A Child Without a Mother
For the first years of her life, Zarina knew her mother mostly through other people’s faces.
There were portraits, of course. There were far too many portraits. The largest hung in the eastern gallery, where the morning sun came slanting through tall windows and lit the dust in long gold bars. In it her mother wore a gown of deep crimson and rested one hand on a marble balustrade, gazing out over a painted city with the calm of someone who had never once been late for anything. She appeared again in the Hall of Concord, standing beside the Supreme Ruler in the first winter of their marriage, both of them crowned and neither of them smiling. There were others in the long corridors and the receiving rooms, and in all of them she looked like a coin: handsome, gilded and finished.
Zarina’s favourite was the smallest. It hung in the private wing outside her father’s study, at a height a child could reach if she stood on the bench beneath it, which Zarina was not supposed to do and did often. In that one her mother wore no crown. She sat beneath a flowering tree with her hair loose over one shoulder, and she was looking slightly away from the painter, as if somebody just out of the frame had said something funny and she was trying not to laugh at it.
Zarina liked that one because it looked like a person. The others looked like history.
The trouble with portraits was that grown-ups could not walk past a child standing in front of one without saying something. Visiting nobles stopped in the gallery with their hands clasped and their heads tilted. Envoys from the guild cities stopped. Once a tall elven ambassador in grey silk stopped, looked from the painting to Zarina and back, and said nothing at all for so long that Zarina began to worry she had done something wrong. Mostly, though, they spoke.
“You have her eyes.”
“Your mother used to stand exactly like that.”
“She would have been so very proud of you.”
They said these things gently, with a softness that made their voices go thick, and Zarina learned early that the correct response was to smile and thank them. She had no idea what any of it meant. She did not remember her mother’s voice, or her scent, or the feel of being lifted out of bed. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, she thought she remembered someone singing to her. But Balif had once explained, kindly and in rather more detail than she had wanted, that people could build memories out of stories they had heard often enough, and that the mind was a very obliging liar.
After that, Zarina stopped telling anyone about the singing.
Her father never told her that she looked like her mother. He did not need to. Sometimes, across a breakfast table or at the end of a long corridor, he simply looked at her a little too long, and then he looked away, and she knew.
The Supreme Ruler was feared in rooms Zarina had never been allowed into, and she knew it the way children know the weather — by watching what the grown people did. Ministers who had been shouting at one another a moment before remembered, all at once, how to stand. Envoys weighed each word before they let it go. Even the old commanders, men and dwarves who had spent half their lives in the field, dropped their voices when he came in, as though the room had grown a ceiling they had not noticed before.
When Zarina was very small, she thought this was the funniest thing in the world.
The council chamber was a long, high room that smelled of beeswax and ink and too many people breathing. Down its centre ran a table of dark wood so old that it had gone nearly black, and on each of its eight legs a craftsman long dead had carved a lion, crouched and snarling, with a mane of curls a small finger could fit inside. Zarina had wanted one of those lions for as long as she could remember wanting anything.
She was five the morning she went under the table for it.
Nobody saw her go. The council was deep in an argument about river tariffs, and the Treasurer — a stout, grey-bearded dwarf named Hadrun, whose voice could rattle the cups — was in the middle of explaining for the third time why the southern figures were wrong. Zarina crawled between the boots and the hems and the dropped papers until she reached the lion nearest her father’s chair. She wrapped both hands around its head and pulled. She braced her feet against the next leg and pulled harder. Then, since the lion was clearly being stubborn, she reached up and tugged on her father’s robe.
The council went silent. Hadrun stopped in the middle of a word.
The Supreme Ruler looked down. He was a tall man, and still in the way that tall men sometimes are, as if he did not need to move very much to be noticed. His dark hair was cut short and touched with grey at the temples, and his face was the kind that made other people wonder what he was thinking. At the moment it was thinking about his daughter, who was holding the lion’s head with both hands.
“It won’t come off,” she told him.
Somebody further down the table made a noise that might have been a cough.
Her father regarded her for several long seconds. Then he bent until his face was close to hers, and spoke quietly enough that only the nearest ministers could hear.
“That is because it belongs to the table.”
