by Zoe Marriott
“You are very welcome, my dear, spoiled prince.” I closed the book, and laid it aside as I stood, shaking out my white skirts. “Now I’m going to leave Shell to amuse you for a little while, and see if I can persuade the doctors to approve poached eggs on toast for your dinner.”
“I adore you!” he called after me fulsomely as I went. I knew I wasn’t supposed to hear the quiet question that followed. “Shell... My Mother still hasn’t asked to visit?”
Curse you, Miramand.
The woman sulked like a petulant child. I was left wondering if she wouldn’t rather Uldar had died than proven her mistaken by surviving due to Shell’s grace. And just as often I asked myself if I was the naive little girl she had called me for even bothering to wonder. She had barely bothered to emerge from her chambers since Uldar had been retrieved from the brink of death; the story her ladies- in-waiting gave out was that she was so destroyed by the ordeal of seeing her son so ill that she needed to rest in solitude.
The King himself had managed to stagger in to see the prince at least once a day, and sometimes more.
But despite Miramand’s wrath, soon Uldar would be well enough to start eating normal food, and after that I had no doubt that he would be back on his feet in no time. And then – well then – there would be no reason that preparations for the wedding should not immediately begin again.
Shell had never been the obstacle that Miramand had conspired to make me think, and the whole Kingdom – if Osia was to be believed – now worshipped at my feet, giving me the credit for healing their prince despite how little I had actually done to help. The King himself had commended me. So there was nothing standing in our way any longer. Uldar and I would be married. Soon.
I stopped in the receiving room, staring blankly at the wall. Our marriage – a mere formality now – would be the final seal on the position I had nearly died to secure, and the penultimate step in my re-ascension to power. Once I was Uldar’s wife I would have the ability to help so many people. To begin to heal all the deep wrongs that were destroying Silinga from the inside. To protect myself – and Shell, and perhaps even Uldar – from Miramand’s wrath, should she ever emerge from her sulk and try to harm us again.
But in my mind I saw a pair of deep blue eyes, changeable as the sea, lit bright with a secret smile. And then the mournful, wistful look that crossed her face sometimes, more and more often now. A look of introspective resignation, that turned away and hid from me behind that curtain of glossy deep red hair.
She knew it too. What was going to happen. What had to happen.
“Sometimes a ruler must do what is best for all, Theoai. What is best – is not always the same thing as what is right.”
As I stood there, feeling hollow and sick and licking the coppery blood from my lip, a knock came at the door to the suite.
“I’m still here! I’ll go!” I called, to prevent Shell hurrying out.
The visitor was Katja. I drew her inside without thinking. “Oh, I’m glad to see you! I’ve worried. Have you been – downstairs – the whole time?”
“Is Uldar well enough yet?” she asked abruptly, stiff under my touch. Fine lines seemed to have multiplied around her eyes, and the corners of her lips were pinched; she did not look directly at me.
I closed the door quickly. “Well enough? For – for the Boiler Room?”
My face and tone must have answered her question. She spun away jerkily and began to pace. Her demeanour was so unlike her usual air of self-possession.
“Has something happened?” I asked, filled with dread. “Is Aerin worse?”
“Does it matter?” she asked. Then she put her head down. “Theoai, nothing ever changes for the better down there. If Aerin isn’t worse today she will be tomorrow. Her, or someone else, or a dozen someones.” She finally met my eyes. “She won’t see me anymore. She’s too ashamed.”
“Of what?”
“How much she owes. The debt on the contract.”
I sat down. As I had hoped, habitual good manners forced Katja to take a seat on the couch beside me. “How much is the full figure?”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Five hundred.”
“Argynt?” That was the Silingan silver coin. It was a very hefty amount, but less than I had expected, given what Katja and Ralkin had told me.
Katja shook her head, opening her eyes to give me a sidelong, weary look. “Gilt.”
I tried not to let my shock show, but she saw it, and huffed out a bitter laugh. That was the gold coin. It was a ridiculous sum. A gilt was worth ten argynt. You could buy a warship with that much. “How – ?”
“There was an accident when she was training. She stoked fire instead of breaking ice, and a carpet was ruined. The masters fined her.”
“A fine? No carpet in the world is worth five hundred gilt.”
“It doesn’t matter. The debt has been logged. She works night and day, barely sleeps because when she is not at her post the debt accrues interest, barely eats because the cost must come from her earnings... She can’t keep it up. No one could. She’s going to die down there.”
No.
No, she isn’t.
I contemplated dragging Uldar forcibly from his comfortable bed of recovery and marching him through those dank fissures in the cliff down to the heart of suffering that kept his realm alive. But it would do no good. He had been so close to death when Shell saved him that his unsteady legs still sometimes required help getting to the bathroom. And even if Uldar had the physical strength to make the trip, there was no guarantee that he would immediately agree with Katja and me that that all the mages must be freed from their contracts. Uldar’s struggle between complete dependence on his parents’ approval and his natural reckless streak made him unpredictable. I could not trust him to do the right thing – not the way I trusted Katja, or Shell.
