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The room stank of sweat and blood. Her attendants had to hold her upright to work the gown she’d been wearing off of her and guide her arms out of the sleeves. Aching, she was laid back down and a damp cloth was taken to her body, gently working the blood off her legs. A thick miasma crowded her body. All she could do was breathe it in and rest limply in her own fluids.
All things around her were slipping into each other like running ink, as if she were looking up from the bottom of a lake. Thick black seagrass floated up towards the surface at the edges of her vision. And was that a face in the reeds? A slim, white face with teeth that tore and a mouth filled with curses. She should have known this would be the dying she would do, should have been ready to be laid open as she was. Sovereign or not, she would always be a woman, in the end.
She could feel it, the difference. Had felt it in the morning, when she hadn’t been kicked awake. She hadn’t been able to place it right away, just sat, unsettled, at breakfast. Then the day had stretched on, and for a rare afternoon, she had let herself forget what troubled her. And then. And then.
In some places, the blood had dried. They rewet the cloth with warm water so they wouldn’t have to scrub at her skin, made delicate with fever. When they were satisfied, she was toweled dry and a clean night dress was slipped over her head as if she were only a baby. Hadn’t she been dying?
She felt a hand on her slick forehead. Someone was sitting next to her on the bed, moving her hair back and speaking to her softly. He was weeping. Someone had taken his baby; someone had taken his wife.
He stayed by her while she lay miserably. Numbly unable to pull him closer or cry or say anything at all, she stared at the ceiling until her lids grew heavy as the sun began to rise. Her tongue was still bitter and heavy from the cup they had pressed to her lips. He kissed her brow. She didn’t want to be forgiven. She wanted to die.
She couldn’t stay awake or sleep for long. Petrus feared what would happen if he gave her lethium, if it would coax her back into the death that had nearly taken her, so she struggled through half-nightmares and nausea unaided, smothered by the foul air. The vile smell of what had happened was too obstinate to leave when asked. Sleeplessness always found a way back to her, it seemed.
Someone was there each time she awoke, wiping the sweat from her forehead or bringing water to her lips. It was Phresine the most. Her hands were not soft but moved softly, something that she had secretly treasured when she was newly a woman. Perhaps it was not a new sensation, but she was new to it nonetheless. As a girl, she had hated being treated like a child.
“My Queen, your people will be alright if you close your eyes for a while longer.”
She wanted to close her eyes very badly, to sink into the darkness and peace sleep should bring, but there was nothing peaceful about what she saw when she did. Phresine patted her forehead with a cloth. “My Queen?”
What she wanted was watery and childish. She didn’t know if she spoke or if Phresine just knew.
“I almost had to pick him up and carry him away. He will be with you as soon as he can, my dear.”
The next time she opened her eyes, he was.
Before she could ask, Gen assured her that everything was taken care of, she didn’t need to worry, he was seeing to it all. She listened to him recount the arrival of Kamet and Costis, the strait full of enemy ships. He complained, too, which made the corner of her mouth rise.
Eugenides stayed with her. She knew Petrus wanted to forbid him from the room, but no one could bring themself to keep him out. It would be pointless, anyway. He would find a way in if it meant his death- which it very well could, her fever so hot and his health so fragile. What Petrus, as well as her barons, servants, and subjects were picturing was two sovereign dead in one fell swoop, the following civil war and years of unrest. She knew they pictured it every time he entered her room and rested his hand on hers, but she did not encourage them to forbid him entry.
One of the easier instances she awoke, his forehead was pressed to the bedpost, still holding her hand.
“How long has he been asleep?”
“Maybe an hour, your Majesty," Luria said softly.
She nodded in approval and instructed her not to wake him. Watching the back of his head laying still, she wished she didn’t feel bitter. How does it feel to worry? How does it feel to stay up late and watch for breathing?
She was unsure of the time as it passed. Resting was never enough to revive her, never enough to relieve the pain. And the pain was remarkable. Her head, her back, her legs, her face, all in revolt against her. And she was nauseous, nauseous always.
The smell didn’t help. The room was choked with it, holding every bit of sourness in place and forbidding it to leave. It reminded her, strangely, of the little purple flowers the women used to crush up in her mother’s wine. She had never let her have a taste. “This is for women, not for girls,” she would say.
The herbs in her own cup these days were from weeds she recognized from the garden at Ula’s temple. She had studied such herbs during her year at the House of Kallicertes, ravenous to have something on her side, something that she could know how to use for herself. Gen, when he learned of her interest, had urged her to write to the Magus of Sounis. The book she had studied from had burned years ago, but there were a few in the library. The Magus sent her tomes of plants and their classifications and uses, with illustrations that boasted imagination more than observation.
