But How Is He Going to Die?
On the first day of the storm-season falling between the seventy-first and second years of Tei Ura's two hundred fifty-seventh kai, Orialu of House Ilisaf went with her mother and grandmother and younger sister to the Heavenfacing Court. They brought with them a handful of Ilisaafi aunts, and one uncle, who of course brought their husbands and children in turn; they brought another handful of retainers, ladies bearing the vessel house names of Icarian and Orunen, Irimias and Yaaharal. And of course they brought a brace of servants, to fetch and carry food and drink and silks and messages, so that no royal eye need peel itself away and miss even an instant of tonight's red spectacle.
For weeks, Orialu had lived within a heady cloud of excitement and a kind of sparkling dread. The closer the date of execution drew, the denser the cloud became; by the time that night arrived, it had choked every other thought in her head. Ai Naa was a low simmering in her mind: warm and lax from the satiation he knew was to come, and releasing sharp pops and bursts of saw-toothed anticipation all the same.
They were going to kill her father.
Two weeks ago, a trident force headed by First Spear Seket had breached the bone-white walls of Vene Ilisaf ni Tauhrelil's laboratory and spilled its bloody secrets for all of Tei Ura to see. From her mother's house in the Ilisaafi courtlands, Orialu had watched the Opaline City's seven high jurists gather about the entrails of her father's work and divine his fate. They found their verdict with an unheard-of swiftness, and on the day of sentencing, all seven came arrayed in masks and robes as white as the broken laboratory walls. Orialu knew the meaning of that, even before the jurists proclaimed her father's sentence: death upon the Court. Unanimous. The voice of the crowds and the venarchs' panel could have tipped the verdict otherwise, but the voice had called for death with ninety-seven point four percent of its strength, and all forty-nine venarchic panelists had voted the same. In seven weeks counted from the night of the verdict, Orialu would go to the Heavenfacing Court to watch her father die.
At nineteen, Orialu was only two years away from stacking her third pyre and attaining full adulthood; even so, none of her elders would tell her exactly what her father had done. She knew he'd killed his test subjects; she knew that in itself was enough to earn death upon the Court. What Orialu didn't know was what her father done to earn death upon the Court so fast. Ai Naa echoed her frustration, dripped curiosity into her mind like slaver; her beloved hungered for blood in all its forms, even if was only the blood-soaked details of her father's atrocities.
You can't even taste that kind, so shut up, she'd told him, and then forced him back into the depths of her mind. You'll see the real thing on execution night.
Real slaver had welled up in her mouth then, but the tide of hunger had slowly receded.
At least, Orialu reminded herself, she was far from the only one who wished to know more and didn't. The records of Vene's arrest were sealed indefinitely, the spears and their cohort bloodsworn to deepest secrecy about what they'd witnessed behind those white walls. Even her Tauhrelil cousins said they didn't know…and if a Tauhrelil actually admitted she didn't know the details of the latest scientific horror-scandal, she was probably telling the truth.
Of course her cousins could have been lying, but Ai Naa granted Orialu a constant and exquisite awareness of the living blood flowing through everyone around her. She could hear it pouring through the body, sense the soft percussion of a pulse, see it glowing red through the skin if she looked too long, even smell it when her beloved's hunger bled into her own. With each cousin she'd asked, Orialu had honed in on their blood and listened for a quickening pulse; for a tightening of the veins; for anything that might indicate they were lying; and each time she'd heard nothing. They could have just been skilled at lying, Orialu supposed, only she knew her cousin Viretani spent too much time with a scalpel in her hand to devote that much time to the liar's art. Vetsa was too busy with marriage-making to even be worth asking. And Vecari was twelve, too young to do anything as high-skill as suppress a guilty pulse.
"To be honest," Viretani had said when Orialu asked, "I'd been thinking of asking you." She'd sounded annoyed to be admitting even that much. "Even if they wouldn't tell his niece, I thought they might at least tell his daughter."
