Nobody Comes
Nalia had already begun when Zarina came back to her rooms, and she had begun with the bed.
The sitting room was as it had been every morning for ten years: the fire laid, the cushions struck and set square, the tall windows full of a cold blue sky. Nothing had been taken down.
The court gowns still hung in their ranks and the jewel cases were locked on the dressing table, and already the whole of it belonged to somebody else, the way a room at an inn belongs to the next traveller while you are still standing in it.
On the coverlet Nalia had laid out what was going. It took Zarina a moment to understand what she was looking at. The brown dress, folded small. The rough shawl. The worn shoes from the mending baskets with their heels gone down on one side.
The plain skirt. The soft leather purse Sera had carried, with what was left in it.
That was all. Nalia had gone through ten years of silk and lace and gold and taken out of it only what had gone down the service stair, and nothing else. She had not laid out the walking boots either. Those she fetched from the bottom of the wardrobe, behind the court gowns, where Zarina had put them in the summer, and set them at the foot of the pile without a word.
On top of the pile, set square in the middle as though it too were a garment, lay the little painted box with the blue birds.
Zarina stood at the foot of the bed in the green coat and looked at it. Nalia did not look at it at all.
She had put it there because it had gone down the service stair and come back up it, the same as the shawl, and so it was going, the same as the shawl, and that was all Nalia had to say about it.
“That’s right,” Zarina said. “That’s exactly right.”
Then Nalia did something Zarina had not asked for. She crossed to the writing table and took up the little dish of pen nibs that had stood at its corner for as long as Zarina could remember, and put two fingers in among the nibs, which rattled, and drew out the small brass key. She unlocked the drawer beneath the writing surface.
Inside lay a letter on plain grey paper gone soft along its folds, and a thin wooden bracelet painted red and blue, with a row of little yellow flowers worn almost to nothing on the underside.
Nalia carried them back to the bed and laid them on top of the folded clothes, beside the painted box, the letter first and the bracelet on the letter.
“You knew where the key was.”
“Since you put it there,” said Nalia, and did not look up to say it.
“I can’t take you. I would if I could. I can’t pay you, and I don’t know where I’m sleeping tonight—”
“I asked,” Nalia said. “The steward.” She smoothed the brown dress flat beneath the letter. “He said there is no household to go with.”
So she had gone down to the steward’s room that morning, while the Lord Herald was still reading, and stood in front of his desk in her linen cap and asked.
Nobody had ever asked Nalia what she wanted. It had never once occurred to Zarina, in ten years, and Nalia had gone and asked for it herself, and been told no.
Zarina put her arms round her. Nalia stood quite still with her hands at her sides. After a moment one of them came up and smoothed the back of Zarina’s coat, once and then again, the way it had smoothed every coat and gown and coverlet of Zarina’s life.
Then she made the clothes into a bundle the way the laundry women made theirs, corners to the middle, with the box and the letter and the bracelet inside, and lifted it into Zarina’s arms, and dropped the small plain curtsey she had made every morning for ten years, neither deeper nor shallower than on any other morning.
She went to the window and drew the velvet half across against the sun on the carpet, as she always did at that hour, and did not turn round again.
Balif was waiting on the bench outside her door.
He had been there a while. She could tell from the way he rose, by stages, one hand on the wall, and from the cup on the bench beside him, which he had plainly carried up from somewhere warm and forgotten.
For once he had no folders, and did not seem to know what to do with his hands.
“I came to tell you something,” he said, “and I would rather you heard it from me than from a footman. I am staying.”
She had known it since the night he came to her with a way out, and she refused it. Still it went into her like cold water. “Of course you are.”
“I came to this house for your mother.” He said it carefully, as though he were setting down something that might break. “I stayed for you. And now there is a man at the end of this corridor who has nobody left in it who will tell him the truth. I find I am going to stay for him. For the man who is left.”
She looked at him a long moment: the lenses on the end of his nose, the ink on his square fingers, the white beard, the stoop. “You were always his,” she said. “Weren’t you. From the start. I used to think you were mine.”
Balif took off his lenses and folded them, one arm and then the other. He could have told her a great many things. She watched him decide not to, and took it for an answer, which he let her do.
“If you like,” he said.
