γυναίκα

HELENA  /  𝑰𝑴𝑷𝑬𝑹𝑰𝑨𝑳 𝑷𝑹𝑰𝑵𝑪𝑬𝑺𝑺.

“You forget, sister, though we now own them heretics, my forebears – the first Roman Emperors – were gods, indeed.  Am I not their God-appointed successor, sent by our Lord to rule over all?”  His words were playful, but his look was watching, a glimmering thing that slanted off dark eyes till they seemed to kindle, all their own, his oft-mercurial humor turning, turning, turning within him.  His smile was a scythe, inviting, menacing, and then something twisted in him, again, and he laughed.  “We all commune with our God, do we not, Helena?”

Yet, for all these words, Theodore felt the beckoning of hellfire, its fiery wrath wreathing his ankles from the bear earth, as if Lucifer would at any moment plunge his crimson fist through the earth’s crust and drag the last Rome’s earthly ruler to be judged before his infernal throne in mockery of the Last Judgment of God.  God, Lucifer, and Helena all knew his sins: and they were mortal, an indelible death mark on his immortal soul.  He could never escape his guilt.

“An Emperor,” he said, turning to her again, now cold, now warm.  “Has all the more to discuss with God than others.”  Particularly, he left unsaid, those who had gained their rank through patricide.  Oh, yes, Theodore prayed: God simply no longer heard his prayers.

Theodore nodded thoughtfully, catching up a long-stemmed chalice.  “The stipulation, thus far, is set to be simple enough.  A binding writ must ensure two things: first, the preeminence of the tsar’s own children over his nieces and nephews, and second that only the heirs legitimate – that is, those of our Sophia’s own body – may ascend the throne.Further, with this done, all nobles of the realm must make binding oaths to uphold this law, first amongst them the Grand Duke, himself.  We may withhold her dowry – and, indeed, her hand in marriage – in consequence of this action, and suring up a burgeoning empire is an expensive business.  The Tsar will have wont of her and her riches.”

He paused.  “Is there something you would…append to this stipulation?  Ensuring that her child is the next Tsar is, after all, paramount to the nature of this alliance.  Perhaps the removal to Constantinople of the Grand Duke’s children for…further education, might prove most efficacious?”  He sipped the cup and placed it down again.  “Assuredly, it would prove an…aggressive move, but the children would, indeed, benefit from it, and so would the alliance, buoying both empires.  If you were Basileus, my sister, what would your next move be?”

Nodding as she spoke of Marguerite, Theodore ran a thumb across his lip.  “She may prove a formidable opponent, Helena, but I’ve no doubt you are up to the challenge.  Nonetheless, I would spare you what I can as you ease into your new role.  I mean to put a plan in place to help…assuage that situation.  This summit promises a bevy of such possibilities, does it not?”  He considered.  “Rumors say that she is to be wed again.  It might prove to best advantage if we can help assure a marriage which will pluck her from the French court and place her somewhere her reach may not much touch us.  You are to be Queen of France, Helena: what is your will on this matter?”

“Is it not in your nature to do away with the children with a more … permanent solution?”  The titter that follows Helena’s barb is a shrill, splitting sound.  She drowns it in another drag of her wine, the swell of her lips tracing the cool of its silver rim.  “I would demand it, and give no quarter to a ruler of barbarians.  You have already awarded him with the finest prize in your coffers––what more can you expect to concede before he treats our family like a rug, worthy of only laying and stepping upon?”

At the mention of Marguerite, Helena’s fingers curled inward, digging half-moons in the fleshy mounds of her palm.  Whenever she thought of Marguerite, she envisioned dirtied nails––soil and specks of earth and the ash of incense jammed beneath the whites of her nail beds, exhumed from the shallow graves of her dead kin.  She imagines that her knees are caked in its permanent residue, where she kneels and weeps beside her children’s mossy tombstones, wondering what evils she’d committed to deserve such a fate.  Even then, her angular Capet face holds no softness: only suspicion and bitterness and disarming hostility.  Beside her, there is the Countess.  All golden hair and buxom bosom and velvet-blue robes trimmed with the finest sable furs and anointed with a deadly-calm, decidedly open demeanour that escaped women like Marguerite, or even Helena.  Yet, if Helena had fancied Aliénor as her own foil, she was mistaken.  Marguerite had already claimed her as her own.  Canting her head at Theodore’s query, Helena judders to alertness, sharp focus.

I want her gone.

The thought blazes in the chambers of her mind like sparkling Roman candles. It shackles her tongue with barbed-wire and gushes venom throughout her mouth: an acid that begins to peel away the flesh at the roof of her mouth, flaking and melting away like sheets of thin paper.  Helena swallows thickly, contemplatively.  In Helena’s goblet, Marguerite is a small pebble: a sickly wan stone, gurgling and bubbling as she thuds to its depths.  “She will never remarry. Not willingly. Charles––the King, I mean––is undoubtedly powerless against her whims, or she would have long ago found a husband or an abbess to abscond to.  What value has she, nursing from the teat of a hedonist?”  Helena’s heavily-lined eyes settled upon Theodore, briefly flitting to the ring encircling his finger.  It was a wonder to her that he continued to wear it, now only large enough to fit the final joint of his pinky.  The ancient sardonyx stone studded within its core eddied with the shades of Constantinople’s famed sunsets: doused in the purple stain of rotted figs, brightened with the pale orange of not-yet ripe clementines. Helen had been a different girl when she presented it to him, giddy and rotten with nerves, all those decades ago.  Now, she contemplated snatching it up and tossing it out the window––or pelting it at his forehead, leaving a red-brick welt above his unblinking eyes.

The path from Helena’s apartments to the Kremlin’s French quarters proved as lengthy and as sinuous as Odysseus’ journey from Troy to Ithaca.  Stone-walled corridors––trimmed with lancet windows and vibrant stained glass––released into golden-domed atria and vaulted antechambers, endowed with commanding views of the Palace’s courtyards, the swirling steam of the river, the Vasilyeviches’ private gardens and their pactolian chambers, the walls of which were delicately painted as though the room, itself, were a jewelry box: masterly flecks of gold and opal and emerald whirled into the faces of heraldic Saints.  Helena was shepherded through such warrens of majesty by a competent Frenchwoman, presumably induced in the service of the countess––the woman’s humble face a round, indistinct moon, engraved with a dour expression that Helena recognized in the countenances of Charles’ countrymen.

The caprices of Nature had favoured Helena’s jaunt.  Streaks of multicolored light streamed into the corridor––oozing through the mosaics of Theotokos and Christ and Saint Olga––and bathed the thin arches of Helena’s high forehead, the apples her cheeks, in prisms of topaz and andesine.  The clement morning sun; the breeze gently undulating and perfumed with fresh blossoms; the clear skies absent of Moscow’s malicious vagaries, a balmy vignette of the Heavens above.  Fair weather would bode well, in any event, for the purpose of the Princess’ reception.  As she neared the vestibule of the Frankish king’s throne room, Helena’s lady swept to smooth the jacinth-hued silks of her tunic into orderly submission––its brilliant yellow-red thread blazoned against Helena’s rich skin and the gossamer linen of her veil.  Helena commanded the woman to step aside, flickering an unshrinking brow at the eunuch who guarded Charles’ quarters.  Obliged, the eunuch then bludgeoned his staff against the marble floors below and pried open a pair of myrrh doors; granting Helena access into Charles’ lion’s den.

Silence descends upon the assembly of courtiers.  Musicians cease their dreadful percussion and nobles their jovial chatter as the eunuch’s voice reverberates across the hall.

By Grace of God: Helena Palaiologina, Despoina of the Latin Empire.

