Behind the Curtain
The Supreme Ruler heard it from Balif in his private study an hour after dawn, on a grey morning in the middle of the winter.
The fire had been built high against the cold. Balif’s coat smelled of damp wool, as though he had spent the night somewhere draughty, and he did not sit.
He stood just inside the door with a folder under one arm and said it plainly, the way he said anything he had already decided to say. She had gone out on the fourth night. She had come back at first light. The agreement was over.
“You waited for her.”
“On the bench outside her door. I asked her whether it was worth it.” Balif shifted the folder. “She said yes.”
The ruler set down his pen. There had been a season, not long ago, when he would have gone straight down the corridor and woken her, and a season before that when he would have had a lock on the service stair by noon. He thought of both, and wanted neither.
He thought instead of the winter garden, and of his own voice telling her that she should not have to escape him to have a life, and found that he was not angry. He was something quieter than angry, and older, and he had no name for it.
“If I forbid it, she goes anyway,” he said. “And I hear of it from you, some weeks after.”
“There is something else.” Balif took off his lenses and folded them, one arm and then the other. “I told you about her eyes.”
“You did.”
“It was worse, this morning. Her hands were steady and her eyes were not, and she spoke to me as if from the far end of a long room.” Balif held the folded lenses in his lap and looked at them. “I have seen men come back from the Iskandar campaigns with that look, and eat poppy for the pain long after the pain was gone. I am not saying that is what this is. I am saying I have seen it.”
The Supreme Ruler looked at him for a long time across the desk.
Then he looked away, at the grey window, and Balif watched him take the thing he had been told and put it down somewhere out of sight, carefully, the way a man puts down a letter he means to read later and never does.
“She is tired,” the ruler said. “She has been doing the work of two secretaries since the spring, and going out half the night besides. Anyone’s eyes would be wrong.” He picked up his pen. “I will not forbid it. I will ask, and she may answer or not as she likes.”
Balif opened his mouth, and closed it again. He had told the truth, and the truth had been heard, and set aside, by the only man in Ashkar he could not make listen.
He put his lenses back on and went out, and in his own rooms the cup of tea he had poured at dawn and forgotten stood waiting on the desk, and he drank it anyway, stone cold, and it was every bit as bad as it always was.
They ate together that evening in one of the smaller dining rooms, with no ministers and no envoys, only the two of them and the servants along the walls.
Her father talked about river tolls. Zarina half listened, and moved a piece of fish from one side of her plate to the other.
“You’re going out tonight,” he said, without looking up.
She looked up too quickly, and he saw it. “Maybe.”
He leaned back in his chair, and for several long seconds said nothing at all, and she waited for the voice that grew quieter when he was truly angry.
It did not come. When he spoke, he set each word down carefully, as though he were placing it on the table between them.
“Do you want me to tell you not to go?”
That surprised her. “No.”
“Would it stop you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and it was the most honest thing she had said to him in a year, and she saw him understand that, and look down at his plate.
“Tell Balif the address.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then someone knows where I am.”
“That is the idea,” said her father, and closed his eyes, and opened them again. “Come back safely.”
She went. She came back near dawn, later than she had meant, with her hands smelling faintly of wine after she had scrubbed them twice and the sweet resin smell in her hair, and the gallery windows were turning from black to grey as she reached the royal wing with a book under her arm.
Her father was standing outside her chambers. He was dressed, though not formally, and held no papers, and had the look of a man who had been standing in one place for a long time.
“I had no idea where you were,” he said. His voice was very low. “I am trying, Zarina.”
She knew what he meant, and it hurt more than shouting would have. There was no command anywhere in it, only a tiredness she had never heard in him before.
She stepped forward and put her arms round him, and for a moment his own stayed at his sides, and then he held her, and she breathed in cedar oil and the cold of the corridor.
He did not look at her eyes. She noticed that afterwards, lying in bed with the shutters closed against the morning.
He held her, and kissed her hair, and told her to sleep, and he did not once look her in the face, and she understood — with a small, cold, guilty relief that she did not like at all — that he did not want to see.
Sabra was brighter that winter than Zarina had ever known her.
