Chapter 13
XIII.
Bits of down circled above me. Several drifted back to the blankets and pillows. Small and white, they couldn’t be my feathers. They had to have come from the bedding.
The concept of bedding startled me into wakefulness.
I was dead. Again. I had to be dead this time. I had to be.
I hadn’t enjoyed pillows and blankets since before the tsarina arrested me the first time. Could this be the afterlife? I closed my eyes again and let myself believe it for a moment. I deserved a moment of rest before I faced my circumstances.
With the sunshine warming my face and the bedding enfolding me in peaceful safety, I could almost believe that this was Varnasia, my place of pinnacle happiness.
Maybe Irena would realize that I was awake and cuddle behind me, wrapping her arm over my shoulder.
Maybe she would kiss the place behind my ear that made me melt and nuzzle her nose into my hair.
Or maybe, if I rolled over, Irena would be there still dozing.
Maybe I could catch her while she slept and admire the bow of her lips and the fan of her lashes.
Maybe I could wake her with stolen kisses and lay my head on her chest and tell her about my nightmares.
She would stroke my face and run her hands through my hair and promise me sweet distraction from the horrors that plagued my slumber.
I might say something sweet and romantic in Varnasian, and she would laugh because I had mistakenly said something that sounded anything but sweet and romantic.
And then all need for words would disappear if we took full advantage of the morning.
Irena didn’t embrace me, and I didn’t roll over.
She wouldn’t be there.
The wings on my back remained. I could not imagine an afterlife so cruel as to make me wear my last shape for an eternity. So I had to be alive.
I fought the blankets with one arm. A bandaged wrist greeted me, the white linen stark against the black feathers and skin, the blood seepage starker still against both.
Rustling skirts moved across the room and stopped behind me.
I twisted my shoulders to see who kept me company.
The glittering molded plaster ceiling decorated with ornate tableaux of shepherds, putti, and domestic animals filled my vision. I remembered this ceiling well, although the tsarina had never been averse to coupling against corridor walls or on dining room tables when the mood struck her.
She laid her hand on my forehead and then replaced her hand with a cool, damp cloth. Her braided hair fell over her shoulder, strands loose and wild from the bulk, wisps around her face.
I tore the cloth away and flung it somewhere. I pushed her arm aside and rolled back to my initial position so that I wouldn’t have to look at her.
“I never thought you would try it,” she said. “Thank The Kind and Fair that you didn’t succeed.”
I attempted to say something cutting and found that I couldn’t, issuing only a pathetic noise of surprise instead.
“You’re muzzled,” she explained. “But only because I didn’t want you to give yourself away by talking in your sleep. I can take it off now if you’ll behave yourself.”
I refused to turn back to her. I buried my face in the pillows and pulled the blanket up to cover the rest of me, beak, muzzle, and all.
“You’re so stubborn,” she griped. “I’m trying to take care of you.”
I did not re-emerge from the blankets. Maybe I should want the muzzle removed, but I didn’t care because I had nothing to say to her. No. That wasn’t true. I had plenty to say to her. I was just certain that I shouldn’t say it.
“Fine,” she said. Her skirts rustled again as she moved away from me. “When you’re done sulking, maybe we can talk like adults.”
I shut my eyes and swallowed the hate that threatened to consume me.
I was too tired for hate. Unfortunately, hate without fire deteriorated into despair, and I fought tears instead.
And somehow, having her see me weep seemed an even greater failure than not being successful in my attempt on my life.
When skirts rustled again, this time to leave the room, I breathed a sigh of relief.
I waited to ensure she was not coming back before I threw the blankets off and forced myself up to sitting with my elbows.
Tendrils of black feathers clung to the sheets.
I did not get much farther though since I overestimated my energy and ended up winding myself before I could rise.
I had been afforded a well-appointed sleeping cot at the far wall across from the tsarina’s bed.
The blankets and pillows, clean and white until I had shed on them, were of the softest goose down.
A stool for company and a small table sat off to the side to provide me with anything I might need.
A book and a bowl of water occupied the table.
I retrieved the small gilt-spined red leather-bound book, left opened and placed pages down, to examine what had occupied the tsarina while I slept.
The exterior read, The Collected Works and Writings of Ilya: A Discourse on The Kind and Fair.
The few lines I read offered confusing philosophical conundrums that I had no mind to tackle just now.
I wished I could still visit the other jesters. But if I could, what might they say of me now? What might they have already said of me now, not knowing who I was?
Whatever had the tsarina said to get a cot set up for me in her own room?
Probably nothing more than “do it,” but I would dearly have loved to hear the servants theorize about the intention.
Would any of them guess the truth? Not the truth of me being Mikhail.
The truth of her intention of making me, in my horrible avian guise, her lover.
If anyone dared to suggest it, they might lose something dear to them, but the idea had to have crossed someone’s mind.
I pulled a leg up and folded my arms atop it, resting my head on my arms afterward.
My wrists didn’t throb the way I thought they should after such wounds, but maybe I was too numb to everything to register them.
