by Zoe Marriott
“They’re mine,” Katja confessed from her place on the bench beside me at dinner. Cousin Yasha sat on my other side, and Uldar and Miramand were across from us on the opposite side of the table.
The open hall at Castle Oborov was filled with row upon row of slightly higgledy-piggledy tables where the whole household, including Katja and her father and their personal attendants, the local priest and judge, the men at arms, and even the kitchen staff and grooms, were welcome to eat the evening meal together. Massive fires roared in hearths at both ends of the room, so that the servants would be kept as warm as the Lord of Skalluskar.
“Forest cats, we call them, although the breed was domesticated many years ago. In theory they’re meant to fight off the larger pests from our stores and protect our chickens from raccoons, foxes, mink and wildcats, but really they’re pets, of course. I love Papa’s dogs dearly, but they cannot curl up on one’s knee and purr while one is enjoying a good book.”
Cousin Yasha’s dogs were volfhunt – wolfhounds – wiry-haired hunters who were large enough for a ten year old to ride on without their toes dragging on the ground. Despite their ferocious reputation they were as friendly as puppies, and let Katja’s cats jump all over them without so much as a curled lip or a growl.
Slipping a piece of roast chicken to the elderly dog which had laid itself across Cousin Yasha’s and my feet with a heavy sigh at the start of the meal, I realised how much I had missed the animals of my home. The elegant, cunning palace cats, the sleek, affectionate hunting dogs, the striking beauty and precision of the falcons. My two horses, Imegin for hunting and riding, and Delimar for war. I even found it within myself to missAramin’s vicious little teacup terrier.
“My poor old Rascal,” Yasha was saying, as the elderly dog heaved itself to its paws and rested its grey whiskery chin on Yasha’s knee. “His joints are troubling him so much this winter. You must make him one of your powders, Katja.”
Katja nodded, and hope darted through my chest with painful suddenness. Could it be so easy?
“Are you a – ” The Silingan word deserted me in my excitement and I scrambled together the closest thing I could come up with. “– herbwife then, Lady Katja?” I took a bite of some random vegetable from my plate and chewed vigorously to hide my sudden, desperate interest.
Katja’s brow wrinkled a little as she worked out my meaning, then smoothed. “I have an interest in healing, yes.”
“I wonder if – ” I began, only to be cut off by Miramand.
“Medicine should be left to doctors, I always think. Growing up in the countryside I saw far too many wounds turn septic and far too many fevers turn fatal because the poorly educated put their faith in unwashed charlatans and their ‘powders’.”
Katja pressed her lips together, apparently unsurprised by this rudeness. Uldar squirmed in his seat. Miramand nodded sharply, as if the awkward pause had been a resounding agreement.
“Try some of this roast hog, Highness,” Yasha said cheerfully, glossing over the discomfort. “I think you will like the spiced apple and leek stuffing – Katja’s recipe, you know.”
I mouthed the word ‘sorry’ at Katja, silently heaping mild curses on the Queen’s head. It would be impossible now to reintroduce the topic. When it came to my condition, sometimes it seemed as if Miramand were trying to make my life more difficult. But I could always catch Katja later on, after dinner. The sharp, bright shard of hope was still lodged in my breast.
Soon enough most had eaten their fill and the babble of conversation began to quieten down as people refilled a final goblet of wine or ale, loosened their belts, and sat back. Yasha called for music, and when it came – from some of the servants, who happily left their seats to take up drums, flute, a kind of long, thin fiddle that was laid across the knee, and a bizarre squeezebox – it was lively and bright. Just the thing to keep diners from falling asleep too soon. Just the sort of thing to dance to.
Shell, who had been seated a little way down from us, between Uldar’s two friends, leaned forward to catch Uldar’s eye, brows lifted in a lively enquiry. Uldar nodded vigorously, grinning.
“Yasha, I have brought you the nicest surprise. You’ll love this. No, don’t ask, just wait!”
