The Crowning Gown

The gown had taken eleven seamstresses six weeks, and it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

It hung on a wooden form in the middle of the dressing room, in the pearl light of early morning, and it did not look like cloth. It looked like something that had been poured. White silk, so fine that it moved when she breathed, fell in a long unbroken line from a high collar of seed pearls to a train that spilled across the floor like spilled milk. The sleeves were slashed with silver. The bodice was embroidered, over every inch, with tiny wings: hundreds, thousands, each stitched in thread so pale it seemed to be a trick of the light. Looking at it closely, she saw that they were not birds.

"Dragons," said Berylla.

She stood at the foot of the form with a pin-cushion strapped to her wrist, regarding the gown as a general regards a battlefield. She had not slept. There were purple smudges under her eyes. She had been at the work for three days, without help, refusing to let anyone else touch it, with a stubbornness that had reduced the chief seamstress to tears.

"The Emperor ordered it?"

"He gave the design. He said that the pattern was from a book." Berylla's mouth twisted. "He said it was old. He did not say how old."

"It's beautiful."

"Yes, my lady. It is."

There was something in the way she said it. Solaia looked at her sharply, and saw that the older woman's hand, resting on the pin-cushion, was trembling.

"Berylla."

"It is nothing."

"You've been crying."

"I have a cold."

"You've never had a cold in your life." Solaia crossed the room and took the pincushion from her wrist, and set it carefully on the table. "Sit down. Please. Tell me."

She did not sit. She stood with her hands folded at her waist, in her black gown, as straight as a post, and looked at the wall above Solaia's head. And then, all at once, as though a seam had given way, her face crumpled.

"I cannot do it," she said.

"Cannot do what?"

"Dress you. For this." The words were hardly audible. "I have dressed you every morning for a year. I have laced your boots and brushed your hair. I have held the basin while you were sick. I have done it gladly. I would do it for the rest of my life." Her voice cracked. "But I cannot send you up that mountain."

Solaia went still.

"I know what is on the Ridge," said Berylla. "I am not a fool, my lady. I have friends in the guard. I have known since Midwinter. I did not tell you because I thought, if I held my peace, it might not be what I feared. It might be a shrine. It might be a fortress." She drew a ragged breath. "I went to see it. Last week. On a pretext. I took a basket of bread to the labor camp. I walked up the ramp. I looked at the pillars."

"Berylla—"

"They are bones. They are the bones of dragons. I put my hand on one, and it was warm." The tears were running openly now, down the lines of her stern face. "My lady, they are going to put you inside it."

The room was very quiet.

Outside the window a bird was singing, and the sun was climbing into a cloudless sky, and from the courtyard below came the muffled clop of horses being harnessed. It was a bright, ordinary morning. It was the day of her crowning.

"I know," said Solaia.

Berylla stared at her.

"I've known for two weeks. Since I flew over the Ridge." She said it quite calmly. "I've seen the pillars. I've seen the ring. I know what the plans were, because I saw them on Osric's table. I know he told me he'd burned them. I know he lied."

"Then why—"

"Because I want to be wrong."

The older woman made a small broken sound.

"I want it so badly I can taste it." Solaia took her by the hands. "Listen to me. I've been a coward for two weeks. I've walked around this palace smiling. I've kissed him good night. I've let him hold me while he lied to my face, and I haven't said one word, because I was afraid of what he'd say. And I realized this week that I couldn't live like that. I can't love someone and watch them like a hawk. It'll kill us both."

"And so you will go up the mountain."

"And so I'll go up the mountain." She smiled, a little crookedly. "And if it's a coronation, then I'll have been a fool, and I'll beg his pardon on my knees. And if it's not—" She stopped.

"If it is not?"

"Then at least I'll know."

…

"You do not understand," said Berylla.

She had stopped crying. She had washed her face in the basin, and dried it, and put her hair back under its cap, and the old iron had come back into her spine. She stood in front of Solaia with her arms folded, and her voice was low and fierce and utterly steady.

"You think that knowing is the thing. That if you see it with your own eyes, you can choose. But I have been in this house for thirty years, my lady. I have watched three men go to the north tower. I held the basin for the second. I know what a man looks like when he has a thing in him that is larger than he is." She shook her head. "He will not choose. He will be carried. And by the time you stand on that mountain, he will have gone so far down the road of what he has promised himself that he will not be able to turn."

"You think he'll do it."

"I think he loves you more than he has ever loved anything. And that he is the sort of man who, loving something, will do any horror to keep it." Her lip trembled. "I have seen that kind of love. It is the worst kind there is."

