Improvisations

  At thirteen, Iliyria was already practiced in the art of resisting every attempt to “improve” her. So when Selphia announced, over breakfast, that she had arranged a music tutor, Iliyria responded with a scowl so profound it made her mother’s hands shake.

  “It is expected,” Selphia whispered, eyes trained on the tablecloth. “All Sylrendreis girls are proficient in at least two instruments. Some even sing.”

  Iliyria snorted. “Some even die of embarrassment.”

  The lesson was scheduled for the following afternoon. The tutor arrived at the suite precisely on time: a young man, barely a century and a half old, with a mop of brown hair and wire-rimmed spectacles that kept sliding down his nose, which he pushed back up with an index finger in a gesture so practiced it seemed part of his breathing. He had the manner of someone who had spent most of his life apologizing for taking up space. He wore the livery of a minor noble house and carried his own case, which held a lute, several sheets of manuscript, and a delicate tuning fork shaped like a wishbone.

  He bowed to Selphia, then to Iliyria, the second bow deeper and more careful. “My lady,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.

  She fixed him with a stare. “Let’s get it over with.”

  The first lesson was an exercise in mutual humiliation. Iliyria plucked at the strings with all the grace of a butcher, while the tutor, whose name, she learned, was Jorell, tried to coax music from the chaos. He was patient, almost to the point of pathology, correcting her fingerings with the lightest touch, counting time with gentle taps of his palm.

  Selphia sat in the corner, her embroidery ignored, watching the exchange with a strange intensity. Iliyria pretended not to notice.

  After twenty minutes, Iliyria declared, “My hands are too big for this. Or maybe the instrument is too small.”

  Jorell smiled, just a fraction. “It only feels that way because you’re strong. Many great musicians have large hands. It helps with the reach.”

  She eyed him, suspicious of the compliment, but he met her gaze and did not flinch.

  “Try this passage,” he said, pointing to a line in the music. “It’s easier than it looks.”

  She tried. It wasn’t. But he didn’t correct her, just let her play it through, then quietly demonstrated the fingering, his own hands deft and sure.

  When the hour was up, Selphia thanked him, voice tremulous with relief.

  Jorell packed his case, bowed again, and left.

  Iliyria waited for the echo of his footsteps to fade. “He’s odd,” she said.

  Selphia smiled. “But kind.”

  Iliyria shrugged. “If you say so.”

  The lessons continued, every other day. Iliyria’s resistance diminished, not out of any sudden passion for music but because she found herself curious about the man who never raised his voice, never made her feel stupid, never seemed to mind when she mangled the melodies.

  He began each session with a question: “What do you want to play today?” The first time, she said, “Nothing,” and he replied, “Then we’ll play nothing, but together.”

  They sat in silence for the full hour, and he marked it as time well spent.

  One afternoon, Iliyria arrived early to the lesson and found Jorell and Selphia in conversation, their voices low. Jorell’s hand rested lightly on Selphia’s wrist, just above a cluster of yellowed bruises. “You shouldn’t have to hide them,” he was saying.

  Selphia glanced at the door, saw her daughter, and drew her hand away. “We all have things we must hide,” she replied, voice brittle.

  Jorell bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”

  Iliyria slipped into her chair, pretending she’d heard nothing.

  Silence became exercise. By deep winter, Jorell drew a single scale and wrote fingerings in his neat ledger hand; above the bars he penciled tiny letters that looked like rehearsal marks, R I V E R spaced across the line. Iliyria saw only homework. Selphia did not.

  “River…?” she breathed into the tuning, barely shaping the word.

  “North gate,” Jorell replied, the way one might name a note. Iliyria missed the chord and both of them smiled at the wrong thing.

  He encouraged improvisation, teaching her to riff on the prescribed exercises, to find her own way through the scale. He brought in other instruments, a flute, a small drum, and let her experiment with combinations. He laughed, quietly, when she attempted to play both at once.

  Footsteps passed in the corridor. Selphia snapped the book shut; Jorell lifted the lute case in one practiced motion. Telemir’s shadow paused at the threshold and kept going. No one in the room exhaled until the hall did.

  Jorell set the case down again, pinged the tuning fork once, their all-clear, and, without looking up, slid a narrow folded page beneath Selphia’s embroidery hoop.

  Over time, Iliyria noticed the changes in her mother. Selphia’s posture straightened; the color returned to her cheeks. She began to hum along with the melodies, sometimes even correcting Iliyria on a missed note.

