The Happiest Years
For several years, Zarina believed that the palace belonged to the three of them.
Not in the way the law meant it. Even as a child she understood that the place belonged to a great many people at once. Armies were provisioned from its offices and ministers quarrelled in its chambers. Guild envoys came up the long hill in lacquered carriages, petitioners waited on the benches outside the audience hall from first light, and an endless river of officials in sober coats flowed through its corridors, carrying papers from one desk to the next. She knew that her father belonged to more people than he belonged to her. Most days she did not even mind.
But there were parts of the palace that seemed to bend themselves around their small household, the way a stream bends around a stone. Her father’s private study, with its smell of cedar oil and lamp smoke. Balif’s cluttered rooms at the top of the scholars’ wing. The morning room where they took breakfast, with the cracked tile beneath the eastern window that Zarina had been stepping over since she could walk. A narrow terrace above the lower gardens, where the wind came up off the city in the evenings. The old observatory, which nobody used anymore and nobody had ever thought to lock.
Those places did not feel like the seat of Ashkar. They felt like home.
And in those years, Zarina was happy.
Not constantly; no child was. She was growing that year in sudden, inconvenient directions, all elbows and shins, with a braid that would not stay braided and her mother’s eyes, as everybody kept telling her. She sulked. She argued. She grew bored in lessons and furious when told no, and she cried over things that she afterward insisted had not upset her in the least. Once, after she had been forbidden to ride out in a summer storm — with the thunder walking about over the rooftops and the stable yard running like a river — she announced that she would not speak to her father for the rest of the afternoon, and quite possibly for the rest of her life.
He lasted less than an hour.
By dinner he had begun asking Balif, in a voice that carried absurdly well down the length of the table, whether anyone had recently seen his daughter. The Supreme Ruler was a tall man and a still one, with the grey at his temples spreading a little further every winter, and he could make a perfectly ordinary question sound like a matter for the council. Balif sat across from him in his usual plain dark layers, pockets everywhere, the narrow sleeves pushed back from his wrists and a book propped open against the salt cellar. He had been trying to read it between courses.
“No,” said Balif, and turned a page.
“Strange,” said the Supreme Ruler.
“Very,” Balif agreed, still reading.
“I seem to remember having one.”
Balif turned another page. “So do I.”
“Dark hair,” said the Supreme Ruler. “Loud.”
“That sounds familiar,” said Balif.
Zarina sat three chairs away with her arms folded so tightly that her elbows ached, and glared at her plate. Her father went on eating with every appearance of calm, cutting his meat into neat, unhurried pieces, as though it were any other evening and the chair three places down were empty.
“Rather a poor temper,” he observed.
Balif nodded gravely, as a physician nods over a hopeless case. “Terrible.”
Zarina glared at both of them in turn. Her father lifted his eyes — not to her, but past her, to the empty doorway, as though the missing girl might wander in through it at any moment.
“If she returns,” he said, “tell her I have decided to leave everything to someone more agreeable.”
“An excellent idea,” said Balif.
“Perhaps the cook,” her father went on.
“The cook,” said Balif, “has better judgment.”
That was too much. Zarina slammed both hands down on the table hard enough to make the spoons jump. “I’m here.”
Her father looked startled, and very nearly convincing. “Zarina.”
“You knew I was here.”
“Did I?” said her father, with mild interest.
“Yes!”
Balif turned another page. “His memory has been poor lately,” he told the book.
She stared at them both for several long seconds with her face burning, determined to stay angry on principle. It did not work. Something rose up in her chest and escaped through her nose as a snort, and then she was laughing despite every effort not to, laughing with her forehead almost on the tablecloth. Her father smiled down at his plate. Balif, who had not read a word in ten minutes, finally closed his book.
That was usually how her anger ended in those days.
She had fallen into the habit of visiting her father’s study whenever she was bored, which was often.
To anyone but the ruler himself, the Supreme Ruler’s private office was perhaps the least interesting room in the palace. Documents arrived faster than the servants could carry them away. One whole wall was given over to maps — the river provinces, the guild cities, the long coast to the south — pinned edge to edge and scribbled over in three colours of ink. Correspondence from the guilds collected on the side tables in neat stacks that grew steadily less neat as the day wore on, until by evening the room looked as though a small and orderly storm had passed through it. It smelled of cedar oil and sealing wax. It was very quiet, and Zarina loved it.
She would arrive with a book under her arm, throw herself full length on the long couch beneath the window, and announce that she intended to remain completely silent.
The promise rarely survived ten minutes.
“Father.”
He went on reading. He read the way other men fought, with his chin on one fist and his eyes moving steadily down the page, as though every document were an opponent he meant to outlast.
“Father,” she said again, louder.
A long pause. Then, without lifting his eyes: “Yes?”
“Do you think fish get thirsty?”
His eyes stopped moving across the page. Across the room, at the little side table where he sat most afternoons with a book and a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago, Balif slowly lowered his book. The Supreme Ruler raised his head and looked at his daughter. “What?”
“Fish,” Zarina explained, in case he had missed it.
“I heard that part,” said her father.
“Well, do they?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
Zarina rolled onto her elbow. “You rule the Aquatic Ascendancy too.”
She meant the sirens of the deep water, whose envoys came up from the coast in their silver-green silks and spoke in voices like water running over stones, and at whom everybody at court was careful never to stare for very long. Her father seemed to be picturing them as well. He did not look as if the picture helped.
“I do not,” he said, “rule their fish individually.”
Balif made a small noise into his cup. Without turning round, the Supreme Ruler lifted the letter in his hand and pointed it at him. “Do not encourage her.”
“I said nothing,” said Balif.
