Chapter 1Of Weather, Terms, and a Daughter to Spare
Miss Mirth is given to understand that a fleet of northern gentlemen has installed itself in the Prylon shallows with every appearance of permanence, and that His Majesty, being constitutionally disinclined to expend soldiers, is presently considering what else in the royal household might be expended in their stead. The eldest princess is reckoned too valuable, and the second too ornamental, to be dispatched anywhere that lacks a looking-glass. There remains, Miss Mirth is reminded, a third: the one who reads. Miss Mirth confesses she had entirely forgotten the girl. She suspects His Majesty had also.
"Ornamental!"
Ysolde flung the Gazette down so hard that it skidded off the table, took a pot of honey with it, and landed face-down in the honey on the carpet.
Calanthe did not look up from her eggs. "You will want to rescue that before the dogs do."
"I will not rescue it. I hope the dogs eat it. I hope it gives them fits." Ysolde stood up, sat down, and stood up again. "As though I were a vase."
I went to get the paper before the dogs did. It came up off the carpet with a sound I did not care for.
"She doesn't actually say you are a vase," I said.
"She implies it."
"She implies that you are pretty, and that Father knows it. Truly, Ysolde, this is the nicest thing she has written about any of us since the spring."
"Of course you would say so. She says nothing about you at all."
"She says I read," I pointed out. "Which is accurate. And she says she forgot me, which is also accurate. Two accurate things in one paragraph. For Miss Mirth, that's practically a sworn deposition."
Calanthe made a small sound into her cup that might have been a laugh. Ysolde glared at us both, and then at the window, at the long dark shapes of the northern ships beyond the harbour.
She had not slept. Her curls had been done twice, and under the table she was holding her own wrist.
"She is only guessing," I said, more gently. "Father has not said a word."
"Father has had the orbs shuttered in the Green Hall for three days," Calanthe said, to her eggs. "Father is saying a great many words. He is simply saying them to Lord Verin."
There was a short silence. A dog licked the carpet.
I was not, in general, troubled by the northern ships. I was troubled by what came off them.
Doran had a chapter on the Ice Coast raids, and I had read it twice and been unable to finish my supper either time. The fishing villages burned to the waterline. The chapel bells carried off whole, still ringing. The men who were not killed were taken north to row, and the women—Doran became very delicate about the women, and I would have preferred to know..
But the ships themselves were only wood. I had watched them every afternoon for nineteen days from the east reading room, four floors up.
On the eleventh afternoon there had been a man on the high deck of the largest ship with his shirt off, hauling on something at the stern. He was much too far away to have a face. I watched him until the daylight waned, and then I went down to dinner and could not look at anybody.
The sea in the shallows had lain flat and grey for a week, but around each of the northern hulls there stood a small private gale. You could see it in the water: a ring of torn chop the length of the ship, and four feet beyond it, calm.
Their pennants stood out straight. Ours, on the harbour towers, hung down their poles and did nothing at all. I had been trying for days to find the exact edge of that wind, with no success.
"Calanthe," I said, "Father would not send you. Your settlement with Ostrevain is nearly signed."
"Nearly," Calanthe agreed.
I looked at my other sister, at her lovely, furious, frightened face. "And Ysolde is very ornamental."
"Sereine."
"I mean it kindly! You're the only one of us who can make the Ostrevain ambassador blush, and he's three hundred years old."
Ysolde opened her mouth to say something unkind, thought better of it, thought of something worse, and saved it for later. Then a footman came in with a face carefully arranged into nothing.
"His Majesty's compliments," he said, "and would Her Royal Highness the Princess Sereine attend him in the Green Hall. At once."
Nobody said anything.
I looked down at the Gazette in my hand, still dripping, at the paragraph that ended the one who reads, and had the distinct feeling of having missed a stair in the dark.
"Oh," said Ysolde, in a very small voice. And then, because she had been terrified for nineteen days and was only twenty-three, she began to laugh.
I went to the Green Hall with the Gazette still in my hand, and only found it there when I was standing in front of my father with honey on my fingers.
The Green Hall was where my father did the business he preferred the court not to see. Its roof was one great tree grown flat against the plaster, the leaves gone the colour of old brass, and every viewing orb along the walls was dark.
My father sat at the far end, in a chair grown up out of the floor. His throne in the Binding Hall had not come back since the spring, when a human nullblood girl with a copper ring had undone three hundred years of magic in a single breath and dropped the King of the Earth-Fae six feet onto the marble. Nobody mentioned it.