Viretani and Vecari were the daughters, and Vetsa the son, of Virieh, the current Tauhrelil family head, Orialu's aunt, Vene's elder sister; if they didn't know, then Orialu could be all but certain that nobody her age did. Asking an elder outright was more likely to get her laughed at or scolded for impertinence than it was to get her any answers. And so, like most of Tei Ura, all Orialu knew of her father's crimes were the bits and pieces that Virieh VI Tauhrelil and her council had declared fit for release.
As the seven weeks leading up to Vene's execution crept by, Orialu's anticipation and Ai Naa's hunger crept higher. The two energies folded into one and became a seething restlessness that filled Orialu's every cell. She knew the feeling intimately; though restraining Ai Naa was, by now, second nature to her, her beloved was forever testing her control, and never more so than when he sensed a chance at blood. Hunger made him swell like a tide. Ai Naa was always hungry, Ai Naa was hunger, but sometimes that hunger grew beyond the usual constant low roar in her mind and became sharper, or rose higher, or burned hotter. No matter what shape his heightened hunger took, it all translated to greater strain on her mind and too much offbleed ra saturating her body, and that all meant the same thing for Orialu.
It meant that her usual habit of pacing turned into her stalking through every room and hall and garden of her mother's house, for the seething feeling was always worse when she was forced to remain still. It meant that she had to hold onto her own temper as if it were a glass grenade. It meant that cousins and friends and servants, and even some of her elder kin, treated her with polite distance or, worse, a kind of fearful delicacy, as if they could sense the grenade themselves and feared it detonating; it meant that they gave Ai Naa's anchor an even wider berth than normal. It meant that Orialu's lessons went from trial to torment, as she was forced to sit and listen and forbidden to leave until her work was done; and because her mind was so full of crawling, restless energy, it took her twice as long to finish that work, only for her teachers to then inform her that it contained twice as many errors as normal, and now she must fix it here, and here, and here –
Orialu hadn't bitten a teacher since she was seven years old, but every day of Ai Naa straining against her control made it harder to refrain. The only thing that helped was Orialu's lessons with the spear.
It was said on Tei Ura – or at least, in the Ilisaafi courtlands – that a paired spirit's anchor represented the shape of their human half's soul. Kiresyata Kohare Kuur, Orialu's instructor in the art of the spear, was one of the only members of the Ilisaf court who seemed to actually believe it. Most members of the court treated Ai Naa's anchor as an unfortunate appendage, something dangerous and undesirable to be tolerated only out of respect for Orialu's most rarefied pedigree. Carry about that spear if you must, she could feel them thinking, so long as you carry it all the way to the Throne Refulgent. But Syata Kuur was different. More than anyone else, Syata Kuur seemed to see Ai Naa's anchor the same way Orialu did: as an extension of herself.
More importantly, Syata Kuur was the only instructor her mother had been able to find who'd been willing to train a student incapable of using any training weapon. Until Kuur, every potential teacher had seen Ai Naa's anchor and immediately declined the job.
In her mother's house, Orialu always carried the spear in a case. It was a lovely thing, carved from black and fragrant netori wood, the color a seamless match for the wood of Ai Naa's spear-haft, while the inside was lined with unicorn hide the dark-rusted red of old blood ink. Instead of a handle, the case had a hollow cut into one of its long edges, exposing the haft, so that Orialu could grasp and carry it directly. Ai Naa hated to go too long without feeling her skin on his anchor.
And Orialu hated the case. The concealment chafed at her. As soon as she stepped into the chamber where she took her lessons with Syata Kuur, she snapped open the case and pulled her beloved's anchor free.
The lesson room was elegant in a way different from most of the Ilisaf court. The court was built from pale stone shaped into cubes and prisms and columns, then hollowed out into great high-ceilinged halls and courtyards and colonnades, adorned with balconies and gardens, and scored with exquisite geometric carvings; the overall impression was one of both monolithic strength and airy delicacy. Banners of captive light woven like silk hung in high archways and between columns, while longer sheets of it draped in curves from the hall-ceilings and stretched from roof to roof overhead in the courtyards, dying the pale stone in a rainbow of dawnlight colors: gold and orange, rose and royal fuchsia, blood-red and moon-blue. Fresh air flowed through every room and carried with it a low current of incense, and of the faint ozone smell caused by a great deal of captured light gathered in one place.
