The Moonlit Jade Pavilion

Solaia had been in the pavilion for most of a day before she found the first thing worth stealing.

It was a bread roll. A small one, golden-crusted and still faintly warm, set in a silver dish on the table beside her bed as casually as if bread were something the world gave away. She stared at it for a full minute. Then she picked it up, turned her back to the room, and slid it into the lining of her sleeve with the others.

There were four now. She had a system.

"That is the fifth meal you have been brought today, my lady," said a cold voice from the doorway. "I am told you have not touched any of them."

She did not turn around. "I'm saving them."

"For what?"

"For when you stop bringing them."

A silence. When she finally glanced over her shoulder, the woman in the doorway was looking at her with an expression she could not quite read, as if she had bitten into something she had expected to be sour and found it, unexpectedly, bitter in a different way.

Berylla.

The Chief Attendant of the Emperor's household was exactly as Solaia remembered her from the gold bedchamber, tall and straight in an immaculate black dress with a high collar, her gray-shot hair coiled so tightly against her skull that it seemed to have been nailed there. Her face was handsome and pale and had clearly been designed by a god with a grudge against softness. A little scar ran from the corner of her left eye to the edge of her jaw.

It was the same woman who had screamed break her legs at her. Solaia had cracked her servants' noses and thrown a washbasin at her head. It had been, she supposed, an unpromising start.

"The Emperor informs me that you are to be called Lady Solaia," Berylla said, in the voice of someone reciting her own death sentence. "I have been assigned to your household. Eight attendants, two guards at the garden gate, one physician, and myself. You will address any request to me. If you need anything, it will be brought. If you desire anything, I will consider it. If you attempt to break anything, I will have it replaced and the cost deducted from your allowance."

"I have an allowance?"

"You will have one when you have learned to spend it responsibly."

"I'm not sure I know what that means."

"Neither am I," Berylla said. "I have never had to explain it to a beggar."

Solaia smiled. It was not a kind smile. "And I've never had to be insulted by someone I could break in half. We both have things to learn."

Something moved at the corner of the older woman's mouth, a minute tightening, quickly smothered. Berylla's chin lifted a fraction of an inch.

"Your bath is ready, my lady."

…

The Moonlit Jade Pavilion stood at the far end of the eastern gardens, where the palace's old walls curved inward and the ground sloped down toward a frozen pond. It was small, by the standards of a place that measured its halls in acres. A single low building of pale green stone, roofed with silver-gray slate, wrapped around a courtyard where a few hardy winter roses thrust black stems out of the snow. There was a glasshouse full of orange trees, a lawn that someone had cleared and swept for archery, and a walled garden whose gate was guarded night and day by two Black Guards who looked at her as one might look at a sleeping wolf.

It was beautiful. It was also, Solaia understood by the end of the first hour, one of the best-guarded places in the capital.

She felt the arrays the moment she stepped through the gate. It was not magic she could see. It was more like an itch beneath the skin, a faint, hot crawling along the inside of her forearms. Thin threads of power wound through the garden walls and the foundations of the pavilion, so dense and so well hidden that the Emperor's mages must have spent a month weaving them. And she could feel, quite distinctly, that they were wrong in the places where she stood close to them. The threads flinched. When she moved her hand toward a section of wall, the faint hum beneath the stone stuttered and went silent for a moment, like a candle shielded from a draft.

She did not know why. She kept her palm where it was, and counted to ten, and watched a small sliver of the wall's glamour turn to dust under her fingertips.

Then she took her hand away and did not touch the wall again.

Not yet, she told herself. Learn first. Break things later.

…

The bath was the worst part.

She had known it would be. She had braced for it, the way a soldier braces for a charge, and none of that preparation had made a particle of difference. Eight attendants in gray linen, all of them young, all of them visibly afraid, hovered at the edges of a sunken marble pool where the water steamed with the scent of orange peel and something called frost-lily. They would not look at her. Two of them were the same girls whose noses she had broken in the gold bedchamber. One still had a faint yellow bruise beneath her left eye.

She stood in the middle of the room in a thin cotton shift and did not move.

"If it please you, my lady," said the girl with the bruise, in a voice that shook. "We have been told to—"

"I know what you've been told."

"We will be gentle."

"I'm sure you will."

It was the sure that did it. She could see it land. The girl's breath caught, and her gaze flickered up for the first time, wide and wet and very young, and Solaia felt something in her chest give an unwelcome twist.

She is afraid of me. And she should be. And she is also seventeen.

"I broke your nose," Solaia said abruptly.

The girl froze.

"It was a mistake." She said it flatly, without apology, the way you read out a fact. "I thought you were going to hurt me. I was wrong. I'm not going to hurt you. If you keep your hands where I can see them and tell me before you touch me, I won't break anything."

No one moved.

At the back of the room, Berylla's face was a mask. But a pulse beat, very small and very fast, at the base of her throat.

"Of course, my lady," said the girl with the bruise, in a whisper. "We... we will tell you."

It was a ridiculous way to take a bath. They narrated it, step by step, as if she were a wild horse. I am going to touch your arm now. I am going to pour the water. I am going to wash your hair. Solaia held herself rigid and let them. Somewhere around the third pitcher of warm water she realized, with an odd sort of disbelief, that she was not afraid. The knowledge arrived quietly, like the last clink of a lock. She had spent as long as she could remember curled against the cold, and nothing had ever been gentle with her. She did not know what to do with it.

It was only when they lifted her hair that she heard the whispers.

"...forty lashes, the Church-woman gave her, with the thorned whip..."

"...I saw her myself, the blood on the floor..."

