Terms

Commander Crane laid the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom on her bed as gently as a man putting down a sleeping child, and then stood back with a face like a closing door.

"No physician," he said.

"He's hurt," said Solaia.

"He is not hurt. He is ill, and the difference, my lady, is the whole of the Empire." He turned his weathered, bloodstained face toward her, and the tired gray eyes in it were very steady. "There are two hundred people in that hall who think they saw a man fall ill from bad wine. There is a cardinal who thinks otherwise, and an inquisitor with a notebook. If a royal physician walks out of this pavilion tonight, by morning every house in the capital will know that the Emperor has a sickness that can empty a banquet hall."

"Then who—"

"You," said Crane.

She looked at him.

"I do not know how," he said. "I do not need to know. I saw what I saw. I saw you walk through that dark as if it were mist, and I saw him come out of it alive." A pause. "He has not slept through a night in two years, my lady. Not once. He has been carrying this thing alone, and it has been killing him by inches, and I have stood at his back and watched it, and I could do nothing. You did something."

"I don't know what I did."

"Then pray," said the Commander of the Black Guard, "that you learn to do it again."

He went to the door, and stopped. He did not turn around.

"Two men will be posted at the garden gate, and two more inside your rooms. They will say nothing. If anyone asks, His Majesty is resting in his own apartments with a headache." His broad shoulders shifted. "And, my lady. The Church-woman, Hester. She was the only one in the hall who did not fall. I would be careful of her."

The door closed behind him.

…

Berylla did what Berylla did best, which was to make an emergency look like a routine.

She dismissed the attendants with a flick of her hand. She had the fire built up, and the curtains drawn, and a basin of warm water and a stack of linen brought in silence by a maid who did not meet anyone's eyes. She unfastened the Emperor's black coat and drew it off his shoulders with a practiced, impersonal efficiency, and laid it over a chair. She did not so much as glance at Solaia, kneeling beside the bed, until she had finished.

"His pulse is slow but steady," she said. "His skin is warm. I have seen men come back from worse." She dipped a cloth and wrung it out. "You have blood on your collar, my lady."

"It's not mine."

"Some of it is. There are marks on your throat."

Solaia put up a hand. The skin under her fingers was tender and swollen, and when she turned her head toward the dark window glass she saw, faintly, the long dark bruises where the claw had closed. Four of them. A cold clean line of them around her windpipe, as though a ring of iron had been snapped around it.

As she watched, in the glass, they began to fade.

It was slow. A greenish tinge crept in at the edges, and the purple went to yellow, and the yellow to gold. Within a minute they were gone, and her throat was smooth and unmarked as the day she was born. Berylla watched it too. She did not say anything. She wrung out the cloth again, with a little more force than was necessary, and set to washing the dried blood from the Emperor's face.

"Berylla."

"My lady."

"You don't have to stay."

"I am the Chief Attendant of the household, my lady." The older woman did not look up. "It is my duty to attend."

"It's the middle of the night. You've been on your feet for sixteen hours."

"I have been on my feet for thirty years." The cloth moved, very carefully, along the line of the Emperor's jaw. "And I will tell you something, since you will not stop asking. I have served three rulers in this palace. I served his father. I held the basin when they locked the doors on that room." Her voice did not change. "I have never once seen anyone sit on the floor beside a bed like that and watch a sleeping man breathe. Not for a duty. Not for a bargain."

Solaia flushed. "I'm not—"

"I did not say you were." The faint twist of Berylla's mouth was almost kind. "I said I had not seen it. Eat something. There is bread in the cabinet. I know where you keep it."

…

He woke some time after the second bell of the night.

She knew it before he moved. The room did not change. But she was sitting in the armchair beside the bed, with her feet tucked under her and a blanket over her knees, a hatchling asleep like a warm gray loaf in the crook of her arm. Something in the shape of the silence shifted, as it does when a sleeper's breathing alters. Then she looked up, and he was looking at her.

Ash-gray eyes. Clear. Awake.

