Whisper of Waves Read online

  He stood with four other men, three of whom he recognized from Meykhati’s salon and other functions, and one who appeared to be a half-elf. They were the newest appointees to the senate and were dressed for the occasion under layer after sweaty layer of fine linen, silk, and wool. Willem itched and chafed in the attire that had been chosen by his mother and donated by a select group of tailors, cobblers, and jewelers anxious to have their wares be seen on the floor of the Chamber.

  On the tier below them were three of the senior senators: Meykhati, Inthelph, and a man Willem recognized but whose name escaped him. The thought that he was no longer in the position to be able to forget another senator’s name made him sweat just a little more, but he remained standing still and straight, a self-satisfied smile lighting his clean-shaven face.

  His mother looked down at him from the gallery. An empty seat next to her should have been occupied by Phyrea. He had sent word to her father’s country manor with an invitation to the ceremony, but she had not deigned to reply. Had he then invited Halina in her place, the master builder might have taken offense, so his mother sat alone. Willem forced himself not to consider the fact that he had no other friends in Innarlith.

  “Senators, ladies, and gentlemen,” Meykhati called out from the dais below. His voice echoed in the massive chamber, bouncing from soaring flying buttresses and a domed ceiling whose apex was fully two hundred feet above their heads, the interior painted in Sembian frescoes depicting scenes of commerce and civil discourse. The room had the air of a temple, but even Waukeen’s priests were never so crass in their celebration of all things mercantile. “Please give your attention to these men, who have come before us, as is our law, on this Midsummer, to beg your permission to swing wide the doors of this hallowed institution and admit their wisdom, labor, and loyalty to the Grand Senate of Innarlith.”

  A rousing round of applause exploded from the assembled senators—Willem never realized there were so many!—and his ears began to ring.

  The ceremony was a simple one, held every year on the Midsummer festival. He had heard it described but had never seen it, it being an invitation-only affair. It was, however, the one day a year that any of the public was invited into the Chamber of Law and Civility at all.

  “With your leave, I will begin by introducing to you a young man whom we all have come to know and trust though his time among us has been short,” Meykhati went on. Willem tensed. Each of the new senators required a sitting senator to introduce him, and that elder senator would be his patron in all things, at least for the first six months while the new senator got to know the lay of the land. Willem, though, had agreed to be Meykhati’s man for five years. “My fellow senators, meet our peer: Senator Willem Korvan.”

  The applause again but not as loud, and Willem stepped forward. All he could think of was that he walk carefully in his new shoes so as not to trip in front of the assembled senate and his mother. He stopped at the edge of the high tier. As he’d been instructed he bowed first to Meykhati, then the master builder, then the third senator, and finally to the assembly. The applause trickled to silence and Willem stepped backward, again careful not to trip. He took his place in line once more.

  “Senator Salatis,” Meykhati called, “please come forward.”

  Salatis stood and walked down the center aisle, taking a place behind a podium on the bottom tier of the dais.

  Willem looked up at his mother, the smile still plastered on his face. She was so far away he couldn’t really see her features, but still he got the feeling she was crying. Her wave was tight and practiced, as if she were Queen Filfaeril on parade through the streets of Marsember. He looked away.

  “My fellow senators,” Salatis began, “ladies and gentlemen. It is my pleasure to introduce to you a young man who has distinguished himself in the service of the city watch, twice beating down the insidious rabble-rousers who daily press for the rebellion of the peasantry against their betters.”

  The young man next to Willem stepped forward.

  That was it. They had moved on. Meykhati had said just enough to satisfy the letter of the traditional introductions and had named him senator. Willem’s smile went away.

  He didn’t listen to the rest of Salatis’s lengthy and gushing introduction, and barely noticed the other two. Willem knew he should have been studying every detail, memorizing every word, but he couldn’t. There would be time, he told himself, to get to know everyone he needed to know, but even then, would it matter? It wasn’t as though he’d have to build coalitions, chair meetings, champion writs and proclamations.

