Chapter 7: The King in the Tower
The council sat earlier that first night, as the King had promised. It adjourned later anyway.
The harbour question had spawned a child. The eastern lords claimed the ice-road tolls by ancient grant, and the grant had burned in a manor fire forty years ago, and the Exchequer produced a copy and the eastern lords produced a copy, and the copies disagreed. By the time the candles had burned to their sockets, the thaw figures had been argued back to November, and Vladimir pressed two fingers to the table and adjourned a room that had accomplished one hour of work in four.
Ilya gathered his papers as he always gathered them, and read his king's face the way he read all faces, and found nothing there but the flat northern patience of a man who has lost a night. Nothing showed. Nothing ever showed. But the walk to the tower stairs was faster than it had been any night that week, and at the turning the King stopped.
"She will be asleep."
"The tea, sire. Likely." Ilya weighed the candle in his hand, and gave his king the truth the way he gave it, in pieces, each one harmless alone. "Her woman brews it when the council sits late. Bích says the King's absence troubles her sleep."
"My absence." Vladimir stood on the stair with his hand on the wall, and the torch behind him put his face half in shadow, and for a moment the twenty years of iron were simply gone off it, and what was left was a tired man of forty-nine climbing toward a door he did not expect to open on anything but sleep. "Then I will sit earlier tomorrow."
"You said so tonight, sire."
"I said so tonight." He went on up.
Ilya did not follow the stairs. He took the corridor to his own cold rooms above the guardroom, and sat with a single lamp and the wolf-head ring, turning it, and made his report to no one. He had told his king the truth. Every piece of it. Bích's report, the tea, the deep sleep until dawn. A man who told the truth was not a man to watch. A man who told the truth in exactly the pieces that served him was the most dangerous man in any kingdom, and he had been that man for twenty years, and the lamp burned down, and he slept badly, which was rare, and dreamed of nothing, which was rarer.
The council tried again the next night. It failed again. The grain fleets at the thaw would not wait on a charter dispute, and the charter dispute would not wait on the grain, and the King of the Northmen, who had ended a succession war in eleven months by being the most ruthless man in it, sat in a warm room and was defeated by paper. He adjourned at midnight. The tower stairs again. The door again. The bar of firelight spilling on Ilya's boots in the dark below, the soft closing of it.
"She sleeps," the King said, coming down, and there was nothing to ask after in his voice, so Ilya did not answer, and the two men went their ways, and that was the shape of the nights now. A king climbing stairs to watch a sleeping woman. A spymaster walking the long way round.
On the fourth night the council ended early, actually early, before the ninth hour, because the Exchequer fell ill over the maps and had to be carried out, and Vladimir rose at once and left the room while the man was still being lifted onto the biers. Ilya watched him go, and waited the customary interval, and then did not take the long way round at all.
He climbed the tower stairs and heard her before he reached the landing.
She was singing. Not the snow piece, or not only it; the melody had moved somewhere new, lower, slower, a walking song, and her voice came through the door thin and clear like water down stone. He stopped on the landing where Bích had stopped with her candle, and the old woman looked at him, and he looked back, and neither of them said anything about the fact that he had not knocked, had not been announced, had simply come up the stairs to listen.
"The Highness sings every evening now," Bích said at last, very low. "While she waits. It is our way. A woman sings to the door she is watching."
"Is it for the King?"
"It is for whoever the door brings." Bích's face was grave. "Mostly it brings no one."
He went in.
The change in the room was the first thing. She had moved the stand back to the window, and there were flowers on the sill now, or the northern pretense of flowers, dried lavender and some dark evergreen sprigs in a shallow bowl, and the furs on the bed had been folded into a shape that was hers, a small mound-within-a-mound at the center of the great bed's expanse. She sat at the strings with a shawl over her shoulders, and the firelight moved on her, and she finished the verse before she turned her head, which meant she had heard the door and chosen to finish.
"Lord Volkov." She rose. The bow. His bow now, calibrated to him alone, and he felt it land in the same place it had landed the first time. "Is the council ended?"
"Ended. The Exchequer is drunk or dying, we will know by morning." He came to the stand, because the doorway had failed him again. "That was not the snow piece."
"No. A road song. From home." Her fingers rested on the strings. "Women sing it when the men travel. It asks the road to be kind." She glanced up, and the lamplight caught the lameness of her Northern, the care of it. "It asks the road to be short."
"You have made it yours. I heard the change in the middle."
"You have a good ear, Lord Volkov."
"I have spies' ears. They are good for nothing but listening." He heard the thing underneath his own voice and could not dig it out. "How many hearings does the snow piece have now?"
"Thirty-one." She said it without shame, eyes down, tuning a string. "He heard it three times two nights ago. He sat through the whole of it and then said, from the beginning, each time. He said the third hearing was the best and he could not say why."
"The third is always the best. The first is surprise, the second is the map, the third is the place itself." Ilya looked at the sixteen strings, at the lacquer worn pale where two months of her hands had lived. "You could sell that wisdom to the Exchequer."
"Is he truly ill?"
"He is truly old and truly angry. The two look alike." She laughed then, the small laugh, and did not cover her mouth, and the sound of it went into Ilya like a blade going into a wound he had been keeping clean.
He stayed an hour. It was defensible, every minute of it. The courier east needed word of the tolls. The King would ask whether she had eaten. The door draft. The fire needing wood, which he added, kneeling at the hearth like a servant while a queen watched him, and said nothing of the strangeness. She played him the road song through, whole, and told him the words one verse at a time, translating slowly into her careful Northern, and the verse said the road is long but the road has an end, and the fire was warm, and at the door she gave him the bow again, and he went down the stairs and stood in the cold and faced his arithmetic.
