Outside the screen, the world had narrowed to a strip of dust and the backs of four guards who were pretending, with varying degrees of failure, that they were not trying to listen.
Sivelle of Tarsen stood ten paces from the blue silk, her hands folded before her in the attitude of a lady's maid awaiting instruction, which was a lie. She was not awaiting instruction. She was watching her mistress through a gap between the screen and the olive trunk, and she was cataloguing every shift of Alianor's shoulders, every angle of her veiled head, every minute adjustment of the hand that held the misericorde low against her thigh. Sivelle had been dressing and undressing and arming and unarming the princess for seven years, and she could read Alianor's body the way a sailor read the sky—not by what it said, but by what it was trying not to say.
The princess's spine had been a spear when she stepped behind the screen. Now it was still a spear, but the point had lowered. Something had changed. Sivelle could not hear the words—the spring's murmur and the distance and the silk itself saw to that—but she could see the angle of Alianor's jaw soften by a fraction, then harden again, then soften once more, as though the princess were arguing with someone she had expected to hate and had not, quite, been able to hate without complication.
Across the open ground, the eunuch stood with his hands clasped behind his back, watching his own charge with the same quiet intensity. He was tall and still and bronze-skinned, his face a smooth mask that revealed nothing except, perhaps, a mild and perpetual disappointment in the state of the world. Sivelle had seen him before, in the pavilion, moving through the chaos with the economy of a man who had learned to take up as little space as possible while remaining exactly where he was needed. She had not spoken to him. She had not needed to. The language of servants was a language of glances and silences and the careful management of other people's catastrophes, and in that language, Rafiq was more fluent than most.
He was watching Prince Zeid's hands.
Sivelle followed his gaze. The prince's hands were as still as carved ivory. But the knuckles were white. Not the white of fear—or not only fear—but the white of a grip that was holding something together by main force. The prince's shoulders were straight, his head was high, his posture was the posture of a man who had never doubted himself in his life. And his hands were shaking.
Not much. Enough that if you watched closely, you could see the tremble in the tendons of his wrists.
Sivelle looked at Rafiq. Rafiq looked at Sivelle. Neither spoke for a long moment, because they were servants and because the moment was already too full of words neither of them had the right to hear.
Then Sivelle said, very quietly, in Vestimarian, "Has he always been this good at looking calm?"
Rafiq did not turn his head. His voice was dry as the desert he had left forty years ago. "Since childhood. It is the family illness."
"I have heard of wasting diseases. I have not heard of this one."
"The House of Tahir al-Din breeds for it. The Sultan can receive news of a defeat while discussing the weather. The late Sitt Zubayda, peace upon her, once conducted a trade negotiation with the Rhomanian emperor while in labour. She did not mention the labour until the treaty was signed. The emperor sent her a gift of sapphires and a letter of condolence to her husband, who had not yet been informed that he was a husband at all. I believe the sapphires are still in the treasury."
Sivelle considered this. "And the prince?"
"The prince was born into the illness. He has never known any other condition."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the answer I have."
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
The wind moved through the olive trees, and the blue silk breathed, and Sivelle could hear, very faintly, the rise and fall of voices behind the screen. She could not make out the words. She could tell, from the rhythm, that they were not shouting. That was something. That was more than she had expected when the princess had drawn the second blade.
"He saved her," Sivelle said, as though testing the words for weight. "The prince. He moved before anyone else. Before the guards, before the king, before me. He moved like he had been expecting it."
"Perhaps he had."
"You knew she would draw a blade?"
"I knew she was a knight of Esberia who had been told she was to marry an infidel. The knife was not difficult to predict. The throat was. I had wagered on the prince's ribs." Rafiq paused. "I am pleased to have lost the wager."
"You do not look pleased."
"I am not permitted to look pleased. It would undermine my reputation."
Sivelle made a sound that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. It was the first sound of its kind she had made since the blade had appeared in Alianor's hand, and it surprised her. She looked at the eunuch again—his stillness, his dry eyes, the careful way he held himself as though he were a piece of furniture that had learned to walk and was still not certain the skill was worth the trouble.
"You have been with him long?" she asked.
"Twelve years. Since he was old enough to require a keeper and young enough to resent being kept."
"And you know."
It was not a question. Rafiq's eyes moved to hers for the first time, and something passed between them—not warmth, not quite recognition, but the acknowledgement of two people who had been entrusted with the same class of secret and had learned, over years of keeping it, that the keeping was a form of love.
"I know everything," Rafiq said. "It is the first duty of a eunuch. To know everything and to say nothing. The second duty is to stand in precisely the wrong place at precisely the right moment. The third is to carry a knife and never be seen carrying it."
"The third is the same in Esberia."
"Then our nations have more in common than our rulers would admit."
Sivelle looked back toward the screen. Alianor's shoulders had dropped by another increment. The misericorde was no longer visible. The princess's hand was still at her sleeve, but the blade was gone—sheathed, or simply hidden, but no longer in readiness. Something had been agreed. Sivelle did not know what, and she did not need to know. She needed only to know that her mistress was no longer standing at the edge of the abyss.
"He is a good man," Rafiq said quietly, as though the words cost him something. "The prince. Not a comfortable man. Not an easy man. A man who has been wearing armour since before he could walk. But good. However one measures such things."
"My mistress would not agree."
"No. But your mistress has just spoken with him for the length of a prayer and has not yet walked out from behind the screen. I find that encouraging."
"Encouraging is not the word I would use."
"What word would you use?"
Sivelle considered. The wind moved through the olive trees again, and the spring murmured, and the guards shifted their weight from foot to foot, and the distant pavilion hummed with the constrained chaos of two courts pretending that the world had not almost ended.
"Unfinished," she said at last. "The word I would use is unfinished."
Rafiq nodded slowly. "Yes. That is the family illness also. Everything is always unfinished. The wars, the treaties, the poems, the children. The House of Tahir al-Din has been unfinished for seven generations. I have learned to find it less exhausting than completion would be."
"Completion would be death."
"Precisely. That is why I avoid it."
Sivelle looked at him again, and this time there was something almost like a smile at the corner of her mouth. It was a small thing, barely visible, the kind of smile that had learned to hide itself from the world. But it was there.
"You are strange," she said.
"I am Nabatir. We are all strange. It is the desert. It makes people into philosophers or madmen, and sometimes both."
"Which are you?"
"I am a eunuch. We are a third category."
Sivelle did not laugh, but the impulse to laugh passed through her and left something lighter in its wake. She had not expected to find, in the middle of this disaster, a man who spoke her own language—not Vestimarian, not Jaludi, but the language of people who managed the unmanageable and kept the secrets of the powerful and woke every morning knowing that the world rested, in some small and invisible way, on their shoulders. It was not friendship. It was not even camaraderie. It was the recognition of a fellow soldier in a war that no one else knew was being fought.
"The screen is moving," she said.
Rafiq straightened almost imperceptibly. "Then we will see what kind of ending they planned."