The walls of Syata Kuur's lesson room were hewn from the same pale stone, but in place of carvings, these walls were covered in a translucent, tinted layer of impact gel; should a practice match turn intense enough to send someone flying, the gel ensured that both their bones and the masonry would remain intact. Behind the tinted gel, the stone panels making up the walls were ordered by color, gradating from white at the doors, to pearl-grey at the room's center, to palest bluestone where the chamber faced out upon the bicolored tiles and flowering pools of the Two Sisters' Terrace. The floors were polished wood, not inlaid stone; the only captive light was a handful of color-neutral floating spheres.
Out of all the rooms in all the buildings of the Ilisaf court, Syata Kuur's lesson room might have been the least ilisaafi. Orialu, with her Tauhrelil teal-black hair and Tauhrelil cut-bronze features and Tauhrelil cyan star-marks, felt more at ease there than she did in any other chambers save her own. The fact that Syata Kuur had entered the room behind her and was swinging a blade at the back of her head did nothing to change that.
It would be a wooden practice blade, of course; no instructor would risk training the heir to a house bloodroyal with live steel. Still, the lesson had begun, a blade was a blade, and a beheading short-spear crashing into the back of your head fucking hurt, no matter what it was made of.
Their lesson commenced, as it always did these days, with a sparring match.
"Beheading short-spear!" Orialu called, and then dropped and rolled forward, turning as she rose so that she faced Syata Kuur with her own spear in hand and a grin on her face. "Ha! How many right guesses in a row does that make now?" But Syata Kuur gave only a small, approving smile before closing the distance Orialu had put between them. Orialu's blood fairly sang through her veins; this was the kind of lesson she was made for, not lectures or readings or decorum drills. The first ringing of blade against blade filled her ears, sweet as any music. Her grin widened as she and Syata Kuur exchanged a flurry of strikes. The wood of Ai Naa's spearshaft was warm and alive under her hands, and the rings adorning the crossguard chimed in counterpoint to every movement, every blow.
"Head, left," Syata Kuur's voice cut through the music, but Orialu knew that game well. The truth was in one's movements, and Kuur had taught her to read those long ago. Torso, right, and Syata Kuur's wooden blade slammed into Ai Naa's spearshaft instead of Orialu's ribcage. "Head, overhead!" Shoulder, left. Their blades rang together. "Knee, left!" Head, right. Syata Kuur's blade hit her spearshaft again with a loud crack. "Torso, center!" Torso – hey, he's not lying about this one! Orialu pivoted to the side, away from the thrust aimed at her solar plexus, and whipped her own blade at Syata Kuur's head. Before his face turned away, she caught another small, approving smile.
The dance sped up. Syata Kuur's false cues came faster and faster, then fell off entirely. Now the only sounds between them were the hissing of breath and of blades through air. And without Syata Kuur's words to distract her, Orialu had room to think.
If I could just do this forever, she thought. Ai Naa surged in excited agreement; Orialu channeled it into an especially vicious swipe at her teacher. No sitting for lectures, no politics, no inheritance, no… The thought spun on, until Syata Kuur broke it by nearly disarming her. Orialu kept her grip on Ai Naa's anchor, barely, and pressed forward with another attack. If I could just become a kiresyata, like Kuur – master the art, fight every day, for a living – or…or…
What Orialu wanted more than anything, so much that she didn't even dare voice it to herself, was to become one of the Seven Spears; to practice the red art and dispense mortal justice upon the Heavenfacing Court. Of course, it could never happen; even becoming a kiresyata, a blade-sage, was out of the question. Perhaps if she'd been a son, or even just second-born…but Orialu was the firstborn daughter of Orisai VII Ilisaf, and would one day inherit the Throne Refulgent. Her path had been drawn for her before birth.
