Chapter 9: Little queen is happy
The frost had come to stay. Two nights after the morning of the unscratched door, the garden below the tower windows lay white and hard as a killed thing, and the ice on the inside of the glass had grown its own small forests, ferns and feather-trees, silver in the early light.
Quỳnh Chi woke at once, as she always woke now, and sat up in her mound of furs, and meowed.
It was not for the King. The King had gone down before dawn to a meeting about the grain fleets, and his side of the bed had been cold for hours. It was for the room itself, the greeting she gave to every morning that came back to her, and Bích, setting down the basin of warm water, received the second meow over her shoulder as her due.
"Good morning, auntie." Quỳnh Chi sprang out of the bed, small bare feet on the cold boards, and did not even flinch at the chill, which was itself a miracle the old woman noted and said nothing about. "Is it still snowing? It smells like snow."
"It smells like the shut windows. Come and be washed before your feet fall off."
She was washed. She was dressed, layer over layer, apricot silk and white, the hair brushed and pinned with the gold-inlaid pin, and throughout all of it she hummed the road song turned inside out, quickened, almost a skipping tune, and Bích tightened the last knot at her nape and thought, not for the first time, that she no longer recognized the girl the sea had brought them. The girl the sea had brought them had trembled at her own shadow. This one counted floorboards and meowed at kings.
The dolls came out before breakfast. That was the new order of the day: dolls, then food, then dolls again, and if the council sat short the King arrived in time for both.
"His Excellency the mandarin," Quỳnh Chi announced, walking the wooden figure along the fur in stately hops, "has petitioned the court for a fur coat, because it is very cold, and he is very thin, and no one respects a thin mandarin." She tipped the little figure toward the drummer. "What does the court say?"
The drummer said nothing. The drummer never said anything unless she made him. She made him say the court approved, and gave the mandarin a scrap of white silk for a cloak, and was still adjusting its tiny sleeves when there came a knock and Mena's red face appeared in the door with the tray.
The food that morning was barley in milk, dark northern barley, heavy as mortar, with honey stirred through it and a spoon of rendered fat that Sova swore by and no southerner should have been able to eat. Quỳnh Chi had eaten it every morning for a month.
She took the first spoonful, and stopped, and wiggled.
It was not a large motion. It was a small twist of the whole upper body, shoulders and all, left and then right, like a bird settling its feathers, done without her knowing she did it, and it had begun, by Mena's count, somewhere in the second week of the honey. Mena had reported it to Sova, and Sova had reported it to no one, because Sova kept her own counsel, but Mena had also told the scullery boy, and the scullery boy had told the guardroom, and so the whole Citadel knew what the tower already lived with: the little queen wiggled when the food was good.
"Hot this morning, Highness." Mena set the tray on the low table and retreated, red-cheeked, watching out of the corner of her eye.
The second spoonful produced the wiggle again, the third a hummed note through the barley, and by the fourth she had abandoned the dolls entirely for the bowl, cross-legged on the furs in her court silks, eating with the frankness of a child. Bích looked at the ceiling.
"The Highness eats like a soldier."
"The Highness eats like someone whose food was good." She held up the spoon. "Auntie, taste it. It tastes the way the palace kitchen tasted when the cook from Huế was alive. Sweet and then the fat after, like rain and then the wet." She wiggled again, apropos of the thought, and Bích's mouth pressed flat and did not press flat quite fast enough at the end of it, and the two of them saw each other almost smile and agreed in silence never to mention it.
The bowl was finished to the glaze. Mena took the tray away with the flower tallies updated in her head, a third full bowl in a week, and Quỳnh Chi returned to the mandarin's fur coat with the serious satisfaction of a full belly.
Vladimir came up before the sixth hour. The council had given him a morning, the grain fleets having surrendered faster than the tolls ever had, and he came through the door with snow in the seams of his cloak and found his wife on the floor of his chamber conducting foreign policy for carved wood.
He had been finding this for weeks now. The first time had taken something out of him and put something else in, and he had not examined what either thing was, because examining it would have meant admitting that the King of the Northmen sat on his own floor of an evening ruling on drummer's drums. He had admitted it. He sat down now without ceremony, having learned that standing made her stop and bow and lose the whole of whatever she had been when he came in.
"Meo," she said, not looking up from the mandarin.
