Chapter 3
III.
I focused on the raw suede edges against the bridge of my nose and my cheeks.
Pain offered visceral and immediate distraction, occupying my mind enough to keep my attention from the audience around me.
The straps would cause sores and then open wounds eventually.
The leather buckles, fastened behind my head, caught in my hair.
Sweat soaked under the hood, through my shirt, and through the many padded layers of my costume.
I couldn’t put my arms down properly, and I couldn’t get out of it.
Despite my words to the servant and no personal wish to see her harmed, I had tried. I had to try.
After shaving, being fitted with the leather beak, and pulling the hood over my hair, I waited for the servants to turn their attentions away from me.
I fought the fabric, stretching and bending in ways that might make the stitches stretch, loosen, and snap.
Nothing had come of it. The tsarina had chosen a skilled seamstress for the task and had given that poor seamstress proper motivation to do the best work of her life.
“How clever you are, Your Majesty,” a lady said.
I snapped back to dreadful awareness, the discomforts not enough to keep my full attention.
I shifted in the basket, a clever construct designed to replicate a nest, and tried to make it as little obvious as possible.
This was meant to be awkward and uncomfortable, but I had no intention of giving the tsarina the further satisfaction of seeing it.
“He always has something to say,” she replied. “Why not allow him to squawk as he pleases and entertain us at the same time?”
The group laughed. Alexei, thankfully, was not among them.
If only I had to worry about discomfort alone. It was the misery, the emptiness, and the loss that tormented me. And the shame.
“Truly inspired,” the first lady said.
Not just shame. Shame beyond expression.
“I’ve always wanted the fabled firebird for my menagerie, but alas, a firebird costume would be too stately for the nature of his crimes.
” The tsarina took in my costume once more.
“I would have preferred real feathers, but overall, I am quite pleased with how he turned out. Real feathers can always come later.”
I shut my eyes so I could not betray the extent of my hate for her.
“What’s wrong, Mikhail?” the tsarina asked. “I am not accustomed to you being so silent.”
When I did not think I would react on impulse, I opened my eyes and met her gaze. “What would you have of me?”
The ladies smirked behind their fans.
“First,” the tsarina considered, “some kvass.”
I glanced over at the array of refreshments on the marble-topped gilt console along the wall across the room.
I struggled to my feet, working around the new bulk of my costume and fighting the stiffness of my legs from having been tucked in my basket nest all morning.
Some of the ladies turned their faces away while others stared even more intently, waiting for me to do something particularly humiliating, as if my current predicament did not provide enough amusement.
The tsarina was of the latter group, although her stare came from an aloof observational demeanor. She studied me from her throne as I lumbered to my feet, ambled over the basket side, and began my progress to the refreshment table.
The burning gazes from the crowd added to the unbearable warmth of my costume, the fabric against my skin already soaked through. Perspiration dripped off my nose inside the beak mask.
A smaller insulated circle of women near the console table discussed me too. Though the hushed words came out with less bite, they still reached me as I hunted for the pitcher of kvass.
“I told you it was horrible,” said Countess Ekaterina, a classic Ilyichian beauty with ivory skin and pale blonde hair, a woman who had once tried to capture my attention and an offer of marriage before I left for Varnasia. She doubtless counted herself fortunate now for having not succeeded.
“Doesn’t it scare you?” asked a woman I did not recognize.
I tried to be surreptitious in my glance towards the small gathering.
The speaker, uncharacteristically dark-skinned for an Ilyichian and extremely short for any adult, fingered the pearls around her throat.
Although she had her black hair coifed in an elaborate style around her kokoshnik and she wore the latest of Ilyichian fashions, nothing could hide her foreign accent and unfavorable looks.
“I don’t think he’s scary, Princess Alaina,” another woman said.
“Of course not,” added one of the other ladies. “He’s just ridiculous.”
Princess Alaina. The tsarina’s niece-by-law.
I could see now why the tsarina, and her nephew too, had despaired over the match despite the potential political gains.
From all accounts, the princess was situated to inherit the throne of Altania when her childless brother died.
I had not met her or seen her before, having already emigrated to Varnasia by the time of the wedding.
“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” the princess said. “It scares me that this can happen. This could be any of us if we misstep.”
“You’re as good as the tsarina’s daughter, and, dare I say, the heir apparent of Ilyichia,” a lady said. “It could never happen to you.”
