Anza had seen engravings of Karegg fifty years ago, men and women in splendid dress outside theaters and concert halls. Now the theaters staged dull plays approved first by the Crown, their audiences scant and subdued. Irini was right. That was a loss. Like Rukovili’s poems, which had nothing to do with sedition but were banned because of the poet’s other words. Karolje forbade art and beauty because they invoked a world that was better.
She was getting tired. She rolled her shoulders back, trying to loosen them, and yawned.
Irini said, “There’s a room upstairs for late nights. I’ll be sleeping there. You can use one of the empty beds if you want. No one will bother you.”
The rug was thick, and there were cushions tucked in the corners of the small sofa. “I’ll be fine here,” Anza said, rising to collect the cushions. “I think if Sparrow wanted me to have a bed, she would have offered one.”
“On the other hand, she didn’t tell me not to offer.” Irini stood. “Come on. You can learn the codes in bed as well as you can sitting on the floor.”
“Does Sparrow sleep there?”
“No. She has her own room. So does Apple. We all do, this house is huge. Don’t worry.”
“What about the servants?”
“They know what’s happening,” Irini said. “Serving Miloscz here is how they have chosen to help us. People don’t all fight. They do what they are suited for.”
“All right,” said Anza, conceding. Then she stopped and swallowed her pride. “Rumil never told me his father was losing money. Everyone else seems to have known. What have you heard?”
“The story is that he is heavily in debt. There’s nothing dishonorable about it—he spent too much and had a run of phenomenally bad luck. And I suppose some ignorance. He didn’t know what he was doing when he bought the vineyards. The harvest failed.”
Her eyebrows went up. Bought the vineyards? Rumil had said nothing about that either. How long had he been keeping secrets? Not that they were any greater than what she had kept from him.
“Rumil came to Radd’s to speak to me yesterday,” Anza said. “I hope he didn’t follow me here.”
“It’s pretty well guarded. And he was never the kind to climb over the walls, that was you. Did he—Anza, why did you join us? How long have you been in the resistance?”
“Karolje executed my father a few months ago.”
“I thought your father was dead.”
“We kept it a secret. He was a soldier. He didn’t think anyone should know.”
“Did Rumil?”
“No. And he has no idea about the resistance. I don’t think he was interested enough in me to collect any clues.”
No, that wasn’t fair to him. Early on there had been many nights where they stayed up late talking, listening, drinking his father’s wine. They had loved each other once. That had begun to change last autumn. She had attributed it to the bloom coming off the romance, but that was probably when the money troubles had started. A crop of withered grapes. He had likely been ashamed to tell her.
“Not by then,” she amended. “I suppose I wasn’t paying much attention to him either.”
“At least you could leave.”
At least she could leave. That was a grace.
MIRANTHA
HIS FATHER DEAD, Karolje returns from the south after only a year of war, a handful of new favorites with him. The battles will continue in his absence. He comes to her bed his first night back. He is drunk. She has expected it, and she lies quietly while he thrusts into her. His rhythm is nothing like Ashevi’s when he is in passion; for Karolje, with her, the act is not about pleasure. When he has finished and she lies sore and silent, he kneels over her and presses her wrists hard into the mattress.
“I’m done with you,” he says. “Do you understand? Do you?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“You will ask me nothing and obey me in everything. You will come when you are called for and at no other time. When you are with me in public, you will look happy. You are my devoted wife, and if you anger me, I will whore you out to my generals or lords. And if I do that, what will you do?”
Despite herself, she is weeping. “Yes, my lord,” she says.
“What will you do?”
“Whatever they ask, my lord.”
He releases her wrists and gets off the bed. “And you’ve been coddling the boys. You’re not to be alone with them again. Ever.”
She still has enough pride left not to beg. I will kill you for that, she thinks.
He leaves the room. The silence from the antechamber after he shuts the door is ominous. She imagines he is forcing himself on the maids. Then she hears the outer door close, and where the weight of his presence had not crumpled her, the relief of his absence does.
