Revolving Door: Volume 3
The Story of the Queendom - II
Deep in the violet overtures of their first evening in San Francisco, Orobelle hears her door click open. Cross-legged in her bed, she lowers her diary to look.
In the doorway, Dorian clears his throat. His hair is tied and draped over one shoulder. “My duchess.”
“What is it?” Her gaze darts to her half-written notes.
“Hong Yi and Vesper have entreated me to ask if you will give them another translation glass. Marcia shares no language with them, you see, and Hong Yi’s device is not always available.”
“I know.” Orobelle closes her eyes. For too long she has felt this conversation impending, and perhaps it is time to have it. “Dorian. Do you recall what I told you about the True Queen and her Gift?”
Eyes widening, he comes to join her on the edge of the bed, and at once the summer heat grows milder. “You have told me about your ancestors—the first matriarchs. Candoresse and how she split the Queendom.”
“Yes,” Orobelle answers without turning. “The Gift of comprehension, the one you have received, is not given lightly. The True Queens inherited it by blood, mother to daughter, and with it they could comprehend all words spoken. But it was only one of the many powers they had—and when the lineage was split—”
—the Gifts were not split evenly.
The House of Hearts received the Gift of control. Whomever the Queen applied her will to—particularly if willing and unresisting—she could influence like an extension of herself. The queens made servants in this way, moulding minds with their powers.
We, on the other hand, received the Gift of comprehension. To speak and always be understood, across lands and cultures, was a deceptively simple boon—one whose true use we did not see for a very long time.
But it all rose to clarity once we discovered your world. After Queen Rosanthe and Duchess Arminella came four hundred years of subterfuge and war, of matriarchs bringing armies to bear against each other. Of the very many things that were always edging us towards bloodshed, one of the most potent was the World Gate.
For almost as long as the Queendom has been divided, the Duchy has upheld the conquest of the Cracked Land. When we found the Gate inside our borders, the Gift of comprehension at once became a bridge between our worlds. We took control of the route and the lands beyond that portal, established a monopoly on the trade of resources and servants across the boundary.
For the first decades or so, we let the Queen and her forces pass through our lands to use it. But in time, as successive Queens made their intentions of reunification clearer, my ancestors saw that the Gate was much too precious, too capable of tipping the balance of power, to be shared so wantonly. After all, the Queen of Hearts could only unite our bloodlines if she could convince one of us to join her cause. But Duchesses of Diamonds are not like the other matriarchs: we would never bow to her might. No, the only way she could ever unite the Queendom was by force.
So we asserted our claim upon the World Gate, and we began to repel those under the Queen’s employ from its gantry. It took no time for these tensions to rise to a boil: first old Queen Gemina talked of capturing it, then her successor, the tyrant Melliona, did.
In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter which Queen was ultimately the one to compel the attack. It was inevitable—in the same way carrion brings flies—that she would one day send soldiers across our borders in an attempt to take it.
And once she did—once Queen Melliona made herself an enemy to our lands—the Duchess’ succession was never challenged again.
*
It was after fourteen generations of descent from Candoresse that my mother was born, the new heir to the seat of the Duchess. Her name was Adamanta the Unbreakable, and I was perhaps the only one who could make her smile.
Adamanta’s life came at a pivot point in our history—that fervent moment when centuries of plots were coming to a head, where her every move became critical to the fruition of the plan.
Just as a mistake had splintered the Queendom itself, it was a simple but costly mistake that had brought all this fate and history spiralling around her. For you see, Adamanta's mother, Cotaria, was the firstborn daughter of Queen Drachen, yet she was never Queen. She was passed over—for the sole fact that Drachen had believed her to be a man.
To the Queen up till then, and to the public, the most eligible successor for the throne was Cotaria’s cousin, Caeli. Accordingly, Caeli was named the heir before her daughter had made her womanhood known to the public.
When Cotaria did at last disclose to her mother the truth, Drachen was struck by a great terror—for in the Queendom, any royal descendant may inherit the throne as long as she is a woman, even if she wasn’t always known as one. Cotaria knew this, and her mother did, too: she was the one who should have been placed upon that throne, and she could split the Queendom over the succession if the people were to come to know this.
