"Do I?" The queen doesn't look at her but follows her suggestion. The mosaic resolves into a tableau of a woman in armor, crushing pearls to dust under iron boots. She steps back from it. "How odd. It is meant to represent me, yet I feel no kinship to it at all. Do you know, I feel none to any of it, the images humans have made of me. Monuments and paintings, murals and poetry. All that have nothing to do with me. Have you solved the mosaics before?"
She itches to ask, What about the general, how is she? But she will get her answer when she gets it, and she would've heard if Lussadh is dead. The operation must have been successful. "Not these ones, Majesty. But most of them work the same."
"An essential and predictable nature. Yes. It is unusual for you to seek me out. Do that mosaic for me, the one to the right."
She follows the queen's gaze to a panel between the yellow and pink windows. It has been scrambled thoroughly, and most of the tiles rotate in place as well as around, irregularly shaped. Some square, two isosceles triangles, a rhombus. But it is confined to the same rectangular frame, and she is quickly able to find the image's outline. It resolves into the same armored woman, that distant approximation of the queen, in a field of flowers as tall as her shoulders, massive red spider-lilies in riotous bloom.
The queen touches the mosaic, fingers running over the crimson petals. "They got the flowers right. These are for the dead, for souls bound to hell. Did I ever tell the artist about that? It's been some time since I took Kemiraj. It doesn't occur to me to remember these things. So, you've found my engineer."
"Yes. She claims you will need a source of great energy to activate Vahatma." This information comes out of her almost without her meaning to, pulling free as a rose-apple falls from a tree: answering gravity, not volition. Slowly you will lose your will, become her creature in truth as well as pretense. She stops herself short—she cannot unsay it, but she can change the subject. "I would ask about my reward."
A sound that is more trill than laugh. "The ruling of Sirapirat? How greedy you are; did I not say you'll need to wait a year or two? Patience. Yet I will reward you, yes, I will grant you marvelous gifts. An immaculate gun, an incomparable sword. Land, if you want that, or an arena of your own to entertain yourself with."
Nuawa's heart thumps. Now she stands at the edge of a cliff. "None of that, Majesty. I ask for your kiss."
The queen studies her with remote, ophidian regard. "What is it that motivates you? Simple ambition? Lussadh? Humans are far from difficult to comprehend, and then there's you, opaque as basalt. You resist domestication so well, ever you insist on being wild. A kiss. Is it that you seek to be Lussadh's equal?"
Nuawa folds her hands before her, holding herself carefully but meeting the queen's black gaze. This is the way to deal with predators. "I don't wish to contest her place at your side, or her place in any other manner. But I remember what it was like to have your lips upon mine, and it has nothing to do with the call of the flesh."
"Did Lussadh tell you about my second benediction, or is it another of your astute deductions?" In the glacier geometry of the queen's face, the smile seems a fault-line. "Look at me. What do you see?"
"An arctic light and your eyes like stars burning."
"The Heron. How did he appear to you?"
There is an edge to the queen's question. It seems a non-sequitur, a peculiar thing to ask. "A naked figure, with wings from his back and hips and sides, and eider down his front. I would say he was hairless, as his body was covered in feathers. Very gaunt. I would judge him to be forty but it's hard to tell."
"Wings," the queen says softly. "You saw his wings."
The minutes lengthen. The queen does not appear even to breathe. Her inanimation is total—none of the stirring that signifies ongoing life, the respiratory rhythm, the miniscule movements that hint at coursing arteries and pumping atria.
"You should not have seen them. Even Lussadh perceived the Heron as human, shaped like you or her. The usual four limbs, the usual shape." The bathyal eyes examine Nuawa, pinpoints of light revolving within them. "The mirror does not grow in everyone the same. I woke your shard hardly months ago."
She has said too much, Nuawa realizes, has admitted more than she should. But there was no way to anticipate that she should have answered otherwise, to lie that to her the Heron was merely a man. "That is so, Your Majesty." What else remains for her to utter.