My only spike of emotion came from the frustration of having endured so much so far for the sake of my moral compass only to end up without a choice.
And this time, as something worse than ever.
I might have fallen asleep again because when next I opened my eyes, the tsarina strode through the doorway, a servant carrying a tray behind her.
I instinctively shifted from my position and put the wall at my back to better observe.
The servant caught my movement and stopped walking, the color draining from her face.
The tsarina waited a half minute before stepping forward, grabbing the book and the bowl from the side table, and then turning to the servant as if to dare her to refuse to come nearer now that she had proven that she had no fear.
The servant moused forward and set the tray down, scuttling back a distance with her completed assignment.
The tsarina dismissed her with a glare, and when we were alone again, the tsarina set the bowl and book down on the nearest dresser. She returned to my side and settled on the stool.
As she surveyed the food offerings on the tray, she asked, “Are you feeling any better?”
“Not at all,” and “I never expect to again,” and “Are you delusional?” fought for response. But I hadn’t even attempted to remove the muzzle. I shook my head and looked away.
“You haven’t eaten in days, my dear.”
Now I was her dear. I wanted to laugh, but that sounded like too much effort.
“I felled the deer myself yesterday.” She lifted a bite of meat on a two-tonged fork and waved it in front of me. “It’s fresh.”
It smelled divine.
She put the fork back down on the tray and beckoned me forward.
Hunger weakened me. I slid toward the edge of the bed and bent my head down so that she could remove the muzzle. I was too tired to fight, but I wasn’t too tired to hate myself for my weakness.
She set the discarded muzzle on the table when it fell away. I stared at the bit of padded leather and then glared at her.
“I was only looking after you,” she said.
She lifted the fork again and offered me the bite. I took it and hated myself for taking it.
“If you behave, I will see that you enjoy everything that you should have already been enjoying.”
“Except as a monster.”
“I didn’t want to do it,” she said. “But no one likes a powerful woman, and I needed a lesson to be learned.”
Power was one thing, but unnecessary cruelty was another.
“Then give me back my wedding band.”
“Firebirds don’t wear wedding bands.” She skewered another bit of meat off the tray. “But I can indulge you in everything else now. As a lesson, I needed to be harsh so that everyone could see what happened to those who displeased me. But since you are now a beloved pet, I can spoil you.”
“Did I not get my point across?” I held out my bandaged wrists. “I would rather be dead.”
“Let’s get your strength back,” she said, ignoring my bandages and my gesture. “And then we can see about everything else.”
“I want my body back.”
“That was rash, wasn’t it?” Her face fell into an expression of deep contrition, not a look she often wore. “You have said such horrible things to me, embarrassed me in ways I never wish to recall.”
I said horrible things to her? I embarrassed her? After how she treated me these past months?
“I should never have done it,” she said at last.
“Undo it then.”
“Alas, my dear, I am unable. I set it in motion, but it is cast by The Kind and Fair.”
“Convenient.”
“For all that you think me heartless, there is a way out.”
Like her challenge between The Kind and Fair and the Great Holy, probably. Chances slim to impossible. But still. A way out. Any way out.
“Which is?”
“You cannot tell anyone that you were ever human. If you do not savor living the rest of your life as a bird, I suggest you stay silent and play your role as my pet.”
“That’s not an objective. What great task must I accomplish?”
“No great task at all. Indeed, it’s like the children’s stories. Someone has to tell you that they love you.”
“Love me?” Dizziness struck me. “Like this?!”
“It’s always been so easy for you. After all, isn’t this what you told everyone at the party? All those ladies could not tear themselves away!”
Despite what the tsarina claimed, I wasn’t an easy man to love, never had been.
I didn’t know my father. My mother tolerated me as her eldest, but no more.
Alexei might have loved me once, but not now.
Marfa respected me but did not love me, and I had never expected her to.
State marriages rarely involved love, even if she and I had managed to make it work for all those years.
There had been mistresses and women who wanted me, the tsarina among them, because I was wealthy, and handsome, and eligible.
But it had never been about me. Irena alone had been the person who wanted me, loved me, took me for all that I was.
But with only two scant years together, would she too have grown discontent when I did not live up to her idea of me?
Drook and Klessa and my unlikely friends alone had shown me that I wasn’t wholly without merit, for they had loved me even without the trappings that others had once desired me for.
Even older, set in my ways, prickly and disillusioned by life, they had claimed me as a friend.
But I did not think that would be enough.
There would never be another Irena. I wasn’t good enough or talented enough or kind enough or soft enough or tolerant enough or whatever it was that made people lovable.
I could twist myself into knots trying to be something someone would want, and I would never be enough.
Who I was, beyond wealth and titles, beyond feathers and a face, didn’t matter to anyone.
And if it had, I would still be found wanting.
“I can help you,” she offered, “if you let me help you.”
“Help how?” I asked. “No one is going to want me.”
“That’s not true.” She abandoned the stool for the edge of my cot and took my hand, my clawed, feathered hand, in hers. “You forget, my dear.” She leaned forward and pressed a soft kiss on my cheek. “I have always wanted you.”