Archive of Our Own ^beta

Haname had not yet found much to love in Tortall. She did not say so. Even if it weren’t hopelessly rude, it was merely hopeless. She had a duty, and that must overcome love, every time, so she didn’t say it. Still, she looked at the land as they traveled across it, and longed for Yaman’s mountains, its curated gardens, its tumbling streams. She could find Tortall’s rolling hills, its green farmland, its picturesque forests, pleasant, but after a year of parading around its core territories, she could not yet love it.

She tried, over and over again, to think of the landscape in its smallest components, to find even a small half-crushed flower to love that would make her love a whole field, but her mistress was kept in the center of the Progress, and the Progress trampled fields ahead of it, outriders going ahead so Haname never reached a place that hadn’t already had the beauty trod out of it by the patient hooves of a hundred horses.

When they headed south after an unsettling Midwinter where two young men had proved themselves so dishonorable that they merited the punishment of a being so ancient and powerful it should not have even noticed them, they rode through more pleasant farmland, and then across a ride and into a landscape so unforgiving it made her catch her breath.

“We call it the Great Southern Desert, in Corus,” said Prince Roald, seeing the way Haname slowed her horse to take the sight in and slowing along with her, the Yamani words clumsy on his tongue. “The Bazhir who live in it have many names for it, in their tongue and ours.”

“I look forward to hearing them.”

It was an invitation, but Prince Roald didn’t understand. He comprehended the grammar of Yamani, but the nuances that came with it escaped him. He merely smiled pleasantly and nudged his horse ahead to speak to Princess Shinkokami. It was the right choice. They had to know each other, that was what their senselessly long betrothal was for.

Only it was lonely, a little, to ride alone, while the princess rode with her betrothed and Yukimi made her own friends. Haname was meant to do that too, but the mass of strangers constantly around her were as difficult to learn as the landscape. There were too many of them, and their bright, quick emotions were hard to parse.

Haname rode alone, and watched the desert, and found the small patches of scrub, the desiccated trees, the skittering of a beetle. It was so barren that it was easier to take in small pieces.

When they reached Persopolis, it seemed to rise from nowhere, all sand-colored stone the color of the dunes from outside.

Inside, though, was beauty. There were gardens of strange plants, some with smooth, thick leaves, others with spines, in arrangements as careful as any Yamani pleasure garden. There were mosaics on every doorstep and painted tiles above most doors. It was a city that appreciated beauty, that wanted it, much more than practical Corus or Port Caynn.

It hadn’t belonged to Tortall, in the not-too-distant past. It was part of what Tortall would not call an empire but still was even if they wouldn’t claim it as such. Princess Shinkokami had said, over Midwinter, when Joren of Stone Mountain had died, that the divisions were deep and dangerous, and that it was her hope to begin to mend them. King Jonathan worried about finding allies beyond his borders, but a Yamani could truly understand the dangers within.

While the princess and her husband-to-be awaited their own children, it would be Haname’s responsibility, as well as Yukimi’s, to hold Tortall together in what ways they could. If it was her fate to return to Persopolis one day, she thought she wouldn’t mind it.

She was almost disappointed when the governor of the city proved to be a man already married, who showed the Yamani delegation the old viewing room of the Black City willingly but with no special attentions to any of them. Haname thanked him and focused her attention on a distant city made of materials nowhere to be found in the vast desert, one that had held beings Yaman had almost no records of, Ysandir that had been defeated by a prince and a squire, which had inured the Bazhir more to northern rule than any marriage could, she thought.

Haname stayed longer than the others, excusing herself with a murmur when the governor offered to show them to some of the city’s tiled fountains. She would want to see them later, but she was caught by the sight of the Black City, still left unexplored, a monument to an ancient fear.

When a man came in, some time later, it startled them both to suddenly have company where none was expected.

Haname offered a bow, taking the moment to try to place him. He looked familiar, but he would. The Grand Progress might have been huge, well over a thousand people most days, but in their second year on the road, there were few people whose faces she hadn’t seen. He was clearly a warrior, in practical leather armor with a knife at his hip, but most of the men were, and the dried-grass shade of his hair and his sun-pinked cheeks were common enough. It was hard to guess at his age—warriors always seemed older than they were, and to Haname, all Tortallans seemed younger than they were, faces as mobile as a child’s.

The insignia at his breast at last gave her context, if not a name. He was one of the King’s Own, it seemed, a force made up largely of younger or less important noble sons and the sons of rich merchants and local politicians with ambition. “Lady Haname,” he said, stiff, and he hesitated before her name, as though worried she was perhaps Yukimi instead, or as though the syllables did not come easily to his tongue. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

By which he meant, no doubt, that he was disturbed. “You haven’t done so,” she said, and stepped to the side of the observation window. Surely he was there to look upon the Black City as well. “I apologize, but I don’t believe we’ve been presented.”

Sometimes Tortallans were so expressive she was embarrassed for them and how little they hid. Other times, they were so expressive she didn’t know how to interpret them. Did they feel emotions Yamanis didn’t, these easterners? Or was it that as the adults learned new emotions without hiding them, they learned new expressions as well? There was something sour in the man’s face, some bitter humor, that moved too quicksilver for Haname to catch it. “I’m Lerant,” he said, and then in a tone that assumed her knowledge, “of Eldorne. Standard-bearer to Raoul of Goldenlake.”

Haname had chosen Tortall young. She had studied its noble houses and its history with Chisokami, while she lived, the two of them wide-eyed over rebellions and wars and conquests, and then studied them again after Chisokami’s death, half tutor and half fellow student with Princess Shinkokami and Yukimi. She knew Eldorne. She knew it to be a house in Tortall’s east, in what they called Hill Country, and she knew that the fief’s daughter had been a traitor to King Jonathan who was imprisoned and not killed. The house had not been expunged, as it would have been in Yaman. Tirragen lived on, too, but both lived on poor and humiliated, an example to those who might betray the king. Looking at Lerant of Eldorne’s angry pride, she thought he might have preferred that his house had been allowed to die. “My lord,” she said, and inclined her head. Eldorne was a poor house with no hope of financing a knight, even if he had been allowed to try. If he was in a martial profession at all, he was likely to be the heir, and he was a standard-bearer, which meant he was likely to draw enemy fire in battle, but was trusted by his commander, who was trusted by the king. An interesting man, then.

“I’ve always found the Black City beautiful,” he said abruptly, turning away from her to look out over the horizon, across the stretch of featureless sand. “I don’t blame the Bazhir for not wanting to explore it now that the Ysandir are gone, but I think it’s a shame, too.”

“It is beautiful. Persopolis is beautiful too. Have you spent time here? Eldorne is not close, I know.”

Another quicksilver expression. “Some. My lord spends time among the Bazhir when he can, so Persopolis is on our rounds frequently.”

Haname considered him, and the way his shoulders were up around his ears with tension he didn’t care to hide. He might be a disgraced noble who had clearly come to the viewing room for privacy, but he was trained in etiquette and determined to be polite. She decided to try honesty. “I’m pleased we’ll spend some time here. I find it more beautiful than most of what I have seen of Tortall so far.”

“At least here one can enjoy endless sand instead of endless mud,” he said, unoffended. “I recommend the markets. They get trade goods from Carthak these days, on top of what the Bazhir make, and sometimes even the Copper Isles.”

It was the Bazhir goods that interested Haname, though she felt no need to say so when he was being kind. Yaman had better trade relations with the Isles than Tortall, and Carthak too, but Tortall didn’t export much from their desert. Foolish of them, if the mosaics and tiles were any indication of the skill of their artisans. She had a cousin who, when she left, had been thinking of tiling a fountain for his new bride. Perhaps she ought to write and advise him.

“You have traveled much more in Tortall than I have,” she said into the gap of silence that followed. “Where else is there beauty to find? Your Eldorne, perhaps? Is it beautiful?”

Lerant of Eldorne scoffed. “No, I wouldn’t say that. Dull, brown, poor. The planned route for the Progress neatly skirts hill country. It’s no impression to make on you and your countrywomen. No, my lady, enjoy Persopolis. If you like the south, try Pearlmouth and the Tyran border, or Legann. If you like trees, try the north.”

He didn’t understand. Perhaps too bitter, but then, two young men had failed to become knights when their skill at arms was adequate, because an elemental had judged their chivalry lacking. Maybe Tortall simply failed to teach its warriors that they had to understand beauty to know what it was they protected. Haname tried once more. “Where do you think is most beautiful?”

