“We have a problem,” the emperor told Kestrel as she approached. “Come help us.” The senators surrounding him were high-ranking, all with seats in the Quorum. Kestrel joined them, grateful that the Senate leader had his back to his daughter’s coterie.
“Problem?” said Kestrel to the emperor. “Don’t tell me you’ve run out of chocolate already.”
“A more serious matter,” he said. “The barbarian plains.”
Kestrel glanced at the eastern princess, but Risha was engaged in her game with Verex, and the emperor’s voice had been pitched not to carry. Risha possessed a grace perfectly proportioned to her beauty. Her black hair was braided like a Valorian’s. She wore rings when a true easterner would have kept her fingers bare, and the contrast of gold against Risha’s richly dark skin was striking. She was about Kestrel’s age. Maybe Risha didn’t remember much of her life in the east before her kidnapping. Maybe she had grown accustomed to the capital and thought of it as her home. Kestrel couldn’t say what the girl would have thought about the emperor referring to her country as a problem, and to her people as barbarians. Uncomfortably, Kestrel remembered that she’d called them barbarians before, too, just because that’s what people she knew did. Kestrel wouldn’t do that now. This seemed at once a meaningful difference and yet also worth very little.
“Your father writes that the plainspeople prove tricky,” the emperor said. “The eastern tribes at our borders are skilled at stealth attacks. They vanish when the general musters his army against them.”
“Burn the plains,” said a senator, a woman who had served under Kestrel’s father. “They’re dry this time of year.”
“It’s good land,” said the emperor. “I’d like to turn it into farms. A fire would spoil my prize.”
And kill the plainspeople, Kestrel thought, though this was a factor no one raised. The plains were vast, and north enough in Dacra that it didn’t rain much there this time of year. Valorian soliders would set the fire while the plainspeople slept. They would wake, and they would flee to the river, if they could make it. But a fire would rage fast and fierce through the dry grasses, and by the time the plainspeople woke it would likely be too late. They’d be burned alive.
There was some debate about whether a fire might endanger Valorian troops. But if not, it would be a significant victory, argued the Senate leader. The plains lay north of the delta where the eastern queen ruled. If Valoria captured the plains, it would squeeze the savages into the southeastern corner of the continent. “And then it’s only a matter of time,” said the emperor, “before Valoria rules the entire continent.”
“Then burn the grasses,” said the senator who had been in the military. “Fire is good for the earth anyway. Eventually.”
Kestrel watched Risha knock over one of Verex’s pieces, an unimportant one. Risha shivered in her furs. It was never cold in the east. Did this knowledge live in Risha’s memory, or had it been given to her as it had been to Kestrel, as a piece of someone else’s information? The princess was young when she’d been captured, as young as Kestrel when her family had moved from the capital to the newly conquered territory of Herran. Maybe Risha didn’t remember her home at all.
Kestrel saw Herran, and her garden there, and seeds beneath her childhood fingers as her nurse pressed them into the soft earth.
She saw a plain of fire. Flames waving and snapping, horses running wild, tents burned to their frames, then crackling down. Parents would snatch up their children. The air would choke hot and black.
“Kestrel?” said the emperor. “What do you think? Your father wrote that you’ve advised him well on the east before.”
She blinked. The sky was white over the Winter Garden. The trees dripped their deadly berries. “Poison the horses.”
The emperor smiled. “Intriguing. Tell me more.”
“The plainspeople rely on horses,” Kestrel said. “For their milk, their hides, their meat, to ride for hunting … Kill the horses, and the tribes won’t be able to live without them. They’ll trek south to take refuge in the delta. The plains will be yours. You’ll mow the grasses and send it to feed our own horses. You can plant the earth as soon as you like.”
“And how do you propose to poison the horses?”
“Water supply,” suggested the military senator.
That might poison people as well. Kestrel shook her head. “The river is wide and rapid. Any poison would be diluted. Instead, have my father send scouts to determine where the horses graze. Spray those grasses with the poison.”
The emperor leaned back in his seat. His cup of chocolate steamed, veiling his face as he tipped his chin and studied Kestrel with a slanting gaze. “Very neat of you, Lady Kestrel. You solve all my worries. You hand me the unravaged plains for the low price of poison. How nice that you minimize our enemy’s civilian casualties at the same time.”
Kestrel said nothing.
He sipped his chocolate. “Have you ever witnessed your father in battle? You should. I’d like to see you fight under a black flag, just once. I’d like to see you truly at war.”
Kestrel couldn’t quite return the emperor’s stare. She lifted her eyes and noticed the prince and Risha leave their gaming table. They disappeared into the hedge maze. Kestrel understood now why Verex seemed so happy. She wondered if the whole court knew about him and the princess. She suspected it must.
