The trials were about winning favor, and I would have to start by winning the favor of my wife. Most grand dukes persuaded their spouses with expensive gifts and wooing and compromises until the trial marriage was over. Of course, I was supposed to get my wife to say no, which made it rather difficult to win. All the same, Sigis didn’t even have a wife, so I was one up there. Until he plucked a candidate from a delegation or tricked me into marrying him somehow.
The second trial revolved around the favor of the church. I attended church on Wintertide mass, and only under duress, but surely the archimandrite would favor me over Sigis. The third trial earned the endorsement of Below, and the final contest was of the people—and by people, Eirhan meant my council. If they declared that the people had accepted me, I won.
“Why would the ministers ever choose Sigis?” I asked. “An Avenko has to hold the throne.”
“Sigis is an Avenko,” Eirhan said.
“What?”
“So he will claim. His great-great-grandmother was Ishrana Avenko. She sent a son to Drysiak for marriage, and, well, here we are.” He shook his head. “Really, Ekata. You ought to have known that.”
My blood grew hot. I’d been grand duke for one day, and I was already sick of Eirhan chastising me for what I didn’t know. I tried to keep my voice calm, as Father would. “Surely his blood’s too weak for him to be a true Avenko.” For him to hold the balance.
“That is something the duke Below and the archimandrite will determine,” Eirhan replied. “Just—win the people’s trial. If you end up tied for trials, that will be the deciding factor. Now”—he turned back to his pile of papers—“we have an hour before dinner, so you may go. Might I suggest a bath?”
“Maybe you’re smelling yourself,” I muttered, resisting the urge to raise my arm and check under it.
I’d hoped Eirhan wouldn’t hear, but his fed-up expression said otherwise. “I’ll sit next to you at dinner to assist you with some of the more advanced political discourse. Your wife will sit at your left hand. Aino will pour your wine. Sigis, of course, will take the space of next importance, on the other side of Inkar.”
“That sounds like a terrible idea,” I said.
“To place him elsewhere would be a snub to his status,” Eirhan replied. “Please believe that I’ve thought this through, Your Grace.”
I barely kept myself from saying something uncivil. I had to choose my battles, and Eirhan would be much warier of me now.
“Before you go”—Eirhan removed a pouch from his belt—“I requisitioned something from the treasury on your behalf.” From the pouch he pulled a glass jar so small it fit into his palm. It was filled two-thirds of the way with a pink-tinged liquid that shimmered like stardust in a sunrise. “Your father always makes a display for the delegates. He usually takes raw magic and refines it on the spot, but we’ll give you some of his prepared stock.”
Magic. For the second time today, someone was giving me magic. I took it, trying not to seem too eager. “How?”
“Kamen demonstrates the three types of magic,” Eirhan said. I knew them well—constructive, destructive, and transformative. “I gave you a transformative refinement. Focus on something simple, like putting color in the floor, and remember that you have to touch whatever you transform. Think about it while you get ready; the clearer you are in planning, the better it will go. And remember—magic is temporary, but the effects can be permanent. So don’t get creative and break the palace. But making people think you have the grand duke’s secrets will make them think you’re the grand duke, long before the trial of the people.”
“Right.” I tried to take the little jar.
Eirhan’s fingers tightened around it. “And don’t tell anyone. Let it be a surprise.”
Aino opened the door. “Your bath has been ordered.”
I tucked the jar into my pocket. Magic. I knew how it worked in theory, but Father had never let us practice. My palms itched to try it.
Aino hadn’t seen the exchange and was still busy fretting over my newlywed situation. “Honestly, Ekata. Married?”
“It had to happen sometime.” And as long as I avoided Sigis, I could put up with whomever I got instead. At least she was pretty, and the right gender.
“After careful thought. After meetings. After you know you’re going to marry someone you like.”
“That’s not how political marriages work.” No one in my family married for love. We didn’t even know what love looked like.
“You only think that because your parents—” Aino stopped and tucked a strand of auburn hair behind her ear. “You should marry for friendship and support. Not because you were told to, and not because that girl gives you an advantage. Especially since you’re a political gain for her.”
