She sat at her father's side in his chamber, listening to him talk about the coming travelling plans. They gathered around the small dinner table, only three of them seated to dine.
"We'll leave as soon as we finish with this folly," her father said sharply, slicing the red meat on his plate with a knife.
Her brother sat opposite her father. "It's about time for you to marry, sister," he said, smirking with a mouthful of juicy meat. A'mna gave him a sharp look that sent his smirk back into a sulk. She moved the meat on her plate with a fork, nearly untouched.
"Why are you welcoming them if I am not to marry him?" she asked, drinking pear juice from her cup. She knew what her father would answer.
"Do you expect me to deny them my honor?" He grimaced. "Even they know I will refuse. These things are customary, and you of all people should know that, daughter," he drank from his cup.
"I do know it, father," she said, eyes down at her plate.
"Look at me," he commanded. When she lifted her head, her eyes met his. They were sharp, poignant, black as night. "You are my daughter. You are a Kulk. One day you will rule in my place, and a ruler must be firm." He then turned to her brother, who was five years younger than her, and said, "What keeps us standing?"
Her brother sat straight in his seat, stretching his chest. "Honor."
"Good boy."
For a while they sat and ate in silence. Silence of forks and spoons cracking against the platters and the chewing of the meat and the drinking. "You are beautiful, my dear," her father broke the silence. "The most beautiful woman in the world. Half the men want you for your beauty, the other half will soon want you for your claim to Goldart."
It was true. The city of Goldart was hers by rights when her father passes away. Here in the east the oldest claims the rule, no matter he be a man or a woman, and A'mna was the oldest, with only a brother to her side.
A beautiful princess, she thought that night as she went to bed. She always knew that. Her beauty did not hit her as a strange thought; men always praised her beauty. And her claim had been written down the day she was born. What troubled her mind was her father's plans for her. Gholys, Sid of Goldart, was a stern man, and sterner even as a father. He was a man of passion, too.
The servants woke her in the morning. The window by her bed faced the east. The sun shone bright, its light gaping through the window drapes. A'mna got out of bed and went by the window, looking out at the city. The walls of the Golden Valley were nearly visible behind the gardens. Tall trees of pomegranates, pears, and oranges circled around; the fruits dangled like flowers of different colors: red, yellow, orange, lazuli. She loved that her window faced the autumn sight of the gardens. Her chamber was the only one, beside her father's, that faced the eastern side of the Golden Valley. The Greenkeep, where her family and their servants lived, gazed upon all the city of Goldart. It stood high up a hill. Once when she was small, she sneaked up the roofs of the Greenkeep and captured a small view of the sea. If you had a keen, sharp look, you could see the ships of the islanders and the northern folk sailing east, her father had told her when she came down. A'mna did not have sharp eyes, nor did she climb the roofs again.
A'mna looked beyond the walls of the Golden Valley. Far below, the streets of Goldart were alive with merchants and folks. In the silk road merchants lay their carpets on the stony ground and paraded their goods. Clothes, tunics, dresses, cloaks, all in different shapes, sizes, and colors. Silk, wool, cotton. Women hovered by them like bees around a flower with their guffas in hand and their shawls around their heads.
Around a corner from the silk road was the Friday market, where everything was available, bought and sold, but only one day a week. Merchants on Friday would land from the sea, bringing spices and different food from the islands, and old, weird trinkets from far beyond. The other days it took the role of a passing street, where people gathered for tea-drinking and games.
Her servants prepared her bath. On the other side of her chamber a balcony faced west, with a small garden, bearing small plants gathering around the entrance. They hugged the walls of the balcony and stretched upward, twisting around all over it. The tub steamed with hot water. As she climbed the small stairs and stepped down it, she felt relaxed.
The water was scented with rose oil, and it clung to her skin and rose up in the steam and filled the whole chamber with it, sweet and heavy. It was her mother's scent. A'mna did not remember choosing it. She had asked for it as a small girl, before she was old enough to know why, only that the smell of it made something in her chest go soft and quiet, and the servants had never questioned it since, and neither had she, though she knew well enough now where the wanting of it came from. There was a room in the Greenkeep, two floors below her own, that had smelled like that once, when it had still been lived in. Nobody used the rose oil there anymore. Nobody used the room at all.
She let herself sink lower into the water, until it lapped just under her chin, and closed her eyes.
