River Secrets by Shannon Hale
The prince looked at him, his eyes a sudden intense, cold blue.
“Yes, in the war,” Razo said, adding hurriedly, “But I’d rather not do it ever again.”
“Is that so? It was a shame, that whole war business.”
Razo schooled his expression to the sleek indifference he’d been practicing.
The prince leaned forward, concerned. “Are you all right? Your face appears to be turning red, your eyebrows twitching—”
“I’m fine, just the heat, you know.” Razo cleared his throat. “So, um, what did you think about that whole war business, anyway?”
“Mm? Seems a waste, but of course, it’s not my concern.”
“But you’re the prince…”
“So I am.” He smoothed his tunic again, looking newly pleased, as though he had fallen into the title only that morning. “And I am not a member of the assembly. Only they have the power to pass laws, execute criminals, and declare war. Across centuries, the assembly has whittled down the prince’s power. Now all I do is bits of public finery, open and close assembly sessions, and such and so….” He stooped to inspect a merchant’s display of inlaid wooden boxes. “Oh, and I may choose my own bride. Tiran princes have always used their choice to maneuver current politics. My grandfather married a noble widow from Circuna, an eastern province that rumbled of secession—Circuna is still unified with Tira. My mother was the sister of an assemblyman, and after she married the prince my father, her brother became chief of assembly.”
“Or you could marry for love,” said Razo.
The prince smiled at an elderly man and woman, both squat and pleasantly round, walking hand in hand. “But how could I waste my only political power? Ah-ha, you think I am being overly candid, don’t you, Razo’s-Own?”
“It’s actually just Razo, of Bayern’s—”
“But I speak nothing that is not voiced in Ingridan’s taverns. Not that I frequent the taverns. Too cramped, too crowded.” They were strolling the amber market, and merchants held up bits of jewelry, offering gifts to the prince. “My people love me from afar. I hire as my companions people who are not my people.” The prince gestured to the group walking in two neat lines behind them. “They’re from the Wasking Islands and have such musical accents. Simply splendid!”
Razo glanced back and lowered his voice. “Do the Wasking hate Bayern, too?”
“Hate Bayern?” the prince said too loudly. “Of course not. And Tiran don’t hate Bayern, either. The war was just some nonsense thought up by disgruntled nobles. Ah, I can tell from your twitching face that you don’t believe me. I’ll prove it to you, Razo’s-Own. Tomorrow night you will celebrate the feast of the watermelon harvest with us. When my city sees its prince with a Bayern lad, they will embrace you.”
“But, Radiance, someone did kill one of my comrades on the palace grounds, and—”
“Yes, yes, I heard.” The prince waved his hand impatiently. “But that was last spring. Summer is the season of the prince.”
The prince turned his profile as though posing for a portrait. Behind his Wasking friends, Razo spied a couple of Tiran men, following close, their eyes on the Bayern lad.
14
Watchers in White
It rained the next day, rinsing the dust from the air and shoving all the heat indoors. Razo squandered several hours playing sticks with Conrad and wondering, hoping, that the weather might delay the festival and keep him alive a few more hours. But that afternoon, the rain stopped suddenly as though the sky had swallowed. The storm-cleaned city looked sharp enough to prick a finger.
“Nothing for it,” Razo told Talone. “I said I’d go with the prince, and if I don’t stick close to him, how’ll I ever find out if he ordered the murders?”
When the sun set, Razo fell in with the prince’s party at the palace gates, and they flowed down the streets toward the heart. Wet stones glistened silver under starlight, and the heat held its breath. People opened their doors and shutters, pulled chairs and tables outside, and gossiped with neighbors as they ate, serenaded by a crooked moon.
The prince was called to every table, and he grinned and huzzahed, waved and wished all well, stopped to sample every fish and soup, each cake and melon, praising them as he would a lady’s beauty. And the people’s gazes worshipped him. Most avoided looking at Razo at all. A few glared.