Orialu knew all that well, but here, now, none of it crossed her mind. Instead, thinking of the Seven Spears reminded her of her father.
What did he do? Syata Kuur drove her back one step, two. Will they tell me after he's dead? In seven years? Never? Her thoughts began to poison her movement. The dance was breaking down. Who's going to kill him? Syata Kuur struck her on the collarbone. Pain bloomed hot and red under Orialu's skin, promising a spectacular purpling later on. Who's going to kill my father? She gritted her teeth and kept fighting. Ai Naa licked the pain from her neurons, savoring, never alleviating, never, never.
How's he going to die?
Orialu missed her parry. Syata Kuur's blade crashed into her thigh. Another bruise for later. Fourth Spear Irimias sometimes amputates the legs – the burning wire – will they give Father the wire? Syata Kuur struck again. Orialu got her own blade up in time to block him, barely.
But the fight was already lost. That one thought unlocked a dozen more like it; now every blow from her teacher made Orialu wonder if this, perhaps, was how they would kill her father upon the Heavenfacing Court. Her focus was dissolving, even as Syata Kuur's attacks came faster still. Orialu knew he was driving her backward again, but it was all she could do to keep his blade off her, and even there she was slipping. She couldn't help it. When Syata Kuur thrust at her ribs, Orialu pictured a blade piercing her father's heart. He side-swept at her arm; Orialu pictured the blade traveling further, cutting into her father's lungs, drowning him in blood. Syata Kuur swung at her neck, and Orialu saw her father's body fall to its knees before his own severed head.
The more Orialu thought in red, the more Ai Naa thrashed hungrily against her restraint. Her focus wasn't just dissolving, it was lost. Her body was moving automatically now, and perhaps a kiresyata like Kuur could win in such a state, but Syata Kuur had practiced his art for decades to become a blade-sage; Orialu was nineteen, and had only been allowed to practice the blade these past five years.
And then the movement stopped.
Orialu came back to herself and found that she was pinned against the wall of the lesson room with a bloody lip, an aching body, and Syata Kuur's wooden spearpoint at the hollow of her throat.
"That," Syata Kuur said levelly, "was not sparring. That was desperation."
A hot, shaking feeling swept over Orialu at his words; her lone eye burned, and her empty socket twinged with a needle-sharp pain. Without thinking, she grasped her teacher's spear, wrenched it from his hands, and threw it wildly away, not even looking where it went. Her chest heaved up and down with quick, harsh breaths. Whether it was from the lesson or from what she was feeling, Orialu couldn't say, nor did she care to think about it.
Shame flooded her almost before Syata Kuur's spear left her hands. They both listened as it hit the ground and clattered away across the tiles of the Two Sisters' Terrace.
"That could have hurt someone," said Syata Kuur, looking at her with black eyes that gave away nothing.
Orialu turned away from his gaze and pressed her cheek into the impact gel lining the wall. Sank into its yielding coolness. Licked the blood from her lip and swallowed twice: once for the blood, and again for the spit that filled her mouth as Ai Naa tasted her blood through her own tongue.
It wasn't Kuur's fault she'd lost the sparring match.
Orialu sank slowly down the wall, ignoring the way her battered muscles ached in protest. She hung her head down, her forehead against her knees. Ai Naa's spear rested on the floor at her side.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Fuck."
"You're better than this," Syata Kuur said after a short silence, and Orialu knew he meant it in more ways than one. "What happened?"
Orialu let out a jagged half-laugh, her head still lowered.
"This is a laughing matter to you?" Though Kuur's voice was carefully neutral, Orialu could still hear a faint note of disapproval. Somehow, that hurt more than the bruises did. Her hand found the shaft of Ai Naa's anchor and gripped it tight. Orialu looked back up at her teacher, a grin already forming on her lips.