"Hello," said Solaia.

"Where am I?"

"In my bed. Which I'd like back, by the way. You haven't got any manners at all."

A very faint, very bleak smile touched his mouth. It vanished almost at once. He lay still, and she watched him take the room in, the dim fire, the drawn curtains, the neat folded coat on the chair. His gaze came back to her throat.

"I hurt you."

"A little."

"Show me."

"There's nothing to show."

"Show me."

She sighed, tugged the collar down, and tilted her chin. Under the firelight, her throat was smooth and pale.

For a long moment, he said nothing.

"It heals," he said, at last, in a low flat voice. "In moments. As if it never happened." He turned his face away toward the wall. "I have seen soldiers die of less. Do you understand what I did? I put my hand around your neck in front of two hundred people, and if you had been anyone else, I would have broken it like a twig."

"But I'm not anyone else."

"No." The word was very quiet. "That is exactly what I am afraid of."

She did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing. In the grate, a log settled with a soft crack and a spray of sparks. On her arm the hatchling stirred, mumbled something that might have been a snore, and went still.

"What did they see?"

"Wine," said Solaia. "Mostly. Crane told them it was a bad cask. The cardinal thinks otherwise. And the little gray man with the book wrote down everything." She tilted her head. "And Hester."

"Hester."

"She didn't fall. Everyone else in the room did, and she sat there with her hands in her lap and watched."

Kieran closed his eyes.

"Of course she did," he said. "The Church's inner order wear a blessing. A stripe of holy fire in the blood. It does a very fine job of keeping out the cold." A muscle jumped in his cheek. "Which means she saw all of it. The darkness, the veins. Me."

"You think she'll tell?"

"I think she has already told. I think the Pontiff knows by now that the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom is a walking plague." His laugh was thin and ugly. "How curious. For five hundred years, my house has taken pride that the Church has never once seen us weak."

"What is it?" she said. "What happens to you?"

He was silent so long she thought he would not answer.

"A tax," he said.

"A what?"

"That is how I think of it. It is what the Dark Magic takes in payment." He opened his eyes and looked up at the plain plaster ceiling. "Every Emperor of my line has carried it. We call it the Hollow. It begins in the hands, at about nineteen. It goes up the arm, through the heart, and into the head. The cold gets in, and it will not come out, and the voice begins." A pause. "My father heard his own father's voice for eleven years. He used to talk back to it. I remember that. I was six. I thought he was talking to me."

She said nothing.

"They locked him in a room at the top of the north tower. For his own sake. For the realm's. I was sent there once, at fourteen, to say goodbye." Kieran's face was still. "He had broken both his own wrists, trying to get at the thing in his veins. He was gray and thin as a rail. He took my hand, and he laughed, and he said, Don't worry, boy. It doesn't take long at the end. And I believed him."

"Did it?"

"It took four more years." He turned his head on the pillow. "I am twenty-nine. The physicians tell me I have a year. Perhaps two. I have never believed them, as it happens. But this winter I have begun to."

The fire popped.

For a long while, neither of them spoke. She sat very straight in the chair, one hand resting on the warm gray lump in her lap, and stared at the dim coals and felt something enormous and cold and unfamiliar opening beneath her ribs. It was not pity. She was almost sure it was not pity. Pity was a soft thing, and this was sharp. It was anger, sudden and clear and furious, and it was aimed at a thing she could not name, a thing that had put a boy in front of a locked door and taught him to call it duty.

"You should have told me," she said.

"Why? So that you could laugh?"

"So that I wouldn't have been standing in that hall with my mouth open when you started to kill people." She did not raise her voice. "You've been using me. Haven't you? Since the tower. The chess. The stone. All of it. You've been sitting next to me and checking."

He did not deny it.

"Yes," said Kieran.

"For how long?"

"Since the day you broke the shackles in the gold bedchamber." His gaze was perfectly steady. "I don't understand what you are. I don't know why it happens. But every time you touch me, the Hollow stops, and I will do almost anything to make it stop." A faint, ugly curl. "I thought you should know exactly how much of a monster you've been sleeping under the roof of."