I should have been glad that Aino disliked Inkar already. We could conspire together to get rid of her. But my mind lingered on Inkar’s dark hair and red smile, on the thought that I needed more friends and not more problems.
As I bathed in my rooms, I recited the names of the brideshow delegates. Aino had to help me only twice. Then I donned a blue dress, unadorned except for a fur lining. As she put up my hair, I said, “Shouldn’t my dress be a little… fancier, for a wedding celebration?”
“Don’t worry, dear. No one’s going to look at your dress. They’re going to look at these.”
She draped me in every diamond and sapphire she’d looted from Mother’s wardrobe. Bracelets around my wrist, earrings at my ears, a glittering belt. “You’re going to look like a duke,” she promised me as she hung a hexagonal pendant the size of my palm around my neck. When I turned, little flurries of light danced around the ice walls.
Aino handed me a pair of white doeskin gloves, and I slid them on. I grabbed the jar of refined magic, and we went out to meet my bride.
Inkar waited for me right outside the royal wing, speaking softly to the two guards that flanked her. She wore a dark green vest and trousers with a white tunic beneath. Half her brown hair had been braided against the side of her head; the other half hung free. She seemed so warm set against the cold walls of the palace. Warm and dangerous. As if she would burn me if I touched her.
I wanted to take off my gloves and find out.
Aino took my arm and pulled me back. A moment later, I realized why. Two axes, edged with gold, hung from Inkar’s belt. Gold threaded through the steel in a snaking pattern.
Inkar brushed the tops of the axes. “Do not worry. They are ceremonial only. No good for taking off heads.” Her red smile was anything but reassuring.
“How did she get those in here?” Aino muttered in Kylmian.
I shrugged. I doubted Inkar would use her golden axes on me. “What does mistress of the Emerald Order mean, anyway?” I could start the process of killing our relationship with poor etiquette and descend from there.
Inkar looped her arm through mine. “It means I control a thousand men on horseback.”
“Who doesn’t?” I muttered. Apparently, every suitor of mine had their own army. “Are you ready?”
“I am very ready,” she replied, and we began to walk. Viljo and my secondary guard fell behind us, and Aino followed them. I could feel Aino’s eyes on our arms. But when I moved to pull free, Inkar tightened her grip. I coughed and pretended I was trying to shift my coat.
My stomach grew heavier with each step. I was about to walk into a dinner where all eyes would be on me. Everything I did would be dissected the way I dissected tundra mice in the laboratory. I could recite bones and tendons and magical remedies all I liked, but here that would do me no good.
Inkar didn’t seem put off by my silence. She gazed at the walls, taking in the relief carvings and the tapestries that told the history of the duchy Above. “These are amazing.”
“What?” I pulled my thoughts back from their anxious fixation on the dinner to come. “The winter roses?”
She reached up to touch one. I grabbed her wrist and was rewarded with a surprised—and per
haps affronted?—look. “They’ll freeze your fingers, even through gloves,” I warned her. “They’re not like the ice of the rest of the palace.”
“Is that why they do not melt near the fire?” she said. “Are they magic?”
“The legend goes that some duke Below gave them to some duke Above, and now they’re an invasive species.” They grew into all the corners, twisted around pillars, and ran over the windowsills. “There’s a superstition that they bloom when the family is in danger.”
“They are blooming now.” Her glove traced the outline of a three-quarter bloom. “For your father, perhaps?”
“They’re always blooming. Of course people see something in them.” I pulled on her arm to get her to walk again.
I could feel her observing me. “Perhaps you are always in danger.”
She had a point. Being a member of my family had often resulted in untimely death. All the same, I wished I hadn’t said anything. “I don’t follow superstition.” I followed facts and rules, and even magic had those. Even if they were as light as temporary madness, permanent outcome.
Inkar followed their trail along the corridor. “I am part of the family now. Will they bloom when I am in danger?”
“Ah.” Guilt flashed through me, leaving me hot. “Maybe we’ll find out after the trial marriage.” After you hate me and reject me and hopefully never want to see me again.