Miramand looked as if she would like to repeat my show of temper from earlier and throw something at Uldar’s head. Instead she rose, murmured a quiet goodnight, and said she would see herself to her usual room. Her lady, knitting needles already in hand, followed. Meanwhile, Shell was making her way to the clear space at the front of the hall, before the largest of the two hearths that warmed it.
I clasped my hands together under the table to still their fine trembling. Miramand was gone – now was the perfect time to speak to Katja – I began to turn – but as I opened my mouth to speak Shell began to move.
I had seen her dance several times now. I had taught myself not to stare, to breathe or speak or blink while she moved and not make a fool of myself. Yet today felt different, new again, as shocking and arresting as the very first time.
Her body was backlit against the shifting fire, a near silhouette limned in gold with face and limbs heavily shadowed, flashes of pale movement that disappeared and reappeared as though glimpsed through deep water. Her hair seemed dull and black as a moonless night.
I had always been at once captivated and resentful of the wildness and freedom in her dancing. But now... I glimpsed something new. Something changed, and vulnerable, at odds with the merry music.
She’s sad. She is sad tonight.
I tore my gaze away with a gasp, blinking rapidly. On my right Yasha was staring, enchanted, smiling. Uldar, opposite him, the same. No sign that they saw anything strange about the dance. No sign that anyone did. All over the room people were clapping to the beat, tapping their feet. Happy and entertained.
You’re imagining things. Stop thinking about Shell! Get on with what you need to do.
Taking a calming breath and firmly keeping my eyes away from the dancing girl, I turned to my left – and found the place beside me empty.
24
I waited for five, then ten minutes, through a second dance from Shell and the usual applause and adulation from everyone present, and the beginning of a more pedestrian jig from a few young couples. But the Lady Katja did not return.
“I hope your daughter is not unwell,” I finally ventured to Yasha, hoping for some bland reassurance, and a hint at where the other woman might be found. “I did not notice her leaving...”
Yasha peered past me at the empty place on the bench, apparently only now noticing his daughter’s absence. A cloud of worry darkened his bright eyes, and he looked at me consideringly. Then he sighed. “I do not think she is ill. But she has been melancholy of late. It’s hard for her here. We’re isolated, and there are few women or girls who are her equal in rank. Her mother has been gone a long time, you see, and about some things a lady perhaps does not wish to confide in her father.”
“I think I understand,” I said, my lips twitching at the understatement. “I, too, have felt somewhat – isolated, of late.”
“I can imagine.” He patted my arm kindly, not allowing his gaze to stray toward Shell, who was sitting nearly in Uldar’s lap, laughing soundlessly at the Castle youngsters gamboling and japing for her attention. “Well, you seem a young woman of more than usual good sense. My Katja can most probably be run to ground organising ferociously in the linen closet, or perhaps in her stillroom, if you’d like her company.”
In a stroke of luck for me, I found the young woman in the first place I looked. It was the ideal location for the conversation I wished to have – a small stillroom, redolent with the scents of white vinegar, dried plants and melting wax. It was tucked in next to the kitchens, which were conveniently deserted now, since all the staff were dancing and drinking in the hall.
Rather less luckily, when I poked my head through the half-open door I found Katja bent almost double over a pile of purple tubers that she had been
attempting to dice, her purple-stained fingers clinging to the edge of her work table for balance as her shoulders shook with miserable sobs.
Her head shot up at the creak of the hinges, and I instinctively backed away with my hands raised, feeling her embarrassment at being caught unawares in such a state as if it were my own.
“I beg your pardon, I am so very sorry to have disturbed you – ” I babbled, expecting to have the floor rightfully slammed on my nose.
Rather than flare up as I would have done, Katja’s shock faded into sad resignation and an unconvincing smile. “It’s all right. I should have closed the door. No, do come in, please.”
Cautiously I obeyed, making sure the door was very firmly shut this time. The other girl sniffed, lifting her elbow to rub her wet face on her sleeve.
