Chapter 8: Little sparrow turn kitty
The weeks after the tolls were defeated brought a change into the tower that no one had ordered. It began small. It began with humming.
Quỳnh Chi hummed while Bích brushed her hair in the mornings, a low thread of the road song worked into something quicker, lighter. She hummed while she ate, and the kitchen girl Mena reported up through Sova that the little queen had begun to finish her bowls entirely, and once had asked for a second one. She hummed coming back from the window.
And one grey morning, with the fire fed and the council not yet summoned, she skipped.
It was not a queenly motion. It was a child's motion, a small springing step from the hearth to the window and back, the hem of her silk swinging, her heels barely touching the boards. Bích stopped folding furs and watched her with her old mouth pressed flat, disapproving and, somewhere under it, not disapproving at all.
"The Highness will trip."
"I will not trip, auntie." Quỳnh Chi sprang the last step and landed facing her, breathless, the pink high on her cheeks. "The floor is even. I have counted every board."
"You counted the floor."
"I count everything now." She said it lightly, and turned to the window, and the lightness held, which was new. The tea helped. She had told Bích this once, plainly: the lotus flower gave her nights without dreams of the palace, and mornings without the weight, and she woke now like a bird, at once, glad. Whether it was the flower or the thirty-seven hearings of her snow piece or the King coming up the stairs before midnight three nights in seven, she did not examine. She was busy being glad.
The dolls came out the same week. Four of them, small figures of carved wood and silk from home, court ladies and a mandarin and one tiny drummer, packed in the bottom of the lacquered cabinet beneath the winter cloaks. She had carried them across the sea and not unpacked them in two months, because queens of her rank did not play where servants could see. Now she laid them on the fur at the foot of the great bed in a half-circle, facing the fire, and sat cross-legged before them in her plain morning robes, arranging their tiny sleeves.
Bích looked at the little court assembled on the King's own bed and said nothing at all, which was her loudest speech.
"They are deciding the tolls," Quỳnh Chi explained, moving the mandarin forward. "This one argues for the eastern lords. He has a burning copy of the grant. This one is the Exchequer." She tipped a small wooden lady gently onto her side. "He is ill again. He is always ill. It is very convenient for everyone."
The door opened on the word everyone, and the King came in with snow on his shoulders, and she did not hear it, because she had begun to make the mandarin speak.
"His Excellency submits," she said, in her light court voice pitched high for the doll, "that the road is long, but the road has an end," and she moved the wooden figure in a stately bow toward the fire, and then, because the council needed a king, she glanced around for a suitable one and found the actual King of the Northmen standing six feet away with his gloves still on.
She went still. The doll stayed in her raised hand. The color came up her throat in one slow wave.
Vladimir looked at the four small figures ranked on his bed, at the fallen Exchequer, at his wife kneeling in her robes with her hair half-loosed. A lesser man would have laughed. A courtier would have made it gentle and unbearable. Vladimir crossed the room, sat down on the edge of the bed the way he sat at council, and pointed at the drummer.
"Who is that one."
She blinked at him. Then, carefully, in Northern: "He is the drummer of the royal band. He is very small but he is the bravest."
"The bravest." He took the drummer between two fingers and held it at eye level. It was shorter than his thumb. "And what does the bravest say about the tolls?"
"He says the tolls should pay for his drum."
"Sound policy." He set the drummer back in her palm, and his hand withdrew, and something in his jaw had loosened by a degree that only Ilya would have priced. "I did not know you kept a court in my bed."
"Your bed has the best light." She said it simply, and then heard it, and hid her face briefly behind the mandarin, and he heard her laugh into the painted wood.
He stayed a quarter hour. He gave a judgment on the tolls dispute as rendered by a wooden court, ruling for the drummer, and Quỳnh Chi made the whole little court bow to him in a row, and when Bích came to clear the furs the King had risen and gone to the window as if he had only stopped there to look at the weather, and no man in the Citadel would ever learn otherwise.
After that the room changed its habits. The dolls stayed out. She played with them in the afternoons, and sometimes in the evenings before he came up, and once, on a night when he came early and found her mid-scene, she did not stop and rise and bow at all. She looked up at him from the furs with the mandarin in her lap, and patted the bed beside her, and the King of the Northmen sat down on his own floor cushions like a guest at a small and terrible court.
It was on one of those evenings that the meowing began.
She had been to the window at dusk, watching a cat from the kitchens cross the white garden in a straight, businesslike line, and when Vladimir came through the door she turned from the glass and greeted him as the cat had seemed to greet the world.
"Meo." A soft sound, rising at the end, her head tilted.
He stopped with one glove half off. "What is that."
"Meo." She said it again, gravely, as though it were an honorific. "It is what the cat says. Mena's cat. It visits the garden."
"I know the animal. It yowls at the guardhouse." He pulled the second glove free. "You meow at your king."
"You were late," she said, as if that were the whole of the arithmetic, and meowed again, softer, and the sound went through him in a place no dispatch had ever reached, and he crossed the room and sat down heavily and said nothing for a while, and the corner of his mouth did not move, and both of them saw that it did not move, and she filed this away as her greatest victory of the winter.
