I know who wins this, she thought, settling into the chair, and I know by how much.
The wooden blades came together with a crack that carried to the far wall.
Mahram took the first exchange on his guard and it drove him back half a step; the second bent his arms. He was sweating inside a minute. He got his weight under it and shoved, and for a moment the two of them were locked chest to chest with the swords crossed between them, and his gold eye above the blade was narrowed to a line of pure concentration.
He pushed off. They came apart and came together again, faster, and the sound of it went round the yard like hail on a roof.
Then Derek's blade came over the top in a way nobody watching quite saw, and Mahram's practice sword went spinning away across the sand.
Derek stood over him with the point at his throat.
"That," said one of the knights, with feeling, "is incredible. Both of them. Did you see the last three?"
Mahram stood very still with the wooden tip under his chin and looked profoundly annoyed.
The Empress watched the two of them face each other in the settling dust.
North is a genius, she thought. That is the plain truth of it. There is one of him in a generation and this country has him guarding a bedroom door.
And Mahram is a child.
But that was only the arithmetic of today, and she knew the other half of it, which nobody in this yard did.
He was a son of the sun, and a son of the sun is not a blessed man with a curse attached; he is one thing that is both at once. The yang energy in his blood was already stronger than his body could survive. It would kill him before he came of age — that was simply what happened to them, and it was why so few of that line ever reached thirty. The spirit king bound to him was not there for war. It was there to cool him, constantly, every hour of every day, and it was spending very nearly everything it had to do it.
Which was why the King of Water had come up out of the floor of that blue space looking so profoundly tired, and why a young man with the sun in him could be disarmed by a mortal knight on a training ground.
It was a stopgap. It would hold exactly as long as it took his body to finish growing.
And afterwards — she had seen what was folded up inside him, and it was not small. Once he matured, the thing that was presently killing him would turn over and become the greatest single asset in the southern half of the world. Three years, she estimated, watching him pick his sword up out of the sand. Give him three years and he will be past his brother, and Kaik will find out what it costs to send a boy like that away to die.
Mahram closed his fist around the grip, and his eyes came up burning.
Good, she thought. That was good for both of them. Let them beat the mistrust out of each other and be done with it.
"Again," Mahram said.
He lost. He said "again". He lost again, and said it again, and again after that, and the shadows on the sand got longer.
"Your Majesty," her attendant said eventually, "how long do you suppose they'll keep at it? The sun's going down."
The Empress sighed and stood up, because there was clearly no other way to end it.
She put her hand over her mouth and coughed, twice, delicately.
Both of them were at her side before the second one finished.
"Your Majesty—"
"Are you ill? Sit — sit down—"
"It's the dust," she said, smiling. "Sir North, take me inside and bring me water."
Derek went. She turned to the other one, who was standing there filthy and anxious with a wooden sword still in his hand, and patted his shoulder.
"You did well. You'll lose to him for a while yet, and then you won't." She reached up and ruffled his hair. "I'll teach you how to become strong. Properly strong. I know more about that than anyone you will ever meet."
She took his face between her hands.
The colour came up under his skin, and his gold eyes went wide, and then he dropped to his knees in front of her so suddenly that his knees hit the sand audibly.
"Then let me be your consort."
Behind her, her attendant made a small sound.
The poor creature, the woman was clearly thinking, and the Empress was thinking something close to it. Whatever they did to him in that desert, they did it early, and they did it to the part of him that learns what people are for.
"I have no intention," the Empress said clearly, "of treating you as a consort. None. Put it out of your head."
He stayed on his knees and looked up at her, and he was not sulking; he was genuinely lost.
"Then what should I do?"
Behind his eyes was a picture of her standing under a white parasol in the sun, and the whole of him was braced around a single conviction: that if he closed his eyes she would not be there when he opened them. That was the shape of everything he had ever been given.
What do I want to do with this person, he thought. Not what am I for. What do I want.
He saw her lying in a field of green grass, which was not a memory of anything.
He looked up at her and could not make the question hold still.
Then he pitched forward and put his face in her lap.
The Empress looked down at the back of his head with a calm, knowing expression, and let him stay there.
"Listen to me." She touched his cheek with two fingers. "Find a dream that isn't being somebody's consort. Anything. Pick one."
Into her skirt he said, "What's a dream?"
She gathered him up — he was heavier than he looked and she was not strong, and she did it anyway — and held him the way you hold something that has been dropped several times.
"You'll have a room in my palace with a window in it," she said. "New clothes, cut for you, not handed down. And meat at every meal for as long as you're still growing, which will be a while, at the rate you eat."
She looked down at the dark head against her shoulder.
Is this an act, she wondered. Is he clinging like this because he is frightened I'll put him back out on the road?
She leaned close and made her voice serious.
"From today, you only have to know one thing. Just one."
He worked it out himself, and she saw the moment he did.
That you want to live.