The Embers of Heaven Read Free

particular sticky sweets of which Nikos was so fond, how to erase as much as possible of the sing-song accent with which she—even though she had been born in Elaas—spoke the language of the land outside her mother’s makeshift temple to Syai.
     
    All that changed when Amais was born.
     
    In Dan’s own inimitable and high-handed manner—she had been married to a Prince, after all, and had never forgotten that she could claim the title and the privileges of an Imperial Princess if she so chose—Vien’s mother had sent word that her granddaughter was to be presented to her in her home at a certain auspicious hour.
     
    Elena had snorted in outrage and had counseled a rebuff of the same magnitude that Dan had administered to Vien herself on what was obviously considered a highly unsuitable marriage. But Vien had rocked her small newborn daughter in her arms, and had dropped her gaze in the face of her mother-in-law’s sharp comments.
     
    “She is my mother,” Vien had said, finally. “I owe her my respect, at least. And this is her grandchild, after all.”
     
    Elena had thrown her hands up in the air, in the expressive manner of her own culture, in a way that Dan would have considered a vulgar show of emotion in public and could not have even conceived of ever doing. “Mark my words,” Elena had said darkly, “no good can come of it.”
     
    Vien had offered up the child as she had been commanded, and Dan, holding her granddaughter in her arms after first wrapping her up in a scarlet birth-cloth taken from one the many cedar chests in her house, had inspected the drowsing child’s features closely.
     
    “Her skin is too fair, and her eyes are too slanted, like a cat’s…. Oh well, I suppose that can’t be helped, under the circumstances.” Dan said critically. She sniffed, giving the impression that she was holding back from saying far worse. “Be that as it may. You will bring her to me every day. For an hour or so, while she is still in swaddling clothes. After… we will see.”
     
    “Whatever for, Mother?” Vien said, looking startled and not a little trapped. Perhaps her mother-in-law’s words were coming back to echo in her mind.
     
    “So that I can start teaching her, of course,” Dan said, in a tone of voice that indicated that Vien was simple-minded not to know this already. “She has unfortunate aspects to her lineage but she was born on an auspicious day. That means that her life will matter. She will be given in abundance, but whether joy or sorrow I cannot tell. It may matter how much she knows of her people and her past, when the Gods come knocking at her door asking for her.”
     
    “Ridiculous,” Elena had snapped when Vien, a little bewildered, returned to her husband’s house with her daughter in her arms. “The child is a helpless baby, not a scion of the gods. What else did she have to say on the matter, your mother?”
     
    “She named her,” Vien said. “The child’s name is Amais.”
     
    “That’s a mouthful,” Elena said trenchantly.
     
    “It means ‘Nightingale’,” Vien added helpfully.
     
    “Ridiculous,” Elena said.
     
    But Nikos had, somewhat unexpectedly, taken Dan’s side and had overruled his mother.
     
    “This is all she has left,” he told Vien in the darkness of their room at night, with the contested child sleeping the sleep of the innocent in the crib he had made for her with his own hands. “Let her have that much. Amais is a beautiful name, and it means a beautiful thing. We can give our daughter that gift.”
     
    So Amais was taken dutifully to her maternal grandmother’s house every day. She seemed content to be there, perhaps lulled by her grandmother’s quiet melodious lullabies, quite happy to kick her baby heels on the piles of cushions which Dan provided for her. Later, when she started to crawl and then to toddle, Dan placed no restrictions on her activities in the house, merely removing small grasping hands gently