She was louder, and quicker, and funnier, and thinner. The gold line on her face ran over a cheekbone that had grown sharper every week since the first snow, and she wore a great many bracelets now, all the way up both forearms, so that they clashed when she danced.
She danced most nights. She danced as though the floor had been laid for her that morning and would be taken up again at dawn, and every room she danced in watched her, and Zarina watched with them and envied her still.
Carisse watched too. Zarina saw it now, the way she had not let herself see it in the summer.
She saw Carisse move the dark decanter from the sideboard to the locked kitchen cupboard whenever Sabra came downstairs, without ever seeming to look at her. She saw the key to that cupboard, the only one, on Carisse’s own ring.
And one night in the deep of the winter she saw Sabra, laughing, with her arm round Carisse’s neck, slip that ring off its hook at Carisse’s belt as neatly as a pickpocket, and go off down the kitchen passage with it, and come back a quarter of an hour later and hang it back again, still laughing, while Carisse talked to somebody else and did not notice, or did not choose to.
Zarina said nothing. It was not hers to say. She said it to herself, at the time, in exactly those words, and believed it.
She had stopped counting her own Thursdays by then. The rule had gone the way of the first one, quietly, without a sound, the way ice goes off a pond: one week she had told herself that two Thursdays together did not count when one of them was a birthday, and after that she could not have said which week the rule had stopped existing. She kept the vials in a little enamelled box in the hollow under the window seat now, with the purse. Sabra gave them to her. Sabra never took a coin for them. “For the bad days,” Sabra said, every time, and laughed, and Zarina laughed too, and did not say that most of her days were bad ones.
Once, that winter, she and Sabra were alone.
It was very late, in the wardrobe room under the roof of the Red House, where Sabra had gone to find a cloak and Zarina had followed her up for no reason except that she always followed Sabra up. The dead crowns hung on their hooks.
The headless dummy still wore its half suit of painted armour. Sabra sat down suddenly on a trunk among the rails of old costumes, as though her legs had decided it for her, and laughed at herself, and did not get up.
In the light of the one candle she looked older than she was. Zarina had never seen it before.
The gold line on her cheek had smudged, and under it the skin was grey and tight, and her hands in her lap were never quite still, the bracelets ticking together very faintly, like a clock in another room.
“Are you all right?”
“Always.” Sabra tipped her head back against the rail behind her and looked at the ceiling. “Carisse found you, didn’t she? At Karel’s.”
“I suppose so. She moved me out of the smoke.”
“She does that.” Sabra smiled at the ceiling. “She found me in a laundry, when I was seventeen. I was folding sheets for a lodging house down by the tanneries, and she came in to complain about her linen, and looked at me across the counter, and said I had a good face.” She laughed, softly, and the bracelets ticked. “She has an eye for faces, Carisse. She can always tell. Whose is going to light up a room. Whose is being kept.” She rolled her head on the rail and looked at Zarina with her bright, too-wide eyes. “She can always tell who’s been kept, Sera. It’s in the shoulders.”
Zarina stood among the rails of old costumes and felt the hair rise very slowly on her arms. “She said that to me.”
“She says it to everybody she likes.” Sabra yawned, enormously, like a cat. “Don’t look like that. She’s good to us. She’s the best of them. She gave me everything I’ve got.” She held up one thin arm, and the bracelets slid down it to the elbow with a little silver rush. “She gave me all of this.”
Then she laughed again, and got up off the trunk too fast, and swayed, and caught at a rail of costumes so that the hangers clashed, and said she was perfectly all right and Zarina was a terrible old woman, and went down the stairs singing.
Zarina stayed a while in the wardrobe room by herself, looking at the empty hook at the end of the rail where the green coat must have hung for two seasons, in a size that happened to fit her.
Then she blew out the candle and went down too, and told herself that she had not understood anything, because she did not want to.
Sabra died in the mirror room on a night in the middle of the winter, while Zarina was in the house.
It was not a spectacle. Afterwards, when people told the story — and they told it often, and beautifully — they made it one, with candles and music and Sabra dancing to the end. It was not like that.
It was a Thursday, and the house was half empty, and the mirror room was warm and dim and quiet, and Sabra was lying on the carpet between the candles with her head on a cushion and her bracelets pushed up her arms, laughing at the ceiling, the way she so often lay.
