When Sera Was Seen
Spring came to the capital that year by inches, and Zarina spent the first of it waiting for something to happen.
Nothing did. That was the worst of it. She had woken in the little panelled room behind Carisse’s boxes with a bruise on her arm and a blank where a night should have been, and she had waited every day afterwards for the blank to come back and find her — a word in a broadsheet, a look across a council table, a knock at her door. None came.
Carisse, when Zarina next saw her, kissed her on both cheeks and said she had been the star of the season and must do her father again some time, and laughed, and touched her keys, and said nothing else at all.
Silas said she had been magnificent. Veyra said nothing, and turned the little wooden faces on her necklace, and did not meet her eyes.
A delegation of the Cosmos Voyagers arrived in the second week of spring, eleven of them in long slate-coloured coats, and her father wanted her beside him at both the formal dinners.
She sat through them in pale silk with her mother’s pearls at her throat, and smiled, and asked after their long journey, and heard perhaps one word in five.
She had taken a whole vial before each dinner, because it was the only way she could sit still for four hours, and the Voyagers’ grave grey faces swam and softened in the candlelight, and once, when the eldest of them spoke to her directly, she had to ask him to repeat himself, and saw her father’s head turn.
She was taking them every day now. She had stopped pretending to herself that she was not. The little enamelled box under the cushion with her mother’s arms was never empty, because Silas filled it, and never asked for anything in return except that she come to him, and she always came.
One morning, crossing the covered walk above the lower courtyard with her hair still damp from the bath and last night still humming faintly in her fingers, she saw her father in the yard below with two ministers.
He had not seen her. She stopped behind a column and watched him. He was dressed simply for the morning, in a dark coat without ornament, with a sheaf of papers under one arm, as tall and as still as ever.
But the grey had spread from his temples further than she remembered, and he moved his left arm carefully, still, since the balcony.
In the flat light off the wet flagstones he looked tired, and with a small cold shock she understood that he had looked tired for months, and that she had not once stopped to see it.
One of the ministers said something. Her father halted to answer, and pointed with the papers across the courtyard, and both ministers turned obediently to look.
She could have stepped out. She could have gone down the stair and put her arm through his, as she had in the winter garden, and walked with him to wherever he was going.
She stayed behind the column until they had gone through the far arch. Then she went upstairs and opened the enamelled box, and that bothered her too, all day, for as long as anything could bother her that spring.
The spring celebrations opened with banners along every main road, and the palace went into the state of controlled panic it kept for festivals and wars.
Performances were commissioned across the city at the throne’s expense, and the Velvet Veil was in the middle of all of it, because it owned or supported too many theatres to be left out, and for the first time Zarina began to see faces from the Red House at official events.
Several days in, a play was given in the palace theatre, a gilded jewel-box of a room under the west range, all red plush and painted ceiling and the smell of hot wax from a hundred candles.
Zarina sat beside her father in the royal box. Balif sat farther along, annotating the programme in pencil.
The play was a comedy about a lost will, and halfway through the second act she looked down into the wings and saw Veyra, standing in the half-dark at the side of the stage with papers under her arm, and the painted faces of her necklace catching the footlights and throwing back little sparks of colour.
The company waited to be presented afterwards in a long panelled room with the candles already guttering.
Zarina followed her father down the line because there was nothing else to do, and then Veyra was in front of her, with no crowd between them and no disguise thick enough to make her feel safe.
Veyra looked at her face. Then at her hair, and the gold threaded through it. Then back to her eyes.
Zarina watched the recognition happen, slowly and not at all dramatically, a change so slight that nobody else in the room could have seen it. Beside her, the Supreme Ruler was speaking pleasantly to a singer about her second song.
Veyra bowed. “Your Highness.”
“Thank you for the performance,” said Zarina.
“Of course,” said Veyra, and moved on down the line, and that was all.
She went to Veyra’s rooms the next evening, because she could not bear the waiting, and found her in the two low chambers over a chandler’s yard by the western canal, where the light came in green off the water and everything smelled of tallow and wet rope.
“Sera,” said Veyra, and the name had a weight on it now that it had never carried before.
“Are you going to tell anyone?”
“No.”
It came at once, with nothing in front of it. Zarina had come with arguments ready, and with something not far from threats. She had not prepared for no. “Why?”
Veyra looked honestly confused. “Why would I?”
She asked whether anyone else knew, and Zarina shook her head at every name — Tessa, Ilyne, Carisse, Silas — and Veyra nodded slowly, and something went across her face and was gone, too quick to name. It was not unkind. If anything it was pleased.
