Chapter 9 - The Garden Party

“In the north,” I tell my maid Iona, “we were only ever allowed to receive people in the cold stone rooms. Never anywhere like this.”

“Then it is a good thing you are not in the north.” Iona sets the last of the cups down on the little table that was carried out and placed under the fig tree. “An empress may hold a garden party if she likes, my lady. I thought you might want to try one. It seemed more like you than a receiving hall.”

It is more me. That is the strange thing about all of this, that there are small moments like this that I am utterly grateful for. I could never do anything like this back home because I was only ever allowed to be a bastard.

The garden is small, walled, and private, tucked in the back corner of the courtyard and full of southern roses, several fig trees, and a fountain that has forgotten how to run, and it is the first space in this palace that has felt like it might be mine.

“I wrote to Lady Melina,” I say, straightening a cup that does not need straightening. “I told her I was sorry, about her brother.” I pause and frown from the memory of two days ago. “Theron told me I needed to pick ladies-in-waiting, so I asked her to come today, because I do not have the first idea how.” I frown. “And then Lady Xanthe sent word this morning that she would attend as well. I did not invite her. She seems to require very little inviting.”

Iona's mouth twitches. “No, my lady. I don't imagine she does.”

They arrive within moments of each other, which I suspect Xanthe arranged so as not to be the one left waiting, and the garden is suddenly full of silk, perfume, and two women who could not be less alike.

Lady Melina comes to me with both hands out and her whole warm face open. “An empress who holds court under a fig tree,” she says. “I adore it already. I got your letter.” Her voice gentles. “You did not have to write it. But thank you. It helped that you tried. It helped more than you know.”

“It did not help Elio.” I frown slightly.

“No,” she agrees, and there is grief in it, but no blame. “But you are the only person with a crown who tried at all, and I will not forget that.”

Xanthe drifts up behind her in white and gold, cool as the fountain wishes it were. “How rustic,” she says, looking about the little garden, and I have learned enough now to hear the barb in it, and to let it pass. “You wished for counsel, I hear. On your household?”

“I do,” I say. “I am told I must choose ladies to attend me, and I do not understand what I am really choosing. Melina. You are honest with me. Tell me plainly.”

Melina does not hesitate. “Plainly, then. They are not friends, whatever they pretend to be. Every great house in the empire wants a daughter placed at your side, because to be near you is near power, and near power is worth having. Whoever you choose, you raise their house up, and whoever you pass over, you insult, and both of those are things the court will remember for years.” She spreads her hands. “It is not a gathering of companions. It is a map of your alliances, worn where everyone can read it.”

“That is the kind version,” Xanthe says.

I look at her. “Then give me the unkind one.”

“Some of the women who smile prettiest at you will be there to watch you,” Xanthe says, and there is no coyness in it now, only a flat, cold competence that reminds me of theron. “They will report every letter, every visitor, every mood, back to the houses that sent them. You are a stranger from an enemy court, and you will be surrounded, and you should trust not one of them further than you can see your own hands. Choose a household, Empress, and understand that you are choosing which knives to keep close enough to watch.”

It is, I think, the most useful thing anyone in this palace has told me since I arrived, and it was delivered like a threat.

“Thank you,” I say, and mean it, and Xanthe blinks, because it was not the response she braced for.

It is then that the child steps out from behind her skirts.

I had not seen her. She is very small, and she has kept herself very still, in the way of a child who has been taught that being unseen is a kind of good behavior, and now she stands revealed in a gown too fine and too grown for her, her pale hair curled into ringlets that must have taken an hour, her small hands folded exactly so.

“My daughter,” Xanthe says, and for the first time all afternoon something in her voice is not smooth. “Chloe. Forgive me. Her nurse is abed with fever, and I do not,” a pause, precise as a dropped stitch, “I do not leave her with people I have not chosen myself. Not in this court. I had no one else to mind her.” She says it like a confession of failure, and I understand that she expects me to be cold about it, the way this court is cold about a great many things, and that she has brought the child anyway because she had no choice, and is braced for the cost.

Chloe drops into a curtsy so deep and so practiced it makes my chest hurt. “It is an honor to meet you, Your Imperial Majesty,” she recites, each word placed like a stone. Seven years old, and already she speaks like a courtier. “You are very beautiful. I hope I am not a bother.”

“You are not a bother,” I say.

She glances up at her mother, quickly, checking, and then back at me, and she gives me a small bright practiced smile and turns her face a little to the side, the way one does when one has been told which angle is best, and she waits.

“What is it?” I ask as she turns her head to mine.

When I ask her this she seems to fumble slightly. “Is my hair not Pretty? My mommy spent a lot of time on it.”

“Hush dear, no need to report that to her.” Lady Xanthe says.