“Your face did.”
Zarina rolled onto her stomach and propped her chin in her hands. “But you should know.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the Supreme Ruler.”
Her father put down his correspondence. That was usually a bad sign, but this time there was something at the corner of his mouth that Zarina had long ago learned to watch for.
“There are limits to the office.”
“Then why call it supreme?”
He stared at her. In the corner, Balif was seized by a sudden and violent cough, and had to put his fist to his mouth and turn toward the wall until it passed. Zarina grinned at the ceiling.
Her father picked the document back up and held it squarely in front of his face. “Go away.”
She told him no. He told her that he had work. She promised, with her hand on her heart, to be quiet.
“You said that already,” he pointed out from behind the document.
“This time I mean it.”
For five whole minutes, she did. The lamp hissed softly. Her father’s pen scratched, and stopped, and scratched again. Somewhere far below a door closed and a sentry called the hour, and the light in the window turned slowly from gold to grey while Zarina lay on her back and watched a spider walk the length of a ceiling beam.
“Father.”
The Supreme Ruler closed his eyes.
Balif was usually the one who noticed first.
There were evenings, that winter and for several winters after, when the child fell asleep in her father’s study and nobody had the heart to wake her. Balif would look up from his reading and realise that the questions had stopped. The book would have slid from her fingers onto the rug, and she would be curled against the end of the long couch with her mouth a little open and one stockinged foot hanging over the edge. He would get up then, with the small grunt his knees had begun to require of him, fetch the blanket from the chest by the door and lay it over her. The Supreme Ruler never once looked up while he did it. Balif had long since stopped believing that he had not seen.
Other nights it was the ruler himself who found her, when he finally pushed back his chair and stood to leave and discovered his daughter asleep in the place where he had forgotten she was. While she was small enough, he simply gathered her up, blanket and all, and carried her through the dim corridors to her own bed, with a guard walking ahead of them holding up the lamp. Balif had watched him do it more times than he could count. He had never once seen the man hand her to a servant.
Later, when she grew too long in the leg to be carried with any dignity, he woke her instead.
“You have a room,” he told her the first time, standing over the couch with a lamp in his hand.
Zarina opened one eye. “So do you.”
“I use mine,” said her father.
“You sleep in this one.”
“I do not.”
“You did yesterday,” Zarina said, and yawned.
“I was reading,” said the Supreme Ruler, with dignity.
“With your eyes closed.”
He gave her a long and very tired look. She smiled up at him, all sleep and no remorse, and Balif bent over his own book and turned a page he had not read.
Those nights were among the few occasions when the ruler of Ashkar laid his work aside before everybody else in the palace had gone to bed. It was not because he was finished. He was never finished; Balif had carried enough of his papers over the years to doubt that any man in that chair ever could be. But the girl had a remarkable gift for making unfinished things seem less urgent, and Balif, going round afterward to put out the lamps, sometimes thought that she might be the only person in the realm who had it.
Balif’s rooms were different. They lay up a crooked stair at the far end of the scholars’ wing, three small rooms knocked carelessly into one, and they smelled of tea and dust and old leather bindings.
No servant had ever succeeded in organising them for longer than a day. Books lay flat across the tops of other books that stood upright on the shelves, and both kinds spilled onto the floor in slow drifts, like snow against a wall. Notes turned up inside bowls, under the bread board, folded into the toes of boots. On the windowsill stood a dried plant that Balif had once brought back from somewhere meaning to identify it, and had then left there for so long that Zarina eventually gave it a name.
“That’s Marcellus,” she informed him.
Balif regarded the plant over the top of his papers. “It is dead.”
“He’s only resting,” said Zarina.
“It has been resting for two years.”
“Then you should water him.”
“That,” said Balif, “would be cruel at this stage.”
She watered it anyway, from the jug on his washstand, while he was looking for a map. Balif pretended not to notice. After that it was a thing she did every time she came up the stair, solemnly, the way some people light a candle, and he went on pretending, and Marcellus went on being dead with great dignity on the sill.
His lessons with her were rarely orderly. He disliked memorisation for its own sake, which put him in frequent and cheerful conflict with the palace tutors, and he did not trouble to hide it.
“Knowing the date is not the same as understanding what happened,” he told her once, when she arrived with a list of coronations she was supposed to learn by heart.
“The tutor says dates are important.”
“The tutor thinks everything printed in a book is important.”
Zarina looked pointedly around the room, at the towers and drifts and small avalanches of books. “You’re a scholar.”
“Yes,” said Balif, who could hardly deny it.
“So don’t you think that?”
“No.” Balif reached for his tea, remembered too late what had become of it, and drank it anyway with a grimace. “That is what experience does to scholars.”
He taught her history by arguing with her. When she was eleven, on a grey afternoon with rain ticking at the windows, he told her the story of a king who had surrendered three border forts in exchange for peace. Then he sat back in his chair and folded his hands and waited, the way a fisherman waits.
“Was he a coward?” Zarina asked.
“What do you think?” said Balif.
“He gave up,” said Zarina, as though it were obvious.
“That is not an answer.”
“It is.”
“Soldiers give up ground when they are ordered to retreat,” said Balif. “Are they all cowards?”
She frowned and pulled her knees up under her chin. “No.”
“So?”
“The king might have saved people.”
“He did.”
“Then he was right,” said Zarina, pleased with herself.
“Ten years later,” said Balif, “the enemy used those forts to invade again.”
Her expression changed. She sat up straight, as though someone had pulled the rug out from under her, which in a sense someone had. “That’s cheating.”
“History frequently is,” said Balif.
She sat back against the bookshelf and scowled at him while the rain came on harder outside. “So what should he have done?”
