The Useful Daughter
They went to the north fields eleven days after Zarina said tomorrow for what Mira had privately decided was the last time, and they went because Mira did not give her the chance to say it again.
It was the slack hour of a grey afternoon in the first days of the spring, the hour between the noon audiences and the evening’s obligations when nothing was ever scheduled, and it was the only hour that had ever worked. Zarina was in her sitting room with the fire banked low and a report open on the table in front of her, and a second report beneath that one, and the little gilt clock on the mantel ticking at her the way it did when she was behind. She heard the door. She looked up, and Mira Saren was standing in it, holding the same two cloaks.
Mira had not changed in any way Zarina could see, which was one of the things Zarina liked best about her. She was slight and quick and freckled, browned across the nose from riding in all weathers, and her dark curls had been pinned up that morning by somebody with good intentions and were already coming down at the back. She wore a riding coat mended at one elbow and boots that had seen mud that week, and she looked at the room full of papers the way another young woman might have looked at a room full of wasps.
“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 cloak smelled of horse and of the cedar chest it had been stored in, and it went on over a dress that had been chosen that morning for receiving a minor delegation. Zarina did not look at herself in the glass on the way out. She had the strong impression that if she stopped for anything at all, even that, the afternoon would notice and close up again.
The north fields were not far and were not anything in particular. They were a long shallow rise above the river, with a track along the top of it where the palace horses were exercised, and beyond that hedges and other people’s barley, still only a green fuzz on the brown. The track had been the edge of Zarina’s world since she was seven years old, and it remained, at eighteen, the furthest she was permitted to go without a written schedule. A groom from the palace stables rode a polite distance behind them, as somebody always did, and had the good manners to take a deep interest in the hedges.
They rode badly. Zarina had not been on a horse since the autumn, and her body had forgotten the whole conversation; her knees ached within a quarter of a mile and her hands kept doing something the horse disapproved of. Mira, who rode most weeks, had been given a chestnut mare with opinions, and she spent the first mile conducting a private argument with it in a low, steady voice that carried perfectly well.
“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. Mira swung down and sat on the top bar of a field gate, because there was a perfectly good bank of dry grass beside it and Mira had never in her life sat on the thing that was meant for sitting. Zarina leaned on the gate below her, and the two of them looked at the river, which was brown and unremarkable and doing nothing at all. The wind came up off the water smelling of cold mud and last year’s reeds.
Mira produced an apple she had stolen from somewhere, ate it, and threw the core into the hedge. Then she talked, without pausing, for a quarter of an hour. She talked about her cousin’s engagement, and about her brother’s opinion of her cousin’s engagement, which was low, and about 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 than anything that might happen if somebody did.
None of it mattered. That was the whole of its value. Zarina listened to a great many people every day, in audiences and receiving lines and in the long dull hours of the council, and every one of them wanted something from the listening. And here was Mira, swinging one boot against the gate, 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. They rode back later than they should have, laughing at nothing in particular, with the groom trailing patiently behind and the light going yellow over the barley. Zarina was fourteen minutes late to a fitting. Nobody said anything, because nobody ever said anything to her.
She thought about it that night in bed, lying on her back with her legs aching from the saddle, and she could not remember the last time she had laughed at something that was not a joke made for her benefit. It frightened her a little, how long it had been. It frightened her more that she had not noticed.
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 to carry her off. There was simply always something on the day, and the something was always real, and every single instance of it, taken by itself, was reasonable.
By nineteen Zarina had become extremely good at being expected. She knew how long a receiving line in the Hall of Concord could run before people began to tire and shift their weight. She knew which guild representatives disliked being kept waiting and which regarded punctuality as a form of weakness, and she knew to be a little late for the second sort. She could sit through a provincial dispute for two hours without visibly losing patience. She could tell, within a sentence, when a noble was speaking to her and when he was speaking through her to her father.
And she was, increasingly, useful.