“Then don’t tell them,” Veyra said. “Not Carisse. Not your poet. Not anyone.” She turned one of the painted faces on her necklace between finger and thumb, the crooked one with the moustache, and looked at Zarina over it. “It’s better like this. Just us.”
Zarina sat down in the other chair, and down in the yard somebody was rolling barrels over the cobbles one after another with a sound like slow thunder, and for the first time in weeks she felt something loosen in her chest.
Somebody knew. Somebody in Sera’s world knew the whole central truth of her, and nothing had fallen down.
With Veyra, over the next weeks, she stopped steering round things — my father did that, my rooms are on the eastern side, Balif told me once — and every small truth felt dangerous as it left her and then, a moment later, ordinary.
She did not notice how much Veyra liked being the only one. She did not notice that Veyra never once, in all those weeks, asked whether she was all right, or looked at the little enamelled box when Zarina took it out of her pocket, or said anything about her hands.
Veyra did not judge. That had always been the thing Zarina loved best in her.
It did not occur to her, that spring, that there might be such a thing as a friend who loved you too much to say stop, or that there might be another kind, who loved you too little.
The moment came in the last week of the spring celebrations.
There was to be a public performance that night in the old market square in the river quarter, the city’s own music on the city’s own stage, nothing the Supreme Ruler would attend. Silas had told her about it a week before.
Half the Veil would be there, he said, and the woman who sang in the back room of the Red House, and the best part of the night would come after midnight, when the respectable people had gone home.
She was expected that night at a dinner in the long gallery above the rose court, under three chandeliers, with twenty-four at table and a broad grey stonekin steward who never let a glass stand empty.
She had dreaded it for a month. The first course lasted nearly an hour. The nobleman beside her spent it on his eldest son’s education.
Her father had kept the whole of the evening after the dinner free.
He had told her so at breakfast, with a kind of careful hopefulness she had not heard in his voice for a long time: there was nothing on the list after the guests had gone, and he thought they might play chess, the two of them, in his rooms, as they used to. He was still very bad at chess. She had said yes.
By the second course she was thinking about the square. By the third her hands had begun, under the table, very faintly to shake, because she had not dared take anything before a dinner where she would sit at his right hand, and it had been nearly a day.
He noticed. He always noticed. “You keep looking at the door.”
“I wanted to see something tonight.”
“What?”
“A performance.” She told him where, and saw that he knew the square, and saw him understand what kind of performance it was.
“I had kept the evening,” he said, very quietly.
“I know.”
“Then sit. We’ll talk afterwards.”
For a moment neither of them moved. The old boundary stood between them, and it was not a locked gate or a guard or an order shouted in anger.
It was only expectation, the quiet, enormous weight of a room that had never once imagined she would not do as she was asked. She sat down. Her father’s shoulders eased a little, and that hurt more than anything he could have said.
She stayed another twenty minutes. Her hands would not stop. She hid them in her lap in the folds of her gown and felt the trembling run up her arms into her shoulders and her jaw, and the grey come down over the chandeliers like a lid, and the nobleman’s voice going on and on about his son from the far side of the thick glass, and she thought she would scream if she sat there one minute more. She stood up again. This time she did not look at her father. She said “Excuse me,” and the table went quiet.
He said her name, not loudly. She stopped, because she had never in her life been able to walk on when he said it, and turned. He was not furious. He was worried, and embarrassed before his guests, and something else, something under both, that she would not let herself see.
“Please,” he said.
One word. She almost sat down.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and left.
Nalia came into the bedchamber a few minutes behind her and found her already pulling the pins out of her hair and dropping them on the dressing table, where they skittered and rang, and kneeling on the floor in her court gown to lift the cushion with her mother’s arms on it.
“Your Highness?”
“Help me with this.”
Nalia stood inside the door and watched her open the enamelled box. She watched her take out a vial with hands that could barely hold it, and drink it whole, there on the floor, and close her eyes, and sit back on her heels while the shaking slowly went out of her.
Nalia did not say anything. She came and helped with the gown, and she did not do it happily, and the court gown went over a chair, and Nalia smoothed it there by habit.
Sera’s clothes came out from under the blankets in the chest: the plain skirt, the worn boots, the green coat from Carisse’s wardrobe with its frayed cuffs.
At the door Nalia said, “He’ll know.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you sneaking?”
