The next day the Empress took stock of what she had left.
Two powers. Only two, out of everything she had once been able to do. The first she had used the night the boy fell across her bed. The second she had used on him as well — the conversion of a life force into her own, which had taken his surplus and added it to the days remaining to her. Because this body had days remaining, and they were countable.
She turned the bracelet on her wrist. Don't get hurt, she thought again, irritated with herself for thinking it.
The Desert Empire had requested this summit. That was the part she kept returning to. Two great powers did not meet at a table casually — the protocol alone took a year, the concessions took longer, and neither side ever asked for it first unless something forced their hand. Quan had asked.
And Quan had already sent one child of its imperial house into her bedroom with a wound in his side. They would try again. They would send him again, and next time he would arrive with an embassy's ribbon on him.
She was working half blind, and she hated it.
"Beralt," she called.
Susan came in at once.
"Arrange a meeting with Duke Ailo. Today, if he can be got."
"At once, Your Majesty." Susan gathered her skirts and hurried away down the corridor.
She had not been gone a minute when a lady-in-waiting came through the door without knocking and then remembered to apologise for it.
"Forgive me — Your Majesty — the Saint is at the gates. The Saint Helen. She is requesting an audience."
Helen came in like weather. She had luggage with her, actual luggage, boxes and a case that two servants carried behind her, and she looked around the receiving room with frank delighted curiosity.
"My first time in the empress's palace! Isn't that awful? All these years."
She walked straight past Susan, who was standing ready to announce her, and Susan's face went stiff with the effort of not saying anything about it.
"I've been shy, that's the truth," Helen said, sitting down uninvited. "I do hope we can be close from now on. Really close." She leaned in over the table with her chin on her hands. "We're the same age, near enough. Can't we just talk the way girls our age talk?"
The Empress smiled at her thinly. "If I had known you were so cheerful, I would have sought you out long ago."
Tea was brought. She let it be poured, and let the silence sit for one beat longer than was comfortable, and then said, pleasantly, "Forgive me. What was your name?"
Helen's smile did not move.
"You came into the empress's palace and sat down at my table without introducing yourself. I assumed you had a reason. I couldn't think what it was."
"Oh — how dreadful of me." She recovered instantly, and the smile she produced was dazzling and entirely untroubled. She rose and made a graceful little courtesy. "Helen, Your Majesty. Saint of the Holy Empire."
Behind her, Susan glared at the back of her head.
Not a pushover, the Empress thought, watching her sit back down. Not a fool either. That's a relief.
She let herself enjoy, briefly, a small private image: the table, the tea, and her own hand driving something sharp into that pretty throat. Weaklings were no good, she reflected. You broke them in a week and then there was nothing left to do with them. In the fantasy Helen, bleeding, went on chattering brightly about the banquet.
In the room, Helen was doing exactly that. She had brought samples. She had brought a great many samples, all of them ordered under her own name, and she began to lay them out along the table.
"Now, this," she said, holding up a sprig of dark green leaves and red berries. "Holly. It symbolises peace — you know that, of course — and I thought, for guests coming out of a country that's warm the whole year round, wouldn't it be lovely? Something they've never seen. It's a sacred plant, you know; the temple teaches that it was the first green thing after the—"
What a shame, the Empress thought, listening to her explain the divine symbolism of holly, what a genuine shame this is.
She should have let her have the banquet. She should have handed the whole thing over with both hands, sat in the gallery with a glass of something, and watched it come apart.
Because there was a custom in the desert that everyone at this table except one person apparently knew: at a formal table in Quan, every decoration is edible. It is a courtesy to the guest. Anything on the cloth may be picked up and eaten, and a guest who is uncertain proves his trust by eating it.
Holly berries are poisonous.
She looked at the sprig lying on her table and turned the thing over in her mind. Did the girl know? It was possible she did not — she was ignorant in enormous, specific patches. But it was also possible she knew exactly what she was doing: poison the guests at the Empress's banquet, let them fall down in front of two nations, and then step forward, glowing, and heal them all in a display no ambassador would ever forget.
"Oh, and one more thing," Helen said brightly, "to help."
She produced a folded paper and pressed it across the cloth. It was a list in her own handwriting: every food the Emperor loved, and beneath a ruled line, every food he could not stand.
"I know all of it," she said, leaning in, dropping her voice as though they were conspirators. "Every single thing. We're so close, you see." She sat back and beamed. "I do hope it helps the two of you grow closer."
The Empress set down her cup and looked at the girl for a while.
If I had met you when I was myself, she thought, I would have kept you. I would have made room for you in my own country. There is a kind of cunning that is genuinely rare, and I have never been able to resist it in anything, human or otherwise.
Saint or mistress, she thought. Which is it? You can't be both in the same sentence, and you keep trying.
"A saint," she said aloud, "ought to be out feeding the poor. I'm told there are a great many of them. Instead you're in my sitting room arranging my flowers."
She reached across and lifted Helen's chin with two fingers.
"Did your god teach you this? Any of it?"
Helen's eyes went very wide.
"Whatever else you are — and I don't much care what else you are — stop playing at being the Empress. There's already one of those."
"I only wanted to help," Helen stammered, and around her, faintly, something began to build in the air, a pressure with a shine on it.
The Empress burst out laughing.
She stood up and pulled the shocked girl into an embrace and held her there, laughing, and put her mouth against her ear.
"It was a joke," she murmured. "How could you take a little joke so seriously?"
Then she sat down again and picked up a small dish from beside her cup and held it out.
"Have some. It's a rarity — they only manage a few dozen a season this far north."
Helen looked down at the fruit in the woman's hand, and then at the woman's red eyes.
Resist, or comply.
She took the peach and ate it, calmly, and smiled through the whole thing.
Duke Ailo sent me those, the Empress thought, watching her chew. My father, who is not my father, who sends his frail daughter treats she is too ill to enjoy. And here you sit, eating one, and smiling, and swallowing every part of it — exactly the way Leonora used to smile and swallow things at your table.
"Your Majesty."
She looked up, startled out of it.
"I've been thinking," Helen said, with great sweetness, "that Enri really ought to share a bed with you." She rose and bowed, demure as a novice. "I intend to see to it."
Looking down at the bowed pink head, the Empress remembered the excuse the girl gave everywhere, at court and in the temple and probably in her prayers. A saint cannot bear children. A saint is not permitted to.
So this was generosity. This was the Saint of the Holy Empire, graciously yielding.
Since I don't need it, Helen had said once, in front of witnesses, I'll let you have it.