Those eyes, Helen thought, as the desert leader went by. Gold, and warm, and open — the exact opposite of Enri's, which had been shut against the world since he was nineteen.
Something new moved in her, hot and simple.
I want him.
From the balcony above the hall, Enrique watched the delegation cross the floor with his hand pressed over his mouth.
In the corridor behind the great staircase, the Empress and the Emperor of Nyx walked side by side.
They went out onto the landing together, hand in hand, presenting a front so united that nobody below would ever be able to describe it afterwards as anything else.
The desert party had gathered at the foot of the stairs, their long-haired leader in front, watching the two of them come down. The Empress smiled at the arriving guests with the ease of a woman who has never once been humiliated in public. Enrique kept his face cold and correct.
And on the opposite stair, at exactly the same moment, the Emperor of Quan and his first consort began to descend, so that the two royal couples came down into the hall together, matched step for step, to a rising noise of delight from every guest in the room.
Simpler than fighting about who walks in first, the Empress thought, inclining her head. Whoever thought of it saved us both a fortnight of letters.
The desert emperor grinned broadly at her across the width of the staircase. He had a confident, easy face, and he kept his eyes forward and his chin up as though the whole evening were a pleasure he had been looking forward to.
He seems like a decent man, she thought, which is a nuisance. I find it very hard to look at that face and see a man who packs his own brother off to a foreign bedroom with a knife.
Then her thoughts went sideways to her husband.
Enrique was watching the room with an expression that gave away nothing at all, except for a small muscle beside his eye that jumped once and then jumped again.
How, he was thinking. I closed every door. I bought out the designer, I frightened the architect's landlord, I had the artist's commission cancelled by three separate people. She had no one. Where did she find new people in a fortnight, and how did she build this?
He looked at her — poised, unhurried, holding the whole hall on a string — and thought: that is not my wife. That woman on the stairs has never been my wife.
The Empress, who was so tired she could feel her own pulse in her teeth, smiled and thought: show me your hand, Quan. Show me quickly, before this body gives out on the staircase in front of two empires.
She turned to greet the delegation, and the light caught the intricate necklace lying across her collarbone.
At the back of the desert party, a young man with gold eyes went scarlet to the ears and stared very hard at the floor.
"Your Majesty is generous," said the first consort of Quan, coming forward. She was a tall woman with dark hair and a wide, shrewd mouth. "My husband says that if we please the Empress tonight, the rest of the negotiation will go smoothly — that we should, ah, soften the ground first."
"Sweeten," the Empress said, in their language. "Not soften. You sweeten ground and you soften a hide. The other way round is an insult in the eastern provinces, and your husband is from the east."
There was a pause.
"Your Majesty speaks Quan?" the consort said, in Quan.
"A little."
"That is not a little." The woman laughed, genuinely delighted, while the two emperors looked on. "That is better than my youngest brother's, and he was educated for it. Your Majesty has an extraordinary ear."
The Empress accepted the compliment and was privately surprised by it. Flattery she could read at forty paces; this had not been flattery, and she wanted to know what the woman wanted.
The consort and her husband stood together, and she began to speak formally, and the hall quieted.
The Emperor of Quan drew something out of the fold of his robe: a small object, pale, like a piece of worked bone.
"This is not our idea," he said. "I want that understood at the beginning. The gods have commanded it."
He raised his voice so the room could hear him.
"It is the will of the gods that a certain blade — a divine dagger, one of a kind, held in our house for eleven generations — be presented tonight into the hands of the Empress of Nyx."
The cloth came off it. The dagger lay in the box on white silk, its handle worked with gold and small red stones, its blade oddly pale.
"With it," he said, "the spread of the Desert of Death will be halted."
"You are giving my wife a knife," Enrique said, into the silence.
"It's blunt, Your Majesty," the consort said pleasantly. "You could not cut bread with it. Feel the edge yourself, if you like."
"The Desert of Death grows," the Emperor of Quan said. "Every year it takes more of my southern provinces, and what comes out of it is no longer sand. Magical creatures walk in that country now, in numbers, and they walk outward. Whatever the gods intend by this, I am not in a position to argue with them." He bowed his head, formally, deeply. "I implore the Empress of Nyx to accept our offering."
The Empress did not move at once. A gift like that is never only a gift; a blade handed across a border in front of witnesses is a sentence in a language of its own, and she was reading it carefully.
At the back of the delegation the young man holding the box wondered, with a lurch, whether the Empress's kindness to him had had something to do with this — whether she had known all along what was coming tonight.
"Your Majesty is remarkably certain of divine intentions," Enrique said.
"I am not certain of anything," the desert emperor said, spreading his hands. "Who can know the will of the gods? I only know that they have never asked us for a thing before, and that they have asked for this. There is a purpose behind it larger than either of our houses." He gestured to the box. "Will Your Majesty hold it?"
The Empress stepped forward.
The young man with the gold eyes flushed to his collar as she came, and thought, in a kind of wonder: she doesn't know. She never knew who I was at all.
I'll test the thing myself, she thought, and reached out, and laid two fingers on the pale blade.