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“Mena, my wise daughter, I am not so strong a man as you may think.” He reached up and tugged on her chin. “I could not change the world. I could not stop others from committing crimes-terrible crimes-in my name. I could not stop your mother from leaving us when illness took her. But I love my children. So you are my work now, all four of you. I thought, ‘Why not build within my house the world as I would have it?’ If I can raise you to adulthood in bliss unusual to the world, I will have accomplished something. You will see what foulness men do to one another eventually, but before then, why not know joy? You want to be a child for whom dreams come true, don’t you?”
Dariel had come into the room then. Her father had called out to him and the brief intimacy between them was suspended until chance allowed for it again. Remembering this now made her tears flow again. She had not answered him. She had not asked just what these horrors of the world were. She had never seen them and knew only of the old struggles written of in the triumphant eloquence of her history books. But she wished she had answered him. She did want-very badly-to be a child for whom dreams come true.
She was sure she would not be able to sleep, but at some point she drifted off, still perched high in the tree, leaning back against wood sculpted to comfort. She dreamed of something that even as she experienced it she thought of as a memory, although she would not later be sure whether it was a recollection of an earlier event or of an earlier dream. She and a girl whose name she did not recall crawled over the rocks of the northern shoreline and out onto the stone pier that jutted into the sea. The girl carried a fishing net with the childish notion that they would bring in the evening’s di
As they neared the end of the pier Mena saw a strange commotion in the water. Just below the surface swam a teeming school of fish. They moved past in a great mass, so many that she could neither see the begi
The princess called for the net from the other girl, grasped it, and bent in preparation to cast it. The girl whispered that they should not catch these fish. “They journey to the sea god,” she said. “It would curse us to eat of them.” Mena did not care. What sea god, anyway? Nonsense. She splashed the net down into the water, bracing herself for the impact of writhing life that she expected to fill it. A moment later she pulled up the net, empty. The fish swam on, teeming just as before, but not one of them had entered the trap. She swung the net in from another angle, pulled it up, dripping: nothing. No matter how she moved her net below the surface-side to side, thrusting down deep into the water, jerking it up-she could not catch even a single fish. They just hurtled by, so close that she could see the minute adjustments of their fins and the flexion of their large scales as they slipped over one another. She watched their eyes roll up to study her in passing, sorrow in them. Something about those eyes drew her. She set the net aside and tumbled forward into the water, sure that this way, at least, she would manage to touch the fish, sure that they wanted her to do so. If they went at the call of some sea god, they did not do so willingly. She could help. This seemed a very important thing as she punched through the water and plunged downward…
Mena started awake. Her arms jerked out, and she almost fell from the tree. For a few moments the world hung around her without context. She felt the dream fade and knew that there was something more important to remember, but it was only through staring and waiting that the evening’s events came back to her. Looking up through a narrow, high window she saw the sky had brightened with the coming dawn. Thin clouds tiled the sky with touches of salmon pink. It was a new day, she thought. How much of yesterday’s damage will now be mended? How much would be shown in the bright light of morning as nothing more than tricks of shadows and nighttime gloom?
She had started to climb down when the door opened. Cori
Cori
“You spoke to him?”
Cori
Sensing that she might carry on in such ma
“What do you want to know?” Cori
She is more frightened than I, Mena thought. She took one of Cori
“Mena, it was horrible. I saw it happen. I saw the man before he revealed himself. I watched him move through the crowd. I thought him handsome. I thought, ‘That’s Gurnal, isn’t it? He looks younger than I remember. How strange I never noticed that he was comely before.’ And then I saw him pull his knife. What was he doing with a knife at a banquet? If I had yelled at that first moment…I didn’t realize…I don’t understand anything.”
Mena squeezed again, pulling her closer. Instinctually, she knew it might be better not to say anything in response to such a declaration, but something in her felt that the roles each occupied were no longer as they had been. She thought of the dream again and in a burst of revelation realized that the girl with her on the rocks had not been a stranger at all. It had been Cori