The Favour
Zarina learned that her marriage was being discussed from a woman whose name she could not remember.
It happened at a reception for the northern river guilds, in the third hour, when the wine had done its work and people had begun saying things they would not have said standing up. The woman was the wife of someone in the treasury. She had a broad, kind face and she took Zarina’s hand in both of hers with the confidence of a person who believed she was delivering good news.
“You must be so relieved,” she said. “That he is taking such care over it. Some fathers simply hand the matter to the council and let them fight.”
Zarina smiled, because that was what she did. “He is careful about most things.”
“Eleven houses.” The woman shook her head, delighted. “Eleven. My husband says the list took three weeks to settle and half of it is arguing about the Phoenix side.”
The room went on around them. Someone laughed near the musicians. A steward moved past with a tray and Zarina watched him go, because looking at him was easier than looking at the woman holding her hand, and because she needed the few seconds it bought her.
“Three weeks,” she said.
“At least.”
“That sounds like my father.”
The woman squeezed her fingers and moved away pleased with herself, and Zarina stood where she was for a while longer, and then finished the reception. She spoke to the river guilds about a bridge. She remembered every name. She was told twice that she carried herself like her mother, and thanked both of them.
Her father was still working when she came in. He had the lamps lit on one side of the desk only, the way he did when he intended to be finished soon and never was, and he did not look up immediately, which gave her time to decide how to begin and to discard all of it.
“When were you going to ask me?”
He turned a page. “About what?”
Later, that was the part she kept. Not the argument that followed. The two words at the beginning, said mildly, without any guilt in them at all, by a man who genuinely did not know which of the many things arranged for his daughter that month she might have meant.
She said, “There is a list.”
He put the page down then. She watched him work out which list, and watched him understand, and watched him decide — she saw the decision happen — to be reasonable about it.
“Nothing has been agreed.”
“There are eleven houses on it.”
“There were nineteen.” He sat back. “Zarina, listen to me before you—”
“A woman I have met three times knew before I did.”
“That is a separate problem and I will deal with it.”
“It is not separate. It is the entire thing.”
He was quiet. Then he stood, and came around the desk, and she braced for the hand on her shoulder and he did not give her one, which meant he was being careful with her, which was worse.
“The Oren Houses has been writing to me about this for two years,” he said. “The Gilded houses have been writing for longer. Every one of them believes that if they are patient and pleasant and give it enough time, the question will eventually be decided in a room where neither you nor I are present. That is how it is normally done. It was done that way to your mother.”
Zarina said nothing.
“So I opened it. Formally, on my own terms, with a list I control and a process that cannot proceed without my signature, and the effect of that is that nobody can approach you sideways ever again, because the front door is standing open and guarded.” He spread his hands. “I did it to protect you.”
“I believe you.”
“Then what is this?”
“You could have told me you were going to protect me.” Her voice was not raised. She was aware of being very precise, the way she got when she was hurt, and unable to stop it. “I would have said thank you. I would have helped. I know the Phoenix side better than your council does and you know that I do.”
“It was procedural.”
“It was my marriage.”
“It was a list of names,” he said, and heard himself, and stopped.
They stood in the lamplight on the one lit side of the desk.
“I will have the council reprimanded,” he said at last. “You should not have heard it there.”
“That isn’t what I want.”
“Then tell me what you want and I will do it.”
And there it was again, the thing he always reached for, offered with real love and no understanding at all: name it and it is yours. She could have asked him to burn the list. He might have done it. That was somehow the worst available fact.
“Nothing,” Zarina said. “It’s late.”
She went to Balif because she wanted somebody to be angry on her behalf, and Balif refused, in the specific way that made her want to throw something.
He was in his rooms with the lenses she had arranged for him through her father and denied arranging, reading with the book held at an angle that would have given anyone else a headache. He let her get all the way through it without interrupting once.
Then he said, “He is right about the mechanism.”
“I know he is right about the mechanism.”
“Do you want me to pretend otherwise? I can. I would not be good at it.”