Lord Verin stood at his right hand. A clerk sat below the dais with ink on his cuff and the face of a man who had been awake for two days.
I curtseyed at the correct depth, and held the Gazette behind my back.
"Sereine," my father said.
He had not said my name since midwinter, when he asked whether I was the daughter who had requested the Agricultural Annals from the library. I said there was a great deal of barren land in the world, and I had wondered why. He looked at me a moment longer than usual and told me to go and dance with someone.
"Your Majesty."
"You are aware that we have visitors in the shallows."
"Yes, Your Majesty." I have been watching them with great interest, I did not say, and I should like very much to stop.
"The King of the Skyldir has written to inform me that he will withdraw from my coast and cease troubling the Ice Coast, on conditions. Grain from my granaries, at a rate he names, for a term of years." He turned a page. "And a wife. An Earth-Fae bride of the blood royal, to go north and teach his rocks to grow barley."
Lord Verin coughed into his papers.
"Forty hulls, Majesty."
The voice came from beside the dark orbs, where I had not noticed anyone standing. General Hartgrave was the only human in my father's army, and the only man in that room who would have spoken unasked. "Half of them lent him by his lords. The north can float a hundred."
My father did not turn his head. "Which is why I am sending him a daughter, General, and not a regiment."
I had counted the ships every afternoon. I had never once thought to multiply.
"He did not specify which," my father went on. "Calanthe's settlement with Ostrevain is too far concluded to unpick without expense. Ysolde would weep the entire voyage and arrive with a ruined complexion, and he would think I had sent him damaged goods."
He looked at me then, at a point just above my eyes. His eyes were the same green as mine, and he had never once looked into them. He considered me the way one looks at a parcel to decide where it should go.
"You will not weep. You will not, I think, do anything at all, which appears to be the quality he requires. You will go."
On the way down I had thought of several things I might say. I had briefly considered falling to my knees, and abandoned it on the grounds that I was not certain I could get up.
None of them arrived. What arrived instead was the frontispiece of Doran's Natural History of the Northern Coasts.
It showed a Skyldir chieftain roughly the size of a wardrobe, with a beard to his belt, an axe in one hand and an entire roasted sheep in the other. He was eating the sheep, all of it, from the head end.
I was going to have to share a bed with that.
"Sereine," said my father. "You will answer when you are addressed."
"Yes. Sorry. Forgive me, Your Majesty." I swallowed. "I was thinking about sheep."
There was a pause.
"Sheep," my father repeated.
"It is nothing." My face was burning. "Your Majesty, may I read the terms?"
The second pause was longer than the first.
"The terms," said my father.
"Of the treaty. As they concern me."
"You are not a party to the treaty."
"No, Your Majesty. But I am the subject of several of its clauses, I think." My voice did something peculiar at the edges, and I waited until it stopped. "I should like to meet them before he does."
Lord Verin looked at my father. My father looked at me, and for a moment there was a stillness in his face that I had seen once before, in the Binding Hall, in the instant before the leaves of his crown began to fall.
Then he lifted two fingers from the arm of his chair.
"Let her," he told the clerk. "It will occupy her."
The clerk brought me the draft, four sheets written close. "I beg your pardon, Highness," he murmured, "the hand is mine, it was done rather fast," and I said, "Then I shall read it kindly," and he went pink to the ears and fled back to his table.
So I stood under the falling leaves with the Gazette tucked under my arm, and read my own marriage.
It had been copied in a hurry out of older treaties. The grain was exact: tonnage by the month, the rate, the penalty for a failed harvest, the right of Prylon to inspect the stores at Kerseyrr once a year.
Withdrawal within ten days of the wedding. No northern hull within sight of the Ice Coast. Then, near the bottom of the third sheet, I stopped.
The Princess Sereine shall go into the north with no household of Prylon, the King of the Skyldir undertaking to furnish her in all things, and shall retain therein her rank and remainder as befits a daughter of this House.
No household. No maid. No companion. Nobody at all to whom I could say I am frightened and be understood.
I read it a second time, so that it could not surprise me later on a ship, and put it aside to cry over in private. Then I went back to the phrase my eye had snagged on.
Rank and remainder.
Marriage treaties were not considered suitable reading for a princess, so I had read every one of them.