If I even survived that long. If I could even make it to the end of dinner—or to the start of it. Now that we’d exited the royal wing, we started to pass people who stared at me, at Inkar, at our linked arms. I could practically hear the gears turning in their minds. Nausea rolled through me, and I stopped to swallow my fear.
Aino’s hand landed on my back, soothing through layers of wool. Then it moved up, and she pretended to adjust my hair, whispering, “You must continue. They’re looking for signs that you’re weaker than him.”
Him. Sigis, Eirhan, or my father? What did it matter? “I don’t think I can eat.”
“Come.” Inkar began to walk again, pulling me along behind her. “The creatures around you are nothing but toads. You do not have to fear them.”
“If they are toads, what does that make you?”
It should have been the perfect insult for Eirhan’s anti-Inkar campaign. But Inkar smiled as though I’d been genuinely funny.
“I am a serpent,” she said, touching a hand to her breast, where the golden serpent coiled. “I eat toads for breakfast.”
“I’ll tell the cook,” I said, and she laughed again. My stomach unclenched a tiny bit. Inkar would sit by my side at dinner, and she didn’t seem easily offended. Eirhan would sit on my other side and keep me from committing the worst political and social sins. I would survive this.
The translucent ice doors of the audience chamber showed a blur of color as delegates moved about within. Sigis was in there somewhere, as were each of my ministers. “Everyone in that room hates me, don’t they?” I asked Aino.
The angry lines in her face softened. “You are the grand duke,” she said. “They will respect you as their host. Don’t be too grateful to anyone who is kind. They are not kind out of pity or love.” She reached for my shoulder. Then her eyes flitted to Inkar, and she stepped back. Aino nodded to the guards. “I’ll be right behind you.”
The guards bowed low to me and opened the doors. We entered the flood.
A hush spread like ice crystallizing over an open hole in the lake. Heads swiveled our way, eyes settled on Inkar and me, on the way we stood together. Then, in a flurry of movement, the servants at the side of the room knelt. They bowed their heads and placed one fist against the ice floor, as Eirhan had done the night before. As they moved, so did the crowd. The delegates and brideshow candidates knelt in a wave; kings and emperors bowed at the waist, hands over their hearts.
I let my gaze linger on my kneeling ministers. Eirhan studied the ground like a good subject. Reko glared defiantly. Yannush’s beard quivered as he whispered to Annika, and Annika’s round face was serious. Bailli rumbled at Olloi. Itilya looked calculating.
And Sigis, hand on his heart, kept his eyes on Inkar. The storm cloud on his face told me he was going to be a problem.
The crowd knelt for a heartbeat, then a heartbeat more. I slipped my hand into my pocket and out of its glove and fumbled for the jar. How had Father managed to begin his displays so elegantly? At last, I popped the cork and felt something cold and smooth flow out onto my hand. The lights guttered, and someone at the back of the hall gasped. It was working.
They wouldn’t be impressed for long if I couldn’t make the magic do anything more. I spotted the tapestries that hung from the walls, filled with my favorite subjects. Concentrate, Eirhan’s voice whispered. If there was one thing I could concentrate on—
I went to the wall and touched a magic-soaked hand to the tapestry. Something stirred in my belly, as though the magic drew out a bit of me as it worked. Hyathae. The seathorn bush on the edge of the tapestry began to grow, spreading branches until it nudged a wolf. The wolf tilted its head up to howl. An owl winged in front of the moon, feathers shimmering.
The magic spread to the next tapestry like wildfire, and a bear lunged, scraping cloth claws into the air. Two foxes started a game of chase, leaping from tapestry to tapestry, and a stag lowered his head to charge a hunter’s horse. The horse reared and sent one of my long-dead relatives flying. Snow and shadows shifted as animals rushed over them; trees grew beyond the edges of the tapestry to spread silk branches into the air.
When the tapestries stilled and light flared in the room, the applause that followed seemed earnest. But the tapestries hung in tatters, with bits of silk torn loose from one spot and tangled in another—a permanent effect of my temporary display.
