Queen of All

by Anya Josephs

  After the ceremony, there is to be a feast celebrating the wedding. It’s the same tradition we have at home, where the wedding of the newly married couple is finalized with a great big meal for everyone present. Of course, it’s a little fancier here at the palace than in Leasane.

  There are sixteen courses, one to honor every Quarter in the Kingdom, and I’m seated between the Duchess of the Second Quarter and Jehan in his new role as the chief of the konim (well, the only konim, at present). It is not exactly the most relaxing meal of my life. I’m too uncertain of the etiquette to enjoy any of the delicacies that are served, and the meal drags on for hours that seem interminable given how weary I am after all the day’s anxieties. Talk is subdued even among the guests that might ordinarily feel more comfortable with such feasts, since we’re all—I must imagine—still in awe of what we witnessed beneath the palace.

  And yet, when I look over at the High Table, where Sisi and Balion are staring into one another’s eyes, not even glancing down at their plates or any of their guests, I wonder if I’ve ever been happier.

  After the sixteenth course—a tiny piece of spun sugar made to look like a pile of purest snow—is served and eaten, the two of them are finally able to escape up to bed. There is much cheering, and several ribald jokes of surprising boldness, from the crowd. Sisi blushes at it all, but she also waves cheerily at everyone—for despite their jesting, the subjects do seem to love their beautiful new queen. Balion leads her out of the hall, her hand in his, and soon after that, the party begins. In his brother’s absence, Ricard is responsible for hosting the dances, which he does with unsurprisingly ill grace. I make a hasty exit from the hall as soon as I think I can and retire up to my room.

  In the dark, my dress unlaced and the familiar soft fabric of my nightgown against my skin, I can finally try to make sense of the startling truth. My cousin is the Queen.

  I made this happen, I think, silently, gleefully, proudly. I’m only a girl, only a foolish young girl—but I do have this strange power.

  I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why I could do what no one else could. I don’t even know if I’ll ever be able to do it again. But I know that I did. Just once, I held power in my hands—and let it go when I needed to.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I am still sleeping off the heavy dinner and rich wine—not to mention the exhaustion of the painful chant, which hits me hard as soon as I’m back in my room—when I am awoken by a knock on the door. I realize the sun is high in the sky as I force my heavy eyes open, but that does not make me feel any more ready to face the day. Still groggy, I put on my dressing gown and stumble to the door.

  To my surprise, I find my father frowning in the doorway. “Papa? What are you doing here?”

  Without any further commentary, he says, “We’re going home.”

  Oh. For a moment I thought he had come simply to talk about Sisi’s wedding. Maybe to discuss the plans for our future, for what we would do now that we were kin to the Queen of All the Earth. Or even, as foolish as I know the thought is, simply to see me. “When?” I ask.

  “Tomorrow evening.”

  So soon. I should not be surprised, but I am. I imagined there was more time. I’ve been in the palace for nearly a year now and have made something very like a life for myself here. I wasn’t expecting it to all end so soon. “We’re—I have to go with you?”

  He looks right at me. It’s a strange feeling, having his calm brown eyes properly on me for once. It’s almost as if he understands what he’s asking of me. Almost like he understands me. “Yes, child. I don’t think you should stay here with your cousin.”

  “She said I could be her companion. I could live like a Numbered lady. Stay here with her, have work to do…” I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t even know if I want what I’m asking for. The words tumble out of me seemingly without my say-so. Though I never wanted to come to the palace, now I can’t imagine suddenly returning home, a place I haven’t missed, a place where there is no future for me. Not after what happened last night, and all the questions it raised for me.

  In response, he only sighs. His face goes slack, and he suddenly looks not like my strong father, but like a tired old man. “You could certainly have the King intervene. Gaia knows I won’t be able to take you home if the King and Queen both wish for you to stay here. I can only say what I hope for—and I hope that you won’t decide to remain. I hope you’ll come home, where you belong. There may be a title for you here, but your home will always be with us. We’re your family.”