"I haven't been sleeping."

"I noticed."

She almost laughed. She did not. She sat with her jaw tight and her hands curled in the blanket, and the part of her that had learned long ago how the world worked, the part that counted exits and hid bread, did the arithmetic.

He needed her. Not wanted. Needed. There was a world of difference. A woman who was merely wanted could be sold, or married off, or bored out of her cage and forgotten. But a woman who held the only key to a dying emperor's life was not a toy. She was a leash.

And it was the first time in all her memory that she had held one end of it.

"All right," she said.

"All right what?"

"Terms."

His eyebrows rose a fraction. "I beg your pardon?"

"You said you'd do almost anything." She met his gaze. "I'd like to see how far almost goes."

For a moment he only looked at her. Then, to her immense surprise, that thin, bleak mouth moved in a real smile, a small, crooked, helpless one that transformed his whole face and made him look, for one moment, no older than she was.

"Go on," said Kieran.

"First. The library. All of it. Not the pretty rooms on the first floor. The lower vaults. The records the Church doesn't like."

"That is dangerous."

"So is dying in a banquet hall. Second." She held up another finger. "No more collars on Gron when I'm in the building. If he's hurting, I want to know why, and I want it stopped."

"Solaia—"

"Third. When you find out who I am, you tell me. The truth. Not a nice story." She watched his face go still, and her heart gave a small hard thump of triumph and dread. "You said you'd tell me. In time. I'm holding you to it."

"And in return?"

"In return I keep you from losing your mind." She shrugged. "That seems a fair price."

He lay quite still, looking up at her.

"You drive a hard bargain, little beast."

"I've had a hard life. As far as I can remember."

"I will give you the library," Kieran said slowly. "I will give you the beast, as far as is safe. As for the third—" His eyes did not leave hers. "I will tell you what I know, when I know it. That is all I can honestly swear."

It was not what she had asked for. But it was the first time he had told her anything that sounded like it came from the inside of him, and she understood, with a faint lurch, that this was the most he had ever given anyone.

"Fine," she said.

"Then we have an agreement."

"We do."

"And Solaia." He held her gaze, and for the first time she saw, under the long cruel arrogance, something almost like fear. "Do not tell anyone. About any of it. Not Berylla, not Crane, not the dragon. If the Church ever learns what you can do..."

"Why shouldn't I?" she said. "I could use a leash of my own."

She had meant it as a joke. It came out sounding like a threat. She watched it land on him, watched the pale gleam of surprise in his eyes darken, very slowly, into something she could not name. And then, to her astonishment, he began to laugh. Not the cold, bitter sound she had heard in the council chamber. A low, broken, helpless laugh, that shook the whole bed.

"Oh, you are a menace," said the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom.

"So you keep saying."

"I will remember it."

He did not say anything more. His eyes closed. His breathing slowed, and deepened, and in less than a minute he was asleep again, as simply as a child. She sat in the firelight and watched him. Somewhere along the way, without noticing, she had moved her chair a little closer to the bed. And his hand, lying across the blanket, had turned over, and his fingers were curled around her wrist, loosely, the way a sleeper holds a rail.

She did not pull away.

She sat there until dawn, listening to the fire and the two slow heartbeats in the room, and wondering what a woman owed a man who had chained her, and what a man owed her for the same, and whether either of them would ever find out.

When the knock came, the light was gray at the curtains.

Berylla came in without waiting for an answer. She was pale, and she held a small sealed envelope of heavy cream paper between two fingers, as though it might go off.

"A messenger from the Cathedral, my lady," she said, very low. "Delivered to the garden gate not five minutes ago. It is addressed to His Majesty, but he is, I am told, indisposed." She swallowed. "It says the inquisitor has taken the liberty of calling at dawn. To inquire after his health."

Solaia looked at the sleeping man. Then at the window, where the pale sky was rising behind the glass.

"How long?" she said.

"He is already at the gate."