Helena’s eyes find Charles––mounted on the throne––with ease; her gaze failing to stray as she makes the elaborate procession from the doors to the dais, like Lady Godiva riding through the streets of Coventry, balancing a pert smile upon her lips.  The despoina then drifted into a lowly bow; low enough that the metal rosary pinned to her tunic chimed against the floor, skimming the exquisite Turkish carpets unfurling toward the throne.  “Your Majesty,”  Helena sounded, her wide-eyed leer making an audacious sweep over the King.  From Charles’ throne, power and authority appeared to emanate, curling like white plumes of smoke over the bustling metropolis of Constantinople.  Helena felt a spark of pleasure––of joy––scale the chinks of her spine as his eyes settled heavily upon her, as blue as the feathers of a macaw.  Was this, Helena mused, the man with whom she’d be interred––entombed, a pair of cached bones, in some western Basilica: its doors and its alms flung open to the French people?  She casts her eyes, with feigned timidity, to her hands; admiring the jewels that adorned her lithe digits, her thin wrists.  The touch of his palm was burned there, the brush of his calloused fingers branded into the cream of her flesh.  It was a game, Helena knew: this flutter of her lashes, the twist of her mouth, the coquetry pearled on her tongue, for sobering reality had yet to sink its talons within her.

Conditions, constraint. 

Helena observes as another witless dvoryanstvo loses his hand to Feodosia, skin roiling with sweat and unease as the Dowager’s cards dance and shapeshift, illustrated with wild imaginations––a Knave of Horns in lapis lazuli, a Queen of Hearts doused in wine-dark crimson.  Each gilded vignette glimmers on the gambling table, crowded with silver chalices and coin purses relinquished by the woman’s string of deficient opponents: each one believing himself worthy of laying a bet, of challenging the Dowager’s fortitude.  They were no match for Feodosia’s expert hands, her flurry of royal flushes, and crumbled like the gritty wings of the sphinx with each reveal of her card.  Forked over fortune flies into Feodosia’s palms like flocks of starlings: gilded hair pins and repoussaged badges and filigreed plate and holy reliquary.  Her eyes hungered over the banquet of grave goods.  Helena watched, head askew, her eyes the depth and darkness of a moonless night.  The despoina’s intrigue blends with enchantment as a new game begins.

Helena’s own purse had thusly remained in the hands of her lady; standing innocuously beside Helena, an unremarkable dichotomy to the Princess’ radiant gleam, flushed cheeks, and the onyx prisms of her watchful eyes.  Her purse swelled and quickened, trembling to be used and gambled and ventured with caution thrown to the wind, for her riches exceeded threefold of what any Russian lord had since wagered.  It chimed heavily with Bezants: rounds of the purest gold, minted with the likeness of Emperor Augustus.  She was not likely to part with her precious coins; for few dared to challenge Helena––partly in fear of invoking her ire––and even fewer managed to best her.  The iron of Helena’s mind grew hot as another opponent lowered himself before the Dowager and began to shuffle through a deck of cards.  She whisked to the side of the newest challenger––a portly boyar, with the meaty, unskilled hands of a blacksmith––and lounged her arm across his shoulder.

The English were an anaemic people.  Stiff and sullen and solemnly sober, as wintry as the halls of the hallowed Westminster Abbey.  Helena’s warmth had fallen flat in their presence.  Her charisma had failed to awe, or even remotely intrigue, the Lords who assembled the House of Commons and the nobles who constituted the Queen’s court.  To them, she was an outsider: a heathenish idol of the Latin Empire, too sinful to tempt.  To Helena, they were the paltry, brittle-boned inheritors of the enigmatic Saxons who ruled England a millennium prior––no longer as Roman, or as lionhearted, as their entombed ancestors.  As the rim of the sun touched the Kremlin, blazoning against its limestone exterior, the despoina readied an excuse to quit their presence.  Helena had done her utmost to reach them, to seize and secure their fondness; but the shallow pools of their candour had left her chilled, and in need of Byzantine joviality.

Lord Mortimer––an Earl duller than ditch water––makes a hum that purls low in his throat as Helena rises from her seat.  The fox furls bundled amply about his throat have failed to conceal the wholly English pallor blanching his flesh; nor do they succeed in deflecting from the ruddy flush that blooms across his pox-pitted cheeks like a field of wild poppies.  He makes no grumble of complaint as Helena bids a swift departure and glides toward the door, releasing into the cool of the corridors that stretch along the Palace complex––like winding catacombs of possibility.  There, at the long stretch of the hall, is the gilded outline of Mary: a stone wall of nobles and advisers and spies built up and around her.  Helena’s dark brow flickers and arches upon the smooth plane of her forehead as she nears the queen, appearing to bow ever-so-slightly as the distance between them narrows to an arm’s breadth.

“Regina,”  Helena greets, her words sinking into the communal Latin.  “Tell me––are you in search of someone, or in escape?”  Charismatic laughter lifted from Helena’s mouth as she canted her veiled head.  “I have just made the acquaintance of your own Lord Mortimer.  I wondered if it was something I said that made him appear so forbidding, or if he is always quite so ... taciturn?” 

Liturgy had been a surprisingly swift affair, a crescendo of homilies and patriarchal hymns followed by the sprinkling of holy oils and silver dishes doled out to those inclined to almsgiving.  Yet––and this Helena knew only all too well––the service had also been emblematic of joining hands, of a holy and Christian union.  It was an opportunity for Byzantine in-laws, the laity, the Vasilyeviches themselves, and the noble factions of Muscovy to convene beneath the gilded-apses of the Dormition Cathedral (which, Helena’s translator, Irene, later told her, had been conceived by a Bolognese architect) and to acquiesce to God, to bless and worship the scab which Sophia had sealed over a bloody and tumultuous history.  Long after worshipers had deserted their pews, however, Helena continued to linger in the square outside of the Cathedral; basking in the sun as her mind gamboled back to Sofíka. How she would likely be anointed and crowned here, after her nuptials were uttered; how children Helena would likely never meet would, too, be christened here, and in time, interred––beneath stone slabs, on which she could find reverential inscriptions for Orthodox patriarchs and Rostislav and, surely, the Tsar’s first bride, Maria.

Helena was equipped with the experience and native caution to hold the legacy Maria of Tver posthumously wielded with both care and vigilance.  The memory of her, the stain of her corpse in the bed beside Alexander, formed an impenetrable bulwark between Sophia and glory––what would there be to do, what moral laws could the Emperor invoke, if Alexander chose for her children to inherit?  As Helena’s mind maunders, so too her feet.  Her procession places her at the edge of a fountain, located in the bustling portal of the Cathedral: an ancient, eight-sided marble basin, from which water gurgles and spits and regales the children of the town who dash to seize a droplet of it in the cloudless air.  At the opposing end of the fountain, an elderly woman washes her feet; the pitted sockets of her eyes mere repositories for grief.  Helena’s head tilts as she watches her, a distanced pang of pity twisting in her soul.

Her gaze was a sharp thing.  Flashing with mirth or with ire, it had the power to cut, incisor-sharp.  He’d thought often that there was no equal to it: no sword or knife to rival a single glance of her dark eyes.  His Helena was no wilting flower, no: she was cut from the mold of the great Theodora beneath whose golden fingertip empires rose and fell: their own empire included.  However powerful France was now, it would feel the power of her expectation – and their enemies would tremble before her.  He wondered, vaguely, if Byzantium, itself, would have something to fear so long as he sat its throne, but still he smiled, felt a strange, distant flicker of enthusiasm for a destruction that might someday arrive.  Perhaps she’d tear him down, someday, just as he’d done to their father.  He was in want of a challenge.  He was in want of a freedom he’d not felt since the day his father had died.

