by E. P. Clark
“Oh…I heard the Tsarina was indisposed yesterday. You must have been worried for her.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, trying not to see either with my mind’s eye or my real eyes the true cause of much of my distraction yesterday, which had been the gap between the bottom of his shirt and the top of his trousers. I wondered if I should ask him to wear longer shirts. No, definitely not. It would only embarrass both of us, and if I couldn’t keep my mind off a few inches of bare skin, I deserved to be soundly beaten by a green boy.
“I hope she is feeling better now,” he said.
“Sorry? Oh, yes, of course. She is, or so I have heard.”
“She seemed very kind. I was surprised. I wasn’t expecting an Empress to be kind.”
“She can be kind when it suits her,” I said. “Once you get to know her better, you’ll see what a generous nature she has.”
He smiled disbelievingly. “Get to know her better! When would I get to know the Tsarina better, Valeriya Dariyevna?!”
“Oh, you never know,” I said. “Same time again tomorrow?”
“If it pleases you, Valeriya Dariyevna.”
“It does if it pleases you,” I said, which seemed to fluster him in a very promising fashion.
***
My first action when I arrived back at my chambers was to send for word of Sera, and to be told that she was continuing to improve and would be glad to have me join her for a light supper that evening, if I were not otherwise engaged. Extremely heartened by this news, I sent back the message that I would be delighted to join her, and, after taking some lunch (despite the heat I was famished after my session with Ivan, which seemed like an omen of good things to come) I went to gather up Mirochka and the tsarinoviches for their promised training.
The training went less badly than I had feared, although I was glad I had decided not to include Ivan in it. The tsarinoviches were all familiar with the concept of swords, but showed little knowledge and less aptitude for their use. Ruslan, despite at twelve being the oldest, and also having a certain fondness for the idea of swords, was obviously the worst, something of which he was acutely aware and which did nothing to improve his temper. Not that he was a surly lad, exactly, but he was one of those serious types who want to understand everything and have everything make sense, and who fare so poorly in skills that require hours of painful practice and embarrassing fumbling. I tried to jolly him through it as best I could, but it was apparent that he was never going to make an expert swordsman, mainly because he kept stopping to ask questions or argue with me—in the most polite, respectful, and rational fashion, of course—instead of actually practicing.
Although it was probably wrong of me to think this about my own nephew, I could already see the earnest, argumentative, unsatisfactory lover he was going to be in a few years. No doubt he would spend half the time trying to convince his partner that her requests made no sense, while insisting on getting his own way in everything, even if she had twice the experience he did. Dariusz—Sera had been determined to keep the name “Darya” going in the family line, and had made what I considered the ill-advised choice to give her second son this inelegant male version, used only on the very Western edge of Zem’. I wondered if, should she have the good fortune to have a daughter, she would name this latest child Darya, and then could have slapped myself for drawing down ill luck on the possibility of a child by thinking of a name before it was born—Dariusz showed slightly more ability, mainly because he was a cheerful, willing child who was happy to practice rather than argue, but he was also happy to wander off to watch the guards, butterflies, dancing dust motes, and whatever else caught his attention. Only Valery showed any real talent for the subject, and he and Mirochka finished off the session by engaging in an actual sparring match, which he lost, of course, but with honor, something I made sure to tell him.
“Thank you,” he said, glowing with pride. I could see that as the youngest, he was not used to shining more brightly than his brothers. “Are you our aunt, Valeriya Dariyevna?” he continued.
“Yes, of course,” I told him. “Your mother and I are sisters, which means that I am your aunt and Mirochka is your sister.”
“You’re much nicer than our other aunts,” he confided in me. “The Northern ones. Sometimes they can be very mean.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, trying not to narrow my eyes too much at this information.
“Are you the one who will take the throne if mama dies?” he asked. The other boys fixed their attention on me, too, and I could see that this was a painfully important question for them.
“I am your mother’s sister,” I said gently. “So yes, I am her heir. But why are you worried about that?”
