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 — the hour when the wine had done its work and people had begun saying things they would not have said standing up.
Rain had come in off the river at dusk, and the hall smelled of wet wool and candle wax and the lilies somebody had banked along the windows to cover both. The musicians at the far end were playing something cheerful that nobody was listening to.
Bargemasters in their best coats stood about in knots arguing over tolls, and a broad stonekin wharfmaster from the upper locks, too big for any chair in the room, had planted himself beside a pillar with a cup like a thimble in his fist and was explaining the spring floods to anybody who came within range.
Zarina had been on her feet for three hours and had not yet stopped smiling. She was nineteen that spring, and would be twenty at the summer’s end, tall and straight-backed in green silk, and she had her mother’s eyes, as perhaps a dozen people had reminded her since the doors opened, in case she had forgotten in the meantime. She was good at receptions. She knew which names to use and which to let lie. She knew that the river guilds liked to be asked about their children and disliked being asked about their accounts, and she had done both, in that order, to everybody in the room who mattered.
The woman was the wife of someone in the treasury. She had a broad, kind face, pink with the heat of the candles, and a gown in a shade of yellow that had been very fashionable two years before. She took Zarina’s hand in both of hers with the confidence of a person who believed she was delivering good news, and held on to it.
“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. Somebody laughed near the musicians, too loudly, and was hushed by a friend. A steward moved past with a tray of glasses, threading his way between the bargemasters, 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. Her free hand had found the seam of her sleeve and was working at it with the thumbnail, a small private worrying that nobody could see. She made it stop.
“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, among the lilies and the wet wool and the cheerful music, as though somebody had taken the floor out from under her and forgotten to tell her feet. Then she 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.
His private study at night smelled as it always had, of cedar oil and ink and the last of the fire, and it was the one room in the palace where she had never once knocked.
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, so that half the room lay in warm gold and the other half had gone to shadow — the tall shelves, the great map of Ashkar, the window full of black rain. He sat in the light with a stack of correspondence at his elbow and a pen in his hand. There was more grey at his temples than there had been when she was small, but he was as tall and as still as he had ever been, a man who never needed to move very much to fill a room. 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, and the chair creaked under him. “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 herself for the hand on her shoulder, the warm weight of it that had settled every quarrel of her childhood. He did not give her one.
That meant he was being careful with her, and being careful with her was worse.
“The Ascendancy houses have been writing to me about this for two years,” he said. He still had the pen in his hand, and he pointed it at the stack of letters as though the houses themselves were sitting in it. “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. She found that she had folded her arms, and left them folded.
“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, pen and all. “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, every word set down as carefully as a figure in a ledger, and she was 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. The rain went on at the window. Somewhere far off in the palace a door closed, and the sound came to them down the long corridors, faint and final, and neither of them moved. Her father closed his eyes, the way he did when he was deciding not to be angry, though she could not tell this time which of them he was deciding not to be angry with. When he opened them he set the pen down on the desk, very exactly, beside the letters.
“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. He might have done it tonight, with his own hands, in the grate behind him, and then looked at her to see whether she was happy. 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.
His rooms lay at the end of the scholars’ corridor, two crowded chambers that had defeated every servant ever sent to tidy them. Books stood in towers on the floor and lay open face-down across the chairs, maps were pinned over other maps on the walls, and the whole place smelled of dust and lamp oil and the bitter ghost of tea. Balif sat in the one clear chair with a lamp at his shoulder. His beard had gone white that winter, and he wore the lenses she had arranged for him through her father and denied arranging, and he was reading with the book held at an angle that would have given anyone else a headache. At his elbow stood a cup that had stopped steaming some hours before.
He let her get all the way through it without interrupting once.
She walked up and down the narrow lane between the book towers while she talked, and he turned his head to follow her like a man watching a game of ball, and when she had finished he reached for the cup, drank from it, and winced.
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, open, on the arm of the chair. “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 that she resented the accuracy the way she might have resented a very well-made lock.
“You always do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Agree with me in a way that leaves everything where it was.”
Balif considered this long enough that she knew he was taking it seriously, which she had not entirely wanted either. He looked down at the open book as though the answer might be printed in it. It was not.
“Yes,” he said. “I imagine I do.”
