Chapter 6: The King's absence
The war room smelled of tallow and cold iron. Maps lay open across the long table, weighted at the corners with daggers, and the harbour question was still unresolved after two hours of argument.
"The southern grain fleets will not wait past the thaw," said the Lord of the Exchequer, tapping a coastline with a knuckle. "If the quotas slip again, we lose the season."
"The quotas will not slip," Vladimir said. His voice was flat, and he was not looking at the coastline. He was looking at the window, where the snow had thickened against the glass in the last hour.
Ilya stood at the edge of the lamplight, as he always stood, and watched his king not read the document in front of him. Three times tonight the document had been turned to a new page. Three times the king's eyes had gone back to the window. Ilya had made his living off such small arithmetic for twenty years, and the sum of this one was easy.
"Sire," he said, "if I might. The eastern courier has not yet gone out. It is a walk past the tower in any case. I can look in on the household on the way and report."
Vladimir's jaw moved slightly. "Report what?"
"Whether the queen is well. Bích sent word at supper that the Highness did not eat."
The table went quiet. The Exchequer looked at the map. Vladimir looked at Ilya for a moment longer than the room was comfortable with, and then he nodded, once, and picked the document back up, and Ilya went out through the side door into the cold.
The tower stairs were dark and smelled of pine. At the top, the guard bowed him through, and Ilya pushed the door open on warmth, on firelight, on the low silver sound of sixteen strings.
She had moved the stand to the hearth. She sat with the silk over her knees, the firelight on the black fall of her hair, and she was playing the snow piece, quietly, the way a person plays when they think no one is listening. She did not sing. She only played, and her lips moved faintly with the melody, shaping the words without breath behind them.
Ilya stopped in the doorway. He had meant to cough, to announce himself, to be the spymaster. He did not do it.
He stood and listened to the end of the verse.
She turned her head, and saw him, and her hands stilled on the strings, and she rose at once with her hands folding at her waist, the whole southern etiquette snapping into place like a fan.
"Lord Volkov." Her Northern was careful and soft. "Is the court well?"
"The court is loud and cold and wrong about everything, Highness." He bowed. He found, to his own quiet irritation, that he meant it. "The King sent me. Bích reported you did not eat."
"I ate a little." She looked toward the table by the window, where a tray sat with bread torn into very small pieces and most of it still on the cloth. She followed his eyes and then lowered hers. "The room is quiet without him. That is all."
"He is two corridors away," Ilya said. "Arguing about grain."
"He has been two corridors away every evening this week." There was no complaint in it. It was stated as a fact of the world, like the snow, and then she added, almost inaudibly, "The council takes long."
"The council is men who like the sound of their own grain." Ilya came further in, because the door draft was reaching her, and he closed it behind him, and that was the first mistake, though he did not yet know it. He should have stayed in the doorway. He should have delivered his message and gone. "May I tell him you are well?"
"You may tell him I am practicing." She sat back down at the stand, because it was evidently acceptable to him, or because she was shy of standing watched. Her fingers found the strings again without looking. "He said he would hear it a hundred times before the thaw. He has heard it perhaps eleven."
"You count."
"It is the only thing I have of his to count." She said it simply, eyes down, tuning a string a half-tone, and Ilya felt something shift in his chest that he did not have a name for and did not want one.
He had seen beautiful women before. It was his profession to know what beauty did to men, to price it, to use it, to warn his king away from it. He had watched her kowtow on frozen stone and felt nothing but recognition of ritual. He had watched her lean on the king's shoulder in court and thought only in terms of faction. He had catalogued Kettrin's walks and Varo's posts and the clerks' abandoned ledgers with the detachment of a man tallying a slow fire in a distant district.
Now he was standing in a warm room with firelight on her profile, and she was humming a note to find its neighbour, and her sleeve had fallen back from her wrist, a small pale wrist, nothing, a bird's bone, and he understood Kettrin's knee, and Varo's gate, and every window in the courtyard.
