Page 39 of A Trade of Blood

Fotia stared—yet she didn’t react to Ana’s behavior with anger or alarm, as so many often did. Rather, she looked at her with an expression of great disappointment.

It puzzled me until I realized what she was thinking:This is the imperial my brother serves under? This is the woman who commands his life?I found a bleak humor in it: both my sister and I had for the first time glimpsed the reality of each other’s adult lives, and found much to regret.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Fotia finally. “You, ah, are very kind. You wished to speak to Madam Armenta, I understand? I’ll walk you to her chambers.”

Again, we started off into the gloomy house, this time winding up a stairway that sported a fretvine railing cunningly grown to resemble horns.

“I’ll assume,” said Fotia, “that my brother told you of Madam Armenta’s health?”

Ana clung tightly to my arm as we climbed the stairs. “That she is undergoing fertility treatments, even at her advanced age?” she said. “Yes.”

“This means she likely won’t be able to talk as long as you might wish. Her medikkers won’t allow it.”

“I suppose,” mused Ana, “we couldn’t just tell them to fuck off?”

Fotia slowed very slightly as she climbed the stairs, blinking in shock. “Ahh. Well. No. For one thing, she listens to them very closely—and for another, they may actually be right. Her health has been severely damaged by the treatments. She truly does need her rest.”

“All this,” said Ana, “to produce more heirs. It seems rather ghastly! Why not simply name another member of the family the inheritor?”

“Velona is a woman of proud heritage. It is her mandate to bequeath her empire to her child. And then, there’s the memory of her lost children. It would be a betrayal to them if she were to give all her property to one not of their direct blood. Perhaps it’s a way of keeping them alive, in some small fashion.” She stopped, then gestured at the far wall. “Those are the Armenta children, if you’d wish to see how they were in life.”

Hanging on the wall above us was an enormous painting—one that had doubtlessly been done by a spatiast, given the astonishing quality of craftsmanship and skill. It rendered its four subjects so perfectly I would have sworn they could begin moving.

On the far left stood a tall, handsome young Tala man with a flashing grin and a dashing cloak: Lyimo Armenta, surely, the one who had been found dead in a pond. He looked every inch a prince, yet there was something slightly unpleasant to his smile. I felt instantly that this was a man who’d grown up expecting to inherit and had no intention of using that inheritance well.

To Lyimo’s left sat a beautiful, clear-eyed Tala girl of about nineteen, her black hair done up in an ornate scarf, and a set of purple ribbons wound about her pale neck. Her dress shimmered with silkand glittering cloths, suggesting it had cost more than my yearly pay. This was Sagma Armenta, then: the girl who had hanged herself.

Behind her was a rather thick, soft-faced younger Tala boy, his uncertain eyes peeping out from beneath a mop of dark hair. He wore his cape and black riding boots with an air of discomfort, as if whoever had dressed him had assumed he’d grow into them but he still had a good ways to go. This would be Gevma Armenta, then: the one who had tumbled from his destrier and perished.

The fourth and youngest one, of course, I knew. Castus Armenta was dressed even more ostentatiously than all his siblings there in the painting, with a bright yellow doublet and a cap sporting not one, nor two, but six white feathers. He had a sword buckled in his belt, and his smile was no less dazzling than Lyimo’s.

How strange the sight was: he had been so diminished in that jail cell, yet once he had been a glittering thing.

I murmured my description of the sight to Ana, who listened carefully. Then we climbed the rest of the stairs until we came to a great balcony overlooking the floor below. Whole, preserved urhosi stood about us, enormous specimens re-creating a small herd. Like the heads below, their glass eyes had an uncanny glint to them and seemed to look only atme.

This was disturbing enough, but then there came a scuttering, and something small and dark went crawling between the herd’s legs. I stepped back, alarmed, but Fotia tutted and said, “Oh, she’s gotten outagain! Here! Come here, girl! Please…no, no, don’t run away!”

Fotia dropped to all fours and went crawling after the creature. As she did so, a man came sprinting out of one of the distant passageways, huffing and red-faced, asking, “Did the thing go in here? Is it chewing on the blasted cows again?”

“If Velona hears you calling it athing,she’ll have your scalp,” said Fotia from beneath one of the taxidermied cows.

The man quailed slightly, glancing at a distant, tall door that stood open a crack. His voice dropped to a whisper: “She might have my head anyway if I can’t bring her awful pet back! The thing—Imean, thecreature—listens only to you, it seems.”

I studied the man. He was a tall, spindly, sallow thing, with high cheekbones and a sloping brow. His skin was quite gray, like my own—asign of significant suffusions—and he was attired like a common medikker, with an algaeoil tunic of dull brown, though he did not bear any formal imperial heralds or colors. He didn’t look at me at all but kept ducking about the stuffed herd, fussing and muttering.

Then Fotia shot up. “I have her! Silly girl, where are you getting to…”

She walked toward us, a familiar creature cradled in her arms: a green-furred, long-fingered drokha-cat. It stared at us with wide, silvery eyes, and its unpleasantly leathery fingers tapped anxiously on Fotia’s arm, like a patient suffering from nerves. A tiny collar was buckled about its neck, and hanging from it was a small brass tag with a name engraved upon it:Coral.

The medikker sighed in relief. “I’ll tell you where she’s got to—she’s chewing on these dead cows’ tails and noses! She has particular affection for the ears. I thought these beasts ate only plants!”

“Where’s your pipe?” Fotia asked him. “If you’d played the proper tune, she’d have come to you straightaway.”

“Madam Velona has…withheldit from me,” the medikker grumbled. “She says that Coral has a great nose for character, and I must shape mine to her liking. It is, I regret to say, a familiar impulse among my patients! They lack so much control that they begin to assert themselves in unusual ways…” He turned to us and flashed a smile. “I apologize, I should have introduced myself. I am Osumlik, medikker to Madam Velona.”

I bowed and introduced myself and Ana.

“I assume you’re here to talk about her son?” said Osumlik. “An awful thing. But I hope you shall not push her into too many unpleasant subjects.”