“I want it.”
“I suspected as much.”
“Can I have it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because then the table would have one less lion.”
Zarina gave this the consideration it deserved. “There are seven others.”
At the far end of the chamber, a young secretary laughed out loud and then clapped a hand over his mouth, looking horrified at himself. The Supreme Ruler closed his eyes. It was a thing he did, Zarina already knew, when he was deciding not to be angry.
“Balif.”
Balif had been standing near the doors with a stack of folders under one arm and the expression of a man who had known exactly how this morning would go. He was not a tall man, nor a handsome one. He dressed in plain dark layers with narrow sleeves, the better to keep ink off his cuffs, and he had a closely kept beard with the first grey coming into it and a way of looking at things as though they might be lying to him. He stepped forward.
“Your Grace.”
“Why is my daughter beneath the council table?”
“She disagreed with my assessment that the council chamber was unsuitable for play.”
“You said it was boring,” Zarina objected from under the table.
“I said you would find it boring.”
“You were wrong.”
Her father turned his head and looked at Balif. Balif, after a moment, lifted one shoulder in a shrug, as if to say that the facts were the facts and he could not be held responsible for them.
The Supreme Ruler reached under the table and lifted Zarina into his arms. She came up with dust on her knees and her braid half undone.
“You are disrupting matters of state,” he said.
“What are matters of state?”
“Things you will one day be very grateful other people worry about for you.”
She leaned against his shoulder and looked down the length of the table at the assembled ministers — the dwarf with his beard bristling, the thin old woman from the Arcanum, the merchant lords with their rings, the general with the scar across his chin. “They all look worried,” she reported.
“They usually do.”
This time two of them laughed, and the Supreme Ruler turned his head very slightly in their direction, and the chamber was solemn again at once. Zarina never understood why. Her father was not frightening. He smelled of cedar oil and old parchment, and his hands were always warm, and on the nights she could not sleep he would sometimes come and sit on the edge of her bed in the dark, even with half the realm waiting on him in the morning.
It would be years before she understood how few people ever met that man.
Balif remembered how the palace had changed, even if the child could not.
He had known this house in happier years, as a friend who came and went. He had come back in the spring her mother died, with a letter from the Arcanum Arcanorum in his pocket and no intention of staying beyond the season, and so he had seen the change happen, one sensible order at a time. First the guard was doubled. Then the routes through the palace were altered, so that no corridor to the royal apartments could be walked the same way twice in a week. Servants assigned to the family were questioned more carefully, and then questioned again. Food was tasted. Carriages were inspected twice before they left the grounds. Visitors who had once wandered the inner gardens as they pleased found gates locked in front of them and polite soldiers explaining why.
Nobody said aloud what it was for. Nobody had to. The Supreme Ruler had lost his wife, and he did not intend to lose his daughter.
By the time Zarina was old enough to notice any of it, it had simply become the shape of the world. There was always somebody near her: a maid, a tutor, a guard, usually several at once. Even the palace gardens had soldiers at the gates, and the soldiers had names, and Zarina knew all of them. She asked about it, as she asked about everything, and her father gave her the same answer every time. Balif had heard him give it a dozen times over a dozen breakfasts, and this morning he heard it again.
“Because there are people who might try to hurt you.”
They were at the small table in the morning room, where the family ate when there were no guests: the Supreme Ruler at one end with a stack of letters by his plate, Zarina in the middle with her feet not reaching the floor, and Balif at the other end with his tea. Balif’s tea was always cold. He poured it, became interested in something, forgot it, and drank it half an hour later with a look of mild betrayal. He did this every morning, and every morning Zarina watched him do it with enormous satisfaction.
“Why?” Zarina asked.
“Because they cannot hurt me easily.”
She frowned, working it through. “So they would hurt me instead?”
“Yes.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It is.”
“Then why do people do stupid things?”
The Supreme Ruler looked down the table at Balif. Balif buttered a piece of bread. The Supreme Ruler went on looking at him.
“Are you going to help me?”
“No.”
Zarina giggled. Her father pointed his spoon down the table like a magistrate’s rod.
“This is why I keep scholars about the place,” he told her. “They are invaluable, right up until somebody asks them a question.”
