At that very moment, the emperor was moving down the corridor with purpose.
The maids flattened themselves against the walls as he passed and watched him go, whispering that he was heading to the office again. They wondered whether he intended to skip sleeping tonight as well. He had been in a foul mood for days now, they agreed, and they would all be extremely careful when attending him.
In his office he threw his coat aside and dropped into the chair behind the desk. He did not touch a single document. He looked straight at Cecil, and the only question he had was this:
"How is the empress?"
She was resting quietly in her room, Cecil said.
Ottol asked whether the treatments were still ongoing.
Sensing exactly how deep the emperor's concern ran, Cecil suggested — mildly, innocently — that His Majesty might simply go and visit her himself.
Ottol scoffed at the idea and angrily denied that he was worried about her at all. He fumed in silence for a while instead, annoyed beyond measure that the woman's determination to hide her own pain now made him look like a bully in front of his entire household.
Then he cleared his throat and said that, since Cecil was insisting, he supposed he would go.
In her rooms, Flora sat by the window, lost in thought.
Vishi noticed the solemn mood at once. She draped a shawl over her lady's shoulders and asked whether she was feeling down.
Flora quietly admitted that she was.
The remedy Vishi proposed was a piggyback ride out into the fresh air. She announced it with total confidence, already turning around and crouching.
Amused despite herself, Flora asked whether someone as delicate-looking as Vishi could really carry a grown woman anywhere at all.
Vishi flexed both arms and insisted she was far stronger than she appeared.
She was so earnest about it that Flora couldn't help smiling, and did not have the heart to turn down the offer.
Whatever Vishi's arms could do, her legs disagreed. The instant Flora settled onto her back, they began to tremble. Flora regretted the entire enterprise immediately. There was a short cry, and then both of them lost their balance completely and went down in a heap on the floor.
The door opened.
Ottol stood in it with his guard behind him, and both of them stopped dead at the sight.
Horrified, Vishi scrambled to her knees to apologise, and looked up to find the emperor himself standing over her with a stony, unreadable expression.
His cold voice filled the room as he asked what, precisely, the two of them were doing.
Flora looked up, stunned to find him there at all.
He ignored the panicking maid entirely. He took hold of Flora's wrist and asked how long she intended to sit on the ground.
As he pulled her up toward him, her scent reached him, and the frustration went out of him like water out of a cracked jug.
Without another word he lifted her off the floor and into his arms. Carrying her out of the room, he sharply ordered his guard and her maid to leave them alone, and left everyone in the corridor frozen where they stood.
He carried her through the halls and into a bedroom and laid her gently down on the bed, and her heart was pounding so hard from the suddenness of it that she could not order a single thought.
Before she could try, he leaned over her, his red eyes fixed on hers with an intensity that made the room feel very small.
Something had been weighing on his mind lately, he said.
Flora stared up at him, trapped by the look on his face, and wondered what on earth he meant.
He pinned her where she was, and his voice dropped low and dangerous. He made it perfectly clear that her life depended on answering him honestly.
Flora froze. Her mind screamed a single thing at her — he knows, he's found out what I am, he knows I'm not the princess.
And as she trembled underneath him, Ottol registered something strange. The calming scent had vanished completely.
He ignored it. He took her jaw in his hand and reminded her, in plain words, of the reputation he had earned and the bodies it was built on. Then he demanded to know whether that was why she had been so silent. Whether it was fear.
Flora could not explain that he had misunderstood everything, because she could not speak at all.
And then his real concern arrived, and it took her completely by surprise.
He knew about her foot. He had known for five days. He wanted to know why she had walked the entire length of that garden in pain without saying one word about it.
His voice grew rougher as he pressed. Had she hidden it because she saw him the way everyone else saw him — as a murderous tyrant who could not be told anything?
Flora frantically tried to deny it and could not form the words, because a memory had risen up and taken the whole of her attention: a harsh lesson from a long time ago, in which she had learned that enduring suffering in silence was a virtue.
The memories came in a flood. Showing pain was an inconvenience to others. Saying you were hungry was an inconvenience. Being ill was an inconvenience. From very early on, enduring quietly had not been one way of living; it had been the only one available to her.