“I want you to say that he should have told me.”
“He should have told you.” Balif set the book down. “He should have told you before he told a committee, and the fact that it did not occur to him is the thing you are actually upset about, and you are correct to be. Is that sufficient?”
It was. That was the trouble. It was exactly right and it changed nothing, and she found she resented the accuracy.
“You always do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Agree with me in a way that leaves everything where it was.”
Balif considered this for long enough that she knew he was taking it seriously, which she had not entirely wanted either.
“Yes,” he said. “I imagine I do.”
Mira came back to the capital in the second week of spring, for four days, and Zarina walked out of a meeting on grain tariffs to see her.
She was waiting in the lower courtyard in a travelling cloak, and she looked exactly the same, which Zarina found unreasonable. She had wanted some visible evidence of the months.
“You look tired,” Mira said.
Zarina hugged her hard enough that she staggered.
“All right,” Mira said, into her shoulder. “All right.”
They walked in the gardens. It should have been easy and it was not. They talked about people they both knew and about the estate, which Mira described as a place where the most exciting thing that had happened all winter was a heron, and Zarina laughed and it came out slightly wrong, and after that they were both aware of it.
There were pauses. There had never been pauses.
Near the fountain Mira stopped. “What happened to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You used to talk about things. Now you tell me what happened in meetings.”
“I’m talking.”
“You’re reporting.”
Zarina looked up at the palace windows, at the long row of them, and could not think of a single thing to say that was not about a meeting.
“I’m fine,” she said.
Mira watched her for a moment. “All right.”
That hurt more than an argument. They kept walking.
Near the garden gate the wind turned and brought music over the wall from the lower city, thin and badly played and unmistakably a crowd. A spring festival had started in the streets below the west quarter three days earlier and Zarina had approved the closure of two roads for it without once thinking about what the roads were being closed for.
Mira stopped walking.
“Do you remember when we used to go down there?”
“With half the palace behind us?”
“No. Properly.”
“Once,” Zarina said. “When we were nine. And it was not properly, it was twelve horsemen and a physician.”
“Once is enough to remember.” Mira tilted her head at the wall. “We could go.”
Zarina laughed.
Mira did not.
“You know why not,” Zarina said.
“I know what everyone says.”
“That is usually because they are right.”
Mira shrugged and started toward the gate. “You’ve become very sensible.”
“I am serious.”
“So am I,” Mira said, without turning around, and that was the end of it, except that it was not, because Zarina stood there after she had gone and listened to the music until the wind changed again and took it away.
Two nights later she was awake at the wrong hour with the window open, and the music was there again, and she got up and dressed before she had finished deciding to.
Not a disguise. She was clear about that afterwards, when Balif asked, and she was clear about it at the time. She wore an old riding cloak, plain boots, no jewellery, and she took nothing with her at all, which turned out to be a mistake of a kind she had not known was available to her.
Nalia was asleep in the adjoining chamber. Zarina considered waking her and decided against it, and she went out through the eastern service stair because she knew the route: it had been taught to her at eleven, along with three others, in case the palace ever had to be emptied in a hurry. She had been made to walk all four of them twice a year until she was fifteen.
She used one of them to leave without telling anybody.
Mira nearly refused. She came to the side door of her family’s residence with her hair down and an expression that went through several stages while Zarina stood in the street.
“What are you doing here.”
“Come with me.”
“Where.”
“The festival.”
“You said no.”
“I changed my mind.”
“You have guards.”
“No.”
Mira closed her eyes. “No.”
“I’m already here.”
“That does not improve it. That makes it worse. That is the opposite of an argument.” She swore, quietly and with feeling, in a way she had learned from her family’s stablemaster and had been beaten for at eight, and then she went inside and came back out with a cloak. “If we die, I am going to be extremely angry.”
The west quarter had put lanterns on ropes across the streets, most of them badly, so that the light sagged in the middle of every span and the crowd walked through alternating pools of brightness and dark. It smelled of hot oil and crushed flowers and too many people. Somebody had built a stage out of cart beds at the junction and two groups of musicians had claimed opposite ends of it and were refusing, on principle, to play the same thing.
