Two Lives — Behind the Velvet Curtain

By the turn of autumn the things Sera needed had found places to live. Two plain dresses and the green coat lay folded beneath the blankets in an old cedar chest nobody had opened since Zarina was a child.

The cheap brown shoes stood behind a row of ceremonial gowns where no maid would ever reach, and a small purse of coins sat in the hollow beneath the window seat, under a cushion embroidered with her mother’s arms. She had stopped noticing that this was funny.

The lies had found places too. If an attendant asked why she was tired, she had been reading. If someone found mud on her hem, she had walked in the gardens.

If she wanted no company in the evening she had a headache, and the headache was respected the way everything she said was respected, without question and without interest. They were not large lies. She still thought of them that way, as small and necessary as the coins under the cushion.

The cost came in the mornings.

“Your Highness.”

Nalia stood beside the bed with the curtains half drawn and a wedge of hard white light lying across the coverlet.

She said it again at exactly the same pitch, as though she had all morning and intended to use it, and Zarina pulled the blanket over her head and said she had heard.

“You have to be downstairs. Your father asked for the blue.”

“Then why are you asking me?”

It came out sharp, a little whip of a sentence, and it hung in the room. Nalia had already taken down the blue gown. She stood with it over her arm and smoothed the silk once with the flat of her hand, slowly, from shoulder to hem, and did not look up. “I’m sorry, Your Highness.”

“No. I’m sorry.” Zarina rubbed her face with both hands. Her head felt packed with wet sand, and there was a sweet, resinous smell still faintly in her hair that she would have to wash out before anybody stood close to her. Nalia said nothing at all. She laid the gown across the foot of the bed and went to see about the water, and that was worse than anything she could have said.

At midday Zarina received the daughters of two provincial governors in the yellow drawing room, with lemon water and almond cakes and the windows open. She had done such things a hundred times.

She was known for remembering names, every name, the names of sisters and husbands and favourite horses, and the court said she had it from her mother.

Halfway through the visit she turned to the younger girl, a nervous, bright-eyed creature in green who had plainly been rehearsing this afternoon for a month, and reached for her name, and it was not there.

She covered it. She was good at covering things. But she saw the girl notice, saw the small light in her face go out and something careful come in to replace it, and she knew the story would go home to an eastern province and be told at dinner for years.

She apologised afterwards by letter, in her best hand. The embarrassment stayed with her long after the letter was sealed, and so did a small cold question underneath it, which she did not ask herself in so many words: when had she ever, in her life, lost a name?

That evening she stayed in. The following night she went out again.

Daren did not arrive as anything important. He worked around one of the smaller theatres in the river quarter, shifting scenery or trimming lamps, and once she found him mending a chair backstage and assumed that was the job until Tessa told her it was not.

He was lean and loose-built, with brown hair that needed cutting, a small pale scar on one cheek, and sleeves rolled to the elbow in any weather, and he had a habit of holding whatever tool he had last used as if he had forgotten it was in his hand.

He was easy company. He did not ask about Sera’s family, and when he had nothing to say he seemed comfortable saying nothing, which almost nobody at the palace had ever managed with her.

One night under the lamp outside the Red House he kissed her. She kissed him back, and then went still, and he stopped at once.

“All right?”

“Yes. I’m all right.”

He waited, and did not move closer, and did not kiss her again that night. For some reason, that was what made her trust him.

It happened weeks later, on a night with no party and hardly any music, in his narrow room over the theatre with one candle burning crookedly and two books on the floor. She had drunk very little, and nothing else at all. She told him she had not done this before, and he scratched at his jaw and said, “Oh,” and that they did not have to, and she understood completely that she could leave and he would let her, and that understanding made the choice harder and not easier. There was no prohibition in the room, nobody daring her, no audience waiting to see whether Sera was brave enough. There was only Daren, and herself.

It was not graceful. A clasp would not open and he caught his sleeve on something and she got so nervous that she began to laugh and could not stop. When she asked him to stop, he stopped. When she changed her mind, she drew him back.