He was silent for a long time, then, both of them looking out over the austere shape of the Black City. Haname had heard its legends, how the Ysandir there would call away the Bazhir’s youth to take into service or to kill, no one knew which. She wondered if some had just seen the shape on the horizon enough times that they wanted to go without the magic calling them. “Everywhere,” he finally said. “Or maybe nowhere. My lord makes jokes about mud in our teeth and the lack of glory, but if you don’t enjoy the sunset while you’re setting up your tent, or an owl calling on night watch, you don’t last long on the road.”

Lerant of Eldorne, she knew, would not appreciate being told that it was a way a Yamani might see the world. Haname didn’t say it. She pressed her hands together and bowed instead. “I will seek small beauties, then. Thank you, my lord. Enjoy the view.”

“Enjoy the market, Lady Haname,” he said, and she left him there, already turning back to the window, dismissing her from his mind, thinking of beauty or perhaps something darker as he looked at the Black City. She didn’t suppose she would ever know.

Instead, she went to the market with some of Corus’s young ladies for company, bought food from street vendors and painted tiles to keep and put somewhere in a home someday, and found beauty where she could.

The shores at the north of Tortall felt almost like home.

The beaches were rocky, and the land didn’t roll down to them in most places. Instead, there were bluffs, and Haname thought often of Yaman, of its rocky and sheer drops down to the sea, at least on the Ajikuro lands. The resemblance ended above the beaches, more of Tortall’s rolling green fields, but Haname was drawn to the sea as they rode north, and only her duty kept her from stepping away from the Progress at night, to sit on the bluffs and watch the waves crash beneath her.

Mindelan was a small fief, as far north on the coast as they intended to go. In Yaman, everyone had known that Baron Piers of Mindelan was a new noble, his father a merchant’s son who had excelled in war in the King’s Own and who, when injured past healing in a decisive battle, was given a fief in the newly conquered lands. He was no warrior himself, though, more like his merchant grandfather, and he had been underestimated for a length of time Haname’s father later admitted was an embarrassment. He had done well for his king, and his king rewarded him by making sure the Progress visited his home even though the plans were growing shorter day by day, as the northern border grew restless with raiders that were turning into an army.

The beauty of the sea was a consolation from those fears. Haname wasn’t alone in them—she felt them a good deal less keenly than Princess Shinkokami or Yukimi. She had no betrothed, no man whose suit she intended to entertain when he gained his knighthood. She would not be losing a man to a war-torn border. Her fears were abstract, so she kept them to herself, and enjoyed Mindelan as she could.

There were daily expeditions down to the sea, and if Haname was not obliged to do something else, she went on them. On her second day in Mindelan, two of the Mindelan daughters, one engaged and one newly married, led the expedition. They were pleasant and charming young women, and the fiefs they were connected with were a good deal older than Mindelan, but, Haname noted with some amusement, it was the youngest Mindelan, the most controversial one, who attracted the most powerful allies. It was her connections that led Yukimi to the heir to one of the most powerful dukedoms in the kingdom.

Despite Squire Keladry’s connections to the young and eligible heirs of several houses, her sisters did not invite her and her friends to the sea with them. Instead, it was mostly a group of ladies, escorted by a few squads of the King’s Own to aid them as they descended the steep bluff paths, who went.

Haname, last down the path, found herself handed to the ground by a stone-faced Lerant of Eldorne, and when she was steady on the spray-soaked gravel, she bowed to him. “My lord. It’s my pleasure to see you again. Do you also enjoy the sea?”

“Does anyone not?” he asked, dry as though they were still in the desert. She had seen little of him since Persopolis, and certainly hadn’t had a chance to converse, but they had a nodding acquaintance at the least. “Eldorne is far from it. It’s still a novelty to me.”

“My father’s lands have sea holdings. When I was not in the capitol with the princess as a child, I was at the sea.” She took a few steps onto the beach, a test. Somewhat to her surprise, he walked with her, but then, the Own was full of noble sons. He was not the only one who had taken the opportunity to walk with a lady while their more impressive brothers and cousins explored the forest or the training grounds above.

“The princess,” he said, testing the words out. “But not Princess Shinkokami, right?”

It ought not have been a surprise. Lord Commander Raoul was famed for his disinterest in courtly games and politics, but as an intimate of the king he was involved in them by necessity. He would have known of Chisokami, of her death and the change, and might have realized that they would have wanted someone trained to go with Princess Shinkokami and her friend. And Haname had seen Lord Raoul, how he rode with Keladry of Mindelan flanking him on one side and Lerant of Eldorne on the other. They were in his confidence, then, or they were careful listeners. “Princess Chisokami was my friend,” she admitted. And then, on a whim, “She came to the seaside with me sometimes. I think of her often, standing in the waves, looking east. I wish she had been at the seaside with me when the earth shook.”

“She was your friend.”

Somewhere off Mindelan’s shore was a small island. Haname didn’t know its name, or if it had one. If there were people there or not. She peered at it, but the sun was too bright on the water to begin to guess. “That is a complicated word, in my tongue. We understood each other. We planned to spend our lives as each other’s closest allies. When she died and I was offered an honorable way out of the contract I had signed, a good and secure Yamani marriage like my older sisters, I chose to continue.”

“Why?”

To her parents, Haname had said she wanted to carry on Chisokami’s legacy. To her emperor, she had said that it was her duty and she would not shirk it. To Princess Shinkokami, she had said that it was the life she had expected, and to change it seemed foolish. To Lerant of Eldorne, she gave a shade of the truth she had told only Ilane of Mindelan in an embarrassing moment of candor the day after Joren of Stone Mountain had died. “Chisokami wanted so badly to love Tortall, to not be frightened.” She’d been pampered, as a child. She was a lower rank of princess than Shinkokami, but her family had been in favor with the emperor, and she had wanted nothing. Where Shinkokami was desperately grateful for escape, Chisokami had needed something to love to convince her not to fear her duty. “She found every book, every painting, listened to every story. She made this place into a legend: a king with the Dominion Jewel who can do no wrong. A beautiful warrior queen, and a beautiful warrior Champion. Fertile fields. Strong warriors. A husband who would have learned all of his parents’ virtues by the time she met him.”

“You believed in that too?”

His rank skepticism might have been impolite, but she liked it nonetheless, that he understood she was not so credulous. “No. While she lived, I hoped to protect her from disappointment, to shield her from the parts that are not beautiful.”

“And now that she’s dead?”

Too small an island, she thought, for anyone to live there. In Yaman, they might have built a lighthouse on such an island. Tortall did not seem to have those. Maybe they would build them someday. Still, for now it was a brave spot of green in the open ocean, with birds wheeling overhead. “Tortall is not a perfect legend. I knew it would not be. But perhaps someday I can do something that will make it a little closer to the paradise Chisokami imagined.”

“She would have been disappointed. No perfection here.”

“Yes. And no change I can make would make it into the place Chisokami wished for. But I must do something.” Chisokami had merely hoped to support her future husband. Princess Shinkokami had plans. She did not intend for herself or her ladies to be idle, and that suited Haname well.

“We all must do something.” He glanced over his shoulder and sighed. “If you’ll excuse me, my lady, I think someone’s trying to ascend. I should help.”

“Go. You’re kind to indulge me,” said Haname, and waved him off. She turned away from the island, from the sea view that eased the pain of remembering Chisokami, and went to speak to the nearest lady she recognized, who was picking shells off the beach.

Oranie of Mindelan found her later that afternoon, when the tide had gone out and the beach was wide enough that more people had come down, and she stood at Haname’s side for a long, delicate minute. Like all the Mindelans, her Yamani manners were impeccable even if she didn’t choose to use them as often as her youngest sister did. The kindness of some of the Tortallan ladies was exhausting, their honeyed words and bright smiles and too-intimate questions. The Mindelans and their friends were a relief, and Haname considered Oranie’s presence a blessing until she started speaking. “You may wish,” she said in slightly clumsy Yamani, the mode a bit too formal, “to be careful when speaking to the man you spoke to earlier.”

Wise to avoid his name. What would have been wiser still was not to bring him up at all. “I am aware of his family,” said Haname, slowly enough that even someone out of practice would understand. “I have read my histories. Your concern is kind but misplaced.”

