Mira Saren

Mira Saren was the daughter of a minor official at the Supreme Ruler’s court, and for most of Zarina’s childhood she was the only person in the palace who wanted nothing from her.

She was freckled, with curls that would not stay pinned, and she sat on anything that was not a chair. She had no interest in politics and understood almost nothing about guild disputes, which was precisely what Zarina liked about her; she talked instead about her family’s engagements and quarrels, and teased flatly and without cruelty, in escalating series. She was the one who turned up with two riding cloaks on the afternoons Zarina forgot, and who was disappointed rather than angry when Zarina chose a report over her once too often.

Their friendship was broken twice, and neither time by either of them. The first was politics. Her father lost his post after a dispute over provincial contracts, and the family was sent back to their country estate without anybody thinking to tell Zarina. The letter Mira left behind said she had thought someone would.

The second was Zarina’s kindness. When Mira came back to the capital to close up the house, the two of them slipped out together one night to a spring festival in the west quarter. Then Zarina asked her father to give Saren his post back, and he did it warmly and in front of the council, and Saren refused it: an office handed back by the ruler’s daughter was a debt, and every order he signed would be read as hers. He took a smaller posting in the eastern provinces instead, and the family left again, further and for longer, and this time because of her.

Before she went, Mira made a point of telling Zarina that the festival had been the best night she had had in years, and that she would do it again, so that Zarina would not decide afterwards that the whole of it had been a mistake.

Some years later, when the broadsheets reached the eastern provinces wrapped round fish, Mira learned of the renunciation and wrote to her — the first letter of Zarina’s life with no title on it — to ask whether she was eating, and to tell her where the spare bed was. Zarina tried three times to answer it, and wrote Mira at the top of three sheets of paper, and could not find a single thing to say after it.

The family left in the spring. Zarina did not go down to the courtyard, because a princess seeing them off would have been one more thing done to them, and watched the carts from an eastern window instead.