Razo’s stomach cramped against the food, and he kept circling as he walked, watching for knives in shadows, hints of violence in strangers’ eyes. Often he saw someone dressed in plain white, watching him from across the street. As the night progressed, the watcher changed, but someone was always there. Razo eyed the prince. If His Radiance noticed the watchers, if he knew them, Razo could not tell.
Eventually the idea of dawn poured dark blue into the black sky. The prince regaled café diners with outrageous stories Razo had told him, and Razo slumped in a chair, drunk with sleepiness and exhausted from being afraid. The watcher had been absent for an hour or more, and Razo had relaxed his spine, so it took him too long to notice the new men gathering on the fringe of the prince’s party and the wildness in their eyes.
“Radiance,” said Razo, standing up. “Radiance, I think I’d—”
“What’s a Bayern boy doing at a sacred Tiran festival?” When the man spoke, the laughter cut short. Glances shifted to Razo. “He’s of a murdering kind. Who among you opens the chicken coop and invites the fox in?”
The owner of the café shifted guiltily. “He came with the prince.”
“Lies!” said another, a man of middle age with the look of a professional soldier. “Even if you’ve all gone soft, we won’t forget. Manifest Tira!”
“Manifest Tira!” the other men shouted. “Long live His Radiance!”
Razo fumbled for his sling, but the men pounced too quickly, two standing at his sides, pinning his arms down, one at his feet to keep his legs still, the other behind him, his hands squeezing Razo’s neck. Razo’s breathing broke, and soft black shapes crumbled around the edge of everything.
“Stop!” said the prince.
The hands relaxed, and Razo’s breath screamed back into his lungs.
“Radiance, this is your enemy,” said the strangler, his voice passionate but eerily calm. “Let me exterminate your enemies. Let me cleanse this city.”
“He is my friend.” The prince was standing, but he did not move forward, made no aggressive gesture. He appeared almost relaxed.
“The Bayern boy has tricked you, Radiance. He plots your death.” Again, his hand squeezed air out of Razo.
“I said, he is my friend!” The prince spoke with urgency now, looking around at the people. “And the prince’s friend requires your protection.”
There was the barest hesitation, a trembling of indecision, before the crowd sprang.
“Get your hands off!”
“What do you think, attacking the prince’s friend?”
“You shame us.”
They tore Razo free and beat back the Manifest Tira fanatics until they fled into a side street. The café owner shook his head.
“I am sorry, Radiance.”
The prince patted his shoulder. After a moment his face changed, brightening with the rim of the sun crossing the horizon. “Well! That was a feast day to remember. A good tussle in the streets pumps the blood, doesn’t it?” He laughed heartily. “I think my city needs sleep now. Thank you all! Huzzah!”
A carriage opened, and the prince gestured to Razo that he should ride with him.
Razo sat in silence, rocked nearly to sleep by the motion, the gloom of staying out all night weighing his head. He wondered if his throbbing neck would bruise impressively and if the pastry girls would notice. The thought did not cheer him as much as he thought it should.
“In front of me, right in front of me they attack you.” The prince rubbed his eyes, dazed, as if wondering if he were dreaming. “I never imagined…”
Razo shrugged. “It’s probably my own fault. I’m always try
“But with me…” The prince shook his head. “I wish I knew of a way to make a change.”
Razo wondered if he should just let this go, just walk away as he should have with Tumas. The city was too dangerous, the prince not easy to trust. But what if the prince could do something? What if Razo could help him bend Tiran opinion? He swallowed his fear and said, “Maybe I could keep going out in the city with you, maybe if the people get used to seeing a Bayern with their prince…”
“Yes, of course! Well thought, Razo’s-Own.” The prince snuggled back in the carriage seat, already cheered out of his dejection. “You will see. Ingridan will yet show her true colors.”
Colors, thought Razo, and began to hatch what he hoped was a very promising idea.
15
Brighter Colors
The next morning, Razo asked Talone if he could be assigned to the prince for the summer.
“You think he may be ordering the burnings,” said Talone, slicing his sword along a whetstone.