* * *
Two nights later, she lies in bed waiting for her clock to strike the first hour after midnight. At last she cannot bear the waiting any longer, and she gets up. She puts a robe on over her shift. Sandals on her feet. She lights a candle in a holder and puts out the lamp. A sprig of lavender has fallen from the bunch above the window, and she treads on it. The bitter sweetness of its scent rises.
The maids are asleep in their room. The guard outside her door wants to follow her. She tells him firmly not to. She can see him considering refusal, but something in her face changes his mind. What would he say if he dared to argue? That the queen—because she is the queen now—is not safe in her own Citadel?
Esvar’s room is above hers. She walks along the corridor and up the stairs. His door is guarded and unlocked. Inside, his nurse sleeps in her alcove. The boy lies on his own bed, covers a tangle, face smooth, lips pouting a little. He is still so young.
“Esvar,” she says. “Vasha.” He rejected the childhood nickname a year ago. She leans over and kisses him. He doesn’t stir.
Through the Citadel and out to the gardens. She takes her sandals off and carries them in one hand while her feet enjoy the cool flagstones of the path. Bright stars shine down. In the distance, far away but clear in the night’s quiet, the Temple bells toll one.
She passes under a trellis into the inner section of the garden. The fountains are shut off for the night. In daytime she can see the reflection of a nearby gazebo in the garden pools, but tonight the water is black and still, throwing nothing back. She stands a long time looking at the silky surface. That would be another way out, but she is not in enough despair to take it.
She hears a movement in the grass, and then her name. Tensing, she turns and sees Nihalik. This meeting was his idea, and the suggestion of it left a taste of fear in her mouth. Karolje has forbidden them to speak. She is safe from Asps or traitors, but not from her husband. Karolje has chosen Ashevi to replace him as the boys’ tutor, and Nihalik has been sent away. He will leave at dawn.
He is not usually courtly, but this time he bows and says, “My lady.” His silvered hair looks ghostly in the starlight.
Bitterly, she wishes it were Ashevi who had been dismissed. Not Nihalik, who has been her safety. She is afraid of what Ashevi will teach her boys instead: harshness, arrogance, domination. He likes power. She hates herself for being drawn to him.
Nihalik offers her a small book, a sealed packet of papers, and a letter. She slips them inside her robe. He says, “After you read these papers, destroy them. The book is for you. The letter is for Tevin. Tell him to wait until he is alone to read it. It is better if you do not know what I have told him.”
“And Esvar?”
“Tevin will watch him where you can’t. And teach him. They are both clever.”
Above, an owl hoots, reminding her of that first night she spoke to him after they left Timor. It seems a very long time ago.
“Mirantha, I must warn you. If you continue to have Ashevi as your lover, you will be hurt. He has more influence than he has let you see.”
“It’s over,” she says, dry-eyed. “It must be, with Karolje back.”
“He will try to convince you otherwise. Be ca
reful.”
It is advice she does not need. She has known since Piyr began to weaken that the affair with Ashevi must end. It would be better if he were not the boys’ tutor, but she dared not argue with Karolje. She wondered what he gained by giving Ashevi the post and concluded it was control over his sons. And, because they are her sons too, it is another hold on her.
“Will I see you again?” she asks. She feels as forlorn as a small child.
“If you need to find me, you can. But I won’t come back to Karegg while Karolje lives. My queen, don’t let anyone convince you that you are not strong.” He bows again and turns.
She should say farewell but can’t. She watches him walk under the trellis, summer flowers massed and untidy over it, and move out of sight. His footsteps show in the dew. Beyond, the bulk of the Citadel looms. It is all Karolje’s now.
In her room, she opens the papers. The first of them is a list of names of people she can call upon for help if she needs it. She wonders about these men and women, lawyers and shopkeepers and carpenters. One is a master in the College. She memorizes their names and addresses, then burns the list. The second paper is a set of instructions about how to reach Nihalik if she needs to. That also she memorizes and destroys.
