The chiurgeon makes a small needling noise as he puts on fresh gloves. “What of that? You don’t have feelings. Here we are.” The hiss of depressurized air. “Keep still; don’t be alarmed. It’ll hurt. This needs to enter your veins, live in your body. I thought of making an incision and inserting it as a charm, but you’ll complain that you can’t fight then.”
Nuawa doesn’t feel anything, a bite, a pinch at the base of her spine. Then the legs, wriggling as they burrow into subcutaneous fat, striking nerves and veins the way machines strike gold, strike arteries of precious gems. Legs and antennae like surgical razors. It feels enormous, though it can’t be; her sense of scale dilates.
“What was that?” she asks as Rakruthai disinfects her back. The alcohol stings, but much less than the pain of insertion.
“A parasite,” the chiurgeon says, matter of fact. “Half-real in this stage of growth; you can’t see it with the naked eye and you shouldn’t feel it move too much. It gobbles up curses and toxins like nothing else. Food too, so you’ll have to get bigger helpings than usual. Don’t recommend keeping it for longer than ten months—it’ll have matured by then and will be trying to use you as a nest. Reproduces asexually. Little ones, you see, not a litter but an entire swarm.”
“What do they look—” Nuawa bites down on her lip. “Never mind. Can I get up?”
“Yes. Take these after you’ve had your last compulsory arena dose; it’ll replicate the oneiric drugs, but more gently so you don’t go into withdrawal. Twice a day for the first couple weeks, then once a day until it’s finished.”
“Thank you, doctor.” The tablets Rakruthai give her rattle in their jar, tiny discs dyed scarab-green.
“There’s a second letter for you.” He tosses her an envelope. “I’m getting sick of being your unpaid courier. What is this about exactly? I couldn’t open the damn thing.”
Grimacing, Nuawa tears the message out. It must have been witched to unseal only at her touch. The same handwriting, the same pattern of mistakes, though the ink blots are fewer this time. Vahatma again, then segueing into proverbs. The second page is not text at all but diagrams, detailed and drawn with an engineer’s precision. And though she is not one, she recognizes this for what it is. The inner workings and anatomy of the god-engine Vahatma. Copied down from some lost, banned volume.
“Something dangerous,” she says. “Do you want to see it?”
Perhaps it is her tone, or perhaps Rakruthai is that risk-averse, but the chiurgeon waves her aside. “No thanks. Can you tell whoever this is to leave me out of it?”
“I’ll try.”
Nuawa dresses slowly, tender from the operation, and wraps herself in insulating layers. Chamois leather coat, a gift from Tezem. She’s never seen the animal from which it is derived, native to provinces that have always been cold and did not change much with winter. Around Sirapirat, most wildlife and cattle guttered out in a matter of decades. Vast fields punctuated by animal dead, preserved until they were stripped and put to purpose: hide, horns, hooves. What it must be like to be a creature of the wild when the queen first came, every ancestral instinct gone to brittle chaff, every channel of information wrenched perpendicular to its original self.
Occasionally she wonders what rice grown in paddies rather than in glasshouses tastes like, smells like, harvests so plentiful that even the poorest could eat bowl after bowl. She should ask her mother when they can speak again safely. Indrahi would be following the tournament. What does your family think? Proud, Nuawa could have said. She is not her brother, who is so removed from her and her mother, has been since twelve—the youngest a temple would ordain a novice—that he is a stranger. Their faces have never resembled one another’s, their inclinations even less. It is not that she resents his cowardice any more than a hawk resents a mouse, more that she disdains his dishonesty, his piety as an excuse.
The month is unseasonable, escalating to frigid much sooner than usual. Seasons run according to the queen’s temperament and proximity: by all accounts the capital is nearly uninhabitable, an ecosystem built on hostility against human life, not that it keeps her court empty. Quite the opposite, despite the shortage of heating. Everyone wants to be close to the throne.
She veers toward the nearby market, hands cupped over her mouth for heat. In her haste to minimize her belongings in the palace, she’d forgotten some conveniences. Favorite soaps, fruit candies. There’s a confectioner who stocks crystallized mangoes and jackfruits, expensive treats Indrahi would spoil her with when she was little. Perhaps she’ll buy a gift for Rakruthai. It pays to treat one’s doctor well.