She went past him down the corridor, and he did not follow.
At the end of the private wing, outside his study, she passed the little portrait of her mother under the flowering tree, the one where she was trying not to laugh at something just out of the frame, and stopped in front of it.
It was small. It would have gone under her arm, and nobody in this house would have stopped her. She left it where it was. Everything with a frame round it belonged to the house, and she had nothing now that she had not carried down the service stair herself.
The front court lay open under a pale afternoon sky, with the cold going out of the stones at last and the gulls come up from the river to walk about on the guardhouse roof as though they had been appointed to it.
Zarina came down the last flight of the great stair and stopped at the bottom, from habit, to hear the four of them fall in behind her. They were not on the stair.
They were standing by the guardhouse wall in the sun, in their plain grey cloaks: Hollis heavy and square, the dwarf woman with her crossbow unslung and leaning against the stones, the two younger men with their hands behind their backs. Somebody had stood them down.
Hollis looked at her across the court, and his face did not change in the slightest. He had promised once to be invisible, Your Highness, and now that there was no Highness to be invisible for, he stood in plain sight by the wall and did not move a step.
The dwarf woman looked away first. Zarina nodded to them, as one nods to people one has known, and walked on.
The gate captain stood in the guardhouse doorway, lean and careful, with his grey moustache. She saw his hand begin to rise toward his helmet, and stop.
Nobody had ever told him how a man at a gate should greet a woman who had been the Supreme Ruler’s daughter at the eighth bell and was a subject of Ashkar by the ninth.
She had meant to ask for the postern. He did not wait to be asked.
He said something low to the men inside, and 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 with a bundle on her hip, and stood open, and waited for her.
She went down the processional way between its unlit lamps. At the bottom, where the road met the river at the old stone bridge, she stopped and stood listening. She did not decide to.
Her body did it for her, as it had every evening since the spring: waiting for the twenty paces, for four pairs of boots to come up out of the noise of the street and settle in behind her.
There was the river, running loud and brown with the snow off the hills. There was a goblin chestnut-seller at the bridge foot roaring his prices to nobody. There was the wind.
She went out on to the bridge with the bundle on her hip, and behind her, twenty paces and forty and all the way back up the hill to the open gate, nobody followed at all.
The room was at the top of the blue house, under the roof, and it had a window that stuck.
It was the narrow house in a stepped lane off the river quarter where somebody had painted the whole entrance hall blue, ceiling and all, so that coming in from the dark was like stepping inside a lantern. Veyra had found it. “It’s yours if you want it,” she said on the first night, standing in the blue hall with Zarina’s bundle in her arms, because Zarina’s arms had begun to shake. “He won’t mind. He never minds anything.” The man who owned the house looked up from his book by the window, listened, and looked at Zarina without the least sign of knowing or caring who she was. “Top of the stairs,” he said. “The window sticks. Hit it at the bottom.”
The room had a bed, a washstand, a chair with one short leg, and a ceiling that sloped so steeply on one side that she hit her head on it the first morning and the second, and then learned.
From the window, once she had hit it at the bottom, she could see a forest of chimney pots, a slice of river with the barges going by, and a great many pigeons who felt that the roof had been let to them first.
She slept until noon. She had never in her life slept until noon.
She woke on the first morning with the sun full on her face through the bare glass, and lay waiting for a knock — for Nalia, for the tray, for the steward with the day written out on a card.
None came, until she understood that nobody was going to climb those stairs to tell her what the day was for, and she laughed out loud, alone, and a pigeon on the sill gave her a look of deep offence and flew away.
That afternoon she went down the steps to the baker on the corner, a tall elven woman with flour to the elbows and a voice like a gravel cart, and bought her own bread.
She put her coppers on the board first, before she touched anything, and asked for a small brown loaf, and the baker gave it to her and looked straight through her to the next customer.
Nobody bowed. The bread was warm through its paper, and she carried it back up the steps against her chest with both arms round it, and ate half of it sitting on the bed with the window open, and it was the best thing she had ever eaten.
It was real. That was the thing she would hold on to afterwards, when she held on to anything.
For a week, perhaps ten days, it was the freedom she had walked out of the Hall of Concord to find: no titles, no list, no stair to be found on, no face to keep still.
