Morning came up over the grand front of the palace, and a maid with a tear-streaked face ran the length of a corridor to reach her.
"Your Majesty — where have you been? All night, where have you been?"
She sat down slowly. All night. In that blue space there had been no hours at all; she had lost track of time the way a swimmer loses track of the shore.
Her three attendants gathered around her, saying the same thing in three different ways — that they had been searching the whole palace, that they had gone through every room twice, that they were so relieved. She looked from face to face and found nothing to say to any of them. Everything she had of this woman's life was a handful of borrowed images from her last hours, and none of them included these people.
"We were afraid," the maid said, wiping her eyes. "We thought — we thought the grief had taken hold of you again."
That surprised her. The abandoned Empress of Nyx, the one everybody in this building had apparently written off, had people who genuinely cared whether she lived. Leonora had thrown her life away, and she had done it without knowing that.
Somewhere else, in a room with a stone floor and one high window, a rope came down across a bare back and blood sprayed across white cloth. It came down again. It went on coming down, patiently, methodically, while the purple-eyed man who held it wept, his bloody hands knotted in the rope.
The cover of the book in her lap said: The Diary of Leonora.
It was soaked through with the anguish of an unreturned love. Page after page of it. She read how cold he had always been, how distant, how he had left his wife to fall alone into her own despair and had not once turned around to look. She read, with real disgust, about the day the saintess kissed the emperor in front of his wife and the wife stood there and could do nothing at all to stop it. A saintess. They called that woman a saintess and bowed to her in the streets, and she was nothing on this earth but a mistress.
The last entries were the two of them together, hand in hand, taking everything the weak-bodied Leonora had ever had.
Perfect, she thought, closing the book on her finger. Raw and specific and unguarded. Nobody could invent this. If she was going to wear this woman's name, this was the material she would build it from.
She opened it again and read that Leonora's body had been immune to healing magic since childhood — no priest, no potion, no saintess had ever been able to touch it — and that Leonora had wanted, more than almost anything and for years, a pet of her own.
"Your Majesty."
A grey-haired man had come in and gone down on one knee. This was Derek North: her childhood friend, her escort knight, assigned years ago to a wife everyone in the palace described as weak and hysterical. Behind him came the two ladies-in-waiting, Charlotte and Susan, brought here from her family home when she married, and never sent back.
They moved around her, straightening the blanket, pouring the water, and she watched them do it and understood that all three of them had loved Leonora.
She remembered a man crying over her while she bled out on a cabin floor.
I have no reason, she thought, to give any of you anything back.
"Get out," she said to Derek.
He looked up.
"And don't come into my bedchamber again. Not once. Not for any reason."
The silence in the room went hard and flat. He got to his feet, and his hand found the edge of the table and closed on it until the wood creaked.
"Why?" he said. "Why are you abandoning me?"
She said nothing.
He smiled at her, and it was a terrible smile, all pain. "Am I no longer even Your Majesty's most cherished piece of furniture?"
Another crying man. She was so tired of the tears of men. You foolish bear, she thought, watching him stand there with his shoulders full of grief, and he bowed his head and offered her his deepest and most abject apologies.
Then he turned his back on her — and did not leave.
He simply stood there with his back to her, in the middle of the room, and she realised he had no intention of going anywhere at all.
"Then stay," she said, "and do as you're told."
He agreed so instantly that it startled her, and knelt, and kissed her foot.
She stared down at the top of his grey head. So there was something in this palace she had overlooked. A person in love, she reminded herself, is not in their right mind, and can be used accordingly.
She stood up to leave, and he insisted on accompanying her, and a maid hurried off to have a carriage brought round.
"No carriage. I'm going to the library of the empress's palace."
Her attendants stared at her as though she had announced she was going to the moon.
She walked out with purpose. If she wanted revenge she needed a position to take it from, and this woman's position was worth less than the paper her diary was written on. Every right Leonora had let slip, she intended to pick back up.
Halfway down the gallery, the older of her maids stepped into her path.
"Forgive me, Your Majesty — the library isn't fit for you. It hasn't been cleaned in months; the dust alone will make you ill."
"Let us fetch it for you," the younger one begged. "Any book. Name it and it's in your hands within the hour."
Her red eyes narrowed. Two women, both talking at once, both standing between her and one door.
"What are you hiding from me?"
They said nothing. She folded her arms and looked at them and let the silence do the work.
"I'll be lenient," she said, "if you tell me now."
The younger one broke first. It came out in pieces: letters. Letters that had come to the empress's palace and been put away unopened. Letters about a summit banquet, several of them, asking formally for the Empress's opinion on the arrangements.
She stood quite still while her attendants watched her with their hands twisted together in front of them.
A summit. She had heard the word twice in three days, and it appeared nowhere in that entire diary — not one line, not one mention. Her own household had let a matter of state pass through this palace without telling the woman it was addressed to.
And there was a second half to it, which the maid gave up more reluctantly than the first: the summit banquet was to be hosted by the saintess's faction.
"Correspondence is Susan's responsibility," she said.
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Then I don't trust Susan."
Susan went down on her knees. "Forgive me. Forgive me, Your Majesty, I only — I hid them so they wouldn't hurt you. Every letter with her name in it hurt you for a week. I thought I was sparing you."
Yang energy moved quietly under her skin as she stood there; she could feel it working, stitching this poor body a little further from the grave. It gave her the patience to think it through.
The emperor's mistress was hosting a state banquet, and the only reason she could was that the Empress of Nyx had been too weak to lift a pen.
"There will be consequences for this," she said. "Susan."
Susan flinched at her own name.
"How many of the saintess's letters did you ignore? Answer honestly."
"All of them, Your Majesty." A whisper. "Every request for consultation. All of them."
Every one. Which meant that nothing had ever been agreed, and nothing signed, and no right formally ceded to anybody.
"Then the banquet is mine," she said. "It always was. Hosting is the Empress's duty, and I am going to do my duty."
One of the attendants made a small distressed noise. Derek, standing by the door with his arms folded, said flatly, "One month is enough time."
She turned to her head maid and put it to her as a challenge, with a smile.
"One month," Susan repeated faintly. "Is that — is it even possible in one month?"
"Say yes."
"...Yes, Your Majesty."
The Empress smirked and went back to her letters. Never again, she promised herself. Never again would she hand over something that was hers because someone else reached for it first.
The last of the letters confirmed the details. The summit was with Quan.
Quan. The desert empire. The country of the boy bleeding on her sheets.
She read the date twice. It could be a coincidence, and she did not believe in those. Quan's emperor had sent a boy of his own blood into this palace with a knife-shaped errand once already; she was suspicious that the boy had been meant to be an assassin, and that the next attempt would arrive wrapped in diplomatic ribbon.
When she returned to her chamber, the bed was empty. He was gone, sheets pushed back, window open.
He had left something behind on the pillow.
She picked it up: a bracelet, fine work, a red gemstone set in it that caught the light and held it. She turned it over once and put it on her wrist.
Don't get hurt again, she thought, which was not a thought she had expected to have.
Far to the south, in a throne room of white stone and gold, the boy knelt on the floor with his head down in front of a seated ruler, and a single bead of sweat ran down his jaw.