“Do you like stories, Nuawa Dasaret?”
“As much as anyone, Your Majesty. The human mind seeks out patterns, applies the structure of beginnings and endings so it may hold onto a sense of order and sequence.”
The queen’s eyes, black sclera on black irises, are impossible to read. “One of the first children I took in was from the occident. They told a most peculiar tale, that I’d abducted him and tainted him to all that was young and beautiful. A rose-girl journeyed to find him, but she died at sea. A storm—her relatives believed I caused it. It was a pity; I’d have liked to meet her, that brave little creature.”
Nuawa puts on another layer of wool. “I’ve never heard of this story.”
“Two, three centuries old, and disseminated in a different part of the world. Continents away, where the sun rises at midnight. Forgotten now; the country was annexed. The tale did have one detail correctly. One to wake. Two to bind. Three—a miracle, a mystery. Is it not strange, do you think, that everything arranges itself into a ritual?”
The queen kisses her. It is chaste, nothing like Lussadh’s first, the barest contact of lips on lips. She withdraws and Nuawa abruptly realizes her eyes are not as alien as they initially look; she can discern the outline of irises, the pinpoint pupils like starbursts.
“There,” the queen whispers. “Are you afraid? Do you feel tainted?”
The furs are suddenly heavy, too warm. When she shakes them off she finds she is not cold at all, despite the queen’s nearness. The detail-work of the carriage stands out in acute relief and the queen likewise, every strand of hair as individual as a brushstroke. The fine bones, clavicles and wrists, like gemstones under a fine silvery cloth. “No,” she says, her voice foreign to her, wondering and hushed. Something inside her revolves on an axis she hasn’t known existed, as though all this time it has been hibernating and now at last stirs to animation.
“Good.” The queen takes her hand.
The rest passes like a dream. She is led up, through parts of the palace that are forbidden to all but the general and the queen, forbidden even to the governor. The passages that have been left untouched, gilded redwood panels and naga statues, mirrors tinted indigo and crimson. She watches her images and the queen’s run before and behind them, distorted and cast in red or blue. Her pulse throbs erratically, keeping to a tempo not her own. The queen’s tempo.
They come to a heavy door, ebony burnished with bronze, latched in place by a nest of nielloware serpents. Resinous venom collects in a groove, colorless and odorless. Nuawa stops then, slowed by intuition, by premonition that pierces the fog—the royal-kiss haze—which makes her remote and strange to herself. She blinks, alert, her heart hammering. The queen’s fingers alight on her shoulder, like her mouth the softest of touches. “Enter. You’ll prove yourself. Once is all I require. After that, you’ll be one of mine. Among the most powerful of my empire. It is better to be on that end of the equation, isn’t it, when the equation is the constant of existence; when you can no more escape it than you can escape the air?”
The vipers disengage, hissing in protest, witched-hunger robbed of yet another meal. Nuawa goes through.
Vahatma. She has seen the god in miniature, icons and amulets. This is twice as tall as she, three times as broad. Even the leopard in their lap is larger than life, nearly double the size of a real animal. Both god and beast are untarnished by time, as lustrous as on the day they were cooling down from the mold.
At the god’s feet, her mother. Indrahi leans against Vahatma’s bronze knee, eyes shut as though in meditation. Her hands are red, fingers mangled, some of the nails missing. One of her arms is bent impossibly backward. Her lower lip is split.
Nuawa knows she has gone very still. She should show no reaction and yet she cannot move forward. Aloud she says, “Aunt.” Is her voice too low, too high, distraught or—as she needs to be—indifferent?
“Ah.” The sound is reedy. “There you are. I was always told adopting you as my own would be a terrible mistake, that you’d grow up to be ungrateful and a disappointment. The latter I already realized. The former—tell me, niece, did I raise you so poorly? What have I ever done to you?”
They’ve cleaned Indrahi so the reek of blood is not high and overwhelming. Underneath that Nuawa smells persimmons, sweet and fresh, the fruit her mother keeps near always but never eats. She used to think it was to do with Tafari, a favorite fruit of her dead parent which Indrahi can no longer bear tasting; she’s been forbidden from eating it herself. But she realizes it is for another reason entirely. Her senses, newly honed, catch the acrimonious note. “It’s nothing to do with you, Aunt. There is an equation that governs existence and I must fit myself into it, for preference on the side that gains rather than loses. I can be crushed underneath it, or I can lift myself up, away from the soil and the worms of the earth.”
From behind her, winter’s voice: “Your aunt gave you a piece of my mirror, Nuawa. Even now she will not confess how she came by it or why she concealed it within your heart.”