  The words, perhaps the longest speech I’ve ever heard my father make, sting me. Maybe they hurt most of all because I know that he isn’t really wrong. There’s nothing at all for me in the City. Sisi may be here, but she has a life now, with no need at all for me. I’d only be a reminder of the unpleasant time before she found her true love, her happiness. She might not even want me here. After all, who would want to spend her time thinking about her former days of being an orphaned farm-girl when she could focus on being the Queen? Would she have me stay only out of obligation—the memory of our friendship, the fact that it was I who found the spell to allow her marriage?

  That thought makes me flinch. Perhaps I could accept that my cousin has moved on to better things, but it hurts more than I would have thought possible to imagine her remembering all our years together—maybe the best years I will ever know—as nothing more than an unpleasant hardship, the dark early days she had to overcome in order to win her King and her crown.

  Strangely enough, my father seems to notice that I’m upset. He places one of his big, warm, callused hands over mine. I can’t remember the last time he tried to comfort me with a touch. He embraced me before I left, that’s true, but that lasted only a moment. And he must have held me when I was a baby. But otherwise, he has steadfastly avoided any contact with me through all my fifteen years.

  Now, he holds on tight to my hand, like he doesn’t want to let me go. He stays there while he looks for the right words. He doesn’t seem to quite find them though, if they even exist. I’m not sure the most eloquent person in all Four Corners of the Earth, much less my taciturn father, could find anything comforting to say. In the end, he says only, “I’m sorry, Jeni. I wish that things could be different. I wish that we didn’t…I’m sorry. I know that this is hard for you.”

  I’m surprised he’s even noticed, though I don’t want to say as much because I can imagine it will only hurt him to know that I have grown accustomed not to moments like this attempt at care, but to the silence that lingers between the two of us like an unhealed wound. There is so much we have never been to one another, so much we cannot say.

  I wonder what he would do if I told him that I know his secret, know about my mother, know that he cannot love me and why he cannot do so. I wonder what he’d do if I told him how I feel about Sisi, that I’m afraid I love her the way I’m supposed to love a husband.

  I wouldn’t share the former secret, of course, because Aunt Mae made me swear a promise, and I wouldn’t break that promise for anything—not least of all because if I did, that would surely be the last time I got any of the good family gossip from my aunt, and if we’re leaving the palace to go back to Leasane, I’m going to need all the gossip I can get or else risk losing my mind entirely from sheer boredom.

  And the latter is something I’ve still never quite said aloud, not to anyone, and I’m scared of how the words would change everything. Change me.

  Yet I have to ask myself if honesty between us, at last, could do anything to heal the scars he still carries, the pain of my mother’s loss, or if I would only be hurting him more. Perhaps if we talked about it, I could find the right words to make him forgive me for being my lost mother’s daughter; to make him forgive himself for being unable to love me. Maybe he could see that we’re the same, in some way, both loving those who were always going to leave us. But most likely, I would only cause more damage, and s
o what I say is not some perfect plea, but the whine of a petulant child. “Why do we have to go back at all?” I ask. “If we have everything now, what’s the point of keeping the farm going at all?”

  “It’s what we have. It’s my whole life. A man is nothing without his place in the Earth, and the farm is mine.”

  “And mine?” I feel a strange, overwhelming urge to slam the door shut and turn my back on him, or scream and stamp my feet, or anything, anything, that might somehow make him understand why I can’t just go back, that could provoke a reaction from him at all.

  “And yours,” he says, though that isn’t even slightly the answer I was looking for. It isn’t true, and I think he knows that. Yes, I may inherit the farm when he’s gone—though I suspect he’d rather leave it to his brother Willem, who has sons—but it’s not for me that he keeps the land. It’s for himself.

  “Fine. Tomorrow,” I respond. “I’ll start packing.” I cross my arms over my chest. If he wants to say something more, he’ll have to be the one to do it.