Zarina was sitting against a mirror across the room with Veyra, half asleep, the warmth humming in her fingers. Somebody was talking low about a play. Sabra had stopped laughing some time ago.
Zarina noticed that the way a person notices a clock has stopped ticking — not when it stops, but some while after, when the silence has gone on long enough to have a shape.
Ilyne was kneeling by Sabra before Zarina had understood that anything was wrong. Ilyne said her name, quite ordinarily, the way she might have said it across the kitchen. Then she said it again, and her voice was different, and the whole room heard the difference and went still.
Somebody shut the door. Somebody went for the doctor, the one who did not ask questions.
He came within the hour, a tired grey elven man with a bag, and knelt where Ilyne had knelt, and did not ask any questions at all, and after a while he stood up and closed his bag.
Zarina sat against the mirror the whole time and could not move.
In every glass in the room a hundred copies of her sat against a hundred mirrors with their hands over their mouths, and a hundred Sabras lay on a hundred carpets between the candles with their bracelets pushed up their thin arms, and none of them moved either.
She was twenty-four. Zarina learned that afterwards. Nobody had ever thought to ask.
The next morning she sat at her father’s left in the audience hall and received the guild of lamplighters.
It was a small audience, nothing at all, a matter of oil prices and the lighting of the new streets in the eastern quarter, and she had been briefed on it a week before and knew every figure.
She sat in her chair in grey silk with her hands folded in her lap and her mother’s pearls at her throat, and asked the master of the guild one exact question about the cost per lamp per season, and he answered it, and her father turned his head and smiled at her, very slightly.
Six hours before, she had been sitting against a mirror watching a tired elven doctor close his bag.
She did not know how she was doing it. She sat there in the bright hall with the high windows full of snow-light, and the lamplighters bowing, and her father’s smile, and she could feel Sabra’s silence in the mirror room as though it had followed her up the hill and come in through the gate and sat down in the hall beside her.
Nobody could see it. She was the only person in the room who knew that anything had happened at all, and the court went on round her exactly as it always had, bowing and murmuring and taking notes, and nobody looked at her twice.
She had taken a whole vial before Nalia came to dress her. It was the only way she had been able to stand up.
She sat through the lamplighters on it, and through the luncheon after, and smiled at a minister’s wife who said she was looking very well, and she was so grateful to the little glass bottle in the enamelled box that she could have wept.
That, more than anything, was what she could not afterwards forgive herself.
The wake was held at the Red House three nights later, and it became a party by midnight.
Carisse spoke. She stood on the bottom stair in black, which she never wore, with her keys at her belt, and talked about Sabra for a quarter of an hour without a note, and it was the most beautiful thing Zarina had ever heard anyone say about anyone.
She said that Sabra had never once in her life asked a room’s permission.
She said that Sabra had lived more in twenty-four years than most people managed in eighty, and had been more free than any of them would ever be, and that they should none of them waste one breath on mourning a woman who had never wasted one on anything.
She said that Sabra had chosen every hour of her life, and that this, too, had been her choice, and that the only way to honour her was to live as she had lived.
The house wept and drank to her. Somebody began to play. By midnight there was dancing in the red rooms, and people were laughing and telling stories of Sabra at the top of their voices, and somebody had painted a gold line from temple to jaw on their own face in her memory, and then somebody else did, and by two in the morning half the house was wearing it.
Ilyne did not wear it. Zarina found her in the kitchen, alone, putting on her coat.
“You’re going?”
“Yes.” Ilyne buttoned the coat to the throat, one button at a time. Her face was as still as ever, and her eyes were red. “She was twenty-four,” she said. “That’s all. She was twenty-four.” She picked up her bag and went out by the kitchen door into the snow, and did not come back that night.
Within the week the mirror room was open again. Zarina went up the stairs on the Thursday and stood in the doorway and saw that the candles had been set round the floor as they always were, and that somebody had turned the cushion over, and that the tray was going round.
She asked Veyra whether she should stop.
They were on the roof of the Red House among the chimney pots on a still night, wrapped in borrowed blankets, with the frost glittering on the slates and the whole city laid out below them in lamplight down to the black river. Zarina had not meant to ask. It came out of her in a rush, with her breath going up white. “Should I stop? The vials. Should I stop, do you think?”
