The queen's apartments were empty by the ninth bell.
She had seen to this herself.
Not with the usual management — not the gentle, systematic dismissal of the evening's staff through the graduated process of ending the working day. She had walked through the outer room at the ninth bell and said, to the room in general, in the specific register she used when she meant something completely and did not intend to repeat it:
"Everyone out. Now. All of you."
And they had gone — the handmaidens, the chamber maids, the junior attendants who maintained the rotating presence in the outer rooms, the woman who managed the lamp oil, the girl who had been sitting in the corner with the mending — all of them filing out with the swift, instinctive efficiency of people who had learned, through proximity, to read the difference between the queen's ordinary instructions and the instructions that meant something else.
Mel had been last.
She had looked at the queen from the doorway for one moment.
The queen had not looked back.
The door had closed.
— — —
The bottle was in the lower cabinet.
Not the formal wine — not the kind that was poured at dinner and at occasions and which was always the correct vintage and the correct temperature and which she drank with the specific, measured quality of someone performing the social ritual of drinking rather than doing it.
This was the other bottle.
The one that lived in the lower cabinet behind the correspondence box, the one that had been acquired without explanation through channels that did not require one, the one that came out on the evenings when Lashina decided that the person who was permitted to drink it was the private one rather than the queen.
She poured a glass.
She sat in the chair.
She drank.
— — —
The first glass had the quality of the first glass always had — the specific, warm arrival of something that was doing what she had allowed it to do, the loosening of the precise edge of things that she maintained through every waking hour of every official day.
She poured a second.
Outside the window, the city had the specific quality of a summer night that had been going since before the banquet and had no particular interest in her current state.
She did not look at the city.
She looked at the ceiling.
She thought: my husband is alive.
She said it out loud — not loudly, not with drama, only the specific, flat quality of a statement she was making to the empty room because the empty room was what was available and the statement needed to exist somewhere outside her head.
"My husband is still alive," she said.
The ceiling did not respond.
"He shall not be alive," she said, "for very much longer."
She drank.
— — —
By the third glass she had moved from the chair to the settee, which was both closer to the cabinet and more comfortable for extended occupancy, and she had removed her formal earrings and set them on the side table with the specific, liberating quality of a woman taking off the last piece of performance.
She was drunk.
Not the partial, managed drunk of someone who had had more wine than intended at a formal occasion. The deliberate, complete drunk of someone who had decided to be drunk tonight and had executed the decision with her usual thoroughness.
She thought about Teivel on the throne.
She thought about it the way she was only ever permitted to think about it in this room, on these evenings, with the cabinet open and the city outside the window and no performance required.
"The throne," she said, to the ceiling. "Teivel's throne. My son's throne." She turned the glass. "Thirty years I have been arranging the world so that my son would have what he is owed. Thirty years."
She had arranged it from the beginning.
From the beginning, when she had been the second candidate and had understood that second was a temporary position and that the difference between first and second was arranging rather than accepting.
She had arranged.
She had arranged patiently, and quietly, and over such an extended period that the arranging had become the texture of her life rather than the purpose of it, and she had arrived, through the arranging, at the current position:
Forty-eight years old.
Selara dead for twenty-nine of them.
The throne in reach.
And a boy with his mother's eyes sitting at dinner tables.
"The Velderathi astronomer," she said, and the specific quality of her voice when she said it was not the performed warmth, not the composed register, not any of the managed versions — it was the actual one, stripped of everything, with the cold clarity of a woman who has named a problem and is looking at it directly. "The Veldrathi astronomer with his mother's eyes and his father's—" she stopped. She drank. "is dangerous. He did not stay conveniently sold. He did not stay conveniently wherever Bremen put him. He grew up and found a court and appeared at my dinner table."
She sat up slightly.
"He will not," she said, with the particular, focused quality of a thought arriving, "be at dinner tables for very much longer. Once Teivel is king — once the throne is Teivel's — the astronomer has no claim. The law requires recognition and the recognition requires the living king's formal action and a dead king cannot—" she paused "—cannot recognise anyone!"
She smiled sinisterly.
It was the specific smile of someone who has followed a logic to its conclusion and found the conclusion satisfying.
"First the king," she said, to the ceiling. "Then the astronomer. Then the throne." She turned the glass. "In sequence. One, two, three."
She counted her fingers and thought about the next mechanism.
The serving chain had failed because of an elbow and a bread basket, which was the specific, maddening category of failure that was no one's fault and therefore could not be corrected by improving anyone's reliability.
The next approach would need to be different.
She thought about different.
She thought about it with the slightly unfocused quality of someone who was drunk and was allowing the thinking to be less disciplined than usual, which was occasionally the condition that produced the best thinking because it removed the self-censorship that precision sometimes imposed.
She thought about the celebration that had been planned — the king's birthday. She thought about other occasions. The succession announcement. The formal introduction of the astronomer.
She thought: there will be another occasion.
She thought: there is always another occasion.
"And the delegates," she said, shifting on the settee to a more comfortable position. "The delegates and their inconvenient presence and their inconvenient questions." She looked at the window. "Once Teivel is king, Veldrath will negotiate with Teivel. The delegation will conclude and the astronomer will — he will have no status here. Without the king's recognition, he has no status. Without status—" she waved her hand in the specific gesture of someone completing a thought they consider self-evident.
She poured the fourth glass.
"And Gorgina," she said, and her voice had the specific, flat quality it always had when she said that name in this room, in this register. "The Duke and her — inconvenient recalculation."
