Esther (42 page)

“Your Majesty, you are still queen,” Ruti said slowly, as though to make certain I did not miss a single word. “Do not ask forgiveness from anyone but the king.”

Not asking for forgiveness was the hardest task I had ever been given. I wanted Ruti's forgiveness, Mordecai's forgiveness, even my escort's. I had jeopardized all of our positions. I thought of my people—what if I no longer held enough sway with the king to save them as Mordecai had said that one day I must? But most of all I wanted my child's forgiveness.

I ran into my bedchamber and began ripping down the ridiculous screen I had ordered Hathach to get for me. From the corner of my eye I saw Ruti watching. She did not interrupt as I tore through the layers of cloth with not only the blade between my fingers but also with my own flesh, until I was scratched and tangled in the tattered screen.

Ruti began to rub my back. After a moment, by the slight tremble in her touch, I knew that she too was crying.

Hegai was only shocked for half a breath. He gathered himself together so quickly I would have missed it if I had not been watching closely. “Pennyroyal,” he said. He looked at me and spoke with even more firmness than usual. “It is time now to think of the girls you wish to save. Think of Utanah. Think of Ruti. You can no longer save the child, but you can still save many more.”

“What do you suggest I do?”

“Keep drinking the tea until you bleed.”

“Is not there a safer way?” Ruti cried.

Hegai glanced at Ruti as though a foul odor came from her. “A knife is more precise than poison, but also much sharper,” he said. “It leaves marks.”

“But whoever has poisoned the tea will surely not continue if he discovers that the queen knows.”

“Whoever has made the tea does not own all the pennyroyal in the empire,” Hegai replied. “Someone else will make the tea for us.”

“What of secretly calling upon a physician?” Ruti asked.

“When the queen starts to bleed we will call upon the finest one that can be trusted. There is no use doing so now.”

I tried, but I could not bring any more of the tea to my lips.

“What do you plan to do, Majesty?” Ruti asked.

“I do not know. I only know what I will not do.”

I did not get long to think about what would happen once my child was born—how I would keep him from being taken to the nursery and how I would protect him from the scorn of any who might see whatever deformity he would have. That very night, the hand that I sometimes felt clenching within my belly squeezed so hard I cried out.

“Dismiss all of your servants.
Quickly.
” Ruti said.

The violent wrenching pains in my belly worsened. Ruti gave me opium tea to drink and put blankets under my hips, but surely I bled through them. I could feel a warm sticky wetness pooling beneath me. It was not just blood. Some of it was thicker. I had the terrible thought that it was my child. My hands tried to grasp at the wetness beneath my hips and there was a new pain.

“Your Majesty, please give me your hand.”

It was Erez's voice. Despite the pain I could not stop clutching at the wetness beneath my hips. Someone grabbed my right wrist and I felt the plate being removed. Then my hand was naked. As naked as the inside of my womb. Ruti gave me more tea, and after a while I fell asleep.

When I awoke I knew that my child was gone. Carried away in blankets that were buried or burned. Ruti did not want me to get up, even to use the chamber pot. “You have already lost a lot of blood.”

“I have lost more than blood.”

“I know, Your Majesty.”

I looked at her in the scarf, which only showed her eyes. “I know you have lost as much as I have.”
We are all in danger now.

“We must stop thinking of what we have lost or we will lose everything we still have. Do not forget that you are still queen.”

“Where is my taster?” I asked Ruti after two new tasters—a eunuch and a woman my age—appeared with my breakfast of bread and honey. The woman was pregnant.

“Hegai took him.”

“Certainly he could not have known anything.”

“Nothing is certain.”

Over the next few days I fought to keep from saying the sad, cowardly things that kept rising to my lips like bile.
I am not without a child. Sorrow is my child. He will be with me forever. I have ingested a poison that turns a womb to an empty space that can never be filled—not by food or love or wealth or power. I have lost what was most important to me in all the world.

When Hegai returned to my chambers to check on me, or perhaps to instruct me, I told him, “I must have Hathach dispatch a messenger to Persepolis. What message shall I send?”

“I was poisoned,” Hegai dictated to me, as though it were me who would deliver the message, “and had a miscarriage. I am well now and cannot wait to behold my beloved king's face once again.”

“What of the person or people behind this? If I do not find out who poisoned me, I fear I will always suspect everyone a little.”

“As you should, Your Majesty, if it will make you more careful.” Before I could say anything he went on, “A girl has confessed to making you pennyroyal tea instead of mint tea. But it does not matter who made it. It matters who ordered it made, and she does not know—she only knows who told her she must do it if she wished to keep her parents safe. None of those she named has implicated Halannah, but none needs to do so for me to know it was her. This is a crime one woman commits against another, and none has more reason to cast you from the king's favor than she does.”

The loss of my child felt nearly too great for me to bear. I was not yet ready to think of the advantage Halannah would gain from my loss. But I could not help asking about the servant who had poisoned my tea. “What has become of the girl?”

“She is missing her hands now, the hands that dropped the pennyroyal into your tea. I thought it best to keep her around where she would be a reminder to others, but after more thought I decided the story left behind by her absence might be more advantageous. She is now useless for all but one task. When she heals, she, along with the others she has implicated, will be one of the now-handless girls who are paraded through the palace and then sent to follow in the train behind the Immortals with the camels, mules, and other concubines who attend them on long expeditions.”

“This is ugly work,” I said.

“Matters of life and death often are.”

“I can hardly bear to look.”

“But you must, and do so without flinching, Your Majesty.”

Hegai drew out the words “Your Majesty.” Like Ruti, he seemed to think I needed to be reminded that I was queen. “My eyes are open now,” I told Hegai. “I will not look away from anything, no matter how ugly.”

Upon receiving my message about the miscarriage, the king returned from Persepolis. “He summons you to come to him as soon as you have stopped bleeding, Your Majesty,” Hathach informed me.

I did not like to think of what words passed between Hathach and the king. I had always trusted Hegai to look out for my interests when he spoke to the king because my interests were the same as his own. I was still uncertain of Hathach's interests.

“How does he know I still bleed?”

“Do you clean your own chamber pot?”

I stood from my cushions and stepped closer. My voice was not as steady as I wanted it to be. “Do
you
remember that I am queen?”

Hathach bowed low, transferring so much of his weight that I was not sure he would be able to stand up without stumbling. “Forgive me, Your Majesty. In my concern for you I spoke to you as though you were a child and not the resplendent queen you so clearly are.”

After I dismissed him, Ruti turned to me, “He spoke improperly, but he helped us. He was angry at us for not protecting our secret. For some reason he wishes to help us. I will clean the chamber pot from now on.”

Before half a month had gone by I stopped bleeding. Afterward I felt an even greater sadness.