The confectioner’s is crowded, gold-drops and gold-cups in boxes, painted wooden cases full of chocolates dusted with tea powder, sugar sculptures everywhere. Loud children and fretting guardians. She picks a generous basket of crystallized fruits, pineapple, jackfruit, tamarinds. Pricey; worthwhile. On the way out, she catches sight of a pet stall. The chiurgeon often complains that he can’t afford to replace his snake, dead of an infection several months past. She’ll bill it to Tezem.
Musky odors waft from the cages and the pens, barnyard smells, damp fur and feed. They are ventilated and diffused by the cold air, though at close quarters they are inescapable, unself-conscious. It isn’t pleasant but she likes the novelty, standing among so much animal mass, their cacophonic warmth. Owls tethered to their perches, a couple of svelte blue-back goats, an albino python in a terrarium. The goats have gorgeous eyes, sideways pupils as alien as they are mesmeric.
“Want to touch them? The goats are of the finest pedigree. Superstitious occidents stay away from them though, but what can you do. Supposedly their demons look like goats.”
Nuawa starts, caught off-guard, mortified to have given childlike admiration to a common animal. “Ziya. This is a dramatic career change.”
“Diversifying business interests, my girl.” He rubs the side of his face. “Animals are kinder to deal with than most people.”
She doesn’t disagree. “I’m interested in the python. Wait, is that for sale?”
Ziya gives a show of his teeth, one incisor missing, from a brawl or age she has never been able to tell. “This lives with me, so no. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
The husky enchants even more than the goats, tall and thickly built, draped in an ombré coat. Deep sienna gradating to a belly like pale fire, the eyes like a clear sky. On an occidental, such irises look peculiar and wrong; on this animal they look right, pretty. She kneels and strokes the dog’s ochre head, the cartilage-in-velvet ears. It regards her, tail twitching, and despite herself she grins. Its body radiates furnace heat.
“Take it for a walk,” Ziya says. “Give it fifteen, twenty minutes. Real exercise if you reach Wat Totsanee. It’s been getting restless and fat, and I haven’t the time. We’ll talk about your snake when you’re back.”
A gift; she doesn’t argue. Nor does she need a leash. At Ziya’s direction, the husky follows, trotting level with her.
In the crowd it navigates, meeting no resistance, picking a direction through and out of the market. Comprehending Sirapirat’s topography more thoroughly than any human native: wolf intellect parlayed, adapted to streets and architecture. Made for one purpose, better suited to the cold than most. Easy to like this creature as it moves alongside her, much easier than any person or child.
Wat Totsanee is quiet this time of the day, the yard scant save for novices shoveling snow, sweeping evergreen detritus. It’s not one of the temples she frequents, its walls enclosing no more than one scriptorium and a prayer hall. Smattering of shrines to large-bellied Totsanee, snake-armed Sravasti, minor icons with the faces of elephants or eagles. Of city temples, this is one of the most minor; Nuawa leaves offerings in the form of currency. Now that her rent for the Matiya apartment is suspended, she has coin to spare. The novices recognize Ziya’s hound. One bhikkuni waves to the dog, brandishing a varnished tibia. This must be some agreed-upon, familiar game; it leaps at once into the chase.
The husky
in motion is a marvel, bulky muscles working beneath umber-and-white, legs built for running put to their paramount directive. The bhikkuni, despite her fleece and billowing robes, keeps ahead for several solid minutes before the hound catches her. Even then she puts up a good fight, wrestling the hound away, keeping the bone out of its reach. Nuawa is vestigial to the event, but she is content to watch from under the canopy of Sravasti’s serpent-limbs.
“Wild things are so magnificent until they are tamed. It robs them, taming, of their vital beauty. What’s left behind is soft as loam beneath sleet, as forgettable. One domesticated thing is much like another. Furniture. Appliances. Ghosts.”