Oranie remembered enough of Yaman to blush sunburn-pink at the rejection. “His aunt is the most notorious traitor in Tortall,” she continued nonetheless, dogged, hopeful that she could make Haname understand what she understood very well. “Hill country isn’t safe, Lady Haname. Even now it’s difficult.”

Haname raised her eyebrows. “Then surely it would help for them to be tied by friendship to the greater part of Tortall. Yaman was brought together by conquest, but it remains together by alliance. If by friendship I can protect my princess and her future children from future rebellions, I will count any other consequences meaningless.”

“I understand.” Oranie gave a small, stiff bow. “I apologize for overstepping, my lady. I hoped only to offer information I feared you didn’t have.”

“As I said. Your thought is a kind one. But that man is no threat to me and mine, unless I leave him to become more resentful, instead of less.” She bowed herself, just as stiff. “Please excuse me, Lady Oranie. I believe I must change before dinner, lest the salt stain my dress.”

It was Lerant of Eldorne who helped her back up the switchbacks of the path up the bluff. At the top, he removed his steadying hand from hers and looked at her with a scowl. “You don’t need to defend me, or pity me, or whatever you think you’re doing, Lady Haname. I know what I am.”

“You’re an opportunity, Lord Lerant,” she said, and watched him flinch to be given his proper title. “You resent Tortall for what it has done to your family, and trust only one man. That is your right. But I have no reason to hate you. It seems to me that the way you are treated is rank stupidity, and if you greet it with further stupidity, that is also your right.”

He crossed his arms. “Then what do you want me to do?”

“I’m also an opportunity for you. Few people have the right to gainsay who I exchange friendly greetings with, and Princess Shinkokami, for her own reasons, will not prevent this. So I shall greet you, and inquire as to how you are, when I see you. It’s your own choice what you do.”

“I won’t be made a lapdog.”

Only for Lord Raoul, but Haname wouldn’t say that. He knew what he was, and what choices he’d made, as sure as Haname understood her own, in all their foolishness and contradiction. “Lapdogs do not interest me. Men smart enough to move past resentment to bring prosperity to their homes—that interests me.”

She looked once more at the ocean while he considered her words. From above, she could see the island again, and the height gave her a vantage point she hadn’t had before. Just enough that she could see one lonely house on the far shore. She’d been wrong. “I’ll think about it,” he said at last, and Haname left him to his thoughts and returned to her tent, to listen patiently to Yukimi’s stories of her latest argument on magical theory with Nealan of Queenscove.

With Yukimi gone north, setting up married life at a refugee camp without them, it was Haname’s duty to accompany her lady to greet her betrothed as he came home for their own wedding. Yukimi would be back by then, but she would be traveling over land with her husband and with Lady Knight Keladry. A more dangerous path, but Yukimi at least would have two knights with a vested interest in her safety to watch over her.

Princess Shinkokami and Haname, however, were standing on the docks at Port Caynn, waiting for a ship that had left from Mindelan to come down the coast a few days before, loaded with the crown prince and other officers and noblemen who had been wounded or were due a leave for other reasons.

To any Tortallan watching, the princess would look as serene as any Yamani lady was meant to as one of the dockworkers shouted out that they had spotted sail. Haname knew the signs to look for, after years in her lady’s service: the tight clench of a grip around a fan she didn’t need on a cool autumn day, the squint of her eyes as she tried to find the ship in the distance, scanning the northern horizon. “If he were hurt, they would have said when he left Mindelan,” she said quietly in their own tongue. “He will be well, and eager to see you.”

Princess Vania, nearby and waiting for her brother, was the best of the Contés at speaking their tongue. Her glance flickered to them, but she didn’t speak. Shinkokami eased up her grip on her fan. “I know it. I have not seen it.”

There was little to say to that. Haname turned to Vania and asked her a few idle questions about Port Caynn. She hadn’t seen much of it the first time, overwhelmed by the bustle of people greeting them, determined to stay close to Shinkokami and Yukimi, understanding less than she thought she would of the language she called Common, which she’d been studying for a decade but which they all seemed to speak so quickly the words blended into one another.

Vania, though, had known it since childhood, and while she was often as shy as any girl raised as a princess could be, she was willing to share her stories of the markets with fresh fruits and vegetables from across the seas, how as a result Port Caynn had all the best and most interesting restaurants. She spoke of going with her mother and Kalasin when the first ship of trade goods from Carthak came after the Immortals War, of being allowed to choose a bolt of fabric to have a dress made out of while her sister read the first letter of many that would come from her betrothed in the years between the end of the war and her marriage.

Some of the others waiting around gathered around them, joining in telling Haname and Shinkokami what joys there were to be found in Port Caynn. The Prime Minister had clearly spent a good amount of time there, and recommended a restaurant on Dog Lane if they had the time to stop there, and Vania declared that they should stay a night if they could, and go to the restaurant together. Since the Prime Minister technically had charge of their party until Prince Roald’s arrival, and since he was very fond of his youngest godsdaughter, and Roald of his youngest sister, she thought it likely that Vania’s hopes would be carried out.

The light-hearted discussion of sights to see and restaurants to try lasted until the ship was, at last, throwing out ropes to the dock, engaging in the well-practiced dance of sailors making sure they wouldn’t drift away.

Prince Roald was the first off the ship, moving quickly but with shoulders slumped as though he was weary. He still smiled at the sight of the people waiting for him, and didn’t seem to mind when Vania, forgetting that she was a young lady beginning to attend court functions, ran at him full tilt and threw her arms around him. Shinkokami, befittingly, waited until he was free and walked forward at a calm pace, offering her hands for him to take, both of them speaking over each other, grave and worried and too quiet to be heard.

Haname turned politely away from them, giving them what privacy she could, and watched the others disembark from the ships. Vania had similar greetings for her other two brothers, both a year away from their knighthoods, back with their knight-masters to stand in support for their brother at his wedding. They both wore their experiences with war a little less easily than their eldest brother. They were young, to see what Haname knew they must have seen.

Other men followed, ones she didn’t know. A few lords who had been ransomed from the siege at Frasrlund, she thought, and others who had been wounded in the last attempt to relieve it.

Among them, uneasy, apart from the company, one arm cradled in a sling, was Lerant of Eldorne.

Haname had known that he must be coming south. Corus had been relieved, in the late summer, by the opportunity to gossip about something besides the war, and the death of the lord of Eldorne from a summer fever had filled the gap. He was young, for a fever to kill him, but hill country was, by all accounts, a hungry and dusty place, one where even the lords must undergo some privation, and healers were scarce there.

There were families there for nearly everyone disembarking the ship, sisters and fathers and cousins and children, all of them there to give welcome, to bring those they loved home from the war in mind as well as body. There was nowhere to look where someone was not weeping, if she did not look at Lerant of Eldorne, and so it was she realized that he was alone, and that he expected to be. No one had a welcome for the disgraced young lord of Eldorne.

Haname did. She was also alone in the crowd, extraneous to the Conté reunion. She was merely there to lend respectability, and there was no space for that, among these people. She walked forward instead, to catch Lord Lerant before he simply walked off the docks to be swallowed by the city, as he seemed to expect to do.

“My lord,” she said as she approached him, and he blinked, refocused his eyes from the road beyond the docks to her, and then blinked again, as though she was such a surprise he thought he might have imagined her. “I am pleased to see your safe return, and offer my belated condolences on the death of your father.”

“Thank you,” he said, stiff and unhappy. “Your thoughts are appreciated.”

“You will go to Eldorne soon, I assume?”

“Yes.” He jerked his head behind her, presumably at Prince Roald. “I gave a temporary oath of fealty to him, but I owe one to the King, so I’ll do that, and then most likely go to Eldorne for the winter before returning to Corus and doing what I can.”

Haname nodded. The previous lord of Eldorne had not cared to spend time in Corus, or perhaps had not been allowed, but most lords split their time between caring for their people in their home fiefs and advocating for their fiefs in Corus. Perhaps Lerant, who had earned the trust of one of the king’s closest advisors, would have an easier time doing the latter than his father had. “You won’t go back north?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

Lerant shook his head, as she expected, and then raised his bad arm with a wince, which she hadn’t. “Even if I still had a place in the Own, which full lords of fiefs can’t, the healers say I won’t ever get full strength back in my sword arm. They might not have kept their killing machines, the Scanrans, but they had the intelligence to realize the blades on them were still sharp.”

