The Useful Daughter
They went to the north fields eleven days after Zarina said tomorrow.
Mira arrived without warning at the hour when nothing was scheduled, which was the only hour that had ever worked, and stood in the doorway of the sitting room holding the same two cloaks.
“I am not asking,” she said. “I am collecting.”
Zarina looked at the papers in front of her, and at the clock, and at Mira, and something in her simply gave up in the correct direction.
“Let me change.”
“No. You will find four things on the way to the wardrobe.” Mira threw one of the cloaks at her head. “Wear that over it. Nobody in a field cares.”
The north fields were not far and were not anything in particular: a long shallow rise above the river with a track along the top of it that the palace horses were exercised on, and beyond that, hedges and other people’s barley. It had been the edge of Zarina’s world since she was seven years old and it remained, at nineteen, the furthest she was permitted to go without a written schedule.
They rode badly. Zarina had not been on a horse since the autumn and her body had forgotten the whole conversation; Mira, who rode most weeks, had been given a mare with opinions and spent the first mile conducting a private argument with it.
“This animal hates me.”
“She likes you.”
“She has bitten my sleeve twice.”
“That’s affection.”
“It is not affection, Zarina, it is a review.”
Halfway along the rise they stopped to let the horses breathe and sat looking at the river, which was brown and unremarkable and doing nothing at all. Mira ate an apple she had stolen from somewhere and threw the core into the hedge and then talked, without pausing, for a quarter of an hour, about her cousin’s engagement, and her brother’s opinion of her cousin’s engagement, and a man at her father’s office who had begun wearing a hat indoors and whom the entire household had decided to say nothing to on the grounds that watching him was more entertaining.
None of it mattered. That was the whole of its value. Zarina listened to a great many people every day and every one of them wanted something from the listening, and here was Mira, telling her about a hat.
“You’ve stopped talking again,” Mira said.
“I’m listening.”
“You listen professionally now. It’s unnerving.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Interrupt me. You used to interrupt me constantly. You were extremely rude and I miss it.”
So Zarina interrupted her, and told her the man in the hat was almost certainly hiding a bad haircut, and Mira said that was the single most useful thing the palace had ever produced, and they rode back later than they should have and Zarina was fourteen minutes late to a fitting and nobody said anything, because nobody ever said anything to her.
She thought about it that night in bed and could not remember the last time she had laughed at something that was not a joke made for her benefit.
She promised herself she would go every week.
She did not go every week.
Nothing prevented it. That was the part she could never afterwards explain to anybody, including herself: no one refused her, no one forbade it, no crisis arrived. There was simply always something on the day, and the something was always real, and each individual instance of it was reasonable.
By nineteen Zarina had become extremely good at being expected. She knew how long a receiving line could run before people began to tire. She knew which guild representatives disliked being kept waiting and which regarded punctuality as a form of weakness. She could sit through a provincial dispute for two hours without visibly losing patience, and could tell when a noble was speaking to her rather than through her to her father.
And she was, increasingly, useful.
In the spring she found the road levy.
It was not dramatic. A district in the southern uplands had claimed relief on the grounds that the winter had taken out two bridges and a length of the river road, and the claim had passed three offices and arrived on her father’s desk with a recommendation attached. Zarina read it because she read everything, and the numbers were correct, and the seals were correct, and something about it sat badly enough that she went and pulled the weather returns for the same district, and the winter described in the claim had not happened.
She brought both to the morning session and put them side by side and said so.
The room went quiet in the specific way it did when a young woman had said something that was going to cost several men an afternoon. An Aquatic Ascendancy trade envoy, present for an entirely unrelated matter and visibly bored, sat up and looked at the papers with open interest and then at Zarina, and said something to her aide in a voice like water going over stone that Zarina did not catch but which sounded appreciative.
Her father read both documents twice.
“Who signed the relief?”
Zarina told him.
“And the weather return?”
“The same office. Nine weeks apart.”
He set them down. He did not smile, because there were fourteen people in the room, but he looked at her for slightly too long, and she felt it land in her chest like heat.
Afterwards, in the corridor, he said only, “That was good work.”
“It was luck.”
“It was not luck. Luck is finding it. You went and looked.”
He touched the back of her head briefly as he passed, the way he had when she was small, and went into his next meeting, and Zarina stood in the corridor for a moment feeling as though she had been handed something.
She cancelled the ride that week to read the rest of the uplands file.
Zarina said yes to everything, and this was the trap, because nobody ever made her.
There was no order. There was never an order. There was a list each morning, and everything on the list was optional in the sense that the realm would not fall if she declined, and everything on the list was impossible to decline in the sense that somebody had already been told she was coming.