Veyra was quiet for a long time, turning one of the painted wooden faces on her necklace between her fingers. She was not a woman who said comforting things. That was why Zarina had asked her, and not Carisse.
“I don’t know,” Veyra said at last. “I don’t know what it’s like for you. It’s not for me to say.” She turned the little face over and looked at the back of it, as if the answer might be written there. “If you have to ask five people whether to do a thing, Sera, you probably don’t want to yet.”
It was meant kindly. Zarina knew it was meant kindly, and she knew that Veyra believed it, because Veyra never said anything she did not believe.
And sitting there on the frosted slates with her blanket round her shoulders, she felt a great, warm, shameful wave of relief go through her, because she had asked, and nobody had said yes.
It was the worst thing anybody said to her in all the months of Sera. She did not know that for a long time.
The night after the wake, she went home with Silas.
She had not seen him since the autumn, except across rooms. She had kept away from him on purpose, because of what he had said in the empty theatre, and because of how much she had liked it. That night he found her on the stairs of the Red House among the gold-painted faces, and did not say anything clever at all. He only looked at her, with the grey eyes, and said, “Oh, Sera,” very gently, as though he knew exactly what she had seen in the mirror room and exactly what it had done to her, and put his arms round her, and she wept into his silk scarf for the first time since Sabra died.
He had rooms over a bookbinder’s on the river terraces, high and bare and very cold, with books stacked against every wall and a great bed heaped with furs, and a little stove that he fed with pages of his own unfinished poems when the wood ran out.
He gave her a vial out of a box on the windowsill, a whole one, and did not say how much, and she did not ask. He talked to her all night, low, with her head on his chest.
He told her that Sabra had been the bravest person either of them would ever know. He told her that the world was full of people who would spend their whole lives behind glass, and that she and he were not going to be among them.
He told her that whoever kept her so carefully, in that house of hers with the shoulders, had never once in her life let her feel anything at all, and that she could feel anything she liked, now, here, with him, and nobody would write it down.
She believed him. It was easy to believe him. Everything he said was very nearly what she had always thought.
In the morning she woke in the furs with the grey winter light coming in through the high window and Silas asleep beside her, beautiful and careless, with ink on his fingers, and she lay there for a long time and waited to feel what she had felt in Daren’s narrow room — tired, and awake, and entirely herself.
She did not feel it. She felt warm, and far away, and very small, as though she were a long way down at the bottom of something soft. She told herself that was the same thing, only better.
When she came home, near noon, Nalia was waiting with the bath already drawn.
Nalia did not say anything. She had stopped saying anything, that winter, about the hours.
She helped Zarina out of the green coat and last night’s dress, and then she stopped, with the dress over her arm, and Zarina followed her eyes to her own throat in the long glass, and saw the mark there, low on her neck near the collarbone, dark and unmistakable, left by somebody’s mouth some hours before.
They looked at each other in the glass. Nalia’s plain round face did not change at all.
“Can you cover it?” said Zarina.
Nalia’s free hand went to the bed curtain beside her and smoothed it, once and then again, though it was already as smooth as it would ever be. “Yes, Your Highness.” She laid the dress down and opened a box of powder at the dressing table, with her back turned. Then, without turning round, in exactly the same quiet voice, she said, “His Grace asked me yesterday whether you were sleeping. At night.”
Zarina went very still.
“I told him you were,” said Nalia. She dipped the puff in the powder and turned round, and covered the mark on Zarina’s throat with three small careful touches, as she had once covered the grazes on her knees when she was eleven and fell out of the fig tree. It was the first lie Zarina had ever known her tell. She did not look Zarina in the eye.
Daren waited for her at the little theatre on the Saturday, as he always did, and she did not come.
He waited the next Saturday too. On the third he came looking for her, and found her at the Red House on a night when she was wearing Silas’s coat over her shoulders because her own was in the cloakroom, and Silas’s hand was on the back of her neck, and she was laughing at something somebody had said about a magistrate, too loudly, with her eyes too bright.
He stood in the doorway of the red room with a lamp-trimmer in one hand that he had forgotten he was holding. He looked at the coat, and at the hand, and at her eyes, for a long moment. He did not shout. He was not a man who shouted.