Nobody recognised her.
She had known, intellectually, that this was possible. Her face was on nothing that ordinary people handled. Without the gold and the guards and the space that always opened in front of her, she was a tall young woman in a plain cloak, walking too slowly, and the crowd’s response to that was to go around her with mild irritation.
At the first stall she took a pastry, turned, and walked away with it.
The vendor shouted after her. “Payment.”
Zarina stopped. Mira put a hand over her face.
“Oh,” Zarina said, turning back.
The vendor was a heavy woman with flour to the elbow who looked at her with the pure contempt of somebody at the end of a long shift. “You think they’re free?”
“No.”
She searched her cloak. There was nothing in it. There had never been anything in it. She had reached twenty years of age and left a building without money because it had genuinely not occurred to her that the world required any.
Mira paid, and steered her away by the arm.
“You are useless.”
“I have never bought food.”
“That is worse. That is so much worse.”
Zarina started laughing and could not stop, and had to be pulled to the side of the street, and stood with her hand against a wall while a man carrying a crate on his shoulder shoved past her and told her to move.
She moved.
Then she looked at Mira with her eyes wet from laughing.
“He told me to move.”
“Yes.”
“He told me to move.”
“You are enjoying this far too much,” Mira said, and she was.
They stayed for hours, and nothing happened, and Zarina remembered it for the rest of her life.
They ate badly cooked things. They watched the two sets of musicians arrive at open war over a note. Near the bridge a Sylvan handler had a low dust-coloured beast on a braided rope, sleepy and enormous, and was charging a copper to let children sit on it; the animal endured this with its eyes shut and its tail moving slightly, and one small boy fell off it twice on purpose. Above the junction a Celestial courier came down onto a roofline too fast, missed the tiles, caught the gutter with one hand and hung there swearing while her wings sorted themselves out, and the crowd below applauded, and she made a gesture at them and went on.
Mira spent too much money on a painted bracelet from a stall selling almost nothing else.
“It is going to lose all its paint,” Zarina said.
“Yes.”
“Within a month.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Then why?”
Mira looked at her as though she had asked why people breathe. “Because I liked it.”
Zarina lost eleven coppers of Mira’s money at a game involving wooden rings and a post, and became convinced, correctly, that the post had been weighted, and had to be physically prevented from taking the matter up with the man running it.
Later they sat on the rim of a fountain eating something that had far too much sugar on it. A group beside them was discussing the government.
One man complained about a new levy on the river roads. Another said the Supreme Ruler had no idea what a sack of flour cost and had probably never held one.
Zarina drew breath.
Mira put a hand on her arm without looking up. “Don’t.”
The men went on. Some of what they said was fair. One thing was so completely wrong that Zarina had to bite the inside of her cheek, because she had read the actual figures nine days earlier and could have recited them.
Eventually the group moved off toward the music.
“Difficult?” Mira said.
“A little.”
“You wanted to correct them.”
“They were wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Zarina turned that over. In the palace, everything she said mattered; everything her father said mattered enormously; a single sentence of his could be read six ways by nine delegations before noon. Here, three men could be wrong about the treasury on a fountain step and then go and listen to some music, and the realm continued.
She found she envied them so much it was almost physical.
She looked around the square. Nobody was watching her. For the first time she could remember, she did not sit up straight.
They came back near dawn with the sky going grey behind the palace and the lanterns burning down to smoke.
Mira was exhausted. Zarina was not.
At the wall where they had to separate, Mira caught her sleeve.
“Don’t do this alone.”
“I won’t.”
“I mean it. Not once.”
“I know.”
Mira studied her for a moment, and whatever she saw seemed to trouble her, but she was too tired to name it.
“You look happy,” she said.
Zarina had no answer to that, because she was.
She went back the following morning under a thin excuse about a book, and found Mira eating breakfast in the middle of the afternoon with the bracelet on the table beside her plate.
Zarina picked it up.
