The Usurper's Crown

by Sarah Zettel

  Medeoan raised her arms so Chekhania and Ragneda could pull her nightdress over her head and lace it up. The covers on the bed were already turned down and the warming pans had been applied. Medeoan laid herself down and the ladies covered the braziers and drew the curtains, wishing her good night and departing to get themselves ready for bed.

  Despite being tired, Medeoan found she was unable to compose herself to rest. She stared up at the shadowy canopy overhead, listening for Kacha’s entrance into the chamber. But there were only the sounds of her ladies talking softly among themselves and making up their beds and changing into their own nightclothes. A restlessness to have her husband beside her took hold of Medeoan. It was becoming a familiar sensation, and a not wholly unpleasant one. She imagined him walking down the corridors, wishing good night to those whose business kept them up late. He would return to his own chamber, where his waiting gentlemen would ready him for bed, and then he would come through the connecting door, and pull back her bed curtains, and then, and then …

  A thought struck Medeoan, a happy bit of mischief. Always, Kacha came to her. What if, this time, she went to him? He would come behind his bed screens, thinking he would need to come find her, and there she would already be.

  The idea pleased her, making her smile in the darkness. She decided at once to put thought into action and supped out of her bed. The floor was chilly under her stocking feet She padded around the bedscreens, and the ladies immediately sprang to their feet and ceased their activities; plaiting and brushing their hair, laying out their clothes, gossiping. Chekhania ran up to her at once, pale in her nightdress, but Medeoan waved her away.

  “I shall be in the emperor’s chamber,” she announced.

  Chekhania’s hand flew to her mouth to smother the giggle that surely must be coming, and Medeoan saw the slightly scandalized delight in her eyes. Lifting her chin in a mockery of imperial dignity, Medeoan turned and walked regally through the door and into Kacha’s bedchamber.

  The effect of her arrival there was as immediate as her unexpected appearance in her own room. The gentlemen were all still fully dressed, as their master had not yet retired for the night, but they too were engaged in their various activities; writing, reading, tending the fire, laying out wine and fruit, gossiping their own gossip. They stared for a moment at the sight of their empress in her nightdress, but swiftly remembered to drop their eyes, and drop into a reverence. Prithu, Kacha’s head gentleman, a neat, dark-skinned man who had come with him from Hastinapura, approached Medeoan hesitantly, his eyes darting about the room, trying to look anywhere but at his partially dressed empress, and reverenced nervously before her.

  “Is there any way I can assist Your Majesty Imperial?”

  “I have decided to await my husband here,” Medeoan said, amazed at how lofty her voice sounded. “And you will not say anything about it, as I wish it to be a surprise. Do you understand?”

  A look of extreme consternation crossed Prithu’s face, but he reverenced again. “I understand, Majesty Imperial.”

  Medeoan felt she ought to pity the man. After all, where he came from, the women lived separately from their men, even their husbands. This must be extremely shocking for him. Somehow, that idea gave her little plan a whole new relish.

  “If one word is spoken, I will be most displeased,” she announced, loud enough for the room in general to hear. Then, she gathered up her hems and retreated behind Kacha’s bed screens, and slipped under the covers of his bed. Settling herself in, she had to cover her mouth, as Chekhania had to smother her giggles.

  Imagining Kacha’s face, and his reaction to her mischief occupied Medeoan’s mind pleasantly while she waited, listening to the muted, hesitant sounds of the gentlemen’s voices and movements.

  Then, at long last, she heard the outer door open, and the sounds of firm bootsteps, and the answering patter of quick steps from the gentlemen hurrying to meet their master.

  “Mother’s guts, Prithu, if I’ve had a more boring night, I don’t know what it was,” said Kacha gruffly. There was a sound after that, probably him drinking a cup of sweet wine offered to him by Prithu. “I’ve one matter to take care of first, then I must attend my lady wife.”

  Medeoan clapped her hand over her mouth again, and forced down her own giggles.

  “Majesty …” began Prithu, and Medeoan froze. Was he going to give her away?

  “What?” answered Kacha impatiently.

