Chapter 7
Simone studied the paintings Dae had left behind on the desk in her bedroom, each of them a curious combination of familiar brushstrokes and style, and utterly unfamiliar subject matter. Art had been one of Simone’s great loves since as far back as she could remember; she had clear memories of spending hours out in the fields of wildflowers that surrounded her childhood home, capturing the vibrant landscape on canvas or parchment. She had nurtured the same love in her daughter, and it was a source of great pride to her that Dae had taken to painting and drawing with natural talent.
Her most recent works included watercolor landscapes of the harsh desert plains and what appeared to be a nomadic camp, along with scenes of a bustling night market crowded with colorfully dressed people. One of the more detailed paintings depicted a view of a fabulous city as seen from a high vantage. Simone had read descriptions of El’Kasari in books; it was said to be a dry, dusty furnace of a city, one which welcomed traders from every corner of the world, however unsavory their nature. The only redeeming feature she could recall reading of was that the city refused to allow slaves to be sold in its vast markets. Those who engaged in such flesh-peddling had to seek their wares in the Tasurik Empire, where slavery was ubiquitous. Dae’s painting made it seem a colorful and exotic place, with streets that met and interwove in a pattern like the petals of a lotus flower, and marble buildings with rooftops that resembled dazzling multi-colored onions. Palm trees and public water pools dotted every street, and towering spires rose against a backdrop of unblemished azure skies.
Dae’s words from their last meeting had been echoing in Simone’s mind over the last week—I don’t think you realize how lonely I felt growing up. Had she always felt that way? Dae had always seemed content in her life, and Simone wondered if she’d missed some sign from her that might have indicated otherwise. True, she’d had an unfortunate propensity to be overly familiar with the servants and commoners, but Simone always attributed this to an excess of compassion, not a lack of companionship. Between her tutors and Simone’s own words of discouragement, Dae had been reminded that while compassion was a fine quality, it was important to maintain strict control over one’s emotions if one wished to be respected by the common folk. Familiarity breeds contempt, she would explain. As a daughter of a noble House, she needed to be very careful about how much of herself she shared with those in her service.
Moving the city landscape to the side, Simone was presented with another painting, this one a portrait of a familiar face. Dae had portrayed Zafirah wearing a crooked half-smile, her sapphire eyes bright against her olive skin and midnight hair. Her expression carried none of the fire and fury that had been present on the woman’s face the few times Simone had seen her, but in its absence she looked only more beautiful; serene…perhaps even a touch playful. In the care and detail Dae had poured into the painting, Simone could clearly read her daughter’s devotion to the Scion.
Is this how she looks when the two of you are together? Simone wondered. Is this how she smiles at you? She’s beautiful, true…but when did this become the face you knew you wanted to see every morning when you woke? How did you come to love this woman?
As much as she wanted to believe that Dae could still be convinced her place was here, in the Heartland, among civilized folk, Simone knew in her heart that it was folly to cling to such a dream. With the Scion refusing to abandon her claim to Dae’s hand, and with Dae still insisting she be returned to her, the inevitability of what must happen was growing clearer by the day. But however hard she tried, Simone could not bear the thought of her daughter leaving again.
Just the memory of how it felt when the news first reached them that Dae’s escort had been discovered on the roadside, slaughtered by southland raiders, made her feel the grief anew. It had been several days before they’d confirmed their precious child was not among the slain, and Simone recalled the cruel moment of hope that had lasted only as long as it took her to realize that Dae had not escaped. The thought of her innocent daughter in the clutches of a band of foul slavers made her loss even more unbearable.
How do I let her go? How can I survive losing her again without it ripping the heart from my breast?
True, Dae would be married by now had she not fallen prey to those slavers, but she would have still been near. Her union with Jonathon would not only have put to rest the feud between their Houses, it would also have meant Dae would be living in Blackwood Manor, a journey of but a few short days. They could have visited often. Looking at the paintings of the desert city, of the nomad camp with their strange dwellings of hide and bamboo, Simone simply could not comprehend why her daughter would want to live in such a distant, alien world as they depicted.
