The Hollow

By the time the last light had gone out of the northern sky, there were three cardinals waiting in the antechamber of the Emperor's study, and a fourth man standing a little apart from them whom Kieran liked even less.

He let them wait for an hour.

It was a small cruelty, and it gave him room to think. He sat behind the black oak desk with a cup of tea going cold at his elbow, and the dark windows reflected his face back at him, and he watched his own hand lying on the blotter as though it belonged to someone else. It did not shake. The veins on the back of it were still pale and clean. Something in him kept checking, over and over, with the helpless, hungry compulsion of a man pressing a bruise.

She did that, he thought. Again.

He had held her elbow in the stall. He had touched her bare wrist. And through all the chaos of the Aerie, the cold in him had not so much as stirred. It had been two days, the longest respite in months. He had slept. He had slept, seven hours without waking, and woken to a morning that had colors in it.

He ought to have been grateful. He was terrified.

"Majesty." Crane stood in the doorway. "They are getting restless."

"Good. Let them." He drank the cold tea and set down the cup. "The fourth man. Who is he?"

"Inquisitor Lucan Verre. The Cathedral's chief collar-warden. He arrived at the south gate an hour ago in a closed carriage, and he carries a case that I have not been allowed to look inside."

"Of course he does." Kieran rose. "Send them in."

…

The inquisitor was a small, soft-spoken man in gray, with a face so pleasant it was nearly invisible. He bowed. He apologized profusely for the hour. He explained, in the tone of a physician explaining a minor operation, that at midday the Cathedral's wardens had registered a disturbance in the collar of one of His Majesty's dragons, a flicker lasting three heartbeats, the sort of anomaly that occurred perhaps once in a hundred years, and that it was his duty to examine the beast.

"The beast was refusing food," said Kieran. "I corrected him."

"Naturally, Majesty." Verre's smile did not shift. "I am sure it is nothing. A minor imbalance. But a protocol exists."

"Then follow it."

They went down to the Aerie together, a long cavalcade of torches and white robes, and Kieran stood by with folded arms while the little gray man unlocked his case and drew out a rod of silver crystal and held it against the throbbing collar of the Blood-Red Dragon. The rod hummed. The red light brightened. Gron lay with his eyes closed, his flanks heaving, and did not so much as shudder.

Verre frowned at the crystal for a very long time.

"There is a residue," he said finally.

"Of what?"

"I am not entirely certain, Majesty." The crystal rod glowed faintly white where it touched the metal. "It is... clean. A cool trace, like frost on glass. It is quite unlike anything in the Church's records." He looked up, mild and unhurried. "Has anyone handled the animal today?"

"Several people."

"Anyone unusual?"

"I am the Emperor," said Kieran. "Everything about me is unusual."

The faintest ripple of amusement passed over the cardinals' faces. Verre smiled. He wrote something in a little black book.

"I see," he said. "Well. I will make my report to the Pontiff, and I am sure His Holiness will be reassured." He closed the book. "I wonder, Majesty, whether we might ask a very small favor. Since we have come so far, and so late. The Duke of Valmont's feast is tonight, I believe. We should so much like to attend."

It was beautifully done. Kieran almost admired it. It was not a request. It was a hand placed on his shoulder, polite and cool and close, and it said that the Church intended to sit in his hall and look at everything.

"Of course," he said. "I would be honored."

And he thought: And I shall bring her. In plain wool. In the back. Let them look at the harmless border girl and the harmless little dog.

It was a clever plan. It would have been a clever plan, if he had been well.

…

The Frost Grand Hall had been rebuilt since the night of the assassin, and was somehow more terrible for it.

New chandeliers hung from the vault, a thousand crystal drops catching the candlelight and scattering it in cold flakes across the walls. The long tables had been laid with silver and white linen. A fire roared in each of the four hearths. Two hundred nobles, in their best furs and brightest silks, filled the benches and the aisles, and from the gallery above, a quartet of harps was playing something light.

Kieran took his place on the great pelt-draped throne and watched them come in.