  “After Equinox,” Jorell murmured to the fork, counting time that wasn’t in the measure. “Weather keeps.”

  As months passed, the lessons became a refuge for both mother and daughter. On the last clear afternoon before the rains, Jorell left a rolled étude with an unplayed cadenza. While Iliyria re-set a slipped bridge, Selphia slid the parchment into the panel behind the brazier and let her hand rest there a heartbeat longer than necessary. When she turned back, her face had the brightness of someone who had found a door in the wall.

  When Telemir was out of the house, Selphia and Iliyria would linger after the tutor left, playing scales and singing duets, their voices blending in the cool hush of the music room.

  Iliyria watched her mother grow braver. Once, when Telemir barked an order across the dinner table, Selphia corrected him, softly but firmly. He stared at her in disbelief, then relented. Iliyria saw the quick, secret smile that passed between mother and daughter.

  One evening, after the lesson, Iliyria asked, “Why do you like it so much?”

  Selphia considered. “Because, for a little while, it makes me feel as if things could be beautiful. As if we could—” she hesitated, then finished, “—as if we could matter, beyond the next disaster.”

  Iliyria nodded, understanding in a way she could not name.

  The music room became their sanctuary. They kept it warm with a brazier, bright with the light from three candelabras. Iliyria decorated the walls with pressed flowers and pinned up jokes she copied from Falanthriel’s prank books. Selphia added ribbons to the curtains, invited Nalea to join them for impromptu concerts.

  In this space, they were neither prisoners nor pawns. They were simply themselves; imperfect, but free in the ways that counted.

  And for the first time, Iliyria caught herself wishing that the moments would last.

  They never did, of course.

  But while they were there, they were real.

  The next lesson hour came without footsteps. The tuning fork slept cold on the stand. Selphia watched the door until the candle drowned its own wick. For the first time Jorell did not come.

  What Hospitality Hides

  That night, Selphia and Iliyria lay side by side atop the bedcovers, a candle guttering on the windowsill and the rain hissing against the glass. Selphia read aloud from a battered storybook, her voice a low, soothing rhythm that traced the edges of a world far from their own.

  Iliyria nestled closer, head on her mother’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of lavender and lemon that clung to Selphia’s nightgown. For a little while, they pretended they were alone in the universe: just two women, one young, one not, both navigating the mapless sea between what had been and what would be.

  Selphia paused, fingertip marking her place. “Are you still listening?” she asked, the old playfulness in her tone.

  Iliyria murmured, “Always.”

  The moment shattered with the sound of the door opening, not gently, but with the authority of someone who has never been asked to knock.

  Lord Telemir stood in the threshold, a tray in his hands. He wore his formal robe, as if expecting guests, and his eyes sparkled with a chemical brightness Iliyria had never seen before.

  Selphia sat up. “My lord?”

  He smiled, the gesture precise as a surgical cut. “I thought I might join you for tea.”

  He crossed to the bedside table and set the tray down. The teapot steamed, and the cups, three of them, were arranged in a perfect triangle. Next to the teapot, half hidden by the lid, sat a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. The lenses were cracked; one was spattered with a brown crust that, even in the dim light, looked disturbingly like dried blood. Jorell’s one-finger tap would never nudge them straight again.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Selphia’s hand flew to her mouth.

  Iliyria stared at the spectacles, then at her mother, and felt a cold, slow understanding unfurl in her chest.

  Telemir poured the tea with exaggerated care, filling each cup to the very brim. “It is a chilly night,” he observed, voice mild. “I thought you might appreciate something

  to warm you.”

  He handed the first cup to Selphia, who accepted it with both hands. The cup rattled against the saucer. Iliyria saw, in that instant, her mother’s eyes go flat with terror.

  He offered Iliyria the next cup. She reached for it, but Selphia spoke first: “No. She’s young. It will keep her up.”

  Telemir nodded, as if this were the most reasonable objection in the world.

  He raised his own cup and waited. It felt obscene to measure terror in saucer rattle and cooling time, but that was the court’s dialect.

  Selphia brought the cup to her lips, her hands shaking so badly that the tea spilled onto her nightgown. Iliyria watched as her mother drank, the motion mechanical, her face draining of color with each swallow.

