Page 93 of Immortal Longings
The servant huffs a breath. “Yes. That’s not a concern.”
Galipei removes his hand. He clears his throat, as if to confirm with Calla that he shall step back now, but Calla doesn’t turn nor look at him at all. Soon his footsteps thud away, and Calla only eyes the woman standing before her. She is short and stout, white hair pulled in a tight knot. When she grabs Calla by the wrist, her hold is surprisingly sturdy.
The other servants part to make way as Calla is pushed into the wide bathing hall. They fan out to run the faucets, powder the clothes, activate the steam. They sidestep and charge ahead, quiet when they need to be and yelling instructions back and forth on matters that need deliberation. Calla is passed around: one station to the other, clothes peeled off and skin scrubbed until she’s red. She tries to take in their faces without letting them blur together, but there’s something about the palace uniform that muddles the servants together. If they cannot stand apart from each other, they cannot lose their life with one mistake. When August moves onto the throne, will he tear down the palace? Dismiss the palace servants, give themnew jobs, tell the councilmembers that no one will wait on them any longer inside these walls, that they must learn to wipe their own dirty behinds?
Maybe she’s giving August too much credit. She can’t imagine what his next move is. Perhaps she should have asked, but the two of them were so intent on their one mutual goal—King Kasa dead and gone—that it hardly seemed to matter what would come next.
Maybe thatwasa mistake.
Calla winces suddenly, one of the cleaning rags digging hard into her shoulder blade. The servant doesn’t pause, even when Calla glares up at her. They don’t fear her. They see the dried blood in the lines of her hands and dotting the edges of her collarbone and wipe it away without blinking.
“This way, Princess.”
The old servant has returned, directing the others. Wrapped in robes, Calla is pushed out of the bathing hall and into the room, shoved in front of a long, glimmering mirror. The glass is clear enough that every mote of dust in the room is visible in the reflection, haloing around her head as she disturbs the chair cushion. She hardly recognizes herself—if this body has ever been recognizable. These sharp cheeks and deep-yellow eyes. Surrounded by an overabundance of red curtains and golden statues along the walls. Calla glides her hands along the smooth wood of the vanity table and marvels at the heaviness of the furniture, like she is eight years old again and newly in the palace, wanting to keep up the pretense of being a princess but unable to push back the astonishment that gnaws like a sickness in her throat. She runs her bare foot along the plush rectangular rug that hems the room, burying her toes into the threads while they tear her wet hair into shape, untangling the knots and dried blood clots by simply ripping them out.
The elderly servant clears her throat.
“In the palace here,” she says, speaking to Calla properly now, “we had given you an alias. That way, the king would not know we were discussing you, discussing Er’s downfall and how it would take so little to bring San into thesame fate.” She takes ahold of Calla’s hair and begins to braid, wrapping a loose chain through the dark strands as she goes. The metal glimmers in the mirror, shining with hidden gems.
“Glory of Her Father,” she continues. “As far as King Kasa knew, it was some village girl from the folktales whom the poor servants loved dearly. A country girl who had performed filial deeds and would be remembered forever. Remember Glory of Her Father. Remember her sacrifice. Remember that we must keep going and going until she returns. The elites in the palace thought you were some god, some minor deity we prayed to on our shrines. But you were out there, real and pumping with blood, lurking within the city.”
Calla tries to nudge the braid when the servant pins it atop her head, but the woman tuts and flicks her hand away, then secures the circular loop from the base of her skull to the top of her forehead.
“I took a sword to my father,” Calla replies quietly. “It was no glory to him when I forcibly removed his life and his power.”
“It was not your father you brought glory to. It was your fatherland. Your kingdom. Talin. You did what we needed.”
The servant takes a step back. The others bustling around her pause too, admiring the crown of hair that has been pulled up, not a single strand out of place. Calla closes her fist in the folds of the robes, scrunching the fabric into her fingers. What would happen if they knew? That her father was not her father at all, that their king in Er was no one to her, that the fire burning in her chest had first been set ablaze in a starving, rotting village out in the farthest reaches of Talin?
They would find her less brave, certainly. If they knew that she was no royal who went against her blood, only a country girl who had found power and seized it without mercy. They would think it was her duty, that any person in her position should have done the very same.
The servant brings a small brush near Calla’s face, dabbing at her pale cheek. “Do you have any suggestions?”
It takes Calla a moment to realize that the woman is referring to the cosmetics. Brushes and powders have been brought near and within her reach.
“What’s the point?” Calla asks dully. Her voice still scratches at her throat. “I gather no one is looking at me.”
“On the contrary, everyone will be looking at you.”
They spritz something into her face. She shuts her eyes. She can’t let the tears start running again, or they might never stop.
“There is no need to use an alias anymore,” the servant says softly. Her voice is almost drowned out by the chatter behind her, by the heavy swishing of curtains as they are drawn back. “Every wing of this palace is filled with talk about the princess. Or rather, no one is calling you a princess anymore.”
The brush presses in hard. Calla welcomes it. The sting goes right down to bone, tingling with a chill.
“And what do they call me?”
Her cheek smarts from the pressure. There has been a decorative design drawn in, a whorl moving from the line of her jaw to the side of her brow. When she opens her eyes, she’s staring at someone else in the mirror, at a Calla who was never exiled from Er, at a Calla who spent the last five years within these walls, surrounded by opulence and molded into the image of power.
The servant’s hands close in on her shoulders. She presses down, gripping at skin that has already been rubbed raw.
“King-Killer,” she hisses. “Live up to it.”
Quicker than a blink, they have Calla up again, shoved into a shirt made of white silk and pants made of something that looks like the unpolluted night sky. Three corridors, four, five—one corner bend, two small staircases, and then a door, arched with a golden frame that ends a hairsbreadth away from the ceiling. They push in, and the throne room unveils before her, clustered with knickknacks and swirling with a breeze from the open balcony doors.
It was foolish of Calla to think that she might have been able to gain access to this room if the palace was distracted by the arena. It would have been an impossibility. As August said, there was never any alternative to the plan they had started with, the plan they have executed.
Calla walks in. They gave her new boots, smaller than the ones she wore before. Her steps are more delicate. Outside the balcony, the masses have already gathered. She can hear them calling for August, shouting their blessings.
