The Decree
He closed his eyes.
She stood just inside the door with her hands at her sides and waited, as she had waited all her life for the end of that particular silence.
It went on longer than she had ever known it go. Outside a gardener went along the cleared path with a shovel, scraping, and stopped, and began again further off.
The fire settled. She did not look away from his face, because she had decided on the stair that whatever she did this morning she would not look away from anything. Her hands were shaking at her sides, and she did not put them in her sleeves.
“I knew when Vash put it on the table,” he said, with his eyes still shut. “I did not let myself know it until he had gone. Then I sat here and looked at it for an hour.” He opened his eyes. “I have watched you write sevens since you were eight years old. You bar them. Balif bars them. Nobody else in this building does. And you have never in your life barred one twice.”
“He didn’t tell you.”
“No. He told me it was a careful hand.” Her father looked down at the glass. “It is not, quite. Not any more.”
He did not ask her to sit, and she did not. He sat back in his chair and looked at her across the desk, the long look he had given her across every table of her life, and she saw that he was frightened, and that he was not trying to hide it, and that this was very much worse than if he had been angry.
“The council sits at noon tomorrow,” he said. “Vash will lay this on the table, because he must. He is not a cruel man, and he will not enjoy it. He will say the original never left this room, and the Coven’s men will ask him, with great courtesy, who has the freedom of the Supreme Ruler’s study. They will not need to say your name. They will simply wait, all of them, to see what I do.” He leaned forward with his forearms on the desk. “Nobody can prove the hand. Balif will not swear to it. The study was never locked. If you come before the council tomorrow and say that you did not do this, I will say that I believe you, and I can hold them. I have held them for a year, against the broadsheets and the guilds and your aunt and every man at that table who thinks a ruler who cannot govern his house should not govern theirs. I can hold them one more time. But I cannot hold them against this, unless you give me something to hold with.”
“And Ilyne?”
“Will be released.” He said it at once, as though he had had it ready. “The paper in her coat proves nothing about who wrote it. I will see that the charge is dropped. I will see that she is out of the Low Gate by the end of the week, and nobody will ever be able to say I did it. I can do that much, Zarina. I can do that much quietly.”
She had known it was coming. She had known since Balif climbed the stair. It went into her anyway, under the ribs, and she stood very still around it.
“You want me to lie,” she said.
“I want you to say one sentence.”
“I’ve said a year of sentences.” It came out of her harder than she meant, and she did not take it back. “I said them to you at breakfast and in this room, about where I’d been and who with, and you knew they weren’t true and let me say them anyway. You let me. You looked at my eyes every night at dinner for a year and let me say I was tired.” Her voice cracked and she pushed it on. “I’m finished. I’m not going to stand in the council chamber with my mother’s face and say I didn’t, when I did.”
“It would be the last one.”
“They always are,” said Zarina. “Every one of them was going to be the last one.”
She heard, as she said it, another voice, low and fond in a wardrobe room under the Red House roof — then someone would have to tell them where it came from, wouldn’t they — and she pushed it away so hard that she felt it go, like a door slammed on a draught.
This was hers. This one thing was hers. She had decided it on the stair, alone. She told herself so, standing there in the white light, and very nearly believed it.
He looked at her for a long moment. “In all your life,” he said, very evenly, “I have never once asked you to do a thing for me that cost you anything.”
She went back through it as fast as she had ever gone through a column, looking for the wrong figure, and could not find one. He had asked her to stand beside him, and to rest, and to take four guards, and to go to the lake.
Every one of those had been for her. Once, gently, he had asked her to come to a reception, which would have cost her nothing but an evening, and she had not given him even that.
“I have given you everything I had in my hands,” her father said. “This is the first time in your life I have asked you to do something that costs you, and I am asking you now because I have nothing left to ask with. One sentence. Not for the council. For me.”
“No,” she said.
He did not move.
“It’s the only honest thing I’ve got left. I lied for fourteen months to have a life, and then I lied for a year to keep it. If I take this back, there’s nothing left of me that isn’t something somebody arranged. Not even this.”
“Honest.” He said the word as if he were turning it over to look at the underside. He picked up the sheet in its glass and held it. “You came into this room, where you have come every day of your life, and you sat in my chair, and you read my papers, and you carried them across the river to the people who keep you.”
“Nobody keeps me.”
“I never locked that desk against you.” His voice was barely above the sound of the fire now. “Not when you were five. Not when you were sixteen. Not this year, Zarina, not once, not through all of it, when every minister I have told me to. It is the one place in my life I never locked against you. And you used it.”
It was the worst thing anyone had ever said to her, because there was no cruelty in it at all.
