The Winter Duke

by Claire Eliza Bartlett

  “I do know what’s in store for me,” I said without much hope. “Sleep. I’m going to sleep for days.”

  “You’re not,” Aino said. “I’ll bring you breakfast at five. As you eat, Eirhan will recount the rest of the night’s happenings, summarize correspondence, and make appointments. At eight, you’ll meet with your cabinet, at nine with the clerics, and from ten until lunch you’ll meet ministers in order of their current support for you.”

  “And then at lunch I can sleep for days,” I suggested.

  “Sigis has requested that you lunch with him. No, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “This schedule stinks of Eirhan,” I complained.

  Aino didn’t even blush. She would have made a great politician. “I had to step in after your outburst with the foreign girl, and that meant making concessions. Eirhan was ready to defect after your little stunt and overthrow you for some kind of a parliament.”

  “Where is the ‘foreign girl’?” I asked. Aino had whisked me from the crowd so efficiently that I hadn’t had the chance to think up a good way to offend Inkar. Maybe leaving without her would do.

  Aino shrugged. “She’s not my problem.”

  We entered the royal wing. It was quieter than I’d ever heard it, a combination of the late hour and the near-death state of my family. The silence was strangely peaceful. After the hubbub of the rest of the day, I could pretend that the whole world had stopped, that I had it to myself for a little while.

  Well, to myself and Aino. And Viljo and the other guard.

  Aino unlocked the door to my rooms and ushered me in. “Help me with my coat,” I begged as she shut the door. “I’m wasting precious seconds.”

  She tugged me out of my coat and began to loosen the elaborate dresswork that kept me standing. I was tired down to my bones. It hurt to move, it hurt to stand still—it hurt. “Maybe Farhod will have the curse figured out tomorrow,” I said, sending a short, mental prayer to whatever god might be listening.

  “There’s not much use in thinking like that,” Aino warned me.

  “I know. Get me my nightgown, won’t you?”

  As Aino went into my bedchamber, I staggered over to the chair before the fire and collapsed into it, kicking off my shoes. The cold air prickled the bare skin of my calves, but I didn’t care enough to fetch the blanket that lay over my desk chair. My eyes slid closed.

  The door unlatched. I tilted my head back as far as it could go and spoke. “If you’ve come to assassinate me, now’s actually a really great time.”

  “I would rather wait,” Inkar said.

  My eyes flew open. She leaned over me, close enough that I could see the unevenness of the kohl around her eyes. I jerked up and narrowly avoided colliding foreheads. “What are you doing here?” My heart pattered. I wasn’t used to other people in my rooms. Not since Nari had grown old enough to coat the inside of my sleeves with glass.

  Inkar’s not dangerous. But I looked at the curve of her mouth, and I knew I was wrong.

  “I am the grand consort now.” Inkar came around the chair so that I could see her properly. “Are these not my chambers as well?”

  I brought my knees up to my chest, tugging my shift over them. “There are special rooms for the consort.” Mother’s rooms.

  “I will not stay in the rooms provided for me. They are too cold.”

  Aino appeared at the door to my bedchamber. She held my nightgown up like a shield.

  “We’ll have a servant build you a fire,” I said.

  “They are not grand consort rooms.” Inkar folded her arms. Her biceps and triceps twitched. “People will look at me, and they will say, that is the girl who is not allowed to be grand consort. She is stuck in a side room while Sigis takes the largest suite. While Sigis competes in the coronation trials and flirts with the grand duke.”

  The door to my rooms opened again. Three servants entered, carrying a chest and a few miscellaneous items. “What’s this?” I asked.

  “My belongings. I travel light.” Inkar nodded to the servants as they set her things down, then pulled a pair of clippers from her belt and clipped three pieces of an armband from her arm. She dropped the metal into their hands, and the servants bowed low, then retreated without saying a word.

  “What—you—” Outrage blossomed in my chest. “You can’t stroll in here like it’s your rooms. You can’t bribe my servants!”