She braced herself against the raging headache rapping behind her eyes, grateful for the lethium she was finally permitted. She drank it and tried to want sleep, instead dreading the way the dryness of her throat would compound with the aches that would come from almost crying.
“A bath.” A long one.
“Of course, my Queen.”
Imenia heated the water while she sat herself up, adjusting to the buzzing in her vision and her ears that came when she did. Aglaia was quick to fly over and steady her, helping her drop her legs to the floor and supporting her when she shifted her weight carefully to her feet.
They washed her, lathered soap on her skin, combed through her hair. She could have done it herself, but she lay still and let them take care of their queen.
“I would like to be alone,” she said when they were finished.
The women hesitated.
“I will ask for you when I am ready. Leave me, please,” she said, and they slipped behind the dark curtain at the doorway to listen to her breathe.
Her belly rose out of the bathwater. It wasn’t taut anymore. She watched the water lower and rise against it as she breathed, the freckle next to her bellybutton sinking and surfacing like a fish. And she felt a bit like a girl again, watching her body change for the first time and unsure of its trajectory.
In the water, her pale skin looked unearthly. If she stayed in the bath long enough, her skin might turn to scales like Gyllo, who floated in seaweed looking for lives to take. Her mother had been the one to tell her the story, the daughter of a fisherman who kept her locked away. She couldn’t remember why. In her prison, the maid went mad with loneliness and heartache for the family she didn’t have, and when Gyllo escaped by some trick, she didn’t know the world anymore. She thought the fish were her own children trapped in the tide and dove into the depths to save them, only to drown in the current. Gyllo, restless from her death and her desire, sought out other women as a spirit and cursed them with weakness and disease so they would die alone as she, and their babies could be hers.
She thought of the flour-dusted women in the kitchens with amulets tucked under their garments, keeping them close to their skin and out of their work. The women who swarmed her mother when she was Attolia would chatter that their fear of Gyllo’s envy was a sign of idiotic superstition. What she wasn’t told outright and yet understood what that madness is the natural state of a childless woman and foolishness the natural state of mothers.
She had never received a pendant herself until she had one pressed into her hand while she bled her baby out onto gold sheets as though it weren’t too late already.
When she was toweled dry and dressed, she met Relius to eat in one of the chambers of her apartments to speak of news and secrets. The food brought to her was disappointing. Lochozema, baked semolina sweetened by honey and butter. Aside from a few of Brianna’s famous spiced almonds, it was the only she had been allowed to eat for days. It clashed with the stale air of her apartments, the stubborn odor ruining her appetite.
Relius noted her mood.
“I miss spice,” she said ruefully. She had hoped now that she was no longer pregnant that she could return to choosing what she ate, at least. “I’m sorry I cannot be better company.”
He humbly accepted his own food, rich with herbs and color, into his mouth. “Your company is always a gift, my Queen. I am happy to see you recovering.”
She looked at Relius with a tired eye. “Perhaps once I’m fully recovered, Petrus will also clear me to do heavy lifting, jump, climb, and run across fields like a maid.”
“Like your king,” he said, wiping his mouth primly.
“So. Only my king doesn’t wait for clearance.”
When she was well enough to make the trip, she gathered her attendants and rode her horse gently along the paved winding path to the temple. The sun was still low in the sky. Dew freshened the grass along the path, blinking in the shy early sun. She dismounted at the short step leading up to the door. Her attendants scuttled behind her, eager to catch her if she collapsed.
Behind the curtain of the naos, she joined the thick scent of wet stone and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. She held a gold necklace, to pair with the goddess's new earrings, over the rim. It was one of her heavier necklaces, with thick squares of carved gold linked together by blue and green stones, dropping waterfalls of white pearls and gold petals.
The statue of Ula held the dedication bowl, encroached upon by marble vines snaking around the goddess’s neck and arms.
She moved her hand to the cordless amulet in her pocket, suddenly clammy. She couldn’t reach it through her skirts, but it seemed immeasurably present. Eugenides had sacrificed a gift to save her life, a gift he hadn’t realized he wanted. A sprig of childish panic sprung alive in her breast. The goddess could have something else. The amulet was hers.
She let the gold and pearls slide from her hand to meet the other offerings and lowered herself to pray.
Outside her temple, a lush garden of herbs blossomed for priests and physicians to reap. Diktamos, marjoram, hayıt. The ripening jujube over her head would need to be harvested and dried by Ula’s priestesses soon. Soon they could have them with dinner, which she had begun to attend once more. She was relieved to hear Ileia and Aglaia chatting freely, not watching her like Iolanthe. At least a few of her women were becoming convinced of her growing strength.
