It was to Tseweng-tsa that Samarkar bowed first, extending her tongue in a show of respect. “Honored Stepmother,” she said, before turning to Yangchen—”Honored Sister”—and the other princesses in turn.
It was protocol. And it was easier to look at Payma’s kind young face as it broke into a smile of delight at seeing Samarkar than it was to look at Yangchen gloating over her son.
In another life, that would have been Samarkar sitting where the light fell across her cushions, a baby chewing peacefully at her breast. It was she who would have read aloud in a bright room where her women sewed and spun. In another life, it would have eventually been Samarkar sitting where Tseweng sat, the entire empire hers to rule as she saw fit until her son turned twenty-five.
Samarkar flattered herself that in Tseweng’s place, she would have lost less territory to the ceaseless gnawing of the Song and Qersnyk, and perhaps even gained a little. But she would never know that now.
“Samarkar-tsa,” Tseweng said, extending her tongue as well. “What a delight! Are you well? Have you been refreshed? Will you sit?”
Her age precluded her rising, as the babe at Yangchen’s breast precluded hers, but Payma and Tsechen and all the ladies started up, setting their embroidery hoops aside with a great rustling of silk and wool.
“Samarkar-la, Honored Stepmother,” Samarkar reminded gently, allowing herself to be led to an unused cushion and seated. She squeezed Payma’s hands before the girl got away, careful not to pinch the princess’s fingers between the elaborate rings and finger-stalls she wore, careful too of Payma’s long enameled fingernails. Samarkar remembered embroidering or serving tea with hands so decorated, and winced when Payma said, “Can I bring you tea, Honored Sister?”
But one didn’t say no to tea. “I would be honored.”
Samarkar settled the inky skirts of her coat around her, a silent reminder of her new honorific. Tseweng-tsa’s plucked and stained eyebrows rose. Samarkar made a show of not noticing.
“Of course, Samarkar-la,” the regent said. “How silly of me. How proceed your studies?”
“Very well, thank you.” Samarkar took the celadon porcelain tea bowl Payma placed in her hands and bowed her head over it. She could see at a glance the two or three wilted, translucent flower petals that rolled in the depths of the clear greeny-amber fluid. Sweetened with rose jam, in just the idiosyncratic manner Samarkar preferred when it was not served as a meal. Someone had seen to it that the room was prepared for her visit, and she suspected it wasn’t the regent.
If it had been—well, the odds of the jam being poisoned were lower than they had been when Samarkar still could have produced an heir.
“Can you make it rain?” Payma asked, her face alight below her elaborate headdress as she settled back onto her cushion.
Samarkar laughed gently. “Not yet.” Roughness scratched her fingertips; she pulled them away from her collar self-consciously and forced them to return to her tea bowl, aware that the nervous gesture had already given away too much. “There’s a weather-working tomorrow night, however. Perhaps I can arrange for you to be invited. I shall beg it of my masters.”
The regent’s sniff echoed. She disapproved of a member of the royal family acknowledging any mastery but hers. But a weather-working meant rockets, and rockets would please the princes’ wives.
Here, too, Samarkar realized, she could hear the rush of the wild Tsarethi. It might run like a millstream through the city, channeled and mollified, but it was not the sort of river one could ever treat as tame. It would tumble on, down through the valleys that divided the Steles of the Sky, gaining tributaries as it fell. It would grow and grow, broad and calm now, until it fell into the sea fourteen hundred li away as one of the world’s great rivers, bearing the fate of three empires, a dozen city-states, and countless crofts and farms on its broad grass-smoothed shoulders.
What was arrogance like the regent’s before something like a river?
Now, said the sometimes-doubting voice in her head. Now you are thinking like the wizard Samarkar.
Samarkar reached across rugs and cushions to set her bowl on a small lacquer table. In so doing, though, she leaned across the great mirror set against the far wall—wizard-work, because no mere craftsman’s hand could forge that span of glass and silver.
She saw herself like a shadow among the jeweled and flowered ladies. She saw the black ropes of her hair and how they caught the filtered light behind her; she saw how that same light lay in oil-sheen gleams on the silk brocade of her coat. She saw herself—again—as a dark, predatory raptor, waiting in the midst of jeweled cage-birds.