Mira came back to the capital in the second week of spring, to help her mother close up the house — a matter of a few days, everyone said, which took the better part of a month — and Zarina walked out of a meeting on grain tariffs to see her.
She had never walked out of a meeting in her life. She did it in the middle of a sentence about bushel weights, with an apology that nobody had time to answer, and went down through the palace faster than was dignified, and came out into the lower courtyard with her heart going as though she had run the whole way. It was a raw, bright morning. The cobbles were still dark from the night’s rain, the water in the horse trough threw back a skin of thin light, and a groom was walking a tired bay in slow circles under the stable arch.
Mira was sitting on the mounting block in a travelling cloak, swinging one boot. She was freckled and sun-browned from riding, and her dark curls had already worked half their way out of whatever pins she had put in that morning, and the hem of her cloak was grey to the knee with the mud of the road. She looked exactly the same. Zarina found this unreasonable. She had wanted some visible evidence of the months — a scar, a new way of standing, anything that would prove the winter had happened to both of them.
Mira jumped down. “You look tired,” she 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. The gardeners were turning the beds for spring, and the air smelled of cold earth, and the first small white starblossoms had come out along the old walls. 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. She did the heron. She did it standing on one leg in the middle of the gravel path, with her neck drawn in and an expression of terrible patience, and Zarina laughed, and it came out slightly wrong — a little late and a little too polite — and after that they were both aware of it.
There were pauses. There had never been pauses.
Near the fountain Mira stopped and sat down on its rim, the way she had sat on every rim and ledge and fence in the palace since they were children, and looked up. “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, each one a room where something was being decided, 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. Mira got up and brushed her hands on her cloak, and they kept walking, and neither of them said anything for the length of the yew walk.
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 fiddle, a drum that could not keep time, a great many voices singing something with a chorus. 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. She had read the request, checked the dates against the market calendar, and signed it between a grain return and a complaint about bridge tolls.
Mira stopped walking.
“Do you remember how badly you used to want to go down there?”
“I went. With half the palace behind me.”
“No. Properly.”
“Once,” Zarina said. “When I was nine. And it was not properly, it was twelve horsemen and two physicians.”
“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. Next you’ll be sensible on purpose. Then you’ll start to enjoy it, and then they’ll have to paint you.”
“I am serious.”
“So am I,” Mira said, without turning around.
That was the end of it, except that it was not. Zarina stood by the gate after Mira 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.
Her bedchamber was dark and cold, the fire long since gone to ash, and the music came in on the night air in pieces — a run of pipes, a burst of laughter, the drum still losing its argument with time. She had lain listening to it for an hour. She had told herself, several times and in several ways, that she was listening because she could not sleep. Then she was standing at the wardrobe with her hands in the dark among the hanging clothes, and the telling had stopped.
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 stood for a moment by the connecting door, listening to her breathe, and considered waking her, and decided against it. Then she went out by the eastern 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, and she had been made to walk all four of them twice a year until she was fifteen, with a guard in front of her and a guard behind and a captain counting the minutes under his breath.
She used one of them to leave without telling anybody. It let her out into the service yard at the foot of the east range, and from there it was two hundred paces along the inside of the outer wall to the officials’ row. She did not set foot beyond the walls alone. She was careful about that, too, and held on to it afterwards as though it ought to count for something.
Mira nearly refused. She had been asleep when the knocking started, and for a while she had folded it into a dream about the heron.
The Saren house stood in the officials’ row, the line of grace-and-favour houses built against the inside of the palace’s outer wall for the court’s lesser officers, each with a garden door cut through the wall itself so that tradesmen need not come in by the gates. It was a narrow, respectable house with a narrow, respectable side door that gave onto the kitchen passage, and nobody ever knocked on that door after dark except the baker’s boy on feast days. The knocking went on, soft and patient. Mira lay and listened to it. Then she got up, because nobody else in the house was going to, and went down the back stairs barefoot with a candle and her hair loose down her back, and drew the bolt, and opened the door, and found the Supreme Ruler’s daughter standing in the lane.
Zarina was alone. That was the first thing, and for a moment it was the only thing. Mira looked past her, up the lane and down it, at the shuttered houses and the single lamp at the corner and the wet shine of the cobbles under the black bulk of the wall, waiting for the guards to come out of the dark — the captain, the horses, the physician, the soldiers who had walked behind this girl through every street of her life. Nobody came. There was only Zarina in an old riding cloak, with her hands empty and her hood down and her face lit up in a way Mira had not seen it lit in years.