Balif only shrugged, and reached for his cup.
Zarina stared at him, and then her eyes narrowed. “You know.”
“I know what he did.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No.”
“Then why did you ask me?”
“Because,” Balif said mildly, “you seemed very certain.”
She threw a cushion at him. He caught it badly, against his chest, and his elbow swept across the desk and very nearly sent his cup of cold tea onto the floor. He saved it at the last instant with a lunge that was not at all scholarly. Zarina laughed until she could not breathe, until she had to lie down flat on the rug and hold her ribs.
Balif looked at the cup in his hand. Then he looked at her.
“This,” he said, “is why monarchies fail.”
He taught her other things, too — things that no royal curriculum required and several royal tutors would have been alarmed to hear about. How to tell whether someone had altered a map, by the way new ink sat on a scraped place. How to spot a forged seal. Why three honest people who had watched the same street brawl would give three different accounts of it, each of them perfectly certain. How to make a cheap ink from oak galls and rusty nails. How to identify five common poisons and, more importantly, why licking an unknown substance in order to identify it was not acceptable scholarship.
She had only done that once. Balif reminded her of it for years.
He was reminding her again one spring morning, while she sat at his worktable grinding a cake of the cheap ink and getting most of it on her wrists. “You said it was probably salt.”
“I said probably,” Zarina pointed out.
“It was salt.”
“That,” said Balif, “is not a defence of your method.”
“It worked.”
“So does falling from a tower, if your objective is reaching the ground.”
Her father chose that moment to come in. The Supreme Ruler seldom climbed the crooked stair to the scholars’ wing, and when he did, it was usually because he wanted something from Balif and did not care to have it sent for. He stopped in the doorway with a letter in his hand and took in the scene — the books, the dead plant, his daughter’s blackened fingers — and raised his eyebrows. “What are we discussing?”
“Your daughter’s commitment to empirical research,” said Balif.
The Supreme Ruler looked at Zarina. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Salt,” said Balif.
Her father sighed, and closed his eyes for a moment. “Again?”
“It was one time!” Zarina protested.
“It has somehow become many times in the telling.”
“That’s because Balif is old.”
Balif nodded gravely. “Very old. I remember the first mountains.”
Zarina smiled at him with great sweetness. “You weren’t there.”
“How could you know?” said Balif.
She opened her mouth, discovered that she had no answer at all, and shut it again. Balif looked triumphant, or as triumphant as a man could look with ink on his cuffs and a cold cup at his elbow. In the doorway, the Supreme Ruler leaned against the frame and seemed, for a minute or two, to forget entirely what he had climbed three flights of stairs to ask.
For all their teasing, Zarina watched Balif closely. She always had.
She noticed, before he would admit to any of it, that his knees troubled him on cold mornings, and that he had begun to take the stairs more slowly, with one hand trailing along the wall as though he no longer entirely trusted them. She noticed that he held his books farther from his face than he used to, and that the grey in his beard was no longer coming in but had arrived and settled down to stay. She said nothing about any of it. She collected it, the way she collected everything.
Then, one winter afternoon, she came up the stair and found him sitting by the window with a book open on his knee, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“You’re going blind,” she announced.
Balif looked up. “A comforting diagnosis.”
“You can’t see that,” said Zarina.
“I can.”
She pointed at the book. “Then what does it say?”
He turned the book around to show her, with the air of a man producing evidence in court. It was upside down.
Zarina folded her arms. Balif looked at the page for a long moment, and then at the heading running along the bottom of it where the top should have been.
“Hm,” he said.
The next morning a lensmaker arrived at his door: a stout, soft-spoken dwarf with a leather case of ground glass under one arm and a pair of spectacles of his own pushed up into his iron-grey hair. He had been sent up from the city, he explained, to fit the scholar Balif with a pair of reading lenses, and he would be grateful if the scholar would sit by the window and hold still. Balif sat. When the dwarf had gone, he came out onto the landing and found Zarina standing suspiciously nearby, examining a tapestry she had walked past every day of her life.
He looked from the lenses in his hand to her. “You did this.”
“No.”
“You did.”
“They’re from my father,” said Zarina.
“Your father did not know I needed them.”
Zarina lifted her chin. “He does now.”
Balif considered her for a moment longer. Then, with visible reluctance, he unfolded the lenses and put them on. They sat slightly crooked on his nose, one glass a fraction higher than the other, and they made his eyes look enormous, like an owl that had been woken in the middle of the day.
Zarina laughed out loud before she could stop herself.
He took them off at once. “Wonderful. I shall remain blind.”
“No — put them back.”
“You are enjoying this too much.”
“You look strange,” Zarina told him.
“I looked strange before.”
“Not like that,” she said, still giggling.
He put them on again, with the air of a man submitting to the headsman. Zarina stepped close and set them straight herself, bending the little wire arms behind his ears with the frowning care she usually saved for mending her pens. “There.”
Balif looked at her through the lenses. For a moment the teasing went out of his face entirely, and he only looked, as though she had come into focus all at once and he had not known until now how blurred she had been. “Thank you,” he said.
She shrugged, as if it were nothing. Then she leaned forward and kissed his forehead, quickly, and turned away. Behind her Balif went entirely still, but by then she was already halfway down the landing.
“Don’t become sentimental,” she called back over her shoulder.
His voice followed her down the stair, very dry. “I would never dare.”
Her father was harder to look after.
It was not that he refused affection; he never did. It was that he always insisted he was fine. He was fine when he had not slept. He was fine when the councils ran from dawn until long after the lamps were lit. He was fine when he came back from a long journey through the provinces with a cough that rattled in his chest for weeks, and he was most especially fine when the court healers told him to rest. Zarina had heard the word so often that it had stopped meaning anything at all.