All of which was irrelevant just now anyway, because he did not have the authority to free the Ice Breakers. Not yet.
Nor did I have any plan for how to replace the mages once they were free. Would any of them wish to stay, under fair conditions and for fair pay? If not, how quickly could new Ice Breakers and Fire Stokers be recruited and trained to take their places?
Much as I wished to destroy all the vile trappings of exploitation of both mages and Llemanssers, I would never gain widespread support for doing so if I allowed the Silingana to melt into a puddle in the process. I must be practical.
“Princess?” Katja prodded me. I blinked, calculations and questions clearing from my eyes so that I could focus on my friend once more. She was staring at me. Waiting.
I could not save all of the mages today. But I had the capacity to save one.
I put my hand to my throat. “In Yamarr, unblemished white pearls are nearly priceless. Are they equally valuable here?”
Katja’s gaze followed my hand to rest on the nearly waist length string of perfectly matched, glowing white pearls that Miramand had gifted me on my first day in the Silingana. “Nearly but... No, Theo, you can’t. Everyone in the Palace knows that Queen Miramand gave those to you. What will they say if you suddenly stop wearing them? What if the Queen asks for them back?”
“I don’t care what the gossips here say of me. And if Miramand asks after them, I shall tell her that I dropped them in the sea. What a tragic accident.” She could hardly loathe me any more at this point, and I found I was shockingly unmoved by the prospect of her wrath.
I pulled the pearls over my head, bundled them up in my hands, and held them out. Katja took them with no more protests, lips trembling, eyes filling with her usual ready tears.
“Thank you. You can’t know what this means to me – to us.” Then she checked herself, face crumpling. “Oh, my foolish tongue. Of course you know. I keep forgetting, I’m sorry. Thank Morogana we are not in Yamarr.”
My brows scrunched together. This was the second time she had implied something like that. “What do you mean? Katja, what do you know about Yamarr?”
; “Not you!” She dropped the pearls into the lap of her shabby green dress in her haste to seize my hand. “I know you would never do that to a child!”
I blinked, wrong-footed. “Well, I did argue to modernise the law – ”
But she spoke over me, hasty and repentant. “Not with what you’ve suffered. And I can’t say that I entirely blame those that do it, because – I mean, I can see that having your child just ripped away from you would drive any parent into a kind of madness. I couldn’t stand it if someone took my own baby away from me, simply because of how they were born. It’s simply brutal. But to feed them poison instead... I don’t think I could do that, either.”
Oh. She had heard tales of those rare, tragic ‘purgings’ and had believed them to be an everyday occurrence. I opened my mouth to reassure her, but before I could speak, she finished.
“I’m sure that your mother and father acted only from love. But even so, you could have died or been crippled for life, and you’ll never even know what gift you might have had. And to this day you have to have your medicine if you want to stay quite well, and I know that people like the Queen will always try to use that against you. At least our mages here are left to grow up normally. They have control of their gifts, and can hope one day to use them freely.”
I closed my mouth. Blinked. Worked out what she was trying to say. Katja had heard Miramand talk about my condition, its symptoms. Katjya had made me, herself, the herbal remedy which treated that condition. So she had assumed – had put that together with her mistaken notions about Yamarr – and jumped to conclusions. But it was preposterous to suggest that my Mother would – would feed a Blessed child a purging potion. I hadn’t even had a Blessing. Had I? No. No, of course not. I would have known about it, and anyway my Mother would never. My Mother would never...
Risk sacrificing her firstborn child for the sake of the throne?
“Sometimes a ruler must do what is best for all, Theoai. What is best – is not always the same thing as what is right.”
There was a rushing sensation in my head, a sound in my ears like the sea, or like my own pulse gone haywire.
Bizarrely, my first instinct was to laugh. Had I honestly never realised this? Never fitted those simple puzzle pieces together, as Katja had so effortlessly done? Or had I guessed at it, perhaps, once upon a time, and been so appalled and frightened that I had locked the question away inside myself, with all the other thoughts and feelings my Mother had taught me to suppress, without ever seeking the answer?
“Theoai? Are you well?” Katja asked, as I stumbled to my feet.
“I – I’m sorry. I’ve remembered – something urgent. Go. See Uldar. He’ll be pleased...”
I could manage no more. I found the door and fled through it.
The heels of my white slippers rang an unsteady rhythm on the icy floor as I lurched away from Uldar’s rooms, wandering blindly through the Silingana’s corridors, my mind churning like the sea at the base of Morogana’s rock.
I had thought myself so clever. So cunning. To hide my condition from everyone all those years. Even right after the seizures had first begun, when I had been panicked and scared, never sure if the fits were going to kill me, still frantically seeking the right medicine and the right proportions. Even when my episodes came frequently and with no warning. Mother had never guessed. Never said a word. Never displayed a hint of suspicion.
Of course not. It had never been a secret. Not from her. She must always have known. She had probably even worked behind my back to conceal it from others. Having realised at whatever young age it was that I was a Whisperer – so early on that I myself could not remember the manifestation of my ability – and having made the decision to attempt to purge my Blessing, she must have been so grateful that I was spared death or some obvious disability that covering up after me when my episodes began seemed a small price to pay.