“She was sick yesterday. And many times before that, too. And papa is very worried, I can tell.”
“People don’t die just because they’ve been a bit ill from time to time,” I said, trying to ignore the cold gripping my heart. If a boy of seven could see it…
“But if she does…Valeriya Dariyevna, aunty, what will happen to us and to papa? Will you…will you send us away? Or…” He gulped and fell silent.
“Sometimes new Empresses kill off all the old Empress’s kin,” put in Ruslan, looking half-horrified at the thought and half-delighted at the fearful reaction it provoked in Valery.
“Well, I wouldn’t!” I snapped. But that only frightened Valery more, so I made myself calm down and tell him soothingly, “If…let’s say, your mother decided to retire to a sanctuary, which some Tsarinas do, and I had to step in for her and take her place on the throne, then I promise you, all three of you, that nothing bad will happen to you, all right? You and your father can stay here in Krasnograd if you wish, or return to your father’s home in the North, or…even go out to the steppe and live with my family, if you wished. Any family of Sera’s is family of mine, and I would never allow anyone to hurt my family, I promise. Does that make you feel better?”
“You promise, aunty?” asked Valery.
“Of course,” I told him. “Besides, you and I have the same name. How could I let anything bad happen to you?”
“We do, aunty?”
“Yes, of course. I’m Valeriya Dariyevna, and you’re Valery and your brother is Dariusz. You were both named after me.”
“Really, aunty?” he asked, cheering up.
“Indeed. Ruslan was named after your mother’s father, and you two were both named after me. I told you, our family is very important to us. I would take care of you like you were my own sons, and your mother would take care of Mirochka as if she were her own daughter.”
“Maybe she should adopt her, then,” put in Dariusz. “Since she doesn’t have any daughters of her own. That’s why you’re her heir, isn’t it? Because she doesn’t have any daughters, just us.”
“Yes,” I said. “But she doesn’t need to adopt Mirochka, because Mirochka is next in line after me anyway. And Mirochka would take care of you and your father too, wouldn’t you, Mirochka?”
“Of course, mama! But they’d have to stay here with me, so I could keep an eye on them and have my brothers close to me.”
“So you see,” I told them, “nothing to worry about.”
“It would be much easier if boys could inherit too,” said Ruslan, getting the same sullen look I’d seen cross his face during training, when he’d made a mistake.
“Maybe it seems so right now,” I said. “But there would be a lot of problems that came with that, too. You don’t want to inherit the throne, Ruslan, trust me.”
“Do you, Valeriya Dariyevna?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “But it’s my duty. Count yourself lucky it passed you by.”
“It’s still unfair,” he said. “Taking the throne away from the Empress’s own children, and passing it on to someone else farther down the line.”
“Life is unfair,” I told him.
“That’s not a good answer. Life shouldn’t be unfair.”
“I agree,” I said,
trying to stifle a sigh. If I were Ruslan, I would be angry too. And in truth, if I thought it would be a good idea for Sera to try to break the many hundreds of years of Zemnian tradition and pass the rule of Zem’ to one of her sons, I would (for mainly selfish reasons) have renounced every claim to the throne without a second thought, but looking at Ruslan, I could see it would be a disaster if she did so. Succession was, as everyone knew, too tricky an issue to trust to the male line, although exceptions were made often enough—witness my own expected inheritance of Stepnoye from my father. And it had to be said that my father was at least as good a ruler as my mother, faint praise as that might be.
But succession through the male line was one thing, especially, as in my case, when the mother was a person of even greater rank than the father, and outright rule by a man was entirely another. Although there were clever men, and good men, and even men who were good and clever rulers, men, as everyone knew, matured late and died early, leaving them little time to rule with wisdom. And places where the rule of men was common, such as the mines and the road crews and the barracks, were too dreadful for anyone of sense to look on the idea with favor. Perhaps if men renounced rape and castration as a means of rule, just as our foremothers had renounced slavery and torture, then perhaps…but it had not happened in a thousand years of history, and perhaps never would until we women demanded that it be so.