It struck harder than Nalia had meant it to. Zarina saw her lower her eyes and begin an apology, and stopped it. “No. You’re right.” For a moment she considered going down the great stair to the main gate and telling the guards she was going into the city. She imagined the shouting, the captain, the runners sent to her father’s table. Not yet. She turned toward the service stair, and went down it as she always had.
The performance had long since begun when she reached the old market square, and she heard it three streets before she saw it.
The square lay at the bottom of the river quarter where four roads met, a rough oblong of worn paving hemmed in by tall crooked houses with every shutter thrown open.
Strings of lamps ran from roof to roof in long sagging golden curves, so that the crowd stood in a moving lattice of light and shadow, and at the far end against the old corn exchange stood a stage of planks and trestles where fiddles and a drum and a low pipe played, and a woman Zarina knew from the back room of the Red House sang in a voice big and dark and unhurried.
It smelled of hot fat and crushed spring flowers and far too many people. A dwarf with a barrow of roasted nuts was doing better business than anyone.
A feather-crested courier perched on a balcony rail with her wings folded and her chin on her fists, listening. Apprentices stood on the rim of the dry fountain to see over heads.
Silas found her at the edge of the crowd, and kissed her, and laughed at her for being late, and put another vial into her hand.
She had already had one. She drank it anyway, because the night had been so bad, and because he was laughing, and because the music was so loud and the lamps so bright, and the warmth came up in her twice over until the lamps swam and doubled and the whole square seemed to tilt very gently, like the deck of a ship.
After that the night went in pieces.
She remembered dancing, though not with whom. She remembered laughing at something, too loudly, with her head thrown back and her hair coming down, and somebody she did not know catching her when she stumbled.
She remembered Silas’s arm round her waist and his mouth at her ear, saying something about her father that made her laugh harder, and a cup going round, and the gold line — somebody had painted Sabra’s gold line on her face again, from her temple to her jaw, and she could feel it drying on her skin.
She remembered thinking that she was happy. She was almost sure she had thought it. It was the last clear thing.
Then she saw the man standing a few paces off, and he was staring at her.
He was middle-aged and well dressed, in a good brown coat, and he was neither Veil nor anyone she knew from the river quarter.
Zarina knew his face. He was a minor court official, a clerk of the household accounts, not important enough that she had ever learned his name, important enough that he had bowed to her in a hundred rooms.
She stopped moving. Everything around her went on — the music, the bodies, the noise — and Silas said something she did not hear.
The official looked from her face, with its gold line and its eyes, to Silas’s arm round her waist, to the people round her, and back, and there was no mistaking what was in his face. It was not anger. It was something far worse. It was pity.
He went pale. “Your—”
The music took the rest. She could still have gone. She could have turned her face away and let Silas pull her into the crowd, and by morning the man might have talked himself out of it.
She did not move. She could not, quite, make her body understand that it ought to.
“Lady Zarina?”
Somebody near her laughed, thinking it was a joke. Somebody else looked again, and did not laugh.
“Sera?”
It was Tessa. She was standing three paces off at the edge of the dancing, in her too-large coat with the button missing, with her hands at her sides.
Somebody had told her Sera would be there tonight; somebody had told her that Sera was not well, and that she ought to come.
Zarina never learned who. Tessa was looking at her face, at the gold line and the wide dark eyes and Silas’s arm, and her own face was very white.
Then Tessa looked properly — not at Sera, at Zarina — reaching for a face she had seen once, years ago, going past in a carriage. It took a long moment. It did not take forever.
Zarina could have denied it. She found that she did not have it in her. She looked at Tessa, and said it, and her voice came out too loud and very strange, and somebody near her laughed again.
“My name is Zarina.”
And the official, because he had done it every time he had ever seen her and his body knew no other way, bowed.
That was what made it real. Not the name; the bow. Right there in the square, in front of Tessa, in front of Silas, in front of people who had never once bowed to Sera, a man in a brown coat bent at the waist as though a herald had called her in, while she stood swaying in front of him with paint on her face and her hair coming down and a stranger’s cup in her hand.
“Your Highness.”
The words went out from him faster than Zarina would have believed words could travel.
Heads turned. The dance broke apart round them, and she felt the space change, the thing that had happened all her life in every street and hall — people moving back, people turning to stare, a clearing opening round her that she had not asked for.
Tessa stepped back. Only one step. It hurt more than anything Zarina had expected to hurt that night, even through the warmth, even through the swimming lamps.
“You’re his daughter,” Tessa said.
“Yes.”
“All this time.” Tessa looked at the gold line on her face, and at Silas, and at the cup in her hand, and her mouth shook. “Oh, Sera,” she said, not angrily at all. “Oh, look at you.”