  All he’d have to do for five years—or as long as he was a member of the senate—was exactly what Meykhati told him to do. In exchange, he’d have a title, a generous stipend of gold and property … everything he’d ever wanted.

  He looked around the massive room, in awe of its beauty and of the power that was like a palpable thing there, an electricity in the air. On the floor of the room, which sloped up away from the dais, were arranged chairs of so many different designs he didn’t try to identify even a fraction of them. It had become a tradition, after one senator complained of the seats the then-master builder had provided for them and finally brought in one of his own, that each senator provide his own chair and desk. It quickly became a competition for who could find the most exotic seat, the most ornate, the oldest, the newest, the most expensive.

  Willem’s mother had already begun shopping for one, and thanks to a gift of gold bars from the master builder, was free to spend more on his chair than he’d spent on that ridiculous sculpture for Phyrea. Try as he might, Willem couldn’t stand the thought of sitting on something that cost so much, but then he was a senator, and in Innarlith at least, that’s what senators did.

  One of the other junior senators nudged him with an elbow and Willem realized the ceremony had come to an end.

  He followed his fellow inductees down the steps of the dais and into a crowd of senators, relatives, and well-wishers. The lot of them streamed out of the senate chambers and into an adjacent room, one almost as big, where a massive feast had been prepared. Musicians began to play from a corner of the room, and servants filtered through the dispersing crowd with food and drinks. All around was gay laughter and light banter.

  “Willem, my dear,” his mother beamed. She appeared to him from the center of the crowd like a dolphin breaking the surface of a raging sea. Her smile was all teeth and pageantry. “Oh, my dear, dear Willem!”

  She took his face in her hands and he smiled because he knew she’d want him to.

  “Senator Willem Korvan,” she said, and there was a tear in her eye.

  “Mother,” he said and could think of nothing else to say.

  Hands clapped him on the back and patted him on the shoulder as he and his mother smiled at each of the passersby and uttered inane, meaningless greetings.

  “The throne was empty,” his mother whispered in his ear when the function had finally settled into pockets of friends, acquaintances, and co-conspirators.

  “The ransar’s throne?” he asked, even though he knew precisely what she was referring to.

  “So auspicious a day,” Thurene said with a pained grimace, “and Ransar Osorkon couldn’t be bothered even to walk across the street!”

  He found himself starting to say something in the ransar’s defense but stopped.

  “When you’re ransar,” his mother said, her voice and face conveying real sincerity, “I never want you to miss one of these. It simply should not be allowed.”

  In his entire life Willem Korvan had never wanted so badly to hit his mother.

  58

  9 Eleasias, the Year of the Wave (1364 DR)

  THE WINERY

  Hrothgar woke up with his hammer in his hand and was on his feet before he realized it was just Devorast.

  “By the braided beard of the Brightaxe, Ivar,” he grumbled. “I just about cracked ya one.”

  Hrothgar took no offense at Devorast’s crook
ed, doubtful smile. Instead he leaned the heavy sledgehammer against his dank, musty cot and sat. Vrengarl snored away, dead to the world.

  The tent they shared was a tight fit for the three of them: Devorast a little too tall for it, and the two dwarves a little too wide, but while they toiled away on the rich man’s winery, the tent was home. It kept the rain out better than their basement room, at least, though it had only rained twice since they’d been there. There was a decent sense of camaraderie in the camp, so no one messed about with their belongings or kept the camp up late with talking, singing, or other disturbances. It wasn’t the Great Rift, but Hrothgar had seen worse.

  “Where do you go at night?” the dwarf asked.

  Devorast pulled off his tunic and sat on the edge of his own cot. In the dark tent Hrothgar knew the human couldn’t see his face, but the dwarf could see Devorast’s.

  “Ivar?” Hrothgar prompted.

  “The woods,” the human answered, then rubbed his face with his hands.

  “North?” asked the dwarf. “Across the path?”

  “It gives me a chance to think,” he said. “You know how we humans value the fresh air.”

