Queen of Springtime Read Online Free PDF Page A

his father Trei Husathirn had known, that that was impossible. The best that the People could hope for against the hjjks was to hold their own with them: to maintain the security and integrity of the territories they already held, to keep the hjjks from encroaching in any way. Perhaps the People might even be able to push them back a little gradually and reach outward a short distance into some of the hjjk-controlled regions that were suitable for their own use. To think the hjjks could be altogether defeated, though—as certain other princes of the city were known to believe—was nothing but folly, Husathirn Mueri thought. They were an invincible enemy. They never would be anything else.
    “There’s one other possibility,” Curabayn Bangkea said.
    “And what would that be?”
    “That this boy is no simple runaway, but in fact some kind of emissary from the hjjks.”
    “A what?”
    “Only a guess, throne-grace. There’s no evidence, you understand. But something about him—the way he holds himself, so polite and quiet and, well, solemn, and the way he tries to tell us things, the way he comes out once in a while with a word like ‘peace,’ or ‘love,’ or ‘queen’—well, sir, he doesn’t seem like your ordinary kind of runaway to me. It came to me all at once that this could be some sort of ambassador, like, sent to us by the wonderful queen of the bug-folk to bring us some kind of special message. Or so I think, throne-grace. If you pardon me for my presumption.”
    “An ambassador?” Husathirn Mueri said, shaking his head. “Why in the name of all the gods would they be sending us an ambassador?”
    Curabayn Bangkea gazed blandly at him, offering no answer.
    Glowering, Husathirn Mueri rose from the justiciary throne and walked to and fro with a sliding gait before it, hands clasped behind his back.
    Curabayn Bangkea was no fool; his judgment, however tentatively put forth, was something to respect. And if the hjjks had sent an emissary, someone of People birth, one who had dwelled among the bugs so long that he had forgotten his own speech and spoke only in harsh grinding hjjk-clatter—
    As he paced, one of the merchants, coming up beside him, tugged at his sash of office and begged his attention. Husathirn Mueri, eyes flashing furiously, raised his arm as if to strike the man. The merchant looked at him in astonishment.
    At the last moment he checked himself. “Your suit is remanded for further study,” he told the merchant. “Return to this court when I am next sitting the throne.”
    “And when will that be, lordship?”
    “Do I know, fool? Watch the boards! Watch the boards!” Husathirn Mueri’s fingers trembled. He was losing his poise, and was troubled by that. “It’ll be next week, on Friit or Dawinno, I think,” he said, more temperately. “Go. Go!”
    The merchants fled. Husathirn Mueri turned to the guard-captain. “Where is this hjjk ambassador now?”
    “Throne-grace, it was only a guess, calling him an ambassador. I can’t say for sure that that’s what he really is.”
    “Be that as it may, where is he?”
    “Just outside, in the holding chamber.”
    “Bring him in.”
    He resumed his post on the throne. He felt irritated and perplexed and impatient. Some moments went by.
    Husathirn Mueri did what he could to regain control of himself, making a calmness at the core of his spirit as his mother Torlyri had taught him to do. Rashness led only to miscalculation and error. She herself—the gods rest her soul, that warm and tender woman!—had not been nearly this high-strung. But Husathirn Mueri was a crossbreed, with a crossbreed’s vigor and intensity and a crossbreed’s drawbacks of disposition. In his birth he had foreshadowed the eventual union of the two tribes. Torlyri had been the Koshmar tribe’s offering-woman and the indomitable Beng warrior Trei Husathirn had swept the Koshmar priestess up into unexpected love and an unlikely mating, long ago, when the Beng