The cold first, before the sight. Senses rouse to urgent stimuli far in advance of cognition, the vanguard: the heart clogging, the blood in roar, the muscles locking into paralysis. Nuawa fights against it as she turns. The Winter Queen, then. Behind the shrine, just out of sight of the novices or the bhikkuni busy with the hound. A hundred sets of calculation fleet through Nuawa, a hundred sets of admonitions and cautions from her mother. They collide with a single image, of the queen in martial regalia, the formal wear of mass executions.
“Your Majesty,” Nuawa says, poised to perform obeisance; bending the knee is a price so miniscule it is not one at all. She does not think of the envelope stashed away in her shirt.
“As you were.” The queen is in softer garb than in Nuawa’s memory, sleeveless fitted bodice and damask robe. Uncovered shoulders, one breast bare. Her flesh is oddly hairless, nearly without pores, the impossible smoothness of steel. Eyes like onyx, black on black on black. “You are the one my general has taken in.”
“Yes, Majesty.” Speed of draw, Nuawa thinks, and the queen alone. Now that the animal part of her has relaxed its hold, flight instinct gone, it is time to evaluate alternatives. What were the stories of assassins, the attempts? Did she not study them the way a student chiurgeon studies mortality’s anatomy? Much of her mind is wasteland, but it is reconstituting. “I serve her, and as she lives in your name so I must live in yours.” It is empty flattery, stalling for time.
The queen’s smile does not show teeth, an expression like the profile of a knife. “Do you? But you have the mien of a wild thing, not tamed at all, not yet.”
All assassins have failed. Nuawa has pored over each case, as much information as she could get, as much as Indrahi could obtain. Some of it was inevitable propaganda, shoring up the queen’s myth and might, an avatar of season and storm—elemental force, unstoppable. Lethal at a touch, a glance. But no matter the embellishments, the queen has survived assassins for longer (four times as, six times as; the number is not easy to pin down, nor is it relevant) than Nuawa has been alive. “I am what I am, Your Majesty,” is all she says.
The royal mouth widens; the monarchic features soften. Tenderness, sudden and inexplicable. “Put your hands here, both of them.”
Where the queen can see them, Nuawa supposes. She flattens her palms on the shrine, at Sravasti’s feet, fingers splayed out. The wood is rime-dusted, though she can’t feel it much—good gloves. The queen leans forward, exhales. Almost at once the wood goes white, Sravasti blanching from brass to glacier.
Time dilates. Frostbite seems a small, inadequate word; Nuawa’s world narrows down to this one point of contact, to the nerves in her hands and the epidermis that serves as their flimsy armor. The body overloads, is confounded, cold translating to high burn as if her ligaments have become coal, blistered and cinderous. The wood creaks, then cracks. She is beyond sensation.
“Lift your arms.” Winter’s voice, hypnotic.
Nuawa does so. The ice shivers and gives; her hands are free. She flexes them, moving her fingers. They are mobile and, when she shakes her gloves off, she discovers her hands intact. Anticipation and knowledge posit grotesque knuckles, blasted nails, late-stage frostbite. But all that has happened is that her hands are red. A piece of the shrine hisses and falls, splinters and icicles. A build-up of frost has covered the ground. Rime has gathered on her coat, in her scarf, on her eyelashes. The world is scintillant.
“Yes,” croons the queen. “This is so fine, so excellent, how strong. I should take you to a place where you may wake and grow, full of puzzles for you to solve. I should take you home, where you can run very fast—see, like that dog you so admire.”
Something under the shrine, a piece of support perhaps, snaps and collapses. “I believe the general was waiting to introduce me to you formally, Your Majesty.” Her hands sting and throb but they are whole, nearly undamaged. Everything works, joints capable, fingertips alert. Nor have her lips fused shut, one more miracle to accompany the rest.
“She’d want formality, ceremony; that is in her breeding. And—” The queen stops. “Lussadh is a creature of supreme intuition, until she is not.”
She is gone without drawing the novices’ attention, exit as abrupt as entrance. Omnipresent, not only in her element but in the world she has created: all of winter her domain, in every sense.
Nuawa collects the husky. She does not stay to explain the property damage.
