What It Costs Him
The first snow of the winter came in the night, and by the hour of the morning audience it lay along the window ledges of the audience hall in a thin grey crust that the sparrows had already printed with their feet.
The Supreme Ruler noticed the sparrows. He noticed, too, that the long bench against the eastern wall, where the guild delegates sat on audience days, had room on it this morning for a dozen more people than were sitting there.
He had sat at the head of this hall for more than twenty years, and he read its benches the way a farmer reads a sky. Nobody had stayed away to insult him. That was not how it was done.
The envoy of the mountain guilds had discovered a pressing reason to go home before the passes closed, a reason which had not existed a month ago. The Dust Dynasty had sent its apologies three weeks running, each time on the same dun-coloured paper.
The river guilds had sent their juniors, young men with new pens who wrote down everything he said and nothing they thought. Things were not taken from a man all at once. They were simply not there on the day, one after another, for good reasons.
The Gilded Coven sent its two representatives to the levy session in the afternoon, as it always did — the silver-haired man with soft clean hands and a voice like a well-oiled hinge, and the woman in dove grey who wrote in a little book.
They were courteous. The Coven was always courteous. At the end of half an hour on the harbour dues the silver-haired man folded his hands and lowered his voice, as a man does who is about to say something painful for the other’s sake.
“Your Grace will forgive me. It is not the Coven’s view. It is only that some of the smaller houses have begun to ask, foolishly, in their cups, whether a ruler who cannot govern his own household can be expected to govern the guilds.” He spread his hands a little. “I tell them it is a private grief, and none of their affair. We are asked a good deal.”
“Then you will have had a great deal of practice,” said the ruler, and moved the session on.
It was Hadrun, the realm’s Treasurer, who came to the study at dusk, with the snow starting again past the windows, and stood on the hearth rug with his heavy hands clasped behind him. “I was speaking when she went under the table,” the old dwarf said. “Do you remember? She pulled at the lion, and I lost my place in the southern figures and never found it again. So you’ll let me say this, because I’ve earned it. Do something. Send her to the lake. Close those houses. Something they can see. They aren’t asking you to stop loving her. They’re asking you to look as if you mind.”
“She is my daughter, Hadrun. She is not a policy.”
“Everybody’s daughter is a policy, to them,” said Hadrun, with something very like pity, and went away down the stair.
The ruler sat on in the dark. He did not light the lamp.
He was thinking that Hadrun did not know the half of it — that the old dwarf thought it was a matter of playhouses and broadsheets and an empty chair — and that he could not tell him otherwise, could not tell anybody, because to say it aloud would make it true.
He knew. He had known since the winter, when Balif stood just inside that door with his lenses folded and told him about her eyes, and he had put it away somewhere out of sight like a letter he meant to read later. He had gone on putting it away all summer.
He had put away Hollis, standing in this room in his grey cloak with his face like a shut door, saying that Her Highness was sick in the mornings, and went into back rooms and came out different, and that she had grown so thin that the dwarf woman on the escort had asked him, privately, whether somebody ought not to say something.
He had put away the letter she had written in the autumn for him to a provincial governor, in her best hand, about the uplands road — the uplands road, of all things, that she had once argued over at this table at sixteen without a note in front of her — with three of the figures wrong, and one of them wrong by a thousand.
She was lost, that was all. People were lost, sometimes, for a season, and came home. She had always come home. She had come home from the lake at thirteen and the festival at nine and the service stair at twenty.
He told himself so, sitting there in the dark with the snow going past the window, in so many words, the way a man repeats a prayer he has stopped believing so as not to notice that he has stopped.
When he lit the lamp at last, the green-scaled secretary had left one letter on the desk beside the sleeping hound, sealed with a bird in flame pressed into red wax so hard that the wax had cracked across the middle.
He knew the seal. She was three days out, and she had not asked whether she might come.
The Phoenix Queen rode in through the great gate at noon on the third day, at the head of forty riders in red and gold, with the snow churned to slush under their hooves and the whole palace hanging out of its windows to watch.
