by Anya Josephs
In this moment, I’m holding hands with Sisi on one side and with a stranger on the other, standing in this hidden City courtyard. But I can also feel the shadowy touch of thousands of other hands, hear the distant echo of thousands of other voices, see the reflection of thousands of dancers moving in the darkness. I don’t know if it is all in my imagination, if it is the hypnosis of the dance itself, or if some other power is working on me, but I suddenly know that what I see is real, the real past collapsing in on the present.
Then I take a deep breath, and the chant stops, and the moment shatters. I don’t know how long it has been, whether we danced for a minute or a night. I barely know who I am. My head still spins. When the chill of the night air begins to bring me back to myself, I turn toward Sisi, eager to know if she’d seen what I saw.
“Oh, my feet are throbbing!” she exclaims. “I feel like I’ve danced for hours. Lio, you’ll have to carry me back to the palace!”
And I realize, from that, I’m alone in this strange experience, in whatever wonder I have, however briefly, touched.
“I enjoyed it,” I say distantly. “I wish it could have gone on longer.”
Suddenly, people are sitting on the ground, opening picnic baskets, laughing and talking, and the mysticism of the evening fades away as though it had never existed. Suddenly, I feel silly, like I must have been imagining something that wasn’t really so, even if in my bones I do know that what I saw was—not entirely, but in some vital and important way—real.
I’m so consumed with my thoughts that I don’t even notice as Sisi and Balion wander away. One of the white-clad and pretty maidens in attendance approaches me to try to make conversation: it might be more worthwhile to try to flatter me now that my cousin is so close to the King.
“My name is Jini too.” She introduces herself with a smile. “Spelled with a double I.” I spend a moment trying to picture the spelling before I figure out what she means. My newfound mastery of letters does not extend quite so far as to make it come naturally.
“Oh, that’s so much like my name. What’s it short for?”
She draws back a little. “Lady Jeni, here we never discuss our True Names. What a personal question!”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.” I eat a chocolate off one of the trays someone offers me. I truly mean it—of course it was not my intention to upset this girl, who seems perfectly nice.
“That’s a lovely bracelet,” she remarks, clearly strained for something to make conversation about.
“Yes, I like it. It was a gift from His Majesty, from the Grand Market.”
“How lovely! Did you enjoy the Market?”
“Very much.” I give up and decide to just participate in the conversation. There’s no way around talking to this girl, who is nice enough, if a little too persistent. And a little dull. “Have you been?”
“Many times, when I was a child. My parents don’t think it’s proper for an unmarried lady of my age to go, though. Not that I mean to criticize you and Lady Sisi, of course.”
“Of course not. If it helps, we didn’t get to see all that much of it either. Aunt Mae kept us pretty close.”
“You are fortunate to have such a caring guardian.”
“Indeed,” I say, wishing for my cousin to return from wherever she and the King have disappeared off to. I feel like I’m failing at this conversation and I’m desperate for Sisi to come back and smooth things over, or, failing that, for Balion to awe her into silence with his royal presence.
It doesn’t take long for me to spot Sisi, and I excuse myself from the conversation to approach her. She and the King are hand in hand and smiling, as they so often seem to be these days. Balion doesn’t look quite as relaxed as she does though, tension visible in his broad shoulders. Sisi is wearing a red rose in her hair, probably picked from among the flowers that grow so freely here.
Sisi turns to Balion, nudging him with her shoulder. “Go on. Tell her.”
He stammers. “Jena, I have something to—something I must say to you. Something I would like to, I mean—”
“Please just do it,” I ask.
“Oh, in Gaia’s name, you ridiculous man!” Sisi exclaims. She holds her hand forward, showing me a simple, unadorned golden ring around her finger. “Balion and I are going to be married!”
“Oh,” I say, taking a small step back. “Oh.” I blink slowly, several times. I look at the ring, then at my cousin’s beaming face, then at the King. “Of course, I’m happy for you. I’m so happy for you both. Don’t you need to ask Jorj though? I thought…”
“Yes, of course,” the King replies. “I’ll do that. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking. I was just—I seem to have forgotten all protocol. I’m just so—”
“Happy,” Sisi finishes. “Isn’t that the word you’re looking for, my dearest?”
“Happy,” he agrees.
“And then I am happy for both of you,” I reply, even if it’s not quite true.
Aunt Mae, to no one’s surprise, is absolutely delighted with the news. It even soothes her rage when we return through the window, well after midnight.
The letter containing Jorj’s permission for Sisi to marry the King, and his many fervent wishes for his sister’s every happiness, arrives within the week. The King’s fastest messenger, riding the best horse in the Kingdom, makes much better time to Prinnsfarm and back than we did in our donkey-drawn cart. The four of us—me, my aunt, my cousin, and the King—sit in our suite together to open the letter, and all of us rejoice when (as I’m sure we must all have expected), the permission for Sisi’s marriage is written out in Jorj’s strong, even hand.
From that moment on, Sisi’s engagement is official—she is the Queen-to-be.
Chapter Twenty
With the official announcement of the King’s engagement to my cousin, the whole Capital seems to erupt into a flurry of sparkling chaos. The preparations for the big day are of the utmost importance. So much must be done in so little time, from formal tests to dress fittings.