The book is a small volume of poetry. She pages through it. Lines catch her eye, here and there a stanza or whole poem. The language is beautiful, precise and vivid. The book contains love poems, and reflections, and poems of despair. Sunset-gilded waterfalls and kisses that taste of wine and happiness.
A single phrase strikes her in the heart: Where lost breaths are swallowed breath by breath. She reads the poem in whole twice, three times. Harpies own all twilights. Yes. The birds of death and loss and vengeance. The twilight realms where shadows might be real, where the eye slips on what it sees, where nothing is certain. The border, the edge, unfixed. That is where she must hide herself. She frees a sprig of lavender from the bunch on the mantel and uses it to mark the page.
She puts out the light and slides back into her bed. Her feet are still cool from the grass. She remembers again that night six years ago. Longing for her home swoops through her painfully, and she closes her eyes. It takes a long time to fall asleep.
* * *
Karolje apparently issued no other orders regarding Nihalik, because in the morning she gains entrance to his rooms without trouble. She looks at the boys’ workbooks, which are all that remain on the shelf. Nihalik took his own books with him.
The books are identical, bound in green leather and stamped in gold with the royal crest. Because of the war, Karolje intends to crown Tevin as his heir during the coronation in a few weeks. She imagines that Ashevi will continue to teach him, but not in the same manner. She opens a drawer and finds another book in Tevin’s hand, half of it at least still blank.
With Nihalik gone, there is no one she can say things to. She needs to write, dangerous as it is, to keep herself from festering. If the book is missed, they will think Nihalik took it by mistake. In her room, she puts it on the shelf with her other books. It sits, innocuous, full of potential. The keepsake of a sentimental mother.
The books shelved with it are ones Karolje has said he will ban outside the Citadel. He has already begun to purge the College of the masters he thinks will oppose him. Language is a weapon, learning is a weapon, and he knows it. He can’t do anything in the Citadel, where the courtiers have already read the books he wants destroyed, but he can control the rest of the city and much of the nation. He is requiring tutors and clerks and lawyers and the like to have licenses, their books inspected and approved by the Crown. His censors are busy at the College library, separating the approved books from the others.
That afternoon, she is called to a meeting to plan the coronation. Karolje’s cousin Goran is there, and a cold-eyed lord named Doru Kanakili, who attached himself to Karolje in the south, and the Hierarch, and Ashevi, and half a dozen others whom Karolje intends to build his reign upon. She would warn them, but they won’t listen. She is the only woman.
She looks at Ashevi, not far from Karolje, and sees a pleased smile on his handsome face. He feels more powerful now. She wonders if Karolje knows. She imagines Ashevi quarreling with him, telling him in triumph, I fucked your wife. She despises herself for thinking it, for not trusting her lover to keep the secret, for imagining him to be as selfish a man as her husband. Once she has the thought, she cannot get rid of it, and the words beat a constant counterpoint in her mind during the meeting. I fucked your wife. I fucked your wife.
* * *
The king replaces all her maids, and she is accompanied everywhere by the gossipy, sharp-eyed wife of Karolje’s favorite general. The night before the ceremony there is a celebratory banquet. The food is plentiful and exquisite. Meat sliced almost paper thin, fruits from the far south that must have cost an exorbitant amount to ship without spoiling, four kinds of delicately flavored soup, eight kinds of cheese. Wine, including the rarest pale blue. The plates are gold and silver, and the glassware sparkles and shines.
Twelve years of banquets have given her experience enough in dissimulating, and she laughs at Karolje’s jokes and is interested in everyone’s conversation. She wears a beautiful flame-colored silk gown and a golden torque that cannot be grabbed and twisted around her neck. As the night wears on, the din becomes overwhelming, and all she has to do is sip wine and nod and smile. None of her family are present; her father is at the front and her brother is in Timor, recovering from a wound. Their mother is caring for him. Or so Karolje said.