“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. Behind them she could see, quite clearly, her father’s face in the morning when the soldiers came to the door. “No.”
“I’m already here.”
“That does not improve it. That makes it worse. That is the opposite of an argument.” She swore then, quietly and with feeling, in words she had learned from her family’s stablemaster and been beaten for using at eight, and found that they had lost none of their usefulness in the years between. Zarina waited in the lane and did not even smile, which was the worst of it. She was not asking as a princess. She was asking the way she had asked when they were children, with her whole face, as though the answer had not been invented yet.
Mira went inside and came back out with a cloak. “If we die,” she said, pulling the door shut behind her, “I am going to be extremely angry.” Then she took Zarina by the wrist and led her round through the dark garden, past beds nobody had tended since the autumn, to the little door in the outer wall, and drew its bolt, and they stepped through it together into the city.
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.
The streets were full from wall to wall. Apprentices in their good shirts went by arm in arm, singing two different songs at once and not noticing.
A dwarf grandmother sat in a doorway with a jug between her boots and a ring of grandchildren at her knees, shelling nuts and passing judgement on everyone who went by. A goblin with a tray of skewers slung round his neck worked the edges of the crowd, crying a price that dropped a little every time he cried it. Two scaled traders from the southern coast had set up a stall of dyed ribbons and were doing a roaring trade among the young men, who bought them for girls and then lost their nerve and stood about holding them.
Petals lay trodden into the cobbles, and every step brought the smell of them up again. Somewhere a baby was crying with enormous conviction, and nobody minded, because nobody could hear it above everything else.
Nobody recognised her.
She had known, in the way one knows a fact from a book, 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.
The first stall was a trestle under a striped awning, stacked with pastries still glistening from the fat, and the smell of them reached out into the street and took hold of her. She took one. It was hot enough to burn her fingers through the paper. She turned, and walked away with it, in exactly the way she had taken things from tables all her life.
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 and an old burn scar across the back of one hand, and she looked at Zarina 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 nineteen years of age and left a building without money because it had genuinely not occurred to her that the world required any. Behind her the queue was growing, and somebody in it made a remark about the quality, and Zarina understood after a moment that the remark was about her and not the pastry.
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. It came up out of her from somewhere very deep, a place that had not been used in a long while, and it bent her nearly double, and Mira had to pull her to the side of the street. She stood there with one hand flat against a wall and the pastry going cold in the other, gasping, 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,” Zarina said again, leaning on the last word as though she could not get over the taste of it.
“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: skewers charred on the outside and doubtful in the middle, a sausage that Mira declared on inspection to be mostly bread, twists of fried dough that somebody had rolled in salt when they had plainly meant sugar. They watched the two sets of musicians on the cart-bed stage arrive at open war over a note — a long, wavering note that each side insisted belonged to them — until the fiddlers at one end were on their feet and the pipers at the other were on theirs, and the crowd had taken sides with tremendous enthusiasm and no understanding of the issue whatsoever.
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, like a grandfather at a wedding, 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. The crowd below applauded. She made a gesture at them that Zarina had never once seen made in the palace, hauled herself up onto the roof, and went on.
Mira spent too much money on a painted bracelet from a stall selling almost nothing else. It was a band of thin wood painted red and blue, with a row of little yellow flowers around it, and the man who sold it had a hundred more exactly like it hanging from strings behind his head.
“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. She said so. She said so with figures, having watched some forty throws and counted the ones that ought to have landed and had not, and she had to be physically prevented from taking the matter up with the man running it, who was twice her width and had plainly had this conversation several times a night for years.
Later they sat on the rim of a fountain eating something that had far too much sugar on it. It was an old fountain, a stone fish spouting into a basin green with weed, and Mira sat on the rim with her knees drawn up and her boots on the stone as though she had been born there. A group of men stood beside them with cups in their hands and their coats open to the warm night, and they were 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 — the levy had been badly timed, and had been argued against in council for very nearly the reasons they gave. 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, column by column, down to the copper.
Eventually the group drained their cups and 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. The water went on spouting from the stone fish. The lanterns swung on their ropes. Nobody wrote anything down.
