AuRon felt like the poor supplicants seeking intervention from the all-powerful. They never managed to speak to any of the princes, just the intermediaries. They did what they could to warn them that the Dragon Empire was readying for war.
They tried to find out about Nissa, inquiring about a princess from the north, or an old arranged marriage from the Ghioz, and mostly received shrugs in return, or blank looks, or some old legend that either illustrated the maxim that it was best to get a good look at the bride before the ceremony of an arranged marriage or a sad story about a heartbroken bride who drowned herself on her wedding eve for she’d been pledged to a rich man rather than her true love.
The princedoms were full of such stories—not really histories, not really legends, but something in between.
“The librarians should really catalog them. There must be hundreds of these little tales.”
“I fear we’ll hear all of them before we find Nissa, or anyone with real authority to do something.”
Outside a city that was fragrant with peppers and more exotic spices and flowers, so much so it was almost dragonlike, they finally received news of her.
“Ah, yes, the Hidden Widow,” said a spice-trader with a good knowledge of Parl who’d been sent out to talk to them. “She was once of the Ghioz court. She resides in the country at the Peacock Palace.”
He supplied them with directions, though they’d spotted the building from the air.
The Peacock Palace had a ragged beauty to it. The jungle had encroached across the old walls that ringed the great house, filling fields with vines and grasses. The white—what else?—house stood besieged by green, three floors of balconies, verandas, and shaded walkways so that the air might run free while the sun and rain were kept out. It smelled to AuRon of chrysanthemum, which was growing in profusion in old pools.
He heard a plate fall and break from somewhere within the house as they approached, landing outside the gates and climbing carefully into the grounds.
A dark woman with two neat pleats of gray appeared on a balcony just above the main door. She wore a simple sleeveless dress with a black fabric belt wrapped and knotted about her waist. She reminded AuRon of both Naf—with her height and grave bearing—and Hieba—with her large eyes, elegant chin, and thick hair—so that it pained him to look at her. Just a little.
Wistala called greetings in Parl, but the woman just smiled and spread her hands as though helpless.
“Were you once known as Nissa?” AuRon asked, in the language of the Dairuss. He’d learned a little of it from Naf and more when he’d served in Dairuss.
She looked shocked and answered similarly: “That is the name my father and mother gave me, yes. I have not heard it spoken in a long time, dragon.”
“Your flowers are beautiful,” Wistala said in the same tongue, though with difficulty.
“They keep the bugs away.”
You know the tongue of the Dairuss? he thought to her.
It is similar enough to Hypatian that I can get by, she returned.
“Are you also the person they call the Hidden Widow in the city?” he asked.
“I am a widow. I keep within my home,” she replied. “There are rumors I am much wealthier than our own Prince Samikan and the rumors attract thieves like flies coming to spoiled meat.”
“I’m sorry to hear you are widowed. I will carry the message back to your mother, if you like. Your father has died. He was a good friend of mine.”
“He told me many stories of a gray dragon. I take it you are AuRon,” she said.
“This is my sister, Wistala.”
“I, too, am sorry you lost your husband,” Wistala said.
Nissa clasped her hands in front of her. “No need for regret. It was a marriage of political power. The Red Queen got her mated pairs of Rocs, a trainer, and his apprentice, and in this poor province an impoverished family gained a connection with the high of Ghioz and a dowry large enough to restore the family fortunes.”
“We came all this way to find someone in the princedoms of importance who would listen to us. The Dragon Empire is preparing for war with your people.”
“Once I might have been deemed important,” Nissa said. “In the days when the Red Queen ruled in Ghioz and the princedoms were eager for her good regard. Since Ghioz fell, I’m little more than a foreign oddity. I tutor students in the Hypatian tongue these days. I’ve almost forgotten my own, but they are similar enough—”
She stopped, then started again. “I would invite you in, but I don’t believe you’d even fit in the entrance hall. I hope you don’t mind if I ask you to remain outside. I don’t know what food I have that would satisfy a dragon appetite. We do have some cooking lard. My father said you needed animal fats for your fire.”
