The Velvet Princess
The light came the way it always came to the eastern side of the palace in late spring, grey first and then gold, sliding down the copper roofs of the old wing and catching on the weathervanes one after another like a row of lamps being lit.
Zarina watched all of it from the window seat. Her knees were drawn up under Sera’s green coat, her boots were still on, and her forehead had left a faint warm ghost on the glass that faded each time she lifted her head.
Her hands would not stop. She had tucked them into the coat’s sleeves an hour ago, and they shook there, quietly, like two small animals that had been shut in a box.
Below the walls the city was waking in its usual order: the bakers’ chimneys, then the ragged bells of the river quarter, then the first carts on the processional way, small as beetles from this height.
Somewhere down there was a man in a good brown coat who had bowed, and a woman in a coat too big for her who had said oh, look at you.
Zarina wondered how far a thing could travel in one night, and found she knew. As far as there were people awake to carry it.
Nalia came at her usual hour. She stopped two steps inside the bedchamber door. The velvet already hung open on either side of the window.
The bed had not been slept in, and the court gown from last night lay over the chair where Nalia herself had smoothed it, its pins scattered over the dressing table like dropped coins, and on the floor by the window seat, where the cushion with the royal arms had been pulled aside, lay a little enamelled box with its lid open.
Nalia looked at the box, and at the coat, and at Zarina’s face, and her own plain round face showed nothing at all, which in Nalia was a kind of speech.
Then Zarina was sick. It came with no warning, up from somewhere under her breastbone where the warmth used to be, and she barely reached the basin on the washstand. Nalia was there before she knew Nalia had moved.
She held Zarina’s hair back from her face with one hand and laid the other flat between her shoulder blades, as she had when Zarina was eleven and had eaten something she should not have at a feast, and did not say a word, and waited until it was over.
Afterwards she brought tea, the dark kind from the southern coast that the kitchens thought too common for the royal wing, and put the cup into Zarina’s hands and folded Zarina’s fingers round it, because Zarina’s fingers could not have managed it alone.
Then she took the coat. Zarina watched her carry it to the window, where the light was best, and study it the way she studied court silks before a reception.
There was dust from the square along the hem and something dried stiff on one sleeve, and a smear of gold paint on the collar, and the cuffs were more frayed than they had been in the winter.
Nalia took up the clothes brush and began, without the least hurry, to brush it.
“Are you going to put it in the chest?” Zarina asked.
Nalia shook out the coat, and shook her head as well, though so slightly that Zarina could not afterwards have sworn to it.
Then she hung it up — not in the wardrobe behind the court gowns, but on the brass hook outside the wardrobe door where the next day’s gown was hung to air, where the first person through the door would see it before anything else. She smoothed its front with the flat of her hand.
Last of all she bent and picked up the little enamelled box from the floor. She closed its lid, and turned it over once in her hands, and set it on the dressing table among the scattered pins, quite gently, where Zarina could see it.
She did not hide it. She did not throw it away. She put it where it could be seen, as she had put the coat, and went to see about the bath.
The report was two pages long, and the Supreme Ruler had read it four times before Balif came in.
The pages lay squared on the blotter under a bronze weight shaped like a sleeping hound, and the ruler sat behind them with his hands flat on either side, as though the pages might otherwise get up and leave.
The windows had been thrown open on the gardens and the room was full of birdsong and cold air. He had changed his coat. With him that was the same as admitting he had not slept.
“Sit,” the ruler said. “Your knees are making the floor nervous.”
Balif sat. Neither of them had slept much since the winter, if it came to that.
The balcony over the western court was sealed now behind new stone, and since then, and since a second thing some weeks ago that the palace had not been told about at all, there had been more guards on the stairs and not the same ones, and routes about the city that nobody announced.
Balif had his own share of that winter in a small room below the archive, in folders he discussed with nobody but this man, and with him only behind a shut door. He had come up from there this morning thinking that nothing in them could make the day worse.
The ruler pushed the pages across the desk with two fingers, and Balif put on his lenses.
It was a clerk’s hand, small and upright and very clear. He had attended the performance in the old market square as a private person.
At about the tenth bell he had seen a young woman dancing near the stage among persons he believed to be of the Velvet Veil. He had thought he was mistaken. He had looked again.
He set down the coat, green and of the kind sold second-hand in the river quarter, and the gold paint on her face. He set down that she was laughing.