  When he does, his tone is quiet and calm, with an urgency undercutting the words.

  “Listen,” he says. “Jeni, we’ll come back to visit. You’ll see your cousin again, before too long. It’ll be a bit of a change, of course. But it’s not as though you’ll never see Sisi again. We’ll want for nothing now, and that means we can come back and forth to the palace, all right?”

  I am choking back tears, though I don’t quite know why. I feel his desperation in the words, his need to make me happy, make me understand that things will be all right even if he doesn’t quite believe as much himself, and I wish I could put a name to the feeling that bubbles up in my heart as a response. I want to find the right words to say, want to be able to comfort him, just as he is trying—and admittedly failing—to comfort me, but I know I can’t. I know there is nothing I can do to make this easier for either of us. So I say only, “Thank you, Papa.”

  Maybe it is at that moment that I first know what I am going to do.

  He leaves without another word, though he gives one last sad look at me as he walks out of the room. He closes the door behind himself, and I let out a long, weary sigh. The tears still feel like they’re just a moment away, bubbling up in my chest like a spring from the Earth, like something alive and wanting to burst to the surface.

  I don’t cry, though. I don’t want to, even though I can feel the threat of it rising up. Something new is arising in me too. As intense as the tears, as much as the sadness, I sense something unfamiliar and a little frightening in my heart. There is a burning coldness rising up from my chest the way the tears won’t, stinging in my throat, holding back the tears from my eyes where they well and stay and do not fall. It’s like the fire from last night. It’s like the humming within the Earth. It’s so much bigger than me.

  I am angry. I am frightened. But I am also ready. At first, I’m not sure what for.

  But some impulse moves me to reach for the book I keep on my shelf, the book of maps that Sisi first read at the very beginning of our time here, that we used to share together, that I looked at before I could even understand a word. I haven’t revisited it since, too busy in the library reading about the history of our Kingdom to consult these volumes that Sisi has already looked at and discarded, or studying to improve my own ability to read (not to mention my increasingly intense and time-consuming hobby of wallowing in self-pity.) Yet it somehow occurs to me that it might be a comfort to return to those pages, to revisit the shapes that fascinated me when I knew less and had more, when Sisi and I were best friends and more than sisters.

  The thought compels me, consumes me, and before I know what I’m doing, I’m tracing my fingers over the gilt lettering. Now I can read the words on the cover easily: The Earth Entire, a guide illustrated to the Four Corners of the Kingdom, with an examination of the major rivers, roads, forests, cities, towns, settlements, and etc. I wonder why old books always have such long and peculiar titles, but for once, I feel too focused to lose myself in that or any other musing.

  I open the book up and look back at the first map. I remember how it had fascinated me, how struck I had been with the idea that the entirety of the Earth could fit on those two pages, how Leasane—which I can find readily enough now, a small dot off on the far left side of the map—might be nothing more than a smudge in the fabric of the wide Kingdom I know so little about. My whole life, lived in that dot of nothingness. And now I’m going back there, when there is all this vast Kingdom I’ve never even seen.

  I let my eyes trace across the pages, back toward the East. Aunt Mae told me my mother went East, I find myself remembering again. I wonder if there’s any way of knowing if she’s still there.

  I remember how long I had looked at one spot, how I had let myself fantasize about a better life, a life with my mother, a life where I belonged, where I never felt as though I were slipping through the margins of a family that didn’t truly want me there with them, but had to take care of me because I was, however little I seemed it, their own blood.

  I see the mark I looked at for so long before, on the first night that Sisi met Ricard and this whole mad drama began. It’s outlined in silver, and this time I can easily read the label that is written there in a careful and elegant script.

  Iashome.

  The two words leap out to my eyes. I blink carefully, as though I can’t believe what I’m seeing, but I know in my heart I can trust it. I know that what I’ve discovered, whatever I’ve discovered, is truth, and that I can rely on it. That I must rely on it.