Once he asked whether she was still all right, and she checked — not what Sera ought to want, not what her father would say, but herself — and said yes.

Afterwards she lay staring at the cracked ceiling waiting for shame, or regret, or some vast new understanding of herself, and nothing came. She was tired and very awake and still entirely herself.

“Is that it?” she said.

Daren opened one eye. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and it was true.

Before dawn one fastening at the back of her dress would not do up however she twisted, and he sat up and said “Come here,” and fixed it for her. Of everything that night, that was the thing she kept. All her life servants had fastened her clothes in the mornings. Now a man with sawdust under his nails did it in a dark room while neither of them knew what to say, and it was the plainest, kindest thing anyone had done for her in a year.

Tessa found out the way she found out most things, walking back with her from the theatre with a bundle of fabric under one arm. “Are you sleeping with Daren?”

Zarina stopped dead in the street. “Who told you?”

“Nobody. He keeps looking for you. Are you?”

“Sometimes.”

Tessa nodded and kept walking. “Good. He’s nice.” She shifted the bundle and complained about the cold, and that was all, and Zarina walked beside her through the dark streets glad of it, and glad of Daren, and thought — with a lightness that she would remember afterwards, much later, and want very badly to have back — that she had found, at last, a life that was entirely her own.

Carisse’s salons were not like the Red House.

They were held in the upper rooms of her largest theatre, a great gilded barn of a place on the river terraces with three tiers of boxes and a painted ceiling of clouds, and the people who came to them wore good coats and real jewels and masks they did not trouble to put on.

There were nobles there, minor ones, and merchants’ wives, and two magistrates, and players, and poets, and a stonekin sculptor with clay to the elbows, and the Veil’s violet eye on a great many collars, worn openly here, as a man might wear his guild’s colours to a feast.

Carisse brought her in on her arm, in the green coat, and introduced her to nobody, which was somehow a greater compliment than being introduced to everyone. “Sera,” people said to one another, behind their hands. “Carisse’s Sera. The green one.” Zarina heard it and pretended not to, and felt it go into her like wine.

There was a play in the long room after supper, three chairs and a painted screen, about a magistrate who had spent the public money on a statue of himself while the roof of his own courthouse fell in.

Each time a piece of painted plaster crashed down behind him he raised one hand and declared that he had heard nothing. People laughed. Then the magistrate began to speak in phrases she knew.

“The matter is receiving every consideration.” “There is no cause for public alarm.” “These reports are premature and, if I may say so, unhelpful.” She had heard every one of them across the old black table in the council chamber, and one of them, she was nearly sure, in her father’s own quiet voice.

A year ago she would have stopped laughing. She knew that, and she noticed, with something between surprise and pleasure, that she did not stop.

She laughed louder than anyone in the room, because it was funny, and because it was true, and because there was a sharp sweet freedom in laughing at the voice that had ordered every hour of her life, here, where it could not hear her.

When the magistrate was crushed at last under his own statue the whole room applauded, and Zarina applauded hardest, and turned, flushed and bright-eyed, and found Carisse watching her from the window with that unhurried, pleased look.

Carisse beckoned with two fingers, and Zarina went.

“You enjoyed that,” Carisse said.

“It was very good.”

“It was very cruel. The best things usually are.” Carisse looked out of the window at the river, where the lamps of the barges moved slowly downstream in the dark, and touched one of her keys. “Do you know the kind of man it was about? Not the minister. The kind. I’ve known a few of them. They love their families the way a man loves a house — they keep it very clean, and very safe, and they would die for it, and it never once occurs to them to ask the house whether it wants to be lived in.” She smiled, and turned the key between finger and thumb. “But you wouldn’t know about that, Sera. You only have the shoulders.”

She said it lightly, as she said everything. Zarina laughed, because it seemed to be expected, and Carisse laughed too and patted her cheek and moved away into the crowd, and Zarina stood at the window with her face hot and a feeling in her chest she could not name, as though somebody had walked into a room she kept locked and set down a lamp in it, and gone out again, and left the lamp burning.