He chuckled, a small sound and low, and leveled her dark gaze with his matching one.  His eyes twinkled with irony and he quirked a brow, a smile, and looked away.  “Oh, I am dazzling, indeed,” he drawled.  There was a quality to her of laughing at the world, he sometimes thought.  Once, he’d been in on the joke: now he was its target, but this did not bother him so long as he could laugh along, too.  He thought, however, that this was soon to change: he’d not laugh when she was Queen of France.

“But you are right, of course.  I should not call myself basileus were it not so: I would not have that right.”  It was a right, after all, which their father had forsaken when he’d exacted that damnable promise from his son: the secret one.  The unspeakable one.  But, then, perhaps, it was a right which Theodore, too, had forfeited when he’d exacted the terms of that oath – his last act as a citizen, and not an emperor.  “But acting of my own accord does in no way mean I do not care to hear the opinions of others: only that I do not always give them the weight others might like.”

He fixed her with an unwavering gaze.  It was not lost on him what she really meant: their father’s doom was in the subtext of every conversation they ever had, it seemed.  But how could it be otherwise?  Theodore had received no earthly justice for patricide, nor was he ever likely to.  That justice, he was sure, would arrive after death, and it would be far more permanent than his own crown…but somewhere deep inside he prayed it would not prove more lasting than Byzantium, itself.

Despite himself, Theodore laughed when she spoke of celebrations in their family, but it was not a joyful sound.  There was nothing of joy in him to think of that fateful day.  In its own way, his betrayal twisted through his organs just as painfully as it did through hers: perhaps it was why he craved the lashing of her tongue.  He believed he deserved her hatred as much as she did.  He did not answer this retort any further.  “She has always been a triumph – she shall always be.  And she will protect Byzantium with all her might through this union.  Who could ask more?”  He glanced back to her, an investigative sort of look.  “Whatever…whatever, my dear sister, may divide us, at least we may all boast of this: our cause in protecting our homeland remains true and unites us, does it not?”

Does it not, Helena?  Or have I turned you, even, against Byzantium?

Theodore’s face was made for a bezant, made to be sculpted into a mould and punched into a round of softened gold.  Helena recalled, once, their mother remarking so as she eyed him––then, a tall, muscular youth, with bronzed skin; a full, bee-stung mouth; his head a cache of chestnut-curls, redolent of the bust of Alexander––and imagined his face embossed onto a freshly-minted coin.  She imagined it being bartered at a wineshop in Venice; in the belly of a Phoenician ship; a market in Constantinople; a mosque in Lydia.  Helena spitefully envisioned his likeness exchanged for something cheap and filthy: diseased whores, curdled ale, a tooth from a barber’s cart, a vial to stamp out a gouty foot.  She imagined it being rolled under a plow, until his nose was flat and snubbed and his eyes melted away under an Angevin sun; or chiming in the velvet purse of a Roman, left at the foot of a cathedral, its great western doors opening to the crush of grime-stained beggars; or flicked up by the Pope’s thumb––upward into the air, glinting as it caught the sun’s afternoon rays, and as it landed Paul would rule whether or not to torch another Holy War.  Perched across from him, with one knee slung elegantly over the other, Helena imagined Theodore’s bezant sinking into the frothy depths of the Black Sea; scattering like particles of dust, grains of sand, across a lifeless seabed.

She ceased her fantasizing and lifted to her feet; the thin aches of her brows knitted, evincing the despoina’s discomposure.  “You confuse yourself with God, brother,” Helena coolly remarks, appearing to glide lithely toward the window, to the oak intarsia table where the Emperor’s underlings had prepared a magnificent swathe of libations: several carafes, silver cups, olive-pitted breads and honey-glazed cheeses that Caligula’s own tongue would have salivated at the mere sight of, arranged to perfection by a competent Byzantine gastronome.  Discriminating hands waft over the spread and pluck up a singular cup; Theodore’s presence had dispossessed Helena of her appetite.  She brought the vinous communion to her lips, sampling only briefly, and elaborated, “even you are second to his Glory.  Even you are at the mercy of his Fortune.  Do you still speak to him, Theodore?  Or have you come to rely solely upon your own impulse?”

With her back turned to Theodore, Helena’s lips descended into a glower.  She wondered––not for the first time––what Branas had intimated to Theodore, and if his own composure had crackled beneath the weight of the Emperor’s cumbersome stare, if he gazed back at him with eyes that hinted he’d touched the Emperor’s own sister, knew her biblically.  She could imagine, easily, the adobes of Branas’ constitution melting beneath the heat of the Byzantine sun, his innards deliquesced into a bath of organs, rotted from the inside out with noxious loyalty.  Yet, Helena also recognized Theodore as a self-obsessed man; uninterested in pursuing or exploring a fault in Branas’ demeanor, his so-far unimpeachable loyalty.  If only he knew, Helena gleamed, her tongue flicking over her mouth with satisfaction. 

Her thoughts turn on a volte-face back to Sophia, to the pride that had swelled in her throat like a tumor as she watched her younger sister make her fraught procession up to the groom’s velvet-draped dais.  “There is, of course, the trouble of the Grand Prince’s children,” Helena reminds, turning on-heel to face the Emperor.  “What will you stipulate in order to ensure Sophia’s children––our Palaiologan blood––ascends to the throne?”

Marguerite watched as Helena stood before her, her eyes greedy for every detail as the little Princess looked to spit from between pretty, pert lips. She thought of Charles then, how he had planned to wed her as soon as they could, to tie these great countries together against the onslaught of whatever came their way (in truth, who were France’s greatest enemies now, with England her tail caught between her legs?). Crossing her hands against her stomach, Marguerite silenced her tongue, her lips curled slightly into a sour smile once Helena toward a familial title she had not heard from anyone but Charles’ children. 

It still ached, of course. To be away from her own brood – her living daughters and son, of whom ruled Cyprus with the same amount of might she had shown them. But this ache was different, it tore at her insides like a demon, splitting her into nothing but skin and bone. What of the bodies she had buried? How could she have left them for this poor display of riches? With a smile on her face, Marguerite hid the insistent grind of her teeth, watching as Helena acted the perfect ambassador for her Empire. 

With a silent nod, she followed Helena, matching her certain pace with the click of her slippers as they made their pilgrimage towards the drinking tables. Her French was rusty and fell awkwardly from the tip of her tongue. Looking at her, she thought that the French people would forgive her for her Roman nose, but not for her lack of language. Twisting her smile into a frown, she whispered, “Charles will have the best tutor in place for you when the time comes, we cannot have you making a faux-step before court. It is, as I’m sure you can imagine, a judgemental place… And I would so regret to see you tarnished for your lack of French,” closing her mouth, Marguerite took a cup of wine, holding it to her breast before peering at her from between the folds of the purest white. 

“Nevermind, I speak Greek… But you will probably find some Cypriot mannerisms, as I had to, for the people  As you will have to.”

The Dowager is hot on Helena’s heels; a pair of beady eyes, light enough to appear whitish, the colour of whipped yokes, burrowing holes into the despoina’s flesh.  Helena glides, for she does not retreat, to the drinking tables, where offerings fly into her hands like eager doves: honeyed meads, offensive wines, cloths impregnated with the finest oils and laden with moulded cheeses, which the servants painstakingly protect from the gnats, swarming in from the sweltering summer dusk.  Helena avails herself to a chalice, the ancient jacinthe ring encircling her pinky-finger glowing as she draws the cup to her mouth, Christ’s blood varnishing the seam of her lips. 

Her eyes then flare with the subtlest of annoyance, followed by the hoisting of a haughty brow upon her forehead.  The evening belonged to Sophia and her Grand Prince; it was for the younger Byzantine bride that the world bowed this night, shriving her with its ample blessings.  Helena, though flamboyant and proud, had been deliberately instructed not to distract from the glorious celebrations –– not with her candour, not with her exuberance, and not with the augusta’s Frankish aspirations.  It would be a grave sin to wrench Sophia’s blooming happiness from her hands –– her soft, sinless hands –– as easy as it might appear to Marguerite.