  Inkar waved a hand. “I am not bribing them. I am thanking them for their service.” Her mouth twitched in a bemused smile. “My wife, in my country, married people spend their nights together.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said impatiently. “Biological imperatives and so on. But we…” I stopped, and a blush crept over me. Biological imperatives were the last thing I needed to think about right now.

  “If I am so horrible, you can cancel the trial,” Inkar pointed out.

  “No,” I said, too quickly, and a sly smile spread across her lips. My face was so hot it was cooking all intelligence out of my brain. “I… don’t want to jump into, um, things. All at once.”

  Inkar’s expression softened a little. “I do not wish to sleep with you—I mean, that is all I wish.”

  We were silent as I contemplated the best way to hide under my chair without looking like a complete fool.

  Behind Inkar, Aino briefly covered her face with the nightgown. “Your Grace, may we speak in private?”

  “I will leave you a moment.” Inkar picked up her chest as if it weighed nothing and squeezed past Aino into the bedroom.

  Aino’s nostrils flared, but she stepped into my antechamber and shut the door. Switching to Kylmian, she said, “We should move you to different lodgings.”

  “No.” I’d slept in this suite every night for sixteen years. My notes were here. Farhod’s dissection illustrations. My portfolio for the university.

  “If she stays, you might not be safe,” Aino said.

  “If I move, she’ll follow me. She’s not here because she likes my rooms best.”

  “We can stop her.”

  “Aino, we can’t make her too angry—” I began.

  “We’re making her angry?” Aino’s jaw was tight, and red stained her cheeks. “She flaunts that sapphire as though it will get her anything she wants. And you’ve always known that there are consequences to letting the wrong people into your rooms.” Like my family.

  The problem was, there were also consequences to keeping Inkar out. “She’s all that separates me from Sigis. And if she convinces her father that she’s been used and snubbed, he could call it grounds for war. We can’t just throw her out. We need to move carefully.”

  “You need to show her that she doesn’t have power over the palace,” Aino argued.

  “She wants to stay the night, and there’s not much we can do to refuse her,” I said.

  Aino flapped the nightgown. “Why not say no?”

  “I’m tired. I don’t want to engage in politics; I want to sleep. Besides, I’m supposed to irritate her, which means spending time with her. Maybe I’ll snore. Or bore her to death talking about biology over breakfast. What could go wrong?”

  Aino’s lips thinned, but she threw my nightgown at me anyway, hitting me in the face. “Have you considered that she might be worse for you than you are for her?”

  I pulled my shift off over my head and slid the nightgown on. “If she kills me, then I don’t have to get up before sunrise. I’ll take it.”

  “That’s not funny, Ekata. She’s not a member of your court, but that doesn’t make her trustworthy,” Aino said.

  That I knew. “I’ll call if I need anything.”

  Aino shook her head but leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. “Anything at all.”

  I staggered to my bedroom door. Inkar sat cross-legged on my bed, wearing a plain nightgown that I recognized from my wardrobe. She’d unbraided her hair, and it fell, thick and dark, to the tops of her bare knees. The light streaks wound like ribbons through it. She held a thin sheaf
of papers in her hand and played absentmindedly with a corner as she looked up. That blasted smile was back on her face.

  I went to the other side of the bed and slid in, making sure to keep at least two people’s worth of space between us. “What are you reading?”

  “It is poetry about the North. I thought it might prepare me for coming here.”

  I wiggled under the quilt. “And did it?”

  Inkar exhaled her soft laugh. “Not even a little.”

  She set the papers on the table next to the bed—the table I usually used—and lay back. Her hair fanned out around her. The candle flickered low in its sconce.

  I cursed Inkar silently. Despite how tired I was, my blood buzzed. Strangers in my room had always meant peril.

  I focused on the curve of her nose and tried to calm my breathing and gather my arguments. “Look,” I tried. “It was very nice to marry you. And then meet you. But… why are you here?”

