The Golden Daughter
By sixteen, Zarina had learned that there were two kinds of rooms in the palace. There were rooms where she could sit badly, and there were rooms where she could not.
The first kind were few, and she knew every one of them by heart. In Balif’s rooms, which still smelled of tea and dust and old bindings, she put her feet on the furniture until he complained, and then left them there a little longer to make the point.
In her father’s private study she could still arrive without warning, steal fruit from his plate, and read over his shoulder despite being told, in the same mild voice for ten years now, not to. Those rooms had not changed. It was she who had changed, and the rest of the palace had noticed before she did.
Everywhere else, someone seemed to be watching. Not rudely — nobody at court was ever rude to the Supreme Ruler’s daughter — and that almost made it worse, because there was nothing to object to.
A servant would glance at the way she held a cup. An ambassador would remember to the minute how long she had spoken to him.
Older nobles noticed which colours she wore, which guild representatives she greeted first, whether she laughed too freely, whether she looked tired. It was like walking through the eastern gallery and finding that the portraits had begun to look back.
Nobody told her any of this directly. She simply began to understand it, the way one learns that a floor is cold: through the feet, a little at a time, until it is impossible to remember not knowing.
The first time her father asked her to stand beside him during a formal audience, Zarina was delighted.
It was late in the morning, and the private study was full of the green, underwater light that came through the shutters when the sun was on the eastern courtyard. She was curled on the window seat with the stones of two stolen plums in her hand, and she sat up so fast that one of them fell on the floor.
“You mean properly?” she asked.
The Supreme Ruler looked up from the document in front of him. “I am not sure what you have been doing until now.”
“You always put me behind everyone.”
“I put you somewhere safe.”
“That is behind everyone,” Zarina pointed out.
Balif was seated at the side table, sorting the morning’s correspondence into piles whose logic was known only to himself. He did not look up. “Usually those are the same place.”
Zarina ignored him. “What do I have to do?”
“Very little.”
“That means something difficult,” said Zarina.
“It means stand beside me, listen, and do not interrupt.”
She frowned. “I know how audiences work.”
Her father gave her a look. From the side table, still without raising his eyes, Balif said, “Do not interrupt.”
“I heard him,” said Zarina.
The Supreme Ruler folded his hands on the document. “There will be a delegation from the eastern provinces. They have been petitioning for changes to the grain levy.”
“I know.”
Her father paused. “You do?”
“Balif gave me the reports.”
The Supreme Ruler turned his head, without hurry, toward the side table. Balif went on sorting with the calm of a man who had seen this coming for some days and had decided to meet it seated. “She asked.”
“You gave her the tax reports?”
“She said she wanted to understand what you were doing.”
Her father looked back at Zarina. She was trying very hard not to smile, and the effort was making it worse. He sighed. “All right.”
“So I can speak?”
“No.”
“That seems wasteful,” Zarina said.
“You are there to observe.”
Zarina folded her arms. Her father pointed at her with the pen in his hand, the way he pointed at ministers. “That.”
“What?”
“That expression.”
“What expression?” she asked, still making it.
“The one you are making now. Do not make it in front of the delegation.”
Balif finally glanced up, over the edge of a letter. “I have told her that for years.”
“You make the same expression,” Zarina told her father.
Her father stared at her. Balif returned to his papers. “I have also told him.”
The delegation arrived shortly after midday. Light fell in long pale shafts from the high windows of the audience chamber onto a floor of polished black and white stone, so that every footstep rang.
Ministers and advisers stood in their places along the walls. Below the dais, a goblin clerk sat with her spectacles pushed up onto her forehead and her pen already wet, waiting to write down whatever the afternoon decided was true.
Zarina stood at her father’s right hand, a step behind his chair. She had expected to be nervous, and she was, but not in the way she had imagined.
There were no trembling hands or forgotten words. Instead she became acutely aware of everything around her: the sound of boots on polished stone, the rustle of silk, the careful silence before anyone addressed her father, like a breath drawn in and held.
Three representatives stood before the dais. Two were landholders, comfortable men in good provincial wool with rings on their fingers. The third was a woman from one of the river towns, whose sleeves were plainly cut and whose face carried the grey exhaustion of someone who had travelled farther than the others to stand in the same place.
Zarina noticed that at once. She did not yet know what to do with it, so she kept it.
The delegation spoke for nearly an hour. The landholders blamed poor harvests. The river representative blamed transport restrictions. One landholder complained about taxation and the other about local governors, and between them they managed to blame nearly everything except themselves. The woman from the river town said very little until she was directly questioned.
Zarina listened. At first she tried to remember everything Balif had taught her — who spoke to whom, who spoke for whom, which figures a petitioner said aloud and which he left lying quietly on the page. Then she stopped trying, and simply listened, and found that she heard more.