“Sera,” he said.
She went out to him on the stair. She did not know what she was going to say. He looked at her in the light from the tinted lamps, and his face was very sad, and very tired, and quite steady.
“I liked Sera,” Daren said. “I don’t know who this is.”
“It’s still me.”
“Is it?” He turned the lamp-trimmer over in his hands, and looked at it as though he had just noticed it. “All right. I hope so.” He put the trimmer in his pocket. “Look after yourself. Nobody else in this house is going to.”
He went down the stairs and out into the snow, and she stood on the landing with Silas’s coat slipping off one shoulder, and let him go, because it was easier.
That was the thing she was most ashamed of afterwards, of all of it: not that she had chosen Silas, but that it had been so easy, and that she had not even had to choose.
She went to the curtained room once more that winter, on a night when the snow was too deep for the Red House.
It was warm, as it always was. Somebody had dragged in an old iron stove at the start of the cold, and it glowed red in the corner. Oren was complaining about his hand. Leni pushed bread across the table. Rike was restringing somebody’s fiddle and did not look up.
It was all exactly as it had always been, and Zarina sat in the middle of it with her cards in her hand and her hands shaking very slightly under the table, because it had been three days, and could not hear a word anybody said.
Tessa watched her across the table. She watched her the whole evening, with the patient, faintly sleepy look she wore when she thought something was wrong, and did not say anything until the others had gone and the stove was dying down, and then she came and sat beside Zarina on the bench.
“You’ve stopped coming,” Tessa said. “On Thursdays.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been at the Red House.” Tessa looked at her hands, which Zarina had folded tight in her lap to keep them still. “I heard about the girl. The one with the gold line.” She was quiet a moment. “I told you once that Karel’s lot were all right in a different way. I should have said it plainer. You don’t have to like everything because you like the people.”
“I know.”
“No,” said Tessa, without any anger at all. “You don’t. You never did.” She looked round the room, at the scarred table and the dying stove and the dog asleep under its chair, and then back at Zarina, and her face was very plain and very tired. “You don’t need me any more, Sera.”
Zarina opened her mouth to say that it was not true. She found that she could not say it, because she did not know whether it was true, and she sat there on the bench with her mouth open and said nothing at all.
The not arguing was the loss. She knew it even then, as it happened, the way a person knows a bone has broken before the pain arrives.
Tessa waited, and when nothing came she nodded once, and got up, and put on her too-large coat with the button missing, and went out through the curtain into the snow.
In the last cold days of that winter, on a clear morning, the old balcony over the western court gave way under her father in the middle of an address.
Balif saw the stone crack and pulled him back by the coat. Three people were hurt in the court below and a guard’s arm was broken, and within the hour the palace was calling it a structural failure and sealing the door.
Zarina was not there. She was not in the court, or on the gallery, or anywhere in the palace at all.
She came in through the ash gate at a quarter to noon, hours after she should have, in last night’s dress under the green coat, with the sweet resin smell in her hair and her mind moving very slowly, as though through water, and a white-faced footman in the lower corridor told her before she had her shawl off.
She ran the length of the royal wing in her stockings. Servants stared. She did not care. She found him in his study with his shoulder stiff and his left arm held carefully against his side, signing letters, and he looked up as she came through the door.
He looked at her eyes before he looked at her face.
She saw him do it. It was a very small thing, a flicker, a half-second; anybody else in the room would have missed it.
Zarina did not miss it, because she had been watching her father’s face all her life, and she had never once in all her life seen him look at her like that, as though he were afraid of what he would find.
Then it was gone, and he put down his pen and held out his good arm, and she went to him and knelt by his chair and put her face against his coat, and he talked about the price of good stone, and she listened to his heart going under the cedar oil and the parchment, and could not stop shaking.
It had never once occurred to her that he could simply stop being there.
She lay awake with it half the night, and in the small hours, when it would not let her sleep, she got up and lifted the cushion with her mother’s arms on it, and opened the little enamelled box.
Balif found her in the eastern gallery two days later, under the portrait of her mother in crimson.