She did not come in a carriage. She never had. She was a tall woman past fifty, broad in the shoulder from a lifetime on horseback, with the red-gold hair of her house gone the colour of ash at the temples, and she smelled, when she came close, of woodsmoke and cold leather and horse.
She had her sister’s eyes. Nobody at court ever said so. They said it of Zarina every day, and of the queen never, as though the same eyes in a harder face had become a different thing.
She came into his study without knocking and threw her riding gloves on the desk, where they landed on the sleeping hound. “I heard it in my own hall. From a wine merchant. The Velvet Princess.” She did not sit. “And now I have ridden four hundred miles in the first snow to find that it is all true, and that you have done nothing but put four men in grey cloaks behind her and talk to her about river tolls. That is not doing. That is watching.”
He did not answer, because there was nothing in it he could fairly deny.
“Burn it out,” she said. “Close every house they keep. Every theatre, every cellar, every back room with a red lamp in the window. Put their people on the road with what they can carry, and let the road decide. In a month nobody in this city would remember there had ever been a Velvet Veil, and the girl would come home, because there would be nowhere else to go.”
“No.”
“You said that to me over Iskandar, when I told you to finish both sides, and you sent the Legion instead with its scales and its warrants.” She looked at him across the fire. “Somebody has tried to kill you this year, more than once, if half of what is said in my hall is true. A balcony that falls on a clear morning. And you stand here and fret to me about playhouses.”
“This is my city, and they are my people, and nobody in that house has done a thing the law can name. I will not put them on the road in the snow because they took her in when I could not keep her.”
“You were always too careful,” she said at last. “She liked that in you. She said you were the only man she knew who thought before he hit anything.” She picked up her gloves. “I will speak to the girl. I have never yet needed your leave to speak to my own blood.”
She went out. When he came to the door a moment later she was standing in front of the small portrait outside his study, the one under the flowering tree with the loose hair and the face turned away, trying not to laugh, and she stood there longer than he had ever seen her stand still in her life.
She went up the crooked stair to Balif’s rooms that night, near midnight, with a single candle and no attendant, and stood among his drifts of books like a general shown a fortress she did not think much of. “You taught her to want what she was not given, scholar,” she said. “You told her every door was worth opening, and she believed you. That is how it was with my sister.” And Balif, who knew why her sister had never once brought a half-made thing to the Phoenix Queen, but only finished things, with the doors shut behind them, did not say so; and she heard it anyway, in the space where it was not said, and her face did something brief and terrible. At the door she said, without turning round, that she had not been blind, all those years ago at her mother’s table. She had only been the sister.
The summons came through Nalia in the morning: the Phoenix Queen asked for Her Highness in the eastern gallery, at her convenience, which meant now.
Zarina dressed in Sera’s coat. She did it on purpose, and knew it, and did it anyway, and before she went she went into the dressing-closet and bolted the door and opened the little painted box with the blue birds, because she could not face her aunt without it.
When she came out Nalia held the coat for her, and turned the collar straight, and smoothed it flat, once and then again, and did not look at her eyes.
The eastern gallery was long and cool and hushed, smelling of old varnish and stone, with the winter sun coming low through the tall windows in long gold bars.
Her mother stood at the far end of it in deep crimson, one hand on a painted balustrade, gazing out over a painted city.
The Phoenix Queen stood beneath the portrait with her back to it, as though set there to guard it, and watched Zarina come the whole length of the gallery. Her eyes went to the coat, and then to Zarina’s face, and stayed there, and something in them changed.
“So that is the famous coat,” she said. “It is a very poor coat.”
“It was a gift.”
“I daresay it was.” The queen went on looking at her. “Sit down. No. Stand, if you like. You will want to be standing for some of it.”