One night she let herself into his study and found a plate of food on the corner of his desk, the napkin still folded neatly across it. Nobody had touched it. The lamp had burned low, and her father sat bent over a letter with his pen moving steadily, and he did not hear her come in. In the deep chair in the corner, Balif sat with his lenses on his nose and a book on his knee. He glanced at her over the top of them and said nothing at all.
She stood there for a while, watching her father write. “Did you eat?”
“Yes,” he said, without looking up.
Zarina looked at the plate. Then she looked at him. “No, you didn’t.”
“I did earlier,” he said.
“When?”
Her father kept writing, as though he had not heard.
She crossed the room and slid the paper out from beneath his hand. His pen went on for half a word across the bare wood before he noticed. Then he looked up at her, and she saw how tired he was, and it made her angrier. “Zarina.”
“You lied.”
“I did not lie.”
“You said you ate.”
“I ate.”
“When?”
He thought about it. She watched him search for an answer, and watched him fail to find one, and watched him decide to give one anyway. “At some point.”
So she picked up the entire stack of papers on his desk, the whole teetering evening’s worth of them, and held it against her chest.
“Give those back,” said the Supreme Ruler.
“No.”
“I am not in the mood.”
“Neither am I.”
“Zarina.”
“Eat.”
He stared at her. She stared back. The Supreme Ruler of Ashkar, who had faced rebellions and assassins and guild councils that sat for entire days without rising, appeared to consider his options and to find them few.
“What exactly,” he said at last, “do you intend to do with those?”
“Burn them.”
“You would not,” said her father.
Zarina glanced meaningfully at the lamp. “I know where the lamps are.”
From the corner, Balif said without looking up, “I believe her.”
The ruler turned his head. “Why are you here?”
“I was invited to dinner.”
“This is not dinner,” the ruler pointed out.
“No.” Balif turned a page. “Apparently it is a hostage negotiation.”
Zarina hugged the documents tighter. Her father looked at her for a long moment, and then at the plate, and then at her again. He sighed.
Then he ate — all of it, while his daughter stood over him with his correspondence clutched in her arms like a gaoler with the keys. Only when the plate was empty did she set the papers back on the desk, squaring their edges with exaggerated care. Her father put down his fork. “Happy?”
“Yes.”
“You,” said her father, “are becoming unbearable.”
Balif nodded. “She learned from you.”
The ruler pointed his fork at the door. “Both of you. Out.”
Neither of them moved.
Zarina loved to see him laugh. It happened so rarely outside their own rooms that it felt like finding money in the street.
Court changed her father. She had watched it happen all her life without understanding what she was watching. He would step through the doors of the audience hall and something in him would settle and close, like a house shuttering itself against the winter. His shoulders straightened. His face gave away less. His sentences grew shorter, until many of them were a single word, and he listened far more than he spoke, and when he did speak, people stopped moving in order to hear it. As a small child Zarina had assumed that everybody else simply failed to understand him. Later she realised that they understood him perfectly well. They had only ever been introduced to a different man.
Once, after a particularly long banquet, when the three of them had escaped to the study and the doors were safely shut, she gave them her imitation of one of the visiting magistrates. She had been storing it up all evening like water behind a dam. She tucked a napkin into the front of her dress for a sash of office, raised her chin until she was looking at them down the length of her nose, and began to talk about tariffs in a nasal, sorrowful drone.
Balif put his face in his hands at once. Her father, in his chair by the fire, tried very hard not to react at all.
“The northern grain tariff,” Zarina announced, “is a matter of absolute urgency, Your Grace. Absolute. If we lower it, disaster. If we raise it, disaster. If we leave it where it is —”
She paused, dramatically, and let the silence stretch exactly as long as the magistrate had.
“Disaster.”
Her father’s mouth twitched. Zarina saw it, and pressed on without mercy.
“And furthermore, my nephew requires a government position, because he is uniquely qualified by having accomplished absolutely nothing.”
Her father broke.
It was not a dignified laugh. It came out of him all at once, like something that had been held down for far too long, and it forced him to twist away in his chair and cover his face with one hand while his shoulders shook. Zarina doubled over, her napkin sash slipping sideways. Balif lifted his head from his hands and looked genuinely horrified.
“You both understand,” he said, “that this man returns tomorrow.”
That made it worse. The ruler was still trying to recover himself, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand, when Zarina leaned toward him and added in a mournful whisper, “Absolute disaster.”
He had to leave the room.
For years afterward, whenever a council meeting went badly, Zarina had only to whisper those two words. Her father would turn and glare at her with the whole weight of his office behind it. Sometimes, though, she could see him fighting the smile.
There were quieter moments, too.
Every year, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, the palace held ceremonies, and every year Zarina disliked them a little more. Everyone wore formal colours, grey and white and the deep crimson of the great portrait. Priests spoke beautifully. The halls were banked with great white starblossoms — the big, showy kind, which Balif said her mother had always thought were showing off — and all day long people who had barely known her mother bent down to tell Zarina how deeply they had admired her.
The year Zarina was twelve, she sat through the whole of it in a stiff grey dress that itched at the collar. Afterward, when the hall was emptying and the guests were drifting away toward the refreshments, she looked for her father and could not find him.
She found him at last in one of the smaller gardens, a walled square of clipped yew behind the old guest wing, where a stone fountain had stood dry for as long as she could remember. He was sitting alone on its rim with his hands loose between his knees. His guards had stopped at the gate, too far away to hear anything that was said. The afternoon was warm and very still, and somewhere beyond the wall a gardener was raking gravel with a slow, patient sound.