  The guttering light illuminated a slice of Inkar’s cheek, and moonlight poured a softer hue over the rest of her, catching in her eyes and on her shoulder. She tilted her head in puzzlement. “I married you.”

  “Actually, I married you. Aren’t you… bothered that you came for my brother and ended up with me?”

  Her smile grew surer. “I do not like to complain about an improvement in fortunes.”

  It was hot. Maybe we were running low on ice. It was hot, and I couldn’t look her in the face. I flipped onto my back and said solicitously to the ceiling, “Don’t you want your own space? Time to think?”

  “I want to see what I have gotten myself into,” Inkar replied.

  I bet you don’t. “It’s a lot of shark paste.”

  She laughed again, a full, bursting laugh. It was the kind of laugh I heard only from Aino, and it sounded like a song meant for my ears alone. “It’s not funny,” I protested half-heartedly.

  “I know you have had a hard day—”

  That turned the song sour. “Don’t patronize me,” I snapped.

  Inkar’s laugh faded. We lay in the awkward silence Eirhan wanted me to cultivate. I had to admit it wasn’t particularly satisfying.

  “I only wish to talk,” Inkar said at last.

  “Talk if you want.” I closed my eyes. “I’m going to sleep.”

  It was the perfect rude statement. But Inkar only shifted, rustling the furs. “I cannot believe you live here.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “A palace made of ice. People under the water. Cold roses that grow before our eyes.” Her voice was… wondering? I’d spent all evening listening to half-baked compliments and veiled complaints. But Inkar seemed interested in this place for itself.

  “The citizens Below aren’t really people,” I said, opening my eyes.

  “It is incredible. We hear the stories from my father’s company, but I always thought they were… a metaphor. I never understood how someone could live here.”

  “I can’t understand it myself sometimes.” What with my father and my brother trying to murder each other for the throne of the tiniest independent nation on the continent, things could get a bit crowded. But no one else had the city Below.

  “I think it is wonderful,” she said.

  I snorted. But when I looked at her, her eyes were big and serious. She had little black freckles in them.

  How could I dissuade her from wanting to be grand consort? “You know the ice never melts, right? And I won’t buy you horses.”

  “The ice never melts at all?” Inkar said.

  “We’d sink if it did.”

  “What happens in the summer?”

  Now I had her. “We don’t have summer. We have days when we can go out, and days when we can’t. Now go to sleep. If I wake up for breakfast, you wake up for breakfast.”

  “I do not think I can sleep,” Inkar said.

  “Well, read or look at the stars or something.” I’d disembowel her if she riffled through my notes.

  “I want to know about you,” Inkar said.

  Did she? Did she want to hear about my dissection drawings, the studies of bear and wolf and deer skeletons from the mountains?

  I wanted her to be interested. But I knew what Aino would say. She was using me. Just as I was using her. It was best not to get too close.

  So I took a breath and thought about the answers I wanted to give and the answers I wanted to keep for myself. “I’m my father’s fourth child. I’m sixteen; I speak Kylmian and Drysian and Farduk; I like to read—”

  Inkar smiled gently. “I know all these things. I read about you when I found out I was to come to Kylma. These things are boring.”

  “Well, they’re me,” I said, stung.

  “No. They are part of you. But what kind of a bride would I be if I did not know them already?”

  “A bride my brother was supposed to marry?” I suggested.

  “I want to know who you are, not how many languages you speak.”

  This was my cue to talk about bones until she threw herself out the window from boredom. I swallowed. “You first.”

  Did Inkar hesitate? “All right,” she said, quickly enough that I couldn’t be sure. “I hate my sisters and brothers.”

  “All twenty-four of them?”

  “You see? You know my boring facts,” she said.

  Thank you, Eirhan. “You couldn’t get along with any of them?”

  “We spent my childhood competing for my father’s affection,” Inkar said.

  “How’d you do?”

  “I am expendable enough to be sent as a hostage and important enough to start a war over if you kill me,” Inkar pointed out.

  “So you’re saying things could be worse,” I said.