Balif dabbed his mouth with his napkin. “You asked why people behave foolishly, Your Grace. I am not certain the Arcanum has produced a volume large enough.”
Zarina thought about that, and then nodded very seriously, as though the matter had been settled to her satisfaction. Her father smiled, despite himself, and Balif saw it and looked down at his cold tea so as not to be caught noticing.
That was how a good many mornings went in those years. It was how Zarina came to believe, without ever thinking about it, that Balif belonged at that table. He was not a courtier, and he was not quite a servant. He was simply Balif, the way the river was simply the river.
Balif, who knew better, was grateful for every one of those mornings, and did not examine too closely why.
He had been there for as long as she could remember, and he was the best part of every day.
He taught her to read a full year before the court tutors thought she was ready, and then pretended to be astonished when she could. He unrolled maps across the floor of his crowded study and let her put her fingers on places she could not pronounce — the salt flats, the guild cities, the high passes where the stonekin quarried — and told her what they ate there, and what they quarrelled about. He explained why two histories of the same war could disagree, and why kings so often described their defeats as strategic withdrawals. He had a hundred pockets sewn into his plain dark coat, and there was always something in one of them: a bent coin from a country that no longer existed, a seed pod that rattled, a stub of chalk.
Most important of all, he never once told her that a question was inappropriate. Other people did that.
When Zarina was seven, an elderly court tutor named Master Ellesh was assigned to teach her the marriages of the old Ashkari dynasties. Ellesh was a dry, narrow man with ink-stained fingers who believed history was a list, and that the purpose of a list was to be memorised. He had been at it for most of an hour, in the warm schoolroom with the bees at the window, and Balif sat in the corner with his notes, ostensibly observing. Zarina raised her hand.
Master Ellesh sighed. “Yes, Highness?”
“Why did Princess Aveline marry Duke Haron?”
“To secure peace between their houses.”
“Did she like him?”
“That is not especially relevant.”
“It was probably relevant to her.”
In the corner, Balif looked down at his notes with great attention. Master Ellesh stiffened like a heron that had stepped on something cold.
“Royal marriages,” he said, “are very frequently matters of duty.”
Zarina turned around in her chair. “Would you marry someone you didn’t like?”
She meant the question for Balif, and everybody in the room knew it, and the room became uncomfortable remarkably quickly. Balif took longer than usual to answer. Zarina noticed that. She would remember, much later, that it was the first time she had ever seen him need to think about something simple.
“No,” he said at last.
Master Ellesh glared at him. Zarina frowned.
“Then why should she?”
“Because,” said Master Ellesh, in the voice of a man returning a dropped book to its proper shelf, “Princess Aveline was born into responsibilities greater than herself.”
Zarina thought about this. Then she looked back at Balif, expecting him to argue, because he always argued. He did not. He was looking at the window, at the bees, at anything at all except her, and she could not for the life of her understand why.
Balif had known her mother long before she was anybody’s queen. That was never hidden from Zarina. What lay between them was never spoken of either, and so it lived in the house the way a draught lives in a house — you could not see it, but you learned which rooms were colder.
He spoke of her respectfully, and rarely, and only when asked. But when Zarina asked, he answered, and he answered truthfully, and that made him different from everybody else she knew.
They were in his study the first time she tried it properly, on a wet afternoon with rain sheeting down the glass. Balif was sorting papers into piles whose logic was known only to him. Zarina lay on her stomach on the rug with her chin in her hands and fired questions at his back.
What flowers had her mother liked? White starblossoms, he said, the small ones that grow along walls; she said the big ones looked like they were showing off. Had she been good at riding? Better than she admitted, and worse than she claimed. Had she liked court? Sometimes. Had she sung?
Balif paused with a paper in each hand. “Badly,” he said.
Zarina laughed so suddenly that she rolled over. “Everyone else says she sang beautifully.”
“Everyone else is being polite.”
“Was she really bad?”
“She was dreadful,” said Balif. “She knew it, too. She used to sing louder to make up for it.”
Zarina laughed until her stomach hurt. Balif smiled — but only briefly, the way a lamp flickers in a draught — and then went back to his papers and did not turn around for some time.