Eventually her father asked one of his advisers, a thin, exact man from the treasury who held his folder against his chest like a breastplate, whether the petition matched the previous season’s reports. The adviser said that it did.
Zarina looked toward the river woman. The woman’s face did not change much, but it changed: something went out of it, the way it goes out of a person who has said the true thing and watched it be filed away. She looked dissatisfied. Zarina waited. Her father went on speaking.
She tried not to interrupt. She tried quite hard. She lasted perhaps twenty seconds.
“Excuse me.”
The chamber went still. The clerk’s pen stopped. Her father turned his head, slowly, and Zarina knew that look; she had known it since she was five years old and under a table. She swallowed. The adviser frowned. The woman from the river town lowered her eyes, as though she wished very much not to have caused anything.
The Supreme Ruler said, very quietly, “Zarina.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
He waited. Zarina should have stopped there. Instead she said, “The transport figures do not match.”
One of the landholders looked offended, in the particular way of a man whose numbers have been doubted by a girl of sixteen. The adviser answered at once. “Highness, the figures were verified.”
“I know.”
“Then —”
“The reports say river traffic fell after the levy changes.” She could see the pages in her head, with her own pencil marks in the margins. “But she said the warehouses were already empty before that.”
The room remained silent. Zarina looked at the woman. “Didn’t you?”
The woman hesitated. Then she nodded. “Yes, Highness.”
“Why?”
The adviser shifted his folder. The woman glanced, very briefly, toward the two landholders beside her — a quick flick of the eyes, there and gone, like a fish turning in deep water. That was enough. Her father noticed it too. Zarina saw him notice, and saw the stillness come over him that made ministers remember how to stand.
The rest of the audience changed quickly after that. Questions sharpened. Numbers were checked again, by clerks sent hurrying out and back. A transport contract appeared that nobody had thought relevant an hour earlier, and the landholders stopped looking comfortable.
By the end, the argument was no longer about whether taxes should be reduced. Someone had been diverting grain before it ever reached the river.
When the delegation finally left, Zarina stayed where she was beside her father. The great doors swung shut behind the last of them, and the sound went round the high room and died. Nobody spoke. The goblin clerk sat with her pen lifted, plainly unsure whether this part was meant to be written down. Then the Supreme Ruler turned toward his daughter.
“You interrupted.”
Zarina’s stomach dropped. “Yes.”
“I specifically told you not to.”
“I know.”
Balif stood near the wall with his folders under one arm and his face carefully empty. Her father looked at her for another moment. Then he smiled. It was a small thing, gone almost before it arrived, and anyone else in the chamber might have missed it. Zarina saw it.
“You were right.”
Her face changed at once. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so,” Zarina said.
“I noticed.”
Zarina tried to control the grin and failed entirely. Her father shook his head. “You were also lucky.”
“I wasn’t lucky,” Zarina said at once.
“You were.”
“I listened.”
“You guessed,” her father said.
“I did not.”
From the wall, Balif said, “She did not.”
The Supreme Ruler looked at him. “You are supposed to be helping me.”
“I am,” said Balif.
Zarina smiled wider. Her father sighed, and closed his eyes for a moment in the way he did when he had decided not to be annoyed, and then he reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “You did well.”
That was all. Three words, said quietly, in a room that had emptied. Zarina carried them with her for the rest of the day, the way a child carries a warm stone in her pocket, touching it now and then to be sure it is still there.
After that, she began attending more audiences. Not many at first; her father was cautious, and he chose them the way a man tests river ice.
A trade delegation from the guild cities. A dispute between two provincial houses over a mill, a weir and a hundred years of grievance. A ceremony honouring soldiers returning from the western passes, at which a stonekin sergeant with a jaw like a quarried block received a medal from her father’s hand and then, to the visible distress of the chamberlain, shook it.
Zarina loved all of it. She loved the preparation, the evenings in Balif’s rooms with the reports spread across his floor. She loved reading the figures beside him and then discovering how differently people sounded when they had to defend those same figures in person. She loved standing at her father’s side and beginning to understand why he asked the questions he asked.
Most of all, she loved the moments afterward, when the doors had closed. Sometimes he corrected her. Sometimes he told her she had missed something. Sometimes he asked what she thought.
The first few times, Zarina assumed he was testing her. Eventually she realised that he actually wanted to know, and that changed something in her that she did not have a name for.
She began keeping notes. Her own notes, and not elegant ones: names written sideways, questions squeezed into margins, small observations scrawled at angles in a hand that grew worse the longer a meeting ran. Balif complained that they were impossible to decipher. He complained regularly, which was how she knew he read them.