She turned and went. Zarina watched the faded coat push away into the crowd until the lamps and the bodies closed over it.
Somebody was at her elbow. It was Veyra, white-faced. “You need to leave. Now. More of them are knowing you.” Behind Veyra, at the edge of the crowd, under a string of lamps, Zarina saw Carisse, in green over wine-red, with a cup in her hand and her other hand resting on the keys at her belt.
Carisse was not surprised. Of all the faces in the square, hers was the only one that was not.
She stood quite still and watched, and her face was calm and interested and very faintly pleased, the face of a woman watching the second act of a play she has seen many times and knows to be a good one.
Their eyes met across the square. Carisse lifted her cup, very slightly, as if to a friend across a crowded room, and smiled.
Then Silas pulled at her arm, and the crowd closed, and Zarina lost her.
In the palace the dinner ended an hour early, and only Balif knew why.
He had watched it from farther down the table, between a shipping heiress and a deaf old general, with a cup of wine he disliked and drank anyway.
He had watched Zarina sit and stand and sit and stand again, and go out without looking round. Then he had watched her father, which nobody else at the table had the sense to do.
The Supreme Ruler did not go after her. He turned to the nobleman from the river house and asked about the son, and heard the whole history of the boy’s education to the end.
He saw his guests through two more courses and out to their carriages, and was gracious to every one of them.
Only once, while the plates were being cleared, did he close his eyes, for as long as it takes to draw a breath. Balif had known him twenty years. He had seen that look before, at a deathbed.
Afterwards the ruler went to the small receiving chamber off the entrance hall and sat down in the plain chair by the unlit hearth, as though he meant to stay until morning.
On a table by the window, Balif saw, somebody had set out the chessboard, with the pieces in their places, and two chairs drawn up to it.
Near midnight the captain of the night watch came in with his helmet under his arm.
A gentleman of the court had come to the gatehouse on foot, he said, from the performance in the old market square, and asked that His Grace be told he had seen Her Highness there in the crowd, dressed as a townswoman, and that she had answered to her name.
The ruler heard it without moving. Then he asked, “Was she harmed?”
The captain hesitated, and looked at the floor. “He says not, Your Grace. He says she was laughing.”
Something went across the ruler’s face that Balif could not read, though he had been reading that face for twenty years. “Thank the gentleman, and see him home, and tell him I will want him in the morning. And when my daughter comes to the gate, let her in.”
“Which gate, Your Grace?”
“Whichever one she chooses,” said the Supreme Ruler, very quietly.
When the captain had gone, Balif took off his lenses and folded them, and found he had nothing to say that was worth the breath.
He was beginning to think that this was the shape his life had taken: to be right, carefully and at length, about things that could not be mended by being right about them.
He looked at the chessboard by the window, set out for two. After a while he went and put the pieces back in their box, one by one, so that his friend would not have to.
She found Tessa much later, and not at the square.
Tessa’s theatre stood dark, but the stage door was not locked. Zarina went in through the smell of size and old paint, past rails of costumes hanging like a crowd of people with no heads, and out into the hall, where a single lamp burned on the boards.
Tessa sat on the edge of the stage beside it with her boots hanging over the drop, and did not look up.
The warmth was going out of Zarina by then. The square had burned through it. She sat down on the edge of the stage an arm’s length away with the empty seats going back into the dark in front of them, and her hands, in her lap, had begun to shake again.
“Your father is the Supreme Ruler,” said Tessa at last, to the seats.
“Yes.”
“That’s why you never knew prices.” Tessa rubbed her hands together. “I feel stupid. I believed all of it.”
“Most of it wasn’t a lie.”
Tessa turned her head and looked at her, at the gold line half rubbed off her face and the shaking hands, for a long time. “Is Sera even anything?”
It went into Zarina like a nail. She made herself think before she answered, as Balif had always told her to, and when she answered she meant it. “Yes. She is. Now she’s me.”
“No,” said Tessa. Her voice was shaking. “No, she isn’t. I knew Sera. Sera ate fried fish on a wall and paid too much for shoes and couldn’t tune a string. Sera was nice.” She dragged the heel of her hand across her eyes, hard, as though her face had done something to her. “I don’t know who that was in the square. Laughing like that. With him. With that paint on your face, like the girl who died.” She stopped, and breathed. “You don’t get to decide that none of this matters because it felt real to you. You don’t get to be somebody I loved and then turn into — that — and tell me it’s still the same.”