  “Majesty, perhaps you should attend the empress directly. Perhaps your other business can wait …”

  “Perhaps you should confine yourself to making sure my nightclothes are brushed and ready. My wife likes to see me at my best.”

  “But Majesty …”

  If you do this, man, I will not be quick to forgive, thought Medeoan, quite miffed. He was going to spoil the whole joke.

  The only answer was silence, and then Prithu saying “Yes, Majesty.” Medeoan found herself wondering what look or gesture Kacha had made to his servant.

  She lay back then, secure in her nest and delighted in her mischief. Kacha would finish this last business, he would come around the screens and see her there, and then, and then …

  Firelight flickered beyond the bedcurtains. The noises of the servants settled to soft rustlings. Medeoan smiled in anticipation of the culmination of her jest. She smelled something sharp, not quite smoke, but not incense either.

  Then, she felt it — the chilling of the air, the prickling in her skin that traveled deep into her bones. Magic. Nearby, someone was performing a working of will. She had given no orders, she knew of nothing needful …

  Thoughts of danger shivered through Medeoan and she shot out of the bed.

  “Kacha!” she cried as she dashed around the screens, and stopped in mid-stride.

  She saw Kacha standing beside a brazier near his writing desk. He trembled hard, sweat pouring down his skin, his face in a wild grimace, torn between agony and ecstasy, and his hand, his withered right hand, thrust deep into the brazier’s fire.

  Shock froze Medeoan where she stood. As he gradually focused on Medeoan, a new emotion crept into his twisted visage — rage.

  Medeoan couldn’t think. Her vision blurred, refusing to see what was before her, she clutched at herself, seeking to still the sensation that told her against all reason that some strange magic was being worked here. Impossible, impossible. Kacha was no sorcerer. Kacha could not look at her with such hatred …

  Medeoan fled. She turned and ran back to her room, slamming the door behind herself. Ignoring the startled flurry of questions from her ladies, she dashed toward the bed, like a child seeking safety from the night’s terrors. She clambered through the curtains and huddled on the mattress, her hand pressed across her mouth, but now it was to suppress her screams.

  It cannot have been … what did I see? Nothing, I cannot have … But it was a working. I felt it … I cannot … it was not … Fragments of thoughts, disjointed and purposeless, tumbled through her mind.

  “Mistress …” came a tremulous voice beyond the curtain.

  “Leave me be,” whispered Medeoan, wrapping her arms tightly around herself. “Leave me be.”

  “Yes, Mistress.”

  She closed her eyes. Kacha’s hand was in the fire. She had seen it. She had felt the magic coursing through the ether. These things were true, but could not be true.

  What happened? What happened?

  “Beloved?”

  Kacha. His voice sounded so tender, so like himself. How could he have been that creature who looked at her with such rage?

  “Beloved, let me look upon you.”

  There was a rustle of cloth and the touch of flickering light upon her eyelids.

  “Please, Medeoan. Look at me. Let me explain.”

  Slowly, Medeoan opened her eyes, and there stood Kacha, framed by the heavy curtains, a lamp in his good hand. His face was as soft, as tender as it ever was when he gazed at her.

  Medeoan licked her lips. �
��What was that?” she whispered. “What were you doing in there?”

  Gingerly, as if unsure of his welcome, Kacha sat on the edge of the bed. He pushed the curtain back so that he could set the lamp down on the bedside table before he spoke.

  “What you saw, beloved, was what keeps my wounded hand,” he held up his scarred and withered limb, “whole, if damaged, on my body.”

  “There was magic there,” she said, her thoughts only reluctantly beginning to order themselves.

  “The fire itself is magical. I must burn, each night, a series of sticks carved with runes, and give my hand over to the fire. This is the working of my father’s sorcerer. If I did not do this, rot would have taken my hand long ago, and it would have been severed to save my life.” He looked shamefacedly down at his shriveled fingers. “This is not a lovely thing, but it is better than no hand at all.”

  “Why did you not tell me of this?” Medeoan’s voice was harsh.

  “Because this treatment is painful, and I … I do not always bear it as a man should. I did not want you to see me that way. I did not want you to worry.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I did not want you to pity me.”

