by Zoe Marriott
“At last, something I am better at,” he gloated, as we circled the long tables, moving toward the other couples. They were forming into a rectangle formed of four lines – a completely unfamiliar arrangement. “You may speak twenty languages, use words like exothermic, and effortlessly have my Mother eating from your hand – but you do not dance! So now it is my turn to teach you something, and I’m going to enjoy it, I promise you.”
There was something troubling about that statement, but I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it. So I only fluttered my lashes at him and murmured: “Whatever you say, my Prince.”
18
He snorted. “Stop that. I can tell when you’re making fun of me, you know.”
Only in your dreams, foolish boy.
We passed Shell at her lonely place at one of the long tables, and I thought that her eyes followed Uldar, but her head did not move and I could not be sure. She had finished eating and was leaning subtly away from the man next to her. He was talking earnestly in the direction of her chest. It must have been intensely uncomfortable, perhaps even frightening, to be the object of such attention without the ability to so much as say ‘Stop’.
And Uldar, who had dubbed himself her friend and protector, either did not notice the other girl’s predicament or did not care.
Stop thinking about her, Theoai.
I snapped my eyes back to the Prince. Still laughing and in good temper, he guided me to a place among the dancers, and then through the steps of the Tantara. In truth, it was not difficult – not for a girl who had trained to be a warrior queen, to fight bare-handed, with knives, swords, and on horseback since she was three. My reflexes and muscle memory were honed. But I soon realised that the more I pretended to fumble and clutch at Uldar’s shoulder, the closer he drew me and the brighter his smiles became.
It was – nice. I supposed. To lean on him and know that he would not only take my weight, but enjoy doing so. All I had to do was swallow my pride, ignore the way the other dancers rolled their eyes at me. What did I care if they thought me clumsier, slower than I was? They would learn better once I had secured my place. It did not hurt me. Not really.
Finally the merry music came to an end. Flushed and still laughing, Uldar bowed to me – I quickly made a curtsey when I saw that was what the other women were doing – and we then applauded the musicians along with the rest of the dancers.
A shattering metallic crash resounded through the room. In unison, every head in the hall turned to stare at the central table. King Radugana had, either by accident or design, replicated his son’s earlier accident on a massive scale, sweeping a platter holding a large pitcher of wine and goblets from the hands of one of the servants.
“By God’s red arse, what an insipid evening this is!” he proclaimed, loudly enough for me to make out each word all the way across the chamber. He ignored the servants rushing to clear up the spilled wine and chase the rolling goblets across the floor. “Is this dancing? Child’s play! In my day we danced better when we were in our cups!”
“You’d have had to,” someone muttered just behind us. “Since you were never out of your cups.” Another man snorted, bitterly.
Uldar’s face was a rigid mask that concealed nothing. His twitching lips, tense jaw and narrowed eyes might as well have been a shout of anger and despair over his Father’s behaviour. He made a jerky sign at the minstrels’ gallery, and almost at once the musicians rushed into a new piece. They played more loudly than before, an arrangement heavy on horn and drum: more of a dirge than something to dance to. But the dancing mood was gone anyway. Everyone was already heading back to their seats.
Uldar’s polite grip on my elbow tightened as we slowly, reluctantly trailed across the room toward the central table. From the corner of my eye I could see his feet literally dragging. Radugana was still ranting about something, growing more and more purple, his hands jabbing angrily at the air and occasionally hitting the table, although his words were nearly drowned by the determined musical efforts from the gallery. Miramand had gone away again. She was unmoving and distant in her place beside him, making no attempt to engage or remonstrate with her husband.
I didn’t want to go back up there; it was clear that Uldar desired it even less. I opened my mouth, not sure what I was about to suggest – that we ignore duty and appearances and slip out of the room to hide from his own Father? – when I was distracted by a sudden quick movement amidst the chastened stillness that had enveloped the room.
It was Shell. She was on her feet, moving swiftly between the tables, a lone graceful figure claiming a place at the centre of the empty dance floor. She raised her hands, and brought them together. I could not hear the sound of her clap. Nor the next one. Or the next. But the musicians could clearly see her. Their dirge slowed, dragged to a halt – and then began again, in a new rhythm that matched the beating of her hands.
The music was still dark, threaded through with melancholy, but now it moved to a faster, wilder beat. The irresistible beat of Shell’s own bare feet. Her arms, her legs, her hips. Slowly at first, but inexorably as the tides, she began to dance.
She moved as though her body were water surging at the human boundaries of her skin. Her arms lifted and her hands beckoned, swaying and unfurling like breakers on a beach. Her eyes closed. Dark lips parted as she bent back, back. Ecstatic. Lost in her own world.
There was no calculation in her wild grace, no studied technique. No symbolism or awareness of audience. Shell’s dancing had nothing in common with mannered court dancing. With war dances of victory or mourning. With the ritual dances the mountain tribes of Yamarr performed. Yet watching her felt like watching all of them at once. Like the purest and most distilled form of everything every other dancer drove themselves to the edge of their endurance and their body’s flexibility to reproduce.
