A Door Left Open
The stair let her out into a low stone corridor where the air was warm and wet and smelled of lye.
Lamps hung at long intervals in iron cages, and the flags underfoot had been worn into a shallow channel by a hundred years of carts, and somewhere ahead water was running into a drain with the patient sound of something that had been running all night and would go on running long after she had gone.
She had not come down as herself. An hour earlier she had crossed the royal wing in a sleeping robe with a book under one arm, a restless young woman going somewhere quiet to read, and nobody had stopped her, because nobody ever stopped Zarina.
Behind one of the old linen rooms on the lower floor there was a narrow storage chamber full of folded tablecloths and broken chairs waiting for a carpenter who never came, and for three weeks it had kept a plain brown dress, a rough shawl and a pair of worn shoes at the bottom of a chest, taken one piece at a time from the mending baskets.
Tonight she had put them on by the light of one candle and looked at herself in a cracked glass, and she had looked wrong: too clean, too well kept, like a lady at a costume supper who has come as a servant and cannot stop standing like a lady.
Her hands were the worst of it. So she had knelt at the cold hearth and rubbed soot across her fingers and along one sleeve, and it had helped a little, and a little would have to do.
It would not have fooled anyone who knew her. That was not the point. People saw what they expected to see, and nobody in the whole of Ashkar expected the Supreme Ruler’s daughter to be carrying an armful of old drapes through the lower corridors at midnight with soot on her knuckles.
The night kitchens reached her as a smell first — woodsmoke and boiled mutton and hot bread and old grease, thick enough to lean on — and then as a roar. A boy trotted past with a crate of onions held against his chest.
Two cooks were arguing over a ruined pot with the patience of people who had argued over pots for twenty years, and a goblin scullion stood on an upturned bucket at the sinks, elbow-deep in grey water, shouting for somebody to bring more wood.
Nobody looked at her. She had spent her whole life being looked at, and it was so strange not to be that she nearly stopped walking to see whether it would last.
Every night before the bread came in, the ash crews hauled the furnace waste out through a guarded gate in the inner wall, and she had watched from a high window, for a month, how the guards looked hard at everyone coming in and barely at all at anyone going out.
It made sense. A threat entering mattered more than a servant leaving. She set the drapes down behind a row of frosted crates, picked up a sack of cloth scraps somebody had left by the kitchen door, and fell in behind four men and one older woman pushing two carts of ash that still gave off a sour warmth she could feel on her face.
The gate was a squat stone arch with a lantern on a hook and a guard on either side.
The carts stopped, and Zarina stopped with them, and for one terrible moment she was certain the nearer guard had seen her and knew her and that it was finished before it had begun.
“You with them?”
She had rehearsed several answers, lying awake in the dark for three weeks. Every one of them went out of her head at once, like birds off a wall. “Yes.”
“Which crew?”
The older woman answered before she could. She was broad and short, with grey hair scraped back under a brown shawl and the raw red hands of somebody who had spent forty years in hot water, and she did not even turn her head. “Laundry side. She’s carrying cloth out. West passage is blocked.” She tugged her shawl straighter, the way a person tugs a bell-rope she is tired of ringing, and sounded so thoroughly put upon that the guard seemed to feel he was somehow to blame for the passage.
He stepped aside. “Go.”
Zarina walked. The back of her neck waited the whole length of the arch for somebody to shout, and nobody shouted, and the gate swung shut behind her with a long iron groan.
In the outer yard, by the shed where the men began tipping the ash out in grey sliding heaps, the older woman stopped beside her, and Zarina had the sudden, unwelcome sense of being looked at properly for the first time that night by somebody who was not in the least impressed.
“You don’t work laundry.”
There was no suspicion in it, only a tired certainty, the look of somebody who has folded ten thousand sheets and can tell at a glance which hands have never folded one. “No,” Zarina said.
