Chapter Text
In a pretty bedroom high above the Imperial gardens, the only daughter of the sixth concubine of the Most Serene Sarkan - his Imperial Grace, Keeper of the Silent River, Lord of the Southern Plateaus, Conqueror of the Volpine Islands, Protector of the Great City, and peerless jewel of the House of Charn (may-the-blooded-sun-of-his-reign-never-set), sleeps peacefully for the final time.
Her nursemaid watches her, looking on from the alcove she has occupied since before her Ladyship, the girl’s mother, was sent to her dotage. Some years ago, at the tender age of thirty-three and a third, and upon the very hour of midnight, her Ladyship was sent to live in cloistered solitude at the House of Mothers, never to darken the halls of the great palace again. The girl has lived under the rule of tutors and chatelaines ever since. Back in the dark, the maid wonders if the stories about the House of Mothers are true. They say the house is a myth, and the woman was sent to the Stone Tower Above Heaven all those years ago instead.
It is of no consequence, she decides. After all, it’s not as if anyone’s gone to check. The maid’s duty is to the girl, who in her dream-turning reminds her to attend.
The girl is tall. Taller than her sisters by a hawk-span, and tall enough to have fully outgrown the child’s bed she now lays across. The other girls tease her mercilessly, calling her giants-get and lamppost, asking if she can tell them what she sees of the future, so high in the sky. She never has an answer ready. She has a tendency of fumbling over her words, and when she gets nervous, as she often does, she tucks her long dark hair into her belt. More than anything it makes her look like a tree caught by its own branch, yearning to grow higher still. A painful, fretting kind of habit she picked up from her last nursemaid, a painful, fretting kind of woman who emphasized silence from children and docility from maidens. She disappeared four months past, as silently and as thoroughly as the mother. Nothing is permanent in the house of Charn - both the girl and the nursemaid know this.
The current woman, the one in the corner, is grateful this last assignment is a short one. Ranking servants in the House are not known for their long tenure either, and the woman’s term is nearly complete. A night-guardian is one thing, but nursemaids have to attend publicly, and the woman shudders at the thought of catching the eye of one of the more ill-tempered cousins. Perhaps they will release her from her contract early, as payment for the long hours of the last few months.
The girl sleeps on. In the night, a pair of guards enter, exit. Before leaving, the younger one picks up a ring in the shape of a vulture, where glittering orbs of black carborundum form sightless eyes that glare into the dark. The guard nearly pockets it before a waft of womanly wrath emanates from the alcove and makes him think the better of it. He puts the ring back on the table before looking back to the maid and shrugging. Come tomorrow, it’s not as if its mistress will be here to miss it.
Once the guards leave, the nursemaid contents herself with her handiwork, twisting and carding a basket of goats’ fluff at her feet into something more useful. As she works, she imbues the yarn with the essence of light itself, causing the skein to emit a faint glow as it winds. A small magic - nothing like the lords and ladies can manage, and a mere marsh-light compared to the Sarkan, but the work is good and the twists are even and she smiles with ancient pride. Before the droughts drove the young ones to the city, her father grazed wiry haired goats on the foothills of the eastern steppes. In the summer when the goats roamed the wild high grazing grounds, the family would weave their wool into tabards for the Imperial Guard. In the darkness she can almost smell home again, clean dry grass, warm, contented animal, and juniper. She wonders if her father is still alive.
The smell of coddled eggs and fresh bread are beginning to rise from the kitchens, and the maid wonders how long her brother has been awake in the city below. His bakery is a mean one, making common loaves for the working class. She sees him once a fortnight, to take home one of the common-loaves he bakes just for her, and information for the Majordomo, of course.
The girl stirs once more and the maid sees that the shadows are beginning to shift. The red sun is rising, having spent the night hours in its usual spot low in the sky.
The sun never truly sets on The Great City, its lidless gaze providing an endless watch under which the Sarkan conducts his numerous illicit affairs of state. Not just he, of course. The city below is crawling with men under his command - agents, observers, spies. Webs upon webs of informants form the city’s foundation- layers of networks that weave together and break apart across tens of generations. Alliances and compacts are drawn up and broken every day here, and some agreements, the oldest of them, are rumored to unmake the world if they are ever torn in two. Speed and accuracy are paramount for these internuncios, and the city is always humming, always alive with gossip, practically teeming with information, with speculation, and with conspiracy - with would-you-rathers and scheming. If you are first to tell his Imperial majesty about some threat upon his life, your reward will be handsome. If you are found to be withholding information, well…
Silent as a moon-hawk, the maid rises and puts her fibre-working away. She too has information to share, for the girl has been kept in darkness long enough. She approaches the bed, the girl’s dark hair making a ghoulish specter across the white linens. Long arms tangle through the sheets, making the girl look like nothing so much as a sand-spider, the long hairs of its body extended to catch the desert winds and sail to some new place. The woman shudders. This girl is ill-portended as it is, and her appearance foretells of dark fates beyond even that dim future.
The girl knows none of this. She sleeps the uninterrupted sleep of a coddled, if lonely child, surrounded since birth by armies of nursemaids and guardians. She does not know it will be the last time she sleeps so well - how could she? She dreams of cool silks drifting across her long arms, and of pools in the desert surrounded by shaggy camels like those in her father’s herds. She dreams of desert hawks and of foxes, the fish of the green river that flows below her bedroom, and all manner of creatures of sand and salt and earth and air. She dreams of her sisters finally embracing her, and of her father turning to temperance. She dreams of seeing her mother again.
She dreams of lions.