Empress of Dorsa (The Chronicles of Dorsa)

32

~ LINNA ~

When L’Linna of Port Lorsin attempted to identify those moments in her life when she could feel a turning point coming even at the time, even as it happened, she could name only four with perfect confidence:

The first turning point in Linna’s life came at the age of eight summers, when the tinkers sold her to Lord M’Tongliss’s second wife at the slave market in Paratheen. The tinker’s wife, Mistress Sunyen, had cried profusely that day, clinging to Linna even after she had accepted the pouch of coins given to her by Linna’s new mistress, clinging to Linna as if she were the one who was losing the only home and family she’d ever known. Sympathetic at first, Mistress Halia had allowed the crying and the clinging to go on for a minute, but then she gestured at Linna and said, “Come along now, girl.” The command was curt but not cruel.

And “curt but not cruel” was an apt description of what it was to serve under Lord M’Tongliss and Mistress Halia. Whereas she had been treated as a family member by the tinkers, her slave status was very clear in M’Tongliss’ mansion.

There were many new rules to memorize: Do not look directly at Lord M’Tongliss, Mistress Halia, or any other member of the Lord’s family; do not speak unless a response is specifically requested; and most of all, when a task is assigned, do not tarry or become distracted until the task was complete. This last rule was hardest for Linna, for she had always been a dreamer, and it was simply her nature to lose herself in some flight of imagination and become forgetful as a result.

She earned more than a few beatings thanks to her daydreaming tendencies. The beatings were never delivered by her new master or mistress; they always came from another slave who outranked her. Rank and seniority seemed very important to the slaves in the House of Paratheen, but they were far more important to the slaves themselves than to her new masters.

Linna had hoped to find friendship and fellowship – maybe even a new family – within the substantial group of household slaves. But they barely bothered to look at her, let alone speak to her. It did not help that almost all of them were older than she was. Nor did it help that most of them had been there for years before she had arrived. As the newcomer, Linna was not trusted by the other slaves, and they excluded her from their social circles. She learned their strange, rhyming Paratheenian slave-speak not because any of them bothered teaching it to her, but because, in lieu of any real connection with anyone in Lord M’Tongliss’s household, Linna soothed her loneliness by keenly observing everyone and everything, using her ever-active imagination to think of what she might say or how she might act had she been permitted to be a part of the conversation.

And so, largely unnoticed by her masters and her peers alike, Linna found other ways to amuse herself: she taught herself, for example, to scale walls, becoming so good at it that she could climb like a centipede even where there were almost no footholds or handholds. When she was ten summers, after a troupe of acrobats, jugglers, and fire-breathers had camped in the Lord’s courtyard for a week and given nightly performances to the Lord, his family, and his guests, Linna taught herself how to tumble, do backflips, and leap and spin through the air as though hurtled through space by the hand of Father Mezzu himself. As she was excluded and mistrusted by the other slaves, Linna had so much time to herself that she even taught herself the basics of reading and writing through eavesdropping on the tutors who came each day to educate the Lord’s many children. When Linna cleaned up after the highborn children following their lessons, she pilfered their discarded scrolls and duplicated the lesson she’d spied on in the privacy of her own bunk.

So it went for nearly four years for Linna, until her life’s second turning point came: an exiled Empress arrived in the dead of night to seek refuge in Lord M’Tongliss’s household. Another slave woke Linna to tend to the woman.

“Get up girl,” said the older slave, eyes puffy with lack of sleep. “Make a bed in the fine guest chamber, then fetch tea from the kitchens.”

“Yes, ma’am,” a half-awake Linna had mumbled, and she stumbled off to obey.

She was startled by the Empress’s beauty when she delivered the tray of tea and sugar cubes to the mansion’s best guest quarters. The Empress sat at the vanity in the corner, disguised in rough commoner’s clothes. But Linna would have seen through the disguise even if she’d come across the woman in a garbage-strewn alleyway: no matter how rough the clothes, they could do nothing to hide the woman’s graceful, regal bearing underneath.

Yet while her bearing was regal, her face was sad. So, so sad. It made Linna’s heart ache to see something so beautiful look so saturated with grief.

“Tea, ma’am,” Linna said from the doorway. She’d said it in common tongue because the woman certainly didn’t look Terintan. Linna was one of only a handful of slaves who spoke common tongue fluently, with almost no accent. It was why Mistress Halia had purchased her, and it was also probably why she’d been given the job of tending to the House of Paratheen’s new guest.

The exiled Empress (Linna didn’t yet know that was what she was) looked up, momentarily chasing away her sadness with an unexpectedly warm smile. “Place it here, please,” she said, and gestured at the vanity.

Linna approached, trying not to stare. The woman was not only beautiful, she was young, too, probably no more than twenty-two summers.

