The Empress sat at her desk turning a peacock-feather quill over in her fingers while Derek made his report.
"My men couldn't act on it," he said. "Not this time. The order came down from His Majesty directly, and it was specific."
She looked at his face. There was a particular kind of stiffness in it.
"You quarrelled with him."
He didn't deny it.
Despicable, she thought, and her eyes flashed, and she began putting together her answer.
The doors banged open before she had finished.
"Your Majesty!" Two of her ladies came in almost at a run, talking over one another. "The designer has broken off — no letter, nothing, the man simply isn't there. And the architect's office won't receive us. And the artist has cut all contact as of this morning—"
Every collaborator she had signed for the banquet. All of them at once, in a single day.
She sat back and had a brief vision of herself chained by the ankle to a throne. So he genuinely does not care, she thought. He would rather two empires watch his own wife fail in his own house than let me have one evening.
They were not even doing it for advantage. They were doing it out of spite, which was clumsy of them.
Which is better for me, she decided. Much better. Wreckage I choose is worth more than a hall I inherited.
"Susan. Charlotte. Sir North." She stood up. "With me."
Trumpets sounded thinly somewhere along the castle wall.
Down on the training ground two knights were making their way across the sand, holding each other up, singing something with more verses than tune. One of them stopped, clutched his stomach, and groaned.
"What's the point," he said. "Of any of it. Tell me the point."
"There's no honour left in this order," the other said thickly. "We used to be — we were — do you remember what we were?"
"Shut up."
"We were the Valkyrie."
"Shut up."
They came round the corner of the armoury and found the Empress of Nyx standing in the middle of the training ground with a practice sword in her hand.
The first knight stopped dead and stared at her with his mouth open.
"Is that — that's not —"
"Your Majesty?" said the other one, uncertainly, and then much louder, "Your Majesty!"
A third knight, sitting on a barrel, smirked at his friend. "You're drunk. You're seeing things. Turn round and look at me and say it again."
He turned round. They both froze.
The Empress looked over the four of them — untucked, unshaven, one of them barefoot — and smiled very slightly.
"You have all lost your minds," she said.
Above them, on a pole nobody had oiled in a year, hung the banner of the Knights of the Valkyrie.
The Empire kept three knight orders. The Imperial Guard, who belonged to the Emperor and had refused her flatly through a secretary. The Crusade, who belonged to the temple in everything but name and were away in the south. And the Valkyrie.
She picked up a chest piece from the rack, looked at the rust on the buckle, and set it down again. That left one option, then.
She reached out and tapped the nearest knight on the shoulder with two fingers, and he yelped and went straight down onto his face in the sand.
"Why is the Empress here," someone said, from ground level. "Why is the Empress here?"
She stood over them while they scrambled onto their knees and bowed so deeply their foreheads nearly touched the dirt. Derek stepped forward, grey-haired and immaculate, and gestured at the bearded man who had fallen over.
"Your Majesty. The commander of the Valkyrie."
"Why," said the commander, from the ground, "is the Empress here?"
Well, she thought, looking at him, that answers one question. She had heard the rumours about the order being abolished and had assumed they were political. They were not political. They were simply true, and this was why.
The commander put his hands over his face and despaired quietly into them.
Four knights. That was all that was left; after the previous commander had been executed, the rest had gone, transferred or resigned or quietly encouraged out. Four.
Then four it is, she thought.
"Training ground," she said. "Six o'clock tomorrow morning, sharp, every one of you. When you can stand in a line at six o'clock I will call you 'sir', and not one hour before."
She turned to go, and then paused, and turned back with a confident little smile.
"One more thing. I'll be leading the training myself."
Derek was struck completely dumb beside her.
Behind her, one knight — who was at that moment being held upside down by the ankles by another, for reasons of his own — shouted, "What?"
"Welcome," said the Empress, three days later, in a reception hall the size of a church.
She was at a desk in a deep purple gown with a document in her hand, and a woman with light brown hair stood twisting her gloves in the doorway.
"Y-Your Majesty. It's — I'm honoured —"
"Sit down. Skip that part."
The architect sat on the edge of the chair.
The Empress spread a blueprint across the desk and put her finger on the centre of the great hall.
"A waterfall. Here, running the full height of the room, and I want the rest of the decoration built out from the water — the tables, the light, all of it."
"A waterfall." The architect looked at the plan, and then at the ceiling, and then at the plan again. "Your Majesty, forgive me, but — the budget. What is the budget?"
"There isn't one. This is the first banquet held in my name. Cost is not a consideration in this room."
A bead of sweat came down the architect's temple. She stared at the blueprint in silence for a while.
"May I ask something. Why me? I have no name. Everyone in this city is better known than I am."
"Because I collect people other people have overlooked." The Empress turned a page. "There are very few women in architecture, and that is not a statement about women; it is a statement about doors. And I have read the graduation projects from the university."
The architect could not speak at all.
That, thought the Empress pleasantly, is how a devil makes a servant. You find out what a human wants that nobody will give them, and then you give it to them.
"If the banquet succeeds," she said, "you will have my patronage. Publicly. For as long as you can hold a pencil."
The architect stood and bowed so deeply that her hair swung forward. "It will succeed, Your Majesty. I swear it."
Walking home that night she thought that the Empress of Nyx was a great deal kinder than the rumours made her out to be. She had even sent the sample champagne back with her, with a note saying it was too good to pour away.
The Empress went down the long hall with Derek half a step behind her.
"Your Majesty has now used all seven reception rooms," he said. "Every day this week. Every one."