So Drachen pleaded and begged and wailed that her daughter reconsider—that she retain her life as her son.
In a rage, Cotaria left the palace. She vanished, seemingly, from the face of the world, and for years Drachen was pleased that she had gotten what she wanted.
That was until one fateful summer when Hellene, then Duchess of Diamonds, declared she had married. The matter of marriage among matriarchs is never kept quiet about, and Hellene gathered the crowds on the streets beneath the water tower to declare her wife to the world: Cotaria, daughter of the Queen of Hearts.
There were whispers that Cotaria had entered this arrangement as an act of revenge. Others believed the couple to be truly in love. But she was a perfect Queendom noble—that is to say, shrewd, discerning, strategic about what she said to whom—and none in her life but Hellene knew the truth.
All I know is this: my mother, Adamanta, was the daughter of that union. She was taught from birth that she was the heir of both the Duchess and the woman who should have been Queen—and whatever Caeli did to prop herself up, some would always know she wasn’t meant to wear that crown.
By her own birth, my mother had incarnated something that had never existed till now: the union of both Hearts and Diamonds. Quickly recognising the utility of her position, she took good care to maintain connections with the remaining two houses—the Spades and the Clubs—and when the time came, used these bonds to resolve, at last, the grand plot of five hundred years.
*
Of particular interest to Adamanta was Blackrain, the young heir to the Spades and six years her junior. Always dressed in black and blue, and always dyeing her skin to match, Blackrain at first seemed impenetrable to my young mother, but she pressed on. The Baroness-in-training was a useful connection—her father was the older brother of the Countess of Clubs, and—more interestingly—she had a brother.
The two found, despite the dooming circumstances, that their wits matched each other’s, and they talked of political hypotheses like children comparing toys. Soon enough they were friends, in the only way matriarchs can be friends—as colleagues in theory who would soon be pulled apart by the currents of power—and one could say my mother had a way with burning bridges.
One day in their youth, at a function with too much wine, Adamanta saw Blackrain’s brother Murkvane from afar. She appraised him through the flickering lanterns, this young man of the same stock as his sister, with hair long and white as his sister's was dark.
It was not his beauty that captivated her, but the beauty of the plan, into which—unbeknownst to him—she would stop at nothing to tangle him.
*
On that day, my mother first hinted her intentions with my father to his family. But it was not until three years later that they finally married.
You see, Murkvane, the twin brother of the Baroness, had many suitors. He, like every nobleman, was a prize for his parents to give away. They were protective of him, and my mother's political prominence was a point to her disadvantage.
But anyone who knew my mother also knew this: she always had her way, one way or another.
No one in the towns was sure if it was she who gathered knowledge of every man and woman who wanted Murkvane’s hand. But the record attests that there were no more suitors within three years. Some had committed suicide. Others had fled the Queendom for distant lands.
I have the privilege of knowing that she was the one who orchestrated those deeds—every last one of those sixteen deaths or exiles. She writes about it in the Playbook, and it is part of the familial memory passed down to me.
Adamanta was methodic, percipient, and ruthless. She knew the web she was spinning would soon ensnare her, too. She also knew that she could win any contest if the opponent did not know they were in one yet. But always, she remained aware that she was merely the penultimate link in the chain: never to be the final glory of the Duchy, but the last step to the pinnacle.
And so she spent every inch of her life, her body, her love, laying the road to that victory.
With all her charm, she wooed my father, and he—now bereft of all his lovers and threatened by the towering spectre of the Duchy—had no other choice but to marry her. Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades—the four suits, assigned to the four sisters in that fateful game of cards, were united again under their wedding canopy.
With all her wit, she won the Knot of Worlds. Pregnant with a daughter, she welcomed the previous bearer as a guest to the Duchy, and with a slow poison put him in a sickbed. She had her doctors exaggerate the diagnosis and made a show of nursing him, speaking sweet words about who should inherit his role. Not one week later, he declared that his successor would be her unborn daughter. Only then did she let him die.
With all her rage, she brought me into the world: her decades of plotting crystalised, all four birthrights in one body, unkillable, unerring, perfect. Yes, I was the prize of those generations of plots: my mother, and her mother, aligning planets within their design.