It was one of the few things she had ever heard about her mother that did not sound as though it had been carved on a tomb. After that afternoon she went looking for Balif whenever she wanted something real. Her father spoke of her mother lovingly, but carefully, the way one carries a full cup. The Phoenix Queen, her mother’s sister, spoke of her on her rare visits with a fierce, bright affection that sometimes curdled without warning into anger, so that Zarina never knew which she would get. The courtiers had made her a saint.
Balif remembered that she burned bread. That she disliked formal poetry and fell asleep during recitals. That she cheated at dice and was bad at that as well. That she had once, during an argument, taken off her shoe and thrown it.
Zarina kept every one of these things like a magpie keeping silver. They were hers. Nobody else had them, and they made her mother belong to her.
On the morning of her ninth birthday, Zarina announced that she wanted to see the Lantern Festival.
She did not mean from the palace balcony, where she had watched it every year, a smear of gold far below. She did not mean from the back of a royal procession, either. She meant from inside the city, down among the people, the way a person was supposed to see it.
It was Balif’s fault. He admitted that afterward. He had mentioned it at breakfast, idly, while the Supreme Ruler read his letters: how the lanterns were strung between the buildings on cords, so that whole streets became rivers of light; how the bakers stayed open until midnight and sold honey cakes so hot you had to juggle them; how there was music in every square and none of it agreed; how the children made little paper boats with candles in them and set them floating down the canals.
Zarina stared at him across the table. “You’ve been?”
“Many times.”
“When?”
“Before I grew old and sensible.”
“You’re not sensible.”
Her father did not look up from his correspondence. “At last,” he said. “Something on which we agree.”
Balif ignored him with dignity. Zarina leaned so far across the table that her sleeve went into the jam.
“Can we go?”
Balif’s eyes went at once to the Supreme Ruler, which told Zarina everything she needed to know about who decided things in this house. Her father was still reading. She waited, and waited, and then she could not stand it.
“Father.”
“No.”
She blinked. “You didn’t even think about it.”
“I have thought about it every year since you were old enough to ask.”
“I’ve never asked before.”
“I know you.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“It is efficient.”
She folded her arms. “I want to see it.”
“I know you do.”
“Balif can take me.”
Balif became very interested in his tea, which was cold.
Her father set down his letter. That was a bad sign. When the Supreme Ruler put things down, it meant he was giving a matter his full attention, and very few matters survived that.
“No.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“There’ll be guards.”
“Yes. There would be.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“There would need to be so many guards,” he said, “that you would spend the whole evening seeing nothing but their backs.”
“I don’t care.”
“You would.”
“No, I wouldn’t!”
He gave her the look that meant the subject was closed. Zarina hated that look more than anything in the world. It was not angry, and it was not unkind. It was simply final, the way a door is final.
She shoved her chair back. “I never get to go anywhere.”
“That is not true.”
“I go where you go.”
“You went to the summer estates only last month.”
“With sixty people!”
“Forty-three.”
She stared at him. He seemed to realise, a moment too late, that correcting the number had not helped his case. Zarina turned to Balif, her last and best ally.
“Tell him.”
Balif let out a long breath through his nose. “Your father has legitimate concerns.”
“You always say that!”
“Because he frequently does.”
“You said the festival was safe.”
“I said it was beautiful.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“No,” said Balif quietly. “It isn’t.”
She looked from one of them to the other and understood, with the terrible certainty that only a nine-year-old can feel, that they had been plotting against her all along. Her eyes stung. Her throat went hot and tight.
“I hate this palace.”
Her father did not react. Balif did. “Zarina —”
“I do!”
She ran from the room before either of them could stop her, and the door banged behind her hard enough to rattle the cups.
She hid in the eastern gallery, because nobody came there in the mornings.
The long room was cool and hushed, and smelled of old varnish and stone. The sun had climbed past the tall windows now, and the gold bars of light had shrunk to thin stripes along the floor. Zarina sat on the stone bench beneath the great crimson portrait, pulled her knees up to her chest, and decided that she would stay there for the rest of her life. They would bring her meals. She would grow old on this bench. It would serve them all right.