She walked to the Copper Market and back for the pleasure of it. She sat on the river stairs in the thin spring sun eating chestnuts from a twist of paper.
She knew the price of bread by heart, and of milk, and lamp oil, and was absurdly proud of all of it.
The Veil welcomed her. That was the word for it, and it was not too large.
On the third night she went to the Red House, and when she came through the dark wooden door into the red light the whole long room stood up.
Somebody banged a cup on a table, and then everybody did, and a man she did not know climbed on to a bench and raised his cup to the freest woman in Ashkar, and the room roared it back at him.
She stood in the middle of it in Sera’s coat with her face burning, and drank to it, and they cheered her for that too.
Carisse came through the press and kissed her on both cheeks and did not curtsey at all. “Well,” she said. “I’ve never seen anyone walk out of the Hall of Concord without being carried.” She touched her keys, one after another. “And to say it in front of the whole council, my dear. In that voice. You’ve no idea what you’ve done for us.” Then Silas was there, and his arm was round her, and the little painted box was filled again before the night was out, and nobody counted.
The invitations began in the second week, and by the fourth they came every day.
They came up the stairs of the blue house in the hands of children and couriers, on good paper and bad, sealed and sometimes scented, and she laid them along the sill of the window that stuck, where the pigeons walked on them.
A salon on the river terraces. A supper in the silk quarter, where her chair would be set beside the hostess’s. A first night at Carisse’s theatre. A reading by a poet she had never heard of, who had written something about her and would be honoured beyond words.
She went to all of them. Why should she not? There was nobody to say she must, and nobody to say she must not, and that was the whole joy of it.
And everywhere she went there was a place kept for her, and a cup put into her hand, and Silas’s arm, and the painted box in her pocket, and the warmth, and the grey a long way off.
She kept no list. She was very clear about that. But she knew without writing it down that Thursday was the river terraces and Friday the poet, and the Sunday after was the Low Gate company’s supper, where she had promised to tell it again for the people who had missed it.
She did not write it down, because writing it down would have made it into something she was doing.
People wanted to hear about the bow. She told it. The first time it came out in pieces, plain and badly.
By the sixth or seventh she knew where to pause before the hand went to her heart, and where the goose came in, and how long to let the silence run after he did nothing, he only sat there, before somebody at the table let out their breath.
“You’ve got a line in it now,” said Veyra, one evening, standing in the doorway of the room under the roof while Zarina dressed, with her painted faces clicking at her throat. “You said it the same way twice at Hester’s, word for word.” She turned the crooked face with the moustache between finger and thumb. “You used to just say things. I liked that about you.”
“People want to hear it.”
“I know they do,” said Veyra. “That’s what I mean.” And then — because Veyra never told anybody anything twice, and never once said stop — she went back downstairs, and did not bring it up again.
She grew thinner. She knew it from the way the green coat hung, and from the baker on the corner, who had stopped looking straight through her and begun to look at her, and once, without a word, put an extra roll in the paper.
She slept until noon, and then until the second bell after noon, and then some days she did not get up at all until the light was going and a child was knocking on the door with a card.
She stopped buying bread every day. Some weeks she could not have said what she had eaten.
The grey came back every morning now, heavier each time, and every morning the painted box sent it away again, and it took a little more each time to send it, and she did not count.
She did not see it. That was the mercy and the horror of it, both at once.
She did not see that her days were arranged again — by invitations on a windowsill, by the Velvet Princess and the story of the bow, by the little painted box and the man who filled it — and that the freedom she had walked out of the Hall of Concord for had become, in the space of a single spring, another room.
She thought she had never been so free in her life. She said so, often, at suppers, and everybody agreed.
Ilyne came to the blue house once, at the very end of spring.
Zarina heard her on the stair and did not know the step, because Ilyne had never climbed it before.
Then she was in the doorway of the room under the roof in her plain dark coat, slight and straight-backed, with the silver chain back at her ear, looking round at the sloping ceiling and the pigeons on the sill and the drift of invitations, and then at Zarina on the bed in the green coat at four in the afternoon.
“They let me out,” said Ilyne. “Before the decree was read. The Warden came himself with the order. No reason given.” She did not come in. She stood in the doorway with her hands in her coat pockets and looked at Zarina for a long time, and something moved in her still face, and was put away. “Nobody will say who signed it.”