Taking her time with the stone walks of the garden, she paid her respects to the coleus bush. She greeted the thick-stalked thriba. The artemesia, named after the botanist-turned-queen. The pennyroyal they gave her to expel the body trapped inside her. Somehow, she felt as though a poison has existed inside her for much, much longer. How long did poison work in a body? Had the sharp coleus wine on her lips somehow made its way inside her? The purple veins in her arms could be hiding anything. Poison doesn’t make a body a hospitable place to live.
When she returned to her apartments, the room had been perfumed, the window opened at her request. Flowers sat prettily in a vase on a low table. But there was no honey on the air, no green in the crisp breeze; the smell had shifted from the sour stench of body and grime to a sulfuric tang. It was difficult to focus on what Imenia said. She watched her mouth as she spoke. Her front teeth pushed against her lips, bowed out from years of thumb-sucking as a child. Frustrated with her own uncharacteristic inattentiveness, she dug her nails into her palm and waited for the pain to bring clarity. There was a pair of letters from Eddis, Imenia was saying.
She sent her lunch away untouched, nauseated, and sat down hard on her upholstered desk chair, harder than she meant to. She fumbled for a letter opener. It could only be something wrong, she thought, something vicious burning. Wasn’t there something to be done about that damn smell?
Phresine was looking at her, stalling at her handiwork. She ignored her, prying the letter’s casing open with difficulty. The sweat on her skin turned cold.
When she woke, Phresine was holding her hand to her forehead. She was still at her chair, head hanging back.
“Water, please,” Her voice came out in a wisp. Luria listened as though her queen were giving her dying wish and departed with tearful urgency.
It wasn't half an hour later that Petrus was leaning over her, explaining that she needed more bed rest and that for the sake of both of them, the king was no longer allowed to see her.
“You understand, Petrus, that my king will not care about your order.”
“Yes, your Majesty,” he said nervously. “But I cannot allow both of you to endanger one another’s health.”
She sat by the open window. So Ula had not been satisfied, after all. She traced the skyline of city and oceanside and studied the kernel of anger building in her head. How much was enough?
She closed her eyes against the light breeze and breathed deeply. She supposed she would eat jujube with dinner alone tonight.
When she was finished writing both letters, she lay her head down on her pillows and waited.
She imagined that she was in the gardens, sun resting kindly upon her body and beautifully out of breath from running. Flowers in bloom. The air in the gardens fresh, green and ripe, hints of honey from the hives by the kitchens. The scene wouldn’t hold. Taking its place, as it had taken everything’s place, was the dimly lit room too packed with attendants and physicians. The ringing in her ears, needles in her clammy skin, and the tiny pink face poking out from under swaths of fabric far too coarse for a baby.
They hadn’t wanted her to see, but she had watched as they whisked the tiny body away and felt a pang so deep in her gut that she had cried out. Phresine sidestepped her other attendants, too distracted with some commotion at the door to protest, and brought her the bundle. She had looked mostly like a baby. There was a head, a body, arms and legs, fingernails and eyelids. And she was very small, made smaller by the limbs curled up against her body like she was cold. Like there was already something she was protecting herself from.
They probably disposed of her like they did any other body- hanged men, beheaded men, dismembered hands- and burned her.
The window made a sound- it was as she said. There was something very juvenile about this sneaking; it was not part of a secret game between just the two of them, this time.
“Your father wrote me.”
“I thought you would be asleep,” Gen said from the sill. He rested his back against the window frame, shoulders tense with worry. She wondered at his distance, surprised that he gave Petrus any heed. “What did he say?”
Her father-in-law had been brief. “He gave me his condolences and told me to write him when I can. He said he has been praying for my health.”
He examined her face. “He doesn’t hate you.”
“I know.” He and Helen had told her as such. She wasn’t sure she believed them, or if she wanted to. She wanted to continue respecting the man's judgment of character.
Gen kept looking at her. “Petrus told me you’re getting worse.” He did not mention his banishment from her room, but he propped a foot up on the sill as if to say he didn’t care. She noted that he did not move closer.
“He would not be moved,” she said curtly.
Gen blew out a breath. “He’s getting bolder. You fainted?”
“I feel fine,” she said. She knew she was being petulant and she didn’t care. She wished he would be angry with her, wished he would withhold his forgiveness for once.
“Irene,” he said, “I’m not opposed to giving you a taste of your own medicine.” He glanced meaningfully at the cup sitting on her bedside table.
“Dosing me before I've even paraded the rooftops alone? How unkind.”
Gen rolled his eyes. “That's completely different,” he said, but he was smiling.
She held an arm out to him. He surrendered, taking her hand when he reached her.
“Tell me a story,” she said. “I don’t want to sleep yet.” She knew he, more than anyone, understood at least that.
He sat on top of the sheets and rested his head on her headboard. “Melite’s voice was clear as a bird.” Predictably, it was a love story. Forbidden romance, infidelity, secret languages. She listened with her eyes closed. His storytelling voice had always been beautiful.
