Kar glanced inquiringly at Azak, who nodded. As the mother hastily wrapped up the girl again, Kar gestured. One of the family men slipped from his horse and came across. He made the surprised peasant bend over and then used his back as a writing desk, asking questions and making entries on a piece of parchment with a silverpoint. Then he handed the man the parchment.
“Bring her to the palace and show that letter,” Kar commanded. ”His Majesty will be munificent.” Nodding steadily, the man put a hand on his wife’s shoulder and began to pull her away, the child going with them. He was still nodding as he backed into the crowd.
“Next?”
Azak refused the next girl, and the next. But in all he bought four in that first village.
A couple of bowshots along the road, where olive trees were already giving way to pasture, Azak said, “Drop your veil.” Inos complied. ”Why?”
He flashed white teeth in a contemptuous grimace. “Because you’re beautiful when you’re angry.”
Angry? She was seething. “You bought those girls!”
“I agreed to take them into my household.”
“You buy them like piglets!”
“I compensate the parents for the loss of their services.”
“Slavery! You sell your own people into slavery? What sort of ruler. . . ”
High on his giant stallion, he was smiling down at her, although there was a hint of something else on that arrogant mahogany face. Perhaps she had hurt his feelings. She hoped so.
“Inosolan, the parents have too many mouths to feed. My gold will benefit the whole village. The girls will be cleaned, clothed, and fed better than they have ever been. Trained, educated, and looked after, for three or four years—”
“Until they are ripe?”
He blinked, and his voice dropped half an octave. “Until they are ripe. Then they are free to go home.”
“I don’t—”
“They are escorted back to their parents and given the choice. Never, ever, has one preferred to return to her village. They always choose life in the palace.”
“Well . . .” Those huts had been pigpens. Inos tried to imagine being faced with that decision. “So they return to the palace and the joys of your bed?”
A spasm like pain crossed his face. “I keep the prettiest, of course. That is what being sultan is all about. But most I give to princes I currently favor, or family men. As royal favors, they must be treated well.”
“Concubines! Toys!”
“Mothers of sultans!”
“Oh.” Inos forgot what she had been about to say.
“Did your father have no mistresses? No kept women? No loyal subjects’ wives?”
“None.” She believed she was speaking the truth, but of course she would not have known, would she? She was glad she need not meet Azak’s eyes when she did not choose to.
“None, never? Strange! But if he had made bastards, they would not have been eligible to inherit his throne, now would they?” Azak chuckled mockingly. “At least, that is how the Impire does things. But all my sons are equal, and all my future sons, also. Their age does not matter, nor their mother’s father—prince or peasant. That is fairer, is it not? My mother was so brought. I will show you the village. My relatives lived there until quite recently.”
For a while there was only the thud of hooves. Inos was thinking of Vinisha and the others—witless, because they had no need for wits, but not unhappy. And she thought of that village.
A lady is never afraid to admit to a mistake, Kade always said. Inos assumed her most regal air. “I should watch my tongue. I admit I would prefer raising babies in a palace to raising them in a hovel.”
“You might not raise them there. You might bear them and watch them die. Many more of them. And field work is hard on the fingernails.”
She glanced up ruefully, seeing the scorn. So much for a private chat! She almost preferred being ignored. “Once again I must say that I am sorry. ”
“You’re not beautiful when you’re sorry. You must learn that monarchs never apologize.” He nudged Dread into a canter.
They visited seven villages that day, seven that had obviously been selected with care, for the royal procession took a winding route along the byways of Arakkaran. Yet this was not merely a pretense staged to impress Inos—Azak had done this before. In one village he inspected fencing he had ordered, and in another a new well. Kar tasted the water.
Olives, dates, citrus fruits, rice, horses, goats, shellfish . . . Inos saw a wide range of Arakkaran’s agriculture, all of which was strange to her. Mostly it was a poor land, every crop scratched from the rocks by the fingernails of its people. The valleys were lush, but even there the peasants were thin and often diseased. The children . . . she did not like to look at the children. Almost every headman risked royal displeasure by mentioning taxes and then suffered for his temerity. One village had failed to obey an earlier royal command to repair the road. The family men executed the headman on the spot, while Inos fought nausea and horror behind her veil. Azak accepted twelve petitions and bought twenty-three girls.
After the fourth hamlet, the royal progress halted in an orange grove to dine on fresh oysters, jellied lamb in pastry, and many other treats. Inos sat on shaded grass with prince and sultan, while the family men stood guard at a distance. In the limp heat of noon the leaves hung drooped motionless on the trees. She thought that no place in all Pandemia could be less like her homeland of Krasnegar. And surely no ruler could be less like her father than Azak was. She had no appetite. Azak noted her distaste with evident amusement, then ignored her.
“The arrow,” he said with his mouth full. Kar smiled and produced the arrowhead. Azak inspected it. “Hak?”
“Almost certainly.”
Azak nodded and tossed the evidence over his shoulder. That was too much for Inos. “What happened to the punishing-the-guilty procedure?” Honest as a djinn.
The red-brown eyes moved to study her. He stroked a finger along the fringe on his jaw-another petty habit that irked her. “Too late. Hakaraz ak’Azakar died last month.”
She glanced at Kar and his inevitable boyish smile. “Snakebite,” he said happily. She shivered at the ice in his eyes. They were discussing one of their brothers. Yesterday she had admired his collection of riding boots.
“A premature end to a most interesting career.” Now Azak was taunting her. “But his archery was erratic. So were his loyalties.”
After a few minutes of silent and desultory nibbling, Inos stoked up her courage and asked, “And what about the petitions you accepted?”
He shrugged. “I’ll throw them in the tinder basket with the others. We monarchs are beset with petitions, are we not? I must get a dozen a day delivered to the palace. My women line shelves with them.”
He spent his days in hunting and feasting. She tried raising one eyebrow, although she lacked his skill at the move. It amused him, but he quaffed wine from a drinking horn and did not comment.
It was the softly smiling Kar who spoke. “Queen Inosolan, he deals with every one of them. Every petition is answered within two days. He works half the night, exhausting whole teams of scribes. He never seems to—” The contents of the horn splashed in his face, silencing him.
Azak was scarlet with fury, menacing as a naked blade. “You are calling me a liar, your Highness?”
Kar made no attempt to wipe his dripping face. He continued to smile. ”Of course not, Majesty. That would be a capital offense.”
“Once more and you’re pig feed!” Azak sprang bodily to his feet and yelled at the retainers to saddle up again. He went striding off. The food had been hardly touched, yet obviously the picnic was over. Kar gazed at Azak’s retreating back, but Inos could not tell whether his continuing inscrutable smile implied brotherly affection or incipient murder.
If that episode had been staged for her benefit, it had been very well done.
4
The sun that beat so savagely on Zark had not yet begun to shift the morning mists in far-off Faerie. As first light gloomed in the east, Rap finished shaving and nudged Thinal.
“Now you,” he said.
“You think I’m crazy?” The thief snorted. “In the dark? I’d cut myself to ribbons.” But he sat up and stretched, growling. The settled farmlands around Milflor had been much harder going for fugitives than the empty beaches farther north. Without Rap’s farsight they would surely have blundered into guards or dogs, but he had persuaded the others that they must rest by day and trust him by night. The moon had helped, of course, but he had led the way along narrow trails, staying as much as possible within patches of woodland and scrub. Now there was no more good cover; they had reached a land of larger houses and dairy farms, signs that the city was close.