I look between her and the little girl, and her defeated face. I realized then, that she was waiting to be told she is pretty. It is the thing she has been taught to fish for, the coin she has learned she is worth, and she is seven, and she is already casting the line.

Something old and cold turns over in me.

I do not tell her she is pretty. I crouch down instead, so that I am not a crown looming over her but instead at eye level, the way my mother used to do with me, the way almost no one has ever done for me.

“Chloe,” I say. “What do you like?”

She blinks. The smile falters. “My lady?”

“What do you like. Not what you are good at, not what you are meant to like. What do you enjoy, when no one has told you to enjoy it? I would like to know.”

And she stares at me, this small girl in her too-fine dress, with the complete blankness of a child who has never once been asked, and I know that blankness, I have lived inside it, and behind me I hear Xanthe go very still.

“I…,” Chloe starts, and stops. She looks at her mother again, but I touch her hand, gently, to bring her back to me.

“You do not have to look at her,” I say. “I am asking you. There is no wrong answer. It is only a thing about yourself, and you are the only one who knows it.”

“Beetles,” she whispers, as though confessing a crime. “I like beetles. The green ones, that shine like they are made of oil. There are some in the fig tree. I saw them when we came in.” She goes pink and rushes on. “I know it is not a nice thing for a lady to like. Mother says—” She stops herself.

“I think,” I say, “that it is a very good thing to like. Shall we go and look at them? You can show me the shining ones. I have never looked closely at a beetle in my life, and I find I would like to, and no one in this garden knows more about them than you…. probably.”

Her whole face changes. It is not the practiced brightness she offered me before, the smile aimed to please. It is something real and startled and delighted, a child discovering that a thing she likes has made someone want her company, and she forgets, for a moment, every lesson she has been taught, and simply takes my hand and pulls me toward the fig tree, talking, fast and eager, about oil-green shells.

I let her lead me. Behind us, the two women are silent, and I do not need to be able to read a room to feel the difference in the two silences, Melina's warm and Xanthe's, when I glance back, not warm at all, but stricken, her hand pressed flat to her mouth, watching her daughter be delighted about beetles as though she is watching something she gave up on long ago come quietly back to life.

We look at the beetles for a good while. Chloe is a fine teacher.

When at last her mother calls her, gently, in a voice with something new and unsteady in it, and Chloe goes to gather herself back into her ringlets and her manners, Xanthe crosses to me, and for once she does not seem to know where to put her hands.

“You did not tell her she was pretty,” she says, low, so the child will not hear.

“She is pretty,” I say. “She is also seven, and she likes beetles, and no one had asked her. The pretty part, she already knew. Everyone has already told her that part. I did not think she needed it from me too.”

Xanthe looks at me for a long moment, and whatever war is happening behind those gold eyes, so like her brother's, she does not let it reach her voice. “You are a strange creature,” she says, which is what she said at the wedding, but it does not sound the same today. Today it sounds almost like thanks.

“So I am told.” I straighten. There is a decision to make, and I find, standing here, that I have already made it. “Melina. I want you as one of my ladies. Not because it maps my alliances well, I have no idea whether it does, but because you tell me the truth kindly, and I have found that rarer here than gold.”

Melina's grin could light the garden. “It would be my honor, Empress.”

“And you,” I say, turning to Xanthe, “Lady Xanthe. I want you as well.”

For the first time since I have known her, she is caught entirely off her guard. “Me.” It is not quite a question. “You do not trust me. You would be a fool to trust me, and you are not a fool. I came here to advise you, and to place my faction's interests near your ear. You know that. You cannot possibly want me in your household.”

“I do not trust you,” I agree. “That is precisely why. You can do a thing I cannot. You can read a room, and hear the second meaning under a smile, and know which knife is which. I am hopeless at all of it, and it has nearly cost me twice already. I would rather have you at my side than be undone by you where I cannot see.” I meet her eyes, because I have learned that with her, at least, it is worth the cost.

“I am not choosing you for your blood, or your beauty, or your faction. I am choosing you because you are good at the one thing I struggle with the most. So feel free to say yes or say no. But that is the reason, and it is the whole of it.”

Xanthe stares at me. And something moves across her face that I have never seen there, in the throne room or the fitting or the wedding, something that has nothing coy in it at all, and she looks, for one unguarded moment, like a woman who has just been handed a thing she stopped hoping for so long ago she had forgotten its shape: to be wanted for what she can do, and not for what she can be sold or married or bred into.

“Yes,” she says, and her voice is not quite steady. “Yes. All right.”

Chloe comes running back with a beetle cupped in her two small hands to show me before she goes, and Xanthe does not tell her to put it down, and does not tell her it is unladylike, and I think, watching the three of them, that I may have just built myself a household out of exactly the wrong people by every rule this court lives by, and exactly the right ones by mine.

It is the first thing I have chosen for myself and I find I would choose it again.