It took Balif about twenty minutes to find her.
He did not tell her to come back. He did not tell her anything at all. He walked the length of the gallery without hurrying, and lowered himself onto the bench beside her with a small grunt of effort.
“My knees object to this corridor,” he remarked.
Zarina stared straight ahead.
“They object to most things, these days,” he went on, to nobody in particular.
The silence stretched out. A pigeon landed on the windowsill outside, looked in at them, and thought better of it.
“You told him not to let me go,” Zarina said finally.
“I did not.”
“You agreed with him.”
“That is a different thing.”
“It isn’t.”
Balif opened his mouth, plainly intending to explain precisely how it was a different thing, and then closed it again. Zarina looked up at the woman in the crimson gown, with her hand on the balustrade and her calm painted eyes.
“Did she get to go?”
“Your mother?”
“Yes.”
“To the Lantern Festival?”
“Yes.”
“When she was young,” said Balif. “Often.”
Zarina’s jaw went tight. “Of course she did.”
He heard what was in her voice. “She was not the daughter of the Supreme Ruler.”
“So?”
“So fewer people had reason to wish her harm.”
Zarina picked at a loose thread on her sleeve, winding it around her finger until the tip went white. “I don’t understand why being his daughter means everyone gets to decide things for me.”
Balif did not answer right away. He sat looking at his own hands, square and ink-stained, folded on his knee. At nine years old, the child beside him had stumbled onto a question that would follow her for the rest of her life, and he knew it, and he knew that whatever he said now she would remember.
He could have told her about duty. He could have explained dynasties and succession, ransom and leverage, the arithmetic by which a child becomes a weapon in someone else’s hand. All of it would have been true.
Instead, he said: “Your father is afraid.”
That made her look at him at last. “My father isn’t afraid of anything.”
Balif very nearly smiled. “Oh, he is.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“He is extremely good at making other people believe otherwise. That is not the same thing.”
“Then what’s he afraid of?”
Balif lifted his eyes to the portrait and did not say anything. Zarina followed his gaze, up past the crimson gown and the jewelled hand to the painted face, and it took her a moment, and then she understood.
“Me?”
“Losing you.”
Her anger did not go away. But it lost its edge, the way a fire does when you open a window and it has to decide whether to flare up or sink.
“That doesn’t mean he gets to keep me inside forever.”
“No,” said Balif.
She turned right around on the bench to look at him. “No?”
“No.”
“So you think he’s wrong.”
“I think,” Balif said slowly, “that fear can make sensible people unreasonable.”
“Will you tell him that?”
Balif looked deeply unhappy. “You are remarkably eager to send me into dangerous places.”
“You said people should always tell the truth.”
“I regret a great many of my lessons.”
Zarina smiled, though she had not meant to. Balif saw it and put one hand on the bench and pushed himself up, slowly, wincing as his knees made their complaint.
“Come,” he said.
“Where?”
“To speak with your father.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know,” said Balif, and waited, and held out his hand.
That was another thing Zarina disliked about Balif. He almost never let her anger solve anything.
The Supreme Ruler was waiting in his private study, and he had sent everyone else away. Balif noted that as he came through the door, and noted, too, that his old friend was standing at the window with his arms folded and his back to the room. It was the way he stood when he had been listening to bad news for a long time and did not want anybody to see his face while he decided what to do about it.
Zarina came in behind Balif and stopped just over the threshold. She was already sorry she had come; Balif could see it in the way she held her elbows.
For a while nobody spoke. Then the Supreme Ruler turned around.
“You frightened your attendants.”
“I only went to the gallery.”
“They did not know that.”
“I wasn’t leaving the palace.”
“That is not the point.”
Zarina looked at the floor. Balif stayed by the door, where he could be a piece of furniture if he was needed to be one. The Supreme Ruler let out a breath, and some of the stiffness went out of his shoulders.
“Come here.”
She did not move.
“Zarina.”
She crossed the room slowly, as if the carpet were a great distance. When she reached him, her father did something Balif had seen him do perhaps three times in the presence of another living soul: he went down on one knee, so that his face was level with hers.