Her thoughts were interrupted at that moment by the sound of a polite cough behind her. “My Lady?”
“Yes?” Simone turned to find Jameson, one of the household guards, standing in the doorway.
“We’ve brought the girl as you requested. Shall I have her attend you in the audience hall?”
“That’s alright, Jameson, this isn’t a formal meeting. Just send her in.”
“Of course, M’lady.” He bobbed his head and departed.
Simone took a moment to compose herself, not certain how best to approach this conversation. She wasn’t even sure why she’d requested to speak with the girl in person. Certainly it would have been easier to avoid this meeting and just send an escort to bring her directly to the reformatory…but Simone couldn’t help but be curious. She straightened her shoulders and fussed nervously with the neckline of her dress.
“You wished to speak with me, Lady Everdeen?”
The voice was throaty and heavily accented. Taking a deep breath, Simone turned to face the young woman standing in the doorway. “Yes…Inaya, isn’t it? Thank you for coming. Please, come in.”
She couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Dae, dressed in a loose cotton blouse which she appeared to have tailored so the neckline plunged lower than what would be considered appropriate for a decent woman, and a skirt patterned with bright, multicolored stripes which she’d slit up the sides to expose her legs to mid-thigh. Several necklaces glittered around her throat, seeming to invite the eyes down to admire her cleavage, and her pierced ears were similarly adorned with golden trinkets. Her eyes were large and dark as pools of onyx, framed by thick, incredibly long eyelashes. She wore her sleek black hair tied in a high ponytail that hung low down her back, yet it seemed to shimmer with iridescent color like the wings of a raven. As she stepped into the room Simon noticed her feet were bare, her toenails painted with a deep crimson lacquer…and she seemed to glide more than walk across the floor.
While Simone watched her in somewhat awkward silence, still not certain what she wanted to say, Inaya drifted around the room, drinking everything in with her large, curious eyes. She inspected the bookcases and mahogany dresser, glancing at the bed and the engraved copper bathtub, before reaching out to trail her delicate fingers over the mechanical toys arranged with care upon the shelves. When she came to the desk, she paused to study the paintings, and her full lips spread in a smile of pure delight. She looked around with fresh understanding. “This is her room, is it not?”
“Yes. You…recognize her work?”
“I recognize her presence. Her touch. The scent of her memory in the air.” Inaya closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath through her nostrils, releasing it as a sigh. “The furnishings and style may differ, but her room in the harem feels much akin to this one. So…how may I be of service to you, Lady Everdeen?”
“My daughter has requested to see you again.” Simone kept her expression carefully neutral and her tone cordial, though her emotions felt closer to the surface than she was comfortable with. “I have certain concerns about my husband’s well-being in the custody of your people, and she promised to petition you to speak with the Scion and urge her to release my husband from this demeaning ‘hostage’ situation. Dae never was terribly good at deception, so I know very well she’s more interested in using you to pass illicit communications on to the Scion. Even so, I’m inclined to grant her request…but before I do, I thought it only appropriate that I meet with you first.”
“That is most considerate of you. I am honored to meet the mother of our Consort.”
Consort. The word alone was enough to make Simone flinch a little. That’s not who she is! her inner voice screamed silently. She took a calming breath and focused on maintaining her civil tone. “My daughter speaks of you with great fondness. I understand you saw to her care after her ordeal with the slavers…helped her heal from her time in chains and made her feel at ease in…well, in the world she found herself. I also know that the two of you became…quite close after she recovered.”
“Mmm.” Inaya’s smile turned coy and playful. “Your tone would suggest the thought of our being ‘close’ makes you uncomfortable.”
Simone looked away, embarrassed by the awkward subject, letting her hair fall forward to conceal her face while she regained her composure. “My husband and I have always been…protective…of our daughter, and cautious with the company she keeps. Is that so wrong?”
“Not wrong at all. No treasure in the world is more worthy of guarding than one’s own family…though I fail to see how our friendship could be considered a threat to Dae’s wellbeing.”
“It isn’t your friendship that troubles me…it’s the fact that you took advantage of her trust by leading her to explore…immoral relations.”