He set down, in a line that had plainly cost him a great deal to write, that Her Highness had not appeared to him to be entirely well. He gave her words exactly: My name is Zarina.
Below the date was one more line, set a little apart, as though the writer had hesitated over it. I regret that I could not have been mistaken.
Balif took off his lenses and folded them, one arm and then the other. There was no malice in it anywhere. It was simply accurate.
“Not entirely well,” said the ruler. He did not look at the pages. “He chose that very carefully. I asked him what he meant by it, and he stood where you are sitting and could not tell me, and apologised for bowing to her.” He moved the hound an inch to the left. “What else should he have done? I asked him that too. He did not know. Neither do I.”
“You know what he meant,” said Balif.
The ruler looked at him across the desk for a long moment, and then away, at the map wall, where the hills above the capital were a brown smudge with a blue thumbprint in the middle.
“The house by the lake,” he said. “For the summer. Her mother loved it, and so did she, the year she was thirteen. Nobody prints anything there. By the autumn there will be some other scandal, and the river quarter will forget her name.” He laid down his pen. “And whatever she is taking in that house will be a long way off.”
Balif had known it was coming the way he knew the turn of a stair in the dark. It had come the spring her mother died, when the guard was doubled and then doubled again.
It had come on the night of the Lantern Festival when the child was nine, in the shape of twelve horsemen. Put the thing somewhere the danger cannot reach, and close the door.
He had spent twenty years learning when to argue with this man and when to let a thing go by, and he knew he must not be careful now.
“Let her stay,” he said. “If you send her away now, she will think you are ashamed of her.”
“I am not ashamed of her.”
“No.” Balif held his eyes. “And she will be right about part of it. And she will go to the lake, and come back in the autumn, and go straight back across the river, and you will have spent the summer pretending it was weather.” He looked into his cold cup. “If she is to be got out of that house, she will have to walk out of it herself. You cannot carry her. Nobody can. I have watched men try.”
The Supreme Ruler closed his eyes. Balif waited, and took none of it back.
“I will ask her,” the ruler said at last. “I will not send her.”
He drew the pages back and squared their edges, and did not put them in a drawer, or in the cold grate. He laid them face down under the sleeping hound, where he would see the back of them every time he looked up, and sent for the letters.
By evening the city had it, and the city had given it a name.
It was a broadsheet of the kind sold in the river quarter for a copper, and Balif brought it up to her rooms himself, because he would rather she had it from him than from a footman’s face.
Half of it was a woodcut: a tall girl in a long coat dancing under a sagging string of lamps, with a crown sliding off the back of her head, and behind her, on a hill made of three curved strokes, a palace with far too many towers, and in one of its windows a tiny cut figure looking down.
Above it, in letters cut too large for the space, was printed THE VELVET PRINCESS.
The Ruler who would set the guilds in order, it ended, finds he has a house to set in order first.
“Fourteen months,” Zarina said. “It says a twelvemonth. It was fourteen.” She heard her own voice going high and quick and could not stop it. “And it says I always lost at cards. I won twice.”
“I shall write to the editor,” said Balif gravely.
She laughed, and it came out wrong, and she put her hand over her mouth, and Balif looked at the fire so that she would not have to be looked at.
He looked, too, at the little enamelled box on the dressing table among the pins, and she saw him look, and he saw her see.
Neither of them said anything about it. After a while he gathered his folders and went away down the corridor slowly, one hand trailing along the wall.
Her father came to her rooms the next morning, which he had not done since she was fifteen.
He knocked, and then he waited to be told to come in. That was new, and it frightened her more than anything Balif had said.
He stood just inside the door, tall and still in a plain dark coat, with nothing in his hands for once, and he looked through the open door of the bedchamber to where the green coat hung on its hook in the first of the sun, and then at the dressing table, and the box, and his eyes stayed there a long moment.
“May I sit?”
He had never asked her that in his life. He took the chair by the cold hearth, folding his long legs into it, and made her the offer he had come to make, and asked her to hear the whole of it: the house by the lake, her mother’s house in the hills, Nalia and whoever else she liked, Balif complaining about the road, and himself when the council let him, through the summer, until this passed.
She could see the house as if it stood in the room: the pale stone and the slate roof, the jetty running out into the mist, her father with his sleeves rolled to the elbow eating trout with his fingers.
She had been thirteen, and it had been the happiest three days of her childhood, and he knew it. He had looked through everything he owned for the best thing in it, and he had brought her that.
