What Berylla Saw

Berylla found the ash on the balcony floor at dawn, and she knew at once what it was.

She had been awake since the Festival. Two nights of sitting in a hard chair at the foot of Solaia's bed, listening to the girl breathe, had left her with a dull ache behind the eyes and a clearness of mind she had not felt in years. She had gone out onto the pavilion balcony to open the shutters, simply to let in the cold, and had stopped with her hand on the latch.

A fine gray powder lay across the stone, in a long curve, like the track of a dragging hem.

It was not the ash of the burned city; that had been black and greasy and had blown in from the south. This was pale. Almost white. It glittered a little in the early sun, and when she knelt and pinched some between her fingers, it was warm. Warm after two nights in the open frost, as if it had been breathed there only a moment before.

She touched it to her tongue before she could stop herself. It tasted of nothing. Of iron, and snow, and old smoke.

I know this, thought Berylla. And a memory came up out of thirty years, whole and cold, as clear as the day it was made.

…

She had been nineteen. A second-year under-maid in the old Emperor's household, with her hair in a plait and her hands raw from lye. It was the winter the old Emperor's father died, and she had been sent up to the north tower with a basin and a cloth, because no one else could be spared.

The room at the top was bare. A mattress, a barred window, a heap of straw. In the corner sat a man who had once been the greatest lord in the realm, with his wrists bound in leather and his eyes gone gray.

He had looked up at her. And he had said, quite clearly, in a perfectly reasonable voice: Girl. Do you hear it?

She had said no.

It is beneath the mountain, he told her. It has been there since before the first Emperor. It is waiting for the debt. We owe it, you know. We have always owed it. He smiled at her, tenderly. When she wakes, she will come for it. And it will be the end of us. It is all in the blood.

She had thought him mad. She had finished the basin, and gone away, and never spoken of it to anyone.

Now, thirty years later, kneeling on a cold balcony with a pinch of white ash between her fingers, she looked at the sleeping girl through the open door, and for the first time she understood what the old man had been trying to tell her.

…

She stood up. She brushed the powder from her skirts. Then she did something she had not done in thirty years of service.

She gathered it up.

It took an hour. She did it with a small silver spoon and a folded square of linen, crouched on the balcony with her back to the door, working the pale dust out of every crack in the stone. She swept the long curve of it into the cloth. She wiped the rail where the girl had stood, the sill, the planking, until not a trace remained. Then she tied the bundle in a knot and thought, carefully, about what a woman in her position ought to do with it.

Give it to the Emperor. That was the loyal answer.

Burn it. That was the safe one.

She did neither. She carried it into the pantry and put it into a tin that had once held tea, and set it on the topmost shelf behind the sugar, where only she could reach. And as she did it, she understood that she had just made a choice, and that it could not be unmade.

"You have blood on your hands, Berylla," she said aloud, to the empty pantry. "Now you are certain to get more."

She almost laughed.

…

"You are hiding something."

Solaia had said it quite mildly. She was propped on her pillows in the afternoon light, with the hatchling in her lap and a bowl of broth cooling on the tray, looking smaller and paler than anyone had a right to look and still be so very awake.

Berylla did not turn from the wardrobe. "My lady?"

"You've been walking around the room for ten minutes without once looking at me." A pause. "You do that when you've decided something."

The Chief Attendant of the Palace set down the shawl she had been folding. Her hands, she noticed, were quite steady. She turned around.

"I have a question, my lady," she said. "I would ask you to answer it truthfully, and I will not hold it against you if you cannot."

"Ask."

"Do you know what you are?"

The girl was silent.

The hatchling stirred in her lap. A thread of smoke rose, and curled, and vanished. And Solaia looked down at the small gray head under her hand, with an expression of such raw bewilderment that Berylla's chest went tight.

"No," she said. "I don't. I keep hearing it. I keep seeing it. A sky. A tower. A woman crying." She laughed, shakily. "I stood on a rail and screamed at the sky, Berylla, and the sky answered. And I could do it again. I could do it right now. And I have no idea why."

"Then I will tell you what I know," said Berylla. "Which is very little."

She told her. She told about the old Emperor in the north tower, and the thing beneath the mountain, and the debt. She told her about the white ash, and where she had put it. She did not tell her what she had decided, because she had not yet found the words.

When she was done, the room was very quiet.

"You kept it," said Solaia.

"Yes."

"Why?"

Berylla looked at her for a long moment. At the thin white face, the ash-gray eyes, the stubborn jaw. At the scrap of a girl who had come in off the northern road in rags, and sat on a floor beside a bed, and held a dying man's hand all night.

"Because I have served three rulers in this palace," she said. "I held the basin for the father. I carried the water for the son. And I have watched the Church take the best of this country and bleed it dry, one piece at a time, for thirty years." She drew a long breath. "I do not know who you are. But I know that when you stood on that rail, I thought, for the first time since I was nineteen: there is someone worth serving."

"Berylla..."

"It is not a debt, my lady. It is a choice." The older woman knelt, stiffly, on one knee, and bowed her head. "If you will have me. I would be your woman. Not the Emperor's. Not the Church's. Yours."

Solaia put the bowl aside. She leaned forward, awkwardly, and took Berylla's hand in both of hers.

"I can't promise to be worth it."

"You do not have to."

"I'm going to be a terrible mistress."

"I have seen worse." The ghost of a smile touched Berylla's mouth. "I once dressed a duchess who bit."

For a moment they stayed like that, quite still, in the amber light. Then Solaia laughed, a real laugh, startled and breathless, and Berylla rose and tucked a blanket around the girl's feet with a brisk sniff, and the moment closed over them both like water.

…

That evening, on her way down to the kitchens for a pot of the Emperor's favorite tea, she was stopped in the lower passage by a figure in gray.

It was a priest of the inner order. A thin man, middle-aged, with a high forehead and watery eyes. He carried no mask. He wore, instead, a simple white scarf and a small brass medallion in the shape of a dimmed sun.

"Mistress Berylla," he said, very low.

She drew herself up. "I am engaged, Father."

"I know. I will not keep you." His eyes darted down the passage and back. "I am Cardinal Marenne. I am told that you carry a certain tin. I am told that you are a woman of discretion."

Her heart stopped.

"I do not know what you mean."

"Of course not." The old man's smile was sad and quick. "I am not here to take it. I am here to ask whether, when the time comes, you would be willing to let someone look at it." He held up his hand, and she saw the palm was blistered, raw, as if from a fire. "My own flame has been guttering for a week. Since the Festival. Since, I think, she spoke. I would very much like to know why."

He bowed. Then he turned and walked quickly away, a stooped gray shape, down the passage and into the dark.

Berylla stood where she was for a long while, with the tea tray rattling gently in her hands.

Another one, she thought. And it is only the first week.