She told it plainly, as a fact, like the length of a road. That she had begged her sister not to marry him, in their mother’s house, in the long room over the river with the shutters closed, because a woman who married the man who meant to rule all of Ashkar would never again belong to herself. That her sister had married him in the spring and been happy, all through the war in Iskandar and a year after it, and then had never recovered from the birth, and had died in this house that spring with Zarina in a basket in the next room. “I blamed you,” the queen said. “I want you to have that from me, and not from somebody’s face. For years I could hardly look at you. You were seven before I could sit across a table from her eyes in a child’s face. You glared at me over the soup.”
There was no apology anywhere in it, and Zarina understood, standing in the gold light, that there was not going to be one, and that the not apologising was a kind of respect.
“I remember the soup,” she said.
Then the queen put out her hand, without any warning at all, and laid it against Zarina’s cheek. It was a hard hand, calloused across the palm from the reins, and very warm. “You stand like her,” she said. “You fold your arms like her, with your chin up. In time I could not stop seeing her. You were all I had left of her, girl. You still are.” The thumb moved once along Zarina’s cheekbone, rough as bark, and then the queen’s eyes narrowed, and she took Zarina’s chin in her hand and turned her face to the window, to the hard white winter light, and looked into her eyes from a hand’s breadth away.
Zarina tried to pull back. The queen’s grip did not move.
“I know that look,” said the Phoenix Queen, very quietly. “I have seen it in my own camps. Good soldiers, with wounds that healed, who went on taking the poppy long after the pain was gone, and smiled at me with eyes like that, and told me they could stop whenever they liked. I buried most of them.” She let go. “What are they giving you, in that house?”
“Nothing. Nobody gives me anything.”
“They let you do it to yourself, and clap.” The queen’s voice dropped, which was worse than if she had raised it. “Do you know what your Velvet Veil is? I do. I have had its houses in my own cities. They call it freedom, to do whatever you want the moment you want it. That is not freedom. That is a horse with no rider, running till its heart gives out, and calling it a gallop. They do not want you free, girl. They want you owned. You are the best thing they have ever had. Every night you sit in their front row you tell the whole city that even the most guarded soul in Ashkar can be had for a little noise and a red lamp and whatever is in that bottle.”
“That isn’t true.” The heat had come up into Zarina’s face. “You don’t know them. They take in people who have been put in the street. They sit with girls who have been hit until they stop shaking. Nobody at this court has ever done that for anyone.”
“I daresay. Wolves feed their own.” The queen did not raise her voice. “Come to the Phoenix domains. Tomorrow at dawn, with me. Nobody prints broadsheets in my mountains, and nobody will bring you anything in a little glass bottle. You will be ill for a month, and you will hate me, and I will sit with you while you do it. I could not stop your mother. I can stop you.”
And there it was. It was the lake. It was the lists and the guards, and her own year laid out in other people’s handwriting on a council table. It was every door that had ever been opened for her by somebody who knew better.
And under it, faint and cold and very far down, was something else, something that heard the words ill for a month and I will sit with you and wanted, for one terrible moment, to put its face against the queen’s hard shoulder and say yes.
She did not let it speak.
“No,” she said. “Everybody in my family has always known better than me. Father knew. Balif knew. You knew, about Mother, and she went anyway.” The warmth was humming in her fingers, and it made her brave, and it made her cruel, and she could not tell the difference. “Do you know why she never told you anything until it was decided? Everyone knows. Even I know, and I never met her. Because nobody ever brought you anything half-made. They brought it to you finished, with the doors shut, and stood well back. She didn’t die of me. She died of a man who loved her. And you’ve stood at the back of every memorial since and hated everyone in the room for it, because you were right, and being right was all you had.”
The Phoenix Queen went white. It went over her face like frost over a window, and Zarina had never seen anything like it, and in the moment of seeing it she would have given anything she owned to have the words back, and could not.
“You little fool,” said the queen at last, very low. “You proud, poisoned little fool. She said that to me. Almost word for word.” Her voice cracked across the middle like the wax on her letters. “And I let her go, and I buried her at twenty-six.”
She turned and walked away down the gallery, her riding stride ringing on the stone. At the door she stopped. When at last she turned round her face had changed, and Zarina did not know it.
