The Jedenvat
Sorrow slipped out once he’d fallen asleep. In the dim light, he looked almost Rhannish. With his ears hidden by his hair, there was no sign of his Rhyllian heritage.
They’d first kissed a little over a year ago. One moment they’d been playing a Rhyllian card game Ras had smuggled to her rooms – she’d complained he was cheating, he’d tried to explain the overly complex rules – and then her mouth was on his, their lips the only parts of them touching in a frozen kiss.
They separated, and laughed, not quite meeting each other’s eyes, and continued with the game as though it hadn’t happened. And three nights later, Sorrow had found herself kissing him once more, but this time with confidence, curiosity, his hands on her shoulders, hers at his waist. It happened again the next night. Then again. And again, until sliding her arms around his neck and pulling him close when they were alone was almost a reflex. Things might have been different if Lincel hadn’t made it clear she didn’t need the aid of a fifteen-year-old boy who now spoke Rhannish better than he spoke Rhyllian. And if Irris hadn’t been occupied taking over from her brother on the Jedenvat, leaving Sorrow and Rasmus alone more and more.
They had no future – they’d known that all along. Laws had been passed centuries ago forbidding Rhyllian and Rhannish relationships, the price death in both countries. But it wasn’t enough to stop them. The fact it was forbidden made it sweeter, another secret, another rebellion, along with laughter, and games, and open windows.
As their relationship deepened, as kisses became much more, Sorrow wanted to know what happened when Adavere Starwhisperer crossed the bridge to Rhannon.
“He married her? The woman he built the bridge for? So Rhannish and Rhyllians could marry once?” Sorrow was shocked when her grandmother told her.
“Well, yes,” her grandmother said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Quite literally once. Before Adavere built the bridge there were no relations between our people and theirs. It was impossible because of the river. So Adavere and Namyra – the Rhannish woman – were the first. And also the last.”
“Why?”
“Adavere had a gift,” the dowager continued. “An ability. He claimed it must have come with the stars when he charmed them down. Because after that, his very presence would soothe and calm. Just to be near him would bring a feeling of bliss. But the gift was a double-edged blade, and while it eased away the bad, it also numbed the good. Adavere’s gift was especially strong, and it drove Namyra mad in the end. Every emotion she had was taken from her by him, leaving her a shell. She stopped sleeping in their rooms, stopped dining with him, even began hurting herself – anything to feel something. It broke her heart to withdraw from him, but it was the only way she could feel at all. Eventually she packed her things and fled in the night.
“She came back here, to Rhannon, and of course, Adavere came after her. It almost caused a war – in fact, some believe it was this that first created the bad blood between our countries – the abilities, and the power it might give them over us. Finally, after realizing the misery he’d left his bride in, Adavere returned to Rhylla, and passed a law saying relationships between his people and the Rhannish were forbidden, on pain of death. And the then-king of Rhannon made it law here too.”
All Sorrow knew of what the Rhyllians called their “abilities”, she’d learned from Rasmus. Neither Charon nor her grandmother had ever mentioned that the Rhyllian ambassador and his son could do things she couldn’t. He, of course, was able to soothe away pain – a skill she later took advantage of when her monthly courses harassed her. And his father was gifted with plants, able to coax them into growing faster than they might, in places they might not naturally, or to yield more fruit than they would normally.
But this gift of Adavere’s sounded different to what Rasmus had told her about his own ability. Dangerous, even. The law made sense to her, in light of that.
Just not sense enough for her to stop kissing Rasmus Corrigan when he lowered his mouth to hers.
Sorrow remembered the story of Adavere and Namyra as she climbed back into her own bed. She’d meant to talk to him after they’d finally sated themselves, to tell him that she was stepping up as chancellor presumpt, and that night had to be the last between them. That from tomorrow she could be his friend, but nothing more.
She tossed and turned for the rest of the night, too many thoughts in her mind to allow her rest. The tentative knocks of her maids at her door were a relief, when they finally came.
“Pardon, Miss Ventaxis, but it’ll be dawn in an hour. Your bath is ready.”
