Bird of Chaos: Book One of the Harpy's Curse (9 page)

Harryet wiped her greasy hand on her apron. “I’m sorry y’majesty. I didn’t mean no harm.”

“It’s my fault. I was running through the halls,” I said.

“It’s
any
harm,” my mother said. “And what have I said about running in the halls?”

“I am sorry, Mother.” I held my breath waiting for her to explode. The serving girl would not look up from her feet. She twirled a long blond curl around her finger.

My mother fought with her anger. Finally, she expelled a long stream of air. Escorting me into the ballroom, she muttered, “We don’t have time for this.”

Two massive columns, shooting into the sky, framed a grand archway. In the yawning space beyond, long tables were crowded with Jace’s men and members of our own court. Serving boys squeezed between the rows of benches, their drab tunics hidden beneath long white aprons, each one carrying at least two plates on each hand.

At one end of the hall a group of flautists played a trilling tune. The sound of gold-plated cutlery scraping against ceramic bowls, each decorated with the Tibutan snake, could be heard above a gentle murmur of conversation.

“Mother, could I please have that girl as my lady-in-waiting?” I said as she steered me towards the high table, where I would hopefully get to side beside Hero.

“Not now, Verne.”

“Please? I can see to it myself. I am old enough.” I could see she was losing composure again. “Ever since father stopped coming, I have been ever so lonely. It would be nice to have someone my own age to talk to.” She pulled me around to look at her. Anger and pain streaked her face.

“You know your father’s busy.”

“I know. But since he cannot see me…”

She shook her head, perhaps wondering how I had become so manipulative. Finally she spoke. “If you behave yourself and listen to everything King Jace has to say and keep your mouth shut about what you really think and if you and Hero don’t make a mess of things
then
you can have that girl as your lady-in-waiting. But”—she pointed her finger at me—“you have to train her yourself.”

I agreed.

“Now stand up straight.”

Harryet moved in to the room next to my solar the very next day. It was such a wonderful event I could barely contain my joy. I helped her move her things—meagre that they were—from the servants’ quarters. We left her small case in the hall while I gave her a tour of her new home. I started with the solar, moved through to my chamber and my study.

As we passed Nanny Blan’s room, which adjoined my apartments, I realised there was something wrong. The smell was different. The sound too. It was like the room of someone deceased: eerily empty but still humming with a sense of them.

I knocked on the door.

“Nanny Blan,” I called.

I turned to my new friend Harryet, who had remained quiet throughout her tour. She was terrified. She kept twisting her curls around her finger.

“My nanny lives here. You will love her. She makes the most amazing honey cakes.” I knocked again and called, “Nanny Blan?”

Strange
, I thought. It was not like her to leave the Royal Apartments. She said there was no need to. She had everything she wanted as long as she had me.

I moved slowly into her room, which was big enough for only a single cot and a dresser. It was unusually tidy—though Nanny Blan insisted on keeping my apartments spotless, her own room was always a mess. The bed was made. There was nothing to tie the room to her: not a sprig of rosemary from her nosegay, not a ribbon or a headscarf dropped on her way out. She was a mere residue.

The jingling of bells made me turn. My mother’s messenger Piebald stood in the doorway with his hands in his belt. His face was ruddy and the bright colours of his tunic made it seem redder still. He rocked on his heels. “Highness, the seneschal sent me to check Harryet is to your pleasing,” he said, indicating the girl. Then to Harryet he said, “You will do whatever the princess tells you, understood? You are the princess’s companion now.”

Harryet’s big blue eyes darted between me and my mother’s messenger. “Yessir.”

I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile then to Piebald said, “Where is Nanny Blan? Where are her things?”

Piebald smiled. “Hasn’t anyone told you?” he said.

“Told me what?”

Now he chuckled. “I am surprised no one mentioned it.”

I stamped my foot. “Will you get to the point?”