“She sang to you,” said the queen. “Every night that winter, until she could not sit up. She sat by your basket and sang to you, dreadfully, and loud, because she said a child should know its mother’s voice even if the voice was bad. You cannot remember it. I can.”
In the morning, early, Zarina heard the riders in the front court and the bars of the great gate drawn back, and she did not go to the window.
She told Silas about it that night, in the furs in his cold room over the bookbinder’s, with her head on his chest and his fingers in her hair.
“She looked at my eyes,” she said. “She held my face and looked at my eyes, as if I were a horse she meant to buy.”
“Of course she did.” His voice was low and gentle and amused. “That’s what they all do, isn’t it? Your father, your scholar, your aunt. They look at you to see what’s wrong with you. They’ve never once looked at you to see what’s there.” He kissed her hair. “She wants to own you too, love. She wants to take you off to her mountains and lock you in a tower and call it saving you. They all want the same thing. They just use different keys.”
She believed him. It was so easy to believe him. Everything he said was very nearly what she had always thought, and it was warm in the furs, and the little painted box was on the windowsill within reach of her hand, and the grey was a long way off.
She fell asleep with his heart going under her cheek, and dreamed of a woman singing, badly and loud, in a voice she did not know, and woke with her face wet and could not remember why.
Her father knocked at her door a little after the sixth bell on the evening after the queen rode out, and waited, and when she called to him he stood in the doorway in his plain dark coat with a flat wooden box under one arm, looking, for the Supreme Ruler of Ashkar, faintly uncertain of his welcome.
“I have found the chessboard,” he said. “It is in a poor state. So am I. I wondered if you would care to beat me.”
There was a playbill on her writing table on cheap yellow paper — THE LOW GATE COMPANY, AT THE BELL STREET PLAYHOUSE, THE WARDEN WHO FEARED THE DARK, A COMEDY — that Ansel had pressed on her at the Red House with both hands, his hair combed for the occasion, and across the bottom somebody had written in charcoal FRONT ROW KEPT.
The play began at the eighth bell. She had said she might come.
She looked at her father in the doorway, at the grey spread so far from his temples, and at his face, which had been her aunt’s battlefield and showed none of it. “All right,” she said, and turned the playbill face down.
They played in his study, by the fire, on the low table between the two chairs, with the curtains drawn against the snow. He was no better than he had ever been.
He held each piece a moment too long before he set it down, as though it might confide in him if he waited, and argued that a knight he had lost had a weak leg, and she laughed, the old laugh from the breakfast table, and saw him hear it, and saw something in his face go still and careful, the way one carries a full cup.
And then, somewhere in the middle of the game, she could not hold the board.
She had always been able to hold it. She had held whole councils in her head at sixteen, every figure in its column. Now she looked down at the pieces and they would not stay where they were.
She could not remember where his bishop had come from, or whether she had already moved her castle, or what she had been planning two moves ago, when she had been planning something; it was all there in front of her in plain lamplight and it slid about like reflections on water.
Her hand hovered over the board and would not come down. She felt the heat climb into her face.
She moved a pawn, at last, because she had to move something, and knew as she let go of it that it was a terrible move, a child’s move, and that he would see it.
He looked at the pawn for a long moment. Then he moved his queen to a square where she could take it with her knight.
She stared at the board. It was so plain a mistake that even she could see it. She looked up at him, and he was frowning at the pieces with great concentration, like a head of state discovering an error in a treaty, and he did not look at her.
She took the queen. He made a small sound of dismay. Four moves later he did it again, with a castle, and she understood, slowly, with a feeling like cold water going down her back, that he was doing it on purpose, carefully and kindly, so that she would win, and so that she would not have to know that she could not hold the board.
He had seen. He had seen and he was not going to say anything, and he was going to sit there and lose to her, badly, for as long as it took, so that she could go on not knowing.
She did not say anything either. She could not have spoken if the room had been on fire.
When the board had thinned she put her hand in her coat pocket for her handkerchief and found the dyer’s petition instead, soft as cloth after a summer and an autumn. “Father. A man gave me this, at the Red House, in the spring. It’s about his brother’s barge. I should have given it to you months ago.”