One evening he picked up a page from her desk, held it at arm’s length, gave up, and fished his reading lenses out of one of his many pockets. “What does this say?”
Zarina looked over. “Which part?”
“This.”
She squinted at it. “‘Governor may be lying.’”
Balif moved his finger further down the page. “And this?”
Zarina did not need to look. “‘Probably about sheep.’”
He lowered the page and looked at her over the rims of his lenses.
“It was a very long meeting,” Zarina explained.
“I see.”
“There were many sheep,” she added.
“Apparently.”
She took the page back and smoothed it flat on the desk. “You understood it.”
“I understood two lines,” said Balif.
“That’s enough.”
Balif shook his head, and put his lenses away in a different pocket from the one he had taken them out of. But he was smiling.
Word spread quickly through the court, as word always did in a building where a thousand people had nothing to do between their duties but talk. The ruler’s daughter was no longer simply attending audiences. She was taking part in them.
At first the praise embarrassed her. Then, a little to her own surprise, she began to enjoy it. Not all of it; some compliments were unbearable. An elderly noble with powdered cheeks told her she possessed her mother’s grace, and patted her hand, and Zarina smiled at him with her mother’s eyes and wished heartily to be elsewhere.
A visiting guild representative said that Ashkar was fortunate to have “such a promising continuation of the throne,” as though she were a road that had been extended. Another called her the Golden Daughter.
Zarina laughed when she first heard it. It sounded like something out of a nursery tale.
Later she heard servants repeating it on the back stairs. Then merchants, in the outer courts where the petitioners waited. Then a herald used it publicly, in his best carrying voice, during a procession through the upper city, and after that it could not be taken back. The name stayed.
Her father thought it was harmless. Balif hated it immediately.
“Why do you hate it?” Zarina asked him.
They were at breakfast in the morning room, the three of them at the small table, with spring rain ticking against the windows and the Supreme Ruler’s letters stacked beside his plate. Balif tore a piece of bread in half and frowned at the two pieces as though they had presented a weak argument.
“Because people who give you names usually want something from them.”
Zarina rolled her eyes. “It is a compliment.”
“Yes.”
“Then what is wrong with it?”
“Nothing yet.”
Her father looked up from his correspondence. “Must everything become suspicious before you finish eating?”
“It is how I maintain my appetite.”
Zarina smiled. “I like it.”
Balif nodded, and reached for his tea, which had gone cold while he was being suspicious, and drank it anyway, and regretted it. “Then enjoy it.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “That sounded like disapproval.”
“It was breakfast,” said Balif.
“You do that deliberately.”
“Frequently.”
The Supreme Ruler looked from one of them to the other with the patience of a man who had sat at this table for sixteen years. “I regret introducing the two of you.”
“You didn’t,” Zarina said. “Balif was already here.”
Her father returned to his letter. “That is what I regret.”
The title followed her anyway. At seventeen, Zarina stood beside her father at the Festival of Concord and heard thousands of people cheer it.
It was a hot, clear day, and from the long gallery behind the balcony she could see down into the central square through the open doors. She had never seen it so full.
Banners hung from the upper galleries of every building around it, and the colours of the guilds spilled down the walls and out into the streets beyond. Bells rang from the eastern towers, one after another, until the air itself seemed to hum.
There were people on the rooftops and in the windows and on each other’s shoulders. Even from that height she could pick out the broad backs of stonekin standing like boulders in a stream, feather-crested couriers who had climbed the lamp posts for a better view, and scaled traders from the southern coast holding parasols against the sun. The noise of them all came up through the stone like warmth.
Before stepping out onto the balcony, Zarina stopped. Her father noticed. “Nervous?”
“No.”
He waited.
“A little,” she admitted at last.
“Good.”
She looked at him. “Good?”
“It means you understand there are people out there.”
“That is not helpful,” Zarina said.
“It is not supposed to be.”
Balif stood behind them in the shadow of the doorway, with folders under his arm out of pure habit. Zarina turned to him. “Anything useful?”
“Do not trip,” said Balif.
She stared at him. “That is your advice?”
“It would be memorable.”
Her father laughed, short and surprised, a sound the court did not often hear. Zarina looked deeply offended. “You are both terrible,” she said, and stepped out onto the balcony.
The sound hit her first. It was not applause. This was something larger — thousands of voices rising at once and rolling up the face of the palace like a wave against a sea wall, so loud that she felt it in her ribs.
For a moment she forgot everything she had been told: where to stand, where to look, when to wave. She stood in the white glare of the afternoon and could not think what to do with her hands.
Then her father stepped out beside her, and the noise grew. Zarina glanced at him. He was looking out at the crowd, his face composed and unreadable, the face the realm knew. But when he noticed her watching, his expression softened, just for her.
