Jeweled Fire

The book opens in Leah’s eyes. At noon in high summer she is squeezed onto the Palminera dock with half the city as the empress’s fleet comes home: dozens of ships crammed with soldiers, because Filomara believes the threat of war is the surest way to keep the peace. Aboard the flagship is a Welchin princess who stowed away without her family’s consent. Leah remembers Corene as a fierce, red-haired twelve-year-old. Darien Serlast, regent of Welce and soon to be king, sent Leah here five years ago; his letters, unusually distressed, now ask her to watch over his runaway daughter. In Billini’s dockside tavern she trades gossip about the young man the empress is bringing from Welce.

The voyage south takes two ninedays, and by the end of it Corene figures everyone aboard hates her. Over her bitter brew Filomara talks statecraft: she married into the prefect’s family to unite the factions, and she will never name a bastard heir. Corene, who sailed hoping for a brilliant marriage, wonders whether she is only following her scheming mother, Alys. With her are Foley, a member of her father’s royal guard who once guarded her sister Josetta, steady and quiet; and Steff, the Welchin farm boy whom Zoe’s coru touch identified as the son of Filomara’s dead daughter Subriella.

Palminera is a city in two halves, red granite to the south and white stone to the north. Over the south rises a red tower crowned with petals of stained glass around a living fire; over the north, a white tower with a glowing dome. Sattisi, the empress’s sour cousin-by-marriage, explains what they mean:

“Fire and ice. South and north. Flame and shadow. Flesh and spirit. Life and death.”

No one is waiting on the dock for Corene, and she is glad. At a palace split like the city, Filomara introduces her impassive steward, Lorian, and Corene introduces Foley as her protector.

Melissande of Cozique, small, doll-faced, gorgeous and cheerfully indiscreet, sweeps into Corene’s room and sizes up the field: three nephews, the empress’s two daughters dead, and Jiramondi already marked as a husband who would not mind her lovers. At the first palace dinner Corene meets the contenders: Garameno, the clever eldest, in a wheelchair since his horse fell on him; amiable Jiramondi; and Greggorio, about eighteen, handsome, kind and slow. Alette of Dhonsho, the third foreign princess, shows no expression; Liramelli, the prefect’s plain, serious daughter, dresses all in white, and Corene guesses she is elay. As the empress rises to leave, Garameno asks why she has kept her good news quiet and announces it himself: Subriella had two sons, and one of them is here. The room erupts. Filomara confirms it but will have Steff’s blood tested; science, she says, trumps anecdotes. That night Foley puts his finger on what is odd about this court: nearly every likely heir of recent decades is dead.

Leah’s chapters run alongside. To reach the princess she poses as a market vendor, and Billini steers her to Chandran, a big, bearded Coziquela merchant whose stall on the market’s top floor the royal party always visits. After her first day behind his counter he drugs her keerza. Sick and dizzy, she admits she is Darien’s agent; Chandran, who almost never laughs, laughs, and asks her back. Shaken, she sits on the blue coru bench of a little Welchin temple; born torz, she has learned to adapt.

On a royal outing to the Great Market, four storeys of red and white stone with livestock on the ground floor and jewels at the top, Corene is drawn behind a curtain by the Welchin assistant at Chandran’s stall. It is Leah. They agree a code for letters, red stones meaning danger, and Corene chatters about Mally, the little girl who stood in for Odelia as a decoy princess, never guessing that Mally is Leah’s daughter. Afterward Corene quizzes Garameno about the market’s rents and contracts and surprises him: she has a head for trade.

Filomara has had old Renalto Corsicara, head of the institute of biological research, take samples in secret, and Renalto pronounces Steff Subriella’s son. The stern empress weeps over his hands and presents him as potentially her heir. Jiramondi, now giving Corene language lessons, walks her through the succession and the old palace poisonings, and mentions that Sarona, the girl Greggorio loved, ran off a nineday or two before Corene came.

A tour takes the young people up the fire tower’s winding stair to a roof where flames taller than a man leap behind jagged glass. Alette climbs onto the flimsy rail, closes her eyes and sways forward. Greggorio lunges and drags her back, and afterward says plainly that she tried to jump. Melissande suspects that the princesses are not guests but hostages, so Corene tests it: hair scraped back, in her plainest clothes, she slips out with Foley into the red-granite quarter. Foley names a meeting place in case they are ever separated, the tower of fire, and before long a roadblock is checking outbound coaches for a girl with red hair.

Leah has become Chandran’s assistant in earnest; she has an eye for wares. A blunt Welchin sea captain, Ada Simms, has worked out whose daughter Darien is worried about, and mentions that she trades with Kayle Dochenza. Leah lays escape plans, down to three weak places in the city wall.

The three foreign princesses and Liramelli become friends. To coax Alette out of her gloom they hold an afternoon feast of lassenberries and keerza and draw blessings for one another from Corene’s coins. Alette admits that if she does not marry whichever nephew is named heir, her father will send assassins; there is a man she loves. On a rainy afternoon Liramelli leads Corene, Melissande, Steff and Foley into the tunnels beneath the palace. At the bottom of a locked stairwell they find a body, long dead; the wheat-blond braid and a necklace tell Liramelli it is Sarona. Greggorio arrives, white and haunted, and lays his hands on the locked door. When Leah next sees Corene, she offers to put her on a ship that afternoon. Corene is torn, and stays.

Corene says flatly that Sarona was murdered, and the friends list suspects, the prefect among them. Berringey declares war on Malinqua. Foley thinks it may be time to leave; Steff refuses, since he belongs here; Jiramondi admits that the court reads its guests’ letters. One evening Corene sprawls on her settee and asks Foley what sort of woman he would marry, offering a tall, blond, quiet girl, and he points out that she has just described Josetta.