“It won’t pass,” she said. “It isn’t weather. I did it. If I go to the lake I’ll come back in the autumn and it will all still be here. Only I won’t have been.”
“I am not trying to hide you. I am trying to put you somewhere I can see you.”
“I know,” she said, and she did, and that was the worst of it. “Are you ashamed of me?”
“No.” He looked through the doorway at the coat. “I am ashamed that it was a square. I would have liked to hear it from you, in this room, and not from a clerk of the household accounts at the eighth bell.” He turned his hands over on his knees. “Then tell me what you want, and I will do it.”
She heard Silas’s voice, low and clear in an empty theatre. So that it would be theirs. And she had an answer ready, and it surprised her how ready it was. “I want to stay. Here, in my own rooms. And go out when I want to. Not by the service stair. As myself.”
Her father closed his eyes. She watched him reach for the instruments he had — the guard, the order, the locked door, the house in the hills — and find, one after another, that he could not lift them.
He had never once been able to refuse her when she knew what she wanted.
“Then stay,” he said. “One thing. Guards, when you go out. Four, at a distance. They will not come through any door you do not want them through, and they will not tell me where you have been unless I ask them, and I will try not to ask.”
“Four,” she said. “Not forty-three.”
Something went across his face that she had not seen there in a very long time. “Certainly not forty-three,” said the Supreme Ruler.
He did not say anything about the box. She watched him come right up to the edge of it, at the door, with his hand on the frame and his eyes on the dressing table, and stop.
Then he went away down the corridor with the long stride, slower than it had come, and she sat where she was and found that her hands were shaking again, and that she was glad, quite fiercely glad, that he had not asked, and despised herself for it.
Silas found her the next night at the Red House, and he had brought the box with him.
Not her box; she had left hers on the dressing table where Nalia had set it, and had not been able to make herself touch it. This was a new one, painted with little blue birds, and it was full.
He put it into her hands in the kitchen passage without a word, and folded her fingers over it as Nalia had folded them round the cup, and kissed her forehead.
“I thought you’d need it,” he said. “After all that. Poor love. All those people looking at you.”
She had gone there by the service stair, because she had gone that way for fourteen months and her feet took her there before the rest of her had decided anything, and the four guards had been waiting for her in the service court in their plain grey cloaks among the laundry baskets. Their sergeant was a heavy, slow-moving man of fifty with a grey moustache and a face like a shut door, whose name was Hollis, and who had promised to be invisible, Your Highness, in the voice of a man who had never once been invisible in his life. The old laundry woman who had answered for her at the ash gate on the very first night had looked at the green coat, and at the four grey cloaks, and said, “Carrying cloth out, are we?”, and something had moved in her weathered face that in a younger woman might have been a smile.
The city had looked at her all the way across the river. And the Red House, when she came in, had noticed her the way water notices a stone: a ring going out from where she stood until it reached the far walls and came back.
A man near the door bowed, awkwardly, and straightened red to the ears.
A young man she had never seen got up from the long table with his cup held high and begged her to come and sit with them, and there was something in the way the table moved along the bench to make her a place that she knew from a hundred banquets.
She was a prize. A thin elderly dyer with blue-stained fingers pressed a folded petition into her hand — his brother’s barge licence on the upper river, taken over a fine the brother swore he had paid — and begged her to put it in front of her father, and she put it in her coat pocket because his fingers were shaking.
And Carisse, in green over wine-red, had set down her glass and sunk into a full court curtsey, deep and slow and perfect. “Your Highness.” It was so beautifully done that Zarina could not tell, for the life of her, whether it was a gift or a joke, and when Carisse rose her handsome face gave away nothing at all. “Oh, my dear,” she said, and kissed her on both cheeks, and smiled. “Now they’ll all know what I knew.”
Zarina had not asked her what she meant. She had gone to the kitchen, where Ilyne was wiping out cups, and Ilyne had looked up once, without hurry. “Is it Zarina, now?”
“It always was.”
“Zarina, then,” Ilyne had said, and pushed a tray of clean cups across the table to be carried up to the mirror room, and Zarina had carried it, and something in her chest that had been held tight since the bridge had let go so suddenly that she had to stand still on the stair with the cups chiming together. At the end of the long table Veyra had looked at her over a piece of bread, turning the crooked wooden face at her throat. “Well,” Veyra said. “Now everybody knows what I know. It was more interesting when it was only me.”