‘Is that what the King has told you, lady Aunt?’  The despoina inquires, quietly.  ‘If it is a wilting, retreating bride the King seeks, then perhaps he ought to look to the younger model.’  Onyx eyes find Sophia (from whom they seldom strayed) with ease.  Her sister is taller than most of the women assembled in Moscow; taller, even, than Marguerite.  Their aunt, however, looms as large as a monolith, watching over the crush of royals like a white peregrine.  It is all too easy to crack open Helena’s mind and to envisage Marguerite as a seasoned crusader, a blood-red cross smeared on the back of her white tunic, eyes rimmed in black and with a sword thrust into her filthy fists, a victorious cry lodged into her throat.  ‘You know what they say of eastern women.  The plains of Thrace do not breed soft, womanly ladies.  Byzantine women ride astride, with hair loose and daggers hilt, turning somersaults off the back of their horses.’

Helena’s lips curled into a simper.  Her words were metaphorical, emblematic, for all assembled knew that Alice of Cyprus had reared two of the finest Christian jewels of the east –– as cultivated and as pious and as decorous as their western counterparts.  ‘I will learn.’  The princess’ words are confident and assured.  ‘I will learn French and the ways of your court, Marguerite, this I vow to you.  Yet both my mother and I would be most... humbled... if I were to count you among those in support of my efforts.  We do not share the same blood, but our fates, our crosses to bear, they are twins, are they not?’

𝐒𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐃𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐋𝐄 — piety to byzantium; fissures with the emperor.

working for the knife by mitski.

the gold by phoebe bridgers.

o’ great and most sacred pascha by sounds of byzantium.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐀𝐒 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑  — illicit love; impending doom; warring against paternal scars.

die for you by the weekend.

the only exception by paramore.

ivy by taylor swift.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐍 𝐄𝐌𝐏𝐈𝐑𝐄  — her words echoed: ‘impress,’ ‘reveal,’ ‘challenge,’ ‘desire,’ ‘obey.’

dinner & diatribes by hozier.

dark but just a game by lana del rey.

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄 — i am a forest fire; i am the fire and i am the forest; self-reflection.

the greatest by lana del rey.

a burning hill by mitski.

𝐊𝐄𝐘 𝐌𝐎𝐓𝐈𝐅𝐒 —

𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡   …   helena   palaiologina   (   @hellcnas​​​   )   𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞   …   a   general   sitting   room   within   the   kremlin   complex   𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧   …   the   early   evening   hours   of   the   29th   of   july   ,   1319   .

a  hand  of  five  cards  was  fanned  out  within  her  hold,  the  sapphires  upon  her  fingers  mirroring  the  glint  within  her  gaze  as  she  studied  the  perspiring  man  that  sat  on  the  opposite  of  the  countess  de  auvergne,  his  frantic  gaze  darting  from  the  hint  of  her  curved  grin  to  his  own  pitiful  hand  of  cards.  there  were  speckled  bits  of  gold  paint  upon  the  tips  of  her  fingers,  glinting  in  the  light  of  a  thousand  candles  but  it  was  known  that  if  a  choice  was  presented,  aliénor  had  always  preferred  to  play  with  her  own  set  of  cards,  a  remnant  from  the  golden  years  of  her  time  as  queen.  it  had  been  a  gift  for  her  thirtieth  birthday  from  one  of  the  many  international  guests  that  had  been  drawn  to  the  parisian  court  ─  the  man  had  been  a  venetian  artist  who  had  customized  the  deck  of  cards  in  the  likeness  of  the  king  and  queen  of  france  but,  nearly  a  decade  after  receiving  it,  the  depiction  of  the  king  had  faded  away  to  points  of  being  unrecognizable  except  for  his  crown  while  the  finely  powdered  gold  that  had  been  made  into  paint  for  the  queen’s  hair  seemed  to  be  wearing  down  with  each  game,  rubbed  off  onto  her  skin.

(  if  there  was  some  symbolism  in  the  disintegration  of  her  depiction  upon  the  cards  and  in  her  increasingly  mercurial  position  by  charles’  side,  aliénor  chose  to  ignore  it  until  it  became  an  actual  threat,  though  both  her  opponent  and  a  number  of  her  ladies  startled  at  the  force  that  she  had  used  to  set  her  cards  upon  the  table,  presenting  a  winning  hand.  )

declared  the  victor,  she  waved  off  his  surrender  of  the  heavy  coin  purse,  well  aware  of  the  burning  gaze  that  his  wife  kept  on  his  back  throughout  the  game  ─  bidding  him  to  usher  in  a  few  servants  with  wine  and  food  as  a  settlement  for  the  lost,  she  smiled  down  at  the  whiskery  kiss  that  was  placed  on  the  back  of  her  hand  before  allowing  her  gaze  to  drift  across  the  room  in  search  of  her  next  opponent.  at  the  entrance  of  the  opened  door  stood  the  one  woman  that  she  had  been  impatiently  waiting  to  make  better  acquaintances  with,  the  one  reason  she  had  consented  to  being  dragged  across  land  and  sea  to  shiver  miserably  in  her  muscovite  chambers  every  morning  and  her  half - lidded  gaze  brightened  with  recognition,  a  gentle  smile  softening  the  half - smirk  she  had  been  sporting  prior.

aliénor  was  not  unaware  of  charles’  intention  to  remarry  though  the  idea  had  soured  what  little  affection  and  loyalty  that  had  remained  in  her  heart,  for  him  and  for  france,  when  she  considered  the  public  opinion  of  their  annulment  would  only  be  further  strengthened  if  he  took  another  wife  and  sired  a  true  heir  after  nearly  twenty  years  of  marriage  to  her.  the  realization  had  stung  like  a  thousand  bees  but  she  had  been  forced  to  bite  down  on  her  tongue,  soothing  herself  on  the  taste  of  copper  and  the  fact  that  she  had  been  informed  of  his  intentions  at  all.  he  had,  perhaps  unknowingly,  given  her  time  to  plan  a  course  of  action  for  life  outside  of  the  parisian  court  so  that  it  would  not  seem  as  though  she  was  a  figure  that  needed  to  be  pitied  for  having  no  agency  over  her  own  future.  yet  she  could  not  deny  that  the  idea  of  feigning  the  act  of  the  aggrieved  ex - wife  was  tempting  ─  the  people  of  france  adored  her  still,  even  more  so  for  the  strength  and  generosity  she  had  shown  as  regent  after  the  pope  had  declared  their  marriage  null,  but  she  had  yet  to  decide  if  the  vindication  she  would  receive  for  such  pettiness  was  worth  the  humiliation  that  she  would  also  suffer.

it  was,  perhaps,  unfair  to  drag  helena  or  any  woman  through  the  embittered  sentiments  that  remained  between  them  but  aliénor  was  not  known  for  her  patience  or  her  reason  when  it  came  to  her  former  husband  ─  even  when  she  had  won  over  him,  she  had  lost  everything  else  and  the  taste  of  defeat  was  not  to  her  liking.  the  time  to  act  was  now,  when  such  plans  were  unknown  but  to  a  select  few  and  when  her  influence  still  carried  weight  in  france  and  across  the  world.  nodding  towards  the  princess,  she  hummed  in  muted  approval  as  the  stragglers  cleared  a  path  as  she  took  a  step  forward  and  away  from  her  seat.  ❝  imperial  highness  …  i  know  you  must  have  a  great  many  things  to  do  but  will  you  not  honor  us  with  your  presence  for  a  moment  ?  i  fear  i  am  all  played  out  for  the  evening  but  i  was  about  to  call  for  some  wine  before  a  new  round  of  cards  begin.  ❞

The lion’s den is hot, warmed by the pulse of a great many bodies and the crackling spit of the hearth, as Helena enters.  Her senses are beset, firstly, by the displeasing odour: the stench of pungent perfume.  Smudged incense.  Heady swirls of gamy wine, masked by smoking sconces on the wall.  Then, the noise: a crush of chatter, grovelling troubadours, beating at their tambourines.  The room falls to a quiet as she enters, the reverberation of the great myrrh-wood door shutting behind Helena.  In the momentary stillness that elapses, she takes in the length and breadth of the space as if it were a formidable battleground – as if it were Outremer, and she the lone infidel – with eyes narrowed into slits, as thorny as a spike-toothed-eel, her gaze fanning about the room. 

