Long Live the Queen

Cosima woke to the city celebrating the fact that it had not managed to outlive her.

She knew the noise before she opened her eyes — the deep, thudding joy of a hundred thousand souls who would every one of them be dust before she needed a second gown. The last of the day came thin and gold through the right-tower windows, and beneath it the fireworks had started early, flowering against a sky not yet dark enough to flatter them, rattling the old glass in its lead until the whole chamber seemed to flinch. God, she thought, without much heat, the way one thinks about weather one cannot change. How I rue this day.

She lay where the morning had left her, naked across the wreck of the bed, her shift and stockings strewn on the floor. The dying light moved over her like a hand she had not invited and did not mind. Three hundred years, and the city still threw itself a party once a century to prove it loved her, and she still woke from it wanting another hour of the dark.

The door opened without ceremony, because only one person in Avenrose entered the queen's chambers unannounced, and she had never once knocked in her life.

"Oh, my fair queen." Sabet came in on a tide of her own opinion. "The cherished and beloved Cosima. It is evening — wake up, duty calls. Your subjects have been drinking since noon."

She clapped twice, brisk — chop-chop — as though Cosima were a hearth that had let its fire sink low, and crossed to the window and threw the curtain wide on a fresh volley of fireworks.

"Cordillion was chivalrous," Cosima said into the pillow, "but he was a drunk, my dear."

Sabet gasped, delighted and scandalized at once. "Cosima." Then she giggled, because gossip was sweeter when it cost something, and treason in a bedchamber cost nothing at all. "You cannot say that, tonight of all nights. There are children in the streets waving little wooden swords with his name on them."

"Then the children, at least, have his measure." She rolled onto her back and threw an arm across her eyes. "Has the gown come?"

"It has, and it is obscene, and you will adore it." Sabet had a list. Sabet always had a list, and read from it the way other women sang. There was a party got up in the esplanade for the common folk; there were the lanterns and the feast and the dancing after. There were royals in from abroad for the festivities, come to drink Avenrose's wine and be seen drinking it, and they had asked — Sabet's voice went sly — for a private audience.

"No," said Cosima, before the sentence had finished.

"I told them you would be devastated to refuse."

"Tell them I am immortal, not idle." She had granted a thousand private audiences. They wanted what private audiences always wanted, which was something from her, and she had long since stopped being curious which thing.

A knock came at the outer door. Cosima was still bare to the evening and content to receive the whole court that way if it would move things along, but Sabet kept standards on her behalf and flung a robe at her, and she shrugged into it and arranged herself against the pillows as though she had meant to be found exactly so. "You may enter."

The door opened on the garment-maker, a footman, and a guard, the three of them moving with the held breath of people carrying something worth more than they were. They lifted the lid from the box, and the gown came out, and Cosima — who had owned more beautiful things than any soul living had set eyes on, who had watched fashions born and curdled and born again under new names — felt the small, real lift of pleasure rise in her chest like a swallow of something warm. It was cut from a cloth the deep gold of the royal house, worked all over with a darker thread and a scatter of stones that were not glass, and it threw the firelight about the room in soft coins. There were jewels to match. She put out her hand and touched the cold weight of them and was, briefly, glad.

The handmaids came in behind, and the next while was all hands — lacing, pinning, the cool slide of the stones at her throat — while Sabet read on and broke off every third line to correct them. "Loosen that. No — don't pin there, you'll have her listing all night. Drape it like this, you foolish girl. You are dressing a queen, not the Royal Jester." When it was done they stood her at the glass, and Cosima considered the woman in it — the honey hair past her waist, the gown drinking the light, the face the years had not been permitted to touch — and smiled, because she was beautiful, and because being beautiful was one of the few jokes that never stopped being funny.

Then there was the long business of going down, which in Avenrose was never a private act. The court fell in behind her as she walked — secretaries and ladies and guards and envoys and the bright-eyed hopefuls who spent their whole short lives angling to be noticed by her twice. Chancellor Serin appeared at her shoulder with the small cough he kept for delicate matters.