  When the cup was empty, Telemir set his own aside, untouched. “Good night, ladies,” he said, and left, closing the door behind him.

  They sat in silence for a long while.

  Iliyria watched her mother’s breathing; shallow, rapid, uneven. The bruises on her arms looked darker than ever.

  Selphia set the cup down. “You need to go to bed,” she whispered.

  Iliyria shook her head. “Not without you.”

  Selphia reached out, tucking a strand of hair behind Iliyria’s ear. Her touch was cold. “It will be better in the morning,” she said, but the lie sat between them, heavy and sharp.

  In the weeks that followed, the ritual repeated. Every few nights, Telemir arrived with the tray, each time a little less gracious, each time a little more impatient. Sometimes he made Iliyria bring the tea herself. She did, because she had no choice, but she watched the liquid slide into the cup, saw the way it left a grayish ring behind.

  By the third week, the night maid stopped polishing the gray moons off Selphia’s saucers; she learned to stack them face-down so they wouldn’t look back at her in the morning. The laundress began a private tally in the margin of the wash book, “tea night,” a dot for each shift she had to coax the same pale stain from the gown. The dots made a quiet little constellation. She never showed it to anyone. The housekeeper wrote a new rule for the staff in her own head: Do not look at what circles in a cup. She obeyed it better than any rule she had ever posted on the kitchen wall.

  Selphia drank, always, never complaining, never protesting. Her hands shook more. The color left her lips, then her cheeks, then her eyes, until she seemed to fade into the very air.

  The physician came once, then again. He smelled of camphor and clean paper, pressed two fingers to Selphia’s wrist and declared “exhaustion.” Telemir handed him a velvet purse that clinked like rain against stone. The doctor weighed it before he weighed any symptoms, left a sealed bottle on the nightstand like a promise, and bowed to the lord, not the patient.

  For weeks, the Sylrendreis suites became a lung that never finished exhaling. The inner doors were latched from the hall; food came and went on trays that smelled of starch and silence. When Iliyria tried the handle to the east corridor, the key turned once on the other side and stayed there, a listening ear that would not answer.

  She wrote anyway. On the good paper with the lily watermark, the kind reserved for royal eyes, she wrote to Queen Myantha, three careful drafts, and to Aunt Carine, twice, the second time plainer than the first. She folded the letters, sanded the ink, sealed them with candle wax, and the pressed edge of a thimble in place of a crest.

  The junior footman collected the breakfast tray. Iliyria slid the envelopes beneath the napkin. He did not look down. He took the tray.

  An hour later, Telemir summoned her to the study.

  The letters lay on the leather like small, white fish. Telemir stood behind them as if he had netted something unclean. “Do you truly imagine,” he asked, almost curious,

  “that messages leave this house without passing through my hands?”

  He opened none. He picked up the top envelope, the one addressed, in her neatest hand, to Her Majesty, held it by a corner, and fed it to the brazier. The paper darkened, flowered black, and curled; the lily watermark bled out and vanished. The letter to Carine met the same fate.

  “Words do not leave this family without my consent,” he said at last, tamping the embers with the bellows hook. “Not yours. Not your mother’s. Learn the rule, and you may keep your paper.”

  Iliyria kept her eyes on the last curl of smoke until it forgot to be a shape.

  One morning, Iliyria found her mother unable to rise from the bed. The sheets were soaked with sweat, the pillow smeared with blood from a coughing fit. Selphia smiled when Iliyria entered, but her teeth were tinged red.

  “It’s time,” she whispered.

  Iliyria sat beside her, taking her mother’s hand. The bones felt brittle under the skin.

  Selphia drew a ragged breath. “I tried to be brave,” she said, voice barely audible. “I tried to protect you.”

  “You did,” Iliyria replied, tears stinging her eyes. “You always did.” They both knew it was a lie.

  Selphia shook her head, a tiny, trembling motion. “I am a useless mother,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

  “No,” Iliyria said, fiercely. “You are not.”

  Selphia squeezed her hand once, then let go.

  The Wisteria Vow

  The funeral was a grand affair. Iliyria wore the prescribed black, her hair braided down her back. The nobles paraded through the salon, offering condolences and platitudes. Selphia’s sisters wept and dabbed at their eyes with lace handkerchiefs. Telemir stood at the front, stone-faced, receiving the mourners with the air of a man who had done his duty.