There was nothing Zarina could say that would not make it worse. They sat apart in the little ring of lamplight, and after a long while Tessa said, “Go home. Wherever that is. Go home, and stop taking it, and then come back and tell me who you are.”
“Tessa—”
“Go home,” said Tessa, and did not look at her again.
There was no point in the service court that night. She understood that as she climbed the long hill through the empty streets with the festival lamps burning down to smoke behind her.
People in the square had seen her. By morning half the city would know, and there was no use any longer in hiding where she had been.
The palace stood above her with far too many windows lit for the hour, and she knew they were lit for her.
She walked up the processional way to the front gate in Sera’s clothes, with the green coat buttoned to the throat and the last of the gold line on her face, and the guards saw her coming and at first did not react, and then one of them looked again, and his face changed.
For more than a year she had gone in and out of this place among laundry baskets and ash carts, by the service stair she had first gone down on a frosted night at the end of the winter she was twenty.
Tonight she came in by the front. Somebody shouted to somebody inside. Then the bars were drawn back, and the gates opened.
Her father was waiting in the small receiving chamber with the fire unlit. Balif stood by the window. Nalia was by the door, her hands folded in her apron.
Zarina stopped in the doorway. He looked older than he had at dinner, and she had done that, in an evening.
His eyes moved over all of it, slowly: the worn boots, the green coat with its frayed cuffs, the smear of gold paint along her jaw. Then they came to her eyes and stayed there, and he did not look away this time, and she saw him see.
“Everyone out,” he said.
Balif hesitated, with his folded lenses still in his hand. “Please,” her father said, and Balif went, and Nalia followed him, and the door closed.
For a while neither of them spoke. Then he asked, “Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“With the Velvet Veil.”
Her jaw tightened. “With my friends.”
He looked down. He got up and went to the cold hearth, and came back and sat again, as though he did not know what else to do with his body.
She understood then how frightened she had been of this moment all along. Not of punishment, and not of his anger. Of his face.
“Are you angry?”
“Yes.” The honesty of it went through her. He looked toward the dark window. “I am also relieved that you are standing here. And frightened. And tired. And I do not know what I am supposed to do next.”
He looked at her clothes again for a long time, and at the gold on her face, and at her hands, which she could not keep still, and which she saw him see.
“Is this who you are now?”
That frightened her more than everything else he had asked. She looked down at the green coat with its frayed cuffs, and the worn boots, and her own shaking hands, and then up at him.
“Part of me.”
His face tightened. He nodded slowly, as though setting down something heavier than it looked, and for a while neither of them said anything at all. He did not ask about her eyes.
She watched him not ask. She watched him come right up to the edge of it and stop, the way he had stopped every time it came near, all that winter, and turn away, because he could not bear to hear what she would say.
“Go and sleep,” he said.
“That’s all?”
“No.” He sounded exhausted. “But not tonight.”
She went to the door, and her hand was on the latch when he said her name. She stopped. He had looked up at last, and whatever anger had been in his face was gone.
What was left was only fear, plain and old and enormous, the same fear that had doubled the guards and sent twelve horsemen after a nine-year-old at the Lantern Festival.
“I love you,” he said.
It nearly broke her. “I love you too.”
Neither of them moved. Then she went out.
She did not sleep. She sat on the window seat in her bedchamber with her knees drawn up, still in Sera’s coat, and watched the dawn come up grey and then gold over the palace roofs.
Beyond the walls the city was waking. Somewhere in that tangle of roofs Tessa knew, and soon the broadsheet men would know, and the palace would hear, and what had been hers alone to tell was no longer hers.
There was no clean way back to the life she had lived before, and no clean way forward either. She knew that, and found that she could not make herself feel it, because by then the shaking had come back and it was the only thing in the room.
It ran up her arms and into her shoulders and her jaw. Her skin was too tight for her. The grey had come down over the window like a lid.
She got down off the seat and knelt and lifted the cushion embroidered with her mother’s arms, and opened the little enamelled box, and it was empty. She had taken the last of it on the floor, eight hours before, in her court gown.
She knelt there for a long time with the empty box in her hands.
Then she climbed back on to the window seat in the green coat and drew her knees up and put her forehead against the cold glass, and waited for the morning, and for her hands to stop, and they did not stop.
The velvet curtains hung on either side of the window, heavy and dark, where Nalia would come in an hour and draw them.
Zarina looked at them for a long time. And somewhere under the shaking and the grey and the shame she knew one thing with a terrible certainty, which she did not understand and could not have explained to anyone: she did not want them to close again.