And underneath all of it, running quietly, the thing she never said out loud: that her father’s pride was uncomplicated and open and easy to produce, and that it was the best thing in her life, and that she would have read a great deal of irrigation law to see it again.
She fell asleep with her face on a book about water rights and woke with the print on her cheek.
She attended a reception for the Crystalline Conclave and stood for three hours in a room they had asked to have cooled to their preference, smiling with her hands going numb, and afterwards told Nalia it had been interesting, and meant it, and could not have said what anybody had told her.
Mira asked her twice more.
The first time Zarina said the following week.
The second time she said the following week again, and offered a different day, and Mira said that day was no good, and neither of them made a third suggestion, and the conversation simply closed like a door being pushed shut by a draught.
Then the asking stopped.
Zarina did not notice for some time. That was the humiliating part. She noticed on an ordinary morning, when Nalia was laying out clothes and Zarina, looking for something else entirely, found a pair of riding gloves at the bottom of a chest, worn through at two fingers and still carrying dried mud from the north fields.
She stood holding them.
“You haven’t worn those in a while,” Nalia said.
“Not that long.”
“Since the spring, Highness.”
Zarina turned them over. The mud was hers. She could date it.
“That can’t be right.”
Nalia said nothing, which was Nalia’s way of being right.
She had begun, around this time, to look at the people in her rooms.
It arrived by accident, out of guilt or restlessness or the gloves. Nalia was folding something and Zarina, who had known her since she was eleven, realised she could not have said where the woman went at night.
“Do you live in the palace?”
Nalia looked up. “In the lower east range, Highness. With the household staff.”
“With your family?”
“My mother is in the city. My brother’s family are in Harrow.”
“Do you see them?”
“At the winter holiday. Sometimes in summer if the schedule allows.” Nalia smoothed a sleeve. “It is a good post.”
Zarina turned that over. “What do you do with your wages?”
The pause was slight, and polite, and enormous.
“Highness?”
“I mean —” and here Zarina discovered, mid-sentence, the size of the thing she had walked into. “I mean, is it — do you send it to your mother, or—”
“Most of it, yes.”
“How much is it?”
Nalia told her.
Zarina had no framework for the number at all. It was not large and it was not small; it was a figure without walls around it. She had spent that morning reading a submission that discussed sums four thousand times greater and she had understood every line of it, and she could not have said whether Nalia was paid well.
“Is that — ” She stopped. “I don’t know what that means. I’m sorry. I have never bought anything.”
Nalia’s face did something complicated and briefly kind.
“No, Highness,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have.”
In the summer her father asked her to come to his study in the evening, and she went expecting documents, and there was a chessboard between two chairs.
Zarina stopped in the doorway.
“You’ve made a mistake.”
“I rarely make mistakes.”
“There are no papers on that table.”
“They are on the other table.”
She looked. A stack of them sat beside his chair, at the height of an ambition.
“That’s worse.”
“Sit down.”
They had not played in years. Her father had never been particularly good and had never accepted this assessment, and for the first several turns he kept glancing sideways at the documents in the manner of a man who believed he was being subtle.
On the fourth of these Zarina reached across and turned the top page facedown.
He looked at her hand.
“You invited me.”
“I am aware of that.”
“You’re reading.”
“I can read and play.”
“You moved the same piece twice.”
He examined the board with the expression of a head of state discovering an error in a treaty, and after a while moved it back.
Zarina said nothing at all, with great effort.
“Not a word,” he said.
For half an hour he left the papers alone. They talked about nothing: a court official who had spent an entire evening discussing a dispute with a visiting ambassador he had mistaken for somebody else, and had been too far in to stop; whether the eastern kitchen had begun doing something unforgivable to fish; a horse he had owned at twenty-two that had bitten a general.
She lost. She had been going to lose from about the ninth move, and let it run rather than end the evening.
At the door he kissed her forehead, which was an old habit he used less now that she was grown.
Zarina went back down the corridor feeling light in a way she could not have described to anybody, and thought: this is why. Whatever anybody else believes about me, this is why.
Mira left the capital in the third week of autumn, and Zarina found out four days later from her attendant.
She found out because she asked. Nalia was setting out clothes and Zarina, in the middle of something else, said she wanted to send a note down to the Saren house that afternoon, and Nalia hesitated.
That hesitation was enough to turn Zarina’s head.
“What?”
“I think they have gone, Highness.”
“Gone where?”
“To the family estate. I believe it was the beginning of the week.”
Zarina put down what she was holding.
“Nobody told me.”
“I assumed you knew.”