She smiled. Then she faced the square, and the fear went out of her like water out of a tipped cup.
Later she would remember almost nothing of the speech. Only the sound, and the banners, and the heat of the sun on the stone balustrade under her palms. And the moment her father introduced her.
“My daughter, Zarina.”
Nothing elaborate. He did not use the title everyone else had begun using; he never had. But the crowd did. It began somewhere below and to the left, a handful of voices, and then it caught and ran across the square like fire through dry grass — Golden Daughter, Golden Daughter, Golden Daughter — the words tumbling over one another and breaking against the walls.
Zarina looked at her father. He was smiling. And for that moment, she loved the name too.
Her responsibilities increased after that. Not dramatically. There was no decree, no formal announcement. Things simply began appearing, the way leaves appear on a step in autumn, one and then another and then too many to sweep.
A luncheon she was expected to attend. A visiting family she should greet. An evening reception. The ceremonial opening of a new bridge, at which she cut a ribbon with a pair of silver shears so blunt that it took her three tries. A charitable foundation that wanted her patronage. A delegation that wished to present her with a gift.
At first Zarina accepted everything. Why wouldn’t she? She was useful. Her father was busy — he was always busy, and he looked a little more tired every year — and here at last was a way to help him. She could help. So she did.
When Balif asked her, one evening, whether she truly wished to attend a three-hour lecture on maritime regulation, she stared at him. “Does Father need me?”
“No.”
“Then why am I going?”
“Because you have already agreed.”
She frowned at him. “I did?”
“Yesterday.”
“Oh.”
Balif watched her over the rim of his cup. “You could cancel.”
Zarina shook her head. “No. That’s rude.”
“You are allowed to be rude occasionally.”
“You aren’t.”
“I am old.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“It helps,” said Balif.
She went to the lecture. It was worse than expected.
The lecturer was an elderly harbour official who had spent forty years thinking about tonnage and wished to share all of it, and somewhere in the second hour Zarina realised that she had been nodding thoughtfully for twenty minutes at a diagram of a breakwater she could not have described for any reward in the realm.
She began studying later and later into the night. There was always something she thought she should know: trade routes, guild customs, the names of provincial officials, old territorial agreements that nobody had looked at in sixty years. The candles in her sitting room burned down to stubs, and the servants learned to bring fresh ones without being asked.
Balif once found her asleep at a table in the library with her face pressed into a book on irrigation law. It was well past midnight, and beyond the lamp’s small smoky circle the shelves went up into darkness.
He told her afterwards that he had stood over her for some time before he did anything. Then he tapped the table.
Zarina jerked awake. “I’m reading.”
“No.”
“I was.”
“You were drooling on agricultural infrastructure.”
She wiped her mouth at once. “I was not.”
Balif turned the book around to face her. There was a mark on the page, a damp patch spreading gently through the paper. Zarina stared at it. “That could be anything.”
“It is shaped like your face.”
She sat upright and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “What time is it?”
“Late.”
“I have to finish this.”
“No.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Father asked me to attend the southern council tomorrow.”
“He asked whether you wished to attend.”
“That is the same thing.”
“No.”
Zarina opened the book again. Balif reached across and closed it, gently, with one ink-stained finger. She looked up at him. “Balif.”
“Sleep.”
“I’m not tired,” she said, and yawned.
“You have just demonstrated otherwise.”
“I need to know this.”
“You need to know enough.”
“What if someone asks me something?”
“Then say you do not know.”
She stared at him as though he had proposed treason. “I can’t say that.”
“Why?”
“Because I should know.”
Balif pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down in it, with the small grunt his knees required of him these days. “Who told you that?”
Zarina thought about it, and frowned. “Nobody.”
“Exactly.”
She did not like the way he said it. She did not like the way he was looking at her either, steadily and without any teasing in it, as if she were a document that had come out wrong. “I’m fine.”
“I did not ask.”
“You were going to,” Zarina said.
“Yes.”
“Then I saved you time.”
Balif sighed. Zarina smiled at him, the bright, easy smile she had lately begun to use on ambassadors. “See? Useful.”
He did not smile back. He only sat across from her in the little circle of lamplight, and after a while she gathered up her books and went to bed, and she could feel him still sitting there as she went.
She still visited her father’s study, only less often, and lately she came differently. Where once she had arrived with a book and a firm intention to be bored, now she came carrying her own documents, held against her chest the way she had seen ministers carry theirs.
The first time this happened, it was a raw grey afternoon with the fire lit and rain coming sideways against the windows. The Supreme Ruler looked up from his desk, took in the papers, and laughed.
Zarina stopped in the doorway. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You laughed. I saw you.”
“I did not.”
