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Guardian
The K’mir were matrilinear, or so Buri’s own mother had taught her what felt like a million years ago when she was growing up in Sarain. Their identities and inheritances trickling from one generation to the next like a clear mountain stream or a woman’s sacred moon blood. Their duties and responsibilities were passed along in the same way.
That was how Buri had been born and bred to be Thayet’s guardian. Her own mother was guardian to Thayet’s, and, among the K’mir, there were few bonds deeper than the one tying the protected to the guardian.
Guardian. There was a word that had a world of difference in meaning between lowlanders and K’mir. To the lowlanders, a guardian was a stuffy person who had legal charge of a ward and the ward’s property until the ward came of age. It was an entirely legal word with entirely legal obligations. To the K’mir, to be a guardian was to become something much more intimate. To be a guardian among the K’mir was to make a lifelong commitment to someone. To swear an oath that could never be broken except by death to protect somebody at all costs. To be a best friend and closest companion. To be as near and reliable to another person as their right hand or their bow.
Buri was Thayet’s guardian, and that was why she had followed Thayet out of war-torn Sarain into Tortall, where Thayet had sought refuge. That was why she had watched with wary eyes as the handsome Tortallan king courted and then married Thayet. That was why she had agreed to lead the Queen’s Riders in Thayet’s name.
Sometimes Thayet, who was fierce as a jungle tiger, would bristle at having a guardian. Argue against the very idea that she needed one. Feel determined to assert that she could protect herself. That she could be just as much of a warrior woman as Buri.
Buri tried to bite her sharp tongue at those moments, reminding herself that Thayet was her mother’s daughter as much as she was hers. Kalasin, she remembered her mother whispering to her once, also chafed against being protected. Saw it as being caged. Ached to fly free.
Buri knew that the same urge to fly free must live on in Thayet. She could only hope the impulse could be satisfied with this move to a strange land and regular rides out to fight pirates and monsters that threatened villages across Tortall.
At least Jon didn’t seek to control and contain his wife as Adigun had. If he had, it would’ve ended in tragedy, because Buri would have felt compelled to kill him. Something--slaying a monarch and liege lord--the Tortallans would have called treason, but that Buri, a K’mir, would have seen as the ultimate loyalty. The greatest protection.
Mystery
Buri had been both honored and disconcerted when Thayet asked her to serve as Roald’s godssmother. When she had sworn in a temple dedicated to Mithros, the chief deity of a Tortallan pantheon she didn’t worship because her soul belonged to the wilder Horse Lords of the K’mir, to protect and teach Roald as if he were a child of her own, she supposed that she had become his guardian too.
Thayet seldom spoke of Sarain to her husband. Much less to her children. Like it was a bandaged wound she didn’t want to pick at. Perhaps the memories of a place she couldn’t go back to were to painful for her to revisit or maybe she found it easier to forget with everyone except Buri. With Buri, she couldn’t forget, because they had been through everything bitter and sweet together in Sarain.
So Roald was raised largely ignorant of his K’miri heritage. He studied Tortallan laws and manners. Spoke Common and never learned any of the K’miri dialects. Dressed and looked like his father in miniature.
There was little of his mother’s appearance in Roald. He had his father’s coal-black hair and eyes blue as a steppe sky. His mother’s influence only showed more subtly in the shape of those eyes and of the nose perched beneath them. The nose that had been the only truly K’miri feature Thayet had inherited from her own mother. The nose Adigun had mocked and scorned her for, calling it ugly--a marring of her otherwise perfect features.
The nose Thayet fingered whenever she was feeling self-conscious or shamed. Roald had inherited that awkward gesture from his mother, Buri noted with a pang.
Thayet hated her nose. She had told Buri that times beyond counting. She wondered if Thayet had passed that hatred onto her son.
If Roald hated the only part of him that marked him as K’miri.