And if we did, our chances of success were slim, for I knew that the greatest beneficiaries of such a purge—the men who suffered daily at their brothers’ hands—would probably be its most vigorous and vociferous opponents. One only had to look at how men dealt with each other to know this to be true. For example, although castration had fallen out of favor amongst our queens and noblewomen as being cruel and wasteful before Zem’ had even become one unified land, when unrestrained by their wives and mothers, our men practiced it on each other at every opportunity. One might argue (I argued with myself) that the problem lay not in men, but in the mines, the road crews, and the barracks as breeding grounds of base behavior, and to a certain extent, one would be right. But that was still no guarantee that handing over provinces to men would work out; indeed, there was every guarantee that for a time at least it would be a dismal failure. One does not recover so quickly from a bad upbringing and bad influences, even with every other advantage it is possible to have. Zem’ would have to be in a strong position, a very strong position indeed, to withstand the upheaval that the influx of untutored, self-serving minds into positions of power would cause, not to mention the threat to our fertility that having so many castrating, child-abandoning rapists running about promised.
Perhaps (I told myself) I was overly pessimistic, but even cursory studies of the Hordes and the Western lands, where men kept eunuchs and sold their mothers and sisters into slavery without a second thought, suggested I was not, and we were still only in the early stages of extracting ourselves from the quagmire of cruelty in which we had wallowed as recently as the time of our great-grandmothers. Such a thing would have to be managed very, very carefully. And besides, Ruslan was not at all the right kind of boy to become the first man ever to rule Zem’. Such a person would need to have the gift of being popular with the princesses and the common folk alike; more importantly, such a person would have to be able to give Zem’ a dream to dream together, such as the dream of a land where no one, not even men, raised their hand in cruelty against their sisters and brothers, and lead us into it, because that was what leaders did. It was Sera who had told me that, when she had told me I was to be her heir. Anyone who ruled Zem’ would have to be able to rule over a dream. She said she’d learned that from Darya Krasnoslavovna. I wasn’t sure that if the time came, I could do it, but I was sure that stubborn, argumentative, clever, fearful, people-blind Ruslan would never have that gift. Not like Mirochka…I shied away from that thought. But it was obvious that the only person who could possibly be less popular with the princesses than me would be him. “Life is unfair, though, unfortunately,” I told him. “But if you could do anything, Ruslan, what would it be?”
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
“Would you want to become a warrior, or a singer, or marry a great princess, or, I don’t know…”
“I’d want to be a scholar,” he said. “I’d want to join a sanctuary and study ancient scrolls and learn things.”
“Well, perhaps you will have that chance—but you wouldn’t if you were to take the throne.”
“You just said that Empresses retire to sanctuaries all the time!”
“Yes, but only after their health has been worn down by years of exhausting service to the land. Would you really want that?”
“I guess not,” he said, not looking convinced.
“Not many would,” I told him, and Dariusz piped in and said he certainly wouldn’t want to become Empress, and Valery and Mirochka agreed, which only sort of pleased me, but the troublesome moment was past and the children said they wanted to go play together some more, but inside, where it was cooler, so I escorted them back to their chambers and returned to my own.
Chapter Twelve
When I got to my chambers I found a vaguely familiar-looking travel-worn woman dressed in silks and mountain wool leaning against the wall outside my door.
“Do you bring word from the Eastern princesses?” I asked.
“Valeriya Dariyevna?” she asked in reply.
“The very one.” I pointed at the scroll in her hand, with the seal of Princess Velikogornaya on it. “I assume she has sent me word of something important?”
“May we speak in private, Valeriya Dariyevna?”
“Of course. Come in.” I went into my chambers and checked for maids. “We are unobserved,” I said. “Please, sit down. Shall I call for some tea?”
“It is not necessary, Valeriya Dariyevna.”
“Then have some water. You must be thirsty after your long ride in the heat. Would you care for some food?”
