Lamentia
Sorrow walked through lantern-lit corridors, her footsteps silent on the threadbare carpet, in no hurry to get to her father’s apartments. The palace, as always, felt still, as though in the midst of a great sleep, and when she trailed her fingers along the decorative stucco on the wall, thick dust coated the tips, leaving a glaring smear of white in the grey.
As she crossed the landing between the wings, something brushed her cheek, and she lifted a hand to gently catch it. A small spider, ink-black and gleaming, scurried across her palm, and she carefully placed it on the banister, watching it skitter away out of sight.
Sorrow had grown up unafraid of spiders, simply because there would have been no end to her terror if she had been. The neglected Winter Palace was a haven for them.
While her grandmother had been alive she’d tried to keep a grip on things, fighting dirt and decay in a palace determined to atrophy. But Sorrow hadn’t bothered since she’d died, allowing dust and cobwebs to accumulate. What was the point? They did their best to discourage visitors; the guests who’d come to Rhannon for the memorial dinner would be smuggled into the palace via the east wing, straight to the state dining room, and they’d leave the same way the moment the feast was over. The stewards who’d visited her earlier were herded in and out the same way. Though there was room for them all, the suites simply weren’t in a fit state for guests. And neither was the chancellor.
Sorrow tried not to leave the east wing, using the rooms there to dine, sleep and work. There, at least, she could make things comfortable; sew up the holes in her hand-me-down furnishings, scavenge cushions from the cavernous storerooms to cover the damage she couldn’t mend. She’d found other treasures too, like the Malice board, storybooks and even some old jewellery, though she assumed it was paste, and not real gems. Sometimes at night she’d take them out, trying to imagine where she might wear a ruby the size of a duck egg, or emerald earrings that were so heavy they made her lobes hurt when she tried them on.
In her room she could push back the drapes, and open the windows when there was no one to tell on her. She could smile illegal smiles with Irris and Rasmus, play games, talk about dreams and hopes.
The rest of the Winter Palace felt too big: a mausoleum for the living, where sunlight was banished and the oil lamps were always lit. Where every moment, no matter the hour, felt like the dead of night: those quiet hours when it felt unnatural and strange, dangerous even, to be awake. Sorrow hated to walk the palace, because it made her feel like a ghost, too.
As for her father’s quarters, in the west wing, Sorrow avoided them as much as she could, avoided thinking about them if she could help it, unwilling to deal with the tangled mix of guilt and fury that rose whenever she thought of the chancellor. And with good reason.
The moment she crossed the balcony along the central complex of the palace and opened the doors to the west, the sweet reek of Lamentia smoke – real this time – assaulted her nose.
Sorrow raised her sleeve to her face to breathe through the fabric, her headache rallying once more, her mood souring even further.
Almost as soon as she passed through the double doors to her father’s reception rooms, she found Balthasar, and the source of the Lamentia reek.
Disappointment flooded her as she looked at the senator for the South Marches. He was a relatively young man, barely in his thirties, handsome, and recently married; Sorrow and her grandmother had attended the subdued ceremony a month before she died. And now here he was, slumped in a chair beside the covered window, a small bone pipe, still smouldering, between his fingers. He’d clearly wasted no time heading here once the meeting of the Jedenvat had finished.
“Senator Balthasar,” Sorrow barked.
One bloodshot eye peeled open, looked at her, and then rolled back into his skull. A single tear fell as the lid shut once more. Sorrow closed her own eyes, breathing through her sleeve as she counted slowly to ten, trying to decide what to do with him.
She’d thought him too driven to be so foolish; after all, he’d been shrewd enough to talk his way on to the Jedenvat eighteen months ago after Harun fired his predecessor. He’d done it despite his age, despite having no family ties to the council, and despite being a descendant, albeit distantly, of the royal family the Ventaxises had deposed centuries before. It was no small thing he’d achieved, and Sorrow knew he must have wanted it very badly.
But perhaps that’s what led him here – his ambition, right to the inner circle of the chancellor, and his addiction.
For a while, Sorrow hadn’t known Lamentia existed, shielded by her grandmother and Charon, for once working together to keep it from her, and the rest of the country. While she’d secreted herself away with Rasmus, they’d been dismissing servants and guards, silencing the Jedenvat, and locking down the palace. Already in the habit of avoiding her father, Sorrow had no idea the headaches she suffered from were triggered by the drug’s smoke. She’d been only too happy to stay away from her father’s rooms when they’d asked her to.