“...Wicked Kleanthis fell over dead just as day rose in the sky. In the light of the new sun, Melite shed her feathers. Without the curse, she and Teisias could finally embrace, and she pulled him from his broken chariot.”
“I always heard Teisias died in the end.”
“Melite and her sister always saved him, the way my mother told it,” he said. “Then they marry." He smiled at his hand in his lap. "I always loved when she would tell this one. She did voices for the birds.”
She allowed him to give her the draft in a remarkable show of humility. Eugenides stood, taking the cup from her when she was finished, and she caught him by the arm. With only a moment of resistance, he allowed her to pull him to her in a remarkable show of humility in turn. She unfastened his hook and he crawled in with her, back to her chest. She pressed her nose against his hair and slid her arms around his middle so he could warm her hands.
There was silence between them as they let the candle burn itself out. He was thinking of names, she knew. They hadn’t picked one, but they had stayed up late many nights mulling them over nose to nose. Teisias, Artemisia, Daphnis, Kosmia. Dite, she had suggested once, and Gen had laughed. They'd spent the night listing people it was rumored they had had illicit affairs with, evaluating how well they would go with Attolia or Attolis one day, giggling at the talk they could cause if they chose. The emptiness in her stretched. She was always taking things from him.
He smoothed his thumb across her fingers as if to respond to her unspoken thoughts— listening, attentive as a supplicant to the silence after a prayer, for her breaths to show him she was sleeping soundly.
She dreamed of a baby on fire.
She did not have time for another long bath. Contained as she was, there was too much to do to rest. She hosted a series of conferences in a small meeting room adjoined to her apartments. Economists, needy barons who fretted in her absence, and, of course, Relius all spoke with her.
Phresine hinted she should do a more trouble-free activity than write missives and review documents, but she did not concede. She thought of the unfinished embroidery she had been working on the morning of her miscarriage, neglected in the middle of a stitch. Her mother had always loved asymmetry, balancing the weight of an embroidery piece outside the evenness of halves. It was inescapable in her own needlework, even now. A sprig of laurel curled around one side, pops of flowers and herbs filling another, a small bird perched on a limb of a tree. A garden she would love to grow herself someday.
That night, she took herself through the passageways Gen had shown her were hidden in her rooms to her freedom. The night air was a balm to her senses. She said her goodbye to her amulet, surprising herself with tears.
She waited for Petrus to arrive. He was no doubt in a hurry, certain she had called him in anger or sickness.
Luria let him in, and she assured him immediately she was well. He stilled himself and tried, very poorly, not to look anxious.
“Petrus, thank you for your dedication to my recovery. As you have gathered, I’m sure, I am no longer going to confine myself to my rooms.” When Imenia came in to check on her in the night to find an empty bed, she had fainted. The woman still looked pale.
“Your majesty, if you have recovered your constitution, you may act with your own discretion.” He left with a barrage of warnings that she not overdo any physical activity, rest often, and tell him if anything changed.
She returned to work at her desk and told Luria to begin arranging meetings in real meeting chambers and that she was visiting Ula’s temple that afternoon. She was returning a long correspondence when, sooner than she expected, there was a new letter.
Irene,
I hope my words find you better than you have been.
Our Gyllo is not from the sea. I have heard some women say she used to have babies who were stolen by nymphs, but I’ve also heard she died a virgin. I couldn’t find anything in our library about her, but I was thankful for an excuse to be away from noise for an afternoon. Your library is much more extensive, but I have a suspicion that your luck will be similar to mine. I did manage to find an illustration that could be Gyllo, but there is no story paired with her. As we’ve said a thousand times, women are not frequently the subject of art unless they are naked.
I’ve done my best to replicate it myself, since it is much too old and fragile to send in a letter. I hope it makes you laugh.
The woman in Helen’s illustration was indeed naked, and the imperfect lines did make her smile. The woman who was maybe Gyllo had long, dark hair, and it trailed down her scaled body, conveniently covering one, but not both, of her breasts. The woman had no talons, like she had imagined as a child, but her hands were bent into claws, ready to snatch up any passing baby for herself. This could be any woman damned, any number of child-eating women featured in stories she had heard. Funny how many there were.
I’m sorry that you should have to go through pain such as this. I miss you.
All my love,
Helen
Like the crack of a whip, the foul smell hit her. Her head began pounding double time, even though it faded away quickly. She hadn’t remembered opening the window, and she was surprised to see it closed when she looked. Surprised to notice a smell that hadn’t been there all morning.
Irene thumbed the amulet. Maybe the bout of sickness had nothing to do with Ula. Maybe one day she would grow a garden. Maybe she could tend to it herself, with grass-stained skirts and dirt in her skin, batting flies away from her sweaty face. Maybe one day she could have what she wanted.