It was Carisse who introduced her to Silas, at the end of that night, when most of the salon had gone and the candles were burning low in the long room and the painted clouds on the ceiling had gone grey with smoke.

He was sitting on the edge of the little stage with a book open on his knee and his long legs crossed at the ankle, reading aloud to three or four people sprawled on cushions below him, and he stopped when Carisse came over, and looked up.

He was perhaps twenty-eight, fair and fine-boned and beautiful in a tired, careless way, as though he had been very handsome once and had stopped bothering and it had made no difference.

There were ink stains on his fingers and a loosened silk scarf at his throat, and his eyes were grey and very steady, and when they came to rest on Zarina they stayed there, with an attention so complete that she felt it on her skin.

“Silas writes poems,” said Carisse. “He has never finished one. It’s his great distinction.”

“I’m saving the endings,” Silas said. “For an occasion.” He shut the book on his finger. “You’re Sera.”

“Yes.”

“I watched you laugh at the magistrate.” He tipped his head, considering her, the way Rike considered a string that was out of tune. “You were the only one in the room who knew the man. Everyone else was laughing at a joke. You were laughing at somebody.”

Zarina went cold to the fingertips. Carisse had gone; she had not seen her go. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“No, of course not.” He smiled, and it was a good smile, rueful and warm, and it took the sting out of everything. “I’m sorry. I make up stories about people. It’s a bad habit. Sit down, Sera — I’ll read you something, and you can tell me it’s terrible.”

She sat. She had not meant to. He read to her — not his own, which he said was not fit, but an old poem from the southern coast about a woman who builds herself a boat out of the doors of her father’s house — and his voice was low and clear and he read it very simply, as though he were only telling her something that had happened, and when he came to the end he did not look up at once.

“Do you know what I think, Sera?” he said to the page. “I think somebody has spent your whole life asking what you want. Very kindly. All the time. ‘Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.’” He looked up then, with the grey eyes. “And I think every time they asked, it was so that they could be the one to give it to you. So that it would be theirs. And I don’t think anyone has ever once just left you alone long enough to find out.”

She could not speak. Nobody had said it. She had never said it, even to herself, not in words. She had felt it in the winter, by the fire in her father’s rooms, as a shape without a name.

And this stranger with ink on his fingers had picked it up out of nowhere and said it aloud, gently, in an empty theatre, as though he had known her all her life.

“I have to go,” she said, and stood up.

“Of course.” He did not try to keep her. He did not even rise. “Come back and tell me I’m wrong.”

She walked home very fast through the cold, with her heart going as though she had run the whole way, and did not go to the Red House for nine days afterwards.

She told herself it was because she was frightened of him. That was true. It was not the whole of what was true, and she knew it, and she left early because she liked it too much.

At the end of the autumn, Sabra gave her a vial to take home.

She did it in the mirror room, carelessly, the way she did everything, pressing it into Zarina’s palm and folding her fingers over it. “For when they’re awful to you,” she said. “Whoever they are. You’ve got that look again.” She laughed at Zarina’s face. “Oh, don’t. It won’t bite you. It’s only for a bad day.”

Zarina meant to give it back. She carried it home meaning to, in the inside pocket of the green coat, and put it in the hollow under the window seat with the purse, meaning to, and did not think about it again for eleven days.

The twelfth day was a council day. She sat at the foot of the long black table from the first bell to the lamp-lighting, through grain levies and the road tolls of the eastern provinces and a long, poisonous, perfectly courteous quarrel between two ministers about a bridge, and she was faultless.

She caught an error in the eastern figures. She answered the one question her father turned to her with, exactly, with the figure and the year, and saw the ministers glance at one another, and saw her father’s slow warm pride, and felt none of it, none, from behind the thick grey glass.

When she came back to her rooms the grey came with her, and sat down on the bed beside her, and would not go.