The truth had been revealed when her father offered her a pipe in the early hours of the morning after his mother had died. At breakfast the dowager had been fine, signing papers and smiling at Sorrow. But by dinner she was bedridden, writhing and sweating, an anxious Sorrow forced to keep away in case her fever was contagious. It wasn’t, but it was mortal, and by dawn the dowager was cold, and still, and gone. Sorrow and her father stood beside her bed, alone together for the first time Sorrow could ever recall.
She didn’t know what to do, how to be, around this stranger she called “Father”, so she’d kept her eyes on the body of the woman who’d been both parents to her. Movement had caught her eye, and she’d looked up to see Harun reaching into a pocket of his robe, pulling out a small ivory pipe, the bowl already packed with something. She watched as he lit it and sucked the mouthpiece greedily, finally exhaling a cloud of smoke that instantly caused a familiar pain to bloom across Sorrow’s forehead.
“It’s Lamentia. It’ll help,” Harun had said, tears welling in his eyes as he held the pipe out to her.
“What does it do?” Sorrow watched her father’s pupils widen, then contract. “What is Lamentia?”
“It’ll help you grieve,” he said.
Fear twisted her innards. “Where did you get it?”
Harun had brought the pipe to his lips again, and smoke whispered out of his mouth, drifting towards her.
Sorrow had backed away from him, clutching her head. “I don’t want it.”
“You need it.” The tears spilled down his cheeks. “We all need it. Or we’ll forget to miss them.” He’d reached out towards his daughter with trembling, stained fingers.
Sorrow had fled straight to Charon, the only adult left she trusted. And he confessed he already knew, and that he and her grandmother had been working to keep Harun’s use of it contained. But the insidious grip of Lamentia had tightened on the chancellor, despite Charon and the dowager’s efforts to halt it.
And now one of the senators, a man who sat on the Jedenvat council, had taken the pipe Harun must have offered. Fear inched an icy path down Sorrow’s spine, obliterating the incessant warmth of the palace, as she realized if he had, then others might follow. And sooner or later, the secret would be out. Balthasar moaned as a trickle of blood leaked from his nose, and Sorrow’s rage spiked, burning away her revulsion.
Sleeve still covering her nose and mouth, she passed the incapacitated councillor and headed towards her father’s private suite. When she saw the guards on the door, she beckoned one of them to follow, leading him back to Balthasar.
“Take him to the cells to sober up. Give him food, water, make him comfortable – not too comfortable,” she amended. “He’s not to leave until I, or Lord Day, say so.”
The guard nodded, and bent to lift the prone man, but Balthasar was too far gone to stand, let alone walk. The guard looked at Sorrow, gave a shrug, and hauled the young senator over his shoulder. Sorrow watched him go, waiting until he was out of sight, before she turned back towards Harun’s private rooms, dread squatting like a toad inside her stomach. What state would she find Harun in this time?
Her foot nudged something and she looked down. Balthasar’s pipe had fallen to the floor and Sorrow picked it up, examining it. It was beautifully crafted, a mermaid curved around the stem and shank, holding the bowl in her arms, peering coquettishly over the top, back towards the lip. An antique, she realized, something from the days past when artists could create beautiful things for the sake of it. And look what Balthasar had used it for…
She dropped it to the floor and stood on it, grinding it under her heel and leaving the pieces on the floor, as she strode towards her father’s quarters.
The remaining guard opened the door for her, and she entered the inner sanctum of the chancellor of Rhannon.
The chancellor was alone, prostrate in front of a candle-strewn altar, sprawled beneath a large portrait of a boy with impossibly curled hair curving against tawny cheeks, brown eyes staring soulfully out, a birthmark on the left-hand side of his neck shaped like a moon. Her mother had been born with a mark too, though Sorrow hadn’t known it until Charon had told her. In the few portraits that existed of her, the first lady’s neck had been covered, as the fashions of the time dictated. As they had remained. Sorrow pulled at her own high collar, before approaching Harun.
“Father,” she said softly, kneeling beside him. “I’m here, Father.”
The chancellor looked up slowly, dazed, his eyes raking over her. His pupils were pinprick small, and his nose … his nose was red, and weeping clear fluid. Lamentia frosted his thick beard. Her stomach dropped as understanding knocked her back two full paces. He wasn’t smoking it any more. He was inhaling it.
“You stupid, stupid… Father!” Sorrow barked.
At the sound of her voice, his eyes came momentarily into focus, and he looked past her into the room.
“Mael’s gone,” he said, his voice hoarse.
Sorrow’s hands became fists at her sides.
“My son. My heir. Mael. Born and died on the same date. What unkindness is that, to be so exact? How can we bear it?”
Sorrow shook her head and reached for her father’s arm, roughly lifting him and half dragging, half guiding him to a chair by the bed. She poured him a glass of water and held it to his lips. “My boy,” he murmured, pushing the glass away.