There was a deep streak of warrior bitterness behind that, one Haname recognized from her own father, when the pain and swelling in his joints had grown great enough that even a healer’s care wouldn’t let him comfortably grip a sword. “I am sorry, though I know you will find new ways to do your duty. At the least, I am pleased to see you safe.”

“Are you?” he asked, somewhere between snapping and curiosity.

They were interrupted before she could summon an appropriate response. The Prime Minister arrived then, with hopeful and polite welcomes for Lord Lerant, recognizing him formally as the lord of Eldorne. Haname watched, curious, while Lerant scraped together courtly manners and thanked him. There was no warmth there, but he knew how the game was played, when Lord Raoul didn’t always. Or maybe Lord Raoul did, and simply didn’t care to play it. Lerant would not have that luxury.

When that conversation started to trail into awkwardness, Sir Gareth surprised Haname by giving her a knit-browed look and then turning to Lerant again with an expression that brimmed with genuine hopeful curiosity. “My lord, Princess Vania has requested a stop at an eating house she knows, and I believe a group of us will go—your lady has agreed, Lady Haname, if you don’t mind terribly. Would you like to join us, Lord Lerant, since you must be spending the night in the city?”

Lerant looked at her too, with much the same expression, and then back at Sir Gareth, nothing but wary. “It’s a kind invitation, but I don’t want to intrude on a family occasion,” he said.

Haname looked between them, at some piece of history she did not quite understand. “Nonsense,” she said firmly. “You will need to eat somewhere. If their Highnesses have no objections, surely you cannot either.”

“They won’t,” said Sir Gareth, in the tone of someone who intended to be certain of it, and sure enough, when Haname put her fingertips on Lerant’s good arm a minute later, following in his wake and enjoying Lerant’s nettled expression even if he would have to learn better to survive at court, Prince Roald greeted him with every evidence of friendliness and extended an invitation.

Haname and Lerant were a quiet oasis in the middle of the chattering group, as they walked through the streets of Port Caynn. It was a ramshackle city in a different way than Corus. Houses were odd shapes, mismatched, built and rebuilt and built again, added to with different materials, renovated with still a third kind. Children ran heedless through the streets with little care for the strangers among them, and vendors hawked wares from carts and shops alike.

There were groups of colored flags over many buildings that Haname thought might simply be dyers’ samples that had become a trend, and they passed through a spice market that made her so abruptly homesick when she inhaled that she had to stop to master herself. Shinkokami, at the head of the group with her betrothed, faltered too, and looked over her shoulder at Haname, the two of them catching the same scents. United, for a moment, in memory.

It wasn’t like Yaman, not like the ordered streets of the cities there, not like their harmony of materials. But still, somehow, despite or maybe because of that, there was beauty in Port Caynn, in its crooked alleyways and crying gulls.

Dinner was easy, in that little was expected of Haname. Prince Roald asked about the doings in Corus and the wedding planning before anyone could ask the warriors from the north any more complicated questions, and Shinkokami was willing, with Vania’s delighted aid and Sir Gareth’s political explanations, to discuss matters. Roald smiled at Shinkokami when she spoke in a way that was a relief, after years of delicacy and an engagement longer than Haname knew the emperor had wanted.

Lerant, at Haname’s side, was quiet, and focused his attention on eating awkwardly with his left hand and denying any attempts at aid. Haname, thinking again of her father, took her fork and embedded it in the roast meat, held it in place while he sawed away at it. It would have been easier to do it herself, but though his ears were red, he wasn’t angry at her as he would have been right to be, if she’d done everything without asking.

When dinner was over, though, he excused himself on the edge of abruptness, with an extra bow for the crown prince, and went to some anonymous wayhouse, no doubt. Haname raised no objections, and neither did Sir Gareth. They had a house rented, and barely enough space for all of them in it.

Haname had a cot in Shinkokami’s room. They needed the appearance of honor, of her coming pure to her marriage, even if Haname herself had been the one to go to the Goddess’s temple a year before and find her a charm against pregnancy.

Easy in her lady’s company, even if Haname wasn’t her friend the way Yukimi was, Haname moved through the evening until she could put out the light, and then was surprised by Shinkokami’s voice in the dark, speaking their own tongue. “Will you give me hill country as a bridal gift, then?”

All of them had admitted, early in the progress, that Tortall’s inner divisions scared them. The outlying areas were not bound as well to Tortall as they would like, and King Jonathan’s efforts to get them allies outside their borders was all well and good, but they wanted security. Yukimi, with her husband, had reassured the loyalists. Haname had looked farther afield: at the old Barzuni nobility, at the far north and at the west. There were men among them she would be content enough with, who would be a connection to hold the areas until Shinkokami’s children could build more lasting ties.

Haname had heard little good of hill country. It seemed to her that even before Eldorne and Tirragen and Malven had risen in revolt, the area had been dismissed, disliked, with no reputation but banditry, with no export when they could hardly feed themselves. It would be easy to write them off, to look at Lerant and see nothing but his bitterness and think he was too far gone to make an ally of. But she saw his honor, his stubborn pride, his willing loyalty to a man his father would have fought against in that rebellion. If he had that, surely hill country had much to offer, if its loyalty could be won.

“The markets have much to offer,” she said, “but it’s a gift I have considered. Would you like it?”

“If it’s the gift you wish to give, I’ll accept it gladly,” said Shinkokami, and left Haname in silence, to think until she could drift to sleep.

Haname had not learned to love Corus or the palace. She did not love Corus’s crowded streets, the strange winds that whirled dust in odd corners, the cutpurses, the contrast between that which was built for practicality and that which was built to show wealth and was only beautiful incidentally. She did not love the palace, not its stones held cold in winter and heat in summer, not its arrow-slit windows, not the way it felt like living in a military encampment more often than not.

She was aware enough to know that it wasn’t an inherent fault in Corus or in the palace. It was Haname herself, not yet willing to allow herself to be at home. She didn’t even yearn for Yaman anymore, not really. She had chosen Tortall, and she would continue to choose it. But Corus, with all the attendant expectations, with all the days she would have to spend there for the rest of her life, she had not yet chosen.

In the months after Shinkokami’s wedding, Haname tried, and tried too hard for it to work. The palace was not festive, exactly, with another season of war on the horizon, but there was a certain relief, a knowledge that the war would soon end. There were parties, and Haname, now finding herself the only unmarried one despite being the eldest of her party, attended them, though most of the warriors were still in the north, and the scholars and second sons who remained seemed to have made a fad of fruitlessly courting Keladry of Mindelan. Those who didn’t want her wanted Princess Lianne, or the braver ones wanted Alianne of Pirate’s Swoop, when she came, a step more wild than any of the other ladies, a step less comfortable to be with.

Haname knew the way people whispered about her. They called her the perfect Yamani lady, in tones of either approbation or scorn, and they misunderstood her utterly. Shinkokami, with her eastern-style dresses and open shows of affection with her new husband, was the perfect Yamani lady. Yukimi, with the dimpled smiles she allowed to show and her adoption of some of her husband’s sarcasm, was nearly as good. A perfect Yamani lady bent, when she needed to. She adapted.

Haname had never had the talent. There was something stubborn as stone at the center of her, and she could not easily leave behind the manners and philosophies of her childhood, even if keeping them left her out of step with the court she had to live in. Even if keeping them left her lonely.

That winter, with Shinkokami and Yukimi both happily married, with Shinkokami cultivating her first few Tortallan ladies so even less Yamani was spoken in her chambers, Haname felt the loneliness keenly. The specter of it leeched the color from the palace and the city even more.

Spring did not obligingly turn her mood, as it chose to arrive not with blossoms and warmth but with rain and mud and the departure of most of the palace’s young men, not to mention Yukimi, whose insistence on returning to the north with her husband and friend was not to be gainsaid. Haname and Shinkokami, with help from the Tortallan allies who expressed themselves more freely now that Shinkokami bore the name Conté, occupied their time sewing shirts and knitting stockings for the soldiers who hoped their second year of war would be a shorter one, with Maggur Ratthausak’s claim on the throne growing ever shakier. Haname, adrift, looked at little but her sewing for what seemed like weeks, as she made miles worth of tiny, strong stitches.

When she looked up again, Lord Lerant of Eldorne was in the palace.