Every daughter of this House who had married outside the courts in four hundred years had gone with a clause of renunciation, a full paragraph, giving up her place in the Earth-Fae succession for herself and all her children. It existed so that no foreign husband could ever arrive at the gates of Prylon with a wife, an army, and an argument.
The clerk had copied the grain with great tenderness. He had reached the bride, and he forgot a “not”.
In a marriage treaty of this House, with nothing after it, it meant I was going north still standing in line for my father's crown. A very long way back, behind my sisters and their sons and several cousins. But standing.
I turned to the fourth sheet, which concerned my dowry and was insulting in a dull way, and handed the whole thing back.
"Well?" said my father.
I ought to tell him.
Calanthe would have done it with a little laugh, as a kindness to the clerk. The missing word would be added, and I would go north exactly as planned.
With nothing. Not even a mistake.
"It is very thorough as to the grain, Your Majesty," I said.
Lord Verin laughed out loud, and turned it into a cough a moment too late. My father's mouth moved very slightly. In another man it might have been the beginning of a smile.
"There is one thing I would ask," I said.
"You may ask."
"My books."
"Your books."
"I should like to take them. All of them." I folded my hands to keep them still, and found they were sticky. "If the King of the Skyldir is to furnish me in all things, I do not imagine he has a library. I imagine he has a great many axes."
"Take the lot," my father said, already turning to Lord Verin. "It will save the dusting. They will burn well enough up there. I am told they have no wood."
"Your Majesty—"
He looked back at me with faint surprise.
"Was my answer wanted?" I asked. "Before. When you were deciding."
"Your answer," said my father, "was not required. You were not asked, Sereine, because nothing you could have said would have changed the outcome, and I see no purpose in making a daughter waste her breath. Consider it a courtesy." There was nothing unkind in his face at all. "You may find it the last one the north extends you. Go and see to your books."
I curtseyed at the correct depth and walked out.
I walked the length of the east gallery at a perfectly even pace. Then I turned into the little stillroom where the gardeners kept their bulbs, sat down on an upturned bucket among the sacks of narcissus, and was quietly and thoroughly sick into a pot of compost.
I spent the afternoon packing books into crates that had come up from the granaries.
A better princess would have been thinking about her duty.
I was thinking that I had never been kissed. Lord Verin's nephew had tried at the midwinter ball, behind a pillar, and missed, and kissed the pillar, and apologised to it. That was the whole of my experience. And now I was to be handed to that, and on my wedding night he would—
Well. I did not know precisely what he would do. My governess had told me that it hurt, and that one bore it, and that one thought of one's House. Ysolde said it was over very quickly. I do not know how she knew. Doran said only that the northern men were "prodigious in all their appetites," and I had read the sentence enough times to feel thoroughly ill.
I did know what his hands had done. They had held the torches on the Ice Coast, or given the order, which Doran said came to the same. They would be hard and broad and smell of tar and other men's blood, and on my wedding night they would be on me, and I would lie still and let them.
I went cold to the ends of my fingers, sitting in the afternoon sun. I measured the door of my room, and then the window, which was absurd, since I would not be married in my room.
I took a hairpin out of my hair and turned it over and thought, quite seriously, about where on a man the size of a wardrobe one would put it. My face went hot. I pushed it back into my hair.
I did not want a great deal from a husband. I was not so foolish as to hope for love; I had read enough treaties to know where love came in the order of business, and it was after the grain.
But was it truly too much to want a husband who used a fork?
"You are not doing that yourself."
Calanthe stood in the doorway in pale bronze silk. She had not knocked.
"There is nobody else to do it."
"There are forty servants in this wing." She sat on the edge of my bed. "Did you actually read all of these?"
"Some of them twice."
"Whatever for?"
"They were there," I said. "And nobody else was."
Calanthe was the beauty among us, with our late mother's gold colouring, where I had our father's near-black hair that no maid alive could make lie flat.
"I heard about the narcissus," she said.
"Of course you did."
"The whole palace has heard about the narcissus. The gardeners are very upset." She smoothed her lace. "You were foolish in the Green Hall, you know. Asking whether your answer had been wanted. Father found it diverting. You oughtn't to rely on that."
"I shan't have occasion to rely on it again," I said, too sharply.
"It is a kingdom, Sereine," she said. "Of a sort. You will be a queen. Of a sort. There are worse things."
"Name one."