“Drink,” Sorrow barked at him.
“I have no desire. Everything tastes of ash. How can I drink, or eat, when my only son is dead?”
Sorrow’s mouth tightened. It wasn’t grief killing the chancellor’s appetite. “Mael wouldn’t want you to starve for him.” She tried to soften her voice.
“What would you know of Mael’s wants?” The chancellor’s glassy eyes were sharp briefly, blazing at her. Then they filmed over with fresh tears and he began to weep once more.
She should be moved by it. Her father’s weeping should move her. But she’d seen him weep too often for it to muster any emotion in her, save for resignation, and a low, simmering anger that she did her best to ignore. He was supposed to be their leader. Thanks to Lamentia, the only place he seemed willing to lead them was down a path so dark Sorrow didn’t know if Rhannon could ever recover.
Sorrow knew what had happened at the bridge – everyone knew – how Harun had inadvertently saved himself, but damned his son in the process. Sometimes she felt guilty that her life had heralded her mother’s death, but Sorrow’s guilt was nothing to Harun’s. Nothing at all.
His need to atone became a lash of contrition on the back of the kingdom. He’d worked night and day to remain grief-stricken, to punish himself, turning the entire realm into a monument for his lost family.
In the Hall of Remembrance at the Summer Palace, Mael’s possessions were on show behind glass cases: the birthday presents he never got to unwrap, his first pair of boots, the blanket he’d been swaddled in as a newborn. His miniature riding whip, a book of stories he’d never learned to read. Pride of place was a tiny coronet, as though he’d been born a prince, and not merely the son of the chancellor. It was so small that Sorrow could wear it like a bangle if she liberated it. One day she might, she thought spitefully. One day she might raze the Hall of Remembrance to the ground.
Sorrow hated her brother sometimes.
But sometimes she envied him too.
Sorrow watched her father give in to weeping, waiting until he was bent double and his body was consumed with sobs before taking the chance to slip a vial from beneath her dress. It was a sleeping potion, nothing more, but necessary to keep him from the powder that controlled him. It was supposed to be for her – she’d never been a good sleeper – but she saved it instead for these occasions, when she had to deal with Harun. She added a few drops to the water glass and held it out to her father again.
“Just a little,” she said, taking his shoulder and pulling him up. “A toast, for him.”
“He was the best of us,” the chancellor said. “It was my fault. My pride… My fault.”
“Drink,” she said again, ignoring his words. She’d heard them too many times before.
Finally, he opened his mouth and allowed her to drip the water on to his tongue.
With his stomach empty and his body weakened, the sedative acted quickly; his eyelids began to flutter and she lifted him to his feet, her arms around him as he stumbled to the bed. She lowered him down, rolling him on to his back.
He looked up at her, once again a flash of lucidity brightening his eyes. “Why don’t you cry for him?” he asked.
Then his eyes closed, his breathing softened, and he was unconscious.
Sorrow straightened and looked around the room, lined with portraits of her brother. Mael aged one, two, and finally three, all painted from his living image. Then afterwards, four, five, six, seven, all the way up to twenty. Mael as a golden child, a gilded youth. Mael as a shining young man, strong-jawed, haughty-eyed.
Unlike his sister, the painted Mael never had an awkward phase; he never had spots, and his hair was never greasy. Each year, a new one was commissioned, imagining how he would look if he still lived, and he was always glorious. The chancellor was supposed to unveil the latest one the following day, after they’d returned from the bridge, and Sorrow was dreading it.
With a start she realized that with Harun unconscious, albeit by her hand, Charon would expect her to lead the mourning feast that very evening. That the people who’d come from across Rhannon, the Jedenvat, the stewards, wardens, landlords, they’d all turn to her to lead them.
Something inside her lurched, as though she was looking down from a great height. If Harun was still incapable tomorrow, she’d have to lead the mourning then too; she’d have to stand on the bridge and face the people, enact the ceremony, and say the words. Because there was no one else. Not any more.
Despite the heat, she shivered, and looked again at the portrait of Mael from last year. He was wearing a high-collared shirt, covering the crescent-shaped birthmark on his neck, hair a shade lighter than hers falling loosely to his shoulders. Sorrow touched her own messy braid, and the painted Mael stared back at her with accusing eyes.
Sorrow had never had her portrait taken. As far as she knew, no one had ever so much as sketched her likeness.
“Why don’t I cry? Because I never knew him,” Sorrow said quietly as she left the chancellor to his slumber. “Because to me he’s always been dead. And I’m alive. I want to live. Not mourn, or wallow. Or even rule. I want a life.”