Or, she realized after seeing him depart early from two different parties, he often visited the palace, which meant he was in Corus. Eldorne had no rooms in the palace, and it seemed the lord of Eldorne did not care to petition the castellan for a room in the wing where the single sons and daughters of the nobility lodged as they sought spouses or took care of other business. The rent for such a room might be too dear for him, or he might simply wish more distance. She couldn’t blame him for that, not when she saw the way unmarried ladies shied away from him at parties as though they feared the attentions of one of the few single men in the palace during a season of war.

Haname chose to stand next to him the next time there was a party with dancing, not pushing but present. It hardly took Lerant the space of a dance before he turned to her, scowl in place. “Your pity is appreciated but unnecessary, Lady Haname.”

Perhaps it was perverse stubbornness to cling so hard to the outward serenity Yaman demanded of its nobles, but it gave her a certain amount of satisfaction, wearing it and letting Lerant’s anger bounce harmlessly off like he’d lobbed a child’s doll at a knight’s shield. “Is it pity to invite conversation with a friend? Or to hope that one of the few dance partners remaining in this palace might ask me?”

His jaw clenched. What was it like for Tortallans, who didn’t know how to hide what they might not want others to see? “I’m not a very good dancer. Especially when my arm still pains me sometimes.”

“I do not require you to be skilled. Or to hold me improperly tight.”

“But you require me to show willing.”

“Does it do you any good, to stand at the side of a dance floor, to do no good to remediate your family’s reputation in the palace as you so ably did in the military?”

Haname kept her tone as cool as she could, and knew that he could turn on his heel and leave, walk away from her or walk away from the party. She thought, though, that he was more intelligent than that, that even if he resented her he would understand her point. Sure enough, when one dance ended, he extended his hand to her and executed a stiff bow. She placed her hand in his, and followed him to the dance floor.

After that, Haname sought him out when she could. Every time, he greeted her with a scowl, with resentment and stung pride, but it faded faster each time. More to the point, when Haname had made it clear the lord of Eldorne was not worth fearing, other ladies stopped fearing him as much. It was engaged and married young ladies first, missing beloveds in the north and with no worries that a lord from a disgraced family might take it as encouragement. When he proved to be a more competent dancer than he’d first proclaimed, if not a particularly friendly one, some of the braver young ladies, especially those of lower rank or younger daughters, started allowing his attentions.

At every party they both attended, though, Lerant danced with Haname. At first, it was because she all but forced him as she had the first time, reminding the court that Lerant of Eldorne had her approval and thus by implication Shinkokami’s. After a few parties, though, he asked her himself. Stiffly and dutifully, and then as a matter of course, and finally, by the time he became a widely acceptable dance partner, with every appearance of relief.

“You do not enjoy your popularity?” she inquired when that time arrived at last, and he had finished a dance with a girl from a northern fief who had been one of the first ladies to overtly flirt with him. He had spent the whole dance with every appearance of alarm.

Lerant scowled at her and, when Haname continued to raise her eyebrows expectantly, sighed. “I don’t want to be popular. That could easily be a fad. I want to be boring, just another young lord who only stands out because he’s home with an injury instead of at war.”

“Then be popular for a while and then let it fade. Easy enough.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said, and then, to her surprise, “I’m going to the market in Corus tomorrow. Would you care to join me for a stroll in the city, Lady Haname?”

Haname didn’t often show when she was startled, but she knew she did it then, judging from the thin smile that came to his face. “A kind invitation. I will have to make sure that my lady does not require me, but assuming she doesn’t, I’m most willing to join you.”

They spoke of other things as they danced, but Haname caught him again before the end of the night, after a rushed conversation with Lady Uline, the host of that night’s party and a lady moving from Queen Thayet’s retinue to Shinkokami’s, who raised her eyebrows but didn’t object, merely told her that she would happily do Haname’s duties for the princess the following day. She told Lerant so, and arranged to meet him at the palace gates at the first afternoon bell, for a lunch at an eating house and an afternoon at the market.

Lerant was prompt, and nothing like courtly, but outside the palace gates, he proved to be friendlier. He had a recommendation, as it happened, for a Yamani eating house run by a married couple from Yaman, who were delighted to speak to Haname in their common tongue and serve her meal closer to how it would be served at home rather than modified for the Tortallan palate.

“How did you find them?” Haname inquired when he offered his arm to walk her to the nearest market.

“Looked for them,” he said with a shrug. “Squire Kel talked about noodle soup sometimes on cold muddy nights on campaign and I was curious, not that I’d tell her that. And then I thought you might like to know of a place, so I went looking in earnest.”

A gift, then. When she’d had homesickness simmering in her chest for months on end, a gift beyond price. “I will return,” she said, and frowned at him, considering. “What’s the food in hill country like? The food in Persopolis was different than it is here, and in the north it was different too. What are the differences in Eldorne? Are there shops here that sell your food?”

“Some, not many. It’s not a particular kind of dish I think of when I think of Eldorne. Everything’s too scarce for us to have an abundance of one thing. But one thing I’ll say for us is that there are several herbs and spices that grow well in our soil, so our foods are well-spiced, and—the Yamani drink a great deal of tea, don’t you?” At Haname’s nod, he smiled. “I’ll find a box of ours for you. It’s different, but I’ve heard more than a few people say it’s the best thing to come out of hill country.”

The afternoon continued like that, surprisingly pleasant and conciliatory, for him. Haname kept her confusion to herself and let him play the tour guide. He showed her the spice shops that sold hill country spices and exchanged a few rapid words in a guttural language she didn’t know with a man who sold a tin of tea that smelled delicious and nothing like the teas she knew at all. They walked by a square where a pair of Tyran acrobats were putting on a show, and by a shop that sold Carthaki linens so finely-woven they slid over Haname’s fingers like water.

In a city that had come to represent, in Haname’s mind, a Tortall she was trying hard not to resent, Lerant showed her all the small beautiful pieces of it that came from everywhere else. He might have done it to make a point, or to be kind, or just because they were the places in Corus he liked best. Maybe, like her, he felt out of place, not at home in Corus, and he had to seek out places that reminded him that Tortall wasn’t all one thing, that Corus wasn’t. Whatever his motive, he’d given her places that made it easier to remember.

“You’ve done me a kindness,” she said when they ended up back at the palace gates. He’d stopped, so he didn’t intend to come in. He would go back to wherever in the city he stayed, a place he hadn’t chosen to point out to her, and they would see one another again at a party, or in a palace corridor.

“You did me one first,” he parried. And then, midway through a bow that would have allowed him to take polite leave of her, he stopped, and straightened, and met her eyes again. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

Haname considered him for a long moment. “I want to help you with what you already wish to do,” she said at length. “You want to fight for Eldorne, to begin the work of reestablishing the reputation of your house.”

“To reestablish would mean we ever had one. We were too new to Tortall for anyone to care about us, until my Aunt Delia made sure everyone’s impressions were bad.”

“Nonetheless.”

“Nonetheless.” He crossed his arms. “Why do you want Eldorne to have a reputation, then? Why does that matter at all?”

The truth, then. If he resented it, he might still think it a good idea, and if he thought it a bad idea, better to know now. “My lady wants peace for her children. Tortall is an embattled realm, from within and without, and she wishes it to be otherwise. The king marries his children to secure allies from without. Princess Shinkokami looks within.”

“She wants to bring hill country to heel.”

“No. That’s of no use to her. That will breed resentment, and another revolution for her children or grandchildren to fight against. What I hope for is a hill country that thrives. That exports its spices at the prices they deserve, that has the money and the will to survive. So I want to help you, because to help you is to help hill country.”

There was a long silence. He did not uncross his arms. “How do you want to help me, Lady Haname?” he asked at last.

Haname allowed herself a very small smile. “That, I think, is up to you.”

Lerant didn’t answer. Merely bowed, excused himself, and then stayed so he could be the one to let her walk away.

In the weeks and months that followed, Haname didn’t push, didn’t ask. It wasn’t her job to do so, and while she wished to help Lerant if he wanted to make Eldorne flower, she had other jobs as well. Alianne of Pirate’s Swoop was missing, and the whole court was desperately worried about it and feared the worst, a topic that took up more attention than even the continuing war in the north, though that drew out too, an exhausting summer of war, wounded coming south by the shipful.

There were mercies: every ship was less full. The Scanrans were losing heart, and turning their attention to Maggur Ratthausak. Soon, he would have no armies to invade a neighbor, only a revolt to take his head, and Tortall could make peace with what remained. War was an ugly business.

