The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar Read Free Book Online Page B

out with a tray of difleta, and Armali took two glasses at once and winked at me. He braced one foot on the rung of the table. “Thank you, I’d rather not sit. Sitting too much is no longer restful. If only the heat would break we’d amuse ourselves with a hunt.”
    Kethina shook her head in passing, wrinkled her nose and prodded his thick arm, crying, “Always in such a hurry!”
    “Like yourself,” he boomed out after her. His smell was fresh and strong as if he had bathed himself in lemon verbena.
    “Look, fireflies!” cried Siski.
    He looked vaguely toward the garden and made a humming sound in his chest. “Yes, delightful!” Then he turned back to me. “What are you planning now? Going back into the army, I hear.” He gulped his second glass.
    “No,” I said. “Into the desert.”
    “Tav is going to visit a cousin of ours, Prince Fadhian,” Siski said quickly. She took a brief sip and added: “A very good friend of our uncle the duke’s.”
    “Not so good,” I said, and at once felt foolish.
    “Well, you told me they were friends.” She frowned, tapped her foot on the gravel and looked away toward the musicians under the arch, and everything gathered in me, the misery of being with her and being estranged from her, and I said: “He is a prince of the feredhai.”
    Later, up in my room, I thought that I could easily have escaped, I could have avoided everything that came afterward, I might have said “He is my uncle’ s friend, ” I might have danced, I might have bowed to Siski’s request that I take off my sword. Instead I stood harsh and awkward in an old-fashioned frock, too tight across the shoulders now, with my old scabbard half smothered in its folds, and leaning on my cane I looked like a clown, Siski told me afterward. A prince of the feredhai .
    “ Do they have princes?” Kethina asked brightly, looking around at the others.
    Armali swallowed hastily in order to answer: “Not as we do. Not at all. There’s no—” He put down his empty glass and snapped his fingers, looking for the word. “No sense of continuity, of blood.”
    “But they have such dreadful feuds!”
    “Well, but in that case the bloodline is just an excuse. All of their squabbles really take place over cattle. Cattle and horses—it’s what they have instead of politics!”
    Laughter.
    “And what’s your politics?” crowed Kethina.
    “My dear, gaisk and good weather!”
    He motioned to Gastin for another drink. His foot restless on the rung of the chair. His calf pulsing and swelling. And Morhon was still talking about blood. The lamplight on his spectacles hid his eyes. “In order to have proper royalty, that is, princes of the blood, or as it is more genteel to say, princes of the Branch, one requires history, and in order to have history, one requires a means of recording history, and the feredhai, possessing no writing—” Kethina was helpless with laughter. Kai of Amafein nuzzling her ear. Something had fallen into her dress—a spider. And Siski sat under the spreading mimosa tree, a pattern of leaves falling over her face and dress, gazing up at Armali, nodding and smiling. Her plaits in a knot on top of her head, small curls escaping and glinting like black fleece. The greenish radiance of her gown. And on the side of her brow a small contraction, the hint of a frown, a pulse beating angrily, signs only I could read.
    “Feredha politics are clean, at least,” I said.
    Armali looked at me, surprised. “My dear girl.”
    “Cleaner than ours. Look at the Lelevai. A feud over horses, a feredha feud—that’s a feud over something. The Brogyar war is a feud over nothing.”
    “But think of—”
    “Nothing.”
    He laughed. A sound like a cough. “Hrrm, hrrm,” deep in his chest. His eyes glittered, chips of broken enamel. “I should think someone like yourself—you are, after all, of a Nainish House—would see the sense in protecting our northern border.”
    “You are, after all, of a