The Mayfly

The kingdom was building something, and Cosima could hear all of it and would not get up to see.

The hammers had started at first light, as they did now every morning, a whole season of them. Somewhere past the south wall they were raising a wing onto her own palace; somewhere past that, granaries, by the look of the carts that crossed the plaza from dawn on, heavy going and empty coming back. The river-capital was doing what it had always done in a good reign, which was to grow fat and proud and loud, and she lay in the deep linen of her bed and let it come to her through the tall windows like weather she had no part in.

Days had gone by like this. She had stopped marking how many.

The Oracle's words sat in her where food would not. You cannot die — but your other can die. Time must run its course. She turned them the way the tongue worries a tooth, not because it helps but because the worrying is the only thing the hand can reach. A man at her court was the far end of her own soul. She had no proof and now she had a fable, which was worse, because a fable was a thing other people believed and she could not afford to believe a thing she could not hold.

A girl came in with a tray and set it on the table by the window where the light was good, and curtsied, and said something soft about the broth being made just as Her Majesty favored, and Cosima said thank you in the voice she kept for that, and did not move toward it. The girl went out. The broth steamed, and thinned, and stopped steaming. After a while another girl came and took it away uneaten and said nothing about it, because they had learned not to, and brought a comb and brushed out the long hair the whole realm tried to copy, and braided it loosely so it would not knot in the night, and dressed her with the practiced gentleness of hands that did this for a living, and Cosima let herself be tended like a fine thing in a case, and when they were done she sank back into the bed and watched the kingdom breathe.

There had been a voice for this once. Sabet would have stood in the door with her arms folded and told her she looked like a corpse that had given up on being mourned, and meant it kindly, and got her up. Sabet was a year in the ground now — a quiet going, seen coming for years, a house in the kingdom standing shuttered with her name still over the door. Cosima had buried so many that the burying had a shape she knew. This one had no shape. It was only the missing of a sharp voice that would have known exactly what to say, and would have said it, and would have been obeyed.

She watched, through her lashes, the woman who ran the house in that voice's place.

Mellani was at the door more often than not, and at the door now, turning the council away in that soft careful tone she had — the queen is resting; the queen is considering it; she'll have her answer for them within the week. None of it was true. The queen was considering nothing. But it was said so gently, and with such an air of a settled thing, that the men on the other side of it went away believing they had been told something, and Mellani closed the door on them and turned back to the room with her hands folded and her face arranged into patience, as though there were nowhere in the world she would rather stand than just inside that door.

And then she did a thing she was not allowed to do.

A page had come up with a sealed paper for the queen's own hand — a seal Cosima knew, the Chancellor's, the office that could not act on anything without her mark. Mellani took it at the threshold. She read the queen's stillness for one beat, the way a sailor reads the sky. Then she broke the Chancellor's seal herself, scanned it, and at the writing-desk in the corner she set her own hand to a line of it and pressed the small queen's-signet she had no right to hold into the wax, and gave it back to the page, and sent the realm's business on its way without ever crossing the room.

Cosima watched her do it and said nothing. There should have been a word for it. Instead there was only a low strange warmth somewhere under the grey of it, the first thing she'd felt in days that wasn't the Oracle: I am held in place by someone who would walk off any cliff in the kingdom before she let me fall off one. She set it away with the rest, and let her eyes go heavy again, and the day wore down.

It was a courier who reached her, in the end. Not the careful filtering Mellani did at the door; a real one, road-dirty and out of breath, his news too large to be turned away, so it came in over Mellani's shoulder while she was still saying he could not. A salt-town three kingdoms east had been taken by force. Two of the little city-states had declared for the raiders rather than be eaten next. The thing that had turned over in its sleep was sitting up.

Cosima heard it the way she heard the hammers.

She had ended wars with a sentence. She had once stopped an army with the choice of where to stand. And the news of a town's people put to the sword and a border bleeding came to her now and found nothing to land on — ran off her like rain off a roof made tight against exactly this, every drop of it shed and none let in. She noted, distantly, that she did not care. A town had burned and she had felt more about the broth going cold.

And that — not the salt-town, not the raiders — was the thing that finally moved her. The not-caring frightened her in a way the war could not, because she had been the kind of queen who cared once, and somewhere between then and now the door had been pulled shut, and a woman who does not care that her people are dying is a season away from being something she had spent a long life refusing to be.

