Page 69 of Broken Vow

“Why?” I asked, my voice steady across the broken glass. “Why?”

Chapter 34

He did not answer at once, and I did not let the silence soften me.

I had not crossed half that palace on the back of my own fury to arrive and forgive him with a look. The rage was still in me, banked hot under my breastbone where the mark still glowed, and I held to it, because it was the truest thing I had ever owned and because I had earned every degree of its heat. He stood there across the broken cup with his mouth half open and no words coming, the great emperor with nothing to say, and I found I had a great deal to say.

“You do not get to be silent,” I said. “You had weeks of silence. You had a whole city of it. I have come a very long way for an answer, and you are going to give me one.”

That reached him. His eyes sharpened.

“I have seen the gallery.” I drew the cloak aside at my throat and let him see it, the mark, the fine pale tracery lit from under the skin, burning over my heart where it had burned my whole life in secret. I watched his face go still. “I have seen this on the faces in there. On a queen three hundred years dead, and on others, the same mark, the same place over the heart. I have carried it since before I could walk and never knew what it was, and now I do. It was never that I was too low for you, or too poor, or too small a thing to keep. It was this.” The mark. “You looked at me, and you saw it, and whatever it means, it frightened you enough to throw me away. That much I worked out on my own, in a cold room, an hour ago. What I could not work out is why a mark on a girl’s chest is worth what you did to me. So you are going to tell me. Now.”

“No.” It came out of him fast and rough, the first whole word he had managed, and it was not the answer of a man defending himself. It was torn out. “No. Not that I threw you away. You have it almost right and the last piece wrong, and the last piece is the one I have carried every day since.”

And there it went, the mask. I watched it come apart on his face for good, the cold imperial thing he had carried into the room sliding off all at once, and what was under it was a man I had seen only once, in a grove, at night, with his whole guard down.

“I am the emperor.” He said it like a man naming an illness. “Before I am a man who can love, before I am anything, I serve this realm. That is what I am for. You have seen the faces in that gallery, the ones who held this throne before my grandfather took it. They brought this empire to the edge of its own grave. They bled the provinces white and let the borders rot, and my family took the throne out of their hands and saved it, and has held it safe for three generations since. The peace those people out there live in, every quiet night, every harvest brought in and every child fed, it stands on us. On the throne doing what must be done and never once setting a single life above the whole of it. That is the duty. It does not bend, not for anyone, and I never in my life wanted it to bend, until you.”

His eyes went to the mark, and his face came apart. “And then I learned what you carry. Whose blood that mark is. That you are of the line we took the throne from, the line my family built its entire claim on having saved this empire from. Do you understand what that makes you, to me? Not an enemy with an army. Far worse. You are the one living thing in the world that could prove the story false. A daughter of the blood we named the realm’s near-destruction, wearing the mark of it on her own skin, standing in the emperor’s hall, loved by the emperor. The day that is known, the day you and I are set side by side in any one mind at this court, the whole story that lets my family hold this realm together turns to ash, and three generations of peace go into the dark with it. Because the emperor loved a woman with the wrong mark over her heart.”

His voice dropped, and the next of it was the worst, because it was not argument anymore. “Of all the souls in this empire. Of all the women I might have been given. The one who got into my blood and would not leave it is the one who carries, here,” his gaze went to the mark and would not lift from it, “in the one place I would have laid my head down for the rest of my life, the sign of the only thing this throne cannot survive. I have lain awake on that more nights than I can count. That of every woman alive, I could not stop loving the one I was least allowed to keep.”

“So that was what I had to end.” He made himself say it plainly. “The thing any emperor before me would have done in a heartbeat to keep the story whole and the realm standing. And I could not. The love had gone too deep, do you understand me, it had got down into the place a ruler is supposed to keep empty, and when the moment came and I was meant to end it, I could not make my hand do it. I failed. At the one duty I was raised from the cradle never to fail, I failed, because of you.”

“So instead you made me a beast.” My voice climbed despite me. “You broke me into this and turned me out into your streets and hunted me through your own city.”

