She took her hand back from the blade.
"Your Majesty went very quiet," the consort of Quan said carefully. "Forgive me — did you see something frightening?"
"I heard a voice."
The whole delegation went still.
"It told me," the Empress said, choosing her words the way you choose stones to cross a river, "that there has been a second revelation."
"There has," Cassandra said, and her eyes had changed. "That is not generally known outside our court."
Beside her, the Emperor of Quan's hand closed hard around the arm of his chair, and everything he was not showing on his face went into that one movement.
Then he straightened.
"There is a second matter," he said to the hall. "This one also comes from the gods, and I like it no better than the first. My brother." He turned. "Come here."
The young man came forward with the box in both hands.
It is an old story in every country with a throne: the young challenger comes up behind the seasoned man and takes it all off him in one afternoon, and afterward everybody agrees it was obvious. The Emperor of Quan had read that story often enough to have it by heart.
"By the will of the gods," he said, and pushed his brother forward by the shoulder, "I offer to the Empress of Nyx my brother, Mahram, as tribute."
The noise in the hall was extraordinary.
Mahram knelt at her feet and held the box up with his head down.
"Greet Her Majesty," his brother said.
"Your Majesty," he said to the floor, and did not lift his head an inch.
Everything is pushing you toward one death or another, said the cold voice inside her. Your enemy's country, your own sisters, this boy, this blade — all of it herding you the same way.
Around the edges of the hall the nobles had already begun to talk behind their hands.
I have always been a little twisted, she admitted to herself, and reached down and lifted the boy's chin.
She looked at his face and found she had no desire whatsoever to kill him.
She thought it through properly, because it deserved thinking through — a foreign prince living in the empress's palace, a gift she could not refuse without insulting two gods and one emperor, a scandal she would be wearing for the rest of the year.
Then, in front of the entire court, she leaned down until her face was a hand's breadth from his.
Enrique's expression twisted into something that had nothing imperial in it at all.
On the balcony above, a pink-haired woman watched with her lip curled in pure disgust, her face burning, her teeth set.
There had been an emperor in Quan, four generations back, who came to the throne over the bodies of thirteen brothers; the histories of that house are not gentle reading. But the specific problem with the young man on his knees was none of that.
The problem was that he was beautiful.
He had been mocked for it since he was twelve — by women, mostly, who found the cursed prince's face funny in the same breath as they found it frightening. And propositioned for it, by other women, in corridors, in gardens, in the dark outside his own door, as though a body that everyone shrank from in daylight became public property after sunset. Somewhere in the middle of all that he had stopped being able to stand any of them. He had got sick of the whole species of it, and he had crushed a rose in his fist once rather than accept it, and that was the last flower anyone had offered him.
The Empress made her decision.
Her hand came forward. Her gaze went over him with a slow, confident, frankly predatory pleasure, and her lips parted a little.
She touched his jaw, and the blood went up his face to the roots of his hair.
Then she took him by both hands and pulled him up off his knees, all the way up, into an embrace, standing, in front of everyone.
A nobleman near the front gasped audibly.
"In front of His Majesty," his companion breathed. "She did that in front of His Majesty."
"I accept," the Empress said, smiling in triumph, and looked down at her new prize with the plain, unembarrassed satisfaction of a woman examining something she owns.
How naive I am, Mahram thought, standing in her arms with his heart going like a bird. And then, distantly, with real confusion: my strength is back. Her hands are on me and my strength is coming back.
She turned, still holding him, and addressed her husband directly.
"You cannot object," the Emperor of Quan said comfortably, before Enrique could speak. "You keep a concubine yourself, I'm told."
"The Saint," Enrique said, in a voice like a slammed drawer, "is not a concubine."
The desert emperor and his consort exchanged a look of quiet amusement.
"Of course not," Cassandra said. "Among us a priestess is a sacred office too. That is precisely why we keep ours out of politics entirely." She smiled at him. "Divinity is a fragile thing. It survives being worshipped. It does not survive being useful."
On the balcony, Helen made a small offended sound and gripped the rail.
She looked down at the four of them standing together in the light, and something settled in her that had been unsettled for weeks. Well, she thought. That decides it, then.
The winter garden of Nyx was famous, and by moonlight it earned the reputation.
"It's magnificent," Cassandra said, drawing her furs closer. "We have nothing like it. We have nothing that survives being cold on purpose."
"It's the pride of Nyx," the Empress said. "Everything in it is chosen to be at its best in the four worst months."
Cassandra took her hand as they walked, which was not a court gesture, and the Empress understood several things at once. This alliance they had come north to build was not being offered to the throne. It was being offered to her.
"It's difficult," the Empress said, because the conversation had wandered that way and because it was useful to let it, "watching your husband hand his attention to another woman in your own house."
"Kaik is faithful," Cassandra said. "Insultingly faithful. It's his wives who try my patience — there are rather a lot of them, and only one of me." She laughed. "Still. Everyone knows to be careful around me in public, which is worth something. It's the private hours that—" She stopped, and did not finish it.
The Empress was already going. "In my house. At a state banquet. She walked in through the main doors in front of two empires and stood there in the receiving line, and everyone in this country has decided to call that piety—"
Cassandra watched her sideways as she ranted, and revised her opinion.
The anger was real. There was nothing arranged about it anywhere, and that was rare enough at this altitude to be worth knowing.
And the Empress, halfway through a sentence, realised the same thing in the other direction: this woman was not being polite to her. She actually understood.
They stood together in the frozen garden with the moon on the hedges, and something began between them that neither of them had planned for.
"Call me by my name," Cassandra said, turning a large blue ring on her finger so that it caught the light. "Cassandra. I'm tired of titles tonight."
"Then you should know," she added, after a while, "that I am in love. Deeply. I want to be clear about it, because people assume otherwise about political marriages." She smiled at the hedge. "My ideal has always been a strong man. A properly strong one, like my husband."
"You love your husband."
"I love his strength," Cassandra said. "Those aren't the same sentence."