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“Come to her wedding,” he had said.
“I can hardly avoid it,” she had answered him.
“I will come away from the crowd, and I will find you, and how clever we shall be, to meet with all such folk about!”
“Be sure that in your cleverness you come far enough away.”
But a thought had begun in him, like a flame which smokes and sparks before blooming into gold. He was not sure he dared—but how the smoke filled his chest! How it prickled and burned and billowed! He felt his heart catching; he felt himself beginning to burn.
And so it was that the boy who would one day be Sultan went into his sister’s chamber the night before she would become a wife and a foreigner in one blow. Dinarzad sat at her mirror, and her hair was all unbound, falling around her like a desert tent, and before her on her little mahogany table were cloths stained with red and gold and dark blue. Her eyes were tired; her lips were thin.
“I am so tired of all this paint.” She sighed. Her nightdress
was laced tight around her, like armor. “I cannot breathe for its stink.”
“I am sorry,” the boy said.
“It is not your fault. Are you not glad? Another night and you will be rid of me.”
“If you are glad, I am glad,” he answered carefully.
“It does not matter if I am glad.”
She was quiet then, looking at herself in the mirror. “You may brush my hair if you like,” she finally said, awkward and hushed.
The boy went forward and took her bone-handled brush. He ran it through her hair, afraid at first to snarl it, to hurt her, but she made no sound. He smoothed her black hair with his hands, amazed at the heat of her scalp. He had never touched her so before.
“What…” Dinarzad cleared her throat, her voice faltering somewhat, like a bird who has not enough breath to finish a song. “What do you think happened to the Papess? Was she happy, do you suppose, in her tower when the war was done? Was she bitter? Did she rip books apart with her teeth and plot against the others? Did she rail like a caught tiger in that place? Did she throw herself from the tip of the tower? Did she go to sleep and never wake up? Did she wake up one morning and find that her heart was as white as a silkworm, and the sun was golden on the sill, and did she then believe that she could live, and hold peace in her hand like a pearl?”
The boy started. “I… I do not know. She has not told me.”
“If she does, when I have gone,” Dinarzad said thickly, “come to me in whatever Palace I live then, and tell me how it was with her.”
It was then that his sister crumpled into his young arms and wept. “I am afraid,” she whispered, over and over. “I am so afraid.”
He stroked her hair as he had seen their nurses do to the children, and in his heart he cursed his own unkindness toward his sister, poor lost beast that she was. Her shoulders stopped their jerking and shivering after a time, and she looked up at him with red and wretched eyes.
“Tell me, my brother, tell me a story. Tell me a tale in which a woman is wed, and her husband is kind to her and no cold stranger, and the other wives love her as they would a sister. Tell me a tale in which a woman is wed and her children are beautiful and whole, and live a long while, and her sister-wives teach her to make bread in the fashion of their country. Tell me a tale where she wakes one morning and finds that her heart is white as a silkworm, and the sun is golden on the sill, and she then believes that she can live, and hold peace in her hand like a pearl. Tell me a tale in which a woman is wed, and she is happy.”
The boy’s lip trembled, and there was pity in him like a strangling vine. He knelt at Dinarzad’s bare feet, and held her hands in his.
“I do not know any stories like that,” he whispered.
“Neither do I.” She sighed. “But it is not impossible that such tales are told.”
Brother and sister sat with their heads together, and after a long while the boy told her of the thing which smoked and sparked in him, and she did not strike him or tell him he was foolish, and he loved her in that moment, his sister with her beautiful hair and her cold, thin fingers.
The morning of the wedding came white as a silkworm, and the snow drifted lazily down, unconcerned about the occasion. A skeletal sunlight shone pale through the flakes, and all the court wondered at it. The boy escaped, his arms full of boiled quail eggs and chocolate, and found the girl at the wrought Gate again, her cheeks lashed red by the cold. He told her nothing, but they smiled and laughed like old comrades, and he passed his hands eagerly over her eyes to close them.
“There are hours and hours before the wedding!” he said excitedly. “Let us find out how a spider changes her profession!”
The girl closed her eyes and lifted her chin, her breath fogging in the chill.
“It took me a great many days to walk to the Parish,” the boy began. “Eight legs are no guard against distance, and I am, in the end, so very small…”
THE
DRESSMAKER’STALE,
