The Boy-Toy Wife

When she was a child, Miria would often have to listen to her father speak about the royal palace. While walking through Karsz's muddy streets, he would point at the hilltop mansion lording above the city, and explain to her how its opulence was the mark of old Leshia's inevitable decline.

"Had our kings," he liked to declare, in a tone of cold condemnation, "spared half the thought to the affair of the state that they offered to their porticos and gardens, no demon would ever come to sleep under his gilded roof."

The luxury registered to him as an insult, and the more he drew Miria's attention to its excess, the more spirited he became. Squeezing his child's hand, he would launch into tirades about the last ruler of Leshia who added a whole new wing to the palace, then filled with canvases by fey masters and tiled with gold-veined marble quarried all the way south, in Duchies of Sun and Ash. Worse yet, when the treasury ran dry, he sold more crown lands to the noble houses, and squeezed the burghers for gold—and still, it was not enough. So in desperation, surrounded by debt and driven by indulgent greed, he turned to envoys: from the Steel Hanza in the north, and Dis in the south, who always came bearing gifts.

"Leshia was never conquered," he would repeat. "The ministers of the land auctioned it off!"

Petrasz had hoped that Miria would learn from this the importance of thrift, and that deeply ingrained distrust towards luxury and comfort that burghers prized themselves on. But the lessons never fully took root. If the fabled opulence of the palace roused revulsion in her, it was always laced with a thin, shameful strand of want. Long before she came to dream of clawed, red-skinned hands, and brick-red infernal flesh, Miria found herself longing for life surrounded of exotic indulgences and of servants tending to her every whim. After her marriage, those distant dreams crashed against a reality far more mundane and less scandalizing than her father's sermonizing would have it be. Still, she remained thankful for the old king's incessant spending, if only for moments like this one, where the maze of the palace's halls, hallways, and corridors gave her room to wander, and to think. There was, after all, a lot on her mind.

No. Not a lot. Too little.

A warm bath, a fresh dress, and a new wig were enough to calm her after being used as a demonstration by the Lady Governor. Now, the events of the study lingered on her only as a slight strain in her ankles, and a memory of a salty taste she could almost find if she licked her lips. Gone, however, was the excitement that made the world around her blur into a kaleidoscopic lightshow of sensations and desires too big for her heart to contain. In its place, a well-known frustration seeped in, as always followed by an uneasy, uncertain sense of threat.

Two days of her investigation had passed, and all she had to show for them was a fresh reassurance that it was not the Lady Governor who was to blame for the apparent conspiracy. And no matter how much relief this certainty could bring, it put Miria no closer to finding out Visza's true killer—and to preventing her lady wife from putting her brother to the sword. Her resolve mattered little, and in the fear and frustration, it felt increasingly farcical. The fact of the matter was that she was lost, and in being so, she found it impossible not to entertain doubt that she should perhaps do as Mażin insisted: accept her powerlessness, and in it, find relief.

The palace sprawled around her in all directions, rolls of white cloth marking it unmistakably as belonging under the sign of grief. By reflex alone, Miria found herself stepping lightly, not to disturb the quiet which now reigned over the house. When servants passed by her, skipping on their tip-toes in their mourning colors, she imagined them as ghosts, and herself one of them. Before she turned to books of infernal excess, she adored such chivalric tales: of castles taken over by a spectral procession, until some champion knight managed to free the dead from the charm, and allow them passage into the blessedness of the Holy. She wished the evil responsible for Visza's death was as easy to find as demons and necromancers with their curses and sorcery were in the stories of her youth. She wished she could recognize the guilt in the face of the culprit, or spot in their hand a still-bloodied knife. But the murderer was subtler than that; he did not strike with a knife, but a sack of coins passed from the palace to Kosehi's mercenary hands. And, if the Lady Governor was right—and how could she not be!—it was meant to buy the doom of not just the Second Wife, but of the entire house.

And that was all that she knew. Too little, too little by far. Worse yet, no matter how much she paced from one side of the mansion to the other, no knot came loose in her mind to free some fresh insight. She had no idea what to do next; she had been raised to be a burgher's son, and wedded to be a boy-toy. None of that prepared her to unveil conspiracies, and no matter how much she tried, she could not escape feeling a little bit ridiculous for thinking she would be able to. But then again, what else remained for her but to try?