"Will you wear the blue today, my lady, or the grey?" Sanna asked, laying both gowns over the low bench by the tub. She had been in the service of the house since before A'mna could walk, a broad, soft-handed woman with grey coming into her hair now at the temples, and she was the only one in the Greenkeep who dared speak to A'mna the way a woman speaks to a girl she had once bathed as an infant, which was to say, without much care for rank at all.
"The grey," A'mna said. "Blue is for feast days, and I have nothing to feast about."
"You'll feast plenty before winter's out, from what I hear belowstairs." Sanna folded the blue gown back over her arm and did not look at her, which was Sanna's way of saying a thing she thought might sting. "They're saying your father means to send word east, to his cousins. That there's already talk of a boy for you there."
A'mna opened her eyes. "Already talk." She said it flatly, testing the shape of it in her mouth. "I only heard it myself last night, over supper."
"Belowstairs hears everything a day before the hall does," Sanna said. "It's the one power we've got, and we guard it jealously." She held out a length of linen, and A'mna rose from the water and let herself be wrapped in it, the warmth of the bath still steaming off her skin into the cooler air of the chamber. "Is it so bad a thing? A husband of your own blood, your father says. Keeps the land in the family, keeps the east happy. Could be worse. Could be some Cherian boy from the west who's never eaten a decent meal in his life."
"I don't want a Cherian boy either," A'mna said. "I don't want any boy. I want to be left to myself a little longer, that is all I want, and nobody in this house asks me what I want, they only tell me what I'm to have." She heard the sharpness in her own voice and did not soften it. It was not Sanna she was sharp at. Sanna only carried the news; she had not made it.
Sanna combed her hair out with slow, even strokes, saying nothing for a while, which was also her way, to let a girl's temper run its course before she spoke. "Your mother didn't want it either," she said at last, very low, as if the words might be overheard by the walls themselves. "The marrying, I mean. Not at first. She came round to it, in her way. Most do." Her hands went still for a moment on A'mna's hair, and then began again. "I only say it so you know you're not the first woman in this tribe to sit here not wanting what's coming for her. It doesn't make the wanting matter less. It only means it isn't new."
A'mna said nothing. She watched herself in the small bronze mirror propped against the wall, her own black eyes looking back at her, her father's eyes, and did not know what to do with the thing Sanna had said, so she set it aside the way she set aside most things that touched on her mother, folded small and put away somewhere she did not have to look at directly. She dressed in the grey, and let Sanna pin her hair back from her face, and all the while some restless thing in her, some thing that had nothing to do with marriage pacts or eastern cousins, was counting the hours until the tribehold would be about its morning business and the yard behind the old stables would be empty enough for what she meant to do there.
"There," Sanna said, standing back to look at her, and something in her broad face softened. "Beautiful, and cross as a cat, both at once. You have a gift for it."
"I learned it from someone," A'mna said, and did not say who she meant, because she did not entirely know herself whether she meant her father or her mother, and left the chamber.
She went down by the servants' stair rather than the great one, past the shut door of the room that had once belonged to her mother, walking a little faster there than anywhere else in the Greenkeep without quite admitting to herself that she did it on purpose, and out through the kitchen yard where the morning bread was already cooling on its racks and nobody thought it strange to see the Sid's daughter passing through in a plain grey gown. Beyond the kitchens, past the old stable that had not held a horse in three years and was given over now to broken carts and rusting harness, there was a strip of beaten dirt walled in on three sides, hidden from the hall windows by the stable roof, and there her brother was already waiting, two wooden practice swords laid across his knees where he sat on an upturned bucket, kicking his heels against it.
"You're late," Denar said, standing, tossing her a sword before she had even reached him. "I've been out here since the bread bell."
"I was being told I'm to be married to a stranger," A'mna said, taking the wooden sword's weight in her hand, feeling the old worn grip of it settle familiar into her palm, and for the first time since supper the tightness in her chest eased a little. "Forgive me for not running straight to you with the news."
"You could have run straight to me and told me on the way," Denar said, grinning, and dropped into the low guard their old teacher had drilled into both of them years before anyone in the hall had thought to ask what the two youngest of the house did with their mornings, and lifted his wooden blade. "Come on, then. Married women don't get to practice. Better make the most of it while you're still only promised."
A'mna looked at him a moment, small and fierce and grinning in the thin morning light, five years her junior and already, in his own boy's way, trying to make her laugh instead of cry, and something in her chest that had been clenched tight since the dark look in her father's eyes at supper let go, just a little.
"Guard up, then," she said, and came at him.