The Deepest Blue(64)

Lady Garnah sighed dramatically. “Just throw him out already.”

“You are dismissed,” Queen Asana said.

Kelo backed out of the room and shut the door. He then stood outside, in the beautiful chamber, and stared at the closed door as if it had answers. How had that gone so very wrong? He’d won an audience with the queen. He’d prepared what to say.

He didn’t know what he had expected—a list of reasons, maybe. Facts that he could argue with. A defense of tradition. He thought the queen would say she wouldn’t end the test.

He never expected her to say she couldn’t.

QUEEN ASANA PICKED UP THE CARVED SHELL. SUCH A BEAUTIFUL thing. She hadn’t expected it to come with a heap of guilt and a shovelful of sorrow. “That was a mistake.”

“Just to clarify: do you mean inviting him or saying no?” Garnah sounded conversational, even bored, as she examined her chipped nails. Unlike most of the court, both the women and men, Lady Garnah did not have lovely, manicured nails. Hers were blackened and broken. When Asana had asked why once, Garnah had cryptically answered, My work.

“You don’t approve?” Asana allowed an edge to creep into her voice. While she enjoyed Garnah’s honesty, occasionally she also forgot who was queen here. Asana wondered if she spoke to the queen of Aratay in the same way, and if the other queen had tolerated it.

Or did she let her come here just to be rid of her?

“Of inviting him or saying no?” Garnah flashed her a smile. “I thought he was a delight. So much earnest need! Really, I could listen to him orate for hours. Or at least a quarter of an hour, before it grew old and I had to silence him. I do know some species of lichen that will cause temporary damage to vocal cords. Tastes terrible, though, so it’s tricky to get your target to ingest it.”

“Garnah.” She pinned her with her gaze. Asana had mastered her no-more-nonsense look not when she became queen but before, when she became a mother. Her daughter had had strong opinions from a very young age. I wonder if she still does. “Enough.”

“You invited me to be your adviser. Don’t you want my advice?”

“You seemed to agree with me when I spoke with him,” Asana said.

Garnah rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to contradict you in front of the peasantry.”

“We don’t call them the ‘peasantry.’”

“You should. Nice ring to it. Establishes the hierarchy with no room for confusion. That was his problem—he seemed to think he could talk to you person to person, when he wasn’t, in fact, talking to you at all.” Garnah grew more serious. “Was he?”

“Of course he spoke to me.”

“Your Majesty, let me ask you a question: If it were up to you, and if there were no other factors to consider, would you have agreed to save his wife? Would you save all of them? You know the Belenian method of training heirs is not the only one possible. As queen, you could—”

Asana cut her off. “It’s tradition, and it’s not within my power to change.”

Leaning back, Garnah propped her feet up on the suka table that held the artist’s masterpiece. “And that, my dear, is the heart of it, isn’t it? You don’t have the power. Not to grant that overly sincere boy his request. Not even to fix the disaster of your city streets, which, by the way, he was right about. They’re a mess.”

Asana ground her teeth together. Today Garnah’s unrelenting bluntness grated.

Garnah continued. “And you should. You control all the spirits on Belene—there’s no reason for you to bend your will to others.”

Oh, there’s reason. And that reason has names: Rokalara, Mother, and Father. “You don’t understand.” She glared at Garnah’s feet, too close to the beautifully carved shell. That piece was everything she wished she could be: the protector of Belene. Except I can’t protect everyone. She knew she was misdirecting her anger—she wasn’t truly angry at Garnah. Or the young artist. She was angry at the Families, who kept her hands tied.

Garnah removed her feet from the table. “But I do understand. You aren’t free.” She studied the queen until Asana wanted to squirm under her gaze. Squirm and fume. At last, Garnah asked, “What do they have on you?”

All the anger drained out of her. “How . . . how did you know?” she whispered.

“Because I’m not an idiot. And I understand power. You don’t have it, which means someone else does—and you don’t seem happy about it, which means it’s not voluntary. Tell me. We’ll fix it.”

“You can’t ‘fix’ it. Not without . . .” She shook her head.

“Is it a ‘what’ or a ‘who’?” Garnah pushed. “I can’t help you unless you tell me.”

There was truth in her words. She really means it. She wants to help me. But . . . why? “What is it you want?” In other words, why should I trust you?

The thing was, that’s what Asana desperately wanted. To unburden all her pent-up truths. To have someone she could be fully honest with, to share her pain, to understand. . . . She’d never had anyone she could trust in that way. Everyone around her had ties elsewhere, families and people who depended on them, other pulls on them that had the potential to conflict with what the queen needed. But Garnah . . .