29

A Ball and a Deathbed

Maia didn’t know whose job it was to decorate the Untheileian, but they had done a splendid job, with crimson and gold and blue banners which artfully suggested the colors of both Barizhan and the Ethuveraz. Maia’s uncomfortable throne had been outfitted with gold-embroidered blue cushions, and he silently blessed whichever servant had had the wits to think of that. He sat and watched the dancing and told himself this was practice for the Winternight Ball when the dancing would start at sunset and go on—with pauses for the banquet and for the midnight celebration in the Untheileneise’meire—until dawn. “Like a wake,” he had said, and Csevet had smiled and said, “Yes, Serenity. It is called dancing the old year down, and it is the one night of the year when servants may join their masters in the dance.”

It was also Maia’s birthday, and although he had tried to explain that he did not want any particular festivity, Csevet had stared at him in horror and said, “You are the emperor. Your birthday will be—and should be—celebrated in every corner of the Elflands. You cannot ask people not to celebrate, Serenity.”

“No,” Maia had said, defeated. “We suppose we cannot.” But he was oppressed by the thought, appalled at the idea that children would be forced to celebrate his birthday as he had been forced to celebrate his father’s.

’Tis not the same thing, he pointed out to himself, striving to be reasonable. What reason has any child to resent thee as thou didst resent thy father?

Idra, a darker voice responded promptly. Ino. Mireän.

I will tell them they need not. And then he realized his own absurdity and had to stifle a laugh.

“Serenity?” Cala said. “Are you well?”

“Yes, we thank you. Merely ridiculous.”

“Serenity?” Beshelar, instantly disapproving.

“It is nothing,” Maia said. “Is not the dancing beautiful?”

“It will be better on Winternight,” said Beshelar, who passed judgment the same way he breathed.

Cala must have caught some echo of that thought on Maia’s face for he said quickly, “We see that the Avar enjoys dancing.”

“Yes,” Maia said. His grandfather had been escorting one elvish lady after another onto the floor; he dwarfed them to the point that he should have looked ridiculous, but he moved with such unerring accuracy and grace that he was somehow beautiful instead—although Maia was not about to tell him that.

He realized that the lady currently partnered with the Avar was Arbelan Zhasanai; his eye tracked back along their path—people cleared well out of the Avar’s way as he moved—and he saw that the woman sitting beside Arbelan’s vacated seat was Csethiro Ceredin.

She met his gaze and raised her eyebrows in a clear question. Maia nodded, and she stood and made her way to the dais. Her hair shone beneath the candles of the Untheileian’s myriad chandeliers, and she had eschewed the obvious lapis lazuli, dressing it instead with black lacquer combs and strands of emeralds to pick up the subtle green embroidery on her gray gown. She curtsied when she reached the top of the steps and said in a voice designed to carry no farther than Maia’s ears, “You need not speak to us if you do not wish to.”

“You are our future empress,” Maia said. “Even if it is only duty, we would rather that duty were a pleasant one.”

He did not mean to sound bitter, but Dach’osmin Ceredin said, “Oh damn,” in an unexpectedly heartfelt tone. “We must apologize to you, Edrehasivar. We were angry with our father—and our stepmother—but we should not have taken it out on you.”

“You thought we were too stupid to matter,” Maia said, realizing.

“We were grossly misled by—by gossip from a source we will not trust again,” Dach’osmin Ceredin said stiffly. “But it seemed as if duty was all there was, and we prefer to be allowed to choose our duties.”

“We feared as much,” Maia said, “but there seemed to be nothing we could do.”

She waved it off. “We wrote to Great-Aunt Arbelan in that same spirit—to spite our father. We have already begged her pardon, and now we beg yours.”

She curtsied deeply, bowing her head, and Maia said, “Forgiven. Please.”

She rose and smiled at him for the first time. “Really, you should make us grovel more than that. But we thank you.”