Sorrow shed the skin of her night-time self and became Miss Ventaxis, daughter of a drug addict and a dead woman, sister to a ghost that would not stop haunting her. And soon, the leader of the land.
Sorrow was bathed and dressed within half an hour, refusing breakfast, her stomach churning too much to contemplate food. Unable to settle to anything, she paced her room, marking the minutes in circuits, until word came from the Round Chamber at precisely seven bells, summoning her to them.
When Sorrow entered the Round Chamber on shaking legs, the Jedenvat were seated at the table in the centre of the room. Someone had brought wine, despite the hour, and they replenished their glasses now, pouring one for her. No servants were permitted inside the Round Chamber, no ambassadors or visitors.
Named for its shape, the Round Chamber had once been a jewel in the Rhannish crown, the walls painted with painstakingly detailed maps of every country on Laethea: Rhannon, Rhylla, Astria, Meridea, Svarta, Nyrssea. The Skae Isles to the north of Nyrssea were rendered so finely that even the fierce water women could be seen frolicking in the grey seas that surrounded them. Whales and sea beasts were painted into the oceans; albino bears dotted the Svartan landscape. Once, a team of five painters had been retained by Sorrow’s grandfather, endlessly painting, erasing, then repainting borders as his battles played tug o’war across the lands, claiming then losing ground so fast the landscape of Rhannon changed almost daily.
The paint hadn’t dimmed, thanks to the curtained windows. The sea-maids’ teeth still glittered in the candlelight; the desert of Astria was still gleaming gold. The only thing that had changed was the scar where the bridge between Rhannon and Rhylla was. Sorrow didn’t know who’d done it, but someone had come into the room and hacked at the wall until the bridge was gone, leaving flaking plaster and paint chips in its place. A lifetime of seeing it never dampened the shock whenever she looked at it. Though she knew the reason for the bridge’s scouring away, and even understood it, it seemed to her to bode ill – that the only land link between their lands had been destroyed on the map, and no one had thought to repair it. Not even her.
“Welcome, Miss Ventaxis. Please, sit,” Charon said.
It chilled her to be addressed so formally by him, and she found herself standing straighter, her shoulders back, in response. When he bade her sit, she moved to the chancellor’s seat, her back to the defaced bridge, her empty stomach churning. When she rested her hands on the tabletop she saw they were trembling, and so she folded them into her lap instead.
Charon was sitting to her right, appearing taller than the rest of them thanks to his wheeled chair; beside him was Bayrum Mizil, merchant councilman and warden of the North Marches, the province that held the Humpback Bridge. Bayrum’s family had defended the bridge for four generations, and next to Charon and Irris there was no one she trusted more.
To his right sat the sea-grizzled Senator Kaspira of Prekara, allegedly descended from pirates and thieves, and round as the pearls that were harvested from the seas beside her archipelago to the north-east; then Lord Samad, minister of Asha, who looked hewn from the sands of the wild desert county to the south. Then Irris, taking the place of her brother, Arran Day, former senator of the East Marches. After being fired by Harun, Arran had returned to his family seat, keeping a low profile, and Irris had represented their family ever since. Finally Tuva Marchant, senator of the West Marches, bordering Meridea, who’d stepped into power when her husband was killed during the war.
Balthasar’s empty seat was like a punched-out tooth between the occupied ones. Sorrow averted her gaze from the gap and took a deep breath as Charon turned to her.
“Miss Ventaxis. This morning the Jedenvat held an emergency meeting to discuss the situation with the chancellor, Harun Ventaxis, 104th chancellor of Rhannon, and First Warden of the Heart. In light of numerous recent events, I, as vice chancellor, moved to pass a motion declaring no confidence in the chancellor, due to his current mental and physical difficulties. The motion passed, with five votes to one, and one in absentia.”
Sorrow wondered who’d voted against. Samad, she decided, from the sour look on his face.
Charon continued. “Following this, I moved to pass a motion to invest you as chancellor presumpt, until such time as an election can be held and you can legally be voted into office. This motion was denied by four votes to two, and one in absentia.”
