of whatever it is that makes a princess, was the apple of the Red Queen’s eye. I won’t lie, Serah had more than several ounces of whatever it is that lets a woman steal the sense from a man and accordingly I would gladly have ignored the common views on what cousins should and shouldn’t get up to. Indeed I’d tried to ignore them several times, but Serah had a vicious right hook and a knack for kicking the tenderest of spots that a man owns. She’d come today wearing some kind of riding suit in fawn and suede that looked better suited to the hunt than to court. But, damn, she looked good.
I brushed past her and elbowed my way in between my brothers near the front of the group. I’m a decent sized fellow, tall enough to give men pause, but I don’t normally care to stand by Martus and Darin. They make me look small and, with nothing to set us apart, all with the same dark-gold hair and hazel eyes, I get referred to as ‘the little one’. That I don’t like. On this occasion, though, I was prepared to be overlooked. It wasn’t just being in the throne room that made me nervous. Nor even because of Grandmother’s pointed disapproval. It was the blind-eye woman. She scares the hell out of me.
I first saw her when they brought me before the throne on my fifth birthday, my name day, flanked by Martus and Darin in their church finest, Father in his cardinal’s hat, sober despite the sun having passed its zenith, my mother in silks and pearls, a clutch of churchmen and court ladies forming the periphery. The Red Queen sat forward in her great chair booming out something about her grandfather’s grandfather, Jalan, the Fist of the Emperor, but it passed me by – I’d seen her. An ancient woman, so old it turned my stomach to look at her. She crouched in the shadow of the throne, hunched up so she’d be hidden away if you looked from the other side. She had a face like paper that had been soaked then left to dry, her lips a greyish line, cheekbones sharp. Clad in rags and tatters, she had no place in that throne room, at odds with the finery, the fire-bronzed guards and the glittering retinue come to see my name set in place upon me. There was no motion in the crone: she could almost have been a trick of the light, a discarded cloak, an illusion of lines and shade.
‘… Jalan?’ The Red Queen stopped her litany with a question.
I had answered with silence, tearing my gaze from the creature at her side.
‘Well?’ Grandmother narrowed her regard to a sharp point that held me.
Still I had nothing. Martus had elbowed me hard enough to make my ribs creak. It hadn’t helped. I wanted to look back at the old woman. Was she still there? Had she moved the moment my eyes left her? I imagined how she’d move. Quick like a spider. My stomach made a tight knot of itself.
‘Do you accept the charge I have laid upon you, child?’ Grandmother asked, attempting kindness.
My glance flickered back to the hag. Still there, exactly the same, her face half-turned from me, fixed on Grandmother. I hadn’t noticed her eye at first, but now it drew me. One of the cats at the Hall had an eye like that. Milky. Pearly almost. Blind, my nurse called it. But to me it seemed to see more than the other eye.
‘What’s wrong with the boy? Is he simple?’ Grandmother’s displeasure had rippled through the court, silencing their murmurs.
I couldn’t look away. I stood there sweating. Barely able to keep from wetting myself. Too scared to speak, too scared even to lie. Too scared to do anything but sweat and keep my eyes on that old woman.
When she moved, I nearly screamed and ran. Instead just a squeak escaped me. ‘Don-don’t you see her?’
She stole into motion. So slow at first you had to measure her against the background to be sure it wasn’t imagination. Then speeding up, smooth and sure. She turned that awful face toward me, one eye dark, the other milk and pearl. It had felt hot, suddenly, as if all the great hearths had roared into life with one scorching voice, sparked into fury on a fine summer’s day, the flames leaping from iron grates as if they wanted nothing more than to be amongst us.
She was tall. I saw that now, hunched but tall. And thin, like a bone.
‘Don’t you see her?’ My words rising to a shriek, I pointed and she stepped toward me, a white hand reaching.
‘Who?’ Darin beside me, nine years under his belt and too old for such foolishness.
I had no voice to answer him. The blind-eye woman had laid her hand of paper and bones over mine. She smiled at me, an ugly twisting of her face, like worms writhing over each other. She smiled, and I fell.
I fell into a hot, blind place. They tell me I had a fit, convulsions. A ‘lepsy’, the chirurgeon said to Father the next day, a chronic condition, but I’ve never had it again, not in nearly twenty years. All I know is that I fell, and I don’t think I’ve stopped falling since.
Grandmother had lost patience and set my name upon me as I jerked and twitched on the floor. ‘Bring him back when his voice breaks,’ she said.
And that was it for eight years. I came back to the throne room aged thirteen, to be presented to Grandmother before the Saturnalia feast in the hard winter of 89. On that occasion, and all others since, I’ve followed everyone else’s example and pretended not to see the blind-eye woman. Perhaps they really don’t see her because Martus and Darin are too dumb to act and poor liars at that, and yet their eyes never so much as flicker when they look her way. Maybe I’m the only one to see her when she taps her fingers on the Red Queen’s shoulder. It’s hard not to look when you know you shouldn’t. Like a woman’s cleavage, breasts squeezed together and lifted for inspection, and yet a prince is supposed not to notice, not to drop his gaze. I try harder with the blind-eye woman and for the most part I manage it – though Grandmother’s given me an odd look from time to time.
In any event, on this particular morning, sweating in the clothes I wore the night before and with half the DeVeers’ garden to decorate them, I didn’t mind in the least being wedged between my hulking brothers and being ‘the little one’, easy to overlook. Frankly, the attention of either the Red Queen or her silent sister were things I could do without.
We stood for another ten minutes, unspeaking in the main, some princes yawning, others shifting weight from one foot to the other, or casting sour glances my way. I do try to keep my misadventures from polluting the calm waters of the palace. It’s ill advised to shit where you eat, and besides, it’s hard to hide behind one’s rank when the offended party is also a prince. Even so, over the course of the years, I’d given my cousins few reasons to love me.
At last the Red Queen came in, without fanfare but flanked by guards. The relief was momentary – the blind-eye woman followed in her wake, and although I turned away quicker than quick, she saw me looking. The queen settled herself into her royal seat and the guardsmen arrayed themselves around the walls. A single chamberlain – Mantal Drews, I think – stood ill at ease between the royal progeny and our sovereign, and once more the hall returned to silence.
I watched Grandmother and, with some effort, kept my gaze from sliding toward the white and shrivelled hand resting behind her head on the throne’s shoulder. Over the years I’d heard many rumours about Grandmother’s secret counsellor, an old and half-mad woman kept hidden away – the Silent Sister they called her. It seemed though that I stood alone in knowing that she waited at the Red Queen’s side each day. Other people’s eyes seemed to avoid her just as I always wished mine would.
The Red Queen cleared her throat. In taverns across Vermillion they tell it that my grandmother was once a handsome woman, though monstrous tall with it. A heartbreaker who attracted suit from all corners of the Broken Empire and even beyond. To my eye she had a brutal face, raw-boned, her skin tight as if scorched, but still showing wrinkles as crumpled
