The mango candy was getting sticky.
Nitara noticed this the way she noticed most things with one eye, the other still dragging hungrily across the page, her small finger trailing beneath the words she hadn't learned yet to read without moving her lips.
She was six years old. She was sitting cross-legged on a cushion the colour of old wine, in the innermost corner of the Kalabhra Palace Library, which was the second greatest library in all of Lemuria, and possibly, possibly in all the known world.
She had heard her father say this to visiting dignitaries, his voice carrying that particular warmth it only carried when he spoke of things he truly loved. The library. The eastern gardens. Her mother. His children. Nitara, in that order, ranked herself below the library.
She had made peace with this. The library was extraordinary. It smelled of cedar oil and old leather and the faint ghost of incense that drifted in from the temple corridor three halls away. The shelves climbed so high that the upper reaches disappeared into a permanent, comfortable shadow, and the librarians used rolling ladders on brass rails to reach the volumes that lived up there, the important ones, the ones on restricted access, the ones that made the older scholars lower their voices when they referenced them. Nitara had already decided she would read all of those first, when she was tall enough.
For now, she had this one.
She had taken it from the lower shelf marked PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL THEORY - CONTEMPORARY, a section she visited often because the librarian, old Ethan with his ink-stained fingers and his deeply resigned expression, had given up trying to redirect her to the children's wing approximately four months ago. He had simply accepted it. He brought her tea now, sometimes. And today he had, without comment, placed a small cloth packet of mango candies beside her cushion before shuffling away. She loved Ethan.
The book in her lap was called:
On The Turning of Ages: A Philosopher's Account of the New World Order and the Death of Kings
By Hugo Grotius, Scholar of the Covenant University, Altenmark
It was not, strictly speaking, a children's book.
The author had a way of writing sentences that started simply enough and then kept going, gathering clauses the way a river gathered tributaries, until by the end you had forgotten where you began and were simply being carried. Nitara had read the first page four times. She was beginning to understand it, the way you begin to understand a song in a language you don't speak by the shape of it, the feeling underneath the words.
She unwrapped a second candy, pressed it to her tongue, and read the quotations form the philosopher's book:
"The New World Order does not arrive. It does not descend. It does not storm the gates as conquerors once stormed the gates of lesser cities. It is more patient than that. More elegant."
"It seeps."
"It enters through the language of progress, through the pamphlets distributed in market squares, through the grievances of the hungry that are true and real and deserve answer, and it uses these true and real grievances as a man might use a good knife: not for the purpose the knife was made for, but for his own purposes, which he does not announce."
"Every great upheaval in the history of the world has had its visible causes, the overreach of a king, the failing of a harvest, the humiliation of a people. These are real. I do not diminish them."
"But beneath the visible causes, if one cares to look, and most historians do not care to look, because what is beneath is dark and the candle of their courage is small, beneath the visible causes there are the invisible architects."
"Monarchies do not merely fall. They are pushed."
"The question the wise person asks is not: why did this king fall?"
"The question is: who needed him to?"
Nitara stopped.
She stared at the page.
Outside, distantly, she could hear the sounds of the palace going about its vast and intricate business, the clatter of the kitchen courtyards, the calling of the gate-guards' hourly count, the particular sound her eldest brother Aryan made when he was chasing her other brother Ryan across the upper terrace, which was a rhythmic thumping followed by laughter followed by something breaking.
Normal sounds. Beloved sounds.
She looked down at the book again.
Who needed him to?
It was a strange question. She was six years old and she understood perhaps a third of the words in this book and yet somehow the question reached directly through her ribs and held something.
She had never thought of the world as having architects. She had thought of it as simply existing, the palace, the dynasty, the Empire of Kalabhra with its three rivers and its spice markets and its temple-cities and its scholars and its armies and its flag that flew gold and crimson over everything as far as she had ever walked or ridden. The world was. The dynasty was. Her family was.
Her father, Emperor Harsha Kalabhra, was. In the most solid, immovable sense of the word.
Who would need him not to be?
"Still reading that one?"
Ethan stood at the end of the shelf, holding a second cup of tea, looking at her with the expression of a man who had long ago surrendered a battle he wasn't certain he should have fought.
"It's confusing," Nitara said honestly.
"It's confusing to most adults as well." He set the tea down. "Grotius was considered a dangerous thinker in his own country for a time. There was a period when that book was banned in three nations."
Nitara looked at the book with renewed respect and considerably increased interest.
"Why?"
Ethan considered this for a moment, the way he always considered her questions, as though they deserved real answers, which was one of the things that set him apart from a great many adults in her experience.
"Because," he said finally, "It asks people to look at power and ask how it got there. And people who have power find that question very uncomfortable. And people who want power find it very useful."
Nitara looked at the page again. At the line she had been sitting with.
Monarchies do not merely fall. They are pushed.
"Ethan," she said.
"Mm?"
"Are we safe?"
The old librarian was quiet for a moment that was one beat too long.
"You are in the library," he said. "Everything in the library is safe."
He said it gently. He said it with kindness.
He did not say yes.
Nitara noticed this. She was six years old and small and her fingers were sticky with candy and her feet didn't quite reach the floor from her cushion, and she noticed this, and she filed it away in the part of herself that was already, without her knowing it, becoming something other than simply a child.
She picked up her tea. She looked at the high, shadowed shelves above her, all those books in restricted access, all those important voices lowered to whispers.
She thought: I will read all of them.
She thought: I will understand all of it.
She thought: Who needed him to fall?
Outside, distantly, something broke. Aryan laughed. Ryan protested loudly in the way that meant he was not actually hurt.
Her family was. The dynasty was. The world was.
For now.
For now, the last sweetness.
In the forty-third year of Emperor Harsha Kalabhra's reign, in the twelfth year of what the historians of other nations were calling the Age of Revolution, in the palace library of a dynasty that had stood for three hundred years and believed, as all things that have stood long enough believe, that it would stand forever:
A small girl ate candy and read a dangerous book and asked a dangerous question.A small girl ate candy and read a dangerous book and asked a dangerous question.
And somewhere far away, in a quiet room she would not learn about for many years, men with clean hands and careful smiles were signing papers.