“Thought not.” The woman tugged at the shawl again. “Don’t stand around here. Foreman’ll put you to work.” She turned toward the shed, her shadow going long across the frozen ruts, and did not look back, and Zarina was never able to tell afterwards whether she had been too tired to care or had decided not to.
Then she turned the corner of the outer wall, and the palace disappeared behind it.
She stopped in the road. For the first time in her life she had left it without anybody knowing, and the size of that came down on her all at once, there in the dark with the frost creaking under her shoes.
Her father believed she was asleep. Balif, if he thought of her at all, supposed she was reading. If anything happened to her now, nobody in the world would know which street to begin in.
That ought to have been enough to turn her round. It was not. She pulled the shawl tighter and walked on down the hill.
She walked through streets she had seen only through the window of a carriage with a guard at each wheel. They were narrower than she remembered, and dirtier, and far more alive.
Frost glittered along the gutters, lamplight showed through cracks in the shutters, and somewhere a man was singing the same three lines of a song over and over, in the hope that the rest of it would come back to him if he only gave it time.
There were coppers knotted into the corner of her shawl, counted out on her bedcover and counted again, and at a brazier on a corner she bought a paper cone of roasted chestnuts from a dwarf with a scorched apron and his beard tucked into his belt for safety.
She held out the coin. He took it. She walked away with her heart going as though she had passed an examination, and ate the chestnuts standing in the street, which she had never once done in her life, and burned her fingers and her tongue and did not care at all.
In a market square where most of the stalls had shut she sat on the rim of a horse trough and watched what was left.
Two scaled traders from the southern coast were roping bolts of dyed cloth under a lantern, stopping every few knots to blow on their fingers, because the capital’s winter was no friend to people from the coast.
A woman came out of a tavern and told her husband, across the whole square, that if he did not come home this minute he could finish his drink in the river.
A man in a carter’s coat bumped Zarina’s shoulder hard enough to rock her, and muttered an apology over his shoulder without looking back to see whom he had bumped.
Nobody bowed. Nobody stepped aside, or fell silent, and began very carefully to say something different. She found that she was smiling into the paper cone, and could not stop. She had spent her whole life being noticed. Out here she could disappear by sitting still.
Getting back in was much harder, and she learned that on the first night, thoroughly.
The ash gate was barred when she climbed the hill again, and she stood behind a storage wall across the road for the better part of an hour, shaking with cold and with something that was not cold, before she understood that the bread wagons were checked outside the gate and their workers waved into the yard in a body and never counted again.
She fell in at the back of the vegetable crew with an empty basket, and a guard looked straight at her and asked why it was empty, and she said she was taking it back, and somebody up ahead shouted at somebody else to move his idiot feet, and the guard’s face soured at everything that was not Zarina, and he jerked his head.
She reached her chambers a quarter of an hour before Nalia came in to open the shutters, and lay on top of the covers with her eyes open while the room went grey, and went over the night the way she went over a set of accounts.
Leaving was difficult. Returning was worse. And if she meant to do it again — she noticed that she had already stopped saying if — she would have to be better at both.
She was. Not at once, and not every night.
She learned never to trust one road. Some nights the laundry women gave her cover, some nights the kitchen porters, some nights the furnace crews with their blackened faces, and she learned that a basket or a bucket was worth more than any story, because it gave people a reason not to ask.
Above all she learned the window. Before dawn she could vanish among the delivery crews. After dawn the senior servants came down into the lower passages, people who had known her face since she was in leading-strings, and the shawl and the soot would not have survived five minutes. Freedom, she discovered, required scheduling, and she found the irony irritating.
The frost had begun to go off the cobbles in the mornings when, one night on her way back with an hour in hand, she heard the music.
It came round a corner, thin and scratchy: a violin rushing at a tune as though it were late for something, stopping halfway, and then, after somebody inside a building shouted, starting again from the beginning.
Halfway along a narrow side street stood a tall old warehouse with its upper windows propped open despite the cold, so that lamplight and warm air and the bad violin all spilled out together over the cobbles.