“You did.”
Balif was reading by the window with his lenses on the end of his nose. “He did.”
The ruler ignored him. Zarina set her papers on the table with as much dignity as she could manage. “What is funny?”
“You.”
“That is rude.”
“You used to come here to complain that I worked too much.”
“I still do.”
“You brought work,” her father said.
She looked down at the papers as though they had followed her in without permission. “So?”
Her father only smiled. “Nothing.”
Zarina sat down across from him. For perhaps half an hour, none of them spoke. The fire settled. Pages turned. Rain ran down the glass. Three people reading in the same room, each in a different country of paper, and it was as near to contentment as Zarina could remember being in months.
Eventually she looked up. Her father was rubbing his forehead with two fingers, slowly, as if he could press something back into place. “Headache?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am ruling.”
“That causes headaches,” Zarina pointed out.
“Frequently.”
She got up, walked around behind his chair, and pressed her fingers against his temples. Her father tipped his head back to look at her, startled. “What are you doing?”
“Helping.”
“It hurts.”
“You complain about everything,” Zarina told him.
From the window, Balif said, “Press less.”
“I know,” Zarina said, not easing off in the least.
“You clearly do not.”
“Both of you stop talking,” said Zarina.
Her father laughed. Zarina smiled down at the top of his head, at the grey that had come further into his hair than she had noticed until now, and for a few minutes the room felt exactly as it had years earlier, when she had been small enough to fall asleep on the couch by the window and be carried to bed.
Then a servant came in with another stack of papers and set them at her father’s elbow, and the moment went out of the room like warmth out of an opened door. Zarina went back to her chair, and returned to her own.
Her friends noticed before she did.
There were only a few people her own age whom Zarina genuinely trusted. A palace childhood did not lend itself to friendship, since every child who came near the Supreme Ruler’s daughter came with a family standing behind it. The one who mattered most was Mira.
Mira Saren was the daughter of a minor court official, and Zarina had known her since childhood. She was freckled and sun-browned from riding, with dark curls that never stayed where they were pinned, and she dressed for the weather rather than the court.
She had no interest whatsoever in politics and understood almost nothing about guild disputes. Zarina liked that about her more than she could easily have said.
One afternoon Mira appeared in the doorway of Zarina’s sitting room carrying two riding cloaks. It was a bright, gusty day that rattled the shutters, and Zarina was at her desk with a report in front of her and ink on two fingers.
“You forgot,” Mira said, by way of greeting.
Zarina looked up. “Forgot what?”
Mira simply stared at her. “You promised.”
Zarina’s stomach sank. “The north fields.”
“Yes.”
“That was today?”
Mira lifted the cloaks a little higher, as evidence. “No, I brought these because I am starting a clothing business.”
Zarina put down the report. “I’m sorry.”
“You said that last week.”
“I know.”
“And the week before,” said Mira.
“I know,” Zarina said again, more quietly.
Mira dropped the cloaks onto a chair and sat herself on the arm of it, swinging one booted foot. “Do you even want to go?”
“Yes.”
“Then come.”
Zarina looked at the report. “I have to finish this.”
“Why?”
“I’m meeting Father before dinner.”
“Will he imprison you if you haven’t read it?”
“No.”
“Execute you?”
“Mira.”
“Exile?”
Zarina smiled despite herself. “No.”
“Then come.”
For a moment she almost did. She could feel it already — the wind along the rise above the river, the smell of the horses, Mira talking without a pause about nothing at all.
She had her hand on the edge of the desk to push herself up. Then she looked down at the half-read page, and she shook her head.
“Tomorrow.”
Mira’s expression changed. She was not angry. Zarina would have known what to do with angry; she had been arguing with people since she could talk. This was worse. Mira was disappointed, and did not trouble to hide it, and did not argue either.
“Fine.”
She got up off the arm of the chair and picked up one of the cloaks. Zarina watched her. “Mira.”
“What?”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“I know,” Mira said, and did not turn round.
Mira left. She did not bang the door. She closed it quietly behind her, which was somehow louder.
Zarina sat there for a long time afterwards, with the wind worrying at the shutters. She found a loose thread at the cuff of her sleeve and worked at it with her thumbnail, round and round, until it came away in her fingers. Then she finished the report.
That evening, in the study before dinner, her father asked only one question about it. It was a fair question and not a difficult one, and it touched on perhaps a single page of everything she had read.
Zarina answered it correctly. He nodded. “Good.”
Then he turned to the next matter. For reasons she could not explain, the word did not feel as satisfying as usual. She carried it through dinner, turning it over, and could find nothing wrong with it. It was the same word he always used, in the same voice.
Still, there were good days. There were a great many of them. Zarina was not unhappy, and that was something Balif sometimes forgot when he worried about her.
