The corridor went up like a struck match.
"A doctor — get a doctor —"
"Poison! They've poisoned the Emperor's guests!"
People were running in both directions at once. A brown-haired woman grabbed the Empress's sleeve. "Your Majesty — what is happening? What is happening?"
She had no answer. She turned to look down the hall and her balance simply went; she stumbled back, and there was nothing behind her, and she heard herself make a small undignified sound as the floor came up.
An arm caught her round the waist.
A dark-haired man with gold-brown eyes had her, and he went red the moment he had her, because he had noticed several minutes ago that she was swaying on her feet and had been following at a distance ever since.
"Quick reflexes," she said. "Thank you."
"I was watching for you to come back in," Mahram said, and then heard how that sounded and looked at the wall.
Warmth came off him and into her, gold and enormous, and the corridor stopped swimming. She breathed out.
"I feel alive again," she said.
"What happened?" he asked. "Are you—"
"You tell me. You were in the hall."
He told it plainly, the way he told everything: three of the Quan warriors had begun vomiting near the north tables, then two more, then a woman from the escort, and it had spread across that side of the room within a minute.
"Your Majesty," he added, remembering himself, and bowed slightly.
"That doesn't suit you at all," she said.
A slow smile went across her face, and it had nothing kind in it, because she had just understood exactly what had happened and exactly what she was going to do with it.
Across the hall, Helen was standing by herself, looking anxious.
Two guards in red uniforms stepped in front of her.
"On your knees," one said.
"What—"
A hand closed on her arm and put her down on the marble. She cried out, and a blonde man came through the crowd shouting her name and dropped beside her, gathering her against him, glaring up with his whole face full of protective fury.
"Explain this," Enrique said. "Explain what you think you are doing to her."
"I am holding the Saint responsible," the Empress said, "for harm done to my guests."
He opened his mouth and nothing came out. She had said it the way one reads out a shipping figure.
Helen peered around his shoulder with her eyes enormous.
"Or were you too angry this evening," the Empress said pleasantly, "to keep an eye on your own arrangements?"
Helen stayed where she was on the floor.
An attendant stepped forward and gestured to the nearest table.
"Your Majesty. The decoration."
Dark green leaves. Bright red berries, in little bowls, down that whole side of the room.
Holly. And more than that: eaten holly, bowls half emptied, because at a formal table in Quan every decoration is food and a guest who is uncertain proves his trust by eating it.
The Empress kept her face still and let herself enjoy it privately. Holly had been struck out of her banquet proposal in her own hand, with a note in the margin. The same document specified, by name, the only fruits permitted as table decoration, all of them edible, all of them checked twice against the desert customs.
"The holly was the Saint's design," Enrique said. "It was the central element of the arrangements she prepared before Your Majesty took the banquet away from her. It has been part of the plan for months."
"Then why," said a noblewoman loudly, from somewhere behind him, "is a forbidden plant on the tables of a state banquet at all?"
The Empress stood over the scene without moving. Down the hall a doctor was on his knees beside a big Quan officer who had folded up around his own stomach.
A small hand went up in the crowd.
A handmaiden in a yellow dress, white to the lips, said, "I'll testify. Please — I'll testify."
"Speak."
"Two handmaidens from the Lily Palace brought the holly through, Your Majesty. Two of them, with the bowls already made up. I thought — I'm so sorry, I thought it was a new decoration, I thought it had been approved—"
"A witness," the Empress said, and turned to the hall. "Then what I need to know is very simple. Why was a handmaiden of the Lily Palace carrying anything at all into my banquet." She looked down the room at the Quan delegation, at the men bent over basins and the women holding them. "And I am certain our guests would like to know as well."
She stood with her back to the sick and her face to the court, and there was not one person in that hall who could pretend the authority was anywhere else.
Enrique's jaw worked. He had no choice at all and he knew it; his hand shook once and then closed into a fist.
Helen, on the floor, understood a half-second later what was about to happen to her handmaidens, and thought, with real panic: no. Not that. Anything but that.
"The examination is complete," the doctor announced, standing up.
Helen stared at him in terror.
"There is no lasting danger. They will be extremely unwell for a full day, and some of them will wish they weren't alive by morning, but no one is going to die of it."
"That is deeply regrettable," Cassandra said.
She had come down the hall with her furs still on and her guards behind her, and she stopped in front of the Emperor of Nyx.
"Understand me clearly, Your Majesty. Those are my husband's warriors, poisoned at your table under your roof, at a banquet held in honour of a treaty we have not yet signed. If they do not recover completely, my husband will not treat it as an accident. He will treat it as an act of war."
The hall did not make a sound. Two empires stood in it, a few feet apart, and every ambassador in the room was already composing the letter.
Into that silence came a small gasp.