“Here,” I said, fumbling a new handkerchief from the pocket worked into my skirt. “Don’t ruin your dress.”
“This old sack? It was ruined years ago,” she said. But she took the square of thin, soft muslin, marking it with magenta smudges as she dabbed carefully at her eyes. “Excuse me. I’m afraid I’m one of those people who cries over almost anything.”
“My Lady – Katja – I know I’m a stranger here and we’ve only just met. But your father said you’d been troubled lately, and I can listen as well as anyone.”
“Oh, that meddling old man!” she exclaimed, then flushed a little at my surprised look. She folded my handkerchief neatly, put it down, and turned back to her tubers, mincing them with rather vicious efficiency. “It’s – it’s an old enough story. I should think every girl has her own version. I had a sweetheart. Now he’s gone.”
I looked at her carefully. At her capable, strong hands, and her meticulously organised room and her mended dress, and the face that moments before had been twisted in sadness and anxiety and care, and was now so carefully composed it was impossible to see anything but calm self-possession there. Without the pink tip of her nose giving her away, I might have thought I had imagined the sorrow boiling beneath the surface. Perhaps Yasha was the only one in Skalluskar who knew her well enough to realise she was suffering without having caught her crying in her stillroom.
“Is that all?”
“All?” She laughed a little wryly. “Isn’t it enough?”
“I think not. Not for you. When you said he was gone, what did you mean?”
Katja put down her knife and rubbed her fingers together, watching the purple juice smear. Then she scooped up the tubers and dumped them into a black granite mortar. “He left. Not – not me.” She shook her head, sighed, and turned to face me again. Absent-mindedly she picked up the handkerchief and began wiping her hands. “We couldn’t... Father would not have approved of him, you see.”
“Why not?”
A slow blush crept up her neck and her gaze slid away from mine. “He isn’t suitable. For a lady. Of my class.”
She and her father were cousins of the King. Even the kindly Cousin Yasha was sure to have strong objections to his daughter marrying a commoner. “I see.”
“We could never have had anyone’s blessing, but that – it wouldn’t have stopped us. Only we needed money. So that we could buy a little land, some animals, make a life. He – he has a gift. And so when the King’s recruiters came looking for Ice Breakers, Wind Casters, Fire Stokers, making all their fine promises of royal service – he took a contract. I begged him not to. He didn’t listen.”
I frowned. “I’m not sure I understand. Is it not – honourable work, to serve the King in that way? Forgive me, things are very different in Yamarr.”
She bit her lip, looking suddenly upset again, for some reason. The piece of muslin twisted round and round her fingers. “Oh yes, I’m sorry. It’s not – no one harms them. But it takes a tremendous amount of people, working very long hours, to keep the Silingana standing, you see. They need a lot of gifted people, Ice Breakers especially, and they don’t – they can’t pay them. Very much.” She was phrasing things quite carefully now, I could tell. “Of course, when the recruiters come they always tell people that if they’re talented, they’ll become a Royal Ice Breaker, serve on the ships, be paid heaps of gold – and earn their contract out in a year or two. But for every one that happens to there are dozens more who go, and just never come back. They never earn their – well, their freedom.”
“Freedom?” I repeated in a whisper, an ice cold droplet of horror trailing slowly down my spine.
“They’re not enslaved. It’s entirely legal, and all of them are of age,” Katja explained hastily, defensive. “And when they sign the contract most of them have nothing. The King engages to give them training, and for the period of the training clothe and feed them, house them – and they’re given a purse up front, for their family. But...” Now her assurance faltered. “Once they’re trained, they must pay it all back, and the contract fee, and pay for anything else they use while they’re working, and so, if they’re given low level work, just maintaining the walls or warming the rooms, and earn a handful of coppers an hour – they just owe more and more...”
“And are stuck there. For life,” I finished bleakly. “How awful. Hasn’t anyone protested?”