She liked the work. She liked being trusted. She liked seeing the parts of the realm that had been hidden from her all through her childhood behind closed doors: the ledgers and the quarrels, the way a whole province could turn on the wording of a single clause.
And she was good at it. That was the plain truth, and she knew it.
By eighteen she could walk into a reception and come out of it with twenty new names, each fastened to a face and a family. She knew which guild representatives disliked one another, and which merely pretended to so as to drive up a price.
She knew when her father was genuinely angry and when he only wanted someone to think he was; the real anger made his voice go quieter, not louder. She learned that silence was sometimes more effective than argument, which was a lesson she would have laughed at two years before.
The court loved her. People began to predict, not always quietly, what kind of ruler she might one day become. Zarina usually laughed it off.
“I am not replacing anyone,” she would say, whenever it came up.
Her father, when this was reported to him, said, “A comforting attitude,” in a voice so dry that she glared at him across the breakfast table for a full minute.
But privately, she began imagining it. Not the throne. She could not picture the throne without him in it, and did not try. The work. Standing beside him and taking some of the weight.
Perhaps one day he would sleep more. Perhaps he would leave the palace without twenty unanswered petitions following him. Perhaps Balif would finally stop complaining that they were both impossible. Those thoughts made her proud, and she kept them close, the way she had once kept the stories of her mother.
The first time Zarina chaired a small council without her father present, she barely slept the night before, and Balif, who had expected as much, found her shortly before dawn in the old observatory.
It was cold up there at that hour. The dome had not opened properly in twenty years, and the brass instruments stood about under their dust like guests who had stayed too long at a party.
Grey light was just beginning at the long window. Balif had carried a cup of tea up three flights of stairs for no reason he could have defended, since it would be cold before he drank it.
Zarina was walking the circle of the room in a dressing gown, round and round the dead instruments, with her lips moving. He stood in the doorway getting his breath back and watched her go round twice before he spoke.
“You know the meeting is not here.”
She did not stop walking. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“I noticed.”
“What if they don’t listen to me?”
“They may not.”
She stopped long enough to look horrified. “Helpful.”
“You asked.”
“No, I didn’t. I was thinking aloud.”
Balif lowered himself onto the bench under the window, as slowly as his knees insisted. Zarina went on pacing. “They’re all older than me.”
“Yes.”
“They’ve been doing this longer.”
“Yes.”
“They’ll think Father sent a child.”
“Possibly.”
She stopped. “Are you trying to make this worse?”
“No.”
“You’re very good at it.”
He gestured toward the chair opposite, an old thing with cracked leather that had stood there as long as he had been bringing her up here. Zarina sat on the very edge of it with her hands clamped between her knees.
In the half-light she looked younger than she was, and also, with her hair down and her eyes too bright, so much like her mother that he had to look into his cup for a moment before he could go on.
“You do not need them to think you are older.”
“What do I need?”
“To know why you are there.”
She frowned. “That sounds like one of your lessons.”
“It is too early for originality.”
Zarina looked up at the old dome, where a seam of paler sky showed through the crack nobody had ever mended. “Father trusts me.”
“Yes.”
“What if he shouldn’t?” she asked, very low.
Balif felt his face soften, and let it. “He does.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“No.”
She waited. Balif leaned back against the cold stone of the window frame and tried his tea, which was already lukewarm. “You will make mistakes.”
Zarina looked annoyed. “Everyone keeps saying that.”
“Because you keep trying to avoid it.”
“I don’t want to embarrass him.”
There it was. He had been waiting for it for some months, the thing underneath all the candles and the reports and the late nights, and here it was at last in the grey light, said aloud and not even noticed by the person saying it. Balif watched her. Zarina looked down at her hands.
“He trusts me with this.”
“Yes.”
“So I have to be good.”
“No.”
She looked up. Balif set his cup on the sill beside him. “You have to do the work. Those are different things.”
Zarina was quiet for a long moment. Then she stood. “That was almost useful.”
“Thank you,” said Balif, with dignity.
She kissed his cheek on her way to the door, quick and careless, the way she had done since she was small, and was gone down the stairs before he could think of anything else to say. Balif smiled after her, and listened to her footsteps going away below him.
Then the smile faded. He picked up his tea, which was cold now, and drank it anyway, and regretted it.
The meeting went well. Not perfectly. It was held in one of the small council rooms, around a table that seated twelve, with the morning sun slanting across the papers and somebody’s pipe smoke still caught in the curtains from the day before.
One governor talked over her twice. The third time, Zarina interrupted him, pleasantly and without raising her voice, and he was so surprised that he stopped. Another, a lean elven official with silver rings on every finger, set out to explain to her something she already understood perfectly well. She let him finish.