"So," he said, and his voice was not quite level. "The piece. May a man who knows nothing of music ask something of it?"
"You may ask anything, Lord Volkov." She glanced up at him through her lashes. "You are the one who told me to rise from the floor. I have not forgotten."
"That was the King's doing."
"That was your knowing." Her fingers rested on the strings. "At the kowtow. You said the word 'ritual' to him, loudly enough for me to hear it in my own tongue. My heart was on the stone and I heard it, and it was the only kind word in that hall."
Ilya stood very still. Twenty years of watching, and he had not known that had landed anywhere at all.
"The question," she prompted, gently, because he had gone silent.
"The last verse." He heard himself ask it before his better judgment arrived. "The one about spring. When you played it for him, did you mean the words, or only the form?"
She looked at him for a long moment. The fire popped on the hearth. Outside, the snow came down without wind, patient, white, unknowing.
"I meant every word," she said. "A song is a treaty too, Lord Volkov. One does not sign it falsely."
Something in his chest finished its shift and settled, and he recognized it now, because he had written reports about it in other men. It was the exact weight, priced exactly, of a thing a man could lose a kingdom over.
"I will tell the King you are practicing," he said, and turned to the door.
"Lord Volkov." He stopped. She had risen again, and she bowed to him, a small formal southern bow, deeper than a maid's, shallower than a queen's to a subject, exactly calibrated and offered for the first time. "Thank you. For the word 'ritual'."
Ilya went out onto the dark stairs and stood there in the cold with the door shut behind him, breathing pine-smell, and made himself face the arithmetic.
He had asked the last verse question. No spymaster asks that question of a queen. He had stood too near the stand. He had let her thank him, and he had wanted it, in a way that had nothing to do with dispatches or treaties or the wolf-head ring on his hand.
Below him, through the stone, the war room murmur went on, and above it, faint, the sixteen strings began again, the slow falling-sound of snow, and he knew the King would ask him, on the way back, whether she had played.
He stood on the stairs and decided, one breath too late, what he would lie about, and understood that whatever he chose, he was already choosing it as a man with a wound, and that his king would never know, and that he would never stop.
He went down.
The next night the war room had grown a fourth map and lost an hour. The harbour question had split into two questions, and both of them were worse, and the Lord of the Exchequer had begun to repeat himself, which was the surest sign in any council that the night was lost.
Vladimir ended it with two fingers on the table.
"Adjourned. The quotas hold at the thaw figures. Kettrin, ride the east road tomorrow and see the ice for yourself." He gathered no papers, because Ilya gathered his papers, and he said, without looking up, "You looked in on the household last night."
"She is well, sire. Practicing her music. She eats a little, Bích says. She counts the times you have heard the piece."
"She told you that?"
"She tells me very little, sire. I infer the rest. It is my trade."
Vladimir looked at him a moment, that long flat look that made clerks confess to things they had not done. "She counts," he said, as if to the table. "Adjourned."
Ilya bowed and went out, and the cold of the corridor took him, and he walked the long way past the guardroom because the short way went by the tower stairs, and he had spent all day not walking past the tower stairs, and he lost the argument with himself at the turning, as he had known since morning that he would.
Bích met him on the landing with a candle, unsurprised. "My lord. The King sends again?"
"He does not send. I come. Is the Highness abed?"
"An hour past." The old woman's face was grave in the candlelight. "She took the lotus tea tonight. She does not sleep well when the King sits late, so her women brew it from home. It is our own way. A flower of our country, steeped. She sleeps like the dead until dawn, and dreams of the palace, she says." Bích lowered her voice. "Do not wake her, my lord. It frightens her, waking in the wrong place."
"I will not wake her," Ilya said.
The words came out of him smooth and ordinary, and he heard them, and he heard what they were, and he went in anyway.
The chamber was dark but for banked embers, a low red wash along the floor. The great bed stood like a hill in the middle of the room, furs mounded, and at its centre, so small the bed seemed built for someone else, she lay asleep.