In the spring she found the road levy.
It was not dramatic. It began as one paper among forty on a wet evening in her study, with the lamp pulled close and a cup of chocolate going cold at her elbow. A district in the southern uplands had claimed relief on the grounds that the winter had taken out two bridges and a long stretch 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. The numbers were correct. The seals were correct. The signatures sat where signatures ought to sit.
Something about it sat badly all the same. Balif had spent years teaching her that figures which agreed too neatly were usually agreeing with somebody, and she found herself reading the claim a third time with her chin in her hand, looking for whoever that was. Near midnight she gave up, went down to the records room in her slippers with a sleepy clerk and a lamp, and pulled the weather returns for the same district and the same months.
The winter described in the claim had not happened. There had been rain, and a good deal of it, and one hard frost in the second month. There had been nothing that would take out a bridge. Zarina sat on the records room floor with both papers in her lap and the lamp hissing beside her, and felt the small cold click of a thing coming true, and did not sleep much afterward.
In the morning she took both papers with her to the morning session.
The Supreme Ruler had sat at the head of the council table for a great many years, and he had long since stopped noticing the room. It was the same room it had always been: long and high, smelling of beeswax and ink and too many people breathing, the great black table running down the middle of it on its eight carved lions. He noticed the people instead. He always had. That morning there were fourteen of them, ministers and secretaries and a trade envoy of the Aquatic Ascendancy who was present for an entirely unrelated matter and had spent the first hour examining her own rings.
His daughter came in with the secretaries, sat in her place, and waited with her hands folded on two sheets of paper until the Treasurer had finished. Then she put the papers side by side in front of her, squared their edges, and said, in a clear and perfectly level voice, that the uplands claim described a winter that had not occurred.
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. He watched it happen. He watched one of the junior secretaries go first pale and then very busy with his pen. Down the table the Aquatic envoy, a long-boned woman in sea-green who had been visibly bored since breakfast, sat up and looked at the papers with open interest, and then at Zarina. She said something to her aide in a voice like water going over stone. He did not catch the words, but it sounded appreciative.
He held out his hand. Zarina passed him both documents, and he read them twice, the claim and then the return and then the claim again, while fourteen people tried to look as though they were not watching him read. He knew the claim. He remembered the seals on it.
“Who signed the relief?”
Zarina told him the name, and somewhere down the table a secretary let out a breath he had plainly been holding.
“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 and every one of them would have carried the smile out of it by noon. But he looked at her for slightly too long. He knew it was too long, and could not quite help it, and he watched it land in her like heat: the colour came up under her skin, and she lowered her eyes to the table as though there were something there she needed to check.
He saw something else, too, because it was his habit to see it. Two of the provincial secretaries had begun looking at his daughter in a new way, the way men look at an unfamiliar instrument that has just been laid on the table and turned out to have an edge. He noted it, and set it aside for later, and moved the session on to the Aquatic envoy’s harbour dues.
Afterwards, in the corridor, he let the ministers go on ahead of him and waited for her.
“That was good work,” he said.
“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 enough to be carried out of council meetings, and went on into his next meeting. At the door he glanced back. She was standing exactly where he had left her, very still, holding nothing, in the manner of somebody who had just been handed something and did not yet know where to put it down.
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, brought up on a tray with her breakfast in a secretary’s neat hand, and everything on the list was optional in the sense that the realm would not fall if she declined. Everything on it was also impossible to decline, in the sense that somebody had already been told she was coming.
And underneath all of it, running quietly, was the thing she never said out loud. Her father’s pride was uncomplicated and open and easy to produce. It was the best thing in her life. She would have read a great deal of irrigation law to see it again, and she did.
She fell asleep one night with her face on a book about water rights, and woke at some grey hour with the lamp burned out, a crick in her neck, and the print of a statute on her cheek that did not fade until the morning audience was half over.