When the dancing starts, she asks for and receives permission to leave. Tevin is still at the table. She expects it to be the first of many such nights. There is no keeping him out of Karolje’s corrupting influence now.
* * *
On the way back to her rooms, she encounters Ashevi. He bows. She imagines his mouth on her breasts and is almost felled by the strength of the desire that shoots through her. Her legs are wobbly. She can blame it on the drink.
A guard stands thirty feet or so away, well within earshot. There is nothing to say. She greets him politely and walks on. I fucked your wife.
DRESSED LIKE A prince instead of a soldier, diamonds sparkling on the collar of a silk shirt, Esvar studied Servos Tashikian while the clerk went through the formalities. They were in the receving room where small private audiences were held. It was carpeted and curtained, softer by far than the throne room. The dais was only a step high, and the gilded ornate chair on it was upholstered with velvet. Several plainer chairs in the room allowed the prince to invite petitioners to sit, but he had no intention of offering one to Tashikian.
Tashikian was a wine merchant of about fifty or fifty-five. His clothes were expensive and well-cut, his greying brown hair sleek and held at the neck with a bronze pin. His eyes were green-gold in an ungentle face, the sort belonging to a man who preferred trampling his opponents to compromising. It must gall him to have to ask anything.
Esvar said, “State clearly your petition or complaint.”
Tevin had foisted the hearing off onto him, and he wanted to be done with the business quickly. It was a routine afternoon ritual, and he had already adjudicated the other matters, settling a small part of an inheritance dispute between the two daughters of Lady Katina and issuing a formal order to Lord Nirik to leave the lady he was enamored of alone. It was unusual for a commoner to have been allowed to petition directly; the man must have bribed several people well.
“Your Highness.” Tashikian stepped forward to the proper spot and bowed. He said, smooth as a hot knife through butter, “I beg your pardon, my lord, but I had hoped for private words with Prince Tevin.”
Of course he had. Tevin would be king. He had seen battle and commanded troops. He brought every eye to himself when he entered a room.
Esvar said, “Not the king?”
“I should be glad to see the king were I invited, but I do not presume to expect it.”
You presume a hell of a lot, Esv
ar thought. He chastised himself for a short temper. He and Jance Mirovian had raided a house the night before, and nothing had gone wrong. At least not from Karolje’s point of view. Esvar had sat quietly in his room afterward, drinking one glass after another of good wine. He was not sure how much longer he could keep up the pretense of obedience.
“I sit in His Highness’s place with his full authority.”
Tashikian inclined his head. “As you know, the warehouse fire destroyed goods worth thousands of marks. Mine were insured, but the insurers are refusing to honor their contracts. Nor am I the only man in this position. Therefore I have come to seek compensation from the Crown.”
He was not the first man to come forward about the fire in the two days since it had occurred. The curfew and the soldiers in the streets, the arbitrary searches, the delay in goods entering Karegg, had brought lords and merchants full of complaints to the Citadel. Tashikian was the first man Esvar was aware of, though, who had asked for money. It explained why he had demanded a royal audience.
“Do you speak for the others or only for yourself?”
“Only for myself, my lord. But much of my inventory that was destroyed was intended for the Citadel.” Tashikian bowed. “I count the steward here as one of my best customers.”
“The problem, sir, is that while the treasury would bear the loss had the wine already been purchased by the Citadel, the risk remained yours. How much was the damage?”
Tashikian told him. It was substantial, but not enough to ruin a man unless he were significantly indebted in other ways. A man who dressed and carried himself like Tashikian did should not be hurt much. Especially if he was selling to the Citadel; the steward was a lavish spender. Good food and good wine kept the nobles happy.
Esvar said, “Do you have a ruling from a magistrate?”
“No, my lord.”
“You don’t have the standing to petition directly without one. You need a magistrate’s ruling against you first.” Any lawyer Tashikian consulted would tell him the same. “And in any event, this is a matter for the chancellor. Why are the insurers refusing?”
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