Tasia shook her head. “Unless I sleep a hundred years, my problems will still be here when I wake.” She paused. “And what is a ku-sai?”
“It means teacher.”
“Forgive me, but… since when do slaves have teachers?”
“They don’t,” Joslyn said. “But runaways do. Some of them.”
“Oh?” Tasia said, intrigued. The more she learned about her guard, the more she wanted to learn. “I could use a distraction right now, Joslyn. Tell me how it came to pass that you were raised a slave but then ended up with a wise ku-sai.”
Joslyn’s expression turned uncomfortable. “It’s not a time in my life that I speak much about, Princess.”
Princess. A minute ago, the guard had called her Tasia. But now she was back to Princess.
When Tasia was nine and Nik was seven, they’d tried to tame the rabbits they’d discovered living around one of the ponds on the palace grounds. They’d spend hours sitting perfectly still, a bit of tempting food in front of them, urging the rabbits to come closer. Once they accepted the proffered food, the Prince and Princess had inched closer to the rabbits, then closer, then closer. They’d almost achieved their final goal of feeding the rabbits directly from their hands when their father found out. He was, much to their surprise, livid.
“Wild creatures need their fear of mankind,” he’d said. “If you take that away from them, they are defenseless. You think you have created friends of those rabbits, but all you’ve done is create victims.”
That was the memory that surfaced when Joslyn called her “Princess” instead of “Tasia.” The guard was like a cautious rabbit, advancing and then retreating from Tasia’s open hand. Maybe Tasia had been wrong to tell the guard to call her by her name in the first place. Maybe friendship with her servants was one more thing she had to let go of as her father’s heir.
The thought made her lonely. She touched her throat lightly as if she could feel an actual noose there.
“My father sold my sister and me when she was seven and I was four,” Joslyn said after a long silence had passed between them.
Tasia searched Joslyn’s face for a residue of pain, but the woman’s face maintained its normal stoicism.
“Who bought you?” Tasia asked cautiously, hoping the rabbit wouldn’t skitter away again.
“A traveling tinker,” said Joslyn. “Here in Port Lorsin, people normally think of tinker families as wandering fortune tellers. But it’s only the women who tell fortunes. The men earn their coin by fixing things, selling things, trading things — a little of everything.”
“I’ve seen traveling fortune tellers before, when I was very young and used to visit commoners with my mother and father. The women who read cards and palms on street corners always seemed a rather grimy lot to me.” Tasia cocked her head to the side, trying to imagine a version of Joslyn that didn’t have a sword at her hip. A version where the woman’s black eyes gazed into crystals and made vague pronouncements. “Did they treat you well, the tinker family? You and your sister?”
Joslyn shrugged. “We were slaves. The tinkers were not cruel, but we were slaves and we were treated as such.”
“But you ran away from the tinkers anyway and found yourself a… a ku-sai.”
“No, that came much later.” Joslyn hesitated. “The tinker sold me to a man when I was eleven.”
Tasia thought she saw Joslyn’s face change subtly when she said “a man.” She was about to press for more details, but they had arrived at the entrance to her apartments.
“Wait for a moment,” Joslyn said when Tasia reached for the door handle. “Allow me first.” She disappeared inside and returned a minute later. “Everything is clear.”
“And Mylla?” Tasia asked. “Is she inside?”
Joslyn shook her head.
Tasia sighed. “Very well,” she said, taking the pin of blue feathers from her hair as she walked through the antechamber and into her bedchamber. She’d expected Mylla to be here. She’d planned on confronting the girl, finding out why the handmaid hadn’t said anything about the marriage proposal. The proposal she had already accepted.
Tasia sat heavily at her vanity, removing the rest of the pins from her hair and letting it down, massaging her sore scalp with her fingertips. Through the mirror, she could see a fragment of Joslyn, posted by the bedchamber door.
Normally the guard remained in the antechamber. Maybe Tasia hadn’t frightened the rabbit away quite yet.
“Do you remember anything about your mother?” Tasia asked the reflection in the mirror, picking up her hairbrush. “Given that you were taken from her at such a young age?”
The reflection stirred. “I remember very little of my mother.”
“What do you remember?”
“I remember that she had black hair that hung to her waist once she unfurled it,” Joslyn said. Then she added, “Her hair smelled like incense and saffron. But I can’t remember her face.”
Tasia ran the brush through her hair, watching Joslyn in the mirror thoughtfully. “I lost my own mother. Did you know that?”
The reflection nodded.
“I was seven when she died. My brother Nik was five. Adela was barely walking and talking. It hurts, doesn’t it? Losing a mother when you still need her.”
“My ku-sai used to say that losing a mother is to slice a wound that never heals.”
Tasia gave a faint smile. “I believe I like this ku-sai of yours.”
For a moment, Tasia lost herself in the memories of grief that had surrounded the weeks and months following her mother’s death. Seven year-old Tasia knew from Wise Man Norix that the God of Time was made up, a myth that commoners prayed to because they were too ignorant to know any better. But in secret, after Nik had crawled into her bed each night and cried himself to sleep, Tasia prayed to the God of Time. She prayed to have one last moment with her mother. She prayed to see her mother smiling at her a final time, because the image of her face was already fading from Tasia’s mind.
“You are the only mother they will have now,” her father had told her, referring to Nik and Adela. “You must be strong for them. They will need you.”
It hadn’t occurred to Tasia at the time to ask her father why he couldn’t be the strong one for his three children. She had simply nodded like an obedient daughter, and did her best to console her five year-old brother and infant sister. At least Adela would never remember losing her mama, Tasia had thought at the time. That, at least, was the God of Time’s one blessing.
“I miss her, Tazy,” Nik would say each night.
“So do I,” Tasia answered. “But you are the future Emperor, and I am the Princess. We can only cry when we are alone, never in front of father or the Wise Men or the lords and ambassadors. Understand?”
He nodded. “Father said we must all be brave,” he said miserably.
“Father’s right,” Tasia agreed. “Father is always right.”
#
Tasia didn’t go to dinner, even though Mace of House Gifford had been invited again. She sent a messenger to her father to say she wasn’t feeling well and would be taking her evening meal in her room. It was partially true; she was tired from the day’s events and had a mild headache. More than that, though, when the time came to bathe and dress for the evening meal, Mylla still hadn’t reappeared. The longer she was gone, the hotter Tasia’s emotions became — a potent mix of anxiety, anger, and despondency.