Seemingly at once, Helena transforms.  Softens, like heated tallow.  Her cheeks blazon with golden warmth, her hands growing weightless as she grants them to the men eager to make her acquaintance, and her voice exudes between her lips in honeyed, dulcet gasps.  She cants her dark head to the ardor; her glossy locks and onyx irises appearing lit from within.  Westerners loved nothing more than a novelty, and an autumnal Byzantine princess was certainly that.

Yet, even in the murky, aqueous glow of the room, Aliénor of Auvergne’s flaxen head burns like a brazier.  Helena’s eyes find her at once: she is as easily detectable as a phare in the harbour, luminous as she coaxes and cranes her little neck to the cacophony at the door, to the men who shouldered to crush rosaries and bibelots in Helena’s delicate hand.  The lushness of her body is displayed as nakedly as a carcass roasting on a spit; she is generously sculpted with decadent curves and indistinct angles, bathed in the wealth of Normandie, of Anjou and Poitou, of any other French province willing to bleed its coffers dry in order to satisfy their own living martyr.  She appeared, in any case, every inch a queen.  Former queen, Helena understands. 

The despoina wondered, if she were to peer closely enough, would she still see the burr-holes drilled into Aliénor’s head?  Bloody, scabbed pits in the skull where her crown had once perched?  No, this was a woman the Frankish King would have taken pity upon –– employing a skilled swordsman to sever her crown from her head.  In any case, Helena also understood that she needed no sceptre, no title, no throne, to consecrate her authority in France.

‘My lady Auvergne.’  The princess’ mouth shapes into a smile.  A sense of knowing pours out of the other woman that Helena could not ignore; betrothals were, after all, a matter of the state.  This woman was the state, with a mind so searing and sharp as to be celebrated both within and without the King’s empire.  ‘Perhaps we ought to collude with one another and show these fine gentlemen the dangers of two female minds at work.’  The omen is indistinct, but there.  Aliénor’s company, so accustomed to their own dogged obedience, remains seated – confusion roiling in their leathery, beaked French faces.  Whether or not they recoil at the sight of a bride of Constantinople falls beneath Helena’s concern.  

The tapestries that adorned the stone walls were worn, sparse where moths had nested and consumed of its once magnificent threads, woven into a dull depiction of ceremony, of angels rising into heavenly choirs, and below, the Vasilyevich’s enemies condemned to perdition.  Down they tumbled, with weights about their ankles, into the pyres of hell.  The hall in which Helena now stood appeared to be deserted, cloaked from ceiling to floor in tapestries of Vasilyeviches princes of former epochs.  A sweet, low hum thrummed through the space, oozing from the chatter and troubadours many floors below, though Helena felt the eerie chill of desertion at her spine; its gelid fingertips crawling up her lithe neck.  The room reminded her, in all its bare humility, of a priory; the quiet, the thin streaks of light seeping through half-draped windows, the stonedust and starch cold, the draft in the apse.  At any moment, she suspected, field nuns and shorn-headed villeinesses could make camp here, and feel quite at home.

Helena stretches her fingertips, warm to the touch, and lays them flat across the worn, weathered face of Rostislav’s ancestors, smoothing away a thick, pounded layer of soot – as integral to the tapestry as the textiles themselves.  She steals a breath, the sound of it hissing and husking through teeth, gritted to the cold, coupled with the groan of a wooden plank underfoot.  She turns toward the noise, the Grand Prince’s height imposing even beneath the loftily-arched door.  His eyes glowed and glowered in the dim light.  Helena felt no great urge to arrange herself, to pleat her skirts, to adjust the luminous strands of dark hair escaping from beneath her veil.  ‘Your Grace.’  Her voice is gossamer-thin as she lowers in a hasty bow.  They will be in-laws, soon, in the convoluted, gnarled way of imperial genealogies, and she need not explain her presence.  Helena glitters against the bareness of the room, the cold stone walls, the sooty carpets, and extends her neck in greeting.

a window overlooking a blossoming garden; the sticky air that comes with a summertime downpour; the memory of her father and her mother and all of her siblings sat at the same table, a rare laugh consuming each palailogan; a sublime lyric from a solemn hymn; the excitement that rumbled in her belly at the sight of a text in the imperial library she’d never read before; the touch of someone who loved her.  she’d made it a habit — years ago, when their father died, though she’d found herself returning to it more and more in the recent months — of reminding herself of things that brought her joy as a tactic to soothe her tenacious nerves. indeed, her imagination was a powerful force. and though she had been frightened since before the moment she stepped foot on muscovite soil, she had helena by her side. and now, with helena’s warm hands nimbly ensuring that sophia always looked like the very picture of the future tsarina, it took everything in the younger sister not to curl into her the elder’s bosom, to not tuck herself into the stitches of her dress. all she could do — all that was appropriate to do — was to tuck this memory within the folds of her mind, for use when helena would not be so near.

the demure grin on her face blossomed to a belly laugh at her sister’s clever play on her words. “would you extend that advice to married life?” sophia wondered aloud, having heard a similar phrase offered to her by the head matron of the kitchens of the almshouse; though she was almost confident that it was in reference to actual food, and not a metaphor for her person. however, for as long as the war between the byzantines and the muscovites waged on, she’d heard stories of the tsar’s bloodsoaked canines, of the very hands that killed byzantine soldiers to which she would be bound by wedding bands. “i think i manage that; for it is not so much different from almsgiving,” she offers, but it is half of a bold-faced lie. as she rises from her gilded seat their vultureish features only become more clear, their teeth seemingly sharper in their smiles as the pair of princesses approach them. per her instructions, sophia meekly offers a minutely trembling hand and a generous smile as if it were bread and bronze coins. much to her surprise, her guests take it and press a kiss to her knuckles as if venerating an icon; the uneasy feeling in her stomach has yet to quell. leaning over to her sister she whispers, a gleaming smile upon her face, “you were right. that was not so terrible.”

Helena stole a moment and observed how practiced, how feather-light, Sophia’s step was as she cascaded down the marble stoop from the dais.  At the base of it, the sisters joined once more.  Helena, the elder, with obsidian eyes agleam as they swept over the vivid swatches of gatherers, prisms of royal pigments –– Sophia, the younger, who absorbed it all with uncertainty as thickly-rimmed about her gaze as the soot of her lashes.  Somewhere, awash in the crowd, Helena found the Tsar’s bearded face and the hardened, unmovable expression plastered across it,  and held Sofíka’s hand a touch firmer.  Without his usual ceremony, Alexander Vasilyevich looked like any other widower; with shadows in the deep caverns beneath his eyes, and spectres wafting in and out of them.  In this palace, Helena mused, there are dead wives all around.  Perhaps, above, these dead wives and late queens were carving slits in the heavens and spying upon the Byzantine’s triumphant processions.  Perhaps they’d cloak Sophia in their gilded auspices, or smother her in their blackened maledictions.  Helena drew her sister from the dais and shepherded her into the great maw of the palace, into its jaws, its vicious tongue.