Haname kept weaving peace as best she could. She danced with Lerant when there was dancing, threw a few Yamani-style parties with fewer guests and invited him there. She kept herself available to him, but she made no claim, as she introduced him to young ladies from Meron, from Seabeth and Seajen, from Hollyrose. He made no claim, and danced more often as summer started becoming fall, but he saved dances for her as well. A time or two, he even invited her to Corus again, and showed her more of what she wanted, bright spots, places and tastes she could love.

He left for the winter with promises unmade, and Haname served Eldorne tea often in Shinkokami’s rooms that season, noting who recognized it and who didn’t, and taking obscure enjoyment in the way some people were uncomfortable with their professed enjoyment, when she told them where it was from. Few people spoke of its origins, but as spring got closer, when Haname went to Corus alone to buy another tin, the proprietor told her, apologetic, that they were out of stock, but that they’d ordered more from Eldorne.

Haname, disappointed but nonetheless satisfied, thanked him and instead stopped at a corner where Lerant often stopped, to listen to three flower sellers who sang old Tortallan songs in beautiful harmony between customers.

As spring arrived, she was too busy to watch the road, but she watched at parties as more and more knights returned from the north, with peace negotiations happening at last between the king and a Scanran council of warlords.

Lerant wrote, some weeks after the equinox, without pretending at stiff courtesies: There was flooding this winter, and I have too much work to do here to come this season. I expect nothing.

I expect something, Haname wrote in return. Replant your tea fields first. Corus has discovered a taste for it.

A month later, a tin of tea was delivered to her door. There was no note, but she knew who it was from.

From the time she had been chosen, Shinkokami had taken interest in the Scanran bride who had been offered to Prince Liam, even as the negotiations happened during her pregnancy with her husband’s heir. As a result, Haname took an interest. Vierka, who claimed no title but her clan name, was half-starved and half-wild, with none of the training that had allowed Shinkokami to bend to Tortall’s needs and make friends.

Haname had always felt, from the four years between her and Yukimi and the five between her and Shinkokami, as though she had to be wise and steady for her companions, to offer them advice and allow them to lean on her. With Vierka, even younger and too frightened to lash out as she clearly wished to do, Haname tried to do the same, trying to offer kindness across the chasm between them that was only ever warily and resentfully accepted.

The match worried her, too, as the summer went on. Prince Liam would not reach out, and Vierka certainly would not.

“She reminds me of you,” Haname found herself telling Lerant one day at a picnic, Shinkokami and her ladies and their sweethearts. It had felt bold, to invite Lerant, but she’d been so busy between young Princess Lianokami and Vierka that she’d hardly seen him all summer, after a whole year of lapsed connection between them.

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment,” he said, with the exact wariness Vierka would have used, only in a lighter shade.

“She needs what you need.” It was the bitterness that Haname saw echoed between them, but it was easier, perhaps, to talk about something else. “Allies who care more about the future than the past. For people to know her as herself and not as a symbol of someone else that’s done harm.”

Lerant frowned and picked a little at the grass. “You make such relaxing and pleasant picnic conversation.”

Haname was considering a reply, but he’d said it just loud enough for others to catch. Maura of Dunlath’s sweetheart laughed and said “You’re one to talk, Eldorne,” and the conversation became more general, but Haname kept thinking about it.

She was still thinking about it, a few days after the wedding when Shinkokami, in the middle of feeding Lianokami, said “It’s a pity that Vierka will not get what I had, a chance to know and be known by all of Tortall. I fear that everyone’s fear of her will make her life difficult.”

Haname, carefully knitting a new hat for a baby princess who seemed to grow bigger every hour, set her needles in her lap. It was rare that Shinkokami spoke of such weighty things when the two of them were alone in her rooms. Haname was not her chief confidante, so there was a reason she’d brought it up. “It’s likely. But Tortall was more willing to accept Yaman than Scanra.”

“I’ve considered mentioning to my esteemed mother-in-law that it’s a shame our Progress was cut short. There are places I did not get to see, and while I cannot do so now, the people in those places have every right to feel slighted.”

The east, with its many borders, had not felt as safe to those leading the Progress once Scanra became truly dangerous. Haname knew Yukimi had regretted not seeing the City of the Gods, where mages trained. Haname herself had not known to miss it at the time, but she regretted hill country being forgotten, and as she thought the words, she knew why Shinkokami had decided to speak to her alone. “Perhaps a smaller delegation, by manner of a wedding trip, might soothe those hurt feelings,” she offered. “If you could spare me, I would of course be willing to lend Princess Vierka some consequence, on such a trip.”

Shinkokami’s smile was slight and true, a deliberate show of her true emotions, but after a moment it fell, and she looked down at Lianokami. “I only fear, Haname, that you would not come back.”

“I owe you my allegiance.” Shinkokami still looked troubled, and Haname swallowed, and forced herself to speak more than she usually would. “And above that, you have my friendship. You might see less of me, but I would not leave you.”

Shinkokami reached out and gripped Haname’s arm. “I am grateful, for the life I have, for the husband I have. I owe Chisokami debts beyond reckoning, and the greatest of them, I think, is for earning your loyalty. I’ll speak to my mother-in-law, and you will come back, I hope, with matters settled.”

They did not speak of it further, but within a week, it became a matter of understanding in the palace that Vierka and Prince Liam, when they went to take possession of their new fief, would go by a long route, through hill country and north to the City of the Gods, with a small retinue to add to their consequence. The principals looked wary of the thought, so much time on the road together, without the space of a keep between them, but Shinkokami spoke to Vierka and Prince Roald spoke to his brother and the both of them did a reasonable job of playacting enthusiasm after that.

Haname left with them and Lerant and Maura of Dunlath, on her way home for the winter, as well as a few knights for protection, a mere two weeks later, and they headed east. They visited pleasant, fertile Naxen, where the Prime Minister almost never had a chance to visit, and other fiefs they had missed on the progress, and it was easier, after so many years in Tortall, with the homesickness less present, to find beauty in the landscapes around her. It was still hardest, she found, in the places like Naxen that looked like illustrations from the legendary stories Chisokami had always read, but she was better at spotting the imperfections that made beauty, now. It was a skill she cultivated.

She knew when they crossed into hill country by the way Lerant grew tense, gaze fixed between his horse’s ears, dropping out of the conversation more often than not, and Haname looked closer as the landscape rolled ahead of them, hills and valleys as far as she could see. The settlements were scattered at the tops of hills, and were rarely more than a few small houses, where the residents shamelessly watched the strange party cross the landscape and sometimes called out wary greetings, in Tortall’s language or the one Lerant had called Hurdik when she had asked him once.

Grass waved everywhere, brown with the autumn, rippling with the merciless wind that Lerant said often came up from the desert and filtered the sun through hazy dust. Though the hilltops were sandy and eroded, in between the hills, the horses’ hooves found mud, and water welled up in their footprints. “You could grow rice here, if you wished,” she told Lerant, riding up next to him. “If these small valleys remain wet for long enough.”

“Some of them do.” He frowned at her. “It’s not a crop I know well, though they’ve had it in the palace sometimes, since the Yamani alliance. Does anyone in Tortall grow it yet?”

Haname frowned, considering the question, and called over Prince Liam as the most likely to know, though Duchess Maura was fast to join the conversation, both of them agreeing that a few people had tried but nobody had a large enough crop to feed anyone much yet. She raised her eyebrows at Lerant, and he rolled his eyes, but a moment later he asked about water levels, about sourcing seed, about how any crop could grow in water without rotting, and Haname had to suppress a smile by looking up into the clear blue sky and watching a carrion bird wheel above.

Eldorne town and its keep all looked much the same, even the town’s walls, where all were at the crown of one of the larger hills. Whatever they were built of, they were roughly covered in some kind of thick stucco that made them all slope as though they were extensions of the hills.

Up close, the whitewash that had once covered them was dingy or worn away, and some of the facades were losing the stucco, or were about to, from the looks of the spiderwebbing cracks. A third of the houses in the town stood empty, doors covered up, roofs caving in. Eldorne’s people had been leaving it. From disgrace, from starvation, from lack of industry, it was impossible to know.