She slept the southern way, on her side, hands folded near her cheek, and her breath went in and out so quietly that he had to stop and listen for it. Her hair had come loose from its braid across the pillow, black silk on white linen, and the fire's faint red found the line of her jaw, the small ear, the pale nape where the braid had loosened. The jade pendant lay on the furs at her throat, rising and falling.
He stood inside the door and did his arithmetic, and for once in twenty years the arithmetic refused to come.
He had a life of reasons. The treaty. The King's blind spot, growing weekly, the whole court's blind spot, Kettrin and Varo and the clerks, a slow fire in a distant district, and here was the fire's source, sleeping, unguarded, a thing of state left on a pillow like a crown on a chair. Any spy in any capital would call it opportunity. He had used the word opportunity about women before, and meant nothing by it, the way a butcher means nothing by the word meat.
But that was not what had walked him up the stairs, and he knew it, and the knowing did not stop his feet.
He crossed the room the way he crossed any room, silently, boots set down heel first, twenty years of habit. He stopped at the bed's edge. She did not stir. Her lips were parted a little, and at some slow interval she breathed a syllable that was almost a word, and it was not his name.
He put his hand on the fur at her shoulder, and drew it down.
The sleep held her like a hand. When the cold air touched her arm she frowned faintly, a crease between her brows, small as a seed, and turned her face deeper into the pillow, and did not wake. The shift slid a little with the fur. He watched the fold of it catch at her waist, and he stood there with the fur in his fist like a man holding a rope over a drop.
He thought of her upright, saying: a song is a treaty too. One does not sign it falsely.
Then he sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress gave under his weight, and she swayed toward the dip of it, toward him, an inch, and lay still.
The slide of silk was loud in the quiet. He gathered it up her legs with two fingers, slowly, an inch at a time, waiting at each inch, and she slept through all of it, the cream of her thighs coming out of the dark fold by fold, the small dark thatch at the junction of her legs, the skin there soft and creased and wholly unguarded. She was so small that her knees did not reach the place his knees would be. He laid his palm on her belly, over the shift, to feel her breathing, a cat's sleep, deep and even, and under his hand she was warm as bread.
"Không," she said, in Vietnamese, in her dream, small and slurred. "Người ta thấy mất..."
"They will not," Ilya answered her, under his breath, in her own tongue, using the words he had drilled from the dispatches. "Ngủ đi, tiểu thư. Không ai thấy đâu"
She stilled. The tea held her down like a grave holds.
He worked the shift up to her ribs. The firelight lay along her body, the little waist he could have circled with two hands, the small breasts with their dark nipples flat and soft in sleep. He bent and put his mouth on one, and it tightened against his tongue, a small hard bead, and she made a sound in her sleep, not a word this time, a low note in the throat, and her hips moved once, an animal thing, the body answering what the sleeping mind did not know.
He was hard enough that it hurt. He had been hard since the fur came down.
He freed himself with one hand. The thing he was about to do stood up out of his breeches ugly and unavoidable, and he looked at it, and at her, and understood with perfect clarity, as one understands a map, what he was, and did it anyway.
He wet himself at her with spit from his fingers, twice, working it into her slit until the small lips slid and opened, and she slept through that too, deep in the lotus, her breath never breaking rhythm. She was tiny there. He had seen the King's cock in the bath years ago and thought then that no small woman could take it, and the answer to that old question was sleeping in front of him, and he did not let himself think whose answer it was.
He pressed in.
The head of him met resistance and pushed, and her body opened around him by fractions, gripping, a wet tight heat that closed on him like a fist, and she frowned in her sleep and turned her cheek on the pillow and let out a long slow breath through her nose, and her hand uncurled from her cheek and lay open on the furs, palm up, an offering she did not know she made.
He fed himself into her an inch at a time, the way the King's dispatches had described the King doing it, he realized, and hated himself, and went deeper.