“You think I am being unfair.”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
She had been braced for an argument. Balif watched the surprise go across her face and then something more uncertain. The Supreme Ruler looked tired. He looked, in that moment, a good deal older than he was.
“Do you know how many people come to the Lantern Festival?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. Thousands. Perhaps tens of thousands.”
“So?”
“So I cannot protect you in a crowd like that.”
“You protect yourself.”
“I am considerably more difficult to carry away.”
Zarina’s mouth twitched in spite of her. Her father saw it, and pressed on, his voice lower.
“If something happened to you because I wanted you to have one pleasant evening, I would never forgive myself.”
“It wouldn’t be your fault.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Balif knew what he was seeing, and knew, too, that he would never say it.
Grown people often claimed there were things children could not understand. Zarina would remember, years later, that sometimes it was the grown people who could not explain them.
Her father touched her cheek with his warm hand. “It would feel as though it were.”
She did not know what to say to that. So she put her arms around his neck and hugged him, hard. For several seconds he held her very tightly, his eyes shut and his chin on her hair.
Then he opened his eyes and looked over her shoulder at Balif.
Balif had been waiting for that. He gave the smallest shake of his head.
The Supreme Ruler frowned at him. Balif tilted his head, a fraction, toward the child in his arms — toward the thread still wound around her finger, the stubborn set of her shoulders, everything that she was and would be. Not this way, the gesture said. You will lose more by keeping her than by letting her go a little.
For a moment Balif thought he had misjudged it. Then he watched his friend understand, and saw what it cost him, and was sorry. The Supreme Ruler closed his eyes, briefly, in the way he did when he decided not to be angry.
“All right.”
Zarina pulled back. “All right what?”
“You may go to the festival.”
Her face lit up like a lamp. “Really?”
“Yes.”
She flung her arms around him again, and he laughed, a short, startled sound, and then added over her head, “There will be guards.”
Zarina groaned into his shoulder. “Not sixty.”
“Certainly not sixty.”
“Not forty-three.”
Balif coughed. The Supreme Ruler gave him an irritated look across the room.
“We will discuss the number.”
It was good enough for Zarina. Balif, watching the two of them, was not entirely sure it was good enough for anybody.
The Lantern Festival began at sunset, and for three weeks Zarina had imagined nothing else.
She had imagined walking beside Balif through narrow, crowded streets, with nobody paying her any attention at all. She had imagined burning her fingers on a honey cake and laughing about it. She had imagined standing in a square with music coming at her from every side and watching the lanterns sway overhead, with her hand in Balif’s so as not to lose him.
Her father kept his promise. Technically.
The royal party rode out of the palace gates as the sky turned the colour of a ripe apricot. Twelve mounted guards rode in front and behind, their helmets polished until they threw back the sunset. A dozen more soldiers walked alongside. Behind Zarina came four palace attendants, two physicians with their bags, several officers of the city watch, and the city magistrate on a nervous grey mare. At the head of it all rode a captain with a jaw like a doorstep, who spent the entire evening glaring at the crowd as though every last citizen of Ashkar had come out tonight for the specific purpose of murdering the princess.
The city itself was everything Balif had promised, and more. The lanterns were strung from window to window, from roof to roof, in their thousands — gold and red and blue and white — so that every street became a tunnel of soft, swaying light. The air smelled of frying dough and spiced wine and candle smoke and the river. There were people everywhere, more than Zarina had known existed. Broad-backed stonekin porters, still dusty from the day’s work, stood shoulder to shoulder with merchants’ wives in their best silk. Scaled traders from the southern coast called their wares in thick, musical accents. A pair of goblin jugglers on a doorstep kept six burning torches spinning in the air while a crowd shouted the count. Feather-crested couriers wove between them all at a jog, as though even tonight somebody somewhere needed a letter delivered.
And all of it stopped when Zarina came by.
The guards went first, clearing the street. People stepped back against the walls and bowed. The goblin jugglers caught their torches and held them still. In the first square, the musicians broke off in the middle of a tune and stood with their instruments at their sides, waiting respectfully for her to pass, so that the only music left was coming from the next street over. When an attendant tried to buy her a honey cake, the baker refused the coin, refused it again, and finally pressed three of the cakes on the attendant with such anxious insistence that Zarina could not bring herself to eat any of them.
