Zarina

Zarina was the only child of the Supreme Ruler of Ashkar, and for the first twenty years of her life she was the most carefully loved person in the realm.

Her mother, the Phoenix Queen’s sister, died while Zarina was an infant, and she grew up knowing her mostly through portraits and through strangers telling her she had her mother’s eyes. Her father she knew better than anyone alive. The realm saw a ruler ministers stood up straighter for; she saw a man with warm hands who sat on the edge of her bed when she could not sleep. She adored him. She also lived inside his grief, which had made him guard her past all reason, and for a long time neither of them called it what it was.

She was quick, stubborn and very good at noticing what did not add up. Her tutor Balif taught her to argue with history rather than memorise it, and by her late teens she was catching falsified figures that ministers had waved through. The court called her the Golden Daughter, and for a long while she was happy to be it.

What she wanted most was to be somewhere nobody knew her name. At twenty she found it, first in a room above a side street where she called herself Sera, and then in the houses of the Velvet Veil, where people remembered everything she liked and a little glass vial lifted the grey emptiness that being the Golden Daughter had left in her. She made rules for it and broke them one by one, left the friends who had known her first, and watched a woman she envied die in a room full of mirrors, and went deeper rather than out.

The break with her father that followed is the defining wound of her life. She stopped hiding, and the city made her the Velvet Princess, and the Veil made her its emblem. He defended her far longer than was wise, and saw what was happening to her eyes, and told himself she was only lost. Then she read a council order on his desk and carried it across the river, misread one line of it, and an old man died in the snow. She would not lie about it. He renounced her before the Hall of Concord, and she bowed to him as a subject and walked out with nothing she had not carried down the service stair herself. It felt at first like freedom. Then she waited for him to come after her, as everyone always had, and he did not, and she decided, on the night of the Lantern Festival, that he had chosen the realm over his own child.

She kept a drawer in her chambers that had once held nothing but spare pen nibs. In the end it held a letter and a cheap painted bracelet, the only things in the palace she had chosen for herself, and they were the only things she took when she left.