Carried down the corridor with her arms around his neck, Helen let her head rest on his shoulder and thought: in the end he chose me. In front of all of them, in front of her, he put his arms under me and walked out. He always chooses me.
The empress's palace was lit up and waiting when its mistress came home, and every one of her people was standing in the entrance hall.
"It worked," Susan said, before the doors were even shut. "All of it, Your Majesty, exactly as we planned."
Because the two handmaidens of the Lily Palace had not simply stumbled on those bowls in a storeroom. Somebody had made certain, three days beforehand, that the theme of the Empress's banquet reached them in a form calculated to hurt — that they knew, in detail, how completely their two months of work had been thrown away. And somebody had put money into the hand of a young woman in a yellow dress, who had raised her arm in a hall full of nobles at exactly the right moment and testified to a thing she had not, in fact, seen.
That somebody was standing in the entrance hall in a plain grey dress with her hands folded: Susan Beralt, lady-in-waiting to the Empress of Nyx, brought here years ago from a duke's country house and never sent back.
"You did well," the Empress said, and then the floor tilted.
She caught at her own chest. This body. This wretched, papery, glass-boned body — she had held two empires apart for four hours and it wanted payment for every minute.
Limit approaching, she thought. Do the introduction now, quickly, while you can still stand.
"All of you — attend. This is my guest. He is a royal of the Imperial house of Quan and he is to be treated as one under this roof; there will be no whispering about tribute in my household." She turned. "Mahram. These people are trustworthy. I've had every other kind dismissed."
Then the hall went sideways and she went down.
"Your Majesty!"
A silver-haired man in uniform came across the tiles at a dead run — and Mahram, who was closer, got there first and caught her under the shoulders and the knees.
She'd been unsteady all evening, he thought, looking down at her. I knew that. I should have carried her from the gate.
Idiot, she was thinking. You knew what you had left in you and you tried to walk it.
Derek stopped a pace away with his hands half raised and nowhere to put them.
In Mahram's arms the Empress laughed softly.
"That meek performance in the hall doesn't suit you at all," she murmured. "You should stop doing it."
"You fainted."
"I did that out of habit. It's a very useful habit and I've had a great deal of practice this month."
"Give her to me," Derek said. "I'll take Her Majesty up."
"I have her."
"You are a guest in this palace and you do not know where her chambers are."
"Then walk in front."
"I am the Empress's escort knight—"
"Then escort," Mahram said. "Lead the way."
Derek's jaw set, and he turned on his heel and led the way.
He must be beside himself, the Empress thought, watching the rigid grey head in front of them, and let herself be carried up her own staircase.
As for the woman who had caused the whole thing, she did not escape either. The Saint of the Holy Empire was disciplined for the poisoning of the Quan delegation, publicly, in a form the desert warriors were willing to accept, and the court talked about very little else for six days.
On the seventh, a letter came from Duke Ailo with good news in it.
The Empress read it twice in her private chambers with a slow smile spreading, then folded it and looked at her doors.
"Send him in."
Mahram came in dressed as a person rather than as a gift — soft shirt, no gold, his dark hair loose — and the morning light came across his face and made the gold in his eyes ridiculous.
A maid wheeled in a cart behind him and he went to the table.
He had stood outside her bedroom door the whole night after she collapsed. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody had been able to persuade him to leave it either; he had been there when they came up in the morning, in the same place, with his back against the wall.
Does he attach himself to anyone who is kind to him once, she wondered. Is that all it takes?
"Are you all right?" she asked. "Properly all right?"
"Yes." He sat. "Thank you for what you did. For — before. In the other country. I never said it."
"Were you worried about me?"
The blush went up his neck and across his face in one wave.
"No," he said.
Cute, she thought, watching him look at the tablecloth.
She studied him for a while with her chin propped on her hand, and then looked at the cart: broth, white bread, a little fish, three kinds of fruit. Invalid food. Her food.
"Take that away," she said to the maid. "Bring him meat. He's still growing and you've given him soup."
"I don't mind it," Mahram said quickly. "Truly, this is more than—"
Something went through him then, some dark quick thing out of another country, and his hand tightened on the fork.
Her expression did not change. It stayed warm.
The servant came back with a steak the size of a plate, still hissing.
He took one bite and his eyes went wide.
She watched him eat it with an amused little smirk and did not say a word, and he got through the whole of it and most of what came with it, and by the end he had stopped remembering to be careful about how he held his knife.
That is what they did to him, she thought, watching a boy of the Imperial house of Quan discover, at his age, that food can simply be pleasant. And here he is enjoying it exactly as though nothing had ever happened to him.
"Cake next," she said.
"Are you trying to fatten me up?" He looked at the cake with open suspicion, and then admitted, "I wouldn't mind it."
Halfway through, he loaded the spoon and held it out to her across the table, going scarlet again as he did it.
She closed her eyes and let him feed her the mouthful, and found it entirely pleasant.
There was something restful in him. He blushed at everything and apologised for nothing, and after a month of Derek North apologising for the weather she found that a considerable relief.
Later she walked in the garden with Susan while the sun came through the bare trees.
"Your Majesty ate a whole meal," Susan said happily. "A whole meal, at a table, with a guest."
"I was reading the mood," the Empress said coolly.
She stopped and looked up. "It's mild. It'll be spring inside a month."
A season for changing things.
"Your report. My instructions of the third — where are we?"
Her crimson eyes narrowed as she listened, and she adjusted the heavy necklace at her throat with the air of a woman moving a piece on a board.
"The investigation is complete," Susan said. "Sixty-seven members of the household staff have behaved in ways we cannot account for. Letters, absences, money that arrived from nowhere. Sixty-seven, Your Majesty."
"Good work. Reassign all sixty-seven. Not dismissed — reassigned, today, to posts where nothing they overhear will be worth writing down."
"And the vacancies? Sixty-seven positions, all at once—"
"We recruit." The Empress smiled benevolently. "And put this in the notice: applicants with children are especially welcome."
Susan blinked.
"Family lodging on the palace grounds for anyone who takes a post, and a place at a boarding school, paid for out of my own purse, for every child they bring with them."
"Your Majesty." Susan's eyes had filled. "Do you know what that will mean? Not to the court — to ordinary people, in the city. They'll talk about nothing else for a year."
Yes, thought the Empress. That is precisely why I am doing it.
She was losing to the Saint of the Holy Empire in both of the ways that mattered: in public affection, where a woman who glowed and healed the poor beat a sickly duke's daughter without effort, and in official standing, where every temple faction in the Empire stood behind the girl.
Both of those could be bought. One with money and one with patience, and she had a great deal of the first.
She stood among the bare hedges with the sun on her face and began, quietly, the long game.
Behind her eyes was a bitter little picture she took out most days: Enrique and the pink-haired girl, together, taking everything a weak woman had. Everything they had taken from Leonora. Everything they had taken from her.
I will take all of it back, she thought, and I will take theirs as well, piece by piece, until there is nothing left of either of them to pick up.
She looked at the sky like a demon considering the weather, and resolved to build a foundation under herself so wide and so deep that nobody in this empire would ever again dare to reach across it.
"Beralt," she said. "One more favour."
What she needed now was an aide for the administrative work — someone cunning, capable, and utterly flexible about method, which was a rarer combination in a palace than anyone would believe.
Her mind went, unhelpfully, to a subordinate from her demon days who would have been perfect for it, and who had also been the single most insufferable creature in her domain.