“This is going to lose all its paint.”
“We have established that.”
She put it on. It was too big, and it was the wrong colour against her sleeve, and one of the painted flowers had already worn down to bare wood on the underside where it had rubbed.
“I’m keeping it.”
Mira looked up. “You are not keeping it.”
“I am. You said you liked it. Now I like it.”
“That is theft. That is theft in front of a witness, and the witness is me.”
“Report me,” Zarina said, and left with it, and Mira let her, because it was eleven coppers and because it was funny.
Neither of them thought about it again for three weeks.
The happiness lasted three days. Then Balif found her in the small courtyard after breakfast and sat down beside her without being asked, and she knew before he spoke.
He was not angry. He never was, in the way people expected; it came out of him as tiredness instead, which was harder to sit next to.
“How did you find out?”
“One of the outer guards notices more than people assume he does. I asked him a question about something else.”
“He reported me?”
“He did not know there was anything to report. That is rather the point, Zarina. Nobody knew where you were.” Balif folded his hands. “You left the palace at night, on foot, without protection, and if anything had happened to you your father would not have known which quarter of the city to begin in. There is no version of this in which I am relaxed about it.”
“Nothing happened.”
“That is not the same as being safe.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
She stood up, because sitting had become intolerable. “I knew you would say all of this.”
“Because it remains true when it is repeated.”
“I went to a festival.”
“You disappeared.”
“For six hours.”
“Yes,” Balif said. “Six.”
She turned away from him. He did not follow, and he let the silence run long enough that she came back and sat down.
“Who was with you?”
She did not answer.
“Zarina.”
“Mira.”
He shut his eyes briefly. “She should have known better.”
“I asked her. She said no. She said no twice.”
“And then went.”
“Yes.”
“Then she is a better friend than she is a sensible person, and I would like you to consider what happens to a minor official’s daughter if the Supreme Ruler’s child is hurt in her company.”
That had not occurred to Zarina at all. She sat with it, and it was awful.
After a while Balif asked, in a different voice, “Why did you go?”
She almost said because Mira asked. It was available and it was nearly true.
“I wanted nobody to know me,” she said instead. “I wanted to walk somewhere and have people not move out of the way. I wanted to hear what they say when I am not in the room.” She shook her head. “I wanted to be around people without being Zarina.”
Balif was quiet for a long moment.
“Yes,” he said. “I thought it would be that.”
She had expected disapproval and got understanding, which was considerably worse, because it left her nothing to push against.
“Are you going to tell him?”
He took his time. She felt her chest tighten with every second of it.
“No,” he said.
“Balif—”
“I said no. Do not make me examine it.” He rubbed at his eyes under the lenses. “I will tell you what I want instead, and I want it more than I want an apology. If you ever feel that you cannot stay here — not that you are bored, not that you are angry with your father, but that you cannot stay — you come to me first. Before the door. Before the cloak. You come to me and you say it out loud, and I will listen, and I may well tell you that you are wrong.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point,” Balif said, “is that I would very much rather you were furious with me than missing.”
Zarina looked at the stones between her feet.
“All right.”
“Say it properly.”
“I promise.”
She meant it. She was entirely sincere. That was what she thought about afterwards, over and over, for years: that she had not been lying, not even slightly, at the moment she said it.
Mira was due to leave again at the end of the week. Her father’s post had not been restored; the review had simply never concluded, in the way that reviews do not, and the family had a country estate and no particular reason to keep paying for a house in the capital. There were four days left, then three.
On the second of them Zarina went to her father’s study, and waited for him to finish with a delegation, and asked him for something.
He was so pleased that it took her a moment to understand what she was looking at. She had not asked him for anything in a year. She realised, standing there, that he had noticed that, and had been quietly hurt by it, and had said nothing.
“Saren,” he said. “The contracts business.”
“It was never criminal. You told me so yourself.”
“It was not.” He was already reaching for paper. “It was a man being disliked by three people who outranked him. That happens perhaps forty times a year and I do not usually hear about it.”
“You could end the review.”