Zarina came across the grass carefully, the way one approaches a deer. He looked up. “You escaped.”
“So did you.”
He smiled faintly. She sat down beside him on the warm stone, and for a while neither of them said anything at all. A bee blundered in and out of the dry basin, looking for water that was not there.
“Did you like the ceremony?” Zarina asked at last.
“No.”
The answer surprised her so much that she turned to look at him. “You’re supposed to.”
“I know,” he said.
“Then why don’t you like it?”
Her father looked toward the hedges. “Because they talk about her as if she belonged to everyone.”
Zarina understood that immediately. She understood it so completely that it came out of her before she had decided to say it. “They do that to me too.”
He turned toward her. She had not meant it to sound serious, and for a moment she was afraid she had hurt him. But he only looked at her for a long moment, as though he were seeing something he had not expected to find there, and then he nodded. “Yes.”
Zarina looked down at her hands. She had worried a loose thread free from the cuff of the grey dress without noticing, and she wound it slowly around her finger. “Did she like ceremonies?”
“No.”
“Balif said she hated formal poetry.”
“Balif says many things,” said her father.
“Was he wrong?”
“No.”
She smiled. After a moment, her father did too.
“She once fell asleep during a recital given in her honour,” he said.
“Really?”
“Completely asleep,” said her father, with a certain grim satisfaction.
“What happened?”
“Everyone pretended not to notice.”
“And did you pretend, too?”
“I was the one who woke her.”
Zarina laughed, and the sound went up over the yew hedges and startled a pigeon off the wall. “Was she angry?”
“Very,” said her father, and something in his face went soft and far away.
They sat there a while longer. The gardener’s rake had stopped. Zarina let the thread go slack around her finger and then pulled it tight again, and at last she asked the question that had been sitting somewhere inside her for years, so long that she had stopped noticing the weight of it.
“Did she want me?”
Her father’s expression changed, but there was no hesitation in it at all. “Yes.”
Zarina looked at him. “How do you know?”
“Because she told me,” he said.
“When?”
“Many times.”
“Before I was born?”
“Before. After. Whenever she thought I was worrying too much.”
Zarina smiled a little at that. “What did she say?”
Her father looked at her for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “That part is mine.”
She frowned at him. “That’s unfair.”
“Probably.”
She leaned against his arm. After a while he rested his cheek on the top of her head, and they stayed like that, the two of them, beside the fountain that had no water in it, while beyond the walls the palace went on looking for them.
Neither of them returned to the ceremony.
Later that afternoon, Zarina found Balif in the old observatory.
He had been taking her there for years. It stood at the top of a tower on the north side of the palace, and its great copper dome had long since gone green and seized on its runners, so that it opened only a hand’s width no matter how hard anyone pushed. Half the instruments inside were obsolete, tall brass things on iron legs whose purposes even Balif was vague about, and the floor was scattered with the leavings of the swallows that came and went through the gap. Zarina loved it. Nobody ever came looking for them there unless something was wrong.
Balif was sitting in the big chair beside the largest window with a book open on his lap and his lenses on his nose. Zarina sat down on the floor beside him, cross-legged, with her back against the leg of the chair.
“My father says Mother hated ceremonies.”
“True.”
“He said she fell asleep during one.”
Balif looked down at her over the rims of his lenses. “He told you that?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
“What?”
“He leaves out the part where he fell asleep first.”
Zarina twisted round to stare up at him. “No.”
“Yes.”
“My father?”
“Your father,” said Balif, and turned a page.
“He doesn’t fall asleep during ceremonies.”
“He was younger then,” said Balif.
“That makes no sense at all.”
“It rarely does.”
Zarina began to laugh. “Did Mother see him?”
“Everyone in the hall saw him.”
“What happened?”
“Your mother kicked his chair.” Balif lowered his voice, as though the tower might be listening. “Repeatedly.”
Zarina clapped both hands over her mouth, and laughed harder behind them. “Did he wake up?” she managed at last.
“Eventually.”
“Was he angry?”
“At her?” Balif gave it some thought. “No. Embarrassed, mostly.”
“I’m going to tell him you told me.”
Balif shut his book at once. “You will do no such thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have survived many dangerous periods in Ashkar through good judgment.”
“You don’t have good judgment.”
“I have enough not to remind the Supreme Ruler that I watched him sleep through a diplomatic recital.”
Zarina grinned. “I think he’d laugh.”
“You think a great many things.”
She leaned her head against the side of his chair. For a while she watched the dust turning slowly in the bar of sunlight that came down through the gap in the dome, and listened to the swallows muttering in the rafters, and the question she had carried up the stairs came out of the quiet on its own.
“How long did you know her?”
Balif’s fingers went still on the cover of the book. “A long time.”
“Before Father?”
“Yes.”
Zarina looked up. “What was she like then?”
“Much the same as she always was.”
“That isn’t an answer, Balif.”
“It is the most accurate one.”
“She wasn’t a queen then.”
“No.”
“So she must have been different.”
Balif took off his lenses and folded them, carefully, one arm and then the other, as though it were a task that required all his attention. “She had fewer people following her around.”
Zarina smiled. “That sounds nice.”
“It did not prevent her from finding trouble.”
“What kind?”
“Mostly the kind she insisted was someone else’s fault.”
“That sounds exactly like Father.”
Balif gave her a doubtful look. “You may wish to reconsider saying that within his hearing.”
Zarina ignored him. “Were you good friends?”
It was a simple question. Balif looked toward the window. “Yes.”
“Very good friends?”
“Yes.”
“Better than Father?”