Lerant rode through the town with crimson ears, but he knew his people. He spoke to the wind-beaten elders and the wide-eyed children in Hurdik and the wary adults in between in Tortallan, and introduced Prince Liam and Vierka relentlessly in both tongues. The prince was visibly uncomfortable, but his mood was soon eclipsed by his bride, who looked around the town with a grim sort of familiarity and was unfailingly polite, especially to elders and children. By the tenth introduction, she’d learned enough rough words to introduce herself, however clumsily. By the twentieth, she elbowed her husband to do the same, and to Haname’s relief, he did.

“They’ll do,” said Maura, watching the pair of them with a small smile. “It won’t be easy, but they’ll do. And so will Eldorne.”

“I had no worries about him,” said Haname as they reached the keep’s gate.

The lords of Eldorne had few luxuries that their people did not. They had little staff, and many of them without livery, probably hired in haste when Lerant wrote ahead in warning of the royal visit. No majordomo showed them to their rooms. It was Lerant who did so, and apologized, ears red again, that Haname and Maura would have to share space, as well as the knights who had come. There were more guest rooms, but they weren’t suitable for guests.

Dinner was plain fare, but hearty and well-seasoned, and when it was done, a small group of women from the town entertained with Hurdik ballads in harmony that raised the hairs on Haname’s arms.

When most everyone else had gone to bed, tired from the long ride, Haname walked through the house, empty and quiet, and looked at the guest rooms with crumbling ceilings, the room that must once have been a library where the only remaining shelf of books were all well-thumbed agricultural treatises.

She found the lord of Eldorne in his own kitchen, stoking the fire with a dismal expression. When he saw her, he closed his eyes. “It’s humiliating, coming home,” he said, very quietly. “Every time, they hope I might be coming with the money to save us, and of course I never have it. And now you’re here to witness it.”

“It will be slow,” she said, and sat next to him without being bidden. Let him bid her go instead, if he wished to. She didn’t think he would. “You will sell tea and spices. Perhaps you will sell rice. You’ll use it to feed your people first, and then eventually to make money to feed them still better.”

“If I can afford to buy the seed, and pay experts to show my people how to grow it.” He prodded at the fire again. “And I can’t.”

Haname sat in silence with him for a moment. “My family is old, and close to the emperor. My dowry is large, and it would be a trifling matter for my father to send seed and experts. You must have guessed that.”

Lerant scoffed and gestured around the kitchen, which against his clear attempt at making a point was a well-kept and well-stocked room. “This is what I can offer you. A fief starving to death, my traitorous aunt housed as far out of sight as my grandfather could get her, people who aren’t sure if they resent me more for playing nice with the Contés or for not doing it well enough and giving us some relief.”

Haname thought back over the day, the long ride. “There’s some kind of green dye, here in Eldorne, or pigment. Your people are tired, but still proud enough to paint designs around their doors with it—and you could sell it, if there’s enough of it, but we can speak of that later. The grass is beautiful in the wind. Children learn their home tongue from their grandparents, when you might have let it be stamped out.”

“That’s what you offer your dowry for?”

“That. And your traitorous aunt, who I would one day like to meet, and your wary people, who have earned that wariness.” She put a hand on his knee and waited until he looked at her. “I told you once about Princess Chisokami, and my perhaps foolish reason for coming to Tortall even after her death. I can’t pretend that I can make things good for hill country, but I can make them better. You and I can do it together.”

“As lord and lady of Eldorne? That is what you’re proposing.”

“I am told it’s a lord’s job to propose here, if there are no parents to arrange the match. Properly, you would petition Princess Shinkokami for my hand, but she gave me her permission before I left.” Haname relented. “But yes. If you wish to be sure of what I’m offering, I offer myself to be your wife. We can be hasty, or I can finish this small progress and go back to Corus, and we can marry in spring with more witnesses.”

Lerant let out a long, slow breath. “Let it be spring.” His mouth quirked up in a small smile. “It will give the rice seed time to arrive from Yaman before the wedding.”

There had been many years when Lerant had wondered if he’d ever see Eldorne in the summer again. Plenty of years where he’d hoped he wouldn’t. His dim childhood memories of Eldorne’s summers were of dust on his tongue, grass fires on the dry hilltops when lightning failed to bring rain with it or when bandits were reckless. What crops grew in Eldorne grew in the spring or fall, other than the harvests of hay that at least let them keep their animals fed.

It had been summer in the blood-soaked north when he’d inherited Eldorne. He’d immediately wondered if he could let the war take him instead of going back, if he could stubbornly vow himself to the Own and let Eldorne rot. Someone in Corus had anticipated the impulse. It was Lord Raoul who had come to him, tired and sorry, and gently told him that he would have to go back, the next time a large enough contingent was going south.

It was Lord Raoul who had handed him the letter from Aunt Delia, his last living kin, the specter that had haunted his childhood, telling him the news and demanding his return. Telling him his duties, telling him that she didn’t have liberty but did have a window and could see Eldorne dying around her. He’d laughed, and Lord Raoul had looked even sorrier.

The first report from his beleaguered steward had come north before he’d been injured and forced onto a transport south. He detailed the summer starvation, everything Eldorne needed. It could almost feed itself, most of the year, but in summer, Eldorne was a misery.

Of course the first request Haname had made of him as his wife was to forget about bridal trips and their duties in Corus. He’d married her in May hoping it would give him the excuse to go to a great many boring parties in the palace, since the princess had seen fit to gift her senior lady-in-waiting a suite for Eldorne, and instead Haname had calmly met his eyes in bed the day after the wedding and told him she would like to go home, please.

He had known Haname for the best part of a decade and known her well for a few years. Lerant could have argued with her, but it wouldn’t have done much good. He agreed, after he warned her that summer in hill country was unforgiving and she was likely to regret it.

It was easy to imagine Haname to be a fragile court lady, with her silks and high position. Lerant knew she wasn’t fragile, but it was one thing to know it and another to see it. Haname didn’t hide away in the keep or use her dowry money to fix the residence first. Instead, she started serving rice to the people, and showing them how to grow it so they would know for the wetter seasons. She traded silk for linen smocks and rode over the hills, talking about the way some hillsides in Yaman were carved into steps so there was more space for crops, how those steps held water that could hold still more rice. She wrote to Yukimi of Queenscove about irrigation and told him over dinner that there would be a mage coming out. She put on her silks, told him not to follow her, and visited Aunt Delia once, and then again a week later, and again the week after that.

“I might as well cede the fief to you,” he said over dinner after a dismal afternoon with his account books. Haname’s dowry was more than generous, and she wasn’t afraid to spend it on Eldorne, but the money made him a little sick to look at, that she was wasting it on a place that might well be impossible to save. Nobody had raised objections to the marriage, but the king had watched him closely. Haname couldn’t wipe away the stain of treason.

“Is it not Tortall’s way that it’s not merely the lord who administers the fief? Perhaps I have misunderstood the relationship between the king and the queen?”

Nealan of Queenscove had spoken to him, once, when it became obvious what Haname’s plans were and that Lerant was willing. To his credit, Queenscove had been friendly, or as friendly as Queenscove ever was when Lerant had grown used to his sarcasm and occasional nastiness on the progress. They were alike that way. Queenscove, though, attempting to find some manner of kinship with him, had said that sometimes speaking to a Yamani lady—he hadn’t said that, he’d said “a woman raised in Yaman,” a distinct and deeply uncomfortable difference to consider—was like conversing with an impenetrable fortress. Lerant had found that speaking to Haname was something more like conversing with a siege engine. Just as implacable, just as unhurried, but with a lot more focus on blowing him apart. “I’m not disparaging you,” he said between gritted teeth. “Merely myself.”

“I bring new ideas. You make sure I am not making a mistake because I don’t know Eldorne as well as you do.”

Lerant waved a hand and looked away. “Change everything, if you like. Eldorne has little to recommend it.”

Haname was silent for a long time. She was better at hiding her expressions than what he’d seen of the rest of the Yamanis. By the end of four years working with her, he’d known when Mindelan’s blank face was hiding annoyance or misery or satisfaction, but with Haname, he still saw what she chose to let him see, more often than not. “It has more than you think,” she said.

She allowed him to change the subject after that, and he was only a little embarrassed at how clearly it was allowance. Still, she watched him, eyes dark and considering, while they discussed where to house the mage who would be visiting and how to recruit a few who might want to stay.