The Church sat along the left side, a long white row. The inquisitor, with his little smile. Cardinal Vessarian, still pale. Hester, in gray, with her splinted hand held stiffly before her. Duke Orloff and his daughter and a dozen of the old houses at the right. At the far end of the hall, at a low table near the kitchen doors where no one who mattered would ever look, sat a girl in a dark gown, with a bundle of gray fluff asleep in her lap.

She caught his eye. She grinned.

It was brief. It was entirely unrepentant. He would have given a great deal, just then, to be able to laugh.

The feast began.

It was an exhausting one. The cardinal made a long, bland speech on the virtues of piety. The Duke made a longer one on the virtues of loyalty. Ysolde Orloff, seated at his left hand as though by long-standing right, laughed at every one of his remarks a half-second before he finished making it. The plates came and went. The wine flowed. Kieran ate nothing and said little and kept his smile fixed, and slowly, so slowly he did not notice it at first, the temperature of the hall began to fall.

It began in his hands.

A faint numbness at the fingertips. Then a creeping, heavy cold that spread up the wrists and into the forearms, as though he had been holding ice. He flexed his fingers under the table. The ache did not go. It deepened, and sank, and gathered itself somewhere in the center of his chest, and he thought distantly, with a cold and absolute clarity: Oh.

Not here.

"Majesty?" said Ysolde. "You look unwell."

"Wine," he said. His voice came out strange. "It does not agree with me."

Breathe.

He had learned the trick years ago, a hard, slow, mechanical thing. Count in. Count out. Push the cold down into the floor. Imagine it running out of his boots into the stone. He had held it off through three councils and a coronation with that trick, and it had never failed him.

It did not fail him now. It merely stopped working.

The Hollow came up through him like a flood through a cellar.

"The lady Solaia of Ashvale," said Cardinal Vessarian, loudly, across the hall, in a voice like a man pitching a stone into a pond. "We have not had the pleasure of her conversation. Come, my lady. Do tell us. They say you have a great affection for dragons."

The hall went quiet.

At the far end, the girl looked up. Her face was perfectly blank.

"Do I?" said Solaia.

"You were seen at the Aerie this morning. I am told you were most solicitous. One wonders what a young lady of the border finds in such creatures." The cardinal smiled, thin and bright. "Do you hear them, my lady?"

Do not, thought Kieran, with a distant, slow horror. Do not answer that.

His vision was narrowing. The edges of the room were turning black, and something was whispering in his ear in a dry, familiar voice. It was his father's. It had been his father's voice for twelve years, and tonight it was very close.

You were always weak. You will die as I did. In a locked room, screaming. Alone.

"Majesty," said Ysolde, in a different tone. "Your hand."

He looked down.

The black had reached his wrist. It ran up his sleeve in thin, branching, writhing lines, like ink in water, and as he watched it surged past the elbow, up into the shoulder, and the goblet in his fist cracked with a sound like a snapping bone and a spiderweb of frost raced up the stem.

The candles went out.

One after another, down the whole length of the great table, as though a giant had breathed on them. Then the chandeliers. Then the fires in the four hearths, a long rolling wave of darkness running across the hall, and the cold struck.

…

Solaia heard the screaming before she understood what she was seeing.

It was a terrible sound, and it did not come from where she expected. It rose from the Church's benches first, then the Duke's, then everywhere, high and ragged and uncomprehending. A great black fog was rolling out from the dais where the Emperor sat. It poured down the steps in thick, silent curls, swallowing the candlelight, and wherever it touched, people fell.

They fell like wheat. Not dead. She saw that with a cold flash of relief. But their faces were gray, and they were clutching their throats, and thin red threads were running from their noses and the corners of their eyes. The cardinal was on his knees. Ysolde had slid off her chair and lay at the foot of the throne with her golden braid in a pool of wine. A guard staggered past Solaia's table with blood bubbling from his mouth and collapsed across a platter of roast goose.

On the dais, the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom had risen to his feet.

He was a pillar of darkness. The black veins had swallowed his whole right arm, climbed his throat, reached his jaw. His eyes were open, but there was nothing in them. Only a flat, gray, empty shine, like a coin at the bottom of a well. A column of black smoke rose from his shoulders and spread across the vaulted ceiling in a vast and silent wing.

And his hand, the right hand, was lifting.