Indrahi lifts her head with difficulty. “Perhaps I met a Yatpun exile, who knew the mountains that birthed you. And perhaps they told me that once you were as small as any snow-woman, least among your kind, ruled beneath the mountain gods’ iron thumbs. I know you are doing what you do for a reason. But so am I.”
The queen has stepped forward to loom over Indrahi, expressionless, her gown making an iron note against the floor. “You will not provoke me.”
“You had sisters.” Indrahi is looking at Nuawa as she speaks. “Though your kind don’t have parents, the children of permafrost. You emerged from the ice full-grown and you were seized with such curiosity, and the mirror showed you so much you could never have. And now you’re finding its pieces to accomplish your heart’s desire—”
The queen takes hold of Indrahi’s shoulders, lifting her bodily from the ground, an unhuman strength. Then her features ease. She lets go; Indrahi falls with a gasp, a thud. “My error in thinking you would yield something new, here at the last. So be it. Nuawa, the rest is for you.”
The poison, Nuawa thinks, must already be halfway through: her mother is dying, would soon wither and rot from within. She doesn’t know the composition of what her mother fed the persimmon tree, the additional dosage that might have been added after. The way there was always a persimmon. Thrown out when rotten, replaced with a fresh one, a constant in the drawing room. An insurance against what might one day come. “Your Majesty, my aunt might know more. If you would—” Given time, given opportunity, she can alter this trajectory. No toxin is incurable. No damage to the body is irreparable.
“I have listened enough. Your aunt would bring me harm, making you what you are. She did not tell you. Are you not upset?” The Winter Queen makes a hard gesture. “I will tell you that no curse from fratricide ever takes—not under my protection. Go on.”
It is said so simply, even gently. Nuawa stares at the queen, at her mother. Her mother’s head stoops as though in exhaustion, in pain, or it may be a nod—purposeful, giving permission. Forgiveness. Nuawa draws her gun, slowly. This may be the best time to test the queen’s mortality after all, a fractal bullet will kill most things. Even ghosts, even small gods, and what is the queen next to that.
She feels nothing at all, there is only her, alone in her head. The gun is firm in her grip, the metal of it the same as it always has been, agnostic to circumstances and indifferent to emotion. Herself much like it, a human-shaped weapon.
She takes aim. A single shot in the brow, painless, instant. It is a kill, like any other. She imagines she hears the blood pour—a hot brilliant tide, roaring—as she says to the queen, “Will that be all, Your Majesty?”
“Yes.” The queen gazes at the body, at the god’s shell, and then turns away as though repulsed by this evidence of mortality. Her face seems once more alien, her eyes black, black, black. “That will be all.”
Chapter 12
The hour, pre-dawn, is such t
hat Nuawa expects no answer when she knocks on Rakruthai’s door. But the doctor is wide awake, if tousled and irritated. “What do you want?” he snaps as he admits Nuawa. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Half past four in the morning.” Nuawa wonders how she comes across. She dressed immaculately in the palace; she has not been to her mother’s house, for all that it is legally hers now, the greenhouse and the land. On her are the gray and white of winter, the victor’s badge at her collar, a belt whose buckle bears the queen’s emblem. “I owe you half the pay for the parasite.” Albeit it came to no use in the end, unless it might shield her from the sin of matricide.
“Ah.” Rakruthai scowls at her clothes. “You won, I hear. Got what you wanted. You’ll be quite powerful now, I suppose. Your friends must soon be calling on you.”
“They already have.” Yifen, Tezem, and even Ziya. A mesh of acquaintances, some barely recalled, sending her notes of congratulations and thinly veiled requests for favors. Nuawa as carrion, and them as an ant swarm. “I’m surprised you aren’t.”
“I don’t care for politics. You’re going to be neck-deep in that now.” The chiurgeon takes the envelope, opens, counts. There are a few notes extra, but he does not pass remark. “The best thing to do is to keep your head down, survive. But you picked the tightrope. Who knows, maybe it’ll suit you. Most likely it will murder you in your sleep. Literally.”
“A good point. Is there a way to kill myself slowly, on a schedule?”
His head snaps up from the promissory notes. “What?”
There is a remnant of tobacco in the air, a day or two old, most of it already ventilated through the window. It is not something Nuawa would have noticed before. A gift from the queen, Lussadh might say. “A method that’ll kill me in a few years. Let’s say eight or ten. I need a motivation, a deadline.”
Rakruthai looks at her, perhaps trying to divine by the naked eye whether she has been possessed or gripped by dementia. “I’m a doctor, not an executioner or shaman.”