“Oh,” the emperor drawled, “the Herrani wish to speak with you, Kestrel. They’ve made a formal request.”
His words seemed to linger in the air longer than possible. Kestrel had the odd impression of the emperor playing a piano, and striking a dissonant chord that caught the fascination of everyone listening.
“Hardly surprising,” she said coolly. “The Herrani are bound to want to speak with me from time to time. I was named their emissary.”
“Yes, we should correct that. You’re too busy for such a dull job. They’ll be notified that you have given up the position. There’s no need for you to meet with either of the Herrani representatives again.”
*
When Kestrel returned to her suite, the bed was empty and made. Jess’s trunk was gone.
But Jess had promised. Her visit was supposed to last longer than this. They’d barely seen each other, and for Jess to leave, to leave now, so soon …
Kestrel tugged on a silken bellpull. When her ladies-in-waiting arrived in her sitting room, she asked, “Where’s my letter?”
The maids looked quizzical.
“From my friend,” Kestrel said. “For me. It’s not like her to leave. Not without saying something.”
There was a silence. Then one of the maids offered, “The lady had her trunk sent to her townhome in the city.”
“But why?”
A silence made clear that no one knew why. Kestrel pressed her lips shut.
“It’s late,” a maid said. “Shouldn’t you change into a new dress for the afternoon? What will you wear?”
Kestrel waved a hand in a gesture very much like one she’d often seen the emperor make. She hadn’t meant to do that. It upset her. “I don’t care,” she said curtly. “You choose.”
Her ladies-in-waiting bustled into action, putting away her furs and parading gowns. While the maids tutted over some fabrics and fingered others approvingly, Kestrel wondered what Jess would have chosen. She shoved that thought away.
But this was like discarding a Bite and Sting tile only to draw a series of worse ones. Because there was Arin, in the velvet balcony of her mind, and there was the Winter Garden, cold with his absence, and there were the pink and red berries and her awful advice to the emperor.
Kestrel knew what would happen after the eastern horses died.
She imagined the yellow-green waves of grass. The ticking zizz of grasshoppers. Horse carcasses rotting in the sun.
The plainspeople would starve. Their children would grow hollow. They would cry for horse milk. The plainspeople would move south on foot to their queen’s city in the delta. Many would fall in their tracks. Some would not get up.
This would happen. It would happen because of Kestrel. She had done this.
But wasn’t this better? Hadn’t the alternative been worse?
The alternative almost didn’t matter. It didn’t keep Kestrel from feeling a sick horror at what she’d done.
One of the maids shrieked.
The maid had opened another wardrobe. Masker moths were flying out. They beat against the lamps and spun up in panicked, gray spirals. Their dusty wings began to wink orange and rose as they blended into the tapestries.
“They’ve ruined the clothes!” A maid slapped moths out of the air. One hit the carpet and lay still. Its wings went red, tipped with white to match the carpet’s design exactly. Masker moths had the property of camouflage even in death.
Kestrel stooped and picked it up. The furred, lifeless legs clung to her. The red wings changed to match her skin.
The maids hunted the moths ferociously. Masker moths were a common household pest in the capital, and this wasn’t the first time they’d eaten into a wardrobe of expensive clothes. Judging by the number of moths, the larvae must have been fattening themselves on Kestrel’s silks for at least a week. The maids killed every last moth, crushing them against the walls. Masker moths left behind smears of no discernible color. Damaged wings lost their camouflage.
“Go, all of you,” Kestrel told her maids. “Fetch servants to clean out the wardrobe.”
None of the ladies-in-waiting thought to question why they all must go. No one asked why Kestrel couldn’t simply summon servants with the pull of a bell. They glared with satisfaction at the carnage of dusty wings, and left.
When she was alone, Kestrel opened the wardrobe wider and found a pelisse crawling with moth maggots. Using her dagger, she cut a swath of fabric where the larvae squirmed most thickly. She brought it to her dressing table, which was stacked with bottles of perfumes and oils and jars of cream. She took a pot of bath salts and dumped its entire contents out a window, then dropped the cloth and its larvae into the pot and stoppered it, but loosely, so that air would flow. To be sure, she hatched a cross into the cork’s center with her dagger’s point. Kestrel set the pot at the back of her dressing table and arranged the bottles to hide it.
She sat back in her dressing chair, thinking about the creatures feeding on the cloth in the pot. They were fat already. They’d become moths soon.
And when they did, she had a plan for them.
Kestrel went to her study, and wrote a letter to the Herrani minister of agriculture.