“I can end the review before dinner.”
“And the post?”
Her father looked up at her, and his face did something she had not seen for a long time. “Zarina. You could have asked me this in the autumn.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Because in the autumn he had offered to summon Mira back and she had refused, furiously, on the grounds that she did not want a friendship handed to her by decree. Because she had stood in this room and told him that Mira was not a problem to be solved. Because she had been right, and it had cost her the winter, and she had decided somewhere in the last four days that being right was not worth what it had cost.
“I was being stupid,” she said.
He signed it that afternoon.
He did it generously, which was the part she had not planned for.
Her father did not restore Saren quietly. He did it in front of the council, with a sentence about the review having been concluded and the man’s conduct having been found without fault, and he did it warmly, and two of the three officials who had disliked Saren had to sit there and receive it.
By the following morning everybody in the palace knew that the Supreme Ruler had personally intervened in a minor administrative matter for the first time in anyone’s memory, and by the afternoon everybody in the palace knew why.
Mira came to see her.
She had dressed for it. That was the first thing Zarina noticed and it went through her like cold water: Mira, who had turned up at the side door in her nightclothes to be shouted at, had put on something good to come and see her.
“My father wanted me to thank you,” Mira said, from the middle of the room. “So. Thank you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“He cried. My father cried, Zarina. He is fifty-one years old and he has three children and he sat down on the stairs and cried, because a girl asked her father for a favour.”
“That isn’t—”
“I know it isn’t. I know exactly what it is.” Mira’s voice did not rise. That was somehow much worse than if it had. “You did a kind thing. You did the kindest thing anybody has done for my family in my lifetime and I am not going to stand here and pretend otherwise. I am telling you what it costs.”
Zarina said, “Tell me, then.”
“He can’t take it.”
“What?”
“He is refusing the post.” Mira laughed, one flat unhappy sound. “He is writing to accept a smaller one in the eastern provinces instead, because he says that a man who has been given his office back by the ruler’s daughter does not have an office, he has a debt, and every order he ever signs will be read as yours. And he is right. He is completely right, and I have spent two days trying to find the hole in it, and there isn’t one.”
The room was very quiet.
“So we are leaving anyway,” Mira said. “Further, and for longer, and this time because of you.”
Zarina could not find anything to say. Everything that came to her was an offer — I will speak to him, I will fix it, I will have it undone — and every one of them was the same disease, and she could hear it, and she stopped herself, and the stopping was the only decent thing she managed in the entire conversation.
Mira watched her not say it.
“You see,” she said, more gently. “You can’t do a small thing. There isn’t a small size available to you.”
At the door she stopped, and for a moment she was almost herself again.
“It was a good night,” she said. “The festival. It was the best night I have had in about four years, and I would do it again, and I want you to know that before I go, because otherwise you will decide the whole of it was a mistake and it wasn’t.”
Then she left, and Zarina stood in the middle of her own rooms and understood that she had reached into the one part of her life that had not belonged to the throne, with the only hand she had, which was her father’s.
She told Balif because she could not carry it, and because he was the person she told things to.
He listened to all of it. He did not interrupt. When she finished he was silent for some time, and then he said the true thing, which was the worst thing he could have said.
“He is a wiser man than his file suggests.”
Zarina looked at him.
“Saren,” Balif said. “He is right, Zarina. That is what makes it unbearable. Power does not have a light setting. You cannot lean on a wall this size gently. Everything you touch is an instruction, and I have been telling you a version of that since you were eleven and you have never once wanted to hear it, and I do not blame you, because it is a monstrous thing to tell a child.”
“So there was nothing I could have done.”
“There was nothing you could have done as yourself.”
He meant it as comfort. She heard something else in it, and once she had heard it she could not stop.
“As myself,” she repeated.
“Zarina.”
“Do you know what you sound like?” She was not shouting. She was doing the precise thing again, and she could feel it happening and could not reach the controls. “You sound like the council. You sound like every single person in this building who has ever explained to me, very kindly, that the thing I want is not available. He says it comes with who I am. You say I cannot do it as myself. You have different words and it is the same sentence.”