Chapter 8
Nuawa emerges from her third—and last—oneiric match. Her muscles feel heavy, sore, as though she’d exerted herself physically. She blinks up at the gray ceiling and draws in a sip of the murky, cloying air. She tries to remember the fight and discovers that she has only the faintest recollection. All around her, the other duelists sleep on; one or two have slid down to the floor, splayed and slack as any corpse, breathing shallowly. Her head aches, the tang of drug in her mouth like copper and unripe fruit. The site of injection in her arm has swelled, bruising darkly.
She pushes herself to her feet and staggers. Her knees are as weak as the rest of her. The dose was much stronger than usual, double or triple the strength. She presses the heel of her palm to her brow, finds it damp with sweat. Several attempts later and she is upright, laboring step by step toward the door. Tezem’s personnel are there to greet and congratulate her; she stares at them a moment before waving them off. Everything around her is either moving too fast or too slow. Her blood beats hot and thunderous behind her breastbone.
Outside by the Marrow’s back exit, a carriage from the palace is waiting for her, and within it, the general. Almost without her volition, she climbs in. The upholstery rasps against her skin like sandpaper. Perspiration pools at the base of her throat, behind her knees.
“Congratulations.” Lussadh holds out a golden brooch. When Nuawa simply looks at it, unresponsive, the general frowns and reaches over to pin it under her collar. Hyacinth and snowflakes, as before. The queen’s favorite flower, perhaps.
“To absolute winter, and to your grace,” Nuawa says, mindlessly. Her mind is at once far away and inextricable from her skin. The sensation of being six. The carriage thrums as it sets into motion. She squeezes her eyes shut, forces herself to open them again. The rolling of wheels on road vibrates through her joints.
“Are you quite all right?”
She gazes at Lussadh’s hand on her arm, a hot weight. “I will manage, General.”
Lussadh doesn’t seem persuaded, but she lets go. “I am glad that you made it. I don’t like to bet on the wrong horse, so to speak.”
“And if I make it through to the end, will I not be accused of doing so under the aegis of your favor rather than on my own strength?” Unwise to say, she realizes as she speaks, but her reason is lagging far behind her mouth.
“Not that I could have affected the results at this stage. But even if every step of the tournament had been broadcast in public, and the least citizens allowed to gawk in person, they would nevertheless say that of any winner. If you become my officer, you’ll have to get used to being the subject of wild hearsay and speculation.” Lussadh’s eyes seem unusually huge in the sculpted frame of her face, jade-dark and lustrous. “How was it? I’ve never taken hallucinogens, certainly not ones which work like that.”
“From the inside, it’s very vivid.” She fingers the bro
och; it has not warmed to her skin, remains as frigid as icicles to her fingertip. “I felt the cold, heard the dark, and every contour of stone was brutishly real. It was an... experience.”
The general is studying her closely, must notice the fever brilliance in Nuawa’s eyes, the sheen of exertion. “I suspect I could ask you anything right now and you’d answer. Loosen your collar.”
Nuawa does. Immediately her breathing eases, air entering her lungs properly, pure and cool. “Ask me then, General.”
A faint smile. “Do you respect the opponents you took down?”
“Not particularly. Unsporting of me. I’m often chided for my deficit in sentiment and gallantry.”
“What awaits them doesn’t trouble you? I say this in confidence,” Lussadh goes on, “but I do regret the process a little. They could have been useful infantry, probably, with some discipline.”
“They chose to enter the games much as I did. Were our places exchanged they would waste no thought or pity on me.” Sobriety is returning, fraction by fraction. “Each of us is motivated by ambition, avarice, ego, the need for fame: all the base and ignominious components, our hungry scavenging parts.”
“And hunger is all we are, from the least of us to the greatest.”
The carriage slows as it climbs the steep, winding path to the palace. They disembark at the gate. When Nuawa stumbles out, unsteady, the general catches her. “Let me,” Lussadh says and, with little apparent strain, carries her into the entrance hall.
The attention they attract is immediate and undivided. Nuawa spots Governor Imnesh coming to a standstill, courtiers and diplomats pausing to stare, servants likewise. Not for long. Each moves on quickly, pretending this is nothing unusual. “If they didn’t think you favored me unduly before, now they certainly would,” she says flatly as they head toward their wing. How Lussadh can keep to a brisk stride under this much weight she can’t begin to guess. The general must be even stronger than she looks.
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