“I don’t know. After Enna I don’t dare think twice in the same spot. If he tells the truth, then he doesn’t have enough power. Most of the time his thoughts don’t go deeper than his tongue, but maybe he’d be useful….” Razo tried to wrestle impressions into words. “Everywhere we went, everyone was looking at him like he was an almond cake. He mayn’t have power, but…”
“But the people love him and watch him. The people’s opinion influences the assembly, and when they renew session for autumn, the assembly will vote if Tira returns to war. Very well.” Talone’s sword screeched in sharpening. “Lady Megina has tried to meet with the prince, but he seems to avoid any activity that smells of politics. Go see what you can do.”
The prince’s apartment was one open chamber, claiming the entire fifth story of the main palace wing. Razo passed Wasking men and women, dodged pillars, ducked beneath torrents of hanging fabric, and cawed back at a caged bird that screeched, “By your leave! By your leave!” He finally found the prince in a courtyard at the chamber’s center, surrounded by potted fruit trees and flowering vines.
“It is Razo’s-Own!” said the prince, jumping up. “I told Nom, I do not think he will come, and Nom said I might send a messenger, and I said I did not know how and never mind, let’s go out on the porch, and if he does not come today, then he won’t be welcome, because I am not a patient man and I cannot wait a week. It is my season, after all. So let’s be off!”
Within half an hour they were strolling the restless market.
“Rupert, my old tutor, bet me another tithe that if the Bayern don’t eat babies, at least they don’t keep their word. And, ha-ha! He was wrong again. How I love it when Rupert is wrong.”
“Me too,” said Razo.
“Rupert cannot come to the market with us, for if he moves too much, his bones might break. Look, a new shipment of amber is in!”
Razo spent several hours in the numbing heat of the market, anticipating his own sudden murder, and questioning if this mindless outing really was ensuring peace.
At last he spotted what he’d been hoping to find—a merchant tendering pouches of Bayern dyes. He was Wasking, bearing a shaggy head of black hair and skin like honeyed wine. The merchant sat in a sad little cart with a rodent-gnawed cloth to screen the sun, its legs so crooked that if it had been a horse, its owner would have offered it a quick and compassionate death.
“No demand for goods from the north,” he said, avoiding even the name of the kingdom.
The prince frowned. Razo purchased a few pouches.
Razo spent two weeks accompanying the prince to the docks and market, theater and music hall, and no burned bodies popped up. The heat seemed to have chased the murderer into hiding, but Manifest Tira stayed like the stones. Often he could hear one of their number orating in Speaker’s Corner. “Why should we roll over and lick Bayern’s hand? Their presence here dirties us and distracts us from our destiny. Tira is the greatest country in the world, and one day our borders will stretch north and west….”
The summer heat built like the tension before a tavern brawl, until it finally exploded into rain. Razo gathered his Tiran-made clothing and Bayern dyes and ran through the storm to the kitchen to borrow their pots.
“You’ve been away,” said Pela with pouting lips.
“I’ve got this new friend….”
“We know,” said the freckled girl. It’s the prince.”
“And all of Ingridan knows you were attacked,” said the girl with smooth hair.
“What’s all of Ingridan saying?” Razo asked.
“That Bayern or no, people had no right attacking anyone under the prince’s protection.”
Progress, Razo thought.
He pulled a thin, pale blue scarf out of his stone pouch and wound it around the pastry chef’s neck. “The prince was going to toss it, said I could have it if I wanted. It’s called silk.”
The chef fingered the fabric and blushed, and the girls oohed and whistled. When she saw Razo’s bundle of clothes and packs of dyes, she insisted on helping him, and soon many of the girls were lending a hand, though none could fathom why he would want to ruin the beautiful white fabric.
A few hours later, Razo climbed into the freshly dyed and dried orange pants, long yellow tunic, and red lummas. He felt like the birds for sale in the market, the ones from Wasking with different-colored heads, wings, and tails, and he was betting that the prince would be intrigued.