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.
The festival lay behind them in its own wreckage: trodden petals, broken skewers, a lantern rope fallen across a doorway, a man asleep under a stall with his hat over his face. The streets climbed and narrowed and emptied as they went. Ahead of them the palace stood up on its hill against the paling sky, every window dark, and from down here it looked like something that had never needed anyone at all.
Mira was exhausted. Zarina was not. She felt as though she could have walked to the coast and back before breakfast.
At the garden door, 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 down to the Saren house the following day under a thin excuse about a book, with a guard left kicking his heels in the front hall, and found Mira eating breakfast in the middle of the afternoon with the bracelet on the table beside her plate.
The Sarens’ little dining room looked out on a yard with a pear tree in it, and the table had been cleared of everything except a pot of tea, a heel of bread and Mira, who was sitting on the end of it rather than at it, still in yesterday’s shirt. She looked at Zarina over the rim of her cup with the profound contempt of the truly underslept.
Zarina picked up the bracelet.
“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.
It was the courtyard she had always liked best, a square of old flagstones closed in on all four sides, with a fig tree in one corner and a stone bench where the morning sun arrived first.
Water ran somewhere in a pipe behind the wall. A sparrow was bathing in a dip in the flags where the rain had pooled, and Zarina had been sitting with her face turned up to the warmth, thinking about nothing at all, which was a thing she had lately discovered she could do. Balif came across the flags with a folder under one arm and a cup in his hand. He set the cup down on the bench between them, and did not drink from it, and did not open the folder.
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 on the folder. “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 and went and stood under the fig tree with her back to him and her arms folded tight, looking at nothing. He did not follow. He let the silence run long enough that the sparrow came back to its puddle, and in the end it was she who 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. She thought of Mira at the side door with her hair down, saying no and saying no and then going inside for her cloak, and she understood that she had not once, in all those hours, thought about what a runaway cart or a knife in the crowd would have meant for the Sarens. She had thought only that Mira was there, and that this made it safe.
After a while Balif asked, in a different voice, “Why did you go?”
She almost said that Mira had asked her. 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. He looked down at the folder on his knee, which he still had not opened, as though it might hold a better answer than the one he had.
“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. The pipe behind the wall gurgled and ran, and the sparrow shook itself, and Balif sat with his hands folded and looked at the far side of the courtyard as though something were written there that he was reading slowly.
“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.”
Balif nodded, once, and picked up his cup and drank from it, and made the face he always made, and went away across the flags with the folder under his arm.
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 claim on a house in the officials’ row while the review dragged on.
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.
She waited on the bench in the passage outside, beneath the small portrait of her mother under the flowering tree — the one where she was trying not to laugh at something just out of the frame. Through the door came the murmur of the delegation, salt-flat men by their accents, and among them a dwarf whose voice came through the oak like a cart going over a bridge. Then there was the scrape of chairs, and the door opened, and they filed out past her, bowing, and she went in before the secretary could announce her.
He was so pleased that it took her a moment to understand what she was looking at. His whole face changed when she said she had come to ask for something. She had not asked him for anything in a year. She realised, standing there on the carpet she had once crossed as if it were a great distance, 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.
Balif was in the council chamber the morning the Supreme Ruler restored Saren, and he would have given a good deal not to be.
The long room smelled as it had smelled for twenty years, of beeswax and ink and too many people breathing, and the old black table still crouched down the middle of it on its eight carved lions. Balif stood where he always stood, near the doors with a stack of folders under one arm, and from there he could see the whole length of the table: the merchant lords with their rings, the generals with their hands on their knees, a dwarf from the treasury with his beard spread over his chest like a rug. And near the foot of the table, in their usual places, sat two of the three officials who had disliked Saren. Neither of them yet knew what this morning was for. Balif did.
The Supreme Ruler did it generously. That was the thing Balif kept turning over as he stood there, like a coin he could not decide was good. He did not restore Saren quietly, with a line in a summary and a clerk’s letter to the country. He did it in front of the council, at the opening of business, with a sentence about the review having been concluded and the man’s conduct having been found without fault. He did it warmly. And he let his eyes rest on the foot of the table while he said it, so that the two officials had to sit there and receive it. One went red to the ears. The other studied the grain of the table as though it had insulted him.