"Ostrevain," said Calanthe at once.
I was so startled that I laughed. It hurt, and it turned partway into something else before I could stop it, and Calanthe, for the first time in a year, was kind enough to pretend she had not noticed.
"Have you seen him?" I asked. "The northern king?"
"No one has. He sends men in a little boat with letters written in our script by somebody who learned it badly." She lifted one shoulder. "They say he is very large."
"Everyone says that! Nobody says how large!" My voice was climbing and I could not stop it. "Large as in a tall gentleman, or large as in a door? Because there is a woodcut, Calanthe. In Doran. He is the size of a wardrobe, and he's eating a whole sheep, and they drink out of skulls, and their women carry knives, and I'm to be put into a bed with him, and I don't know a single word he says—"
"Sereine."
"—and the worst part, the very worst part, is that I can't even be properly frightened, because I keep thinking about the sheep—"
"Sereine." Calanthe leaned down and caught my wrist. Her fingers were cool. "Breathe."
I breathed.
"You are working yourself into hysterics over a woodcut," my sister said. "Doran never went north. Doran went to the Ice Coast once, was seasick for a week, and came home and wrote a book about it." She released my wrist and sat back. "People say a great many things about him. That he burned the beacon on the Ice Coast with the garrison still inside it. That he did not, and they ran. That he doesn't count his dead, or his gold, or anything at all." She paused. "They call him Death, you know. It is the name his own people use."
"Skaði," I said.
Calanthe stared at me.
I pointed at a brown volume on the nearest stack: A Glossary of the Northern Tongues, with Remarks, by a Master Halloran, who had been far more interested in the remarks. He called their speech Vindmál, "wind-speech", which I suspected was a joke. "Page two hundred and four. It means harm. Or loss. Death, in the oldest sense. He gives an example from a funeral verse." I found the entry eleven days ago and have read it every day since.
My sister looked at the glossary, and at me, and stood and shook out her skirts.
"You will want warmer things," she said. "I shall send you my second-best furs. They are out of fashion in any case." At the door she paused. "Sereine. When you meet him, do not ask whether you were wanted. Men find it a tiresome question."
"And women?"
"Women," said Calanthe, "are not asked."
She went out. I sat on the floor among the barley crates and wanted, more than anything in the world, for her to come back.
I did not eat the supper they sent up. When the palace was quiet I took a candle and Master Halloran up the long stair to the east reading room, and sat in my window, where the old glass ran downhill.
At night the ships were black hulls on black water, but the pennants stood out against the stars, straight and steady. Everywhere in the world the night was still and cold, except within four feet of those ships.
I tried to imagine having so much wind that one could spend it holding a flag up at midnight, for no one. In the window box was a thyme plant that had been dying since the spring. I put my fingers in its soil and coaxed the root the width of a fingernail toward the damp side of the box. The effort came back up my arm and lodged in my thumb, where it would ache until morning.
That was the whole of my magic. Expandable as well.
He doesn't count things. It might mean he was so rich he had no need to. It might mean he was a savage, as Doran thought.
Or it might mean he had decided, a long time ago, that there were some things he would not reduce to a number.
I wanted very badly for the last to be true. Savage, I thought, and beast, and was ashamed of the words.
And still I wanted to know why a man who could do that had come all this way for barley. And, though I would sooner have died than say so aloud, I wanted to know what very large meant.
A lantern came up the stairs, fast, and swung around the last turning with Pell behind it: the page, eleven years old and very good at finding the cat.
"Oh, Highness," he gasped. "I looked in the kitchens."
"I'm so sorry, Pell. Sit down before you fall down."
"Can't, Highness. Lord Verin said "run." He held out a folded paper sealed with green wax, and then, while I broke it, he blurted, "Highness, is it true you're to marry the Death-King? Tobin in the stables says he eats horses."
The hysterical laugh came up again, and this time I let a little of it out.
"I shall ask him," I said, "and write and tell you."
Lord Verin's note was short.
The King of the Skyldir had declined to sign through envoys. He would come ashore at first light and sign in person, before witnesses. He had made one further condition, which His Majesty had seen fit to grant.
He wished the bride to be present.
Out in the black shallows, one of the northern pennants dipped and fell slack against its mast, and then another. Their wind was going out. It took me far too long to understand why they no longer needed it, and by then the creak of ropes was coming across the water.
They were lowering the boats.