She never asked him. She never felt close enough to ask him even though he was her godsson. Few people, she thought, ever felt close enough to Roald to ask him questions. He was polite but distant. Courteous but so bound up in formality as to seem unknowable.
When Thayet prayed, she still worshipped the K’miri gods, Buri knew, but she seemed content to let her children--or at least her heir--be raised in the Tortallan religion.
Roald prayed to Mithros and the Goddess and seemed to have very little interest in any K’miri deities. Buri still remembered the only time he had asked her about the K’miri Horse Lords. He had been a young boy and they had been in the stables then. She had cursed for some reason she couldn’t now recall, and he had scolded her for taking the names of gods in vain. As if he were some haughty Mithran priest sitting in judgment of the world, waiting to condemn. Those haughty Mithran priests she so despised were his tutors.
She had told him about the Horse Lords and about the K’miri myth of the creation of the world. He had seemed interested. Had listened with wide eyes.
She had hoped he might ask her more about the K’mir--their myths and legends--one day, but he had not. So she hadn’t shared anything else with him. She would not force a K’mir heritage on him if he did not want it.
She did sometimes wonder, though, if he was sincere when he prayed to Mithros and the Goddess or if his devotion was more for the sake of politics and appearances. With Roald, who could be so unreadable, it was hard for her to know what was done out of sincerity, and what was done in the name of politics and appearances.
And she couldn’t ask him because she didn’t have that open relationship with him that she did with Thayet.
He would always be a mystery shrouded in courtesy to her because she hadn’t been as good a guardian to him as she had been to Thayet.
Maybe being a guardian was too all-encompassing a task to assume the role for more than one person. Or perhaps she was just inventing excuses to exonerate herself. To try to erase her own guilt.
Song
Since Jon had the privilege of naming their firstborn, Thayet had the honor of choosing what their secondborn would be called.
Buri would never forget how Thayet’s hand had curved gently--in an almost protective manner--over the growing bulge of her pregnancy as she explained to Buri that she and Jon had agreed she should be the one to name their second child.
“What will you name the child?” Buri had asked.
“Kalasin.” The murmured name had sounded like music on Thayet’s full, red-painted lips. “If the child is a girl, of course.”
“And if the child is a boy?” Buri had pressed.
“I haven’t decided yet.” A furrow had cut across Thayet’s forehead like a knife stroke. As if she didn’t want to think about bearing another son and not a daughter.
“Not Adigun, though.” The words had spilled out before Buri could stop them. Jon might have named his son after his father, but Thayet would never pay her father such a tribute.
“Not Adigun.” There had been a snap in Thayet’s voice as there always was at the mention of her father.
Silence had fallen heavy as sleet between them before Thayet added in a softer tone that had the air of a confession, “I haven’t thought about what to name this child if it is another boy because I want so much for it to be a girl. I’ve already given Jon a son. Is it so bad for me to wish with all my heart and soul for a daughter of my own?”
Sons and daughters, Buri had thought. That was so much of what it came down to in the end.
A son for Jon. That was what Thayet had said. Buri had wondered if that meant Thayet didn’t really see Roald as her son. And a daughter for herself because daughters had always been more precious among the K’mir.
The patriarchal Tortallans were the opposite. Valuing sons over daughters. Of course, Jon had been charming enough when Thayet was pregnant with Roald, assuring her that he didn’t care whether she gave birth to a boy or a girl. Promising that he would be happy and proud either way. Buri didn’t know if Jon had been lying to Thayet or to himself, but either way she was certain he had been lying.
No king of Tortall could possibly rejoice in the birth of a daughter as much as a son. Not when inheritance came through the son, not the daughter. The laws of inheritance would have to change for Tortallan daughters to be valued as sons were and for K’miri sons to be valued as K’miri daughters were.
“It’s not bad. It’s natural,” Buri had assured Thayet because she believed in her bones it was the truth.