“I did the only thing left to me that was not the thing my own duty demanded.” He took a step toward me, and his voice cracked down the middle. “There is far more to that night than I can put into this room, with my house awake around us. But hear this much, because you have earned it.” He stopped, and made himself say it plainly. “The man who loved you in that grove, I killed him to do what I did. A man who feels what I felt for you cannot give the orders I have to give, so I put him to death in myself, on purpose, with my own will, and I have worn his corpse under this crown every day since. You were at least allowed to hate me. I was not even allowed to grieve what I had done. I have had to wake every morning and be the man who did it to you, and want nothing, and show nothing, and rule.”

And I felt the rage begin to go.

I fought it. I want that set down. The moment it wavered, I knew exactly what waited under it, and I did not want the thing that waited, I wanted to stay angry, because anger let me stand and the thing underneath did not. So I stacked it all against him one more time, the gallery, the mark, the streets, the weeks as a hunted animal. And it was no use. Because it is one thing to rage at a crown and at a choice and at a betrayal that wears no face, and another to stand in front of the actual man with his composure coming apart in front of you, the dark head and the storm-coloured eyes and the scar through the brow I had touched once with my own fingers in a grove, and hear him tell you he had killed off the part of himself that loved you in the same stroke that broke you. The anger could not hold against that. It went out of me, fast, and the thing it had been built over came flooding into the empty place, the grief, the hurt, the disappointment without a floor to it, and under all of it, still alive, still mine, the love I had carried for him since before I knew what he was, battered now and bleeding and refusing, even now, even here, to die.

We stood there in the wreck of it, the two of us, alone in the shut hall, with everything said that could be said and a great many things that never could.

And he lifted his hand.

I do not think he knew he was doing it. It was not the gesture of a man who decides to reach out. It was the other thing, the body moving before the will can stop it, the same helpless motion my own body had made a hundred times against my command, and his hand came up and crossed the space between us and his fingers touched my cheek, only just, the lightest thing, the warmth of him after a lifetime of cold.

And that touch took the last of my hold.

It went through me like a struck note, all of it at once, the love and the grief and the terrible new truth and the heat of his hand on my face, and it was too much for the thin thread I had been holding myself by, and the curse took the opening. I felt the woman begin to go. But I knew this feeling now, I had earned hard knowledge of it in that gallery, and I did the one thing I had sworn I would never stop doing, I fought, and though I could not stop it I could shape it, and I kept the one thing that mattered, so that when I dropped to four feet on the cold stone with his hand still hanging in the air where my face had been, I went down a fox with a woman’s eyes, and not all the way gone.

I looked up at him out of the fox. And I watched it reach him.

I understood, only then, that he had never once seen it. He had given the order in a sealed room. He had hunted a rumour through his streets. The fox had been a word to him, an abstraction, a thing in other men’s reports. He had never stood in a room and watched the woman he loved fold down into an animal on the floor at his feet because he had touched her. Now he had. And it broke something in him that all his confession had not come near, because it is one thing to carry the weight of what you have done and another to watch it happen in front of you, small and silver and looking up at you with the eyes of the person you destroyed. The colour went out of his face. He made a sound I had never heard a man make. He began to go down to his knees on the broken cup, his hand reaching now with purpose, to gather me up, to undo it, to do anything.

The doors came open.

Both of them, hard, all at once, and the guard was through them with steel already drawn, a dozen of them, because the palace was hunting intruders and there had been a commotion in the emperor’s hall and they had found their sovereign sinking to the floor with a silver fox crouched at arm’s reach from him. The very creature the whole city had been turned out to hunt. The foreign witch-thing. The animal that was no animal, here, in the heart of the palace, a breath from the emperor’s own throat.

“On the emperor! It is on the emperor!”

I saw him understand the trap in the half-second it gave him. The trap his own hunting orders had built, sprung now on both of us at once. If he stood between his men and the fox, if he did one thing to shield the creature his whole empire had been mobilized to destroy, in front of a dozen witnesses, with the northern envoy somewhere in the building and his witch in the dark below, he would not save me. He would only damn us both and hand them the question that ended everything. Why would the emperor shield the assassin?

He had a half-second. And for the second time in my life, in front of me, he chose the throne.

“Take it alive.” His voice came out of him broken, and he did not look at the men as he said it. He looked at me, at the fox, at my woman’s eyes, and I have never seen a man say anything that cost him what those words cost him. “Do not harm it. I want to know who sent it. Cage it, and bring it to me when it is secured.”