That brought his attention back at once. “That is not how friendship works.”
“It can.”
“No.”
“It can.”
“Then your education has failed.”
Zarina rolled her eyes. “You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“Answer something else.”
Balif regarded her for a moment, his eyes unreadable without the lenses. Then he reached down and tapped the top of her head with his book. “You ask too many questions.”
“You taught me to ask them.”
“A serious professional mistake,” said Balif.
She smiled. It was true, and she had noticed it before, that Balif became strange whenever her mother came into the conversation. Not sad, exactly. He simply grew quieter, as though part of the talk had moved off into another room where Zarina could not follow. She had never thought very much about it. Everyone who had known her mother seemed to carry something away from those years. Her father carried grief. The Phoenix Queen, on her rare visits, carried anger and affection in nearly equal measure, and never seemed sure which she would set down first. Balif carried memories, and he was kind enough to share them.
That was how Zarina understood it. And Balif never corrected her.
“Tell me another one,” she said.
Balif asked another what, and she said another story, and he said that he had work.
“You’re reading,” Zarina pointed out.
“That is work.”
“You’ve been on the same page since I came in.”
Balif looked down at the book. He had.
Zarina smiled up at him, triumphant. He sighed, the long sigh of a man who has lost an argument he never expected to win. “All right.”
She shifted closer to the chair. “Something embarrassing.”
Balif raised an eyebrow. “About your mother?”
“Yes.”
“That narrows the possibilities considerably.”
Zarina laughed. Balif opened the book again, though neither of them so much as glanced at it.
“Once,” he began, “your mother became convinced that she could beat me at archery.”
Could she? No. Had she, even once? No. Then what had happened?
“She accused the bow of being poorly made.”
“That sounds like her,” said Zarina.
“You never met her,” said Balif.
“I know.”
He glanced down at her. Zarina was smiling, her chin on her knees and her eyes on the dusty light, as though somebody she knew very well had just walked into the room. “Keep going,” she said.
And he did.
The three of them went away together the following summer.
It was not state business. Her father had promised her three days away from the capital, and for once no crisis arrived in time to steal them. They went to a small lakeside estate in the hills that Zarina’s mother had loved — a long, low house of pale stone with a slate roof and a wooden jetty running out into the water, and a garden that had been allowed to grow a little wild. The air smelled of pine resin and cold water. In the mornings a mist lay on the lake so thick that the far shore vanished, and the only sounds were the slap of the water against the jetty posts and the ducks complaining in the reeds.
It was modest by royal standards. Zarina adored it immediately.
Her father complained about the beds, which were too short for him. Balif complained about the road, which he said had been designed by someone who hated both carriages and scholars. Zarina complained about both of them complaining, at length, from the end of the jetty, where she sat with her shoes off and her feet in the water.
On the second morning she persuaded her father to take a boat out onto the lake.
He was terrible at rowing. Zarina discovered this within minutes. The boat lurched away from the jetty in a series of jerks, each oar striking the water at a slightly different moment from the other, and then, once they were clear of the reeds, began to describe a slow and stately curve toward the opposite bank.
“You said you knew how.”
“I do,” said her father, with dignity.
“Then why are we going sideways?”
“The wind,” said the Supreme Ruler.
Zarina looked at the lake, which lay as flat and still as a looking glass all around them. “There isn’t any wind.”
Balif sat in the stern with his hands folded on his knee, looking entirely unwilling to help. The Supreme Ruler glared at him over the oars. “You could contribute.”
“I am observing.”
“You are sitting,” said the Supreme Ruler.
“Observation is frequently performed sitting.”
Zarina reached over and took hold of one of the oars. Her father resisted, on principle. She pulled. The boat swung round, almost the whole way, and slopped a cold wave over the gunwale, and Balif grabbed the side with both hands.
“Excellent,” he said. “Now none of us knows what we’re doing.”
Zarina laughed so hard that the oar slipped out of her hands and over the side.
Her father stared at it as it drifted gently away across the water, turning a little in the sunlight, well out of reach. Nobody said anything at all.
Then Balif said, “A commanding performance.”
Zarina collapsed against the side of the boat, helpless. After a moment her father began laughing too — not the short, startled laugh she sometimes surprised out of him at home, but a real one, his head tipped back and the sun on his face — and the boat rocked gently on the still water while the three of them sat there with one oar between them and no way at all of getting anywhere.
They had to be rescued, in the end, by two guards from the shore. The guards waded out up to their belts, with expressions of perfect solemnity, and towed them in.
For the rest of the visit, Zarina called her father Admiral. He threatened to leave her at the estate. She knew he wouldn’t.
That certainty was one of the foundations of her world.
In the evenings they ate outside, at a long table under the old walnut tree at the edge of the garden.
There was no court there, and no guild envoys, and nobody in ceremonial dress. There were only the three of them beneath a string of hanging lanterns, with moths and beetles battering themselves senseless against the light, and the lake going from silver to grey to black beyond the garden wall. The food was plain country fare — trout from the lake, new bread, a sharp white cheese — and her father ate it with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, which Zarina had never seen him do in her life.
She asked endless questions about her mother. Her father and Balif disagreed about almost every answer.
“She liked pears,” said the Supreme Ruler.
“She hated pears,” said Balif.
“She ate them constantly,” said her father.
“Because you kept buying them.”
“She asked me for them.”
“She was being polite.”
“My wife,” said the Supreme Ruler, “was rarely polite when she disliked something.”
Balif considered this, and inclined his head. “That is true.”
Zarina listened with her chin in her hands, fascinated, looking from one to the other like someone watching a game of catch. For years she had known her mother only through portraits and memorial speeches, through the gold frames and the soft, thick voices of strangers. Now, here, between two grown men arguing about fruit, she found that she could finally begin to imagine her alive.