“You signed it,” she said. “You sat at that desk and signed it knowing what the Red House was to me. You knew Ilyne. You knew who slept in those rooms upstairs, because I told you so myself, at dinner, more than once. You put a ram to their door in the middle of the night in the snow, and an old man died on a doorstep—”
“Because you gave the wrong night to the wrong people,” said her father, and stopped, and she saw him wish it back, and saw that it was true, and that they both knew it.
“Yes,” she said. “Because I did.”
“I am sorry. That was—”
“It was true.” Her hands were shaking so badly now that she pressed them flat against her skirt. “It was true, and I did it, and I’ll go before the council tomorrow and say so, and they can do what they like.”
“Your aunt told me to burn them out,” he said. “Every house. I gave them seven houses and two nights and one warrant, and I argued it down to that, and signed it because it was the least I could sign and still be a ruler who meant what he signed. If I had left that house off, every man at that table would have known why. And a watchman’s mother in the Tanners’ Steps would have known that her son was worth a little less than my daughter’s friends.” He set the glass down very carefully on the blotter. “That is why I had to.”
She stared at him. She understood, with perfect clearness, that he was right, and that she was right as well, and that there was no column anywhere in which the two of them could be made to add up.
There were only two true figures that could not stand on the same page.
And then she said the thing she had not known she was going to say, the thing that had been lying underneath all the others since a night at the chessboard, since a winter garden, since a long room in her grandmother’s house that she had never seen.
“My mother told you she would rather belong to you than to herself,” she said. “And you let her. And she died in this house before she was twenty-seven. She died belonging to you.” Her voice was very steady now, and very cold, and she could not stop it. “I won’t. I would rather belong to anyone in that city — to anyone at all — than die in this house the way she did.”
She watched it go into him.
She had seen a great many things go into her father’s face across a great many tables, and she had never seen anything go in like that.
It went in and went all the way down and did not come out again, and his face did not change at all, and that was how she knew.
He sat very still in his chair with his hands flat on either side of the glass, as though the desk might otherwise get up and leave, and for a long moment he did not breathe.
Then he stood up. He came round the desk slowly, and stopped in front of her, close enough that she could smell the cedar oil, and did not touch her. And when he spoke his voice was not quiet.
It was not anything she had ever heard from him. It was low and rough and shaking, and it came from somewhere he had never once in her life let her see.
“Anyone in that city,” he said. “Yes. I believe you. You have given yourself to people who will not even notice when it kills you.” He looked at her eyes, from a hand’s breadth away, the way the Phoenix Queen had looked. “They will paint something on your face, and dance, and the room will be open again within the week. And I will be up here, behind a locked door, because you will have made me lock it.”
She could not breathe.
She was in the mirror room. She was sitting against the cool glass with the warmth humming in her fingers, and a hundred copies of her sat against a hundred mirrors, and on a hundred carpets between the candles a hundred Sabras lay with their bracelets pushed up their thin arms, quite still, in a silence that had gone on too long.
He did not know. He could not know. Nobody had told him about Sabra. And he had said it anyway, as if he had been there, as if he had knelt beside her with Ilyne and watched the tired elven doctor close his bag.
He saw her face. She watched him see it, and understand that he had struck something he had not known was there, and the anger went out of him all at once, the way a fire goes out when the door is shut on it, and left him standing there grey and old and appalled.
“Zarina,” he said. “I did not—”
“I know,” she said. “I know you didn’t.”
Neither of them moved. The fire settled in the grate. Outside, the gardener’s shovel had stopped.
They stood a hand’s breadth apart in the white light, the two of them, each with the other’s sentence in them like a blade, and she understood that neither sentence could ever be taken back, and that they were both true, and that this was what it was going to be, from now on, to have been his daughter.
She waited for him to say it. She had heard it over Mira and over the list and over the lake, the old offer that came out of him whenever he could not bear her face: tell me what you want, and I will do it.
She waited, with her thumbnail in the seam of her sleeve, and he did not say it, and she saw that he could not. There was nothing left in his hands to give her.
He had looked through everything he owned for the best thing in it, all her life, and he had come to the bottom.
He did not shout. When he spoke again his voice had gone quiet, the way it had always gone quiet when he meant a thing most, and she had to hold her breath to hear it.
“I love you,” he said. “I have loved you every day of your life, and I love you now, standing there.” He looked at her for a long moment, and nothing in his face was hidden. “And I have run out of choices.”
The decree was written in the last week of winter, in the study at the end of the private wing, by the hand of the man whose name would stand at the foot of it. Balif sat across the desk from him and watched every line of it go down.
The fire had sunk to a red bed that gave more light than heat. A wind had come down off the eastern range at dusk and was still trying the shutters one by one, like a man who has lost his key.