“All right, princess, all right. No need to get feisty. Your mother says if you are old enough to choose your own staff then you are too old to have a nurse. Madam Blan has been sold to a family in Elea Bay.”

My heart stopped. I could see only pinpricks of light and a great dark tunnel opening in front of me. “But I…She said nothing, and we agreed…” I looked around me, hardly believing it could be true. “But I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

Piebald shrugged.

“But I…I don’t want her to go.” A single tear wriggled down my cheek.

Piebald snickered. His voice was like vinegar on a fresh wound, “I am
so sorry
, highness. I imagine it must come as a terrible surprise. Is there anything I can do?”

When I did not respond he turned to leave then, remembering something, turned back. “Also, your mother wanted me to tell you, she found a satryx in your room.”

“That’s Stax,” I said, finding my voice. “My father gave her to me.”

“Stax, you say? A pet?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that
is
a shame.” His eyes gleamed with delight. “She had it exterminated.”

Days passed, one after the other, a succession of marching hoplites off to die, and still the pain sat heavy in my chest. My small self, always the victor, rejoiced in it. My defiant self was defeated, angry and full of self-loathing. I buried the memory of Nanny Blan’s hands stained with turmeric. I chose to forget the way she dropped into her native tongue whenever she was impassioned. I pushed away thoughts of her kneeling at my shrine but praying to the god of the mountains. In time, the part of me that knew and loved Nanny Blan shrivelled like a severed lamb’s tail, the stump left to scar.

Even though whenever I passed her room I felt a lump grow in the back of my throat, even though I could not speak her name and even though I would never,
never
forgive my mother for what she had done, in time I was able to laugh without guilt. I was thankful that the gods had given me friends and I prayed that those same gods would stop my mother from taking them away too.

The bird arrived not long after my twelfth Name Day, when Harryet was eleven and Hero was ten, in the winter of 2994 AB in the Tibutan reckoning, my mother’s twenty-fifth year on the throne. We were in the kitchen, a long immaculately clean domed building lined with shelves holding every imaginable ingredient in clay pots or copper jars. A woodfired oven took up much of one wall. A low, recently scrubbed table ran the length of the building and we sat at this, cupping hot bowls of fish chowder to fight the cold that whipped through the buildings outside and snuck under the door to coil around our legs and inside our collars.

“Highness,” said Cook, throwing me a piece of hot bread, which I caught in one fist. “You know you shouldn’t be down here.” He threw another piece of bread, which Harryet caught, and another, which Hero missed. He picked it up, dusted it off and dipped it into his soup.

“I’ll take my chances,” I said.

“You won’t get her in the dining room unless her mother insists,” Harryet said. I hated dining with the nobility. I hated Odell’s orotund pronouncements and Arkantha’s criticisms of my table manners. But more than that I hated sitting beneath my mother’s hawk-like gaze.

“And as if that’s going to happen. My mother hates me,” I said, locking eyes with her. We both laughed.

“You shouldn’t say that,” Hero said.

“But it’s true.”

I suspected Mother was glad I ate in the kitchen. My presence was a cruel reminder of her mortality, her limited time on the throne, and her growing irrelevance. Plus, when I was there, my father would sometimes talk to me.

No, Cook was far more interesting than anyone you would find in the dining room. He had seen things that made him question life. He had seen the battlefields of the Black Strip, had watched his brother die, had run around the inside of his own mind and nearly fallen into the abyss of madness. He expressed scepticism about everything and could laugh at the most serious—or
apparently
serious—things because to him they held no meaning. He was fond of saying, “What will it matter once yer dead?” and it was common knowledge that he never visited the temple. “The gods weren’t with us in Caspius so why would they show themselves now?” he would say with a grin, making it impossible to castigate him, though Harryet often tried.

Cook kept his kitchen like an armoury—polishing and shining his weapons—and spoke to his staff like a drill sergeant. Yet for all his show of inflexibility he was the go-to-man for any soldier with a broken heart. Harryet and I would often find ourselves at his table with our little hands wrapped around a hot bowl of something-or-other discussing the pros and cons of the phalanx formation, the proper etiquette for duelling, and whether Cook thought, in all honesty, that I could take the throne without a gift.