The afternoon still thundered when Razo climbed the stairs to the top floor of the main palace wing and the prince’s personal apartment. He said hello to his Wasking friends reading by the door, swiping from them a piece of cracker bread for his favorite caged bird (the one he’d trained to shriek, “Razo the great!”). All the windows were covered in thick-slatted shutters, allowing air in and keeping most of the rain out. The prince was lazing on a peach-colored pillow, looking horribly bored. As soon as he saw Razo, he bolted upright.
“What are you wearing?”
“My clothes,” Razo said impressively. “Touched with the Bayern dyes. Now they look proper, except they pinch…. Maybe the dyes shrink fabric a bit? Don’t know why everyone in this country drags themselves along in white all the time. White’s only good for funerals and weddings. No Bayern right in the head feels at home in—”
“I want that, Nom.” The prince pointed at Razo and spoke to the tall Wasking man.
“You wish your clothing dyed like the Bayern boy’s, Radiance?” asked Nom, his accent smooth as water over stones. “Very well.”
The prince beamed. “What a noise we’ll make among the drab and dull, how we’ll…Wait, I want more green. I hope I did not imply I only wanted your colors. We can’t turn a cold shoulder to green, and blue, and purple, for the sake of all ordered things, how can you dismiss purple? Celi, call Nom back and tell him of my need for purple!”
That week, Razo brought Enna and Finn into the city for the festival of seven rivers, and with his friends by his side, he felt safer than he had in weeks. They laughed and ate all day aboard the prince’s boat on the Tumult, the river so crowded with wooden crafts banging and scraping one another that they could scarcely spot any water. The prince was elated to have three whole Bayern in his party.
“Look at their hair!” the prince shouted to passing boats. “Black as pitch. And such salty accents. Marvelous!”
Enna took Razo aside, whispering in his ear, “He’s kind of odd, isn’t he? I mean, are you the only friend he doesn’t pay?”
“He pretends not to be lonely,” Razo whispered. “Enna, when you write to Isi next, tell her the prince here needs a wife. If he marries a Bayern woman, it might help sway more Tiran to our side.”
“Huzzah!” the prince shouted from the deck of the boat. He was dressed in one long tunic, purple from shoulders to ankles, with a river-blue lummas running across his chest and flung over his forearm. Every time someone remarked on his new clothing, the prince
The prince kept wearing his colors all summer. Razo’s heart thumped the first time he noticed a Tiran woman in the market wearing a bright green lummas over her hair. A few days later at the music hall, Enna counted five dyed lummas cloths in the audience. By the next feast day, the rickety stall of the Wasking merchant had transformed into a sturdy structure—steps up, a planked floor, extravagant shade. The merchant had combed his hair and broadened his smile.
By the time the summer heat got lazy and let the wind from the ocean tear it into strands, and the nobles tottered back dusty and bored of country life, one in ten citizens had cast off their white and pale hues for the darker, richer tones of Bayern.
“There’s number twenty-two—yellow!” said Megina, watching the street from a window and counting dyed lummas cloths. “I can send our traders back for more dyes and other Bayern goods at last. The queen was right—trading will make peace more plausible. You surprised me, Razo.”
Razo squelched a pleased grin. “I watched you that time you had dinner with the chief of assembly, how you didn’t try to convince him that Bayern’s good and innocent. You were just friendly. At the time, I thought you weren’t so smart, but that’s all I tried to do with the prince. Look, there’s twenty-three….”
Razo stopped, realizing the orange he saw entering the palace gates belonged not to a dyed lummas, but to a girl’s hair.
A queer crush in his chest felt both painful and exciting. Dasha was back. Summer was over. The darkness that had clutched at him all spring and been stifled by the summer heat now seemed to crouch and wait, ready to pounce again.
16
Razo’s Luck
The banquet hall rose three stories, and the shadows swayed and crept under the light of a thousand oil lamps. To Razo’s mind, the crossing and snapping of light and shadow made the walls feel alive and crawling, the room tangled in spiderwebs.