She was annoyed with herself, mostly. Any body she had ever owned would have stepped aside from a falling man without thinking about it. This one had not even tried.
He slid off her and collapsed on the bed beside her, and his blood ran off his shoulder and dripped onto her chest.
"Stand down," she told the maids, who were crowding the doorway with their hands over their mouths. "All of you. Stand there and be quiet."
She could feel his breath on her collarbone, and it was hot — far too hot for a fever. Then the power hit her.
It came up out of him in a wave, and golden light spilled across the bed and the walls and the ceiling, and she knew that light. She had seen it a very long time ago and from the wrong end of it.
Why, she thought, is a descendant of the sun god bleeding to death in my bedroom?
A slow smile spread across her face. Whatever else he was, he was medicine, and he was exactly the medicine she needed.
"Wait here," she said to the unconscious man, quite seriously. "I'll come back with supplies."
Then she opened herself and drew the power out of him — carefully, a thread at a time — and felt the borrowed body begin to knit itself together around her. Blood moved. Her fingers stopped shaking. She was still weak, but she was no longer dying at the same speed she had been an hour ago.
While she planned what to do next, the maids kept talking over each other in their fright, and out of their chatter came her new name and her new station, repeated and repeated until she could not mistake it.
Empress. She was the Empress.
"From now on," she said, "no one enters these chambers without my permission. No one. Say it back to me."
Later she went to the archives and asked the keeper for the imperial family tree and this year's records.
She turned the pages carefully. The dates told her the first thing she needed: five years had passed since her death. Five years was nothing. Five years meant Enrique was almost certainly still alive somewhere, still walking around inside the life he had bought with her body.
She remembered the pink-haired woman's arms around him in the wrecked room. Crown prince. That was the price they had agreed on — a title, in exchange for a demon's corpse.
But there was no Enrique in the family tree. Not in this generation, not in the last. She sat with the ledger open in front of her and considered the two possibilities. Either the name he had given her had been a lie from the first day in the field, or he had never been a subject of this country at all.
So: information, then. Information, and more of that golden energy, as much of it as she could take.
Through the tall window of the archive she saw a figure crossing the courtyard and went very still.
A maid was chattering somewhere behind her about a summit banquet and the guests it would bring. She did not hear a word of it. She stood at the glass and stared at the party coming through the courtyard, and at the woman at the head of it, pink-haired, laughing.
Down in the courtyard the woman was reporting to someone that she had checked over all the banquet preparations personally, and she gave a small confident smile as she said it — a smile that knew exactly how much it was worth.
Asteroth knew that smile. She had died looking up at it.
Rage came up through the borrowed body so fast that the air around her darkened, and it took her a long moment to put it away. She went back to her rooms and lay down on the bed and recited to herself, as she had recited for a thousand years, the one rule she had always lived by: what is mine comes back to me.
Elsewhere in the palace, a blonde man on a throne told an aide to consult the Empress about the banquet arrangements.
And that was how she learned the rest of it.
Enrique was the emperor of this country. Not a crown prince. Not a shepherd. The man sitting on the throne of Nyx was the man who had put a dagger through her, and he had been given a country for doing it.
The name had been a lie. And here was the joke at the bottom of it: he had not even won the woman. He had a saintess for a mistress and an empress for a wife, and he flaunted the one in front of the other in his own palace.
She clenched her fist until the thin fingers ached. All that love, all that praying at that altar, and he had thrown it away for this. He should have made his lover his empress, then, if he wanted her so badly.
No. That was the wrong reading of him, and she made herself see it clearly. He had not chosen the woman over her. He had chosen the throne over both of them. What Enrique loved, more than the pink-haired saintess, more than anything, was the chair he sat in.
Her attendant came in with a tray of medicine and asked, gently, whether she was all right.
She turned around, and whatever was on her face made him flinch back a step.
"Your Majesty — you're sitting up. You shouldn't be — should I call —"
"Leave it there and go," she said. "Now."
Alone, she began to laugh. This was her chance. She would destroy the two of them; she would take everything he had ever wanted and hold it up in front of him. Her smile split her face and her eyes ran over, and she had never in a thousand years wanted anything so simple and so much.
