Court of Fives (Page 55)

A staggered formation of Garon soldiers stands in the first rank to protect the household. Behind them, with the best view, the lords and ladies of the palace assemble. In the third rank gather the lesser relatives, officials, and officers. The highest-ranking servants and Challenger-level adversaries stand in the fourth rank, and we Novice and fledgling adversaries and the lower servants are crammed at the back with the worst view.

Kalliarkos stands between Lord Gargaron and an elderly woman carried in a chair. He is wearing an elaborately tasseled hat. I catch glimpses of his bare neck as the beaded strings sway each time he shifts.

“Stop staring at him.” Gira nudges me with her heel.

Flushing, I try to think of how Amaya would salvage the situation. “Why do Patrons wear those ridiculous hats?”

Gira snorts.

A servant in the fourth rank hisses displeasure, so we shut up.

Pipes, bells, and a chorus of singers announce the arrival of the king and queen at the head of the funeral procession. The royal banners glide into view, carried by officials wearing robes embroidered with blood-thorn roses, white death-flower, and skeletal falls of bone-vine. A hooded sea-phoenix perches quiescent in a cage, its folded wings glittering. When the royal carriage rolls past without king or queen in it, I hear a murmur of spiteful satisfaction. Not even Prince Nikonos has come to honor the dead man. People will discuss this dreadful insult for months.

The funeral wagon passes, devoid of the embroidered banners and garlands of painted masks that would usually drape the flatbed with its open coffin. A lord’s burial casket should be gilded with gold flakes and studded with jewels. Ottonor’s coffin is humble wood painted with cursory daubs of lozenges, straight lines, and handprints to depict the three gods and their attributes of fecundity, martial prowess, and justice.

Lord Ottonor does not lie in the coffin yet, of course. Dressed in formal parade wear embroidered with the three-horned bull of Clan Tonor, his corpse lurches forward one awkward step at a time. The priests have bound his self, his shadow, and his name into his body, where his heart still resides. With the mystical power held by the priests, they have motived his flesh with a fresh spark of life taken out of another creature and fixed into him.

Kings and princes and lords walk to their tombs this way.

His expression is a peaceful mask, face waxy with the paraffin that has been rubbed over his skin to preserve it. Only the jerking motion of his limbs betrays disquiet within the four remaining parts of his soul, as if he fears to approach the judge who rules the afterlife.

Four priests attend him, one at each of the cardinal directions. Each holds a ribbon attached to the silver chain at his waist.

His male relatives follow. Heads bowed, they pace in shame. Steadily rising whispers spread like fire among the onlookers.

Father’s decision to join Lord Gargaron’s household no longer seems quite so heartless and ambitious. Now it seems more like prudence and desperation. What would have happened to us had Father’s fortunes tumbled into the pit with Ottonor’s clan?

The crowd’s whispering conversations quiet.

The oracle comes.

In the empire of old Saro, a dead emperor was accompanied into his tomb by servants. They would be smothered to death and arranged in the chamber so as to serve him in the afterlife. Last of all, an oracle would be brought into the tomb and given poison. In her death throes the priests could read a prognostication of the next emperor’s reign. But when King Kliatemnos the First died, his devoted wife, known as the Silent Orchid, refused to condemn another woman to that cruel tradition. She and her four daughters walked with the king into the tomb, the only time Patrons have ever had anything good to say about a man having four daughters. Out of respect for her dignity the priests allowed her and her daughters and the oracle who accompanied them to live. If you can call that living: walled up in a tomb until you die.

Girls chosen to be oracles grow up in separate cells in the temple, never seeing another person and speaking only to the priestesses who pass them food and water and the priests who instruct them in the lore of the gods. This procession is the only occasion an oracle will ever have to glimpse the sky and the sea and the city and the faces of people.

The curtained wagon passes in silence. No one wants theirs to be the last voice heard by an oracle on her way to her tomb. She might carry some fragment of your five souls—a taste of your heart or a thread of your shadow or a sliver of your self or, worst yet, the memory of your name—to dwell among the tombs forever.

The silence makes my skin prickle like ants crawling all over me. I shift my feet nervously but even that faint scuffing reverberates like a clap of thunder. The curtains sway. I hold my breath for fear the oracle will catch the spark of my breathing and steal it.