by E. J. Beaton
“You have someone in mind?” Cassia said.
“Perhaps.”
Lysande was aware of the inscrutability of his gaze. “Who?” she said.
He turned to face her. “You.”
She wanted to laugh, for the idea was so impossible that it was almost ridiculous. But the others were nodding instead of scoffing. Her disbelief turned to disquiet. Ever since she had taken up the Councillor’s staff, she had felt that she was wobbling on a frayed rope, above a gulf whose depths she could not discern. Step by step, she had inched along it. At first, she had tiptoed, but as the last two days had passed she had taken bolder steps, learning how to interact with city-rulers, challenging them, even daring them to prove their worth. Yet she had not prepared for the possibility of reaching the other side and walking further amidst royalty, amidst silver and jewels . . . amidst cakes laced with metal.
You could not plan for something that you could not imagine. Only now did she see that she had finished crossing the rope, and a ladder awaited, stretching up.
They were all looking at her, Luca, Jale, Cassia, and Dante, and she focused on this moment. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“A commoner cannot make decisions for the realm, surely. There has never been such an appointment,” she said.
“Five minutes ago, there had never been a council, either,” Luca replied.
“You are the only Councillor among us.” Jale grinned. “So really, you’re the most practiced for the job.”
“You jest well, Your Highness, but you cannot be serious. The silverblood families will never accept this.” You had to feel your way, slowly, when you were climbing a ladder in darkness. You had to test every rung with your feet.
“I am quite serious,” Luca said. “Who better than a scholar to apply her scrutiny to the realm? Your lack of breeding is immaterial when we consider Queen Sarelin’s esteem for your wits. For an orphan, you are better read than many ladies. And you seem to have no hesitation in dealing with royalty.”
The look he gave her was much cooler than his praise. If Luca Fontaine wanted her to share in the rule, it was not out of charity: she was sure of that much.
“I do not often agree with the prince of Rhime, but I cannot fault him on this,” Dante put in. “I move that we add Lysande Prior to the Council of Elira.”
“I have no objection.” Jale nodded.
Cassia sighed, and laid her hands on the table. “If I must share the crown, it makes no difference if it is with three people or four. It is all dishonor in Pyrrha.”
Lysande’s insides were churning. Books flapped before her in memory, speaking their warnings about city-rulers, scolding her with long-dried ink. She held them at bay. There would be a time for insecurities. This was the time to reach up: to grasp the next rung.
“There we are.” Luca raised his wine, with a half-smile. “To dishonor.”
“To the Council,” Dante said, glaring at Luca.
“Indeed. To the Council,” Cassia said.
Lysande raised her goblet with a trembling hand, scarcely able to look at the others. A surge of something powerful was running through her. Ever since she had opened the envelope after Sarelin’s death, fear and grief had followed her—and both were still there, but joined by another emotion. It was not just the voice of duty or the deep echo of her sorrow but something more like brushwood, kindling within her.
There could be no complacency, she knew. She would have to watch her back and her food. It would be folly to close her eyes for a second around these rulers, or let herself believe for a moment that any of them was worthy of her trust. But this must be it. Her quill was her sword. If she worked with all her effort, surely she could wield it for the woman who had trained her; for the woman who had plucked her from a narrow world and immersed her in a realm of leather-bound books, debates about epic poetry, trips in a carriage to the Axium theaters, hedges sprinkled with white bellflower blossoms, and laughter at ribald jokes.
And yet this extended beyond Sarelin. This was about the shop fronts smashed in the capital; the elementals of skin and bone huddled on the back of the executioner’s cart. It was about Charice, and the empty room where they had once spent hours together, hours that became days, days that became achingly beautiful nights. It was about the young man in ragged clothes who had been tasked with baiting wolves with only a bolt of cloth, and all the people who would never hold a chest of gold bars in their hands.
