Page 48 of The Second Marriage
Instead of turning his brain inside out trying to understand the speeches, Taral studied the other functionaries in the room. King Aditya sat at the front of the room facing the low platform where the orators stood, and at his side was a man in a long jacket whose odd behavior caught Taral’s attention. He didn’t seem to be listening to the speeches and made no pretense at doing so. Instead, he looked all around the room, turning his head this way and that and from time to time rising to his feet to make a slow circuit of the room. The Chedai ignored him; a number of the Skopai tracked his movements each time he stood.
Taral puzzled over this strange conduct for a while. The man looked very familiar, so Taral must have seen him around the court, although he couldn’t remember exactly when. The man was a sorcerer, he surmised at last, with a creeping sense of unease. Simra had said that King Aditya kept a sorcerer with him at all times for protection. Were the alert Skopai therefore sorcerers themselves? The mountain people had only the simple, useful magic of earth and water, but Taral had heard the tales of sorcerers and was discomfited to be in a room with men who could crumble the palace from its roots. No one should be able to do such things.
Aditya must be frightened indeed to keep that watchful serpent of a man in his company at all times. But frightened of what? And if he trusted no one, as Simra claimed, then what hold did he have on his sorcerers to be certain of their loyalty?
There was too much he didn’t know. He feared for the outcome of these talks and prayed his misgivings were only paranoia.
The assembly room faced west and grew warm as the afternoon dragged on, and Taral saw more than one chin nodding toward its owner’s chest, so at least he wasn’t alone in his boredom. Even the Skopai diplomats looked heavy-lidded by the end of the final Chedai speech. At last, as the light in the room turned orange with the coming sunset, King Aditya stood to dismiss the gathered courtiers and dignitaries. Taral’s body ached from sitting on a hard chair for so many hours. He said to the woman sitting to his right, the younger sister of Samtse’s queen, “What did you take from all that?”
She shook her head. “Not much of anything. And you?”
“About the same.” Taral rubbed at his temples. He had thought these negotiations would be quick and uncomplicated. Feba’s initial briefing had made the situation seem straightforward: Chedi had won the war, more or less, or at least Skopa had been the first to call for a truce. The Kasauli Hills had been Chedi’s before the conflict began, but the Skopai wanted to claim mineral rights to a gold deposit they had found in those badlands, and it seemed Chedi had wanted to end the fighting badly enough that they were willing to consider a concession of that magnitude. A bit of initial posturing, a few days of offers and counter-offers, and Taral had thought the matter would be settled in short order.
If the past two days were any indication, he had been sorely mistaken.
Instead of returning to the room he shared with Sejun, he went out into the city to take a walk through the streets near the palace. The angle of the sun turned the narrow streets into shaded canyons. From time to time a gap between buildings let through a golden ray that warmed Taral’s face. Soon the sun would sink below the hills and the long summer twilight of the hill country would begin.
He walked downhill past the massive Temple of the Wind sheltered behind its walls and through the outskirts of the entertainment district. All around him, people walked home from the market pushing carts with a few stray unsold pieces of fruit, or went to the temple for evening prayers, or stood on a street corner talking with a friend. The size and noise and busyness of Banuri was still strange to him, but he liked the city and how he could disappear into it—not in the sense of vanishing but in becoming anonymous. The town of Tadasho was only a village in Chedai terms, and everyone knew him there. In Banuri, he was marked by his foreignness, but no one stopped him to ask how the baby was doing or to complain that their neighbor’s sheep had gotten into their vegetable garden. He could do as he liked.
As he walked, he thought about what he had heard that day and tried to make some sense of it. A Chedai diplomat had told a long story about the first person who discovered the Kasauli Hills, which had sounded to Taral more like a tale out of legend than historical fact. He had been bewildered at the time, but decided now that the story had been meant to establish some ancestral claim on the badlands. An absurd prospect if one knew anything about the history of the coastal nations. The Kasauli had passed back and forth between Chedi and Skopa many times over the centuries. There was no telling which kingdom had held that land first.
Why bother, then, if everyone in the room knew the truth? A mystery. Taral hadn’t expected to find Chedi quite so foreign.
By now he had come into the margins of the market district. He passed a shop with a display of books in the window and stopped there to look. The titles didn’t mean much to him, but one cover was decorated with a printed image of two people standing close together in a romantic pose. It looked like something Sejun might like to read.
He went inside. The shopkeeper looked up from his ledger and uttered a greeting Taral couldn’t understand. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Chedoy,” Taral said, a phrase that came easily to his tongue by now, and the man bowed and didn’t question Taral as to why he was interested in books written in a language he didn’t speak.
Taral browsed the shelves. The books looked to be secondhand, with worn and faded covers. That wasn’t a problem. Sejun’s entire collection was secondhand; new books were a luxury even a son of wealthy Merek couldn’t readily afford. He found one book that bore the brushstroke symbol the Chedai used to represent true love, and another that featured a man and a woman clutching each other in an embrace more passionate than he had thought Chedai sensibilities would permit. Those seemed like good choices, and a quick flip through the pages revealed nothing to suggest otherwise. He paid for them both, fighting back a grimace at the steep price, and walked back to the palace with one tucked under each arm.
Sejun would be happy, he hoped, with a wriggle of unaccountable anxiety. There was no reason for Sejun to be displeased. Even if he didn’t like the books, he would be flattered, surely, that Taral had thought of him and thought to bring him a present. The first present Taral had ever brought him in all the days of their marriage, and Taral frowned at a second wriggle. They hadn’t been married for long. They had been traveling and busy. Sejun hadn’t asked for presents. He hadn’t been neglectful. Only absentminded.
He tried to remember if he had ever given Jaysha anything. Yes: flowers he picked along the roadside on his way to visit Jaysha in Barun, which had arrived somewhat crushed from an afternoon in his saddlebag. Jaysha had been so pleased.
Taral pushed those memories away. What he had done more than ten years ago had no bearing on what he did now, today. Who he had been with Jaysha wasn’t the man he was now. All that mattered was what would please Sejun, and Taral did want very much to please him.
Sejun was in their room when Taral returned to the palace, dressed only in his inner robe and washing his face. He glanced up when Taral came in and smiled with his hands cupped in front of his dripping face. “There you are. You went out after your meeting was over?”
“Yes.” Taral laid both books on the small table inside the door. “I needed a walk after sitting in that room all day.”
Sejun went back to splashing water on his skin. “Tedious again?”
“Incredibly. I hope tomorrow will be different, because otherwise I’ll fall asleep after lunch and Feba will regret ever sending me an invitation.” Taral sat on the bed and watched Sejun dry his face and begin rummaging in the wardrobe. “I take it you have plans this evening.”
“That gathering with Nirav I told you about. It’s tonight. I suppose I forgot to say.”
“You did, but that’s fine.” Taral suppressed his disappointment. Two evenings in a row without Sejun’s company wouldn’t do him any lasting harm.
Sejun pulled his outer robe onto his shoulders, the same one he had worn for their first marriage, and went over to the table to inspect the books. He flipped one onto its front to look at the cover, then turned to look at Taral for a long moment before he flipped over the other.
“Those are for you,” Taral said, the most unnecessary comment any person had ever made.
Sejun huffed. “Yes. I gathered.” He opened the book with the embracing couple and scanned the words on the page. “Well. Erotica, Taral? I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“What,” Taral said, shocked.
Sejun started laughing. “You didn’t know?”
“No! I thought it was one of those romances you like! I didn’t inspect it carefully enough, I suppose.” Taral groaned and dropped his face into his hands. “What must that shopkeeper have thought of me?”