She established the whole of it in under half an hour, which was what made her angriest.
Mira’s father had lost an administrative post following a dispute over provincial contracts. Nothing criminal, nothing dramatic: a man who had fallen out of favour with three officials who outranked him. The matter had been referred for review, and the family had gone back to the country while it proceeded, which reviews largely did not.
Half an hour. Two questions to a clerk and one to a steward. It had never been hidden. It had never been anything at all. Nobody had thought she needed it.
Her father was with two advisers when she came in, and he saw her face and dismissed them without asking why.
She waited for the doors.
“Did you send Mira away?”
He frowned. “Mira?”
“Mira Saren.”
“I know who she is.”
“Then did you?”
“No.”
It knocked some of the wind out of her, which she resented.
“Her family have left the capital.”
“Yes.”
“You knew.”
“I knew that Saren had gone back to his estate. It was in a summary.” He was watching her now with real attention. “Zarina, this had nothing to do with you.”
“She is my friend.”
“I know that.”
“No,” she said, “you don’t,” and it came out harder than she had meant it to.
Her father did not interrupt. He waited, which was worse.
“Her family disappear out of the capital because three men decided her father had become inconvenient, and it does not occur to a single person in this building that I might want to be told.”
“He was not removed for being inconvenient. There was a dispute over—”
“I don’t care why.”
“Then what are we arguing about?”
“That she is gone.”
He absorbed that. She watched him understand some part of it — not all, but a real part — and then she watched him do the thing he always did, which was to reach for a tool.
“I can have her brought back.”
Zarina stared at him.
“What?”
“If you want her in the capital, that can be arranged. Today, if you like.”
“You would order her back.”
“I would invite her.” He said it patiently. “There is a difference.”
“Because I asked.”
“Yes.”
And there it was. She could not have explained, then, why it was unbearable; she only knew that it was, with total physical certainty, and that saying so would sound like ingratitude.
“She is not a problem,” she said.
“I did not say she was.”
“You are talking about her like one.”
Her father passed a hand over his face. He had been in session since before she woke.
“Then tell me what you want, and I will do it.”
Zarina opened her mouth.
She wanted nobody to have taken it. She wanted a friendship that had not been restored by decree. She wanted to have noticed within four days. None of it could be requisitioned, and all of it sounded, said aloud in this room, like a girl complaining that the world had not arranged itself around her.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Zarina.”
“I said nothing.”
She left, and regretted it before she reached her own corridor — not the anger, only the ending. He had tried. He almost always tried. He was not some distant tyrant rearranging her life for his amusement; he was a man who saw a difficulty and reached for the instruments available to him.
The difficulty was that every instrument available to him was an instrument of power.
Zarina was beginning to learn that certain things are ruined by being touched with one.
Mira’s letter came three days later, and it was short.
The family would likely remain away for some months. She was well. The countryside was dull in a way that had to be experienced. Her mother had already begun redesigning the gardens and had involved a man with strong opinions about gravel.
At the bottom she had added: I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye. They told us we were leaving the same morning. I thought someone would tell you.
Zarina read that line several times.
Then she folded the letter and put it in her desk, and did not show it to her father.
The question of her future arrived that winter, disguised as planning.
It came in reasonable pieces. Which councils should she attend as a matter of routine? Would she benefit from a season with the Celestial Winds? Should she take a larger role in relations with the Phoenix domains? Was it time she maintained a residence of her own in the capital?
Zarina was used to hearing her life discussed. What changed was the grammar. People had always asked what she might do. Now they discussed what should be done with her.
One afternoon she came to her father’s study and found three senior advisers already seated, with documents spread across the long table. Her father gestured at an empty chair.
“Good. Sit.”
She sat, and the conversation resumed over her.
They discussed travel, security, the correct number of public appearances, the proportion of the year she should spend representing the throne outside the capital. One adviser observed that Her Highness’s popularity made her particularly useful in provinces where confidence in the central government had weakened.
Useful.
Zarina looked at her father. He was reading something else.
A second adviser argued that her schedule was already too heavy, and for a moment she was grateful to him.
“If Her Highness is to assume greater responsibilities in the coming years,” he went on, “her appearances should become more selective. Rarity has value.”
He said it in front of her without the smallest embarrassment, and the discussion moved on, and Zarina understood that she had just heard herself priced.
Then a further document was produced. She reached for it.
Half of her next year had been divided between places she had never agreed to visit.
“Who made this?”
“It is a preliminary arrangement, Highness.”
She turned to her father. “You’ve seen it?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And we are discussing it.”
“You were discussing it before I came in.”
