The Empress stood afterwards in front of the holy symbol on the wall of her own receiving room and worked out precisely what she had been given.
Permission. The Saint of the Holy Empire had graciously granted the Empress of Nyx permission to bear the Emperor's child. That was the gift. That was what the little bow had meant, and the girl had delivered it with her eyes lowered and her hands folded, and by the end of it she had looked ready to lean across the table and slap her.
She let it go. She was a child. That was all she was: a clever, hungry child.
In another place — the one behind her eyes, where she was still herself — a girl with pink hair sat very small and meek at the foot of a towering winged demoness in black armour, and the demoness looked down at her without much interest.
A thousand years, and I have seen ten thousand of you, she thought. You are stones in a stream. The water goes over you and around you and in a hundred years there is no stone.
She smirked at her own uneasiness and put it away where it belonged. That was what had been bothering her since the corridor — not the emperor, not the council, but a foolish little woman who believed she had won something with parlour tricks and a list of a man's favourite foods.
In a way she was grateful. Thanks to Helen she could look at her own hatred the way she used to look at everything, with cold and comfortable logic, and it was almost pleasant to feel like herself again.
Back in her human shape she stood at the window and watched the visitors leave.
"That vixen," her attendant fumed, arranging the cups with unnecessary force. "Marching in here without so much as a card, sitting in your chair, laying her rubbish out on your table, and then wafting off again as though she'd done us a kindness—"
The Empress was thinking about the timing. Not the visit. The hour of it, and the day, and how neatly it had landed on the morning after the council.
"Susan."
"Your Majesty."
"How many of the servants in this palace would you swear for? Not like — swear for."
Susan opened her mouth and then closed it again.
"Yes," said the Empress. "The Saint has had people inside the empress's palace for years, and I have been living in a house with holes in the walls. Dismiss all of them except the ones you would swear for. I don't care how many that leaves. I would rather be served by four honest women than forty who write letters."
Down in the courtyard, Helen had been met by someone in a hooded cloak.
An enchanting little viper, the Empress thought, watching them talk. Let's see the fangs, then. You're hiding them well, but they're in there.
Then the group in the courtyard broke apart in a sudden panic. Attendants converged, hands out.
"Your Holiness — Your Holiness, are you all right —"
Helen had both hands at her throat. She was gasping — really gasping, her chest heaving, her face going a colour no performance produces. Someone reached for her as she lost her balance.
She went down into the snow, and two of her women went down with her.
"The Saint has collapsed!" a purple-haired girl was screaming. "Someone — the Saint has collapsed!"
The Empress watched all of it from her window without moving. Her eye narrowed. What, precisely, had happened in that room?
Then she smiled, small and extremely satisfied, and thought: whatever it was, I will be sure to pay you back for it.
The next day a blonde man with a neat goatee was announced and shown in, and the Empress rose to greet her father.
Duke Ailo, head of House Ailo, the man who held the noble faction together with his two fists.
"Are you all right?" he said, before he had even sat. "I heard the Saint was here. Under this roof. Alone with you."
"Sit down, Father."
He sat, and she took the chair opposite him, and told him the whole thing had been too trivial to have troubled him with.
The rest of the story had come round by then, brought by three separate servants: the Saint's collapse had not been an assassination, nor a curse, nor a divine visitation. It was a peach. The Saint of the Holy Empire was allergic to peaches, and had eaten one in front of the Empress of Nyx and smiled while she did it.
Not even poison, the Empress thought. I have been alive for a thousand years and I ruined my rival's week with fruit.
"It could be a scheme," the Duke said, frowning. "A collapse in your courtyard, in front of your windows. It has the right shape."
She put her head down on her folded arms on the table like a tired girl and let him talk.
"Listen to me. This is the last chance we will get. Use the banquet. Do not simply host it — use it, and crush her with it, publicly, so that nobody can pretend otherwise afterward. If we let this go by, that woman will have the Emperor's favour and the temple's authority in the same hand, and then she is not a rival, she is a power."
"I know."
She unrolled a large map across the table between them.
"Now tell me something. What is the real reason the desert kingdom asked for these talks?"
Duke Ailo leaned over the map with a serious, contemplative expression, and traced the long southern border with one finger.
"Something is wrong down there," he said at last. "The mood of the place has changed — our people can't put a name to it. It has to do with the sun, or the sign of the sun; their court has been full of it. And the request came afterward." He looked up. "They received a revelation. That much we know for certain. Nobody outside their inner court knows the content of it."
When he had gone she sat alone for a long while with the map still open.
A revelation. Humans said the word as though it only pointed in one direction.
Nine times in ten, said the older thing inside her, a revelation is a demon lord's intention wearing a clean shirt. Gods and demons speak the same way; it is only the listeners who insist on the difference.
Could it be them, she thought.
Against a black sky hung with stars, three tall horned figures stood together, watching something a long way below.
In that void her own demon form turned slowly, wondering what her sisters were doing, and why, and whether any of it had anything to do with her.
Black feathers were falling past the windows of the palace.
"Your Majesty must be tired," Susan said gently from the door.
"Leave me. All of you. I want the room."
She lay down on the bed and let the day come off her. She was exhausted in a way she had not been exhausted in centuries; this body ran out like sand through a hand.
Her red eyes opened in the dark.
Was it a coincidence? Any of it? She had died in a cabin and woken five years later inside a woman who had thrown herself off a balcony in the same empire, in the same reign, under the same two people. She did not believe that the world arranged itself that neatly by accident.
She thought of her sisters. If they could see her now — a demon lord of death in a body that could not climb a staircase — would they laugh at her? Pity her? Would they take her by the ear and tell her she had been warned?
She lifted her hand toward the ceiling, toward the falling feathers and whatever was on the other side of them.
Revenge, she thought, will very likely be the thing that keeps me out. There must be a road home and this is not it, and I am walking down it anyway, at speed.
And while I am gone — a thousand years is a long absence, and a domain does not sit empty. Some other demon has moved into my country by now. Some other demon has moved into my place in my sisters' hearts, which is worse.
She closed her hand into a fist.
I want to go home. I want it so much I can hardly breathe around it.
No human could understand what that meant, and she did not intend to explain it to one. This was the loneliness of something that does not die on schedule, and it had no bottom.
She turned over and put her face to the wall.
Never again, she said, silently, to no one. Never again will I love anything.
She said it several more times while the tears ran sideways across her nose and into the pillow, until she believed it enough to sleep.