And now Silas stood in the kitchen passage with the painted box in her hands and his grey eyes on her face, and she opened it, there, with Hollis twenty paces off at the mouth of the lane outside and the house going on round her, and took one, and the shaking stopped.
She went out by the front gate on the last evening of spring, three weeks to the day after the square.
She had understood it in the service court on her way home one evening, with four grey cloaks at her back and the whole of the laundry staring: that she had spent fourteen months learning to come through this yard unseen, and that she was still doing it, with half the household looking.
If she could not be nobody, then she would not hide being somebody. The hiding was the last thing the palace had left her to do. It felt like doing as she was told.
Nalia dressed her without being asked: the plain skirt, the old boots blacked until they shone, the coat, whose frayed cuffs Nalia had turned and stitched under while Zarina slept, with a patch of the same green, cut from inside the hem, beneath each thinning elbow.
She settled it on Zarina’s shoulders and smoothed it down the back with the flat of her hand, once and then again, and dropped the small plain curtsey she had made every morning for ten years.
Zarina went down the great stair alone. On the second landing an old goblin under-steward who had slipped her sugared almonds when she was six bowed, with his ears gone pink, and went on bowing until she was past.
The gate captain, a lean, careful man with a grey moustache who had kept that gate for longer than she had been alive, began to raise his hand to his helmet, and stopped, and began to bow, and stopped, because nothing in all his careful years had told him what to do when the Supreme Ruler’s daughter came across the front court on foot, dressed as a townswoman, and did not stop walking.
“Would you open the gate, please?” said Zarina. “The great gate.”
There was a small silence in the guardhouse. Then she heard the bars drawn back, one and then the other, heavy and slow, and the great gate swung open for one tall young woman in a patched green coat, and she went through it, and walked down the middle of the processional way where the carriages went.
She did not look back to see whether he was at the window. Twenty paces behind, four people followed.
By midsummer the Velvet Veil had made her its emblem, and it took less than a month.
Carisse took her round the theatres by daylight, and wherever they went the work stopped. In a long room over a coopers’ yard a company rehearsing a tragedy in its shirtsleeves rose as she came in, and the murdered queen put down her apple and curtseyed. At the playhouse in Weavers’ Row the actor playing the elder brother saw her in the second row, lost his place entirely, and bowed to her first at the end, and the apprentices turned round on the benches to see who it was for, and saw, and began to clap, and it went along the benches like wind through standing corn. In the lobby afterwards a stout woman in a good blue gown took her by both hands and would not let go. “If they couldn’t keep you, my love,” she said, “then they can’t keep anybody. You’re the proof. You’re what it looks like.”
By the second month there were coats. She saw the first on a girl in the fish market, long and green and not quite the right green, and then a stall in the Copper Market with half a dozen hung on a pole under a card that said VELVET COATS, LATEST.
The boys who ran messages on the bridges shouted Velvet Princess after her as she went by, the way they shouted at a famous racehorse.
Hester Quell had a chair placed for her. Hester was a small upright silk-merchant’s widow of seventy in the mourning grey she had worn for nine years and made fashionable, with a closed ivory fan she tapped against things whenever she wanted to be listened to, and her salon was the best on the river terraces, in a long room hung with old silk the colour of weak tea, with the river talking under the open windows.
The chair stood in the great bay at the end of the room with the palace hill framed in the glass behind it, a tall carved chair with a green cushion very nearly the green of her coat, and Zarina could see the pale marks it had left across the nap of the rug, coming from the wall where it ordinarily stood.
She had sat in chairs placed for her all her life. She had never before sat in one placed for her as a reward for leaving all the others.
Silas came to the salons too, and stood behind the green chair, and read to the room with one hand resting on her shoulder — verses about a bird in a gilded cage, and a woman who builds a boat out of her father’s doors — and the room looked at Zarina while he read, and his hand stayed on her shoulder, warm and light, as though it had always been there.
And all summer, through all of it, she was never without the little painted box with the blue birds, and she never once took anything in front of the guards.
She went into the Red House kitchen passage for it, or behind the wings of Carisse’s theatre, or into the dressing-closet at Hester’s with the door bolted, and came out again with her eyes bright and her hands steady and the grey a long way off.
She grew thinner. She knew it from the way her gowns hung, and from Nalia taking them in, twice, without a word.