Sarelin was a part of her, but the girl with the quill could see things that the Iron Queen had not. If she could reach around her and touch the populace, perhaps she could weave the threads of their lives together in a way that Mea Tacitus could not, too.
Thinking of her decision to halt executions, she remembered how her words had sounded like sunlight on steel as she issued the order.
The opportunity had been temporary. She had been Councillor for a few weeks, and she had fitted her ambition to that timeframe; as her role had been fleeting, so she had curtailed her desires. But now she could see a way ahead. For the first time, a ladder was hers to climb, its rungs not woven of fibers but fashioned of smooth and unbending metal. Who knew where she might scale it to?
Restrain, constrain, subdue. This time, she labored to push the chant away.
She looked across the room and saw Derset behind the table, a slight furrow between his eyes, and guessed that he was checking himself from showing more concern. Once she spoke the words, there could be no going back.
Steadying her hand, she brought the goblet to her lips.
“To the Council,” she said, and drank deeply.
Six
Her quill scratched across the page as the sound of laughter rang out in the wintry air; tails and loops of letters poured onto the fine paper, her hand moving to the rhythm of her thinking, the formulation of phrases so well practiced that to an observer it would have appeared as pure instinct. The scent of ink wafted up to her nostrils, and minutes slipped by before she paused to peer out of her window.
The guests having moved on from the garden below, Lysande felt the new silence. She still remembered how, on the morning she had first been led into Charice’s back room, a silence had fallen over her like thick cloth. She had run her finger along the bottles full of liquids and powders, taking in substances transformed by magic or tinctured by foreign ingredients. Some had been familiar to her from a need that it was better not to describe.
Where Charice was now, she did not like to think.
It seemed wrong, to imagine Charice poor or desperate. Far better to recall the night Charice had knelt between her legs, stripped of all her clothes, Lysande still sporting a doublet and nothing else, wrapping her boots around Charice’s neck. That was not an easy night to forget. When they had moved to the bed, Lysande had lain pressed to Charice’s back and slid her hands around Charice’s warm waist, before the two of them had slipped into a state of blissed-out repose, finishing their entanglement slowly.
After recovering, they had taken up their dialogue on Severelle again, Charice blowing smoke-rings toward the window.
“It is metaphorical. It is markedly, unambiguously metaphorical.” Charice had waved her pipe.
“Can you not find space among all the sums and measurements in your head for a little imagination?” Lysande had been well aware that she was goading. “Suppose that the middle space is real and you can step into it, as you might escape this world through . . . I don’t know, a magic doorway.”
“I can suppose no such thing.”
“But imagine. Imagine you could.” She had poked at one of Charice’s smoke rings.
“Not everyone has the luxury of imagining escape.”
“If you cannot imagine it, you can never make it real. Just think, Charice. A whole world where there are no rules hammered into your mind, and you may go around and make your own, or none at all.�
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“Severelle never wrote of such a thing.”
“Well, I am writing it now. On your chest.” She had pressed her lips to the tops of Charice’s breasts, quickly, one after the other. “There. It is inked.”
Charice’s smile had widened, even as she shook her head. Lysande tried to paint it into her memory with fresh strokes as she closed her window now.
She put down the golden quill and held up the briefing for a moment. The last sentence stared back at her, blotted twice: The Council shall rule until the White Queen’s defeat. In the two days that had passed since the tournament, she had considered specifying exactly what “defeat” meant: laying out a clear condition for the end of the Council.
A victory in combat? The capture of the White Queen? Her death? Having heard the city-rulers raise all three possibilities, Lysande had decided on the prudence of a general term, which might be interpreted and reinterpreted as one wished, while she kept a precise definition in reserve.
She examined the briefing carefully. It occurred to her, with a twist of understanding, that she had no one to hand it to for approval.
Raden stomped in with an armful of chests and placed them in the only space on the floor. “Your attendant said these were all to be checked. Garments, shoes, weapons, more garments, medicines, and your scholarly things.”
“Six chests?” Lysande said.