  “Ha,” Hrothgar huffed. “That’s a dangerous pursuit, my friend. There could be predators about. After all, the last few times we went out of the city together it was, what, giant frogs and killer waves? Or was it killer frogs and giant waves? Either way, one more walk in the woods and you could find yourself working your way through a dragon’s bowels, and he’ll use your shin bone for a toothpick.”

  Devorast smiled and lay down on his back, his hands behind his head.

  “I’m only kinda kidding, there,” the dwarf warned.

  “I can take care of myself,” Devorast said. “Besides, this whole area has been cleared, and there are patrols.”

  “Those guards are city-born,” the dwarf complained. “One look at the beasties that haunt these parts and they’ll run back to Innarlith so their mommas can wash the night soil out of their breeches.”

  “Maybe so,” the human allowed.

  Hrothgar sat quietly watching Devorast for a moment. He hadn’t closed his eyes and didn’t appear sleepy.

  “Well, you already woke me up,” Hrothgar said. “Might as well tell me what’s on your mind then maybe we can both get a little shut eye. I’m still catching up on what I lost to the su—”

  Hrothgar couldn’t bring himself to say the word “sunburn.”

  The first ten days at the work site had been among the most painful of his life. Everything Devorast had warned him about had come to pass, including the peeling. Then there was the itching, the burning again, and more peeling. He and Vrengarl sat for so long every night, just tearing layers of flaky yellow-white skin off each other’s backs; Hrothgar was sure he’d lost an inch off his shoulder span. Eventually, though, all that stopped, but what they were left with was no less disturbing.

  “I look like half a drow!” Vrengarl had exclaimed the first time they’d seen themselves in a mirror.

  Their skin had turned a rich brown color they both still found unsettling.

  “Ivar,” Hrothgar urged.

  “It’s nothing, my friend,” Devorast replied. “As I said, I just like the fresh air.”

  “That’s all?”

  Devorast sighed, and Hrothgar could tell he had more to say, so he sat quietly waiting.

  “There are no stars out tonight,” Devorast said after a long moment. “On nights like this, it’s hard to tell where the mountains end and the sky begins.”

  Hrothgar nodded. The Firesteap Mountains rose like a wall of brown, green, gray, and white on the southern horizon, towering over the gentle hills already planted with the Innarlan senator’s Sembian grape vines. Hrothgar and Vrengarl often spent a lazy moment gazing at the mountains, thinking of home, thinking of all things dwarven.

  “Are you homesick?” the dwarf asked.

  “Like you?” Devorast replied with a friendly smile that made Hrothgar look away.

  “Aye,” he said, “like me. Like me, and Vrengarl, and every other swingin’ hammer out here. There’s no shame in that, you know.”

  “Perhaps not, but for me …”

  Hrothgar waited for another long pause to end but finally had to break it himself. “For you what?”

  “For me,” Devorast replied, though he was obviously reluctant to do so, “there’s no home to be sick for.”

  “I can’t imagine that,” the dwarf said. “If I didn’t have the Great Rift to pine for, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “Make your own home,” Devorast suggested, and Hrothgar wondered if the human had convinced even himself that that was possible. “You can make a home for yourself if you want to.”

  Hrothgar didn’t want to go down that path. He liked where they were, what they were doing, and though he never would have imagined bringing a human so deeply into his confidence, he liked that it was the three of them out there. He didn’t want to make a home anywhere else just then and didn’t want either Vrengarl or Devorast to do that either.

  “Before we left,” the dwarf said instead, “you were working on something.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Tell me about that,” Hrothgar suggested. “You always feel better when you talk about some project or another. What was it, another ship?”

  “No,” Devorast replied, “not another ship. I’m sorry, my friend, but I promised another friend that I wouldn’t speak of it.”

  Hrothgar nodded and said, “It’s all done?”

  “It’s all done.”

