Entered Out of Spite

Tamsin Vey entered the Trial of the Glass Court for the worst possible reason, and she would like that on the record before anyone starts calling her brave. She did not enter to win. She did not enter out of ambition, or duty, or any of the noble things the heralds liked to read out about the candidates. She entered because her cousin Davitt, at a supper she had not wanted to attend, in front of forty people she would now have to see again, had laughed at the idea of her name on the candidate roll. Not cruelly, even. That was the part that had got under her skin and stayed. He had laughed kindly, the way you laugh at a child announcing they will be a star, and he had said, "Oh, Tam, the Glass Trial isn't for people like us," and everyone at the table had done the small warm sympathetic murmur that meant they agreed and were too polite to say so. People like us. Lesser cousins. Names from the thin end of the family, decorative, unconsidered, invited to suppers to fill chairs. Tamsin had gone home, and lain awake being angry in the specific, useless way you are angry at one in the morning, and somewhere around two she had stopped being usefully angry and started being dangerously calm, and at dawn she had walked to the Court registry and put her name on the roll, purely so that Davitt would have to watch her do it. That, she will be the first to tell you, is not a heroine's reason. It is a grudge. She entered the most famous and most lethal succession trial in the kingdom out of pure, petty, two-in-the-morning spite. The trouble started when she did not lose. The Glass Court chooses its heir the way it has for two hundred years — not by blood-order, which the Court considers crude, but by a season of trials, twelve of them, each one designed to measure a different quality the Court has decided a ruler ought to have. Wit. Nerve. Mercy. The reading of people. Forty candidates enter at midsummer and the field is cut after every trial, and the one still standing at the first frost wears the glass crown. Everyone of importance enters. Davitt had entered. Davitt was, the supper-table consensus held, likely to place quite respectably. Tamsin had entered expecting to be cut in the first trial, suffer one clean afternoon of public failure, and spend the rest of the season watching Davitt remember, every single day, that she had at least dared. She placed fourth in the first trial. She herself did not understand it at first. The first trial was a trial of wit — a long, knotted, deliberately unfair negotiation, candidates against candidates, and Tamsin had spent her whole decorative unconsidered life at the thin end of the family learning to read a room she had no power in, to know which smile meant yes and which meant later and which meant never, to get the things she needed out of people who outranked her without ever once being seen to ask. It turned out — and nobody was more astonished than Tamsin — that this was the entire skill the first trial measured. The powerful candidates had never had to learn it. They had never had to. They had power; people simply gave them things. She placed fourth. Davitt placed nineteenth, and was cut. And that should have been the end of it — her petty grudge satisfied beyond her wildest two-in-the-morning hopes, Davitt sent home, Tamsin free to lose the second trial with her point thoroughly made. Except that two things happened on the night the first results were posted. The first was that the prince came to find her. The Glass Trials were run, every year, by the reigning monarch's eldest child — this year a prince named Aris, who was twenty-six and elegant and entirely opaque, and whose single job for the season was to administer the trials with perfect impartiality and never, by word or glance, favour a candidate. Tamsin had seen him only at a distance, presiding. She had not expected to find him waiting in the cold colonnade outside the candidates' lodging, alone, having clearly arranged to be alone, looking at her with an expression that was doing a great deal of work to appear like nothing at all. "Candidate Vey," he said. "Fourth place. From a name nobody on the roll could find on a family tree without help." He studied her. "I run an impartial trial. I want to be clear that I am not, in any way, here to be partial. I am here because I have administered four of these seasons, and I have learned to notice things, and I have noticed something about you that I think you have not yet noticed about yourself, and I find I would rather you heard it from me tonight than discovered it the hard way in the second trial." "That sounds," said Tamsin, "remarkably like partiality wearing a coat." The corner of his mouth moved, and was disciplined. "The second thing you should know," he went on, as though she had not spoken, "is the reason I have broken four years of habit to stand in a cold colonnade. You placed fourth, candidate. And in the two hundred years of the Glass Trials, every candidate who has placed in the top five of the first trial and come from outside the great names — every one — has met with an accident before the season's end. Five of them. The Court calls it ill luck. I have read all five accounts, and I administer this trial, and I am telling you, here, where no one can hear me say it: it is not ill luck." The cold of the colonnade seemed to deepen. Somewhere behind them, in the lodging, the other candidates were celebrating or grieving their results, loud and ordinary. "You entered out of spite, didn't you," Prince Aris said. It was not unkind. It was, somehow, the most disarming thing he had said. "I can usually tell. The spite ones have the steadiest hands — they never expected to be here, so they are not afraid of losing. It makes them very dangerous, and it makes them, candidate Vey, very easy to underestimate, which is the only reason you are alive to have this conversation." He took a step back, restoring the proper distance, the impartial distance. "So. You have a choice, and you have until the second trial to make it. Withdraw — candidates withdraw, it is no shame, your cousin is already gone and your point is already made — and go home, safe, your grudge magnificently satisfied. Or stay. Place high again. And understand that from the moment you do, you stop being a girl who entered to spite her cousin, and become a girl that someone in this Court has a two-hundred-year-old reason to want quietly dead." He left her there. He was good at leaving; it was, she would learn, the most princely thing about him. And Tamsin Vey stood alone in the cold colonnade, a lesser cousin from the thin end of the family, holding a fourth-place finish she had never meant to earn — and discovered, somewhat to her own alarm, that the two-in-the-morning calm was settling over her again, and that it did not feel, this time, like spite at all.