*
Adamanta’s life was never to last. She writes of this in the Playbook—that she knew she was courting death, that in wronging so many lives to further the House of Diamonds, she had accrued an untold debt unto a hundred families.
But once I was born and taught every lesson in the Playbook, such a future became a warm certainty. For her death, in her eyes, would be a final revolution of the cycle of vengeance—the impulse for my final coup.
And I would, she thought, inherit none of her guilt.
It happened one day that they were riding in a carriage—Mother, Father, and their protector Talon—on their way to the Queen’s City for a nonexistent summit. Somewhere on the road, before they had crossed the border, Talon drew his sword and slew them both.
I was ten years old at the time, and I only heard of it from the coachman. I felt my grief for only a brief time, before it was drowned out by the awareness that it was time for me to ascend.
Talon, the man hired to protect my parents, had been bought by the Queendom. The one they had entrusted with their lives was finally the one to end it.
When I ascended as duchess, my first decree was to have him executed.
And of course, Baroness Blackrain, sister of my father, came to hate us all. She tore herself away—as well as she could—from this web of treason and death—all friendship and enmity, all liabilities and debts. We do not speak, but there is no reason we should, not until the day I ascend as Queen.
“And this is how you came to be my guard,” Orobelle ends simply. “I, granddaughter of Cotaria, am just as legitimate as any heir Gertelina chooses, if not more so. Because my bloodline is the one with truer continuity to the Last True Queen. Whether the common people will agree is the only uncertainty.”
“I only knew part of this,” murmurs Dorian, a storm brewing in his mind. There are many things he could say, but does not. “And is that why you have been amassing forces—”
“Shh, don’t say that too loud,” Orobelle whispers, then shakes her head. “It is important for you to know this, Dorian. The Gift of comprehension that you bear is more than just a boon. It is an officiation into our web of counterplays, its secrets and dangers. No one too callous or gregarious can have it.”
Then she draws a deep breath, and Dorian can tell—despite his efforts to ignore it—that the Duchess is nervous.
“But Marcia…she could hold her own in my court. She knows her way around battle and subterfuge both. And if her inability to dialogue with her comrades should be her greatest stumbling block in protecting me…then I think there is no better candidate to receive the Gift.”
Dorian’s eyes widen, but even as the words cross him, their truth rings clear. “Yes, you are right,” he replies, and this comes with a slight wavering of emotion. “I would trust her with the Gift, if you would.”
Two years ago was the last time Orobelle initiated someone into the Gift of the Last True Queen by her blood. That person sits in this very room, motionless as a sculpture.
The drawing of the curtains was the first step in the ritual. The room is made a secret within that rich golden light.
Facing Orobelle in the centre of the woven carpet is Marcia. Her eyes are questioning but not fearful. She watches the duchess’ hand move across the blade hanging from her neck.
“Marcia,” she says. “What is your full name?”
“Junia Paetina Marcia, for all intents and purposes,” she replies.
“What was your name at birth?”
“I do not know. Is that important to the ritual?” She sees the dreamlike desert market flash in the back of her eyelids. But no faces, no names.
“Well, is the name you have given me your truest name?”
Marcia mulls over the question for a second. “What makes a name true?”
“It is a name that connects you to the history to which you belong.”
She closes her eyes. “Then yes.”
“Good. Junia Paetina Marcia. I wish to give you the Gift of the Last True Queen, which will accord you the ability to understand all words as spoken. This ceremony has political significance in the Duchy of Diamonds. Dorian the Hopeful was the last to undertake it at my hand, when he transited from his world to mine.” She nods at him. “There is no prerequisite to undertaking it, besides my assessing your worth. But I have no concerns about your worth. In the week I have known you, you have proven yourself wise, brave, shrewd, and resilient—qualities that recommend you as a candidate for the supreme gift of the Queendom.”
“Is flattery part of the ritual?” Marcia murmurs.
“It is so that you know that this gift is not given lightly. But I am also choosing you for you are the only one here who shares no language with the rest.” Other than Honourless, they both think. “I would rather only have nine possessors of my gift at a time. But you will be my tenth.”