The tempo of her movements increased. The fabric of her gown belled and rippled around her twisting form like the shadows of clouds scudding over a tranquil sea. Her hair was dark fire, glints of flame cresting black waves as night fell.
The music had fallen away. The noise of the hall might have been a thousand miles distant for all I could hear. All there was for me was the barely audible shuffle of her feet and the harsh rasp of my own breath.
Have I ever, for a single instant in my life, been so free as she is right now?
Shell spun, dipped, swayed and reached imploringly for something I couldn’t see or imagine. She pirouetted on one foot on the very tips of her toes, her other leg lifting, arms raised as if she were about to take flight – and then went still. The long bars of her ribcage were clearly visible through the bodice of her dress, heaving with exertion. Sweat gleamed on her exposed shoulders and the tops of her breasts. For a dizzy, irrational blink, I was sure that no one could possibly hold such a position. Something must break. She would fall, or the sharp knobs of her collarbones, her cheekbones, her knees and elbows, would suddenly tear through the pale fragile silk of skin, and it would fall away to reveal some wondrous dream creature: something with wings.
Then her uplifted arms fell. Her right foot found the ground again, perfectly balanced. Her head and shoulders bowed down. She lowered herself into the deepest possible obeisance, forehead almost touching the floor.
Her eyes opened for the first time since she had begun to dance. They passed over me as if I did not exist – and fixed on Uldar.
It was a fist to my gut. Sounds rushed back as the breath left me in a hard cough. The final notes of the music, the almost inaudible rustle of many people breathing. A chair creaking as someone shifted.
Uldar gasped. “Beautiful.”
It was not he who began the applause. But by the time he had dropped my arm and flown past me to jostle his way through the crowd of stamping, hooting, clapping courtiers, there was not a single person in the hall who had not nearly knocked over their chair in their rush to rise and show thunderous approval of Shell’s performance. Not a single person, save for me.
I was a writhing knot of snakes trapped within a person’s skin.
My eyes were burning, but I did not need to touch my cheeks to know that they were dry. It was not sorrow I felt, or even rage – nothing that would bring tears to my eyes. I did not know the name for what I felt, this bitter black poison that broiled within me. So I stood still, watching them, trapped, hands open and loose at my sides, because I did not know what would happen if I tried to move. I did not know if I would try to hurt someone – or whom.
All I could think was: let go.
Let go. Let go. Look at me.
Look at me.
But they didn’t. Why would they?
I had to move. I had to look away. As stiffly and cautiously as a woman who has taken a fatal stomach wound and fears her insides will spill out, I inched around, turning my back on the joyous couple. My eyes unfocussed and blurred as if I had drunk too much wine, and then found their target. The central table.
Radugana was on his feet with all the others – his bent frame mostly concealed by the bulk of the Chancellor, though his waving arms were visible. Beside him, Miramand was the only other person in the hall not caught up in rapture. I was not close enough to make out the expression in her eyes. I did not need to. She was white to the lips, rigid, and as she stared down at Shell and her son her entire being radiated a single violent emotion. I may not have been able to name my own feelings, but hers were obvious.
Hatred.
Found in the ruins of the great library at the Ice Palace of Silingana, after the thaw
I could not sleep that night. I was exhausted, worn thin with frustration and resentment and worry, yet I could not sleep – only drift in and out of a confused, restless doze. My thoughts, tumbling over themselves like slow swirls of sandy sediment in the warm rivers of the delta, ran through strange channels and travelled to odd places. I was haunted by half-remembered dreams and half-realised emotions.
What was that feeling which had rocked me so when I saw Shell dance? When I saw Shell and Uldar embrace?
I thought I had experienced something like it before. The feeling that comes to everyone who has climbed up to some great height – and then looks down. An almost electric shock that makes our limbs twitch and sends us jerking back from the edge in revulsion.
But that wasn’t quite it. Because something came before. A half-moment, a shiver between breaths. Before the recoil. Before the retreat.
The urge to let go.
And in my dazed, weary mind it all made sense. Somewhere in the shadow of ourselves, the darkest place we fear to gaze on or even admit exists, we all want to stop fighting. To step forward of our own free will and fall. Fear of falling isn't really fear at all. It’s yearning. Desire.
And it’s that which truly terrifies us.
Didn’t you always tell me that fear is weakness, Mother? That a strong Ruler fears nothing? You did not coax me from my nightmares, but scolded me for having them, until I learned to hide them from you in shame. And yet you were the one who taught me fear in the first place. The fear of disappointing you, of being found out, of not being good enough. Always fear. You used it like a surgeon wields a scalpel or a sculptor his chisel, shaping me into the form you wanted.
And I was grateful, then. I thought you were making me worthy. I thought you were making me better.
Do you ever dream of falling, Mother?
19
Days passed. I saw Uldar only once each day, at the evening meal. On the first two evenings after Shell’s now famous dance, Miramand’s attempts to extract promises from her son to escort me to various places and activities planned for the next day were easily foiled by Uldar’s cheery claim that he was simply rushed off his feet organising our visit to Skalluskar.