“Then they’re ashamed of keeping you.”
“Perhaps.” Ilyne looked at the painted box on the sill among the invitations, with its little blue birds, and then at Zarina’s hands, and then at her eyes. “I came to see if you were eating.”
“I eat.”
“No,” said Ilyne. “You don’t.” She did not say it unkindly. She said it as a plain description of how things stood. Then she took one hand out of her pocket and set something on the end of the bed: a small brown loaf in its paper, still faintly warm. She looked at Zarina a moment longer, as though there were something else she might have said, and had decided it was not hers to say.
She did not stay. She went back down the stair, and Zarina heard every board of it under her, and the door at the bottom, and then nothing. Ilyne never came again.
Zarina heard, weeks later, that she had gone back to the Red House and was running the kitchen there as she always had, and sitting with whoever came to the door, and that she had moved the sick rooms to a house nobody would tell the watch about.
She was glad of it. She meant to go and see her, and did not.
The letter came at the end of spring, and it was the first letter of her life without a title on it.
A carter had brought it from the east to the Red House, and somebody had brought it on to the blue house and left it on the stair.
The paper was plain and grey, the kind the Sarens used for everyday, and on the front, in a round hurrying hand with a blot in one corner, it said Zarina, and nothing else.
No Highness. Only her name, written by somebody who had known it since they were both six years old.
Zarina, it said. I didn’t know what to put at the top, so I’ve put your name, since I’m told that’s what you told them.
We get the broadsheets about a month late out here, generally wrapped round fish, so I want you to know that I learned you’d been thrown out of your father’s house from a herring.
I’m going to say three things and stop, because I know you and you are reading this standing up. One. Are you eating? You don’t know how to buy food; I have seen you not know how.
The trick is that you give them the money first. Two. If you still have my bracelet, which you stole, it has lost all its paint by now and I was right.
Three. It is very dull here. There is a pear tree that does nothing and a heron who has outstayed his welcome, and there is a spare bed in the room at the end that nobody sleeps in.
I’m not asking you to come. I’m only telling you where the bed is, in case you ever want to know. Mira.
Zarina read it three times, sitting on the bed in the long gold light, and by the third time she was laughing and crying at once and could not have said which had started first.
She untied the bundle in the corner, which she had never quite unpacked, and took out the bracelet. The red had gone pink and the blue had gone grey, and the flowers were bare wood underneath. She put it on.
Then she took a sheet of the cheap paper the stationer on the corner sold by the quire, and the pencil she had bought for a copper, and sat at the window and wrote Mira at the top.
She could not go on. Her hand would not hold the pencil still. The letters of Mira’s name wavered across the top of the sheet like something written on a moving cart, and when she tried to begin the first sentence the pencil skidded and tore the paper.
She took another sheet, and wrote Mira again, and it wavered worse, and she put the pencil down and pressed her hands flat on the sill to stop them, and waited, and they would not stop.
She took the painted box off the sill. Afterwards her hands were perfectly steady, and she took a third sheet and wrote Mira at the top, and sat looking at it, and found that she did not know what to say — not one word, not anything at all — to a person who had asked her whether she was eating.
She put the letter on the sill with the three sheets that said Mira and nothing else, and laid the invitations over them to keep them from blowing away.
Summer came in hot and close over the river, and Zarina began, without knowing that she had begun, to listen for steps on the stair.
The stair of the blue house was narrow and steep and made of old bare boards, and every board had its own voice. She learned them the way she had once learned the palace bells.
The man who owned the house came up twice a week to look at the roof, with a long slow step, as though he were reading on the way. Veyra took them two at a time. Silas came up lightly, humming, at all hours. The children with the invitations ran.
None of them was the step she was listening for, and she did not tell herself whose step that was.
Every time before, someone had come. When she was nine she had run from the breakfast table and hidden in the eastern gallery, meaning to stay on the bench under the crimson portrait for the rest of her life, and it had taken Balif twenty minutes to find her.
When she was grown her father had come to her rooms, to her door, to the corridor outside her chambers at dawn with no papers in his hands, and stood, and waited.
When she had come home with the river on her boots, Balif had been on the bench outside her door.
