"They're here, Your Majesty," an attendant said.
Two handmaidens were pushed forward and went down on the marble in front of the Emperor and the Saint. The witness in the yellow dress was brought too, and confirmed it: yes, those were the two, those were the ones who had carried the bowls.
The Empress stood over the nearer one.
"Explain. All of it, from the beginning, and leave nothing out."
"We only —" The girl was shaking so hard she could barely form words. "We only wanted to cheer Her Holiness up."
That, the Empress had not expected.
It came out in pieces between them. They had worked on the banquet for two months, both of them, every day — the fruit, the ribbon, the bowls, the little arrangements — and then the Empress had taken the banquet over and every single thing they had made had been carried down to a storeroom and left there.
Earlier that evening two cloaked figures had stood in that storeroom looking at the discarded decorations, and had decided, whispering, that surely nobody would mind if just a few of them went up. Just a few. To be part of it.
On the way up they had heard someone crying on the balcony above the lower path.
They found the Saint of the Holy Empire alone in the dark with her hand bleeding.
"Your Holiness — why are you crying? Your hand — you're hurt—"
"It's nothing." She turned away and wiped her face. "It's nothing, truly, I'm being silly—"
They knelt on either side of her, and looked at each other, and both of them thought the same thing: the Empress. The Empress has been at her again.
"I feel like such a terrible person," Helen wept. "The banquet is beautiful. It is genuinely beautiful, and I'm standing out here in the cold feeling sorry for myself because there isn't one thing of ours anywhere in that room. Not one. Two months, and you two worked harder than anybody—" She pressed her hands to her face. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't put this on you. Forget I said anything."
The two handmaidens looked at her with their eyes full.
Then they looked at each other, and something was decided without a word.
"Wait here a moment, Your Holiness," one of them said. "Just a moment. And don't go into the hall until we come back."
They pressed a little gift into her hands and hurried off down the path.
Helen stood watching them go with her tear-stained face full of worry.
"That's all," the handmaiden said now, to the floor, to the Emperor, to the whole hall. "That's everything. We only wanted to comfort her. We didn't—"
Beside her the other one had already given up her own share of it, in a whisper, while the guards were still bringing them up the stairs: that they had thought the berries were too small for anyone to notice, and that it had never once crossed their minds that anybody at a banquet would eat a decoration.
Enrique listened to all of it with his teeth together.
She was there. Helen was standing on that balcony when they went to fetch it, and she did not stop them, and she came into the hall afterwards and said nothing.
And under that, uglier and closer to the surface than he would have admitted an hour ago: the waterfall, the lights, the hall, the seven reception rooms, the uniforms for four broken knights. He had seen the accounts. She had spent like a woman emptying a house before a fire, and it had worked, and he had been waiting all month for her to collapse from her own illness and hand the whole thing back to him in pieces.
She had not collapsed. She was perfectly well. She had charmed the desert consort within an hour of meeting her, and accepted a beautiful foreign boy as tribute in front of him, and smiled while she did it.
"Your Majesty," one of the handmaidens sobbed, "please—"
"You endangered the lives of foreign guests," Helen said. She had come forward and taken hold of Enrique's arm, distraught, her voice trembling. "Do you understand what you did? Do you understand what could have happened?"
"Your Holiness — Your Holiness, please, tell them we didn't mean it, tell them—" Both maids were reaching for her skirt now.
Why are they clinging to me, Helen thought, in a spasm of pure irritation. Every eye in this room is on them, and they are pointing at me while they do it.
"They will atone for it with their lives," Enrique said.
"Your Majesty!"
The Empress said nothing at all. She was watching the girl in pink.
I will not apologise, Helen was thinking, with her chin up and her eyes wet. Not to her. Not one word of it, not ever. I will not bow my head in this woman's hall.
She had one trick that had never failed. She used it now.
Her eyes rolled up and her knees went and she folded, artistically, against the Emperor's chest.
"Compose yourself," the Empress snapped. "Stand up."
"I'm sorry," Helen breathed, to Enrique, only to Enrique. "I'm so sorry — I've ruined everything for you—"
He swept her up off her feet.
"I'm taking her to her rooms," he announced.
"Stop right there."
He stopped.
"We are not finished," the Empress said. "There are two women on the floor of my banquet hall awaiting judgment, there is a foreign delegation being carried out of it, and there is a question about the Lily Palace that nobody has answered. You will leave in the middle of that?"
Enrique looked back at her over his shoulder, one cold sidelong glance.
"Her Majesty," he said, "can manage the rest."
And he walked out with his guards closing in behind him and did not look at his wife again.