He unfolded it carefully along its tired creases and read it as he read everything, steadily, and when he came to the receipt copied at the bottom his mouth went tight at one corner. “The upper river toll office,” he said. “They fine a man, and he pays, and the second clerk fines him again because the first has not entered it, and when he cannot pay twice they take his licence and sell it to somebody’s cousin. Your dyer’s brother is right.” He reached behind him for the pen and wrote three lines across the foot of it in his small square hand, and signed it, and sanded it. “That is all it ever wanted. Somebody to read it.” He looked at the top of the paper, where the large careful letters said To His Grace The Supreme Ruler By The Kind Hand Of, and then nothing. “You had better fill that in. It is rather bare.”
She hesitated over the blank, waiting for her title to arrive by itself the way it always had. Then she wrote Zarina, only that, and her hand shook so that the letters wavered, and he looked at the wavering letters and said nothing at all.
“May I ask you something?” she said. “What has my aunt got against you?”
He sat back and looked at the fire. “She asked your mother not to marry me, because she would never belong to herself again. She said it to my face, in her mother’s house, the day I went to ask.” He was quiet a moment. “She was right. Your mother knew what it would cost. She heard every word of it with the shutters closed, and then she came out and found me in the garden and told me she would rather belong to me than to herself. And I let her. I have spent twenty years wondering whether a man who loved her ought to have let her make that trade.”
Zarina did not move.
“I wanted you to belong to yourself,” he said. “From the day you were born. It was the one thing I wanted for you that I did not want for the realm. And I do not think I let you.” He looked at the board, and then, for a long moment, at her hands in her lap. “And now I do not know who you belong to. That is the thing I cannot sleep for.”
She opened her mouth to say something — she did not know what; that she belonged to herself, that she was fine, that she could stop whenever she liked — and nothing came at all.
The fire settled. Somewhere far below a sentry called the hour, and it was the eighth bell, and across the river in the Low Gate a company of actors was going on in front of an empty seat.
He moved a piece. It was a terrible move. She took it, and he made his small sound of dismay, and they sat there in the lamplight, the two of them, and played out the rest of the game as though nothing were the matter, and she won.
She won, and he congratulated her, and she thanked him, and it was the saddest hour of her life, and she did not know it yet.
The knock came as he was setting the pieces back in their box.
It was the green-scaled secretary, and behind him in the corridor stood a young man in the grey and blue of the city watch, with snow melting on his shoulders and his chest heaving as though he had run the whole of the hill. “Your Grace. There is a disorder at the Bell Street playhouse. The watch was sent to close a play, on the Warden of the City’s order. There’s a crowd in the street, a big one, and somebody’s thrown something, and there’s a man down. One of ours.”
Her father was on his feet. She had not seen him rise.
He looked at her — not the way he looked at a council; the way he had looked at her on the night of the square — and asked her whether she had known of this, and she said that they had been playing tonight, and had asked her to come, and that she had said she might.
The Supreme Ruler closed his eyes. When he opened them he was asking for his coat, and for Balif, and for the captain of the night watch, in a voice so quiet the runner had to lean in to hear it. At the door he stopped.
“Stay here,” he said. “Please.”
The facts came the way snow comes, a little at a time and from no direction anyone could point to, until by the second day they lay over everything.
The watch had been sent to the playhouse at the interval, on the Warden’s own word and no magistrate’s.
By then there had been perhaps three hundred people in Bell Street — some from the house, some from the taverns either side, a good many from the Veil’s own rooms, and a crowd of broadsheet men who had come to see whether the Velvet Princess would be in the front row.
A doorman had put his hands on a sergeant of the watch and shoved him off the step. And somebody, from somewhere above the street, from one of a dozen roofs, had thrown down a roof tile.
It struck a young watchman on the head. His name was Tobin Marle. He was nineteen and had been in the watch eleven months.