“I helped Dae understand the leanings of her heart, Lady Everdeen,” Inaya said, looking slightly indignant at her accusation. “Whatever else there is between us…well, let us say that my people do not view a sharing of pleasure between friends as being ‘immoral.’ During her time in the harem, Dae learned that much of what she had been taught concerning Jaharri culture and customs was based in ignorance and prudish bigotry.” Simone opened her mouth to protest, but Inaya held up a hand to forestall her words and said, “I mean no offense against you, Lady Everdeen…but it is true your people are not known for their charitable attitudes towards those not born of the watered lands.”
Simone considered this a moment, and found she could not dispute the claim. “Are Jaharri any better?” she asked. “Anyone not born of the desert is an ‘outlander’ to you…no?”
“True…yet so long as our lands and our laws are respected, we do not discriminate against others based on their beliefs or practices. When your daughter joined with Zafirah, she became as much one of my people as any Jaharri born to the desert. I stood by her side during the ceremony as she took a Jaharri name, accepted a Jaharri token of commitment…and became the Consort of my Scion. She is one of us now, regardless of her familial bonds.”
Simone could not bring herself to even imagine what Dae’s wedding might have been like; just thinking of it made her feel like there was a hollow place in her heart. An emptiness which might, in a different life, have been filled with the memory of her standing by her daughter’s side in celebration, just as she had always envisioned. It made her feel cheated…as though she’d been robbed of something precious she could never get back. “She is still my only child,” she said, hearing a tightness in her voice she could not control.
“And nothing about her union with Zafirah will ever change that,” Inaya agreed readily. “I know how much Dae means to you…and I know what it cost you to bring her into this world. Perhaps that is why you fight so tenaciously to hold on to her.” Simone tensed, Inaya’s words striking sensitive nerves. “She told me your pregnancy was a difficult one…that her birth cost you the chance to bear any more children.”
“Th-the healers told me it would not be likely that seed would take root again. It’s not a subject I enjoy discussing.”
Inaya took a step closer, her dark eyes filled with sympathy. “I am sorry. That must be especially painful, considering the God your people favor. I understand that Tarsis views sex as little more than a means of procreation…that to pursue the act of love for the sake of pleasure alone is considered animalistic and shameful.”
“That’s correct.”
“Does this mean you and your husband have not come together as one flesh in twenty years?”
Simone blushed hotly, scarcely able to believe the girl’s impertinence. But Inaya had posed the question with such blunt frankness she might have been asking Simone what she’d eaten for breakfast that morning. She struggled to respond. “I don’t…no, we… Th-that is not an appropriate topic of conversation.”
Her response seemed to confuse Inaya. “Yet it is appropriate for you to question what intimacies Dae has shared with myself and my fellows in the harem? Forgive me, but I do not understand. Why are you so fixated upon your daughter’s sex life, yet so offended at even a casual enquiry into your own?”
Simone found herself flummoxed by this strange creature; Inaya had all the grace and polished tones of a royal courtier, yet she displayed an almost childlike lack of inhibition with regards to propriety. “Such subjects are private…between husband and wife. It is improper to bring them up in polite conversation. Do you truly not understand this?”
Inaya shrugged lightly. “Preferences of desire may vary from one person to another, but they are common to us all, whether highborn or low. Why should we avoid speaking of them? I have never shied from discussing my own appetites, or with whom I chose to indulge them, with my own parents. They are part of who I am.”
“Perhaps if your parents had shown more discipline in your upbringing, you might have become more than just a plaything of the Scion.”
Inaya raised an elegantly plucked eyebrow and made a soft sound of derision. “At least they listened to me when I shared my feelings with them…instead of locking me away in some prison where I could be ‘re-educated’ against my will.”
“You mean like your Scion has done with my husband?”
“Your husband is a hostage to his own word, not a prisoner. He is not kept in confinement or isolation. He speaks with his soldiers often when they come to watch the spahi train. You are free to come visit him any time you desire.”
“’Visit?’ With my own husband? On the land your Scion occupies at his discretion?” Simone could feel her frustration getting the better of her. “Who is she to keep us separated in the first place?”
