Chapter 6 - The Emporer's Sister

The seamstress arrives arguing.

I hear it before the door opens: Iona's voice, low and apologetic, and over it a woman's voice, dry and unbothered. Then the door suddenly opens, and Iona comes in backward, arms full of pins and folded cloth, and behind her comes a round woman with curly black hair already complaining.

“One day is hardly enough time. One day he says? Huff. I’ll have to have several girls working overnight for this.” The round woman then approaches me and bows curtly.

“Agatha,” she says by way of introduction. She sets her basket down and looks at me the way a butcher looks at an uncut pig. “I don’t have much time, so lets get this over quickly. Turn.”

I turn but she huffs.

“No, to the light. There.” I look confused and she approaches me, guiding me to face a lantern on the wall. “There, stay still, arms out.”

But she is not the one I am looking at.

There is a third woman in the doorway, and she has not announced herself. She leans against the frame, wearing a purple stola with golden roses woven into the fabric along with a cinched corset like belt with more golden threads fitted in its spine, styled in the southern fashion. She is tall, nearly five foot eight and her hair is white. And when she lifts her eyes to mine they are gold, a pure impossible gold, and I have seen that exact color once before, this very afternoon, on a throne.

“You'll want to leave, my lady,” the seamstress, Agatha, says over her shoulder without warmth. “I've a bride to pin and no room for spectators.”

“Agatha. You wound me.” The white-haired woman drifts inside anyway, and Agatha's mouth thins, and I understand that this is an argument the seamstress has already lost several times today. “I only came to see the famous northern bride. The whole court is talking of nothing else, and here she is, and no one has thought to introduce us.” She smiles at me. It is a lovely smile. “Goodness. You are exactly as they said.”

“What did they say?” I ask. Genuinely curious.

A small silence. Behind me, I feel Iona go still in the particular way she still goes when something has happened that I have not caught.

“That you are refreshing,” the woman says warmly. “So very plain-spoken. It is a rare thing in this court, a woman who says exactly what she means. One can only wonder what such a substantial figure must be like beneath all that presence”

“Thank you,” I say, because it sounds like a kindness, and I have decided to take the kind things when they come.

Iona makes a sound behind me, quickly swallowed. I do not know what it means. I file it away and figure I will ask her about it later.

Agatha kneels and begins to pin the hem, muttering around the pins in her teeth, and the white-haired woman circles me slowly while she works, trailing one finger along the cloth that Iona holds.

“Such a fuss, all of this,” she says. “A whole empire holding its breath over a wedding. As though we have nothing better to spend ourselves on.”

“Do you?” I ask.

That stops her, just slightly. “Do we what?”

“Have something better to spend yourselves on.”

“Oh,” she says, and for the first time something under the smile sharpens into something real. “The beasts, girl. The dark beast attacks. While the lords in that hall argue over your father's mountains, things are crawling out of the forests and eating our border villages, and every house in the south owes a child to the front to fight them. My own included.” Her finger stills on the cloth. “I have a son at the Pass who is nineteen, and a daughter I will have to give up next, and all the while others argue over whether the north kneels or bows. Lady Sabina has the right of it. End the human war. Turn the whole of that army on the thing that is actually killing us. That is what your wedding is for, whether anyone in that hall will say it or not.”

“That seems sensible,” I say. “I was attacked in my own carriage on the way down south before entering the city of Kolzhely.”

Lady Sabina gives me a look I can’t quite name. “It is remarkable, really, that someone of your stature can speak so freely.”

“It is the sensible thing to do.”

“Hmmmm is that so?” she pauses. “You keep saying that. Sensible.” She laughs, light again, the sharpness folded back away. “You are going to be eaten alive here, do you know that? Sensible women do not last.”

Agatha snorts around her pins. She lifts a small bronze like clasp to fasten the shoulder, and it cracks in her fingers with a dry little sound, and she curses and tosses it into her basket and reaches for another. “Southern ore,” she mutters. “Brittle as old bread. Nothing down here holds.”

I think of the crystal in my pocket, northern-cut, that I have held since I was five, and I say nothing, because it does not seem like the right time to boast about it or reveal that I have it.

“He frightened you today, I imagine,” the woman says, watching me now with more attention than her voice admits. “The emperor. In the hall. He has that effect on people.”

“No,” I state bluntly.

The word lands wrong. I feel it land wrong without understanding why. Both women have gone still.

“No?”

“He was kind to me,” I nervously blurt out. “The hall was very loud, and there were a great many people looking at me, and it was becoming difficult. He sent them all away. He told me I did not have to meet his eyes if it was hard, that I could speak to the floor and he would hear me the same. No one has ever done that. So no. He did not frighten me…. At least not yet or in the way I expected.”

The silence that follows is a different kind than before.

The white-haired woman is looking at me as though I have said something in a language she used to speak and has tried very hard to forget. The lightness is gone from her face entirely, and what is under it is not coy at all. It is something closer to fear and to grief.

“You should be careful how much you trust his gentleness.” she pauses. “He was gentle with our father too,” she says quietly. “Once.”

I do not understand what she means. I feel Iona understand it, behind me, in the way her breath catches.

“That is what makes him the worst.” She turns her back to me then. “He will be gentle, kind, and it is entirely real, right up until the moment it is not.” She turns back around to face me again and blinks. The waver in her voice is gone and the mask comes back over her face like a shutter drawn, and she is smiling again, easy and bright. “Listen to me.” She chuckles more to herself. “Frightening the bride three days before her wedding. Agatha will have my head.”

“I would,” Agatha agrees quietly. “If it was my choice, but now, your Highness,” Agatha adds, pointedly, to the white-haired woman, “if you are quite finished, I have a shoulder to set and you are in my light.”

Your Highness.

The pieces slide together all at once. The gold eyes, the white hair, the unannounced arrival. The same eyes and hair as her brother. She was not just any lady of the court, but his sister. I have been speaking to the emperor's sister for a quarter of an hour as though she were anyone at all, and telling her the plain truth the whole time, and I do not know yet whether that was a mistake.

“You are the emperor's sister,” I say. Just confirm and be safe.

“Lady Xanthe.” She dips into a curtsy that manages to be both perfect and mocking. “A pleasure, truly. I so rarely meet anyone honest. I had almost forgotten what it looks like.” She moves for the door, then pauses with her hand on the frame. “A word of advice, since you are new and no one else will give it to you kindly. In this court, everyone will smile at you. Learn quickly which smiles have teeth.”

Then she is gone, and the room feels larger without her in it, and Agatha goes back to her pins as though a storm has not just walked out of this room.

I wait until the woman has measured my arms and pinned my collar and gathered her basket and left, promising the dress in a day. I wait until the door is shut and it is only Iona and me. Then I turn to her.

“She was mocking me,” I say. It is not quite a question. “The whole time. The refreshing, and the plain-spoken. She was laughing at me.”

Iona's face does something complicated. She is only a maid; she could not say a word against the emperor's sister and I felt her holding it in the whole time like a held breath. Now she lets it out.

“She was, my lady,” she says gently. “A little. The backhanded sort, where the words are kind and the meaning isn't. I didn't like it.” She twists her hands. “But at the end, when she went quiet. That part she meant. That part wasn't mockery at all.”

“I see,” I say in contemplation. “So part of it was true.”

I turn back to the plain glass window and the pale towers beyond it, and I think about a woman who is afraid of her own brother, and a gentleness that is real right up until the moment it is not, and a wedding two days away now, to a man who cleared a hall for me because he saw I was drowning.

Both things cannot be true. And yet somewhere in my chest, I feel certain that they are. I do not know how to carry a thing like that.