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“My lady,” he said. “With respect, this is palace business.”
“It became my business the moment your men walked into my evening.” She did not raise her voice. She crossed the floor, stopped a little way from him, and looked at him with a mild, pleasant attention that was somehow worse than temper. “I have been at prayer, Master Guardsman, in your emperor’s own house, as a guest of his court, and I come out of it to find armed men hauling off the one officer in this whole gilded city who has shown my people the smallest courtesy. Captain Auden saw my household safe through the lower wards some weeks back, when your watch was nowhere to be found. I have been meaning to ask His Majesty for the loan of him as my escort while I remain in the capital. I had thought there was time for the asking.” She let the words rest a moment. “I see I should have asked tonight. So let us call it asked. The captain comes with me.”
I watched the master of the guard go looking for the edges of his own authority and fail to find them. She had done a thing with very few words that I only half followed at the time and understood better later. She had set her foot in the one place his orders could not reach. He held a seal telling him to take a captain to the barracks, but he held nothing at all telling him what to do when the envoy of the empire his own sovereign was courting stood in front of him and let it be known, mildly, that she wanted the same man for herself. Refuse her, and if he had misjudged the emperor’s will, he had insulted the north and lost his head for it. Yield, and if he had misjudged it the other way, he had let a confined man walk and lost his head for that. He did not know where the line was, and a man who cannot see the line does not step over it.
“I’d have to confirm it with the palace,” he said, the fight already gone out of him, because confirming it meant hours, and hours meant the night was no longer his to lose.
“Of course you would.” Vasstent’s mouth moved, almost a smile. “Confirm it. Take all the time you need. I will keep the captain by me in the meanwhile, since we are both here already, and you may send word when His Majesty has made his wishes plain. I am sure he would not want an honoured guest left unguarded in a strange city over a clerk’s muddle. He is so very concerned with my comfort.” A pause, set down with great care. “Do give him my regards.”
The master of the guard looked at her, looked at Auden, and looked at the doors behind which lay the long road to anyone who could tell him what to do. He did the only thing a small man can do when two great powers lean against each other over his head. He pulled back. Gathering his uneasy men with a jerk of his chin, he gave Auden a short, unhappy bow that was also an apology. They went out across the marble as they had come, the great doors shut behind them, the sound of their boots faded, and the temple fell quiet again under the gods’ burning lamps.
* * *
It should have felt like a rescue, but it did not.
Auden turned to her, the set of his jaw proving he trusted it no more than I did.
“My lady,” he said. “I am grateful. But I have done you no service that earns this, I have sworn no oath to your household, and I do not understand what just happened in this room.”
“What happened is that I spared you a season in a barracks cell over a war that does not exist, and spared myself the loss of one of the few men in this court worth the courtesy he gives.” She drew her grey shawl closer, the matter already folded up and put away, a thing concluded. “I will not truly trouble you to stand at my door, Captain. I can keep myself safe in this palace from everything in it, except possibly your own order, and even then I would back myself against them. You may go where you please. Consider yourself unleashed, with my compliments.”
“Then I owe you nothing?” Auden asked carefully.
She made a small sound that was almost a laugh. “Owe. What an ugly little word that is. No, let us not have ugly words between us, not on such a lovely night.” She adjusted the shawl at her throat. “I have done you a good turn. Some day it may please me to ask one back, and on that day I will think of you.” She let that settle, and then her eyes moved, for the first time, to me.
I had been standing very still behind Auden, my hands folded low and hidden against my robe, holding the fox down by main strength. I had begun to hope she might simply leave without marking me at all.
She marked me.
It was a brief look and a complete one, a moneylender’s look, the bite-test of a coin done with the eyes alone. It traveled over the river-robe, the silver thread, and my own true face the brew had given back to me. I made myself meet it and give it nothing, because giving it nothing was the only move I had left.
“You danced beautifully,” she said. “The whole temple thought so. Even the gods, it would seem.” Her gaze flicked up to the burning lamps, then came back down to me, carrying something I could not read and did not like. “Take good care of him. And of yourself. A girl who can wake the dead lamps of Tateharas with her two feet is far too rare a thing to go to waste in a city that would not know her worth.” A beat. “Enjoy what is left of your evening, the both of you. You have earned it more than anyone else in this barn.”
She gave the smallest nod, turned, and walked out as she had come. The doors let her through into the night, leaving behind a quiet with a hook in it that I could feel yet could not name.
Auden looked at the shut doors where she had vanished, the stillness in him shifting into a different kind, the stillness of a man rapidly turning a thing over and disliking every face it showed him.
“I have to find out what this is,” he said low, half to me and half to himself. “Why my own emperor would sign an order against me. I have served this throne my whole life and never once given it cause.” Then he looked at me, and the calculation left his face. The worry that replaced it was not for himself at all.
He did not want to let me go alone.
I saw the conflict in him: the captain who needed to ride for the palace this very hour to learn who had signed against him, and the man, still half inside the rite, still looking at me as he had across the drum, who did not want to put a single dark street between us on this night of all nights.
He took half a step toward me. “I will see you home first. The streets are no place for you alone after this, and I would not rest until I knew you were—”
“You will do no such thing,” I said gently. It cost me to say it, because some disloyal part of me wanted nothing in the world so much as to let him walk me home through the dark and stay by my side. “Something has happened to you tonight that you do not understand, and every hour you spend seeing me safely to a door is an hour you are not spending finding out what it was. Go to the palace. Find out who signed it, and why. I will be behind a locked door before you have crossed the first courtyard.” I made myself hold his eyes. “I will sleep the easier for knowing you went straight to it. Please. Let me give you that much.”
He did not like it, but he heard the truth underneath: the kindest thing either of us could do for the other tonight was to let the other go and tend to what had to be tended. After a moment he gave way, as he had given way to me about everything from the first, by choosing what I wanted over what he wanted. He made me promise to send word in the morning that I was well, and I promised.
Then he went one way into the cold gold dark of the palace toward whatever had reached out to take him, and I went the other, stepping out a side gate and down into the streets on my own two feet, a lady walking home from her devotions. Tsuki settled onto my shoulder the moment I cleared the lamps, keeping watch on the dark ahead of us.
I held the fox down during the long walk home through the emptying streets, every step its own labour, refusing to loosen my grip on myself until I was safe behind Selene’s walls.
* * *
I lay awake a long time after in the dark of my borrowed room. The thing that kept sleep off me was not the guard, not the brew, and not even the grey envoy with the hook in her voice I could not see the shape of.
It was that for one hour, while dancing, I had forgotten to be afraid. The world had waited for exactly that moment, for the door of myself to stand open for the first time since the ruin, and then it had come through to take something. It felt as though it had been watching the whole while for an opening, enforcing the one rule I kept failing to learn: the moment I allowed myself to have a thing was the very moment it was marked to be taken from me.