Months later, Kalasin--soon to be shortened to Kally--was born and named in homage to Thayet’s mother. Kally inherited her mother’s beauty--even if she had her father’s eyes like Roald--the way that Thayet herself had inherited Kalasin’s indescribable good looks.
Kally would ask Buri as Buri plaited and beaded her hair in the K’miri fashion--as a young girl, Kally was fascinated by K’miri hairstyles and wore them whenever she could--why her name was so strange. Why it wasn’t normal like Roald’s.
“It’s not a strange name,” Buri had told her as she wove blood-red beads into one of Kally’s thick, black braids. “It’s just not Tortallan but K’miri.”
“What does it mean in K’miri?” Kally had shot Buri a curious glance over her little shoulder.
“It means beautiful and sad song.” Buri had paused in her braiding and beading. Imagining what Kalasin’s last beautiful, sad song must have been like to her. She envisioned it as a dying swan’s song. A final piercing gift to the world before jumping from a tower so high it stood alone amidst slate-gray clouds. Heard it echoing in her ears like a battle cry. A call for freedom that couldn’t go unanswered forever.
“How can a song be both beautiful and sad?” Kally’s head had tilted skeptically.
“A song can’t be beautiful unless it’s sad,” Buri had replied briskly. “Unless it tears the heart asunder, it isn’t a truly beautiful song.”
“Oh.” Kally had still sounded confused.
So, Buri continued her curt explanation, “Beauty has to hurt, Kally. A woman isn’t a beauty unless she makes men weep and sigh to look at her, knowing they can’t have her. A landscape isn’t beautiful unless it breaks the heart to gaze on it. It’s the same with songs. If the song doesn’t make the listener cry, it’s not a beautiful song.”
“I don’t want to be beautiful then.” Kally had shook her head. “If it means hurting people and breaking hearts.”
“You don’t have a choice about it.” Buri had tweaked Kally’s nose--hooked like Jon’s, and not like Thayet’s. “You are a beauty whether you want to be or not. Just like your mother and her mother before her. Your beauty is a blessing and burden inherited from them. As to sorrow, that’s something every K’mir has and grows. The K’mir might not have much, but every K’mir has their own sorrow to love. To nourish. To make strong. That’s why all K’miri songs and stories are sad songs and stories.”
Years later, when Kally would sail to Carthak to sing her song as Empress there, Buri would remember this conversation like a knife in the chest and her fingers would dance with the urge to slip one last bead into the little girl braids Kally no longer wore.
Nomad
Liam, the only one of Thayet’s children to inherit her sparkling hazel eyes, was the most militaristic and violently inclined of the offspring Thayet had with Jon.
It was Liam who always begged to train with her in the practice courts. Who wanted to learn K’miri trick riding from her and how to shoot a bow with deadly accuracy and the hand-to-hand combat techniques Buri had been taught by the Shang Dragon who had given Liam his name. A legacy of sacrifice and bravery Liam was determined to live up to strength and courage.
It was Liam, too, who was most fascinated by the warrior women of the K’mir.
It was he who asked her one day as they fired arrows at an archery target, “Is it true the K’mir have competitions every year for women to show off their riding and archery skills?”
“Of course it is true.” Buri grinned at him. “Among the K’mir, women are celebrated for their warrior prowess, so they do not need to hide it behind any false modesty.”
“I wish I was born among the K’mir,” muttered Liam, nocking another arrow. “I would be more at home among such a people than I am in Tortall.”
“A nomad’s life on the steppes is hard.” Buri’s shot hit the center of her target. A bull’s eye as she had known it would be. “A ger isn’t exactly a palace and fermented mare’s milk is much more of an acquired taste than white wine.”
“A nomad’s life would appeal to me.” Liam’s jaw clenched stubbornly, but there was a wistfulness, an urge to roam, that told Buri the spirit of adventure burned deep inside him. He was indeed a nomad at heart. The way his mother’s people had been. “I long for adventure and excitement.”