The courier east. The tolls. The King's questions. All true. All of it built around one hour in a warm room like walls around a fire, and he knew, now, the thing he had not let himself know on the night of the tea: that he would come up these stairs again, and again, and that the coming was not for the King's questions. That some part of the arithmetic had stopped being arithmetic at all.
Five nights later the council sat late again. The tolls split into three questions. Vladimir adjourned at the second watch and climbed his stairs and Ilya, coming up an hour behind him on a pretext about the courier, met Bích on the landing with the candle, and the old woman's face was grave, and she said the words he had already begun to wait for.
"She took the tea, my lord. The lotus. She sang until the ninth hour and then she took the tea, because the council sat late, and she sleeps like the dead until dawn. Do not wake her. It frightens her, the waking in the wrong place."
"I will not wake her," Ilya said, and heard himself say it, and went in.
The embers were low. The red wash lay along the floor, and the room smelled of pine and dying fire and, faintly, of the lavender on the sill. She lay at the center of the small mound of furs, on her side, hands folded near her cheek, the black hair loose across the white linen. The tea held her down. He stood over her and watched her breathe, and told himself the things he had prepared, the courier, the King's blind spot, the fire in the district, and none of the words worked, because he had already done this once and the once was the whole argument.
He knelt at the bed's edge.
The fur came down from her shoulder in a slow fold. She frowned at the cold air, the small seed-crease between her brows, and turned her face deeper into the pillow. The shift had ridden in sleep; the line of her collarbone was bare, the small pulse in her throat, and the jade pendant lay risen on the fall of her breath. He lifted it aside with one finger. It was warm from her skin.
He worked the shift up from her legs by inches, waiting at each inch, and the cream of her came out of the dark fold by fold, the little thighs, the slit with its soft dark thatch, and he put his mouth there.
He had not done that the first night. He had not dared to want it. Now he bent his head between the thighs of a sleeping queen and licked her slowly, the flat of his tongue up the whole small length of her, and she slept through it, deep in the flower, and her body did not. The little hood at the top tightened under his tongue. Her hips rolled a slow half-inch, a sleep-drunk animal pursuit, and her breath caught at the top of its rhythm, the bird on the branch, and a thin sound started in her throat on each exhale, and his cock was so hard in his breeches that his vision thinned.
"Đợi," she murmured.
He stopped. His mouth was wet with her. The word hung over the bed the way it had hung the first night, and he answered it the way he had answered it before, in her own tongue, the drilled words, softly.
"Sleep, little lady. It is only weather. The road is short tonight."
She stilled into the tea's hold, and he decided what he had decided before, that a sleeping word was not a word, and stood, and freed himself, and wet himself into her with spit and his own leaking, working her small lips open until the head of him could press.
She took him by fractions. The tight wet fist of her closed and eased and made room, clenching down the length of him, and her back arched that finger's width at the deepest push, and her mouth opened on air, and her hand uncurled on the furs, palm up. He fed himself in to the root and stopped there, buried in his king's wife, looking down at her slack sleeping face, the lovely priced-past-all-reports face, and moved.
Slowly. Slowly was the tea's law and his own. He drew out until the head held and her slit stretched pink and obscene around him on her small pale body, and sank back in, and the furs whispered, and her breath hitched at the deepest point of every stroke. He found the small place at the top of her with one fingertip and circled it in time, and her hips began to lift to meet him, the half-inch roll, the body answering what the sleeping mind did not know, and the thin sound in her throat came on every exhale now, uh, uh, soft as falling snow, and he looked at the open palm and did not take it, because taking it was something more than this, and this was already the end of himself.
"Little lady," he whispered. "It is only weather."
"Trời," she agreed, dreaming.
He bent over her, bracketing her with his arms, no weight on her, and fucked her in long slow strokes with his teeth gritted, and the end came up like a tide, and he pulled out at the last second and spent across her belly, four thick pulses on the cream silk and the bunched shift, and knelt in the ember-light, shaking, his funeral spreading white on his king's wife's skin.
He cleaned her with the sheet corner. He smoothed the shift. He drew up the fur, laid the loose hair as it had lain, lifted the jade pendant back to her throat, and stood at the door and looked back, and she had turned toward the door in her sleep, face quiet, hand open.
He went out onto the stairs, and the cold took him, and he welcomed it the way a condemned man welcomes any weather.
The King was coming up. The candle tilted on the wall, the heavy shoulders, the snow melting on the cloak, and Ilya stood one step below him and had his face ready, twenty years of faces ready, before the light reached him.
"She is abed, sire."
"The tea?"
"The tea, sire. She sang until the ninth hour. A road song from her country. Then she took the flower and sleeps until dawn."
Vladimir paused on the step above. The candlelight moved on the stone.
"She sang," he said. "Did she sing the snow piece?"
"No, sire. A new one. It asks the road to be short."
The King stood there a moment, and the torch below them hissed in its bracket, and something crossed his weathered face that Ilya catalogued and priced and filed: not suspicion, never suspicion, but a man's plain ache, arriving on a stair at midnight, at the image of his wife singing to a door that did not open.
"I sat late," Vladimir said, as if to the wall. "The council will sit earlier. It will sit earlier tomorrow if I must carry the Exchequer out myself."
"Tomorrow the tolls, sire."
"Then the tolls will lose." The King climbed past him, and the words came back down the stairs with him, quiet, iron-flat, the voice of a man signing something. "I did not marry a treaty. I can defeat the tolls."
Ilya stood below in the dark and listened to the door of the tower chamber open and close, softly, a king entering a room where everything was exactly as he had left it, down to the last fold of the sheet, down to the last cleaned inch of skin, and the tower leaned a degree further off true, and he turned his face toward the cold corridor and began to plan tomorrow's lie before his foot reached the bottom step.