Her mother had been impatient. She had laughed too loudly. She had disliked getting up early. She had once cheated Balif at cards and denied it to his face, while two cards were tucked up her sleeve the whole time. She had once thrown a cup at Zarina’s father in the middle of an argument.
“It was wooden,” the ruler insisted.
“You ducked, as I recall,” said Balif.
“Of course I ducked.”
Zarina was crying with laughter by then, her face wet, her ribs aching. The Supreme Ruler pointed his cup at Balif across the table. “You are enjoying this far too much.”
“I have waited many years,” said Balif.
Zarina looked between them, the lantern light warm on both their faces, and felt something settle inside her, quiet and warm, like a cat turning round three times before it lies down. Her mother was no longer a painting. She belonged to these stories now, to pears and cards and wooden cups, and somehow, through them, she had come to belong to Zarina too.
That evening Zarina fell asleep at the table, with her head on her arms among the crumbs.
She woke briefly when her father lifted her. She was thirteen that summer and already nearly too heavy for him to carry with any comfort, and she could feel it in the way he settled her against his shoulder.
“Put me down,” she mumbled.
“You are asleep,” said her father.
“No, I’m not.”
“You are arguing with your eyes closed.”
“Still counts,” she mumbled into his collar.
He carried her anyway. Over his shoulder, through half-closed eyes, she could see Balif moving slowly around the table under the lanterns, gathering up the abandoned cups.
“Balif.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t forget to bring Marcellus.”
There was a pause. “The plant is not here,” said Balif.
“Good.”
Her father laughed quietly, and she felt the laugh more than heard it, through his chest. Zarina rested her head against his shoulder and breathed in cedar oil and lake water and lamp smoke. She remembered thinking that he felt older than he used to.
Then she fell asleep again.
Birthdays belonged to Balif. It had been so for as long as anyone could remember, and he guarded the privilege jealously.
Every year he gave her a book. Every year, with great care and some pleasure, he chose one that was too difficult for her. On the morning she turned fourteen, he came into the morning room with the year’s choice under his arm — a volume on the legal systems of the pre-unification kingdoms, bound in brown calf and roughly the size and weight of a paving stone — and Balif watched her see it from across the room and knew at once that he had judged it perfectly.
Zarina stared at it. “No.”
He placed it in her hands, and her arms dipped under the weight. “Happy birthday.”
“This is a punishment, not a present.”
“You said you wanted something challenging.”
“I meant interesting.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
She hefted it onto the table and opened it, and Balif watched her face as she found that the first page was a diagram of agricultural inheritance law. She looked at it for a while, with her mother’s eyes and her father’s frown. Then she closed the book again.
“I hate you.”
“I know,” said Balif, and reached for his tea, which had gone cold while he was waiting for her to come down, and drank it anyway, and regretted it, and did not care.
The Supreme Ruler came in a little after, still in his council coat, with a small wrapped box in one hand. He looked at the book on the table, and at his daughter’s expression, and drew his own conclusions. “What did he give you?”
Zarina held the book up with both hands. Her father looked at it, and then at Balif. “Do you dislike my daughter?”
“Frequently,” said Balif.
Zarina laughed, and took her father’s gift, and pulled off the paper. Inside the box, on a bed of faded blue velvet, lay a small silver pendant in the shape of a bird in flight, its wings swept back, its chain as fine as thread.
She stopped smiling. Her father, Balif saw, suddenly looked unsure of himself — an expression the court would not have recognised on him, and one Balif had seen on him only a handful of times.
“It belonged to your mother,” the Supreme Ruler said.
Zarina touched it with one fingertip, very carefully, as though it might fly off. “Really?”
“She wore it when she was young. Before we married.”
Balif knew that. He had seen the bird at a young woman’s throat, catching the light, long before there was any crown in the question, on afternoons he did not let himself take out and look at very often. He had not known the ruler had kept it. He found, standing there, that he did not know quite what to do with his face, and so he did nothing with it at all.
Zarina looked from the pendant to her father. “Can I wear it?”
“That was rather the intention.”
Balif came a little closer, without quite meaning to. Zarina glanced up at him, and something in his expression must have caught her, because she tilted her head. “You remember it?”
“Yes.”
“Did she like it?”
Balif nodded, and found his voice. “Very much.”
Zarina fastened it around her own neck, fumbling with the tiny clasp until she had it. Then she got up and hugged her father, and he held her tightly, with his eyes shut, the way he did when he thought nobody was watching. When she let him go she turned and hugged Balif too, hard, with the brown calf volume still lying between them on the table.
Balif endured it with exaggerated patience. “I gave you agricultural inheritance law,” he pointed out.
“I know.”
“I don’t believe this reaction is proportionate.”
She only hugged him harder. Over the top of her head, Balif met the eyes of his old friend, and neither of them said anything about the bird at all.
Those were the years in which Zarina began to imagine her future.
She did not imagine it as queen, or as ruler. She rarely thought in titles at all. She thought, instead, about helping. She saw how tired her father was after the long council sessions, the way he rubbed the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes when he thought himself alone. She saw Balif carry documents to him after midnight, folders tucked under one arm, his lamp going slowly along the dark gallery. She heard conversations stop when she came into rooms, and understood just enough of what she heard to know that Ashkar was seldom as peaceful as it looked from the windows.
One evening she found her father alone on the narrow terrace above the lower gardens. The sun had gone down behind the hills, and the city spread out below them in the blue dusk, its lamps coming on street by street, the river a dull bright line through the middle of it. He stood with both hands on the stone railing, staring out toward it.