She had run from all of them, all her life, and every single time somebody had come after her, and every single time she had been angry about it, and never once had she wondered what it would be like if nobody did.
She knew now. It was like this: a long hot evening in a room under the roof, with the window open and the pigeons quarrelling, and a step on the stair that was the man who owned the house, going up to look at the roof.
The weeks went. Then the months. Nobody came.
She heard things, because everybody in the river quarter heard things and repeated them to her. That the Supreme Ruler sat through every council and said almost nothing.
That men of the Gilded Coven were losing seats they had held for twenty years, and contracts they had held for longer, quietly, one at a time, and that nobody would say why.
Nobody said that he had asked where she was. Nobody said a man in a grey cloak had been seen at the bottom of the lane, or that a letter had come for her in a small square hand she would have known anywhere.
She did not ask. She could not have borne it if they said yes, and she found she could not bear to hear them say no.
It was a mile from the palace gate to the blue house, she thought, lying awake under the sloping ceiling with the heat pressing down and the painted box in her hand. One mile, and one bridge. He could have crossed a bridge.
Her birthday came in the first week of the last month of summer.
She woke before dawn without meaning to, in the room under the roof, and lay listening for a knock that had come on every birthday of her life, and heard the pigeons on the sill and a cart in the lane and nothing else.
She was twenty-three. She put on the walking boots he had given her the year before, which she had not once worn since the day she found them outside her door, and found they were loose now, and laced them tighter, and went down the stair, and did not tell anybody what day it was.
Balif walked behind him on the night it happened, a street behind, and never told him so.
It was very late, and very hot, in the middle of the summer.
Balif had been unable to sleep and had gone down to walk in the gardens, as he often did now, and had seen a tall figure in a plain dark cloak with the hood up go out by the little gate in the garden wall that the gardeners used, alone, without a guard, without a lamp.
He would have known that walk in any crowd in Ashkar. He followed, because there was nothing else in the world he could have done.
The Supreme Ruler went down the hill by the lanes, not the processional way, through the sleeping streets, past the shuttered stalls of the Copper Market and over the old stone bridge with the river running low and black beneath it in the drought. He did not hesitate at any of the crossings.
He knew where he was going, the way a man knows the turnings of his own house, and Balif understood that he had walked it before — in his head, at his desk, on a hundred nights, with a map of the river quarter he had certainly had drawn and certainly kept face down under the sleeping hound.
He stopped at the bottom of a stepped lane off the river quarter, in front of a narrow house with a blue door.
There was a light in the window under the roof. It was the only light in the lane.
Balif stood in the mouth of an alley across the way, in the dark, with his knees aching and his breath held, and watched his oldest friend stand at the foot of the steps that went up to the blue door, and look up at that one lit window, for a long time.
He put his hand on the rail.
He stood like that for as long as it takes a man to decide a thing that cannot be decided, with his hand on the rail and his face lifted to the light, and once his foot went to the first step, and stopped there. Balif could not see his face under the hood.
He did not need to. He had seen it at a deathbed, and across a council table the day the order was signed, and in the Hall of Concord with his hands on the arms of his chair like a man holding the rail of a ship.
Then a voice came out of the lit window above — a woman’s voice, laughing, high and quick and far too bright, and a man’s voice answering, low, and the laughing went on, and on, and did not sound like anything Balif had ever heard come out of her in her life.
The Supreme Ruler took his hand off the rail.
He stood a moment longer at the foot of the steps. Then he turned round and walked back down the lane the way he had come, slowly, with his head bowed under the hood, past the mouth of the alley where Balif stood pressed against the wall in the dark, so close that Balif could have touched his sleeve.
He did not see him. Balif did not let him see. He waited until the tall figure had gone round the corner toward the bridge, and then he followed it home at a distance, all the way back up the hill and in at the gardeners’ gate, and never once in all the years afterwards did he tell his friend that he had been there, or that he had seen his foot on the step.
In the morning, at breakfast, the Supreme Ruler talked to him about river tolls.
The Lantern Festival came at the end of summer, as it always did, and that year Zarina went down into it alone.
The Red House had taken a roof above the Street of Lamps for the night, with wine and music and the best view of the canal in the river quarter, and a place kept for her at the front, and Silas waiting, and Carisse.