He shrugged. “You can have your clothes washed in Rhime, since you’re all dashing to get there for this meeting. And in case the Rhimese make trouble, there’s enough there for a few weeks.”
Lysande did not have the heart to tell him that six chests would last her for a few months, not a few weeks. She remembered telling Litany that new clothes were unnecessary and jewels out of the question, but her attendant had had a shifty look on her face as she agreed, and Lysande suspected that there were several sets of emeralds and diamonds packed carefully away in lined boxes. The girl was devoted to detail, no doubt.
“I’ve picked someone to lead your traveling guards. Captain Chidney will be useful if anyone causes trouble—or looks like they’re thinking about causing trouble.”
“I trust your choice.” Lysande, who had seen Chidney’s muscles, felt she had reason to.
“You might need her. The range-riders went scouting yesterday and found tracks. Large prints. Like a bear. Some of them swear that they smelled an animal lingering near the trees—and I don’t mean a Rhimese scout.”
Lysande frowned. “Then I hope Chidney is as dangerous with a sword as you are.”
Trying to give the impression that she was checking the luggage, she let her eyes linger for a moment on a chest, half-draped in an old blanket, closer to the foot of her bed. From the ratty covering, she hoped it was hard to tell that the contents included two jars of scale, a spoon, a piece of purple night-quartz, and a vial, each polished and wrapped in its own cloth.
It was not as if she had a problem with the substance. It was a way of coping. If she wanted to, she could throw the chimera scale away at any time, though why anyone would do so when it was packed so neatly . . .
As Raden’s boots echoed down the stairwell, Lady Pelory approached the doorway. Lysande adjusted her doublet quickly, brushed down her sleeves, then walked to her desk and picked up a stack of papers, leafing through them casually just as Pelory stepped inside.
“A pleasure to see you, Mistress of Laws.” Lysande looked up. “The Master of Works’ figures seem clear, and I am content with the envoys’ notes. Yet the Treasurer’s report . . .”
“I am agog to hear what you have found,” Pelory said.
Lysande kept her posture firm as she walked toward Pelory. “Lady Bowbray has omitted a few expenses. Put simply, her calculations appear imprecise, in regards to funding my jail.” The words came out just as she had practiced in front of the mirror—casual, but not so casual as to let the listener forget that an order hung in the vicinity.
“Well, I expected it.” Pelory pursed her lips. “Building a jail for elementals is a complicated undertaking.”
“True. But we are not building one. We are restoring the Prexleys’ disused castle.”
It was no longer an idea, but a real solution. After halting the executions of the elementals, she had begun taking notes of the current state of fortune of each of the great families, investigating their known properties, in addition to their coin, art, and jewels; looking into where money pooled and where it disappeared; finding old castles that some families could not afford to keep. Hand the crown your second estate, and the crown will absolve your debts, her overtures had implied. She was not managing the laws like Sarelin but as herself, a girl who had grown up spattered with ink, who had learned to research, to observe, and to take detailed notes. Surprise the rich, Perfault claimed, and you may steal a march on them before the sun rises on their silver.
She was beginning to see how her scholarship could be used in these dealings.
Pelory hesitated, and Lysande saw her teeter. “Still, an intricate business. One that requires time and calculation,” Pelory said at last.
“That is why we must make sure it is adequately funded.” She looked into those gray eyes. “I would have you go over Lady Bowbray’s books and find out exactly what she is spending the crown’s cadres on. As Mistress of Laws, you have the authority to examine the Treasury, do you not? You will bring the results to me in Rhime.” She liked the way it sounded. You will. The time for dancing with maybes and mights had passed.
Pelory’s mouth had opened, but the last word made her pause. “Rhime, Councillor?”
“Lord Derset tells me your husband has long wanted to purchase Rhimese perfumes, rubies, and embroidered cloaks. I recall that Queen Sarelin would not grant you permission to travel out of Axium while she needed you here. Procure the Treasurer’s accounts for me, and Lord Clifferd will have his trip.”