‘You’d know as well as I would,’ Helena returned.  The crowds appeared to part, rather like the Red Sea, in anticipation of the duo and their princely retinue. ‘My little sister, married before me.  Would father not be delighted to know this –– his pride and his joy still joined at the hip?’  Her protective gaze lingers on the courtier who juts out from the crowds, gathers up Sophia’s delicate hand and brings it to his mouth, bestowing blessings and raining kisses upon her soft, unmarred flesh; doubtlessly biting the urge to turn over her palm and admire the gems decorating her digits, to sink his teeth into the muscle and sinew and blood consigned to the Grand Prince.  ‘There,’  Helena coaxes, grinning enigmatically.  As Sophia leaned into the wings of ancient ceremony, the elder sister drew discreetly aback, displaying an altogether uncommon forbearance in permitting the younger to assume centre-stage.  It was Helena, after all, who was groomed for it, who turned to the glow of ardor like a blossoming rosebud.  Her hands retained the scars of those who’d greedily snatched them up and inundated them with their devotion.  ‘You are a natural, every inch a Palaiologina.’

“We shall know each other well enough soon—wholly, in fact.”

He permitted himself this pointed retort but suppressed the laughter her question provoked. It would have been hearty, full of mirth at the irony—or, perhaps, serendipity—of her speaking aloud what he had already foreclosed as speculative mischief. A quick glance found the tsarina in question unmoved but accompanied now by a familiar face. Charles quirked an eyebrow as he strained to see her form in the shadows. If she was becoming, or beguiling enough to be so threatened, it was unbeknownst to him. Noticing suddenly Helena’s presented hand, he returned his attention to her. “I wished to meet you,” he said, poorly concealing the glee of knowing what he was to say next. “However, I mistook that ill-favored noblewoman,” Here, a pause to flick his free hand in the direction of the pair who had haplessly claimed his time minutes earlier. “To be the Byzantine princess whom I sought.” In the ensuing beat of quiet, he awaited her recognition of the woman but soon carried on. “How fortunate that I said nothing indecent to her, that I suggested no such thing as departing propriety for a private conversation.”

As he spoke, his hand cupped hers—not wrapped loose and neutral around her fingers but instead palm-to-palm. Though draped in fabric nearly from head to toe, only jewels clothed her hand. With their palms so aligned, he could curl his fingers around the slender curve of her wrist, able to both feel with his fingertips the supple skin and toy against the inner folds of her sleeve. If she wished, she might do the same. He imagined she would choose simply to ignore the minute touches. They were, however deliberate, so feather-light as to be a phantasma. With his own amusement now passed, he watched her with intent. Her words echoed: ‘impress,’ ‘reveal,’ ‘challenge,’ ‘desire,’ ‘obey.’ Against the walls of his imagination, distorted and silhouetted, stripped of their purpose and twisted into fantasies, they danced like candlelight figures. The performance conjured no smile or simper; his eyes, murky in the low light, suggested one puppeteer’s favorite—the wolf, often cast by two hands overlaid.

“Shall we?”

She had already consented, and so the words were little more than a prompt of courtesy as he moved to lead her away. The narrow path between the crowd would bring them to one of the hall’s doors—from there, either into some occupied antechamber or brisk outdoor landing. He knew nothing of this Palace of Facets except that every inch of it seemed to crawl, like an anthill, with workers whose downcast eyes distracted from their open ears. Where they were not, others stood already, having their own private conversations about speculation or mischief, or both.

Charles’ words do not overcome her, indecent though they may be.  It is his hand, like hot iron against her own, curling around her wrist that prompts Helena’s eyes to flash, unbidden, to the melding of their flesh: the outcropping of her palm caught up in the cusp of his, a rapid heartbeat drumming through the gossamer-thin skin of her hand.  If the King had flipped her arm over and glanced at its slender, cordiform mound, he would see it nakedly: the silhouette of a bloody organ pumping beneath, irregular and discordant, unfurling and flowing from it a labyrinthine map of cobalt arteries, tumescent and smooth. A shrill breath whistles betwixt her teeth as her fingers unfurl, flutter and warm to attention, and wrap around the King’s hand like a serpent around the staff wielded by Cleopatra.  As the snigger of hyenas at her throat disperses, Helena bears a pair of wide eyes––the size and shape of Venus, the hue of liquid soot—into Charles’ skull; granting him a silent, albeit implicit nod. Helena then scans the room, searching for an escape route, recording doors garrisoned with gimlet eyes, vigilant eunuchs and armored sentinels, whose pockets clinked with the burden of gold coins like a chime in the harbour, tinkling above the Prosphorion.  ‘This way,’ Helena beckons, the hand held within Charles’ own shepherding him in the direction of an unguarded passageway.

Outside the hall, which sweltered with the heat of bodies serried closely together, long corridors stretched along the complex, flanking the Moskva––they reminded Helena of the endless halls of the Boukoleon, where the echoes of footfalls extended further than eyes could peer.  Light breezes flowing in from the Marmara cooled the palace, forming a tunnel of wind in those unending halls she and Theodore had once raced, fingers loosely linked, whilst the sun leaching through the windows sparkled against centuries-old stone walls.  Helena’s breast ached for a lungful of that air as the brine from the river smarted at her lips, stretched into another radiant gleam––a harbinger of mischief, of knowing.

With an incline of her head, the princess observed, ‘you have managed to entrap me by lonesome now, save for––’ Two fingers, not clamped in the King’s hand, gesture toward a pair of musicians in an alcove of the hall, plucking and drumming at their tambourines.  They looked like lovers, swarthy and sweat-glazed, and cavorted down the hall at the sight of Helena and Charles approaching.  Streams of trickling laughter followed them, like hounds after a fox, that Helena merely shook her head at, delightedly. ‘Them.’

Helena’s tongue traced the seam of her bottom lip, the fissured marble-floors absorbing the swish of her skirts.  Deathly silence prevailed in those ancient halls, where only the glow of burning sconces lit their aimless meander.  Perhaps—however unlikely—he is hatching some plan, some objective.  ‘I wager there are things you wish to ask of me; to know me, or to interrogate me.  But, on the contrary, I find myself uninterested in answering questions and would prefer to ask them myself.’  It was not necessary, this Helena also knew, for Kings and Queens to know one another; to bear his moods with rapid acuity, to tolerate the foul breath with which he roused each morning, for though they would be fettered upon the throne, their domestic lives cleaved at the hip.  In any case, she found herself intrigued by him––his long, dignified pauses, the genuine interest taken in her words, which she made no cognizant habit of mincing, the stoic and hardened arrangement of bones that forged his skull, his scholarly brow.  Charles would trade flashes of his life in clean, detached snippets and would expect to be rewarded with accounts of her own, delivered with winsome tilts of the head, reports sanitized for the King’s pleasure and goodness.  The idea that her life rested on these moments––in these dignified pauses, august ellipses, consular omissions––gathered in her lithe frame like the white crest of a wave.  At least before news of their union emerged, the King could make a volte-face and renege upon the arrangement; Helena, howbeit, was determined to prevail, to seduce the senses with the heady swirls of fragrance still wet on her throat. 

Men were like carpets, after all; lay them once and walk upon them forever.  The French king was no different.

Though it was with familiarity that their lips met, each touch seemed to burn through him anew – as though now, here, was when she first deigned him worthy of her presence, of her person. He offered her his fealty, too, whether she wished it or not — but it was not fealty on his mind now as he strengthened his hold on her, standing steady even as she leaned into his frame, hands roving her waist, her back, her cheeks, all the places that his hands were familiar with and whose presence they had missed in these past weeks. When she pulled away, if only to breathe, he chased after her again — but only for a light press of his lips to hers, an evidence to himself that she was here, and this was no dream, and for this hour, or this minute, at least, he could kiss her as much as they wished.