The very first hurdle is choosing a date. At the advice of Elan, who has been promoted to the role of King’s steward at Sisi’s recommendation, they choose the end of Summer as a means to make the festivities look more presentable to the public. Balion and Sisi are eager to be married as soon as possible, but there are some practicalities which it seems even a King must respect. They need time for everything else, for her to be presented to all the right people, and—Elan manages to imply without quite saying—for the scandal of her involvement with Lord Ricard to fall out of people’s minds.
There is also a whole list of things that Sisi has to do to prove her worthiness to be Queen. I didn’t know this until she told me, but she has a Test of her very own that she must undergo, just like the choosing of the King himself.
And that’s only the finale of a lengthy season of interviews and panels and balls, subtle and explicit ways that Sisi is required to win over any number of people that stand between her and marrying the King. There is much more involved in this than I ever could have imagined. Balion, of course, has lived with these ceremonies hanging over him every minute of his life since he was a child, so it’s all second nature to him. Without his expertise, we wouldn’t know where to go or what to do.
Even watching it from my relatively safe distance as Sisi’s best friend and de facto lady’s maid is overwhelming. I can’t imagine actually going through with all of this.
“You should’ve just married the potter’s lad,” I tease, as I’m doing her hair up for a state dinner with the Lord and Lady of the Second Quarter, who are Fifth and Sixth in the Kingdom, respectively. Although they’re about to get demoted after Sisi’s wedding. “You’ll be lucky if these people don’t spit in your soup.”
“Ha ha,” Sisi says, but then looks thoughtful, and I don’t think it’s about the possibility of becoming Daren’s bride. “When your supper is brought up, save me a plate, would you? I might wait to eat till I get back.”
Diplomatic dinners, though hardly Sisi’s strong suit, are nothing compared with the real Test. If she is to become Queen of All, she has to be approved by all Three Powers of the Kingdom.
I have to have King Balion explain the whole thing to me.
He looks puzzled at first when I point at his crown and ask him, “So what are these Three Powers that Sisi has to deal with, exactly?”
“Right,” he answers, looking embarrassed. “I suppose it’s not the sort of thing that just anyone would know. I forget, sometimes…”
“Did you know I couldn’t even read, before I got here?” I say, just to shock him. It works, as I knew it would. Shocking Lio has become something of a hobby for me, not least because it’s so easy.
But I also get my explanation.
Just as the Kingdom is divided into Four Corners, and each Corner into Four Quarters, and just as Gaia’s People are divided into Three Nations, power in the Kingdom too, is held in a careful tripartite balance. He shows me the three symbols on the crown—the Sign of the Three Powers.
“I’m one of them,” the King says. “Well, rather, the King is. And the Royal Family. The whole Power of the Crown. We rule over things of the mind—laws, regulations, trade, culture. Our power often seems greatest.”
Next is the Power of the Sword, represented (appropriately) by the sword in the symbol, which neatly pierces through the crown. This, Balion tells me, stands for the Guard. Even he—though he’s been followed by a member of this silent order all his life—knows little about them. They train in secret, and their members are ruthless, deadly killers in the service of the Royal Family. They rule over things of the body—fighting, yes, but also healing, hunting, and much else. To my surprise, I learn that Balertius, the King’s dancing mentor, is thus technically a member of this Power as well.
Finally, and even more mysteriously, Sisi will have to face the Power of Magic. This power, which governs things of the soul, all that is unseen and unknown, is dwindling in the Kingdom, down to just the last two konim—the elderly Garem, and his assistant Jehan, my former reading teacher. Once they had vast schools of knowledge. Balion frowns as he tells me this. “Maybe Sisi’s right. Maybe I ought to do something about it.”
“Worry about your wedding first,” I council him. “There’s enough to fret about on that score without adding to the list.”
But it turns out that, other than planning the wedding feast itself, all the real trials are on Sisi’s shoulders, not Balion’s.
First, she has to deal with the first and greatest, the Power of the Crown. The authority of this power is invested in the King himself. Fortunately, the King has already approved of her, so she just has to speak with a panel of his loyal advisors. Unfortunately, the head of this panel is Lord Ricard.
Balion assures her that she needn’t worry about anything. “None of them will go against what I want,” he says. “I want you to be the Queen. They have everything to gain by supporting my choice and everything to lose by going against it. And none of them have any reason to oppose you.”
“Except for your brother.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t need to worry about him. I’ve known him much longer than you have. He’s my brother and, really, he’s a good man. He might have had his feelings hurt, but I’m sure he’s gotten past it. And the heart wants what the heart wants. He’ll understand that.”
Sisi rolls her eyes. She’s reluctant to argue with her fiancé, it seems, but I can’t deny that I tend to agree with her assessment of Lord Ricard. I don’t think the King understands nearly as much as Sisi does about him—not that it’s hard to believe a man might be biased in favor of his own brother.
