At six the next morning she ran the perimeter of the training ground, and at seven she was still running, and the four knights of the Valkyrie stood at the rail watching her go round with expressions of pure disbelief.
"She doesn't stop," one of them said.
Within a fortnight they had stopped watching and started running with her. They were in better spirits than any of them could remember being; one morning the commander said, with his hands on his knees and his lungs burning, "We can't just go on despairing, can we, Your Majesty. It's undignified."
That was the whole point of it. A reputation is dispelled from underneath — not by proclamations, but by an empress who turns up at six in the morning in a plain coat and sweats alongside the men she intends to own.
After training she asked, "Sir North, what does the day look like?"
The ground went sideways.
Her vision came apart into wet light and she felt herself go, and she got one hand into his coat on the way down.
This body, she thought, furiously, cannot keep up with me.
She looked up at him, exhausted and unrepentant.
"Leonora." He had caught her against his chest. His voice had gone completely out of formality. "Leonora — a physician. Somebody fetch a physician—"
"There's no need."
"You are grey, Your Majesty—"
"It's anaemia. I have a body made of glass and I ran three miles in it. That is the entire diagnosis."
"Then don't get up. Please don't get up."
"Derek." She said it the way she would have said it twenty years ago, if she had been anybody's childhood friend. "Would you rather I never left the bedroom at all?"
He went stiff.
"Is that it?" She let herself lean on him, deliberately, and looked up. "You'd like me kept in your arms, the way I used to be."
"Your Majesty — I have never — that is not what I—"
"Your Majesty," an attendant called from the gate, "the tailor and the designer have arrived."
She pushed off his chest and was walking before he had finished his sentence. "Let's go."
He stood where she had left him and watched her cross the sand, and everything he was not permitted to say sat quietly in his face. Then he went after her, and as she passed the rail he dropped to one knee behind her, head bowed, in front of every man there.
An hour later she came back out and turned in front of them.
"Look," she said.
She was wearing a uniform of deep red, cut close and long, with the collar high — a coat a person could actually fight in, and be seen in from the far end of a field.
"It's beautiful," Derek said.
"I know that." She faced her knights. "You'll all have one. The whole order — every man in the Valkyrie, and every man who joins it after, in this cloth, in this cut. It's warmer than what you have, and it's lighter, and it doesn't chafe at the shoulder."
The knights stood there with their mouths open.
"The measurements," the youngest one said suddenly. "Last week — that's what the measurements were for—" and then he bowed and thanked her twice, and got tangled up in it, and one of the others grabbed him by the head and shook him.
"So," the Empress said. "Will you hand over your glory again? You've done it once."
Then she took Derek aside, and this part she said seriously, because they had earned seriousness.
"This banquet is the first thing that will ever have happened in my name. It matters more than I can explain to you. The Imperial Guard have refused me. The Crusade are three hundred miles away and would refuse me if they were here. I have no other options, and I am not pretending otherwise to you."
She looked up at the night sky over the training ground.
Never again, she thought. Not one more thing of mine goes to somebody else.
"Lads," said the commander to the other three, quietly. "You feel the same. I know you do."
"My position is not stable," she told them. "I won't lie about that either. But whatever standing I have, I will spend on you, first and before anything else."
She looked at them and waited.
Afterwards the youngest knight would tell it this way: that they had fallen so far they had stopped counting the distance, that they drank in the afternoons because the mornings were unbearable, that a man can carry being hated but cannot carry being useless. And then a woman half their size had come down to the training ground and called them out of their minds to their faces — and the strange thing, the thing he could never explain properly, was that it had made them happy.
Under a bright sun, on clean-raked sand, the four knights of the Valkyrie knelt in a row and swore themselves to their new commander.
The Empress smiled.
She took stock. She had two things now that nobody could take off her: money enough to buy a small country, and the only title in the Empire that outranked the temple's favourite.
Come and try me, she thought. Please.
The banquet hall filled from the hour the doors opened.
It was a dazzling success. Water came down the whole height of the north wall in a sheet lit from behind, and the light off it moved across the ceiling all evening.
"Was Her Majesty always this accomplished?" one lady said to another. "Where has this been?"
"It's a different order of thing entirely, isn't it," her friend said. "Say what you like — you can see the birth in it. The Saint's little evenings never looked like this."
Helen stood in the middle of the crowd by herself.
A noblewoman going past looked at her, and looked away, and the look had scorn all the way through it. Helen closed her eyes and put a pleasant expression back on her face.
"—and did you see the holly? Out on the tables, if you please."
"In this house? Somebody should have told her."
She turned her head away and set her teeth.
Her hand closed slowly at her side. Behind her eyes something burned and did not show.
It isn't fair, she thought. It has never once been fair. That woman was born with a duke behind her and a name in front of her, and I have nothing behind me at all, and they call it accomplishment.
And Enri had made her walk in alone. They had always arrived together — always, for four years, on his arm through the main doors — and tonight he had sent word ahead that she should come by herself.
The herald's voice went up over the noise, announcing the delegation from the desert.
Why, she thought. Why would you do this to me tonight, of all nights.
"Barbarians," a guest near her said comfortably. "I'm told they wear the same coat for a year. Do brace yourself."
A single polished boot came down on the marble inside the doors.
The delegation of Quan came into the hall in white and gold, and the whole room turned. They wore robes that moved like water, worked with gold at the hem and shoulder, and every one of them was cleaner and better dressed than any noble standing there. At their head walked a man in an ornate flowing robe, dark-skinned, handsome, unhurried, and his eyes were a startling gold.
Helen stared at them with her lips parted.
They passed within a few feet of her, and she had exactly one thought, and it arrived whole.
They're magnificent.