Twenty paces behind her, outside every door she went through that summer, Hollis waited in the heat with his face like a shut door, and it never changed at all, whatever it saw, and she was grateful to him for it, and could not have said why.
Her father still came to dinner. He came every evening at the seventh bell, and knocked, and waited to be told to come in, and they dined at a small round table by her sitting-room window because the great dining hall was too large for two people who did not quite know what to say to each other.
He talked about river tolls. They were not really about tolls; they were somewhere to put his voice.
Early in the summer he went north to hunt in the foothills, as he did most years, and came back days before he was looked for, with the guard closed up round him like a fist, and never mentioned it, and sat down at the small round table that first evening and told her what a barge paid at the upper weir.
One evening near the end of the summer he put down his fork, and she knew from the way he did it that the tolls were finished.
“The mountain guilds are sending an embassy down before the passes close,” he said. “They will be received in the Hall of Concord on the twenty-second of the month. I would like you there, beside me, on the dais. Not because the steward has written it on a list. I am asking you, as a favour to me, because it matters to me.”
“Why?”
She watched him consider the question, and her, and decide not to answer it. “It does,” he said.
He had never asked her before. Now he was asking, gently, across a small table, and it was so much harder to refuse than an order that she felt a flash of something very like anger.
She thought of the Hall of Concord, and of herself on the dais under the double portrait of her parents, being looked at. Being shown. She thought of the little painted box, which she could not take on a dais in front of the whole court.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
Her birthday fell a few days later, in the first week of the last month of summer, and he knocked at dawn, as he had on every birthday of her life, before the household was awake.
She was not there to open the door. She had not come home.
She came up the great stair a little before noon with the river still on her clothes and her head splitting, and found, outside her door, a parcel in plain brown paper on the floor where he had left it when nobody answered his knock.
Inside was a pair of boots, good ones, cut low and soft at the ankle and made for walking a long way on stones, and nothing else, not even a note.
They fitted exactly, which meant that somebody had measured the old ones while she slept, and that he had asked them to.
She was twenty-two. She sat on the edge of the bed with them in her lap for a long time, and did not know whether they were a gift or an answer, and then she put them in the bottom of the wardrobe behind the court gowns, where she would not have to see them.
Jory Fenn’s new playhouse at the top of Rope Walk opened on the twenty-second night of the last month of summer, and he had kept the middle of the front row for her since the spring.
Fenn owned three theatres and part of a fourth, a big, soft-handed, glittering man with a voice made for the back of a hall, and he had put her name on a card on the middle seat in gold.
She knew what night it was. She sat down in the gold-lettered seat between Carisse and Silas and knew that she had chosen, and took the painted box out of her pocket under cover of the dark and Silas’s arm.
At the interval Fenn came out on to the stage and raised one great soft hand, and a boy came after him with a tray of cups, and the cups went down along the front row and back through the benches, hand to hand, until the whole house was holding one.
“Friends,” said Jory Fenn. “Tonight, up on the hill, the Supreme Ruler is giving a reception for the mountain guilds. Every minister in Ashkar is up there tonight. And on the dais, at the Ruler’s right hand, there will be a chair with gold on its arms, and it will stand empty all night.” He let that sit. “Because his own daughter is not up there with them.” He turned, and lifted his cup toward her. “She is here. In our front row. With us.”
The house came up off its benches with a roar. “His own daughter, friends, in our seats tonight and not at his side!” — and the house drank.
It was the sound of it. Not the cheering, but something underneath that she had heard all her life in other rooms: the sound the council made when a rival guild’s delegation was kept waiting in the antechamber.
Satisfaction. It was a room full of people who had wanted a thing for a long time and had got it, and the thing was not her.
She heard it, and felt the cold go up her arms under the green sleeves, as though somebody had opened a door behind her on to the winter.
Then Carisse squeezed her hand, with her eyes wet, and Silas’s arm tightened round her, and the warmth was humming in her fingers, and she lifted her cup and drank with the rest of them, and the cold went away.
The Hall of Concord had been made cold for the mountain guilds, as it always was, and Balif’s knees had been complaining about it since the first course.
Great copper basins of ice from the cellars stood along the walls, smoking faintly in the candlelight, and the envoys from the mountains stood under the painted ceiling in their heavy grey furs, perfectly at ease.
At the end of the hall, above the dais, hung the double portrait of the Supreme Ruler and his wife in the first winter of their marriage, both of them crowned and neither of them smiling. Beneath it stood two chairs. The ruler sat in one. The other was empty.