To this he said, “Of course you can. And so what if you’re not a Talent? Does it impact on your ability to be the best queen you can be? No. Their approval means nothing.”

Harryet and Hero adamantly agreed.

Nothing meant anything to Cook and for this I was glad. In my world everything meant something. Still, I had a sinking suspicion he was wrong. I thought of the woman with the missing tooth and her friends who had saved me from the Shark’s Teeth at Antoine’s initiation ceremony. The people’s approval meant
everything
.

On this particular bitter afternoon Cook was up to his elbows in soapy water. The wind was howling through the eaves and sleet was splattering against the side of the building. Harryet, Hero and I were laughing at Odell’s new outfit, which his mother had made him wear to the recent banquet that had brought Hero and his family to the visitors’ apartments. It was all frilly layers and blue ruffles, but what was particularly humorous was the long sleeves.

“You should have seen him,” I said, clapping my hands. “He tried to shoot ice at me from across the table but instead he put a gaping hole in his new cloak. Thera was furious.”

“Mother had it made especially,” Hero said.

There was a screech outside. Cook flung back the animal skin over the window, threw back the shutters and peered into the whirling white. “Well, Heritia damn my soul.”

“Cook,” Harryet scolded, then made the sign of Ayfra to ward off evil. No one paid her any attention.

“What is it?” I said, jumping to my feet to stand on a stool beside him. Hero climbed up and stood so close I could feel his warmth. Cook pointed. Through the swirls of sleet we could see a shearwater. Like a kite on the end of a string the seabird fought against the wind’s violent attacks.

“What in the tides is it doing here this time of year?” Cook said.

“Blown off course, perhaps. Or sent by the gods,” Harryet said.

“Poor thing. It should really…” Hero didn’t finish his sentence. With a flick of its hand the wind whipped the bird up and out of sight. “Where has it—?” I started but was cut off. There was a thud on the door. Harryet and I looked at each other with wide eyes.

“Do you think—?” Hero started.

“You’d better—” Cook said but I had already jumped off the stool and run to open the door. The seabird lay in a crumpled heap of feathers at my feet. I picked it up like it was broken glass and carried it to the table.

“Is it dead?” Harryet said in a voice thick with concern.

“It looks it,” Hero said.

“It is almost frozen,” Cook said, prodding it. Its brown-tipped wings were solid. Its webbed feet were ice. “Done for, if you ask me.”

“No, it’s alive,” I said. I don’t know what made me so sure, but it was almost as if I could sense the bird’s life-force flowing from its heart down to the tips of its wings.

Harryet’s bottom lip trembled and tears welled in her eyes. Both Cook and I looked at her then at each other. “Harry, you better get a blanket and put it near the oven,” I said, making my friend grin with relief. “And Hero, can you find a box or crate?”

“I’ll fetch Epoul,” Cook said.

Epoul was a healer and a xenolith from the furthest reaches of Isbis; she had short spiky black hair and epicanthic folds in her eyelids. When she arrived having fought against the wind and hail, she was hardly impressed to discover her patient was a bird. But Cook fixed her with a look that said, “Refuse and you have no heart.”

“What does it matter anyway? It means nothing if your patients are human or animal,” I said, borrowing from Cook’s philosophy.

“And Ayfra is watching,” Harryet added. “Please,
please
will you heal her?”

Hero was nodding in earnest.

Epoul looked at each of us, shook her head and said, “How can I refuse?” As she worked she tut-tutted, mumbling about us wasting her time and valuable resources. She tended the bird’s broken wing and compounded knitbone, rue and salt to feed to the bird daily in a paste of fish and shrimp. Then she wiped her hands and rested her fists on her hips. “I wouldn’t be too optimistic. She’s far from her flock and it’s mid-winter.”