Inaya opened her mouth to argue further, then seemed to reconsider. “That is…regrettable,” she acknowledged quietly after a moment. “It is not the same as being truly free…is it? To be denied the chance to speak with him openly…to share your thoughts with him as they come to you, or be comforted by his reply? Having to go to your bed each night knowing half of your heart will be absent?”
Simone’s throat constricted and she found it suddenly difficult to swallow. Inaya stepped closer, moving with the same graceful allure as Dae had employed when she’d been introduced to Jonathon. Simone found it impossible to look away. Inaya’s voice, the soft intensity of her gaze, had a strangely hypnotic quality.
“Each night you must close your eyes in slumber without the comfort of his arms around you, and it wounds the very core of you. Knowing he rests on a lonely bed of his own but a few hundred paces from you…so close, and yet as distant as the moon.”
“Yes.”
“Then at least you have some understanding of the pain you inflict upon your own daughter…keeping her from her wife.”
“That’s not the same—”
“Is it not?” A slightly harder edge now crept into Inaya’s voice; fire flared in her deep, dark eyes, and her full lips tensed into a stern line. “Just because Zafirah is a woman? What wonderous powers of insight you must possess, Lady Everdeen, to have heard Dae tell you over and again that she loves Zafirah, that she wishes to return to her embrace…and then state with such conviction that she is wrong. That these feelings are simply a figment of her imagination.”
“Passion and love are not the same thing.”
“Perhaps…yet I cannot conceive of one existing in the absence of the other.”
“And what of a mother’s love for her only daughter? Do your people pervert that bond as well?”
“Not all passion is sexual, Lady Everdeen. I believe you and your husband both love Dae with great passion. So much so that you sought to shield her from the world outside of your love, fearing any who might come to steal her affection. From what I understand, you waited longer than is customary to begin seeking a suitor for her hand. You kept her cloistered, kept her chaste, guarding her purity like it was some precious treasure that must never be tainted with even the thought of lust or carnal desire. When I first met your daughter, she seemed a lost and frightened child who was a stranger to herself.”
“A lost child you seduced! Whose innocence you violated!”
“Violated? Is that how you see it? I would use a different term: enlightened. And innocence? Would not ‘ignorance’ be more accurate? In the Jaharri we do not shame and stigmatize physical pleasure, we celebrate it as the gift that it is. Yet you who consider yourselves an educated, civilized people forbid the teaching of it as such. When Dae came into the harem, she knew less about sex, about her own body or desires, than I had learned by the time I saw my thirteenth spring!”
“She understood what was appropriate for her to understand!” Simone protested. “Dae never expressed any interest in other women before! Not once! And we taught her how misguided such attractions are.”
“If you plant a seed in salted earth and water it with poison, would you be surprised that it fails to sprout?” Inaya was glaring at her furiously now, not backing down an inch. “I only helped open Dae’s eyes to that which you had so cruelly denied her! Do not blame me because she found more beauty in the light of her awareness than she ever did in the blindness of her ignorance!”
Had any other commoner spoken to her in such a disrespectful manner, Simone would have had them punished severely…yet ‘common’ was hardly a word she would use to describe Inaya. Are all Jaharri women possessed of such fiery disposition? she wondered.
“This isn’t a productive line of conversation,” she eventually stated. “I didn’t ask you here to debate the morality of Jaharri customs over those of the Heartland.”
The fierceness in Inaya’s expression softened quickly, and it seemed to Simone that she was not a woman who angered easily. “Then why am I here, Lady Everdeen?”
Why indeed? Simone wasn’t sure she knew herself. What did she want from this woman, who was friend and lover and confidant of her daughter? “I don’t…exactly know. I only know that, for whatever reason, you have become someone my daughter cherishes greatly. Someone she trusts…perhaps even more than she ever trusted me or her father, or any of her tutors. I thought maybe if I saw you for myself, I might…understand…might be able to…” Her words trailed off; they seemed insufficient to explain this tangle of emotions—confusion, desperation, fear—that roiled within her.