"...but look. Look. There's not a mark on her."

"Hush!"

The hiss was Berylla's. The whispering stopped instantly. The girl with the sponge, who had been scrubbing at Solaia's shoulder blade with a look of mounting astonishment, jerked as though she had been struck.

Solaia turned her head. "What?"

"Nothing, my lady," said Berylla.

"They said forty lashes. I remember some of it. It hurt." She looked down at her own arm, at the bare pale skin, flawless and smooth except for a few thin white lines where the old border fever had marked her. "There should be scars."

"There is no cause for—"

"There should be scars."

Berylla was quiet for a long moment. Then she stepped forward, the movement stiff and exact, and took the sponge out of the girl's trembling hand.

"The physician examined you," she said at last, very low, so the others could not hear. "After the fire. He found nothing. Not the whip, not the shackles, not the chain on your neck. He said it was as if you had been born that morning."

"And what do you say?"

"I say that I am a servant, my lady, and I do not say anything."

"That's not true."

"No." The corner of her mouth twitched again, that sour, rueful shape. "It is not. But it is the sort of untruth that keeps a woman alive in this palace for thirty years."

Solaia studied her.

She had expected hatred. She had expected sneering, the cold pride she had seen in the gold bedchamber. What she saw instead, beneath the mask, was something she had no name for. It was not warmth. It was closer to the wary respect of one tired soldier for another across a field where both had been fighting a much larger war.

"You hate me," she said.

"I have not decided." Berylla set down the sponge. "I intend to take my time."

…

It was dusk when the dressing began, and by dusk she had learned two things about being a lady.

The first was that she owned a great many clothes, none of which she had chosen. They hung in a row in the wardrobe like a silent army: gowns of ivory and ice-blue and dove gray, shot through with silver thread, edged in fur, cut by a dressmaker who clearly believed that a woman's shoulders were her most important asset. They were soft and thin and made her feel as if someone had wrapped her in water.

The second was that there was one dark gown at the very back. Black wool, high-necked, plain as a nun's habit, with long sleeves and a belt of unadorned leather. She did not know why it was there. She suspected Berylla.

"This one," she said.

"It is unfashionable."

"It has pockets."

Berylla studied her for a moment. Then, with an almost imperceptible shrug, she took down the gown.

Standing in front of the long mirror afterward, Solaia looked at herself for the second time in a day.

This mirror was a plain one, silver glass in a gilt frame, and it did not hold a hundred stranger's faces. It held only one. A tall, thin young woman in dark wool, with a stripe of damp hair over her shoulder and a mouth set in a hard, unhappy line. Her eyes still looked back at her, deep purple, strange and wide. But there was color in her cheeks now, and the hollows had begun to fill, and for the first time she thought she saw, beneath the starved sharpness, the ghost of someone who had been beautiful.

Solaia, she thought, and was irritated by how little it hurt.

"Lady." It was the bruised girl, hovering at her elbow. "Your supper."

Supper was laid out in the glasshouse, on a small round table under the dark leaves of the orange trees. A great many covered dishes. A fat wax candle in a glass jar. And through the glass walls, the enormous sky, bruised violet at the edges, full of the first pale stars. Solaia sat down alone, and ate, with the slow, shaky care of a woman who still half expected the plate to be snatched away. She ate until the pain in her stomach became an ache and the ache became something warm. She thought, with grim amusement, that she had cut a man's throat for a bite of dirt not a fortnight ago.

At some point she noticed that Berylla was standing at the edge of the glasshouse, watching her eat. She did not seem to be aware that she was doing it.

"Sit down," Solaia said.

"My lady?"

"You're making me nervous. Sit."

"It is not permitted."

"I'm told I make my own rules now."

For a moment she thought the older woman would refuse. Then, with a sound that might have been a muffled laugh, Berylla lowered herself onto the very edge of the second chair, spine as straight as a spear.

They did not speak. The candle guttered. Somewhere in the snow-dark garden, a night bird let out a thin, wavering cry.

"Berylla."

"My lady."

"What's to the north?"

The older woman went still.

"Beyond the garden walls," Solaia said. "Past the city. Past the border. What is there?"

"The Ice Range." The answer came reluctantly. "A wall of mountains. Nothing lives there. The peasants say it is cursed, and the Church says it is a grave, and the Emperor says," a faint, wry pause, "that it is none of anyone's business. It is where he found you."

"Did you ever hear anything about it? Any stories?"

"There are always stories, my lady." Berylla's eyes slid away. "The border clans have a saying. That the mountain is only sleeping."

Solaia put down her fork.

Thump.

It came through the soles of her feet. It came through the glasshouse floor, through the stones of the garden, through three hundred miles of snow and frost and old, old dark. A slow, vast pulse. She did not need to count it any longer. She knew, with an instinct deeper than thought, exactly how long it had been since the last one.

And she knew that it was wrong.

It had come too soon.

By the strictest measure she had, it had arrived a full minute early. The long, patient rhythm she had kept in her head for fifteen days had skipped a beat, as though something beneath the ice had heard her pass through the tower door, and rolled over, and was beginning to wake.

"My lady?" Berylla said, sharply. "You've gone white."

"It's nothing."

"Shall I send for the physician?"

"No." Solaia curled her hand into a fist beneath the table, and under her palm, very softly, the black wool of her sleeve warmed and began to smoke. She put it out against her knee before the older woman could notice. "No. I'm only tired."

She looked up at the night sky above the glass, at the great cold stars turning in their courses, and felt, for the first time since she had crawled out from under a rotting wagon, that something was looking back.