The Empress began to smile.
"Don't bow your head," she said gently.
Her knight looked up at her.
She got one arm free of the guard holding her, bent down, and lifted his chin with a finger.
"I can't stand seeing something of mine look so dejected."
She smiled at him warmly, and he stayed on his knees in front of her, and something in his face came back together.
Then she turned to the Emperor of Nyx.
"By imperial law," she said, "the Empress maintains a personal guard. Her own. Chosen by her, paid by her, answerable to her, and to no council and no order. It is written into the imperial code — I imagine because somebody once thought an empress might one day need protecting from her own palace."
The silence changed quality.
"So disband the Valkyrie," she said. "I have four knights and I am about to have a personal guard, and the men in question have already sworn to me."
Her knights got it a half-second later.
"Wait — can we do that? Can she do that?"
"She can do that—"
"Your Majesty, is this actually legal?"
Enrique's aide had gone grey. Enrique himself simply stared at her.
"Well?" The Empress lifted her chin. "Will Your Majesty take back his own decree in front of fifty of his own knights? Say the word and we'll go back to arguing about a barracks."
He made a noise that was half a scoff and half something else, and could not find a sentence anywhere.
She looked down at him — and to the older thing behind her eyes, he was already kneeling.
Look at that self-important face, said the voice in her, in a tone of enormous contempt. Look at him standing there being the Emperor. And underneath it there is a boy who sobs when the world gets too loud for him — who sobbed on me, on the floor, with my blood on his hands. Is the crown for hiding your face behind? Is that what you got it for?
Unforgivable, said the voice.
Show me. Show me the one who was crying that night.
"The order will need a name," the commander said, awkwardly, into the quiet.
"Yes," the Empress said. "It will."
Through a crack running across a memory like a crack in glass, a black-haired woman leaned close to a young man in a field and said, I'll marry you.
The young man cried out and cursed her, and she went on smiling.
I'll be your lover soon enough.
My name is Asteroth.
The Empress of Nyx stood in the middle of the training ground with tears standing in her red eyes and gave a smile that stopped the nearest man breathing.
"Call it the Asteroth Order."
Enrique's face changed.
"You remember the name," she said. "How gratifying."
"Your Majesty—" An attendant ran forward to take his arm.
She turned away and found that her eyes were streaming and could not think why she felt so much; she had won, and she was crying, and the two things would not sit together.
A hand came under her elbow and held her up. She looked round in surprise into a pair of gold eyes.
Mahram stared straight ahead, grave and intent, and said nothing at all.
She looked back at him with her face perfectly composed.
Behind them, one at a time, the knights went down on one knee — the four of them, in their red coats, in front of everybody — and swore to follow the Empress of Nyx wherever she took them.
She accepted it the way one accepts weather one has arranged oneself.
"The order will need quarters, an armoury, and a training hall," she said, to nobody in particular but loudly enough. "I will fund all three personally. Send me the estimate by Friday."
Enrique watched her walk away with an expression like a man biting down on a broken tooth.
In the dark behind his eyes, a voice he had been outrunning for five years said: your wife. Remember your wife. Remember what you did to her.
Night came down over the training ground.
The Empress got as far as the second courtyard before her legs stopped cooperating. She took hold of her own arm and squeezed it, hard, determined to walk the rest on her own feet.
"If you fall," said a voice behind her, "I'll catch you."
She gave in, and fell, and he caught her.
Mahram gathered her up and stood there for a moment. Then his breath caught, and he looked more closely at the arm that had fallen loose across his sleeve, and at the skin above her wrist, and he made a small startled sound.
He said nothing. He carried the unconscious Empress in through the lit doors of her palace, and the question stayed with him the whole way.