“He admires the eastern fashions greatly.” Pelory allowed her a thin smile. “I shall see you in Rhime, Councillor. Travel safely.”
Perhaps I’ll need to, Lysande thought. How many people did it take to subdue a bear?
She felt a spark of satisfaction as she watched Pelory leave. Only when the spark faded did she feel the emptiness of the room: the huge, dolorous emptiness that had filled every chamber in the palace since Sarelin died. She gazed out the window, looking for a figure that would not be there, and searching for a crown that had already been stored in the vault.
“I have to go, Sarelin,” she said, quietly, drawing a key engraved with a crown out of her pocket. “But first, forgive my intrusion.”
The royal suite had not been cleaned since the death of its occupant, and though Lysande did not much believe the Axiumite idea that the dead must be allowed to walk in their chambers for a month with the windows closed, until they were calm, she respected Sarelin’s devotion to custom. She found the bedchamber shrouded in dust, lit by a single torch. Leaving the door ajar, she listened as the footsteps of the guard retreated.
The few papers scattered on the table did not help her: treasury bills for hundreds of cadres and mettles, a draft of a letter to King Ferago of Bastillón about trade on the Cordonna River, and a smattering of orders to the envoys, expressed with Sarelin’s characteristic tact (“Tell the Royamese to go and jump in their lagoon”). Her pulse sped. She was not sure what she had expected—a stack of papers sealed with emerald wax, or letters secreted away—but she could find nothing mentioning or even hinting at any “Shadows.” Sarelin croaked those last words at her again, in memory, her translucent body writhing on the grass.
She left the bedchamber and moved into the study, where the sight of a tactos-board made her stop and swallow. Here, where they had spent so many hours together sliding their stone guards, nobles, city-rulers, queens, kings, and chimeras back and forth, she slipped back to the last time they had played the game, sitting by the lake with chalices of
wine on Sarelin’s gift-day, the red vintage sloshing near the rim whenever the queen took a piece. It was the same game they had played more than a hundred times: Sarelin leading the attack; Lysande calculating her moves to retreat across the board, bringing herself to lose so gradually that the queen would believe it had been her own doing. Guffawing, Sarelin had slapped her knee after Lysande ceded her chimera, red drops spraying over the tactos pieces.
Lysande turned determinedly to the desk and began to search it. Sarelin had once said that writing was for people who could not think with their sword, and most of the documents that had been stuffed into the drawers were maps of military movements. A list of ideas for a jubilee parade languished in the top drawer. She gazed at the page, taking in the familiar scrawl, until a scrap of paper in the fireplace caught her eye. Only a blank corner had survived the flames, and it gave off a smell of rose-oil as she picked it up: not an Axiumite scent, but the kind of perfume that tinged paper from eastern Elira.
It had struck her as odd, as a child, how often Sarelin burned papers. If you had made your fame by riding into a wall of fire, expecting to wither to ash, it would make sense to keep away from flames for the rest of your life. But she had seen over the years that Sarelin was quick to light a fire on a hunt and did not hesitate to set her fireplace ablaze. The charge that might have seen Sarelin die seemed to have only made her stronger and brighter—a smoking brand in a sea of dry birches.
A knock sounded at the door to the suite. “Come in,” she called.
Looking up, she found Derset crossing the room.
“Excuse me, my lady.” He bowed. “The steward thought you might want to decide what to do about the Rhimese archers. They have broken two statues of Queen Illora.”
Lysande dropped the paper back into the fireplace. Derset was studying her in what he must have thought was a surreptitious manner. The ropes of tension pulled taut in her shoulders again, and she thought of the strange look that had flitted across his face, yesterday, when she had discussed her plan to fund a jail for elementals instead of returning to Sarelin’s law. She read questions in his face, now. But he was not going to ask them, and she thought of Charice’s empty chamber, and the night the two of them had spent talking under the stars in the forest, so many years ago.