She sat at the window for a long time with the lamps unlit, looking out at the dark gardens.

Then she knelt and lifted the cushion embroidered with her mother’s arms, and took out the vial, and held it up to the last of the light. It was a deep, smoky amber, and it moved like oil.

The rule was half, and only at the Red House. She remembered setting it down, in the summer, as neatly as a clause in a treaty, and being proud of it.

She told herself, quite clearly and reasonably, that the rule had been about the Red House. It had been about not being seen, not being careless, not taking it in front of strangers.

It had never been about her. She was in her own room, with the door locked, alone. Nobody could possibly be harmed. She was not breaking the rule. She was only understanding it better.

She drank half, and sat on the floor with her back against the bed and the window open on the cold, and the warmth came up from under her breastbone, and the grey went away.

It did not feel like a fall. That was the thing she would have said, if anyone had ever asked her, which nobody ever did. It felt like coming home.

She sat in the dark of her own bedchamber with her mother’s arms embroidered on the cushion beside her, smiling, while somewhere in the wing a clock struck the hour and was answered, a moment late, by another, and the whole palace slept around her, and nobody knew, and nobody was ever going to know.

She drank the other half before midnight.

Balif had been standing in the eastern gallery for the better part of an hour, in the coldest week of the winter, and his knees had been complaining about it for most of that time.

He was a man who distrusted any fact that arrived alone, and so he had let these arrive one at a time all year and told himself each time that it meant nothing. The poetry. The shoes. The dyers’ lane. Lessons missed.

A travel account about the western coast that her father had mentioned at breakfast, and that Balif had found a copy of and carried to her door a little after ten one night, telling himself he was being kind; she had opened the door a hand’s width in a robe held close at the throat, and below its hem was not a nightgown but a plain dark skirt of a kind no lady’s maid in the palace would have let near her wardrobe, and she had taken the book and thanked him, and he had known from her face that she had never seen it in her life.

And her eyes. That was the fact he had not let himself set beside the others.

On certain mornings that winter her eyes had been wrong — too bright, too wide, the dark of them swallowing the colour — and on others dull as river stones, and she had been either gentler than he had ever known her or so short with everyone that Nalia went about the wing with a face like a shut door.

He nearly gave it up. Then he heard footsteps from the direction of the royal apartments, soft and careful, and a cloaked figure crossed the far end of the gallery keeping to the shadows, and Balif would have known that walk in any crowd in Ashkar. He had known it since it was a toddle.

He followed her. He told himself on the stairs that he did not mean to stop her, and in the eastern court, where the furnace crews were loading their carts in a fog of breath and nobody so much as glanced at a stooped grey man in a dark coat, which was a lesson in itself and not one he enjoyed.

What troubled him most was that she did not hesitate. She did not stop at the crossings or glance back the way people do in a strange city.

She went across the old bridge with her hood up and on into the leaning streets beyond as though she were walking the corridors of her own house.

She went up two steps and through a dark wooden door behind a derelict glassworks, and the door let out a breath of warm red light and music and closed behind her.

Balif stood across the street in the mouth of an alley until his feet went numb and then stopped hurting, which he knew was worse.

After perhaps half an hour three people came out laughing, and one of them paused on the step to fasten his coat, and as the cloth shifted Balif saw something pinned inside it where it would lie against the heart — a strip of deep violet cloth, and on it, for the half-second before the coat closed, a small silver clasp shaped like an open eye.

He knew that mark. He knew what the Velvet Veil built its houses on: the conviction that every limit was a cage somebody else had built for you, and that the only freedom was to want and to have.

For most people that was a philosophy to argue over a bottle. For a young woman whose every hour had been arranged for her since the season her mother died, it would sound like the first true thing anybody had ever told her.

He did his thinking on the bridge going home, with the black river going under him and the palace lit on its hill, and was more afraid for her than he had been since she was born.

He found her in the library three evenings later, and she knew from the way he shut the door that it was not about books.

“Where do you go at night?”

