A beggar with his right hand severed for some infraction caught her eye. She tossed him a coin, wondering what his crime had been. Once, she would have considered his punishment only what he deserved. But that was before she learned quite so much as she knew now of the ways of the world.
The city’s white walls and red tile roofs rose on her right hand, and the river poured down smoothly on the left, filling its chasm and the whole of the valley with the sound of rushing water. The railings rustled with prayer flags; the eaves of houses rang with strings of prayer bells. Samarkar drew the air deep, delighted, for a moment setting the nagging thought of her task aside.
An hour or so of walking brought her to the Black Palace. She approached the towering black gate boldly, as if she belonged there still; it felt strange to come home to a place that was home no longer. The guards at the gate recognized her anyway, despite her black wizard’s garb and her hair dressed plainly in two shining dark braids over the green and pearl collar.
Ushered inside the palace, she was greeted most formally by a chamberlain and a series of functionaries, all of whom she knew by name. One or two had been warm acquaintances when she was princess. But now, they treated her as an honored stranger—with absolutely correct dignity and deference, and not even the shade of a smile.
It should not have stung. She had made her choice to serve Rasa as a wizard and not as a princess—in some ways, a matter of preserving her own life and freedom, because as a wizard she could neither be sold off in another marriage to serve her brother’s ambition (assuming he could find a man who would take her, after the last debacle) nor would she eventually find herself and any heirs murdered by a cousin to clear a line of succession.
It should not have stung. But Samarkar knew enough by now to understand that things were rarely as they should be.
“Will my brother see me?” she asked, as they swept her down the halls. Given the pace the functionaries set, she was glad she had waited to come here. Although the long strides and the wind of their passage made her wizard’s black-on-black brocade coat and broad trousers—designed to set off the pearls and jade of her stiff high collar—flare out around her dramatically. She was adapting to the collar—not so different from court garb, after all—but despite her two years of novitiate, it felt strange to walk about bareheaded. Probably because now she was bareheaded in the palace, and she had not done that since she was old enough to toddle upright after her nursemaids.
As she asked the question, it occurred to her that she should have phrased it more positively, to make the functionaries work harder to deny her. Had all the learning of a lifetime of politics been snipped from her body with her stones?
“His Highness is unexpectedly detained,” one of the functionaries—old Baryan—said, managing to walk sideways and backward like a river crab and still bow so low his headdress scraped the floor. “The princesses will entertain you while you wait, Samarkar-la.”
Samarkar-la smiled and congratulated Songtsan silently. No one could claim he had not done her honor, and yet he could keep her waiting indefinitely to demonstrate his disappointment in her delays.
“Then we are going to the solar?”
“Yes, aphei.”
“Never mind, then. I know the way.”
The wizard’s trousers allowed a person to move at a pace an old man reduced to scuttling in court robes could hardly be expected to keep up. Samarkar lengthened her stride, letting her bootheels hit the flagstones with a force she would not have dared when she whispered through this palace in narrow slippers that never kept her feet warm. She cruised down the hall like a great golden eagle, the wind of her passage filling her coat like dark wings, and the functionaries flocked behind, ineffectual and hurried as mobbing crows.
She had spent many hours in the women’s solar. It took her two minutes to walk there, hustling up stairs two risers at a time, and even though her side caught a stitch in half-healed muscles partway up the final flight, she did not show it. When she paused in the doorway, she did put a hand out to the frame, but that could have been to show off her bare hands and bare fingertips as much as because she needed the support.
Because suddenly—she needed the support.
The doorway stood open, its curtains drawn wide, and sunlight streamed into the long room through windows glazed against the cold with oiled rice paper. At one end of the solar, heat rolled forth from a brazier beneath a hooded chimney. The face of the servant who crouched on a stool behind it, slowly lifting and lowering her fan, was dewed with sweat.
At the other end—the end closer to the doorway—fifteen women of various ages sat on thick rugs and cushions, their feet in horned slippers, their brocade robes falling about them in bright layers like the petals of so many variegated roses. Three of those women were princesses—Songtsan’s and Tsansong’s wives, Yangchen (with her babe at her breast), Tsechen, and Payma, who was barely fourteen. One of the women—Tseweng—was the Dowager Empress and Regent, accorded a stool in deference to her age and stiff joints and (Samarkar thought uncharitably) the skinniness of her ass.