In the autumn, they had planted xeranthemum and roses and crocuses and beautiful violets, irises also, and hyacinths and the narcissus, growing yellow as a crocus, and for a time she had watched them from the shade of the pomegranate tree with eyes like a northern viper, waiting to see if they would flourish. He had warned her not to take it as any kind of an omen, but in the deathless realm one had to scrabble for some meaning beyond that which was apparent: you are dead. If flowers could grow here, there was hope.
But they withered. Their roots shrivelled and grew black, petals wilting from their stems at the merest touch of her fingertips, the colour draining from them as blood from a cooling corpse. They died in their multitudes, lost in swathes as though to the scythe of a reaper, so Zhivka the handmaiden tore them all up again in fistfuls and left them to rot beneath the pomegranate tree. When next she saw Viktor, in the long throne room vaulted by the roots of an enormous tree, the ceiling lost miles above to shadows and the nests of bats, she had put a bouquet long grass stems, dried and yellow as the scrubland of a desert, into a glass vase and was observing it mutinously.
"I won't ask," Viktor said and Zhivka said nothing while she continued silently to arrange the harsh thistles, her hands raw from pulling thorns. At the head of the room stood an inordinately ornate throne, carved as though from onyx and jet and other precious materials of the earth and hemmed in pearls, but the prince had eschewed a place on the throne in favour of a seat on the steps. For all that, he did not look in any way astray - he was, as ever, perfect. Not a strand of hair misplaced. He watched her as she worked, a silence between them that did not ask to be broken, and for a moment the quiet of death rushed back in to envelop the hall.
"I am summoned to face the sun," Viktor said abruptly, and the handmaiden noticed for the first time the envelope in his hand.
Zhivka picked up a withered grey rose and began to strip the thorns from it with a small, sharp paring knife, etched in Cyrillic characters that marked it as one that had belonged to some Tsarist soldier, fallen where he fought. "You rather make it sound a chore, Vitya."
"I don't intend to." He made a sound under his breath and stretched his legs long across the steps. He was wearing a nice coat, the kind he wore when he went visiting beyond his realm. He did not often wear that coat. Zhivka set down the knife. "An unwelcome reminder, perhaps."
She withdrew a nettle from the bunch and proffered it to him, holding it at arms length, her dark eyes without humour; after a silence he rose and walked a few steps to take it from her, the sound of his shoes a metronome in the hollowed echo chamber of the throne room.
"A drink, Zhivka, if you please."
He turned the stinging nettle over in his hand, seemingly ignorant of the prick of stinging hairs against his flesh as Zhivka continued to silently rearrange the extempore bouquet. She pushed it into the centre of the table, and in the same motion, reached for the pitcher of wine at the side. She poured it without flourish; Viktor lightly touched at the lyme-grass and wind-grass, the withered gentian and ferns, the stinging nettles and gorse with which the handmaiden had made up the bunch.
"Drinking this early in the morning," Zhivka murmured. She handed him the glass, and straightened the wine with a flick of her wrist. "I hate to think of what marriage will do to you, Vitya."
"Is it morning? I couldn't tell. You were betrothed, weren't you, Zhitiye?"
A pause, one she left longer than she should have. Small creatures, spiders and moths, stirred within her hair. She turned so that she leaned against the table to consider her tsar from a side profile. He wore his hair like his father's, slicked back.
"I left a widower," she said quietly. "If that's what you mean."
"Handsome man," Viktor said. "I suppose, for a girl like you."
A girl like you. A dead girl, a strangled girl, a starved girl with phantom burns and water in her lungs even now. The underworld was full of girls like her.
"He was prematurely grey," she said darkly. "His hair made him look older. And he wasn't young to begin with."
When he half-smiled in response, she looked glad. It was a difficult thing to serve an austere king, and if Zhivka had ever had a sense of humour, it had died along with her living self, so she rarely was capable of provoking him into mirth. She waved the wine pitcher at him and he drained his glass to accept a refill.
"He was kind," she added, for fear her tsar might think otherwise. "I wouldn't have agreed to take his ring otherwise. I was fortunate, I suppose."
"I find there's more kind in the world than unkind, dorogaya."
Viktor put the empty envelope on the table, where it lay like the shed skin of a snake, green ink gleaming. She half-expected it to start smoking.
"He'll be expecting you," Zhivka said dryly. Her master's brother so rarely gave much notice when he demanded parlay - an hour, two hours, less.
"Why do you think I'm drinking?"
She tipped the bottle again, and watched the dark wine swirl, but rather than taking a drink, Viktor offered the glass to her.
The handmaiden raised her hands, scratched by the thorns and nettles she had torn up the hour before. One of them had buried beneath the skin and lay there, black and sharp and malignant. "No," she said. "Oh, no."
"Come on, solnishko. If I have to see the sky, then so do you. I'm not going alone."
Zhivka took the glass, and, after a long pause, raised it to her lips to test her tongue against it. It was sweeter than she had expected, piercingly sweet, like tasting a love song. Where traces of the liquid touched her skin, it stained, red and pink. Pomegranate wine. She remembered brewing it, although she could not say how long ago. Time didn't seem to have any meaning down here, beneath the earth, where dwelt the dead. "No," she agreed. "What if you needed someone to do your hair?"
"Or pour me wine."
"Or pick you flowers."
"You really are invaluable, aren't you, Zhitiye?"
"I like to think so."
She lifted the pitcher with an arched eyebrow, but the tsar shook his head, so she recorked it and set it back on the table. Viktor took the glass from her to take a sip, and she relinquished it easily. His skin was not warm. She found that few things down here ever were.
"All this talk of marriage," she said. "It's coming, then."
"It's inevitable," the tsar said, folding his arms and leaning against the table. "Unfortunately."
"And I thought the Selection would come to you as a relief. Another beating heart to keep your own company."
They traded once more, the wine glass for the paring knife. He tested the blade against his thumb almost thoughtfully, and whittled the stem of the nettle leaf into a point which would fit in a lapel as she accepted the drink.
"It's a formality," he said. "A king requires a queen."
"Ereshkirgal," she said. "Kore. Mictecacihuatl. Morevna."
He spoke over the crystal rim of the glass, his lips stained crimson. "You've been reading."
"I'm dead." Her voice was blunt. "There's little else to waste time on."
"You'll be glad of a break, then," Viktor said, and this time when he offered her the glass of wine she took it and drained it, shaking her head and observing him dourly.
"Zagreus will be there, I suppose." Zhivka said, mutinous, her dark eyes humourless. "And Zavgorodniy." Where the Tsar of Life went, his bodyguard was not far behind. And the vědma tended to preside over any instant in which one tsar came face to face with another, where death met life. Zhivka Lazarova was fond of neither and suspicious of both.
"Don't forget, Zhitiye." Viktor plucked a withered hawthorn blossom from the thorny slip in the vase and put it behind the dead girl's ear. "You're dead. They can't hurt you now."
The SYOC is still open!
I am not operating on a first-come, first-serve basis, but choosing the best characters which suit the story, so if I have yet to get back to you, it is because I am still considering them. The only character I have accepted thus far is Zhivka Lazarova, who we were introduced to in this chapter!
Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed and PMed me, I'm so glad to see that people like the idea for my story! I can't wait to see what you all thought of this one.