I motioned for the crowd to rise. Before we could begin milling about, a loud tapping silenced the hall again.
The tapping came from an iron staff striking the floor. The bearer of the staff was an old woman who leaned on it aggressively as she approached. Her robe was white and silver, spun from silk, and electrum chains wound about her neck, dotted with sapphires as pale as the ice of the city streets. The top of her staff glittered with pearls, and rings adorned her white gloves, two to each finger.
Her eyes were as fierce as a hawk’s and as cold as the snow, and they focused on me. Whatever she thought, I couldn’t decipher, for her face was as cragged as the mountains around us, her skin weathered by snow and salt and wind.
She was the archimandrite, and she was, in theory, my equal.
While she looked as though her voice ought to come wheezing out of her, she spoke clearly, with a strength that made every spine straighten. “The tribute to your father is appreciated,” she said, and I doubted I imagined her icy tone. “However, magic does not make a grand duke. The coronation trials do.” She raised her voice so that no one in the hall could mistake her. “As is my duty as archimandrite, I officially declare that the coronation trials have begun.”
The delegates began to murmur. I forced myself not to look at Eirhan. We’d known this was coming. All the same, sweat prickled my palms.
“Every grand duke must prove her mettle and willingness to serve. The coronation trials are the chance to prove her ability beyond all other contestants and give us the ruler we need. The coronation trials will conclude when the grand duke has won the will of her wife, the will of the gods, the will of Below, and the will of her own people. Who stands against her?”
I was oddly glad that none of my siblings were here. They’d try to win through elimination, after all. Father had killed all his siblings before his trial, so he’d gotten a minister to stand in—none other than Minister Reko.
But I wasn’t so lucky. With the clicking of iron-clawed shoes on ice, Sigis came forward. And even though I’d known he would, my stomach twisted until I was sure it sat upside down. He smiled a smile of cold hate. Don’t throw up.
“I will stand,” he said.
Deleg
ates turned to one another. Their muttering took on angry undertones. Sigis was already too powerful a force in the North. If he won the coronation trials, his gains might make him unstoppable. My ministers regarded this shifting landscape, but no one interfered—not even Reko, who looked as though he wanted to proclaim revolution the moment the trials were declared. They had to support my bid for the trials. I was the throne, and the throne was mine.
“By what right do you stand?” the archimandrite said.
“By the right of ancestry. My great-great-grandmother was grand duke of Kylma Above.”
The muttering grew. The archimandrite spoke over it. “Can you prove your bloodline?”
“I can,” Sigis called back.
Eirhan motioned to the guards. Their halberds came down with a crack. Silence rippled over the crowd.
The archimandrite waited a moment longer, then said, “You will submit it to me tomorrow. And tomorrow you both shall be judged by the gods.”
Her iron staff tapped three times on the ground, and she walked back to the edge of the room. The court surged to its feet, and the muttering began anew. They clustered together—normal, I knew, but more sinister now that I also knew they were all talking about me.
“Well, that’s a start to my reign,” I said.
Inkar looked at me. “What did she mean, you must win the will of your wife?”
Eirhan appeared before I had to spin a reply. He’d found the time to wash his hair and put on a royal-blue coat that bulked up his weaselly arms. “Your Grace,” he said with a blank expression that might as well have said he dealt with coronation trials all the time. He nodded to Inkar. “Your Grace. Have you everything you need?”
Inkar inclined her head. “I dislike my rooms,” she said.
It was the first she’d said to me about it. I shrugged. Eirhan’s expression did not waver. “I’ll send a maid directly. May I present the minister of the hunt?”
Minister Itilya approached. She reminded me more of a tree than a person—taller than anyone else on my father’s council. Her thin face and ice-white hair made her seem less human than the rest of us. She eschewed fashionably long coats for garb that left her legs free in leather trousers and scuffed brown boots, and she wore a black tunic with a sapphire-and-diamond pin in the shape of a rose. I’d met Itilya a handful of times, mainly when she’d negotiated for the delivery of certain animals to Farhod’s laboratory for study.
The Winter Duke Page 9