Till Human Voices Wake Us by Victoria Goddard Read Free Book Online Page B

asked everyone if they had seen you. A Tanteyr boy in a city of Shaians … you would be so obvious, we thought. But no one had seen you there.”
    Kasian let that silence drag out such a long time Raphael finally said, “No.”
    “I always hoped you weren’t. Dead, I mean. I always thought you couldn’t be, that I’d know , but they said—I was sure you’d come home if you weren’t—I mean, Da said.” He laughed, a bit nervously, Raphael thought, thinking that nervousness was not a trait he would ever have ascribed to his brother. “I was terribly sick for a while, after the Fall, but so were plenty of others. Da especially, from our family.”
    He shifted uncomfortably. “You recovered?”
    “As you see me!” Kasian laughed again, more naturally. “I did have a relapse later, on my— our —twenty-first birthday. It was all very awkward, I collapsed in the middle of high court. Very bad omen, that, given my— our birthday’s the winter solstice. At least it wasn’t the summer one! That would have been worse. But nothing seemed to come of it besides a few broken dishes, and bed-rest for me.”
    Raphael sifted through various thoughts, wondering what he could ask that would be least dangerous. “High court?”
    “Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know, would you? I’m the king.”
    He asked, because with Kasian one couldn’t really be sure, “Of where?”
    “The Realm, of course. The Tanteyr Realm. Only kingdom I’m remotely entitled to! Though I’d be king of Ixsaa in a heartbeat.”
    “Ixsaa—”
    “I know, I know, they’re set on rule-by-committee. Democracy, if you’d rather. It’s not a particularly efficient system, I don’t think. No one who’d actually be any good at running a country ever seems to stand for election. What about you?”
    “Me?”
    “Yes, you. You’ve got the broad outlines for me. Fall of Astandalas—Kilturn—oh, yes, I went to the University of Riddles in Ixsaa for a bit,   before being suspended, whereupon I went exploring up the Whitefeather, found the Realm, and was offered the kingship. King I have been since my— our —eighteenth naming-day. There you are. What about you?”
    Raphael considered all the options available to him in response to that question and settled for, “I act.”
    “In what?”
    Everything, he thought, gazing balefully at a shoal of runners rounding the corner of Lambeth Bridge. “Plays, mostly.”
    “And you’ve done that since we were fourteen?”
    Perhaps being a king meant Kasian had learned to watch what he said, for he did not give voice to his incredulity. Raphael at fourteen had been brutally shy and stuttered. “Also a bit of magic.”
    Kasian threw out his hands in fierce mockery. “I do believe that was very nearly a complete sentence! Do you enjoy magic? You hadn’t any before the Fall. I daresay you’re not the only one to have had magic woken in them by what happend. Have you lived here, on Ysthar I mean, since then?”
    “Yes.”
    “From what I’ve heard, that’s been a lot longer than on Daun—centuries and centuries, not just a handful of years off, like Alinor. I suppose they say it’s been nearly a thousand years on Zunidh, too. It must have something to do with Zunidh and Ysthar being the old centre of the Empire … Has it really been that long, for you?”
    “Yes.”
    Vigils for the dead, phoenix years, a bare few years, sometimes even a decade or two, at any one apparent life, then starting over somewhere else as someone else. Moves of the Game, movements of magic, letters and friendships and enmities and slow crashes of civilizations. The Lord of Zunidh thought the warped time was due to—something he couldn’t actually remember at the moment. He shook his head at himself.
    Kasian caught the movement. “And what are you thinking, to shake your head so, O brother mine?”
    Raphael glowered at the gunmetal river, the flashing white gulls, the neon-bright runners. Beware looking back, Gabriel