There was no sign over the door. Inside, a narrow stair went up, and at its head hung a curtain of heavy dark cloth that might once have been velvet, worn to the weave where a great many hands had pushed it aside.
Beyond the curtain the violinist missed another note. Several people groaned at once, as though they had been waiting for it, and somebody laughed. Zarina looked back down the stair at the street, and checked the hour against the last bell, and pushed the curtain aside.
The room beyond had once been a storeroom. Old iron hooks still hung from the beams, and the plaster had gone yellow with lamp smoke, and where the mismatched chairs ran out people had taken benches or cushions or the bare boards.
It smelled of tallow and spilled wine and wet wool drying. Two students were sharing a bottle and arguing with their heads together.
A young stonekin carter sat folded onto a bench far too low for him, knees up near his chin and a cup like a thimble in his great grey hand, nodding along to the violin with an expression of deep and generous forgiveness.
Somebody had brought a dog, which was asleep under a chair with its legs in the air.
Nobody turned when she came in. For a moment Zarina simply stood there, waiting without knowing what for. In every room she had ever entered, something happened when she came into it.
Here nothing happened at all, and it was so strange that it made her uncomfortable, like putting a foot down for a stair that is not there.
Eventually a young woman came over. She was about Zarina’s age, perhaps a year older, with dark hair cut roughly at the jaw as though she had done it herself with the nearest shears and not much minded the result, and a faded coat too big for her with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and one button missing.
On her way across the room she had picked up a cup from an empty table, smelled it, and kept it.
“You’re new,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Thought so. You were standing by the door a long time.” She drank from the cup that was not hers. “They’re usually better than this. A little. I’m Tessa.”
Zarina almost gave her own name. The instinct came at once and from very deep, the way a hand goes out to catch a falling glass — Zarina, daughter of the Supreme Ruler, the two so close together in her mind that she had never heard the first without the second coming after it, like a servant at a door.
She stopped it. She had prepared plain names from the household rolls, and not one of them came. What came instead were two syllables she had never thought of before, arriving in her mouth from nowhere she could afterwards find, as though they had been waiting there for her to need them.
“Sera.”
Tessa nodded. “Sera.” There was nothing in her face, no recognition, no flicker. She said it the way she might have said the name of a street, and Zarina felt something loosen in her chest that she had not known was tied.
“We’re sitting there,” Tessa said, and pointed with her borrowed cup at a table near the stage, where four people sat, one sorting cards and another eating bread. “You can sit for a while. If you don’t like it, you can leave.” Then she went off across the room and did not look back to see whether Zarina would follow, and that, more than anything, was what made her follow.
A young man with a weathered face nodded to her when Tessa said “This is Sera.” He was big and broad-shouldered, with grey roof dust in his dark hair that he had plainly not noticed, and he shuffled the cards from one hand into the other in a continuous ripple without looking at them, the way some people drum their fingers. A round-armed young woman with flour in the creases of her knuckles shifted her chair to make room and pushed the bread toward the empty place.
Nobody asked where Sera was from. Nobody asked who her family were.
“Do you play?”
“No.”
“I’ll show you.” His name was Oren. He explained the rules once, at speed, as a man explains something self-evident, and Zarina understood perhaps half of them and did not say so, and lost the first round before she had arranged her hand.
She lost the next round, and the one after. But somewhere in the third, the part of her that had argued with river towns about their grain began, without her permission, to count — which cards had gone, which were left, and how Oren’s shuffling quickened when he held something good. She did not win the fourth. She lost it a great deal more slowly, and Oren looked at her over his cards with mild surprise and said nothing, and she was more pleased by that than by most of what had been said to her all year.
The bread went round again. The young woman with the floury knuckles was Leni, who worked at a bakery near the river and complained that she smelled of flour no matter how often she washed, and Zarina, sitting beside her, found she rather liked it; it was a warm smell, like morning.
Oren mended roofs with his uncle and argued with his uncle and was not paid enough, which was everything he had to say on the subject. Tessa made costumes when there was work and helped at a theatre when there was not.
