Nettle & Bone(9)

When she was twenty and had spent five years in the little room with whitewashed walls and baskets of yarn and thread, she was summoned to the Northern Kingdom. Her sister Kania was about to bear a child at last.

It was strange to travel in the queen’s carriage again. Marra was not confined to the convent and traveled often enough to the nearby village, but she walked or rode on the donkey cart with one of the sisters. To be in a well-sprung carriage with velvet seats, drawn by swift gray horses, was a forgotten luxury.

She stared out the window and thought how odd it all was, how very odd.

“You look very well,” said the queen.

“Thank you,” said Marra. She ran an appraising eye over her mother. It was like looking in a mirror, twenty-odd years into the future. The queen’s hair was still black, though henna played a part, and her clothing was as carefully layered as armor, creating a shape with which enemy eyes could find no fault.

“Mostly corsets,” said the queen, amused, watching Marra’s gaze. “There’s a trick to it, at my age. You must have a good figure for having born two children, but not so girlish that people suspect artifice and not so ripe that people think you are trying to be seductive.”

“It matters that much?” asked Marra, looking down at her own plain robes. The material was very fine and there were grackles embroidered around the sleeves, but no one would mistake her as being from anywhere but a convent.

“For a queen? Yes.”

Marra sighed. It seemed absurd. The abbess was stout as a barrel, and the Sister Apothecary had narrow shoulders and wide hips, like a pear, and both of them wore layered robes like Marra, except that the abbess also had vestments and the Sister Apothecary tied her sleeves back to keep from trailing them in the herbs.

“Clothing can be arranged for you,” said the queen. “If you would like dresses instead of robes for the week.” Her voice was carefully neutral, as if she did not wish to prejudice Marra’s decision.

Marra looked at the queen’s clothing and remembered how long it had taken her in the mornings to get ready, even at age fifteen. At the time it had seemed exciting. Now it seemed like so much work, and the eyes on her would be far less indulgent than the ones when she had been a teenage princess in her own family’s castle.

I have forgotten whatever I knew. There would be maids and ladies-in-waiting to tend me and do my hair and powder my face, but I would have to sit for hours while they dressed me like a doll, and then for the rest of the day I would be afraid to eat or drink for fear of ruining all their handiwork.

“I would rather appear as a nun,” she said.

Her mother nodded. “More robes, then,” she said. “It is easily done. But you will be treated as a nun, not as a princess, you know.”

“I think,” said Marra, folding her hands to hide the calluses from shoveling manure, “that I would prefer it.”



* * *



The Northern Kingdom’s capitol was set on a hill above a cold, flat plain. There were few trees. The mountains in the background loomed like swords, but the city loomed higher, as if it had been made to stand against the mountains.

The first city had been walled, then had outgrown the walls, so a second set had been built, then a third, until there were five sets of high white walls and a main road spiraling up the hill between them to the palace.

The white stone glowed against the brown earth, but it was a chilly glow, like moonlight on snow. Marra felt very small compared to that immense white city, very small and insignificant, and yet she had the feeling that the effect was deliberate, as if the city was designed to make visitors feel insignificant in comparison.

Perhaps it makes it safer against invasion, she thought. But it does not seem like a friendly place.

The carriage passed through the gates, under portcullises edged like saws. Marra pulled the lap quilt more tightly around herself, as if the cold were seeping in. Then came the long, winding way up to the palace, through streets that wrapped in a circle, over and over, as if they were climbing the body of a coiled eel. There were eels in the river near the convent and sometimes people tithed them to the nuns. Marra had eaten a great many eels. She suspected that this one would stick in her throat if she tried.

At the palace, hardly anyone waited to meet them. Marra’d had a vague notion that there should have been a great show of pomp and royal favor and she had been braced to withstand it. When it failed to materialize, she felt off balance. “Not many people,” she murmured.

“We are being put in our place,” said the queen calmly. “We are here as Kania’s family, not as royal envoys, and so we are being reminded that we are poor relations.”

“What do we do?”

“We ignore it.” And she proceeded to alight from the carriage as if she were the queen of this kingdom, not a poor relation at all.

Two footmen in livery flanked a woman who reminded Marra of the Sister Apothecary. “She’s gone into labor,” said the midwife bluntly. “Your majesty. It’ll be hours yet, but it’s been hours already, and the first time’s always hard.”

“Take me to her.”

The palace was a blaze of color and hallways and tapestries. Marra was swept along in her mother’s wake, following the midwife. She had also expected to go to a room and perhaps be able to rest or eat, but it seemed there was no time.