  I knew when I first saw it. Before I could even read the name, before I had any way of knowing, I felt some kind of connection with that place. Wherever it is, whatever it is, whatever it means, I felt as though I were drawn there. I looked at it, at that mark on the map, and I imagined my mother.

  And then I learn to read, not thinking of this map at all for months, and when I most needed guidance, I somehow knew to turn to these pages again, and what did I learn? What did I find? One simple and clear truth. One thing that may very well, it seems, change my life forever.

  This town has my mother’s name.

  And so, looking down at the paper, unwilling or perhaps unable to tear my eyes away from those words that look like something more than words, that look like a prophecy, that look like my future, I know what I have to do.

  This is a sign. Maybe Gaia arranged it, maybe the universe itself, or maybe it is just chance righting the fact that everything that has ever happened to me up until this moment seems to have gone rather terribly and entirely wrong. I can’t be sure either way, but I can know that it means something.

  Iashome.

  Ia’s home.

  My home.

  This town has my mother’s name, and I am going to find it, no matter what it takes. I am going to journey there, whatever it costs.

  I’m going home.

  I’m not quite sixteen years of age, but that doesn’t matter. Merri was scarcely older than I am now when she was sent away from her family and everything she knew to find work with Jorj’s family, and that much she did with our family’s knowledge and blessing. Why, Sisi is only four years my elder, and she’s just been crowned the reigning Queen of the entire Kingdom.

  Running away from home can hardly be more difficult than what Sisi is being asked to do.

  I don’t have any illusions that what I’m doing is anything other than running off. My father would never give me permission. He’s never so much as mentioned my mother’s name in my hearing—that’s how upset he still is with her for whatever happened between them at the end of their marriage. He’d never give me permission to go look for her.

  And so I won’t ask for it.

  Instead, I determine to leave by myself.

  My preparations have to wait for tonight, when no one will see me and suspect. First, I leave the room and find my family gathered around in the parlor. I need to allay any suspicions they may have, or I’ll be caught before I
can even set off.

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” I say. “I was upset. When are we leaving?”

  I try to avoid lying to him outright as the plans are made. Instead, I stay silent as the rest of the family talks about the logistics of hiring carriages and how many guards will accompany us, as I wait for night to fall. Then I can begin.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I find, in the back of my overstuffed closet, behind all the fine gowns I’ve worn but once, a plain white petticoat made of solid and sturdy cotton. That will do as a travel sack. I tie it at the top and make some quick stitches across the bottom with a needle and thread. I’ve never been nearly as handy at sewing as, say, Aunt Mae is, but it should last for a while at least.

  Then I ring for a maid. I tell her that that the entire family is planning on leaving tomorrow, and I ask her to bring me up a selection of cakes and dried fruits and hard cheese—things that will last for a long journey—as well as a skin for water. I’m sure the King has actually made provisions for our family’s travel back to the farm, but the maid doesn’t seem to know that, and I have to take the risk of asking. I will need something to eat along my journey, though I expect I’ll eventually need to forage for food or trade for it, and I’d rather not actually steal from the kitchens if I can possibly help it.

  I do hate asking for food. I know people look at me and assume that, because of my size, I must have an excessive appetite, and it always makes me self-conscious. But in this case, I can use it to my own advantage.

  When she’s been sent off, I begin packing some clothes. To my sorrow, all the loveliest of the dresses that have been made for me have to be left behind. They’ll be no use at all while I’m on my journey, and most of them, being encrusted with gems and so on, are too heavy to carry even if I thought I’d find some opportunity to wear them along the way. Instead, I take simple things: the homespun I travelled here in, my new warm wool coat (since I’m not sure how long my journey will take and I fear that the warmth of summer may fade into fall long before I reach my destination), two spare day dresses chosen from the simplest of the ones I have, and my sleeping gown.