  Iliyria stood at her father’s left hand, face wet with tears. She let them fall, let them streak her cheeks and salt her lips. She told herself it was the last time she would cry in public.

  The service was brief. The high priest muttered the prayers in a voice so thin it almost vanished in the wind. When it was over, the nobles crowded around Telemir, offering condolences as if they were placing bets on his next move. He accepted each with a gracious nod, lips tight in the semblance of sorrow, but his eyes, those cold, calculating eyes, never once flickered to Iliyria. The condolences came like wagers placed in a crowded room; everyone wanted odds on what happened next.

  Myantha and Falanthriel arrived without retinue. The queen had a single lily in hand, placed it on the casket and murmured something inaudible. She touched Iliyria’s hair once, brief as a blessing, and said, softly and public, “The royal gardens are open to you, child. Day or night.” Telemir smiled at the words; he missed the warning.

  On passing, Falanthriel adjusted Iliyria’s cuff where her hand shook. “Four in,” he murmured, so only she could hear. “Four out.”

  Tasaka’s eyes were dry, his handkerchief damp. “Brother,” he said, voice silked thin, “you were a dutiful husband.” His sleeve smelled faintly of bitter herbs; he kept his wrists turned away from the Queen.

  Laira admired the floral arrangements a fraction too long. “Exquisite taste,” she told Telemir, then to Iliyria, “Keep your chin high, dear. People look to us for composure.” Her thumb pressed a little too hard on Mirella’s shoulder.

  Mirella’s sobs were perfectly spaced, a lesson in acoustics. Between them, she looked to see who was watching. When her eyes met Iliyria’s, her mouth made a tiny sympathetic bow that never reached her gaze.

  Carine’s hug was brief, professional; her whisper wasn’t. “You are not only his.” Nalea’s came right after: “You are not alone.” Between them, Iliyria remembered how to stand. Carine passed a handkerchief that smelled faintly of lemon. “For the eyes,” she smiled. Nalea tucked a wrapped sweet into Iliyria’s glove. “For after,” she mouthed, and did not look away.

  Only at the very end, as the mourners departed and the room emptied, did she see it: the brief, satisfied curl of Telemir’s mouth, the private smile of a man who had won.

  Iliyria’s heart went still. There was no longer any room for doubt.

  He had done it. He had murdered her mother.

  She spent the rest of the day in her room, staring at the ceiling, listening to the hush of the servants as they cleared the last traces of Selphia from the suite. She did not speak. She did not eat.

  When night fell, Iliyria rose, dressed in black, and slipped out the back stair. She carried nothing but her spellbook and the memory of her mother’s voice.

  The garden was empty, the grass slick with rain. She knelt beneath the wisteria, opened the book, and let the anger pour out.

  She started small: a flicker, a twist of fire between her fingers. But as the minutes passed, the flames grew, swirling up her arms and down to the tips of her shoes. She felt the magic build, raw and wild, fueled by rage and sorrow in equal measure. She conjured a sphere of ice, then shattered it into a thousand burning motes. She drew sigils in the air, watched them ignite and dance.

  Her breath came in sobs, by the fourth sigil her fingers trembled; she bit her tongue, breathed four in, four out, and the lines held.

  She practiced until her throat was raw, until the sweat ran cold down her spine, until the clouds parted and the moon found her, alone and unbroken.

  In the glow of her own making, Iliyria made a promise.

  She would never be powerless again.

  She would never let herself be erased.

  By the time the sky began to pale, she was spent. She closed the spellbook, tucked it under her arm, and walked back to the house with her head high and her eyes dry.

  The next morning, she greeted her father at breakfast. He looked at her, as if expecting to see something shattered. She met his gaze, steady and cool, and did not blink. He straightened his collar twice.

  She ate in silence, each bite a victory. She finished her tea, wiped her mouth, and stood.

  As she left the room, she felt his eyes on her back.

  But this time, she knew: he was the one afraid.

  The Queen’s Hedge

  The gardens were at their most civilized; hedges braided into arches, jasmine trembling like a rumor. Nalea and Falanthriel peeled away at the first chance, the one to the fishpond, the other to the maze, their laughter trading lead. Iliyria stayed where the Queen sat, embroidery slack in her hoop, the silk thread catching and releasing the sun.

  “Go on,” Myantha said, watching the children. “You have an hour before tutors think to look for you.”