She dwells upon the words, the gentle warmth of surprise rising through her. “Then I am honoured to receive it,” she answers.
“It is by this ceremony that my councillors become members of my court.” There is a practised steadiness to Orobelle’s words as she speaks them, as if she had spent hours rehearsing them before a mirror. “You need not hold office, but in spirit, you will become my vassal. It can be revoked whenever I choose. I shall grant you the gift of comprehension, and you will understand and be understood by all.” Then she pauses and casts a glance aside. “We are, er, all out of cards, and I have brought no card to meld you with, anyhow.”
“All the better, because I shudder at the thought of turning into one,” Marcia replies.
“Then…unless you should ever change your mind…it is settled. And your magnanimity is appreciated. The giving is sealed by a passing of blood.”
Orobelle finally lifts the pendant that hangs from her neck, a crystal that Marcia knows hides a blade. She pushes the metal out of the gem, lifts her own right palm and, with all the stony resolve of some soul far older than herself, slits it. Blood beads on the cut, dark against her pale skin.
She looks at Marcia. “Are you certain you are recovered from your illness?” she asks then.
She closes her eyes. “I think so,” she replies. “But I cannot be sure beyond a doubt that is completely gone from my body.”
Orobelle nods. “Then, take my blood with your finger,” she replies, “and swallow it.”
This, of all things, is what makes a chill run down her back. She has heard tales of blood rituals aplenty, though her own people did not practice them.
But where pools of blood have never fazed her, this cut brings a momentary fright. She lifts a finger and wipes the dark liquid from the wound. What a child this must be, she thinks, who enacts such magic without an ounce of fear.
“The blood of the True Queen runs through me, she who receives her power from the Light of the cosmos. I, fifteen times descended from True Queen Candoresse, and I, Knot of Worlds, invoke my bond with her bloodline, which sprang from the universe itself. I solemnly offer her gift to you. Do you accept?”
“I accept,” Marcia replies. And in that red-gold light, beneath the mad joy of the duchess’ unsmiling stare, her hand seems to move of its own accord. She touches her bloodied fingertip to her tongue, and swallows.
As she does, she feels the rusty taste grow to warmth. Warmth radiates down her throat, piercing her chest like heartburn, blooming like flames through her head and throat and lungs.
For a minute, agony seals her lips, as if she might spew fire if she parted them. Then as the heat drains away, she croaks, “How do I know when it’s done?” Her mind feels buoyant, borne on the hazy pain, already fading.
Orobelle wipes the blade on a prepared handkerchief and shrugs. “It is done,” she finally replies. All at once, the moment’s grandeur scatters from the scene. “Go speak to someone.”
“Ah…that I shall.”
Heart booming at the words, Marcia turns to leave. Dorian meets her eye as she goes, and as they smile at each other, he says, “Take care, my sister.”
*
She catches a glimpse of all six of the others—sitting in the sunlit chamber at the end of that amniotic hall. She drifts towards them, starting to distinguish them into individuals.
But the one she looks at first is Honourless.
Of course, the unfairness of it all is not lost on her. Honourless was here first. She is the one who has toiled tirelessly, wringing every last ounce of force from her body to carry them between the worlds, in the distant hopes of someday being free. Without her, they would still be stranded apart.
But Orobelle has decided, in her own cruel duchess’ way, to withhold from the Ghost the gift that she has willingly offered Marcia.
“Honourless,” she calls, laying a hand on the taller woman’s shoulder, where the rough skin bears the marks of teeth much bigger than wolves’. “Do you hear the words I say?”
Honourless spins around. Her eyes meet Marcia’s, and widen, and keep widening, until there is white all around her irises. Her mouth widens in a crooked, toothy grin, the scar over her nose wrinkling. “I hear you!” she cries out, and flings her long, sinewy arms around her in an embrace. Her gravelly voice speaks the words of Latin, but she hears them in her own accent—her own vocabulary—and there is a homeliness to the sound that makes her heart soar. “You hear me—she gave you the power she gave Dorian? Oh, I am so pleased.”
“Yes!” Marcia answers, then her smile clouds up. “But Orobelle should have given it to you.”
Honourless’ rumbling laughter crescendos. “You would sooner squeeze water from a rock.”