There was no confusion in her. She could feel the place where confusion ought to have been, and all she found there was a great cold stillness, like a pond in winter. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. I saw you leave. I followed you.” He lowered himself into the chair opposite with the small grunt his knees made now, and took off his lenses, and folded them. “To a house behind the old glassworks, where people wear a violet eye inside their coats.”

She went to the window with her arms folded and stood looking out at the snow, and behind her he stayed in his chair and did not come after her, and she hated that he knew not to.

“You had no right.”

“No,” Balif agreed. “I didn’t. I was afraid.”

“Of what? I go and see people. I talk. I drink a little wine. I have friends, Balif. You’ve never had to fight your way out of a palace to have one.”

“No,” he said again, quietly. “But I have had a great many friends who drank a little wine, over the years. And some of them had eyes that looked the way yours have looked, on certain mornings this winter. Too bright. Too wide.” He turned the folded lenses over in his fingers. “And I watched what became of some of them.”

She did not turn round. Her thumbnail had found the seam of her sleeve and was working at it, hard. “That’s not what this is.”

“I hope not.”

“They don’t ask anything of me,” she said to the glass. “They don’t care who my father is. They don’t even know.”

“That may not remain true. You are the Supreme Ruler’s daughter.”

“Not there,” said Zarina. She turned and looked at him, straight at him, and made herself say the rest. “That’s the point.”

She watched it go into him. She saw him understand, not the danger, which he had understood all along, but the thing underneath it, the thing that had taken her down the service stair in the first place.

He understood it more than he wanted to. He was a long time finding what to say, and she watched him try a lecture and discard it; she had known him far too long to miss that.

“Just don’t let anyone decide what freedom is supposed to look like for you,” he said at last. “Not them. Not your father. Not me.” He paused. “And not whatever is in the little glass bottles.”

She did not answer. She picked up her book and opened it at a page, any page, and he waited a long time, and then got to his feet with the small sound his knees made and went to the door.

“Don’t follow me again,” she said, without looking up.

“All right,” said Balif.

It was only afterwards, lying awake, that she noticed what he had not promised.

He kept the letter of it. He did not follow her again. On the sixth morning he went to the Supreme Ruler.

He had done this once before the other way. Years ago he had found out about one night in the city and sat beside her under a fig tree and kept it from his oldest friend, and called that loyalty, and it had bought nothing but a year in which she learned that the only way out was down and alone.

He would not do it twice. She would not forgive him, or not for a long time, which at his age came to much the same thing.

The Supreme Ruler was signing something in his narrow, overheated office in the north range when Balif came in without knocking, as he had come into this man’s rooms for twenty years. “It’s Zarina,” Balif said, and the pen stopped, and the papers were forgotten all at once, and the ruler looked up with his whole face. “She is safe. Nothing has happened. Sit down.”

He told it plainly. The nights. The months. The house behind the glassworks. The violet eye. He hesitated over the last thing, and saw his friend see him hesitate, and said it anyway: her eyes, on certain mornings.

There was a silence. The fire shifted in the grate. The Supreme Ruler laid the pen beside the papers very exactly, and said, “No.”

Balif had expected anger. It was the certainty that surprised him.

“She wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

He did not answer, and that was the trouble, Balif thought. The man did not know himself what he was refusing to believe.

He had carried a daughter in his head all these years, the Golden Daughter who remembered every name, and now he was defending her against charges nobody had made, because they were the only ones he could bear to imagine.

The ruler stood and went to the window and stood with his back to the room, the way he had stood in his study long ago, waiting for a nine-year-old to come in and be argued with about a festival. “Why am I the last person to hear this?”

“Because I thought you might react exactly like this,” said Balif.

That landed badly; he watched it land. In the court below somebody was sweeping a path, and the scrape of the broom came up faint and regular through the glass.

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

Balif looked at his back. “You know why,” he said.

The summons came at the lamp-lighting hour, with snow lying a hand deep along every sill in the private wing. Balif was not with her father, and that alone told her everything.