  She took his withered hand, and it was rough and crabbed as it always was. She had become well used to the touch of that hand. It wasn’t even warm from the fire. The scars that ringed the wrist were as white and crooked against his dark skin as they had been before.

  “This magic does not heal you,” she said.

  He shook his head. “It cannot. The damage was too severe by the time they were able to free me.”

  She held his hand, willing herself to believe, willing herself to accept, but at the same time, her blood prickled with the sensation of shaping magic, of the working of will. It came from Kacha, and from Kacha’s wounded hand, and she did not know why. If all was as he said, why would she feel this now that the spell was over and done? If he lied … but how could she even think that Kacha might lie to her?

  “I’m sorry if I startled you, beloved.” Kacha’s good hand tucked under her chin and lifted her face until she must look into Kacha’s deep eyes. “I’m sorry I deceived you.”

  She kissed him, hard and suddenly, surprising herself at the force of her gesture. Kacha stiffened, but only for a bare instant. Then, he wrapped his arms tightly around her, answering her urgency with his own. She needed the urgency, needed the rush of it, to wipe away her doubts, the lingering feeling of a spell where there should not have been any, to restore the unclouded peace in her heart that had always occupied the place where Kacha dwelled.

  Morning came. Medeoan opened her eyes to see Kacha sleeping beside her. She liked to watch him as he dreamed. She liked the peace in his face and his tousled hair and the gentle sound of his breathing. Their mornings together were never long, so, normally, she would watch him and then she would press herself against him, and he would sigh in his sleep and roll over to embrace her, and she would revel in that as well.

  This morning, she did not move toward him. Her eyes felt dry and too hot, as if she had just finished crying. She had slept only fitfully, for she could not stop the thought tumbling through her head.

  Why would any sorcerer impose such a healing, not even a healing, such a spell on a person? How could it be that this was the only way to keep Kacha’s hand whole? She remembered too well the day Avanasy had called her from her studies and taken her out to the laundry sheds. Amidst the steam and the stench a woman lay on a pallet, screaming in her pain and writhing so her fellows were forced to hold her down. Her legs and both feet were a mass of burned and swollen flesh where a kettle had overturned and spilled a flood of boiling water over her. The stench from her roasted flesh sent Medeoan reeling.

  Lord Sorcerer Iakush was already there. Avanasy ordered Medeoan to stand by the Mistress of the House, and the two men began to work. They had few tools at their disposal, and they had to work quickly, before the mere pain of her burns carried the woman away. Avanasy bound the woman’s pain in a stone, the effort of it nearly making him swoon. Iakush plunged her legs into a basin of milk and herbs and then sprinkled more milk in a circle around her, weaving his spell as he made his circle. Perspiration sprang out on his forehead from the strength of his working and the heat of the room. Medeoan herself shivered from the waves of magic that rolled from the two men, cresting over the burned woman and crashing against Medeoan. No one else could feel anything. They could only stare and pray. Medeoan had been brought to watch and understand, and she tried to concentrate on the words Iakush spoke, on the touch of his working.

  At last, at long last, a trembling Iakush knelt before the basin and drew out the woman’s right leg. Even under the white film the milk left, Medeoan could see her flesh was whole and sound.

  If an injury that should have killed a woman could be made whole by two Isavaltan sorcerers, how could the sorcerers of the Hastinapuran court, who were rumored to be among the most powerful and extensively learned in the world, fail to make her husband’s wounded hand whole? Medeoan had never asked herself the question before, and now she hated herself for the asking. She wanted to accept what she had been told with all her strength and soul, and yet she could not.

  Was there some neglect? Some lie, some secret, some incompetence on the part of the sorcerer? Could that be true? Medeoan stared up at the canopy. There had been a sorcerer at her grandmother’s court, a dark and charismatic man. He had been given the care and treatment of her ailing great-uncle, and had, it was later found, been deliberately keeping him ill to prolong his appointment. He’d been beheaded in the courtyard.

  Could this Hastinapuran sorcerer be doing something similar to Kacha? Was that what was happening? Was Kacha being deliberately kept in pain by a worthless servant? The thought clenched Medeoan’s jaw in anger.