"Meo," he answered, gravely, and her head came up and her eyes went bright, because the King had answered the cat again, and each time he did it she banked it like treasure.
"The mandarin has a fur coat now. Do you approve, sire?"
"I approve." He looked at the little figure, the white silk scrap, the painted face no bigger than a thumbnail. "He is thin. It is a bad look for a mandarin."
"That is what I said." She beamed at him, and then, because the day was bright and her belly was full and the tea had long ago burned the weight off her mornings, she bounced where she sat, a small lift of her whole body off her heels, and pointed at the drummer. "He has a petition too. He wants a drum."
"The drummer had a drum petition last week."
"He won it. Now he wants a bigger drum." She lifted the tiny figure and held it at the King's eye level, and her face was so open and so pleased that he looked at it a moment longer than a king should look at anything on the floor of his own room. "It is the way of drums, sire. They grow."
"So I have heard." He reached out and touched the gold hairpin, one finger, the way he touched things he did not want to disturb. "Eat?"
"I ate everything. There was honey." She wiggled. She did it right in front of him, the small feather-twist, wholly unguarded, and he went still as he had gone still in the snow two months ago, and she did not notice, because she never noticed, because she had stopped noticing anything dangerous at all.
He filed it. He filed the wiggle and the bounce and the meow and the full bowls and the mornings, and he carried the file down the tower stairs that afternoon into his council, and set it beside the other file, the one with weight, the one that had been growing since Bích said the words nothing until dawn on a frost-hard stair.
That evening he did not climb the stairs to her chamber. He climbed them to the door and stopped below it, on the landing, and stood a long time in the cold with the torch hissing in its bracket.
He had questions now, and he was a man who took questions apart for a living. He had taken apart the succession war, eleven months, room by room, man by man. He would not take his own household apart with armies. But he would take it apart.
The door opened soft on its draft. She was at the strings, the evening shape of her that he had come to know better than any dispatch: shawl over the shoulders, fire low, the lavender on the sill gone dry and grey. She turned her head and meowed at him, low and rising, and he came in and sat in the great chair and let her play.
She played the road song. Then the snow piece, and he heard it through, all of it, and did not say from the beginning, because tonight he was listening to something else. He was listening to the room. The settling of the fire. The wind finding the window seams. The small sounds a tower makes at night, the sounds a woman lying two paces from a man ought to hear, or half-hear, or sleep through and half-remember.
"Little sparrow." He waited until the last string had stopped ringing. "Who brews the flower?"
"Meo?" She tilted her head at the strangeness of it.
"The lotus. The tea." He kept his voice in its ordinary register, the voice for charter questions. "Who brews it?"
"Bích. And Mena fetches the water, and there is a written recipe, in our letters, from the ship's doctor." She set her hands in her lap. "Why does my king ask? Is it bad for me?" A thread of worry crossed the open face, quick as a bird's shadow.
"It is not bad for you. Does Bích write the recipe, or only keep it?"
"She keeps it. It came from home. Auntie says the ladies of my mother's court all drank it." She said it easily, nothing hidden, because there was nothing hidden in her to find. "It gives me nights without the palace dreams. I told you. I am glad of it."
"I remember." He was glad of it too. He had been glad of it for a month, and the gladness had turned in his hands two mornings ago like a charter copy that disagreed with the other copies. "When you drank it the first weeks, before the council sat late, did you drink it every night?"
"Only when I could not sleep for homesickness." She smiled a little at her own past fear. "Now I drink it most nights. The council sits late, and I would rather sleep than lie listening for the stairs." Her eyes went down, and the color came faintly up her throat, and he understood she had just confessed, in her way, that she lay listening for him.
"The nights I come up before midnight," he said. "Do you hear me?"
"Sometimes the door." She considered it honestly, wanting to be accurate. "Very far away, like something in a dream. Sometimes not at all." She looked up at him with the whole of her simplicity. "The flower holds me deep, sire. Is that wrong? Auntie says the heart needs rest."
"The heart needs rest," he agreed, and his voice did not change, and inside him something stood very still and watched the door of this conversation the way he had watched the door of his own chamber.
He stayed while she ate her supper, and the wiggle came at the honey, and he watched it land and said nothing. He stayed while she prepared the dolls for bed, a small procession of wooden figures laid in a row on the sill, the mandarin in his fur coat, the drummer, the two ladies. He stayed until the proper hour and then rose, and she rose with him and gave him the meow, soft, the one that meant the fire was warm and he was being called away, and he paused with his hand on the door.