“Maybe later, Valeriya Dariyevna. Water is fine for the present.”
“Very well.” I poured two cups of water and set one in front of each of us. “You’re Princess Velikogornaya’s second-sister,” I told her. “I remember you from when you’ve been to Stepnoy Dom before on your sister’s business. But I don’t…” I snapped my fingers. “I do! Aksinya Olgovna, right?”
“You are correct, Valeriya Dariyevna.”
“The Tsarina will be delighted to welcome you to Krasnograd,” I said.
“I would be honored, of course, but I fear I will need to set off for home immediately, Valeriya Dariyevna.”
“I see. What did you wish to tell me in private, Aksinya Olgovna?”
“My sister was both gladdened and distressed to receive your message this spring, Valeriya Dariyevna. Gladdened because it meant other princesses might be able to come to our aid, and distressed because it meant the problem has grown more serious.”
“More children have gone missing in your province, then?”
“It was quiet over the winter. Most likely, Valeriya Dariyevna, when you killed those two that you killed, you cut at least one of the heads off the snake, but it’s grown another one, the Black God take it. As soon as the passes cleared, more children started disappearing, and in even greater numbers than before. At my sister’s command, I led a party to investigate. I discovered little of use except one unpleasant fact.”
“What was the unpleasant fact?” I asked.
“That some of the missing children were not stolen, but rather sold by their parents to the slavers.”
“By all the gods!” I exclaimed in horror.
“Indeed, Valeriya Dariyevna. Those we found guilty we sentenced to hard labor, and my sister dispatched me to inform you of this fact, and to beg further help from you. But by the time I arrived on the steppe, you had already set off for Krasnograd, so I set off after you myself, and here I am, to inform you of what we in Velikogornoye have found, and to beg for your help.”
“You shoul
d tell the Empress,” I said.
Aksinya Olgovna twitched her shoulders in a way that said she would rather not encounter the Empress. “We were hoping you would plead our case to her yourself, Valeriya Dariyevna. Surely your voice will speak much more loudly in her ear than ours.”
“Yes, but it is still only one voice. I know you want to return home, Aksinya Olgovna, but you should stay and tell the Empress and the Princess Council what you have learned.”
“Do you really think it will help, Valeriya Dariyevna?”
“Well, it won’t hurt,” I said. “Please, let me arrange for a chamber for you—I am sure the Tsarina will be glad to have you stay in the kremlin—and let me ask her to hear you out, and to call a session of the Princess Council to hear what you have to say. If we both speak, our message will be twice as loud.”
“I suppose there is wisdom in what you say, Valeriya Dariyevna,” she agreed reluctantly. “Although I’ve already been gone longer than expected. I hate to leave my sister like this, not knowing where I am and without my aid. No doubt more of our people are being taken even as we speak.”
“No doubt,” I said. “So we will have to speak loudly and clearly, and make the Empress and the Princess Council act, and quickly. As you said, Aksinya Olgovna, we are fighting a many-headed snake, and I don’t think we’ll defeat it without the full backing of Krasnograd and the rest of Zem’, and for that we need our sister princesses.”
“I suppose I can stay another day or two, Valeriya Dariyevna.”
“You’ll need the rest anyway, before you start back,” I told her. “It’s a long ride to the mountains.”
“We mountain folk are tough, Valeriya Dariyevna.”
“Well, so are we from the steppe, but I almost collapsed my first day here after running around like a fool instead of resting after my journey,” I told her sharply. “You will make better time, and we can find you a better horse, if you wait a day or two, and now that you’re here you really might as well plead your case to more people than just me.”
I went out into the corridor and, hunting down a maid, told her that Princess Velikogornaya’s second-sister had just arrived with important information, and that I thought it would be best if she were given a chamber here in the kremlin. The maid seemed a bit nervous about agreeing to something like that on just my say-so, but I must have looked very irritated when she hesitated, for after a moment she agreed that yes, she could at least speak to the mistress of chambers about finding a spare room for Aksinya Olgovna, of course she could.