He felt his mouth curl into a small, satisfied smile — always far too proud of himself with such praise on offer — and squeezed the backs of her arms, intoxicated by her mouth alone. “If you did not want your words to go to my head, you wouldn’t say things like that,” he said, one brow raised in admonishment, though his smile diminished it. He let her go easily when she pulled away, turning to face her back, wondering absently if she was cold. This city was colder than their home, it was true, but he was familiar with long nights spent on the march even in winter months, and could reckon with the cold with little trouble — though he did prefer a hearth. To her, perhaps, this was cooler than comfortable. He approached her from behind, just close enough for his heat to warm her.

“Is that what brings you here, then? Theodore’s plans?” he asked, keeping his tone as light as he could even as the question — as any question of Theodore’s plans, goals, intent — sowed seeds of frustration within him. He knew Helena’s desires, knew her mind, and yet. He was not a spy, and would not be. “If you wish to know his plans,” he murmured into her hair, willing away his frustration so he could remain in the quiet pleasure that her company brought him. “Then I can direct you to his chambers. They are not so distant from your own.”

The following offer was – almost tempting. Branas raised a questioning brow. “Anything?” he asked, eyes flicking down to her lips, then further down as his mind did what any sane mind would do, presented his lover offering a favour so carelessly. He leaned closer in, raising a hand to hold her neck, not the possessive hold she had placed around his throat earlier, but a supporting one, fingers sinking into the soft hair at her nape. “Any manner I deem just?”

Generous heat shedding from Branas’ body had been absent for only a moment––hardly long enough to be noted, let alone mourned––before he returned to her, cloaking the back of her shoulders with his chest.  Helena eased into the carafe of his body; her long, elegant fingers still musing the silhouette of Theotokos splayed on her chest, Tyrian purple gems glittering against Helena’s olive complexion, lacquered with balms and a constellation of freckles.  She stood as still as a Greek bust––a marble statue whose mossy elbows held fast at her side, whose fractured throat she arched just so to appear artfully askew, accommodating the calloused palm curving protectively around her neck.  She noted his eyes traipse to her lips, ample and exquisitely bowed, to her decolletage; as he loomed above her, his eyes could feast on the sliver of milk-white skin flashed below, the cresting handfuls of a modest bosom, without so much as cleaving his gaze from her own.

‘Thank you, Branas, for the reminder.’  Helena rolled her dark eyes, flippantly.  ‘Though I am not certain that visiting my brother is what I had in mind this evening,’ she admitted, canting her head an inch further to allow him a full stretch of skin to lavish his endless caresses.  She locked her eyes with his, two fluid caches of obsidian, flecked with the gold inlaid within the Emperor’s crown, and tsked.  Helena’s tongue flicked viciously against her mouth as she spoke of Theodore, the venom welled within her her breast belying her cool composure as it oozed in the bitter inflection of her voice.  Branas was too loyal to him, to Theodore; yet, it was one of many subjects that neither dared broach, for they threw up impenetrable walls at the sound of it.  Neither would relent, though she had half-expected he might––somehow, somewhere, down the line.  ‘We are no Zeus and Hera, after all.  But if I must find another man to entertain me, perhaps you’ll point me in the direction of one of your able compatriots.  Admiral Ooryphas comes to mind.’ 

In a rare turn, Charles chose to exercise forbearance. Her question asked for no answer because she had posed it with surety. It was the confidence of a siege underway, of a mortal wound in which the blade still sat lodged, with which Charles himself would stand alongside Amis and Amiles as some mangled predator spasmed at their feet. Still, an answer weighed heavy in his mouth. He longed to discard her remark concerning the dancing; what was it, after all, except an afterthought of a balm? There would be no dancing. He wished to lean close and whisper against the innermost curve of her dainty ear that she should pray to his God the implications of her taunting were untrue. He had, after all, approached her with surety of his own—the proprietorial sort. Always, he saw the gossamer tendrils of what would be dangling above the cusp of his palm. Such was his luck that he only ever needed to grasp them. They, these threads, took her form on this evening.

Would it be easier to whisper if they danced?

“I distract you already,” Charles answered. “Do you not now stand here, imagining what we may do, instead of hurrying away to the occupation which beckoned you first?” He would have chuckled, but he was distracted, too. The provocation held his thoughts without respite as he watched her scrutinizing eyes. How depthless they were; how pitch-black, dark as sin.

‘How do you know these things?’ reverberated as a chant in his thoughts.

‘Do you recall the sound of your father’s laughter?’ he could have asked.

Her answer would not have mattered, for the climax would be the same: ‘Do you hear it now?’

“I thought we might converse in private.” Instead of the derision which filled him like breath in his lungs, he supplied this forthright explanation. The crowded nature of the room and laughability of absconding from it prompted him to further elaborate, adding, “There will be other times, but I make no habit of letting opportunities go unused.”

Indeed, better than fleeting dance floor embraces, the edges of tables and shadowed walls of the hall proved intimate for dozens of their fellow attendees. Anyone might stare nakedly upon them as they talked—Charles did this himself, eyeing the dowager tsarina still as a statue here, or the sour faces of one very holy Henri and his wife there. Still, the unpleasant music and discordant murmur of overlapping voices discouraged eavesdropping. As he considered it, he wished to be seen conversing with the Byzantine princess. He imagined the eyes of interested parties tracking his movements like able sailors marked celestial bodies. What would they make of these constellations, which must be either woven together into the darkness by the hand of God or a meaningless trick played by unseasoned eyes? With full faith, Charles would bet upon the former.

The hand, once raised, now beckoned in a fluid gesture that they relocate. Any aperture in the press of gathered people would do—a gap along the wall, beneath one of the bronze lamps, where the warm light would roll shadows across their figures like water. Perhaps they would be hitherto undisturbed by bothersome nobodies with their own cravings for her attention. Were she anyone but herself, he would march them outside into the summertime night.

“You cannot say my company fails to intrigue you,” he insisted, smiling, his voice more genial accusing. She could, in fact, disagree. Their exchange insofar suggested she would do exactly that. However, her words’ rough edges had given him a pretext to closely attend to the language of her body. Thus, he concluded with astounding sincerity, “If you do, then I will be undeterred, and you will be a winsome liar.”

Tittering had released into quiet forbearance, a hand encrusted with tasteful rings brought to her centre, a steadying weight beneath Helena’s bosom. ‘You do distract me,’ she relinquished, the bow of her lip ever-so-slightly inclined, ‘for you amuse me.’ The lie pearled with ease from Helena’s tongue, gliding like a swan across the curve of her mouth as she met Charles’ weighted gaze with a charming cant of her head.  There were many adjectives with which to describe Helena – and not all of them particularly honeyed – but distracted was not among them.  She was keenly alert to the cacophony of the reception hall, the glissando of hautboys, the mindless din of chatter between fresh blood and old hands, the swish of tunics and slippered feet.  She embraced mayhem, the music, the laughter, the courtly love that flowed from it, and cast a discrete gaze once more to the crowd.  She found, there, a heavenly terenne: flecked with rulers, nobles, crimson-coated patriarchs, roughly edged by eunuchs and helots, as loyal and as silent as hounds.  Cardinally, Helena had remained attuned to the whereabouts of her sister, Sophia, who sat at the helm of the grail and proved, at any moment, liable to weep her face hideous.  Her childlike nature lived at the periphery of it all like a leper.  Helena observed as she wafted a hand across her belly – cradling the vacuity that would one day sow Moscow’s next tsar – before the quicksilver flash of her eyes returned to Charles.

‘For, in truth, you amuse me. And, if you must know, I relish being amused.’