Certainly, she should probably stop her wandering. It was only a matter of time before she ran into the Hofmeisterein, or someone else likely to take umbrage with some unwifely aspect of her gait or look, and if not that, then chastise her for idleness. But she was in no mood to return to the parlour, and in air thick with gossip and worry try ineffectually at feminine pass-times expected out of her. Unlike Mażin or Czewa, she had no knack for embroidery and little fondness for cheap romance, nor could she find pleasure in the mind-numbing laying of cards into endless solitaires. Of course, she could always excuse herself to her chambers, and wait until evening under the twin scourge of solitude and boredom, which together would drive her restless mind insane. 

What she needed was to focus on anything else but her own thoughts, but the palace offered no relief. In white, it was stripped of its air of opulence. Paintings hid behind thick cloth, elaborate carvings sank into shadows, and the overwhelming silence pushed down on Miria's shoulders with the weight of a tombstone. All of it was meant to facilitate grief, but for the Sixth Wife, it cinched a steel noose around her gut. Each step took her down a spiral staircase of her own mind, winding infinitesimally closer to something dark and terrible at the bottom. 

But then, there was also a song.

Perhaps the word was too grand to describe the small wail that wafted through the palace's corridors like thin smoke. Miria could not tell for how long it had been there, unnoticed, until it finally crept up on her, with its sparse melody, and the single word "woe" chanted over and over again in voices strained to the edge of breaking. The lamentations joined the white drapes in making good on the The Lady Governor's that her beloved wife would be sent from the world in the manner befitting a Leshite lady.

Holding onto the sound as if it was a thread, the Sixth Wife followed it all the way out of the labyrinth of her own mind, and to the gallery overlooking the palace's grand hall. There, wailers in torn shrouds flanked a bier and a shut coffin, raising their gnarled arms and desperate voices to declare upon the world that death had come to this home, all too cruel, all too soon. They moved slowly around the hidden body, grasping at their hair, tearing at their clothes, and wailing, wailing, wailing; when one of them felt their voice falter, she would drop to her knees in an exaggerated collapse, only to be dragged back by her peers, with another lamenter poised to take her place. There had to be two dozen of them, a number to display great grief and hint at enormous wealth.

The last thought made Miria scowl; it came to her in her father's voice. Yet, there could be no denying the fact that a mourning for a Leshite lady was supposed to be a theater, carefully choreographed and staged; in the past, great lowland magnates would ruin themselves just so not to be accused of shirking when it came to matters of death. The Lady Governor would not let herself be thought of as their lesser—or disrespectful of the customs of the land.

The wailers were just a part of it. Their procession circled the coffin, and before them, a single splash of black stood out from the uniform whiteness drenching the hall: a pedestal at the foot of the bier, covered with dark cloth, to display the jewels of mourning. From her vantage point up above, Miria saw the glitter of gold and gems—and a thought crossed her mind that the Lady Governor might have broken open the treasury of the old kingdom just to bring the ancestral jewels out for her beloved wife. It was a riveting notion, but a terrifying one: would the burghers and nobles not see that for sacrilege? Would they not curse a display of a royal bounty for a dead demon-wife? The worries, however, could not fight the envy that drowned Miria as she got a better look of the display itself.

Three jewels on black cloth, so to say: a lady has died in her prime. First among them a lotus flower rendered in white gold and diamonds, declaring love above death, destined to never ever perish. Not a rose for "dearly missed"; not a forget-me-not for "in the Holy we will be joined". The Lady Governor declared her love immortal, and flanked it to the left with a breaking wheel banded in silver, so that all would know that the death was an act of evil, and to the right with an axe with a golden blade and rubies running down its shaft like blood, a dire promise to those who let the death in.

Miria looked away, her throat momentarily squeezed tight. Everything about the display was a Leshite custom would demand, and yet an air of demonic Want held above it, intoxicating in its sheer potency. How could she not envy Visza, as petty and awful as that feeling was? To the last, the Lady Governor would not allow anyone to doubt that the Second Wife died exalted in love, and that her death would not go unavenged. It was a gesture of wild desire and wild excess, bound to make mortals grumble in discontent, and it made Mira grasp at the stone still at her neck.

Somewhere deep inside, she longed that her own send-off, when the time came, would be as beautiful and terrible in its promises. But it was a foolish thought, and she tried to shake it off; and left her with an oily sense of guilt. Even in death, she still could not stop herself from envying Visza. It made her remember painfully just how small her spirit was, and how petty her wants. She looked away from the jewels.

