Chapter 11: The Recipe in Ink
Dawn came grey through the frost on the windows, and Vladimir had not slept. He sat in the chair beside the door the whole night through, his sword across his knees, watching his wife breathe under the furs. She had spoken in her sleep twice, in her own tongue, soft words he half understood now. His hand still remembered the weight of hers, the first time he had taken it, and how her fingers had not closed around his because she was too far under.
At first light he rose, sheathed the sword, and unbarring the door, found Bích already in the outer chamber with a tray of warm water. The old woman's face did not change when she saw him there, but her hands slowed on the tray.
"Send for Mena," he said. "Bring the recipe. The written one, in your own hand. I will have it read to me here, in this room, before my wife wakes."
Bích set the tray down on the dresser with care, as if the porcelain might crack if she hurried. "The recipe is only a flower, Majesty."
"So I have been told. By you, by her, by everyone whose word I am tired of taking." He pulled the chair away from the door and sat again, squaring his shoulders in it. "Fetch it."
She went. He listened to her footsteps down the tower stairs, and then to his wife's breathing behind the bedcurtains, slow and even and utterly without waking. Eleven hours, Bích had admitted. She bars the door from within and walks out into the frost, and the little queen sleeps like something buried.
Mena came first, red-cheeked and out of breath from the kitchen stairs, clutching a paper with flour still on her wrist. Then Bích, with the recipe in her own neat hand, and Ilya behind them both, uninvited, his pale eyes moving from the chair to the door to the King's face.
"You kept the watch," Ilya said. Not a question.
"I kept the watch. Nobody came. Nobody scratched." Vladimir gestured at the dresser. "Read it."
Mena looked at Bích. Bích nodded once, a small precise motion, and unfolded her own paper as well. Mena began, her voice thin in the cold stone chamber.
"Lotus flower, dried, one blossom for every two cups of water. Water to be boiling, not merely hot. Steep covered, the time of nine paternosters. Honey if the Highness refuses the bitterness." She paused. "That is the whole of the first page."
"The second," Vladimir said.
Bích's paper, when she read it herself, was in Vietnamese, and she translated as she went, her voice level and unhurried. "Southern lotus only, from the lake at home. The northern flower is wrong, it makes the head heavy and the stomach sick. Steep it longer if the night will be long." Her eyes came up from the page. "That is all it says. It is my mother's recipe. Her mother's before her."
Vladimir leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at the papers, not at the women. "And the dose. How much does she drink."
"One cup," Bích said.
"Every night."
"Most nights, Majesty. As the Highness told you herself."
He sat back. The fire in the hearth had been fed in the night by nobody, and had burned down to a red jaw of coals. He thought of the conversations of the last weeks, the small cracked door of his suspicion, and how it had opened onto nothing. A flower from a lake ten thousand li away. A dose measured in cups. Nine paternosters of steeping.
"Has anyone in this Citadel fallen ill from it," he said. "Anyone who drank it, ate the flower, touched the water."
"No, Majesty," Mena said. "I brew it only for the Highness. I taste the steam sometimes when it rises. Nothing."
He looked at Ilya. Ilya stood by the window with his arms folded, and his face was doing what it always did, which was nothing at all. "You arranged the courier visits," Vladimir said. "The fire. The tolls message. I gave you the chance to tell me why, and you told me it was arithmetic. Sleep is arithmetic. A tired queen sleeps, a King sits late, nothing to be found."
"I found nothing," Ilya said. "You watched all night. You watched me come to the door and talk to Bích about the morning water."
"I did." He held the look a moment longer than he needed to. Ilya bore it the way stone bears rain. "Then it is a flower," Vladimir said, and heard his own voice settle as the word closed the door behind the suspicion. "It is a flower, and it is harmless, and my spymaster is innocent of everything but an overstocked imagination." He rose. "Bích. She wakes with no memory of the night. Only dreams of the palace."
"That is the tea, Majesty. All the southern ladies say so."
"Then I will not take it from her." He said it before he had fully decided it, and heard it land in the room like a dropped coin. "She is afraid of the dark here, and of the silence, and of waking alone to a foreign ceiling. The flower gives her the palace in her sleep. She may keep it." He pulled on his gloves. "But the door stays open from tonight. Unbarred. If the tea is the reason she hears nothing, then the tea is the reason nobody hears her, and I will not have a sleeping woman behind a barred door in a castle full of men who look at her the way mine do."
Bích bowed her head. Ilya's face did not move, but his thumb passed once over the wolf's-head ring, a small motion, quickly done.
"Where is she," Vladimir said. "It is past dawn and she is not awake."
"She woke at first light," Bích said. "Before all of us, I think. She took her red cloak and went down. There was a cat in the courtyard, Majesty. It has been coming to the kitchen scraps since the frost began. I saw it from the window when I went for the water."
The tower stairs were dark and smelt of tallow and old smoke, and Vladimir took them at a pace that made Ilya, following, lengthen his stride. At the bottom, past the guardroom where two men snapped to attention, the inner courtyard opened under a sky the color of dirty wool. The snow from two days past had been trampled to grey ice by boots and cartwheels, refrozen in the night, and the colonnade pillars threw long purple shadows across it.