Inaya was studying her with her head cocked slightly to the side, and Simone shifted uncomfortably under the silent intensity of her gaze. Then something shifted in her expression…as though she had recognized something Simone wasn’t even aware she was trying to conceal. “It pains you deeply, does it not? The thought of letting her go.”
Simone stiffened, surprised. Intuitive indeed. “I cannot lose her again.”
“Yet the tighter you hold her to your loving breast, she further she slips away.” Standing so close to her now that her perfume filled Simone’s senses, Inaya reached out and laid a delicate hand on her shoulder. “Yet how can she ever be lost when I see her in you so clearly? Not just in your appearance…though the familial resemblance is striking. It is in your mannerisms. The way you let your hair fall forward to hide your face when the subject of conversation makes you feel embarrassed or awkward…very familiar. She did the same thing a great deal in the harem, especially during those early days when so much of what she saw and heard was still new to her.”
“Dae and I spoke of her family in the weeks before her joining with the Scion. Even in her happiness, her thoughts were with you…and with the pain she knew you must be suffering in her absence. The agony of not knowing that those who took her from you had been slain and she had avoided a fate of being sold in the Tasurik slave-markets. I suggested she write you a letter, so you might take solace in the knowledge that she was safe and loved. Though she feared to tell you of her union with another woman, she still wished to ease your heartache. Sadly, she never had a chance to finish her missive.”
“Nothing she might have written would have changed anything,” Simone said. “She could have been coerced. The letter could have been a forgery. My husband and I wanted our daughter back, not empty promises that she was happy in a new life half a continent away!”
“That is your grief talking, Lady Everdeen…the grief that still consumes you. I see it clearly; you grieved Dae’s loss after she was abducted, and now that she is with you again you grieve the loss of the child you knew and the future you had envisioned for her. The weight of that anguish makes the future seem so bleak—that she must return to the desert, that she would choose a path so unlike the one you planned for her to walk. It feels as though your daughter has forsaken the love she held for you in preference of the love she has forged with the Scion. Do you not see that this is no more than a cruel mirage conjured by your grief? Your people seem to view love as some type of commerce; an exchange of something precious, yet finite. But to Jaharri, love is infinite. It is the endless wellspring that nourishes our hearts and souls; the more we give, the more we have. Zafirah takes nothing away from you or your husband.”
Simone could feel her words sinking into her, softening her resistance…yet still, she fought against their persuasive influence. “I just…I don’t understand how any of this happened! What can this woman offer Dae that she couldn’t have found here, in the Heartland, where her family would always be close to offer support and advice. This ‘Scion’ of yours seems so cold and quick-tempered; I can’t understand what Dae sees in her.”
“You do not need to understand your daughter’s choice of a partner. Perhaps that will come in time…perhaps not. Right now, the most important thing to Dae is that you accept it. If you are only hoping to learn what schemes the Scion is concocting, Lady Everdeen, there is no need to allow me to visit with your daughter; Zafirah has been nothing but forthright with you concerning her intentions. If you let me return to see Dae…let it be because you are her mother, and you do not wish for her to suffer in the absence of her mate as you suffer now. That is the common ground on which to take the first step.” Inaya’s fingers squeezed her arm lightly. Her smile was sad, but compassionate. “If there is nothing else you wish to discuss, Lady Everdeen, I should be returning to the camp. Think on the matter a while…and if you decide to grant your leave for Dae and I to speak again, you know where to find me.”
Inaya had made it to the open doorway, and Simone almost let her go without commenting further…but at the last moment she called after her. “Be ready tomorrow, an hour before noon. I’ll arrange for some guards to escort you up to the monastery.” Simone turned away from Inaya…from the understanding and gentle compassion in her eyes. “And please…if you would tell my daughter that…that I am still trying…and that I love her as much today as I ever did before…I would greatly appreciate it.”
“Of course.” A pause. “Have courage, Lady Everdeen. The first step on the road to acceptance is often the most painful and difficult to take. It will get easier, I promise.”
Only when she heard the door click shut behind her did Simone allow her tears to fall.