Helen got to her feet.
"I can heal them," she said, and her voice carried beautifully. "All of them. Instantly."
Enrique turned to stare at her.
"I did not bring the holly here," she said, "but I can undo it, and I will."
She raised her hands, and the light came.
It came up out of her and filled that end of the hall, and she rose off the floor with her hair lifting, and wings of pure light unfolded behind her shoulders, wide enough to touch both walls. She hung there in the middle of it, bathed, serene, smiling gently down at the sick.
The court exhaled as one animal.
"Extraordinary—"
"There is nothing like the Saint. Nothing in the world—"
"Nonsense!" bellowed one of the Quan warriors from the floor. "Get her away from me!"
Cassandra was already moving. She got between the light and her people with her arm out.
"You will not touch them."
Enrique caught Helen by the wrist and pulled her down. "Stay still."
The desert consort looked at him, thoroughly baffled by the whole exchange.
"What did I do?" Helen said. "Enri — what did I do wrong?"
The Empress watched in silence, which was all that was required of her.
"A desert warrior," Enrique said, quietly, furiously, "cannot accept the power of another religion. Not from a stranger, not to save his life. If you heal one of them he loses his standing at home. You would be taking their honour, in public, with two hundred witnesses." He let go of her wrist. "You should have known that. You should have been more thorough than this."
She gasped as though he had slapped her. The tears came up instantly and honestly.
"I didn't know," she said. "I didn't know—"
Diplomacy, thought the Empress, is such a specific little skill.
Around the hall the murmuring had changed key.
"Was she always like this?"
"She was going to lay hands on a foreign officer in front of his own consort."
"Personally," an older noblewoman announced, to a wide circle, "I think the temple's people should be barred from diplomatic occasions altogether. Her Majesty has worked for a month on this evening, and look at it."
Why, Helen thought, standing in the middle of the floor with the light gone out of her hands. Why will none of them let it go? It was a mistake. People make mistakes. Why is nobody overlooking it?
Behind her fan, the Empress smiled, and her eyes shone with something a long way from human delight.
They had called Helen the Sacred Compass once, for the way she could turn a room. That name had been earned at home, in domestic matters, where charm is the whole of the weapon: a tearful glance in a council chamber, a hand laid on a duke's sleeve, a small confession offered to exactly the right ear. In four years it had never once failed her.
Taken abroad, the weapon had come apart in her hand like wet paper.
Charm, in a room with foreign ambassadors in it, is not read as charm. It is read as ignorance.
"She organised a state banquet," a noble said audibly, "without learning the first thing about the guests."
"She could have started a war over table decorations," said another. "Over decorations."
Helen bowed her head.
The Empress crossed the floor to Cassandra and inclined her head with perfect formality.
"The Saint is ignorant of your customs. That is the plain truth and I won't dress it up. Ignorance is not a defence and I am not offering it as one — the insult stands whether it was intended or not, and it was not intended." She held the other woman's eyes. "She will be punished, publicly and in a manner your warriors will find satisfactory, and their honour will be restored in front of both courts. On that basis, I ask for your forgiveness tonight."
Cassandra took a long moment.
"Granted," she said at last. "Reluctantly. And that woman does not come within sight of me for the rest of this banquet."
The Empress turned around and let herself be seen smiling, standing over the Saint of the Holy Empire and the man holding her up.
This is wrong, Enrique thought, watching his wife handle two nations in the middle of a disaster. This is not simply a change of temper. Diplomacy is not a thing a person is suddenly good at. Nobody wakes up fluent.
A memory came to him from years back, sharp and unwelcome: a black-haired woman with a book about the desert country open on her knees, and himself lying with his head in her lap.
She had asked, without looking up, whether he knew who gave revelations.
Gods, he had said.
Sometimes, she had said. And sometimes it is a demon lord, and the priests cannot tell the difference, because at the bottom of the thing there is no difference. Gods and demons are the same material. It is only the direction they are facing.
His thoughts began to run very fast.
A revelation out of the desert. A gift pressed into his wife's hands by a foreign emperor who claimed the gods had ordered it. His wife, who had been dying for years, who had not been able to walk the length of a corridor, standing in the middle of a poisoned banquet negotiating an empire out of a war.
And the Empress had recovered from an illness that had no cure.
He arrived at the possibility and it went through him like cold water.
The Empress of Nyx has made a contract with a demon.
He stood absolutely still with that in his mouth, and across the hall she caught his eye and smirked at him.
I will find out, he thought. Whatever it takes, I will find out.