Her father was standing by the fire in his plain rooms at the end of the wing, a tall, still man with the grey spread back from his temples until it was simply the colour of his hair, and he did not turn at once and did not ask her to sit. “How long have you been leaving the palace?”

“Since the end of winter.”

He turned then, and repeated it, and she watched him count it, the way she counted things, and arrive at the total. Nearly a year. All of those breakfasts.

He asked whether she went alone, and she said usually. He asked whether it was always at night, and she said yes, and watched each answer go into him and stay there.

When he spoke again his voice had dropped, and she knew what that meant. Other men shouted when they were angry. Her father went quiet. “Balif says some of these places belong to the Velvet Veil.”

“Some do.”

“And you knew?”

“Not at first. I do now.”

He waited. She knew what he was waiting for, and the knowing made her angry before she had even said it. “No. I haven’t joined them. And they’re not what you think.”

“I don’t know what I think.” He crossed the worn rug toward her slowly, the way a man comes up on a horse he does not want to startle, and stopped an arm’s length away, and looked at her — at her face, and then, quite deliberately, at her eyes. She saw him do it. She saw him look for the thing Balif had told him about. And whatever he found there, he decided not to have found it, and she watched him decide.

They spent the better part of an hour trying to find a shape that would hold, and failing, one reasonable offer at a time. Guards who would keep out of sight. A single attendant of her own choosing. Only telling Balif the quarter of the city, so that somebody would know where to begin. “Then invite them here,” he said at last, and she nearly laughed at the size of the misunderstanding, opening under her feet like a cellar door, and said that was exactly what she did not want.

“The palace?”

“All of it.”

He went very quiet, and she watched the words reach him and wished them back, and could not have them. Near the end of the hour he passed a hand over his face and said the thing he always said, the thing he had said about Mira and about the list. “Then tell me what you want, and I will do it.”

And she heard Silas’s voice, low and clear in an empty theatre — so that they could be the one to give it to you — and could not answer him at all.

In the end they found the only shape that would hold, and it was a small one.

She would stay in at night. Not forever, he was careful to say, but for now, while the two of them worked out what came next, together and in daylight, like people on the same side.

He would not post anyone at her door. He said that part twice, and she understood that it was the largest thing he had to give her, and that it was costing him more than she would ever be told.

“Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Zarina, and meant it. She crossed the rug and sat on the broad arm of his chair, as she had not done since she was small enough to be lifted on to it, and he took her hand, and his hands were warm, as they always were, even in the dead of winter.

“I don’t want to lose you,” he said.

“I’m right here.”

“I know,” said her father, and held her hand more tightly, and did not look at her eyes again.

He struck things off her list the next morning — two receptions, a session on harbour dues, a luncheon for a visiting lord who had brought three unmarried sons to the capital for no reason anybody could discover except the obvious one — and gave her an afternoon in the city, with Nalia and four guards in plain grey cloaks that deceived nobody.

In the Copper Market the man who had once sold her a pair of bad brown shoes took off his cap and bowed until his forehead nearly touched the trestle, and within twenty paces people were stepping out of her way before she reached them, and a fruit woman would not take her money and wept and said the late queen had once stopped at her mother’s stall.

It was a great deal better than twelve horsemen and two physicians. It was nothing like being Sera at all.

On the third afternoon of the agreement he found her in the winter garden, the walled garden below the private wing that had been her mother’s, with the clipped yews standing black out of the snow and the old fountain frozen round a stone fish with an icicle hanging from its mouth.

He came down the steps in a heavy cloak with nobody behind him, which was rare enough that she stopped to look, and fell in beside her, and for a while they walked with their breath going up white between them.

“I probably kept you too close,” he said.

She looked at him. He seemed uncomfortable saying it, as though the words were a coat cut for somebody else. “After your mother died, I worried about everything. If you were ill, I thought it was serious. If you went riding, I wanted twice the guards. If someone upset you, I remembered their name.” He breathed out through his nose, which was as near as he came to laughing at himself. “I thought keeping things away from you was the same as keeping you safe.”