  “I’d like to sit,” Iliyria answered, and did. She waited until the wind shifted, until the guards on the terrace had taken three steps farther away. Then, very quietly, “He killed my mother.”

  The Queen’s needle froze mid-air. For a heartbeat, nothing moved but a bee negotiating a peony. Myantha did not look at Iliyria; she looked at the lattice, at the shadow of a guard passing, at the gap between hedges where sound carries.

  “You must never say that sentence again,” she said, each word as precise as a stitch. “Not to me. Not to anyone.”

  Iliyria went cold. “I thought you would want me to tell the truth.”

  “I want you to live,” Myantha replied. Now she turned, and the gentleness in her eyes made the words worse. “Truth without proof is a blade you hand your enemy. Accusation without warrant is treason. House Sylrendreis feeds half this city and frightens the other half. Even a queen counts her breaths around rivers that size.”

  “So you’ll do nothing.”

  “I will do what I can,” Myantha said, and the smallness of can rang like a bell. “I can keep the gardens open to you. I can slow certain tongues. I can see that some doors you need stay unlocked. I cannot pull down a house on what we both know but cannot yet afford to prove.”

  “I don’t want doors,” Iliyria said. “I want him stopped.”

  “Then live long enough to choose your moment,” the Queen said, and, because she could give at least this, she touched Iliyria’s hair, once. “Hide your gift. Learn everything. And never say that aloud again.”

  The bee left the peony. The children’s laughter rose from the maze and fell away. Iliyria stood, and for the first time the gazebo felt like a cage someone had learned to decorate.

  Accounts of Freedom

  The Lumear parlor smelled of lemon oil and rain. Nalea sat at the window with an embroidery frame big as a ship’s wheel, tongue peeking at the corner of her mouth as she stabbed and pulled, stabbed and pulled, making daisies line up like soldiers. Carine had a ledger open and a cup cooling on the sill, spectacles perched where her hairline began to silver.

  “How do I be like you?” Iliyria asked, because the room made honesty feel possible. “How do I not marry and still live?”

  Carine closed the ledger on a slip of paper to keep her place. “Most choose different first questions,” she said lightly. Then, seeing Iliyria would not be teased away, she folded her hands. “There’s a story people tell about me. That I was too clever for any man, too sharp to keep. It’s pretty. It lets them admire and dismiss me at once.”

  “What’s the true story?”

  Carine’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. “The court discovered there was no child to be had from me. Some called it a sorrow; more called it a savings. Without a womb to trade on, I became a ledger entry; no alliances to buy, no heirs to bargain. I made myself useful instead. Very useful. Men prefer a woman who vanishes into their accounts.”

  Iliyria’s fingers tightened around her cup. “So it wasn’t a choice.”

  “It became one,” Carine said. “I could have married anyway and been pitied, or hidden in a cloister and called serene. I chose to be indispensable. That is not the same as free.”

  She reached for the ledger, tapped the margin with one blunt nail. “Since you asked directly, here are the routes the court permits: a royal dispensation to remain unmarried; rare, political, and revocable. A religious house; safe, narrow, and silent. An oath to a guild or college; possible, if your house allows you to sign your own name. A scandal that makes you unmarriageable; useful and ruinous. Widowhood; effective, but the entrance fee is a husband. Or this—” she lifted the ledger— “be so valuable they cannot afford to move you.”

  “And if I want none of those?”

  “Then you’ll have to build a door where there isn’t one yet,” Carine said. “That takes allies, money, and time. Your father will fight you on all three.”

  Nalea pricked her finger and hissed, then looked up, worried, as if she’d broken the conversation. Carine passed her a thimble and a smile, then turned back to Iliyria.

  “I can give you tools,” she said. “Numbers, names, the way the city breathes. I cannot give you a life no one here has ever seen.”

  “I thought it was easier,” Iliyria admitted, and hated how young she sounded.

  “It is easier to imagine,” Carine said. She slid a small, blank notebook across the table. “Write your own ledger. What you owe, what you refuse, what you’ll need. Bring it to me when it’s ugly. We’ll improve it.”

  Nalea held up her daisy chain on the linen, crooked and earnest. “Is this right?”

  “It’s exactly right for now,” Carine told her, and the softness in her voice hurt more than any lecture.

  Later, when Iliyria left the parlor, the lemon scent clung to her, and the room, safe as any in the palace, felt smaller for what it could not make real. The path she wanted existed, but not yet, and not for free.