Balif looked at his notes. It was what he did when a room turned awkward, and the room was not awkward; the room was delighted, in the way of rooms that have learned which way the wind blows.
He looked at his notes because he did not want his friend to see his face.
He knew why it had been done. He had known since the afternoon before, when the Supreme Ruler came out of his study looking ten years younger and asked for the Saren papers by name, and Balif had not needed to be told whose hand was in it.
A daughter who had asked her father for nothing in a year had asked him for something, and he had done it the only way he knew how to do anything, which was completely. Balif understood that. He had loved the man for twenty years and he understood it entirely.
What he could not stop thinking, standing by the doors with the folders growing heavy under his arm, was that nobody in this room had stopped to wonder what it would feel like to be Saren.
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. Balif heard it on the stairs from two clerks, who stopped talking when they saw him. By the afternoon everybody in the palace knew why. He heard that too, from a steward in the kitchen passage who told it with real pleasure, as though it were the prettiest story of the spring.
He went back to his rooms and drank a cup of tea that had gone cold while he was out, and regretted it, and did not go to find her.
Mira came to see her.
Zarina was in her sitting room, with the afternoon sun coming in long and yellow across the floor and a report on the river levy open on her knee that she had read the first page of four times. She had not planned for the generosity. She had imagined a quiet signature, a letter, Mira’s father back at his desk on the next market day and nobody the wiser. She had not imagined the council, or the stairs, or the kitchen passage. By noon she had begun to feel the story going round the palace like a draught through a house, and she had shut her door against it, and it had come in anyway.
Mira had dressed for it.
That was the first thing Zarina noticed, and it went through her like cold water: Mira, who had come down to a side door in her nightclothes and sworn at her in the lane, had put on something good to come and see her.
A grey gown with a lace collar, her mother’s by the cut of it. Her curls pinned so hard that not one had escaped. Good shoes. And she did not sit. She did not sit on the window seat, or the arm of the couch, or the edge of the writing table where she had perched a hundred times swinging her heels. She stood in the middle of the room with her hands folded in front of her, the way people stood in the presence of the Supreme Ruler’s daughter.
“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. Outside, a gardener’s barrow went creaking along the path beneath the window and away.
“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. Her thumbnail had found the seam of her sleeve, and she worked at it instead. 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, with her hand on the frame, 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, in the long yellow light, 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 came to her sitting room that evening and sat in the chair by the hearth, where nobody had yet lit the fire, with his hands on his knees and the dusk filling the windows behind her. He listened to all of it. He did not interrupt. He did not look at his notes, because for once he had not brought any. 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 has no light touch. 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 hearing it.
“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 she could no more stop it than stop a cart on a hill. “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. They played in his rooms with the board balanced on a pile of atlases, and the stones clicked down one by one into the quiet, and both of them studied the board as though it were the most interesting thing in Ashkar. He brought her a punishing book, as he always did when he did not know what else to bring. She complained about it, as she always did. 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 it — 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. She stood at a window on the eastern side instead and watched the carts go down the hill, two of them, piled with furniture roped under canvas, and a carriage behind, and she could not tell at that distance which of the cloaked figures was Mira. That was the last decent restraint she had in her.
That night she took the key out of the dish of pen nibs and 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. She sat through the grain tariffs to the very last bushel and went back to the river guilds to finish the business of the bridge, and she smiled at receptions and remembered every name, and thanked everybody who told her she carried herself like her mother. That summer her father halted the Gilded Coven’s expansion into the Sylvan forests, and at the receptions the Coven houses were furious in low voices; she heard it in pieces, and thought about other things. Nobody watching her could have found a single thing to correct. 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, and 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 in great wicker baskets, smelling of soap and steam. Broken furniture was carried away down back passages she had never been down. The kitchens ran a second shift through the night, and had been running it her entire life, and she had never once wondered who was in it.
She went about it the way she had gone about the uplands file. She counted. She noted which bells the carts moved on and how many went out and how many came back, and she kept every figure in her head, because writing them down would have made them into something she was doing. 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 had walked past the head of it all her life. The steps went down in a tight turn, worn into a shallow dip at the centre of each by generations of feet that were not hers, and the rail under her palm was cold and smooth with use, and from somewhere below came the smell of wet linen and woodsmoke and bread that was not meant for her.
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.