  “Beloved?” murmured Kacha sleepily.

  Medeoan turned toward her husband, and felt her love for him, unquestioning and unquestionable, well up in her. He was being wronged, but, unschooled in magic as he was, how could he know?

  The fingers of his good hand brushed her cheek. “Your face was stern, beloved. What were you thinking of?”

  “Your hand, my husband.”

  Kacha smoothed the coverlet over her stomach. “I wish you would not. What it is, it must remain. There is nothing to be done.”

  Medeoan pushed herself up on her elbows. “I’m not so certain, Kacha. I’ve seen miracles performed by Isavaltan sorcerers. It should not have been so impossible for a sorcerer to save your hand whole without this … treatment you must undergo.”

  Kacha shook his head ruefully. “Everything that could be done, Yamuna did. He is my father’s Agnidh, his bound-sorcerer. The life and protection of our family is his charge.”

  Medeoan tried to choose her words with care. “Kacha, is it possible that Yamuna … did not do all that he might?”

  “What do you mean, Medeoan?” Kacha frowned.

  Carefully, Medeoan told him the story of her grandmother’s court sorcerer. Kacha listened, his face remaining grave.

  “That might be a thing that could happen in Isavalta,” he said when she had finished. “But it is not possible in the court of the Pearl Throne. Yamuna is bound to my family, by oaths and ceremonies. He cannot act against us. It is impossible. He would call down the wrath of the Seven Mothers if he did.” He tried to smile, and almost managed it. “I must ask you to accept what I myself had to accept years ago, beloved. My hand is ruined and its treatment is painful.” He kissed her gently on the forehead. “Your concern speaks of love and I am glad of it, but try not to worry about it any more.”

  “I will do my best,” promised Medeoan.

  Her best, however, did not take her very far. The question gnawed at her through the breakfast with Lord Master Kagnimir and his men. It occupied her through the council meeting, and as she dictated her morning letters to her secretaries afterward and tried to concentrate as they read back to her a report from the legal advisors her father had assembled
in an attempt to begin to codify the laws of the empire.

  It stayed with her even after Kacha rode out to welcome the new convoy of ships arriving from Hastinapura, which carried the new ambassador from the Pearl Throne. Although Medeoan no longer had to watch him working with his weak and painful hand, the thought that he suffered repeatedly and needlessly would not leave her. But how could she make him believe that was so?

  She would have to make sure he saw the proof with his own eyes. That would cause him pain, and she could not relish that thought, but the pain it would spare him would be much greater. After he saw how he had been wronged, he would allow her to bend her mind to the ways in which that wrong might be put right.

  Medeoan left the papers and the laws and the blandly disapproving secretaries. Surrounded by her entourage, she returned to her private chamber. Through a series of audience chambers, sitting rooms and private studies, she came to a small, unadorned inner door. There, she took a silver key from the bundle she carried at her waist and opened it smoothly. The ladies took up lit candles in tall holders, placed them on either side of the door and retreated immediately. Here was the one room in the palace where Medeoan alone was permitted to walk. This room held the Portrait of Worlds.

  The Portrait of Worlds was no mere carving or daubing of paint on silk or canvas. It was a working clockwork model of all the worlds, mortal and immortal. Made of bronze, silver, copper, and gems, it was a conglomeration of delicate spheres formed of wires and jewels, each turning on its silver spindle and each swinging in its separate stately orbit, all part of a great dance, its steps regulated by the fantastic clockwork that had taken a century to execute.

  Unbidden, Medeoan’s mind unleashed a flood of memories, all of them filled with Avanasy. Avanasy’s loving voice as he described the Portrait, making her learn the names of its parts, their functions, and the history of this immense and complex tool. Hours of study at Avanasy’s side over the books written by the court sorcerers of the Portrait’s various uses, and their discoveries concerning its nature and the further nature of the visions it might evoke and the barriers it might be used to bypass or uncover. Yet more hours of his patient, cautious tutelage so that she might work well and familiarly with the precious object Father had placed in her guardianship.