Linna set the tea down and scurried from the room.

The shock of meeting the beautiful young Empress and the single servant she’d brought with her – a stern middle-aged man called Brother Evrart – was certainly anomalous, but it didn’t become a turning point in Linna’s life until the morning the Empress caught Linna spying on her morning exercises.

Linna, always up before the sun so that she might have a few moments to herself before the other slaves woke and began barking orders at her, was fond of climbing up the walls to the private rooftop courtyard where the Lord, his wives, and his children often relaxed after dinner on particularly hot nights. It was forbidden for Linna to be in the courtyard without permission, but of course that was the appeal. Up there, unseen by slaves or the Lord’s family, Linna could imagine a different life entirely. She would lounge on the divans that slaves were forbidden to touch and pretend to pluck fruits and nuts from an imaginary bowl.

“The plums are delightful this time of year, don’t you think, my love?” she would mouth silently, imagining herself a younger, handsomer version of Lord M’Tongliss.

“Oh, yes,” she mouthed next, sometimes imagining she was Mistress Halia, sometimes the Empress Natasia herself.

One morning, Linna had been so absorbed in her fantasy that she’d almost failed to hear the Empress’s sandals upon the staircase until it was too late. With the agile speed of one of the acrobats she so admired, Linna had launched herself out of the divan and dove behind a curtain of hanging vines on the far side of the rooftop’s courtyard.

What Linna saw next fascinated her in a way even the acrobats had not. The Empress produced two long daggers from beneath her tunic and proceeded to work through a series of movements with them. She whispered words as she moved, sometimes haltingly.

Mimic that she was, Linna immediately wanted to duplicate every step.

That first moment of watching Empress Natasia perform the dance of the Seven Cities, Linna would later decide, was more impactful than when the Empress invited her to start training with her, and even more impactful than when Lord M’Tongliss, noticing the Empress’s fondness for Linna, sent Linna with her as a parting gift.

Because from the first moment Linna witnessed the dance, she knew that nothing would stop her from learning it herself.

The third turning point in Linna’s life came only a few months later, when the Empress had both invited Linna to sleep on the floor of her tent and granted Linna her freedom on the same night. The invitation to sleep inside the tent sent a full kaleidescope of butterflies swarming in Linna’s stomach, because by then Linna fully understood that she had quite the crush on the beautiful young Empress. But the joy and nerves produced by being invited to sleep on the Empress’s floor was quickly overwhelmed by new, unfamiliar emotions when the Empress declared she was making Linna a freewoman.

Free? What did the word even mean?

For a terrifying minute, Linna thought being freed was the Empress’s way of dismissing her. But then the Empress clarified that she still wanted Linna around, so long as that was what Linna also wanted.

Of courseit was what Linna wanted. Besides the fact that the Empress was beautiful and elegant and strong, she was the first person who had treated Linna with dignity and respect since she had left the tinkers’ bliva. Knowing that she could both remain with the Empress and yet do so of her own free will felt to Linna like an oxymoron, an unsolvable paradox.

On that first sleepless night in the Empress’s tent, she tried to gain a sense for this concept of freedom, tried to feel the word inside her heart to see if she felt any different. With a shock that made her whole body quake for a moment, Linna realized she had always felt free. It was simply everyone else who saw her as a slave. Like a stage player, Linna acted the role of slave, and she was quite good at it.

But her mind and her heart had always been her own, the possessions of no man or woman but herself.

When Linna realized this, she grinned in the darkness of the Empress’s tent, smiling until her cheeks ached and sleep took her. Now she would be as free on the outside as she was on the inside, even if she chose to stay at her beautiful Empress’s side, which she certainly intended to do.

The fourth and final turning point in Linna’s life (so far) came on the day she saw the Commander fight for the first time. It was during the Battle of Port Lorsin, when Linna found herself first separated from her beloved Empress and then confronted with the horrifying news that the Empress’s body had been possessed by a shadow. Linna met the Commander by chance while scouring the city for survivors with Brick, but after listening to the Empress’s stories of Joslyn of Terinto for so many months, she recognized the warrior immediately, despite the fact that she was supposed to be dead. Not long after, Linna found herself in a pitched battle for survival, fighting as best she could at the Commander’s side. Even in the midst of that chaos, she recognized the dance of the Seven Cities within the Commander’s movements – and they made the Empress’s movements look like a child’s weak impersonation of an adult by comparison.

Linna knew what she wanted to do with her freedom then. As much as she adored the Empress, Linna realized she didn’t want to be a servant for the rest of her life – at least, not the kind of servant who spent her days making beds and fetching tea for her betters. No, Linna knew that the destiny Father Mezzu had written for her was to be a warrior. A sword master. Just like the Commander.

But now? Now that Linna had actually taken the life of another?

Now she wasn’t so sure.