But first the body. The body could barely stand.
She looked down at the injured man in her bed, and behind her eyes there was a crown, waiting.
She leaned over him. Only a little, she promised herself. Only enough to keep this shell walking. She would leave him a little drunk with her magic and he would remember nothing at all.
She had her hand above his chest when he convulsed. A groan tore out of him and his whole body arched off the bed — the deep wound in his side had gone into seizure, and that complicated everything. She could not draw from a body that was fighting itself.
Then the light came, and it was not gold this time. Blue energy erupted out of both of them at once, a torrent of it, and it went through the room and through her and took her somewhere else.
In the west wing, the pink-haired woman was standing at a window with a perfect view of the archive.
"Your Majesty," she said sweetly to the man behind her, "the Empress has woken. They tell me she's gone to the library."
She had chosen this corridor for that view. She had chosen the hour, too. All she needed was for the Empress to look up and see the two of them together, and the rest would happen by itself; it always did.
She saw the pale figure at the archive window and laughed out loud. "Oh — we've walked right into her."
She let herself remember the last time, the Empress's face going white and then furious, and she savoured it the way another woman might savour a sweet. Far off across the courtyard the Empress turned from the glass, and the pink-haired woman thought about the day that fool Leonora had climbed onto a balcony rail and stepped off it.
Leonora, who had been handed everything. Daughter of a great duke, noble from the hour she was born, and what had she ever done with it? Nothing. A frail, greedy woman who wept for her husband's love and could not so much as stand up straight beside him. Not the way I can, she thought.
She watched the library window and waited for the Empress to run away crying, the way she always ran away crying.
She closed her eyes, pleasantly. "Enri," she called, "have they found the intruder yet?"
In the blue space, the energy went on and on.
It wrapped her and the unconscious man together and turned slowly around them, and she was startled by how much of it there was. This was not the ordinary output of a wounded boy. She read it the way she would read a page.
He was a spirit king's contractor. That alone was rare enough to be worth a war. But under it, older and hotter, was the other thing — he was a son of the sun.
The legend was old even by her standards. The sun god had loved a mortal, and the children of that love had become a royal house, and their descendants carried the god's fire in their blood. The power came with a price written into it. Leave the desert, and the god's protection thinned to nothing.
She looked at the state of him and drew her conclusion. This boy had been cast out of his homeland. Someone in power there had looked at what he would become and been afraid of it, and had sent him away under some plausible errand, into a country where his own blood would work against him. Sent him out to die politely.
"I'll save your life," she said to him, "and you'll pay me in energy. That's a good bargain. Better than most of mine."
He groaned. His eyes opened a slit, gold and hostile.
"Get lost," he said.
"Think of it as a goodnight kiss," she said, and reached for him.
His hand snapped up and caught her wrist. "Don't touch me."
Then, without any warning at all, he pulled her down into a fierce and desperate embrace, holding on to her as though she were a plank in open water, panting, one tear running sideways down his temple. He was fighting himself the whole time. With the last strength he had, he shoved her away.
In that space her shape had slipped down to a child's, which happened when she was careless, and she stood there in it, annoyed. Stubborn, this one. Still — he had fainted, and fainting suited her purposes perfectly.
She took her adult form again and summoned the spirit.
It came up out of the floor of that place as a great humanoid thing made of water, taller than the bed, and it looked at her with unmistakable irritation.
"You know what I am," she said, smiling. "So you know how this goes. Help me, or watch your contractor die tonight. Choose quickly."
Then, while it was still deciding, she asked the question that had been bothering her. "Why is a child of the sun's bloodline this easy to injure? I was told they close their wounds in hours. I was told they don't scar."
She turned him onto his side to look at his back, and stopped.
His back was a map of old scars, ridged, overlapping, some of them still angry.
"He has never once been treated," the spirit said. "Not in his entire life."
She held that for a moment without saying anything. It gave her pause, which very little did. He was young — younger than the men who had done this to him could possibly justify — and she looked down at him with something she had not expected to feel.
Whatever else I am, she thought, I would never have treated him that way.