  “Then there’s your answer,” Hrothgar said. “Get yourself another project. Draw your drawings and figure your figures. Make something. Invent something. Put something together in your mind, on parchment, or with your own two hands, something that’s yours and no one else’s. That’s your home, Ivar, not a place, a city or a realm, but a … ah, what’s the word? What am I tryin’ to say?”

  “I understand,” said Devorast, “and you’re right. Nothing anyone’s ever said to me has been more right, you wise old dwarf you.”

  “There, see,” said Hrothgar. “I’m good for something. What’ll it be then? Maybe that canal you talked about months back, eh?”

  Hrothgar felt a change in the air in the tent, a heaviness to the silence between them.

  “Ivar?” he asked.

  “Go to sleep, my friend,” Devorast whispered, his eyes closed. “It’s late, and we start on the pasture wall tomorrow.”

  Hrothgar nodded, but Devorast’s human eyes probably wouldn’t even register the gesture if he’d opened them.

  59

  13 Eleasias, the Year of the Wave (1364 DR)

  BERRYWILDE

  Construction on the country estate house began a hundred years ago at the request of Phyrea’s great-great grandmother. In the century that followed, rooms, whole wings, gardens, outbuildings, and so on were added here and there and Inthelph still didn’t consider it finished. Most of the central house was built in the Sembian style, all rich hardwoods and marble with fittings usually of gold. It could have housed a hundred people comfortably, and if the downstairs and kitchen were fully staffed, they could have entertained ten times that many.

  Phyrea was alone there.

  She had dismissed the regular staff—an upstairs maid, two downstairs maids, a cook, two gardeners, a handyman, and the dour old butler—on the third day. They took it well, having been dismissed before. They’d gone back to the city to visit family and friends while her father continued to pay them. When she was ready to go back to the city, they would resume their duties at Berrywilde as if nothing had ever happened.

  Phyrea couldn’t stand the thought of anyone watching her, of anyone walking into a room when she thought she was alone. She wasn’t necessarily doing anything she didn’t want anyone else to see, but the point, for her at least, of the country home was to get away from people.

  Her father had begun to pressure her to marry the simpleton from Cormyr,
so it was getting harder for her to enjoy herself in the city. Wenefir hadn’t quite forgiven her for the ransar’s egg, so she couldn’t work either.

  She spent her days on a variety of pursuits. Mostly she explored the house and grounds. Some days—most days even—she didn’t leave the house at all. One room led to another and another and another, and in each was a separate treasure trove of trinkets, furnishings, and everywhere gold and silver. One dead relative after another looked down on her from portraits, most of which were so big the figures were larger than life size. The ceilings in the majority of the rooms soared thirty feet or more over her head.

  In the daytime, light streamed in through enormous windows, and Phyrea made sure that all of the heavy curtains were kept open so that light and air would fill the house.

  She’d spent time at Berrywilde as a little girl but never roamed the halls. She’d always hated it there. Nightmares plagued her then—terrible images of violence and death. They got worse after her mother died. She remembered begging her father not to take her there anymore, and for the longest time he hadn’t.

  Eventually, though, Phyrea grew older and forgot all that little girl nonsense. She still didn’t spend any appreciable time in the country, but the ghosts she imagined there as a girl were pushed aside by the young woman she was becoming and the very real violence she put herself in the way of over and over again on the streets of Innarlith.

  On the thirteenth day of Eleasias, Phyrea sat on a leather sofa in her father’s library, absently sorting through a sheaf of paper on which some long-dead great-uncle had written some notes concerning the history of the estate. The family historian puzzled over the name Berrywilde, as if the estate had been called that before any of her family even built the place. No one seemed to recall where the name came from.

  It was late, the windows that in the daytime would flood the room with brilliant light stood as black rectangles twenty feet tall, reflecting the entire room from the light of the candelabra she’d carried in with her. Phyrea rested her head against the soft arm of the sofa but didn’t close her eyes. She tried to read more of the notes, but the handwriting was dense and that particular great-uncle wrote in a dry and stiff style that was hard to get through even when she wasn’t so tired, and Phyrea was so tired.