He did not sit. He stood with his hands in two of his many pockets and looked at the portrait, and not at her, which was how she knew that it was going to be bad. “Where were you,” he said, “on the morning the balcony fell?”
“In my rooms. Asleep. I didn’t hear the bell.”
“Nalia was in your rooms at the eighth hour, to dress you for the address. You were not there. She told the steward you were unwell.” He took his lenses off and folded them. “She lied for you, Zarina. Nalia, who has never told a lie in her life. She stood in the steward’s office and lied to his face, and then came and found me in the scholars’ corridor, white as a sheet, and asked me what she ought to do.” He turned the folded lenses over in his fingers. “I did not know what to tell her.”
Zarina looked at her mother’s painted face. She had her mother’s eyes, by universal and tiresome agreement. She wondered, suddenly, what they looked like now.
“Your father nearly died,” said Balif. “If I had been two steps further off, he would have gone down with the stone into the court, in front of four hundred people, and you would have heard of it from a footman at noon, in last night’s dress, with your eyes like that.” His voice did not rise. It never did. “I am not your father. I cannot order you to do anything, and I would not if I could. But I am asking you. Whatever it is that you are taking in that house, I am asking you to stop.”
“It isn’t like that.”
“Then what is it like?”
She opened her mouth. She had an answer; she had a whole speech, half built, about freedom and glass and the grey place and Silas’s voice in the empty theatre.
And standing there under her mother’s portrait with Balif’s tired, honest face turned toward her, she found that none of it would come out in any order that made sense, and that her hands, inside the long sleeves of her gown, had begun very slightly to shake.
“I can stop whenever I like,” she said.
Balif looked at her for a long moment. Then he put his lenses back on, and nodded, as though she had told him something he already knew, and went away down the gallery with his knees complaining, and did not look back.
She stood there under the portrait until the shaking stopped, which took a long time.
There was a night, a week after the balcony, that she did not remember.
She remembered the beginning of it. She remembered Carisse’s theatre and the painted clouds and a great many people, and Silas, and a vial, and then another, because it had been a bad week, and Silas had said it was a night for it.
She remembered dancing. She remembered somebody painting a gold line on her face, from her temple to her jaw, and laughing, and not minding.
After that there was nothing at all. Not darkness; darkness would have been something. There was simply a place where the night ought to have been, and was not.
She woke in a room she did not know. It was grey morning.
She was lying on a couch under a coat that she knew by its smell was Silas’s, in a small panelled room with the shutters half closed and the remains of a fire in the grate, and her mouth was dry as dust and her head was splitting, and there was a bruise on the inside of her arm above the elbow, dark and tender, that she could not account for at all.
Veyra was sitting on the floor by the couch with her back against it, asleep, her necklace of painted faces in her lap. She woke when Zarina moved, and looked at her, and for a moment did not say anything.
“Where am I?”
“Carisse’s. The little room behind the boxes.” Veyra rubbed her eyes. “You don’t remember.”
“No.”
Veyra turned one of the faces in her lap over, and back. She chose her words carefully, the way Zarina had never seen her choose them, and that frightened Zarina more than the bruise.
“You were wonderful,” Veyra said. “You were the best thing in the room. You did your father — the way he talks at council, the way he sits. Nobody knew who you were doing, but it didn’t matter, it was so good. You had the whole room crying with laughter. You stood on a chair and pointed at people with a spoon.” She hesitated. “And you told them the things he says when he can’t sleep. When he walks up and down. You said you’d heard him, through the wall, since you were small.”
Zarina lay very still under Silas’s coat. “What things?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t listening properly by then.” Veyra looked away, at the cold grate. “Carisse was. She was right by you. She was listening very carefully. She made you say some of it twice.”
Zarina did not remember any of it. She lay on the couch in the little panelled room behind the boxes with her head splitting and the grey light coming through the shutters, and tried to remember, and could not find so much as a single word.
There was only the place where the night should have been, smooth and blank as a sheet of glass, and on the far side of it — she knew it, the way she knew the cold — her own voice, saying her father’s words, his private words, the ones he said to nobody, standing on a chair in a room full of strangers, while a woman with a ring of keys at her belt stood close beside her and listened, and made her say them twice.
Somebody remembered. Somebody had remembered every word.
It was not her.