The steward had come up the dais steps at the start of the evening and bent, and asked very low whether the chair should be taken away. The ruler had looked at it for a long moment, as though he were reading it. “Leave it.”
The eldest of the envoys had been presented last, as she always was, a tall, slow, straight-backed woman with hair as white as frost and a face like a weathered cliff, who had come to this hall for every embassy since before the child was born.
She had looked at the empty chair, and then at the ruler, and asked after his daughter.
“She is in the city,” the ruler had said. He did not say indisposed. Balif had watched three ministers within earshot brace for some courteous lie, and none had come, and he had loved his friend for it, and thought it was going to cost him.
“Then the city is fortunate,” the envoy had said at last, and bowed, and nothing in her voice told anybody what she meant by it.
There was a broadsheet in the inside pocket of Balif’s coat, the week’s Velvet Princess, bought at the bottom of the hill that morning.
It was set in a worn type with a broken capital R, the bowl of it cracked open at the top, and Balif had seen that broken R before, on a dozen unsigned pamphlets about the cost of royal hesitation that he had been gathering for two years into a folder he showed nobody.
He had noticed it on the stair, and said nothing, and was saying nothing now.
Toward the end of the evening a heavy man came in late by the side door and stopped at Balif’s pillar.
Minister Gerault Vash, Warden of the City, was a big, slow, thick-shouldered man of fifty-odd, bald and close-bearded, with the Warden’s heavy chain across his shoulders, and he had a habit of laying one broad hand flat on whatever was nearest before he spoke, as though to make sure it would hold. He laid it now on the pillar.
“I had three sergeants and twenty men on Rope Walk from the seventh bell,” he said. “The crowd was out to the bottom of the street. A cart went over at the corner of Lime Alley and a man broke his arm under it. Twenty men, so that a young lady could sit in a playhouse.” He said it without malice; he said everything without malice, which Balif had always found the most formidable thing about him. “I would send them again tomorrow. But I would send them for a cooper’s daughter too, and I would want the cooper to answer for the cost. The law ought to look the same from every street in this city. I shall have to say so. Not here.”
Afterwards, when the envoys had gone and the ice in the copper basins had begun to slop over on to the floor, the ruler sent for him. He was still on the dais, with the other chair beside him.
“I want you to watch her,” the ruler said.
Balif took off his lenses and folded them. “You want me to spy on her.”
“I want to know that she is alive at the end of every evening.” He did not raise his voice. “Hollis tells me she is sick in the mornings. Hollis tells me she goes into back rooms and comes out different. I try not to ask him. I lie awake instead, and then I ask him.” He looked at the empty chair. “You told me in the winter what you had seen in her eyes. I did not want to hear it. I am hearing it now.”
“Then speak to her.”
“And say what? Give it up, or I will lock the service stair?” The ruler’s hands lay flat on the arms of his chair. “She would go anyway. She would go and not come back. You said yourself — she will have to walk out of that house on her own feet, or not at all.”
“I will not carry what she does across that river to you every morning like a tray,” said Balif. “She would know it within the week, and then there would be nobody left in this palace she could come to, and she will need somebody. But I will be near. On the bench outside her door, if it comes to that. My knees will have a great deal to say about it.”
“Near,” said the ruler, with his eyes closed. He took it, Balif saw, because it was what there was.
The last of the summer’s salons fell two days later, on a grey afternoon with the rain coming on, and the room at Hester Quell’s was full. It was a sea captain who asked, in the end, a big sun-darkened woman with gold rings in both ears, leaning back with her boots crossed at the ankle. “What’s he like, then? Your father. When there’s nobody watching.”
The room went quiet to hear. Silas’s hand was on her shoulder.
Zarina thought of the long stride in the corridor, and the knock, and the boots outside her door, and twelve horsemen, and a guard doubled and doubled again, and four grey cloaks twenty paces behind every step she had taken since the spring.
“My father,” she said, “is the only man in Ashkar who cannot be bribed.” She let them wait. She had learned that from him. “He can only be frightened.”
It was the best laugh of the summer. Hester rapped her fan on the arm of her couch three times. “Oh, that will go round the whole city by dark.” Silas bent and kissed the top of her head, and murmured that it was perfect, and she sat in the green chair with the rain running down the glass behind her and the room turned toward her like flowers to a lamp, and did not, for the rest of the afternoon, think about it at all.
