Read Online The Embers of Heaven by Alma Alexander - Free Book Online Page B

exchanged for local money that could be better figured out.
     
    Vien deposited Aylun down on the nearest bed, and sank down beside her.
     
    “I don’t think I can go anywhere tonight. I need to rest, I need to think.”
     
    “Aylun will be hungry.”
     
    “I know,” said Vien, rummaging in her bag for more gold. “Go to this teahouse. Bring us back something to eat.”
     
    Amais opened her mouth to say something, and then changed her mind, taking the coins her mother had thrust into her hand and turning away. She closed the door very gently behind her, as though she feared that a slam might wake her mother up—for that was exactly what Vien was, dreamy, almost sleepwalking, buckling under the weight of this place and its impressions and all that it meant—and the memories that crowded around incongruously of a different life somewhere far away which now seemed no more than one of Amais’s stories. Amais knew all this because she fought against the same shock herself. Part of her was whispering, Welcome home . The other part wanted nothing so much right at that moment than to hear her father’s deep voice utter, in a language unknown in this strange land, words that would have made her instantly feel cocooned in the security and the power of his love: “She is with me.”
     
    Vien ventured out of her room only on the third day, and had not gone far. The streets seemed to frighten her a little, and she looked lost and unhappy. She tried for days—she would take the urn with the ashes of her mother, as though that was a talisman against some unspeakable horror that awaited her in the city and which she was pitifully unable to understand, and venture forth with a clear intention of visiting the Chirinaa Temple and taking care of this, the most sacred and—as she had thought—the most pressing of the things she had sworn to do when she returned to Syai. But she never made it to any Temple. She avoided Temples as though she was afraid of them, of what she might find there. Chirinaa had been so very different from what Vien had thought it would be—not that she had ever had any clear expectations, but the reality had been coldly inimical to all of the ones that she might have begun to shape in her mind—that Vien instinctively shied from having this last illusion destroyed. What if the Temple she chose was nothing like she expected? What if there too she was so inept, so inexperienced, so utterly lost? What if she did or said the wrong thing and her mother’s spirit remained forever denied rest?
     
    Amais had immersed herself in the world of Tai’s journals and her own stories and had come to her own conclusions.  She was watching her mother; she was watching the city, so different from the Imperial Syai she thought she knew, she had believed utterly that she would enter when she stepped on the shores of Syai . Instead of that, she found herself in an unquiet city seething with sulky rebellion and sometimes overt outrage—a city which had been one of the anvils on which Syai’s revolutions had been forged over years and centuries, a city whose streets had run with blood as one side or another labeled some other group as dangerous and unleashed calamity upon them. It was a city that had risen in rebellion more than once, most recently, according the street talk that Amais overheard, for a young man called Iloh, whose name was proscribed but was somehow whispered by every shadow in the streets—it was a city in which that particular rising had been had been bloodily and ruthlessly suppressed by the man in Syai’s high seat, General Shenxiao. There was no grace here, no calm nobility of an ancient court, no rich and exotic heritage—nothing, in fact, of what Amais and her sister had been brought here expecting to find. Only bloodshed, austerity, and fear.
     
    All of this connected, somehow, and the answer to their difficulties became blindingly obvious to Amais.
     
    “We don’t belong here, Mother.