The advisers became extremely still. Her father glanced at them and said, “Perhaps we continue this privately.”
“No,” Zarina said. “They can stay.”
She turned a page. “There are three months here in the western provinces.”
“It is a proposal.”
“I don’t want to spend three months there.”
“Then say so,” her father said.
“I am.”
“Good.”
She waited for something further, and it did not come, and the irritation rose in her throat.
“Is that it?”
“What else should there be?”
“You approved this.”
“I approved discussing it.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“Zarina,” he said, with the first edge of the afternoon, “that is why you are sitting here.”
She looked at the pages. To him the distinction was so obvious it barely needed saying, and she could not find the words to explain that being present while other people arranged her was not the same as being asked, and that the difference was the whole of her life.
“You could have asked before people planned my year.”
“No one has planned anything. People prepare options. That is their work.”
“They are my options.”
“Yes.”
“Then shouldn’t I be there when they are made?”
“You are.”
“Afterwards.”
One of the advisers shifted. Her father dismissed all three with a gesture, and this time she did not object.
When the doors closed he said, “You have been angry with me for weeks.”
“That isn’t true.”
“It is.”
She looked away.
“If this is about Mira—”
“It isn’t just Mira.”
“Then what is it?”
Zarina tried, and what came out was: “Everything happens before I know about it.”
“That is not true.”
“It feels true.”
His face softened, and she hated that too, because she did not want sympathy, she wanted him to understand, and she had never once managed to explain the difference.
For several weeks afterwards they were careful with one another, which was new.
She still went to his study. He still asked her opinion. But he stopped mentioning the western provinces and she stopped mentioning her schedule, and the disagreement did not resolve so much as settle, somewhere underneath everything, where it could be walked over.
Then in the middle of winter they had dinner alone, which had once been ordinary and now required arranging.
They were both tired. For most of the meal they discussed work, because work was easy. Eventually he put down his fork.
“I have not seen you much.”
“I’m here every day.”
“That is not what I mean.”
She knew it was not. She drank something.
“You could cancel things,” he said.
“What?”
“You have been attending more than you need to.”
Zarina looked at him, and something in her went very cold and very tired at once.
“You’re telling me to do less.”
“Yes.”
“You wanted me to help.”
“I still do.”
“But not too much.”
“I did not say that.”
She pushed food around her plate. He watched her for a while, and then asked the question he had been circling since the autumn.
“Are you unhappy?”
“No.”
He waited.
“I’m not,” she said, and heard how it sounded.
“All right.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I did not say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Her father sat back. “Then tell me.”
And she could not, because she had everything. She loved him. She loved parts of the work, genuinely, not as a duty. She was not unhappy. She was tired of being visible, which sounded, when she assembled it in her head, like the complaint of somebody who had never had a single real problem.
“Sometimes,” she said at last, “I wish people would leave me alone.”
“I understand that.”
“No.”
It came out too fast. He looked at her, and she could not take it back, and going on was less bad than stopping.
“You can leave a room and still be yourself. When you walk somewhere, people see you, I know that. But you chose this.”
“I was born into it too.”
“Not like me.”
The words were out. She had never said them aloud, to him or to anyone.
Her father looked toward the window for a long moment. She wanted very badly to reach across the table and pull the sentence back into her mouth.
“No,” he said. “Not like you.”
There was no anger in it whatsoever, which was what made it unsurvivable.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant.” He turned back to her. “You are allowed to be tired of it.”
She stared at him.
“But being tired of a thing does not make it go away.”
And the warmth went out of the room, because there it was again, waiting where it always waited, at the end of every corridor she had ever walked down. Who you are. What comes with it. What cannot be altered.
Zarina nodded, and they finished dinner, and they were kind to one another, and neither of them said anything else that mattered.
That night she took Mira’s letter out of the desk and read it once more.
I thought someone would tell you.
She had a small drawer beneath the writing surface that had never held anything but spare pen nibs. She emptied it into a dish, put the letter inside, and closed it.
Then she turned the key.
There was no reason for it. Nobody searched her rooms; nobody would have wanted the letter; there was nothing in it that could have embarrassed a child. If Nalia had found it she would have put it back where she found it and said nothing, because that was what Nalia did.
Zarina locked it anyway, and sat on the edge of the bed with the key in her closed hand, and understood that the act had not felt shameful. It had felt like discovering a room inside herself that no one else had a door to.
She was nineteen years old, and she had never in her life owned anything that had not been given to her, approved for her, or arranged around her.
Outside, the guards changed. She heard their boots go past.
Zarina put the key in the dish with the pen nibs, where nobody would ever think to look for it, and went to bed.