“I can pay you,” Nuawa says mildly. “I happen to have inherited some capital overnight.” The house will have to be sold or rented out in a year or two. She will make an opportunity to go through it first.
“Fuck off.” The doctor shoves the money into a drawer and makes a low, disgusted noise. “I’ll give you an anesthesia. It will stunt your parasite’s growth so it matures in five years instead of one. By next year it’ll be a part of you and removing it will be either painful or fatal. By year five it’ll kill you dead, messily, and it’ll be pure agony leading up to that. Is that what you want?”
Five years. It is hardly any amount of time. But she will be in the queen’s court, part of the queen’s defense, close to the throne. If in that time she can do nothing, then nothing can be done. “It sounds very efficient, doctor. I assume in the meantime it’ll keep me impervious to curses, grudges, and such?”
“It’s in the parasite’s interest to keep you healthy. It’ll also make you infertile.” Rakruthai bends to a bottom drawer, unlocks it, draws out an ivory case. “Take this twice a day. I’ve measured out the dosages and the dates—dosage has to be higher the further along you go. Miss even one dose and you’ll regret it.”
“You’ve always been generous to me. If you ever need anything that’s in my power to give …”
“I’m sending you away with poison.” He slams the drawer shut. “I pity your family.”
Nuawa’s mouth twists. A rictus. “That won’t be a problem any longer, since my only meaningful relation is dead. The funeral should be soon, after a fashion. As ever, doctor, I’m grateful.” You’re doing what you do now for a reason. But so am I. Nuawa, six years old, swallowing that sharp, icy fragment. A reason, she thinks. To have her survive, for the queen cannot afford to throw away any piece of her glass? To have her become a possession of winter? A reason.
Outside the day is crisp. After the queen’s departure the air is growing, if not warm, then less frigid. The general is waiting for her by the carriage. “Lieutenant,” Lussadh says. The general cuts a sharp figure in gray and white, coat fresh and spotless, belt a gleaming black slash. Her hair is tied at the nape of her neck, caught in a platinum band that, like much else, bears the queen’s hyacinth.
She salutes—this requires no learning; she’s seen the gesture many times over since childhood, a hand over her heart to signify devotion to the queen. “You didn’t have to pick me up. I’m just a soldier.”
“I have got your luggage. We’ll be leaving this afternoon. You have settled all your affairs?”
“Some loose legalistic ends, but I don’t anticipate them being an issue. It’s not as though I will never come back to Sirapirat.” Five years, Nuawa thinks. She will mark each day—each hour—with precision, balancing it in an account.
On Lussadh’s urging she looks over her belongings, a couple suitcases, the sum and total of her material life. Atop them, folded neatly, is her mother’s diptych. She pulls it over, props it up in her lap. It is cumbersome. She parts it enough to feel the paint, the canvas. Breathes in the smell. Her throat closes and she thinks that she must burn it, to prove a point.
“I realize you didn’t get along well with your aunt,” the general is saying, “but she said she wanted you to have it, not that you are obliged to.”
“I’ll take it with me.” Nuawa draws in a breath, feigns a cough, clears her throat. Her limbs ache, as though grief translates itself to physical hurt. Nausea at the back of her mouth. “An antique. I’ve never understood why she kept it around, but it might prove valuable one day.”
Lussadh does not ask how she feels or offer her condolences. She wonders whether the general understands her better than most, or if there is a distinction because the general ended the al-Kattan line on her own volition. But the general does put an arm around her. Nuawa says, “Am I going to share your quarters, over there?”
“If you wish, it would be my delight.” The general kisses her palm. “You’re remarkable.”
In what, Nuawa wonders. In reptilian ruthlessness. In the ability to carry out matricide and act like nothing of import has happened, after. Their one common ground then, this deficit in humanity. Someday she will have to find out if the mirror shards are attracted to monsters in the making or if the glass makes them that way, sanding off empathy and compassion. “I’m glad you think so, General.” She presses her brow to the window, smudging it. A new day. Not even winter can stop the passage of sunrise, the warmth, the brilliance it brings. In another part of the world, spring or summer is beginning.
Nothing is forever. Even winter can end; even the queen can fall.
Nuawa puts the diptych away. To Lussadh she says, “I look forward to serving the queen with you, General.”
A slow nod. Another kiss, this time on her lips. “To her eternal reign.”
“To your grace,” Nuawa says against the general’s mouth, “and to absolute winter.”
About the Author
Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, and year's best collections. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.
Copyright © 2017 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN 978-1937009-62-5 (TPB)
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