  She laughed as though I was charming and clever and funny. People didn’t laugh at me that way. Something warm curled in my belly. “Your turn.”

  “Well, I don’t get on with my siblings, either,” I said.

  “Vying for affection?”

  That and trying not to get murdered in the line of succession. “Books make better friends.”

  “What kinds of books?”

  “Biology, mostly. The city Below.”

  Inkar turned to lie on her back, tilting her head so she could see through the clear window. “It is fascinating,” she said.

  “It’s important.” The city Below and the city Above needed each other.

  We lay silent for a few moments. My eyes drifted closed. I had to sleep, especially if a vengeful Aino was going to throw me out of bed in less than five hours.

  “I want to know everything about it,” Inkar said. “I want you to tell me.”

  That needed to be the last thing I wanted to do. Yet it wasn’t.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kill me,” I groaned as Aino pulled the furs away.

  “Breakfast,” she said. Her tone was like a bucket of water. “It is ready in your antechamber.” Inkar sat up, pulling on the blankets and sending a cold wave over my skin. Aino’s glare settled on her. “Please don’t let us disturb you further, my lady.”

  Inkar wiped her eyes and stared blearily at Aino. Aino’s mouth became a thin gash in her face, and I slid out of bed before actual sparks shot from her eyes.

  Aino pulled me into my robe, tugging the sash so tight I thought I heard a rib crack. Then she steered me by the shoulder into my antechamber. “So thoughtful of you to put on a nightgown,” she grated out as she shut the door behind us.

  “I never took off my nightgown,” I said.

  Someone in the corner coughed. Farhod stood by my desk, next to a covered plate. Eirhan waited next to him, radiating rage. His eyes gleamed in the dawn with something a little too close to hate.

  “That bed could fit four people. We didn’t even touch.” I was babbling. “She wouldn’t go away. I was tired—”

  “Your breakfast is getting cold, Your Grace,” Eirhan said as Aino turned up the lamps and started the fire.

  Breakfast was bread, porridge, and cold smoked fish. A
s I took a bite, Eirhan shoved a slip of paper under my nose. “Your order of the day,” he said. “Sign at the bottom.”

  I tried to focus my bleary eyes on the first item. Breakfast. How cute. Next—

  “Your father met with the council each morning to discuss the affairs of the duchy. This morning… you’ll have a lot to talk about. Expect a discussion of Sigis, the coronation trials, and parliament.” Then I would have private meetings with my ministers. “You’ll need to convince them that their priorities are your priorities. That’s your first step.”

  “What if their priorities aren’t my priorities?”

  Eirhan’s eyes lifted heavenward ever so slightly. “This is politics, Your Grace. Pretend. Soothe the ministers and they won’t revolt in the next twenty-four hours. Then we can focus on the twenty-four after that.”

  It seemed shortsighted. “So I make my ministers happy,” I said, even though they’d probably be happiest if I abdicated. “Then—” I frowned at the next item.

  “You make Sigis happy,” Eirhan said.

  I snorted a laugh. “Not possible.”

  “You were his sister for two years. Yet you do not know how to appease him?” Eirhan said.

  “He doesn’t get appeased,” I argued. “He demands more.” Being around him was like slipping under the ice of the moat, a shock that ran my blood hot and cold at once, a pressure that sat on my chest and refused to leave. I could think of only one thing when Sigis was around, and that was getting away from him as quickly as possible. Doing what Sigis wanted was worth avoiding the unpleasantness he could unleash, and he knew it.

  “Sigis was furious at your little trick, and now that he stands in the coronation trials, he won’t back down. But as long as your father might be revived, it will be better for Sigis to be your consort than our duke. Everyone sees his actions as a power grab, but if you convince him he can get what he wants without defeating you in the trials, he’ll let you win.”

  He’d let me win the right to marry him. Joy.

  After lunch, we had the second trial, the one to win the approval of the gods. “The archimandrite will probably ask you for money. Give her what she wants.”