Chapter 17
XVII.
I didn’t struggle when my escorts brought me back to the palace.
I stumbled enough from clumsiness with my jesses and sightlessness from the hood for it to be seen as potential intentional delay.
The pulling on the lead told me nothing but which direction was forward.
I took several hard hits on loose gravel and stairs.
Eventually, two of my escorts grabbed an arm each and caught me before I went down the next few times.
We made painfully slow progress in this fashion.
And like before, when we arrived at her room, they affixed the lead to the end of the bed and left me.
Hours passed. I huddled on the tile floor and tried to sleep.
Servants worked and cleaned in the rooms adjacent to the bedroom.
The bedroom door opened once, but the maid gave a strangled little gasp, likely when she saw me, and then several others joined her.
No one approached, and the door closed again not long after, staying closed this time.
When the tsarina finally made her appearance, it was with many of her ladies in tow. The chatter died immediately when one of them pointed me out.
“Why do you keep that thing here?” one of the ladies asked. “It could hurt you.”
“Don't be fools,” the tsarina scolded them. “Like any creature, it needs to be shown who is its master. It is learning.”
“It’s a horrible thing,” another, probably Ekaterina, said. “When the guards brought it into the audience hall that time, I thought I might faint!”
So much for Ekaterina’s declaration that she could see me through any disguise.
“When did that happen?” This time, the one asking sounded like Princess Alaina.
“A few weeks ago,” the tsarina answered, “before I had the chance to properly introduce it to court. Just as well. It still fought confinement.”
“You should count yourself fortunate that you did not see,” Ekaterina said. “It’s almost as ugly as an Altanian!”
Others laughed, although the princess probably did not.
“Ugly or not, I am told it is doing much better and finally settling into its new home,” the tsarina continued.
“I thought it might be time again to bring it indoors occasionally, to get it accustomed to the environment, especially in preparation for winter. I would like to be able to show my firebird off, but I need it to submit to me before it is ready for wider audiences.”
“You plan on handling it, ma’am?”
“I plan on its obedience, however that is achieved.”
“Why would you want to keep something so awful and strange near you?”
“Because it amuses me to do so. I do not plan on letting my firebird go after it took so long to obtain. Now, enough about that thing. Come, ladies.”
The gaggle wandered into the dressing room, the laughter and chatter fading with their withdrawal.
As long as the ladies remained, I could breathe. She wouldn’t do anything while they were there lest they suspect her true designs on me.
I settled back against the floor and did not bother straining to hear the chatter. I did not think any of their discourse would be helpful or pertinent.
A servant brought evening chocolate. Then another served other offerings. The ladies only began filtering back out to the bedroom once the tsarina yawned.
“Have a lovely night,” one of the ladies told her.
“Will you be able to sleep well with that thing so close?”
“That sounds like a punishment!”
“It knows better than to give me any trouble,” the tsarina assured them. “And if it does, it will learn not to.”
“We only worry about you,” Ekaterina assured her.
“Go now,” the tsarina told them, almost sweetly. “I will see you all tomorrow. Pietrodillo has assured me that he has another fantastic routine for us.”
I recognized Drook’s public name and wished I could get a message to him somehow.
I didn’t know what I would say though. I couldn’t tell him I was alive and well, because though alive, I was not well.
Could I send a message conveying my distress?
I very much might have appreciated rescuing or a merciful death, but then truly it would damn me, if not because the tsarina assured me anonymity was my only way out, then because I did not want anyone to know me like this as Mikhail.
Pride ever my downfall, I could not imagine the depth of my shame if even they should know the true extent of my debasement.
“Good night,” echoed from several ladies as their skirts and slippers and voices faded down the corridor and the doors clicked shut behind them.
The tsarina made several more movements around the room before approaching the bed. She tapped me with her foot between the wings. I rolled onto my back as much as the wings would allow to face her direction, even though I was still hooded and could not see.
“Are you going to behave tonight, my dear?” She waited a moment, and when I didn’t respond, she hummed through pursed lips in dismay. “Nothing to say? I can see you’re not muzzled.”
“I have nothing to say,” I confirmed.
“Very well. We can make this quick then.”
She climbed over me and sat. She began working in silence, and when my body responded, she took up her position and worked me until she was spent. My ankles jingled, and I could not prevent the occasional grunt or whimper, but all of it got lost in her vocalizations. And then she climbed off me.
“So much easier than last time,” she said, “though not nearly as much fun. Where’s your wit, my dear?”
It ran away, I almost said, because I cannot. But I didn’t say anything. I just rolled over onto my side again and breathed.
In. Out. In. Out.
Why did breathing have to be so difficult? And why couldn’t I stop when I wanted to?
Eventually, she left my side and climbed into her bed.
Long after I thought she had fallen asleep, she whispered into the dark, “I wish you had said ‘yes’ from the beginning. None of this would have had to happen.”
“None of this had to happen even then,” I whispered back.
“It’ll get easier, my dear.” She shifted in the bed, the swish of sheets and blankets and the groaning of boards suggested she sat upright. “Just do as I wish, and you will be happy again.”
