She was still seething as she went down the gallery. Approve. He had sat there and approved her hosting her own banquet, as though the right were his to hand out — as though the Empress of Nyx held her duties at the pleasure of the man who had married her.
What an actor he was. She thought back over the field and the village and the small neat house, and every gentle thing he had said in that borrowed summer, and she saw the performance in all of it now, the way you see the brushwork once someone has pointed at it. She had been a thousand years old, and he had fooled her with a straw hat.
Her chest closed like a fist. She caught at it and had to stop walking.
Divine power. She had been sitting in a room full of it for two hours, and this body had no defence against that at all; by rights she should have been on the floor since the first quarter-hour.
She looked down at her wrist. The red stone in the bracelet was glowing very faintly against her skin, taking the weight off her, holding her upright.
"Your Majesty?" Derek had her elbow.
"Keep walking."
Did that child know what he was giving away, she wondered. Did he have the faintest idea what this thing was worth?
Behind them a voice said, "A word."
She turned. The fair-haired man came down the gallery toward her with two guards behind him, and she let her red eyes rest on him and did not soften anything in her face.
"What do you want," she said.
Enrique checked, very slightly. That was not the tone he was used to being answered in. "You might remember," he said, "that while you were unable to leave your bed, Helen managed this palace. For years. Without complaint."
"And I should thank her, I suppose."
"It would not be undeserved."
She thought about a woman weeping alone in a locked room while her husband failed, month after month, to come down one corridor and open one door. That woman had been abandoned in the deepest part of her despair by the man now standing in front of her, and here he was, quick as a whip, to defend his mistress's stolen position before anybody had even finished taking it from her.
"Your love is remarkable," she said. "Truly. I've never seen anything like it."
His jaw tightened.
"It was the Saint who overstepped. Not I. And I want you to understand that I permitted your arrangement — all of it, all these years — for exactly one reason. Because I loved you."
Derek stood very still by the wall and looked at nothing at all.
"That reason is finished," she said. "I am going to take back my place."
They stood apart from each other with several feet of cold marble between them.
"You aren't yourself today," Enrique said slowly. "Where did this tongue come from? You've never spoken to me like this."
Something rose in her that did not belong to her: a memory of a younger Leonora and a younger Enrique standing in sunlight somewhere, close together, and the memory was sweet, which made it worse. Under it lay her own — a wedding kneeling, a prayer, a woman who had been willing to give away every year she had left.
His love had been a lie. It had been a lie in the field, at the altar, and in the little house, and there had been something else behind it the entire time.
The memory of it went into her like a blade, and for a moment she felt again what she had felt dying on that floor, which no human word covers.
She looked him in the eye and thought of the words she had once wanted to say to him.
I love you.
She watched them break apart in her own head like glass on stone.
Enrique turned to go, and his guards turned with him. She did not move. He stopped after three paces.
"You truly won't allow her any part in it? Nothing at all?"
"Nothing at all."
He stared. Behind him his attendants fidgeted with their sleeves and did not raise their eyes, and every one of them was privately wishing that His Majesty would let his wife have one win, just once, just this one.
"Order your saintess to stick to her own duties," she said, with a smirk that felt very good on this unfamiliar face. "She has plenty."
She walked away with Derek at her shoulder and left the Emperor of Nyx standing in the middle of the gallery.
He watched her go. Was she always like this, he thought.
And then, over the retreating figure in pale silk, he saw something else — a dark-haired woman with horns, standing where his wife was standing, turning her head to look back at him.
Cold sweat came out along his hairline. There was a presence in that corridor that he had never once felt from Leonora, not in all the years he had known her.
The feeling dragged a memory up with it. A voice at his ear, warm and encouraging: You can do it, Henry. Trust me. Take it. All of it — take it now, while it's still warm.
Helen had made him absorb the demon's magic after he had killed her. She had promised him that this way the demon would be his forever, that nothing would ever be able to take her back. A prize, she had called it. A satisfying prize.
In the memory he was crying and looking down at his own hands in confusion, and her voice went on and on, and at the end of it she had said, My beloved Henri.
His hand trembled. He closed it into a fist and held it closed until it stopped.
"Back to the palace," he said coldly to his attendant, and walked, and did not look back again, because he had already admitted to himself that he could not stop thinking about her.