Solaia was silent for a long moment.

"Obsyra said something," she said at last. "In the mountain. She said he'd do a terrible thing for love, and call it mercy, and believe it. She said, love him anyway."

"Then she was wrong."

"Maybe."

"My lady—"

"But she's the only one who ever looked at both of us." Solaia let go of her hands. "She said it was my gravest fault. And the greatest gift to the world. I don't understand that. But I think she meant I can't stop. Even if I wanted to." She laughed, softly, without humor. "I tried, Berylla. For two weeks. I tried to stop."

Berylla stood very still.

Then, with a long and shaky sigh, she unfolded her arms.

"Then I will tell you what I can do," she said.

She went to the wardrobe. She reached up, on her toes, to the highest shelf, and took down a small tin box that had once held tea. It was dented and worn, and the lid was held down by a twist of string. She carried it back to the dressing table and set it down in front of the mirror.

"You remember the ash," she said.

"The white dust. From the balcony."

"I kept it. Behind the sugar." She untied the string. "I have been thinking of it ever since. It was warm when I found it. It was warm for days. It is warm now." She opened the lid. A small pale heap lay inside, fine as flour, glimmering faintly in the light. "I do not understand what it is. I only know that it is yours. It came off you, in the night of the Roar, when you stood on the rail. Something of you stayed behind."

Solaia touched it with one fingertip.

It was warm. It hummed, faintly, against her skin, a tiny trembling note like a plucked string. She felt it climb her arm. She felt her own pulse answer.

"I would like you to carry it," said Berylla. "In the hem of the gown. I have sewn a pocket. It is small, and no one will find it."

"What will it do?"

"I do not know. Perhaps nothing." The older woman's eyes were bright. "But if there is a moment, my lady, in the dark, when you need to remember what you are... I thought it might help to have a little of yourself with you."

Solaia looked at her.

She had no words. She stood in front of the mirror, in her plain gray gown, with a tin of ash in her hand, and the woman who had lied to her in the first week and held her through the last year, and for a moment the whole bright room seemed to swim.

She put her arms around Berylla.

She felt the older woman go rigid, and then, slowly, soften. A hand came up and patted her back, once, twice, awkwardly. It was the first time, in thirty years of service, that Berylla had embraced anyone.

"Thank you," Solaia whispered.

"You will make me cry again."

"You've been crying all morning."

"I am a servant of this house, my lady. We are very good at it." Berylla drew back and sniffed. She held out the hem of the gown, and with deft, quick fingers, began to tuck the little pouch into its pocket. "Now. Stand still. We shall be late."

…

It took an hour to dress her.

She stood on a low stool in the middle of the room while the women fussed. The silk went on like a cloud. The pearls closed about her throat, cold and heavy. Berylla fastened the long row of tiny buttons up the back, one by one, and brushed out her hair and pinned it in a coil on the crown of her head, and set over it a veil so fine it might have been woven of breath.

When it was done, she turned to look.

The woman in the mirror was a stranger. She was tall and pale, and white from head to foot, with her dark hair wound high and her gray eyes enormous. Pearls glimmered on her collarbones. The dragons swarmed across her bodice in their thousands, silver on white, with their wings flung wide. She looked like something from a painting. She looked like a queen.

She looked, she thought, like the girl on the balcony. The one who had laughed.

"Well?" said Berylla.

"I don't know her."

"That is how it should be." The older woman stepped back and surveyed her with grave, exact attention. Then she came forward again, and reached up, and straightened the veil by a quarter inch. Her hands lingered a moment at Solaia's shoulders.

"There is one more thing, my lady."

"What?"

Berylla leaned close, so that her mouth was almost against Solaia's ear. She spoke very softly, with a cold calm that was more frightening than tears.

"When you stand on that mountain, and the chains go on, and he says it will be only a little pain... I want you to remember that I said so."

Solaia's heart skipped.

"I said so, in this room, in the sun. I asked you not to go. I begged you." The whisper trembled. "And you went anyway. I want you to hold that. When it hurts, and he is telling you that it is for your own good, I want you to remember that there was one person in the world who did not lie to you."

"Berylla—"

"That is all, my lady."

She stepped back, and curtsied, and the old iron went back into her face like a door closing. She picked up the Empress's train. And Solaia stood in the mirror in her white gown and her borrowed pearls, with a tin of warm ash sewn into her hem and the cold weight of a cloth, rolled tight, against the skin of her left wrist, and thought, with a perfect steadiness: I'll remember.