Oleander

XXII. Crumbling Walls (part one)

The persistent hum of the threat—a mosquito's trill in her ear, a prickle of chill in her spine—followed her return to the high city. Despite their twisted route through the lime-washed facades, Yalira could not escape its intrusive pulse. Intertwined with each of her own heartbeats, the truth screamed and echoed in her ears.

Loyal Shadow, fortunately for Yalira, took no heed of his troubled rider. He followed the promise of warm stables without care for the unforgiving grip of her bone-white knuckles. Such thoughtlessness was an unkindness, but the ninth queen could not loose the new knots that had twisted and formed within her.

Where Shadow tolerated, Gallus watched. Her mind was too noisy to weave a reassuring answer to his pinched brow, the stalwart concern that gleamed in his dark eyes. Flitting from branch to branch, her errant, crooked-winged thoughts flinched from the circling predator. For certain that was what lurked beyond sight: only a beast could find such a brutal price acceptable.

But who?

For no matter where her reasoning flew, it returned to that question in predictable migration. Surely that figure, the hooded woman in the slums, could not have resisted in gloating over playing such a wicked role in Andar's humiliation; but if not that thread of treason, then who? Did Rodan wager his claim to throne on the skeletons of infants? Did Lyroc poison the queens in an effort to foster a leashed bride at Andar's side? The queens, each of the beautiful eight, had motive to see their competition fall.

No. Yalira refused to consider that treachery in sisterhood, for surely they could not sink to such dark means. Her stomach twisted in response to the pale flutter of her heart, the memory of ether and oleander in the void of the mountainside. Sisters are not immune to betrayal.

The thought shadowed her arrival to the palace, to a waiting Andar to whom Gallus undoubtedly sent word. A fit, she imagined him conveying. Strange unresponsiveness. Perhaps touched by the day. How else could he describe her harrowing discovery if not as symptoms of something readily understood?

Andar's golden eyes searched each inch of her as if expected a new wound, a fresh burn, but he did not run to her, did not ask after her wellbeing. For all the intensity in his molten gaze, he waited in unflinching patience, uninterested pause. Even in the gentle stillness of night, there was no rain-soaked sky to shield them.

A flock of servants and their silent hands came to aid her dismount, to lead Shadow towards the dusk-bathed stables. Alone, or at least as alone as they could be with a trailing Gallus, he offered his arm. His skin seared against her frozen fingers. Half caught in shadow as he led her into the palace, Andar voiced his shielded anxiety in a hissing breath.

"Are you well?"

"No," she answered, matching his volume.

The tendons beneath her arm tightened. A mirrored match to the tautness in his jaw. A flash of candlelight sent a ripple of burning bronze through his hair. A statue, unyielding. "I will not allow you to return to the slums, I—"

She had spent too long fighting this mystery on her own. Too long playing a game without seeing the pieces. The great thread of her patience had finally worn thin against the discordant echo, but who? Subterfuge lived in each of the palace shadows. Deception lived in its columns and halls. Gallus, in gentle advice, had asked that she not wage forth alone. So be it. "Send for Oristos and Rishi. We must talk."

Andar's brow bent and broke into confusion. Whether the surprise of the interruption or the promise that breathed through each word, the message was received with unfamiliar acquiescence. He yielded.

His efficiency in sending servants to the queen, to his advisor, did not settle the prickling current in her skin. Yalira grasped for the logic to calm her nerve. Oristos was loyal to Andar before all others: he would thread the worn sinews of his heart through a needle if it meant proving that love. And Rishi helped before. The memory of the Lytvian queen spiriting away the dying infant was not as comforting as Yalira had hoped. Oristos, and Rishi were the closest she had to allies. And Andar was something for which she had no word to name.