Until I exposed that secret by having a seizure before the Council of Three and the whole court.
No wonder she had refused to fight for my position, to stand up to the Whisperers and Scholars and the Council of Three on my behalf. The only way to keep inconvenient questions from being asked, questions that would have resulted in her law-breaking coming to light, had been to swiftly and quietly remove me from the line of succession and put Aramin in my place. Perhaps Aramin herself had even realised that.
My sister always was cleverer, more cunning, than I.
As far back as I could remember, I had aspired to be what my Mother was. Resolute. Immoveable. Flawless. The ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, worthy and unworthy.
It had been a lie. A thin, desperate cobweb of lies: just as pitiful as my own pretence of confidence and command had been, back then.
Why had she done it? From love? Had she been so desperate to avoid losing me? That didn’t seem like her – but clearly I had not known her as well as I always believed. Or was it ambition? Reluctance to lose her firstborn, the heir to the throne, when she had not known yet whether she would ever have another child? That felt more like the truth.
But whatever the reason, I could not deny it. Rather than give up her Blessed firstborn to the Order, or attempt to overturn their uncompromising traditions, she had cast aside principles, laws, and her duty as a monarch and a mother and deliberately poisoned me. Destroyed a natural, inborn part of me before it had even had the chance to develop fully. As Katja had said, I would never even know what my talent might have been. The things I could have done. The life I might have had. My own parent had taken all of that away from me.
And then – perhaps worst of all – Mother had spent the rest of my life trying to justify that monstrous act. Trying to burn her weakness out of me. Make me into a reflection of that Queenly perfection she herself had so utterly failed to reach.
Love, Katja said. My Mother must have acted out of love. The same love, perhaps, that Miramand felt for her son, even while she stood over him and watched him dying by her hand. What was this love that was made of lies, and poison?
Rest was for the dead. Pity was more bitter than death. But love? Love was crueller than pity or death.
I am calm.
I am...
I am not calm.
I am not calm at all.
36
I forgot about my duty to keep Uldar occupied while he recovered, and my promise of eggs for the midday meal. I could not look at anyone, talk to anyone, feign normality for anyone, not even for a cook or a maid – not now.
I hid where no one else ever seemed to go, and where no one was likely to look for me. In the library.
At first I read. I located every book about Yamarr that the Silingans had and tore through them. Some part of me was hoping to find obvious bias and bigotry, fantastical stories and clearly fictional claims. To prove Katja and myself wrong. To rebuild the shaken foundations of my world.
But it didn’t work.
The purging of Blessed children was a rare practice, confined to a few isolated incidents each decade. That was what I had always been told. The story that had been flung in my face every time I campaigned for changes to those ancient laws. Purging hardly ever happened anymore, and when it did, it was the fault of bad education or bad judgement on the part of the parents – not of the Yamarri state. And of course, since children who were purged were ‘always’ either killed or left paralysed or blind or seriously disabled, it was easy to catch and punish their parents.
Lies. More lies. The books – which had been gathered from multiple sources, multiple countries, over the past century – had a different story to tell.
Yamarr, it was said, had only half the number of active ‘magic users’ that belonged to nearly every other civilised country; the practise of purging was that common, that widespread. Despite the strict laws against it, those who were wealthy or of noble families were almost never punished for doing this to their children. In fact, many wealthy families had their own traditions surrounding the purging, including idiosyncratic recipes f
or the purging poison. And most children thus treated, especially those who manifested young, survived the process with only ‘minor’ side effects. Clumsiness, heaviness in the limbs, or slurring of speech that might improve with time. Persistent headaches.
Some loss of sharpness in the vision.
‘Occasional seizures.’
Treatments for all these were listed.
It was not, after all, my own ingenuity that had yielded an effective treatment for my episodes. The apothecaries I had feverishly consulted must have made similar cures all the time. My Mother could have obtained one and given it to me herself, if she had not been so deathly afraid her own actions would be exposed.
According to one tome – a learned medical book, less than ten years old – the only children in Yamarr who avoided mutilation and were left to grow into their powers were those from the lower classes. Parents with large families who were able to surrender a child to the Order without missing them so much, it suggested. Or perhaps those that needed the purse of gold that the Order of Whisperers often paid in recompense...
A purse of gold. Didn’t that sound familiar?
Had I believed that Silinga was uniquely rotten? That it was within my power to heal this broken nation? Miramand had been right to laugh at me. I had not even noticed the corruption that festered in my own homeland. My own family. I really was the child Miramand had called me.
After a few hours I could read no more. I tucked myself into one of the few sheltered corners of the library where the bookshelves formed a small nook, and stared at the pages blankly. I tried to think, but my thoughts could not settle on anything for long before great gusts of misery blew up to sweep them into the whirlwind of my emotions.
If everything I have believed is a lie, does that make me a lie too?
If everything I have wanted is empty and worthless, then what is left of who I was?
Triple Gods – do you exist? Will you answer me?