The next day, she invited him out for her ride around Eldorne town. Lerant, knowing she must want something but knowing that what she wanted was for Eldorne’s benefit, cast his work aside and went with her. Haname was too smart and too gracious to make a point of anything, and even if she were making a point, he wasn’t sure what it was. He rode alongside her, sedate after years of hard rides through difficult terrain, and when she stopped to speak to a group of children, he stopped with her, and greeted them in Hurdik. Haname did too, to his surprise, the syllables sitting strange in her accent but recognizable to anyone who spoke their tongue. The children were delighted but unsurprised, so it must not have been the first time she’d done it.

“I would have taught you some phrases, if I knew you wanted to learn,” Lerant said, frowning as they rode away.

“Why do you think I visit your aunt?” she countered, which made his stomach pitch. She continued before he had to struggle to find anything to say. “You have better things to do than teach me the basics. She has an abundance of time.”

Lerant frowned, trying to pick apart the layers of all of it, and eventually decided to try the one thing he could say that was both kind and honest. “I’m not sure I do have better things to do. You’re my wife. If you want help that I could give you, I want to give it.”

Haname nodded, and he was watching closely enough that he could see her hand flex on her horse’s reins, a rare crack in her facade. At least they were both discomfited, then. “Then I will ask for your help. Did you learn it young? Or when you were older, like your aunt?”

It had never occurred to him to wonder whether Aunt Delia spoke Hurdik, and if she did, when she might have learned it. His father hadn’t spoken it to him, and while he thought his mother had a few times, since she was from Malven, he didn’t remember it well. “A nurse taught me.”

She asked questions as they rode, never prodding, changing topics slightly or stopping to comment on the scenery (dry, dusty, dull) when he grew uncomfortable. She stopped everyone they met and hailed them in Hurdik and asked how they were faring. After three such conversations he was forced to tell her, trying to bite back amusement, that he thought Aunt Delia might have learned her vocabulary from books several centuries old and she might want to use the newer versions if she didn’t want to sound like she’d stepped out of a fireside epic.

They had too many duties to ride all day, but Haname asked him to ride again the next day, and thereafter every day they didn’t have duties that would prevent them from doing it. Sometimes they rode through the town, talking to the people making grass baskets for any merchant who happened to pass through going between Tusaine and Corus. Other times, they rode out over the hills, surveying likely sites for future work or knocking on the doors of outlying settlements or visiting the tea fields that were starting to become profitable for the first time, thanks to her influence.

As they rode, Haname would point at one thing or another, and ask “What is that?” in Hurdik that grew more fluent as the days passed. Lerant dredged up what words he knew and asked his people what ones he didn’t, told her that there was no word for wind in general, only for winds from a certain direction, and spent an afternoon with one of the hill village elders learning the names of farming tools and kitchen implements, words the son of the lord had never had a chance to learn.

Haname was curious about every aspect of life in Eldorne, and she asked him questions he knew, but just as many that stumped him. She sat with the basket weavers in the town square, learning their techniques and asking them the words for them. She dressed him in armor and buckled on his sword when bandits came too close to people under his protection and he had to take his few guards out to deal with them and asked what each word was called. One memorable night in their stifling hot bedroom, she asked him for more intimate vocabulary, words he’d learned from a Malven cousin who’d told him he should be educated before he went off to join the “king’s lapdogs,” as he’d called them.

Her desire to learn the language made Lerant go looking for chances to show it to her, for speakers far more fluent than he was. He found a frail old man in a hermitage at the edge of his lands, one of the last devotees of a hill goddess few people had heard of, much less worshiped, and let him teach Haname the prayers. On Midsummer night, there was a bonfire, and Haname sat, lips parted, as a woman in a ragged smock recited one of the epic poems that Aunt Delia must have read. The two of them traveled to the place where Lake Tirragen abutted his land and he named the fish for her.

As much as Lerant tried to show Haname what she wished to see, she seemed to want to show him just as much. “Come see,” she would say every few days, and she would show him the tiny pale-purple flowers blooming around the town’s walls, or the demonstration of a Shang warrior taking on anyone who wanted to try in exchange for a night’s lodging and food, or a woman selling tiny bells in the marketplace that people would sew to their clothes before holiday dances. Things he hadn’t noticed since he was a child too small to understand Eldorne’s precarious situation, things he might not have even noticed then.

“Come see,” she whispered one night, shaking him awake, and led him to the window, pointing out. “What are those? I’ve never seen them. Are they some magic of the hills?”

Lerant blinked, squinted, looked out and eventually noticed the brief flash of yellow-green light, and then another, a little more distant, and others past that. “Fireflies,” he said, in Common and then in Hurdik. “If you can dress quickly, you can see them better outside the city walls.”

The two of them went, whispering through the keep like children up past bedtime, and walked out the nearest gate.

In the dark, the landscape was less severe. The grass was still dry enough to rustle around them, but under the moon it was silver-blue, not the unrelenting tan of daylight. The sky wasn’t merciless blue with only the rarest of clouds and the sun to relieve it, and Lerant was reminded of how much magelight there was in Corus, how many taller buildings, and how it made it hard to see the stars.

Haname didn’t seem to care about the stars. She was watching the grass, her hand on his arm, and watching the thousands of fireflies spread across the hills, lights flashing at random.

They weren’t, Lerant realized after a moment, alone. The grass on the hillside not far away was rustling, and there were giggles carrying across the night air, whispers in Hurdik. Children, out to catch fireflies in their cupped palms and let them go again, as Lerant had done a hundred times as a child, the reward for another day of heat, of following his father around the fief hearing about all the problems they didn’t have money to fix, hearing that they would need supplementary food from Corus’s stores again.

He caught Haname’s hand in his and started pulling her down the hillside, towards where the fireflies were thicker on the ground. “You can catch one, if you let it go again,” he said, coming to a stop, dropping her hand. “It won’t hurt you or the firefly. I’ll show you.” They weren’t fast, if you didn’t startle them. Lerant hadn’t caught a firefly since long before he went to the Own, but the trick to it wasn’t hard, given the primary people who used it were children. It was hardly a minute before he had one cradled in his hands, crawling around, wholly unconcerned with its change of circumstances.

Haname, instead of catching her own, came closer and cupped her hands around his, as though both of them were holding the firefly at once. Her eyes were shining, mouth curved. More expression than he’d ever seen from her, all brought on by a simple insect, a childhood memory Lerant had all but forgotten. “Are they only from the hills?” she asked, whispering as though afraid she might scare it away.

“No, I’ve seen them outside of the hills too, up and down the west side of Tortall, though not in the desert. Apparently they’re in Tusaine, too, according to an old tutor of mine.”

“But they’re most beautiful here,” she said, like it was something she was certain of, like she couldn’t imagine otherwise. So eager to love Eldorne, when Lerant felt like he’d been running from it his whole life, like the land itself had been polluted by treason against a king Eldorne hadn’t asked for in the first place. Haname was loyal to her lady, wanted Eldorne to keep its king, but the treason didn’t bother her, or at least didn’t outweigh her desire to know the place.

Lerant’s father had told him once, on a blazing hot summer day when they’d gone to dig a firebreak to starve a fire since there wasn’t enough water nearby to put it out, that Lerant would, in all likelihood, be the last lord of Eldorne. That it would starve to death on his watch, and that even if it didn’t, Lerant would not receive permission to marry from the king, when permissions on marriage had been one of the conditions of Eldorne’s continued existence.

But Lerant had received permission, and a smile to go with it, because Haname wished it. Lerant had received Haname’s dowry and her expertise and her stubbornness, and thought that within ten years, Eldorne would be growing enough to trade, because she wouldn’t allow anything else. She was determined that Eldorne would be her home, and that meant it would be Lerant’s as well.

Lerant looked up, at the field of stars that was only rivaled by the one in the desert, at the silvered grasses waving tall enough that only the tops of the heads of the running children showed they were there, at the hills rolling away in all directions, at the blinking lights he hadn’t remembered until Haname woke him to see them. He looked down, at the open wonder on his reserved wife’s face, at her delicate hands wrapped around his scarred ones, at the blinking light of the firefly before it crawled onto his thumb and took off, never theirs, only caged for a little while.

“Shall we go home?” Haname asked, hushed, hands still around his. Just a question, not a suggestion with steel behind it, in Hurdik, where the word “home” made something in him hurt like a newly-cleaned wound.

“We can stay a little longer,” Lerant said, just as hushed, as though their words might scare the fireflies away where the enthusiasm of Eldorne’s children wouldn’t. “It’s your turn to catch one this time.”