Marcia, too, laughs. “Then I will translate for you whenever you please. The duchess cannot prevent it.”
Honourless leans out of the embrace, but continues to hold her shoulders. “And this is why you are the one who received it.”
Now that they have parted, Marcia’s awareness finally expands to encompass the rest of the room. Only now does she notice that everyone else in the sitting room is wearing various faces of startlement.
But the first to burst through it is Hong Yi, who flies off the seat and shouts, “Gods above! You received the translation magic? We can talk to you now? This…this changes everything!”
She laughs. “I don’t know what possessed the duchess,” she answers as he leaps to her side. “But I cannot begrudge it.”
“How did she do it?”
“There were…a lot of words that she said. Then she cut her palm, and I took her blood—”
“Hong Yi, are you speaking Mandarin?” asks Adelaide from her seat.
He turns. “Oh, I—yeah, I heard Marcia in Mandarin. Huh! I have an odd thought.” His voice effects a deeper monotone as he says, “Marcie, do you understand me now?”
Marcia blinks. “Yes?” she replies.
“Oh, no way! This time I heard you in English. We have so much science to do—”
“Marcia!” She recognises Vesper’s voice long before she has seen her, leaning out from behind the armchair. “What a delight—I’ve longed to talk to you.”
Marcia freezes, hearing her in words she can understand for the first time. The measured steadiness of her voice is clearer now, like a fortress of steel and stone. “Us both,” she answers. “We have so much to discuss.”
For Artur, Felix and Adelaide, it is a matter of far less shock, for she has barely spoken to them to begin with, through the fogginess of her recovery. But where there was dead silence between them before, words now cross the gap.
“I look forward to working with you,” is Felix's concluding remark, and she senses there will be more soon to come. Adelaide, still glued to her chair, is not talkative, and deeply inexpressive when she does talk, though her face always shows when she is flustered, like when Marcia asks her one too many questions at once.
Artur is even less talkative than Adelaide, but weighed down by some leaden lethargy that he must have learned somewhere. Felix and Adelaide leave together, and then Artur does—then it is just Vesper and Hong Yi, the latter lying on the couch and the former taking a seat on the armchair.
“Excuse me,” Marcia says, drawing a long breath, looking each of her companions in the eye. “Has Artur always been like that?”
“If you mean, ‘like he hates everyone,’ …yes, but I can’t really blame him, I guess.”
“He’s working through a lot right now,” Vesper puts in, gazing past them at the corridor. “He really didn’t want to come along with us. He had a rough time letting go.”
Hong Yi hums in agreement. “And that’s fair enough. He only talks to Vesper, for some reason.”
“I’m not surprised,” murmurs Marcia, draping herself over the back of the armchair. “I imagine you could charm anyone with that smile.”
Vesper turns to look at her, blinking daftly. “Me?”
Marcia laughs. “Yes. Your name suits you, have I told you? You would look right at home in the heavens.”
“Well, goodness me,” Vesper gasps. “You certainly have a way with words, and now I can hear them straight from your mouth.” Then she chuckles. “Thank you, though. That’s very kind.”
Marcia turns to Hong Yi with a helpless smile, but he is busy rubbing his temple. This, it seems, is not just a problem of translation.
The morning dawns in greys and blues, dusting every inch of the hall. Honourless sits in the armchair in her shirt and pants, awaiting her clients—or so she likes to imagine.
This, she thinks, is a welcome change of pace—no longer a gradual agglomeration of people, straining her physical resources with every successive acquisition.
The trio bound for the current world is the first to reach her, each with a separate load of luggage—and all are dressed in clothes they could well have plucked straight off the street. Marcia in particular is eye-catching in a gown of deep red, rippling like a lake at sunset. Vesper wears a grey-green shirt and white breeches, a coat draped over her shoulder, hands always adjusting her cuffs. Only Felix is dressed about the same as he always is, in what she has come to recognise as the formalwear of his society.
“Look at you, you’ve even costumed yourselves,” Honourless laughs.
“And I cannot complain about it.” Marcia answers, swishing her dress about.
Honourless watches appreciatively for a second. “So, lovely lady, where are you headed?” she asks.