“We will manage,” AuRon said.
They ended up eating together in Nissa’s back garden. There were stones planted and mortared together between the trees, and the jungle had not yet succeeded in breaking the stones up. Her servants never left the house, so she had to bring them a meager meal of fat and soup-bones herself. Every now and then AuRon caught a glimpse of a face watching them. She sketched out her life as a young girl, part hostage and part student, in the Queen’s palace. Though Ghioz had fallen, she wasn’t sure that the Red Queen had fallen with it. When pressed, she told this story as the day birds quieted—a pair of peacocks retreated up a tree—and the night birds began to speak:
“The Red Queen told me a story once. She was an enchantress of the Ironriders and lived in a hut woven out of living trees, elves who’d returned to tree-hood and been enslaved to her will. It walked about their lands. She said wherever it went the weather turned bad, so it was almost impossible to find.
“The Ironriders feared her, but the very desperate and the very reckless would go to her. Seeking aid. The wretched, she would dismiss or dispose of. If they had wealth or power, she would promise to double it, which she did, but once they had their crowns and gold, she used her aid in their rise against them and they became her slaves, crowns bowing to her and gold washing into her treasury.
“When the Ghioz rose, they fought a war against the Ironriders in Dairuss. The Ghoiz had their own wizards, disciples of Anklemere of old, and the Ghioz managed to burn her walking, living hut of woven trees, and the Ghioz believed the old witch dead.
“She had a new version of herself born in Ghioz, though, and this time her rise was even faster—doing services for the rich and powerful and in turn taking what they gained and more.
“I’ll tell you something else. I remember little of my early life, my being brought here, and my marriage. I lived as though in a waking dream—I don’t know if dragons dream, but you often move about as though someone else is controlling your actions.
“Then one day I woke up. My husband had died on a trip and I found myself in a palace, with servants and wealth and a parade of people coming to seek my advice and assistance each morning. I didn’t begin to know how to get this merchant’s wife to love him again, or that young prince a ship that could weather any storm.”
“You believe the Red Queen was acting through you?” AuRon asked.
“I was presented to her when I was very young. She questioned me closely and had me play with a crystal ball. I remember how bright it was. Nothing changed after that. It wasn’t until my betrothal to Prince Dalparta that I began to have stranger and stranger dreams and then one day the dream didn’t end. I felt no fear—I felt nothing, to tell the truth. It just seemed a very long, very vivid dream. For some reason she gave up on me.”
“When was this?”
“While I was still young. I had not seen my eighteenth year then. Arranged marriages happen young in this land. It must have been twenty years ago or more.”
“About the time Ghioz fell,” AuRon said.
“So,” Wistala said, “the Red Queen was repeating her trick in the princedoms, it seems, but events in Ghioz intervened and she was destroyed.”
“You said you found a tree growing versions of herself?” Nissa asked.
“Yes, but not the way an apple tree produces apples, where they all grow at once. There were ‘fruits’ all at different stages of development, if you follow. I burned it and the creatures it was producing.”
Nissa took a deep breath. “My late husband had a younger brother who became a high minister of the Lion Order. They’re an old caste of warriors who call up their own militias and horse-levies when war requires. I could send him a message, but the last news I had of him, he was already involved in a war with the dragons over some islands farther south. They and their men are burning all the ships they can find.”
“Men flying with them?” Wistala asked.
“He said nothing of their tactics, only that there’d been losses of ships.”
“That would be NiVom’s Aerial Host, I expect,” AuRon said.
“I take it no dragons who could be convinced to fight on your side live here,” Wistala said.
“I’ve heard of none. There is a story of a dragon who lives with the blighters in the mountains to the north. He was so huge and furious, he destroyed an entire army underneath his impenetrable skin.”