She sat up.

"Mellani."

The name brought the woman across the room at once, the courier forgotten. "Majesty."

"There's a man at court. New. Lately." She found she had to reach for him through the fog, and the reaching was itself a kind of waking. "Fair. Young. Easy in himself — he won't have learned to be afraid of anyone here yet. He came up out of the river country on the edge of Vesperia, but he carries letters from the Vesperian house. He calls himself Pariston Haffer." She heard her own voice steadying as it went, the sovereign coming back into it by inches. "A Mayfly. Find him, and bring him to me. Now, today. Bring him, do not summon him — there's a difference."

Something lit in Mellani's plain face — pleasure, naked and unhidden, that the queen wanted a thing she could go and get. "As you wish, my queen," she said, already moving, and was gone before the sentence had quite finished, and Cosima heard her in the antechamber putting the order into the right hands with a crispness she never wasted on the council.

Then there was the waiting, which Cosima spent on her feet at the window for the first time in days, watching the city she had let blur back into something with edges. The light went long and gold across the new scaffolds. She told herself she was prepared.

When the knock came she had her back to the door.

Two guards; the scrape of the latch; a third set of footsteps, lighter, uncertain, stopping a pace inside. "Leave us," she said to the room, and the guards went, and Mellani went last and slowest, and the door closed, and it was the two of them and the long stripe of evening on the floor.

Cosima turned around.

She had told herself she was ready for him and she was not. The man before the door was sunlight where the other had been the inside of a closed room. Gold hair gone loose at the shoulders; an open, unguarded face; a build that moved easily and a stance that hadn't yet been taught to brace. Bright where the other had been quiet. Quick where the other had been still. Everything the man years dead had not been, standing in her chamber in the last of the day, watching her with the careful courtesy of someone who has been brought somewhere grand and told nothing.

She crossed the room and stopped close to him and took him in, and could not make herself stop.

"Is there something I can help you with, Your Majesty?" he said. Plainly. Not afraid. A little wary, as a sensible man is wary of a thing he doesn't understand, but underneath it steady, as though the strangeness of the moment were interesting to him rather than dangerous.

And the queen who could silence a hall, who had not stumbled over a sentence in three hundred years, opened her mouth and had nothing in good order to put in it.

"You'll think I've lost my mind," she said. "I'm going to say it anyway, because I've held it alone long enough that holding it is worse." She made herself meet him. "There's something between us. You and me. I don't — I can't tell you what it is or where it came from, I have no name for it and no proof of it, and I am not a woman who says things she can't prove. But it's there. I've felt it since the day you came to this court. I've felt it across rooms. I've felt it standing in this one not saying it to you, like a fool, for days—" The words were coming out of her in a way words did not, fast and unguarded, and some far-back part of her was already watching the door, waiting for him to make for it. "You'll go back down to that hall and tell them the queen is mad, and they'll believe you, and you'll be right—"

"I know," he said.

She stopped.

"I have felt this too." He said it plainly, as if she'd asked him the hour. No awe in it, no fear, only a slightly relieved certainty, like a man glad to find the thing he'd been carrying alone was carried by someone else as well. "At first I thought it was only — you're a legend, Your Majesty. I grew up on the tales. I told myself any man would feel turned about, brought in front of you, that of course it would be strange." His brow worked, trying to fit a shape to a shapeless thing. "But it didn't stay that. It got bigger than that, and I don't know what it is either, and I haven't told a soul because who would I tell, and there's no — I keep trying to find a way to say it that doesn't sound like — my brother, back in the river lands, he'd laugh me out of the house, he's the sensible one of us, and even he couldn't—"

She crossed the last of the distance and kissed him.

It was nothing she had planned and it came out of her the way the words had, the only clean thing she had to say after a day of saying nothing right — her hand finding the side of his jaw, her mouth on his to stop him talking and because she could not wait through one more word of it. He went still under it, caught, his whole easy certainty undone in an instant. And then he understood her, and chose it; his hand came up warm against her back and brought her in, and the careful courtesy was gone, and there was only this, the meeting of it, kept apart so long it arrived already feeling old — two people coming together as though the meeting of them were older than either one, and had known the way before they did.

She did not hear the knocking that had begun, soft and steady, at the chamber door.