Rika

Rika is Malaya’s vizier and intimate friend, a political ally whose declining health becomes inseparable from the personal crisis between Malaya and Guin. Crush has taken her sight and is expected to bring a horrific death, but it has not erased her wit, her bond with Malaya, or her ability to perceive what her friends cannot yet admit to themselves.

Identity and Declining Health

Rika holds the office of vizier and stands close to the center of Malaya’s royal household. Her illness has altered the practical shape of that closeness: after Crush blinded her completely, she was moved into Malaya’s suite, where Guin could keep watch over her as well. The arrangement places Rika within the protection of the household, but also makes the household’s danger and grief part of her daily surroundings.

Her condition is more than blindness. Crush is described as bringing its sufferers a screaming death, and Malaya fears the severity of what Rika will endure at the end. Rika tires quickly and must conserve her strength; before a Senate meeting, she rests rather than joining the day’s activity. Music remains one of the few pleasures she can enjoy easily and one of the least taxing on her constitution. These details give her illness a daily texture: it limits movement and energy, while requiring those who love her to measure ordinary visits against the cost of exhausting her.

Friendship with Malaya

Rika and Malaya’s friendship is built from years of shared work and private amusement. They once sat at opposite ends of a piece of beadwork, heads bent as they gossiped and tried to outscheme political schemers. Guin would sit nearby, teasing them as little hens and sometimes making up off-key limericks to provoke their reactions. The woven fringe remains in the palace as a material trace of that companionship. Rika can no longer see well enough to bead, and Malaya cannot bring herself to continue an activity that Rika loved when her friend cannot join her; Rika’s fatigue has also made their former long stretches together harder to recover.

As Rika’s illness advances, Malaya’s fear of losing her overlaps with her fear of losing Guin. She tells Rika that she is already torn apart without him, and Rika responds with tenderness rather than reproach. She acknowledges that she will miss Malaya after death, while imagining that the many scapes and dimensions beyond it may offer possibilities in which she can picture whatever she wants. Her hope does not cancel her grief: she speaks wistfully of the husband and family she once wished for, and recognizes that separation from Malaya is the loss she cannot make entertaining.

Perception and Counsel

Rika’s blindness does not mean that she has lost every means of orientation. Her third power is a locus ability: she can find the location of anyone familiar to her, provided that person is in the same scape. When Malaya is distressed by Guin’s absence, Rika tells her that he remains in the city. The ability offers Malaya a concrete assurance without resolving the conflict or making Guin return; Rika’s help is a way of opening a path, not taking control of what Malaya must do next.

Rika’s more difficult counsel is emotional. Malaya proposes that Guin has left to protect Ashla from her fate, but Rika rejects that explanation: in her view, Guin is protecting himself. She refuses to tell Malaya exactly why, saying that the understanding will mean nothing until Malaya reaches it herself. She frames this withheld answer as a lesson Malaya must learn rather than a secret Rika can simply disclose. Her refusal is deliberate, but not cold; it preserves Malaya’s agency even as Malaya pleads for an explanation.

Rika can be playful as well as stern. When Malaya asks where Guin is so she can go after him, Rika turns the threat into teasing advice, suggesting that Malaya should win him back through intimacy. The humor recalls the earlier ease between the friends, but it also shows that Rika still speaks into the choices shaping Malaya’s future. Her failing strength has not made her a passive object of concern.

Place in the Royal Household

Rika’s status as vizier connects private illness to public rule. She is present in the political life surrounding Malaya’s Senate, even when her condition keeps her in bed. As Malaya prepares for another meeting about the royal marriage law, Rika listens to music and conserves her strength. The contrast is sharp: the Senate debates succession, marriage, and the security of the monarchy while Rika’s own time and unrealized hopes are narrowing.

The political setting also makes the household’s protection consequential. Malaya’s enemies have made attempts on the lives of people close to the royal leadership, and Guin’s guarding responsibilities extend to Rika after she is moved into the suite. Rika is not merely a friend at the edge of the political story: her office, her vulnerability, and her closeness to Malaya place her within the same network of care and danger that surrounds the monarchy.

Rika’s role is ultimately defined by the contrast between what she can still give and what illness is taking away. She cannot bead with Malaya as before, and her body requires rest; yet she can locate Guin, recognize the self-protective motive Malaya overlooks, and insist that Malaya arrive at understanding on her own. Her approaching death casts these acts in a particular light: friendship becomes both shared memory and present counsel, sustained by a woman whose physical world has contracted but whose attention to the people she loves remains acute.