"Come on, Syata, don't you read the news?" She'd meant to sound more apologetic, but the words came out wrong, all arch and prickly. "What kind of blade-sage doesn't know what the Seven Spears are up to?" Ai Naa simmered happily in the heat of her sudden anger; Orialu's temper had run away with her, and taken her tongue with it. "They made my father leave his lab recently, perhaps you've heard about it. Or maybe noticed his name on the red banners? Oh, wait – he's bloodroyal! He probably gets a banner all to himself!" Another jagged laugh escaped her. "My father's been dead for weeks, Syata! The only reason his family hasn't held his funeral yet is because they're waiting to get his body back from the Court!"
The person known as Vene Ilisaf ni Tauhrelil had died the night the high jurists handed down their verdict. Her father was no longer her father, he was nothing but a corpse still in possession of its heartbeat, and soon one of the Seven Spears would extinguish that, too.
"I kept wondering…during our fight, I kept wondering, which Spear's going to…or how…I…" Now Orialu held Ai Naa's spear in both hands, hugging it as close to herself as the narrow shaft would allow. "Do you think they'll cut off his head? I think they might cut off his head."
Outside, on the terrace, rain began to fall. The mirror surface of the pool dissolved into ripples, and raindrops struck the floating lilies and made their petals shiver. The motions of falling rain and flowers drew Orialu's eye, and for a moment she just watched; looking at the rain was easier than looking her teacher in the face.
"I think," Syata Kuur said almost gently, "that I should dismiss you for today."
She could smell wet stone, humid air. The terrace tiles gleamed slickly under a coating of rainwater. Then Orialu noticed something else that was coated in rain: her teacher's spear, which she'd wrenched from his hand in a fit of pique. It rested at the very edge of the pool, just short of falling in; the wooden blade hung over the water, rain-beaded and dripping.
Something about the sight of it lying there gave Orialu an ache in her throat and made her mouth turn down at the corners. She pushed herself up from the floor with Ai Naa's spear and then stepped out onto the terrace. By the time she reached the pool, her hair and clothes were damp all the way through, and her cheeks were coated in warm water. Orialu knelt by the pool with Ai Naa's spear in one hand, then gathered up Syata Kuur's in the other. She couldn't see her reflection in the terrace pool's rain-rippled surface, and for that, Orialu was glad.
By the time she returned to the lesson room, the ache in her throat was gone, and it was easier to control her face. Orialu felt Kuur's eyes on her as she tracked water across his floor.
"Here," she said, and held his short-spear out to him, blade pointed down. "I'm sorry."
Orialu watched Kuur's copper-skinned hand close around the haft of his weapon. Don't say anything to me. Please. Her control was back, but it was fragile, and if Kuur said the wrong thing, Orialu thought she might start crying. She would have rather ripped out her own fingernails with her teeth.
Perhaps Kuur sensed her feelings. That, or he's afraid to say the wrong thing to a bloodroyal. Orialu forced the thought aside. As soon as Syata Kuur took the weapon from her hand, she strode past him and crossed the room, her eye fixated on the door. She wanted to run to it, but doing so would have felt too much like weakness, and she'd already shown her teacher a shameful amount of that today.
At the door, Orialu stopped and turned. No matter how badly the lesson had gone, she still owed Syata Kuur gratitude for taking the time to teach her. And with how badly today's lesson had gone, there was one more thing Orialu was afraid of, one thing of which she needed to make sure. She knelt to replace Ai Naa's anchor in its case, then stood straight and raised her head and tucked one arm behind her back.
"Thank you, Syata," she said, bowing at the waist, and then, after she'd risen again: "Three days? The usual time?"
Syata Kuur always kept a firm lid on his expressions, and Orialu stood too far away to make out any hints, but she saw his answering nod clear enough. Orialu hadn't thought she'd be able to smile for the rest of today, yet she felt one rise to her face now. It felt strange and fragile, but still better than what she'd been feeling before.
Only after Orialu had slid the door to the lesson room shut did she remember that she was bruised, aching, and covered in scrapes and dried sweat. And my clothes are all soaked from the rain, it feels disgusting. Between the aches and the dirt and the damp, Orialu decided, a hot bath was very much in order. She set off in search of it, exhausted, yet somehow feeling lighter than she had since the night she'd heard of her father's verdict.