Part of her wanted to tell him then. Not about the Veil, or the mirror room, or the little bottle under the cushion with her mother’s arms on it — only that across the river there was a young woman called Sera whom nobody had made, and that Sera was her, and that she was frightened, a little, of something she could not name.

The man beside her had just admitted, without anybody asking, that he had been wrong. She opened her mouth.

He spoke first. “I’ll do better.” He smiled at her, tiredly, the way he smiled at the end of very long days. “You shouldn’t have to escape me just to have a life.”

The words stopped her where she stood. He meant it generously, as he meant everything: he would open so many doors for her that she need never use the one at the bottom of the service stair.

He could not see that it was the one thing he could not hand her, because the moment he handed it to her it would be his. And he had named it without knowing, in a single word. Escape.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No,” said Zarina, and put her arm through his, and he covered her hand with his own, warm through both their gloves, and she did not tell him.

On the fourth night of the agreement she could not sleep.

It was not the curtained room she lay awake thinking of, nor Tessa, nor even Daren. She had thought, when she agreed, that it would be those she missed, and she did miss them, distantly, the way a person misses a summer.

What kept her awake was something else. By midnight on the fourth night her skin felt too tight for her.

Her hands would not keep still on the coverlet. There was a fine, thin trembling in them that she had never felt before, and a sour, dry taste in her mouth, and the grey had come down over the bed like a lid, heavier than it had ever been, so heavy she could hardly breathe under it.

She had finished Sabra’s little vial weeks before, on a council night at the end of the autumn, and there had been nothing in the hollow under the window seat since. She got up anyway and lifted the cushion and looked, as though one might have grown there.

She stood in the middle of her bedchamber in the dark with the empty hollow at her feet and her hands shaking, and understood — slowly, clearly, the way she had once understood a column of figures that did not add up — that she was not going to go back across the river because she wanted to. She was going because she could not stay.

It frightened her very badly. It frightened her for perhaps the length of time it took to open the cedar chest and take out the green coat. Then it was simply a thing that was true, like the cold, and she put the coat on.

She did not go to the curtained room. She went straight across the old bridge and through the leaning streets to the house behind the third glassworks, and Ilyne opened the door to her, and looked at her face, and said nothing at all, and stood aside.

She came back in the last grey hour before the palace woke, with the cold of the river in her coat and a warmth under it that was not her own, and the corridors were empty, and with her own door in sight she thought for a moment that she had done it.

Then she saw Balif.

He was sitting on the bench opposite her chamber door, the one her father had promised to leave empty, with his cloak round him and his hands folded on his knees. No folder, no cup. He had plainly been there some time. He was not angry, and that made it worse.

He looked at the green coat, and then at her face, and then, for a long moment, at her eyes.

“Your father thinks you’re asleep.”

“I know.”

“You told him you would stay.”

“I know.”

Neither of them moved. She waited for him to tell her to go and wake her father now, this minute, and say it to his face. He had every right to. He did not do it.

“Was it worth it?” he asked.

The question was not cruel. He asked it as though he genuinely wanted to know.

And Zarina, standing in the grey light with the warmth still humming in her fingers and the grey held off, for a few hours more, somewhere just behind her shoulder, opened her mouth to say what she had been going to say all the way home across the river.

“Yes,” she said.

Balif closed his eyes briefly. She heard it as he heard it — the word coming out too fast and too bright, a word set down to cover a hole — and she understood that it was not an answer to his question, and that he knew it was not, and that she knew he knew.

He stood. His knees made their small complaining sound, and he stepped aside so that she could reach her door.

“Get some sleep, Zarina,” he said.

She shut the door behind her and stood with her back against it in the dark.

Her hands had stopped shaking. That was the only thing she could think about, for a long time, standing there: that her hands had stopped shaking, and that she knew exactly why, and that she did not know — she truly did not know — what she was going to do the next time they began.