The Winter Queen takes hold of Nuawa, touching her belly, stopping at a point beneath her heart. Her hand drops. "The Heron," she says, "is alive. Piece by piece he reconstitutes himself. When I have found him, it will fall to you to hunt him down and bring me his heart. That shall be Vahatma's core, the piece of living puissance our engineer so demands. Prevail against him and you will have your kiss."
Ten
Lussadh wakes to the queen at her bedside. Her thoughts wheel sluggishly in place; she is on painkillers, likely an incredible quantity. The air is at once too bright and too dim, the sleet-light like pottery shards through the window. She is not in her bed. Ceiling too low, the stone too dark. "Your Majesty," she rasps. "I feel that I've failed you."
The queen strokes her jaw. "It does not reflect on you to face defeat before a creature such as that. A leaf is blown away by a storm, and who can fault the leaf?"
Despite her clouded cognition, she does not think herself a leaf. Her mouth is parched. "What was the Heron, my queen?"
"A vessel for might." The queen's gaze turns distant. "Container for a will. Once that was my will, for the most part. Now his container belongs to himself alone, though still he siphons from me. Strange how these things transpire. When I was made, I didn't have a consciousness to call my own. This array of intent and calculation you see today came about because I'd drawn a soul from its original body and kept it within me longer than I was meant to."
The painkillers make her say, "You never did tell me much of all that."
The mildest smile. "Why, my general, you never did ask. It is such an old, lengthy story. The age of a nation, the heft of a dynasty. In Yatpun a war raged between the gods of the mountains and the mortals of the iron cities. I say gods and mortals, but the balance of power was more even than you might think. This tipped when the gods began to create my species. Snow-women the mortals would come to call us, though not all of us were female." Her head tips slightly. "We were sent into the wild as vacant dolls, without memory or desire. To the mortals we were like lost animals. Sometimes it was a seduction—they took us home to nurse to health, thinking us beautiful humans. Sometimes the draw was that we were innocent and fragile. Whatever the case, we would capture their souls. And souls, my treasure, are very potent. They transmute what they touch. Water flows to fit its vessel, but with souls it is the other way around."
Lussadh listens to the rhythms of her body. There is no fireplace in here—even if there was one, it'd have been extinguished in the queen's presence—and so the quiet is complete. The hum of ghosts is louder and closer, nearly rattling. She raises her head, not too far and reaches for the glass at her bedside, which she drains. Water tinged with lemon, of necessity chilled. Most things don't stay warm near the queen. "I can't imagine you as any other than what you are now."
The queen points to the floor, where snow begins to build into a mountain range, from which arises stone faces: anthropomorphic, but so severe that they are without expression. On the other side of the room, miniature cities spread across a moraine, their walls high and gleaming and delicate as frosting. Clouds of vehicles like tiny insects hover above them and rain down webs of gossamer snow, rime javelins and harpoons. "It's not a precise rendition," Her Majesty says, "us being indoor and there being hardly any space. Those mountains were the gods', those cities the mortals'. Do you see those, the flying things? I piloted one. My first flight was like nothing else I'd ever felt—I had no conception of mortality, no fear. But this was a test and most of these vehicles fell and my siblings with them. First, we were infiltrators to harvest souls, and then w
e were disposable shock troops." At a gesture from her the ice reforms: now there are behemoths, faceless and twice as large as the cities, with lashing serpentine limbs. They open their maws, swallow the cities down, and grind them to silver dust between teeth like boulders.
"The gods built siege engines the size of moving mountains and powered them with ghosts. They seared the mortals' mantled defenses and split open their iron cities. And so, the mountain gods won their war and gained dominion of Yatpun." The queen continues smiling. "By then my siblings and I were obsolete, the whole lot of us so fragile and ephemeral."
Lussadh doesn't need to prompt what happened after. She has lived her childhood and adolescence waiting for her grandaunt the king to decide which among the potential heirs would be worthy of succession. The rest were discarded, sometimes consigned to the executioner's blade. "I wonder," Lussadh murmurs, "what I would have done if I had chanced upon you in some white forest, snowed over, and you gazing up at me with eyes empty of knowledge. I like to think that I would have recognized the supreme transcendence in you, a glimpse of the divine."
