Esmenet gazed at her beloved daughter in reproach, if not disbelief. She was past being surprised by her extraordinary children.
“Kill her? And for what? For doing the very thing I would have done? You see only the consequence of the life I have lived, daughter. You know nothing of the blood and bitumen that fills a bowl so cracked as your mother! You know nothing of the terror! Grasping and grasping for life, for bread, for medicine, for the gold needed to secure these things with dignity. Killing her would be killing myself!”
“But why would you-you confuse yourself with this woman? Sharing the same-same weal does nothing to change the fact that you are the Empress, and she-she is the whore who betrayed you, that had-had Imhailas murd—”
“Shut up!”
“No, Mother. Momemn is besieged. You are Father’s vessel, the one anointed to rule-rule in his absence. All eyes are upon-upon you, Mother. You must-must gratify them, show them the strength they need to see. You must-must be ferocious.”
Esmenet gazed at her daughter, stupefied by that word, “ferocious.”
“Think of Kelmomas, Mother. Imagine if he had died because of that woman.”
The fury had always been there, of course, the will to make suffer, to gloat and glory in vengeance. Her soul’s eye had witnessed Naree die countless ways for what she had done—enough to make a habit of bloody imagery. The girl had betrayed her, had sold her life and the lives of all those she loved for silver. It all came rushing back, a cringing, noxious tide, the girl’s petty cruelties, her peevish need to humiliate a deposed queen, a mourning mother …
Esmenet looked to her beloved and inhuman daughter, watched the girl read and approve the savage turn in her thought, saw the clenched jaw where slack eyes had been.
“If you wish, I will do it for you, Mother.”
Esmenet shook her head, caught each hand in the other to prevent either from floating away. She could taste the words she had spoken months ago, the oath they had contained.
“It means that your life—your life, Naree—belongs to me …”
“She’s my burden. You said so yourself.”
Theliopa raised the pommel of a knife she produced as if by magic from the intricacies of her gown.
Esmenet could taste the thing when she inhaled, or at least so it seemed. She clutched the handle, felt a cloud of gas for the heft of it, the lethal solidity. Her husband’s eyes watched her from her daughter’s angular face. She flinched from them, looked down out of some unnameable instinct. She turned to the door, numb, barged through on a deep breath.
The chipped, yellow-painted walls. The tawdry simulation of opulence. The tincture of too many bodies and too little bedding.
The Inchausti had been no more gentle this visit than the Shrial Knights had been the previous. The girl’s shelves had been ransacked, her furnishing smashed and thrown as wrack in the corners.
Esmenet had returned, this time steeped in the very power she had fled from before. It seemed mad that the floorboards did not creak, the walls did not groan, for the presence of one who could burn everything down.
Naree lay crouched in the corner to the right and opposite, naked save for a rag she clutched beneath her chin. The girl immediately began keening in terror, but not for recognizing her Blessed Empress—that would come later—but for understanding that once the rapists left, the executioner always followed.
One of Ngarau’s runners found his body at daybreak of the seventh day of the siege, at the bottom of an ancillary stair. The victim had chosen anonymous attire, but he was too well known on the Andiamine Heights not to be immediately recognized: Lord Sankas, Consul of Nansur, Patridomos of House Biaxi, and confidante of the Blessed Empress.
Esmenet had hoped the Patridomos would simply reappear, drawn like the others by word of her restoration. And now here he was sprawled across a blackening sheet of blood below the Reverse Gallery of the Apparatory—the path she had directed him to take what seemed a lifetime ago.
“Perhaps-haps he merely tripped,” Theliopa offered, wearing nothing but a smock—scandalous attire for any Princess-Imperial other than her. She looked like those mad Cultic ascetics who confused mortification of flesh for cultivation of spirit, angular with bones, strung with veins.
“And what of his broadsword?” Phinersa asked mildly. “Did it simply fly loose its scabbard?”
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas could only gawk at the inert form.
Sankas …
He had dressed to travel incognito, bereft of any insignia, wearing a simple white-linen tunic beneath a blue-felt robe that had slipped loose one arm in the fall, and now lay bundled to one side of him. The tunic had wicked the blood, clotting violet and black like bandages about his edges, so that he seemed inked in place, as much an artistic conceit as a corpse …