“O Alsper, give me the courage to face the world and myself. Give me resolve against the demons that reside within me. Grant me your strength and your will. Show the wayward your example.”
The prayer was spoken scarcely above the movement of breath. Whether anyone heard it was uncertain. Whether Alsper heard it was another matter entirely.
Morning had not yet reached the windows. Beyond them was only the Heavenly Veil, its distant light spread over the rooftops like frost. Within the chamber, a single lamp burned upon a low table. Its flame had been turned down until the room seemed arranged around a failing star.
A lone figure sat before it with her head bowed and her hands joined loosely at her waist, clad only in a robe. She wore no symbols of authority. There was no need for one here. It had existed elsewhere, distributed among papers, seals, and the expectations of people who had never seen her alone.
Her name was Kimia. She was half-manic, lacking the frame of mind to sleep.
Matriarch and duchess of some repute, inheritor of a Tradehouse Minor whose oldest holdings had once been no more than an enclave behind wooden walls. She ruled over estates, workshops, tenant districts, river rights, old obligations, new debts, and a great number of people who understood her chiefly as an office. Her ancestors had grappled with things that seemed distant today. Their descendants now issued permits.
This was called progress.
She was well-spoken and erudite. She raised her progeny and made them her wards, trying her best to prepare them for what the world imposed. She knew histories no longer taught outside the house academies and could quote commercial law from memory. In council, she could make a refusal sound like an invitation and an insult resemble a point of order. Human ministers found her precise. Baxxid envoys found her properly restrained. Other yinglets sometimes accused her of having too much varnish in her voice.
Few of these accomplishments gave her authority over herself.
There were mornings when she woke and the world possessed weight and arrangement. A cup was a cup. A window looked outward. Her duties were disagreeable but finite. She dressed, ate, read the memoranda placed outside her chamber, and entered the machinery of the day with no greater resentment than any other sovereign animal condemned to rote administration.
On other mornings, she could not persuade herself that the world was real in the same way twice.
The furniture appeared to have been placed there as evidence. Her clothes belonged to the duchess and therefore required her body merely as a means of locomotion. Her name seemed not a name, but a summons. When servants addressed her as 'Your Grace', she sometimes experienced the sudden and lucid conviction that they were speaking to somebody standing immediately behind her.
She never turned to look.
She lacked the words to explain the despair. Or she possessed them and refused to assemble them. Words once spoken became facts, facts entered records, and records were consulted by physicians, ministers, heirs, rivals. A private misery could be endured. A documented misery became an organ of state.
She called it fatigue.
She called it melancholy weather.
She called it a difficult season, though the seasons came, went, and left it behind.
At its worst, she felt that there was nothing within her but a system of strings. Some unseen hand drew one taut and she spoke. Another moved and she signed her name. She walked through halls, received petitions, remembered birthdays, expressed grief in correct proportion, and all the while watched these actions from somewhere deep inside, from a small and lightless chamber where the actual Kimia had been sealed away.
Perhaps there had never been an actual Kimia.
This possibility troubled her less than it should have.
Whiteblood helped.
Kilcane helped more.
Together, they brought false liberation so persuasive that for a time she ceased caring. The whiteblood came first, drawing heat through her body and turning each thought bright at the edges. Then the kilcane, measured less carefully than the physician had ordered and more carefully than she admitted, and the strings slackened. The chamber within her opened. Her soul rose incandescent and unburdened, no longer subject to title, lineage, the physical laws of the world, or the humiliating continuity of cause and consequence.
She could breathe then.
She could laugh without hearing the duchess laugh.
She could look upon her own reflection and recognize neither ruler, nor patient, nor fraud, but something radiant and briefly without history.
The cost arrived afterward.
It arrived in the trembling of her hands, and the chemical bitterness at the back of her throat. It arrived in missing hours, in servants who would not meet her eyes or dare to touch her, in decisions she found already signed, or hours spent in the shower, fully convinced that tiny insects were skittering all over her. It arrived as a numbness that did not merely conceal pain but consumed the part of her capable of feeling relief.
Each time she promised herself she would be more exact.
A lesser dose.
A longer interval.
Whiteblood without kilcane. Kilcane without whiteblood. Neither before council. Neither on consecutive nights. Never when alone.
The rules multiplied because the behavior remained.
Before the lamp she raised her head. Her tired green eyes caught its weak reflection. Her hands had separated during the prayer and now hung at her sides.
She waited for courage.
Nothing entered the room.
After a time, Kimia extinguished the flame, tightened her robe, and prepared to meet the people who believed she had already been saved.
Two waited outside her chamber.
The first was Tarkhe, her personal physician, a small and dignified stick of a human who seemed to have been assembled from narrow bones, clean linen, and the conviction that nobody had ever answered a medical question honestly. His remaining hair had retreated to a pale gray fringe around the back of his head. Thin spectacles sat low on his nose. He wore a dark coat buttoned to the throat and held a leather case beneath one arm, though Kimia could not remember the last time she had seen him open it. The case had become part of him.
Beside him stood her bodyguard, an indrel soldier.
It was an absolute mountain, taller than the carved lintel frame and forced to stoop slightly beneath it. A heavy garment descended from its shoulders in broad, plain folds, concealing all but the upper portion of its head and the immense architecture beneath. Its face was not a face in the usual sense. Brown plates fitted together around several fixed eyes of varying sizes. The lower half was hidden behind a black pheromone mask whose valves gave a faint periodic click as they admitted and recirculated the compounds that kept the soldier balanced, attentive, and safely itself.
It never spoke.
Kimia could no longer remember whether the soldier was male or female, or whether those words applied to it in any meaningful way. Indrel biology occupied a neglected fraction of her education, filled with half-remembered lectures about castes, reproductive habits, chemical governance, and communal identity. She had once known the correct forms of address. She had forgotten them through disuse and was ashamed enough of this that she had never asked again.
Whatever it was, she trusted it with her life.