Page 52 of The Tsarina's Favorite
“I promise, my dear.Things will be different.You’ll see.”
“Yes,” I agreed.“We will see.”
“Does the tsarina oftenkeep you in her room?”
The princess didn’t seem to have the capacity for niceties when next she found me in my enclosure.A weight dropped on the bench — I guessed an assortment of books — and then she approached the shelter.
“I came out the other day to read to you and you weren’t here,” she explained.“And then I saw you up in her room the other night.Have you been there all this time?”
Although I did not mind being out of the cold, taking meals and being available to the tsarina’s needs in her bedroom for a several-day stretch had not been the change of environment I had wished for.
“She finds my presence...”I didn’t know how to phrase it.“Exciting,” I finally decided upon.I shifted in my sitting position, my tail feathers bending in odd ways since sitting like a person wasn’t natural for a bird, and yet I was not built enough like a bird to perch.
“No one would dare say anything explicit,” the princess said, “but the servants have remarked upon stray black feather remnants on her night gowns.Might you know anything about that?”
“How the tsarina chooses to amuse herself has little to do with the agreement or compliance of those around her.”
“Oh, Great Holy, it’s true then.”
To Mikhail, she had used an invocation to The Kind and Fair.But in private, with a creature who was not supposed to be able to speak, she called upon the Great Holy.No one else here invoked the Great Holy, and I warmed to her for even that small show of accidental solidarity.
“For your own safety,” I warned, “say nothing.”
“I would never.”She paused, a question poised at the end of her teeth, while she debated if she should push it out or not.“Is it okay for you then, in there?She must dote on you and look after you, no?I worried about you for a moment, but she has to look after you better inside than out here, right?”
I wanted to laugh.I wanted to cry.I wanted to shake the princess with hands I no longer had access to and ask her to look at how I was kept.I wanted to scream in her face about the nightmare of my current existence.I wanted to show her the self-inflicted wounds and ask her if she thought I was being cared for to any extent.But I didn’t.I swallowed down my bitterness.She was naive and hopeful, and that, although wildly frustrating, remained a precious commodity in a world that seemed designed to torment me for the rest of my days.
“No,” I said.
“But she—”
“Please,” I asked as humbly as I could.“I do not wish to speak of it.”
“Of course,” she said, realizing how insensitive her questions might appear.“I brought books, unless you’d rather talk about something else.”
Half of me wanted to have her relay the gossip of court, the things that circulated around me but no longer involved me, things I could listen to now without taking things to heart, and maybe hear about Alexei and how he fared as head of our branch of the Karilitsyns.I wanted her to tell me of my friends, the jesters, their troubles and triumphs, but I didn’t know how to ask specifically about them without giving away that I knew them fairly well, though they had never visited the strange Otherland bird.
“You were with the group of women who helped the tsarina retire for the evening the other night?”I knew the answer since she had mentioned seeing me in the tsarina’s room, but as of yet, I had to pretend ignorance about knowing who she was since she had never visited me while I could see her.
“That's when I saw you there.”
“She mentioned Pietrodillo giving a performance.He doesn’t sound Ilyichian.Who is he?”It was Drook, but I had to pretend ignorance on that too.
“One of her jesters,” the princess explained.“And he’s ethnically Varnasian, I think?”
“Was he any good?”
“He’s her finest.Clever and funny.The entire continent knows him!Maybe, if she plans to bring you inside, you will get to see him sometime.”
“That will be the only nice thing of coming in for the winter,” I mused aloud.“Perhaps I will get to experience some degree of cheer.”
“The tsarina just lost one of her favorites,” the princess said, “and has been in a dour mood for such a long time now that everyone has tried to bolster her spirits.”
“So that she doesn’t further retaliate,” I said.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
I considered all of the tsarina’s favorites.She never had many, and those she did, she never fully released.Maybe it was her Allemandian lover, or maybe it was some young officer that she had more recently set her sights on.
