Lara startled like a deer hit with a bow, opening her eyes and leaping up in one swift movement. She had grown fat, Esther saw. It suited her. Her sickly, stubbled skin was gone. Her eyebrows had grown together into one line that dipped slightly in the middle, like a great, gliding bird. Quickly, she took an inventory of Esther’s queenness, from her jewel-heavy diadem past her layers of silk to the gold fringe that swept the floor wherever she went. Then Lara smiled, her thin but glittering smile, full of mischief and warmth, and Esther’s throat went hot. She waited for Lara to embrace her. They were alone—the other girls had bowed absurdly low and fled when they’d seen Esther enter. She was not pregnant yet that day. She had known the king twice only, both times in blackness, encounters so brief and seemingly independent somehow of Esther herself that they made less of an impression on her than her first kiss with Nadav. She still felt at that time that she belonged more to the night station than she did to the royal chambers.
But Lara stayed where she was. “It was so hopeless making,” she said. “One day, fifty days. What difference would it have made?”
Esther fought off tears. Why had she started with an accusation? She did not want Lara to hate her. She didn’t want to go back to her chambers, alone, to sit upright through dinner, playing queen. What she wanted, she realized, what she wanted almost as much as she wanted Lara to help her bring a message to the camp, was for Lara to lie down with her like they used to, when they were still waiting. Lara’s smell was as it had been, eucalyptus and salt. Esther would lie behind Lara and scratch her back, and then Lara would lie behind Esther and do the same, and all the while they would trade stories, until one of them fell asleep or got called off to some useless task. Esther’s longing for this closeness was almost embarrassing in its intensity, as bodily as thirst or hunger. But what could she do? It was Lara who had spurned her, not the other way around. It would have to be Lara who came forward. In the absence of that, Esther would have to act as if she didn’t care.
“So you tricked me twice,” she said.
“Tricked you?”
“My tally marks. Our plan, to go as ourselves.”
“I meant to do it.”
“Really.”
“I did. I meant everything.”
“So?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what? What we were doing wasn’t hard. It was the opposite of hard.”
Lara looked away. She shrugged. “I must not be as brave as your majesty.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“But you are. That.”
Esther emitted an involuntary groan. Apart from her robes, there was nothing queenly about her. There had been no training. There had been a ritual with the crown, but the priest spoke in an ancient language no one but he seemed to understand; nothing about it resembled any marriage Esther had ever seen, and afterward the king’s minister breathed in her ear: Try a fleck of sorcery and I’ll have you impaled. Right here. He’d shoved her with genius stealth into a pillar, then called the king off to some business of some sort. Since then, Esther had been attended constantly. She had been fed like a queen, and bathed like a queen, which was to say she had been fed and bathed like a night station girl was fed and bathed, yet more indulgently and with more ceremony, no longer part of a herd but elevated, alone. She had been praised. But she did not feel like a queen. It was all a costume. Couldn’t Lara see that? She was squinting at Esther. She drew closer, examining, until her breath landed on Esther’s skin. “What happened to your face?”
It was an opening. Esther felt an anticipatory unclenching, the confessional equivalent of salivating before a meal. She almost told. Later, she would return to the moment and wonder, if she had sat down in her queen’s robes and told Lara everything—the cold, pulsing vortex, the beast, the near-escape, the knife—might it have made the difference? How, since then, she had tested herself, in secret, and found her powers so sapped it took her three hours to move a ring an inch? Would Lara, allowed in, have taken pity on her and gone to the camp? But that day in the night station she was so hurt still by Lara’s defection, and so hungry for Lara’s touch, and so angry that she was being denied it, and so disgusted by herself that she needed it, and so determined to protect herself against any of these feelings, that she gave back to Lara what Lara had given her and asked, coolly, “What difference does it make?”
Lara backed away. And that was how they stood for the rest of the negotiation, which is what it became, irrevocably, the second Esther said, “I came to ask a favor,” and began to try to sell Lara on privileges like access to the wives’ swimming pool and invites to an upper-tier banquet in exchange for Lara going to the camp. “And you’d get out of here for a while,” Esther added. “I’ll tell whichever eunuch brings you to take his time.”
She was still innocent then—both of how a queen was supposed to talk to people and of how the people could just say no. Lara didn’t even apologize. She said, “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Lara, after a pause, said, “No one’s told you what’s happened with the camp.”
“You mean the bandits?” Esther’s voice dove deep, mocking: “The king’s cleanse? They’ve been doing that for a long time.”
“No. There’s a new edict.