I didn’t know how she could make such a promise since she had never possessed the ability to make me happy. And that was the problem, right there. I had never been happy with her, not then as a lover, never as a prospective wife, and not now — and she couldn’t stand it.
“I promise, my dear. Things will be different. You’ll see.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We will see.”
“Does the tsarina often keep you in her room?”
The princess didn’t seem to have the capacity for niceties when next she found me in my enclosure. A weight dropped on the bench — I guessed an assortment of books — and then she approached the shelter.
“I came out the other day to read to you and you weren’t here,” she explained. “And then I saw you up in her room the other night. Have you been there all this time?”
Although I did not mind being out of the cold, taking meals and being available to the tsarina’s needs in her bedroom for a several-day stretch had not been the change of environment I had wished for.
“She finds my presence...” I didn’t know how to phrase it. “Exciting,” I finally decided upon. I shifted in my sitting position, my tail feathers bending in odd ways since sitting like a person wasn’t natural for a bird, and yet I was not built enough like a bird to perch.
“No one would dare say anything explicit,” the princess said, “but the servants have remarked upon stray black feather remnants on her night gowns. Might you know anything about that?”
“How the tsarina chooses to amuse herself has little to do with the agreement or compliance of those around her.”
“Oh, Great Holy, it’s true then.”
To Mikhail, she had used an invocation to The Kind and Fair. But in private, with a creature who was not supposed to be able to speak, she called upon the Great Holy. No one else here invoked the Great Holy, and I warmed to her for even that small show of accidental solidarity.
“For your own safety,” I warned, “say nothing.”
“I would never.” She paused, a question poised at the end of her teeth, while she debated if she should push it out or not.
“Is it okay for you then, in there? She must dote on you and look after you, no? I worried about you for a moment, but she has to look after you better inside than out here, right?”
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. I wanted to shake the princess with hands I no longer had access to and ask her to look at how I was kept.
I wanted to scream in her face about the nightmare of my current existence.
I wanted to show her the self-inflicted wounds and ask her if she thought I was being cared for to any extent.
But I didn’t. I swallowed down my bitterness.
She was naive and hopeful, and that, although wildly frustrating, remained a precious commodity in a world that seemed designed to torment me for the rest of my days.
“No,” I said.
“But she—”
“Please,” I asked as humbly as I could. “I do not wish to speak of it.”
“Of course,” she said, realizing how insensitive her questions might appear. “I brought books, unless you’d rather talk about something else.”
Half of me wanted to have her relay the gossip of court, the things that circulated around me but no longer involved me, things I could listen to now without taking things to heart, and maybe hear about Alexei and how he fared as head of our branch of the Karilitsyns.
I wanted her to tell me of my friends, the jesters, their troubles and triumphs, but I didn’t know how to ask specifically about them without giving away that I knew them fairly well, though they had never visited the strange Otherland bird.
“You were with the group of women who helped the tsarina retire for the evening the other night?” I knew the answer since she had mentioned seeing me in the tsarina’s room, but as of yet, I had to pretend ignorance about knowing who she was since she had never visited me while I could see her.
“That's when I saw you there.”
“She mentioned Pietrodillo giving a performance. He doesn’t sound Ilyichian. Who is he?” It was Drook, but I had to pretend ignorance on that too.
“One of her jesters,” the princess explained. “And he’s ethnically Varnasian, I think?”
“Was he any good?”
“He’s her finest. Clever and funny. The entire continent knows him! Maybe, if she plans to bring you inside, you will get to see him sometime.”
“That will be the only nice thing of coming in for the winter,” I mused aloud. “Perhaps I will get to experience some degree of cheer.”
“The tsarina just lost one of her favorites,” the princess said, “and has been in a dour mood for such a long time now that everyone has tried to bolster her spirits.”
“So that she doesn’t further retaliate,” I said.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
I considered all of the tsarina’s favorites. She never had many, and those she did, she never fully released. Maybe it was her Allemandian lover, or maybe it was some young officer that she had more recently set her sights on.
“How did she lose a favorite?”
“She had him executed for... for... for a few things, I think?”
Was the princess referring to me? I hardly ever counted as a favorite. Unless she meant a favorite to torment.
“That doesn’t sound like he was highly prized.”
“It's complicated.” The princess paused and then sighed. “We all hoped that catching a firebird would lift her spirits, but she’s been even worse, if that’s possible. No one dares even look at her with a cross thought lest she call you upon it and accuse you of foul intentions towards her.”
“All the better then that I am hooded, else she might have my head too.”
“Are you that expressive?”
I didn’t think I was, not with a beak freezing most of the expressions on my face from nose to chin, but eyes could say enough, couldn’t they?
“I have a lot of cross thoughts,” I explained. Before she could say anything else along the lines of my discontent, I asked, “What were you doing up in the tsarina’s rooms?”
“The tsarina occasionally likes to have her ladies get her ready to retire.”
“Oh, you’re one of her ladies then.” I added to nettle her, “I didn’t think serfs could read.”
“I am not a serf!”
“My apologies,” I couldn’t help barbing her, knowing the flimsiness of titles, “but I cannot imagine that anyone of actual substance would have nothing better to do than visit me.”
“Nonsense,” she assured me. “Have you forgotten? I’m only using you to get home.”