"In Yatpun, there were fables of people who found my siblings and wedded them in gentleness and lived in bliss all the days of their lives." The queen snaps her fingers; the theater of ice and snow dissolves without a trace, not even water on the floor. She kisses Lussadh's brow. "Take off your robe."
Lussadh does. The wound is vast, a red and sanguine gate through her chest. The spear pierced her lung, must have bruised her kidney, and missed her heart by a hair: the tip of it was broader than most knives. Anesthetics keep her from feeling the profound damage on those connected structures inside her, the trachea and diaphragm, the river of esophagus and the arch of aorta. Blood in lumps and membranes clotting, which would have choked those passages if not for the salves that work to fortify her veins and smooth the flow of alimentary fluids. It will scar unlike any other injury she has ever sustained, both front and back, entry and exit.
The queen puts her mouth around the wound, exhaling lightly, the most feathery of sighs. Her eyes are shut in utmost concentration. The injury does not instantaneously heal but something much greater than a chiurgeon's craft occurs. The flesh is smoother where the queen has made contact, less raw. Lussadh breathes easier, heady with relief, the fog of painkillers lifting.
The queen stands and steps neatly out of her robe, the weight of fabric susurrating as it falls to pool at her feet. It is a stunning sight, a vision, and no matter how many times she has seen this, it never fails to stir Lussadh. The small breasts, the skin that seems less like flesh and more like lantern-glass for the luminescence that dwells within, the swell of hips against the starkness of it all. Knots of wiry hair at armpits and between thighs, making odd shadows. The queen gestures at herself, one hand passing up from her stomach to her chest. "How many spirits do you think I contain, Lussadh?"
"As many as you require. No fewer, and no more."
The queen laughs. "It is my nature to kill what I love."
"That describes a lot of us, my queen."
"Were I to kiss you a third time, Lussadh, I'd simply kill you. Glass-bearing or not your animus would freeze and sink into me, like a piece of shipwreck into the sea. The mouth is the conduit of souls, their natural exit." She climbs back into the bed, onto Lussadh's lap. Her hand grazes Lussadh's belly, low, then lower. "The mirror was also my heart, and when I crossed the barrier from there to here, it tumbled out of me and split to pieces. So many. One of them is inside you and I could give you more still, to strengthen you, to make you more than mortal."
"That's what you did for the Heron. It changed him." Lussadh moves, slightly; she cannot remain quite still, not with the queen's hand on her like this, all her blood concentrating in one place, one spot.
"Correct. And he grew greedy. Why stop at two fragments of my mirror, when he could steal three, four, five ..." The queen's fingers apply more pressure, stroke a little faster. "I've thought of inviting Nuawa here. To have her cradled between us, writhing helpless, crying out wildly like a hawk as we make her come again and again."
Her breath catches. She is almost impossibly hard, more than she has any right to be with her injury so fresh. And yet. "Yes."
The queen pushes her down. Her cunt is slick and cool as she lowers herself onto Lussadh, the grip of it like nothing else. The queen rises and falls; the bed creaks under them.
"Come inside me," the queen whispers, "I want to feel your heat deep in me and it will be like a small, incandescent annihilation."
And she does, and it is.
For a time, they are in silence, joined, the queen still above her and bent like a bow. The royal face is flushed the same way storm clouds may stain the sky, the starbursts of her eyes enormous. "I'll tell you my name. In all this country, in all the world beyond the island of my birth, you'll be the only one to know."
She leans down and speaks into Lussadh's ear, and her name sinks into Lussadh like a pilgrim into the slow-moving dunes.
* * *
The queen's instructions come sooner than Nuawa anticipated, while she is overseeing Penjarej in the makeshift atelier. It is delivered not by Ulamat or calling-glass, but by a snow-maid.
