escort Father to the blue house?”
The end to this evening had been interesting. Father hadn’t said a single word about Cybele’s Gift until we had parted ways with Irene and Murat and returned to the han. Then he had calmly reminded me that our own buyer was a scholarly collector of advanced years with a passionate devotion to religious antiquities. This man, unwed and something of a recluse, would care little about the supposed capacity of Cybele’s Gift to bestow a future of good fortune and prosperity on its owner. Chances were he would not be troubled by the availability of only half the piece; he would still want it for its historical interest. Indeed, Father had said, our buyer should be delighted to obtain the item at a reduced price. Slightly reduced. Father had no intention of letting anyone else outbid him now that success was within his grasp. Before we had left the blue house, he had told Barsam he would be back in the morning with a revised bid, one that was likely to be acceptable. He had asked the Armenian to hold Cybele’s Gift until the midday call to prayer.
“There is only one possible problem,” Father had added. “Perhaps one or two of the others might consider coming back to Barsam with revised bids, but I don’t believe anyone was keen enough to act immediately. Except for Duarte Aguiar. He was still there when we left Barsam’s house; I imagine he remains in the race. And they say he’s ruthless. I expect he, too, will be there in the morning, ready with an offer. I’ll go early, but not so early that I disturb Barsam’s household and risk offending him. I can outbid Duarte. The man’s purse cannot be bottomless.”
“He must be quite wealthy,” I’d said. “He couldn’t maintain the Esperança without a good source of funds, surely.”
“Perhaps he has a rich family,” Father had said. “Stoyan, I will need you in the morning. Not straight after breakfast, but a little later.”
Now, in the semidarkness of our quarters, Stoyan had found what he was looking for: a strip of linen and a small pot of something pungent. “A salve,” he explained. “It should bring down the swelling. Will you…?”
I hitched the skirt of my nightrobe up toward my knee and put my foot on the other chair. I made myself breathe slowly as I felt Stoyan’s hands on my ankle, gently massaging in the ointment. A confusion of sensations filled me: pain, certainly, but something else as well, something I liked more than was appropriate. I valued our friendship; I knew he did, too. I liked the way he was there when I needed him, strong, quiet, and capable. Anything further between us—the sort of relationship Irene had hinted at—would be all wrong. There were so many arguments against such a development that I would not even entertain the idea of it.
When he was done, Stoyan wrapped my ankle in a neat bandage. “This Aguiar,” he murmured as he bent to fasten the ends of the linen securely, “you like him?”
A startling question. “What do you mean by ‘like him’?” I asked.
“You spoke much to him tonight. As if he were not an acquaintance but a friend. There was a smile in your eyes as you did so. I wonder if you have not heeded my warning. He seeks to exploit you, Paula. I see this in his face.”
Cautiously, I returned my foot to the ground. “It does feel much better with the strapping,” I acknowledged. “Thank you, Stoyan. And don’t worry about Duarte. He loves to flirt. If it hadn’t been with me, it would have been with some other woman. It means nothing.”
“You did not answer my question.” He was rolling up the extra bandage, stowing things away.
I tried to summon an honest answer. “It seems wrong to say I like him if there’s any possibility he was the one who threatened Antonio. But he appeared quite shocked when I suggested that, so maybe I was wrong. Duarte is interesting to talk to, full of surprises. He seems to enjoy the same kinds of things I do, books and ideas in particular. I’m flattered that he wants to talk to me. But I don’t trust him. And maybe you can’t actually like someone unless you have trust in them.” The topic was uncomfortable, especially in the middle of the night. “You should go back to sleep,” I said.
“Why were you crying? What did you see in your dream?”
“I dreamed about Tati.” My voice sounded small and forlorn; I couldn’t help it. “She was in the Other Kingdom, and she was saying how much she missed her family and that she would undertake a quest just to be allowed to see us….”
A sudden wave of homesickness came over me. I covered my face with my hands, unable to stop the tears. Stoyan moved to kneel by my chair and put his arm around my shoulders, muttering something indistinct. I gave myself up to weeping. It was only when the flood began to abate that I realized I was holding on tightly with my face pressed against his shoulder and that he was whispering words of comfort against my hair and doing his own share of holding. So much for heeding my own good advice.
