The Book of V.: A Novel(38)

“So you tricked me twice,” she said.

“Tricked you?”

“My tally marks. Our plan, to go as ourselves.”

“I meant to do it.”

“Really.”

“I did. I meant everything.”

“So?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t what? What we were doing wasn’t hard. It was the opposite of hard.”

Lara looked away. She shrugged. “I must not be as brave as your majesty.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“But you are. That.”

Esther emitted an involuntary groan. Apart from her robes, there was nothing queenly about her. There had been no training. There had been a ritual with the crown, but the priest spoke in an ancient language no one but he seemed to understand; nothing about it resembled any marriage Esther had ever seen, and afterward the king’s minister breathed in her ear: Try a fleck of sorcery and I’ll have you impaled. Right here. He’d shoved her with genius stealth into a pillar, then called the king off to some business of some sort. Since then, Esther had been attended constantly. She had been fed like a queen, and bathed like a queen, which was to say she had been fed and bathed like a night station girl was fed and bathed, yet more indulgently and with more ceremony, no longer part of a herd but elevated, alone. She had been praised. But she did not feel like a queen. It was all a costume. Couldn’t Lara see that? She was squinting at Esther. She drew closer, examining, until her breath landed on Esther’s skin. “What happened to your face?”

It was an opening. Esther felt an anticipatory unclenching, the confessional equivalent of salivating before a meal. She almost told. Later, she would return to the moment and wonder, if she had sat down in her queen’s robes and told Lara everything—the cold, pulsing vortex, the beast, the near-escape, the knife—might it have made the difference? How, since then, she had tested herself, in secret, and found her powers so sapped it took her three hours to move a ring an inch? Would Lara, allowed in, have taken pity on her and gone to the camp? But that day in the night station she was so hurt still by Lara’s defection, and so hungry for Lara’s touch, and so angry that she was being denied it, and so disgusted by herself that she needed it, and so determined to protect herself against any of these feelings, that she gave back to Lara what Lara had given her and asked, coolly, “What difference does it make?”

Lara backed away. And that was how they stood for the rest of the negotiation, which is what it became, irrevocably, the second Esther said, “I came to ask a favor,” and began to try to sell Lara on privileges like access to the wives’ swimming pool and invites to an upper-tier banquet in exchange for Lara going to the camp. “And you’d get out of here for a while,” Esther added. “I’ll tell whichever eunuch brings you to take his time.”

She was still innocent then—both of how a queen was supposed to talk to people and of how the people could just say no. Lara didn’t even apologize. She said, “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Lara, after a pause, said, “No one’s told you what’s happened with the camp.”

“You mean the bandits?” Esther’s voice dove deep, mocking: “The king’s cleanse? They’ve been doing that for a long time.”

“No. There’s a new edict. Any non-Hebrew communing with a Hebrew will be put to death.”

Esther laughed. “That’s not possible. How would they buy or sell anything? How would they live?”

“I don’t know.”

“So the Persians must have stopped, then. Smashing the tents?”

“No. That’s allowed.”

“When was this?”

“Right after you were chosen. What’s he like?”

“Who?” But Esther was distracted. After you were chosen.

“The king,” said Lara.

“I hardly know him.”

“But haven’t you known him?”

“He’s harmless.”

“Clearly he’s not.”

Esther could have explained how the dangerous one wasn’t the king, but said instead, “I have to go.”

And Lara didn’t protest. She said, to Esther’s back, as nonchalantly as if they would see each other again in a couple hours: “Those things you offered me? The pool, the banquets? Do you really think it’s up to you, to let me do those things?”



* * *



Esther went straight to the king. His guards scoffed—they had not been told of any permission granting the queen entry today. And the minister was away, in Persepolis.

“I have no permission,” she said. She was shaking. “I won’t go away.”

Time passed. Esther had to sit down on the floor with her head between her hands; she could hear her teeth rattling. At some point, her arms were grabbed; someone hoisted her onto a chair. The queen must not sit on the floor. By the time she was led into the chambers, her shaking had given way to a dense pain that circled her head as if tracing the line of her crown.

The room where the king waited for her was not a room she had seen before. It was darker than his other rooms, without windows, lit only by torches and crude ones at that, the kind used in the palace’s passages and storage closets. Dominating the space was a large table strewn with tools and what looked like tiny stones, along with shelves—these, too, strewn with objects—that filled an entire wall, from floor to ceiling. The table was the only bright surface, its length lined with torches.