42 - Lightweight as a Pseudobutterfly

Dear Ma,

I’m glad to hear that you and Yasna are working on getting you better.  Your last letter, well, it was a little – intense.  You don’t have to tell me anything about you and my father.  Really.

As for me, I’ve got a few new Zon I’m going to be introduced to and I have a wing-brother now, would you believe it?  Someone willing to be that close friends with me.  Werfas really understands what it means.  We’ll be ready to lay our lives down for each other and he gets it, even though he’s Milar.

Ma... I’m not sure how to put this but... I mean... It seems to me that you were better when I was able to visit you more often.  If that helps, I will come home.  I swear.  I’ll find someone to teach me at home, someone with the guts to teach someone from the Basin.  Before, I didn’t think I could find anyone like that, but Ilax said there is always someone willing to teach.  I think he’s right, so if you are better with me home, say so, and I’ll come. I swear on the home star.

Your son,

Kyrus

**

The Sunrise loggia thrummed with music, the dancers circling and dancing and humming like the bees they were unconsciously imitating. Or perhaps not so unconsciously, Diryish thought. These group dances had been deliberately written to mimic the motion of bees in the hives and enough of the court wore gold and black that if he squinted it was very like the wiggling on the hive floor and walls.

He gestured to Mariush to come sit on the dais. Not next to him, not any longer, but up off the floor away from the rest. Even the vizier attending him was down that crucial step. She was moving differently as the baby grew. She was still slender, barely showing especially under the honour veils.

Outside, the rain howled down on the desert, hammering flowers out of the rock, as the old Lainz would have said. The scouring rains were filling every crack and crevice of basin in the city. The Basin itself was half full and the streets with the water caught and funnelled into it. Wind cracked on the shutters and the raw, natural glass windows.

Diryish leaned back and watched his swarm.

**

Nadian ground his teeth in rage, but let not a hint of that leak through to his hands as he patted his wife’s grip on his elbow. 

It was all his fault anyway. He could see her adoring smile on her face. She’d already been head-over-hem in love with him when he’d offered for her hand in marriage. It had been purely political on his part. Her father was an old friend, one-time war-brother, of the Emperor, some old fart too frail to ever come to the bustle of Lainz, or the court but his daughter was tied to the name of his house – Pahgemar. What was her decrepit father’s first name? Dakir, or Dukir… something like that. Of course it hadn’t hurt that she was pretty.

Now, after the enDarkened spell he’d attempted, she was clinging to him like spit to a wall. And every other female thing who had even come close to Mariush. A trickle of sweat ran down his back.

“Shashi,” he purred at her. “You’ve danced attendance on me so carefully, so faithfully, and in your condition, too! Why don’t you go join the fun, hmmm? All the younger people are dancing. I give you my permission.”

She blinked her kohl-rimmed blue eyes at him, almost distressed. “Oh, husband, how could I leave you to sit all alone?”

I have to destroy that blasted affinity mandery the instant I can. It is driving me mad! It had been much more powerful than he'd expected. He certainly hadn’t needed the zardukar’s washerwomen and seamstresses trying to do him tiny favours! They were everywhere all of a sudden, he couldn’t turn around without tripping over another woman. They wouldn’t leave him alone.

He gritted his teeth again and offered her his arm. “Well, then I must also dance with my most precious desert jewel.”

She smiled bright enough to be seen through her scarlet and gold veil. “Oh, Nadian! How lovely. You haven’t danced with me in so long!”

**

Diryish glanced over at the dancers re-forming for the next set before him, the smile on his face growing only a shade wider as he saw Nadian dragged into the melee by his wife. With Dukir off to Milar to try and find the boy who, if he existed, would be the nearly grown heir to the Empire, it was absolutely necessary that someone be his eyes and ears unknown in the court.

And who heard all? Everything spoken and unspoken on the dance floor, behind every carved screen. Shashi Basserus was known in his court as an innocent. Someone who everyone knew had the political sense of a pseudobutterfly. You could tell her anything and she was good at keeping secrets, but a light-weight ornamental bird on her husband’s wrist and nothing more.

No one even thought twice that she might be anything but what she seemed. Diryish was very pleased to be the only one who knew how sharp a hunting falcon she was, and the wrist she graced was that of her Radiance, in her father’s absence. 

It was fascinating that she and Mariush were perhaps the only two women in the court unaffected by the ‘mandery someone had done. Illegal, untaught, unfocussed. He wondered who had dared afflict Basserus with such. He scanned the court, looking to see who was more attentive to the man’s possible embarrassment. If he could feel, or spot the illegal would-be Dee, he might have a chance to find out who had been quietly killing his family.

“Our most noble lord Basserus is very popular with the ladies recently,” he said, leaning on one arm of his throne, watching the dancers.

The vizier leaned forward a fraction, attentive. “He should be careful, Immutable. Other men are not making moon-eyes at the man, more like war-bird’s glaring.”

“Why, because these men’s wives are smiling at the man?” Diryish snorted. “He may be called out in a duel or two, should I allow it, and he is not careful.”

“Perhaps the man’s ardour could be cooled sending him to quell unrest in Trovi, or to oversee the safety of the roads?”

You would love to have such a rival away from me, in a dangerous situation where he might get killed. 

“My advisor, I would not put a Basserus next to Arbunazh, for another Emperor hive.” He smiled and accepted the honey teacup from the servant. “Here, Zurchan, taste this for me, would you?”

“Gladly, my Immutable.” He accepted the cup and straw with no hesitation. You old fraud. You know it’s not poisoned because you haven’t poisoned it.

“No,” Diryish continued as Nomarc Arshaka stepped up to stop his wife, Farida, from taking Basserus’s left arm, his right still clung to by Shashi. “I prefer both of the Basserus brothers here at my court rather than very far away.”

The women had both turned angry eyes on the Nomarc who, in frustrated rage, glared part of the time at his own wife and part of the time at Basserus. Nadian – there was no other word for it – shook himself loose from the women and bowed elaborately to the Nomarc. “I don’t have to hear what my honourable lord is saying but it is obvious he is flinging the veiled lovelies between himself and a potential duel. I wonder what has happened that he has become such a shining face for all our lovely sunflowers, that they turn their faces so relentlessly toward him.”

The vizier laughed discretely, his chuckle barely audible a step away. “Shall I inquire, my Immutable?”

Diryish waved a dismissive hand. “Not something I need, my friend.” You are as much a friend as my old warbird, outgrown easy mounting and control, my ‘friend’. “Let us see how he handles his troubles.”