Branches snapped from evergreen pines piled at the foot of the pedestal. There had to be dozens of them already, left by the trickle of mourners entering through the wide-open doors. They came by ones or twos, wearing white and carrying a branch; for a time Miria watched them come close to the bier, kneel, and leave the offering before turning away without speaking a word. There were burghers among them that she recognized, and nobles, and a few commoners allowed the privilege. There was no doubt that before the end of the day half of the floor would be covered in needles and twigs. Only fools and rebels would refuse to leave a sign of death defeated before Visza's interment; to do so would be paramount to offending the Lady Governor herself. After all, that was the meaning of this old Leshite custom: a chance for the city and its people to show that they too mourn as the bereaved does. Mira wondered how many of those men and women briefly kneeling before a slain demon-wife had to still their faces to hide looks of disgust and contempt; how many of them would later whisper how this was a perversion of tradition and the lowlands way. It seemed that she could not rid herself of ugly thoughts today, neither of herself, nor of the world.

"What a damn sight, huh?"

Miria blinked rapidly, only now noticing Mażin leaning against the balustrade next to her. The Third Wife seemed smaller than usual, as if she had pulled herself in. Her face sagged, and a faint scent of cheap akvavit clung to her dress, mixing with the sharp notes of tobacco smouldering in her pipe. There was something decidedly unwifely about it at all, not just the very fact of smoking, but the cheapness of her tobacco, and the battered, worn-down shape of the wooden pipe between Mażin's fingers. If there was a single word to describe it, Miria would say "crass", and for a moment, she struggled to reconcile her image of the Third Wife with what she was now seeing—and smelling—right next to her. She just hoped Mażin had not noticed her confusion.

"I'd have never guessed that this is how she would go," the Third Wife added, sending a smoke ring towards the painted ceiling. "Like a real princess."

There was a sarcastic timbre to her tone, barely perceptible, but so obviously there. It grated.

"What do you mean?" Miria asked, growing more perplexed by the moment.   

"You wouldn't know, would you? You didn't get to know Vi at all."

Miria shook her head. The Second Wife kept apart from the rest, so obviously the Lady Governor's favourite that she might as well had lived in an entirely different world from the other wives. Especially from the sixth, the boy-toy mostly left to wander aimlessly through the palace, feeling increasingly surplus in the economy of want that governed it. In fact, she could hardly recall having any interactions with Visza outside of the formalities demanded and directed entirely by protocol.

"She was a…" Mażin let her voice hang, thinking on the next word with a long puff on her pipe. "A difficult woman. And we were so sure that sooner or later, she would fall out of Asha's graces."

Another word grated on Miria's ears.

"We?"

"Us other wives," the Third Wife shrugged, before glancing at Miria. "Sorry."

The boy-toy wife smiled unpleasantly back. She should not be surprised. In her months since the wedding, she kept mostly to herself. There was no reason why the rest of the household should trust her with more incendiary gossip, especially if she was just a toy, and little more. And after all, did she not want to be valued precisely that little? Wasn't her dream to be nothing but her lady wife's favoured playing thing?

"Look," Mażin continued, turning her attention back to the steady stream of mourners, "I meant me and Czewa, mostly. And Stava, sometimes. You know how Luna gets. She never cared a whit for us, mortals. And you… you're just so new."

"And irrelevant," Miria muttered, before she could bite down on the complaint.

Mażin, however, paid no attention to the bitterness of it. If anything, it drew a nod out of her.

"We thought the same thing about Vi. A boy-toy in the house, to amuse Asha when she's bored. Only she had such a nasty attitude that even that old bat the Hofmeisterein could not beat out of her."

For a moment all the ugly feelings receded in a snap of Miria's undivided attention. She had to grip the balustrade tight just to avoid jumping in shock.

"But she was the Second, not…" she managed to say, again staring at the arrangement of the jewels of mourning. "She was the beloved wife."

"She died one," Mażin chuckled through the pipe, "but was wed a boy-toy. You didn't know?"