“The city,” she answers, “is the same one where we found Hong Yi, but in this present world. Nu Joric. New York? If I am pronouncing it right.”
She steeples her fingers, gleefully playing the part of coordinator. “One can work with that,” she murmurs. “But tell me something about this New York and where inside it you are headed.”
The three glance at each other and dive into a brief exchange. “It contains the first and only air-port in North America,” Marcia says. “And there is a building—tallest in the world in the current time. Somewhere close to that building would be good.”
“That’s better. Will you need funds?”
Marcia takes a sidelong glance at Felix. “No,” she answers.
“Come now, then.” Trying to envision how something like an “air-port” might manifest, Honourless rises from her seat, extending both hands. They form a circle with her—Vesper to her left and Marcia to her right, and Felix only follows suit once he has understood that this is the procedure.
“We go through Adelaide’s world—it’s safer,” Honourless says once the circle is complete. Marcia repeats her for the benefit of the rest. The trio nod to each other.
As has come to be familiar to all of them, the world begins to warp where they stand, as if to pop them off its surface, and in one rending second, like the piercing of a needle, they tear through the skin between the two spacetimes.
Hong Yi, Adelaide and Artur arrive at the sitting area to find it empty. For about ten seconds, they stand contemplating the spot where they were told Honourless would wait.
“Well, let’s just…” Hong Yi drops into the neighbouring couch, “...hang out till she gets back, I guess…”
Artur sits down beside him, but with a generous gap. He wears his shirt with one button open, fanning himself with his hand. “Never come back to San Francisco,” he mutters.
Adelaide meanders behind the seats, wearing a long green dress bought at a boutique a few streets down. In her hands, she holds Felix’s reset phone, and at her feet sits her newly stocked luggage bag.
“Sooo…either of you been to Dalian before?” asks Hong Yi.
Artur nods slowly. “Long, long ago. Before the bombs. Beijing, Dalian, beautiful cities.”
“Oh, you've been to my hometown?” Hong Yi calls. “Gotta say, your pronunciation is spot on.”
“I had Chinese customers, they taught me,” Artur answers, quietly smiling to himself.
“Addie, will you need help with language?” asks Hong Yi.
She shifts her bag off her feet. “I get the feeling my helpfulness will not be in communication.”
“Fair! We’ll probably spend the first couple of days looking stuff up, anyhow. I haven’t the least clue where this sect would be based.”
“I’m worried about that part,” she says. “Are we meant to do the research in those ten days as well? What if we just…don’t find it?”
Hong Yi shrugs. “Surely Orb can give us more time if it turns out to be that hard.”
“Orb?” Adelaide giggles. “Is that short for Orobelle?”
“Shh, don't say it so loud.”
Before Adelaide can answer, there is a heavy trudging of feet up the corridor stairs, and then from around the corner shambles Honourless, lifting her hand with a limp wave. Hong Yi returns the gesture, picking his phone from his pocket, on whose screen his instructions are already prepared.
She throws herself into the armchair, takes in a gigantic breath, and plucks the translation glass from the pocket of her cargo pants.
Honourless nods along as she squints over the text. Dalian is a port city near my hometown of Beijing, where we have been once, in the bunker. It was once ruled by Artur’s country. The land reaches subzero temperatures often, but it was made a port because its ocean doesn't freeze.
Pulling her notebook from her pocket, she answers: I can use that. Let me give you your funds. Then, she begins to trawl her pockets, from which she starts to pull wads of United States Dollars.
Hong Yi stares. “Okay…first stop, money exchange.” He takes the bills, because neither of his companions seem keen on handling it. “So, since this is your first time ghosting,” he says as he takes Adelaide's hand, “hang on tight, to us and to your luggage. Anything loose will vanish.” Adelaide pushes her notebook deeper in her pocket and loops her bag around her arm. Hong Yi, with his arm likewise through the handle of his trolley bag, takes Artur’s hand and waits with his head bowed.
Honourless starts to grumble, as if at a chore. It's the happiest she has ever been to do it.
That is Hong Yi’s final thought—before they are torn away, out of the San Francisco of the ninth world and into the breach.
“Your move,” says Orobelle, hands laid upon the villain’s note and the pages of the sketchbook.