"What does the cat say when it wants in at night?"
She laughed. "Sire, you asked me this already. It scratches." She demonstrated on the doorframe, a tiny.drag of her nails, a sound like a whisper. "But politely. Once or twice. Our cat is a courtly cat."
"And if it scratches and no one comes?"
"Then it waits for morning." She said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and the small insistent sounds she had made for him before, those had a patience in them, a certainty that the door would open eventually, because doors always opened for her; they always had, someone had always opened them, all her life, and the certainty went through him like cold water.
"Sleep well, little sparrow."
"Meo," said the queen of the Northmen, and the door closed on her.
Bích was on the landing with the candle, as Bích was always on the landing with the candle, and this time the King spoke first.
"The recipe for the flower. Who keeps it?"
"I keep it, sire. It came in the princess's own chest, written in our letters."
"Show it to me."
The old woman's candle tilted very slightly, one degree, no more. "It is in my chamber, sire. It is a simple recipe. The flower, the water, a little honey."
"Tomorrow, then, you will bring it, and I will read it. In your letters or in mine, I will have it read." He looked at her, and Bích had served grand houses all her life and knew what it meant when a man of iron began asking for paper. Her face did not change. Her face had not changed through two months of tea and tallies and a girl who no longer heard anything at night.
"It will be brought, sire."
"And Bích." He waited until her eyes came up. "The nights she sleeps the deep sleep. Does anyone sit with her? Does the door stay barred?"
"The door is barred from within, sire, when I leave. I leave when she is under, and I return before dawn." The candle held steady. "No one enters. The King has entered, many nights."
"The King has entered," Vladimir said, "many nights," and heard his own words come back to him wearing a different coat, and could not yet say why. He went down the stairs.
He did not go to his council chamber or his own cold rooms. He went to the guardroom corridor and found Ilya's lamp still burning above it, because Ilya's lamp was always the last burning in the Citadel, and knocked once.
The spymaster opened the door himself, papers in hand, the wolf ring catching the light. Behind him the room was bare as a monk's cell. Twenty years of faces were ready on him before the King had finished the threshold.
"Sire."
"Ilya." Vladimir came in without invitation, which he had never once needed. He stood in the middle of the small room, and the lamp put his shadow up the wall, and he looked at the man who had managed every delicate thing in his reign, the marriage, the translations, the tea, the nights. "My wife sleeps like the dead."
"She sleeps deeply, sire. The flower."
"The flower. Bích keeps a recipe. I will read it tomorrow." He said it flatly, and watched, and Ilya's face was a lamp-lit wall, and twenty years of reading faces found nothing on it, which was itself a reading. "You told me she sleeps deeply. Many nights you told me. On the stairs, coming down."
"On the stairs, sire." Ilya set the papers down, unhurried. "It was Bích's report. The tea holds her until dawn. It frightens her to be waked in the wrong place."
"Frightens her." The King turned the phrase over. "And the nights I came up late, and you came up after. The courier. The fire in the district. The tolls message." He said each pretext without accusation, in the tone of a man laying documents side by side on a table. "All of them true."
"All of them true, sire."
"True things, arranged in rows." Vladimir stood a moment longer. The lamp hissed. Below them the guardroom laughed at something, ordinary men at an ordinary hour, and the two most dangerous men in the kingdom stood in a cold room with a lie between them, or the shadow of a lie, unreadable as yet, a charter copy that disagreed.
"I will sit with her tonight," the King said at last. "I will not wake her. I will watch."
"Watch, sire?" A degree of care in the question, no more.
"A cat scratches, Ilya, when it wants in and no one opens." He went to the door, and paused, and did not turn. "No one has scratched my door in two months. Tomorrow I will read a recipe. Tonight I will keep the watch myself."
He went out into the corridor, and the cold took him, and Ilya stood alone with his lamp and his papers and the arithmetic of his life, and for the first time in twenty years the arithmetic would not close. He turned the wolf ring once, twice, and began, with the steadiness of long practice, to plan what a man should have ready when a king starts reading recipes.
Above them both, in the warm tower, the little queen slept at the center of her mound of furs, hands folded near her cheek, turned toward the barred and unscratched door, dreaming without weight, hearing nothing until dawn.