It made sense, in a decidedly theoretical way. The manual gifted by Luna taught Miria that the wife hierarchy needed not to be absolute and set in stone. Seniority ruled most households, but it was within the purview of the lady wife to elevate her other wives as high as she wanted them to be, or to throw them down the ladder. And yet, it was such a distant and preposterous possibility, shrouded in scandal. To change the set way—to go back on a decision of what a wife was wed for—brought disunity and strife into a household. Worse yet, it represented confusion and indecisiveness that hardly befitted a follower of Want, let alone the lady wife. But was that not also the reason why Miria had never heard of the change in hierarchy before? No one wanted the Lady Governor to seem uncertain and unready; no one should have wanted that. Everybody knew, of course, but no one was supposed to know. Gripped by cold suspicion, Miria sniffed at the air again. With how strong the tobacco in Mażin's pipe was, the stench of alcohol should have been completely covered up. And yet.

"You're drunk," she observed.

"Pah!" the Third Wife sputtered, knocking the ash out of her pipe and onto the marble balustrade. "Wouldn't have been. If not for that damned medicine!"

She had the good sense to stifle the drunkard's laugh, but her unhappy eyes continued to focus on the display below. And in that, the incongruity that Miria had sensed finally resolved herself. The Mażin standing next to her was simply a reflection of a bygone time. A shape of a person that the dress and lessons of wifeliness erased peered through time, and Miria's stomach churned at how obviously masculine the Third Wife was, with her wide shoulders, calloused hands and the swagger of a drunk soldier. Was that who she was before? Miria tried to imagine Mażin sitting at a campfire, in a breastplate and with a musket propped against her shoulder, drinking akvavit with other soldiers and shouting a bawdy song to the sky aglow with the fires of war. The image came to her easily, as if she could peel the face of a wife from the flesh below and see—and the ease made her stomach churn. If one could see through Mażin so simply, what did it make her? What sort of a grotesque creature did others see as she passed them by?

"Were you the Second before Visza?" she asked quickly, as much out of the desire to know as out of the need to think of anything less but the indelible marking of the flesh.

"Me, the beloved?," Mażin grimaced. "You're thinking Czewa."

Czewa? The cold and distant Czewa, who so scorned the demands of being a wife? Miria closed her eyes and tried to imagine that too, the tall woman in the Lady Governor's embrace, perhaps even sharing it. How much must it have hurt to lose it for someone more beautiful and feminine? How much must it have broken her heart to be deprived of the beloved status? Was that where the anger began? A hundred more questions opened in Miria's mind, blossoming into a thousand possibilities and suspicions. She stumbled over her own tongue, uncertain on what to ask first—and did not get to ask anything. Before she could speak, Mażin leaned abruptly over the balustrade, hand extended so that her pipe would point at one of the mourners in line to the bier.

"No fucking way," the Third Wife uttered, transfixed. "Is she mad?" 

It took Miria a moment to realize what Mażin meant, but when she did, she too could do nothing but stare in dumbstruck silence.

Waiting between two burghers, and wearing a plain, white dress, there was the half-demon servant with piercing yellow eyes that Miria had run into a few times before. That alone was hardly irregular, though for a mere maid to let herself in with well-born mourners bordered on impropriety. But that was not the reason why everyone in the hall kept nervously glancing at her, as if only the demand of silence prevented them from raising their voices in angry shouts. No, the true cause of that rested in the woman's hands, where she held not a simple pine branch, but the unmistakable green-and-red of holly leaves and berries.

In wordless horror, Miria, alongside the rest of the mourners, watched the servant come to the pedestal, kneel, and put the branch on the pile of pine, declaring in the ancient language of flora and grief a single, clear message: "to the one I loved, and held as my own": the very same offering that the Lady Governor was expected to leave, at the close of the mourning.

There was a brief moment afterwards when the entire hall froze into perfect stillness. No one could move, and no one could intervene, lest they would break the sanctity of silent grief, so key to the Leshite way. Only the lamenters continued their wailing pavane, oblivious to the scandal. The maid's declaration stood firm, as she did, flagrantly wiping tears away in front of the bier, as if it was where everyone expected her to be.

The spell could not hold forever. It broke when house soldiers finally made their way through the mourners' crowd, and grabbed the half-demon by the shoulders. She had to be expecting that, and did not resist. Behind her, burghers rushed forward with their own offerings, to hide holly under green pines, as if that could restore some manner of decency to the scene. 

"So the rumours were true," Mażin murmured with gleeful astonishment. "Vi really did fuck the half-breed."

Something changed in the air below. Though the wailers and the mourners both tried to pretend that the unbroken silence meant the ritual could continue unbroken, a scandalous charge clung to the air. The house would suffer for it, and no doubt so would the maid—but finally, Miria had a suspicion, and a good idea where to go next.