When they asked Zarina what she did, every answer she had invented on the stairs died in her mouth. “A little of different things,” she said. “Mostly helping at home.”
“Family business?” said Oren.
“Something like that.”
He accepted it. That was the extraordinary part. At the palace an uncertain answer never passed; it was asked again a week later, or remembered, and somebody’s secretary quietly made inquiries.
Here Oren had already begun to describe, with his hands, a chandler’s roof he had nearly fallen through the week before, which had looked sound from the street and turned out to be held together by moss and good intentions, and nobody ever came back to her answer at all.
Then, far off over the roofs, a bell began to ring, and Zarina counted the strokes, and her stomach went down through the floor. She stood so quickly that her chair shrieked across the boards and the dog under the next table woke and looked at her with reproach.
Oren lifted two fingers without looking up from his cards. Leni raised a hand with bread still in it. Only Tessa got up and walked with her to the curtain, unhurried, carrying her borrowed cup.
“Come back if you want,” she said. There was no ceremony in it and no insistence. It was said the way a person might mention that the bakery on the corner opened early, and then somebody called her name from the stage end of the room and the curtain fell shut between them.
She was too late. She ran the last of the hill with her breath tearing in her chest and saw the ruts of the vegetable wagons already in the frost by the gate, and the sky over the eastern road going the colour of dishwater, which frightened her more than any guard.
She came in at last at the back of a lamp-oil wagon with her head down and her mind gone white, and changed in the storage room with fingers that would not work, and climbed into the royal wing as the first servants were opening the gallery shutters, so that the light came in behind her in long pale bars as though it were following her home.
Nalia was standing outside her chamber door.
She was a neat, compact woman some years past thirty, with a plain round face that people forgot while they were still looking at it and brown hair pinned flat under a linen cap, and in nine years nobody had ever seen her hurry. She looked at the book under Zarina’s arm.
Then her eyes went down, quite slowly, to the hem of the white robe, and Zarina looked down with them and saw a dark crescent of grit along the silk — the black dust of the lower yards, which came from no grate in the royal wing. For one terrible moment she was sure Nalia knew everything.
Nalia reached past her and opened the door. “Would you like me to bring tea, Your Highness?”
“Yes,” said Zarina. “Please.”
She went in, and leaned back against the closed door with her hands pressed flat to the wood to stop them shaking. She had nearly missed the window. She had nearly been seen.
She had stayed in a room full of strangers because a violin was bad and a game of cards was good, and she knew exactly how foolish that was. She was exhausted, and she was frightened, and she already wanted to go back.
When Nalia carried the tray in, Zarina was asleep on top of the covers with one arm across her eyes. Nalia set the tray where it would stay warm and drew the blanket up over her, and the dark crescent on the hem showed for a moment at the edge of it.
She looked at it for some time. Then she smoothed the blanket once with the flat of her hand, although it was already smooth, and let it fall, and went out without a sound.
Zarina went back four nights later, and stood inside the curtain longer than she liked with her hands folded tight in front of her, certain that nobody would remember her at all. Then Oren looked up from a table by the stage with the cards rippling from hand to hand.
“Sera.”
He lifted a hand across the room and went back to his cards. That was all, and it was enough.
It went into her like a warm drink on a cold night: a name she had made up out of nothing, four nights ago, in somebody else’s mouth across a crowded room, as though it had always been there.
After that, when the palace let her go, she went to the room behind the curtain once a week, and then sometimes twice. There was Rike, a bony, stooping musician with clever, scarred fingers who said almost nothing unless somebody asked him about instruments and was nearly always repairing something that did not belong to him. There was Davin, with ink on both cuffs and a satchel of books he never opened, who claimed to study law and complained about it so often that Zarina suspected very little law was involved, and who always seemed to know where something was happening that night.
One evening Rike sat down across from her with an old six-stringed instrument, its neck mended with glue and twine, and plucked a string and listened to it with his head on one side as though it had said something offensive. “Do you want to learn to tune one of these?” She was surprised by how much she did.