She attended a reception for the mountain guilds and stood for three hours in a room they had asked to have cooled to their preference. The envoys down from the high passes, wrapped in their heavy grey furs, did not seem to feel it at all. Zarina, in silk, smiled and listened and asked after their journey with her hands going slowly numb at her sides. Afterwards she 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. She said it warmly, and meant it, and the following week the Treasurer brought the harbour accounts forward by four days.
The second time she said the following week again, and offered a different day, and Mira said that day was no good. Neither of them made a third suggestion. The conversation simply closed, the way a door is pushed shut by a draught, softly, with nobody’s hand on it.
Then the asking stopped.
Zarina did not notice for some time. That was the humiliating part. She noticed on an ordinary morning in the summer, with the windows open and the smell of cut grass coming up from the gardens, when Nalia was laying out the day’s clothes and Zarina, digging through a chest for a shawl she wanted, found a pair of riding gloves at the very bottom. They were worn through at two fingers and still carried dried mud from the north fields.
Nalia had been her attendant since Zarina was eleven, and in eight years Zarina had never once seen her hurry. She was a neat, compact woman some years past thirty, with a plain round face and her brown hair wound under a linen cap, and she had a habit of smoothing whatever cloth lay nearest to her hand — a sleeve, a coverlet, a fold of curtain — as though the world would be in better order if its creases were seen to. She was smoothing a skirt across the bed now. She glanced at the gloves and went on with it.
Zarina stood in the middle of the room, holding them, while the curtain moved in the warm air.
“You haven’t worn those in a while,” Nalia said.
“Not that long.”
“Since the spring, Highness.”
Zarina turned the gloves over. Her thumb found the frayed edge of the worn fingertip and began to pick at it, worrying the loose threads out one at a time. The mud was hers. She could date it: the gate, the apple core, the man in the hat.
“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. It was evening, and the candles had been lit in the dressing room, and Nalia was folding the day’s linen into the press with the same small, exact movements she had used for eight years. Zarina, sitting on the end of the bed with her hair half down, watched her, and realised with a jolt that she could not have said where the woman went at night when the last candle was out.
“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 flat against the shelf. “It is a good post.”
Zarina turned that over. It was said in the voice of someone closing a subject, and Zarina, who had spent her life in rooms where people closed subjects, did not let it close. “What do you do with your wages?”
The pause was slight, and polite, and enormous.
“Highness?”
“I mean —” And here Zarina discovered, partway through the 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, plainly, in the voice she might have used to give the hour.
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, floating in the candlelight with nothing to measure it against. She had spent that very morning reading a submission that dealt in sums four thousand times greater, and she had understood every line of it, and she could not have said whether Nalia was paid well or badly or something in between.
“Is that — ” She stopped. Her face was hot. “I don’t know what that means. I’m sorry. I have never bought anything.”
Nalia’s face did something complicated and briefly kind. She set down the folded shift she was holding and looked at Zarina properly, as one woman looks at another, and Zarina had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being seen more clearly than she had been seen in some time.
“No, Highness,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have.”
Then she went back to the linen, and Zarina sat on the end of the bed and watched her hands, and did not ask anything else that night.
In the summer her father asked her to come to his study in the evening, and she went expecting documents.
His study was at the end of the private wing, past the little portrait of her mother under the flowering tree, and in the long summer evenings it held the light later than any other room in the palace. The windows stood open on the gardens. The room smelled, as it always had, of cedar oil and old parchment, with something green and warm coming in underneath from outside. And there was a chessboard set out on the low table 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.”
She sat. They had not played in years. Her father had never been particularly good at chess and had never accepted this assessment of himself, 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. He was tall even sitting down, long-legged in the low chair, and he held each piece a moment too long before he set it down, as though it might say something to him if he waited.
On the fourth of these glances 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. After a while, with great dignity, he moved it back.
Zarina said nothing at all, with tremendous effort. She pressed her lips together and folded her arms and looked out of the window at the gardens, and her shoulders shook only a little.