She had not liked the recalculation.
She had not liked, in the precise assessment she maintained of the court's factional dynamics, the specific shift she had been observing in Gorgina over the past months — the withdrawal from Teivel, the specific quality of distance that was not the managed distance of a woman maintaining protocol but the actual distance of a woman who was deciding something.
"Gorgina has been useful," Lashina said, to the wine glass. "As a position on the board, she has been useful. As a piece that was — attached to Teivel in the specific way that provided leverage without requiring direct management." She frowned. "Pieces that start deciding for themselves are problems."
She thought about what to do with pieces that decided for themselves.
The thinking was less disciplined than usual.
The wine had done its work.
"If Teivel is king," she said, more slowly now, the words arriving with the slightly careful quality of thoughts that were being assembled in a less precise state than usual, "then the Duke of Wadee answers to the king. And if the Duke of Wadee is — if her position is — if there are sufficient grounds to reassess the ducal appointment—" she trailed off.
She looked at the ceiling.
She said, quietly, with the specific satisfaction of a woman who has arrived at the shape of something even if not its details:
"Everything in sequence. One, two, three."
She closed her eyes.
She was still holding the glass.
She was asleep in approximately four minutes.
— — —
Mel entered at the eleventh bell.
She entered with the specific, practiced quietness of someone who had been performing this entry for decades — the key in the lock, the door opened at the angle that did not produce a sound, the specific, measured step across the threshold.
She closed the door behind her.
She stood in the room.
She looked at the queen on the settee.
Lashina was asleep in the specific, unglamorous way of a woman who had drunk four glasses of the good wine and had allowed herself to reach the end of it without the usual management. Her formal clothes were still on. Her hair was still pinned. One hand was loose at her side. The wine glass was on the floor beside the settee where it had fallen from her relaxed hand — not broken, only fallen, the last of the wine making a small, dark mark on the rug.
Mel looked at the glass on the floor.
She looked at the queen's sleeping face.
She had looked at this face for thirty years.
She had looked at it in the morning and in the evening and in the specific hours between them that the queen's schedule produced. She had looked at it in its public versions and its private versions and in the version it had right now, which was the version of a woman asleep without the performance, which was perhaps the most honest version available and which was, Mel had always thought, the one that gave the most away.
She set the wine glass on the table.
She gathered the queen.
She was not a large woman.
She had never been a large woman.
Mel carried her to the bed with the practiced, impersonal efficiency of someone who had done this before — not often, only on the specific occasions when the private evenings had concluded in the settee rather than the bed, which was not frequent but was not unprecedented.
She arranged her against the pillow.
She pulled the cover over her.
She stood at the bedside and looked at the sleeping queen for a moment.
She thought: thirty years. I have been in this room for thirty years, doing this but not much longer.
She turned.
She crossed to the desk.
The key was where it always was — the inner pocket of the formal coat on the desk's hook, the specific location of a habit thirty years old. Lashina moved it there every evening. Had moved it there every evening for as long as Mel had been attending her. Had never questioned whether anyone knew this.
Mel knew this.
She took the key.
She went to the drawer.
The drawer was at the desk's lower left — a deep drawer with a good lock, the kind that communicated through the quality of its fittings that it contained things its owner considered important.
She opened it.
She worked.
She worked with the focused, quiet attention of someone who had planned this and was executing the plan carefully — not hurrying, because hurrying produced mistakes, and not dawdling, because the queen's sleep was reliable but not guaranteed.
She finished.
She closed the drawer.
She locked it.
She replaced the key in the coat pocket with the specific, careful motion of someone returning something to the exact position it had been in.
She crossed to the door.
She looked back once — at the room, at the sleeping queen, at the desk.
Everything was as it had been.
She went out.
— — —
In the southern wing of the palace, the Crown Prince's room had the specific, warm quality of a room that had been recently and thoroughly occupied.
The two naked maids on the bed were asleep. Exhaustion etched on their faces, their bodies glistened in sweat and substances that proves what had happened few minutes back in this room.
They were asleep with the exhausted, boneless quality of people who had reached the end of something and had stopped at the precise point where stopping was possible.
Teivel was not asleep.
He was sitting on the room's bench by the window, dressed again — partially, the informal state of someone who had attended to the minimum requirements of decency and had not gone further — with a thin cigarette between his fingers.
He inhaled.
He exhaled.
The smoke moved through the warm room in the specific, unhurried way of smoke in still air.
He inhaled again.
He exhaled again.
He watched the smoke.
He thought about the plan.
He did not think about it in the way he thought about most things — the systematic, analytical way, the way that produced strategies and counter-strategies and the specific, branching map of a person who was always thinking three moves ahead.
He thought about it simply, the way you thought about something that was close to its conclusion.
The shape of it.
The direction of it.
The specific, satisfying quality of pieces that had been moving for a long time arriving, one by one, at the positions they had been moving toward.
He inhaled a third time.
He exhaled.
He looked at the city outside the window.
He thought: by next year's beginning the throne shall be mine, by next year's beginning.
He thought about how it would feel to sit in it — not the performance of sitting in it, which he had been practicing since he could understand what sitting in it meant, but the actual feeling of it, the moment when the performance became the reality and the reality was simply himself in the room where he had always been going.
He exhaled the last of the smoke.
He looked at the city.
He thought: not long now.
He sat at the window until the cigarette burned to its end.
Then he set it aside.
He went to bed.
The two maids slept on, undisturbed.
The summer night continued.
The city was entirely indifferent to the plans being made within it.