From a passing salver offered expectantly to the princess, she plucked an apricot, bringing the ripened, sweet drupe to her mouth as she expelled Sophia’s crumpled countenance from mind.  Her lips curved generously over the succulent treat, its pit discarded in the servant’s palm.  ‘If you will not dance with me,’ she countered, chin jutted, ‘then I must find some other way to impress.’  Her words catered to his manner, a scholarly bearing assuaged only by impertinence, his decadence, a self-righteousness that both repulsed and attracted Helena –– iron-locking the reputation for hedonism that proceeded him.  She would not begrudge a private discussion, for the chillblained Vasilyeviches would hardly miss them, not so long as they remained distracted by the grandeur of Tsar Alexander’s matrimonial panache.  Her mother’s voice was at the shell of her ear, reminding her to curb her insolence, rein in her cheek.  Alice had clutched the relics of Byzantium, Christ’s fingerbone and a fragment of Saint Peter’s ribs, and prayed, prayed devoutly, that the French King would not be dissuaded by her daughter’s sharpness, her acidity.  In any event, Helena surmised, the augusta’s intercessions had either been in vain or spiritually relieved; Charles seemed intrigued by her character, delightedly affronted.  Helena easily feigned the disposition of a blushing bride, of Byzantine scraps. 

there was a singular light among the dim muscovite summer, one face whose gaze could never be questioned. helena. in truth, sophia had always imagined their roles reversed. it was she who was meant to stand in resplendent solidarity amidst the crowd while helena played the part of gleaming bride. the younger princess would marry well yet quietly, and now having known the alternative, she may have even preferred such a fate. it was the elder princess who was built for the pomp and circumstance of nuptials of these proportions. yet it was sophia who headed the procession of dowries and glories.

perhaps she could attribute a fraction of the weighted feeling to exhaustion from the weeks-long journey to moscow. or perhaps her lithe frame was already beginning to crack.

whichever was the root of her disquietude, helena’s honeyed words soothed her. for the first time could truly breathe, her ribs no longer seemingly crushed by the heavy brocade. at helena’s warm touch — her hands were always warm — sophia allowed a true smile to blossom across her rosy lips. she shook her head minutely: “i hardly think that i am beloved,” the younger responded, glancing again to the whirling bodies beneath the dais. they were all lost in the feast and the music and the conversation, but every now and then a scheming eye would pass over the byzantine princess. “they look like they would much sooner eat me alive than love me.” yet she rose from her place, a hint of joy returning to her complexion. “but only you could lure me willingly into the lion’s den, though i do not think i could stomach a dance at the moment. an easy promenade, perhaps.”

Her sister’s hesitation had not extinguished the flames of Helena’s blazing pride.  Uncertainty was natural in a bride, trepidation an intrinsic symptom of approaching a holy and unbreakable convent, with the successful union of two empires resting upon her fragile shoulders.  Helena yearned to sympathize, yearned to prepare a place in Sophia’s soul for Moscow as best she could, yet what she knew of marriage had been ascertained from the grapevine, through women before her who had entered God’s sacred institution of marriage. She had never been dragged to its sacrificial altar herself, nor even betrothed.  Where the fate of her sister’s hand lay in Moscow, Helena’s had assumed an unyielding grip on Byzantium: its litany of precious states, islands, dominions, its gold rush.  Her fingers were bloodstained, where Sophia’s would be neat and gleaming with nuptial bands, but it was as God himself had willed it, and soon, he might will her to be Queen of France.

Charles nodded as she spoke. She made her misshapen words intelligible, but it was the all-important confidence buoying her voice which he understood best. Seeing her up close, he decided that Helena was a woman whose corpse might someday disappoint. She would, in all likelihood, not rest in her coffin as a breathtaking tragedy. Would anyone, their eyes blinded by beauty rather than tears, suggest in despair that she appeared to have fallen asleep in the midst of a fruitful life? For some, to have their inner hearth extinguished would be to render their exquisite splendor as mere prettiness. How many unfortunates aspired pitifully to be even this, pretty? Yet, Charles considered it an insult; she might, too. The arrogance of her response told him that this radiance was not because heaven had sculpted her countenance to catch and refract its own angelic light. He had seen such people. The letters—those assuring him she was pretty, that she was capable, that she had suffered no horrific accidents rendering her unmarriageable—had also implied vivacity. Now, he saw how it imbued her. Wealth softened ugliness and made goddesses of mortals, it was true, but so too did mystique. He smiled, easily, imagining both the way she must laugh and the angry cadence her voice must take. 

They would fight, this he knew. She may be her most radiant in such moments. Indeed, personal experience suggested the most beloved ( if not best ) wives were.

“At last, clarity.”  Still nodding, Charles made the declaration to himself before continuing.  “Your effort must be the reason that you, an old maid of near-forty, have groomed and sculpted no husband or children of which to speak.”  Perhaps he meant this statement as a barb, but only insofar as one might use a gilded spur, bidding a svelte courser to demonstrate its swiftness.  “You might imagine the contradictions in Alice’s many claims. Now, in the flesh: no paradox, no deceit, but a curiosity. You have piqued mine, anyway.”

He raised a hand, anticipating and forestalling a clever retort.  “You walked from the dais with purpose. Allow me to distract you from it, only briefly, and I will repay you—generously.”

Stern intent settles upon Helena’s brow as she listens to Charles’ words, her eyes discreetly tracing the movement of his lips to keep abreast of the rapid French eluding them.  So as to not incriminate her own ignorance, Helena flutters her gaze, every so often, from his mouth to his eyes; entrapped by the warmth of them, thickly-rimmed Bosphorus azure, flanking a self-important Carolingian nose.  There, at least, Parisians had not exaggerated; it was, perhaps, one of the few artistic embellishments of size that would not disappoint Helena, were her mother’s negotiations with the French bound to segue into nuptials.  ‘I––,’ Helena begins, yet before she could get a word in edgewise, a solicitor at her hand gravels for attention, for a moment of the glittering despoina’s regard.

A rustic-looking Russian princess (with only extravagant jewels and beetle-dye smeared across her sullen cheeks to recommend her) gathers Helena’s hand in her bony fingers, bringing them to the gelid plane of her mouth.  Helena’s face turns to the poor gallowsbird, disarmed with a tight smile as if to convey: not now.  The gaunt creature leaves with a royal escort and Helena’s own blessing, and with the stain of her lush, pert mouth.  Her eyes swivel back to the king.  Do you see, ruler of the Franks?  How I am valued?

In an instant, however, Helena’s eyes –– aqueous, molten pools of volcanic rock –– flash with ire.  An ire that, God above, Helena was inept at concealing.  Stupefaction and shock wrought by Charles’ quip follows, her offense assuaging into something risible, nettling.  The sound that lifts from her throat is boisterous, glorious.  Her laughter chimes like a bell, accompanied by an elegant incline of her neck, revealing a sun-kissed column of her skin, palisaded by fine silks.  ‘Make no mistake, my lord, it is no accident that I am unmarried.’  She moves a pace further toward him so that her words might lower, reserved for his ear alone, a whispered challenge.  ‘You see, there is security in my position, an ‘old maid’ I might be.  I know, at least, that my family will not put me aside when the sudden urge for something freshly felled and hot-blooded strikes.’  Instinctively, Helena finds the radiant Aliénor in the crowd, both a victim and reward of Charles’ errant lust.

Aliénor’s perfume lingered in the court of France, Helena was told, like a watchful ghost.  She cants her dark head to the side, head tilted upward to leer at Charles boldly, openly; affording him neither a bashful flutter of her lashes, nor a roseate glow to her cheeks. She is all woman: Eve who devours, Godia who rides dauntlessly.  The trappings of an ingenue escape her.  ‘The same cannot be said of women with spouses, can it?’