“Perhaps you will travel to Sarain one day.” A heartbeat after the last word left her mouth, Buri couldn’t understand why she had spoken it when she knew that Thayet would never allow any of her children to go to Sarain. Not to a land she associated with civil war and heartbreak. She would want to protect her children from that as would any proud, fierce K’miri mother. K’miri mothers were not to be trifled with. They would shield the lives of their children with their own blood.
“Perhaps I will,” Liam answered in a tone that made it clear he realized as well as Buri that he would never set foot in Sarain. His mother would never want him to visit her ancestral homeland.
She would much rather him remain in Tortall, her adopted country, than venture to Sarain, the place that had forced her into exile.
Buri didn’t know whether she could blame Thayet for that. Nor did she know if Liam would end up resenting his mother for that or if he would honor her for her protective urges. Or both. Maybe it could be both--the bitterness and the reverence--between a mother and son bonded by fierceness if nothing else.
Scholar
Jasson with his eyes green as the steppe grass was the scholar amongst Thayet’s children. The one whose nose was perpetually buried in some intimidating tome on an obscure subject that would generally be of minimal interest to Buri. The one whose favorite place was a windowseat in a library. The one who took the most detached, academic curiosity in the K’mir and their customs.
Unsurprisingly, it was Jasson who had once looked up from a treatise on traditions of inheritance in the Eastern Lands to comment to her, “The K’mir clans are matrilinear. All inheritance flows from the mother, not the father, and daughters are favored over sons in matters of inheritance. This is the opposite of how it is done in Tortall, where inheritance comes from the father, not the mother, and where sons are generally given preference over daughters in inheritance law. It’s the opposite of how it’s done in the rest of Sarain as well.”
“The K’miri way is the only one that makes sense.” Buri had snorted like a pony. “How Tortallans and Sarain lowlanders decide matters of inheritance based on fathers always struck me as backward and the height of folly. Like putting the cart before the horse.”
“How so?” Jasson had cocked an inquisitive head at her.
“Mothers can always be sure their children are indeed their own. They know whether a child came from their own womb.” Buri’s lips had quirked in wry amusement. “Fathers, on the other hand, can never be completely certain that the children they believe to be theirs are actually their own. They have to take a woman’s word for it. That’s why Tortallan nobles and Sarain lowlanders are so insistent on marrying virgins and think chastity is some great virtue instead of a mere passivity. They want to be as confident as they can be that the child presented as theirs is truly theirs. Whereas among the K’mir, no man would ever dream of insulting a woman by demanding she remain a virgin for him until they married.”
“I shall keep your wise counsel in mind always.” Jasson’s sarcasm had made it plain he would do no such thing.
“You should.” Buri had given his black hair a teasing tossle that caused him to squeak like an indignant mouse in protest. “Especially if you ever have any desire to woo the ladies.”
“I wouldn’t be my father’s son if I had no desire to woo the ladies.” Jasson had smirked, and, although Buri hadn’t been able to disagree with his remark, she had still cuffed his ear lightly for his impudence.
She was certain that if Thayet were present, she would approve of the discipline Buri had given her son. Then again, if his mother or father were here, Jasson would never have dared to make the wisecrack he did.
So, of course, it had fallen to Buri to keep far-too-witty-for-his-own-good Jasson in line.
She would help Thayet bring up her impertinent son properly with cuffs on the ear if she must.
Bride
Lianne stood, dark hair flowing down her back like a veil, on a stool before a half-circle of mirrors in Lalasa’s shop. The mirrors offered a view of the wedding dresses Lianne was trying on with a rather resigned air from every angle: front, back, left, and right.
The fractured combination of different perspectives and reflections was distorting. Dizzying. Almost as distorting and dizzying as the swirl of time that transformed a sweet baby girl cradled in arms into a woman in the flowering prime of her beauty about to be married off to the heir of Maren.