Her fingers would not go where they were put, and he moved them on the neck with his own scarred ones, several times, saying nothing but the name of the note, and when at last she found something close to it he nodded once and said “Again,” and she did it again for nearly an hour. Nobody applauded. Nobody made it into a little story that would reach her father by dinner. When she gave the instrument back, the tips of her fingers were scored red and sore, and she liked that too.
She learned the things she supposed she ought to have known already. How much a bowl of stew should cost. Which stallholders doubled their prices at the sight of good cloth. How a tavern keeper tells his customers to go home without saying so, which is mostly a matter of chairs.
A woman who sold fried dough at the end of the river bridge looked up across her spitting pan on Zarina’s third visit and said “You again. Less honey this time?”, because the week before it had run down Zarina’s wrist into her sleeve and she had stood at the parapet licking it off like a child.
It was a very small thing to be remembered for. Not for her father, or a procession that had closed a road. For how much honey she liked. She thought about it the whole way back to the palace wall.
She bought a pair of brown shoes in the Copper Market because she liked them, and paid the first price the man asked, and Leni turned one over and bent the sole and said she had paid too much — “A lot” — and pushed the bread across to her as though she needed comfort. The sole came away inside a fortnight and flapped when she walked, and Zarina kept them anyway, and would not hear a word against them.
The first time Tessa asked her what she wanted to do, the five of them were standing outside a theatre behind the old wool exchange on a mild wet night, with the rain just stopped and the cobbles shining and a notice nailed to the door saying in run letters that the play was cancelled.
Oren wanted somewhere to drink. Leni wanted food. Rike had sat down on the steps to wait for the argument to finish. Then Tessa turned and looked at Zarina, and said “What do you want?”, and waited, and did not offer two choices or glance at Oren to see what Sera might like.
Nobody had ever asked her that without first arranging a set of acceptable answers and watching to see which she took. She had to go and look for the answer in herself, and she did not know where it was kept.
“Food,” she said at last, and they went for food, fried fish and onions eaten on a wall by the river while Oren complained that nobody ever wanted to drink, and that was all.
It was such a small thing. Years later, when a great deal else had been forgotten or had grown too painful to take out and look at, she could still remember the run letters on that notice, and the shine of the cobbles, and the feel of Tessa waiting.
The next morning her father joined her for breakfast.
The small breakfast room faced east over the gardens, and in spring the sun lay across the table in a broad bar that set the silver and the jam pots shining. Zarina had slept perhaps three hours.
Her father came in with a sheaf of correspondence under his arm, a tall, still man who did not need to move much to fill a room, with the grey at his temples spread a little further that winter, and when he bent to kiss the top of her head on his way past he smelled of cedar oil and old parchment, as he always had.
After a while he set one letter aside. “You’re quiet.”
“I’m eating.”
“You can usually do both.” His eyes were already halfway back to the next letter. “Up too late again?”
For one dreadful instant she thought somebody had told him — Nalia, a guard, the old laundry woman at the ash gate — and the bar of sunlight on the table went very bright and very far away.
Then he smiled faintly into his letter, and she understood that he was teasing her, as he had at this table since she was small, about reading in bed by a candle she had been told to put out.
“Yes,” she said. “A travel account. From the western coast.”
“Any good?”
“Not really.”
He pointed his letter at her, amused. “Then why stay awake?”
“I wanted to finish it.”
He nodded, as though that were perfectly reasonable, and the talk moved on to a dispute among the cloth merchants and repairs to one of the southern roads, and Zarina answered when she was asked and knew more about the cloth merchants than he expected, and saw him notice it and be pleased.
And under all of it she was thinking: I have never done that before. She had kept things from him. She had kept a letter in a locked drawer.
But she had never once sat across a table from her father and told him a thing that was not so, in plain words, looking at his face, and watched him believe it.
