Chapter Five

...And Doubts

Weaving through the narrow corridors of his private quarters — dish of Enlo cakes in hand — So Ga finally found himself in his Little Palace’s Inner Room. All houses had them, but So Ga’s was a little different, as his royal father — and therefore he, himself — was tolibin. The Inner Room was primarily reserved for remembrance of the dead. But it was also used to venerate the Ădol, the eleven governing creators of the living world, four high Ădol and seven lesser Ădol. Most Houses had a favored among the eleven. Some households also had their own preference or devotion. The royal House of Sona had been tolibin for five generations. And tolibins honored Níoth, who had made for mankind the human body and who was said to maintain order in the physical world.

A finely carved statue of the lesser Ădol Níoth rested on a wooden pillar in the center of So Ga’s Inner Room. He was depicted simply, as a tall man dressed in a fine, flowing golt with a wide embroidered belt. On his outstretched hand there stood a tiny human figure made of clay — unlike the carved wood of the rest of the statue — hollow and with space enough within its chest for a small candle. On Níoth’s feasts the maids would place one there, and the little clay figure would glow from within just as the first human bodies had done when they had been filled with the Deep Light.

The details painted on Níoth’s belt delighted the prince. Even though the four statues of Níoth commissioned for the Four Little Palaces were, of course, supposed to be identical, So Ga had always been able to find tiny differences, especially in the belt. This Little Palace, for instance, had a Níoth statue with a tiny blue bird embroidered on his belt. None of the other statues had that little bird.

Though So Ga didn’t offer Níoth or the little bird on his belt, much thought or consideration as he entered the Inner Room that evening.

The space of an Inner Room must not have windows and ought to only have one doorway, these were the ancient rules. So Ga’s also had a low ceiling, which was also considered ideal. The Inner Room was not meant for grandness, but for private devotion. An ostentatious Inner Room was a sign of a shallow, vainglorious household.

Several glass lanterns hung from the ceiling near the walls. Ever since the technique for coloring glass had been brought over from Srenléth, colored lanterns had been popular in Láokoth and many households liked to hang blue lanterns in their Inner Rooms, as blue was the color of mourning. But So Ga had ordered that only plain lanterns be hung in his Inner Room, in keeping with tolibin asceticism. The light, therefore, was simple and yellow. The walls were unadorned and the wooden floor stained dark, as in the rest of the Little Palace.

Along the longest wall of the Inner Room stood a narrow, high table carved of wood on which he kept the memorials to his mother, his younger brother, and his older sister. A row of candles were lighted at all times along the front of this table. And So Ga liked to look at the memorials lit by the dancing candlelight. Each was a small carved figure representing the deceased, finely carved but never painted. They were not meant to be exact representations, but after nine years of staring at them lovingly, they had become joined with the last image he could recall of his dead family. And in the flickering candlelight their faces sometimes seemed to move or change expressions. In this lonely Little Palace these three little figures had become very important to him.

So Ga placed the little plate of Enlo cakes in front of the memorial to his mother. Then he put a cake in front of his sister, and another in front of his brother. Taking the last, he sat on the floor in front of his mother, and quietly ate it.

It tasted almost as he remembered it. The sugary coating crunched between his teeth, and though the dough was soft it was not sweet. The creamy filling, however was as rich as butter and flavored with precious vanilla and cinnamon.

Looking up at his mother, he chewed thoughtfully. If she was here perhaps he could talk to her about his worries as Simna had done in the past. Though if she was here, there would be no need for him to worry. If the Palace had not been attacked and his family had not been killed, he would not be the crown prince and could have remained in his quiet life.

If his family had not been killed that night, he also would not have been parted from his father. Absentmindedly, he touched the shape of the golden seal he always wore under his clothes. If his father saw him today would he really not recognize him except with this seal? Could a father fail to know his own son?

So Ga understood why the king insisted on the strict protocols for the Four Little Palaces. He lived constantly under the strain that he would lose his last child and only heir in another attack. Of course So Ga understood that, but that couldn’t stop him from missing his father or feeling pained by the fact of their prolonged separation given that they both lived within the walls of the Palace.

After he had finished the cake, the prince wiped his fingers on his silk handkerchief and retrieved from within his sleeve the pages of this morning’s court transcripts. The nagging sense that he had missed something that his father had been trying to tell him from across the infinite chasm that divided them had not waned.

The most glaring word that he saw on the unmarked page was, of course, “Nŭnon.” After all, that was the House that had been found guilty of the murder of his family. And though the sight of the name did affect him, it was not in the way that Hin Lan had feared it would.

Thinking of the matter as a father attempting to protect his son made less and less sense to So Ga. If his royal father had truly wished to spare him from painful memories, he would have had every mention of Hin Dan and Nŭnon removed from every record for the last nine years. He could have even issued a decree forbidding the mention of that House and that princedom within the Courtyard of the Four Little Palaces. But he hadn’t. More and more the prince was getting the sense that his father had not wanted those lines effaced so that So Ga wouldn’t see them, but so that he would notice them especially.

Smoothing the pages on the floor — the blacked-out page and the unaltered one side by side — he glanced up at his mother.

“Do you understand what he was trying to tell me?” he asked her in a whisper. Then he looked back at the pages. “Or am I overthinking?”

It wasn’t just the thought of the day his family had been killed that had been recalled to So Ga. Indeed, that memory was always crisp and vivid in his mind, to the point that he was, to some extent, used to it. However in the last few months So Ga’s thoughts about the day and the weeks that followed the attack had been of an entirely different sort.