They had come into Corus together because Lianne had wanted to look at wedding dresses with her and nobody else. The exclusivity of this invitation had shocked Buri, given that she hardly regarded herself as an expert on fashion. Buri hadn’t been able to fathom why Lianne would prefer to search for a wedding dress with her instead of with her mother, Vania, or the Lady Cythera, the Prime Minister’s wife whom Buri had yet to see appear in public with so much as a hair out of its immaculately-styled place.
“I like this neckline.” Lianne fingered the v-shaped silk that covered her chest. “But Mama and Papa will say it plunges too much. Shows too much cleavage. It’s riddiculous really. They’re in such a hurry to marry me off, but they get so scandalized if I dare to dress like a woman and not a little girl or a stuffy spinster.”
“We can’t have you dressed in anything that’ll upset your parents.” Buri was willing to defer to Thayet and Jon in matters of fashion. They attended far more banquets and court functions and were generally far more attuned to issues of appearance than Buri, who was often happiest in a mud-splattered Rider uniform. “They are paying for the wedding dress, after all.”
“As well they should.” Lianne scowled into the mirror. “They’re the ones who want this marriage--who arranged this marriage--not me.”
“Lianne,” began Buri without figuring out what she meant to say or even if she meant to offer a consolation or a reprimand.
“Is it true that among the K’mir women choose their own husbands?” In a swirl of silk, Lianne whirled to face Buri, who sensed they had arrived at the real reason--beyond any paltry crumbs of fashion advice Buri could provide after a lifetime of avoiding formal events and entertainments as much as possible--Lianne had asked her to accompany her on this hunt for a wedding dress. “That their parents don’t pick for them? That they never marry against their will and if their husbands displease them, they kick them out of the tent and into the steppe winds and snows?”
“You aren’t being married off against your will.” Buri felt as adrift and out of her depth in this conversation as she would have in the middle of the Emerald Ocean. As unmoored as a ship without anchor. She rested a hand on Lianne’s shoulder as much to steady herself as her best friend’s daughter. “Your parents arranged this marriage, but if you refused to consent to the match, they would not force you to marry Prince Rurik, and you know it.”
“I can’t refuse my consent, and they know it.” Slippery as an eel, Lianne twisted out of Buri’s grasp. “It’s best for Tortall if I marry Maren’s heir, and I must always do what’s best for Tortall. That’s what I’ve been raised to do. Raised to believe.”
Thayet, Buri thought, had raised her daughters to know their duty first, and their happiness second. It seemed almost a mournful notion. One more befitting the mood of an impending funeral than an approaching wedding.
“If the K’mir women choose their own husbands, do they often marry for love?” There was an odd, almost wistful quality to Lianne’s voice now, and Buri knew that the princess was thinking of Alan of Pirate Swoop. The young knight who had stolen her heart years ago when he was still a squire with Raoul.
That was the real problem, Buri understood with a flash of enlightenment like lightning. Lianne had such trouble accepting the match her parents had arranged for her not because the heir of Maren was a particularly odious person--he had actually impressed Buri as clever and courteous on the occasions they had met during his state visit--but because she already loved Alan. Would have married Alan if she was free to follow her heart instead of do her duty like the good daughter of Tortall she had been raised to be.
Would she have been happier as a wild child of the steppes? Free to follow her heart? But a heart could lead itself to a breaking point as well as to bliss. That was why so many K’miri songs and stories were tragic. Imbued with freely chosen sorrow and melancholy. And wasn’t that what Lianne was doing? Choosing her sorrow and melancholy if not her love.
“Sometimes,” Buri answered Lianne’s question curtly. “Love is a rare thing. Most who marry--whether by choice or by arrangement--never feel or find it at all. That is true whether the person is K’miri, Tortallan, or some combination of the two.”
“My parents felt and found it.” Lianne’s observation was undebateable. The passion the king and queen of Tortall harbored for each other might reach a fever pitch in arguments and tears, but it was undeniably a rare case of true love among royals.