A riding party goes north to the white tower, whose stone seems to swallow light rather than shine. Garameno, who loves to ride, talks shrewdly with Corene, and she notices the power in his shoulders. Below the tower two men seize Alette and run for a cart. Foley leaps from his saddle with a knife and comes out of the fight bloodied; Greggorio carries Alette into the tower, and she tells him he saved her life. The attackers were Dhonshon men with a hawk, her father’s crest, on their sleeves, and one shouted not here: Palminera believes that whoever kills in a tower’s shadow dies within three days. That night Alette whispers of Cheelin, the man she loves, and Corene vows to get her out.

Corene asks Leah to rescue Alette instead of herself, and Chandran agrees to help. In the lanes off the blockaded harbor Leah calls Cheelin Barlio’s name until he appears, gives him a code phrase, and recruits Teyta, a Dhonshon shopkeeper’s daughter of Alette’s height and build. Then, knocking at a door, she is pulled inside by Nelson Ardelay, the sweela Prime. Darien has sent him ahead of fifty Welchin warships as an ambassador, and he has followed Leah’s trail through Captain Simms and Kayle. He has been looking for her for five years.

The escape is a conjuring trick. Teyta wears Alette’s flame-coloured dress and bright yellow scarf; Alette, in muted blue, drapes a scarf over her head and slips away to Leah’s people, while the false Alette climbs the fire tower again with the party and rides back to the palace. Corene is sick from food bought in Tower Alley; Foley carries her to her room, and she keeps the silver button that came off his jacket in her fist.

The next evening Lorian announces at dinner that Alette is gone. Corene, with Alette’s embroidered blessing of courage in her pocket, goes on the attack: the princesses are hostages, gathered to drag their countries into Filomara’s war with Berringey. If so, the empress replies, it has worked; Welchin warships wait offshore, and Coziquela ships are coming. When Corene says Filomara sent her own youngest daughter to Berringey to be murdered, the empress slams her hand on the table. Foley moves into Corene’s suite to guard her, and they spar in the night, sweela fire against torz steadfastness. In the morning Nelson appears at breakfast, through the blockade, with a gift for the empress: an elaymotive from Kayle’s factory. In the gardens Corene lays out her theory: someone is clearing Greggorio’s way to the throne and to Liramelli. Nelson tells her he has found Leah, and that Mally is Leah’s child.

At Nelson’s dinner every tongue loosens, and Liramelli and Steff are drawing together. Melissande offers Corene a kiss, curious to know what kissing a woman is like; Corene thinks of Foley, and Melissande sees it.

Leah’s chapter jumps ahead to the night. The city shuts for a gala in Steff’s honour, and Chandran takes her up the white tower with a picnic to watch the fireworks. She tells him about the daughter she left. The booms over the harbor are not fireworks, and Chandran, at his spyglass, knows whose ships they are.

The book then rewinds to gala day. Melissande wears dark blue and a velvet mask that hides nothing; Corene wears grey shot with crimson under a hooded mask that covers her telltale hair. The palace grounds become a labyrinth of candles, fire jugglers and acrobats on wires, and Corene and Foley share a flaming drink. Following a lantern to the white gazebo at the heart of the maze, Corene finds a masked man on his knees beside Garameno’s wheelchair, and in it Greggorio, dead. The man unmasks. It is Garameno, standing and moving freely. Foley suspects him; Garameno swears he found the body when he came back for the chair. Foley sends Corene for help.

Running, she reasons it out: in the dark, the killer took Greggorio for Garameno, since the cousins are built alike. She finds Lorian and tells him about the body. He snaps that it is Garameno who was strangled. She had said only bruised. The steward, fond of Liramelli and devoted to Greggorio, is the killer.

Soldiers are shouting for the princess. Corene vaults into Nelson’s smoker car and drives blind through Palminera’s dark lanes, steering by the flame on the southern tower, because Foley said that is where he would find her. She climbs to the roof, and the soldiers follow, one at a time through the trapdoor. She tears her grey jacket in two, lights half of it at the great fire, and throws it in the face of the first man up. A burning soldier falls against the old wooden stair, and the tower catches.

Foley and Nelson find the smoker car and call to her through the smoke. Lorian, Foley tells her, ran through the maze with soldiers, screaming for them to be killed, and ended on his knees by Greggorio’s body, weeping. She bumps down the charred stair while Nelson calms the flames; when it groans loose, Foley tells her to jump, and that he loves her. They land alive, and after asking whether he meant it, she kisses him. Welchin guardsmen under Captain Sorren of the Chialto Royal Guard appear, and with Leah and Nelson they explain the night: Cozique has invaded to fetch Melissande home, and Welchin warships lie offshore.

At the occupied palace Jiramondi relays Lorian’s confession. Greggorio’s father, Morli, began the killing, and Lorian carried it on for Morli’s son: he arranged the riding accident that supposedly crippled Garameno (he could walk all along), killed Sarona when Greggorio strayed from Liramelli, and strangled the man in Garameno’s chair. Jiramondi now believes he also bribed the first blood testers to deny Steff. With Greggorio dead, Jiramondi reckons Garameno the only real choice for heir; Melissande, who expects her mother to choose her a husband, proposes a practical marriage to Jiramondi instead. Kneeling to dress the gash in Corene’s leg, Foley promises he will still love her in Welce, and suggests the work she was made for: Welce’s diplomat to all the southern nations. She will start with Cozique. She apologises to Filomara for spiriting Alette away, though no one yet knows whether Alette is safe. Half the city watches the Coziquela ship leave, and Corene, watching the red tower and the white one fade, thinks:

“I’m a sweela girl who is learning to control her own fire”