Penjarej screams as the snow-maid climbs in through the window, moving with the satiny ease of an invertebrate. But when it lands it looks as human-like as ever, wearing the same alien smile it always does. Petite frame, slender limbs, and eyes like the queen's: black irises, black sclera, the gaze of deep-sea animals. Made in the image of the queen's siblings, Nuawa now recognizes, either to mock or commemorate.
The snow-maid comes up to her and points at its bare breasts, its bare stomach. On these surfaces is a map to an old crematorium not far from Kemiraj's boundaries: a smear of black on paper-white flesh. More instructions, written raggedly around a sketch of disintegrated architecture.
"I understand." Nuawa inclines her head, knowing she is the only one who can see the queen's missive. The snow-maid nips her hand like a curious dog before exiting the way it entered.
"Oh, gods." Penjarej hurries to double-bolt the window and drop the shutters. For good measure, she leans against the frame. "What was that?"
"A royal courier." The crematorium is a few hours' travel by carriage. Best to leave within the day. "I'll be absent for a time. My colleague Major Guryin will be overseeing you. Xe's very charming and a staunch defender of winter."
The professor nods her understanding: no more needs to be said.
Nuawa stops by her suite to retrieve the anthurium pendant in its little box, delivered this morning by the jeweler. She stays there for a while, turning the velvet case this way and that, scrutinizing its flawless integument.
Crossing the wing to Lussadh's sickroom, she feels pursued, that behind her something is biting and licking at her shadow. The closer she gets, the more this sensation mounts.
The general's voice comes through—Enter—before she even knocks. So much for stalling.
She finds Lussadh reading by the window, a small black book in hand, nude. The general looks for all the world like the erotic inspiration for a sculpture, one that might be called Contemplation or The Soldier-Scholar. Alabaster lighting glazes and softens the contours of the general's body, yet there's no obfuscating the serpentine curve of the spine, the narrow hips and thick thighs that Nuawa has many times traced with her tongue.
"I thought you would come to see me sooner," Lussadh says. "I have been on my feet for days, Lieutenant. The chiurgeon doesn't even fuss over me anymore."
"I had—" Work to do, a task assigned by the queen, but those are only excuses. "General, I could have been someone else. You are not wearing anything."
Lussadh turns to her, shutting the book—Nuawa catches the title, Verses from the Frontline, a collection once included in many curricula, fallen since out of favor because it engages too closely with insurgency, with the romance of fugitive lives. "I knew it was you," the general says. "Remember, I have a better sense of glass-beare
rs than most. You especially."
Nuawa picks up a robe Lussadh has carelessly flung to the foot of the bed. She drapes it over the general, though it covers no more than those muscled shoulders, that long shapely back. "I needed the time to think."
"About what?" This is asked softly.
"It was my fault that you left the palace. By rights, I should have taken the spear for you." It is merely the correct thing to say. More than anyone, Nuawa knows she does not believe in most of what she speaks. But the words come out of her without premeditation, as though propelled by conviction like a tide.
"By rights, I do not deserve to have your death. I myself made the decision to come after you, and I hear you held the Heron at bay most admirably."
Nuawa touches the general's neck. The pulse there burns under her fingertips like a living coal. "Lieutenant Guryin admonished me. Xe wanted to know whether I have—that is, if I ever ..."
"Not an inappropriate question, I trust?"
"No. Of course not. Xe suggested I could stand to be more ... open, more forward with what I mean." Nuawa puts the velvet box in the general's palm. "This is as nothing next to what you're used to, a trifle."
Lussadh opens the box, lightly touches the felt and peels it away to reveal the pendant. A silver anthurium, plated against tarnishing, with a spadix of sanded rose gold. Her smile softens all of her, her features, the set of her shoulders. "It is far more sublime to me than any pearl. Not as sublime as you, but what is? Put it on for me."
She does so on tiptoes, brushing hair away and fastening the clasp at the nape of Lussadh's neck. Then she puts her mouth against the base of the general's skull. "On that day, I thought what it'd be like if I couldn't wake up beside you or have dinner with you again. Is that not maudlin and childish?"
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