Chapter Thirty-Six Vina
Chapter Thirty-Six
Vina
[In Punjabi] I love you, my daughter. Never forget. I love you.
Source: Letter from Chandni Arora to Simran Arora
Cross the mark I’ve just left on the stairs, and your archive will burn. Every book, every chain. Even the stone.” Simran leaned forward, unblinking. “You saw what I did to the entrance to the White Tower, didn’t you? I can do so much more.”
Vina knew it was a bluff, but she wasn’t going to let the archivists know that. She clenched her hand around the hilt of her sword, letting her face and her voice fill with anguish.
“Please, listen to her,” Vina begged, aiming for a look of noble suffering. She had a lot of experience, all in all, so she was fairly sure she was doing a good job of it. “If there were any other way, sir, we’d take it. But if you cross her, it cannot be helped!”
“I am more than you think I am, Apollonius,” Simran said softly. “I’m no simple witch. I’m an incarnate witch. I have lifetimes of witching in me. I am malice and destruction down to my very bones. Try me. I’d happily set this place aflame, and let it take all of us with it.”
Personally, Vina thought Simran was laying it on a little thick, but it seemed to be working on the archivist. Apollonius had a hunted look on his face. The archivists around him were muttering, faces pale.
“Fine,” Apollonius said abruptly. “Come quietly, and your minions may leave unimpeded.”
“Do I have your word?” Simran asked.
“My word, on my honor. Now,” Apollonius continued, turning his attention to Vina, “remove your sword.”
“Fuck this,” Edmund said suddenly. “I’m not letting them take you.”
He rammed forward, sword an arc of steel, throwing himself at the archivists. One of the warders grabbed Apollonius and concealed him with his body.
Vina swore under her breath and swiftly drew her own blade.
“Run!” Vina roared, cracking her blade heavily into another guard’s helmet—then slamming her elbow into his nose. “That’s an order, Eddie!”
“You don’t bloody give me orders!” Edmund yelled back.
“Christ, you idiot. Get out of here alive so you can help us later, or I swear I won’t forgive you!”
His eyes flashed. Somehow she’d gotten through to him, because he took advantage of the distraction she’d provided to push his way through the throng and vanish down the stairs.
She looked at Simran, and Simran looked back at her. She lowered her sword.
Perhaps Apollonius’s word could be trusted. Perhaps not.
But she trusted that Hari and Galath would do everything they could to keep the archivists at bay. She trusted that, if she and Vina failed, their allies and their family would find a way to escape and thrive.
Soon the Queen’s attention would be focused entirely elsewhere, after all.
Vina’s sword was taken from her roughly.
“Hold them,” instructed Apollonius. “The Queen wants them whole.”
They were taken to the Palace.
The Palace grounds were changing. The roses were gone, the sky blue as an eye, immune to the smog of London.
The Palace itself had grown lustrous white turrets, pennants that shifted from rose-and-white to sword-upon-blue at their pointed peaks.
Vina could hear the roar of the sea, which was strange indeed—London was far from the coast.
Whatever tales the Eternal Prince hailed from expected seas and tides, so the Palace shifted to accommodate him.
Even the White Hall had changed, its walls transformed to bare stone veiled in lush tapestries, the wood paneling gone, the torchlight smoky and dull.
The air smelled of moss and anise, the rosewater that usually swathed the room fading.
The room was full of incarnates, and empty of courtiers. The Queen’s court had abandoned her like rats from a sinking ship. She’d gathered the incarnates around her, any incarnate who’d been at the ball, all the ones in London who’d remained here under her thumb.
Vina did not recognize those figures, but her gaze scanned over them—a woman with extremely long, golden hair; an enormously tall man; an older woman, hunched over in a spindly chair. The old woman smiled slyly as Vina and Simran entered, dragged in by grave-faced Yeoman Warders.
“Leave us,” said the Queen, waving a hand at the warders. “Apollonius, my incarnates—remain with us.”
As his fellows left, Apollonius lingered, looking up at the Queen with beatific true belief.
With a jolt, Vina realized that the single knight at the door, guarding Queen and Court, was Matthias.
She almost hadn’t recognized him. He looked himself, still—but sorrow had carved shadows in his gentle face.
He did not look at her, even though she stared at him open-mouthed for a long moment.