"There has been another offer, Majesty. From Prince Aurel."

"Has there." She did not slow. It was the tenth time he had offered her his hand; she had taken the rest of him to bed perhaps thirty times, and he was lovely, and once the wanting of him had been a clean bright thing she could feel in her teeth. She had outgrown him now. Or — she let the thought finish itself, since honesty in the dark of one's own skull cost nothing — not outgrown. The other thing. The thing she had no word for and did not turn to face, as one does not turn to face the sun. She gave Serin the answer she always gave, which was no answer, which was no.

The drums found her before the doors did. They had been going all evening, a pulse under the stone, and as she came down the last hall they rose to meet her, and the great doors were dragged open, and the noise and the heat and the gold of three hundred years of celebration broke over her at once. Three hundred candles burned the length of the hall, one for every year of Avenrose, and the court rose as one and turned and stared the way the faithful stare at a thing they are not certain they are allowed to want. She walked it without hurrying. From the dais the faces blurred as they always did now, a long bright smear of teeth and jewels — though here and there one swam up and resolved: a grandson wearing the face of a grandfather she had once danced with; a house she could remember before it had a name worth keeping; a girl in the same ugly emerald her great-great-grandmother had worn, and worn better. She took her seat. She let them love her. It was the easiest thing she did all year and it wearied her past all the rest.

The visiting royals had the high table, and it was the mother — the cold one, with the son she loved like a held breath — who rose first with her cup. Renna kept a smile for exactly this, gracious to the back of the hall and honed to a point at the front.

"To the next generation," she said, and let her glance touch her son, and then, lightly, the empty air beside the throne where in another sort of reign an heir might have stood. "The truest measure of every prosperous reign."

The hall murmured its approval, not one in fifty hearing the knife inside the silk. Cosima heard it. She had been hearing that particular blade since before Renna's whole line held its title, and she raised her own cup without rising, because a queen who must stand to answer has already lost.

"And to mothers," she said, pleasant as cream, "wise enough to let the next generation choose its own future."

It landed. Renna's smile did not move; her knuckles did, whitening on the stem of her cup, and for the length of a breath the high table was quiet and the air had a taste to it. Then Aurel was on his feet, easy as a man rising to refill a glass, smiling as though neither woman had said a thing worth recalling.

"And to good wine," he declared, sweeping his cup to the room, "which has saved countless kingdoms from having to explain their mothers."

The hall laughed — relieved, grateful, a little drunk — and even Renna let the corner of her mouth go, and Aurel bowed to them both with perfect evenness and sat, untouchable, having reminded the whole court without seeming to try that he was the one person at the high table anyone actually liked. Cosima rolled her eyes where only Sabet could catch it, and drank. The wine was the finest the kingdom had; it tasted, as everything did now, like the memory of itself.

Lady Elizabeth Bridges arrived after the toast, which was a small rudeness, and arrived not quite finished, which was a larger one. Cosima missed nothing — missing nothing was most of what she did — and Sabet at her shoulder missed even less.

"Lady Elizabeth has dressed in a hurry," Sabet murmured.

"Elizabeth does most things in a hurry."

"One fastening wrong. Her hair repinned by a blind woman. Gloves, in this heat — and her chamber token gone." A delicate sniff. "And she is wearing a soap that is not her own."

"Her father will be relieved to hear she arrived with her virtue intact."

"The Chancellor assures everyone it remains perfectly preserved."

"Then she has merely misplaced the ribbon that carried it," Cosima said, and Sabet made the small strangled sound of a woman swallowing a laugh in a holy place.

The feast wore on and loosened into the party, the way feasts did — the music going soft, the dignitaries growing fond, the gilded room tilting pleasantly toward morning. Cosima left the dais a while and moved through it for form's sake, being the queen at people, Brant Donatee and his guard a quiet wall at her back wherever she drifted. Then the drums gathered for the night's centerpiece, and she returned to her throne to be told, once more, the story of how she was supposed to have begun.