“Well – I suppose – everyone thinks it’s a shame, but...” She shook her head helplessly. “It’s just how things work. I mean, how things have always been.”
Exactly the same as back home. Whenever I had brought up changing the old laws, allowing Blessed children to grow up a little, to enter the Order and receive training without being permanently removed from their families, I had heard: This is how it works. This is how things are. This is how it has always been. Repeated over and over with a kind of bewildered annoyance, as if I were questioning why the sky was blue, or demanding that the sun should rise in the west. Even the kindest and best people seemed unable to admit that there could ever be any system better than this, than the way it’s always been.
But still, each year, there would be a case – sometimes two – where a child was poisoned by their own family. ‘Purged’ of their Blessing. They were usually left either dead or blinded or paralysed, and always with their Blessing forever burned out of them. All out of misguided love, out of the desperation of parents who could not stand to lose their child to the Order of Whisperers forever. It could be so easily prevented. I had never understood why there was such resistance to change.
Katja was still justifying. “Without Ice Breakers everything would fall apart, and the Kingdom isn’t made of gold. And, well – at least it’s better than what happens where you come from, isn’t it?” That last was offered in a placating tone, as if attempting to reassure me.
I jerked a little, surprised at how closely her thoughts paralleled my own. “I wouldn’t say that. Perhaps Yamarri laws are a little – old-fashioned – but it’s not as if we haven’t had good reasons to – ” Then I held up my hand. “No, never mind. Do you mean to say that you haven’t heard from your sweetheart at all since he left?”
“The recruiters took him away the next day. He didn’t know where he would be staying, exactly, but he promised to write and let me know the address as soon as he was settled. That was six months ago, at end of summer. He – never broke a promise to me before.”
For some reason that bereft little sentence pierced me to the core. I sat down hard, on one of the stools next to the work table, and thought furiously. No. But? And then maybe...
“How would you like to be an attendant – my attendant, like a temporary lady-in-waiting – at the wedding?”
She stared at me. “That’s kind, but we already have an invitation to the wedding. A standing invitation.”
I schooled myself to patience. “I mean, how would you like to come back to the Silingana with us? And live at the palace, free from supervision by your father or anyone, really – except me, I suppose – for a few weeks? Katja, if your sweetheart was taken to work at the Silingana then he must be there, at least some of the time! You could search for him!”
A light of understanding and hope dawned on Katja’s face. “Oh. Oh! I would – I would like that very much. But would you really want me?”
“I have no ladies-in-waiting. I – lost them. It would be nice to have someone to confide in, other than my future mother-in-law. It would be a help to me, honestly.”
She took a deep breath, jaw clenching with a look of fierce resolution. “Then I accept. With more gratitude than you can possibly know, Princess. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me just yet,” I said, feeling a great rush of relief and triumph, like a starving lion poised, at last, to pounce upon its prey. “I also need a favour from you, and it must be our secret.”
It took no work at all to convince the grateful Katja that I needed the remedy to ease the terrible symptoms associated with my monthly cycle – mood swings, headaches, backaches and cramps. Or that the strictest confidentiality was required to avoid incurring the Queen’s disapproval.
“It’s not a recipe I’ve ever come across before,” she said, blinking at the notes I had dictated to her. “But in the proportions you list I can’t see that it would do any harm taken once daily. And if you feel it helps then that is really all that matters. It says here that a long steep is necessary... If I start now then I should have some ready for you by the day after tomorrow.”
I had known that must be the case, but it was still hard to hide my flinch. Yet the medicine would be useless if she did not follow the instructions correctly, and I had managed so far. What I had left would be enough. It had to be.
“That would be perfect. You have all the required ingredients already?” I asked.
“Hmmm? Yes, yes,” she mumbled, already rummaging in a cupboard for a sealed clay pot. I left her to it, feeling a lightness in my step that had not been there, perhaps, since I had boarded the ship for Silinga.