Over the years, thanks in large part to his constant awareness of the happenings in his father’s court, So Ga had developed an understanding of the people who occupied it and their respective ambitions and allegiances. This was true of the princedoms as well, insofar as he was able to know them. Recently, though he had not said so aloud — not even to Hin Lan — So Ga had begun to wonder about the hasty investigation that had named the Nŭnon House as the perpetrator of that great crime.

He couldn’t entirely account for his growing doubts and often wanted to speak with Hin Lan about them, though he had not yet managed to do so. It had been said that Nŭnon had attacked the Palace to avenge the murder of their heir. So Ga, of course, had had no awareness of what was going on in his father’s court at that time. But he had later learned that the prince of Nŭnon had sent his son to the royal court on his behalf to report on some critical matter. It was also true that the Nŭnon prince’s son had been poisoned in Sona Gen. But according to all the reports that had come from Hin Dan at that time, Prince Lă Kol¹ Nŭnon had never found conclusive evidence that this had happened in the Sona Palace. There had been a rumor that he had claimed to believe as much, but So Ga could find no report in the records to confirm this.

Prince Lă Kol had had a reputation for being careful and prudent. Even if he had believed that the king had poisoned his son, he would not have acted without proof.

But even if he had had proof, and then had decided to act, his retaliation had been swift, too swift. Attacking the Palace was no small matter. It would have taken months or years to plan. But the assassins had breached the Palace walls only two weeks after the Nŭnon heir’s funeral. So Ga wasn’t sure they would have even been able to travel the distance from the Nŭnon estate in Hin Dan to the Palace in Ŏno Soth² in two weeks. Although, of course, the Nŭnon prince might have hired Houseless mercenaries. But where was the evidence of that? As far as So Ga had found in all the records he had requested from the archives, the attackers had never been identified.

These argument had never been put before the king, nor voiced in any way in court. Moreover, according to the records, the Prince of Hin Dan had never confessed. Right until the moment he had been beheaded, he had said nothing. He had also not bothered to claim his innocence. But the Nŭnon House had been a proud House, so that was not surprising.

For years So Ga had been comforted by a simple, almost childish hatred of the Nŭnon House. But recently, as doubts had begun to set in, he found himself thinking about the people of the Nŭnon House who had been executed. What if Nŭnon had been innocent? What of the eleven thousand who had been killed in Hin Dan if Nŭnon had been innocent?

And then he would think of his little brother, dying in his arms while they hid behind the body of their dead sister. He would remember his mother’s blood-soaked body and his father’s terrifying stillness while he lay comatose, both legs broken, his head bound in a bloody bandage. He would think, too, of the rows upon rows of dead Palace Housemembers, servants, maids, and guards, and the stricken Palace Housemaster who was said to have never recovered from his grief. And he would ask himself if he really had the right to question his father’s judgment — and condemnation.

Last year he had read the account of the Nŭnon Prince’s last hours. It was said that the Prince had ordered his physicians to produce gallons of poison which his officers and ministers then took home to their families, so the women and children at least could die painlessly and be spared the terror of their House’s elimination. Why would he have done this if he had been innocent? Wouldn’t he have fought the army that had come to massacre his House? When the rest of Nŭnon was dead, Prince Lă Kol and his last surviving officers had handed themselves over to be beheaded without protest, indeed it was said that he had never uttered a single word.

If Nŭnon had been guilty perhaps the elimination of the House, while horrific, was necessary. So Ga had not been able to overlook the fact that after the Nŭnon House’s mass execution, the aggression of Bá Hoth³ to the south and Ŭthol Na⁴ to the north had ceased entirely. They had made no further moves to test the Sona king’s command of his borders, as they had done repeatedly throughout the first half of his reign. The entire peninsula had come to fear So Ga’s royal father. And so there had been peace for almost an entire decade.

But if Nŭnon had been innocent…

So Ga suspected he would never know the truth and that troubled him. He wondered if his father shared his doubts, though he knew that in this as in all the most delicate matters of ruling, the king would likely do nothing. Even if he did have doubts.

After all, the Nŭnon House had already been completely destroyed. If the world became aware that the king had ordered the elimination of an innocent House, never mind the Sona royal House, the throne itself likely would not survive. And without the throne, unified Láokoth would fall into chaos. War would inevitably follow close upon such a revelation. It was a strange thing, So Ga thought, to rely upon such a monstrous lie to maintain peace.

Assuming, of course, Nŭnon had been innocent. Though more and more, So Ga believed they had been. At which point So Ga’s thoughts always arrived at the most troubling question:

Who, then, had attacked the Palace nine years ago?

At that moment, one of the candles in the little cups — the one directly in front of his mother’s memorial — burned low enough to snuff itself out. The sudden flicker created a gap in the row of dancing flames as a single thread of smoke climbed to the ceiling.

As So Ga reached for the little cup that held the smoking, extinguished candle, his fingers brushed it just so, causing it to slide off the table. It fell onto the wooden floor but somehow did not break. Instead it rolled and as it did so, the liquid wax spilled in a line following the cup’s path. It rolled across the blacked out page before So Ga could finally stop it, though it was too late to save the page.

The prince put the empty cup back on the table; the maids would replace the candle later. Then he tried to pick the warm, hardened line of wax off the rough texture of the rumpled page, but it had stuck fast. The page was almost entirely effaced now, as the wax had covered the only words that had not been hidden by ink: “Ban Lo of Sonen House.”

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1. Lee-ah-COHL

2. EYE-oh-noh-soth

3. Bay-HOTH

4. Eye-uh-thol-NAH