What frightened her, walking back to her rooms with his kiss still on her forehead, was how easy it had been. It ought to have cost something. It had cost nothing at all, and she understood, with a small cold drop in her stomach, that the next one would cost even less.
There was a day, a little after that, which she did not tell anybody about, because there was nothing in it to tell.
She rose at the hour she was expected to rise. She received the wives of two river-town magistrates in the yellow drawing room and remembered the names of their children and the illness of one of their mothers, and sent them away delighted.
She sat at the foot of the council table through a long afternoon of harbour dues and answered the one question her father turned to her with, exactly, with the figure and the year.
At dinner a minister’s wife told her she grew more like her mother every season, and Zarina thanked her as she always did. Everything she did that day she did perfectly, and she felt none of it.
It was as though she were watching a very accomplished young woman through a pane of thick glass, from a long way off, and could not make the young woman turn round.
It was not unhappiness. Unhappiness would have been something. It was a grey, still, airless place where nothing hurt and nothing mattered, and she had begun, that spring, to find herself in it more and more often in the daylight hours, and to come out of it only at night, on the service stair, with soot on her hands and her heart going like a drum.
She thought, lying awake that night with the window open on the soft dark, that Sera’s hours were the only ones in which she was actually awake, and the thought frightened her, and then — because she was practical — she stopped thinking it.
Late in the spring Tessa took her somewhere new, for no better reason than that a man called Karel had told her to come.
It was a quieter street with higher walls on the river side of the city, and behind one of them stood an old townhouse with a courtyard full of lanterns hung in a flowering pear. The petals came down over the flagstones whenever anybody brushed a branch, and people in good shoes were kicking through them and laughing, and music came out of every open window at once, none of it agreeing. “Whose house is this?” Zarina asked, and Tessa shrugged and said “I don’t know. I know Karel,” and walked on in, and Zarina, after a moment of staring at her back, followed.
It was not like the places they usually went. The clothes were better, there were real servants in grey with trays, and a good many of the guests had masks — not wearing them, mostly, but carrying them by the ribbons or pushed up onto the tops of their heads, so that a painted face gazed at the ceiling while the real one beneath it ate and talked and laughed.
Nobody asked Zarina’s name at the door. Nobody asked anything at all.
Here and there, pinned inside a collar or tied round a wrist, she saw a narrow strip of deep violet cloth with a small silver clasp on it shaped like an open eye, and thought it was some fashion of the season, and did not wonder about it.
In a room off the hall a crowd had gathered round an actor doing a scene from a new play, and Zarina was halfway through it before she understood what she was watching.
It was a minister of the realm explaining away a theft from the treasury with his hand on his heart while the money all but fell out of his sleeves, and the room was helpless with laughter.
She knew the man. She had sat three places down from him at dinner, and could have named the vote and the year and the column of figures that had nearly come to light and then had not.
She stood at the back with her glass and watched a stranger wear his face, and found that the likeness was unfair, and also not entirely wrong, and that she was laughing too, which she had not meant to do.
In the long room at the back the furniture had been pushed to the walls for dancing, and there she saw Sabra.
Zarina did not know her name yet. She only saw a young woman in the middle of the floor dancing as though the room belonged to her and everyone in it had been invited on sufferance — one side of her head shaved close, the dark hair on the other side falling to her shoulder, and a thin gold line painted from her temple down to the hinge of her jaw that caught the lamplight every time she turned.
She was not beautiful exactly. She was something rarer. She moved as though she had never in her life wondered what a room thought of her, and the room watched her as rooms at court watched the Supreme Ruler, and Zarina, who had been stood on platforms since she could walk, felt a pang of envy so sharp and so unexpected that she had to look away from it.
The air in the dancing room was thick with sweet smoke from a brazier in the corner, where something other than wood was burning, and Zarina had been breathing it for some minutes and trying not to cough when a woman she had never seen took her lightly by the elbow and moved her three steps to the left, into the draught from an open door, and let her go.
“Better?”