The council’s paper lay at the ruler’s left hand. It was one page, fairly copied, and it said in the careful language of men who did not wish to be quoted that an heir who had betrayed an order of the council could not remain the heir.
Minister Vash had brought it himself that afternoon. The council had sat on it for most of a month, ever since the noon in the middle of the winter when Zarina had stood where the petitioners stand and said, in a clear voice, that she had done it, and then walked out before anybody could speak.
Vash had not enjoyed bringing it, which Balif found harder to forgive than if he had.
Balif had laid out his argument an hour ago, piece by piece, the way he had once laid out maps on the floor for a child. The house by the lake. Or the Phoenix domains: her aunt would take her, and not ask why, and in the mountains there was nobody to bring her anything in a little glass bottle. “Exile is a punishment,” he had said. “The council will take a punishment. What they want is a gesture, and a gesture can be made at a distance. Send her away, and they have their gesture, and you still have a daughter. And she has a chance.”
The ruler had heard him out. Then he had closed his eyes, and opened them, and taken a clean sheet from the drawer.
“She refused the lake. She refused her aunt to her face. Shall I send her up the hill road in a closed carriage with Hollis sitting on the door, and have her carried into her aunt’s mountains screaming? I can.” His voice had gone quiet. “And the day she got free of it she would walk straight back across that river, and never once come home again, and she would be right. If I protect her from this, I am what they say I am. Every guild in Ashkar has spent twenty years trying to find what I will sell, and I have told them, every time, nothing. If I send her to the lake, I have told them the price. It is her.”
“Better a closed carriage than this.”
“For whom?” said the ruler, and Balif had no answer, and had not insulted him by pretending to find one.
Now there were four sheets on the blotter. Three had lines struck through them, and one had a single word on it, written and crossed out and written again, and the ruler had turned that one face down.
He wrote slowly. He had always written fast, in the small square hand that clerks could read across a room, and tonight he wrote as though every letter cost him a coin. Balif did not watch his face. He watched his hand, and the hand did not shake, and that was the worst of it.
He was thinking, as he had on and off all winter, of a schoolroom with bees at the window and a child of seven turning round in her chair to ask him whether he would marry someone he did not like.
He had told her no. He had gone on telling her things of that kind for fifteen years — that no question was improper, that a wall was only somebody’s decision and could be argued with, that she had the right to choose — and been proud of every one.
He had given her the words for freedom, all of them, every one she had used in this room.
And he had never once in fifteen years taught her what to do with it when she had it. In his mind, sitting there in the red firelight, the whole of it began with him.
“Titles,” the ruler said, without looking up. “Inheritance. Place in the household. Have I left anything out?”
Balif took off his lenses and folded them. “Her name.”
“Her name stays. It is the one thing in this house she has ever said was hers.”
Near midnight the ruler laid down the pen and pushed the sheet across the desk with two fingers. “Read it for me. Look for mistakes. She would find one.”
Balif read it twice, with his finger moving under the lines, because he knew what he was looking for and why he had been asked. It was short. It said what it had to say and nothing else, and it did not call her anything at all. “There are none,” he said.
The ruler squared it and set the bronze hound down on top of it, so that the sleeping dog lay with its blind face over her name. Then he took another sheet, a small one, and wrote three lines on it, and sealed it, and pushed that across too.
It was an order to the Warden of the City. The woman called Ilyne, held at the Low Gate, was to be released at first light, and every charge against her laid aside, on the Supreme Ruler’s own word, for reasons that the Supreme Ruler did not propose to give.
“Vash will take that to the Low Gate himself,” the ruler said. “Tonight. And he will tell nobody where it came from, because I shall ask him not to, and he is an honest man.” He looked at the sheet. “She is not to know. Zarina. She is not to know I did this.”
“Why not?”
“Because she would think I had done it to be forgiven.” He sat back in his chair. “And she would be right.”
“And afterwards,” Balif said. “When the decree has been read. Will you go to her?”
The Supreme Ruler was looking at the map wall, at the thumbprint of slate where the lake was. “She told me she would rather belong to anyone in that city than die in this house the way her mother did,” he said at last. “She has told me in every way a person can that she wishes to belong to herself. From tomorrow she will.” He closed his eyes. “No. I will not go to her.”
Balif had meant to go to his rooms after that. Then he looked at the man behind the desk, sitting in the lamplight with his warm hands flat on either side of the sheet, and thought that in all this enormous house there was nobody else, and set his cup down on the side table, and did not go.
Toward dawn the ruler slept in his chair for perhaps a quarter of an hour with his chin on his chest, and Balif kept the room for him while he slept, as he had once kept a nursery, and watched the shutters go from black to the colour of ash.