Everybody knew she was coming. At sunset she put on the green coat and went down the stairs of the blue house, and at the bottom of the lane she turned the other way. Nobody stopped her. Nobody asked where she was going. There was nobody to ask.
The lanterns were strung from window to window and roof to roof in their thousands, gold and red and blue and white, so that every street had become a tunnel of soft swaying light.
There were people everywhere, more than she had known the city could hold: stonekin porters shoulder to shoulder with merchants’ wives in their best silk, a pair of goblin jugglers on a doorstep keeping six burning torches turning while the crowd shouted the count, feather-crested couriers weaving through the press at a jog.
And none of it stopped when she came by. Nobody cleared the street for her. The musicians in the first square did not break off in the middle of a tune.
Somebody trod on her foot. A man with a child on his shoulders shoved past and told her to mind herself, and she minded herself.
A girl in a green coat went by on a young man’s arm and looked straight at her and did not know her. The green coats had mostly gone out with the spring, and nobody looked twice at the ones that were left.
At the canal the children of the city crowded along the stone embankment to set their candle boats on the water, and nobody opened a space for her. She had to make one with her elbows like everybody else.
An old woman with a tray of boats round her neck was crying her wares: plain paper boats, folded quick and a little crooked, with a stub of candle in each, a copper apiece.
Zarina gave her the copper first. Her hand shook so that the coin fell on the tray and rolled, and the old woman picked it up and gave her a boat and a light, and looked at her face for a moment, and then at her eyes, and said nothing, and was calling over Zarina’s head to the next customer before she had closed her hand.
It was not edged with gold. There was no crest on the sail. The paper was thin and the fold was off true and the candle leaned so badly it was a wonder it stayed lit at all.
She crouched at the edge of the water among the children, with her coat in the wet, and set it down.
The current caught it at once and spun it round, and it went off down the canal crooked, knocking against the others, with its little leaning flame, until she could no longer tell which light was hers.
She stood up. Behind her the crowd went on, the music and the shouting and the jugglers’ count, and she lifted her head and looked over the roofs to where the palace stood on its hill.
It was lit from end to end, as it was every year on the night of the lanterns, every window gold, the long front of it hanging over the city like something that had never needed anybody at all.
She looked along the eastern side, past the copper roofs of the old wing, until she found the one she wanted, high up and a little left of the tower, where a girl of nine had once stood in her nightgown with her forehead against the cold glass, looking down at the lights, wishing to be somewhere nobody knew her name.
It was dark. It was the only dark window in all that long gold front.
She knew now what it felt like. She stood in the middle of the city on the night of the lanterns with a copper boat gone away down the water, and in all those thousands nobody knew her name, or made room for her, or bowed, or turned to see where she went.
Nobody was coming down the hill to find her. She had it. Everything she had wished for at that window, she had.
All her life she had pushed against him the way a child pushes against a wall, as hard as she could, with everything she had, because it was there, and because she had known without ever once having to think it that it would hold.
That whatever she did, however far down whatever stair she went, he would love her too much to let her go. He would come.
He had not come.
She had thought, for a long time that summer, lying awake under the sloping ceiling, that he had let her go because she had asked him to — that he had loved her enough, for once in his life, to give her exactly what she wanted. She did not think so now.
She stood on the wet embankment with her hands shaking in the sleeves of the green coat and the painted box in her pocket, and looked up at that long gold front with its one dark window, and understood it at last, and it was not what she had expected at all.
He had not let her go. He had chosen. He had sat in his high chair beneath her mother’s portrait with four hundred people watching, and weighed his daughter against his realm, and the realm had been heavier.
He had chosen the realm over his own child. He had always been going to. She had only been the last person in Ashkar to know it.
The thought came up in her slowly, from somewhere very far down, under the grey and under the warmth and under everything, and it was small and cold and hard, like a coin in a closed fist. She did not let go of it.
She stood under the swaying lanterns among other people’s children, and closed her hand round it, and found that of all the things she had carried out of that palace — a brown dress, a bracelet with no paint left, a letter she could not answer, a little box with blue birds on it — it was the only one that was entirely her own.
She held on to it, and turned, and went back up the lane toward the lights of the Red House roof, where somebody had kept a place for her at the front.