From the corner of her eye she saw Balif, seated near the back with his notes, lower them by perhaps an inch, and she knew that he had noticed. By the end, an agreement had been reached.
When she returned to her father’s study afterwards, she tried very hard to appear calm.
“How was it?” he asked.
“Fine.”
Balif came in behind her. The Supreme Ruler looked past her at him, and Balif said, “She did well.”
Zarina turned on him. “That is all?”
“You would prefer a song?”
Her father stood. “What happened?”
Zarina told him. Not everything — only the important parts, laid out in order, the way Balif had taught her to lay out a case. The governor who had resisted. The concession she had offered. The final agreement. The Supreme Ruler listened without interrupting, his hands flat on the desk and his eyes on her face.
When she finished, he walked around the desk toward her, and for one terrible second Zarina thought she had missed something.
Then he embraced her. She froze. Her father was not usually demonstrative immediately after political work; in this room he was the ruler first. But his arms were round her and his chin was on her hair, and he smelled, as he always had, of cedar oil and old parchment.
“You did well,” he said.
Zarina smiled against his shoulder. “You already said that once.”
“I am allowed to repeat myself.”
“Balif says repetition is lazy.”
“Balif says many things.”
Behind them, Balif muttered, “A dangerous precedent.”
Zarina laughed. Her father let her go but kept both his warm hands on her shoulders, looking at her, and there was pride in his face. Open pride, unguarded, the kind he showed to nobody else in the palace.
Zarina felt it like the heat of a fire after a long ride in the cold. She would have done almost anything to see that expression again.
And so she kept saying yes. Yes to another ceremony. Yes to another audience. Yes to another speech. Yes to another late night reading something she might never need.
Nobody demanded it of her. That was important, and she would have said so to anyone who asked. Her father occasionally told her to rest. Balif told her more often, and with less tact.
Zarina ignored both of them. She was helping. She was becoming useful. She was becoming someone her father could rely upon, and for a while, that felt very much like growing up.
Late in the autumn, the palace hosted a formal reception for representatives of several guilds. It was the largest event Zarina had attended without remaining constantly at her father’s side, and for weeks beforehand she prepared for it as though for an examination: names, titles, disputes, family connections, subjects best avoided.
She kept them on cards, and the cards multiplied, and she carried a stack of them everywhere and shuffled through them at meals. Balif found the entire exercise depressing.
“You are meeting people,” he said, “not invading them.”
“It feels similar,” said Zarina.
“Then you are attending the wrong receptions.”
On the evening itself, her ceremonial dress was heavier than she had expected. Gold embroidery ran thick across the sleeves and up around the high collar, so stiff that the cloth stood away from her body.
Three attendants spent nearly an hour on her hair, braiding and pinning and pinning again, while the light went out of the windows. Nalia, who had dressed her since she was eleven, set the last of the pins with her mouth full of the rest.
Mira, who had agreed to attend with a reluctance she had not troubled to hide, sat on the edge of the dressing table behind them with her ankles crossed, in a plain green gown she could quite easily have ridden in. She looked horrified. “You cannot move your head.”
“I can.”
“Try.”
Zarina tried. She could. Barely.
Mira laughed. “If you fall, I am leaving you.”
“You are an excellent friend.”
“I know.”
The great hall had been opened up and filled with light, three chandeliers ablaze overhead and long tables down both sides heaped with food that nobody of consequence would have time to eat.
The guilds had come in their best: masters in heavy chains of office, a stooped dwarven assayer who examined the silver plate with professional disappointment, two lizardfolk shipping agents in sea-green silk whose soft, hissing laughter carried under everybody else’s.
For the first hour, Zarina enjoyed herself. Then came another hour. Then another. Everyone wanted to speak with her, and everyone wanted to tell her how impressive she had become. How much she resembled her mother. How proud the Supreme Ruler must be.
Zarina smiled. She asked questions. She remembered names. She laughed at stories she had already heard, at the right moment and for exactly the right length of time.
Across the hall she caught sight of her father now and then, tall and still at the centre of his own slow-turning circle. Once their eyes met over the heads of the crowd, and he smiled. Zarina straightened without realising she had done it.
Later, Balif appeared at her elbow with a cup of something he was not drinking. “You are limping.”
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“My shoes hurt,” Zarina admitted.
“Sit down.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” said Balif.
“Lady Senara is bringing the northern delegation.”
“They will survive seeing you seated.”
Zarina lowered her voice. “Balif.”
“What?”
“Stop.”
He looked at her. She kept smiling, but not at him. She was smiling past his shoulder at the people approaching behind him — Lady Senara, grey-haired and upright in dove-coloured silk, and half a dozen travellers from the north — and the smile had not flickered once while she told him to stop.