“Not a word,” he said, and pointed at her with the captured piece he was still holding.
For half an hour he left the papers alone. They talked about nothing. He told her about a court official who had once spent an entire evening discussing a boundary dispute with a visiting ambassador he had mistaken for somebody else entirely, and had realised it too far in to stop, and had simply gone on to the end. They argued about whether the eastern kitchen had begun doing something unforgivable to fish; he said it had, and she said he had been saying so for ten years. He told her about a horse he had owned at twenty-two that had bitten a general, and seemed, after all these years, to be still rather proud of the horse.
She lost. She had been going to lose from about the ninth move, and she saw it coming and let it run, rather than end the evening a minute sooner than she had to.
At the door he kissed her forehead. It was an old habit, from the years when she had had to stand on tiptoe for it, and he used it less now that she was grown.
Zarina went back down the corridor past her mother’s portrait with the summer dark coming in at the windows, 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. It was a raw morning with rain on the windows and a fire just lit in the grate, and Nalia was setting out clothes, and Zarina, in the middle of reading something else, said she wanted to send a note down to the Saren house that afternoon. Nalia’s hands stopped on the bodice she was smoothing. She 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. It was nothing criminal and nothing dramatic: a man who had fallen out of favour with three officials who outranked him, and who had no friend placed high enough to make the falling cost anybody anything. The matter had been referred for review. The family had gone back to the country while it proceeded, which reviews, in Zarina’s considerable experience, largely did not.
Half an hour. Two questions to a clerk and one to a steward, none of whom had hesitated to answer. It had never been hidden. It had never been anything at all. Nobody had thought she needed it.
Her father was in the small audience room off the council chamber with two advisers when she came in, and the three of them were bent over a map of the eastern roads. He looked up, and saw her face, and dismissed them without asking why.
She waited for the doors. They closed with the soft, heavy sound that every door in that part of the palace made, a sound she had heard ten thousand times and had never before wanted so badly to be louder.
“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. She had come down the corridor with the whole of the argument built and ready, and he had taken out the bottom stone of it with one word.
“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, the whole weight of it, and she felt it the way she always did, like standing too near a fire. “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, as though explaining a point of procedure to a new secretary. “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, in her stomach and her throat and the backs of her hands, and that saying so would sound like ingratitude. Her fingers had found the seam at the cuff of her sleeve and were working at it, and she made them stop.
“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, and for a moment, in the grey light from the window, he looked every year of his age and some that he had borrowed.
“Then tell me what you want, and I will do it.”
Zarina opened her mouth to tell him, and found nothing ready in it.
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, as he had reached for them every day of his life, because they were the ones that worked.
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.
It was written on the plain grey paper the Sarens used for everyday, in Mira’s round, hurrying hand, with a blot in one corner where she had set the pen down wet. The family would likely remain away for some months. She was well. The countryside was dull in a way that had to be experienced to be believed. Her mother had already begun redesigning the gardens, and had involved a man with strong opinions about gravel.
At the bottom, squeezed in below her name as though she had nearly not written it, 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, standing at the window with the rain coming down outside and the paper going soft at the edges where her thumb held it.
Then she folded the letter along its creases 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, and each piece arrived by itself, politely, at a sensible hour. 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, where her mother’s sister reigned as the Phoenix Queen? Was it time she maintained a residence of her own in the capital?
Zarina was used to hearing her life discussed. She had been hearing it discussed since before she could follow the sentences. What changed that winter was the grammar. People had always asked what she might do. Now they discussed what should be done with her.
One afternoon, with snow lying in the courtyards and the lamps lit by the middle of the day, she came to her father’s study and found three senior advisers already seated around the long table, with documents spread across it in overlapping fans. One was a grey-whiskered dwarf from the provincial office, his heavy hands folded on the papers; one was a thin woman from the household administration; the third was a man Zarina knew chiefly by his voice, which was mild and carried well. Her father gestured at an empty chair.
