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It has been another night empty of sleep and full of heavy, abstract thoughts she cannot afford to acknowledge during the day, when every moment presses around her with immediacy and she must make choice after choice and see that they are carried through. She is exhausted, but she is always exhausted. Perhaps that is why sleep struggles to find her: there is no difference between the hours in which she is awake and the hours in which she is expected to rest. There are simply fewer voices.
So maybe it is also because this is the only time she can be alone, and even her subconscious mind cannot relinquish the opportunity to take advantage of the solitude. It is almost peaceful, when the only clamor is in her head. If she is tired enough, even that may quiet a little.
So maybe, she thinks, a little regretfully, it comes back to the choices after all. She will never admit that she is tired of making them, because that is the first step toward letting someone else make one for her, and letting someone make a choice for her means acknowledging that someone else could. But sometimes she wishes she had more instances where her choices felt like hers and not like a test.
Everything is a strategy. Every scenario placed before her has a correct option, weighted by the likelihood that it will keep her from losing her throne. It is simply her job to ensure that that option is selected. She is stepping in the footprints left by a myth already written, following patterns of history and human behavior. That is all that a myth is.
It is apt, then, that she has taken Hephestia as her symbol. There were other ways she could have chosen to presage her rule, but this one felt- poetic. Everything she has done since becoming queen has been to make herself into something that cannot be affected by the world. She is untouchable, like the gods in myths. If that means she is also something unreal, something layered beneath time or memory or stone, so be it. If she is, she does not have to be a person.
This feeling of alienation has followed her her whole life. She understood people as something to study and learned too late that no one was looking closely enough to understand her. She had not yet completed her successive course in brutal trial and error to learn what she had missed before it became irrelevant. Then it was a brutal trial and error of a different sort, and it turned out her deficits were her strengths.
If she had been someone else, she could not have done it. It does not make it any less isolating to know that the only reason she had succeeded was because no one had understood her.
And it does not make up for what she knows she was missing. The ability to understand people’s patterns of self-interest, to judge the magnitude of a reaction and the dynamics of give and take, does not translate to the ability to understand people. Interpreting the contours on a map cannot tell you what it is like to stand at the summit of a mountain. She is lucky that she has no time for hikes and that her position depends on staying at sea level.
It is straightforward, with gods. You make your sacrifice, you follow the rituals, you pray in thanks when things go in your favor and you pray for forgiveness when things do not, because of course it is the gods’ dissatisfaction and not your own poor planning that caused such an outcome. This is the kind of understanding Attolia wants to have with her barons: any action to cross her would be met with consequences that they should have anticipated, even if they could not have anticipated what form those consequences would take.
Curled up in her chair, watching the moon, she feels the phantom press of her headband across her brow and fails to stop herself from reaching to check, fingers brushing warm skin instead of skin-warmed metal. She shivers and tucks her fingers into her palm, as if friction has ever been effective against echoes.
Now, in her carriage, she touches her fingers to the headband and feels foolish. But the separation of flesh from flesh is reassuring. Here, she is Attolia; she is stone; she is the myth she is making of herself.
But the motion itself, of checking, of reassurance, separates her from the stillness of Hephestia’s statue, from the unyielding solidity of Hephestia’s mountains. Does a god need to check that she still exists? Attolia doesn’t think so. Gods have mortals to remind them who they are. Attolia has other people telling her who they want her to be, and every day she fights to show they are wrong. She isn’t sure they aren’t succeeding anyway - what is the freedom to make choices if every choice you make is in service of keeping your throne and not yourself?
Those are thoughts to revisit during the next sleepless night. Only a few more hours, she thinks half-wryly.
Her position is still precarious, but she stands at a transition point. No one else can see that it is a transition point, but it does not make it less dangerous. When all her choices are between two sides of a knife, one would think the gaps of precarity should be flattened, or negligible; this is not the case. There is a difference between a knife in the belt of your enemy and a knife held to your throat.
Her mother’s jewelry is almost depleted. She is not precious about them for their own sake; they are tools, and she has no regrets at deploying them. But once they are gone, she will need to rely on her other sources of power and capital, and she has not yet put her full weight on this new bridge she has built. She plans to buy back the jewelry that she can, once she has the means, in the long view of the future she refuses with an absolute calm to believe will not happen. The future, however, is the future. Once the jewels have left and returned to her, they will not serve the same purpose again.
But such is her dilemma: she has three recipients she is considering for a thin, light chain of gold she does not remember her mother wearing. She has mapped the threads of decision, watching them spill and branch into the future like a river network running backwards. Whose allies might be swayed? What help could each subject provide beyond her initial ask? What other ways would she have to get what she needs if she did not choose the person who could provide it to her, and how would she compensate if she could not get it?
Once given, the jewelry precludes a future relationship based on anything other than bribery. But at least she can factor in a temporary alliance in the short term, rather than wrest with the uncertainty about whether a person falls in opposition to her or just in a malleable neutrality - though that ultimately amounts to the same thing, since she will not be the one to manipulate it.
She could give it to a minor noble, the father of one of her attendants, who holds land along a major trade route and keeps meticulous records. She could give it to the mistress of one of her more contentious barons, a clever and, importantly, self-centered woman Attolia can almost respect. Or there is a man of mixed Sounisian heritage whose connections could prove valuable and whose loyalty, she is sure, can be bought.
Or any number of people whose potential she has weighed again and again. A man with three sons in her guard. A scholar who is not the court’s foremost expert on anything but whose insight, Attolia has found, others tend to heed. A family with a daughter who had been close to her brother.
She does not often let herself doubt her own judgement, but with the trust she has in it today, she may as well sacrifice the chain to the gods. It would do her as much good.
The flippant idea sticks, and she finds herself giving it a second thought. What could she gain by it? The priests, perhaps, though that may not be enough to justify it. Was anyone at court devout and willing to be swayed by an in-kind show of piety where they would not accept an outright bribe?
She does not realize she had shaken her head until she is startled by the featherlight brush of her own hair against her nape. No. Sacrificing the chain to a temple is not a decision. It is an excuse to avoid making one. She has provided more than adequate sacrifices to appease the priests and those who would use a failure to respect tradition as another reason she was unfit to rule, regardless of their own piety. It is impractical to sacrifice one of her few pieces of practical bargaining power at the altar of a god. The thought is absurd. What could she possibly receive in return?
But it is more than that, in the part of her mind that answers to Irene and only speaks in moonlight: she wants, just once, not to have to make a bargain. If she offered this token to the gods, it would be another piece of her value in another cupped palm; another alliance whose boons she could not trust not to turn against her when that value ran dry.
Perhaps everyone has a foolish myth they wish they could believe in.