I think we will end this discussion. It is not a subject upon which we are likely to agree. -- Cranford (2007), Episode 3

Gialma's first thought was that the sitting room he entered was much smaller and more dingy than he would have expected. Perhaps the Malishese weren't used to anything grander. His second thought was that the princess's clothes were so grand she made the room look even duller in comparison.

Princess Jalakanavu wore a floor-length bluish-purple gown. Its neckline reached up to her throat. Its bodice was embroidered with silvery-gold thread in a design that seemed to be circles and spirals within circles and spirals -- or were they perhaps meant to be flowers? Gold jewels were sewn onto the gown's skirt. On her head she wore an extraordinary sort of crown.[1] It was the same colour as the gown and shaped like an open fan placed atop her head, with dangling jewels hanging from it. Pulled up over the crown and hanging down from its back was a long blue veil made of some opaque fabric. If pulled down, it would have covered the princess's face and hung down to below her waist. Her hair was hidden behind the veil, but he could catch an occasional glimpse of jewels braided into it when she moved.

All in all, she was a sight such as Gialma had never seen before. Not even at the more extravagant balls he had attended had any of the woman been dressed so ostentatiously.

Why is she dressed like this for this meeting? he wondered. Surely those clothes aren't practical for plotting. Do the Malishese have no grasp of sensible outfits?

Even as he thought this, he bowed awkwardly and mumbled some sort of greeting -- not even he could have said what it was.

The princess inclined her head and said something in her strange native language. The translator repeated Gialma's greeting (or an approximation of it) in Malishese and Jalakanavu's in Carannish.

With the pleasantries over, they could turn to the reason they were there. Gialma sat down opposite the princess on a rather threadbare armchair. He found himself at a loss for words. His throat seemed to have closed up and he couldn't think of anything to say. All he could hear was his heart pounding in his head. All he wanted was to run far, far away.

The prince grabbed hold of the arm of the chair and forced himself to breathe. Panicking now would be worse than useless. He had to think clearly and calmly.

His mind's eye conjured up images of the poverty he had seen in the city. Paradoxical though it seemed, this calmed him more than any attempt at reassuring himself. That was why he was here. Because he would be a better emperor than Tinuviel. Because he would do something to help those people.

"Your Highness," Gialma said. His voice was clearer and steadier than he could ever have hoped for. "I wrote to your husband because I have heard he and I have similar goals. He wishes to see Tinuviel deposed. So do I."

~~~~

Qihadal was certain of two things. One, the Carannish language was ridiculously complicated. Two, she was going to master it if it was the last thing she did.

She squinted at the sheet of paper in front of her. The Carannish alphabet was made of lines flowing into circles, arranged haphazardly into squares or blocks to form syllables.[2] Each word was separated from the next by a small dot placed between them. Trying to puzzle out which symbol represented what sound, and trying to connect the separate sounds with recognisable words, made her head ache. 

One of her maids walked into the library and stopped beside her desk. She didn't look up from the page. That group of symbols there looked like they spelt out "kanzen". Qihadal recognised that word. It meant "butterfly". But what were the rest of the words?

The maid coughed. "Excuse me, your Majesty."

Qihadal finally looked away from the writing. "Yes? What do you want?"

The maid shuffled her feet and wrung her hands. "The Queen Mother wishes to speak with you. She says it's very important. I told her you were busy but she insisted on seeing you anyway."

It took Qihadal a minute to connect the words "Queen Mother" with her mother-in-law. What did Tinuviel's mother want to speak to her about? She barely knew the woman.

She got up, stumbling slightly over her unfamiliar dress. She had begun adopting Carannish fashions and clothing to appear less out-of-place among her new subjects. It meant she got fewer odd looks, but it also meant she ran a constant risk of tripping herself up until she got used to them. Recently the Empress Consort had also begun to style her hair in the swept-up hairstyles of Carannish noblewomen. This was even more difficult, because her hair was of a different texture and required much more work to stay in those complicated styles.

Qihadal followed the maid out of the room, feeling painfully aware of how in her mother-in-law's eyes she must look like a child playing dress-up.

Malishese women were never on good terms with each other. They were always vying for power, control, or favour -- usually a man's favour. A woman's worst enemy in many cases was her mother-in-law. The mother-in-law had spent years reinforcing her control over her son, and now he went and married a stranger who would take over controlling him. She had seen the cruel enmity between mothers- and daughters-in-law everywhere she looked back in Malish. It had slowly begun to occur to Qihadal that this was not the natural state of affairs, at least not in the rest of the world. Her mother-in-law had never been cruel to her or treated her with scorn. Yet she still didn't trust the woman.

Arásy was waiting for her in the Empress's private sitting room.

Tinuviel and his official wife lived separate lives, in different sides of the palace, seeing each other only for official occasions when they were expected to pretend to be happily married. She had an entire wing to herself, which she could decorate as she wished. Qihadal had chosen to decorate it in pale blues and greys, with as little ornamentation as possible. She wanted no more reminders than absolutely necessary of the ornate, gaudy Malishese palace that she had spent most of her life caged in.

"Your Majesty," Arásy said, nodding to her. As the Queen Mother, she was not expected to bow like everyone else was. "I would like to speak to you about your daughter."

Qihadal froze. "I have no daughter."

"No," the Queen Mother agreed, "not once you officially sign her care over to me and my husband. But at present, and for at least another hour, you do have a daughter. And I hear you have utterly ignored her existence."

This conversation was not heading in a direction Qihadal liked. "I want nothing to do with it."

Arásy frowned. Qihadal had always had trouble guessing at the emotions of the Carannish. They all looked alike to her, with their pale skin, dark hair and slanted eyes, and she could never tell what many of them were thinking. Yet she was fairly sure her mother-in-law was angry.

"Your Majesty, she is not an 'it'. She is a living child who needs care and affection. No matter how cruel and miserable the circumstances of her conception were, no matter how evil her father was, she is as much an innocent victim as you are. Punishing her for her father's sins will do no good. She'll grow up knowing that she is hated for something she had no control over, and sooner or later she'll come to hate you."

The Queen Mother's voice started out calm, but as she spoke more and more anger crept into it. Yet it wasn't quite anger of the sort Qihadal was used to. That was cruelty and spite. This was the sort of frustrated, hurt anger that a parent would show when their child was doing something foolish and refused to listen to reason.

Knowing this didn't make Qihadal listen any more than she would have if she hadn't know.

"I think we will end this conversation here," the Empress Consort said in the regal, icy tone she had adopted over the past months. "We will not agree on this subject no matter how much we discuss it."