Sorrow reeled from the announcement, her emotions changing so fast she didn’t know what to feel. Denied? So she wouldn’t be chancellor… Irris had been wrong…
Charon cleared his throat, drawing her attention back to him. “Finally, I moved to pass a motion to invest you as chancellor presumpt, with a codicil granting the Jedenvat the power to preside with you, until such time as you turn twenty-one and can govern alone. The motion passed with a majority of six. The Jedenvat of Rhannon move to depose your father, and invest you as chancellor presumpt.”
Sorrow’s ears were ringing, and she blinked, hard, trying to collect her thoughts.
Opposite her, Bayrum Mizil and Tuva Marchant were beaming, and beside them Irris was smiling too, and nodding. When Sorrow turned to Charon, he raised his eyebrows expectantly.
She realized they were waiting for her to speak, but her tongue was useless, her brain empty of words.
“So now…” she finally managed.
“Now we go to your father, inform him of our decision. Depending on his … state, and reaction, we’ll decide how to proceed, but the most important thing is that we invest you. Then we can make our way to the bridge.”
“Wait,” Sorrow said. “I’d like to propose waiting to invest me until tomorrow.”
The look of impatience that crossed Charon’s face told her he’d expected her to do something like this.
“Sorrow—”
“Today is the eighteenth anniversary of Mael’s death,” Sorrow said to the room. “It would have been his twenty-first birthday. To do it today would be the height of cruelty. We can surely afford to wait one more day, now the decision is made and we’re all agreed?” Then she turned to Charon and spoke in a low voice. “I’m not playing for time; I’ll do this. But I don’t want history to remember me as the girl who deposed her father on the anniversary of her brother’s death. I want… I want to be better than he is.”
Charon gave her a long look, then nodded. “Very well. Tomorrow.”
Sorrow pushed back her chair. “Thank you. We should get ready to go to the bridge. I’ll go and see if my father is ready.” She lifted her glass and drained it in one, leaving the room while she still could.
As she walked to the west wing, climbing the great stair that split the foyer, she tried to sort through her feelings. Oblivious to the guards who opened doors to her, murmuring their sympathies, she saw and heard nothing, save for her own thrumming heart, and the faces of the Jedenvat as Charon had announced that final, vital motion.
No matter what Irris had said, no matter how much fun it had seemed last night, it still felt to her as though the trapdoor had opened, the axe had fallen. Her old life, pathetic as it had been, was over.
Unless…
There was always a chance, she told herself as she approached the west wing, that the spell had broken. Perhaps now, eighteen years later, on the day he would have turned twenty-one, Harun would finally be able to let Mael go. He might be waiting, weak, but determined to see this through. Maybe he could finally heal, and take his place.
The hope died a swift, cruel death when she saw her father’s valet outside his doors, wringing his hands as he waited for her.
“Miss Ventaxis…” He paused and looked at her. “I don’t think the chancellor is going to make the ceremony this year. I don’t know where it came from, I thought…”
She didn’t reply, and moved past him, opening the doors herself.
Sorrow found Harun face down in a pile of Lamentia powder. He’d sniffed so much of it he was in a stupor, incoherent and drooping, his eyes streaming tears that were tinged red. Sorrow stared at him, at the mess, and then swept the Lamentia to the floor, creating a toxic cloud that she had to back away from.
The chancellor protested feebly as she destroyed the pile, and she turned on him, her jumble of emotions honing itself into one clear, bright feeling.
“Your son would have been twenty-one today,” she leant over and hissed at Harun. “And I’m glad he’s dead, because it means he doesn’t have to see you like this.”
Harun didn’t look at her. Instead he laid his head back on the table and closed his eyes.
“Enjoy today, Father. Tomorrow, things will be different.”
Without another word she left him there.
“My father won’t be joining us,” Sorrow said to Charon as she levelled with him in the hall. “And I’ve changed my mind. Find a clerk now, and have the papers drawn up ready for when we return later. Let’s get this over with.”
She left him and Irris staring after her as she marched through the doors to the palace, to where her carriage was waiting.