She came and stood beside him. “Bad day?”
He glanced down at her. “Why?”
“You have the face,” said Zarina.
“What face?”
“The one where everyone has annoyed you.”
“I have many faces,” said her father.
“Not really.”
He smiled faintly. Zarina leaned on the railing beside him, her elbows on the cool stone, and looked out at the lights. “When I’m older, I’ll help.”
“You already help,” said her father.
“No. Properly.”
He turned his head and looked at her. “You have plenty of time.”
“You always say there’s too much work.”
“There is.”
“Then I’ll do some of it.”
He laughed softly, and looked back at the city.
“I’m serious,” said Zarina.
“I know.”
“When I’m older, you won’t have to do everything.”
Behind them the terrace door opened, and Balif stepped out into the dusk with a folder under one arm. He had come at exactly the wrong moment, or exactly the right one, and he stopped where he was. He had heard her.
The Supreme Ruler reached over and touched Zarina’s hair. “I would like that.”
Balif said nothing.
Zarina looked back at him over her shoulder. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You made a face, Balif.”
“My face is old,” said Balif. “It does things without consulting me.”
She accepted that. For now.
On Zarina’s fifteenth birthday there was music in the private garden.
It was not a formal celebration; she had asked for none. Lanterns had been strung between the plane trees, gold and white, and a trio of musicians played beside the fountain, and the tables under the trees were set with honey cakes and cherries and jugs of cold wine. The guests were a handful of people she actually liked: a few relatives, a few trusted members of the household, two young companions she had known for years. Among the household was a goblin under-steward who had been slipping her sugared almonds since she was six, and who stood at the edge of the lantern light in his best coat with his ears pink from the wine, looking enormously pleased to have been asked.
Her father arrived late. Zarina pretended to be offended. “You missed dinner.”
“I was delayed,” said the Supreme Ruler.
“By the realm?”
“Unfortunately.”
“The realm is very rude.”
“I have mentioned this.”
Balif was already settled beneath one of the plane trees with a cup of wine, which for once he was actually drinking. Zarina pointed at him. “He gave me another terrible book.”
“I assume you thanked him.”
“No.”
“Good.”
Balif looked wounded. The Supreme Ruler sat down beside him, and for once nobody brought him documents. Nobody asked him for decisions. Nobody bowed after he sat. Music drifted across the garden, and the lanterns swung a little in the warm air, and nobody looked at him as though he were the ruler of anything.
Zarina danced, badly, with one of her friends. Then with Balif, who complained the whole way through that she was trying to kill him. Then she came across the grass and took hold of her father’s hands and tried to pull him out of his chair.
“I don’t dance,” said her father, not moving.
“You married Mother,” Zarina pointed out.
“That does not mean I danced.”
Balif laughed into his cup. Zarina pulled harder. “Come on.”
“No.”
“Father.”
“Absolutely not.”
She gave him the look — the one that had defeated him since she was small, and that they both knew perfectly well she was using. He sighed, deeply. “This is extortion.”
“Yes.”
He stood.
He was not a good dancer. Zarina informed him of this almost at once, when he trod squarely on her slippered foot. “You’re stepping on me.”
“I told you.”
“Mother married you anyway?”
“Against all advice.”
Balif called from his chair, “Mine especially.”
The ruler pointed at him over Zarina’s head. “You are very brave tonight.”
Balif raised his cup. “Wine.”
Zarina laughed, and her father laughed, and they went on treading on each other in a slow, lopsided circle under the lanterns. For a little while, her father forgot that anyone might be watching him. Balif forgot his knees. And Zarina forgot everything at all, except the music and the light and the people around her.
Much later, when most of the guests had gone home and the musicians were packing away their instruments, the three of them were still in the garden. Balif had fallen half asleep in his chair, his cup tilting dangerously in his lap. The Supreme Ruler sat with his coat open and his legs stretched out in front of him, looking less like the ruler of Ashkar than Zarina could ever remember seeing him. Zarina lay full length on a stone bench with her shoes kicked off somewhere underneath it, looking up through the plane leaves at the lanterns.
“Best birthday?” her father asked.
She thought about it. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“The lake was good,” said Zarina.
“You nearly drowned us,” said her father.
“You lost the oar.”
“You lost the oar.”
“You were Admiral.”
From his chair, without opening his eyes, Balif muttered, “A disastrous command.”
Zarina started laughing all over again. Her father shook his head at the sky.
She turned her head on the bench and looked at them both. Balif, old and grumbling, his beard gone grey and his lenses pushed up on his forehead. Her father, tired but smiling, with the lantern light gold on his face. Overhead the lanterns swayed gently in the warm night air, and the fountain talked to itself in the dark.
There was nowhere else she wanted to be. No other life occurred to her. She did not wonder who she might become, or dream of escape, or resent her name. She was Zarina. Balif loved her. Her father loved her. And she loved them both with the unquestioning certainty of someone who had never yet learned that love could change its shape.
Eventually her father stood and stretched. “Bed.”
“I’m fifteen.”
“And?”
“I can decide when to sleep.”
“Wonderful. Decide to sleep now.”
Balif opened one eye. “An excellent first exercise in governance.”
Zarina snatched up a cushion from the bench and threw it at him. It struck him squarely in the face.
There was a moment of perfect silence. Then Balif began to laugh, a creaking, helpless sound with the cushion still in his lap, and her father joined him, and Zarina did too, until all three of them were laughing together in the emptying garden and none of them could have said any longer what had been so funny.
And there beneath the warm light of the garden lanterns, with the two people she trusted most in the world, Zarina thought herself extraordinarily fortunate.
She was.