The physicians at the Low Gate watch house sat up with him all night, and in the morning he knew his own name and asked for his mother, and they told Balif he would very likely live.
He died on the second night. Nobody quite knew why. Something under the bone, the physicians said, that had been bleeding slowly all the while he lay there knowing his own name.
The captain of the Low Gate watch had made his report by then, and it named the man who had stirred up the crowd: the actor who had played the Warden, who had come out on to the step in his paint and chain, the report said, and called on the street to drive the watch away.
“Ansel,” said Zarina, when Balif told her.
“That is the name in the report.”
“He didn’t. He couldn’t drive a cat out of a kitchen. Balif, he came to the Red House in tears once because his landlord put him in the street.”
“I believe you,” said Balif, and she heard that he did, and that it did not matter in the least what either of them believed. A watchman was dead, and the report named the man who had killed him, and in the city of Ashkar there was only one thing that happened to a man named in a report like that.
A note came for her that evening by way of the postern, a scrap of handbill paper folded in four, in Veyra’s large impatient hand.
Ansel never came out. He was behind the stage the whole time in his paint, being sick into a bucket. I held the bucket. Whatever they’ve written, it’s a lie. And below, smaller: They kept the front seat for you. Nobody sat in it.
She read it standing in the doorway, and put on her coat, and went down the great stair, and twenty paces behind her four people fell in.
There was somebody at the gate. She saw her from halfway across the front court: a small woman in a widow’s black, standing in the slush outside the postern with the gate captain bending to speak to her, with a shawl over her head and a basket on her arm, not shouting, not weeping, only standing very straight, as if she had been told to wait and meant to do it properly.
“That’s the boy’s mother, Your Highness,” said Hollis behind her. It was the first time in seven months she had heard him speak unasked. “Chandler’s widow, from the Tanners’ Steps. She’s been there since the noon bell. She wants to see the man who gave the order.”
Zarina’s feet carried her the rest of the way. The woman was older than she had looked from across the court, with a broad tired face and tallow ground into the creases of her knuckles, and she looked at Zarina’s coat, and Zarina watched her work it out. Everybody in the city knew that coat.
“I’ve brought candles,” said Tobin Marle’s mother. She lifted the cloth a little, as though somebody had asked; there were a dozen tallow candles inside, tied in pairs with string. “For the lying-in. They said I could have him home tomorrow.” She looked at Zarina. “They say it was your friends’ play.”
Zarina’s mouth had gone quite dry. “I wasn’t there.”
“No,” said the chandler’s widow. “He was.”
She did not say it cruelly. She said it as a thing that had happened. Then she covered her candles and turned back to the gate captain, as though Zarina had already gone, and asked whether she might go on waiting.
She did not have to wait long. The great door at the top of the front steps opened, and the Supreme Ruler came down them alone in the snow, without a cloak, and crossed the whole of the front court on foot, and stopped in front of the chandler’s widow from the Tanners’ Steps, and bent his head to her.
Zarina could not hear what he said. She saw the woman look up at him, and say something, and saw him answer, and then she saw the Supreme Ruler of Ashkar take the basket of candles from the woman’s arm and hold it, as a servant would have held it, while she wept at last.
Zarina went back across the court the way she had come, and twenty paces behind her four people turned round too, and none of them said anything, and she went up to her rooms and bolted the dressing-closet door and opened the painted box, and sat on the floor with her back against the wall until the warmth came and the woman’s face went away.
The council sat on the third day after the funeral. Balif, in his place by the wall, watched Minister Gerault Vash rise to speak and thought he had never seen a man so plainly wish to be somewhere else.
“They may put me in a play,” Vash said, with his broad hands flat on the black wood. “Let them. I have the face for it. But I sent eleven men to that street on my own word, without a magistrate, because I was angry, and one of them was nineteen and is in the ground. That is mine. I will carry it.” He looked down the table. “And the man the report names is still in this city, and the houses that keep him are still open.”
He asked for every house the watch ledger knew for the Veil’s — thirty-four, Balif counted, as the list was read — to be closed and searched, and anyone found in them who had been in Bell Street on the night to be held.