“And he was a prince, from one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the empire. If it could happen to him....” The princess cast a not-so-subtle glance at me before returning her attention to her ladies. “Could you imagine being so degraded in front of your peers?”
“I would rather die,” the countess said.
“He probably would too,” the princess observed with another momentary glance at me.
I lowered my eyes and returned to my task of pouring kvass so that I would not have to see any others of the group look my way. Between the mockery and the pity, I could not decide which stung more.
The princess was right, of course. Mounting the scaffold to an executioner’s block and facing the headsman’s axe would have brought with it its own shame and embarrassment, but there would have been an end to it. A swift, sudden, immediate end. None of this indefinite torture.
I brought the glass of kvass back to the empress and stood to the side and behind her so as to keep her attention only on her current conversation. I held the glass in front of me, to the periphery of her sight, so that she would see that and nothing else.
When the conversation bounced to two of the officers in her gathering, she took the glass and asked, tone lowered so that only I could hear it, “Do you regret your decision yet?”
“What decision would that be, ma’am?” I stared at the gilt wood finial of her chair, wishing to set it on fire with her in it. “I have made so many that you hold against me.”
“The one where you turned down my offer of a better position than your current one. If you reconsidered, I might be persuaded to listen to your petition, so long as you made it worth my time.”
“I would have to be a fool to do such a thing. And just because you’ve dressed me like a fool and given me the title, do not mistake me for one.”
“Is that so?” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She waved her hand and beckoned me forward, hushing the crowd around her as she did so.
“I require an entertainment,” she told the group. “Mikhail, entertain us.”
I stepped forward, obeying her gesture and bearing the unwanted attention of former friends and acquaintances. Portions of my soul continued to shrivel and die.
“What would you have of me?”
“I would have your humor. You’re always so funny.”
“He’s the funniest thing of all,” Sergey said, a rat-faced courtier of my age who imagined women owed him something and whose company I had never been able to tolerate.
“Clearly, you have not looked in a mirror lately,” I shot back at him.
The assembled laughed, including the tsarina, and his cheeks puffed out, red and furious.
“There’s my Mikhail,” the tsarina said.
“But he—” the courtier spluttered.
“Did exactly as I asked,” the tsarina cut him off. “Now, now, Mikhail. A joke or a tale, else you might earn yourself a beating when I am not here to defend you.”
“I have only my bitterness, ma’am. You have stolen my humor from me.”
“My word,” she feigned surprise, “was it that easy? Very well. Something easier then. Any suggestions?”
Laughter again traveled around the grouping with various ideas being offered. Singing, dancing, juggling all given as possibilities. I paid them no mind as I waited for the tsarina’s instruction. The tsarina sipped at her kvass, listening but unmoved by any of the traditional suggestions.
“I know,” she said when the group found silence again. “Squawk for us!”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Squawk.” She leveled a malicious glare at me. “And flap your arms.”
My heart refused to stop beating. My lungs refused to stop filling with air. If humiliation could kill, I should have been dead many times over by now. But I was alive and at another crossroads.
Complying would be the easiest course of action.
Painful, humiliating, degrading, and ridiculous though it might be, the tsarina might leave me alone afterward if I satisfied her request. And to be forgotten sounded like the most merciful fate in my current circumstances.
Complying might inspire others to seek the same torturous amusements from me in the future though, but if I failed to be as entertaining the second, third, fourth time, would they still try to provoke me?
Disobeying would be amusing to me for a whole half minute until the tsarina found another novel torment with which to burden me.
And all because I could not bring myself to become her lover again.
No one said no to the tsarina.
A deeply unsettling noise, both shrill and guttural, issued forth from my throat. My arms made wild arcs in the air at my sides to accompany the horrendous shrieks.
The tsarina threw her head back and laughed and laughed and laughed. And so too did the group around her. No one noticed when I stopped, too caught up in the hilarity to pay any attention to the object of their amusement.
The tsarina’s paroxysm finally subsided, and she discarded her empty cup before rising from her seat.
She paused in front of me, taking me in again before smiling up at me.
“I am never going to let you go, you realize.” She reached up and patted my cheek, her palm sliding over the straps of the beak mask.
“Return to your nest, Mikhail. I will see that someone comes out to feed you.” She slid her hand down and patted the chest of the pillowed costume. “No one will ever want you now.”
“Except you,” I whispered. “What does that make you?”
“Have a good night, Mikhail,” she said, her voice ice. “Tomorrow, I am fitting you with a collar.”