Elsewhere in the palace, an official was hurrying through the halls, having been summoned by the emperor at an hour when no one is summoned for good news.
Michel Laurent of the Imperial Household ran the last stretch convinced he was in serious trouble. He arrived to find Ottol seated with a whetstone and a bare intensity of focus, polishing his sword.
The official asked timidly what His Majesty's orders were at such a late hour.
Without a word, Ottol unsheathed the blade the rest of the way, and the sharp metallic ring of it made Michel flinch down to his shoes.
The emperor took a seat, his expression unreadable. At last he looked up at the sweating official and said that there was something he wanted to ask him.
Michel waited, mentally reviewing every decision he had made that year.
He asked, carefully, what it was his emperor could possibly want.
Ottol leaned forward with a grave expression and asked: "Do all noble women get blisters from their shoes?"
Michel was baffled. He had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night for fashion advice.
Suspecting it might be some kind of test, he answered as professionally as he could. Noble ladies, he explained, had their footwear made to order, from soft and comfortable leather, fitted precisely. Properly made shoes should not cause pain of any kind.
Ottol listened with total attention, thinking about a badly fitted shoe and a bleeding heel and five days of bandages.
The official added, confidently, that custom-made shoes did not cause blisters — assuming, of course, that they were the right size.
That stopped the emperor where he sat.
He thought about Flora. Why would a princess be wearing shoes that did not fit her? And the longer he turned it over, the more he found that a great many things about his wife failed to add up.
Misinterpreting the sudden silence entirely, Michel began to sweat again.
Then Ottol issued his command. "Find out which shoe designs are popular with the noble ladies, and have a hundred pairs made for the empress."
The official was stunned.
He explained nervously that custom orders took a considerable amount of time, and that producing so many of them quickly would be extremely difficult.
Ottol's patience thinned to nothing. He coldly told the man to stop making excuses and simply follow the command.
Intimidated, Michel agreed at once. Then he asked when he might measure Her Majesty's foot — and was told that the empress had an injury, and that it would have to wait.
He stood there panicking quietly over an impossible task with no measurements attached to it.
Which was when the emperor offered a solution.
He held out his own hand, palm flat, and stated calmly that it was about the same length as Flora's foot. Then he held up two fingers to indicate the narrow width of her ankle, and added, with the very faintest blush, that her feet were exceptionally slender.
The official stood absolutely frozen, stunned by the specificity of the emperor's knowledge.
He recovered enough to promise that his craftsmen would begin on the first few pairs immediately, and he hurried away marvelling that His Majesty should remember the empress's foot size so perfectly.
They must, he concluded, be spending some very sweet time together.
That single observation sparked a rumour, and the rumour went across the empire like fire through dry grass.
News of the imperial couple's growing affection reached Duke Glass's estate before the week was out.
Inside, a porcelain vase hit the floor and burst.
A maid cried out a warning to be careful, but it was already too late. Lady Evelyn stood over the shards with her face hardening, overcome with frustration and jealousy.
She stewed on it for hours.
She kept remembering an afternoon in Ottol's study, surrounded by the lavish tributes that arrived there from every corner of the empire. Eager for his attention, she had picked up a brilliant necklace made of rare Curia jewels and held it against her throat and asked whether it suited her.
He had not looked up from his paperwork. Not once.
And her frustration boiled clean over now, because that was the very necklace he had given to the woman from Pedania. The gift he had not even acknowledged when Evelyn held it up in front of him had gone around another woman's neck as a wedding present.
While Flora was beginning to find something like happiness, Lady Evelyn was being consumed by rage. She decided she could not allow this to continue, and that the new empress would have to be got rid of quickly.
Full of purpose, she stormed into her father's office.
Duke Glass completely misread his daughter's mood. He greeted her warmly and offered, if she couldn't sleep, to tell her a story.
Annoyed, Evelyn pushed him away and informed him that she was no longer a child. She had come with a serious request.
Eager to please her, the duke cheerfully promised to grant any wish she had.
Her expression hardened as she made it. She wanted the empress eliminated.
The friendly manner vanished from the duke's face instantly, and he tried to send her out of the room.
Evelyn refused to be dismissed. She caught his arm and insisted that such a task should be easy enough for a man like him.
Grimly, her father explained that Flora was a princess of a treaty nation, and that they could not simply move against her.