It went round faster than Hester had promised. By the seventh bell it had crossed the river and climbed the hill and gone in at the great gate, and Zarina knew it had because her father, when he came to dinner, knocked twice.
“I am told,” he said, when the fish had been cleared, “that I cannot be bribed.” He turned his cup on the cloth. “It is a very good line. You always did have your mother’s timing.”
She had braced for the quiet voice all the way from the river terraces. It did not come.
He looked at her across the little table, and his face was only very tired, and very still, and his eyes went once to her hands, which she had put under the table, and came back.
“The second half is true as well,” he said.
He did not say it to wound her. He said it the way he would have told her a figure was correct when she had expected him to dispute it.
And she understood that she had known it was true when she said it, and that this was why the room had laughed, and that he knew she had known.
She came back after midnight, up the great stair with the rain in her hair. Balif was sitting on the bench opposite her door, with his cloak round him and his hands folded on his knees.
He lifted his head and looked at her. She knew what he was. He was her father’s eyes, set outside her door to count her hours.
She walked past him without slowing and without looking at him, as one walks past a chair in a corridor, and heard him draw breath to say something and then not say it, and closed her door behind her.
She waited for the creak of the bench and the slow complaint of his knees going away. It did not come. She went to bed and lay awake and listened, and it did not come.
The council sat on the third day of autumn, and the first thing on the paper was the river tolls.
Balif sat where he had sat for twenty years, on the bench behind the ruler’s right shoulder. The pale autumn light lay across the old black table with its eight carved lions.
On the ruler’s left sat Hadrun, Treasurer of the realm, the old dwarf who had kept its accounts since before the child was born and had never once in Balif’s hearing voted against him.
On the long bench by the doors sat the two representatives of the Gilded Coven, a silver-haired man with soft clean hands and a younger woman in dove grey with a little book open on her knee. They had no seat at the table. They had never needed one.
When the clerk had turned the page after the tolls, Vash pressed his broad hand flat on the black wood and spoke.
“Your Grace. Before the next matter. I must put something to the council that is not on the paper, and I would not do it if I thought anyone else at this table would.” His voice was heavy and level, a voice for reading out charges in a cold room. “On the night of the mountain embassy I had twenty men of the watch on Rope Walk, holding a crowd that had come to see a young lady in a playhouse, while in the Hall of Concord there was a chair empty that every envoy in the hall was looking at. Since then I have heard repeated at three tables in this palace, and in the guardroom of my own watch house, a remark about Your Grace that was made in a widow’s salon and laughed at.” He did not look away. “Her Highness has been given every latitude this house could give. She has used it to make the throne a joke in every playhouse in the river quarter. I am sorry for it, Your Grace. I am. But she is a disgrace to the house.”
There was not a sound in the chamber. The ruler did not move. Balif could see only the back of his head and the line of one shoulder, and the hand on the table. It did not close.
“Minister Vash.” The ruler’s voice had dropped so low that the delegates on the bench by the doors leaned forward without meaning to. “My daughter is not on the paper of this council. She will not be put on it from the floor. You have served me eleven years, and served me well, and I have never had cause to say this to you. You will not use that word of her at this table. Nor in any room where I can hear of it.”
He held Vash’s eyes down the length of the black table until the big man lowered his own, slowly, and took his hand off the wood, and inclined his head. “Your Grace.”
“The next matter,” said the ruler, in his ordinary voice, and the clerk turned the page.
Balif did not hear a word of the next matter. He had sat in rooms like this for twenty years, and he knew where to look to see a blow land. Not at the man who struck it, or the man who took it. At the others.
On the bench by the doors the woman in dove grey lifted her eyes from her little book and turned her head a very little toward the silver-haired man, and he looked back — only the look two merchants give each other across a stall when the price of something has moved.
And on the ruler’s left, Hadrun, who had never once voted against him, sat studying the table, his hand resting on the carved lion under it, on its snarling mouth and its mane of wooden curls, worn smooth by a child’s small fingers a long time ago.
Balif thought of that child. He thought of the young woman she had become, who at sixteen could recite every figure in a provincial report a fortnight after reading it, and who that morning, passing him in the gallery with her eyes too bright and her hands in her sleeves, had asked him, quite seriously, whether it was Tuesday.
It had been Thursday. He had told her so, and she had laughed, and gone on.