Balif stepped aside. Zarina greeted them flawlessly.
The reception ended long after midnight. By then Zarina’s cheeks hurt from smiling, and her shoulders ached under the embroidery, and she had forgotten when she had last eaten. Still, she stayed until the final delegation left, and stood by the doors to see them out.
Her father found her there. The great hall was nearly empty now, the candles guttering in the chandeliers and the servants moving quietly between the tables, gathering glasses with a soft chiming like distant bells.
“You stayed,” her father said.
“Of course.”
“You did not have to.”
“I know.”
He looked around at the emptying hall, and then back at her. “You handled yourself very well tonight.”
Zarina smiled up at him. “Thank you.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
He touched her arm. “Go to bed.”
“You too.”
“That is unlikely.”
She frowned up at him. “Then I’m staying.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because one of us should behave sensibly.”
“Balif says neither of us does.”
“Balif is usually irritatingly correct.”
Zarina laughed. Her father bent and kissed her forehead. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
He walked away down the length of the hall, between the cleared tables, and she watched him go until the far doors opened for him and a secretary who had been waiting there fell into step at his side with a folder. Then she turned toward her chambers.
Balif found her ten minutes later in a small retiring room behind the reception hall, which was not on the way to her chambers or to anywhere else.
It was a narrow room meant for mending a hem or recovering from a conversation, with one lamp, a long mirror and a couch that nobody was using. Zarina was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall.
Her ceremonial shoes had been thrown across the room; one lay against the far wainscot and the other on its side by the door, near his foot.
One earring lay on the floorboards beside her. The other was still tangled in her hair, which had begun coming down on one side in a slow, untidy slide. Balif stopped in the doorway. Zarina looked up at him.
“If you laugh, I will have you removed from the palace.”
“I would like to see you try.”
“My feet are bleeding.”
“That is less amusing.”
He came inside and closed the door. Zarina had both arms bent up behind her neck and was trying to undo one of the clasps at the back of her collar, and her fingers kept slipping on it. He watched her miss it twice.
“Here.”
“I can do it,” Zarina said through her teeth.
“I can see.”
She glared at him. Balif crouched behind her, with a remark from both knees, and worked at the clasp. It was a fiddly thing, a gold hook buried in stiff embroidery by somebody who would never have to undo it at one o’clock in the morning. For a while neither of them spoke.
Then he said, “You should have left earlier.”
“I was fine.”
“You are sitting on the floor.”
“The floor is comfortable.”
“You are bleeding.”
“Barely,” said Zarina, inspecting a heel.
The clasp came loose. Zarina let out a long breath, as if she had been holding it since the first guest arrived. Balif lowered himself the rest of the way and sat beside her against the wall, and wondered how he would ever get up again.
“You do not need to stay until everyone else leaves.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
She gave him a tired look. “Yes.”
“Then why did you stay?”
Zarina leaned her head back against the wall. For several seconds she said nothing, and Balif let the silence be. Then, quite unexpectedly, she smiled.
“Father was watching.”
Balif frowned at her. “What?”
“He looked happy.” She turned her head toward him. “Did you see him?”
Balif had. He had watched the Supreme Ruler watching her all evening across the hall, through the chandelier light and the press of the guilds, the way a man watches a lamp he has lit himself. “I did.”
“He was proud of me.”
“Yes.”
Zarina looked down at the discarded shoe near the door. “So it was worth it.”
She said it without bitterness. She said it without sadness, either. Balif listened for both, the way the Arcanum had taught him to listen for the lie in a witness, and found neither. She truly meant it.
He watched her for a long moment, and she noticed, as she always noticed. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing the face again.”
“What face?”
“The worried one.”
“I am old. I have many unpleasant expressions.”
She smiled at him sleepily. “Stop worrying.”
“I will consider it.”
“You always say that,” she said, her eyes closing.
“Yes.”
Zarina rested her head against his shoulder. Balif stayed very still, the way one stays still when a bird has landed close by. Within a few minutes her breathing slowed and lengthened, and her weight settled against him, and he understood that she had fallen asleep.
He looked down at her: the ruined hair, the gold collar hanging open, the stockings dark at the heel, the face that everybody in Ashkar agreed was her mother’s. The Golden Daughter. That was what the court called her now.
Everyone seemed so pleased with what she was becoming — the ministers and the guilds, the crowds in the square, her father most of all — and she was pleased too. She had bled into her shoes for it and called it worth it, and meant every word.
Balif reached over and, very carefully, worked the remaining earring free of her hair before it could catch. Then he sat with her in the quiet room, with the lamp burning down and the earring in his palm, until someone came to help carry her to bed.