Page 47 of Broken Vow

She had not gone anywhere.

That was the thing the witch put in his chest that he could not get out again. She had not been carried off to some far shape on some far road. The fire he reached into had not sent her away. It had kept her here, twisted her into a thing that would not hold its shape, and left her loose in his own city, under his own windows, all these weeks, while he sat above her mourning her as gone. She had been here. Hunted through his streets by the thing he had summoned, wearing a wreck he had made of her with his own desperate hand at the altar, near enough that on any day of these weeks he might have passed within a wall of her and never known. Not lost. Not removed. Here. And his, all of it, the shape, the suffering, and the hunting, all of it his.

The grief he had buried came up so fast and so hard that he set his hand on the cold edge of the dais to stand.

The part of him that had not drawn a true breath since the altar wanted to roar it down the halls, wanted to call out every man he had and turn the city stone by stone until he found her. It wanted to go down into the lower wards himself, walking them until he did, falling at her feet to beg a forgiveness no man has any right to ask for.

Yet he could not. He understood it in the same breath the longing arrived, the two of them coming together, the longing and the iron wall it broke against. He could do nothing. He was the master of the known world, yet he could not lift one finger toward her. To search for her, to be seen wanting her, to spend one soldier, one coin, or one hour of imperial attention on finding a lowborn provincial girl was to confess before the whole court and the watching north that the emperor’s heart had never been free to give. That the year-long courtship of Iskanrin was a hollow show. That he had been grieving a peasant while their empress sent him her portrait. It would wreck the marriage. It would shame the empress past forgiving. It would tell every enemy of this house that the emperor had a wound, and where to put the knife. The dynasty he had paid for her with was the very thing that now stood between them with its arms spread, refusing to let him pass. He had given her up for the bloodline, and the bloodline had taken her, locked the door, and kept the key.

“You see it,” Morrigwen said, watching him. There was no cruelty in the crow’s flat eye, only the long, cold patience of a thing that has watched men break before. “You cannot move toward her. You dare not. So let me do the small, tidy thing in your place. Cage the captain, keep the one piece from drifting where it should not, and leave the rest to me. I will find her. I will tend to the loose end your softness left in the world.” A pause. “Quietly. As you cannot.”

The worst of it, the very worst, was that the cold reading and the kind reading pointed the same way. Everything practical, everything an emperor who loved his people should do, everything his own survival required, agreed with the witch. Contain it. Silence it. Cage the captain. Let her clear up what he had spilled. Only his heart pulled the other way, his heart alone, against the throne, the marriage, the witch, and the cold sense of the whole world. A man does not rule an empire by listening to his heart.

“Confine him,” he heard himself say. “I will find a cause. Unrest in the south, a precaution, something the council will swallow.” His voice came out level. He has wondered since how it came out level. “Name him to me.”

“In time,” the crow said. “The order first, in your own hand. Then the name.” It spread its wings. “You did a soft thing once, Majesty, at the altar, and it has cost us both more than you know, and it is not finished costing. Do the hard thing now. It is the only mercy left in this for anyone.”

The crow dropped from the sill into the bright air of the inner court and was gone. He stood alone in the great hall with the portrait of his correct, cold bride still uncovered on its stand, bearing the knowledge that the woman he had loved and destroyed was alive somewhere below him in the city, and that he, who could command anything, could command nothing at all.

* * *

Behind the long tapestry on the eastern wall of the antechamber, where she had stepped the moment the great doors closed and the guards’ eyes went forward, Vasstent of Iskanrin stood very still, breathing very quietly. She understood that her tedious morning had become the most valuable hour of her embassy.

She had not meant to listen. She had meant to leave. But an emperor does not break off an audience with the envoy of an allied throne and rise to his feet over the arrival of a crow unless the crow is more than a crow. Vasstent had not survived three decades in the courts of the north by walking away from a man at the exact moment he forgot to wear his face. She had let her people go ahead, slipped behind the arras, and listened. What she heard was worth more than the whole marriage she had been sent to broker.

She had not caught all of it. The voice that came through the crow, and she did not let herself dwell on what manner of thing speaks through a crow, carried thin through heavy cloth, and much of it was a riddle she could not yet read: fouled workings, an altar, a thing that would not hold its shape. But she caught the bones, and the bones were these: the emperor was not heart-whole and reluctant out of northern coldness or imperial pride. The emperor was in love, catastrophically so, in a way that wrecks treaties, with some lowborn girl he had tried to be rid of and failed, who was alive, in this city, and whom he was forbidden by his own throne to seek.