He doesn't know where he is, she thought, with perfect certainty. He's not here. He's somewhere else, and whatever it is, it's about to kill every living person in this room.

Her body moved before her mind could argue.

She dumped Soot off her lap into the safety of a tablecloth. She stood. The fog reached her feet and curled around her ankles, thick and cold and alive, and the bite of it was terrible, a numbing, grinding hunger against her skin. But where it touched her, it hesitated. It drew back, in little hissing wisps, as if it had touched a coal.

She started to walk.

"Lady!" Berylla's cry came from somewhere behind. "My lady, no!"

She did not stop. She walked through the fallen bodies, through the shattered glass and the spilled wine and the darkness piling around her knees. It parted. It flinched. She felt the white fire waking beneath her ribs, slow and steady, not the great wave of the Measuring Stone but something quieter and more purposeful, like a lamp lit in a long-shut room. A faint pale glow spread along her arms and her throat and the edges of her skirts. And in the dim, enormous, ringing silence of the hall, with two hundred people dying around her, she climbed the dais steps one by one.

At the top, the Emperor's hand came down.

A claw of black shadow, long as a sword, shot out from his palm and closed around her throat.

It was ice. It was the cold of a grave. It lifted her off the floor, and her feet kicked uselessly at the air, and in front of her the gray, blank, shining eyes looked through her and did not see. She could not breathe. White spots danced in front of her eyes. She heard, from very far away, someone screaming her name.

Kieran, she tried to say. No sound came.

She did the only thing she could think of.

She reached out with both hands, and set them flat on his chest.

It was like touching the sun. The white fire that had been trickling through her flared up in a sheet, pouring out of her palms into the black wool of his coat, and the claw around her neck shrieked. It was the sound of a thousand voices, thin and furious, a scream of old pain. The darkness recoiled. It tried to flee. But she had her hands on him, and the fire went in and in and in, seeking out the black veins one by one, burning them down the way lightning burns a tree, and under her palms she felt his heart go from a raging gallop to a heavy, stumbling beat to something slow and steady and almost peaceful.

"Look at me," Solaia said. Her voice was hoarse. "Kieran. Look at me."

The shadow let go.

She fell to her knees. He went with her, his legs collapsing, and she caught him against her shoulder with both arms. His head dropped into the hollow of her neck. He was shaking violently. The terrible cold was draining out of him in great shuddering waves, and where it passed, his skin was growing warm, and his breath was coming in long, ragged gasps against her collarbone.

"Solaia," he said. It was barely a breath.

"I'm here."

"Don't..." A shudder. "Don't let them see."

She lifted her eyes.

The fog was gone. The fires roared in their hearths again, and the great chandeliers swung gently overhead, and in the sudden terrible quiet two hundred pale, bleeding, bewildered faces were turned toward the dais. Cardinal Vessarian was on his hands and knees. Duke Orloff had a napkin pressed to his nose. In the front row, with her white-gloved hands folded neatly in her lap, sat Hester, who had somehow not fallen at all. The old woman was not looking at the Emperor.

She was looking, very carefully, at the girl with her arms around him.

And on his knees beside the cold hearth, small and neat and pleasant as ever, the inquisitor had taken out his little black book and was beginning to write.

"His Majesty," said Solaia, loudly and clearly, in a voice that carried to the farthest wall, "is unwell."

No one answered.

"The banquet is over."

It was an absurd thing to say. It was also, she found, the only possible one. She heard the words ring out against the vaulted ceiling and felt the whole room take them in, slowly, like a bell being rung in a drowned church. And then, in the back, a man began to stand.

It was Halvard Crane. He had a smear of blood across his weathered face, and he looked ten years older than he had that morning. But he strode up the center aisle at a steady march, and when he reached the foot of the dais he went down on one knee, with his fist to his breast.

"Lady Solaia," said the Commander of the Black Guard. "Where shall I take him?"

She looked at the gray, drawn, sleeping face against her shoulder. The long dark lashes. The thin line of dried blood at the corner of his mouth. She thought of all the rooms of the palace, with their gold and their locks and their watchers, and of the one place in it that was truly hers.

"To my rooms," she said.