“We will make you answer a question, then,” Maia said, feeling very daring. “You said you wrote to your great-aunt to spite your father. How…”

“Well, more to embarrass him than spite him,” Dach’osmin Ceredin said; she seemed not at all bothered by the question. “Our father, you see, did not … ah, well, it is not that he did not recognize her, for of course he did, but he did not dwell on the relationship. He did not visit her or write to her, and our sisters and ourself knew that we had a Great-Aunt Arbelan only because our grandfather would talk of her sometimes. Father gambled that she would not return to favor—or court—in her lifetime.”

“It must have seemed a very safe gamble,” Maia ventured.

“Yes, though rather cold-blooded—and not, we think, likely to increase his standing with the late emperor regardless.” She grinned suddenly, an urchin’s expression. “He certainly did not expect you to be kind to her.”

“We like Arbelan Zhasanai,” Maia said, a little stiffly, unsure whether she was mocking him or her father.

Her eyebrows shot up. “You recognize her as your father’s widow?”

“Yes,” Maia said, even more stiffly.

“Csoru must hate you,” she said, and when Maia stared at her in bewilderment, she laughed outright. “We beg your pardon, Serenity—as it seems we will be making a habit of doing. Our father, you see, was fostered in the household of Csoru’s grandfather and became inextricably close friends with her father. ‘Heart-brother,’ they call each other, which we find rather sentimental, but no mind. It was their great wish to see an alliance between their houses, but they were cursed by a plague of daughters. Our father has five daughters, although there are hopes, we are told, that our stepmother will be delivered of a son when she is brought to bed in the spring. And Csoru is her father’s only child, for he would not marry again upon her mother’s death, despite the strongest representations of his father, our father, his mother, his wife’s father and mother … So.” She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Still listening?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You are patience itself. But thus it happened that the Count Celehel and the Marquess Ceredel—our second sister wrote a very rude rhyme based on the similarity in family names, which we will not embarrass you by repeating—could not achieve a marriage, and so they became determined that their daughters should be closest friends—heart-sisters.” Her smile was sharp. “On our first introduction—for as we are the same age as Csoru, all but a handful of months, and named after her dead mother, so it was considered our fate to be her beloved friend—we lasted slightly less than ten minutes before we hit her. Now, of course, that we are adults, we can hold out for nearly an hour.” He couldn’t quite tell if she was joking. “When she was betrothed to the late emperor, our father all but forced us to ‘reconcile’ with her—which Csoru accepted in exactly the same spirit in which we offered it—and he has been imploring us ever since to be friendlier to her, when he does not command it outright.”

“No wonder you wished to spite him,” Maia said, and made her laugh again.

“We will find it much more pleasant to be amiable to Arbelan Zhasanai than to Csoru Zhasanai.” Her brows drew together in a slight frown. “And you, Serenity? How do you find the drunken hornet’s nest that is the Untheileneise Court?”

“Bewildering,” Maia said before he managed to censor himself. It was the way she asked—as if she actually desired to hear his answer.

“It would be,” she said thoughtfully. “We must beg your pardon that we know very little of you. As you might imagine from his attitude toward his aunt, our father has ever behaved as if relegation were contagious. We know that you are the child of Chenelo Zhasan, and that you were relegated at the time of her death to somewhere in Thu-Evresar.”

“Edonomee,” Maia said. “In the western marshes.”

“That must be a bleak landscape.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And you lived there until your father’s death?”

“Yes.”

“How many people made the household of Edonomee?”

“Ourself and our guardian. Two menservants, one for the inside work and one for the outside. A cook and two maids, although they all slept out.”

“And you saw the occasional courier, we would imagine.”

“Very occasional,” he agreed.

“Very bleak,” she said.

He did not know how he would have answered her, for it was at that moment that Csevet approached, bowed, and was on the dais before Maia had even registered his appearance. “Serenity.” He bowed again. “Dach’osmin Ceredin.”

“What is it, Csevet?”

Maia couldn’t entirely keep annoyance out of his voice, and Csevet spread his hands apologetically as he answered, “It is Osmerrem Danivaran, Serenity. Osmin Danivin says she is dying, and did you wish to come?”

There was a horrible, jolting moment when first he couldn’t remember who Osmerrem Danivaran was or why he cared about her death and then did remember and was hit with grief like a stone to his chest. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we wish to come. Dach’osmin Ceredin, please forgive us. We must—”

“But where are you going?” she said. “Who is Osmerrem Danivaran?”