It was the rebellion, of course. It was always the rebellion. Players in painted armor drove a tin-crowned king up and down the floor while a tall fellow in farmer's brown rallied the painted poor, and the court sighed over it as though they had not seen it ninety-nine times.

"Cordillion was not that tall," Cosima said, to no one and to everyone.

"History improves men, Majesty," said one of the ladies at her side.

"He also had fewer teeth."

"Must you ruin every hero we are given to admire?" said another, and Cosima smiled, because she could, and watched a nation's founding performed by a man who would not have lasted one real afternoon in the cold.

At the height of it the players hauled open the great prop gate — the centerpiece of the whole pageant — and out of the painted dark behind it came a young man with the ceremonial key.

She noticed him the way one notices a wrong note in music known by heart.

He was beautiful, but not as the court was beautiful, not as Aurel was beautiful, polished from the cradle and aware of every line of himself. This one wore his looks like something done to him without his leave — a hard, dark, unasked-for handsomeness — and he carried the gaudy key as though he could not believe he had agreed to hold it. None of that was what stopped her. What stopped her was that he was not gazing at her. Every other face in the hall was turned to her and full of the same old thing — awe, or hunger, or arithmetic, the queen as goddess or prize or threat. The young man with the key wanted none of that. He saw her as if she were a body with a heart inside it, a tired woman at the end of a long, loud night, and he was taking her measure, and finding — she could not tell what he was finding. It had been a very long time since she had not been able to tell.

Something in her, old and bored and three centuries asleep, opened one eye.

At the high table Aurel had gone still. He had followed her gaze to the stranger, and where another man might have soured he sharpened; she saw him weigh the difference between a man she found beautiful and a thing she found dangerous, and settle, faster than she did, on which this was.

A glass burst on the stone. Across the hall Lady Elizabeth stood white as her gloves, the wreck of her cup at her feet, staring at the young man as though he were a ghost arrived at the wrong house — as though she had been certain, until this breath, that he was already gone.

"Wait," Cosima murmured. "Who is he, really?"

But Sabet was only now turning to look, and the stranger was already on the steps of the dais, and there was no longer time for anyone to answer.

He came up with the key held out, and Brant moved — she felt more than saw the Castellan start forward, the old soldier's instinct that had carried her through a hundred years of men bearing gifts — and she lifted one finger and stopped him. She was curious. She had forgotten what curious felt like, and she wanted another breath of it.

The young man knelt. He took the hand she gave him to kiss, and his hands were warm and steady and not at all the hands of a man overcome, and he leaned close enough that his voice was for her alone.

"You have stayed awake too long, my queen," he said.

She did not understand it. That was the strange part — the part she would have all of an instant to wonder at — that she who understood everything, who had read this book a thousand times and could say each line before it came, did not understand him at all; and it was the most interesting thing that had happened to her in a century, and she was still leaning into it, still reaching after the meaning of it, when the blade went up beneath her ribs and into her heart.

There was no pain at first. There was only the wrongness, the impossible breach of it, steel where three centuries had taught her nothing could reach. He did not look glad. She would keep that. As her legs went from under her he caught her — gently, the way one catches a thing one has decided to break — and held her against him, and she felt the hooked blade turn, and felt it withdraw, and felt the cold of the open place where her heart had been.

Then she saw it. He had drawn it out of her, and it lay dark in his red hand, and then it was on the stone — small and still, the most private thing she owned, set down in front of the whole court.

The music stopped.

For one held beat the bright hall only stared: three hundred candles, a thousand faces, and the queen's heart on the floor.

Then the screaming started and the hall came apart, and very far away now Aurel was hurling himself at the stranger, and Brant and the guard were a wave breaking over them both, and Sabet was making a sound Cosima had never once heard her make. She was on the stone herself by then, though she had not felt herself arrive there, her cheek an inch from the thing they had taken out of her, the candlelight going grey and grainy at its edges. The last thought she had was clear, and almost amused — the thought of a woman watching the single thing she had never been able to predict — that she had asked for one more moment of being curious, and she had been given it.

Then Cosima of Avenrose, who did not die, died.