Halfway down the Street of Lamps, a boy of about her own age broke out of the crowd and came running toward the procession, waving a paper dragon on a stick and shouting something she could not hear. He had not gone three steps before two guards had stepped between them, smooth and silent as closing doors.
The boy froze. His mother came darting out after him, caught him by the collar, and hauled him back, bowing and bowing and saying something over and over that Zarina could not make out. The boy did not bow. He just stared at Zarina from behind his mother’s skirts, and she stared back at him.
His paper dragon had one wing folded the wrong way. Zarina could see exactly how it ought to go. She wanted to ask him where he had got it, and whether he had made it himself, and whether she could fix the wing for him. She wanted that very much.
The procession moved on.
“Isn’t it magnificent, Highness?” one of the attendants asked her.
Zarina looked up. Overhead, the lanterns swayed in the evening wind, thousands upon thousands of them, like stars that had come down for the night to see what the streets were like. It was magnificent. It was beautiful, exactly as Balif had said.
It was nothing at all like she had imagined.
Everywhere she went, people watched her. Some smiled. Some whispered behind their hands. Some bowed, and kept on bowing until she had gone by. Nobody jostled her. Nobody trod on her foot or shouted at her to get out of the way. Nobody, not one single person in all those thousands, treated her as though she belonged there among them.
A few paces behind her, her father rode in quiet conversation with the magistrate. He caught her looking back at him and smiled, and Zarina smiled back. She knew he had done all of this for her. She knew how much it had cost him to say yes. Somehow, that made it worse.
At the canal, the children of the city crowded along the stone embankment, laughing and pushing, to set their candle boats on the water. A space opened for Zarina without anybody being asked. One of the attendants handed her a boat of her own. It had been made specially for her, edged with gold leaf, with the royal crest painted on the sail in tiny, perfect brushstrokes. It must have taken someone days.
She hated it the moment she touched it.
Balif came and stood at her shoulder. He had found, somewhere, a cup of spiced wine that he was not drinking. “Something wrong?”
“No.”
She crouched at the edge of the water. Beside her, a little girl with a gap in her teeth was lowering a crooked paper boat onto the canal. Its candle leaned so badly it was a wonder it stayed lit at all. The current caught it and spun it, and the girl shrieked with delight and ran along the embankment after it, dodging between legs, nobody stopping her, nobody even noticing.
Zarina looked down at her own perfect boat. Then at the guards standing behind her in a half circle. Then at the hundreds of faces along the canal, all watching, all waiting to see what the princess would do.
“Balif.”
“Yes?”
“Next year, can we come without everyone?”
Balif followed her eyes to the running girl, and his face softened in a way she did not often see.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“That’s what grown-ups say when they mean no.”
“Frequently,” Balif agreed.
Zarina put her boat on the water. It floated beautifully — straight and steady, the candle burning upright in its golden cup, the crest catching the light. A moment later the little girl’s crooked boat came bumping back on an eddy and knocked against it, spun halfway round, and went bobbing on downstream. The girl laughed again, and was swallowed up by the crowd, and was gone.
Behind them, the Supreme Ruler called her name.
Zarina turned. Her father had dismounted and was standing at the top of the embankment, the lanterns making a halo of gold behind him, and he was smiling at her — truly smiling, pleased and proud and almost boyish with it.
“Well?” he said. “Was it worth all your arguing?”
Zarina looked up at the lanterns. She looked at the soldiers, and at the people kept so carefully beyond arm’s reach of her, and at the dark water where the little girl’s boat had gone. Then she looked back at her father.
She smiled, because she loved him. “Yes.”
He looked so relieved that it hurt to see. Balif, standing a little way off with his untouched wine, said nothing at all.
Much later, long after the procession had wound its way back up the hill and the palace gates had closed behind it, Zarina stood at her bedroom window in her nightgown with her forehead against the cold glass. Far below, the city was still burning with lanterns. From up here she could not see the walls, or the guards, or the people stepping back to let her pass. She could only see the lights.
And for the first time in her life, Zarina wondered what it would feel like to stand somewhere nobody knew her name.