Chapter 3
Kira
The corridor on the east side of the court had windows that shouldn't exist.
That was the thing Saya had catalogued on day one, before she'd understood what kind of place this was — the light came in from the wrong angle — the sun moving incorrectly through the sky, or the windows built for a sun that lived somewhere else. The light through those panes was always slightly redder than it should be. Nothing dramatic. Nothing alarming. Just wrong enough that if she stared too long, something behind her eyes began to ache.
She had been walking for twelve minutes because the tithe room was making her passive, and she had decided, somewhere around the fourth hour of her second night, that she would not let that happen.
Small decision. Not heroic. She was not under any illusion that walking the corridor constituted resistance in any meaningful sense. But the room had a quality she hadn't been prepared for — not threatening, not cold, designed for waiting, and waiting had a texture she was starting to understand was specifically intended to make a person sink into it. The cushions were soft. The filtered light was restful. Everything arranged to make staying still feel like an appropriate response to the situation.
Saya Aldren was not going to become someone who found waiting appropriate.
The east corridor opened into the second gallery through a stone arch, and the gallery was where she'd first encountered the oldest residents of the court. They moved through the space the way water moved through old channels — not quickly, not with any urgency, with the particular economy of motion belonging to people who had stopped expending energy on things that didn't matter, which included, she was beginning to understand, most things. They were beautiful, each of them. In the way that long exposure to a specific force shapes a thing — smoothed, darkened, made precise. Their faces had a quality of having resolved into something final, the way old stone resolved into its final form after centuries of weather.
One of them had noticed her as she crossed the gallery the previous afternoon. A man who moved like someone who had lived inside these walls so long the walls had grown around him. He'd looked at her with something that might have been recognition, or might have been the specific, remote compassion of a person watching a small animal walk toward something it hadn't identified yet.
She had looked back directly.
He had glanced away first. Small. She kept the count.
Between the two windows, mounted on the stone, was a mirror framed in something that looked like bone. Not decorative bone — functional, as if the frame had been made from something the court had already used for another purpose and seen no reason to waste. The mirror showed her back to herself: dark hair, dark eyes, golden-brown skin slightly pale from two days of interior light. She looked like someone who had been removed from the world she understood and placed in one she was still cataloguing. She supposed that was accurate.
She was halfway across the gallery, moving toward the far windows where the wrong red light came in strongest — she wanted to look at it until it was a known quantity rather than leave it in the category of unsettling — when someone spoke behind her.
"You're walking like someone taking inventory."
The voice was low and dry. Someone who'd learned to keep her voice low as a matter of survival and now found loudness actively wasteful.
Saya turned.
The woman was standing at the gallery's edge where the stone arch met the corridor. Dark complexion, mid-thirties, wearing clothing chosen for its unremarkability — not poor, but deliberately unnoticeable, the specific choice of someone who had decided long ago that being overlooked was a survival strategy worth maintaining. She had sharp eyes currently performing a rapid, unsentimental assessment of Saya's face.
"You're not frightened," the woman said. Observation, not praise.
"I am frightened," Saya said.
"You're not performing it." A slight tilt of the head. "The court watches for that. Some of them find it refreshing. Others find it concerning." She moved from the arch into the gallery, coming closer. Her gait carried the same quality as her voice — economical, deliberate, nothing spent on effect. "I wanted to see which you were before I came to find you."
"Which am I?"
"You walk toward things to understand them. Most tithes walk away from things to feel less at risk." She paused for a beat. "Probably the more dangerous instinct to have in a place like this. But it's also why you're still functional on day two." She stopped a few paces away. "Kira. Six years in the court. I arrived as a political prisoner from the Thornvale eastern districts, and I stayed because the court decided I was more useful inside than dead." She delivered this information the way someone delivers a transit route — complete and without commentary. "I am not a tithe. I am not free. The distinctions matter."
Saya understood immediately that she was being given something valuable. There was no warmth being performed here, no softening. What Kira was extending was context, and context was currency, and she was extending it without being asked.
"Saya Aldren. Thornvale village side. Two days in." She kept her voice even. "I haven't seen the king yet."
Something moved through Kira's expression — quick, and then contained. "I know who you are. I know which day you arrived." She glanced toward the far windows, the wrong light, and then back to Saya with the efficiency of someone who had decided to be direct because indirect had stopped being worth the effort. "You haven't seen him because he hasn't sent for you. That's the first thing you need to understand."
"I was told the ritual happens on day three."
"It often does. The court tells the tithes day three because certainty is preferable to uncertainty when compliance is the goal." Kira's voice didn't change in quality. "But it isn't always day three. The king sometimes delays. Sometimes he wants to understand something about the sacrifice first — who she is, where she's from, what her bloodline contains. Whether she arrived for the right reasons or someone else's." She let that sit for a moment. "I have ideas about what he's looking for when he delays. I'm not confident in them. I don't share theories I'm not confident in."
Saya noted that. Filed it.
"The women who were delayed," she said. "What happened to them?"
"Most of them lasted longer in the court than the ones who weren't delayed." Kira paused. "Most."
"That's not a complete answer."
"It isn't," Kira agreed, without apology. She looked at Saya with an expression that wasn't warm and wasn't indifferent — the expression of someone who had used up all their usable sympathy a long time ago and was operating now on the more durable resource of honesty. "I've done this with five tithes since I arrived. Told them what I'm telling you. Three of them did something with the information."
The space where she didn't say what happened to the other two had a particular weight to it. The gallery held it without comment, the way this court held everything — absorbing, giving nothing back.
Kira turned to go. Her footsteps were quiet on the dark stone. At the arch she paused, not turning, her voice carrying back into the gallery with the particular clarity of a space that had absorbed a great deal over a very long time.
"The ones who ask questions last longest. The ones who don't ask anything are gone fastest."