“Good. Sit.”
She sat, and the conversation resumed over her.
They discussed travel, and security, and the correct number of public appearances in a year, and the proportion of that year she should spend representing the throne outside the capital. The dwarf observed, in his deep and unhurried voice, 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.
The man with the mild voice argued that her schedule was already too heavy, and for a moment she was grateful to him. She turned toward him a little in her chair.
“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, the way a man might remark on the weather or the price of lamp oil, and the discussion moved on. Zarina sat very still in her chair and understood that she had just heard herself priced.
Then a further document was produced from the bottom of the household woman’s stack. Zarina reached for it before anyone could hand it to her.
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, in the way of people who would very much like to be furniture. Her father glanced at them and said, “Perhaps we continue this privately.”
“No,” Zarina said. “They can stay.”
She turned a page. The ink on it was dry; it had been dry for some time. “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 like something swallowed wrong.
“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 down 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. She could not explain that the difference was the whole of her life. She sat with the document in her hands and the words would not come, and the three advisers looked at the table, and the snow went on falling past the window.
“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 in his chair. Her father closed his eyes for a moment, and opened them, and dismissed all three of them with a small movement of his hand, and this time she did not object.
When the doors had closed behind them he said, “You have been angry with me for weeks.”
“That isn’t true.”
“It is.”
She looked away, at the fire, at the stack of other documents on his desk, at anything.
“If this is about Mira—”
“It isn’t just Mira.”
“Then what is it?”
Zarina tried. She tried honestly, and searched for the words, 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. She had never once, in her whole life, managed to explain to him the difference between the two.
For several weeks afterwards they were careful with one another, which was new.
She still went to his study. He still asked her opinion, and still listened to it. 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, like a flagstone that has sunk a little in the night, where it could be walked over every day by people who had agreed not to look down.
Then, in the middle of the winter, they had dinner alone. It had once been ordinary. Now it had to be arranged, by two secretaries and a steward, a week in advance.
They ate in the small dining room in the private wing, with a fire on the hearth and the curtains drawn against the cold, and a single footman who brought the dishes and went away again. They were both tired. For most of the meal they discussed work, because work was easy, and they both knew its shape. Eventually her father 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, and did not taste it.
“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 the same time.
“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, with the firelight on one side of his face, and then he asked the question he had been circling since the autumn.
“Are you unhappy?”
“No.”
He waited, turning the stem of his glass slowly between his fingers.
“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 in his chair. “Then tell me.”
And she could not, because she had everything. She loved him. She loved parts of the work, genuinely, and not as a duty — the click of a figure coming true, the faces round the council table when she was right. She was not unhappy. She was tired of being visible. And that sounded, when she assembled it in her head, like the complaint of somebody who had never had a single real problem in her life.
“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, and they sat on the white tablecloth between the dishes like something that had been dropped and broken.
Her father looked toward the curtained window for a long moment. Zarina 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 across the table.
“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, sitting at the writing table in her nightgown with a single candle and the palace gone quiet around her. The grey paper had softened along its folds. She did not need to look for the last line. Her eyes went to it by themselves: I thought someone would tell you.
She had a small drawer beneath the writing surface that had never held anything but spare pen nibs. It had a lock, and a little brass key that had sat in the lock for as long as she could remember, because there had never been any reason to turn it. She pulled the drawer out and emptied the nibs into a dish, where they rattled and lay still. She put the letter inside, and closed the drawer.
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 exactly where she found it and said nothing, because that was what Nalia did.
Zarina locked it anyway. She sat on the edge of the bed with the key in her closed hand, its little teeth pressing into her palm, 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 in the corridor, unhurried, and the low word of the watch passing from one man to the next, and then the quiet again.
Zarina put the key in the dish with the pen nibs, where nobody would ever think to look for it, and went to bed.