It was. The smoke thinned at once. Zarina looked round, and found a handsome dark-haired woman of about forty in green over wine-red, with a ring of keys at her belt that she touched as she spoke, one key after another, as if she were counting them.
She had a low, amused voice and the air of a person in her own house, although for all Zarina knew it might not have been.
“How did you know?” said Zarina.
“You were holding your breath.” The woman’s eyes went over her once, unhurried, from the shawl to the cheap brown shoes and back, and something in them was pleased, though Zarina could not have said with what. “You hold your cup like someone being watched, too. Like it’s going to be written down how much you drink.” She smiled. “Nobody’s writing anything down in this house. That’s rather the point of it.”
Before Zarina could think of an answer, somebody across the room called “Carisse!”, and the woman lifted a hand to them and went, trailing the faint chime of her keys, and did not look back.
Zarina stood in the draught from the door with her heart going fast, as though she had been caught at something, and looked down at her own hand, and saw that it was true. She was holding the cup close against her body, low and careful, the way she had held cups at receptions all her life, where every glass was counted by somebody. She let her hand fall loose. It felt very strange, and rather wonderful.
She stayed late, much later than she should have. Sabra went past her once in the crush at the door to the courtyard, with her arm round the neck of a laughing young man, and glanced at Zarina, and said to nobody in particular, “Oh, that’s a good face,” and was gone again in a drift of pear petals before Zarina could decide whether it had been meant kindly.
Walking home in the grey with Tessa, past the dark river and the first of the bread carts, she was so full of the house and the lanterns and the strange smoke and the woman with the keys that she hardly spoke, and Tessa, who never pushed anybody to talk, let her be.
At the corner where they always parted, Tessa stopped. “That lot,” she said, and jerked her head back the way they had come. “Karel’s lot. They’re all right.” She seemed to consider whether to say any more, and said it. “Just — they’re all right in a different way from us. You know?”
Zarina did not know, and said so. Tessa shrugged deeper into her coat. “You will,” she said, not unkindly, and went off up her own street with her hands in her pockets.
She went back to the curtained room the following week.
Nothing about it had changed. The violinist was as bad as ever, and was groaned at in the same places. Oren was complaining about his uncle.
Leni had brought a heap of rolls that had come out of the oven lopsided and were therefore, she said, free, and Rike was restringing somebody’s fiddle in the corner and ignoring everyone, and the dog was asleep under its chair with its legs in the air.
Tessa tipped her chair back on two legs and dealt Sera into a hand without asking, and Zarina picked up her cards and found she was glad to see every one of them, truly glad.
And yet. She sat in the warm yellow light with the cards in her hand, and the room that had seemed, two months ago, so wide and so strange that she had stood by the door afraid to come in, seemed that night, for the first time, small.
The ceiling was low. The plaster was stained. The music was very bad. She caught herself thinking of lanterns in a pear tree, and of a woman dancing as though no room had ever been able to hold her, and of a low amused voice saying nobody’s writing anything down, and she was ashamed of the thought, and could not put it away.
She lost the hand. Oren gathered the cards in and looked at her across the table. “You’re somewhere else tonight.”
“I’m tired.”
“You’re always tired.” He shuffled, the cards rippling from hand to hand. “Get some sleep, Sera.”
When she reached for her cup a little later, there was a square of paper folded under it that had not been there before, and on the outside of it, in a neat dark hand, one word: Sera.
She had not put the cup down anywhere but on this table, and she had not left the table except to fetch bread. She looked round.
The room was as full and loud as ever, and nobody was looking at her, and nobody seemed to have come or gone. She unfolded it under the edge of the table with her heart beginning, slowly, to knock.
It was good paper, thick and creamy, the kind sold in the shops on the river terraces and not in any market Sera could have afforded.
There was a street on it that she did not know, and a night, and an hour, in the same neat hand, and below them, small and exact, a drawing in violet ink of an open eye.
She sat very still with it in her lap while Oren dealt the next hand round her. She had given that name to the people at this table and to nobody else in the world.