~~~~

"My husband will be more than happy to help you become Emperor," Jalakanavu said sweetly. Her slaves, standing nearby, cringed when they heard her tone. She was always at her most deadly when she seemed most good-natured. They knew this. The Carannish prince didn't. "But he has very little political power himself at present. He hopes to become Iqui soon, and then he will help you gain your throne."

"And what does he want in return?" Gialma asked warily once the translator had finished relaying this to him. "My help in his becoming Iqui?"

Jalakanavu smiled. "Yes, your Highness. Specifically, he would like you to provide his soldiers with weapons."

"I don't know how I can do that," Gialma began.

"One of your uncles owns a weapons factory, doesn't he? All we need is for you to arrange a very favourable contract for us."

~~~~

"What do you think of him?" Jalakanavu asked after the prince had left.

Lalkasam, her lady-in-waiting, frowned at this question. "Does her Highness[3] wish to hear a lowly servant's[4] true opinion?"

"Of course I do, or I wouldn't have asked."

The princess had learnt long ago that servants noticed far more than their masters thought they did. And so she had learnt to turn her servants into her spies. Lalkasam was the widow of a condemned criminal. She would have been left to beg or starve on the streets. But Jalakanavu saw an opportunity there, so she took Lalkasam in. She made her a high-ranking servant, paid her wages, and never mistreated her. In return her lady-in-waiting was another pair of eyes and ears for her.

"I think he is very young and naïve," Lalkasam said after a minute's consideration.

"Yes, that's what I thought too," Jalakanavu agreed.

"And I think he feels guilty about what he plans to do. Her Highness undoubtedly noticed how he stumbled over his words, and how pale he looked. Not even these foreign barbarians are naturally that pale."

This was not quite the information the princess hoped to hear. "Do you think he's a spy sent to trap us?"

"No," her lady-in-waiting said. "I do not believe he is."

"Thank you." Jalakanvu dismissed her servants with a wave of her hand.

This foolish prince will serve our purposes very well, she thought.

~~~~

That evening, as the sun fell beneath the horizon and the two moons shone brightly overhead, Arásy left the palace with Princess Lethil in her arms. Qihadal didn't watch her daughter leave. Kilan and Nadriet did.

"So now your step-daughter is our adopted sister," Nadriet said musingly. "How confusing!"

Kilan said nothing. He barely heard what his sister said.

Have I done the right thing by allowing Qihadal to ignore the child's existence? he wondered uneasily. He tried to console himself by thinking, She has a right to decide whether or not she wants to see her daughter. It would be cruel of me to force her to see her if she doesn't want to.

Zasordoth Palace had a balustrade built at the edge of its roof. Statues of gods, monsters, and long-dead monarchs were placed at equal distances all along the roof, gazing sightlessly down at the courtyard below.

Death sat in the shadow of a statue of the god of death. She watched until the carriage carrying Arásy and Lethil to their waiting airship had disappeared in the gloom of the dusk.

The sun had fully set and the distant stars glittered coldly in the night sky. Death still sat there. Instead of the courtyard, she saw the past, present and future written in the shadows below her.

And she didn't like what she saw.

Chapter Footnotes:

[1] Jalakanavu's outfit is the typical style of dress of a Malishese noblewoman visiting another noble family. On such occasions everyone involved tries to dress more expensively and extravagantly than everyone else. Jalakanavu's choice of clothing is downright restrained compared to what some other women wear.

[2] In other words, the Carannish alphabet is very similar to the Korean Hangul alphabet. Words are written vertically, like in the original forms of Chinese, Japanese and Korean, instead of from left to right, like in English.

[3] her Highness = The Malishese language requires people to refer in the third person to people of a higher social class.

[4] a lowly servant = The word Lalkasam uses, djahish, is a pronoun used by servants to refer to themselves. It means roughly "this worthless person", and reinforces the difference in station between master and servant.