“She was very kind to us at our mother’s funeral. The only person who was. She had a brainstorm, and has been … it is not unexpected, but…”

“Then you must go,” Dach’osmin Ceredin said. “Do not give us a second thought, Serenity. You need have no doubt you will see us again.” And with an odd quirked smile that made her face seem properly lived in for the first time, she curtsied and descended from the dais.

Maia barely saw her go. “Do we need to say anything?” he said with a desperate, wide gesture at the Untheileian. “Will they—?”

“Do not concern yourself, Serenity. We have spoken to Lord Berenar and to the Great Avar’s steward and certain other people. Nothing will be disordered by your absence.”

“Thank you,” Maia said, and with his nohecharei, followed Csevet out of the Untheileian. He was not surprised to find that Csevet knew the way to the Danivadeise apartments, although he supposed he should have been. But Csevet knew everything, and Maia was profoundly grateful for it.

Osmin Danivin met them at the door. She had been weeping, but had achieved both poise and dignity in her grief. “Serenity, we thank you for coming,” she said, sweeping a curtsy. “We will not ask you to stay for long, but Mother is lucid now, and we know that…” She bit her lip and fought herself back under control. “We know that she was so very pleased by your visit, and we thought—”

“Osmin Danivin,” he said, realizing that interrupting her was the only way out of an increasingly painful sentence. “A visit costs us nothing, and if we can repay kindness for kindness, we are pleased to do so.”

“Thank you, Serenity,” she said, and led him into her mother’s bedroom.

It was unchanged since his previous visit—except possibly warmer, and if that was so, he was gratified by it—and the woman on the bed was only more frail, more swallowed by her clothes. Her eyes were open, and as he approached the bed, he could see that she saw him.

“Serrrrrrr,” she croaked. Serenity.

“Hello, Osmerrem Danivaran,” he said, and he smiled at her.

“Come to…” She heaved a deep and obviously difficult breath. “Good-bye?”

“Yes,” he said. As Osmin Danivin had said, she was lucid. She knew that she was dying. “I wanted to.”

That made her smile, the same twisted smile as before. “Nissss.” Nice boy, she’d said last time.

He took her hand carefully. There was nothing, he thought, that needed to be said, and he remembered from his own mother’s death that she had not wanted to speak very much in the last two or three days that she was cognizant. She had wanted to look at him, to hold his hand. To know that he was there. And he thought there was a light of relief in Osmerrem Danivaran’s eyes when she realized he wasn’t going to make her struggle either to speak or to listen. He held her hand and thought about how kind she had been to him when he was eight, and thought about Thara Celehar saying the prayer of compassion for the dead with the same attention the last time as the first. And when he could see that she was beginning to fade away from this moment of clarity, he stooped and kissed her forehead.

Her hand clutched his more tightly for a moment. “Good,” she said. “Good emprrrrr.”

And whether she meant, be a good emperor or you are a good emperor, there was only one answer, “Thank you, Osmerrem Danivaran,” Maia said. “Thank you for everything.”

She smiled again and released his hand. He stepped back, letting her daughter resume her place at the bedside. “Thank you,” Osmin Danivin whispered in passing.

He inclined his head to her, then turned and left before he became too blinded with tears to move.

“Will you return to the Untheileian, Serenity?” Beshelar asked when they were out in the hall.

“Must we?” Maia asked wearily, swiping an impatient and futile hand across his face.

“Later,” Csevet said firmly. “The dancing will go on for hours yet. Come back to the Alcethmeret, Serenity, and compose yourself. There is no hurry.”

When Maia woke the next morning, he could not remember how he had gotten from the Tortoise Room, where he had agreed to sit quietly for half an hour, to his bedroom, and could not imagine how Csevet had persuaded him to go. But he was grateful.

Waiting for him on the breakfast table was a black-bordered note from Osmin Danivin: her mother had died the previous night, less than an hour after his visit.

And no one would understand, Maia thought, if the emperor wore mourning for her.