From then it was theirs. She meowed when the door opened, once, like a sentry's call. She meowed, low and complaining, when he was called away before the fire was warm. On the best nights she meowed as he lifted her, small and light as she was, from the window seat to carry her to the bed, and he had begun to answer it, once, gruffly, in a growl pitched so low it was barely sound, and she had laughed until she had to sit down on the furs.
Ilya came up on the courier's pretext in the third week of it, and the meow was waiting for him too.
He had climbed the stairs rehearsing the tolls message, and the door was ajar, and he heard it before he saw her: a soft "meo" from somewhere near the floor, followed by her low voice in Vietnamese, explaining the duties of the drummer to a new member of the wooden court. He came in, and she looked up from the furs, and her face did the thing it did, the small bright opening, the lack of any guard at all, and she greeted him.
"Meo, Lord Volkov."
The word went into him the way her laugh had gone into him, blade-first, and he stood in the doorway with his papers and could not have spoken for a moment for the life of him. She was kneeling among the dolls with a shawl over her shoulders. She had made the wooden Exchequer lie down again. She was, by every report he had ever filed, the most carefully guarded woman in the Citadel, and she meowed at him.
"What is that?" He made his voice dry, and it came out drier than he wanted, not warm, never warm, he would not allow it warm.
"The cat's greeting." She rose, and gave him the bow, his bow. "You have not been greeted by it?"
"Never."
"Then you are honored. It is rare." She said it with complete gravity, and then her eyes betrayed her, going bright at the corners, and he understood she had learned to be playful at him as she was playful at the King, and that she felt safe, and that he was the cause of her feeling safe, and the papers in his hand weighed nothing and the whole staircase behind him weighed everything.
He sat, because the doorway had failed him a third time. He delivered the tolls message. The charter dispute had produced a fourth copy; the King intended to burn all four; she translated the word burn into Vietnamese and then into doll-court, pronouncing sentence on the mandarin, and Ilya listened to a wooden official be condemned to the cabinet by a nineteen-year-old queen and heard his own voice saying the appropriate things in the appropriate measure.
She is happy. He filed it. She sings to the door, she sleeps like the dead, she plays on the floor of the tower like a child let out of a lecture hall, and every piece of it is true, and every piece of it is mine to keep.
He left at the proper interval. At the door she meowed at him again, very softly, and he said "good evening, my queen," in a level voice, and went down into the cold, and stood in the courtyard longer than the errand required.
The turn came at the end of the month, on a night of hard frost.
The council had been short. Vladimir climbed the stairs before the ninth hour for the first time in a season, and Bích met him on the landing with the candle, and the old woman's face was grave in its usual way, and she said the usual words. The tea. The deep sleep. Do not wake her.
But tonight she hesitated, which she never did.
"The Highness asked me a question this morning, sire. She asked why she never dreams of the waking at all anymore. Before, she said, she heard things sometimes in the night. The settling of the fire. The door. Now, nothing until dawn." The candle moved with the old woman's breath. "She thinks the flower has grown stronger. She is glad of it. She thanked me for it."
Vladimir stood on the stair with his hand on the wall, and the word he heard under her words was not tea and not flower. It was nothing. Nothing until dawn.
"Nothing," he said. "She hears nothing in the night."
"The flower holds her deep, sire. It is our way, when the heart needs rest."
He looked at the old woman a long moment. Then he went on up, and the door opened soft on its draft, and inside the embers were red and low, and his wife lay at the center of the mound of furs with her hands folded near her cheek, exactly as she always lay, exactly, he thought now, standing very still inside the door, as she had lain every night this month.
He watched her breathe. The pulse moved in her throat, the small pulse, and the pendant lay risen and fallen on it. He crossed the room without a sound his own bulk should have forbidden, and knelt, and looked at her face for a long time, the slackness of it, the sleep like a held breath under glass.
Then he rose, and did not wake her, and did not go to bed beside her at all. He sat in the great chair by the hearth with the fire breathing down to embers, and he turned in his mind, slowly, the way he turned the tolls charters, the fact that his wife slept like something laid out, and that he had been glad of it, that Ilya had told him she sleeps deeply and he had been glad, night after night, glad like a man glad of a locked door he did not have to wonder about.
In the morning she woke singing, at once, like a bird. She found him already dressed at the window, and she meowed at him, small and rising, and he turned and looked at her a moment too long before he answered.
"Little sparrow." His voice was even. His eyes were not quite. "What does the cat say when it wants the door opened at night?"
She considered this with real seriousness, head tilted, the gold hairpin swinging.
"When it wants in?" She demonstrated, a small insistent sound, repeated. "Like that. Louder each time. But our cat is polite. It only asks once."
"Once," he said. "And if no one opens?"
"Then it scratches." She laughed, the small laugh, and turned to the lacquered cabinet to bring out the dolls for their morning court, and did not see the King of the Northmen stand very still by the window, looking at the door of his own chamber, at the smooth unscratched wood of it, with the frost going white and hard on the garden outside, and something with the weight of a charter copy settling into his hands that he intended, at whatever cost of nights, to read to the end.