She wrenched her attention back to the throne.
The Queen had never appeared out of place in her own abode.
Now, seated on her throne in her finery, she looked subtly wrong.
A misplaced glove, the wrong note in a rendition of a song.
In the dim torchlight, the Queen herself was papery: her blue veins like spills of lustrous ink, skin as white as good parchment.
She was still luminous, but in the way of paper lamps, or very finely woven silk—as if a single touch could rend her through, leaving nothing but the light.
Her hair was unbound, which Vina had never seen before.
It was a swath of red down her back, bright as freshly spilled blood.
Her ladies-in-waiting remained, still. Some watched the incarnates. Others were gathered around her, their faces unreadable beneath black velvet.
“You,” said the Queen, and her voice was hollow and tired.
“Why did you seek to harm our archives? Why did you run from our embrace, and our protection?” She opened her hands, palms up.
Her gaze fixed on Vina. “You know we are a benevolent mistress, knight. You have served us over so many lifetimes. Why do you turn on us now?”
Vina bowed, as Simran stood straight and tall at her side.
“Majesty,” she said. “The Isle is changing, as the sea is ever changing, as the sun rises and falls. I was loyal to you once, but as all things born and made new in the Isle, my heart has long since changed. I do not love you any longer, and it is my heart-sworn duty to see all incarnate tales free. I regret nothing I have done, though it pains me to offend your good self.”
“Traitorous,” the Queen said, fury bone-deep and feral crossing her face, before collapsing back into exhaustion.
“But you will reap what you sow. Everything we have done, we have done for the sake of the Isle. We rose to our throne, after the bloody work of battle was done, and the Eternal King had once again become Prince, and gone to his long and deathly rest in the Lady’s arms. And we made the Isle prosperous and strong. ”
Vina remembered, with a jolt, the Spymaster’s vulnerable words to her, when they were alone in the Tower of London a lifetime ago. The words came to her as clearly as if he were whispering in her ear. Did you come upon the Lady, in her blue cloak, her eyes of midnight?
The Queen leaned forward, gripping her throne with hands stretched wide as claws. “We preserved your tales at the height of their greatness. And yet you turn upon us.”
“You chained us to tales for the sake of the Isle, Your Majesty?” Vina asked.
“You killed new incarnates, incarnates rising from Elsewhere tales, for the sake of the Isle?” A rustle from the ladies-in-waiting, a tightening of Matthias’s jaw—but they did not interfere.
“The Isle dies, Majesty, because of what you have done. You have strangled your own Isle to its slow death.”
“Change is not a force of goodness, knight. It is the death of history—that hallowed land where all was good and bright, and the horrors of tomorrow cannot stretch their hands. Change muddies the Isle, and erases what is eternal at its heart: what it was, and what it must always be. You, and your Elsewhere folk, and all the aberrant tales that follow you, are a canker in the Isle’s heart.
” She stood. “We should have you culled,” she said with conviction.
“We have done it to your kind before. So many incarnates destroyed, for what is right and just. But we will not, because you are what we made of you, for all that you are flawed—and we wish for the Isle to survive, in all its greatness, even when we are gone. The mountains that rely on you will continue to stand. We are not selfish as you are.”
Simran made a muffled noise of outrage next to her.
The ladies-in-waiting scurried in and out, bringing ewers of rosewater—and pieces of armor, golden and shining.
“We always knew we would face him eventually,” said the Queen.
The ewer was held before her; a cloth placed in her hand.
“We are a creature from a very old tale,” the Queen whispered, crushing the fine cloth small in her hands.
“We think, sometimes, of the woman—or women—that made us, great ladies whose heroism bore tale fruit. Or did our tale rise from nothing but an artist’s imagination?
Did they know that across the silver sea we would be forced to carry the burden alone? ”
She took up that rosewater-dipped cloth and began to wipe her face clean. Gouts of white paint covered the cloth as she dipped it in water, and drew it up clean, and wiped her face again. She repeated the process gravely, steadily.
The woman under the paint was still the Queen—but more human and more solemn, the laughter drained from her.
“You think we are a villain,” said the Queen. “But we are a woman willing to do what it takes to live.”
“Curious,” said Simran, “that you think we should pity you. Do you think all the Elsewhere-born and new incarnates you killed were less deserving of survival than you?”