She was in the middle of it, in the red cloak, bareheaded, her black hair loose over her shoulders because she had not waited for Bích to pin it. And on the ice in front of her, tail up, ears forward, sat a cat. It was a great lean grey thing with a torn ear and the scarred face of a creature that had spent its whole life winning fights, and it was watching her with its whole body.
Vladimir stopped in the colonnade shadow and did not come forward. Ilya stopped beside him, and neither man spoke.
Quỳnh Chi was crouched low, the hem of her cloak spread on the ice, and she was speaking to the cat in Vietnamese. Her voice carried in the cold, clear and small.
"Đến đây. Đến đây, mèo xấu. Nghe này, ta nói cho ngươi nghe." Come here. Come here, ugly cat. Listen, I have something to tell you.
The cat did not come. It blinked at her, slow, insolent. She laughed, a breath of sound that steamed in the air, and stretched out one finger and drew it across the ice, a slow line, and the cat's head dipped to follow it like a hawk's.
"Ngươi không vâng lời," she told it solemnly. You do not obey. "Ta là hoàng hậu mà. Người ta phải vâng lời ta." I am a queen. People must obey me. She paused, and her voice went softer, almost secret. "Nhưng mèo thì không. Mèo chỉ vâng lời ai tốt với mèo." But cats do not. Cats only obey whoever is kind to them.
The cat took one step forward on the ice, claws clicking. Another. Then it sat again, having made its point, and Quỳnh Chi covered her mouth with both hands, laughing behind them, her shoulders shaking under the red wool.
Vladimir stood in the shadow and felt something move in his chest that he had no name for. He had watched her kowtow on stone. He had watched her tremble before his whole court. He had watched her weep behind a door. He had never watched her laugh alone with nobody watching, giving her whole face to a scarred kitchen cat, and the sight went through him like a blade going through water, no resistance at all until it was deep.
She held out her hand to the cat, palm down, fingers curled, the way her own court ladies had taught her to offer a hand to a rank she could not name. The cat sniffed it. Then, with the casual brutality of its kind, it butted its scarred head hard into her knuckles and held there.
She made a sound, a small high sound of delight, and sat down entirely on the ice, cloak and all, heedless of the wet, and took the great ugly head in both her small hands and scratched under its torn ear. The cat's eyes shut. A roar of purring came off the frozen courtyard, absurdly loud.
"Ngươi bị làm sao vậy," she whispered to it, scandalized and thrilled. What is the matter with you. "Sĩ diện m đâu rồi. Một con mèo to mà kêu như vậy." Where is your dignity. A great big cat making a noise like that.
She noticed the King only then. Vladimir saw the moment of it, the freeze of her shoulders, the instinctive drop of her eyes, the old tide of shyness coming up in her. But the cat was in her hands, and she was on the ground, and rising in the full ceremony of her court was not possible from here, and something in her seemed to weigh all of it and set it down.
She looked up at him across the ice, still kneeling, the cat purring against her palms, and she said, in her own tongue, but slowly, in the way she used when she wanted him to follow, "bệ hạ ạ, nhìn kìa. Nó cho ta vuốt." Your Majesty, look. It lets me pet it.
"I see it," he said in Northern, and then, laboring, in her language, in the accent he had built in secret over five weeks of lessons with Ilya: "It is a soldier. Look at the ear."
Her whole face opened. She turned to the cat, astounded, as if the information were new. "Nghe chưa," she demanded of it. Did you hear. "Nhà vua khen ngươi. Vị tướng mèo." The King praises you. The cat-general.
She beckoned him. It was not a court gesture, not the two-handed imperial invitation of her homeland, which Bích had once described to him with silent disapproval. It was one crooked finger, the way one calls a cat, and she did it without knowing she had done it, and Ilya made a small sound in his throat that might have been a swallowed laugh.
Vladimir crossed the ice to her. Up close the cold had stung her cheeks pink above the pale skin, and her breath came in little clouds, and the jade pendant at her throat had slipped sideways as she crouched. He lowered himself with the stiffness of a man twice her weight settling onto frozen ground, and the ice creaked under him, and the cat opened one eye, assessed him, and returned to Quỳnh Chi's fingers.
"Ta gọi nó là gì đây," she said, half to herself, half to him. What shall I call it.
He tried the words out in his head. The Vietnamese for grey. The Vietnamese for soldier. He had only the words his lessons had given him, and the lessons had been made of dispatches and poems, not cats.
"Chiến binh," he said. Warrior.
She looked at him for a long moment, and then her eyes went bright, and she said it back, tasting it, "Chiến binh," and the cat, hearing itself named, stood up and walked in a circle and sat again, and both of them laughed, the King's laugh low and rusty from disuse and hers ringing off the pillars, and somewhere above them a window filled with faces and neither of them saw it.
Ilya watched from the colonnade, and his pale eyes were on her hands in the grey fur, on the way she leaned her small weight against the King's shoulder without ceremony, and he thought, with the flatness of a man doing sums, that the tea had given her this morning. That the flower from the southern lake had bought her the sleep that made her brave enough to sit on ice and name a cat before her husband. That the King had just decreed the door would stay open, unbarred, from tonight.
Ilya turned his collar up against the wind and began, quietly, to think again.