Page 46 of Broken Vow

He looked at the cold, handsome, painted face of the woman he was meant to marry, and he felt nothing at all. That nothingness was the most honest thing in the room.

Because he had held the other thing once. He knew now what the other thing was, the thing that has no price and is given to a man once if he is lucky, and to most men never at all. He had held it in his arms and felt the whole of his life turn toward it, root and stem, the one true thing he would ever be given. Then he had weighed it against this, against fortresses and bloodlines and the magnificent painted face, and he had chosen this, with his eyes open, letting the other thing be destroyed. A man does not get to make that choice and then feel something looking at the portrait. The feeling is the first thing you give up. He had given it up. He sat there empty and correct before the empress’s correct, empty face, understanding that he had bought exactly what he paid for.

“She is very beautiful,” he said, because something was required.

“She is,” Vasstent agreed, and there was something dry under it, something that had been there the whole hour, prompting him to look at her properly for the first time. She was no fool, this envoy. Northern, grey-clad, sharp as a winter morning, she had watched him fail to attend to her empress for an hour and drawn her own conclusions, and those conclusions did not flatter him. She knew. Not the particulars, but she knew the shape of a man whose heart is somewhere a marriage cannot reach. She had built a career on reading exactly such men, and she was performing a courtship she had already privately judged to be carrying a corpse. “My empress is patient,” she went on, with that same dryness. “She understands that an emperor newly come into the full weight of his throne has many cares. She does not require haste. She requires only”—a pause, weighed exactly—“good faith. The courtship of empires is an old dance, Majesty. It asks that both partners at least pretend to hear the music.”

It was a rebuke, delivered so smoothly it could be denied. He had earned it. He made himself incline his head and say the things a man says, that the empire of Iskanrin honoured them, that the empress’s patience was a gift, that the matter sat near his heart, all of it ash, all of it lies of exactly the kind the throne is built from. Vasstent received them with a courtier’s face that believed not one word.

Then, past her shoulder, in the high window that gave onto the inner court, something landed.

A crow. Black, and the black of it drank the daylight rather than caught it. It stood on the sill on three legs where there should have been two, turned its head, and fixed him with one flat eye.

Everything in him went cold.

He had seen that crow only a handful of times in his life, and never once for a small matter. There was no mistaking it, no other thing in the world it could be. A crow with a third leg is not an omen a man invents for himself. It was hers. She sent it when she wanted him, and when she wanted him, she did not wait. A summons from that quarter overrode every other matter in the empire, including the marriage of two thrones. The old dread came up through him, the dread that wears a witch’s face, and he lost, for one fatal moment, the discipline of fifty audiences.

“We will continue this another day,” he said, standing up. An emperor does not stand to end an audience with a foreign envoy, and he heard how abrupt it was, how rude, how it landed on Vasstent like a slap, but he could not help it. “Convey my deep regard to your empress. My people will see to your comfort.”

Vasstent rose because she had to, her face smooth and her eyes very bright. She glanced once, past him, to the window and the black thing on the sill. He watched her mark it, mark his haste, and file both away behind that sharp, grey northern face. He did not care, because the crow was on the sill and he needed the room empty. They withdrew, the envoy and her grey-clad people, with all the cold ceremony he had just insulted, and the great doors closed behind them. He was alone with the crow.

Or he believed he was.

* * *

“You are careless,” the crow said, in her voice, the bird’s throat shaping a woman’s words. “You emptied the room like a boy who has wet himself. The northern woman saw. She sees everything, that one. You would do well not to make her curious.”

“You sent the crow into an open audience.” He came down from the dais. “What was I to do, finish discussing portraits while it sat there?”

“You were to be the emperor for the length of an hour and send them out without haste.” The crow walked the sill, three-legged, ungainly, and exact. “But it is done. Hear me, Majesty, for I have not come down out of my rooms for portraits.”

He waited. With Morrigwen, one always waited. He had stood before her only a handful of times in his life, the summoning, the altar, and once after. Each of those times had left a mark on him a year could not wear away. The little he knew of her was this: she did not hurry, she did not want, and she had served this house since before his grandfather’s grandfather wore the crown. Yet there was something in the set of the crow now that he had not seen in those few dread meetings and did not like, a tightness, a thing that in a person he would have called fear.

“There is a captain of the Veilborn,” she said, “who has begun to wander where he should not. I want him off the streets. I want him brought inside the walls and kept to the barracks, the one I will name to you, and watched. No temple, no city, no errands of mercy in the lower wards. Inside, and close.”

He had expected many things. He had not expected this.

“You want me to cage a captain of the Veilborn.” He said it slowly, to be certain he had it. “One of the vanguard. The oldest order in the empire.”

“I want him kept where I can see him.”

“Morrigwen.” He turned from her and walked the cold floor, because this was not a small thing she asked. It was a thing with no precedent he knew of, and the throne is precedent, the throne being nothing but three hundred years of what has and has not been done. “Do you know what the Veilborn are? Not what the court thinks, but what they actually are. The five captains have ridden free since before this dynasty took the southern provinces, the silver-veiled vanguard, each of them sworn by the pendant he wears and answerable in his own movements to no one but the emperor, and to the emperor only in war. No emperor has confined one of them. My grandfather did not. My father did not. To pen a captain of the vanguard in the barracks in a time of perfect peace, for no cause I can name to the council, is to announce to every sharp eye in this court, and the north has just left a very sharp eye in it, that something is amiss in the emperor’s house. It is a loud thing to do. You ask me to do it quietly, and it cannot be done wholly quiet. There is no caging of one of the emperor’s own vanguard that no one remarks upon.”

The crow was silent a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had gone lower, and she spent something, he felt her spend it, a thing she had held back until now and laid down between them at last.

“Then I will give you a reason,” she said, “and you will wish I had not.”

He stopped walking.

“The working at the altar did not take as it should have. You know this. You were there. You put your hand where it did not belong and threw a thing into my fire that I had not chosen. I told you then you might have made your own downfall, and you wept, refusing to listen.” The flat eye held him. “I have been hunting the thing your meddling made. It moves through the lower city. It will not hold one shape. I have seen it in the black water, and it flickers, Majesty, fox and woman and neither. It will not settle. It is exactly the wreckage a fouled banishment leaves behind when a fool reaches into the fire to save what should have been let burn.”

The cold that had started with the crow reached his heart and closed around it.

“The girl you gave me to be rid of,” Morrigwen said. “The one you weighed against a crown and decided you could hand across and walk away from. The banishment did not take her where it should have taken her. I do not think she went out of the world at all. I think she is here, in your city. Wearing a shape between forms and drifting, somehow, toward the very captain I want caged. That is a thing I will not allow, and it is the whole of why I have come down to speak to you through a bird instead of leaving you to your portraits.”

He did not know what his face did. He had governed it for an hour against an envoy, and he could not govern it now.

He had told himself she was gone. That was the bargain he had made with his own grief, that the banishment had carried her out of the world, into some shape and some distance past all reaching, a creature on some far road, lost to herself, to him, and to everything. He believed he would carry the guilt of having handed her to that fate for the rest of his life, never knowing more than that. Lost. Removed. Past help, and so past his failing her any further. He had built these last weeks on that one mercy, that wherever she was, she was beyond him, leaving nothing left to do but grieve.