“Yes.” Buri nodded crisply. “They were lucky.”
“As they always are.” Lianne’s lips curled in self-pity. “As I never am.”
“You’re a princess.” Buri shot Lianne an arrow-sharp glance. “Do you know how many peasant daughters would give anything to be born a princess?”
Despite her barbed words, Buri realized better than most that a princess could just as easily mean being an exile as it could being lucky. She had been beside Thayet when she had been a princess fleeing Sarain and not a queen of Tortall.
Consumed by pouting, Lianne ignored Buri’s reproach as she went on in an almost musing manner,“I found love too, but now I’m supposed to lose it and act as if I never found it. I think that’s worse than never having found it in the first place.”
Exile. Outcast from her homeland. That was how Lianne would feel in Maren, Buri was certain of it, and that feeling would make her more like her mother than Lianne with the narrowed, limited view of a child would ever recognize. Because Buri knew that despite the love Thayet had found with Jon, the joy she took in raising her children, and the passion she poured into governing Tortall alongside her husband, Thayet would never quite stop feeling like an exile. Would never really see Tortall as her home. Thayet might claim otherwise, but Buri could read it like a soothsayer could tea leaves and patterns in the alignments of stars, and could spot the truth from a mile off in the dark.
Lover
“What do the K’mir make of women who engage in relationships with other women?” Vania asked over the clip-clopping of horse hooves as they rode along a sun-dappled path in the Royal Forest on a July morning when the dew clung to the green leaves. Before the heat became sweltering and draped them both in sweat like overworked mares.
“The K’mir are matrilinear and so have the utmost respect for bonds between women.” Buri was smooth.By now accustomed to the fact that she was the one that all of Thayet’s children inevitably sought out when they had questions about their K’miri heritage.
“I wasn’t talking about friendship between women.” Vania’s cheeks flushed to the hue of the summer raspberries swelling to fecund life on the bushes they passed.
She would have been referring to romance between women. Buri had heard whispers of the kisses and embraces Vania exchanged in shadows with a Rider named Giselle. Whispers that were now proven accurate by Vania’s words on this morning ride. Even a blind squirrel might stumble across an acorn. Such it was with gossip and rumor.
“I know.” Keen and shrewd as ever, Buri flashed her teeth in a fleeting grin. “Nor was I. There are many types of love, Vania. All of them are honored and celebrated among the K’mir. That’s part of what makes us such a special people easily misunderstood by the rest of the world that isn’t as tolerant as we are. Your mother should have told you that.”
Was she criticizing Thayet, her best friend and the one she had been charged with guarding since she was a little girl? Who was she to judge Thayet as a mother anyway? She’d never had children of her own, unlike Thayet who had born and raised six, and she never would even with Raoul--the unlooked for love and unexpected harvest of the golden honey autumn of her days--because the Change of Life had come upon her. Same as it had Thayet. Thayet who had wanted children in a way Buri never had.
“Maybe she would’ve if I’d asked her.” Vania gnawed her lower lip like a dog determined to suck the last ounce of marrow from a dry bone. “I was just too afraid of what she would say to ask her.”
“You shouldn’t be afraid of your mother.” Buri reached out, closing the distance between them, to pat Vania’s still-burning cheek. “She’d never want any of her daughters--any of her children--to be scared of her. She loves you all very much.”
“I know.” Vania stared down at her reins as if she had never seen anything so interesting. “So does Papa. But their love sometimes makes things more difficult and confusing.”
After all her years living in both Tortall and Sarain--after all the heartbreak she had witnessed in each of those lands--Buri could understand that. Love didn’t always make life easier. In fact, most of the time it made life more complicated. That didn’t mean love wasn’t worth it, though. Ever since she was a girl training to be a warrior, she had believed that the only things worth doing were the hard ones. Anyone could do the easy ones, after all. It took a special soul to do the hard ones. The loving, the sacrificing, and the hurting.