Desperate, Evelyn reminded him of his own promise — that no one but their family would ever sit beside the emperor.
Her tears finally broke his resolve. She demanded to know how he could stand by and watch that woman act as though she owned the throne.
The duke tried to dismiss her fears. Flora was merely a tribute from a defeated nation, he said. A convenience. Someone the emperor could never truly love.
But Evelyn knew that whatever ran between those two went far deeper than gifts, and she said so. She was afraid — genuinely afraid — that Ottol was falling for the empress.
Overcome by his daughter's panic, the duke put his arms around her and promised, reluctantly, that he would find a way to handle the situation before the emperor's feelings became irreversible.
Evelyn added one more thing. The emperor's headaches, she said, seemed to have vanished entirely of late, and she intended to ask the physician about it.
Her father warned her to keep her dislike of Flora hidden for the time being.
Evelyn was disgusted by the idea and protested that even a simple conversation with the empress left her drained.
Unmoved, the duke told her gently and very firmly to be a good girl and do as he said.
A few days later, Cecil reported that the empress's injury had healed completely, and was promptly summoned to see her.
He entered Flora's chambers to check on her progress and found her waiting with a radiant smile, looking entirely recovered. After the formal greetings, he knelt to inspect the foot.
She asked whether he intended to wrap it up again, and there was a note of worry in the question.
He reassured her that the wound was completely closed and needed no more bandages.
As he unwound the dressing for the last time, Flora beamed with pure relief and gratitude, overjoyed to be free of it at last.
Cecil remarked that Her Majesty seemed to be in a particularly good mood today.
Then her smile vanished.
She had spotted a figure standing in the doorway. It was Ottol. She asked, nervously, how long he had been standing there.
The emperor came across the room with a troubled look on his face. He could not stop himself wondering why her happy expression had disappeared at the exact instant she laid eyes on him, and it clearly bothered him a great deal.
He said so out loud. Her smile had gone the moment she saw him.
Trying to cover her tracks, Flora stammered that she had only been surprised by his sudden visit.
Unconvinced, Ottol crossed the rest of the room and sat down right beside her, dismissing the excuse: there was nothing startling about a husband checking on his wife.
Then he told Cecil, casually, to continue the treatment.
The physician applied the ointment to the healed foot, and the emperor watched every single movement of his hands with a sharp, possessive glare that filled the room with tension.
The glare grew until it was practically suffocating.
Cecil, feeling the full weight of it, made a bold move. He looked up and asked whether His Majesty would like to take over.
The suggestion flustered the emperor, who stammered in surprise. Flora was just as shocked and told him he couldn't possibly apply the medicine himself.
Recovering his composure, Ottol asked coldly who exactly had decided that, and made it clear he would do precisely as he pleased.
With a look of grim determination, he declared that he would handle the treatment. He ordered a stunned Flora to hold still, and she was too shocked to do anything but agree.
Then he took her foot into his lap, and his touch was surprisingly careful.
As he prepared the ointment, Flora's heart pounded in her chest. She noticed a strange contrast: the medicine itself was cold, and his hands were incredibly warm.
This unexpected gentleness from the man she had once been certain would kill her left her utterly flustered and speechless.
Every place his fingers pressed against her skin felt warm enough to send a jolt through her. Her face flushed, and she could not begin to process this side of him.
Ottol was just as affected, because he had noticed that her soothing scent had grown stronger again.
Later, the imperial physician delivered his findings. While treating the empress, he had observed that her distinctive fragrance was unusually potent.
It only confirmed what Ottol had already been thinking, and left him pondering exactly how much power this woman held over him.
Cecil went further. He had observed that the scent weakened when she was flustered or frightened, and that it grew much stronger after His Majesty had treated her kindly.
Ottol put it together quickly. Was the strength of the scent tied to her emotions?
Cecil confirmed the theory and proposed a simple test. Do something that pleases the empress.
Ottol scoffed and asked whether he was supposed to sit around flattering her.
With a smirk, Cecil clarified that it was more a matter of deepening their relationship — and his teasing tone earned him an immediate dismissal from the room.
Making his hasty exit, the physician pleaded with the emperor to at least consider the suggestion, reminding him that it was for his own well-being.
Ottol furiously ordered him out.
And once he was alone, he scoffed at the whole idea.