She has to go in to speak with the council alone. Even the King isn’t allowed to accompany her. Instead, Balion and I wait for her on a red velvet-covered bench in the long marble hallway outside the chamber. For all his assurances that she has nothing to fear, he is obviously too nervous to do much in the way of making conversation. He sits on the edge of the bench, tapping his foot insistently and rhythmically against the floor, his eyes fixed to the dark wooden door. We have no way of knowing what is happening in there, and the King himself is as powerless as I am to help Sisi as she faces strangers who must judge her, and at least one person who is openly hostile to her.
Perhaps the King was right about Lord Ricard, or perhaps—as I privately continue to believe—the Prince has some secret reason of his own for not wanting to stand in his brother’s way in this. Regardless, Sisi leaves the room grinning. “I have the council’s permission,” she says. “One down, two to go.” Apparently, she has few fears now that this first hurdle has been crossed.
The Second Power must have given Sisi her Test without any of us noticing it, because one day, she wakes up and finds she has a mysterious black-clad shadow of her own, a bodyguard just like the King’s. She tries to ask the guard about it, to find out who he is and where he came from, but he will say only, “You have been chosen, my lady.”
Balion tells her what little he himself knows, that their order is as ancient as the throne itself and that they have their own rituals by which they protect the King and Queen. He also tells her that she’s unlikely to ever learn any more—he’s had his own bodyguard since he was a boy of seven, and he’s never so much as learned the man’s name.
Uncharacteristically, Sisi seems willing to accept that. Perhaps she’s distracted by the staggering amount of wedding planning that she has to do. Or perhaps she’s nervous about her third Test, the Test of the Power of Magic, which won’t take place until the wedding itself. Even without that hanging over her head, though, the logistics at play are staggeringly complex. I wouldn’t have thought every single aspect of the minutiae needed Sisi’s personal intervention, but everyone has questions for the Queen-to-be.
Emissaries must be sent to our house to bring back our family, and to the Four Corners to invite every Numbered man, woman, and child in the Kingdom, lest offense be inadvertently given to some House that turns out to be more powerful than anticipated. Plans have to be made, for a banquet grander than any in living memory, for gifts to be made to the populace, for elaborate and unheard-of sorts of entertainment.
Balion and Sisi, I am sure, would be quite contented to whisper their vows to each other in front of a single priest, or indeed with no company but each other’s, but they don't seem to get much of a say in that. After all, as Balion says himself while hearing half a dozen tailors plead their cases about how they should be chosen for the honor of sewing the wedding napkins, he is the King, and sometimes that means he has no freedom at all. Their wedding is more about Sisi becoming the Queen than it is about her marrying the King, and certainly more than it is about her marrying Balion, the man she loves.
I wonder distantly if I ought to be jealous of her. So often in the past, I’ve hidden a secret anger that Sisi is always the center of attention, always the one so admired by others, when I am ignored. Surely, now that she is about to become the most powerful woman in the Kingdom, that she has fallen in love with a man who is handsome, kind, and devoted to her, that their union is about to be celebrated by an enormous ceremony where all the most important people in the Kingdom will celebrate them—surely now, I have something to envy.
Yet I don’t. She has so little freedom now, and soon, when she is Queen, she will have even less. She may have power, she may even be able to make her dream of justice for the forgotten people of the Kingdom come true, but she’ll spend most of her life confined to the palace, surrounded by people who wish her ill or see her as nothing more than a means to an end.
At the same time, it is becoming clear that I, as a poor and unregarded girl whom no one cares in the least about, am free to do exactly whatever I want. I can sit in my rooms all day and read; I can go down to the kitchens and eat sweets until my stomach aches; I can sneak about the palace and listen to people gossip about exactly what Sisi must have done to win the King’s hand in marriage. I particularly e
njoy one popular theory, which holds that she is a witch who has put a spell on him so he will die a bloody and terrible death if he looks away from her for longer than an hour. Honestly, speaking as someone who spends a lot of her time watching the King stare at Sisi, this claim seems to fit the evidence. But, jokes aside, I appreciate that I can do as I please.
No, jealous I am not. But in private, I must admit to myself that I am saddened to realize that Sisi has grown so distant from me—not because, as when we’d first arrived, she is driven by a fury, but because she is happier in her new life, happier with her fiancé, than she is when she’s with me.
I don’t want to talk to her about it. Because if I do…
If I do, I fear that nothing will change, even if I ask. And I don’t want to have to accept what that would mean about me. About her. About our friendship.
About my future.
Whatever unspoken hope I might have had about Sisi’s feelings toward me is gone now. It’s obvious that she is entirely in love with the King, as he is with her. She can’t, and never could have, shared my longings for more.
I try to put those thoughts out of my mind entirely and focus on what matters. That is, I try to be a friend to her.
I can do little to help Sisi plan the wedding, since I’m neither important nor elegant. She’s going toward her new life, and it would be foolish to try to follow her there, where I’m unwanted and unneeded. Instead, I resolve to find a useful way to fill my days: spending time in the library.
Chapter Twenty-One
Aunt Mae finds me on my way back from a long day of studying. My eyes are bleary and my head aching, but I have a new tidbit to share with Sisi: a report of some of the pahyat, those who cannot use magic at all, still possibly living up in the Northern Mountains as recently as ten years past, when the book was authored.