“What preparations have you undertaken?” I asked at last, that second night. My tone was as pleasant as I could make it, but I feared my efforts to conceal my real feelings only made me sound dull and resentful. “Have you decided yet who shall come with us, or how long we will stay?”
Uldar took a long drink from his wine. “Oh, it’s all in hand. Chancellor! Tell me more about this idea of yours for community fines?”
I stared at the side of Uldar’s face until I was sure he must feel my regard like a red hot poker applied to his cheek. But though his cheek grew pinker and pinker, he did not look at me again. Not once.
So. The trip, the vital, life-saving trip to Skalluskar was very clearly off, even if the Prince did not have the courage to tell me that. I wondered what excuse he would have for me. Or if he would even bother with an excuse.
My supply of medicine was steadily dwindling, and I could not think of another solution that did not require me to explain my secret. It was an impossible dilemma. Revealing the truth voluntarily would likely cause the Silingans to reject me, just as I had been rejected by my Mother. But if I ran out of medicine, eventually, inevitably, they would see my weakness for themselves. They would laugh at me. Turn on me. Pity me.
Pity is more bitter than death.
I reached for my own goblet, lingering over a sip to hide my face. The wine was sour, like acid on the back of my tongue. I wished I could spit it out; good manners forced me to swallow it down instead.
Every evening, Shell waited for the music to begin, rose to her feet, and danced. And every evening I told myself I would not stay to watch. On those first two nights, Miramand left the room the moment she saw activity in the long musicians’ gallery, her eyes half ordering, half pleading with me to follow.
But I didn’t.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t look away, couldn’t flinch and show them that it hurt. Not even if it made me bleed somewhere hidden deep beneath my ribs, so that I clutched at my chest and fought for breath when I returned to my rooms and was finally alone. Had no one ever taught Shell how to behave? How to hide herself away – fold her vulnerability and passion up small, small, and put them in a safe place where no one would see them? Judge them? How dare she – how could she – dance as if she didn’t care that everyone could see inside her soul? Didn’t she know any shame?
I had been a fool. While I fretted and castigated myself for using underhanded tactics to capture Uldar’s attention, Shell had reached out without hesitation and simply taken him for herself.
On the third night, Uldar sat with Shell at one of the long tables, surrounded by his own friends. When he and Shell met each other’s eyes, when they touched, even my near-sighted gaze could see the glow of new love between them. He did glance up at the central table from time to time. Each glance made him hunch in place like a whipped dog, and he was quick to return his gaze to his plate.
“Damn her,” Miramand whispered as the musicians began to warm up. She was grey, lips trembling until she forced them into a thin, hard line. She leaned against the table for support in rising to her feet, and I saw that she was shaking. I stood and reached out to help her. She brushed my hands aside brusquely.
“No. Stay and watch her with the rest like you always do,” she bit out. Then she sighed, dropping heavily back into her seat. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said hollowly, sitting beside her. “What have you to be sorry for?”
“He is my son,” she said. And she said it as if it were a curse.
I clenched my teeth, swallowed, breathed out slowly. I did not mean to speak. But somehow on the next breath my voice emerged again, small and sharp. “It’s her I would like to kill.”
Miramand did not look shocked, nor did she reprimand me for my lack of restraint. She only nodded. I found myself wrong footed by her lack of reaction. Perhaps that was her intention, for her next words did not refer to my confes
sion in any way.
“Have your maid wake you at dawn tomorrow, and make sure she dresses you in your new ermines.”
“Dawn? Ermines?” My expression must have resembled that of the large, whole fish which had been served at the table that night. She let out a tiny, huffing laugh – the first I had ever heard from her.
“Yes. You are going to Skalluskar, remember?”
I felt a surge of heat in my breast. Hope. “I thought that the trip had been – postponed.”
“You believed he had given up the idea and was just using it as an excuse to avoid you? Oh no. He’s going all right.” Something grim flickered in her eyes as she finally pushed to her feet and turned away.
*
I had not been sleeping well, of late. My eyes were open, wandering over the greyish blur that was the silk tester strung above my bed, long before I heard the tiny vibration in the walls that signalled Osia’s quiet entrance into my chambers. I did not wait for her gentle knock, but rose quickly, pulled dressing gown over shift, and in the half-light filtering in through the ceiling, mixed a dose of medicine.
Perilously close to a half dose.
I tilted the locket this way and that. No matter how I stared at it, the greenish powder I had left still looked like barely enough for one more day – let alone the two or three it might cost me to locate a discreet herbal practitioner at Skalluskar. I had been overly optimistic in my estimates.
And when I ran out? What then?
Triple Gods, guide me in my choices. Protect me on my path. Bless me with your greatest gift: time.
I rinsed my mouth out and then drained what was left in the water flask by my bed. My throat always seemed to be parched here. My skin was ashy and dry, my hair flyaway and crackling. Something in the air of the Silingana simply did not suit me. I let out a soft, hollow laugh, swallowing it when I remembered that the maid was in the other room.
