She set him down on the low wall and stepped back.
"And no," she said. "I still can't stand children."
Her eyes stopped on his wrist.
He was wearing the bracelet again — the red stone, the fine old work. She had returned it to him the day he came into her house, and she had been curious about it ever since, because it had held a body full of divine power off her for the length of a council meeting.
"Where did you get that?"
"It was—" Mahram's mouth closed. Something went across his face out of a dark room a long way south. "It was my mother's."
She took his wrist to turn the stone toward the light.
The bracelet lit up red, and the power came out of it and through her hand and up her arm like a bar of iron dropped into her chest.
She reeled backwards off the wall.
"Your Majesty!"
Her attendants got to her before she went down. She could not see properly. The pressure in the air was enormous, and it was not the bracelet — the bracelet was only answering it — it was coming across the training ground in a wave, and she knew that flavour, and there was a great deal more of it than one man could hold.
The whole Crusade, she thought. He has brought the entire order onto this field.
"What is the Empress doing here?"
Light blonde hair. Purple eyes, narrowing as they went from her to the young man holding her up.
"And why," Enrique said, "is a royal of Quan standing on the grounds of the Imperial Knights?"
She looked up at him, flushed, breathing badly, and could not do a single thing about it. He had come with fifty holy knights at his back and every one of them was a lamp turned up full, and a demon in a paper body could not stand in that light and pretend otherwise.
"Put Her Majesty down," Enrique said. "And Your Majesty will explain what she is doing on this ground."
She shut her eyes.
Mahram set her on her feet, slowly, and did not step away.
That bastard's power, she thought, with her chest full of stones. Mine. He is crushing me with mine.
She could not get a full breath. She could not stand up without a hand on Mahram's arm, and she was aware of exactly how that looked.
Enrique watched her struggle with a sharp, fixed gaze.
"Hold here," he said to his knights, without turning his head.
Then he came forward alone.
"Anel," he said.
She blinked.
"The flood at Anel. My own home town, saved before the water ever reached it, out of a private purse." He was watching her face. "It was your money. It was your instruction. I found out this morning."
She felt the blush and was furious about it. He had only just discovered it — that was the tell. He had gone looking for the corruption underneath her spending and had found instead the town he was born in.
It had been demon's knowledge, of course, put to work through Duke Ailo, who had not asked how she knew. As the desert of Quan widens, the water it swallows leaves the world's account somewhere — it does not vanish, it moves — and it comes down again a long way off, in the dark, all at once.
Enrique's knights had closed a loose ring around the yard.
Did he bring the entire Crusade, she thought, for this conversation?
The Emperor of Nyx stared straight ahead with his jaw set, going over it all again: the recovery, the banquet, the languages, the desert gift, the flood.
Coincidence, he thought. Say the word to yourself and listen to how it sounds.
The Empress kept her face entirely still.
She had been a different woman for two months. Not braver — different. The wife he had known had not been able to finish a sentence in a full room, and this one had taken two empires apart on a staircase and been fluent in the language of one of them. That is not recovery. Nobody wakes up fluent. He had watched her quietly for weeks on nothing but a suspicion, and now the suspicion had a shape, and he said it inside his own head.
The Empress of Nyx has made a contract with a demon.
Behind her, in the long shadow the wall threw across the sand, something with dark wings and yellow eyes put its arms around her from behind and looked at him over her shoulder.
"You caused the flood," he said.
"I caused a river to change course, in a country I have never visited, from a bed I could not get out of." She smiled at him. "Your Majesty flatters me. I have no demonic power. Look at me and tell me what you think I could lift."
His hand went to his sword.
"Then answer me plainly, and I will judge you plainly, here, in front of my knights. What is inside you?"
The light came.
It came off her in a white sheet, and wings — brilliant, feathered, enormous — unfolded from her shoulders and filled the yard, and she stood with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes lowered while feathers of light drifted down and went out on the sand.
The Emperor and fifty holy knights stared at her.
"A voice speaks to me," she said. "Since the night of the banquet. Since I touched what the desert brought."
"Is Her Majesty a saintess?" someone said in the ranks, quite audibly.
Enrique understood, in one motion of the mind, that everything he had built this morning was already worthless.
"Your Majesty," his aide murmured at his shoulder, "surely — a revelation, from nowhere, in front of an audience? Might Her Majesty not simply be — wanting attention?"
"And what," the Empress said, "would I gain by lying about it? Say the sentence out loud and hear how it works."
Deep underneath her own voice, another one moved, saying her name in a way that made the nearest knight step back.
Enrique turned away. His shoulders had the shape of a man who has lost.
Then he stopped, and his face went hard and quiet.
"The god in me," the Empress said pleasantly, "finds you irritating. I am telling you as a courtesy. My patience is not endless and it is nearly finished."
"Knights of the Empire." Enrique raised his voice to the whole yard. "I thank you for your long service."
The Valkyrie, standing in a knot behind their commander, went still.
"The continued existence of your order has been under discussion at council for some time. That discussion is now concluded." He looked at the Empress, and then at the four men in red coats behind her. "The Knights of the Valkyrie are disbanded."
Nobody made a sound.
Then two of his guards took the Empress by the arms.
She was too weak to prevent it. She stood in their grip and watched two of her own knights forced down onto their knees on the sand in their new coats.
Above them, on the mounting block, Enrique looked away, because he found he could not watch it.
"Understand the reason," he said. "Divine power is appearing in the young. More of it every year — in villages, in temple schools, in children who have never been near a shrine. The Empire does not need three orders, and it does not need one that cannot fill a barracks."
That stopped her.
Is that true, she thought. Is that actually true?
Divine power multiplying across an entire generation, in the same decade a demon lord's magic was torn out of her and handed to a man. Balance is not a moral principle; it is a mechanism. Causality does not permit a debt that size to sit unpaid — something is being counted somewhere, and this is what the payment looks like.
That is a very bad sign, she thought. That is the worst thing anyone has said to me since I woke up in this body.
Mercenaries, she thought next, coldly and practically. Ailo can hire mercenaries. Ailo can hire a great many mercenaries, and nobody need ever be told who paid for them—
"This is unjust!" one of her kneeling knights burst out. "We have done nothing! We have—"
A guard's hand closed over his mouth.
"That," Enrique said, without turning round, "is disobedience. Thank you for demonstrating it."