Rachel Swirsky: The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window

“I will do this, too,” said Tryce. She began to speak more, but I raised one of my ringed, blue fingers to silence her.

“There’s another set of protections you don’t know about. One cast on your mother. It can only be broken by the fresh life-blood of something you love. Throw the blood onto the Queen while saying, ‘The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath Your Window has betrayed you.”

“Life-blood? You mean, I need to kill—”

“Perhaps the automaton.”

Tryce’s expression clouded with distress. “Gudrin is the last one! Maybe the baby. I could conceive again—”

“If you can suggest the baby, you don’t love it enough. It must be Gudrin.”

Tryce closed her mouth. “Then it will be Gudrin,” she agreed, but her eyes would not meet mine.

I folded my arms across Okilanu’s flat bosom. “I’ve given you what you wanted. Now grant me a favor, Imprudent Child Who Would Be Queen. When you kill Rayneh, I want to be there.”

Tryce lifted her head like the Queen she wanted to be. “I will summon you when it’s time, Respected Aunt.” She turned toward Gudrin in the shadows. “Disassemble the binding shapes,” she ordered.

For the first time, I beheld Gudrin in his entirety. The creature was tree-tall and stick-slender, and yet he moved with astonishing grace. “Thank you on behalf of the Creator of Me and My Kind,” he trilled in his beautiful voice, and I considered how unfortunate it was that the next time I saw him, he would be dead.

I smelled the iron-and-wet tang of blood. My view of the world skewed low, as if I’d been cut off at the knees. Women’s bodies slumped across lush carpets. Red ran deep into the silk, bloodying woven leaves and flowers. I’d been in this chamber far too often to mistake it, even dead. It was Rayneh’s. It came to me then: my perspective was not like that of a woman forced to kneel. It was like a child’s. Or a dwarf’s.

I reached down and felt hairy knees and fringed ankle bracelets. “Ah, Kyan…”

“I thought you might like that.” Tryce’s voice. These were probably her legs before me, wrapped in loose green silk trousers that were tied above the calf with chains of copper beads. “A touch of irony for your pleasure. He bound your soul to restlessness. Now you’ll chase his away.”

I reached into his back-slung sheath and drew out the most functional of his ceremonial blades. It would feel good to flay his treacherous flesh.

“I wouldn’t do that,” said Tryce. “You’ll be the one who feels the pain.”

I sheathed the blade. “You took the castle?”

“Effortlessly.” She paused. “I lie. Not effortlessly.” She unknotted her right trouser leg and rolled up the silk. Blood stained the bandages on a carefully wrapped wound. “Your protections were strong.”

“Yes. They were.”

She re-tied her trouser leg and continued. “The Lady with Lichen Hair tried to block our way into the chamber.” She kicked one of the corpses by my feet. “We killed her.”

“Did you.”

“Don’t you care? She was your friend.”

“Did she care when I died?”

Tryce shifted her weight, a kind of lower-body shrug. “I brought you another present.” She dropped a severed head onto the floor. It rolled toward me, tongue lolling in its bloody face. It took me a moment to identify the high cheekbones and narrow eyes.

“The death whisperer? Why did you kill Lakitri?”

“You liked the blood of Jada and Okilanu, didn’t you?”

“The only blood I care about now is your mother’s. Where is she?”

“Bring my mother!” ordered Tryce.

One of Tryce’s servants—her hands marked with the green dye of loyalty to the heir—dragged Rayneh into the chamber. The Queen’s torn, bloody robe concealed the worst of her wounds, but couldn’t hide the black and purple bruises blossoming on her arms and legs. Her eyes found mine, and despite her condition, a trace of her regal smile glossed her lips.

Her voice sounded thin. “That’s you? Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath My Window?”

“It’s me.”

She raised one bloody, shaking hand to the locket around her throat and pried it open. Dried petals scattered onto the carpets, the remnants of the red flowers I’d once gathered for her protection. While the spell lasted, they’d remained whole and fresh. Now they were dry and crumbling like what had passed for love between us.

“If you ever find rest, the world-lizard will crack your soul in its jaws for murdering your Queen,” she said.

“I didn’t kill you.”

“You instigated my death.”

“I was only repaying your favor.”

The hint of her smile again. She smelled of wood smoke, rich and dark. I wanted to see her more clearly, but my poor vision blurred the red of her wounds into the sienna of her skin until the whole of her looked like raw, churned earth.

“I suppose our souls will freeze together.” She paused. “That might be pleasant.”

Somewhere in front of us, lost in the shadows, I heard Tryce and her women ransacking the Queen’s chamber. Footsteps, sharp voices, cracking wood.

“I used to enjoy cold mornings,” Rayneh said. “When we were girls. I liked lying in bed with you and opening the curtains to watch the snow fall.”

“And sending servants out into the cold to fetch and carry.”

“And then! When my brood let slip it was warmer to lie together naked under the sheets? Do you remember that?” She laughed aloud, and then paused. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter. “It’s strange to remember lying together in the cold, and then to look up, and see you in that body. Oh, my beautiful Naeva, twisted into a worm. I deserve what you’ve done to me. How could I have sent a worm to kill my life’s best love?”

She turned her face away, as if she could speak no more. Such a show of intimate, unroyal emotion. I could remember times when she’d been able to manipulate me by trusting me with a wince of pain or a supposedly accidental tear. As I grew more cynical, I realized that her royal pretense wasn’t vanishing when she gave me a melancholy, regretful glance. Such things were calculated vulnerabilities, intended to bind me closer to her by suggesting intimacy and trust. She used them with many ladies at court, the ones who loved her.

This was far from the first time she’d tried to bind me to her by displaying weakness, but it was the first time she’d ever done so when I had no love to enthrall me.

Rayneh continued, her voice a whisper. “I regret it, Naeva. When Kyan came back, and I saw your body, cold and lifeless—I understood immediately that I’d been mistaken. I wept for days. I’m weeping still, inside my heart. But listen—” her voice hardened “—we can’t let this be about you and me. Our Land is at stake. Do you know what Tryce is going to do? She’ll destroy us all. You have to help me stop her—”

“Tryce!” I shouted. “I’m ready to see her bleed.”

Footsteps thudded across silk carpets. Tryce drew a bone-handled knife and knelt over her mother like a farmer preparing to slaughter a pig. “Gudrin!” she called. “Throw open the doors. Let everyone see us.”

Narrow, muddy legs strode past us. The twigs woven through the automaton’s skin had lain fallow when I saw him in the winter. Now they blazed in a glory of emerald leaves and scarlet blossoms.

“You dunce!” I shouted at Tryce. “What have you done? You left him alive.”

Tryce’s gaze held fast on her mother’s throat. “I sacrificed the baby.”

Voices and footsteps gathered in the room as Tryce’s soldiers escorted Rayneh’s courtiers inside.

“You sacrificed the baby,” I repeated. “What do you think ruling is? Do you think Queens always get what they want? You can’t dictate to magic, Imprudent Child.”