Vasstent stood behind the tapestry and let the pieces settle. She was not a sentimental woman and did not waste a moment’s pity on the heartbroken emperor or his lost girl. She thought, instead, as she had been trained to think since she was a child in the cold halls of Veyrkhan. If there is a woman alive in this city who is the one thing the master of the southern empire cannot stop longing for and cannot afford to be seen wanting, then that woman is not a tragedy. That woman is the most valuable object south of the mountains, and at present, no one holds her.

There were not so many new faces at this court that a careful woman could not sort through them. New arrivals were few, and remarkable ones fewer. Vasstent had attended every reception of the season with the boredom of a professional, and sifting through the faces now behind her eyes, she found that exactly one of them stopped her. A debutante of no great house, lately come under the wing of the Veyra woman, whom the whole gilded room had watched without quite knowing why. Pale, fine, striking in a way the painted northern empress on her stand would never be, a way that owed nothing to jewels. Lady Liora of House Marenne.

She did not know it for certain. She would have to be sure. But certainty was a thing one acquired with patience, coin, and the right questions, and Vasstent had all three.

She waited until the hall beyond fell silent, until the emperor’s own footsteps had faded, and then she stepped out from behind the tapestry, smoothed her grey skirts, and went to find her people with the calm of a woman who had come to a foreign court to deliver a portrait and was leaving with something a great deal more useful than a wedding.

The marriage might happen or it might not. Empresses had married colder men. But an empress whose envoy held the emperor’s secret heart in her own keeping was an empress who would never again sit down to negotiate from weakness. That, Vasstent thought as she descended the great stair into the bright, indifferent morning, was worth a little patience, a little quiet, and the finding of one pale Marenne girl in a city of a hundred thousand.

Chapter 22

Selene had been waiting for an excuse like this since the afternoon Auden stood on her doorstep with my shawl over his arm. Now that she had one, she was not going to waste it.

“Sit,” she said, steering me onto the stool by her window with both hands planted firmly on my shoulders. “Sit and surrender. You have no say in this. A woman who keeps a temple man secret from her own chaperone forfeits all say in how she is dressed for him. It is in the rules. I am quite sure it is in the rules.”

“There are no rules.”

“There are now. I just made them. Tsuki, the comb.”

The squirrel had been turning slow, ecstatic circles in a dish of candied peel on the sill. At her command, he sat up straight. He held the comb high over his head like a tiny soldier presenting arms, his small face tight with enormous self-importance. From the good chair by the fire, Rainthorn set down her untouched cup and made a sound that, in a younger woman, would have been a laugh.

I want to put down plainly what that afternoon was. So much of what I have written until now has been fear, running, and the slow, cold work of not falling apart. A person reading my story might think that was all my life ever held, but it was not. That afternoon in Selene’s rooms was different. The late sunlight came through the window like spun gold. Tsuki gorged himself sick on candied fruit. Selene pinned my hair, unpinned it, stood back with a frown, and started all over again. Rainthorn watched me, the hard lines of her walnut face going soft in a way she would have denied to her grave.

I laughed. It was such a deep, beautiful feeling, mostly because I had not laughed once since leaving my cottage. I had almost forgotten the muscles it used. Those three, the sharp, lonely noblewoman, the old hidden crone, and the greedy little squirrel, had decided without a single word that I needed an evening to be made beautiful simply for the joy of it. They were right. I sat back and let them handle everything, because it was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in a very long time.

The garment Selene brought out at the end was not standard court dress. She had gone looking for it specially when she heard the rite would follow the river forms, obtaining it through a woman who knew a woman. It belonged to the riverlands, the southern reaches I half came from yet had never seen. It was a short, wrapped robe of the kind the river-temples danced in, dyed a deep blue and shot through with fine silver thread that caught the light whenever I moved. It crossed and tied at the hip, leaving my throat and a hand’s width of my chest bare. The hem fell just above the knee, and the wide, loose sleeves were cut short enough to expose my forearms. Every turn of the silhouette was made to open and close the fabric as water folds over stone. It was made to move in. It was made to be seen moving in.

When I put it on, it became the first thing I had worn in this city that did not feel like a disguise. In that robe, I was not pretending to be a high lady of the capital. I was stepping into the skin of the water-country my mother’s people had called home. The moment the cloth settled against my skin, my body remembered. It was like an old tune learned long ago, sunk so deep into the muscle that the hands remember the notes after the mind has forgotten them.

“Oh,” Selene said softly when I turned to face her. She did not joke. “Oh, Liora. Look at you.”