At the head of the table the Supreme Ruler read the list from the first name to the last. Balif thought of the Phoenix Queen on the hearth with the fire behind her — every house, every cellar, put them on the road — and waited to see which it would be.
“Not thirty-four,” said the ruler. He pointed at the list with his pen. “The houses your ledger connects with the Low Gate company, or with that night. No others. A warrant for the one man your captain names, and nobody else taken unless a magistrate names him too. Doors knocked on before they are opened. And not tonight. Nothing more in this business is to be done in a hurry by angry men in the dark.”
The council clerk, a thin young woman with ink to the wrists, was already striking names. Thirty-four, and then twenty, and then, after a muttered conference over the ledger with two of Vash’s captains, seven.
“One of the seven first,” said Vash. “The house behind the old glassworks, the one they call the Red House. My captains believe the man is hidden there. If we go to the other six first, he will hear of it and be gone. The second night for that one. The rest on the third.”
“The second night, then, for that one,” said the ruler, “and the third for the rest. At the second bell, every captain with it in writing and read twice.”
The clerk wrote it out fast, in a quick slanting hand, while the council talked of other things, and carried it up the table and laid it in front of him with the wax and the seal.
He read it through. Then the pen, which had been moving steadily down the page, stopped about halfway, over one line, for exactly as long as it takes a man to breathe in and out. Balif did not need to see which line.
“If I will not sign this for that house,” the ruler said quietly, “then I cannot sign it for any house in the city, and the law becomes a thing I hand out at my own table to the people my daughter likes. Minister Vash says it ought to look the same from every street. He is right.” He dipped the pen. “It will have to look the same from mine.”
He signed it and pressed the seal into the wax himself, and held it there a moment longer than it needed.
Then he told the clerk to make the fair copies for the captains, and folded the original once along the middle, and put it inside his coat, and took it away with him to his study.
Carisse sent for her that night, which she had never done before.
The note came by way of the postern, in a hand Zarina did not know, on good cream-coloured paper with a violet eye drawn small at the foot, and it said only the theatre, after the tenth bell, come alone, and she went, with four grey cloaks behind her to the very door, because there was no other way left for her to go anywhere.
Carisse was waiting in her great gilded theatre on the river terraces, empty at that hour, with the benches going back into the dark and the painted clouds on the ceiling lost in shadow and a single lamp burning on the edge of the stage.
She was sitting on the stage beside it in green over wine-red with her keys in her lap, and she was not alone.
Silas was there, and Veyra, sitting apart on the bottom step of the stage with her necklace in her hands, and two or three others Zarina knew from the Red House, and all of them turned to look at her when she came down the aisle, and none of them said anything.
“You’ve heard,” said Carisse.
“About Ansel. Yes.”
“They’ll hang him.” Carisse said it quite simply, touching one key and then the next. “For a boy he never touched. You know that. You know what happens in this city to a man the watch names for a dead watchman. They’ll find him in the Red House on the night they come, and they’ll take him to the Low Gate, and there’ll be a magistrate who wants to be seen to be quick, and that will be the end of Ansel.” She turned the ring of keys over in her lap. “And Ilyne’s sick rooms will be turned out into the snow, and the girl with the cough on the top floor, and old Mattock who can’t walk, and everyone else in that house who has nowhere else to go. In the dark. In the winter.”
“He can’t be hanged. He didn’t do it. Veyra held the bucket.”
“Veyra’s word against a captain’s report,” said Carisse gently, “in a city that has just buried a watchman of nineteen.” She looked out into the dark benches. “No. There’s nothing anyone can do. Not now. Not unless someone knew when.”
She did not look at Zarina when she said it.
Nobody looked at Zarina. Silas was looking at his own ink-stained hands, and Veyra at the painted faces in her lap, and the others at the floor, and Carisse at the dark benches, touching her keys one after another as if she were counting them, and the lamp burned on the edge of the stage, and nobody asked Zarina anything at all.