I remembered the letter from our journey, the letter regarding Morva’s Eve that he had passed to the piercingly blue-eyed man named Feliks in the city. The occasion was a few weeks away in the early spring on the night before the festival celebrating the goddess of fertility.
What were Anton and Feliks planning? Would the nobleman with the amethyst ring join them, or was he only the first messenger of the letter? Did the emperor know about it? Based on Anton’s covertness and how he’d tried to hide the letter from me, I doubted he wanted his brother involved. But wasn’t it my duty to relay any suspicious behavior to the emperor?
My gaze drifted to Anton. We were obliged to suffer through another long council meeting, but his aura was nothing like bored. His intentness and fervent energy awoke me from my tedium. He had his arm stretched over a map on the table, his brows drawn together in earnest as he named the villages near the Bayac Mountains that had experienced the most hardship from famine and the Black Death that took Emperor Izia’s life years ago—the villages that had also lost many of their able men to the border wars. Anton proposed we send a portion of Torchev’s excess regiments to reinforce the lines against Estengarde and start up a ministry of agriculture to consult with the peasants over which crops could be cultivated in harsher conditions, how to combat the pests that surfaced in abundance once the snows melted, and the best way to rotate plots of soil so the earth could renew its nutrients.
As I listened to Anton, I wondered . . . could I betray him to his brother? He seemed to care far more for Riaznin than Valko, who had spent most of the meeting tracing and retracing the Jinshan River designating the border between his empire and Shengli, our eastern neighbor, rich in jade and emeralds. As the emperor’s eyes lingered on that river, his melancholy of the last few weeks lifted. Now his aura made my stomach groan with a sensation close to hunger.
Anton moved next to the topic of serfdom and leaned his knuckled hands on the table. A lock of hair fell over his eye, reminding me of his tousled look on our journey. I had slept in the same room as this man. And while I’d dozed off in the troika, he’d laid his mother’s blanket over me.
Would it be treason if I didn’t betray him?
I examined the prince as I had done that day in the troika, when he helped me overcome the auras of the commoners in the city square. My gaze followed the slope of his nose in profile. The faint crinkles around his eyes, proof he sometimes smiled. The small mole alongside the upper bridge of his nose, his only imperfection, my favorite part of his face. Somehow that little flaw made him appear younger, more like the boy he was underneath the political roles his life had thrust upon him.
An ember sparked in my belly and curled warmth throughout me, from toes to fingertips to ears. The sun cut through the clouds outside, illuminating the prince in a rainbow of color from the stained-glass window. Dust floated around him like gold.
“Riaznin has enslaved a portion of our peasants as serfs for over five centuries,” Anton said. “In the last fifty years, that number has multiplied to a quarter of our population. Not only is serfdom inhumane, it is a danger to us. There is talk of revolt.” Anton seemed to lose his trail of thought when he caught me gazing at him, my brows lifted, my spine straight as an arrow. The warmth inside me expanded with a tumble of escalating emotion, too rapid-fire to decipher. A little frown tugged at his lips, and he cleared his throat, hazarding a glance at Valko.
I looked at the emperor and froze to find his eyes soft on mine, his finger removed from the river of Shengli. I swallowed.
“What is your name again?” he asked. Across the table, his councilors turned their heads to me, as if just noticing I was in the room.
My hands slid under my thighs. “Sonya Petrova.”
“Do you like it here, Sonya?”
I blinked. The sunlight was in my eyes. “Sometimes.”
He laughed, his boredom breaking up like a glacier sliding off a mountain.
In response, a smile flickered to my mouth before I could push his sudden mirth away. “I worry for those I left behind at the convent,” I said, taking advantage of this, our first conversation together. “The peasants in the surrounding villages are unhappy, too. Perhaps . . .” I looked briefly to Anton. “Perhaps you could discuss that, as well.”
Valko laughed again. His grin lingered like I’d said the most amusing thing. “Yes, yes. By all means, let’s discuss it.” He scooted forward and put his elbows on the table.
I pressed my lips together, torn between emotions. Was he making fun of me? Or had I just awakened him from a deep slumber? Did he truly care about Ormina?
“There’s nothing to discuss,” Anton said. He folded the map into hard creases.