She took him to the root. She was so small that her body had to make room for all of him, and it did, clenching and easing, and at the deepest push her back arched off the mattress a finger's width and her mouth opened and no sound came, only air, and her brow smoothed, and her hips settled back down with him inside her.
"Đợi," she murmured, the stop-word, in her sleep, to a man who was not there. Or to a man who was.
Ilya stopped moving. The word went through him colder than the tea that held her. He knelt between her legs in the dark with his cock buried to the hilt in his king's wife, his muse, his funeral, and the word hung over him, and he decided, in the last coin of himself, that a sleeping word was not a word, and moved.
He took her slowly. Slowly was all he could manage and all the tea required. He drew out until only the head held, watching her slit stretch around him, pink and dark and obscene on her small pale body, and sank back in, and the furs whispered, and the embers ticked, and her breath kept its rhythm except at the deepest point of each stroke, where it caught, a tiny hitch, a bird startled on a branch, and settling.
He put his fingers on her and found the small hooded place at the top of her slit, and circled it with one fingertip in time with his strokes, and her body began, without her, to answer. The fist of her eased and flooded. Her hips began to lift to meet him, a slow sleep-drunk roll, half an inch, an animal pursuit of the feeling, her head turning on the pillow, her lips parting, and a thin sound started in her throat with each exhale, uh, uh, soft as the snow sound of her song.
"Little lady," he whispered in Vietnamese. "Sleep. It is only weather."
"Trời," she agreed, muffled, dreaming, agreeing with everything.
He bent over her then, bracketing her small body with his arms, careful to take no weight on her, and fucked her in slow long strokes, and looked down at her face below his, slack with the flower's sleep, lovely past all his pricing, past all his reports, and felt the end of himself coming up like a tide.
When it came he pulled out, at the last second, with his teeth gritted, and spent across her belly and the bunched shift, four long pulses of it, thick and white on the cream silk, and the relief went through him like a blade drawn out of a wound.
Then the room was silent again, and very cold, and he was still kneeling between the legs of a sleeping queen with his seed cooling on her.
He cleaned her with the corner of the sheet, carefully, learning the lesson of the wet shoes, the snowball, the court's eyes, that nothing must be left to find. He smoothed the shift down her body. He drew the fur back up to her shoulder. He found the stray fall of her hair and laid it as it had lain, and he looked at her a long moment to be sure the bed remembered itself, and the bed did.
At the door he stopped, because a spymaster always stops, and looked back. She had turned in her sleep onto her other side, facing the door he was leaving by, one hand open on the furs, her face quiet, dreaming of the palace.
"My funeral," Ilya said to her softly, in her own tongue, testing the words Ilya drilled him nightly, and went out.
On the stairs the cold hit him and he welcomed it, and two flights down he met the man he had been avoiding all day, coming up with a candle, heavy-shouldered, snow on his cloak.
"She is abed, sire. Asleep an hour."
"The tea?"
Ilya had prepared for the question. "Bích says she sleeps poorly when the council sits late. Your Majesty's own household herbal brews her the southern flower for it."
Vladimir stood on the stair with the candle, and the light moved on his face, and he said, "She sleeps deeply, then."
"Like the dead, sire, until dawn. Her woman swears to it. She will wake with no memory of the night, only the dreams her country gives her."
"Good." The King said it plainly, a man glad of one clean fact in a long night, and he climbed past Ilya toward the door of his wife's chamber, and Ilya stood on the stair below him and felt the whole dark tower lean a degree off true.
"Sire." The word was out before he could weigh it. "If I might. She asked after you. She said the room is quiet without you. Perhaps the council could sit earlier."
Vladimir paused on the step above him. The candle tilted, and light slid down the wall.
"You are the second tonight to tell me the council is long," he said. "She said so as well?"
"Her very words, sire."
"Then it will sit earlier." The King went on up, and the door of the tower chamber opened down the corridor, spilling a bar of firelight, and Ilya stood in the cold stairwell and listened to it close, softly, a man entering a room where everything was exactly as he had left it, down to the last fold of the sheet.