Curtains stirred in a tall moonlit window on the other side of the palace.
In the Lily Palace, Helen was sobbing. She did it beautifully, in gulps, with her shoulders working, while her attendants knelt around her chair.
"Your Holiness, please — what did she say to you? What did that woman say?"
A single tear came down her cheek, and behind it her eyes were flat with misery and something harder.
The door opened. A blonde man with purple eyes came in, and Helen and every maid in the room startled at once.
He was dressed for an audience, all silver thread and dark cloth, and his face was serious and full of concern. He crossed the room and went down on one knee beside her chair.
"Are you all right? They told me you collapsed."
"I'm quite all right." She let herself sway, just slightly, into his hands. "It came on after I visited Her Majesty. Right after. But truly, it's nothing —"
He leaned closer. "Tell me everything that happened in that room. All of it."
"Enri—"
"Nene." He said it gently, the way he had said it since they were both children with nothing. "Tell me."
She had come from a place called Quidd.
There was a wall around it and a name for the people inside it, and the name meant untouchable. In a grimy alley a filthy hand closed on a girl's shoulder and spun her round; a gaunt man with a mouth full of gaps held her by the arm and looked at her the way a man looks at meat, because in that isolation zone — set aside, the officials said, for criminals — things had gone far enough that people had begun to eat one another to get through the winter.
Then a shout went up from the gate.
"The temple! The temple's come, they're here, they've brought the supplies—"
The alley emptied. Everyone ran at once, and the crowd went through the narrow street like water through a pipe, and a small girl with pink hair was knocked flat into the muck and trodden over.
"Please," she was crying, from underneath all of it, "please, I only want something to eat, please—"
She lifted her face out of the dirt. Shock, and hunger, and nothing else in it at all.
From the ground she watched the others get their bread. She watched the temple officials handing it down from the carts in their clean gloves, and one of the priests looked over the heaving crowd with a mild and detached pity.
"How nice it must be for them," he said.
Those people, the girl thought, live in a world with a wall around it, and the wall is on my side.
She dug her fingers into the wet stone. Born noble. That was all. That was the entire difference between the man in the clean gloves and the child under his cart — one of them had been born to a name and one had not, and there was no other reason, there had never been any other reason.
The rain came down in sheets. The priests stepped under an awning to keep dry.
The girl stayed on her knees in it, with her face turned up.
"What did I do?" she screamed at the sky. "Tell me what I did! I've lived in hell my whole life for one reason — one! — so tell me what I did wrong!"
Nobody answered.
"I want to live like they do," she said, quieter, with the rain running into her mouth. "I want a good name. I want beautiful things. I want people to lower their eyes when I come in. I want—"
She stood up in the mud.
"Give me the power to rule the world."
The lightning came down.
It came down on the isolation zone in a single white column, and the people who were still in the street fell over screaming. When they could see again, the ragged girl was two feet off the ground with her arms out, wrapped in holy light, and wings of light were opening behind her, and the light was going out across the filthy tents and the mud and the carts and turning all of it gold.
Her eyes opened, and they were glowing.
The priests dropped to their knees in the water, because they understood exactly what they were looking at.
"Truly," Helen said, wiping her eyes, "I'm fine, Enri."
"Don't hold it in." He brushed her hair back. "It's the strain. You've had all of the palace on your shoulders for years and nobody has ever once thanked you for it. Anyone would break."
She said something then, low, with the Empress's name in it.
"What?" he said sharply.
She had known he would react to that. It was almost too easy. The Empress had never in her life said one word to her about where she came from — never so much as looked at it — but Enri's whole body went tight at even the suggestion, because his own origins were the softest place on him, and anything that touched them made him hers.
He took her by the arm. She lifted her wet eyes.
"I never meant to challenge Her Majesty. Truly. I only wanted to help—"
He pulled her against his chest and held her there, and over the top of her head his purple eyes were cold as a shut window.
"She will regret taking your work from you," he said. "I promise you that."
And his honour is precious to him, Helen thought, with her cheek against his shirt. It is the most precious thing he has. Remember that.
He tipped her chin up to kiss her, and she pulled him closer and let it go on.
She kept her eyes open the whole time.
Later, in the dark, she rolled toward him. "Do you understand what I feel? Truly understand it?"
He did not answer that.
Push, said the voice in her that had got her out of Quidd. Push harder. She resolved to make the Empress of Nyx regret every part of this, and to teach her never again to covet what belonged to Helen.
I clawed my way up out of a gutter, she thought. The world owes me better than this. The world owes me the whole rest of it.
In the morning she looked up at him, shirtless, standing at the window with his back to her, and said nothing.
Alone in her bath she went over it again.
The plan worked only if Enri loved her and nothing else. That was the hinge. She bit the side of her finger and thought about the peaches — how he had walked straight past a whole bowl of them at the Empress's table without so much as a flicker.
The devil he once loved is nothing, she told herself. A dead animal. Worthless.
But that was the trouble, and she knew it perfectly well, sitting in the cooling water: the real problem had never been the wife. The real problem was the woman Henry had loved before either of them, the black-haired one, whose favourite food had been peaches.
She stood up out of the bath, dripping.
Nothing in common. That was the answer. She would make certain she had nothing in common with that woman, not a food, not a colour, not a word.
She faced her own reflection and made it a vow: every memory of her, buried, and my own laid down on top.
Then she waved the thought away — it wasn't worth comparing, she wasn't worth comparing to — and slumped forward against the glass.
Why, she thought, with a sudden flat panic, do I feel like this? Everything is going exactly the way I planned it. Everything.
The next day dawned bright and cold over the palace.