The Hall of Concord had been built to hold a thousand people, and that morning it held perhaps four hundred, which made it look emptier than if nobody had come at all.
The Supreme Ruler sat in the high chair on the dais and watched it fill. Nobody had required him to be there.
A decree of the house was read by the Lord Herald and needed no more of its author than the seal, and three members of the council had told him so, kindly, in three different ways.
He had thanked them, and put on the dark coat and the plain circlet, and walked down at the eighth bell, because he had written the thing in his own hand and would not make another man stand alone beneath it.
Above and behind him hung the double portrait from the first winter of his marriage: himself at twenty-seven, a little too stiff in the new crown, and beside him the woman who had married him against her sister’s wishes, both of them crowned and neither of them smiling.
The painter had asked them not to smile. It was not done, he said, in a portrait of state. She had laughed at him all through the first sitting, and he had had to begin her face again.
The council stood along the left of the dais in their chains. Gerault Vash was among them, heavy and grey-faced, and he was the only one who had not looked at the ruler once since coming in.
Beyond them, in a little knot of dove-grey silk, stood the Gilded Coven’s representatives, attentive and sorrowful, like guests at a funeral who have been left something in the will.
The guild delegates filled the floor. Behind them, behind the rope, stood the petitioners, as on every audience day: a stonekin carter with his cap in both enormous hands, a thin woman with a goose under her arm, a girl of about fifteen in a green coat several sizes too big for her, of the kind that had been sold on every bridge in the city since the summer.
And behind the girl, at the very back of the hall against the doors, stood his daughter.
She was in the coat. He had known she would be. It hung on her long and green and patched at the elbows, and it hung on her more loosely than it had in the spring, and her hair was down her back, and her face was very white, and she stood among the petitioners with her arms folded as though she had a petition of her own and expected to be kept waiting for it.
Even from the dais he could see that she was holding herself very still, the way people hold themselves when it costs them a great deal to stand at all.
He did not look away. It was the only thing left that he could give her, and he gave it.
The Lord Herald came forward to the edge of the dais, a broad old man in a tabard so stiff with gold thread that it stood a little away from his body on every side, and broke the seal, and the sound of it went the length of the hall.
The ruler had written every word, and he heard them now as though somebody else had.
He heard her named — Zarina, only daughter of this house — and saw the girl in the green coat turn round to look at the back of the hall, and turn away again quickly, red to the ears.
He heard that the said Zarina, having of her own will and knowledge betrayed an order sealed in council, was from this day renounced by him as daughter of his house.
Renounced. He had written it and struck it out and written it again, and now it went out over four hundred heads in a voice like a bell, and nobody moved.
That she was stripped of every title she held or might hold by right of birth. That she was put out of the line of his house. That she forfeited all right of inheritance, in lands and revenues and goods.
That she was put out of the royal household, its rooms and its service and its protection, and was from this day a subject of Ashkar under its law like any other, and should be known by her name.
He had let them keep that. It was the one line in the paper he had not had to write twice.
The Lord Herald rolled the sheet and stepped back. In the silence the goose said something, once, and the thin woman hushed it in a frantic whisper.
The ruler kept his face still. His hands lay along the arms of the chair, and he held on to the carved wood the way a man holds the rail of a ship.
At the back of the hall his daughter unfolded her arms.
She stepped out from among the petitioners into the open aisle, and the carter moved back for her without knowing why. She stood alone at the far end of that long floor with the light across her in pale bars.
Then she laid her right hand flat over her heart and bent from the waist, low and slow and perfectly correct, in the bow every subject in Ashkar made to the Supreme Ruler.
He had seen it ten thousand times from ten thousand people. He had never once seen it from her.
She had curtseyed to him at receptions as a daughter curtseys, which was a different thing, and come into his study without knocking since she could walk, and never once in her life bent to him as though he were the Supreme Ruler and nothing else.
He saw, from the dais, that her hand over her heart was shaking. She held the bow exactly as long as the form required, with the hand shaking, and did not let it fall.
Then she straightened, and turned, and walked out of the Hall of Concord. The doorwardens opened the great doors for her, because they had been trained to open them for anyone going out, and closed them again behind her. She did not look back to see whether he was watching.
He was. Nobody else was. Every face in the hall, from the council in their chains to the girl in the green coat, was turned up toward the dais, to see what he would do.
He did nothing. He sat in the high chair beneath the portrait of himself and his wife, and after a while he lifted his hand to the Lord Herald to say that the audience might proceed, and the stonekin carter was brought forward with his cap in his hands, and the ruler heard every word of his petition, and afterwards could not have said what any of them were.