Back in the present, tears ran down her face, and she finally explained herself.
She had not wanted to be a bother to anyone.
The raw simplicity of it caught Ottol completely off guard. The anger drained out of his face and was replaced by something else entirely, and he reached out and gently wiped a tear from her cheek.
Through the tears, Flora told him the rest of the truth.
She had not hidden the pain because she distrusted him. She had endured it because she had been looking forward to seeing the flowers with him. Because she had wanted to stay by his side a little longer, and she had been afraid that if she complained, he would send her back inside.
Her words left him completely stunned.
He asked her quietly whether she really wanted to stay with him.
Finding a sliver of courage somewhere, Flora simply said that they were husband and wife.
The directness of it shattered whatever composure he had left. The Emperor of Nordvein sat there blushing and utterly speechless.
After the confession, a heavy silence filled the room. Ottol sat looking conflicted with himself until Flora gently touched his sleeve.
Gathering her nerve, she asked him quietly whether he still intended to kill her.
He told her, with brutal honesty, that he was thinking about it.
It shattered her. She burst into tears all over again, wailing that she had answered him honestly, that she had told him everything, that this was not fair.
Ottol was thrown into an outright panic. He told her not to cry. He demanded to know where the tough act from thirty seconds ago had gone. Overwhelmed, Flora collapsed against him, and the emperor sat there with his arms half-raised, utterly flustered.
Internally he was screaming. He had no idea — none whatsoever — how to comfort a crying woman.
Outside the door, Vishi tearfully told the guard that the emperor had cornered her lady in there and had forbidden anyone to enter.
Inside, left with no other option, Ottol simply waited until the sobs subsided. Then he asked, awkwardly, whether she had stopped.
Flora looked up with puffy red eyes and quietly apologised for her outburst.
The emperor's only thought was that Cecil was going to give him an absolute earful for making the empress cry.
Still completely out of his depth, he noticed her injured ankle. In a clumsy attempt to be useful, he took it and began to massage it, explaining that this was what Cecil did for his headaches.
Flora yelped that it hurt.
He let go instantly, panicking, and the sheer absurdity of the sight — the tyrant of the north recoiling from an ankle — made her laugh out loud, much to his embarrassment.
He gave the whole enterprise up and remembered what Cecil had actually advised, which was simply to apply the medicine.
Then he made her a solemn promise. He would not kill her. In exchange, she was never, under any circumstances, to tell Cecil about his medical efforts.
He observed, then, that she seemed to place a great deal of trust in his physician.
When Flora asked why he was so afraid of the doctor's lectures, he got flustered and retorted that she had never once asked him about his own skills.
Then he closed the distance between them, and it startled her badly enough that she flinched back, and her injured ankle gave out under her.
Ottol lunged and caught her before she hit the floor. He pulled her securely against him and warned her to be careful.
Held there in his arms, blushing furiously, Flora could not produce a single word.
The flustered emperor tried to justify himself, demanding to know what she thought she would do if she fell and hurt herself again.
Pressed against his chest, she could hear his heart hammering.
And she realised that the scent — her own scent, the one that had faded to nothing when she was frightened — was coming back now, stronger than it had ever been.
Overwhelmed by it, Ottol gave in to instinct. He pulled her tighter and buried his face in her hair and breathed her in, and the relief was immediate and enormous.
Under the full moon coming in through the window, he lost himself in it completely — and then snapped back to his senses, annoyed with himself for having forgotten himself again.
A blush climbed up his neck. He pulled back slightly and looked at her with flustered eyes and said the obvious thing, which was that the two of them were different.
Flora, still in his arms, was left entirely confused by the sudden change.
And then, overwhelmed by his confusing words, she went limp against him and fell fast asleep.
The emperor stared down at her, baffled beyond words. Who, he wondered, could possibly pass out at a moment like this?
Frustrated, he concluded that she must not see him as a man at all.
Then he gently laid her out on the bed, and reconsidered.
Perhaps her total lack of caution around him was not foolishness. Perhaps it meant she trusted him.
The realisation brought a deep blush to his face.