Balif’s face changed. She saw it land.
“That is not fair.”
“You told me to come to you first. To come to you and say it out loud.” She spread her hands. “I am saying it out loud. What do you do now? Do you have anything? Or do you take it to him?”
“I have not taken anything to him.”
“Yet.”
“Zarina—”
“You’re his man too.”
She had not planned it. It arrived and she said it, and she watched it go into him, and there was a moment perhaps a second long in which she could have taken it back and did not.
Balif stood up. He was careful about it, the way he had become careful about standing in the last few years, and he did not raise his voice at all.
“I have been his man for twenty years,” he said. “I came here for your mother and I stayed for you. You may decide which of those makes me his.”
Then he left, and the door did not slam, because he was not a man who slammed doors, and Zarina would have preferred it if he were.
They mended it. Not that week; the week after, badly, over a game of stones neither of them wanted to play, with nothing said about any of it. He brought her a punishing book. She complained about it. It very nearly worked.
But she did not come to him. Not once, afterwards, in all the months that followed. The promise had been made to somebody she was no longer certain existed, by a girl who had believed that saying a true thing out loud might change what was possible, and every time she thought about going to his rooms she heard herself saying you’re his man too, and stopped.
Mira’s family left in the fourth week of spring. Zarina did not go down to the courtyard, because a princess seeing them off would have been one more thing done to them, and she stood at a window on the eastern side and watched the carts instead, and that was the last decent restraint she had in her.
That night she unlocked the drawer beneath the writing surface, where Mira’s letter had been lying by itself since the autumn, and put the bracelet in beside it.
She had been wearing it under her sleeve for three weeks without once thinking about it. Now she could not look at it. Eleven coppers, painted badly, already going bare on the underside, stolen at a breakfast table by somebody who had thought at the time that she was being funny.
She shut the drawer and turned the key and did not open it again for a long while.
The list of eleven houses became a list of nine.
She attended everything. She was flawless. Her father, who had spent the winter worrying, told Balif that she seemed to have settled, and Balif said nothing.
And in the meantime, quietly, without admitting to herself for several weeks that this was what she was doing, Zarina began to study her own home.
It started as something to think about instead of the other things. She had walked four emergency routes twice a year until she was fifteen; she knew the bones of the place better than most of the people who worked in it. But the routes had been designed to take her out fast and visibly, with a guard in front and a guard behind, and that was the opposite of the problem.
So she began watching what she had spent twenty years walking past.
The palace was built to keep the world away from her father, and nearly all of its caution faced inward: toward arrivals, toward carts coming through the gates, toward strangers. Almost nothing faced the other way. And the building had to breathe. Food came in and ash went out. Laundry crossed between the wings at all hours. Broken furniture was carried away. The kitchens ran a second shift that had been running her entire life without her ever once wondering who was in it.
She learned when the night kitchens changed staff. She learned that the eastern service court was busiest before dawn, and that the furnace crews sent their carts out well ahead of that. She learned which supervisors looked at faces and which ones looked only at whether the work was moving, and that a person carrying something is invisible in a way a person with empty hands is not.
Twice she went as far as the lower passage and turned back. The first time there were two guards at the stairwell who should not have been there. The second time there was no reason at all except that her nerve failed, and she went up to her rooms and lay in the dark furious with herself, which surprised her, because she had not yet admitted that there was anything to fail at.
The third time was a Friday, late, with the palace gone quiet and the eastern court frosted over and a laundry crew moving bedding down toward the lower level.
Zarina stood at the top of the service stair with her hand on the rail.
She could still go back. Nobody had seen her. Nothing had happened. She could be in bed in four minutes and there would be no lie to tell in the morning, and Balif would sit opposite her at breakfast and see nothing, and her father would ask whether she had slept, and she would say yes, and it would be true.
Below her, somebody laughed at something, and a door opened, and the light from the lower corridor came up the stairwell and laid itself across the stone.
She went down.